How does Napoelon use his power to control the animals?

After Snowball is chased out of the farm Napoleon, with Squealer as his right-hand “man”, assumes total control of the farm. To be able to control what the animals say and do Napoleon uses his intelligence and a number of techniques, these being the following: propaganda (relying mostly on lies) and intimidation.

Propaganda is the main aspect that allows him to control the animals, since it is because of this that most of them are on his side. Because the pigs have higher intelligence than the rest of the animals, it’s easy for him and Squealer to tell things that are not true, or completely true, and have them believe it. “He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions by yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and there where should we be?” (p 40) Here Squealer tells the animals that the reason why Napoleon is making all the decisions now is because they can make the wrong ones. And because of his way of acting before and his higher intelligence the animals believe Napoleon can never be wrong, especially Boxer, who is an important figure in the farm.

When he finds animals that do not go along with what he thinks, he uses intimidation to get them to stay silent. “The four young pigs who had protested when Napoleon abolished the meetings raised their voices timidly, but they were promptly silenced by a tremendous growling from the dogs.” (p 47) Napoleon has the now grown up puppies who are only loyal to him always around to threaten any animal who dares speak up against him. The animals that are against him have no option but to live in fear because of this.

Napoleon intimidates and lies to the animals to be able to have them where he wants them to be, doing what he wants them to do.

Amazing Tactician Snowball brings Victory

By: Isamine Souma

A week ago in the place we all once knew as Manor Farm, but that is now called Animal Farm by its new owners, a battle in which two lives were lost was held. This battle, we found out after sneaking into the farm, has been baptized as “The Battle of the Cowshed” by the animals.

According to what we were told the old owner and a group of companions attacked the farm in an attempt to take it back, but thanks to Snowball’s, a pig’s, great ability to create tactics in a short time they were defeated. Sadly, the life of a brave sheep was lost, but it will be forever remembered.

Snowball directing the animals (representation of the battle)

“The only good human being is a dead one” said Snowball to us after we went to talk to him disguised as animals. Since it was probably our only opportunity to talk to him we decided to ask him all the questions we had in mind, the most important one being how he learned such good war tactics. “Reading and studying books left by the humans. As useless as they might be these days, their old literature does help out a lot.” He also told us he mainly read Julius Caesar’s books, to think we were once told that animals were not capable of intelligence makes me think a lot about what we don’t know about all of these creatures.

With this doubt in mind, we went to talk to animal expert Mr. Smith. We asked him what he thought about this development (animals having intelligence) “There must be some sort of radiation in that farm. I refuse to believe animals are capable of such thoughts” was what he told us. After this he seemed to doubt his own words and we were forced to leave.

We also talked to a military general, Mr. Free, to ask him what was it about the animals’ strategy that made it work so well. “They got the right timing for their movements, everyone did what they were supposed to be doing” He said that was the secret to a good strategy: teamwork. In this occasion, the animals were working as a team while the humans weren’t. “It’s only logical the animals won” was his final statement.

We also had a talk with Mr. Jones, but he refused to say much, maybe out of shame of having lost his farm and a battle to animals. We asked him about teamwork and he said, while looking sad, that it was something they were lacking “We just attacked without planning. If we tried again with a better strategy we might win” After this he didn’t say anymore and we were forced to leave the place he has to now call home.

Image from: http://randommusings2010.blogspot.com/2012/07/v-behaviorurldefaultvmlo.html