“How do you win an information war?” asks Peter Pomerantsev in the introduction to his new book, before addressing its animating question with a personal flourish: “What can you do when those you love . . . slip away from you under a quicksand of lies, and move mentally into an alternative reality where black is white and white is black?”
The critical word here, it took me some time to realise, is “war”. In a war you do everything possible not to lose. It isn’t about posing your better values against the enemy’s, but about undermining popular belief in their “truth”.
Pomerantsev’s main current enemy is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, about whose complex and effective propaganda regime the academic and writer — who was born in Soviet Ukraine to dissident parents — has already written two books: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014), and This Is Not Propaganda (2019). Both were written before Putin launched his all-out bombs and guns war on his European neighbour.
How To Win an Information War was written in a time when Russians who are contacted by their Ukrainian friends and relatives, and told what is actually happening, usually respond with disbelief and rejection. Ordinary Russians have become unreachable by the living truth. Meanwhile in the US up to 40 per cent of Americans believe that the last presidential election was “stolen” and it is conceivable that the corrupt author of this fiction will become US president again.
So that’s what we face, and few questions keep democrats — conservative or liberal — awake at night like the one that Pomerantsev poses. It’s a question he answers by suggesting to us that we reflect on the extraordinary career of Britain’s top wartime counter-propagandist, Sefton Delmer, who was an all-out commander in the information war against Nazi Germany.
The son of an Australian academic teaching at the University of Berlin, Delmer was 10 in August 1914 when the first world war broke out. All around him were celebrations of German virility, predictions of victory and expressions of contempt for the Reich’s enemies. Young Sefton was bullied at school and his father was interned.
Even as a boy, Delmer understood the appeal of the patriotic and nationalist slogans, because he felt their power himself. But as the war went on, this certainty in the people he encountered started to wear thin. “Looking at it much later, much of this [initial] enthusiasm was artificial”, he subsequently wrote, “They had talked themselves into it”.
In 1917, before the war ended, Delmer and his family were allowed to leave for England. After finishing his schooling, he went to university and from there to work for the controversial tycoon Lord Beaverbrook’s uber-patriotic Daily Express, then the largest circulation newspaper in the world.
A fluent German speaker, he was posted to Berlin where, in February 1929, he first saw Adolf Hitler deliver a speech to a vast, but half-full, auditorium. Delmer found him hard to take seriously.
A year, a Wall Street Crash and a slump later, Delmer heard Hitler speak again. This time it was different: the crowd was bigger and far more militant. Delmer was violently berated by a “tiny little fat man” for the crime of not joining in the Nazi salute. Delmer recalled: “‘You just wait till after,’ he kept threatening. ‘We’ll show you; We’ll teach you!’”
Pomerantsev recounts how contemporary psychoanalysts studying Hitler’s speeches noted their invariable structure. The first 10 minutes was an “orgy of self-pity”, all about suffering and grievance. The next 10 minutes were devoted to blaming the terrible people who were responsible, as “self-pity gave place to hate”. Then came the hopeful bit about the fabulous growth of the resistance embodied in him, and finally the call to arms.
The author notes — just as the reader may do — some of the structural similarities with the speeches of Donald Trump and also with speeches made by Putin, with their starting point in the humiliation of Russia.
In 1941 Delmer was recruited to join the newly created Political Warfare Executive (PWE) — a secret organisation tasked with beaming propaganda into occupied Europe. His job was to undermine Nazi solidarity and enthusiasm, mostly using radio — and he already had a set of insights that shaped his unique approach. As Pomerantsev writes, Delmer had realised that: “You needed to tackle people’s connection to the Nazis at its root; the need for belonging, the sadism and the simplified identity that the Nazis offered. One needed to climb into Germans’ relationship with the Nazis — not lecture them from outside.”
The first PWE attempts at broadcasting propaganda to the German people out of London suffered, in Delmer’s view, from an alienating high-mindedness. “Trying to appeal to the Good German”, Delmer called it, “Maida Vale calling Hampstead”.
Delmer argued that counter-propaganda should instead look for the chink that always existed between the ideology and the reality. Look for it and ease it open. He had noted how much of the support for the Nazi regime was not given out of conviction. Disappointed SS statisticians had calculated, for example, that only 24 per cent of citizen denunciations of unpatriotic fellows were made for ideological reasons; most of the rest were made out of personal malice.
Delmer told his bosses that “we must appeal to the inner pigdog inside every German”. In other words, meet him where he was, not where one might like him to be.
Thus was born Der Chef (the Chief). Apparently broadcasting from station Gustav Siegfried Eins in Germany or occupied Europe (in fact from Britain), Der Chef was a foul-mouthed German nationalist, who disliked Jews and Winston Churchill, who loved the army but hated the corrupt and venal Nazi bureaucrats.
Using real information gleaned from contacts in Germany, and filed on a card index system, Der Chef would rattle off the various crimes of hoarding and indulging in luxury committed by named members of the Parteikommune while ordinary Germans suffered privation.
To spice this up, there would be sexual allegations against the SS, described in pornographic detail. Smut sells and pretty soon (though it was a crime to listen) Gustav Siegfried Eins was one of Germany’s most popular stations.
Der Chef was just one of the early Delmer interventions. Others, purporting to be broadcast by servicemen, displayed detailed knowledge of the life of the ordinary grunt, and always played on the gap between the “good” army and the “bad” party, and always suggested the emptiness at the heart of jingoism.
But given that the Germans fought till the bitterest end, did any of it actually work? Pomerantsev thinks that contemporary research — not least among POWs — showed that it did indeed “cut through”. Delmer, he concludes, “had shown that trust develops when you are useful to your audience, when they feel that you know their world so intimately it almost stops mattering who you are.”
Where does that leave us? Most controversially, with a refutation of our usual liberal piety. So Pomerantsev asserts that we should not trust in a “marketplace of ideas” where the “best” information will somehow win out if we just publish it. Success means engaging people who are resistant to what we want to say. You need to understand their world — the world of the Russian citizen or the Trump supporter — and speak to it. And use “art” in doing it.
Counter-propaganda Pomerantsev-style is clearly not the job of the BBC or any media outlet that needs to be understood as being based on an objective view of the truth. Such high-mindedness may be the essential counterweight, but it doesn’t fight information wars. They are not sufficient.
This leaves me wondering if there is somewhere a wealthy liberal or democrat willing to put her money into, say, Radical Redneck Radio, All About Men and Russia Tomorrow. If so, Peter Pomerantsev wants to hear from you.
How To Win An Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, by Peter Pomerantsev, Public Affairs $30/ Faber £20, 304 pages
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