What was the relationship between truth, lies, and everything in between? How did political parties use truth and lies to manipulate information, justify violence, and promote ideology? This roundtable will gather historians working on modern Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America to examine the weaponization of truth and lies and the consequential political paranoia with a focus on the twentieth century. On the one hand, our comparison will show that information politics was often conditioned by the local context of race, class, and geopolitics. On the other hand, we will reveal the common interlocking processes in which disinformation was created, circulated, and amplified. Political parties often portrayed truth as a revered goal that could only be possessed by them, while discrediting opposing narratives as lies or rumors to justify violence. Propagandists and rumormongers also used forgery and rhetoric to produce truthful-appearing narratives and artifacts to legitimate themselves and maximize their influence. The circulation of rumors and propaganda further instigated political anxiety and fear about external intervention, sedition and insurgency, and racial and class inequality, all of which often fueled new cycles of disinformation. Methodologically, the panelists will demonstrate how a critical and creative reading of popular opinion reports, forgeries, news media, and journalism textbooks can deepen our understanding of ideology and information.

Béla Bodó focuses on the role of rumors in political and ethnic violence in Hungary during the counterrevolution in 1919 and 1920. Mian Chen examines how the Chinese Communist Party developed a propaganda/surveillance complex to position the Party as the sole authority on the truth in the mid-twentieth century. Adam LoBue examines forgeries, print cultures, and geopolitics in Cold War Africa. Jonathan Ablard critically reviews the historiography of conspiracy theories in Latin America and highlights the role of class and race. This roundtable discussion will provide an in-depth historical analysis of the mechanisms and consequences of propaganda, rumors, and conspiracy theories. Our discussion also helps us understand the current dilemma of post-truth, misinformation, political polarization, and the paranoid style in global politics.