Lies in our connected world: Never easier to spread propaganda

It makes a good parlour game to speculate what propagandists of the past — Lenin, Castro, de Valera, Collins, Pearse, Carson, FDR, Churchill or John Charles McQuaid — might make of fake news and the opportunities our susceptibility, our deep- yearning need to be told what we want to hear, might offer. 

They might not go as far as the British war machine did during the First World War when it falsely reported that German troops had crucified prisoners or, in one incident, nailed a Belgian child to a church door.

Today’s propagandists, those who lie, slander and spread fear to secure power, are less graphic, more subtle and more successful.