dogs show up later as military enforcers or secret police. As the newer generations are brought up with propaganda and the old generations are ignored, Squealer begins making changes to the Seven Commandments. The animals experience a vague feeling of unease, and when Clover and Muriel ponder the changes, they are told that they have simply forgotten. They accept this easily, helped along by the growling dogs that accompany the pigs everywhere. Benjamin alone appears to understand what is happening, though he never acts. If asked, he says that donkeys live a long time, and that "none of you has ever seen a dead donkey". True to his cynical nature, he continues to believe that life never gets better. He is briefly outraged by Boxer's death but becomes ever more cynical when Squealer again convinces the denizens of the Farm that Boxer was only taken to a hospital. In the end, this works out to Squealer's advantage. Terror and silver-tongued oration fool nearly everyone, and the sole animal who sees through these fronts, Benjamin, is simply too cynical to do anything. This reflected Orwell's view that events in Russia following the Revolution of 1917 had followed an unwelcome path, and that the egalitarian socialism he believed in had there become a brutal dictatorship built around a cult of personality and enforced by terror and lies. Orwell wrote: "All people who are morally sound have known since about 1931 that the Russian régime stinks". Squealer, as the chief propagandist of the regime, is prominent in the story and Orwell defines the path down which small lies lead to bigger lies. Orwell regarded propaganda as a feature of all modern governments but especially prominent in totalitarian regimes, which depended on it. In The Prevention of Literature (1946) he described "organized lying" as a crucial element of totalitarian states. References Fictional pigs Fictional politicians Animal Farm characters Literary characters introduced in 1945 Fictional revolutionaries Fictional characters based on real people Male literary villains Pigs in literature Male characters in literature