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The Early Evolution of Post-Truth Culture
The Early Foray into Post-Truth Mechanisms and the Hijacking of Western Soul
Prologue:
Malcolm Muggeridge went to the Soviet Union hoping to encounter the future. Instead, he discovered how a promised future could be used to conceal a terrible present. His awakening was not merely a rejection of communism: it was a confrontation with the mechanisms by which political power, intellectual prestige and professional journalism could collaborate in the displacement of truth.
“Post-truth” a term that will not be ‘officially’ recognised by Oxford until 2016 (a term defined as; “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”) was a spell being conjured and well and truly in play a century earlier. It is a retrospective description here, not Muggeridge’s own terminology. Yet his experiences in the early 1930s illuminate a recognisable pattern: evidence loses its authority when it threatens an emotionally compelling political narrative. The regime supplies the story; sympathetic intellectuals lend it respectability; journalists, operating under pressure or pursuing their own interests, transmit it to distant audiences. The resulting deception need not depend on everyone knowingly lying. It can also emerge through selective observation, euphemism, professional accommodation and the refusal to reconsider cherished beliefs (Muggeridge, 1933; Vessey, 2023).
From socialist expectation to Soviet disillusionment
Muggeridge’s original sympathy with the Soviet experiment is essential to understanding his subsequent opposition. He approached communism from a socialist background, attracted to its promise of an alternative to the poverty and inequality of capitalist society. The Morning Post, introducing his 1933 account, described him as having gone to Russia an enthusiastic communist and returned entirely disillusioned. That contemporary description establishes the direction of his sympathies, although it should not be mistaken for evidence of formal Communist Party membership (Muggeridge, 1933).
His encounter with Stalinist rule exposed the distance between emancipatory language and coercive practice. The state that purported to govern for the workers maintained a privileged ruling apparatus while imposing deprivation and repression on the population. His reporting attacked not simply the failure to deliver prosperity but the falsification of the regime’s moral identity: domination presented as liberation, and suffering presented as the necessary passage towards a better society (Muggeridge, 1933).
Crucially, Muggeridge did not initially frame this discovery as an abandonment of concern for working people. Near the conclusion of his June 1933 article, he declared that he retained “the deepest sympathy with, and admiration for, the working-class movement.” His hostility to the Soviet government arose, he argued, because it was profoundly reactionary and because association with it would damage that movement (Muggeridge, 1933, “Wilful Blindness?” section). His awakening therefore involved a distinction between a humane aspiration and a political regime claiming exclusive ownership of it.
The first mechanism: making reality inaccessible
Propaganda succeeds more readily when competing evidence is difficult to obtain. Soviet control of foreign reporting extended beyond the censorship of completed articles. Correspondents depended on official communications and a state-controlled press; access to officials was restricted; contact with ordinary citizens could expose those citizens to danger; visas and travel permissions could be used to discipline reporters (Vessey, 2023).
These arrangements shaped what journalists could know before they shaped what journalists could publish. Official information became the readily available material from which foreign news was assembled. Independent investigation required greater effort and risk, while proximity to influential officials could be mistaken for proximity to the truth.
The famine of 1932–33 made these constraints especially consequential. Travel restrictions helped prevent foreign correspondents from observing conditions outside Moscow. Muggeridge was among the exceptions who travelled into famine-affected regions; other exceptions included Gareth Jones and Ralph Barnes. His importance should therefore be recognised without repeating the inaccurate suggestion that he was the only Western journalist to investigate the catastrophe (Vessey, 2023)
The mechanism was straightforward: restrict observation, control the sources, and then present the resulting informational dependence as authoritative knowledge.
The second mechanism: intellectual prestige legitimises deception
Muggeridge’s anger extended beyond Soviet officials to the Western visitors who endorsed their claims. In “How World Is Deceived,” he described scientists accepting implausible statistics, pacifists admiring military displays, economists anticipating profitable commerce, and literary figures celebrating a supposedly new civilisation. These were his polemical characterisations, but their organising accusation was clear: distinguished people applied one standard to societies they criticised and another to the regime they wished to admire (Muggeridge, 1933) .
His explanation was psychological as well as political. Finding their aspirations apparently endorsed by a government with immense power could intoxicate intellectuals. Admitting that the practical application of those aspirations had produced disaster would threaten both their convictions and their self-image.
This is where the “hijacking” of the Western soul becomes a useful metaphor. The object being captured was not simply political opinion but moral attention. Compassion for workers and hostility to exploitation could be redirected towards defending a state that oppressed the very people it claimed to emancipate. The victims became less visible than the historical project.
Muggeridge understood that such misrepresentation had consequences beyond intellectual embarrassment. Admirers’ articles and lectures could encourage economically distressed foreigners to move to the Soviet Union with their families. For them, disillusionment was not merely the revision of an opinion; it could become a crisis of livelihood, citizenship and escape (Muggeridge, 1933).
The third mechanism: journalism learns to censor itself
Muggeridge’s criticism of his own profession was particularly severe. In the preface to Winter in Moscow, he described Soviet coverage as “a joke,” supplied by correspondents rendered docile, correspondents whose relationships with the dictatorship put its words into their mouths, or correspondents compelled to exercise discretion (Muggeridge, 1934, as cited in Vessey, 2023, p. 210).
Yet the historical explanation requires more than a division between courageous truth-tellers and dishonest collaborators. Vessey’s (2023) study of Walter Duranty, William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons shows how ideological sympathy, financial interests, professional security and censorship interacted. Some correspondents consciously accommodated the regime; others gradually adjusted their reporting until restraint became habitual.
Self-censorship was especially effective because it reduced the need for overt intervention. Reporters learned which formulations would pass, which stories would create trouble and which investigations were unlikely to be rewarded. Unpleasant realities could be softened through ambiguous phrasing, omitted altogether or embedded in accounts that preserved the appearance of Soviet progress.
The central professional failure was therefore not always the invention of facts. It was the progressive surrender of independent judgement. A journalist could retain the language and outward procedures of reporting while allowing the authority being investigated to determine the boundaries of the account (Vessey, 2023).
Winter in Moscow: satire exposes the machinery
Published in 1934, Winter in Moscow transformed Muggeridge’s experiences into a satire of Soviet power, foreign correspondents and political fellow travellers. Its fictional form allowed him to dramatise the relationships between careerism, ideological enthusiasm and moral evasion, although its scenes must not be treated as documentary transcripts (Vessey, 2023).
Walter Duranty appears through the character Jefferson, whose acceptance of human sacrifice is encapsulated in the familiar justification that an omelette requires broken eggs. The metaphor reveals a dangerous conversion: actual people become disposable material in an allegedly necessary historical process. Once this premise is accepted, evidence of suffering need not discredit the project. It can instead be presented as confirmation that the project is advancing (Vessey, 2023).
Muggeridge’s satire also denied his opponents on the political right an unrestricted claim to honesty. The novel’s prefatory criticism, reproduced by Vessey, condemns misleading reporting rather than merely the political affiliation of those producing it. His broader contemporary account similarly makes truthfulness—not partisan usefulness—the stated justification for his intervention: “I have written these articles because I believe them to be true” (Muggeridge, 1933, “Wilful Blindness?” section).
From the righteous cause to the manufactured world
The later reflections reproduced in the supplied transcript extend this early experience into a wider criticism of institutional dishonesty. The passage contrasting truth with justice is best understood not as hostility to justice itself, but as suspicion of what happens when a claim to justice becomes permission to deceive.
The catalogue of politicians, priests, professors, journalists, microphones and cameras identifies a common responsibility. Each institution or profession possesses the power to mediate reality for others. Each can abuse that power by substituting what is persuasive, convenient or ideologically desirable for what can honestly be established.
The anecdote about Ignazio Silone and a Comintern meeting sharpens that distinction. In the supplied account, a newcomer objects that a proposed statement would be untrue, provoking collective laughter. As a remembered anecdote rather than independently verified meeting minutes, it should be handled cautiously. Its rhetorical significance nevertheless lies in the replacement of one question by another: not “Is it true?” but “Will it serve our purposes?”
The transcript’s final passage makes the criticism more searching still. Muggeridge asks how to escape the “fantasy and fraud,” remove his own theatrical costume and makeup, and silence the apparatus of the studio. The critic recognises himself as a participant in the manufactured world. His problem is not simply how to expose other people’s deception, but how to resist becoming another performer within it.
The enduring warning
Muggeridge’s early Soviet experience offers a warning about the alliance of moral certainty and concentrated power. A cause does not become truthful because its objectives sound humane. An intellectual does not become reliable because of distinction or eloquence. A report does not become independent because its author has access to important people.
At the same time, his experience should not justify blanket distrust of journalism or scholarship. The historical lesson is more demanding: examine how information is obtained, what pressures shape its presentation, which evidence is excluded and whether an institution permits correction. Vessey’s reconstruction strengthens this lesson by explaining the constraints that Muggeridge’s satire sometimes flattened into moral caricature (Vessey, 2023).
The “hijacking of Western soul,” in this reading, occurs when the commitment to human dignity is made subordinate to the defence of a political narrative. Muggeridge’s awakening began when the suffering before him could no longer be reconciled with the story he had wanted to believe. Its lasting force lies in the demand that no promised future, righteous cause or professional reputation be allowed to place inconvenient reality beyond examination.
Compiled by Disciplesplanet
References
Muggeridge, M. (1933, June 8). Russia revealed IV: How world is deceived: Art of gulling our intelligentsia. The Morning Post. https://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/muggeridge_morning_post_4.htm
Vessey, D. (2023). First-hand accounts? Walter Duranty, William Henry Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons as Moscow correspondents in the 1930s. Journalism Studies, 24(2), 209–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2022.2150876
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