In his novel Animal Farm, Orwell satirises the way in which power corrupts and he uses events in Russian history after the 1917 Russian Revolution to demonstrate this.

symbolises propaganda; and the green Animal Farm flag represents the Communist Red Banner. When Snowball is exiled from the farm in the same way that Trotsky was exiled from Russia, we see history starting to be rewritten on Animal Farm as he is branded a ‘traitor’. Later, when Napoleon adopts the windmill scheme, which had been branded ‘moonshine’ by Squealer and on which Napoleon had previously urinated, the animals are told by Squealer that Napoleon had ‘seemed to oppose the windmill, simply as a manoeuvre to get rid of Snowball’. Any further doubts are allayed when Squealer baffles the animals with the word ‘tactics’, which he says Napoleon used. Orwell shows us the way that those in power (in this case the pigs) use their superior intellect and linguistic ability to rewrite history, just as, he believed, totalitarian governments did. Later, when we witness the gradual erosion of commandments, we see the way in which history continues to be rewritten. The first commandment to change is the Fourth Commandment; when the pigs take up residence in the farm house and sleep in beds, this becomes ‘No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets’, and despite Clover and the rest of the animals’ reservations, they are made to believe that they have faulty memories as a result of Squealer’s use of fear (Mr Jones and the dogs) and his rhetoric. This pattern is repeated when several animals are killed and when the pigs get drunk. Each time, a commandment is changed and history is rewritten. Only Benjamin is aware of what is going on: he is described as nodding ‘his muzzle with a knowing air’, although he says nothing when Squealer is found with a paint pot and brush in Chapter Eight. Orwell thus shows the way history is rewritten by those in power, but he also highlights for us the danger in people doing nothing. By the end of the novel, most of the original animals have died and only Clover and Benjamin remain, but Orwell makes clear for us that the animals ‘could not remember’ whether things had been better or worse directly after the Rebellion. He demonstrates the way in which collective memory is eroded. By using the barn’s wall as a symbol of collective memory on which the original principles of Animalism — its Seven Commandments — are inscribed, Orwell is able to show the way in which memory is removed. The fact that the pigs alter these, progressively eroding them all until only the Seventh Commandment, substantially changed, remains, shows the way that history is forgotten and altered. He makes comments about the way in which those who hold power in the present control not only the present but the past and future too.