MY LIFE IN PROPAGANDA
Language and Totalitarian Regimes

By Magda Stroińska      

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“As Magda Stroińska shows in this fascinating and personal account of the abuse of language, totalitarian states have effectively entrenched their positions by abusing the meaning of words. ...Nobody is better placed to explain how the control of language can lead to the control of society.” —Dr. Philip Booth, St. Mary’s University, London UK

My Life in Propaganda: Language and Totalitarian Regimes is Magda Stroińska’s personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She looks at the influence of her family history that contradicted what she was taught at school; the cognitive and emotional effects of compulsory school readings; socialist realist art and film; and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and their role in shaping her generation’s collective view of the world. Through her chosen field of linguistics, she analyzes ways in which propagandistic language, such as ‘doubletalk,’ Orwellian ‘Newspeak,’ ‘weasel words,’ and, more colloquially, ‘bullshit,’ is used to distort reality.

She also observes post-communist societies through the lens of societal trauma and explains how to understand the sudden fall into the populist trap. The book demonstrates that democracy can never be taken for granted.

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