The Guardian: Death of truth: when propaganda and 'alternative facts' first gripped the world

Truth was the first casualty of the Great Depression. Reflecting the anguish of the time, propaganda was manufactured on an unprecedented scale. As economic disaster threatened to trigger shooting wars so, as George Orwell said, useful lies were preferred to harmful truths. He went further, declaring that history stopped in 1936; after that there was only propaganda. [...]

But propaganda, like advertising, only strikes chords when the conditions are right. For all his ranting, Hitler could never have won widespread support if he had not been able to exploit the multiple miseries of the Depression. After 1929, Germans were receptive to his assertion that their sufferings were the evil fruits of the rotten Weimar system. The problem was not economic but political, he insisted, and it could only be solved by the restoration, under his leadership, of German might: “The key to the world market has the shape of the sword.” His means of grasping that sword was the Nazi party, which he organised entirely “to serve the propaganda of ideas”. [...]

Truth was further occluded by faith and fear. In the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, Arthur Koestler observed some of the worst horrors of the famine but affirmed they were products of the capitalist past, whereas the few hopeful signs pointed to a communist utopia. Even in the gulag, Eugenia Ginzburg wrote, people refused to believe the evidence of their senses: “Anything that appeared in a newspaper carried more conviction with them than what they saw in the street.” [...]

The Labour politician Arthur Ponsonby gave voice to the widespread outrage: “The injection of the poison of hatred into men’s minds by means of falsehood is a greater evil in wartime than the actual loss of life.” In consequence, people were reluctant to credit stories of genuine atrocities emanating from Hitler’s Germany. When the News Chronicle printed a circumstantial account of the horrifying brutality of guards at Sachsenhausen in 1938, Hilaire Belloc wrote that this “example of lying on the anti-Nazi side” made it impossible “to believe anything from that quarter without corroborating testimony”.

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