Squealers

Psalm 54: 1 – 7

Squealers

To the Chief Musician. With stringed instruments. A Contemplation of David when the Ziphites went and said to Saul, “Is David not hiding with us?”

1 Save me, O God, by Your name, and vindicate me by Your strength. 2 Hear my prayer, O God; Give ear to the words of my mouth. 3 For strangers have risen up against me, and oppressors have sought after my life; They have not set God before them. Selah 4 Behold, God is my helper; The Lord is with those who uphold my life. 5 He will repay my enemies for their evil. Cut them off in Your truth. 6 I will freely sacrifice to You; I will praise Your name, O LORD, for it is good. 7 For He has delivered me out of all trouble; And my eye has seen its desire upon my enemies.

Have you ever experienced someone become a tattletale or a squealer against you? If you have then welcome to the team. If you have not had someone do this to you then you probably are not even familiar with the terms. These words refer to a close family member or friend who betrays you and turns to be an informer. Why would someone be so low to do this to you. The principal reasons are fear or reward.

I am thankful to my High School English teachers who challenged me and stretched my knowledge by having me read some excellent novels. Not the junk you find today (when is the last time you learned of a new real hit novel?) but some real classics.

British novelist George Orwell (1903-1950) wrote an amazing allegory in 1946 called ‘Animal Farm’, Orwell satirized the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent decades of totalitarian Soviet oppression. The story takes place on a fictional farm where the maltreated animals’ rebel and overthrow their human overlords. They establish a seemingly utopian society where they work for and are governed by themselves; however, it doesn’t take long for the farm to deteriorate into a totalitarian state with a ruler who can only be described as a tyrant. The most pivotal factor responsible for this outcome is propaganda. Using propaganda in the book, Orwell argues that a government’s power to control its people’s knowledge and views is that government’s capacity to manipulate and oppress.

The first way that Orwell demonstrates the insidious power of propaganda is through the carefully crafted language used by the farm’s pigs, who incrementally assume all power and control over the other animals. For example, in chapter three, a pig called ‘Squealer’, who is essentially the mouthpiece of the despotic Napoleon, declares that “the Seven Commandments could in effect be reduced to a single maxim, namely: ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ ”. This slogan is one salient example of oversimplification as well as “us vs. them” rhetoric—both propaganda ploys that Squealer uses to extract support from the animals. Another example of Squealer’s deliberate language is found in chapter nine, when the pig consistently refers to the animals’ shrinking shares of food “as a ‘readjustment’ of rations, never as a ‘reduction’ ”. In this passage Squealer utilizes a form of propaganda know as euphemism, where a word that clearly represents something negative is replaced by a word with a more neutral or even positive connotation. Squealer does this to prevent the animals from realizing the true severity of the food crisis, which might have led to some discontent among the animals about how things were going on the farm. One last instance of propaganda in Squealer’s language is his oft-reiterated appeal, “ ‘Surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones back?’ ”. Squealer makes this query over and over throughout the book: first to defend the pigs’ hoarding of the milk and apples in chapter three, later to support his claim in chapter five that Snowball was a traitor, and towards the end to justify the pigs’ practice of sleeping in the humans’ beds. In all these scenes, the question is a thinly veiled attempt to instill fear in the animals to make them comply with the pigs’ schemes. In conclusion, Squealer’s intentional language—his slogans, his euphemisms, and his appeals to fear—supports Orwell’s argument that propaganda gives those in authority the power to manipulate their people.

The last and most concrete manner in which the pigs use propaganda to further their own agenda is the changing of the Seven Commandments. Originally composed in chapter two, some of the more specific Commandments read: “No animal shall sleep in a bed. No animal shall drink alcohol. No animal shall kill any other animal”. However, the animals soon notice things amiss. In chapter six, the news leaks out that the pigs (who have moved into Jones’ vacated farmhouse) are sleeping in the beds. The smarter animals feel faintly concerned about this and consult the Seven Commandments, but they find that commandment number four states, “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets” (67). Later, the animals learn that the pigs have obtained wine and held a raucous party after which Napoleon nearly dies of a hangover. Again, the smarter individuals seem to remember that the Seven Commandments forbade alcohol, but when they look at the wall of the barn on which the Commandments are painted, they find only, “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess” . It all comes to a head when, in chapter seven, Napoleon and his dog enforcers perform a massive crackdown in which scores of animals are executed for various alleged crimes against the state. The bloody massacre downright appalls the farm, and this time practically all the animals have the distinct feeling that the event violates their memories of the earliest guidelines laid down for Animal Farm. As a body they gather below the Seven Commandments on the wall, but they discover that the commandment in question proclaims, “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause”. In all three of these scenes, it is blatantly obvious that the commandments have been altered from their original forms. How this occurs is revealed at the end of chapter eight, when in the middle of the night Squealer is caught outside the barn with a ladder and bucket of white paint, rewriting the Commandments. This is possibly the most insidious incidence of propaganda in the book, but it is indisputably successful in accomplishing its goals; namely, to absolve the pigs of all responsibility for their questionable behavior, and thus to uphold the idealistic view of the farm and its rulers as infallible and exemplary in all things.