This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev (PDF)

Description

Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this “insightful” account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times).When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war.We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we’ve lost not only our grip on peace and democracy — but our very notion of what those words even mean.Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age—from Kiev to Manilla–where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, “behavioral change” salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his Ukranian dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia — but the answers he finds there are not what he expected.Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I have the paperback which is 256 pages. I gave it 4 stars because the subtitle is “Adventures in the War Against Realtty” when I think that the substance of the book could be better described as “Adventures in the Creation of Identity.” Much of the author’s and his parents’ early life suffered from living in the Soviet Union. Their desire to read what they wanted to read and think what they wanted to think met with Soviet oppression. Much of the author’s subsequent life has been defined by this experience.His early years seemed to have been lived in the Ukraine. My copy of the book shows publication in 2019. The book looks at the struggle between Russia and Ukraine for many years prior to 2019. The lRussian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 offers a fascinating backdrop for these parts of the book. Russian’s effort to enforce its will on the Ukraine is not new. I found these parts of the book enlightening.The effect of the internet and social media provide much of the context for the book. As a purely personal opinion, I believe that social media probably does more harm than good. The tidal wave of information brought about through the internet contrasts sharply with the considerable, but more limited, information sources that prevailed before the advent of the internet. The author offers a number of examples of ways to use the internet to shape opinions both generally and in more focused groups. Much of these have to do with the creation and maintenance of identity with a group or groups. Identity requires an “other” which is not within the group or groups. I found myself asking what is “reality” and is all or most of what I encounter in information mostly an effort to shape my opinions and sense of identity. Fascinating speculation.The collapse of the Soviet Union had a profound effect on the author. On page 186, the author writes: “Within a year teh Soviet Union was gone. The map on our kitchen wall began to change. …The geography of identity that I had grown up with – ‘there’, ‘here’, ‘them’, ‘us’ – no longer made sense.”He describes efforts to build a European identity as opposed to the identity of various countries in Europe. The success of these efforts is not clear. He examines aspects of identity and on page 250, asks the question: “Are religion and creed then, where identity begins?” The book raises philosophical questions worthy of conservation.I found the book to be a fairly quick read. Once or twice, I asked myself if the author was real. Are there such as thing as facts? Yes, there are, but the interpretation of facts may be manipulated by all parties. His belief that the torrent of information to which led are no subjected has drained many words of their origins, and maybe any, meaning, unfortunately rings true to me.If the subject matter interests you, I recommend the book. .

⭐THIS IS NOT PROPAGANDA is an interesting but jumbled book about disinformation and the tools that governments now use to influence the public dialogue. In its discussion, the book jumps from influence operations in, say, the Philippines to those in the Ukraine and Russian and then to Cambridge Analytics and so on. A gallimaufry, a salmagundi, a ragbag… PROPAGANDA may be at its best when it contrasts the diverse manipulation strategies used by governments today to the authoritarian strategies used by the Kremlin in the 1970s, when Pomerantsev’s father was a Russian dissident and the battle lines were clearer. Nonetheless, he makes many great points and I pass the microphone to him.o “We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, fake news, deep fakes, brainwashing, trolls, ISIS, Putin, Trump” Page XIo “The physical and political maps delineating continents, countries, and oceans, the maps I grew up with, can be less important than the new maps of information flows… These network maps, which look like fields of pin mold…show how outdated our geographic definitions have become, revealing unexpected constellations where anyone from anywhere can influence everyone everywhere…. Maps of connectivity are now more real than the geographic maps boomers grew up with.” Pages XIV-XVo“ Now social media mobs and cyber militias harassed, smeared, and intimidated dissenting voices into silence or undermined trust in them. But because the connections between states and these campaigns were unclear, a regime could always claim that it had nothing to do with them, that the mobs were made up of private individuals exercising their freedom of expression.” Page 24o “… identify journalists, academics and opposition staffers as ‘scum,’ ‘slime,’ and ‘enemies of the people’ and target them with hit pieces and social media taunts. The victims then receive vats of online vitriol, phone calls to their place of work demanding they are sacked, and death and rape threats… This was censorship through noise.” Pages 26-27o “Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power. The Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counterrevolutionary conspiracies everywhere… But those conspiracies were used to buttress an ideology… With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology, the idea that we live in a world full of conspiracies becomes the worldview itself… And the net effect of all these… pileups of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything.” Pages 48-49o NATO had made sense when aggression was physical; it was called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for a reason. But now that you could have interference anywhere, did geography make sense as a main principle of unity?” Page 62o “Journalists who travelled the region had warned me about this phenomenon: people would rearrange the evidence to fit what they saw on television, however little sense it made.” Page 105o “War used to be about capturing territory and planting flags, but something different was at play out here. Moscow needed to create a narrative about how pro-democracy revolutions… lead to chaos and civil war. Kiev needed to show that separatism leads to misery. What actually happened on the ground was almost irrelevant—the two governments just needed enough footage to back their respective stories… It’s provocation for the camera.” Pages 106-107o “The borders between Russia and Ukraine, between past and present, between soldier and civilian, rumor and evidence, actor and audience had buckled, and with that the whole rational, ordered sense of perspective suddenly gave way to thinking that was magical…” Page 107o “…he [Putin] wasn’t so much lying in the sense of trying to replace one reality with another as saying that facts don’t matter. Similarly, Donald Trump is famous for having no discernible notion of what is true and factual… And what are the consequences in a world where the powerful are no longer afraid of the facts? Does that mean one can commit crimes in full view of all? And then just shrug them off?” Page 119o “This sort of micro-targeting, where one set of voters doesn’t necessarily know about the others, means you need some overarching identity to unite these different groups… Facts become secondary in this logic. You are not, after all, trying to win an evidence-driven debate about ideological concepts in a public sphere. Your aim is to seal in your audience behind a verbal wall.” Page 164o “For the 2000 presidential election, Pavlovsky pulled together everyone who felt they had lost out during the Yeltsin years, the ‘left behind,’ and imbued them with the sense that this was their last chance to be winners. These were disparate segments of a society that in Soviet times would have been on different sides of the barricades—teachers, secret service types, academics, soldiers—who Pavlovsky would bundle together under the idea of the ‘Putin majority’… the aim becomes to lasso together disparate groups around a new notion of the people, an amorphous but powerful emotion that each can interpret in their own way, and then seal it by conjuring up phantom enemies who threaten to undermine it.” Pages 174-175PROPAGANDA is a worthwhile read but is more like a collection of magazine articles than a unified book. Regardless, recommended.

⭐Very little to dislike other than the facts brought up by the author that point out how the truth is twisted, taken out of context, and how gullible the masses are to the lies of the few.

⭐Read the author’s “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” which was my first introduction to his work. “This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality” takes the war on information introduced in the former to a much higher level in the latter. This is an important book in a “post-fact” world where Oscar Wilde’s observation that all the world is a stage and the actors are poorly cast has become increasingly evident, a world where social media enables the distribution and consumption of misinformation that allows one and all to embrace personal and group beliefs based upon their own individual and collective truths, regardless of facts. Everyone gets to dance on foundations made of quicksand. And Russia has raised this to an art form embraced in Washington, DC, state and local capitals, in the UK, Brazil, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and on and on. Laws stop at borders but the free flow of information and money does not. Thank you, Russia for an export that doesn’t affect the trade deficit but which is far more destructive.

⭐We are being lied to.There’s nothing new in that, of course; people have been lied to by their oppressors for centuries. It’s just that now the lying has become sophisticated, intrusive, encompassing, immoral and dangerous and undermines reality.The lies pour out from rulers (often despots), to leaders (likewise), politicians, corporations, big businesses, “professionals,” internet trolls, through ‘fake’ news and even to the chatty stranger on the bus or train who has been influenced by this nonsense. It involves almost everyone, in fact: to the point where we can no longer easily tell the difference between that which is true, or at least factually accurate, and that which is propaganda. Cynically collected data about individuals allows outsiders with an agenda to know more about ourselves than we do.And those who try not to lie, to tell the truth as they perceive it, well, they are often dismissed as cranks, crazies or a danger to society with phrases like “the problem with people like you is…” This is why, protected by plausible-sounding lies, the despot kills so many of his own people, the people he is there to protect and nourish, imposing his own selfish, greedy, iron will, mostly whilst the rest of the world looks on and says ‘NIMBY.’From the atrocities in the Philippines, Syria and the Ukraine to the false characterisation of Mexicans by a US president and the calculatedly imprecise recounting of the amount the UK pays to the EU by an MP (surprisingly?) now British prime minister. And I won’t go into how many responsible journalists are killed annually by those anxious to hide their criminal conduct – which makes it sickening to see some torch-bearers of the profession happily sucking up and promoting the lies themselves without any attempts to get to the truth.This is the crux of This is Not Propaganda, Adventures in the War Against Reality, (Faber and Faber) – an oppressively absorbing new book by Peter Pomerantsev, senior fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs (LSE), TV producer and expert on disinformation and media.He posits that confusing and dividing the people is, of course, the best way to achieve the devious purpose you are aiming for: the Us and Them syndrome; from the twisting of true Islam into a blindly fascist jihad, to the multiple and xenophobic untruths about Brexit, for example. I might add, also the dangers caused by a blind-devotion to a seriously manipulated and fallible Science (“right thinking”) leading to an over-medicated population whose individual immunity to disease is being critically compromised in the name of commerce.Those who study our behaviour and use that knowledge to manipulate the way we think and act reflect, Pomerantsev writes, how Hilter’s propaganda minister Goebbels “promoted the use of the raised-arm Sieg Heil salute because he had worked out that the forceful exhalation of breath combined with strenuous arm movements caused hyperventilation and exhaustion in the audience, which made them more susceptible to messaging, almost putting them in a trance-like state.”A Russian historian of the Holocaust, Mikhail Gefter, predicated in the 1990s that the end of the Cold War would usher in an era of ‘sovereign murderers’ where, in the sudden absence of historical norms “we have vacuums in which chaos agents behave according to rules they make up for themselves, who murder people, and indeed whole peoples according to their own ‘sovereign’ logic.” One of President Putin’s early spin doctors, Gleb Pavlovski, observes that this makes an image of a common mankind impossible, no alternative has emerged and “everyone invents their own ‘normal’ humanity, their own ‘right’ history.”A UK Parliamentary committee on disinformation and ‘fake news’ decided that existing legal frameworks were ‘no longer fit for purpose’ to control or manage such infractions, concluding: “In this environment, people are able to accept and give credence to information that reinforces their views, no matter how distorted or inaccurate. This… reduces the common ground on which reasoned debate, based on objective facts, can take place… the very fabric of our democracy is threatened.”We have been warned. Whether we do anything about it is another thing entirely.

⭐The author, Peter Pomerantsev, develops a selection of his previously published essays (1) to give a sequential flow to this book. His theme is propaganda and its development from the Cold War and the use of psycho-ops (2) through to the modern electronic campaigns of disinformation and fake news. He draws heavily on the experience of his parents and on his own research (3). He is the child of Soviet dissidents. His parents were given an offer they could not refuse: take exile from the Soviet Union or go to prison. His father eventually found a home with the BBC World Service.This book gives no great insights nor comes to any great conclusions. What it does do is give background to what we should already know: that we are living in a time of increasing electronic disinformation where the truth is hard to find and that the results of this are not just virtual – there are real world consequences. This books is enjoyable and informative and is a useful companion to his previous book (4).THE CHAPTERS are: Part 1 “Cities of Trolls” where he describes disinformation from the Philippines and St Petersburg (5). Part 2 “Democracy at Sea” discusses how non-violent direct action campaigns have been thwarted by authoritarian leaders using flexibility, conspiracy theories and a promise of a return to a golden era of the past. Part 3 “The Most Amazing Information Warfare Blitzkrieg in History” describes how to destroy another country electronically, for example Russia against Estonia and Russia against Ukraine. Part 4 “Soft Facts” is about the collapse of the idea of the future and the return to that mythical golden age. Part 5 “Pop-Up People” is about the exploitation of identity politics. It starts with the story of someone who became involved in radical Islam as a young man and now works to prevent this happening to others. There are explanations by spin doctors on how disparate identity groups are targeted online. Despite the differences between these groups, they are woven together by providing a common enemy such as the establishment, the swamp, China or the West. Populism is discussed. Populism is not an ideology, it is a strategy and it is a strategy that fits well with social media. Finally, he discusses his time in Russia and how the techniques he saw in Russia seem to be enveloping the West. Part 6 “The Future Starts Here”, contains a short but ominous overview of China and its successful dystopia, which now seems to out-big Big Brother. At the end of the book there are several pages of Notes, but no Index.____________________________________________________________________________________________________(1) The essays were previously published in Granta, the Guardian, American Interest and the London Review of Books.(2) Psychological operations were designed by the military to influence their selected audience to change their behaviour.(3) He works at the Institute of Global Affairs in the London School of Economics, where he studies 21st century information manipulation.(4) His previous book was

⭐Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia

⭐(5) This chapter includes a discussion of the St Petersburg organisation “The Internet Research Agency”, a troll factory working on an industrial scale. It will be interesting to see what sort of reviews are posted about this book and from where they originate. However, the Amazon reviews for his previous book

⭐Nothing is True and Everything is Possible

⭐seem remarkably troll free.

⭐While much non-fiction on the state of the world dips into cheesy left/right stereotyping and journalistic clichés, Pomerantsev has done proper work.We meet interesting characters and see how fake news affects real people in places like Donbas and Aleppo.The unusual juxtaposition of recent events with the author’s family history jarred to begin with, but the anecdotes within these flashbacks were interesting and by the end I was convinced that these sections made a valid contribution to the whole.

⭐Considering the author and his family’s past (Soviet dissidents and exiles plus Pomerantsev’s previous book on Russia), I was expecting him to go in all guns blazing on Russia, as was my sceptical Soviet Russian girlfriend. He doesn’t; instead he shows how “Russian” practices which dominate the media in fact dominate the world and are prevalent in Britain, the USA and the rest of the West as well as countries such as the Philippines and, obviously, Russia. The author’s level of bias or subjectivity or whatever you want to call it will probably be called into question but does that really matter in light of the information he presents, which concurs with a lot of literature going back years, even decades. The world is a mess for a lot of people and reading this book doesn’t fill you with much hope for the future but at least this book and others like it help people understand the forces that shape our lives, regardless of your political views.

⭐The thawing of the Cold War may have freed information previously censoredby totalitarian regimes but ironically this new abundance of free speech, propagated by Big Tech social media platforms has been weaponised by authoritarian politicians and social agitators worldwide.This is 5he central tenet of this powerful book.Indeed the author cleverly describes how a lack of a cohesive ideology to replace anti communism has led to unscrupulous pop up populists anywhere to exploit social media to reach potential followers everywhere.The danger to truth in the 21st Century is not propaganda but an over abundance of information that is malevolently manipulated by loosely allied groups around pseudo rather than grass root political and social movements eg Brexit.More sinisterly such techniques have been adopted by authoritarian states, who have created bot factories to pedal misinformation and target potential supporters by social profiling.In a world where information is weaponised truth and principles are portrayed as being less important than how it can be used to gain and maintain power.This is evidenced by alliances between far right antisemite European politicians and Israel. Moral incongruence cannot be allowed to interfere with political expedience.

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