Daily Archives: 12/09/2022

In my now highly-dated e-book Seeing Through Smoke I wrote about how, once propaganda becomes the basis of a society, even the most sceptical will be fooled much of the time: In a society like the late Soviet Union, it may have been the case that everyone knew fifty percent of what they read in Pravda (ironically meaning “truth”!) to be false. But in a totalitarian state there was no independent way for them to know which fifty percent they should discount. I have no doubt that canny Russian dissidents who rightly rejected news reports on one issue were hoodwinked into believing other falsehoods, or indeed were dismissive of propaganda … Continue reading →