Animal Farm Socratic Seminar

Animal Farm: Socratic Seminar

Group A (Choose 2):

1. How does Animal Farm help us understand deception and propaganda in our world today? How do the media and political leaders take advantage of us?

Animal Farm helps us understand deception and propaganda in our world today mainly through the character Squealer. A symbol of the organization of Pravda in the book, Squealer uses his silver-tongue to persuade the animals into believing or doing specific things. One time, he began saying lies that “Snowball, who, as we now know, was no better than a criminal” (Orwell 69) even though Snowball never was one. At this point in the story, Snowball was long gone from the farm and he never did any criminal actions. Unfortunately, the animals believe this propaganda just like humans believe propaganda from the media and political leaders. Through their ignorance

From this, the pigs would probably not be able to spread their propaganda and deception resulting in them not having power. Sadly, in the story, this is not the case. Instead, the animals were so uneducated that they could not understand specific things very well. There are a few exceptions but for the most part “None of the other animals on the farm could get further than the letter A” (Orwell 50) resulting in the pigs having an extreme advantage in power due to their education. In our world, if everyone was highly educated then governments would have a hard time controlling and taking advantage of their people. In Animal Farm, however, Napoleon easily was able to influence the animals due to their lack of education. Usually, every time he says some sort of lie to the animals, they always believe “Napoleon is always right” (Orwell 75) due to their extreme lack of knowledge. From a perspective, the animals seem like puppets controlled by Napoleon, doing everything he makes them