Animal Farm

In Animal Farm, Squealer the pig represents the Soviet press and propaganda machine under the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. He is the pig who explains, justifies, and rewrites Napoleon’s actions so the other animals continue to obey. Orwell uses Squealer to show how propaganda manipulates language, distorts memory, and keeps ordinary people loyal to a corrupt regime.

Squealer’s greatest skill is persuasion. Early in the novel, when the pigs secretly keep the milk and apples for themselves, Squealer insists that the pigs are “brainworkers” who need special food for the good of everyone else. He warns that if the pigs fail in their duties, “Mr. Jones will come back.” By constantly invoking fear, Squealer convinces the animals to accept unfair treatment. Later, after Napoleon drives Snowball off the farm, Squealer claims that Napoleon’s harsh actions are actually necessary leadership, asking, “sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?” Through speeches like these, he trains the animals to distrust their own judgment.

Squealer also represents how propaganda can rewrite history. After Snowball is exiled, Squealer gradually changes the narrative of the Battle of the Cowshed until Snowball becomes a traitor instead of a hero. He even alters the Seven Commandments in the middle of the night so the pigs can break the rules without appearing to do so. When the pigs begin sleeping in beds, the commandment suddenly reads, “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.” Later, after the pigs drink alcohol, the rule becomes a ban on drinking “to excess.” Squealer depends on the animals’ poor memories and lack of education to make these lies believable.

By the end of the novel, Squealer fully embraces the corruption he once disguised. He walks on two legs, teaches the sheep to chant “Four legs good, two legs better!” and helps replace the original ideals of Animalism with the absurd commandment: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Through Squealer’s character, Orwell shows that propaganda does not just defend tyranny after it appears. It actively creates the conditions that allow tyranny to survive by convincing people to accept contradictions, inequality, and fear as normal.