“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
– Dylan Thomas
It looks like any other summer morning, where children climb onto buses, memorize songs, study maps, and learn stories about who they are and where they belong. Nothing seems wrong, yet somewhere in those ordinary rituals, a vision of the world is being carefully assembled: Friends and enemies, heroes and villains, grievances and promises. The children absorb it long before they learn to question it.
Propaganda does not begin with violence.
It begins with stories.
In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell warned that political language is designed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” His concern was not simply stylistic decay, but moral erosion—the point at which language no longer describes reality, but replaces it. In that environment, even violence begins to speak in the language of virtue.
C.S. Lewis captured the broader moral risk of this dynamic when he wrote that, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” Blind moral certainty is often the condition under which manipulation becomes most effective, and in doing so, it becomes most powerful precisely when it appears most compassionate.
That is the beautiful lie.
Most people imagine propaganda as something obvious like black-and-white posters, raised fists, radio broadcasts demanding obedience. It feels like a relic of regimes we are confident we would recognize on sight.
History suggests otherwise with brutal consistency. In Nazi Germany, extermination became the “Final Solution,” creating distance between language and moral reality. In Rwanda, radio broadcasts reduced human beings to “cockroaches,” and once language completed the transformation, machetes followed. Before people are destroyed physically, they are often redefined linguistically.
Modern discourse has only intensified the problem. Words that once required precision are now deployed as instruments of alignment. “Fascist,” “terrorist,” “resistance,” “oppression” – terms that should carry analytical weight are increasingly used as shorthand for moral positioning. In the process, they lose definitional integrity and gain emotional volatility.
“Terrorism” is among the most consequential of these distortions.
Not every war is terrorism, nor is every civilian casualty is terrorism. Neither is every authoritarian regime terrorism. War, by its nature, produces tragedy; it has done so for all of history. Civilian suffering, while morally serious, is not sufficient on its own to define a tactic.
Terrorism is more specific. It is the deliberate targeting of noncombatants for political effect, where the primary objective is not battlefield victory but psychological impact. The weapon is not simply explosive or kinetic; it is perceptual. Fear is the intended output. By exploiting grief, outrage, and compassion, violence extends far beyond the immediate victims and into the minds of those who witness it.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a modern example of how narrative, ideology, and lived reality collide under conditions of prolonged trauma. Any serious attempt to understand it has to resist both simplification and moral avoidance.
That begins with ideology.
Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as a movement seeking to reorder society through an Islamic framework. Over time, it fractured into numerous branches and ideological descendants, among them was Hamas.
Hamas is often flattened into a binary – either “resistance” or “terrorism.” Neither framing, in isolation, is sufficient. Hamas operates as a political, militaristic, and ideological actor simultaneously, drawing from religious language, national grievance, and historical memory. Its founding charter and later statements have included explicit eliminationist language toward Israel, while also framing its actions as resistance to occupation. Both realities exist at once, and ignoring either produces analytical distortion.
But the deeper issue is not classification, it is consumption.
In a digital environment, ideological conflict no longer enters the public sphere through institutions of study or historical literacy. A slogan can circulate globally before its origin is questioned, a symbol can be detached from its history and rebranded through repetition, and a short clip can replace decades of context.
This is how entire generations can encounter complex conflicts primarily through algorithmic fragments that are emotionally charged, visually persuasive, and historically incomplete. The danger is not that people are uniquely naive. It is that they are encountering highly engineered narratives without the interpretive tools to recognize them as narratives at all.
In that environment, moral certainty becomes easier than moral literacy, and the people most susceptible to it are rarely those seeking truth; they are those who believe they already found it.
We have seen this before.
In 2021, Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” recirculated widely on TikTok. Stripped of context, it was reframed by some online audiences as a political explanation rather than extremist justification. A document authored in the shadow of mass murder was reintroduced as philosophy to a generation without the lived memory of the smoke over Manhattan.
When history is reduced to clips, slogans, and symbolic shorthand, even well-intentioned audiences begin to mistake emotional coherence for understanding. Even in conflicts where suffering is real on multiple sides, propaganda succeeds by borrowing from truth and stripping it of context.
Organizations like Hamas are not merely political movements with different policy preferences; they are sophisticated practitioners of psychological warfare. Their goal is not simply to win battles but to shape perception, manipulate emotion, manufacture outrage, and recruit sympathizers far beyond the battlefield itself. They understand that a viral video can sometimes accomplish what a rocket cannot.
But this is also where many people make a catastrophic error.
To treat Hamas and the Palestinian people as interchangeable is to accept the same kind of intellectual laziness that propaganda depends upon. Millions of Palestinians are not members of Hamas, nor are millions of Palestinians terrorists. Many are ordinary people trying to raise children, build families, and survive circumstances they did not create.
At the same time, compassion should not require blindness. Hamas is not a movement dedicated to liberal democracy, pluralism, women’s rights, or peaceful coexistence. Their leaders have repeatedly embraced anti-Western rhetoric, celebrated violence against civilians, and promoted an ideology fundamentally at odds with the values many of its Western defenders claim to champion. Their actions have barbarically slaughtered hundreds of Jews while endangering hundreds of thousands more. The same movement being romanticized in some corners of the internet has a long record of political repression, restrictions on civil liberties, and hostility toward dissent.
Supporting innocent Palestinian civilians is not the same thing as supporting Hamas. In fact, those two commitments often point in opposite directions.
That distinction matters because terrorism survives by collapsing categories. It wants us to believe that criticism of Hamas is criticism of Palestinians, and that sympathy for Palestinian civilians requires sympathy for the movement that governs them.
Additionally, if there is one lesson history teaches again and again, it is that the people most vulnerable to manipulation are not those who hate evil. They are those who fail to recognize it when it arrives wrapped in a cause they already support.
That is why the answer to propaganda is not cynicism, nor blind loyalty to any side. It is intellectual humility, and the willingness to admit that caring about something and understanding it are not always the same thing.
I went to Israel with questions I could not fully articulate. And I left with more.
Standing in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, the silence is dense. Weighted with names, photographs, fragments of lives reduced to absence. The mind tries to hold it all at once, and eventually, it cannot, because moral capacity is finite. There is only so much suffering we can process before we begin to flatten it into categories, into roles, into something emotionally survivable.
One of the most disorienting realizations is how easily sympathy turns into confusion, and confusion into withdrawal. It becomes tempting to conclude that if everything is complicated, then moral clarity itself is illegitimate. That if every narrative has a counter-narrative, then nothing can be known with confidence.
The temptation to reduce human suffering into a single coherent moral narrative is powerful, but dangerous. Because coherence often comes at the expense of truth, and truth, in conflicts like this, is rarely coherent. Yet complexity does not cancel truth; it only raises the cost of pursuing it.
This small, beautiful world is far bigger, stranger, and more complicated than we would like it to be. The relief of certainty is real. So is its danger. Because the stories that feel the most complete are often the ones most tempted to simplify reality into something manageable.
And perhaps that is why Dylan Thomas’s words endure.
“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Wrestle with everything, including yourself. Especially yourself. Seek truth more than victory. Love understanding more than being right. Be willing to sit in the discomfort of complexity, because that discomfort is often where truth lives.
And when the world offers you a story so simple that it asks nothing of you except affirmation, beware.
Beautiful lies usually do.
*Aryanna Highfill is a Young Women for America Ambassador in Virginia.
