forced societal consensus, created through a monopoly on mass media, combined with strict censorship. This creates the conditions for chronic mobilization of the population, always prepared to carry out the decisions of the party-state. . . . The subjects’ attention is focused predominantly on events inside the country, which is isolated from the outside world; hence the sense of exceptionalism, a focus on “us,” and a powerful alienation barrier, a refusal to know or understand events “on the other side.”
