In George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, a tale about an animal communist revolution gone awry (as communist revolutions always do in a fallen world), a pig named Napoleon emerges as the unrivaled leader of the newly liberated farm animals. Step-by-step, as he accrues more and more power to himself, Napoleon gradually turns the farm into a massive operation to serve his own self-interests and enslave his “comrades”.
One key component of any statist operation is a ministry of propaganda whose purpose is to flood the ignorant public with positive spin for the regime and to slander all political opponents. Statists seek to control behavior and suppress opposition by controlling the way the public interprets reality. Another pig, Squealer, plays this role for Napoleon. One of Squealer’s primary duties is to convince the cold, hungry, overworked animals on the farm that their life is better than it was under Farmer Jones in the days prior to the revolution. And Squealer has no trouble doing it, using convoluted accounting methods to argue mathematically that the animals are enjoying more food now than they ever did before.
According to Dick Morris, it appears that recent statistics that are being fed to us as signs of an economic recovery might have been created by the Obama Administration’s version of Squealer.
