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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Comparing present day North Korea with 80s Romania is pretty far - the communist regime in Romania never had anything close to the same fanatical dedication from its people. Few in Romania ever believed the official propaganda, even if they were forced to spew it. In fact this is common with most dictatorial propaganda: no one believes it, it's more of a show of force - everyone repeating what they know to be a lie, least they get reported for wrong think.

By all accounts, this is not the case in N Korea - the propaganda there has been much more drilled into people, and I've even seen interviews with defectors saying that they still couldn't bring themselves to say bad things about Kim, or touching S Korean leaflets, for fear of divine retribution.

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why do you think north koreans believe the state propaganda?

Testimonies from escapees tend to show they sort of believed at least the negative propaganda about the south, western countries, and China. Not so much the godlike powers of the leadership.

It's similarly true about Soviet propaganda. The people living in Soviet territory commonly believed the propaganda about the US and West as well. Even the highest tiers, including eg Yeltsin, believed some of the false propaganda (which is why Yeltsin couldn't believe his now famous 1989 visit to Randall's grocery store in Houston Texas wasn't wholly staged). Yeltsin was on record admitting that even the upper echelons of Soviet power believed a lot of the false propaganda they were fed.

You can still see a river of false propaganda common among the Russian people in their beliefs about the US. It's all over YouTube in interviews-on-the-street type videos. The Russian people still live under a totalitarian regime that directly controls all media, all democratic actions and tries to control all information.

The CIA term for planted stories which got picked up by Western media, and often intel, was blowback. (See the 1977 "CIA and the Media" hearings: https://archive.org/details/CIAMedia1978Hearings/page/n3/mod...)

Makes one wonder how much of what's believed in the West isn't self-owned propaganda.

Russians today have internet access and can travel abroad, it's nothing like back in those days anymore. Also not to defend Putin's regime, which is bad enough, but it's not totalitarian. Totalitarianism is the most extreme form of authoritarianism, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were examples of that. And China seems to be heading in that direction yet again.

But escapees also have an incentive to lie. Nobody will hire them, assuming they're spies.

The only real employment they can get is giving interviews about how awful and insane North Korea is.

That's not to say it isn't, of course.

On the other hand Romania is having startling amount of nostalgia over the communist regime

https://euobserver.com/news/30890

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/18/nicolae-cea...

etc

Sure, but I would attribute that much more to modern propaganda than historical, mostly because many of the communist elites are even today clinging to power (and have been in power since the revolution). Romania is also experiencing all of the ills of modern capitalism, and Ceaușescu is a common nationalist icon, so the same social forces putting Le Pen, Boris Johnson, or Trump in power or close to it are fueling "communist" (populist nationalist) nostalgia in Romania. People pine for "free jobs" and "free houses", "no foreign interference", "tough on crime police", not for Systematization, farming co-ops and other more left-leaning ideals (not that they should pine for those, as they were done in an almost maximally harmful way in practice).

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