The last few weeks I’ve allowed a genre of “You Fucked Around and now You’re going to Find Out” videos to become a major time suck – with a lot of creators venting their frustration against racist White Americans, Trump voting Muslims and Latinos, and the frighteningly large population of voters who do not know that the Affordable Care Act (which they love) is the same thing as Obamacare (which they hate).
The common thread between all these groups voting against their own best interests is a vast cloud of misinformation that has, in the climate context, very much been my preoccupation over the last 20 years.
If we are going to reclaim democracy, finding new ways to cut through dense noise and deprogram a population is pretty core to our task.
Some insights here.
From one of our leading experts on disinformation, this inventive biography of the rogue WWII propagandist Sefton Delmer confronts hard questions about the nature of information war: what if you can’t fight lies with truth? Can a propaganda war ever be won?
In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat his powerful propaganda machine, crowing victory and smearing his enemies as liars and manipulators over his frequent radio speeches, blasted out on loudspeakers and into homes. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against this wave of disinformation.
Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking German military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion. His listeners included German soldiers and citizens, as well as politicians in Washington DC who were debating getting into the war. And–most importantly–Der Chef was a fiction. He was a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war.
Then, as author Peter Pomerantsev seeks to tell Delmer’s story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his own: the US response to the invasion of Ukraine. In flashes forward to the present day, Pomerantsev weaves in what he’s learning from Delmer as he seeks to fight against Vladimir Putin’s tyranny and lies. This book is the story of Delmer and his modern investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to manipulate the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of an information war, an extraordinary history that is informing the present before our eyes.