Six voices on how to fight propaganda

With the great powers facing off and a global authoritarian slide, we are entering a new era of brazen propaganda.

Dissidents already living under totalitarian regimes are reaching out to those who feel their democracy is under threat. We hear from six of these champions of free thought on how to fight back and protect the truth.

I am one of the so called “remaining” – those who, continuing to fulfil their research and journalistic duties, risk staying in Russia, analysing what is happening to our country from the belly of the beast. There are few of us, but we do not feel isolated. We have spontaneously formed “clubs” where we discuss matters at private apartments or in cafés. One of the regular toasts at our table is: “May we all survive this.”

The sociologist Yuri Levada spent many years developing the concept of the “Soviet man”, the archetypical personality type shaped by the Soviet system. Adaptability is the main characteristic. Levada called this type of behaviour a “game”.

Consider, for example, the “work” game. In the Soviet version, it was described by a successful joke of those years, “We pretend to work, you pretend to pay.” Another is the game of “consent”: imitation of submission to the state and support for its actions in exchange for a quiet private existence.

When external circumstances in Russia once again became authoritarian and then hybrid totalitarian, both the former “Soviet man” and the new “Putin’s man” turned to all their adaptive capabilities to survive. Their reverse transformation into “normal” people – i.e. non-authoritarian personalities – is possible under very simple conditions: the authorities must change, the external conditions of existence must be altered, and propaganda slogans and ideological postulates must be modified. Then, quite unexpectedly – just as happened with “Soviet man” at the turn of the 1990s – the “neo-totalitarian man” will begin to evolve rapidly toward normalisation.

For this transition to occur and hold, institutions matter. During the transition period from the Stalinist state to a more or less normal, nearly democratic system, they did not have time to form. The post-Soviet person has become a consumer in the capitalist sense, but has not become a citizen who is a supporter of human rights, humanistic values and the rotation of power as something extremely important for everyday life. Without democracy there can be no modernisation, especially in an ideologised empire with messianic hallucinations.

Once, when my friends – all people with “dissenting” thoughts – and I made our regular toast, “May we all survive this,” one of the circle, in his 70s, who was born under Stalin, remarked gloomily: “No one has ever managed to do so.” He was referring to the endless return of Russian history to its despotic beginnings – several times in the course of his lifetime. My own mother was the daughter of an “enemy of the people”, and it’s a good thing she didn’t live to see me declared a “foreign agent”. Such are the Russian cycles from which one yearns to escape.

I am 60 years old. People of my age and circle are often asked why we are so attached to the 1990s, a time of transition from socialism to capitalism. For us, it was a time of hope and freedom. The freedom that the great Andrei Sakharov spoke of in his 1968 work, Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom: “ ... intellectual freedom is essential to human society – freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economy and culture.”

You might say that all this is too simple and naïve. Perhaps, but it is precisely the absence of such a vision of the world that leads to the emergence of Putins, dictatorships and wars. In my opinion, nothing better than this triple freedom has been invented in my 60 years on Earth. I would not want my sons and daughter, who have become the children of a “foreign agent”, to be the parents of the next “enemy” of the next Russian dictator. Me, my family and my country, which should not be equated with Putin’s regime, need the kind of freedom of which Sakharov dreamed.

“Climate change – it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.” That was Donald Trump, speaking to the United Nations in September. The US president went on to denounce what he called the “green energy scam” and praised “clean, beautiful coal”. Just months earlier, wildfires had devastated California. Trump and his allies around the world want people to believe this is normal. But everyone who can read knows that climate change is a clear and present danger.

Scientists say that 2025 was one of the three hottest years on record. The World Weather Attribution service identified 157 extreme weather events last year as “severe”, in that they killed at least 100 people, affected half an area’s population or led to a state of emergency being declared. Of these, it said the year’s deadly heatwaves were made 10 times more likely than a decade ago by climate change.

Meanwhile, oil and gas companies (which donated $25.8 million to Trump’s re-election campaign) have taken Trump’s return to power as a sign that they can stop pretending to curb their emissions. Companies like BP have scrapped their 2030 targets for switching from oil and gas to renewable energy production.

All this has encouraged climate deniers in Europe. In December 2024, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage spoke at the launch of the European branch of the Heartland Institute, a US think-tank that boasts of “supporting scepticism about man-made climate change” and has received funding from ExxonMobil. Spooked by Reform’s polling, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party has declared net zero “impossible” and pledged to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act.

Meanwhile, green policies at the European Union level have been opposed by far-right parties across the continent, with similar arguments from Conservative Pierre Poilievre in Canada. In Europe and North America, the Venn diagram of far-right parties and climate deniers is a circle. And these nationalists are increasingly working together across borders.

Despite this, and despite the COP30 summit in Brazil in November failing to even mention fossil fuels in its final statement, some long-time climate-watchers remain optimistic. Former US president Al Gore and environmentalist Bill McKibben have recently pointed to the extraordinary growth of renewable energy (92 per cent of new electricity generation in 2024) as a trend that right-wing demagogues can’t stop.

The biggest challenge is to generate political will for effective climate action. Advocacy has had some recent wins. Guardian climate journalist Nina Lakhani noted that the first ever “just transition mechanism”, agreed at COP30 for an energy transition that respects human rights, was the result of “years of civil society organising” including large protests at the climate summit itself. She also highlighted plans by Colombia, the Netherlands and 22 other states to work on moving away from fossil fuels outside the sluggish COP process.

In another promising development, the International Court of Justice ruled in July that states have a legal duty to tackle climate change – the result of a case brought by law students in the Pacific Islands, which are on the frontline of rising sea levels. That ruling could now be used to oppose new fossil fuel projects. In recent years, France has passed a law against corporate greenwashing, while the Hague has banned fossil fuel advertising outright. The idea is to treat “Big Carbon” the same as tobacco companies.

As for the climate denial flooding our screens, the EU and the UK’s respective Digital Services Acts require tech companies to moderate the deluge on their platforms. At COP30, more than 20 countries signed a “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change”, calling on governments, the private sector and civil society to tackle climate denial and support accurate information.

But these efforts are under growing attack from the political right, as if “freedom of speech” includes the freedom of corporations (and their proxies) to lie about their planet-warming emissions. The rise of nationalist politics threatens to drown out climate as a priority, and to use “cost of living” worries to dismiss green policies as a left-wing “elitist” luxury.

The challenge is to build a democratic politics that connects the struggle against predatory corporations and authoritarian demagogues with the need for climate action – and, crucially, gives people something to vote for, instead of simply against. “Clean power, people power” would be a good slogan.

Anti-immigration propaganda saturates the UK. Well-funded far-right social media accounts proliferate, pumping misinformation onto our screens, often straight from the US where anti-migrant messages brought Trump to power. The mainstream media has joined in with obsessive coverage, framing immigration as a problem to be eradicated, rather than a human reality to be managed.

As Reform UK top the polls, Labour moves right and Tommy Robinson leads huge nationalist marches, it is easy to despair. But that is exactly what the people funding the far-right hope for: that decent people will stay quiet and let them pass.

While immigration is a huge issue of concern, we should remember the public remains relatively level-headed about the subject. There is significant opposition to small boats, but quite strong support for most other kinds of immigration, from carers to builders to students, and even for protecting refugees.

What is criminal is that so few voices speak for this silenced majority. Changing that starts with a more confident, proactive approach – less responding to negative framing and more telling the story of the alternative.

There are three lessons we can take into 2026:

Focus on who suffers from anti-migrant politics, and who gains

The government is making it harder for immigrants to get settled, permanent status. Care workers, for example, who came on the promise that after five years they could settle, must now wait a further 15. But when workers have temporary status, they are at risk of exploitation, as they rely on their employer for their right to remain in their home. This move creates a more exploitable second class of worker, which in turn impacts wages and conditions for all.

It is businesses seeking to underpay workers who benefit from them being more insecure, and loan sharks who celebrate more migrants being trapped in cycles of debt to pay visa renewal fees for longer. Meanwhile, private security firms and corporate landlords rake in lucrative government contracts to provide an ever-escalating but never effective pantomime of enforcement at the border and in asylum seeker accommodation.

On the other side, fewer workers means costs pushed up in hospitality, care and farming, resulting in higher prices for everyone. All the while, much lower immigration means a smaller economy with less money for public services and more tax rises.

Talk about real solutions

In the face of chaos, it’s tempting to say “but we must do SOMETHING” as if the only option were more restrictions on rights and movement. In fact, we have plenty of highly evidenced alternative approaches available to us. From the striking example of how a safe route for Ukrainians saved lives and bypassed smugglers, to the evidence that more stable, settled status correlates to higher salaries, or economic modelling that shows investment in integration and giving asylum seekers the right to work produces better outcomes and saves money for the state.

It is striking how utterly the anti-migrant politics of deterrence, pursued over years, has failed on its own terms. Yet we still accept a conversation where “more of the same, just a bit harder this time” is the answer. We must articulate how to run an immigration system to the benefit of the country, because we know how to do that. We don’t have to choose between the chaotic status quo and even more hostility.

Find our courage

For too long, progressive voices have been cowardly. Propaganda has convinced many that it is “out of touch” to support immigrants. Since the Brexit vote took much of the commentariat by surprise, they are desperate to prove they “get it” by giving up ground to an increasingly belligerent and extreme anti-migrant right. We find ourselves now facing potentially the most serious far-right threat in our history, dominated by figures like Farage, and even Robinson, who are miles away from representing the majority of ordinary Brits.

We ordinary people who reject a hyper-nationalist future for Britain, like that which has overtaken the US, need to find our courage. There can be no wishing this issue away. The right has successfully made the debate about immigration, and now we have got to win it.

As the great Mahatma Gandhi reportedly counselled, let us be the change we wish to see in the world. This also applies to us scientists. We can mount legal challenges to the promotion of lies and conspiracies. We can organise and pressure academic and scientific institutions to take a more proactive stance against anti-scientific disinformation, and to provide support and defence for scientists subject to concerted right-wing attacks.

If we don’t, these institutions will assuredly cave in to the bad-faith demands of polemicists, propagandists and pressure groups. Look no further than Stanford’s pitiful capitulation to right-wing critics in dissolving their Internet Observatory for the study of disinformation because it came under attack by disinformation promoters like the Putin-loving Ohio congressman Jim Jordan.

We’ve seen some progress over the past decade. Back in 2012, Andrew Weaver, a leading climate scientist from the University of Victoria in British Columbia ran for office. He was elected as the first Green Party member of British Columbia’s legislative assembly in 2013 and went on to become the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia in 2015. He used this platform to push for clean energy and oppose the expansion of liquefied natural gas. Climate policy scholar Claudia Sheinbaum took it to a new level in June 2024, running for and becoming president of Mexico. It remains to be seen just what she will do with this platform.

Of course, you hardly need to be an expert to play an important role. All of us can work towards increased support for science education and objective and comprehensive science standards in schools. Any lasting solution to the anti-science crisis will require limiting the ability of vested interests and plutocrats to seize control of our media environment, increasing support for public media, enforcing basic rules of journalistic integrity and getting special-interest money out of our politics. That relies on each of us taking action.

It often comes down to voting, and not just at the presidential level, but at the state and local levels. Even the 2024 US election, which handed full power of our federal government to a Republican Party opposed to science-based policies, offered at least one silver lining. Climate initiatives did well across the country. Voters in Washington rejected a ballot measure that attempted to repeal the state’s cap-and-trade system for emissions reductions, while voters in California and Hawaii overwhelmingly passed measures to invest in climate resilience. We must – as youth climate activists have done – speak truth to power and put pressure on our elected representatives to work toward global climate agreements that truly meet the moment.

We face an anti-science threat of epic proportions, a battle for the Earth itself. In The Two Towers – the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy – the two hobbits Merry and Pippin face a similarly daunting task. They find themselves among Treebeard and his army of tree-like beings known as Ents, as they mobilise against Saruman, who is destroying the forests for his military operation (yes, Lord of the Rings is replete with environmental themes). The diminutive Pippin questions the purpose of such a small creature as he in this great war. He says to Merry that at least “we’ve got the Shire” and that “maybe we should go home”. Merry admonishes Pippin, explaining that the war will spread, “and all that was once green and good in this world will be gone”. He chillingly warns, “There won’t be a Shire, Pippin.”

It might be tempting to see the battle against anti-science as too removed from your everyday life. But if humanity fails to combat the great global crises we face today, there won’t be an Earth – at least not one that we’d recognise. We will lose the welcoming planetary home we know today, with its rich forests and oceans and ecosystems teeming with diverse, interconnected life forms. That’s stark. But the choice is ours. The obstacles are not physical or technological. They are political.

Today, harm is being done by the spread of despair and defeatism, some of it weaponised by bad actors like Russia to create division and disengagement. We are, in fact, far from defeat. The United States remains close, according to some estimates, to being on track to meet its commitment to cutting carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 and reaching zero by 2050, despite the opposition by Trump, the Republicans, and polluters and petrostates.

A path to limiting warming below 1.5°C still exists, though it is becoming increasingly narrow. Yes, we may miss the 1.5°C target. But keeping warming below 2°C would still avoid much harm and suffering. It’s never too late to make a difference.

With the Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing in 1989, history began to run in the opposite direction. Just as exiles from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were returning home, our own time of exile began. Not long ago, the nightmare was reincarnated, as the war criminal Putin strode smugly across the red carpets of China, the US and India. To my eyes, it was as though each of his footprints was steeped in the blood and flesh of those crushed by the tank tracks on Tiananmen Square.

“The Great Leap Forward”, the Chinese political slogan of the 1950s, could be changed to “the Great Leap Backward” to perfectly describe the post-Cold War world. Today, the spiritual crisis of humanity is far graver than during the Cold War. Globalisation and the illusion of “the end of history” have concealed a frightening reality: autocratic totalitarianism and western big capital have been quietly converging. Big capitalists are scrambling to throw themselves into the arms of the Communist Party of China, enjoying the cheap labour made possible by autocratic repression and obtaining huge profits that are unimaginable under the rule of law, while the CCP has strengthened its power by hijacking western capital, technology and knowledge.

The “theory of evolution” has thus become a joke: getting rich means abandoning your moral principles. Since there is no idealistic vision, all that remains is to grab what you can, in line with immediate interests. Selfishness, cynicism and “profit first” have combined to paint an ugly portrait of the world.

My poem “1989” ends with the line, “This is no doubt a perfectly ordinary year”. This implies a self-questioning. If Tiananmen shocked us as though it were the first time we had ever heard of a massacre, then where were our memories of the countless dead in the Cultural Revolution? If they had simply been forgotten, then who can guarantee that the tears we shed after Tiananmen Square were not just washing away our memory in preparation for the next shock? Today, we stare open-mouthed in astonishment as the nations of Big Brother – including Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Trump’s US and Khamenei’s Iran – openly form agreements, and democratic systems degenerate into games of majorities.

In China, lies and suppression are the two magic weapons of the CCP’s rule. While state propaganda blames the west for blocking China’s access to YouTube, Google, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, Chinese people are locked in a high firewall by their own government, hopelessly becoming either prisoners or their own guards in the world’s largest prison.

In 2018, I spent more than 10 months translating George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Soon after, news came from Beijing: Orwell was officially banned in mainland China. My translations could only be published in Taiwan in the end. 1984 reveals the true face of totalitarianism, which the Big Brothers of today seek to conceal. In 1984’s final, most terrifying sentence, we learn of the protagonist Winston Smith: “He loved Big Brother”. In 2026, it is we who love Big Brother. Today’s world goes beyond Orwell’s darkest imaginings. Once Xi Jinping rebuilds a comprehensive autocracy, and lies and violence become pervasive, Mao Zedong’s system of surveillance will pale in comparison.

This brings us back to the essence of resistance. It should not only be directed towards an external power, but even more towards our own spiritual decay, because it is precisely the surrender of each individual that creates opportunities for totalitarian control. Today, a rebel must be an “active other, who takes the energy of self-questioning – I question therefore I am – and consciously resists self-inertia, regardless of what immediate benefits this attitude might bring them.

Where do we go from here? Firstly, there is no heaven, but we must resist every hell; and secondly, we must understand that we are starting from the impossible. Orwell’s works can still guide us. They shatter the utopian illusion, and at the same time affirm human dignity and the essence of civilisation.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe now.