In June 2025, I received a book in the mail, seemingly out of the blue. Usually, that would have been unremarkable in my line of work, but this time it was a more than 900-page biography of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s minister of propaganda, published in German in 2012. I was perplexed. Was somebody trying to send me a coded message? Or was this an especially wicked promotional gift?

It turned out that a conscientious translator I was working with needed to confirm a quote from the book and had written to the publisher, who sent it to me without comment. I dutifully combed through the index to check the quotation as required and ended up reading more than a few pages. There was something in the way the author read Goebbels that neither glorified nor pathologized the infamous diarist and minister. The author carried the weight of interpretational responsibility with admirable discernment. It reminded me that books like this—more a torturous public service than a matter of pure scholarly interest—exist because history is a hotbed of contestation. Someone has to do the work of establishing the facts for posterity before AI muddles the puddle entirely. Sometimes, that involves reading diaries and whittling down valuable historical information from, well, propaganda.

I congratulate anyone who attributes the age of disinformation to the advent of AI for having managed to avoid the abysmal bulk of western “reporting” on African countries like Uganda. “Like Uganda,” here as elsewhere, is code for countries considered by the Western gaze to be relatively small, somewhat impoverished, and marked by simmering strife (not yet at war but no longer at peace); countries that typically have a string of dictators, coups, or both to their name. There are many misguided historical comparisons. Attempts to understand parts of the world over there are often made by invoking things that happened over here. One egregious comparison implies that Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, and his expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972 were somehow comparable to Hitler’s persecution and extermination of Jews. It should go without saying that Nazi Germany and late-twentieth-century Uganda had almost nothing in common.