I feel that it was very apt that I finished reading this book just as Mark Zuckerberg of Meta announced his decision to stop fact-checking on his social media platforms, and just minutes before Donald Trump, with the help of Elon Musk, destroys democracy for good. In How To Win An Information War, Peter Pomerantsev explores the use and weaponisation of propaganda and disinformation, using the true story of a Berlin-born Australian/British man called Sefton Delmer.
Delmer was a journalist who set up a secret radio station which twisted Goebbels' own propaganda in on itself. The radio station, run out of an English country house by German exiles, targeted the "good Germans" and called on them to rise up against Hitler and the Nazis. Delmer had been born and raised in Berlin, only moving to the UK as a teenager. He had spent time with Hitler, travelling with him on his private plane, and had a very good understanding of the inner-workings of the Nazi party.
Delmer and his colleagues created an experimental radio broadcast called Gustaf Siegfried Eins, with a host known as der Chef. It was a kind of grotesque cabaret-style show, aimed at targeting the very worst of human nature. Delmer had concluded that the ordinary German wouldn't respond to reason or lofty intellectual ideas, so had created a show that ridiculed the English and Churchill using foul Berlin slang and lambasted the Nazi elites as crooks and swindlers. Delmer wanted to undermine the Nazi party from within.
The show was a sensation, with huge numbers of Germans tuning in to hear what outlandish things der Chef would say. It was so authentic that the Americans - who hadn't entered the war at this time - really believed that it was the work of German nationalists or a group of disgruntled army officers.
In Pomerantsev (and Delmer's) view, propaganda works when it can successfully convey a sense of belonging, and where facts are meaningless. What matters are feelings and illusions, creating a world full of grievances, victimhood and (perceived) enemies, where its practitioners bend reality. Pomerantsev was born in Ukraine and grew up in London. He has worked as a TV producer in Moscow and since 2022 has ben part of a project documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine. He manages to bring the propaganda ideas created and used by Goebbels and the Nazis into the present day, where he compares them with Putin's Russia, Donald Trump's America, Xi's China, and the social media billionaires who control the information we see now.
This was a fantastically written and insightful book. I'd never heard of Delmer before and his story was absolutely fascinating. At the end of his life he really reflected on his actions and questioned whether what he had done had been good or bad, but as Pomerantsev and the late, great Hannah Arendt said, he was just ordinary, and understood that he himself could easily have been a victim of propaganda just like we all are. The message of the book is to stay alert. Research things for yourself, and try to keep your own mind.
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I'm Louise, but you can call me Fatty. I really like to read, and then I really like to tell people about what I've read. I started this book blog to give fellow readers some great recommendations and maybe introduce them to a writer or a genre that maybe they wouldn't have discovered on their own - because that's what reading is all about!
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