The main ideal of the Beats of England is that of freedom from tyranny. At the time the animals thought the only tyrants were men but this proves to be wrong as after Snowball is violently expelled from the farm Napoleon becomes a new tyrant and the animals begin to lose the freedom they rebelled in order to get. The song says that “Cruel whips no more shall crack” but near the end of the book we see the pigs carrying whips and controlling the animals in the same vicious way that the humans do.
The song is a dream of a world in which there would be only animals and they would all live in equality and they would all own “Riches more than mind can picture” but as happened in communist Russia and other totalitarian states the intelligentsia, in this case the pigs, become corrupt rulers who take all the riches for themselves. An example of this is when the pigs, namely Squealer, convinced the animals that the pigs needed apples and milk for themselves so that they would be able to work hard mentally otherwise the farm would fall back into the hands of the humans.
This “golden future time” was not imagined to include having terrifying dogs by the pigs’ sides stopping some of the animals from speaking their mind and killing others who supposedly disobeyed orders or werew supposedly treacherous purportedly working for the universal scapegoat Snowball. The animals had to live under a constant state of fear from the secret police, the dogs, which Napoleon used to stop them from rebelling.
Under the harsh regime of Napoleon Squealer tried to convince the animals that they had more food they actually had less food than they did before the rebellion. This was certainly in contrast to why they had sung the ‘Beasts of England’ and rebelled. They wanted the food to be shared out equally so that there would be more for them because then they would no longer have to give up some of it to the humans but instead now Napoleon and the pigs like Stalin and his friends had become so corrupt they took the majority of the food themselves so while the working classes were starving they were eating more for the collective good of the farm.
The most damning piece of evidence, which the animals were too naïve to perceive due to Squealers propaganda and cruel manipulation, that the farm had failed farm to live up to the ideals of animalism, was the prohibition of the singing of the ‘Beasts of England’. Squealer said that this was because the song was purely about the rebellion which had been completed and so was useless but in reality it was because Napoleon’s new regime of terror was in total contrast to the principles of communism and its seven commandments.
As the regime grows crueler and autocratic Napoleon increases his dealings with humans against the theme of the ‘Beats of England’ and the Seven Commandments which he amended to suit him. In the end the pigs are seen to be indistinguishable from the humans showing that their oppression had increased to the level of that of the humans if not greater due to their notations of elitism because they were more intelligent. This portrays the situation of that in the 1950s under Stalin when he had become more corrupt and despotic than his predecessors the Tsars.
The animals were forced to believe in the lies of the pigs because of their lack of intelligence, ingenuousness and the state of terror created by the elitist pigs. They therefore forgot about the dream of a state of bliss under animalism and accepted their new way of life as better than before the rebellion without ever knowing the truth.
