Winning the disinformation flimflam: the propagandist who outwitted Joseph Goebbels; turns out to not to be a "how to" book on duping the citizenry but a biography of a covert World War Two British intelligence director. This blatant bait and switch was ultimately forgivable because the actual subject of the book turned out to be rather interesting.

Although a native son, when war came to the schoolyard; Sefton "Tommy Gun" Delmer was suddenly excluded from the festivities (having an immigrant father) and was forced to become the reluctant standard bearer of the enemy during recess and perilous hallway jaunts. Nuts! Later when his family was repatriated to the English pitch; he was forced to endure a version of the same teasing and ridicule, this time as a sketchy refugee from Germany. Double nuts! What good is a war if you can't do to the parade? At times, it's easy to imagine an older, slightly inebriated Delmer sitting behind the big desk with a big pile of carefully constructed scripts and scatological skits exacting revenge on all these phantom bullies from his childhood.

Granted, there is an exquisite schoolboy thrill of running with the pack and belonging to the full-throated, inarticulate throng. But patriotism turns out to be a rather flimsy social construct; since the identifying markers of the enemy are all circumstantial and fickle as the turn of the roulette wheel; anyone could be betrayed by a moment of involuntary inattention.

Mr. P(omerantsev) points out two components essential for working propaganda. The first one is what the Nazi propagandists called the sweinehund (an inner cur, an inner child without a moral compass) delighted to cosplay Lord of the Flies whenever there is a sudden gathering of the clan or a sulfurous torchlight parade.

An example of this would be the bug splat video from West Palestine (Gaza). The average person is perplexed as to why is this gangster state openly cataloging its war crimes. Duh, it's a simple numbers game. For every person revolted by this display of depraved sadism; there is a tally of deplorables secretly jazzed by genocide. When the victim is too young to vote or still in diapers, the attack switches to a prescient hygienic procedure, triggered by the proverbial twinkle in their little eye that will become a terrorist plot that will kill thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people―40 or 50 years from today.

The second essential component is the monger of fear, the double crack since the propaganda lash whips both ways; it is above all else, a bug zapper enforcing social orthodoxy. What if you are not clapping hard enough or doing a regulation foot stomp and someone notices? In present-day America, an aversion to baseball caps could be a fatal form of social blindness. What if, by some freak of circumstance, you ventured out alone one night flamboyant and ran into a mob of self-proclaimed moral arbiters? In a heartbeat, one could be beaten to a pulp or lynched as a symbolic enemy of the people by this band of irrational brethern.

The author stumbles a bit with a morse code Dinkus. The book also would have been a lot stronger had the author not gone exclusively with Russian propaganda, but selected a few examples from the overflowing American trove.

The writing staffs of late-night talk shows in the US simply troll Thunderdome (social media) for convenient fodder for their opening monologues; elected officials say the darndest things in public today. But what if your objective lies beyond idle entertainment? Mr. P. seems to suggest an intriguing way forward. The best way to neutralize propaganda is not to set up another prevarication outfit and begin chumming the waters, but to remain with the original missive and simply add comic exaggeration to provoke a giggle or the fatal guffaw. The best propaganda is always ephemera, even the most appetizing worm fails if you notice either the sinker, the line, the steely hook, and the rubber dungarees beforehand. ( )

Rather than concentrating on the current state of propaganda with a focus on Russia, Peter Pomerantsev's latest book looks back to the Second World War. He examines the work of Sefton Delmer, a British man brought up in Germany who became a journalist reporting on the Nazis for the Daily Express. In 1941 he was recruited by the Special Operations Executive to run a radio station, seeking to counter Nazi radio propaganda. The station would pretend to be broadcasting from Nazi-occupied areas of Europe and try to undermine the regime.

Delmer took a quite different approach to running his initial radio station compared with other groups in SOE, who largely tried to appeal to the rationality and idealism of their listeners. Delmer's first radio station used a character called 'der Chef', supposedly a disillusioned Prussian soldier who criticised the Nazis in obscene and contemptuous terms. This persona reminded me of [b:Diary of a Man in Despair|438025|Diary of a Man in Despair|Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1368630898l/438025._SX50_.jpg|426886] by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, a conservative German condemnation of Nazism. Der Chef appealed to the curiosity and self-interest of listeners, trying to spread doubt and distrust of the Nazis:

The soldier sending these subversive messages was going to be 'of the old Prussian school, who would use the transmitter to give members of the organisation is caustic and salaciously outspoken views of what was going on... while being spiced with plenty of inside information. The station , in fact, would seek to be a nightly demonstration if a growing split between the conservative elements of the army and radicals of the Nazi party.'
[...]
Here was Delmer's approach in miniature: acting appalled at something that was actually titillating to his audience, while at the same time breaking the taboo on insulting the SS and deepening the rift between the party and the army, the party and the people.

As the tide of war turned on the Eastern Front, Delmer retired der Chef and took a different approach: a fake Nazi station with an announcer called The Sender that reproduced some official speeches for plausibility but was still obviously unofficial. This also sought to sew distrust, publicise Germany's losses, and appeal to self-interest, for example to generate panic buying. Pomerantsev examines all this in such detail because he sees in Delmer someone with an exceptional grasp of what gives propaganda its appeal. He considers this in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine:

But however much Ukrainians appealed, their Russian friends, or now former friends, and relatives refused to listen to the evidence, and told their Ukrainian relatives, the ones sitting under bombardment, that they were wrong, that the evidence of shells and body parts exploding all around them was a myth, or they were exaggerating, or that the Ukrainian army was bombing its own citizens, or that if it was was happening, it was a necessity. The specific excuses could change in line with Russian propaganda that in one moment claimed that atrocities like Bucha were a fake and in the next moment celebrated Russian strikes against civilians as 'necessary'.
[...]
Did Russians really 'believe' this? That's the wrong question. We are not talking about a situation where people weigh evidence and come to a conclusion but rather one where people no longer seem interested in discovering the truth or even consider the truth as having considerable worth.
[...]
One consistent motif of the propaganda, however, was how it took away the burden of responsibility. [...] The propaganda allowed you to both relinquish responsibility and enjoy dominance. This was part of psychological deal the Kremlin offered people. You can identify yourself with the sense of supremacy, but you don't need to carry any moral burden.

Given the frightening impact that authoritarian government propaganda has on the world in 2024, it's fascinating to examine what was used to counter it eighty years ago. Pomerantsev makes no dramatic claims that Delmer won the war, vanquished Goebbels, or anything of that nature. Rather, he is looking for lessons from Delmer's work that could be relevant to information wars today. These include the key point that propaganda targets the lonely by offering a sense of identity and belonging in a chaotic and confusing world:

Delmer was always welcoming you into games where you could take back control and define yourself. The Sender involved you in a masquerade where you knew the British were behind the station, and the British knew you knew, but everyone kept up the role play because it helped reveal censored truths. You were no longer passive, submitting to the power of propaganda, one small limb in a mass, co-ordinated show - instead you had agency once more.

Alarmingly, this reminded me of the methods of US conspiracy theorists that Naomi Klein describes in [b:Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World|138505710|Doppelganger A Trip into the Mirror World|Naomi Klein|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1689105362l/138505710._SY75_.jpg|167494133]. She points out that Naomi Wolf and her fellow conspiracists are always inviting their watchers/listeners to become part of a movement and, crucially, to take action. People who feel helpless in the face of global problems are offered stupid ways to gain control: campaigning to ban books, shunning vaccinations, buying merchandise sold by the conspiracists, etc. Unfortunately some of Delmer's lessons can be used by any propagandist. Nonetheless, Pomerantsev synthesises methods for undermining the effects of authoritarian government propaganda:

Through these four processes - creating media communities stronger than the propagandists'; breaking the propagandists' monopoly on expressing the darkest feelings; making people aware of how Nazi social roles were a ghoulish cabaret you could discard; and provoking people to behave more independently - Delmer created a distance between the German people and the Nazi propaganda. Once that distance had been opened up, he could start to communicate with them in a new way.

Delmer's aim, however, was never to replace one hate-filled political cult with a different one. The listener was not meant to worship Der Chef like Hitler. [...] Delmer always believed that people were never fully entranced by propaganda. He thought there was always another person inside us all - grounded in reality - and ready to break free of the propagandists if there was enough reason to do so. It's our job to find that reason. This process can start with the most basic self-interest and survival.

So much of contemporary propaganda is designed to make you feel overwhelmed by the amount of confusing content out there, undermine the difference between truth and lies, and through this confusion find relief by placing your faith in a leader who reduces the world into crass conspiracies. This is why fact-checks rarely work when they directly challenge a political identity. What we need to do if give people the motivation to care about truth again.

Contemplating that last paragraph, I found the eye-catching title of [b:How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler|182761575|How to Win an Information War The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler|Peter Pomerantsev|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1698420610l/182761575._SY75_.jpg|166210539] more optimistic than the content. Frankly, the truth of the world isn't very appealing to look at: the global economy is appallingly unequal, exploitative, and unjust, and is systematically destroying the environmental conditions that are required for humanity's survival. On the other hand, there are reasons to be hopeful - such as the continued rise of renewable electricity generation in spite of fossil fuel companies. Countering misinformation is certainly not easy and this book is a valuable and unusual effort at a detailed historical case study for how it has been done successfully. I was also delighted to discover that [a:Muriel Spark|13093|Muriel Spark|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1342563799p2/13093.jpg] worked with Delmer at SOE and wrote [b:The Hothouse by the East River|40181369|The Hothouse by the East River|Muriel Spark|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526822647l/40181369._SY75_.jpg|830605] about its legacy! It's great to have some context for that mysterious novella. ( )

The story of Sefton Delmer (1904 - 1979), a British journalist who was born in Berlin and grew up in Germany as told by Peter Pomerantsev, a British journalist who was born in Kyiv. The book is principally about Nazi propaganda and Delmer’s important role in the production of British propaganda during the Second World War. Although entitled How to Win an Information War, it seems unlikely that British propaganda played much part in the Allies victory, and if one had to pick a winner in the battle between Sefton Delmer and Joseph Goebbels, I think the answer is clear.
It’s hard to read this story without thinking both of the deluge of propaganda that we are exposed to in the traditional media and of the layers of anonymous troll-driven propaganda on the internet - propaganda’s greatest friend. The story is one of a supposed necessity to fight manipulative lies with counter-lies. Ultimately the whole business is deeply depressing.
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Unless I missed it, the author never mentions or uses Delmer’s wife’s surname. She was born Isabel Nicholas. ( )