A quick review I left on Goodreads, for Animal Farm:
One of the quintessential allegories describing the danger of democracies, and (to me), an illustration of the inevitable cycle of the nation-state apparatus itself.
One thing to note: Squealer wasn’t the real villain–Napoleon and, temporarily, Mr Jones were–but he was the linchpin that made Napoleon’s totalitarianism possible. As the consummate conman, who could “turn black into white,” he persuaded (lied) and gaslighted the rest of the farm animals on behalf of Napoleon, as the head bureaucrat of his Ministry of Truth. Orwell, perhaps unwittingly, cast the little bastard as a stand in for the mass media propagandists (a redundancy) and modern journalists, who end up being nothing more than water-carriers for oligarchs.
This idea came to me in my edition’s foreward, written by Ann Pratchett. She gave Squealer a passing mention with the implication. I wanted her to say more about him, but a moment’s thought and an Internets search revealed why she wouldn’t admit to a similar inference out loud. Pratchett is an establishment author with the correct opinions, approved by All the Proper People and Institutions, with a lot of resources invested in her career. She’s not about to badmouth the profession sitting right next to her. That would be awkward.
2 Comments
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say the world has never seen objective journalism. They always report in favor of whomever has the power to silence them, but doesn’t.
And I don’t think that non-objectivity is necessarily bad. It’s humanity’s lot in life to be unable to escape subjectivity, at least with respect to some topics. Weather reporting can be fairly objective proposals of what could happen. To me, they meet the criteria of objective reporting more than other areas of knowledge, though weather reports are sometimes/often wrong (I wouldn’t consider “correctness” as a criteria for how objective something is).