in chapter 6 why do the animals confess to being traitors

Napoleon’s execution assembly represents the Moscow Trials and the Great Purge, Stalin’s widespread campaign to suppress any and all dissent in the Soviet Union. Indeed, this was a far cry from the cooperation and good cheer with which the Animalism revolution began. In the Soviet Union, it began as a “cleansing” of the Communist Party and was expanded to one of the entire, vast Soviet population, among which tens of millions were killed or deported. In the Moscow Trials of 1936-1938, Stalin incriminated many party leaders, charging them with crimes ranging from conspiracy to attempted assassination. The accused gave their confessions, seemingly freely in front of a general assembly, just as Napoleon’s accused give theirs in front of all the other animals. This gave lookers-on a reason to believe that the traitors were rightfully accused, another belief we see repeated in Animal Farm. As Orwell suggests in the text, Stalin (and Napoleon) staged the confessions by using violence and fear tactics to coerce the accused. Witnesses at the trials also gave scripted testimony in order to force guilt upon the accused. Stalin had the accused traitors executed (or, if they were lucky, expelled) just as Napoleon has the dogs rip out the throats of the supposed traitors. Despite the publicity of the Moscow Trials, Stalin often had torture and executions performed in secrecy. Orwell makes Napoleon’s purge not only public but especially cruel in order to shed light on the magnitude and barbarism of Stalin’s purges. It is one thing to hear of an execution by humans against humans for political reasons, quite another to contemplate the image of fierce dogs tearing out traitors’ throats.

The Soviet population became terrified of execution and internment in forced labor camps called Gulags. In the novel, the animals’ immediate response to the purge is fear and disillusionment. Shaken, Clover and the other animals try to take comfort in “Beasts of England”—they know that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong but cannot quite describe what or how. They want to focus on the positive ideas of freedom and abundance. Squealer shatters even that comfort when he announces that the song is obsolete and therefore forbidden. We can assume that the real reason Napoleon abolishes it is that, since the animals have committed it to memory, he cannot revise it like the Seven Commandments. Therefore, he forces the animals to forget it, along with the tenets of their beloved Animalism, to be replaced with a new song and new values that are looking more and more like the values under which Mr. Jones ran the farm.

The animals confess to being traitors because they believe that they deserve what the other animals got from them.

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they confessed becouse they tought if they confessed there leader would respect them for telling the the truth but instead there leader killed them without even thinking twice about it because he felt no sympathy for traitors like ones they turned to snowball the pigs, hens and all of the including some sheep were killed in front of everybody...

due to squealer and his intellectual use of propaganda he convinced the sheep that they had been associating with snowball. The sheep are narrow-minded and naive, therefore they were convinced that they were traitors.The fact that they were traitors wasn't true...