‘So far I have been discussing an ideal totalitarian society, of which the existing ones are (or were) only more or less successful approximations. Later Stalinism (like Maoism) was a reasonably fair approximation. Its triumph consisted not simply in that virtually everything in the Soviet Union was either falsified or suppressed—statistics, historical events, current events, names, maps, books (occasionally even Lenin’s texts)—but that the inhabitants of the country were trained to know what was politically “correct.” In the functionaries’ minds, the borderline between what is “correct” and what is “true,” as we normally understand this, seems really to have become blurred; by repeating the same absurdities time and again they themselves began to believe or half-believe them. The massive corruption of the language eventually produced people who are incapable of perceiving their own mendacity.’
-Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie’, 1983