The Politics of Propaganda: Myth and Reality of the Iron Curtain

Abstract

In our day to day political spheres of increasingly conflicting interests, political propaganda has become an essential tool for contending rivals to construct a narrative based on selected facts rather than commensurable truth in order to win over the masses. However, the origin of deploying propaganda as a political weapon goes back to the beginning of history since the inception of power based political organizations (like kingship) and have continued ever since. But it is only in the twentieth century when the world was divided between capitalist USA and its political as well as ideological rival, the communist USSR, that political propaganda gained a rapid momentum. The attempt of this essay is to reconstruct from contemporary movies, books, radio programs and lastly official documents, the ways in which a concept of an ‘Iron Curtain’ under the communist USSR was created in the tumultuous backdrop of acquisition of nuclear power, political upheaval and infiltration in opponent’s spy agencies