Social-media sites beat Joseph Stalin in mind control of the masses.

Joseph Stalin issued circa 1950 a decree on revealing state secrets, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: There was a good-sized wave from the new Decree on Revealing State Secrets. (State secrets included such things as: the district harvest; any figure on epidemics; the type of goods produced by any workshop or mini-factory; mention of a civil …

COVID-19 masks are hand-clapping for the masses.

Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un gets near-unending applause from North Korean audiences in 2021. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote something similar about Joseph Stalin’s USSR audiences in the 1930s: Here is one vignette from those years as it actually occurred. A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary …