Bending the truth has always been part of the political game. The government talks about employment numbers while the opposition focuses on unemployment. One side highlights GDP growth; the other, rising inequality. It is the art of using selected facts to support a preferred narrative. Anyone who knows anything about politics knows this.
But then there are the grand, omnipotent fabrications typically orchestrated by authoritarian regimes. The German Third Reich and the USSR excelled in crafting societal lies so vast and unhinged that they eventually threatened the very stability of the regimes themselves. Authoritarian governments have always taken deception to extremes—often with such a sickly elegance that one could almost admire the audacity, were it not so soaked in menace and contempt. This tradition continues today in regimes like Putin’s Russia, Communist China, and, in perhaps its purest form, North Korea. Coming in a close second—though with less theatrical flair—are the populists. But let us begin with one of the original gangsters.
In Stalin’s USSR, truth was not merely denied; it was prohibited. Hannah Arendt, the grand old lady of political philosophy, dissected these mechanisms with surgical clarity.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she described the logic using the example that if Stalin declared Moscow’s metro the only one in existence, the existence of the Paris or London Undergrounds was not a problem of fact but a problem of power. If they existed, that was not an argument for a change in narrative but an argument for destroying the metro systems of other nations. Truth was whatever the party or its leaders said it was. For those who did not agree, there was a vast system of correctional facilities designated for political dissidents.
One of the many intellectuals who was sent to those facilities was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Like Arendt, he examined the function of lies within totalitarian systems in his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago. He described how the entire social fabric was woven with lies that no one dared challenge. With sardonic clarity, he wrote:
“We know that they are lying; they know that they are lying; they even know that we know they are lying. We also know that they know we know they are lying too. They, of course, know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but the pillar industry of this country.”
Solzhenitsyn described how inmates of the gulags who were innocent of every crime (and there were several of those) would often not dare to contradict the accusations made against them in fear of contradicting the great Soviet. The lie had become such an integral part of the societal structure that the falsely accused inmates often started to believe the accusations themselves.
Arendt reminded us that the key to breaking a society lies in the totalitarian impulse to destroy the shared world of factuality. A functioning society, democratic or otherwise, relies on some degree of common ground: a terrain where argument is possible and decisions can be made. A shared reality, if you will.
In the authoritarian cosmology, however, facts are a threat to the entire societal structure. The lie becomes something more than a lie, even to the point where the goal is not to persuade the public but to bewilder it. The strategy is to wear them down until they become exhausted and hopeless, leading them to accept the lie not as credible but as inescapable. Arendt noted that the goal of propaganda in totalitarian states is not to make the population believe but to make them unable to believe. Their function is to prove that the liar can say what he likes and still command obedience. If you object, you are not just wrong; you are an enemy of the people.
Authoritarian regimes, of course, operate under the looming threat of crude violence. Democracies, by contrast, require some degree of voluntary participation for such deception to function. This makes the process more complex—and, arguably, more insidious.
This is one of the reasons why American soft power has historically been so important. It rested on a foundational belief—both domestically and abroad—that whatever America was doing was right in a broader moral sense. That they were winning over the forces of old and evil. This narrative was not just for domestic consumption. It was embedded in the Marshall Plan, in Voice of America broadcasts, in Hollywood’s heroic myth-making, and in the branding of the Cold War as a clash between freedom and tyranny. The belief didn’t require perfection—only that America was facing the right direction while others marched backward.
While many violently disagreed with this notion, the general post-war consensus accepted that America was at least the lesser evil. But in recent years, that perception has begun to erode. The disillusionment isn’t necessarily turning people toward another superpower, but it is shifting nonetheless. And for good reasons.
As we turn to the modern-day populists like Erdogan, Orban, Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin, we can see that they did not invent these tactics. They simply imported them with the same crude efficiency they apply to everything else. They all rose to power through democratic elections and slowly began reshaping the state in their own image.
The most recent entrant into the quasi-authoritarian club is, of course, the United States. The fact that its president is a habitual liar is well-documented. What is more interesting is the methods he employs. Because we are not talking about grand societal-wide falsehoods. Not even political doublespeak or some other form of semantic trickery. We are talking about plain old lying. Like a child vehemently denying ever opening the pantry while still chewing the cookie. No sophistication or bravado. No. This is Baghdad Bob territory.
When Donald Trump stood before the cameras and claimed that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been bombed into submission, the statement was not grounded in fact but in subjective assertion. When CNN then countered with satellite images and intelligence briefings disproving the claim, the response was not to adjust the narrative but to punish the messenger. Trump did not argue. He denounced ”fake news”. The aim was never to inform but to polarise.
More recently, Trump dismissed the head of the Department of Government Statistics because the job numbers failed to match his expectations—once again attempting to tailor reality to fit the narrative.
There is no greater contempt for the citizen than to lie to him in plain sight and then punish him for noticing. If you cannot trust your own eyes and ears, you cannot govern yourself. You can only be governed. And so, Trump’s lies about Iran and job statistics—like Putin’s lies about Ukraine and historical fact—are not mistakes. They are assertions of dominion. They are performances of power without accountability. In one country, the people have already lost. In the other, they are complicit in their own real-time subjugation.
