A key function of propaganda has always been to demoralize the opposition. From the perspective of the propagandists, it is important to always give the impression that their side is the side of the majority, and the most popular. We have witnessed this in action in recent years with the rise of censorship designed to “combat misinformation.” By suppressing dissident viewpoints, the regime lessens access to “unorthodox” ideas, but there is an important secondary function: suppressing dissenting speech also gives the impression that the dissidents are less numerous and more isolated than they really are. By ensuring that certain voices dominate the public square, propagandists help to create a sense of inevitability of the regime’s program. This facilitates greater public acceptance of the propagandists’ inescapable victory. After all, why bother resisting if the other side is so popular, and your side is but a small minority?
Socialists and their allies have long been very adept at using these methods, and few had a greater mastery of it than V.I. Lenin. For most of the twentieth century, Lenin’s successors employed his methods, successfully portraying the spread of socialist regimes as the inevitable outcome of enormous communist mass movements. The modern post-Soviet Left still employs similar tactics, portraying itself as being on “the right side of history” and as the legitimate majority position.
Nonetheless, the extent to which many of these twentieth-century “revolutions” were truly revolutions has always been in question. Many of these socialist regime changes could far more accurately be described as a coup d’état in which a small minority seized control of the state without majority support or any bottom-up revolutionary mass movements.
For example, the so-called “October Revolution” in Russia was not a revolution, but was a coup carried out by a small minority. In the socialist version of history, the October Revolution was a bottom up “people’s movement” devoted to helping Lenin and the Bolsheviks topple the provisional social-democratic government. This narrative has been key in establishing the legitimacy of the Lenin regime. In this view, Lenin was merely giving “the people” what they wanted. The portrayal of the October coup as a revolution of the masses also gives the impression that the turn to communism was the inevitable and desired result of unfolding and intractable historical trends. Naturally, this view of history encourages socialists while demoralizing their opponents.
Yet, the historical facts tell us that socialism’s greatest political victory—the creation of the Soviet Union—was neither inevitable nor a response to the demands of a revolutionary majority.
Hellbound and Down 