What is Democracy?
Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. [4] As of today, not all countries have a democratic government, such as China, where the president is elected from and by only a handful of people. A typical example of a democratic government is America, where President Barrack Obama was selected by all eligible citizens of the country: "a government of the people by the people and for the people" as they say.
This system of government gradually evolved from another one, known as "absolute monarchy" where the King or the Monarch gets to dictate anything and everything that happened in the country. However, this was gradually abolished since it was discovered that it always led to bad ends and miserable lives for the people. |
Animal farm: A democracy or not?
As in the novel Animal Farm, the purpose of the Rebellion at the beginning of the story was to fight off the humans (Mr. Jones and his men), who had total control (absolute monarchy) over the farm. The animals then derived ways in which they thought could arrive at a state where democracy exists, such as through "Sunday meetings", where the animals were allowed to comment and vote on the decisions made by Snowball and Napoleon. However, Napoleon, upon not wanting to share his power with any other individual, forces Snowball to flee the farm and in fact abolishes the Sunday meetings (with Squealer reasoning that it was because Napoleon did not want the animals to make the "wrong" decisions).
Distorted commandments
The pigs, by altering and distorting the seven commandments bit by bit, gradually take away the seemingly present democracy, which the animals naively believe. Below is a table that shows how the commandments were edited (by Squealer) and the pigs' actions that directly violated the initial commandments.