Russkij mir, Lebensraum, Denazification of Ukraine and Other Excuses: Totalitarian Propaganda in the Contemporary Context - Instytut Pileckiego

Listen to a brilliant discussion on the totalitarian propaganda in the contemporary context.

Current world events make us question what we see in the media daily. Could this event be true? Is there more context to what I am seeing? Why is this person behaving in this way? Social media does not help matters, with a flurry of information, images and videos flooding the sites daily. Is this information reliable? Who is posting it and why? Many people don’t ask themselves these questions and then pass on whatever they have read, even though it could be propaganda. However, this is the modern context, how did this work under the Third Reich? What about under the Soviets? Can we compare this and where do we find any parallels?

Join us with our experts as we delve into all of this maze and try and answer some of these questions.

Participants:

Prof. Richard J. Evans is Regius Professor Emeritus of History at Cambridge University, and the author of The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War, all of which have been published in Polish. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (also due to be published in Polish), and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination. His article 1940-Forgotten War? appeared in Wojna I Pamięć no. 2 (2020). He was the principal expert witness in the unsuccessful libel action brought in 2000 by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt over the latter's allegations of Holocaust Denial, portrayed in the film Denial, starring Rachel Weisz and Timothy Spall. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Learned Society of Wales and was knighted by the Queen in 2012 for services to scholarship.

Dr. Ian Garner is an expert on Russian war propaganda. He has written or interviewed on the Russia-Ukraine conflict for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, BBC, CNN, CBC, ABC, and dozens more newspapers, television channels, and radio stations across the globe. His first book, Stalingrad Lives: Stories of Combat and Survival (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) shows popular readers how Stalin’s propagandists turned the tragedy of Stalingrad into a triumph that has gripped the minds of Russians for almost eighty years. Garner has studied at universities in the United Kingdom, Russia, and Canada, where he received his PhD at the University of Toronto. He currently resides in Kingston, Ontario.

Moderator:

Dr. Mateusz Werner is a philosopher of culture, essayist, film critic. Author of the book Wobec nihilizmu. Gombrowicz, Witkacy (2010), publisher of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s essays Po ludobójstwie (2012), editor of, among others, What Kieślowski Tells Us Today? (2008) and Polish Cinema Now! Focus on Contemporary Polish Cinema (2010). Assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University and head of the totalitarian studies section at the Pilecki Institute. Editor of the Kronos philosophical quarterly.