FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2024

The presentation will focus on how the propaganda machinery and disinformation-saturated media landscape that characterised Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime in communist Romania constructed a specific epistemic positioning of individuals that undermined, weakened or obliterated their disposition to make reliable judgements about whom, what and when to trust. While histories of media in (former) totalitarian regimes have paid ample attention to propaganda and censorship, less – if hardly any – attention has been paid to how such mechanisms of disinformation have worked to compromise the epistemic autonomy of people who have lived through such political regimes. This overlooked element in the anatomy of propaganda, namely the epistemic positioning of people in an environment where - as Hannah Arendt (1951) would describe it - “everything was possible, and nothing was true”, can offer insights into the most urgent casualties and liabilities in today’s struggles against disinformation.  

Using oral testimonies, Securitate files and press clippings from the time, I will illustrate how under Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime, the effectiveness of propaganda consisted primarily of people’s disbelief of the regime’s lies, while simultaneously believing that nothing and no one could be trusted and everything was possible. This compromised epistemic autonomy has been a lingering after-effect in post-communist Romanian society. It is this persistence to the present day of a compromised epistemic autonomy rooted within a history of propaganda and disinformation, a persistence that goes on despite the present-day pluriform, independent and alternative systems of information, which is most interesting in understanding the finest mechanisms of how disinformation affects people’s reliance on others in the pursuit of truth and how disinformation ultimately relies on compromised basic social relations.