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.