This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev

Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power. The Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counterrevolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were used to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists, or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology, the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the worldview itself. Conspiracy theory replaces ideology with a mix of self-pity, paranoia, self-importance, and entertainment. Erdogan, Trump, Putin, Orbán, and the rest invoke conspiracies to explain events, often hinting at them without going so far as stating them directly, which only strengthens the sense that what they are establishing is a more general worldview than any single theory.