I also want to poll people on twitter to see if a scene I'm working on is too dramatic but then I forgot I have a professional twitter and am followed by many embassies.

You know you are a fiction writer if you come up with some really dramatic scenes that could jolt authoritarian propaganda but then are like "wait this is how it could be manipulated"

To better understand the current geopolitical space, study the 18th and 19th centuries. In a world where autocrats seize property (and pets) of opposition leaders Propaganda seeks not to convince but to cause apathy Rulers are united not for communism or nationalism but for absolute power and mercantalism is all in vogue. We are more like Les Miserables than 1984. Check out my latest piece

To Understand Geopolitics Read Les Miserables

The current geopolitical scene has more in common with the exhausted world that the students in Les Miserables faced than to contemporary dystopias...

Fiction often tries to make dictatorships look like they are calculated and strategic. This is never the reality- dictatorships are psychological and manipulate emotions. Venezuela and Iran found ways to manipulate emptions to direct anger at the opposition instead of the regime They target homes and personal items, their disinformation is not an argument but a clutter of emotional charged noise designed to break people down. Les Miserables depicts dictatorship in a clearer way than modern literature, dictators want to make every citizen Grantaire

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Autocrats seek to destroy the reputations of opposition leaders and make people lose faith in everything. We have seen this trend in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba- this is the result of autocracy

Freedom for Freddy Superlano, Jimmy Lai, Maria Oropeza, Jesus Armas, and all political prisoners!