From Autocracy, Inc. (Anne Applebaum, 2024) pp77-9
… autocrats monopolize national conversations by accruing as much attention as possible for themselves. Hugo Chávez appeared on Venezuelan television constantly, preempting regular programming and dominating all television and radio channels at once. On Sundays he conducted an hours-long talk show, Aló Presidente, during which he treated viewers to long monologues on politics or sports, as well as personal anecdotes and songs. Sometimes he invited celebrities to join him, among them Naomi Campbell and Sean Penn. In some ways, his monopoly of the national conversation prefigured Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, although Trump made use of social media, not television, to dominate the conversation. Both men also lied repeatedly, and blatantly, as do other modern dictators. The political scientist Lisa Wedeen has observed that the Syrian regime tells lies so ludicrous that no one could possibly believe them, for example that Syria, at the height of the civil war, was an excellent tourist destination. These “national fictions,” she concluded, were meant not to persuade anyone, but rather to demonstrate the power of the people who were spinning the stories. Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.
This too marks a departure from the past. Soviet leaders also lied, but they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. Like Khrushchev at the UN, they became angry when anyone accused them of lying, and in response they produced fake “evidence” or counterarguments. In Putin’s Russia, Assad’s Syria, or Maduro’s Venezuela, politicians and television personalities often play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But when they are exposed, they don’t bother to offer counterarguments. When Russian-controlled forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a denial but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: they blamed the Ukrainian army, or the CIA, or a nefarious plot in which 298 dead people were placed on a plane in order to fake a crash and discredit Russia.
This tactic, the so-called “fire hose of falsehoods” produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you can never know? If you can’t understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy, or follow a truth-telling leader, or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you will avoid politics altogether. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world.
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