Topic: Discuss the ways the ideals animal farm begins with are corrupted.
Contention: it’s the pigs in animal farm that change the ideals and dreams
3 arguments:
- Equality changes to dictatorship
- The changing of the commandments
- The idea of freedom becomes slavery
They say dreams are the most important thing to a person animal or not it’s what keeps you driving towards a goal and if you think about it keeps you from boredom or even insanity. But in George Orwell‘s Animal farm it’s the pigs that change the ideals and dreams because things as they do naturally change. Equality changes into dictatorship, the commandments change from pleasant to obscene and the idea of freedom becomes slavery. Which all show the power hungry, hypercritical ways of the pigs. It’s almost like racism how we say everyone’s equal but there are still those who think better of themselves then others.
Equality changes into a dictatorship which corrupts the ideals in animal farm because the pigs think they are better and much more important than everybody else on the farm. Slowly and slyly the pigs made these changes to the equality starting off by taking the milk and the apples for themselves all because according to squealer “Milk and apples (this has been proved by science comrades) to contain substances absolutely necessary to the well being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers.” Then this gradually turned into the pigs taking over all the animals’ lives and even acting like humans so the rebellion was for nothing. But the equality was not the only thing that changed gradually, the rules also took this affect.
The changing of the commandments corrupts everything in animal farm because it allows the pigs to do and get away with anything they wont. Some of the rules they break include the contact with humans, the use of human possessions, the growing of beer and most importantly the killing of another animal which happens on more than one occasion and the pigs didn’t show one bit of remorse or concern for the others. This tells me that the pigs never wanted the great equal land they promised at the start, all they were looking out for was numero uno. But worst of all they got caught and then changed the rules to make sure that the other animals would still trust them. For example “Every one is equal, but some are more equal than others” which is probably the worst change of the rules because it simply says “I can decide who is better than the others just because I am smarter that you.” It’s not only bad to lie to your brethren but to make them your slaves when you promised them freedom is just savage.
The idea of freedom becomes corrupted into slavery when the farm gets over thrown by the pigs, because the animals have no power and the pigs have worked them down to worse off then when Jones was the owner. They had done this so well that even the other farmers congratulated the pigs on it. As Mr Pilkington says” I believe that the lower animals on Animal farm did more work and received less food than any animals in the country” Telling us that the pigs have become so corrupt that they are now worse than the humans. At the beginning old major talks about the vast plains of freedom, abundant supply of food and little labour that they will have to do but this soon turns to darkness because of the pigs greed and lust to be as powerful as they can. But the greatest insult of all, that completely destroyed the dreams and ideals of the animals, was changing the name of animal farm back to the title Manor farm, which was thought to be in the time everyone wanted to forget, the very enemy and purpose of the rebellion.
Overall we now know that the ideals and dreams of the old animal farm have been mutated and sickly twisted into a greedy one sided factory. This is because of equality changing into dictatorship, the commandments changing from pleasant to obscene and the idea of freedom becoming slavery. We can only hope that the real people in Russia in which this book was based, who have already over come this communism can get their lives back to what it was for only a short while, right after the rebellion.
