“When one hears of state planning in the Soviet Union one usually thinks of factories, steel plants, large grain farms and cotton plantations, tractors and other accessories of industrialization,” wrote the American historian and journalist, William Henry Chamberlin, in 1932. “What is perhaps not generally realized is that man himself is the first and most important objective of Soviet planning.” In Germany too, Timothy S. Brown explained that “The [National Socialist] revolution was not to be socioeconomic but cultural, biological, and above all racial.” As Chamberlin noted, culture shapes man’s environment because it affects how humans see the world and act purposefully within it. Controlling culture thus helps a totalitarian ruler control his citizens’ behavior and elicit consent for his rule without the resort to violence. By laying the foundational principles and norms on which society operates, a carefully controlled program of cultural production and engineering prepares the groundwork for the long-term maintenance of totalitarian government. Newly unearthed internal Baʿth Party documents show that Saddam Hussein’s regime also relied heavily on ideological propaganda and indoctrination to shape Iraqis’ worldviews. In party reports, Baʿthist authors speak explicitly about “a strategic campaign to frame (taʾṭīr) society and Baʿthize (tabʿīth) it by instilling the values of the party and its principles in the masses of the people…” The Baʿth referred to this campaign under the general rubric of “culturalization” (tathqīf), a term that Baʿthist authors frequently paired and interchanged with “indoctrination” (tawʿīyya). Like the Soviets and Nazis, the Baʿth theorized that by subjecting Iraqis to constant propaganda and indoctrination in the media, popular culture, and in school—-and by forcing them to consistently engage in individual and collective rites where they had to express their allegiance to Hussein and the Baʿth-—the population would “absorb” (ʾistīʿāb) Baʿthist principles, and the Baʿthist ethos would become an organic part of the Iraqi soul. To aid this process, Hussein and the Baʿth appropriated and manipulated established myths, customs, norms, values, and vocabularies from Iraq’s religious, tribal, ethnic, and local cultures. If they could harness the tendencies to think, feel, believe, and act in the particular ways that any cultural environment imparts to the individuals immersed in it, Hussein and the Baʿth hoped that Iraqis would support their regime out of their citizens’ own motivations instead of through coercion or oppression.