This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev

Those images of people-powered revolutions articulated the victory of democracy over oppression, connected to a whole vocabulary passed down from the struggles of dissidents and civil rights movements. But what if a cleverer sort of ruler could find other ways to undermine the dissidents, rid them of a clear enemy to fight, climb inside the images, ideas, stories of those great people-power protests, and suck them dry from the inside, until they were devoid of meaning? Could they even use the same language and tactics as “the democrats” but for opposite aims?

Srdja’s belief in nonviolence doesn’t come so much from pacifism as calculation. Regimes have the upper hand when it comes to physical force; what they can’t deal with are massive, peaceful crowds out on the street.

He teaches the need to formulate a vision of the alternative political model you want to see. How to bring very different groups together around a lowest common denominator. How to find the weak spots of the adversary’s “pillars of power” and bring them over to your side.

For me there are only two types of societies: places where governments are afraid of the people, which we call ‘democracies,’ and places where people are afraid of their autocratic governments. I don’t care which dictator I’m empowering people to be free of.”

Conspiracy theory replaces ideology with a mix of self-pity, paranoia, self-importance, and entertainment. Erdogan, Trump, Putin, Orbán, and the rest invoke conspiracies to explain events, often hinting at them without going so far as stating them directly, which only strengthens the sense that what they are establishing is a more general worldview than any single theory.

More important, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anyone’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove plot, so that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic the renowned Russian media analyst Vasily Gatov calls “white jamming.” And the net effect of all these endless pileups of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what chance do you have to turn it around? In this murk, it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. “Trump is our last chance to save America,” is the message of his media hounds. “Only Putin can raise Russia from its knees,” say Trump’s Moscow counterparts. “The problem we are facing today is less oppression but lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,” sighs Srdja. “There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.”

He found that every wave of protests involved a certain amount of words that made the lattice of communication grow thicker, words that worked almost like magical magnets powering capillarity. It was these increasing interconnections that Alberto described with the word “love.”

Defining the argument means winning it. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant, they will end up thinking of an elephant. “When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame… when you are arguing against the other side, do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame—and it won’t be the frame you want.”

One motif to the Kremlin storytelling was this: that the desire for freedom didn’t lead to peace and prosperity but to war and devastation (a message, first and foremost, meant for its own people so they didn’t become overenthusiastic about the idea). To make this narrative real meant ensuring that Ukraine could never achieve peace. The country had to bleed.

When Vladimir Putin went on international television during his army’s annexation of Crimea, and asserted, with a smirk, that there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea when everyone knew there were, and then just as casually later admitted that they had been there, and even publicly awarded medals to the soldiers whom he had earlier said hadn’t been there, he wasn’t so much lying in the sense of trying to replace one reality with another as saying that facts don’t matter.

Back in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government was fighting a war against the domestic BBC, accusing it of being biased for attacking Conservative politicians, of being disloyal for broadcasting Irish terrorists. There were even threats to close down the BBC: why should one have a publicly funded broadcaster if Thatcher believed in market freedom? But now the attacks are aimed not only at the BBC’s impartiality but at the very idea that there is such a thing as impartiality.

YouTube didn’t want to be the judge of what is true, but they wanted their algorithms to be the judge of what gets promoted. As a consequence, untrue content could get massively augmented.

Couldn’t one offer people more diverse content? He was told this was not the focus. YouTube was primarily interested in increasing the time that people spend watching it. It struck him as a terrible way to define desire: purely by how much time someone spent staring at a screen—a far cry from the patrician public service ethos of the BBC.

The joy of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense. And it’s no coincidence that so many of the current rulers are also nostalgists. Putin’s internet troll armies sell dreams of a restored Russian Empire and Soviet Union; Trump tweets to “Make America Great Again”; Polish and Hungarian media lament lost nationhood.

Russia had seen so many worlds flick through in such rapid progression—from communism to perestroika to shock therapy to penury to oligarchy to mafia state to mega-rich—that its new heroes were left with the sense that life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable.”

Now he was about to be offered a new home, a place where he would belong perfectly because it didn’t yet exist, an Islamic state. Each week Rashad and the other members of his study group would immerse themselves in Hizb’s founding texts, which laid out in stunning detail every aspect of what the ideal Islamic state should look like. There were books on law, government, ethics, on how reality was shaped by a priori thoughts. Hizb had been founded in the 1950s by a Palestinian Islamic scholar, Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, who had previously been a senior member of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. For al-Nabhani, the creation of Israel was a sign that Muslims were weak, unable to stand up for each other, corrupted by Western notions such as “the nation,” which had splintered them into different countries. It was the very language and concepts through which people saw the world that had to change. At the foundation of Hizb’s approach was the “Islamic personality.”5 This concept held that a person had natural instincts that had to be fulfilled, but training yourself to think in the correct way would channel those instincts into the “right” behavior. So, for example, man has a natural instinct for security, which was articulated in the search for acquiring things and property. Marxism suppressed that instinct and was therefore destined to failure. Capitalism, however, overindulged it and undermined another instinct, procreation, which expressed itself as the need to feel part of a c...

But the essence of Hizb recruitment arguments was clear. Whatever issue a potential recruit cares about, your job is to connect it with the need for an Islamic state.

Social media users are organized through vastly different interests: animal rights and hospitals, guns and gardening, immigration and parenting and modern art. Some of these interests might be overtly political while others are personal. Your aim is to reach out to these different groups in different ways, tying the voting behavior you want to what they care about the most.

Mouffe spoke about the need for a charismatic leader as an “articulating agent” who could bring together the very different causes and grievances of the newly created “people”; of the need for strong passions, the expressions of our deepest, unconscious drives, to bind them; how important it was to define the enemy.10 She argued this could be done within democratic rules, but it wasn’t hard to imagine how it could turn into something frightening.

Suddenly, the Russia I had known seemed all around me: a radical relativism that implies truth is unknowable, the future dissolving into nasty nostalgia, conspiracy replacing ideology, facts equated to fibs, conversation collapsing into mutual accusations that every argument is just information warfare, and the sense that everything under one’s feet is constantly moving, inherently unstable, liquid.

During Putin’s almost two decades in power since Pavlovsky helped him become president, the idea of the people has been reorganized over and over while always managing to unite disparate groups around a rotating enemy: oligarchs at first, then metropolitan liberals, and more recently, the entire outside world.

They wrote, to give but one example, about how Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, promoted the use of the raised-arm Sieg Heil salute because he had worked out that the forceful double exhalation of breath and repeated, strenuous arm movements caused hyperventilation and exhaustion among Hitler’s followers, putting them in a trance-like state and making them more susceptible to messaging.

Cambridge Analytica explored the potential of psychographics: the idea that your social media preferences and language predict your personality. Consider if you were running a campaign to support the right to bear arms. If the campaign manager knew someone was an anxious person, then they could target them with messages which argued they needed guns to keep them safe. This is the potential nightmare of the new media: the idea that our data might know more about us than we do, and that this is then being used to influence us without our knowledge.

Everyone now agrees that influence means understanding your audience better and deeper than the next person, not by forcing themselves on you, but by tickling the “real you,” fitting your message to them rather than pushing an ideology top-down. “Isn’t that democracy,” asks Oakes rhetorically, “when you give people what they want?”

“Brexit,” “The People’s Will,” “Sovereignty,” “No Deal.” What any of them meant was moot. Borwick had won the vote by talking to so many audiences in different ways one couldn’t really say what the will of the people really was. Had the country voted to stop immigration? To protect animal rights? “Brexit means Brexit,” the prime minister had said, but what did “Brexit” mean?

If any country would be first to perfect the use of data imprints to target people according to cognitive, psychographic and behavioral patterns, it would be China.

A 2013 Pentagon paper about China’s doctrine of three warfares (economic, media, and legal) concluded that “twenty-first-century warfare [is] guided by a new and vital dimension: namely the belief that whose story wins may be more important than whose army wins.” China made this point in the South China Sea when it annexed vast maritime spaces by first building artificial islands and then claiming the surrounding waters as their own, all without firing a shot.4

Community of Shared Future of Mankind! Democracy! Liberty! Justice! Friendliness! The slogans were in such contradiction with reality that their effect was to strip these pretty words of any meaning, so that they became codes that must be loyally repeated to signal fealty.

The difference between Hong Kong and China, thought Wu, was that in Hong Kong there was a need to go so far as to create books that presented the official version of what happened in 1989, whereas on the mainland, the story was suppressed.

“I had the sense that all the big, official words around us didn’t mean anything anymore,” says Lina. “They were like old linen blowing in the wind, empty.” And then she quotes a line from a poem: “Dead words smell foul.”