„A huge media towards the army and their families, that would be first. A huge one, confusing them, depressing them, getting them to hate their officers, getting them to defect. He’d be looking at the actual quite stable dislike of Russians of Chinese and of Chinese of Russians and he’d do all of the Russia-China tensions.”A huge media towards the army and their families, that would be first. A huge one, confusing them, depressing them, getting them to hate their officers, getting them to defect. He’d be looking at the actual quite stable dislike of Russians of Chinese and of Chinese of Russians and he’d do all of the Russia-China tensions.
We’re completely allowing Xi Jinping and Putin to push this narrative that they’re happy together”, this is how Peter Pomerantsev answers the question of what Sefton Delmer, the propagandist who defeated Hitler, would do to weaken Russian support for Vladimir Putin.
Journalist Peter Pomerantsev is an expert in countering Russian disinformation and the author of reference books on this topic (translated into Romanian by Cartier Publishing House/Republic of Moldova).
I spoke with Peter Pomerantsev in Bucharest, where he was invited by EFOR, about the USA and autocratic practices, which do not need an ideology, about the narrative of threatened borders - identity or physical borders, about where democracies have lost control over the story to tell the people, and also about the adventure of the recently canceled elections, with or without the hand of Russia, in Bucharest.
The major agents of manipulation and propaganda have media platforms. But these platforms operate within democratic system. So, it's a big dilemma: how do you counter them? If you shut them out, you violate the freedom of expression. If you leave them be, you are forced to engage in fact checking and debunking, essentially playing on their agenda
You mean banning platforms or media outlets?
Platform and media outlets that are spreading only propaganda
Propaganda isn't illegal. Why would you take it down? What's your reason? That's part of it. To take something down, it has to be connected to a crime. Propaganda isn't a crime, so why would you take it down?
Because they are spreading fake news?
That's not illegal. In Britain, in Britain we have broadcasters, they have to be fair and accurate, but there's nothing like that for online outlets. I don't think disinformation is a legal category. Not yet.
Should it be?
It would be very hard to define and very hard to say when it's harmful. I think we could ask for more transparency of platforms. So if they're not being transparent, I think that's an assault against our freedom of expression. We should have the right to know what's on them and how they're regulated and how their algorithms are regulated. I think that can be a legal thing because that's a demand for transparency, accountability and consumer rights, apart from anything else. That's possible.
So let's say a platform doesn't comply with transparency. We don't know what's happening on it. Why is something popular, what's happening? And they refuse to tell us, I think that could be a reason for starting legal proceedings. But that's a transparency issue, it's not about content. Obviously it's like when you have harms to national security. There are laws around that, everyone has them. But that's nothing new, that's always been there. Some countries have stuff about elections, but that's nothing new. They've always existed.
But you know that in Moldova, some media outlets were shut down because...
Because of the risk to national security. So yeah, if they're controlled by Russian agents who want to invade the country and use it as a platform to invade Ukraine - and you can show that, which wasn’t very hard to do, then, yes... But this is nothing new. We have had laws around this for decades, if not hundreds of years. The new thing with digital media is the technological bit, the reach, the targeting - that's what needs to be regulated. There's nothing about content that's new, there's no new content that's been created. It's always there. So the same laws that you had before should apply now. I just think we misdiagnose the problem and end up looking for the wrong solution.
You always said that it’s not about truth versus lies, that this paradigm is wrong. It’s more about which story is more seductive. But where has the liberal narrative failed, for example?
That's a really good question. I think we slightly mistaken it. Obviously, truth and lies are an important thing, I'm not dismissing them, but that's not actually what this is about. This is about different types of narratives, different types of identity, some of which value truth, some of which don't value truth. Conspiratorial thinking doesn't value truth in the first place - it's not that somebody lied to them, it's because they're not interested in it.
The authoritarians have the best narratives because they're based on people's deep discomfort in the modern world, the fact that it feels so unstable, things are changing etc. And in that panic, which everybody experiences, authoritarian narratives are very strong because they're based on a sense that something's being taken away, in a very childish sense. “They are coming to take mine away”.
How can a liberal compete with that? Look at Germany – in Germany, the conservatives are now working together with AfD, Alternative für Deutschland, instead of competing with them.
I think political narratives follow cultural ones. The solution of the question starts with culture. So I would look much more for the answer not to CDU, but to filmmakers, storytellers, that's where it starts.
We haven't had a good story, a new story since 1989, which was the political expression of a much deeper story about freedom, which burst into the political sphere. I don't think we've had a good one since then.
Like Putin has now a good story about Russia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
In the changes that Russia went through the 90s - that's why Putin was a bit ahead of the wave - people felt very unstable, very panicked, very confused. They desperately wanted stability, and Putin provided that.
If people are feeling so unstable, you must work with that. You can't say: “we're going to give you more instability”. No, you've got to work with that. You can't run away from that, and you can't keep on telling people: yes, but you're have more freedom and less borders and all this kind of stuff. When people are feeling really unstable, it's not going to work. You have to work with those fears and anxieties.
I don't have a simple answer for it, but we have to start with that.
Autocrats are very good in manufacturing people's fears.
Well, yes, they manufacture them, but they also draw on them. They exacerbate them, and the main thing is that they exploit them. They direct them into places that are profitable for them. The hero of my book, he works directly with those authoritarian impulses. He works with the need to feel, to have an identity, the need to be part of a group, the need to express very negative emotions, something that libertarians do. And then he guides it in a different direction. But he works directly with those people. He doesn't try to preach to people. He doesn't try to tell them to be good democrats. He works with some of that nastiest people.
I was in United States during the campaign and one of the key theme there was how people had lost their sense of relevance – they no longer had the social role that society had taught them they should have. For example, “young men” was a theme in the United States. Why? This explains a little bit Trump’s success because he practically delivered a narrative in which they had a role, where they felt, again, relevant. But it is a revenge-driven narrative. So where did the Democrats lose these Americans?
Well, they did kind of everything wrong. Think about it. They knew that they had a problem with Hispanic male voters. They knew that for a long time, and they decided to make abortion their number one beat. So if you make abortion your number one beat among catholic men, well, that's not really going to work. I mean, a lot of the voters that Trump seems to attract, the new ones, the ones that weren't factored in, a lot of them were maybe quite patriarchal, but he also got a lot of women who were very concerned about security.
The Republicans were quite ruthless in in saying that the Democrats are for irresponsible freedom – instability, gender roles, borders. But it's all about the borders shaking, the borders of identity, the national borders, at a time when people desperately want to feel the borders of their psyche, the borders of their psychology, the borders of their identity again. So, you're quite right, the Republicans completely capture that.
The democrats, I think they understood it, but they just seemed incapable of going from analysis to action. They kept on trying to reclaim nationalism and reclaim patriotism. They tried to talk tough on the border, they tried to talk tough on being American, they tried to talk tough on patriotism. If you have listened to them, they tried to take back the “freedom” word, which is big for Americans.
My problem with Democrats was partly the messaging, but also the idiom. They didn't seem to understand what it meant to work in a social media age, which is more like a reality show where you're constantly performing.
They thought, Kamala beat Trump in the debates. They seemed to go: she beat him in the debates, we've been very clear that we're patriotic, we've been very clear we're not with the really progressive bit of the party. They were very clear about that, but then they just stopped. Like as if it was the mid-1990s, where you do a message and an ad and then you stop and go home. While what Trump and Vance and the others understand very well: it's relentless. You've got to live in the social media reality bubble, you've got to be constantly performing. You can fuck up as long as you go back the next day. People almost expect you to be that relentless in order to show that you're like in a reality show for their benefit. You can't go in and out.
It's a sort of a contract that people have with their politicians, in America, now. We want to see you suffer on the campaign trail all the time. You're allowed to make mistakes, you're allowed to say stupid stuff, but we want to see you perform endlessly. To the point where you're going to McDonald's and dress up as a McDonald's man. And people are like: cool, he did that for us. The trick being that after that, we're the ones in the reality show.
And instead of that, the Democrats...
Like they were in the 1990s. The guy who ran the campaign for the Democrats was the guy who did Obama's first campaign, which was all about that. It's still very early Facebook, but it's all about one message. Say it once, disappear again, say another thing once, disappear again. They just don't get the modern form of storytelling.
And they seem to pick up a wrong scapegoat, like the fascism.
That was stupid, simply because that word for people just means nonsense. When you're raising the bar to Gestapo and concentration camps well, Americans don't have much knowledge of authoritarianism and so they find it really hard to imagine that. So they kept on talking about Nazis and it was really unhelpful.
So, they have little little knowledge about the authoritarian traditions, in their own country. You know, there actually have been authoritarian leaders in America, they're just not very well remembered. Huey Long ruled Louisiana in the 1930s, very much like Victor Orban, that kind of leader. He centralized the state, with a little bit of a repressive mechanisms, with using polarization etc. He captured the legislative, the executive, the judiciary. Like a very recognizable modern authoritarian, like an autocrat. So they do actually have examples in their own history, but nobody knows about them anymore. Americans need a real education about contemporary authoritarianism and why it might be a danger, but, frankly, they might want some of that. What's worring in America? A lot of people seem to be prepared to have a conversation about sacrificing some democratic norms for what they imagine is greater efficiency.
Do you think that America is now on the path towards the autocracy? Because autocrats nowadays are different animals from what were Hitler and Stalin.
I like to think in terms of autocratic practices rather than autocracy, so I don't think you can centralize the country in any consistent way. But you can introduce more and more autocratic practices because they're already there. You can misuse the courts - that's already happening, America already has really politicized courts. They kind of always did, going back to the civil rights movement. I mean, courts in different states have completely different visions, but now it's not just philosophical, now it can come together with power. We've actually seen in the last two years, the Congress creating these bullshit hearings around academics who study disinformation, actually, accusing them of censorship.
And then based on these bullshit hearings, which are just pure political theatre, courts would start opening cases, which eventually get thrown out, but by that time, the universities have closed all their research. So they won.
That's really a very strange partnership between power and courts.
Maybe you don’t think courts are exploitable? You already have gerrymandering on how the districts are cut up. Counties and states spoke for the same person over and over again. They're not accountable to the people anymore because they'll never be voted out. That's not very democratic.
The money in politics was always, for us, the Europeans, super corrupt, but they’re normal in America. They have the laws around non-transparent funding but now it's got worse with Elon Musk
So all those things are already there. There’re already all these attacks on checks and balances. And they can all get a lot worse. Can you take over the FBI and weaponize it? We're about to see that. Can you get the army to do what you want and override the constitution? It’s probably a lot easier than we think. Can you get the tax department to start opening cases on your enemies? Technically, it's not possible, you can't instruct them that, but as long as you just put your guy there... Can you get the Department of Justice to follow your political enemies? Again, all these things are very soft, there's very few barriers there. And we're about to find out how easy they are to exploit.
The democracy doesn't die on a battlefront. It's about small steps.
It's autocratic practices. It's not autocracy. It's non-democratic practices. I suppose the question is: how many of them do you have until you're into a different political model?
Viktor Orban once said that it is enough to win the election once.
Well, the admiration of Viktor Orban among people around Trump is well known. The question is: will Americans care? Will it be done in a way that's subtle? Picking on the enemies that nobody cares about, like universities, journalists, the proven “enemies of the people”, or will they go too far?
The war that Trump wants is an ideological one, a war between conservatives and progressists, the “woke” movements. Is it a staged war?
Of course it is. And it’s one that has been all too easy to actually manage. One of the biggest campaign subjects in America was Kamela's support for transgender rights in prisons. Which was a tiny fee, when she signed some letter, I mean it was not a policy platform.
It was a story.
It was more than a story; it became a symbol, and they really seized on that. And it became one of the biggest stories. But it had nothing to do with their official platform, their policy proposals.
This time Trump really does what he said he will do, because he signed some executive orders against trans people.
I don't know what Trump will do yet. Usually, these governments in democracies, because it's very hard for them to govern, because they can't respond to the deep level problems of society, because they don't really know how to solve health problems or reform infrastructures or do other stuff that actually needs to be done. So they constantly have to be campaigning. So you invest enemies all the time. Maybe there'll be a lot of pressure on universities, “the evil woke universities that are brainwashing our children” to keep on dragging in.
If you know how to stage such an identity crisis…
Yeah, I think he'll do identity for a bit. I think he's quite flexible by the way and I think some of the people around him are obsessed with woke populism. There are these Claremont Institutes -these are ideologues for whom that's the main thing. But I don't know if he actually cares. I think for him, there can be any enemy - today it's woke. He's very flexible. He's a real populist. He's not ideological.
Is this good or bad?
It makes them more successful. If you're ideological, you can be outflanked.
But ideologues are more dangerous, in general.
That's what we use to think. But they're less effective.
I know that your father was a Soviet dissident. Back then, we had a huge censorship. Now we don't have censorship anymore, or we have less of it. Even in authoritarian regimes. Is it more efficient to attack journalists with thousands of bots and trolls?
Yes, there's more of that. Or just drowning out desire. Compared to the Soviet Union, in Russia you can find out what's happening in Ukraine very easily. People don't want to, or they don't want to talk about it, or they like it.
What would do Sefton Delmer in Russia today?
Definitely a huge media towards the army. I don't know why we haven't done that. The army and their families, that would be first. A huge one, confusing them, depressing them, getting them to hate their officers, getting them to defect. That would be first. He'd ignore the liberals and wouldn’t care about them.
Maybe he'd go off to analyze the different media. He’d look at the various tensions - and there are many tensions, between different power ministries, between different regions. So he'd be focusing more on that. He'd be looking at the actual quite stable dislike of Russians of Chinese and of Chinese of Russians and he’d do all of the Russia-China tensions. We're completely allowing Xi Jinping and Putin to push this narrative that they're happy together That is not what's happening beneath the surface. Chinese businesses are really pissed off that they are tethered to Russia. Russian feels that China is just exploiting them, sucking them dry and then dumping them. Total distrust of both sides. And we're just giving it to them, we're just letting them do it. And the stronger they look, the more everybody goes: oh wow, Russia's got China's back.
So loads of things. He would look at the vulnerabilities and he would attack those. Factory workers: I'm sure he’d do a lot around the people working in the factories that build the weapons. He'd look for every vulnerability and every critical bit of society that he'd be targeting there.
And he'd be having a great time.
About the Romanian adventure with the presidential elections. We don't know today more than two months ago. What do you think about that? Was it a Russian operation?
Russia wins either way. Either they get their candidate, or everyone thinks it's them, and that's complete chaos. Russia wins. They don't care how. They win it anyway.
I don't know that much about the situation, but I was at a meeting this morning where I saw different presentations. And I think it really highlights the problem we're all having, which is a total lack of transparency and clarity. We have no idea what's happening on these platforms. Why did Georgescu get so many followers? That's a legitimate question to ask. I don't know if that's a legitimate reason to ban an election, but that's a completely legitimate question to want to know.
And then on the side of the courts - a lot of confusion. About what are the norms and rules around such a radical move. Or even if the laws are there, the rationale for the laws. It’s like we're all living in darkness. The idea of a democratic public sphere is based on transparency, we understand who is behind what, and we can all have a conversation about it.
Even if there's a disbalance of power, like a newspaper owner has more of a voice than an ordinary person, it's just sad, but we can still hold each other accountable. And we can see what's going on. And at the moment, everything is unclear. And that is the opposite of a democratic world. We're all in the dark, feeling our way through.