atoast2toast.com

This so accurately describes true events in the real world – mostly the current NAMA bluff.

Napoleon’s smooth-tongued accomplice Squealer represents not just one person, like Napoleon and Snowball do, instead he represents an entire social institution of power with which Orwell is deeply concerned. Just as 1984, his following novel, grapples with language and memory as its principle concerns, so does Animal Farm. Squealer the pig, working in conjunction with the violence and intimidation provided by the police dogs, is a propaganda machine. He constantly manipulates language in order to reshape the collective memory of the farm’s animals and ensure their obedience. At times he simplifies language, similar to New Speak in 1984, to the point that debate and dissenting thoughts are impossible (“Four legs good, two legs bad!”) and at other times he crams his speeches so full of vocabulary, jargon, and statistics that the animals are psychologically overwhelmed and, since they cannot understand what Squealer is saying, tacitly consent to allowing the pigs to think for them. It’s the calculated and strategic manipulation of language by the pigs that distorts the memory and ideology of the Animal Farm and perpetuates the pigs’ oppression of the other animals. The other animals can no longer think for themselves without the pig intelligentsia arbitrating and guiding their thoughts.

It is precisely the mastery of reading and writing that gives the pigs the tools they need to manipulate and control the other animals on the farm. Furthermore, the pigs are able to re-narrate and reshape the history of the Animal Farm to fit with their constantly changing political stance by confusing the other animals with semantics, and secretly altering the seven commandments posted on the barn in the darkness of night. In truth, it’s their knowledge and command of language, along with their cleaved hooves acting as surrogates for opposable thumbs, which distances the pigs from the other farm animals socially and eventually transforms them into the very creatures they once loathed.

http://culturazzi.org/review/literature/animal-farm-george-orwell