Key Quote
“"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal"”
Squealer · Chapter 5
Focus: “more firmly”
Squealer's propaganda technique at its most insidious — claiming Napoleon believes in equality MORE than anyone else, precisely at the moment when equality is being abolished.
Technique 1 — SUPERLATIVE PROPAGANDA / THE BIG LIE
The construction 'No one believes more firmly' is a superlative claim — Napoleon's commitment to equality exceeds everyone else's. This is the technique of the Big Lie (telling a falsehood so enormous that people assume it must be true): the claim is so completely opposed to reality that the listener cannot process the contradiction. If Napoleon APPEARS to violate equality, the listener concludes they must be mistaken — because Squealer has pre-emptively established Napoleon as equality's greatest champion.
The title 'Comrade' — a term of socialist equality, implying all members are peers — is used for the leader who has destroyed equality. This semantic inversion (using a word to mean its opposite) is Squealer's characteristic technique: he does not avoid the language of equality but WEAPONISES it, using revolutionary vocabulary to defend counter-revolutionary action.
Key Words
RAD — REGRESS
Squealer's propaganda represents the regression of language from communication to manipulation. Words no longer mean what they say — 'equal' means 'unequal,' 'comrade' means 'master,' 'believes' means 'pretends.' This linguistic regression parallels the political regression: as the revolution degrades, so does the language used to describe it. Truth and language decay together.
Key Words
Technique 2 — SQUEALER AS MEDIA
Squealer functions as the farm's media: he delivers information from the leadership to the public. But his information is always distorted — facts are omitted, statistics are invented, and history is rewritten. Orwell uses Squealer to represent not just individual liars but the institutional propaganda apparatus — the newspaper, the radio, the school system — that mediates between power and public in totalitarian states.
Squealer's effectiveness depends on the animals' inability to verify his claims: they cannot read the commandments (Squealer changes them at night), cannot remember the past accurately, and cannot access alternative information. Squealer succeeds not because his lies are convincing but because the animals have no way to check them. Propaganda flourishes in the absence of independent verification.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
PRAVDA & SOVIET MEDIA
Pravda ('Truth') — the Soviet Union's official newspaper — was notoriously full of lies. Orwell's Squealer directly parallels Pravda: a media organ whose NAME claims truth while its CONTENT produces falsehood. The irony of naming a propaganda tool 'Truth' mirrors Squealer's technique of using the language of equality to defend inequality.
ORWELL & JOURNALISM
Orwell worked as a journalist and broadcaster for the BBC. His experience with institutional media — its compromises, censorship, and propaganda functions — informed his portrayal of Squealer. Orwell understood from the INSIDE how truth is distorted by institutional pressures.
Key Words
WOW — SIMULACRA (Baudrillard)
Jean Baudrillard's concept of simulacra — copies without originals, representations that have replaced the reality they once depicted — describes Squealer's propaganda precisely. Squealer does not merely LIE about equality (which would imply that equality exists somewhere as a truth to be distorted). Rather, Squealer creates a simulation of equality that has completely replaced the real thing. On the farm, 'equality' no longer refers to genuine equal treatment but to Squealer's narrative ABOUT equal treatment. The word has been severed from its referent: 'equality' is now a floating symbol that means whatever the pigs need it to mean. Baudrillard would argue that the animals do not live in a world of truth distorted by lies but in a world of hyperreality — a reality entirely constructed by representation. There is no 'real' equality hidden behind Squealer's lies; there is only Squealer's version, which IS reality for the animals. The simulation has consumed the real.
Key Words