The Festival of New

Post-Truth and Politics is a course that has grown out of the study of propaganda and public relations as media and political tools. Post-Truth—as a recent explosion of political culture in which debate is framed by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy or impartial information—requires a careful examination. Is it political spin, wishful thinking, mass myth, art of evasion, or simple lying, based on “fake news” and “alternative facts”? There are repeated unverified assertions to which factual rebuttals are ignored, and people are compelled to believe something regardless of evidence. How do these differ from previous examples of political lying? There was, of course, Plato’s “noble lie,” aand Machiavelli’s counsel that a good prince must be “a great pretender and dissembler.” What makes post-truth different from past political manipulations—including that of propaganda—is communicative abundance. This enables messages to be sent and received through multiple user points, in a chosen time, real or delayed, within global networks that are unregulated, affordable, and accessible to billions of people. In this new era, Marshall McLuhan’s famous formula—"the medium is the message" distributed in a “global village” without restraint—has reached a new level of boundlessness. The message is based on a deliverer’s whim, and itself becomes the medium. We will investigate how post-truth politics is manifested in various political cultures, among them the USA, the UK, India, Turkey, Austria, Germany, Poland, and Russia.