The Challenge of Propaganda

Peter Pomerantsev is my latest guest on Q&A — here. He is a return guest. He is an authority on, among other things, propaganda, one of the most important topics in our world. His latest book is How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler. Who was that propagandist? We will get to him in a minute.

In 2014, Pomerantsev published a striking book with a striking title: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. In 2019 came another such book: This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality.

Pomerantsev was born in the Soviet Union — in Kyiv, to be precise. The family went to Germany — West Germany, actually — and then to Britain. Pomerantsev is British, essentially (getting more so every day, he says). He has also lived in Russia. He teaches at Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. He has gotten around.

What about that “propagandist who outwitted Hitler”? The subject, or one of the subjects, of Pomerantsev’s latest book? He, too, got around. Sefton Delmer was a British subject born in Germany in 1904. His father, an Australian, was a professor at the University of Berlin. Young Delmer was the only British boy in his school. When the world war broke out, he saw, and felt, the awesome power of propaganda.

In the next world war, Delmer, from Britain, broadcast to Germany. He knew you couldn’t preach to Germans about democracy. They didn’t want democracy. They wanted Hitler (and had him). No, you had to peel them off in other ways — creative ways. You had, somehow, to drive a wedge between the people and their leadership.

All this is fascinating.

So is the subject of propaganda at large. Is there not a mutual understanding between the propagandizing and the propagandized? Is there not an understanding between the conman and his mark? There are people who want to believe, right? Who are ripe for believing.

Peter Pomerantsev’s first chapter is headed “Propaganda Is the Remedy for Loneliness.” Isn’t that a haunting, even a painful, phrase? It comes from Jacques Ellul, who Pomerantsev says is his favorite philosopher, when the topic is propaganda.

Modern man, writes Ellul,

is available, and ready to listen to propaganda. He is the lonely man, and the larger the crowd in which he lives, the more isolated he is. Despite the pleasure he might derive from his solitude, he suffers deeply from it. He feels the most violent need to be reintegrated into a community, to have a setting, to experience ideological and affective communication. That loneliness inside the crowd is perhaps the most terrible ordeal of modern man. That loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances. For it, propaganda, encompassing human relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths. It also responds to man’s intellectual sloth and desire for security — intrinsic characteristics of the real man as distinguished from the theoretical man of the existentialists. All this turns man against information, which cannot satisfy any of these needs, and leads him to crave propaganda, which can satisfy them.

We see it all around us. Think of the QAnon movement, that community. Think of other things. (Reflect, too, that Ellul wrote those words before the dawn of the social media!)

Pomerantsev has written a work of history, but he also comments on the present day. The book is titled, after all, “How to Win an Information War.” That applies to yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

In January, Phillips O’Brien was a guest on Q&A. He is a professor of strategic studies at St Andrews. He said, “The Russians have gained far more geopolitical leverage out of the millions they’ve spent on information warfare than the billions they have spent on the military.”

Recall Senator Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.), in February:

And this is what Tuberville said a few days later, about Putin’s assault on Ukraine: “We forced this issue. We kept forcing NATO all the way to eastern Europe, and Putin just got tired of it. He said, ‘Listen, I do not want missiles on my border from the United States. It’d be like Russia coming to Mexico and putting missiles in Mexico.’ I can understand what he’s talking about.”

The senator further said, “You can tell Putin is on top of his game. One thing he said that, it really rung a bell, is the propaganda media machine over here, they sell anything they possibly can to go after Russia.”

Bear in mind that a U.S. senator has access to a wealth of information — to extensive and intricate intelligence. Also, he sits in America’s highest legislative body. If Tuberville can think and talk that way — how about the man on the street? If a U.S. senator can buy and mouth Kremlin propaganda — what can be expected of the ordinary Joe?

(Maybe more.)

In our Q&A, Peter Pomerantsev says that Russia, China, and other such actors are light years ahead of us in information warfare, political warfare. (By “us,” I mean the democracies. The West.) We had better get in the game, he says, or we are cooked. “Either we start competing or we hand over the world to Russia and China.” That would be fine by many. But it would be catastrophic.

Again, to hear Pomerantsev, go here. An education, and also a pleasure.