The Perils of Propaganda

The Perils of Propaganda Philip J. Costopoulos (bio) How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler. By Peter Pomerantsev. New York: PublicAffairs, 2024. 304 pp. "Knowledge is power," wrote Francis Bacon, and in war, information is a weapon. Peter Pomerantsev is a student of propaganda, especially but not solely the Russian variety, and twenty-first–century information warfare. Having already authored two highly regarded books on these topics, he seeks to understand these phenomena even as he works in the realm of ideas to defend democracy and his native Ukraine against propaganda such as Vladimir Putin's. The Russian president likes to justify his aggression by charging that Ukraine is not a real country but part of a larger "Russian world"; that Ukraine is a "springboard against Russia" and a pawn in the West's "anti-Russia project"; that Kyiv "simply does not need Donbas"; and that today's Ukraine is full of neo-Nazis. With interests and commitments such as Pomerantsev's, it seems natural that he would turn to the jaw-dropping but semi-obscure career of World War II British covert-propaganda wizard Sefton Delmer (1904–79). Born to Australian parents in Berlin and raised there till World War I's outbreak turned his father into a detained enemy alien, Delmer was a bilingual Oxford graduate, hard-partying bon vivant, and once-and-future reporter for Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express who spent World War II fighting the Nazis with information, some of it true and much of it false. His comrades in arms included the future novelist Muriel Spark, and he bonded with another writer-to-be, a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve officer with a vivid imagination and a taste for spy games whose name was Fleming . . . Ian Fleming. [End Page 180] As a clandestine-radio impresario in Britain's Political Warfare Executive—a wing of the secret army that Prime Minister Winston Churchill formed in July 1940 to "set [Nazi-occupied] Europe ablaze"—Delmer knew his foes. In May 1931, he had become the first British journalist to interview Adolf Hitler. In 1932, Delmer had a seat on the plane with Hitler and his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, as they flew around Germany addressing mass rallies in as many as four cities a day during the year's three national elections (p. 39). It was a glimpse into the future: history's first use of that staple of modern political campaigns, air travel. Delmer saw up close how the Nazis expertly worked to bring out the German public's worst impulses. In 1934, Hitler's government expelled Delmer, who worried increasingly about the Nazis' rise. Hitler had told Delmer personally that no "softies" were wanted in the Nazi movement, and that a weak and selfish inner Schweinhund (pigdog) lurked inside everyone, undermining idealism and larger loyalties (p. 99). Delmer would later use these remarks against the Führer, ingeniously broadcasting a mix of news, rumors, and lies designed to seem as if they came from dissident nationalists—probably within the ranks of the Wehrmacht (German armed forces)—who despised Jews and Churchill but also loathed the creatures of the Nazi establishment. Delmer played jazz and big-band music banned by the Nazi regime while freely salting his scripts with barracks-room obscenities and sexual references. His aims were to seem authentic and to capture attention so that he could induce Germans to step outside Nazi rhetoric about the "master race," the "Thousand-Year Reich," and "Judeo-Bolshevism," perhaps see its ridiculousness, and in any case focus instead on their personal needs and concerns and the ways in which Hitler's war was harming these. Goebbels believed that people were "gramophones" who merely played back whatever the authorities put out as "public opinion" (p. 83). Delmer disagreed. He believed, as Churchill had put it in his post-Munich BBC radio address to America on 16 October 1938, that even "a little mouse, a little tiny mouse of thought" could threaten dictators since their rule—which Churchill condemned as the "fetish worship of one man"—had set itself against the "workings of the human mind" and the "natural promptings of human nature." Delmer thought...