How to win an information war? - with Peter Pomerantsev
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We need a fresh perspective on propaganda. The old strategies for combating misinformation are no longer effective. Simply offering fact checks isn't enough. Those ensnared by propaganda aren't searching for facts. They're searching for something deeper: identity, belonging and meaning. This is the central argument of a new book by Peter Pomerantsev, a renowned scholar of propaganda and information warfare.

How to Win an Information War tells the story of British journalist Sefton Delmer, who developed innovative techniques to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II. Peter explores Delmer's legacy in hopes of uncovering lessons for today. Perhaps we too can learn something from both of them. My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko. I am a Ukrainian philosopher, editor-in-chief of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine.

Ukraine World is an English-language media outlet about Ukraine run by Internet Ukraine, one of the country's leading media NGOs. You can support our work at patreon.com/UkraineWorld. Your support is crucial as we increasingly rely on crowdfunding.

even a small monthly contribution can make a meaningful difference you can also help fund our regular volunteer missions to ukraine's frontline areas where we deliver aid to both soldiers and civilians primarily by providing vehicles for the military and books for local communities to support these efforts donation can be made by paypal you can find the links in the description of this episode peter vamiran so welcome again to this podcast

I've really missed being on. Okay, so you wrote a new book which is called How to Win an Information War and it's a very interesting book. It's an amazing book for me because it's kind of a, it's read like a criminal drama a little bit. I wish we could find a Netflix TV series one day about this. But tell me about your character.

It's actually a book about yourself a little bit, but mostly about your character, who is called Sefton Delmer, right? Sefton Delmer. Sefton Delmer. It's an unusual name. Yeah, it's Tom Delmer, right? He was calling himself Tom. Which was short for Sefton, became Tom. Yeah. So tell me about him, why you're interested in him. So actually, this is my most personal book.

notwithstanding that there's very little of me in it compared to my other books. It's actually the first time where I talk the most about myself through this main character, because him and I have a lot in common, but he achieved far more than I. So Sefton Delmer was the leader of British counter-propaganda against the Nazis. He ran an army of radio stations, between 12 and 20, we don't even know the exact number,

that broadcasts into Germany and into occupied Europe with a mission to destroy the influence of Nazi propaganda. But he faced many challenges that people who think about how to reach audiences who are captured by authoritarian propaganda face today.

So Delbert thought liberal media, so German social democrat media, or British BBC broadcasting to Europe, that they were what we would call now called trapped in an echo chamber. They were talking to themselves, to the converted. They were doing nothing to reach the people who followed Hitler, who liked Hitler, who might though not always be ready to die for Hitler.

And in order to do that, you know, in order to reach those people, he really had to understand the essence of why Nazi propaganda was powerful. He had a very close relationship with Germany. He was born in Germany to British parents. He grew up in Germany. And then he returned there in his 20s after Oxford and became sort of the star correspondent of the British media there.

And he got to know the Nazis very early. He spoke fluent German and he managed to sort of make his way into their world. You know, he was very much an actor. You know, he put on different faces and guises throughout his life.

And he kind of like pretended to be their friend and became very close to Ernst Röhm, was allowed to travel with Hitler on Hitler's journeys in his plane, in his mass rallies during the elections of 1928, I think, late 20s.

So he knew the Nazis inside out. He was then thrown out of Germany. But he saw that people enjoyed Nazi propaganda. He saw that people liked Hitler. And until you started understanding the psychological roots of that, you were never going to succeed in undermining authoritarian propaganda. And one of the things that interests me is that he published his memoirs in 1960s.

And it seems like a forgotten figure right now. So you're talking about him as if nobody knows about him anymore. The same on your advice. I started reading such authors as Jacques Ellul, for example.

And I'm even teaching to my students this personality. And it seems that people like Jacques Ellul also understood everything about propaganda, everything that we need to understand right now. And he was also writing in 1960s. So why we forgot everything? So listen, these are all people. So Delmer, who was working counter-propaganda, Ellul, who saw the rise of fascist propaganda himself.

Eric Fromm, who I think is one of the better psychoanalysts who talk about the allure of fascism and authoritarianism. And who's that other philosopher who went to Stanford, has this theory of mimesis, that we all follow each other's emotions. We imitate each other. René Girard. Yeah, René Girard, yeah. Who again has become back into fashion now.

They all witnessed the rise of Nazi propaganda. And even if they don't always talk about it directly, and they are thinking about propaganda more broadly, you know, they saw this in front of themselves. And then for a long time, that sort of propaganda, I think, became taboo. You know, there wasn't, it became taboo to do those sorts of tricks, at least in Europe and America, you know. And now, of course, those taboos are broken. And we are seeing the return of

of the types of propaganda techniques, the types of psychological manipulation, which were very common actually before the Second World War, not just in Germany, they were happening in America, they were happening in the Soviet Union obviously. And so as that has emerged again, I think we're going to have more and more interest about the people who observed it then. Delma was forgotten for a very specific reason though. Delma was forgotten, and this is what his son thought,

was because Delmer did what we would call today fake news. You know, he did... His radio stations would pretend to be one thing and they were another. They would pretend to be Nazi stations when they were actually British stations undermining the Nazis. He played lots of dirty tricks. And even in his autobiographies, he talks about, am I a goodie or a baddie? And his autobiographies are a sort of moral...

fable because the consequences of his very successful counter-propaganda were very bad in the post-war period and so he makes himself into this comedy baddie so so he's playing all the time this idea that he's using dirty tricks to win the war and after the war the british didn't want to remember that you know they wanted to think about the second world war as our finest hour you know

as when the best qualities came through. We see that as well in the way we kind of talk about the Blitz in England and the Blitz spirit. When Delmar describes the Blitz, it's a much more dark place. So Delmar was kind of a memory of the dark things we did in the Second World War. And I think that was kind of pushed away out of public speech. It was never denied. There was always something about Delmar there. The archives opened in the 90s.

But nobody wanted to talk about it very much. We wanted to talk about daring fighter pilots and the escape from cold hits and these kind of simple heroic stories. And Delma's story is not a simple heroic story. It is, however, I think, a story of genius.

So there are two major arguments in your book, I think. The first argument is that the propaganda, the question of propaganda and information war is not really a question of disinformation or lies. It's a question of how you built your identity and how you actually help people who lose their identity, who feel lonely and who feel atomized to regain their identity. And another argument, this is your final chapter,

So Delmar for you is not goody, goody, baddy, baddy, but ordinary, ordinary. Can you elaborate on that? So Delmar's great insight, but also Elul's, also Hannah Haren's, if we go back to her, definitely Eric Fromm's, is that people in the sort of 20s and 30s had lost their sense of who they were. There were huge social changes, economic changes, technological changes. Everything seemed in flux.

Very similar to our world today, where everything is liquid, in Sigmund Bauman's great phrase. And in that chaos, you have wonderful art. Berlin is this expression of explorations of identity. But a lot of people can't deal with it. And what the Nazis and others do is they create a strong common identity and also a strong individual role for you to play. Delma had a very theatrical view of life.

I actually think the way to understand them is through different types of theater theory. And he worked in his counterpropaganda with a lot of the stars of the Berlin cabaret, a lot of famous playwrights. So he had a very theatrical view of life and he saw the Nazis as sort of gruesome cabaret that gave Germans who didn't know who they were a language to use, you know.

You can be an Aryan, a superior Aryan superior to Untermenschen. It gave you a community, das Volk, to be part of. Radio was the mechanism through which you became part of one community of sound, essentially. It gave you a way to take your most negative feelings, sadism, aggression, resentment, victimhood, normalize them and inflict horrible pain onto others. Delmar had a very dark view of human nature.

So the genius of the Nazis, the evil genius of the Nazis, was to give people a role to play. And in order to counteract that, you have to think about how do you give people an alternative community, which is less toxic, and you have to give them other roles to play. Delma never thought there was a true you. He'd grown up in so many countries. He was very conscious that every time you learn a language or you move societies, you always put on a new mask. The question is, is somebody putting it on you?

and sticking it to your face? Or are you yourself going to play with different roles? Either you're a passive, either you're a willing but ultimately passive actor in Hitler's drama, because at the end of the day you're giving your willpower to Hitler,

Or into the sort of collaborative theater where you have a role where you can do things. I mean, in his case, you can do things like defect from the front. You can fake illness. You can sabotage your boat. But he was always introducing these things as like, let's play again. Let's do this. And I think that's psychologically very, very deep. I think Delman would have loved social media. Social media can either be a place where we kind of all imitate the roles others give to us. And we see it all the time. People kind of, you know.

doing these repeating these hateful slogans online not really thinking about just being part of the crowd and playing that role or we can think about using it very very originally you know so he would have loved that that potential of are you are you the director of your own life or is Hitler the director of your life um can you and this is a great English phrase I don't know if you have it in Ukrainian can you act yourself act yourself that's that's a beautiful idea acting yourself

So that's what it was and its roots. But also it was very pragmatic. You know, Delm was trying to organize economic crises in German cities. He was trying to demoralize troops, German troops, before a British attack. So he was also being both incredibly pragmatic, often working very closely with the army, but at the same time incredibly psychological indeed.

And one thing about him is that, and you write about this, that he was himself subject to propaganda. And you describe one of the very strange episodes in his life when he was a boy, an English boy in Berlin, and he was experiencing the...

basically the 1933 and arrival of Hitler, right? And he was...

He was also kind of feeling that at a certain moment he would join this identity himself. And he was also attracted to it, but at the same time understood that you need to fight it. So does it mean that in order to understand propaganda, you need to be a little bit vulnerable to it first? So one correction.

He was a child during the first war. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it's 1914-15. He's a British boy in Berlin. He's bullied. He's the only, imagine the only, I don't know, Ukrainian boy in a Russian school or whatever. So he's the only English boy in a German school at the start of the war. He's bullied. He's beaten up. He stands up for Britain. And at the same time, when they have these kind of, you know,

communal events at school, singing, marching, chanting for Germany. He finds himself singing this, caught up in it, singing how much he loves Germany. And he has this complete split moment when he's like, hold on, who am I? Am I the British boy or am I this German patriot? And the fact that he's honest about that, I mean, he's 10 years old at the time. The fact that he's honest about that, that he shows, that he knows he's vulnerable to propaganda is of course what lets him understand it.

Look, look at it the other way. Who are the people who are most convinced that they will never fall for any propaganda? I mean, you know, how many Russians have you known over your life? Not even intellectual Russians, just common Russians will say, oh, I see through all of it. You know, those people in the West, they're idiots. I'm Russian. I can see through propaganda. I'm so cynical. I don't believe anyone. I don't believe the Kremlin. I don't believe the West. You can't trust anyone in this world.

And then they will repeat every line from Russian propaganda. And in America, you have all these people say, I don't trust the mainstream media. I don't even trust Fox News. I don't trust anyone because I believe QAnon is real or something. We have so many studies showing that people who say they don't trust anything, that believe that they are impervious to propaganda, are the ones who believe the most propaganda.

So whenever people ask me, like, you know, what's the first best way to defend yourself from propaganda? I'm like, step number one, admit that we are all vulnerable, not necessarily to fake news or disinformation that we can be, but for the desire to be part of a group, for the desire to belong, for the desire to be someone who's powerful.

recognized by others I think that desire is is is universal and very few people can escape it even the smartest most liberal ones but is it bad is it bad that we try to belong is it bad that we try to have collective identity no it's not at all and I think really the debate today and maybe in the 30s as well is around toxic communities and collaborative open ones

Going back to 60s sociology, there was this very popular concept then of the public versus the mass. The mass is like this angry, seething, but actually very controlled crowd. While the public is a space where people interact with each other, come to communal decisions, can form movements, can be very emotional. It's not about, I hate this distinction of emotion versus non-emotion.

there are good emotions and there's love or which should be part of a common identity you cannot build a society without emotions exactly exactly i've not be just rational and critical thinking and yeah yeah and it would be awful to live in that world yeah no i've i am we'll get back to this but um so you know and that's what dalma's saying no you have the community of the village which is very positive about he does plays with that lord regional identities the church

Go back to Freud. You know, Freud was already looking when Freud talked about sort of, you know, the mass grouping. Yeah. He thought about two different types. He thought about very, very positive ones, like the church or sometimes the army, you know, where you have a positive communal sense filled with what he called libido and love. And then you have hateful mobs. I think where we are right now, actually, is very similar. Because right now, I don't think the great conflicts...

in the world is between freedom and non-freedom. I think it's between two different types of community. If the Cold War narrative was censorship versus freedom, totalitarianism versus freedom, right now it's about in this chaos where people don't know who you are, can we construct communities that are

you know, all the good old things, open, empathetic, tolerant, take decisions together, or are we going to create these kind of seething, angry masses which are controlled today by algorithms, by tech overlords, by authoritarians?

And then we have a liberal illusion that we actually don't need communities, that we are all individuals, cosmopolitan individuals. And I think this liberal illusion is bad because it leads to the illusion that communities don't matter and that we can live in atomized society by ourselves. Well, I am a liberal cosmopolitan. I need community deeply.

Also, that community has to do something. It's not a community for the sake of community. I think we have three crises of the liberal community at the moment. One is one of communication. How do we form the public sphere? How does this positive community form? There used to be an idea, probably a faulty one, that there was people in the streets and at home, and their opinions and thoughts were formed into the public through newspapers, TV, and that influenced politicians, etc., etc.,

Now we're in kind of this chaos. I mean, social media, the new public sphere, but who controls that? Is it just a couple of oligarchs in America, some of them with pretty crazy ideas, who are going to control how we form into a community? So look, I think those are the issues we have to address. And then finally, what is the influence of this community? I mean, what people in America are now saying openly and which they were saying in the 1920s.

is that you can't trust the people to make decisions. People don't know what they want. They're too emotional. We need tech overlords or we need elites to decide for them. That, Peter Thiel argues for that, one of the sort of people who kind of like, is very close to Elon Musk and all these figures around, the tech figures around Trump. He says this very openly, you know, democracy is no longer fit for use. In order to guarantee what he calls freedom, we need essentially democracy.

authoritarian president and tech elites to rule the country. He had very similar arguments in the 1920s in America. Yeah, and it's an old cycle because when democracy comes to crisis, the solutions are either tyrannical or oligarchy. We all know that from history. But let me come back to Delmer.

So when he establishes these fake German radios, he's very skeptical about a typical way how to speak to the German audience. And this is exactly the way how the mainstream in international organizations or international media was thinking about, for example, the Russian propaganda, like,

Let's find rational arguments. Let's persuade them that the war is bad. Let's give them facts, etc. So Delmar was confident that it leads us to a very wrong direction. And what was his strategy? Because his strategy, as far as I understand from your book, is rather to accept the kind of the...

this fantasy, this Nazi fantasy or this Nazi emotion as real and try to exploit it, try to turn it against itself. Like try to say that, yeah, you know, Germany is great, Nazism is great, but these guys around Hitler are just, you know, betrayals, betrayers. So Delmocrate said, we don't know how many, but 12 to 20 radio stations over a very brief period of 41 to 45. And he tried very many different approaches. He had a radio station just...

you know, meant to be from a rebel SS group. He had one just aimed at Austrian Catholics. He had one, he had, he was controlling in many countries. Like Telegram channels today. Yeah, exactly. So, so there wasn't one thing, his most famous one, but it's only the first one. And it's really the only one that's remained in British public history much. And it was kind of genius was a figure called Deschef and he started broadcasting in 1941.

And he was, if you need an equivalent today, like a pro-Goshen figure. You know, he was basically this right-wing Prussian soldier swearing. The show was done as if it was him talking to his, like a cabal of officers. It wasn't broadcasting out. It was as if you, the listener, could suddenly find a wavelength where German soldiers were talking to one another. And he, um...

And he would say the most horrendously hilarious pornographic, a lot of porn, about Nazi elites and mid-ranking Nazi officers. The aim of this was to show the public that there was a split between the army and the party. You've got to remember, this is 1941. The attack on Russia has not happened yet. The attack on Operation Barbarossa has not begun yet. Hitler rules Europe.

From the Atlantic, essentially, to the Black Sea via proxies. Britain is alone. It's a moment of total desperation where Hitler's propaganda seems completely in control. Any last opposition in Berlin among the working class has been wiped out. And suddenly this voice telling you these completely taboo things, completely outrageous things, in a voice that is...

more German than the Nazis. You know, the Prussian officer corps is a deeper identity than the Nazi one, which was an idea of Delmas. You've got to do something that's deeper than the Nazis. Using the sort of language that nobody used in radio. I mean, the pornography scenes are stunning. You know, sadomasochistic scenes, orgies where mid-ranking Gestapo officials, and it was very much against the SS actually, it was against Himmler.

that the SS are organizing orgies and monasteries where they force prostitutes and nuns to dress up. It kind of veils and they pour candle wax over them and a lot of sadomasochism, which I think got to the essence of the Nazi project in many ways, as we've discussed before. And incredible details about the corruption of the German party officials. And it was all about how these guys betray the army. But unlike Prigozhin, the aim of this was not to

stop corruption in Germany. He wanted people to listen to this and go, oh my God, there's a split between the party and the army. And this corruption shows that we can be corrupt ourselves. Even though the tone was outraged, the effect that Delma wanted was for people to go, well, we're not going to risk our lives for this.

We're not going to take part in the Nazi economy, which was starting already to sort of not creak, but starting to be a little bit hard for this. We're not going to sort of like, you know, sacrifice our well-being for this lot. We're going to start cheating on the black market. We're going to start having sex parties. We're going to stop going to stupid Nazi rallies if they're not. So his idea was to normalize corruption, increase corruption. So he'd do stories about how, I don't know,

in a very pragmatic way. He'd do stories about how, you know, the whys of Nazi officials know that there is about to be a shortage of stockings and they're buying up all the stockings in order to create like an economic pressure on stockings. Everyone would go and buy stockings. And those are little things, you know. So that was his tactic. That was his first show. And that was indeed a deceptive radio. So people were meant to think it was real and it was hugely successful.

The Nazis were freaked out about it. We have Eric Kessner, who was a very famous German writer, writing in his diary how everybody in Berlin is listening to him. The British, after a while, started doing kind of polling of captured German soldiers to see how many listened to Delma's radios. Around 50% listened. 50%. Imagine we had 50% of Russian soldiers listening to our strategic communication efforts. Amazing. So... But that...

But that station was also quite quickly blown by the Gestapo. So the Gestapo basically worked out who it was and they told German people, look, this is just the Brits. So I think that's a lesson there as well. You can do spectacular things with a piece of deceptive content, but it's going to be found out very quickly. Today's can be found out quicker. And then Delmar adapts his strategy radically.

And actually, I think it's his later work, which is a more successful in terms of listenership, but also is much more clever. He does, he starts doing mass radios, big armed forces radios with music. They were live. This was not recorded anymore. This was live, big band music and entertainment and a Shandorz, who was a Jewish star of the Berlin cabaret scene.

And entertainment news and sport news, the whole thing, like a live radio for the forces. Soldaten sender, Soldaten sender Kale was one of its names, broadcast on medium wave, like a normal radio, not an underground radio. And it officially was like a Nazi radio. So it had speeches from Goebbels and speeches from Hitler and some of the Nazi music.

But he wanted German listeners to know that this was the British imitating the Nazis. People were meant to be in on it. They were meant to understand that this was actually a piece of masquerade. And you could tell that very easily because the news would just report on losses on the front. You know, there was lots of details like the life of a soldier on the front with incredible detail about how awful it was on the front. Real detail actually got from the front through a very complicated system of research. And Delman was doing that for two reasons. Safety.

When people would tune in to a foreign radio like the BBC, this was a crime punishable by hanging. So here if the Gestapo came or if your officer came and said, look, this is actually a British station, but I just had Goebbels' speech on, sir. I had no idea. So you could deny things. So that's very important. But more importantly than that was a psychological safety. And everybody who worked on the radios writes about this because I found a lot of unpublished memoirs as well. This is what they said.

They said that even people who knew this was the British would find it easier to listen to what was essentially treacherous content when it was we. It was giving people a psychological excuse. Our boys, our army, we Germans. Even though they knew it was actually the British, this made it psychologically easier. And even deeper than that, I think Delma was saying something very specific to people. Look, Nazi propaganda, we can imitate it.

even though we're the british and then we give you stories about your life which are more true closer to your experience than nazi propaganda so why do you need them we can do all they do we can do the speeches if you want to feel that fine but i'm welcome i'm welcoming you into community where we understand more than you i'm sorry but i'm welcoming you into community where we understand more about your lives and the enemy

Which is really quite a stunning idea, because today we wonder, would we liberals ever be listened to by people who vote authoritarian? The Alamor are saying you can. If you show that's actually stronger, if you show, yes, I'm on the other side of a real war, let alone a cultural war, but I can understand you better than them, people will be drawn in. You'll start to win people's trust. And when POWs would be captured...

They'd be interviewed about the radios. They'd all say that, like, the amount the British know about us, both in terms of espionage, but in terms of understanding us, made us go, well, there's no point fighting. These people know us. These people understand us. They also, they firstly know all our maneuvers, but they understand our lives. Now, how can we fight this? You know, it's very disarming.

So throughout, Delbert's also doing several things. So he's welcoming these people into an alternative community. He's also giving them a space to vent their most strong, violent emotions. You know, he saw how the Nazis manipulated anger, viciousness, sadism. His shows were full of those emotions, but redirected at the Nazi party. So sort of breaking their monopoly over strong emotions. And then the third thing, which I think is the most subtle one, but I think the most important one,

is that there's something about the process of being involved in this sort of masquerade that liberates you from the Nazi performance. The Nazi performance, and Goebbels would talk about this a lot, was all about giving up your willpower, being part of an orgiastic mass. You know, he'd talk about it, and Hitler talked about it as well, how people in the Nazi crowd would feel themselves part of this, you know, this, this, this mass.

almost this being that didn't have any individual willpower anymore. It was part of one experience. Dahlem is doing the opposite. He's always stimulating people to think for themselves. Just the process of tuning into the radios is already this sort of psychological liberation. You're listening to a radio that you know is the English cosplaying the Nazis.

And you know that the British know that you're doing this, but you're both pretending as if this is a real Nazi station. So you're already psychologically going through these steps, which are getting you into a very different psychological dynamic to what the Nazis do. How can we use these lessons today? Because I think one of the very important things that we need, for example, if we think how to influence Russians today,

One thing is that we should get rid of our illusions about Russians. We should get rid of an idea that Russians think, feel in the same way as we, as Europeans, as Americans, as Ukrainians. We really need to think what bothers Russians, what interests them. And probably we need to play with this idea of great Russia, but in a different way, as you say, show them the deeper Russia than Putin shows to them.

Or one of the conclusions might be that, okay, they kind of outsource their subjectivity to Putin, to this collective body. But then at a certain moment, there is probably a need to bring this subjectivity back, to bring this individuality back in a certain way and to reject this fatalism. What do you say? So listen, I do... Well, there are several steps that have to be taken. First...

We have to recognize a political fact. You know, at the moment, obviously, Ukraine does information operations into Russia. We'll find out more about them after the war. And I think there'll be many great stories like with Delma. But I assume they're more connected to the direct military operations. You know, what we have to realize, and I think some of the allies should do, because it takes a lot of resources. I mean, the resources that Delma were given were vast, is that the Kremlin leads Ukraine.

will not look for peace in a serious way until they feel that their control over society is under threat. The only path to peace is to put enough pressure on the Kremlin elites that they have to recalculate the risks of the war. Now, that includes oil price, that includes some cleverer sanctions. We can talk about many things that make them paranoid.

But so far, we haven't even tried to do this. So far, all we've done in the West is signal to Russia, we're in this for the long term. And with Trump, that's collapsed. It was never about making them feel worried. It's just like, you think you're going to outlast us? We'll outlast you. That was the Biden-Sullivan approach. If Biden stayed in, maybe it'll work. I think Biden's idea was, we're richer than them. At the end of the day, we'll always be able to put more chips on the table. Oh, you've put this on the table. But it wasn't really working, was it?

I think that the only way to stop the Russians, to get them to really be serious about peace, is to put so much pressure on them that they have to calculate things differently. And the fear of not being able to control things inside of society is part of that. So it's not about regime change or all the sort of fantasies that people have, you know, fears or fantasies. It's really very, very direct.

How do you do that? Part of that is the information space and the social space. So first you have to work out what are the issues that the Kremlin wants to control but cannot control. We do a lot of analysis of this in the economic community, in the sort of various stratcoms groups. There's quite easy to see once you analyze a lot of Russian discursive data, media, social media, behavioral data, when the Kremlin's propaganda works and when it doesn't.

A lot of its holes have been around the economy. You know, it'll try to pressure people into not taking out payday loans. It's like the Nazis would try to get people to save or invest in Nazi coupons. They'll more try to undermine that. So a lot of the fragility is around the economy and economic well-being. So you would push your campaigns there in a way to show the Kremlin, you thought you could do this campaign, look, we just destroyed you.

You thought you could, I don't know, get people in this, in one region to all go and work in a factory to produce munitions. We just messed that up. You have to start getting them to think, okay, we're not actually in control. Because at the moment they think they're in total control. In order to do that, you have to understand both what's working, what's not working. And you have to understand the deeper appeal of Kremlin propaganda. So I've been doing a lot of research in Russia with various academic partners, professors,

looking at when does Russian propaganda work well. And it works well a lot like Nazi propaganda when it is combined with ideas of Russian superiority and chauvinism. So over half of Russians will agree with questions about Russia as superior to other countries, Russia has been victimized. So the whole cocktail of victim narrative, legitimizing chauvinism and supremacism

that we see in, we saw in the Nazis and in so many authoritarian regimes. I mean, it's such, it's classic. So that is deeply connected to support for the war. So you have to think about the themes that undermine that. So weirdly, the themes that don't undermine that, firstly, is showing, well, certainly showing dead Ukrainians won't help. Showing dead Russian soldiers won't help either.

That has a backfire effect. That makes Russians more aggressive. That makes them more ready to fight if they see bodies of dead Russian soldiers. So the whole, like, don't fight Russians, you'll die, makes people more aggressive. We've learned that. What works best in the studies that I've seen is stuff about crime.

Crime in Russia is going up. Putin is letting criminals out onto the streets for his war. Your daughter might get raped. If you go to the front, you're more likely to get killed by your comrade than the Ukrainians. I think it goes very deep because crime is associated with chaos. Putin's about, or is meant to be all about order. So,

Things about crime, things about, you know, lack of social services, easy things like that. But also things about we're becoming subservient to China. All this sort of stuff, you know, that undermines the sense of superiority, they work very, very well to undermine support for the war. But then you have to time this with physical operations.

When there was the invasion, the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk, the Russian propaganda system collapsed. They had no idea what to do. Putin's rating dropped to like 50%, which is very low. That was the moment to increase information operations. That's the moment when they're fearful. So we have to learn how to do these things in time with military things, as Delma did as well. He was constantly talking to the military, to the British Air Force, the RAF.

and combining his campaigns with them. But for that, you obviously have to have found a way to the audiences, to these deeper issues around identity. And then you spike certain things in order to combine with the military and economic warfare. Delman didn't think what he was doing was journalism. He was very open. I'm a propagandist. But at a time of war, this is what will work and what we need.

What if we undermine the Russian feeling that they have a genuine tsar? Because I think we talked about this, like in the Russian mythology there is a clear idea that Russia will only survive when there is a genuine tsar. When there is not a genuine tsar, when the tsar is fake, then the Russian political community can collapse.

The Ukrainian mistrust to the government is a proportion of the fact that we have a corrupt leader. The Russian mistrust to the Tsar is probably the reverse.

your leader is not sufficiently corrupt, is not sufficiently cruel. So you have a better leader and Putin is not the genuine Tsar. What do you think? Yeah, totally. I mean, I think so. I think you'd want to go for regional Tsars, pro-Goshen as a Tsar, totally. And that's why you have to exploit to the max these moments when Putin's, when the strong hand is weak. This is the Kremlin's, the Kremlin understands that. That's why they're so freaked out about

controlling the information environment. I mean, why do they? I mean, the country's a dictatorship. They don't have anything to fear from the information space, really. And look how paranoid they are about it. Not because they think there'll be some huge revolution soon. They monitor for that, obviously. But because if they cannot show that they can control

attitudes and behaviors like at the click of a propaganda finger, it means they're not real Tsars. So Putin's rating is the most famous example. What does it matter what Putin's rating is? I mean, who cares in a way? And yet they know that if Putin's rating falls between, I think 60%, most people say, that shows something's going wrong. That means they're not in control. It is their job as the Tsar to go, Putin is the greatest, jump.

And it doesn't matter whether people believe it. If they can get people to jump and say, yes, sir, you are the greatest, that shows their power. If suddenly people are calling Putin all sorts of bad things, as they were after Kursk, if his rating is going below 60%,

That's a crisis for them. So you've got to start understanding their paranoid, how they think. So yeah, you want to show that they're not in control. That will get them worried. And if they ignore it, that will open up the field to others. And again, and it's all about timing as well. So you cook this, you cook this, you cook this. And then at the critical moment, you apply all sorts of pressure, which shows they're out of control. The information only works with the economic military actions together.

But the others won't work without it because at the end of the day, Russia can take a lot of blows. It's got its oil. It's got so much cannon fodder to kill. They don't really care. They've got China supporting their technology. The big paranoia they have is social control. And we're not touching it. And they will not look for genuine peace until we have that deterrence. We have to start thinking of informational engagement.

public education campaigns into Russia, let's call it that, as a completely essential part of the journey to peace and deterrence. It's not escalatory. It's the opposite. That means that we need to learn from propagandists and we need to not be too much afraid of this word. And what you say in your book that we need to learn from people like Delmar,

And your argument that we can undermine Russian power, Putin's power, when we show it's not under control is very much rhyming with the Brexit slogan, take back control, right? So they play on this feeling that we are not in control, want to get back control, and this is the best way to, the best technique of propaganda. So if there is one man

who I would like to make head of our propaganda, our strategic communications into Russia, it would be the head of the Brexit campaign, Dominic Cummings. Unfortunately, he spends his sizable propaganda talents destroying, you know, destroying what he doesn't like in Britain, which happens to be what I like in Britain. But if we could use his destructive talents towards a genuine enemy,

and i think he has the genius to do that then um i would love to have the guy who came up with take back control taken a real phone not take on the labor party or the guardian or these easy praise that is you know chicken feed for him but actually go and do something serious and take on a real enemy i think he's got the talent we'll see though maybe my last question um

You talk a lot about psychoanalysis and probably even propaganda as in ours in the 20th century was born out of people like Bernays who were connected with Freud and even... Directly. Directly. And...

And I came up with an idea recently, a very simple idea that basically propaganda is psychoanalysis in reverse. Psychoanalysis upside down because psychoanalysis is taking your trauma and trying to cure it and propaganda is taking your trauma and trying to make it feel worse. What do you think?

Well, I mean, this is, this was a line I had in my previous book, you know, that I can see with this in a very similar way. I called it the competition or the conflict between the proper sort of the cult leader and the therapist. The propagandist, the authoritarian propagandist works like a cult leader. They prey on your, they find out your vulnerability and then they manipulate it to make you follow them and be part of a collective movement.

that they control and you're in their power. The therapist finds out about the same traumas, the same awful things, and helps you express it and bring them into speech. In this case, not private speech, but public speech. That's what good media, positive propaganda, or whatever you want to call it, does. It's taking all resentments, angers, frustrations, and then bringing them into public speech. So we can talk about them, tell stories about them, make movies about them, have podcasts about them.

So I think, I mean, I completely agree with you. I think that's a very good metaphor to use. But then Delmo, what you described in his latest years and I think what you're trying to do now

is something different is something more close to psychoanalysis but collective psychoanalysis let's like like let's let's let's think how we deal with trauma but not in in a sadistic way not in the in the way how we make it worse but try to cure it no I don't know if he's really cured at the end of the day he's trying to win a war we also forget well I think Ukraine is understand this you know this is not a theoretical thing for him he was he was looking what works what works what works

But like everybody at the time, he was steeped in psychoanalysis. I think he was not a huge devotee of it. But to be precise, the first de facto professor of psychoanalysis at Cambridge, McCurdy, who'd been a sort of like a first-generation student of, I don't remember if he studied with Freud, but first-generation psychoanalyst. The guy who actually kind of defined post-traumatic stress in the First World War. And a guy who explored a lot the idea of kind of

the desire of soldiers for death and the odiar of soldiers for a wound and played with this a lot in his work with Delman how some soldiers want to die just to end the agony end the fear end the sort of you know the horror of being at war while others try to get themselves wounds in order to get out for the front so the difference between these two things um

Sonia McCurdy was part of Delma's team. I don't think he would have said that what he was doing was therapy at this point. They were trying to win a war. But in order to win the war, they had to get Germans and Nazis to act independently, and in that sense freely, as an independent from the Nazis. Delma did lots of very immoral things, by the way. You can read the book and things that he said he regretted afterwards. Deeply immoral. Deeply immoral. But it

But essentially, he is trying to get Germans and Nazis to think for themselves and in that sense be free. Not in a romantic way, but in a very kind of psychologically... Well, this is a very pretentious podcast. So what Hegel would call autonomous. He wanted people to be autonomous. To start going, do I really need to die for Hitler? Do I really need to be here on the front? Do I really believe these stupid Nazi songs?

Peter Pomeranzo, thank you so much for this conversation.

This was a podcast series Thinking in Dark Times by Ukraine World, an English language media outlet about Ukraine. My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko. I am a Ukrainian philosopher, editor-in-chief of Ukraine World and president of Pan-Ukraine. Ukraine World is run by Internews Ukraine, one of the country's leading media NGOs.

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