Power and Propaganda: How Pigs Gain Control

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Propaganda empowers those in control to manipulate the uneducated into believing farcical facts and doing ridiculous actions. It communicates false information to people in a sly manner (“Reporting”). George Orwell’s Animal Farm focuses on the various forms of manipulation the lower class animals suffer a result of the pigs’ quest for power. Also an allegory of the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm resembles the events and actions surrounding Soviet leaders who rose to power, specifically Stalin and Lenin. The novella incorporates Communist agitprop as well as class conflict among the animal version of the intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, and proletariat classes. Similar to how Stalin seized power in the Soviet Union, the pigs gain control, uphold power, and manipulate the animals on Animal Farm through their use of gaining trust, distortion and concealment, and bad logic. Orwell’s Animal Farm closely follows the people and events of the Russian Revolution. In fact, Orwell wrote Animal Farm to convey the evil correlation between revolutions and tyrannies, and to point out the fault in revolutions (“Animal Farm” Literature). The Russian Revolution came about when the Bolsheviks took power after overthrowing Czar Nicholas II and Romanov rule, around the 1920s (Smele). This revolution was the real life version of the Rebellion on Animal Farm, an event in which the animals overthrew the evil humans who owned the farm. Two of the most well-known figures of this time include Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, who both used and accentuated propaganda. In the novella, Napoleon the pig represents Stalin. Both Napoleon and Stalin became a dictator and stopped any resistance to their power through the use of propaganda (Stults). Old Major, a respec... ... middle of paper ... ...als, they can do whatever they please. Due to the lack of intelligence the animals posses, the pigs use bad logic to control the animals through twisting and manipulating facts. Because the animals are uneducated and do not think for themselves, they allow the pigs to manipulate them through propaganda, which eventually leads to the downfall of the farm. Had the animals not been so ignorant and more aware of what was taking place, they could have stopped the pigs from having paramount power. The animals could have used their own judgement to not trust the pigs and not be tricked into believing certain facts. Instead, though, the foolish animals did not recognize what was going on, nor did they think independently. In conclusion, one can see that not thinking for oneself can be an invitation for manipulation and a hinderance to the amount of power one has available.

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