Peter Pomerantsev’s “This is Not Propaganda”

quick rambling notes… part of the Parlia series on our information ecosystem.

This is Not Propaganda is an exploration of the politics of ‘truth’ today — how we live it, how it’s manufactured, how it’s fought over. As a tour of the ‘formation of men’s attitudes’, it’s more insightful and human than anything I’ve read this year.

You can find it here (the publisher), here (amazon), and here (goodreads), and maybe skip the diary bits — feel like they were bolted on by an editor.

TL;DR: We’re not post-fact, we’re post-meaning.

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Pomerantsev’s big question is: what does meaning look like today and how is that meaning manufactured?

Back in the old days of information sovereignty, a mildly paranoid state could police its borders, block its airwaves, and arrest its protesters.

No more, for obvious reasons. (My favourite non-political example is the fact that the Mormon Church has haemorrhaged members ever since the community got widespread internet access.)

Today, states and parties and people manufacture their stories with different tools.

**Relativism, or the great Tsimtsum.***

Politicians have always lied. Why is it today that they seem to make a point of acknowledging it, of being proud of it?

We are all post-modern now. We all know how ‘framing’ works. But when political leaders are so free with bullshit, they’re telling us truth doesn’t matter. They’re telling us: we all tell stories, they’re all as bad or as good as you want them to be, don’t go searching for objectivity because it doesn’t exist. Just go find your tribe, the people you feel close to.

Why is that useful?

Because if they destabilise the idea of ‘truth’, they leave us in a terrible meaning gap. We’re robbed of the capacity to value or judge objectively. The terms we seek to aspire to as a collective are somehow ridiculed. All political visions and values are somehow ridiculed.

Pomerantsev’s deep Russian connection is fascinating here. He argues Russia lived through the collapse of meaning long before the west, when the Soviet Union fell apart. They’re therefore much smarter at understanding the political communication advantages in a meaning-void. “Objectivity is a myth that was imposed on us!” complains the ultra-nationalist Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.

Identitarianism

If you can’t really believe anything you read any more, you rely more and more on what you feel. The ideas of objectivity and impartiality are shot: all that remains is the ‘authentic’, the ‘genuine’. With the end of Left and Right, the end of people’s affiliations to broad political parties, so ‘values’ like religion, the monarchy, minority rights have become more important. As has identity: I don’t know whether I’m a socialist or not, but I do know I’m white.

Conspiracy

Conspiracy thinking isn’t just all over YouTube but all over multiple state media: propagating the idea that everything somehow is part of a bigger story, a bigger whole, that you can hardly see. Why? Because it breeds a cynicism about the possibility of you being able to do anything about it. Conspiracy is the self-justification of the powerless trying to explain their powerlessness.

And it leads directly to

Populism

Populism is the political refuge of conspiracists and identitarians: people without actual politics. It is the consequence of a fractured society that doesn’t know how to articulate its commonality, other than by what it is not. Populism demands that there be ‘non-people’ (immigrants, Muslims, Jews, the Rich) so that an idea of the ‘People’ can emerge**.

And of course, with the tools at our disposal today, states and political groups can target their mis/dis/post-information with scalpel-precision…

But Pomerantsev’s book seeks to make a much larger, and more frightening, point. That all these machinations across political comms around the world tilt at the idea of democracy’s exceptionalism.

The narrative runs so simply!

• As the UK has the BBC, so Russia has Russia Today and Iran has Press TV. Same thing.
• We have facts, and you have facts. Same thing.
• You demonstrate for liberal values; we demonstrate for authoritarianism. Same thing.

And everyone has a troll army, a bot battalion, and a comms consultant in the background.

Everyone is fighting to own the narrative — let nobody think themselves superior or different from the rest.

It’s a metaphysical sort of war (and one both Chinese and Russian military strategists have written about extensively), and so surprising for Westerners, precisely because we’ve never had any cause to doubt we owned the narrative — that “Democracy” was the only legitimate argument.

No longer.

That means we’re going to have make the case for Democracy again — the values it stands for, the society it seeks to build, and the theory explaining why, ultimately, democracy works.

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* Tsimtsum: after God created the world, he retreats from it. Pomerantsev describes Russians using the metaphor to describe the great emptying out of meaning from the world after the Soviet Union fell.

** Pomerantsev meets Chantal Mouffe, the very worst of this brigade. An academic at Westminster who thinks of ‘Populism as Strategy’, and has done her best to push it through the Labour Party. Two things to know about her:

1. Her book, For a Left Populism is remarkable for nearly a full 40% of its footnotes cite her or her partner’s own work.
2. She’s lived in the UK since 1972 without feeling at home because she doesn’t understand British humour.