Angry Planet - How the Future of War and Propaganda Started in Russia

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

Does it feel like there’s just too much information out there and you can’t get a handle on it? Do you have trouble parsing the lies from the truth? Do you know all the places America is at war? Can we even technically call them wars? Are your Twitter followers even real or are they just bots? Are Antifa and the Proud Boys rumbling in the streets a natural extension of electoral politics or just street theater organized online? What if it’s both? Are you tired ALL THE TIME, like me?The answers, or kind of answers, to these questions and more at the heart of the new book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality. Its author is Peter Pomerantsev, a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics, and a former Russian TV producer.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. War is about taking territory. It's about planting flags. In East Ukraine, you have a situation where neither side actually wants this territory. There might be individuals, business for whatever who do,

but neither Moscow nor Kiev is particularly keen to have this. bit of Godforsaken countryside. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. Does it feel like there's just too much information out there and you can't get a handle

on it? Do you have trouble parsing the lies from the truth? Do you know all the places America's at war? Can we even technically call them wars? Are your Twitter followers? followers, even real, or are they just bots? Are Antifa and the proud boys rumbling in the streets, a natural extension of electoral politics, or just street theater organized online? What if it's both? Are you tired all the time like me? The answers or kind of answers to some of these questions

are at the heart of a new book. This is not propaganda, adventures in the war against reality. It's author, Peter Pomeranzov, a senior fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of economics and a former Russian TV producer is here with us today. Peter, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right. So in 2014, I read your first book. Nothing is true and everything is possible. And at the time, I thought it was one of the most important books about the media landscape and the way we live now that I'd ever read. It focused on Russia and how the Kremlin had pioneered a new form of authoritarian control. Things have accelerated since then, I'd say. And a lot of what you wrote about and nothing is true has spread across the world. And this is not propaganda.

It kind of takes a global view on this issue. What do you think has changed since you wrote that first book? Well, look, my first book was fixated on Russia. It was a memoir of my time in Russia. And actually, the book ends. I don't know if you remember. I come back to London. And I'm sort of going, well, thank God I've come back and everything here is going to be normal. And it ends actually with, you know, the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine and its international propaganda. And, but also kind of me sort of seeing kind of little indications that what I saw in Russia spreading it across the world, not just because it's caused by Russia, but because some sort of, you know, cultural, cultural political tightguise. And it actually ends the first book with me going, oh, my word, is Russia actually not just this, you know, little curiosity

pickled in its own agonies and its own propaganda, is it actually something that is a harbinger of the future? And the first book ended on that, and it was a genuine question. And the second book really picks up. And my conclusion, if you want to spin right to the end

of the book, is that, yes, the future arrived first in Russia. And what do I mean by that? I mean what we refer to rather casually and often annoyingly, but yet now quite universally as post-truth politics, i.e. a politics where politicians don't care if they're caught lying and actually revel in lying. A politics where the idea of the future has disappeared and nasty nostalgia exist instead, and kind of where spectacle

has pushed out any kind of even attempts at rational sense. I think those are some of the key ingredients, which I saw in Russia already in the 1990s and early 2000s and now have spread everywhere. And with that kind of comes a propaganda approach. It doesn't seem to convince people, but just looks to confuse them and undermine them and spread so much doubt that one ends up yearning for strong men and kind of deliberative democracy in that kind of Greek way that we aspire to quite recently, I think, has kind of. disappeared as a possibility. So without a doubt, I mean, I saw those things in Russian 2000s. In this book, I go back to the Russian 1990s and look at how they kind of develop then. And as you say, go around the world, the Philippines, Mexico, Europe, and even a little bit

North America to sort of kind of do a kind of like show how, you know, these things are happening everywhere with national characteristics, but the kind of the underlying techniques and ideological crises are the same. I even go to China and find it a kind of another example of the same but with Chinese characteristics. One of the themes, I think, that this kind of recurs over and over again is the way that this new media landscape separates a person from their own reality. Can you speak to that?

Yeah. To me honest, I think that's always been a big part of propaganda and the cruelty of propaganda. but I think that's particularly so in the social media era and the internet era because the promise of social media and of the internet was that, they would connect people to each other. That's why it was so exciting. But also that we'd be able to kind of to understand ourselves, you know. I speak to this fantastic sort of activist, internet guru in Mexico.

And his whole idea is like, you know, the internet would allow to kind of see the revolutionary reality just below the surface. And then he's got a whole technology of doing that by analyzing Google searches, we can tell what the true desires for change are in a society. A bit like Google can tell in these sort of famous studies that they've done when there was a flu epidemic building in a certain area. By the way, by the searches people were doing online, they could tell a flu epidemic was building.

People were asking questions that showed there were more and more cases of flu appearing. in a very unnatural way. So this guy, he tries to look at sort of like, you know, are people complaining about employment or the ecology and so on and so forth, and really catch that wave of the desire for social and political change before it's kind of been formulated into an idea and help to encourage very open engagements around it. So, you know, what a lot of the new propaganda about is, A, splitting people up, yeah? So there's a wonderful study by heart, other people of propaganda, online propaganda in China, showing that it's not so much fixate on crushing all opinion. They're not necessarily. It's much more concerned with as soon as

they see people organized to split them up. In Russia, the Kremlin, since 2011-12, kind of flooded the internet with so much disinformation. People couldn't organize anymore. It's all about partitioning and breaking people up. But also, by, you know, creating these bots and trolls and gaming SEOs and so on and so forth, kind of putting so much, putting so much noise in between people and their actual desires online, how they're expressed online, that people can't tell what they want anymore. I mean, sorry, that sounds a very worthy, long-winded way of saying it, but essentially Mexico, which is the case study I take, using so many bots and trolls that it sort of drowns out the actual social desires

of people are expressing online with a lot of chaos and disinformation. Was that okay? Do that make sense? I don't know. You tell me. No, I think it makes... It's actually very clearly expressed in the book.

I'm sorry if I got a bit lost there. No, I think that's clearly expressed. I think you're kind of making the point that we've built a world where we... We interact with identity, with our politics, and with each other through these filters, not really understanding that, that there are other people with other agendas in control of those filters, or at least shifting them, right? TV always did that. You know, that was always part of TV.

You create a fake reality. And that then, and, you know, there's a lot of studies about this. People will see that. And if they think that the reality on TV is the dominant reality. They will kind of, they will change their behavior. to adapt to it and fit in with it, to something called this spiral of silence, which is a very important sort of study of how people's relationship with broadcasting and mass media, which is why we always try to have a plurality of media. That was the idea. We have lots of

different media. So, you know, and in those clashes and conversations, some sort of real, you know, the chance of a real reality, the chance of a genuine reality emerges. While an authoritarian regime, you had complete domination of the media sphere. And people adjusted their, behavior to fit in with the reality that was broadcast to them. So the internet was meant to be this breakthrough. That was the thing. The internet was meant to sort of like release all the all the unsaid things in democracy but in authoritarian regimes is to knock down the fake kind of oppression of the fake Tuna reality of oppressive regimes and authoritarian regimes and

you know, people were able to express themselves genuinely. But basically regimes have adapted by using, you know, the techniques of troll. farms, bots, gaming the search algorithms, they're again able to instill a kind of a design reality of people, which people then start to fit themselves into. There's a great study by the Oxford Internet Institute, which basically says, look, it's not as if like one bot or one troll changes people's minds. That's not how it works. No one's ever been convinced by one troll or one bot. But when you spread a whole inauthentic reality, through the mass use of inauthentic campaigns,

people start thinking that's the dominant point of view out there and start adapting their behavior towards it. That's kind of what I'm trying to get at. Well, the authoritarian regimes also learned from the protest movements that were fighting them, correct? Exactly. I mean, especially with the internet, because, you know, whether it's the Arab Spring or Gessie Park, or there's this wave of internet-powered protests across the world,

which first really alarmed authoritarian leaders, and then they're like, okay, we can game this. And then, you know, we can kind of crawl inside it and start manipulating it as well. But I don't want people to think the book is all about technology. There is, you know, the book starts off of technology and very quickly gets into kind of bigger ideas. Because I don't think technology is very important

and the relationship between technology and ideology and narratives is very interesting. To what extent, you know, does the nature of the technology change the ideological model. But this is also a book about storytelling and ideas. And when it comes, you know, the sort of the story of revolution, it's really the storytelling of revolution that's been hacked,

which is what explore extensively in the book. So the forces, whether it's the Kremlin or far right forces that were kind of made vulnerable by the narrative of revolt and freedom of revolution that really dominated at post-1989, have managed to use that language and that storytelling for their own ends. Right. I think that's the part of what you do in the book that makes that work and brings that to the forefront is the beginning of every chapter is memoir, right?

You're telling the story of your own family as dissidents in the Soviet Union. Exactly. So the book is actually built as a, there I say, a fugue, which actually happened because as I was put into the concept of the book, I was getting my kids to sleep every night by listening to a lot of Philip Glass, really good for getting kids to sleep. And kind of the Philip Glass crawl into my head. He's a modern composer, for those who don't know, who writes views.

And I was like, okay, I want to really play with the past and present in this book, because this is a book about ideas of the future break, and ideas of kind of coherent sense of history breaking down. And so, as you say, the book is exactly 20% memoir, or almost 20% memoir. I was quite strict on not overdoing it. But I tell the story of my parents who were dissidents in the Soviet era. And their fight for freedom, they were arrested by the KGB, for reading books.

And my father was a very sort of freedom-loving type of poets and artists. And then their work for the BBC and then Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, but really kind of expressing these sort of very classical ideas of freedom and revolts against totalitarianism that was so important in the 20th century. And showing how all these ideas have been hacked and changed. But in the book, the memoir then seems into the future because my parents are still very much alive and working. And so at the end, I hope to give some hope by showing how, you know, both they're still going and then they're transforming their ideas to battle the authoritarianism to the future. I don't know if that came off.

That was meant to be the rhythm of the book, which is meant to be rewarding in itself. But I don't know. It's also a literary experiment in the book. I think you succeeded. Thank you. One of my favorite bits, one of my favorite memoir bits is the beginning of soft facts, which is a little bit later in the book. When you talk about this is when your father's working at the BBC, but I believe it's your mother. This kind of highlights these other kinds of, I hesitate to call it authoritarian control because that's not really what it is.

But your parents, when they come to the West, begin pushing up against these other kinds of these other kinds of, these other kinds of, control, things specifically of your mother being told that her views as a Soviet dissident are biased. Can you speak to that? And how that reflects today or what the point of that is today? That was a poorly worded question. No, no, no, no, look, very well noticed because that's one of the little things that I try to do is dropping these little details of light, which, you know, reflect these huge debates about public opinion and propaganda as a part of public opinion. So, yeah, so this is a whole chapter, which is about the idea of, is objectivity possible? Yeah, you know, in the present, you know, I talk about things like Fox News or Russian propaganda,

which basically argue for a kind of wild relativism, that, you know, everything is biased. There's no such thing as objectivity. There's actually no such thing as facts, which I think is the larger kind of cultural background that makes a Trump or Putin possible. But then I go back to the 20th century where, you know, my father's looked at the BBC World Service, which is, you know, wins the media cold war by insisting on facts. I talk about Chernobyl as this moment where everyone in the Soviet Union listened to the BBC World Service because they needed the facts about what was going on.

But I already show how in that period in the 20th century in the 80s, already you have this kind of, you know, incipient, the beginnings of a narrative that will later say that, oh, everyone's bias, so therefore there are no facts, and there is no objectivity or accuracy from a big, we seem to cleave to. And it's a little C when she comes, then she told me about her colleagues at London University, who are nice, but generally very leftist, as academics tend to be. And they say, well, well, you can't be objective about the USSR because you're a dissident. So you're biased.

And she says, no, no, no, I was a dissident because the objective nature of the USSR, which, you know, repressed freedoms. And it's just a little note. But, you know, I could show how you know, 30 years later, 40 years later, that has grown into, you know, that sense of everyone's biased or there is no objectivity out there, has been completely taken over and hacked and has now misused by very aligned political forces. Yeah, I remember the exact moment I knew that we were truly in trouble and living very much in the world of your book that you described in your first book after the Republican National Convention, Trump gave this, you know, law and order. America's in trouble speech. They were interviewing Newt Gingrich afterwards, and they were pressing him, you know, like crime rates are down.

What's going on here? And you said, well, you have your set of facts and we have our set of facts. It's like, oh, no. So it's interesting you mentioned you because I was, I had to listen to a lot of Fox News for this, especially Sean Hannity, who I find fascinating. And Newt is often on Hannity's radio show and on, his TV show. And I've heard him say that quite a lot. He really speaks like a really, a really bad undergraduate who's just come across postmodernism and using what I think rules called bad relativity.

You know, there is actually a concept in philosophy about good relativity, which takes in other people's points of view, and bad relativity, which basically says, oh, well, that there is no truth. And it's absolutely stunning. I mean, this is certainly a man who we would expect. reflected a conservative ideology, which insisted on the primacy of enlightenment values, but not anymore. Well, there's an idea that Newt himself was ground zero for a lot of this stuff in American politics, but that's a whole other discussion. I want to talk about some of the specific places that you visited and what you saw there. Can we talk about Estonia? And can you tell me about why statues are important in Estonia, an important part of this discussion? Okay, so, you know, Estonia is one of the places that we saw the Kremlin's use of, again, we don't know what to call it.

Hybrid war. I don't really like that. The Kremlin's use of very, very ways of messing with other countries without quite invading them, whatever you want to call the play out. And that was, this is, I think, 2007, 2008. You're going to have to double check in the book. Sorry, we're going to get a date wrong. But essentially, there was a statue in Estonia celebrating a Soviet soldier in World War II, which after, you know, a lot of stupidity actually from Sustonian nationalists who said this has to be removed and quite, you know, generally provocative behavior from them. And then maybe a very rash decision by the government of the time to move it. You know, the Russians always capitalized on stupidity and polarization that exists. But in any case, once it's moved, you have a mixture of riots by ethnic Russians who are in contact with the Russian embassy, but more important, like a massive media assault onto Estonia, all looking to fuel polarization, saying that Estonia, the sort of ethnic Russians have been attacked in Estonia by mobs that somebody's been killed, all of this utter nonsense, sort of fueling the sense that Estonian fascists are attacking the poor. ethnic Russians who are protesting against the removal of the statue.

So you've got riots, you've got media attack based on kind of what we would now call, or we shouldn't call, but let's call it fake news. And most importantly, a massive kind of internet attack, a DDoS attack, which incapacitates Estonia's banking system, parliament, and major media. So basically they take out Estonia for a day. Again, you can't even prove who did this, because apparently it's patriotic. from Russia who just doing this out of their sense of patriotic duty

I mean the government says it's got nothing to do with us so again that deniability all these factors that afterwards we saw Ukraine to set in America and in other countries played out in Estonia much much much much earlier and it's a real kind of foretaste of things to come that's the technical side but also I think

there we have a foretaste of the Kremlin doing something else which is basically saying look you guys have your colour revolution well we're going to do this now you know this is our version. There is actually the same. Your color revolution are stirring a bit of discontent in Estonia. You do it, we do it. There's no difference. Especially because Estonia is also the place where a lot of the street protests that led to 1989

and the overthrow of the Soviet Union also took place. So again, I use that as a small example of the Kremlin, you know, the sort of like the street language and the associations you have with street protests and say, well, two sides can play it at this game. Street protests don't necessarily have to be pro-democracy. They can be pro-authoritarian. We saw that much more in Ukraine. So when the Ukraine in the Maidan happens, the Russian-backed forces, but essentially run by the Russians, not Russian-back, Russian-run proxy forces in Ukraine, start doing their own kind of revolutionary protests in eastern Ukraine. So, well, you know, there's big protests

in Kiev, well, we're going to have our own ones here. They even use the same kind of visual imagery, we're putting ties everywhere. And they call it the Russian Spring, which is an invocation of the Prague Spring, the great demonstrations in 1968 in Czechoslovakia against Soviet rules. They're constantly using the language of protests

and the visual language of protests in order to kind of say, well, you know, protests don't necessarily mean democracy and prosperity. They can mean something else entirely. And that eats away at our sense that, you know, street protests are part of an inevitable historical process to whatever. It's ever more democracy everywhere. You just lighted on something else that I thought it was a really interesting theme in the book. Maybe not a theme, but something that you said kind of at this point,

this idea of Russian hybrid war or whatever you want to call it, however you want to define the thing that they're doing. once you do define it, or if you accept that they're doing it, you are accepting it on their terms, and you are kind of trapped by the way that they frame it. And that can be dangerous in it of itself, right? Yeah. I mean, what I look at specific, so first, let's talk about framing. Yeah? When we're talking about information and language, you know, we have to be very careful.

information language you don't win and losing it by kind of you know shooting words like bullets to shoot the other person with you know which is somehow sometimes the language will get caught in when we talk about what's become known as information war we want you win it you mean there's been so much study of this in the field of media effects for decades now you win it by agenda setting getting the other side to talk about what you want to talk about and by framing the issue in such a way that imposes a logic that leads to the result that you want. So information war, and I talk about information war specifically in the book, which is, you know, something, a term we've started thinking, talk about a lot since, since sort of Russian Malai and foreign activity has been discovered. We started using the words information war a lot. And that is actually much more than a Syrata technique, yeah, that Russia uses. And Russia, information war, and they have a whole kind of, like, you know, body of pseudo-experts who talk about this, is a whole philosophy. It basically, basically said, the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, not because it had rubbish policies and

terrible human rights, but because of information war from the West. Information viruses planted by the West like Perestroika and Glasnost, et away at the Soviet Union and destroyed it. And nowadays, everything we see in the world, color revolutions, you know, for all sorts of things. The promotion of democracy, the spread of kind of like international news, These are all parts of information war. Nothing has any values in information war. Nothing has any sort of sense of history or ideals or norms or rights. Everything is near manipulation.

Yeah. The whole world is a manipulative space. And the problem is when we think about the world in terms of information war, we start to buy in to this Russian worldview. And the Russian worldview actually has a policy aim because the Russians have a whole idea. if the whole world is information war, then it's going to be, then we need information, sovereignty and censorship to stop it. It's a way of excusing censorship,

it's a way of breaking a world of less borders and less frontiers, which was the ideal of 1989. So there's a real danger that as we completely correctly recognize Russia's malign activity, as we completely correctly think about policies to deal with it, we can actually slip into thinking about it the logic that they want. So, A, just a cultural sense that everything is manipulation,

everything is information war. And I think we're ready, and then we don't listen to the other side. We don't try to argue with the other side. We don't try to win arguments. We just, you know, we're constantly kind of in this paranoid stance of non-stop psychological conflict.

But even more importantly, we start to develop policies that actually strengthen that. So we see that, I think, already in the West with, you know, you have sort of, firstly you have kind of very, very, you know, cheeky sort of quasi-authoritarians in the bookers, for example, saying, oh, well, we've got to, like, you know, we've got to shut down the independent press here because, you know, there might be part of Russia's information war.

So they're just, like abusing the situation. But even healthy democracies, like Germany, like France, start talking about imposing censorship on internet content as a way. to approach it, which I think is completely the wrong policy solution and actually one that plays into Russia's worldview and makes information into something dangerous, we'll have to defend ourselves from, and it becomes, you know, we're basically saying that censorship is vulgarized, which, again, is the opposite of what, you know, Russian Democrats want. I do think that's a clever way of doing regulation.

I do think we need regulation in this space, but I don't think censorship. is the way forward at all. So, so you kind of, another track I wanted to go down, it's this idea of ideology first and then shape the world around that, right? That's kind of what Russia's doing, yes? Well, that's what, when they talk about information war, they say all ideologies are just excuses to do something. So very basically, they say, look, freedom of expression, the Americans don't believe in it,

they just use that as a way to oppose regime change in other countries or human rights. So basically they're saying, look, it doesn't, you know, what comes first as a military aim, yeah, an aim to a political aim, and then you magic up any ideology you need to make that possible. So even in terms of Russia having a, it is defences for information warfare, they're like, okay, we've got to create an ideology that gives us an excuse to impose sense. It's everything, you know, information precedes essence. First, you have a military aim or information or a political warfare aim, and then you, like, you chuck some ideology. on top to give that shape. And look, they get you wrong. You know, there are times when America has been very, very hypocritical and its use of human

rights discourse, Austin freedom of expression discourse. But that doesn't mean that those values aren't there and thereabouts. And the fact that we even say the US has been hypocritical really shows that there's something to be hypocritical vis-à-vis. So, you know, there are some values there somewhere that we can at least appeal to. in the Russian-Russian, there aren't even any values to appeal to. Regulation is a small part of the solution to these very important problems. I don't know if regulation is going to be the thing that's going to come and help us.

I think it's one of the small, I think we're doing propaganda and information of political speech, regulation is never going to play a big part unless you're kind of a dictator. And even they struggle to cope with that. but I do think there are the regulation itself can be a piece of storytelling, you know, so the regulation I think we need is to make a much more transparent internet

where we have much, we have to understand how the information environment is being shaped. So I think it's our right to know whether something is a bot or not a bot. I'm not saying anonymity. Anonymity is very necessary and a democratic right, but I as a user of the internet should be able to understand why algorithms have chosen

one piece to show me one piece of information not other, whether I'm seeing something online as part of a campaign or it's organic, which bit of my data has been used. I mean, the internet has to become interpretable. And that's also a piece of political storytelling, because that says, look, in democracies, this is how, this is a sort of information space we have. It's one where the user has a right to understand everything about how it shaped. While in authoritarian regimes, that's never going to happen. You know, the Kremlin and the Chinese want to keep their information space as a black box. So I think there's a bit of very important storytelling.

to do around the information space and regulating it. However, I agree that all that will do is help even the field to give, you know, to give the ordinary citizen at least a fighting chance of survival. It won't win anything. I mean, you know, people might still choose to follow, you know, Russian propaganda or Nazi propaganda. I mean, it won't be the forces of liberal democracy of one. I want to talk about how, I mean, this is a war show ostensibly.

I want to talk about how war has changed, how this is all altered the way conflict looks. And I think in your book, it's most apparent in your chapter about Ukraine. What did you see there? Well, Ukraine, I think, is so important to understand because it's really a place where a lot of things we've talked about are crystallized. It's also very important to me personally in the book because my parents are from Ukraine. and I end up always going back to the places when my father was arrested in the death of the 70s and I'd seen the new war there now

so he fought in a Cold War while today we have this information war but I also go right to the front lines and I spent some time with the army and it's a very, very strange thing when you're there because at the end of the day I think I guess maybe war experts know better but for me you just did a bit of war and school and university, war is about taking territory. It's about planting flags. In East Ukraine,

you have a situation where neither side actually wants this territory. There might be individuals, business for whatever who do, but neither Moscow nor Kiev is particularly keen to have this bit of Godforsaken countryside. But neither can they give it away, because if they give it away, that's made them look bad in certain ways. And also that, you know, they need to, you know, they need it for various political games. So you have this conflict where the information effect for both sides is far more important

than the territorial effect. And the storytelling that's done and the people on the ground, the soldier in the ground, they use as kind of like act as in a piece of storytelling all the time. So that's very, very, very strange. It's as if the information effects is far more important than the physical effect.

And that's very weird. The soldiers there are very aware of it. They're very aware that they're involved in, they're actually part of an information war or a war where the information is more important than the physical tanks. And that's just very strange. It's very unusual. It was to me anyway, and I think it wasn't for the soldiers as well.

No, I brought it up because it's kind of, we just talked to Robert Young-Pelton, who'd gotten back from Libya. And he described a very similar situation there, the Civil War in Libya, where it is, a lot of it is theater. And he called it the future of war. Well, I think the future of war came to Ukraine first. I think that's what you saw. You know, America's been in Afghanistan for almost two decades. And at this point, it's not about taking and holding territory.

what are the objectives here? Things have changed completely. And I think about the famous Klauschwitz line, war is a continuation of politics by other means. And I wonder what this version of war says about our politics now. Oh, that's a great question. But let's go deeper. It's what each side is trying to do in Ukraine. And by the way, I don't want to draw any kind of equivalence. I mean, there's only one guilty party in this war, and that's Russia. But basically, the Russians, the storytelling the Russians need to show in East Ukraine is that your desire or the desire for democracy leads to pain, blood, and horror. Yeah, they need to break, you know, that montage, that editing association that we had

in our heads from 1989 that crowds out on the street, as they were in Maidan, you know, in Kiev in 2014, lead to democracy and prosperity. They need to instill an editing cut that says, look, they went for democracy. Yeah, they overthrew their kleptocratic authoritarian government. And what do you get? You get blood and horror. It's not even about Russia invading. It's about blood and horror.

It's that it's that line. Well, the Ukrainians need to show that if you welcome in Russian proxy forces, if you welcome in Russia, you won't get a nice time either. You won't get kind of Crimea and kind of embracement from Russia. You will also get discomfort, yeah, and pain. So both of them are trying to show that's, that's the narrative both need to show. And that's the narrative that they need enough on the ground evidence to create enough shots to exemplify that. Neither wants to take Labato, which is like, you know, this godforsaken village that I went to where like, you know, which is in the center of this conflict.

to neither side wants this village at all. So yeah, so that's so, so what, so we're in a world where the narrative, where the storytelling is more important than kind of the evidence, you know, is that what it tells us about our politics that are, we're in a world where I'm thinking out Latin, we're in a world where narratives are constantly being improvised, or you could take the same facts on the ground and show completely different narratives. Maybe that's the point. That's the world we're in. I mean, that certainly relates to sort of like, you know, one way to explain Trump's, you know,

word salad is that by saying so many different things, people just say, take what they want from it and create their own narrative out of it. I mean, that's what we keep on seeing online. You know, it happens over and over and over again, whether there is, you know, the Brett Kavanaugh nomination or what we have now in Britain over Brexit. We kind of have the same set of facts on the ground

and people will just create completely different stories out of them. And you kind of see it happening in real time. Is that the big lesson? Everything. Reality is up to grabs. But, you know, whatever the facts are, the evidence is, it's all about magicing up quick stories out of it. Isn't that playing into the Kremlin's postmodern, nihilistic view of the world and of reality, though?

Well, I mean, the horrible thing that I say in the book is that the Kremlin might have caught the tightgeist. I'm not saying that it's good or bad that they just got it. And in my book, I argue that the paradox is by losing the Cold War, by being the place for kind of all the old kind of like enlightenment style stories, whether it's communism, which for all its perversities was meant to be based in objective scientific fact, and democratic capitalism, which is imbued with enlightenment thinking. because both these stories collapsed first in Russia, communism and 91, and then by 93, people have lost faith in democratic capitalism. It becomes this kind of like, you know, this kind of vacuum space where a new type of politics emerges, which, you know, politics has always been about storytelling, but here it's just about emotion and storytelling without any need for evidence or kind of like, you know, evidence and rational discourse anymore. And so the Russians are just quite good at it. because they've been developing propaganda strategies since the mid-90s to deal with this new unreality.

And I show that in quite a lot of granularity in the book, showing how the propaganda strategies used by Russian spin doctors in 96 and 99 kind of anticipate Brexit and Trump by several decades. We've kind of arrived at the same place, I mean, where our consensus about rational theories of social and economic progress have whittled away, partly because the financial crash, partly maybe because you know, you could only impose that consensus on rational style reality with a limited amount of media, partly because of, you know, various foreign policy adventures that went wrong.

But whatever, enough people are now in that kind of nihilistic place where Russians are, where they see no, you know, no Enlightenment-style version of the future that has any worth to them. So Russia caught the tight guys. It kind of admitted this new reality and managed to cope with it first. And in the book, I think our challenge is to, in the space I write about, which is the information space, is how do we deal with us? How do we start generating discourses in an information space where facts start mattering again? Yeah, it's up to us to sort of do something with this sort of a, with this kind of completely liquid swirling period where everything is constantly up the grabs. We have to start building that reality again, building that shared reality again.

So that's the challenge we face. So the Russians got to the tight first. And that's why they're quite good at it. I mean, Russia is a declining power with massive social and economic problems, which is somehow managed to tap into the information game so well. They seem like, you know, they seem like these titans again, you know. They've managed to accrue great power status just through, you know, very, very targeted use of real power in Syria and Ukraine, but also but largely through information. Peter, thank you so much for coming on the show.

The book is This is Not Propaganda, Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev. That's it for this week on War College. Thank you for listening. As always, War College is me, Matthew Galt, and producer Kevin O'Dell. is created by myself and Jason Fields who had a beautiful wedding. If you like the show, please remember to like,

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