Animal Farm, written by George Orwell was an attempt to allegorize the revolution and
subsequent transition to authoritarianism that happened in Russia following the First World War.
There are several themes in this book that reflect the times and the attitude of the author that may be
questionable or troublesome to the modern reader. Most notably is the theme of eugenics, and the
different “natural” intelligence levels of the different groups of animals. The transition from an
egalitarian society to an extreme hierarchy is explored through the theme of propaganda and the
control of information as well as the re-interpretation of events and mythologizing the past. Animal
Farm shows how this process can slowly seep into a society. The theme of education is ever present
in Animal Farm, and directly ties into the other two themes of eugenics and propaganda mythology
making. By exploring these themes it is easy to see how the lessons of Animal Farm are broader
than just as a historic examination of the Soviet Union, and can be applied to all sorts of different
religious and secular societies.
In Animal Farm there is extensive detail about the different intelligence levels of the
animals. It is discussed as to how they are not all able to memorize the verses to the anthem, as well
as how not all the animals are able to read. The animals are sorted into roughly four groups of
intelligence. The pigs and dogs who are able to read, the horses who are able to learn a few letters,
the sheep who are unable to read but can process sound bite versions of the new teachings, and the
“wild” animals, such as birds, who have no interest in education. “The reading and writing classes,
however, were a great success. By the autumn almost every animal on the farm was literate in some
degree.” These groups match to the understood “natural” intelligence levels of humanity at the
time. It was assumed that the vast majority of humans were not as intelligent as others, and this was
used as an excuse for the ruling class to oppress the working classes and people of other races. The
theory of eugenics was not demonized until after a thorough deconstruction of Nazi politics, which
would not happen until many decades after World War Two, and at the time that Animal Farm was
published was still considered the common wisdom about how humans were naturally born. Since
Animal Farm is a written book, one must assume that Orwell assumed that only the humans in the
upper intelligences would be reading his book, as those of the lower order were assumed incapable.
The entertainment for those who were unable to read was cartoons and movies. The animals are
also shown to have different levels of capabilities in regards to the farm work that they are able to
do. Boxer the horse is unable to read, but everyone admires his strength and work ethic. “Boxer was
the admiration of everybody. There were days when the entire work of the farm seemed to rest on
his mighty shoulders.” This is a stereotype of a brutish worker who is unable to read and only uses
his body. This stereotype is still present in our society, despite the fact that working people are now
widely educated in reading, and with the introduction of the Internet some level of literacy has
become absolutely necessary for interaction with our economy. In Animal Farm the animals that are
unable to read are also easier to fool, with the exception of the horses. This reflects the assumptions
of how much propaganda intervention would be necessary to re-write the historical narrative for
different groups. The “least” intelligent groups do not ever question the different edits to the farm’s
origin story, while the “more” intelligent are the ones that are doing to re-writing. “Afterwards
Squealer was sent round the farm to explain the new arrangement to the others.” The societal
structure of Animal Farm becomes a replica of the previous social structure, in part because of the
eugenic assumptions of the author. Which strongly suggests that the people of Russia are not
entirely capable of determining that they wanted to be a Soviet Union. This plays further into the
narrative that the oppression in the society around is part of the “natural” order of human
intelligences, and the gross inequality is partly due to the greed and corruption of the “most”
intelligent groups, but more largely is how societies will always organize themselves, because of the
“natural” hierarchy of human intelligence. This understanding of the world creates a frightening
model, one in which our current conditions must be assumed to be the best possible, thanks to our
benevolent leaders, because without them we would be subjected to more corrupt and greedy
influences. Fortunately for the modern reader, in Post-Reagan America our elites have fully
embraced a destructive “greed is good” and “too big to fail” mentality which is easy to see as elites
wanting to hoard all the material riches of the world, and when caught in a situation where there are
natural consequences from their chaotic behavior that they will escalate the oppression of the
workers and not reassess or change the course of their actions.
The next theme in Animal Farm is how propaganda is used to re-write history. As this is a
theme I will be comparing the propaganda tools in Animal Farm to the propaganda tools used in the
United States, as I am more familiar with these mechanisms, recognizing that the allegory of
Animal Farm was meant to directly correlate with post World War One Soviet Union and not the
United States. In Animal Farm the main source of instruction is weekly ceremonies where the pigs
instruct the rest of the animals in how best to understand their post-farmer world. “After the
hoisting of the flag, all the animals trooped into the big barn for a general assembly called the
Meeting. Here, the work of the coming week was planned out and resolutions were put forward and
debated.” In the United States our propaganda machine uses all of these components to educate the
public in the superiority of Western Democracy and Capitalism, two terms which are generally ill-
defined. There is mandatory education of the youth, which is what is demonstrated when Napoleon
kidnaps the puppies and trains them to be secret police against the other animals. The education of
the puppies is removed from their mother and any understanding of what a “dog” should be and
they are instead trained to be hateful and violent separately, hidden away from the rest of the farm.
“Where did these creatures come from? The problem was soon solved: they were the puppies whom
Napoleon had taken away from their mothers and reared privately.” The public education system in
the United States is similarly segregated and unrelated to the actual adult experience of living in the
United States. The weekly meetings of Animal Farm is best compared to the nightly News briefings
and headlines that are easily consumed so that the “informed public” are really those who are most
up-to-date on the current narrative of geo-political drama. At the farm meetings there was
performative debate by the pigs about the building of the windmill, only to have the windmill be
built once Napoleon took control of the farm. In our current political situation the “party in power”
is debated against, sometimes heated and vigorously on various news programs, such as “Meet the
Press” or “PBS Newshour” but once the roles of the parties are reversed the programs don’t
change course. The debate is new, but the deportations and gun violence continue. Animal Farm
shows how this form of performative political debate is used to pacify they animals into thinking
that they are “involved” in the process, but also acknowledges that “It was always the pigs who put
forward the resolutions. The other animals understood how to vote, but could never think of any
resolutions of their own.” Further into the plot Moses, the clerical Raven is brought back from
being banished in order to further assure the animals that their society is beneficial for them.
Religion has always been a driving force in United States politics, as churches are the societal
communal buildings, where people come together to spend time and talk about things. The role of
religious teachers became coordinated with politicians during the abolition and prohibition
movements, however, things were escalated in a propaganda sense during the 1980s with the rise of
national religious broadcasting networks, which run 24 hour news programs, and these networks are
aligned with the conservative “moral majority” which is not a natural coallition, but an artificially
constructed one that has hegemonized the secular world’s understanding of Christianity. There are
many, many diverse religious groups in the United States, but the secular news only acknowledges a
very generic, surface level understanding of religion. The most poignant recent example of this
ignorance was from “Democracy Now” which had a journalist report on how the current MAGA
movement is driven by a bleak, apocalyptic understanding of the world. This journalist reported on
how the belief of the rapture was driving the erratic behavior of MAGA conservatives. There are
several problems with this shallow reporting, most glaring is that many Christian denominations, as
well as Mormons, do not believe in the rapture. It is not believed to be supported scripturally, and is
understood to be some weird fantasy interpretation of what the apocalypse will look like. The “Left
Behind” series of books are widely condemned in more Biblically focused denominations as
complete nonsense as they ignore most chronological and theological interpretations of the actual
text of the scriptures. Despite this, the most propaganda heavy Christian news networks support
this apocalyptic theory, but it shows an ignorance of the culture of religion in the United States,
because religion has become another arm of propaganda, if you watch the most popular version of
TV prosperity gospel Christianity. Prosperity Gospel is also widely believed to be a false doctrine as
it promotes greed and material wealth over spiritual growth and stewardship, as well as the
preachers who preach this doctrine are atrociously overly self-indulgent. Fundie Fridays is an
investigative journalist Youtube channel which reports of the most egregious abuses within the
Christian fundamentalist communities, focusing primarily on the evangelical branches, and there
are hours and hours of reporting about how abusive the organizations of the prosperity gospel
preachers are.
The education of the animals on Animal Farm is a theme throughout the book, especially as
the historical narrative of the farm is slowly changed over time.
Squealer asserts the “Snowball was in league with Jones from the very start! It has all been proved
by documents which he left behind him.” Which is even more insidious when one remembers that
the animals on Animal Farm are largely illiterate therefore in no way allowed to argue against what
Squealer is claiming that the pigs have in writing. The most poignant example to my mind of the re-
writing of American history is how the public was re-educated on how to be polite an civil in the
suburbs post World War Two. There are educational films still available on Youtube14 that show that
the government was directly involved in how we best understand to date and dress and run a
household. The invisible part of this re-education is that the culture of the rural and poor Americans
was heavily erased. Erasure of culture is assimilation, and the vets of World War Two were able to
be sold new and fun things, which to teens that grew up during the Great Depression was especially
enticing, and in exchange they left any folk culture and knowledge and marched in line through the
university system to the office, or out of high school onto the manufacturing lines. Coupled with the
Red Scare, which is now re-written as the Hollywood stars standing up to the over-reaching
government, as in the film “The Aviator” was used as a tool to silence any real political opposition
to the military after World War Two and during the Cold War. Communism, and by extension,
worker’s rights were demonized and made to be the most terrible forms of existence in the minds of
the average American. If you ask someone to describe what it is like to live in Russia, or China,
they describe an absolute Hell, and if you ask them to describe living in America they will also
describe a dire situation, but they will insist that “at least here we are ‘free’”. Everyone who chose
not to live in the suburbs and urban areas of the country is presented on TV as ignorant and
uncultured. The TV show “The Beverly Hillbillies” and in more recent years, reality TV shows
show what these stereotypes look like. It is notable that
these representations of the non-suburban Americans are not religious, and do not belong to any real
alternative religious community, which further erases the religious culture of Americans who do not
live on the coasts. Education level is assumed to be a direct correlation a person’s intelligence, so in
effect, asking someone their education level is the coded way that we still speak and classify the
world according to eugenic tenants. Instead of birds, sheep, horses, dogs and pigs, we are “did not
complete high school”, “high school or GED”, “some college”, “bachelors degree” and “advanced
degrees”. This completely disregards the entire current “psychiatric” model of intelligence, with
“multiple intelligences” and “Bloom’s taxonomy”, which have nothing to do with a person’s
diploma. The way that education is used as a marker of one’s eugenic class, despite the fact that the
most current scientific models dispute this shows how these are tools of control, and not actually
related to any accurate understanding of the real world. Our news media is also sorted by reading
comprehension level, and the various news networks present the news with different vocabularies,
and with the presenters staged differently to best be seen as people of authority. The way that the
news presenters stand directly relates to how people of that class interact with their managers.
Working class managers don’t sit down, and so neither do the news anchors that speak to the
working class. Office managers always have messy desks, so do the news anchors that speak to
white collar working class. Businessmen speak to their bosses via Zoom calls, so the news anchors
are quite literally talking heads, just as they are on Zoom calls. The true elites only listen to mom
and dad, so their news anchors sit there and talk like mom and dad would. These subtle segregations
of our society, based on eugenic principles of “natural” intelligence are almost entirely invisible, but
they are real and enforced, regardless. The type of news that you watch, shapes which political
narrative you understand and resonate with. The propaganda in the United States has been effective
because it was segregated in a way that the Baby Boomers felt that they were special and seen. The
propaganda used before was too hegemonized, and so it has become necessary for multiple
storylines to be occuring at the same time, depending on what news you listen to. This has created a
situation in which the American people do not exist within the same reality. I believe this system of
segregated and shallowly “customizable” realities has become untenable, especially for those who
do not have a consistent narrative. This is what is creating the sense of chaos in our current system.
Moses and Squealer are having to work double and triple time because our Napoleon keeps
changing whether to build a windmill or whether to buy a new field or whether to throw away
everything and make Manor Farm a dairy instead of a grain farm. Moses and Squealer don’t have a
story to tell everyone, and they must create a different, understandable, sympathetic story for each
different animal species.
In Animal Farm, by George Orwell, the themes of education, eugenics and propaganda re-
writing history are intertwined and driving forces of the story line. It is through the mechanism of
propaganda and education that the eugenic classes are further segregated, lifting the pigs and the
dogs away from the rest of the animals on the farm that are doing manual labor, and how history is
mythologized and retold so that the animals doing manual labor are complicit with their new plight.
These allegorical themes are seen in our current governmental system as well as the post World War
One Soviet Union.
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