This Is Not Propaganda Adventures in the War Against Reality
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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, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, "behavioral change" salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his 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.
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I've been wanting to read about the disinformation propaganda age, from a non-US focused perspective, and Peter Pomerantsev delivers. At the center of this book is Russia and how it seems to have perfected a politics based on behavioural changes through psy-ops, trolls and gaslighting. Spearheaded by a leader who smirks while invading nations claiming to rescue them from situations that were media-engineered by his bot farms. Trump follows in the footsteps. Truth and facts lose their meaning. People are united and radicalised under a common lowest denominator, while being micro-targeted based on their own personal fears. Populism not as ideology but as strategy. And those fighting against the populists and dictators have no choice but to learn to adapt the same tools.
The book goes from Duterte's influencer-supported win in the Philippines, to Moscow's Internet Research Agency, to Russia's cyber-attacks on Estonia, to Russia's strategic information warfare and the brutal consequences in the Ukraine, to Brexit, to ISIS recruitment tools, to China's propaganda. Entwined along is Pomerantsev's own family history, his parents fleeing Ukraine from the KGB, and dedicating their lives to entwining the lies and to help ex-soviets free themselves from the Kremlin's propaganda.
The book doesn't necessarily leave you with any hope, just with a disquieting and oppressive feeling of being overwhelmed by today's twisted reality game full of political agendas. Eye-opening and scary.
