My Life in Propaganda: Language and Totalitarian Regimes

by Magda Stroinska

My Life in Propaganda 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, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America and their role in shaping her generation’s collective view of the world. She also observes post-communist societies through the lens of societal trauma and explains how to understand the sudden fall into the populist trap. This demonstrates that democracy can never be taken for granted.

Genres: Nonfiction

276 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2023

Reviews

[Mary Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried the audiobook and the narrator was awful, so maybe try the print version.

[Alberta Views Magazine]

From “doubletalk” (the intentional distortion of words) to Orwellian “Newspeak” to “weasel words” (that corrupt the meaning of a word in order to manipulate an audience) to “bullshit,” we’ve all heard it, increasingly so as populism surges—in Alberta and around the world. “How can ordinary people protect themselves from propaganda and language manipulation?” asks Magda Stroińska, in her thought-provoking “academic memoir.” Stroińska, now a professor of linguistics at McMaster University, grew up in Poland under the communist regime—“a place where language became divorced from reality.” Much of her book focuses on the propaganda used by the twin totalitarianisms—Nazi and Soviet—that plagued Poland in the past and still infect political speech in that country. And elsewhere: “the spread of empty promises and all forms of populist rhetoric in public discourse seems to be reaching epidemic proportions worldwide,” she writes. “Propaganda and thought manipulation have become some of the most important problems we face today.” To defend against this scourge, “I hope that my own struggles with language and its representation or creation of reality may be of some help to others.”