Six books you didn’t know were propaganda

“ALL ART is propaganda”, wrote George Orwell in 1940, “but not all propaganda is art.” Few people would argue with the second part of that aphorism. Many readers have admired what one critic called Kipling’s “positive, detailed and non-stereotypic portrait” of Indian people. “Reading Lolita in Tehran” was an instant hit in America, spending 117 weeks on the New York Times’s bestseller list. Yet Mundo Nuevo, a Colombian magazine financed by the CIA, printed two chapters of his masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, a year before the book’s publication in 1967. One CIA agent called the approach “fidelismo sin Fidel”, ie, the communist creed of Fidel Castro, Cuba’s ruler, without his anti-American revolutionism.