Propaganda In Animal Farm

The Largest Lies Possible Propaganda has been used all through history as fuel and justification for countless revolutions and political regimes, in both negative and positive ways. Propaganda is simply a type of communication intended to persuade and impact the views and thoughts of people into certain, predetermined views and thoughts. It is more than a lie; it is systematic and intentional. A common example is the widely known American “We Can Do It!” poster used to motivate women during World War II, which certainly sends a positive message. But propaganda can also be harmful, blinding and cruel. For instance, ruthless Nazi propaganda that ran rampant in Germany during the very same World War. In this kind of propaganda, ideological ideals
That is what makes it so horrific; it takes morals and replaces them with human ideals that are not always just. This strong propaganda was also used destructively in Russia while under Stalin’s Communist rule. Newspapers like the Pravda, Russian for truth, told the unassuming people of all the “wonderful” things their leader was doing and kept questioners quiet. It was this propaganda and blindness of the people that made the Russian Revolution so harsh. The novel Animal Farm was written by George Orwell in protest of such totalitarianism. The novel is an allegory of the Russian Revolution and the story of the Russian Revulsion could not be told without propaganda. In the novel, Squealer, the pig, stands for propaganda in a profound way. Squealer propagandizes the animals, progressing from twisting words to telling half-truths to
The propaganda itself may be striking, but the most poignant thing about this is not the propaganda, but the progression that it follows. One second, Squealer is just blowing things out of proportion and making little things up. Then out of seemingly nowhere the lies are huge and there is a snowball effect to the propaganda that was suffocating the animals. It is hard to even tell where it came from. It is hard to tell where Squealer crossed the line between semi-innocent lies and wildly detrimental propaganda. And that is the sad part. If the reader doesn’t even know how things got complicated and dirty so fast, then how did the animals feel? If modern day readers where blind sighted by it, the animals must have been blown out of all knowledge. But this isn’t really about the animals. A story about propagandized animals means little, but this is a story about the Russian Revolution and Communist Russia. The people of Russia went through this, they were propagandized, they were left in the dark and that is what matters. Real people affected by the largest lies possible;