tactics

The concept of tactics first enters the animals' vocabulary on the evening after Napoleon's expulsion of Snowball, when Squealer privately explains that Napoleon had never truly opposed the windmill. On the contrary, Squealer asserts, it was Napoleon who had advocated it from the beginning, and the plan Snowball drew had actually been stolen from Napoleon's papers. The apparent opposition was a cunning maneuver — a piece of "tactics" — to rid the farm of Snowball, who was a dangerous influence. Squealer repeats the word several times, skipping and whisking his tail, and the animals accept the explanation without further questions, though they are not certain what the word means. The term thus functions as a blank check for any contradiction between past statements and present actions, insulating Napoleon from charges of inconsistency.

Throughout the remainder of the novel, Squealer deploys the same tactical logic to justify a series of betrayals of the Rebellion's original principles. When the pigs begin to sleep in the farmhouse beds, he argues that the Fourth Commandment only forbade sheets, and that a bed is merely a place to sleep. When they engage in trade with humans, he insists that the resolution against commerce had never been passed — it was a dream, a lie circulated by Snowball. When the hens rebel against the egg quota, the dogs enforce the new order, and the hens' deaths are attributed to disease. Each of these episodes is presented as a necessary expedient, a tactical adjustment to circumstances, never as a deviation from the founding ideals. Squealer's rhetoric consistently frames the pigs' privileges as sacrifices for the common good, and the threat of Jones's return shuts down any lingering doubt.

But the most devastating application of tactics occurs in the rewriting of history itself. Squealer retroactively transforms Snowball from a hero of the Battle of the Cowshed into a traitor who had been Jones's secret agent from the start, and who had tried to lose the battle deliberately. The animals' own memories are overwritten by Squealer's vivid, repeated narratives; they come to believe that they remember seeing Snowball turn to flee at the critical moment, even though the evidence of his bravery had been plain to all. The word "tactics" thus becomes the key that unlocks the entire machinery of propaganda: it is the label under which truth is replaced by convenient fiction, the mechanism by which the pigs' absolute power is naturalized. By the time the Commandments have been silently altered — "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets," "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess," "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause" — the animals have long since learned to accept that the rules are not fixed but subject to the tactical needs of the leadership.

Ultimately, "tactics" is the name given to the process by which the ideals of Animalism are hollowed out and replaced by the will of Napoleon. It is a concept that allows the pigs to maintain the appearance of following the Seven Commandments while systematically violating their spirit. The creatures who once sang "Beasts of England" with revolutionary fervor now march in Spontaneous Demonstrations and chant "Four legs good, two legs better" — a slogan that is itself a tactical revision of Snowball's original maxim. The farmhouse becomes a museum no animal enters, then a residence for pigs, then a place where pigs dine with human farmers and play cards, and finally the setting for the ultimate tactical reversal: the farm is renamed Manor Farm, the green flag loses its hoof and horn, and the pigs begin to walk on their hind legs carrying whips. Through it all, the word "tactics" has served as the solvent that dissolves every principle into expediency, every revolution into a new tyranny.