George Orwell, in “Nineteen Eight-Four,” grasped an essential point about totalitarian propaganda, namely that the more outrageously false it was, the better it served its purpose, which was not to inform or persuade, but to humiliate and subdue. In totalitarian states, it is not enough to lie low and keep silent: you have to join in, as if you enthusiastically believe the lies that you are obliged to repeat on pain of social ostracism at best and of severe punishment at worst. If you can make people assent in public to what everyone knows to be false, you destroy their probity and therefore their moral authority to resist. You also make them hostages to fortune: for when the orthodox doctrine changes, everyone fears to be held to account for having in the past publicly asserted things which are now in contradiction to the new orthodoxy. Therefore no one is innocent …