Propaganda

Why do intelligent people believe things that are demonstrably false?
Why does correcting a lie so often make it stronger?
Why do entire populations choose leaders they know will harm them - and feel proud of the choice?

The answer is not stupidity. It is propaganda.

In this urgent and meticulously researched book, Victor Lane draws on the latest neuroscience and social psychology to reveal exactly how propaganda works - not as a crude tool of dictators and demagogues, but as a systematic exploitation of the cognitive architecture that every human being possesses.

Propaganda moves from the science of the individual mind to the machinery of mass persuasion to five landmark cases:

• Nazi Germany: How Goebbels built the most complete propaganda state in history - and what his private diaries reveal about his methods
• Soviet Agitprop: The revolution that rewrote reality - and its evolution into today's confusion-manufacturing doctrine
• Rwanda: How Radio Milles Collines used language alone to prepare a population for genocide
• Big Tobacco: The blueprint for manufacturing scientific doubt that has since killed more people than any political propaganda campaign in history
• Cambridge Analytica: How psychographic micro-targeting personalised propaganda at a scale no previous system had achieved