Orwell wrote Animal Farm as a fable about the Russian Revolution, but its actual target is broader: any uprising against tyranny that reproduces the same tyranny under new management. The animals overthrow Farmer Jones in the name of equality; by the final page, the pigs are indistinguishable from the humans they replaced. The warning isn't about pigs, or farms, or even one specific revolution — it's about how easily "never again" becomes "again, but us."
Power in Animal Farm doesn't arrive by force alone — it arrives by rewriting the rules faster than anyone can keep track. The Seven Commandments are amended one clause at a time, each edit small enough to go unchallenged, until "all animals are equal" quietly becomes "but some animals are more equal than others." Squealer's propaganda does the rest, supplying a justification for every walk-back before anyone has time to object.
The mechanism of incremental rule-changing — amend, don't announce — describes a real and recurring pattern in how institutions drift from their founding principles. Orwell's insight that propaganda works best not by lying outright but by continuously supplying plausible cover for each new contradiction has aged into something closer to a case study than a fable.
The book compresses a process that, in reality, plays out over generations into a single farm's lifetime — useful for a fable, less useful as a model of how long institutional capture actually takes, or how much resistance it typically meets along the way.
The specific mechanism — a founding document or promise amended piecemeal until it means the opposite of its original intent — shows up anywhere power outlasts the principles it was justified by. See Surveillance Notes for contemporary, sourced examples.