Breaking of The Seven Commandments
Throughout the book, Napoleon and Squealer break the Seven Commandments, the tenets on which governance of the farm is based. To prevent the animals from suspecting them, Squealer preys on the animals' confusion and alters the Commandments from time to time as the need arises. Squealer falls off a ladder while trying to change one of the commandments in the night. A few days later it is discovered that Squealer was altering the commandment regarding alcohol which suggests the reason he fell off the ladder was because he was drunk at the time. Orwell uses Squealer mainly to show how the increasingly totalitarian and corrupt regime uses propaganda and deceit to get its ideas accepted and implemented by the people. In the end, Squealer reduces the Seven Commandments into one commandment, that "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".
This reflected Orwell's view that events in Russia following the Revolution of 1917 had followed an unwelcome path, and that the egalitarian socialism he believed in had there become a brutal dictatorship built around a cult of personality and enforced by terror and lies. Orwell wrote, "All people who are morally sound have known since about 1931 that the Russian régime stinks.' Squealer as the chief propagandist of the regime is early prominent in the story and Orwell delineates the path down which small lies lead to bigger lies. Orwell regarded propaganda as a feature of all modern governments but especially prominent in totalitarian regimes, which depended on it. In The Prevention of Literature (1946) he described 'organised lying' as a crucial element of totalitarian states.
Read more about this topic: Squealer (Animal Farm)
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