Peter Pomerantsev writes:

Nothing is true and everything is possible. That was my one-line attempt to sum up the politics and propaganda that enveloped Russia at the start of the 21st century. It was a world where politicians no longer cared whether they were caught lying; where old ideologies were dead and conspiracy thinking had become the new way to explain the world; where all the old political categories (socialist and liberal, conservative and communist) seemed utterly meaningless and it was unclear what political parties stood for; where warped nostalgia and vague emotive calls to “Raise Russia From Its Knees” had taken over from any rational idea of the future.

In 2010, I came back to the UK because, in the words of my naive self, I wanted to live in a world where words had meaning. Sure the west was its own sort of mess, but politicians in Washington and Westminster still pretended to respect facts, sneered at conspiracy theories, tried to sound rational.

Then came the revolutionary year of 2016 and ever since then I’ve had the distinct deja vu that the same pathologies of public opinion I saw in Putinist Russia are now prevalent here. [Continue reading…]