When one sees a startling headline online, how many of us no longer think “breaking news” but instead wonder, “is this real?” Digital misinformation is one of the defining trends of our era, fuelling conflicts from India to Washington DC. But can we learn anything from the past about how to deal with our increasingly slippery future?
Ukrainian-born journalist Peter Pomerantsev, who has written books about life in Putin’s Russia and the global rise of fake news, thinks a lot about propaganda and how we use it.
In How To Win An Information War, Pomerantsev pivots to conflicts of the past, telling the story of World War II master propagandist Sefton Delmer, who became a kind of cross between a magician and octopus by using mass media to fight the Nazis.
Delmer was a man of many places: he was born in Germany, the son of Australian parents who later moved to Britain. He began his journalism career with a poisonous kind of scoop. He was the only non-Nazi journalist chosen to accompany Hitler on his presidential campaign trail in 1932.
“He was offering this illusion-hungry people the miracle man it had longed for,” Delmer found.
Having seen the face of the Reich up close, Delmer was the perfect choice to rattle its cages. As World War II erupted, he returned to Britain and was asked to join the government’s “black propaganda” psychological warfare campaigns. He set to work taking everything he’d learnt watching the Nazi menace rise and turning it against them. He quickly unleashed on Hitler, in one memorable BBC address even insulting the Führer’s “evil-smelling teeth”.
Delmer’s crowning achievement was the radio character “Der Chef”, an unrepentant Nazi who ranted in obscene language about corrupt party officials and the suffering of frontline troops.
Der Chef would rail against the “Jew Churchill” one minute and then blast a senior SS minister’s wife for hoarding luxury food the next, portraying himself as a morally outraged “good German”. The “real” Der Chef was a gentle German immigrant coerced into playing the role of a lifetime by Delmer.
Delmer believed propaganda could change behaviour, inducing panic buying or even, controversially, encouraging suicide. “Suicide is notoriously catching,” one report notes dryly.
He could use propaganda as a hammer, and Pomerantsev doesn’t shy away from highlighting his most questionable tactics.
At one point, Delmer organised false letters that were sent to the families of dead German soldiers, claiming personal treasures were stolen from them on their deathbed. Is that propaganda, or just sadism? Propaganda can move quickly from eroding confidence in an authority to eroding confidence in humanity itself.
Delmer would create fake radio stations that seemed real, real radio stations that had false motives, and far more elaborate schemes that sought to corrode the Nazi grip.
“You needed to tackle people’s connection to the Nazis at its root: the need for belonging,” Pomerantsev writes. “One needed to climb into Germans’ relationship with the Nazis – not lecture them from outside.”
If this were just a history of the propaganda wars run in the shadows during World War II, Pomerantsev’s book would be a solid read, but it’s his canny comparing of the past and present throughout that leaves the reader wondering how much has actually changed. In one moving scene, he arrives at the site of a massacre in Bucha during the early days of the Ukraine war. A Ukrainian general gestures to a pile of filled black body bags and says, “This is created by the propaganda.” The tricks and techniques Delmer mastered in radio and print are still with us, just faster, harder and even more explicit.
Hitler himself once told Delmer that “there is an inner pigdog in every man”. Online grifters and amoral politicians are happy to keep on feeding that pigdog today.
“With social media, creating ‘sock puppets’ like Der Chef is easy,” Pomerantsev writes. We see it in the avatars that haunt our digital life, where descendants of Delmer’s oily wave of disinformation almost seem to block out the sun.
It’s in realising the promise in his book’s title that Pomerantsev strains a bit – although, to be fair, it may just be an impossible task to truly declare victory in an information war in 2024. The patterns of propaganda constantly repeat, and so, too, do our failures in dealing with them.
“If propaganda is the remedy for loneliness, we need to provide a better cure,” he says, calling for a “jolt into awareness” that could be the start.
There is no magic bullet, no red pill or blue pill to show us the way. Only hard work.
That may not be the most helpful prescription, but digesting books like Pomerantsev’s measured and electrifyingly topical history may help provide the tools we need to reshape the battlefield.
How To Win An Information War: The Propagandist who Outwitted Hitler by Peter Pomerantsev (A&U, $39.99)
