Casting Doubt

A lot of people still think of propaganda as the art of making lies sound truthful, but...they want to make truthfulness an irrelevant category. It’s not about proving something, it’s about casting doubt. Most political ideologies have not been about casting doubt — they’ve claimed to be telling the truth about the way the world is or should be. But this new propaganda is different. Putin isn’t selling a wonderful communist future. He’s saying, we live in a dark world, the truth is unknowable, the truth is always subjective, you never know what it is, and you, the little guy, will never be able to make sense of it all — so you need to follow a strong leader.

Sean Illing & Peter Pomerantsev in a Vox  interview