Politics & Power Quote by Claud Cockburn

Government propaganda doesnt just bend the truth; it metabolizes the person hired to deliver it. Claud Cockburn lands that point with a line that looks like a throwaway joke and behaves like a moral indictment. The Minister of Information isnt merely a spokesman making hard choices under pressure. Hes compelled, "in the national interest", into "continuous acts of duplicity" so routine they leak out of policy and into physiology. Even his hair starts performing. The image is grotesque because its ordinary: the wig is the most familiar shorthand for respectable disguise, and Cockburns twist is that the disguise becomes the body. In a system built on managed perception, authenticity is the first casualty, and it dies quietly.

Cockburn, a journalist who spent his career puncturing official narratives, is writing against the wartime sanctification of secrecy. Total war requires coordination, morale, and censorship; it also produces a ready-made alibi for lying. That parenthetical permission slip - "in the national interest" - is the real villain. It absolves the liar and elevates the lie into duty, turning ethical failure into professional competence.

The line works because its cynicism is surgical. It refuses the comforting idea that deception is an emergency measure used sparingly. Instead, it suggests the propaganda state is a lifestyle, one that reshapes its operators until they can no longer tell where the role ends and the self begins.