Putin is a better student of Huxley than Orwell. When he was a KGB agent based in Dresden in the 1980s, most of its population could pick up television from the West on their transmitters. These were the most politically quiescent parts of East Germany. Far from being glued to the West German news, they were hooked on Dallas, Baywatch and Dynasty. As Evgeny Morozov pointed out in The Net Delusion, there was one part of the east that could not receive West German TV. It was known as the Valley of the Clueless. Yet it was also the most politicised part of the country. People from here applied in
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