 Thank you for joining us. My name is Peter Bergen. I'm Vice President at New America. We're delighted to have Peter Pomorantsev with his new book, How to Win an Information War. Peter is a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University where he co-directs the Iranian initiative. He's also the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, the surreal heart of the new Russia, which won the 2016 World Society of Literature Prize. And this is not propaganda, adventures in the war against reality. He's one of the world's leading experts on propaganda and disinformation. And very happy that he can talk about his new book with us today. Over to you, Peter. Thank you, everybody, for joining. I can't see you. So it's always this sort of sense that I'm talking into a void, but I know you're there. I can feel you. So listen, I am very much a student, a researcher, someone who looks for solutions to our current crises of echo chambers and polarization and extremism and alternative facts. Russia was really my original focus, but I've expanded that to look at other places in the world. And now I live in the US where I'm sort of doing this sort of like starting to look at it sort of trembling with all sorts of mixed feelings. But this book was a bit of a departure for me in the sense that it's a book that looks at a historical character who was essentially head of Britain's special operations to undermine Nazi propaganda in the Second World War. A bit of a COVID book in the sense that I think a lot of us went on to decided to try something new in COVID can do our usual kind of reporting or research. I was like, okay, I have access to the archive. And let's get into this. And I was fascinated, you know, like somebody who works in the space. I'm very frustrated because we can see how many things aren't working. We can see propaganda winning across the world. And he was someone who tried something completely different, out of the box, unorthodox. And which I think has strange and unexpected lessons for us today. So let me start with D-Day. I've been told by my publicist, actually, that when you do things in America about the Second World War, you've got to start with D-Day. And in Britain, we'd start with the Blitz because that's kind of our big moment. But it's got to be D-Day with Americans. So I'm going to start with a scene from D-Day. You know, I'm not actually going to read it because that's just too, that's not the right energy. I'll just tell you what happened. To D-Day, the first radio station to scoop, essentially, the allies had landed on D-Day before Nazi, well, before official Nazi radio stations had, was something called the Soldatenzende Kalle, which gave this news, I think at 410 a.m. So before, you know, other German stations. So as you can tell, it was a German station. And I suppose to the first time listener, they would have thought it was a Nazi station. It had speeches by Göring and Goebbels and Hitler and the rest of that grew some crew. It had official news flashes, communications from Nazi HQ. But it also then had other things in it. And the things that had in it were, apart from some great jazz, which was already a little bit suspicious, because you weren't meant to do too much jazz in Nazi Germany. Didn't have naughty words in it, but had a little bit too much swing music for a regular Nazi station. But mainly, it gave these incredible visceral descriptions of what life was like for the soldier, the civilian, the Luftwaffe pilot. I will read you a little bit. I mean, this is in the week after, in the week after D-Day, describing how the 716th Infantry Division has been abandoned by its leadership, how these German soldiers are just wasted on the beach by the oncoming allies. There they lash and they're smashed and slit up dugouts naked without cover, grenadiers without pistols and machine guns and anti-tank guns. The end of comrades who held out and waited for reinforcements or relief, who do not know they had been written off, written off from the very beginning. And it goes on and on like this incredible description of how German soldiers have been abandoned by their leadership. And look, by this time, you know, you've probably already twigged that this isn't really a Nazi station. This is actually a British station disguised as a Nazi station in order to undermine Nazi morale. Now, if that had been the end of the story, I wouldn't have written this book. Because frankly, all sides are doing something like this. The Soviets had stations which pretended to be Nazi stations. The Nazis had stations which pretended to be British stations, which were hilariously bad, actually. We can go back to them in the Q&A. The reason I started to write this book was when I realised that the British who were creating the station wanted the Germans to know that they were British cosplaying Nazis. They weren't doing deception. They were putting on a mask to give their audiences cover. So something much more interesting was going on. What kind of cover? Firstly, safety, because if your officer or the Gestapo walked in, you could say, well, I thought it was a Nazi station, so I had no idea. Remember, listening to a foreign station was punishable by hanging. But much more interestingly than that, because that still isn't enough reason for me to write a book about it, was psychological cover. So what they had decided, what they'd worked out after several years, was that people psychologically needed the comfort of listening to anti-regime content that was dressed up in the language of us, our boys, we Germans. And cover in a third way. And here we get into the theory of propaganda that the people who designed the stations had. Cover to do what you really wanted to do in the first place, which was not fight, surrender, shirk, get sent home, not send your kids to the front. Because people at home on the home front will listen to these stations as well. So what was happening was not deception in the classic sense, was not disinformation as we define it today. But was a consensual masquerade that created an environment where firstly you could communicate facts, because as we get into these shows were incredibly well researched, where you could communicate facts, and where you could welcome people into a masquerade, where they could actually do what they really wanted to do. Where they could act themselves. When I realized that, I was like, Oh, there's something really interesting going on here. And I became intrigued by the man who was behind this. So the man who was behind this, the main character in this book, Michael Sefton Delman. And he was running a whole fleet of stations like this across Europe, stations in Italian, in what was then known as Sabo Croat, in Bulgarian, Romanian, Norwegian, French, and many, many in German. German was his main focus. There's a reason for that. He was born in Germany. And I realized with time that actually his personal story was really what you need to do to understand his really fascinating concept of propaganda and practice of propaganda. He was born in Germany as the son of British academics, trapped in Berlin as a kid, 10 year old kid in the outbreak of the First World War. And in his memoirs, it's really his early experiences, which set up his later propaganda practice. Well, land on one really important thing. The amazingly honest thing in Sefton Delman, that was his name, Sefton Delman's memoirs is how he describes growing up as a British kid in Berlin in the First World War, bullied, put down, humiliated by his classmates for being an enemy schoolchild. But at the same time, brought up and singing along to German war propaganda. And he talks about having this almost split self where he's almost talking to himself. We're like, hold on, I have no right to have these feelings, but I do have these feelings. And so I'm very young age, he's aware of the power of propaganda to make you feel part of a group to articulate desires for, well, sometimes very cruel desires, desires for violence and sadism, but also how it's always a tiny bit performed. He's aware that he's both in love with but performing this propaganda. And when he looks around himself as a child, he sees all the adults, they're enjoying the propaganda, but it's also kind of an act. And they can be very different at another time, same as he's got a British self and a German self. We have many roles that we perform. Later, he goes back to Britain and is accused of being too German and bullied there and learns to act English. Because of course, he's not, no, he's been bullied for being British. He doesn't belong in Britain. And again, very aware of how you act your social roles. Then he goes to Germany and becomes a superstar reporter, a mix of Borat and Tintin for the Daily Express, covering the rise of the Nazis. He becomes a master of impersonation. Why is a Borat and Tintin, he's doing serious investigative reporting, but putting on disguises, he becomes a master of disguise in the age of cabaret. And he impersonates Ernst Rolmes, assistant to get into a stormtrooper rally. He does many other fun things in the book. But he gets so close to the Nazis, some say too close to the Nazis, that he gets to see their propaganda close up. They allow him to be the only correspondent to accompany Hitler on his airflights from one hysterical rally to the next in the 28 elections. And what does he see? He sees that others have seen this, that Hitler is acting. That Hitler is a morose blank. He describes him like a traveling salesman eating an egg between performances. And the minute the performance starts, Hitler goes into his role as a messiah. And he dissects it very accurately what exactly that performance is. Now, he's not the first person to talk about this. Where Delmar is fascinating, there's only one other person who I've read who talks about this as well, is that the crowd are acting as well. Even in their hysteria, even in the kind of hypnotic moments of crowd ecstasy, there's always a little bit of theatre there as well. So skipping forward, when Delmar starts designing his sort of cabaret of counter propaganda, he's doing many things. Some of it is quite banal, you know, deceiving Germans as to where the Normandy landings would be that kind of ABC of deception that is part of every war. But much more than that, he is in his, by the end, dozens of radio stations, doing something that nobody else was doing at the time, I think has some lessons today. Firstly, he says, forget about the German service of the BBC. Forget about preaching democracy. Forget about lectures about how democracy dies in darkness. If you want to reach audiences who are in love and fear of Hitler, you have to do something completely different. If you want to penetrate echo chambers to use our language today, you have to do something completely different. You've got to firstly tap into the same visceral, satisfying emotions they do. And a lot of the characters in his radio shows are these kind of ranting, often far right soldiers who are, in Delmar's own words, covering the Nazis with a layer of filth as dirty and as deep as the ones the Nazis flung over Jews. So using that language against the Nazis. Finding a language to split the Nazis from people. He called them the Patei Kamuna, the sort of self-serving corrupt group who are causing normal Germans to suffer. The descriptions are amazing. One of the joys of this book was getting hold of the transcripts of the shows. So we don't have the recordings, we have the transcripts of the radio shows. I spent a lot of COVID reading through the transcripts. It was a bizarre time for us. There was porn scenes, nonstop scenes of saline masochistic sex, basically. Quite explicit, actually. All these scenes of disease. You take this idea of the body that the Nazis had of the pure Aryan body, and you do nonstop stories about how Germans were diseased because of the Nazis, how they were suffering physically, how they were getting lice on the front. So really counter-engineering the Nazi emotional architecture. But that's just the start. I mean, that's the first thing you've got to do, to just even tap into the same, to be on the same stage as the Nazis. You've got to be working in that space. And then what he did, or the essence of what he did, because he did many things, but what he did was try to, through a set of rhetorical techniques, make people aware and sort of shock them into remembering that the roles they play when they follow the Nazis are just roles. Now, what does that mean? It doesn't mean satire. Satire is when you, like, you know, very aggressively attack the social roles others play. But that usually backfires if the people are playing those roles. In Britain, we have lots of satire about Brexiters. I'm not sure they reach Brexit voters. Using something much more subtle, which I think actually we all saw the other day with Senator Britt from Alabama. She wasn't doing satire of MAGA. But by going slightly over the top, she suddenly revealed and made you shockingly remember just how artificial MAGA rhetoric is. I don't know if you'll saw it, do see it. It's fascinating. And it's fascinating the reaction from people in her own camp, who were shocked, because for a moment they were confronted with the artifice of what they tried to pass up as the genuine. She actually revealed its nature. And Delma writes, talks about this, talks about it in a presentation to the King of England, who we have to explain his approach to, talks about it as taking Nazi propaganda just one step further into the ridiculous. To not satire. We can get into Brecht, other theatre directors around whom Delma spent his youth. He was obsessed with theatre. There's, you know, there's a lot of relations to a lot of theatrical ideas at the time. That's what he's doing. So first the emotions. So you get rid of the Nazis, monopoly and emotions, then you alienate people from the roles that they've been playing within the Nazi spectacle. And that's just the start. All that does is open up the potential for having a different kind of conversation. And then you tap into their self-interest, individualism, their bonds beyond the bonds of the Nazi folk, their bonds in church, soldier camaraderie, all the other relationships they have. You give them, then you can start giving them lots and lots of information about how to shirk from the front, how to surrender if need be, how to generally disobey the Nazis. He was very interested to actually, the idea that you had to get people to do something, not just change their attitudes, but actually behavioural change. So it's this arc between wrestling the Nazis' monopoly on emotion, alienating people away from Nazi social roles, and then giving them the chance to do what they want to do. But let's go back to this scene right at the start that I described, where people are listening to the radio, knowing that it's a British station that knows they know it's a British station while actually everybody's cosplaying. He's setting up a different type of drama. He's sort of giving you a mask under which you can reveal yourself. I love this English phrase act yourself. He's giving you a chance to act yourself. There's lots to get into about how you can only be yourself when you're playing a role. But the question is what sort of role? The Nazis were trying to bring people into their spectacle, into their vast fascist theatre where you were meant to play along, but where the Nazis defined your roles for you. Here Delma was saying, no, you can join a different type of spectacle where you can act in your own self-interest, your individuality, express your resentment towards your leadership and so on. You know what? I'm actually going to pause there and we can discuss whether it has any relevance for today because obviously Delma has many lessons good and bad. Many bad, by the way. We can talk about that as well for our current times. But in my experience of looking at propaganda campaigns across the world today, we have so much more technological opportunities. We have so much more social science, sociology. We have so many more ways of analysing target audiences, all that stuff. I've yet to discover anything which approaches the relationship between people and power and communication in a way that is as interesting. That was it. How many minutes was that? We can't hear you. I need to, I'm sorry. Yeah. That was brilliant Peter. And let me ask you some questions and the audience, if you have questions, put them in the Slido app and I will feed them to Peter. So you mentioned this bifurcated self that Delma has and you yourself are somewhat bifurcated, right? I mean, you born in Kiev and in the sort of Soviet era grew up in England. Do you think that that attracted you to this particular character or helped you reflect on him in ways that if you were less bifurcated, you might not have embraced the subject in quite the same way. I think we're all bifurcated. I think this is everybody has and remembers playing different roles as a child and putting on different hats and experimenting, especially in your teenagers with identity. But I do think people who have been forced to move countries as a child, those jumps are more radical. And so without a doubt. I mean, there's several moments in my research or like, okay, I want to write the book. One of them was when I realized Delma was doing something a lot more sophisticated than I'd originally thought. And the other one was when I saw this connection. And the connection is actually very, very visceral. So Delma personifies, personifies the red word. Delma summarizes I don't know, his feeling outside in England, because when he arrives from Germany at the age of 13, when he sets foot on English soil after having kind of like thought of England as this sort of heaven for so long. And he arrives in England, and he's surrounded by children laughing at him. And they're pointing at his socks, because he's wearing little Berlin sailor socks, while English children wear woolly socks wrapped up to their knees. And the story of the socks kind of like stays with him this whole life. He carries on having nightmares around it. And when I was around, so I was four when my parents moved to London, and I had a similar experience, where my mother, on a winter day, clothed me in, well, what in the Soviet Union would have known as Kaeswana, which were basically a mix of Long Johnson tights. But they looked a lot like tights. And he got cold. So she dressed me in them. And that was normal. And if I went to school, I was just learning English, I was just starting to fit in. I'm getting changed with PE. I remember this in a lot of detail. And suddenly, everybody is laughing at me, even the teacher, Mrs. Callahan. And they're all pointing at me and saying, he's wearing tights, he's wearing tights. And I'm like, these are Kaeswana in my accented English. And it's completely sort of like, I've come from a different universe. So yes, his socks thing, it gets quite personal at times. I mean, I have to say in other ways, I'm very different to Delma, very different to Delma. I mean, I have a real, after several years with him, I wouldn't say love hate, but it's a kind of like, like dislike relationship I have with him. Why? He did a lot of very, very dark things. You know, we talked about sort of the pure things that he did just now. He did a lot of dark things. He admitted to it himself, kind of revel in the idea of being a baddie. The son of the book, he says, I'm a baddie, baddie. He did lots of, you know, he'd write letters to grieving German parents, as if they were from their lost children and say, Oh, your son's, you know, dear mutti, I'm still alive. I'm just with the British, it's great here, you know, this sort of thing to undermine, to give them the false feeling that their children are still alive and give them the and hopefully get them to tell all their neighbors that is great with the British. What I have done the same thing if my country was being attacked by Nazis, I suppose it is at the moment, I'm still very much Ukrainian. So, you know, when you're in the middle of war, you maybe don't have the, you know, moral, you know, the space for moral considerations. But there's lots of stuff that he does, which I talk about in the book, which make you go, Oh, thank God, you about him and also the people he recruited for the broadcast, because I mean, for them to be plausible, they must have been beyond bilingual Germans, they also had to be deeply, they had to pass themselves off as far right Nazis, right? How did, how did he find these people? Who were they? So he selected them very carefully. There were people from the Berlin cabaret scene. So literally, you know, there's some very cabaret like in his whole approach. And literally, there were people from the Berlin cabaret scene there. There were a lot of German POWs playing German soldiers. That wasn't, you know, that was less hard for them. There was a lot of exiles, a lot of here's where it gets really interesting Jewish exiles who were playing Nazis, essentially. So Jews cosplaying Nazi to subvert Nazis, which already is a fascinating kind of psychological jujitsu, which there's very, very, I mean, I went through several memoirs of other people who worked that listed like looking for somebody's self reflection on this, but mostly they just have laughed. Muriel Spark, the novelist was there as well. And she just said the Jews really enjoyed this because it gave them a way to sort of like hit the Nazis back. I don't know, if I were to make a film about this, I would have a great time, I think with the with actors really thinking through psychological process of that. So fantastic. I mean, a real sort of mix of scholars spies Ian Fleming was one of the the author of Bond was one of the people who made this all happen. He was at the admiralty of Maya Delmer's work and supports Delmer at this moment when he's at risk of being shut down and helps him grow exponentially reading. The first essentially professor of psychiatry and psychoanalysis at Cambridge. That wasn't his official title, but he was the first professor teaching courses on psychoanalysis at Cambridge. And just this amazing array of sort of like scholars and the people who are most useless actually apparently were advertising execs. So I think one of the memoirs, one of the guys who ran this whole system said the newspaper men were really good at doing propaganda. The novelists were very good and the ones who were really rubbish with the advertising guys. Well, as you were talking, Peter, you know, and you were describing this sort of far right Nazi movement that it was sort of okay to listen to if or at least plausibly okay. It reminded me of course of the ultra nationalists in Russia, in Ukraine war, who have been given some license to criticize Putin's Russia, although one of them recently committed suicide after which may have been a genuine suicide or not, but it's always hard to tell in Putin's Russia. But what are the similarities or differences between the ultra nationalists who have been given permission to some degree to criticize in real terms what's going on in the war? And, you know, is it just completely different? Or is there other of some? So there's similarities and differences. The similarity is that, yes, in systems such as these, often the way the place you can do the most visceral criticism is by going further right, but more extreme, that Russian propaganda and Putin is probably much more sophisticated in many ways than the Nazis in the sense of understanding different narratives because it's much more cynical than the Nazi one. It doesn't exist insist on that much as much ideological rigidity and they're much more flexible and say, OK, let's let's do this over here and this over here. And the idea of having these nationalists in the Russian media space, again, only in the social media space, they're not on TV, was to have somebody attacking them at the army. So the army didn't get comfortable as a way to beat the army. Like, hey, we've got these guys to attack you, by the way. So they're playing different bits off of each other, which the Nazis did as well, but in Russia it's kind of more public. And the difference is, though, that the ones in Russia are when they talk about corruption in the army, they genuinely want an improvement. They want less corruption in the army. When Delmas characters were talking about corruption in the army, he wanted people to be more corrupt. The point was to be outraged about this terrible corruption in the army so that you can be more corrupt, you know, outraged by how Nazi officials' kids weren't going into the army. So you don't have to send your son either. I mean, it was he was playing outrage in order to not help the other side. These guys actually do what Russia's conquer countries and do really well. So there's a bit of a difference there. Yeah. And it's important to remind the audience that it was a hanging of fans to listen to the BBC or other, right. And this this is kind of a fairly critical point in terms of how Delma had to operate. Well, the BBC was to listen to. You just have to do very, very carefully. It's interesting that in terms of viewing listening figures, according to surveys, by the end, Delma stations, which had none of the brand recognition or none of the kind of like many, many, many wavelengths that the BBC had kind of had caught up and maybe even overtaken the BBC. So like 41% of soldiers said they listened to it. The head of the SS in Munich says these Delma stations are among the top three listened to in the city. So that's a bit like having a, you know, being right up there with, I don't know, Fox and MSNBC in your cable package. I mean, it's kind of it's huge. These weren't little psyops. These were like mainstream media. So BBC did have a lot of listeners. People have to listen to it in a lot of quiet and silence. Delma's main gripe with the BBC was that it was preaching to the converted was that it was just talking to people who are ready to do that. Its figures went up a lot towards the end of the war because as the British start winning, people want to listen to what the British are telling them because they'd be, they'd be talking about where they might, you know, about things to do with air raids and stuff like that. So the BBC got exponentially more popular, like towards the end of the war, people listening to it and Delma kind of stops his own broadcasts in the last bit of the war saying, look, they can just listen to the BBC now. Like there's no need for us to do this elaborate masquerade. You said you wrote this book during COVID and that you had access to the archive. So what are the archives? I mean, I started in COVID. I mean, there's a lot of the book is about Ukraine as well. So part of it is in 22. But I got to I got to do a deep dive during COVID. And I started it before COVID. But COVID was the time I could really not go anywhere. And the archive is collected by a remarkable historian and archivist called Lee Richards without whom I could not have done this book. Lee is a his he's fired tons and tons and tons of the classified archive of what was the political warfare executive. And we have all these notes, really in great detail of strategy. Delma talking to his superior saying why he's doing something when it's done a lot about what he was trying to achieve. Then there's the memoirs. Delma wrote his memoirs in the 60s, which tell us a lot about his childhood, but which are as subjective and footnote free as you would expect. Some others, there are a couple of other memoirs that came up afterwards, all very vetted as wolves. I found the unpublished memoirs of several other members of the of the organization that was incensored. I did did something as I went out and found that the most remarkable one to my mind they were all remarkable, but really remarkable one. I don't want to compare them. One really remarkable of all the remarkable ones was given to me by Ian Fel, a former BBC journalist who'd interviewed René Helcott, a member of the Bauhaus group in Germany, who'd worked with Delma and Ian had done incredible interviews with René Helcott before his death and then they're unpublished and he was kind enough to share that with me, which is so nice of him. But the really delicious bit again, one of the again, again, one of those moments we're like, OK, I've got to write about this, is that even though we don't have recordings of the show, apart from a couple of tiny examples or that I found, we have the transcripts because all this time, the US State Department, which was making faithful transcriptions of all Nazi propaganda, thought these were genuine Nazi stations. So the Germans may have cottoned on, but the State Department didn't. And actually, it's here, here in, you know, outside of DC in that beautiful archive, what a beautiful archive you guys have. I've forgotten what it's called. I've been there, but also again, these gathered a lot of the stuff. There's all the transcripts, not many of the transcripts in German and English of these shows. So we have, we must have the scripts, we have the scripts. We don't know how they were spoken, but we have the scripts, which also makes it a lot of fun because one gets to imagine how, how did the sound? So all those different data sources, then as soon as I started the book, I realised, oh, my God, that's not enough. I need to understand how Nazi propaganda works, because I've got to do both sides. And the book moves between, well, three places, like that for sure, where Delmar is, Nazi Germany, where the Nazis are, and contemporary Ukraine. So there's sort of like this, there's, there's sort of three places of action, I suppose. And that took, that took a lot of work, which again, I stand on the shoulders of giants. There's obviously wonderful, wonderful historians written about life in Nazi Germany. But the real find for me, for this project was a book called Nazi Radio Propaganda, which was written by two German cultural historians working at the new school during the Second World War and going through, which was support from the British and American governments, going daily through Nazi Radio Propaganda and analysing it daily. And they've written a book which you can get at the new school. I've got to, you know, it's hard to find, but which is the sort of day by day, theme by theme, narrative by narrative breakdown of Nazi propaganda called Nazi Radio Propaganda, written by two writers who are famous. I think one is a cultural historian, the other is co-analyst. I can't remember now I'm having a brain fog, but people who write beautifully about culture writing in this wonderfully lucid literary prose about how this machine works. I mean, this should just be on everybody's desks. I mean, the amount of parallels between how Nazi propaganda works and propaganda today is fascinating because we always think about, you know, the anti-Semitic stuff and all that stuff, which is obviously key. But it's all the other stuff which resonates so much with today. Before we get to today, you know, you said something kind of striking at the beginning, which is Delma was, and I'm paraphrasing, I think the sort of special operations of propaganda. And it's interesting because of course, special operations, we understand it, you know, really originated with the SAS, which was founded at the beginning of the World War Two, which eventually, you know, became, you know, the SAS of today and the special boat service. You know, were the British more inclined to improvise for reasons that you might speculate on outside of conventional kind of, whether it's special operations or this kind of propaganda? So I didn't go into much in the book. There is there is some good. There is some good stuff on this. So originally, this sort of. There was a huge fight between the Ministry of Information and the special operations executive between who should control this. So is this the BBC and the Ministry of Information? This is their kingdom. Or is this subversive sabotage that world? In a way, what Delmar is doing is between that and there's a tug of war between the Minister of Information, who is wreath and then a guy called Bracken, I think Bracken becomes Minister of Information and the SOE, who are doing really, you know, charge of setting Europe on fire or whatever it is, by Churchill. And it's the SOE who bring Delmar on. He's got friends in the SOE and they see him as someone whose mind is subversive enough to bring him into the propaganda radius. Then there's so many fights between them that in the end, they create their own organization called the Political Warfare Executive, kind of at the same time as similar times Delmar joins, which is in charge of. All. Should we call it communications? We don't want to use the word propaganda from the BBC through to subversively flooding, you know, which has a panel with both people from the SOE and the Ministry of Information all fighting each other all the time, like a board and then all bits of it doing what the hell they want. So the BBC just ignores orders all the time. This bit is constantly in rebellion. I mean, there is. I just didn't do it in the book, but there is like, you know, there is just a comedy to do about the dysfunctionality of and the infighting and the territorial fighting between different bits of. British officialdom as they tussle over power and I don't know Delmar's boss for a while is Richard Crossman, who is famous for like, you know, someone describes him like you would phone him, you tell him what to do. He'd put the phone down and then do exactly the opposite. We've got to understand just how much improvised everybody was improvising. I think there was a lot of insurrection all the time. Ever since 9 11 in the United States, you know, that's well al-Qaeda than ISIS. And now with Russia and China, you know, there's been a fair amount of energy around the question of counter counter messaging. Some of it that located the State Department in the in the GEC and some of it elsewhere. You know, what are the lessons for today, for the work that you've done on this book? Hi. There's lessons good and bad. You know, Delmar. I mean, just a double in disinformation, a lot of disinformation, but he came to regret it, you know, he really came to. Feel that. It hadn't been backfired on him in all sorts of ways. And also he got caught very fast. I mean, his early stations didn't try to let the audience know who they were. They actually tried to be something else. And they were fun and they got lots of listeners and they kind of crashed them. They kind of like flew too close to the sun. And they were caught up pretty quickly. And then, you know, Gestapo was saying pretty fast. Look, this is just a British up to their evil tricks. So I think there's a cautionary tale there about deception as being a really easy way or a seemingly easy thing to do. I mean, the other side's doing it. The Nazis were doing loads of stuff like this. So the other side's doing it. Why don't we? And if anything, Delmar's experience shows that. The externalities are bad and you're going to get caught. I think his great insight is about. His sober portrait, understanding of the limits of preaching about democracy and that you really have to understand people where they are. The way he's effects driven, you know, he's looking at a result. He's like, what are we trying to achieve with this? His notes are very terse, you know, they're like, like, we're trying to do this, we're trying to do this. It's very hard to measure, you know, effects of communications. But he's always in that frame. He's always in the frame of what are we trying to do with this? How does this hurt the Nazis? But then everything that I've tried to talk about in my little introduction today. I mean, he broke through the greatest echo chamber you can imagine. I mean, today we complain like we can't reach audiences and echo chambers. They don't want to listen to the truth. Delma's media had so much relevance and so much emotional appeal and so much power for its audiences that they listened to it, even though they knew it was being broadcast in a real world, not a cultural from the other side. They knew perfectly well the British, the people bombing them were broadcasting this and yet they listened. Huge part of that is about the amount of detail about their lives that they can listen to there. Delma spent a huge amount of time invested into understanding soldiers' lives, understanding civilians' lives. And so he made his broadcasts sound well and be relevant to his to his audience. So lots of things to learn, good things, bad things and and things which which I don't think we do enough of. You know, President Joe Biden has made the threat to democracy kind of the main appeal in the election. And by implication, you may you seem to be suggesting that that's probably not a very effective message. No, look, rallying your own troops, saying what the stakes are, that that can work. I think if it's just that, yeah, that's not going to be enough. That's too abstract. You've got to then connect that to what does that mean for you? You know, just just an abstract stuff about, oh, I don't know, liberal constitutional theory versus another type of, you know, our arrangement that it definitely isn't going to do it. But no, I think I think setting the stakes of something is really important. You know, you know, you sometimes, you know, sometimes that matters a lot. And Biden's doing it for his own side as well. I've got to remember that. And he's really worried about getting out the boat. Delvin was dealing with a slightly different situation. You know, he's he's not worried about the British. He's just worried about the opposition. So. So if that's the only thing that Democrats are going to run on, that's not great. If they then manage to connect that to people's lives without any kind of preachingness or camps, but in a really kind of visceral way, then I think then I think maybe they'll not lose. Another political question. I mean, people always decry negative advertising, yet everybody does it. Presumably because it's effective. I mean, I'm talking about politics, obviously. Yeah. And yeah, I remember talking to my last book, I went around and talked to a lot of spin doctors. That was my last book. This is not propaganda. It was literally that going around and talking to, especially ones from the dark side. And, you know, that's exactly the point they make. No one likes to talk about it. But that's it. You do you do both. You both come with your sort of big, beautiful ideas and then you, you know, hobble the opposition. And it's it's no one saying it's a pretty game. And I'd like to think that what I value in my sort of time of Delma has been less about that, which again, I think everybody does it. And it's not a huge surprise, even though it's always shocking just how dark and dirty it gets. It's the other stuff that he did, which I found really, really interesting. So questions from the audience. Do you see this more open faced propaganda approach as a way to counter the misinformation narratives that are spreading virally today? I mean, Delma's not trying to counter narratives. Yeah, he's trying to get to the audiences and find what they find interesting. He's not doing debunking. He's catching out the Nazis on their lives when it's really relevant to people. There's a long time at the start of the war and when Goebbels doesn't want to talk about British raids or Germany because it makes the Nazis look weak. And so a lot of the radios are going, you know, why isn't Goebbels telling the truth about how Archen was bombed the other day and how the air raid didn't work. So it's always getting back to when does truth start mattering to people? When did the facts start mattering to people? I'm not trying to, like, have a debate about that thing over there that we really don't like. But getting back to their lives and saying, OK, here is where facts matter because they affect your daily life and they mean something to you. So I think he'd be you know, there's two ways of approaching what was many ways, but there's two big ways of approaching this information. One of them thinking about the kind of the product or the supply and battling the supply. And the other one is thinking about the demand. Why do people want it in the first place? So he was a very demand focus. Let's understand why people want this and how can we make them interact with another form of content? You mentioned Ukraine and that a good part of the book is about Ukraine today. So how does that? How do you how are you able to weave this all together? So the war kind of like rode a tank into my into my life into what I still consider is partly my country, though I grew up abroad, obviously. And into my into my book, probably the last one is the support is the other ones, frankly. But the war broke out just as I was sort of like putting putting the things together. And I went on a journey right at the start of the war with colleagues from the Atlantic magazine to use a lens key. And this is an April 22 and he was facing such a similar situation to the British in 41. He was trying to communicate with Russians. He'd worked in Russia. He'd been quite a successful entertainer in Russia. And he was like they're locked in a bunker. They don't listen to me, you know, preaching to them about democracy, about war crimes. You know, trying to tell Russians about look at the war crimes you're committing. And it was his words that people are in a psychological bunker. So something else was needed and it wasn't, you know, so I was just OK, how would Delmar approach this? And by the way, you created to do loads of really, really inventive things. I think most of the stories will only merge after the war, hopefully, hopefully a victorious war. But of the stuff that I'm told, because a lot of this coming from the Civic Center, they're kind of discovering a lot of this themselves. So I met sort of activists who do kind of robo calls at Russians or mass calling Russians to try to get them to stop supporting the war in the start of the war. They did moral things that's telling them about. War crimes. That didn't really work. The minute they switched it to like, oh, the government's going to introduce a new tax to fund the war, people like, well, I want our money and it was much more effective. So that's that was kind of one of the pills that. Delmar wanted everybody to swallow at the start of the war like stop. It won't you won't win as long as you're talking about the stuff that you care about. If you want to win, you're going to stop romanticizing. You're going to stop hoping that there's some democratic uprising around the corner. None of that's going to happen. What you've got to do is crack the relationship between a Putin. Other types of authoritarian leaders, a Hitler and their followers. You've used the bunker quite a lot. And I, you know, I don't know if you've read this book connected to surprising power of social networks by James Fallow and Nicholas Christakis, but basically the theme of it's where it's worth a read. You know, we're basically it's kind of maybe this is tautological and obvious, but it was revelatory to me because based on a lot of, you know, large data sets, I mean, we simply believe what everybody around us believe. The idea that we have independent beliefs is actually almost kind of insane. If I'm summarizing, but it's a much more subtle book. But this question of whether you call it bunkers or we call it silos or whatever we call it and breaking through. I mean, you've raised a very interesting point. If you, in a sense, if you appeal to somebody's self interest, they may be in a bunker, but if they don't, they don't really want to be mobilized to fight in a war that they may die in or so unpack all that both in Ukraine and also in World War Two. So you've said a very interesting thing there about everybody around people. Yeah. So Delma was very aware that the Nazis were trying to make it feel that people were part of a community. The folk, that was their mission, actually. I mean, they were very naked about it. There's very good work by Ian Kershaw and others about these attempts to create out of the pluralistic, chaotic German society, a unified folk. And that was meant to be your community, where you went along with everybody else. And within which, you know, famously be like Hannah Arendt would say that facts stop mattering. All that mattered would be to belong and to listen to the leader. So one of the things that Delma realized and I think is very true today is very few people are prepared to be dissidents outsiders, very few, very brave people. And they're incredibly important because they break through fear. But most people aren't going to be like that. They might even resent them because they're so brave. Most people are want to be part of a group and get into the many reasons for that historically or civilization. And you've got to give them a different group. So yes, you want to be part of a group. But what Delma is saying, you can be part of a group pool. Well, he had stations for believers. So the charge is another group where you can have a different set of trees. So just socially camaraderie is a different set of trees. There's always this tension between the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party. So the Wehrmacht was its own community. And so on and so forth. The Nazis were very aware of this. They're constantly trying to break these different divisions. If you listen to their speeches, they're nonstop about this, you know, all the old divisions have broken down. We're now part of one bulk, one community. So Delma was always very much OK, he can be part of other communities. And in that community, there's a different you. So Delma was. No, he never believed there was a true you outside of performance, but there were different types of performances you could do. Yeah. And there were some performances where actually there was more of you in them and then other ones. So he was creating different stages, different fora, where you can be part of a different group and where you can behave differently and where you can be a different you. He was sort of exploiting the fact that we all have slightly we have different selves. But today, I mean, I researched on this at the LSC and Hopkins. Others do it in a much more dedicated way. You know, a group, a political group, a conspiracy group is one group. But the same people are also mothers and, you know, soccer soccer players or there are other groups that they're part of. And so you'd approach them through there to that other bit of belonging that they would have. I mean, and of course, Ukraine and World War Two are very much linked because today, because a lot of Russians believe they're fighting Nazis and how, you know, how has that been so effective? So belief. Yeah, that belief is a good word. It's a very complicated word generally, what we mean when we believe in something and especially in a in a society with sort of a kind of cult of cynicism, like as in Russia. Delma and I don't disagree with him. Delma would have said that the power of propaganda. Or I think Delma would have said that the power of propaganda is not to persuade people to believe in something, but to offer them ways. To be what they want it to be. And think what they wanted to think and do what they wanted to do. So when. Whether this propaganda is effective, we can actually analyze because Russians don't repeat it domestically as much as we think they focus on other things. But. But it's a long running one. It gives you several things. Firstly, it means for the Russians who might in any way feel uncomfortable about this war, they don't need to feel any kind of responsibility because if they're Nazis, well, we can let go of responsibility. A lot of Kremlin propaganda. Probably also not a problem, but especially Kremlin propaganda is about giving up responsibility. Nothing to do with me. Them up there, they'll understand, but they're Nazis. We should probably do this. It gives those who desire sadism. And they might be a much bigger number than we'd like to admit. The legitimacy to do that, because once you, if they're Nazis, well, then then you can do anything you want to them. So we have dehumanizing. So it's not really about persuasion. Propaganda works when it legitimizes things that are there already. That's just that's just what that's when it's effective. When it's just trying to sort of convince people of something, you're kind of in a bad place already. Have you ever read the novel by Hans Voluda? Every man dies alone. No, but another Hans Voluda novel makes an appearance in my book. Alone in Berlin. Maybe that's the same novel. Maybe it has got maybe maybe different things. But anyway, it's it's amazing. It's like and I rarely read fiction, but but it encapsulates a lot of things that you're talking about. Well, we can really nerd out here. So so in the book, which is set in sort of a Berlin worth and class suburb in the first years of World War Two, a couple are raised by the death of their son. Go around Berlin, yeah, leaving little notes everywhere, postcards on which are anti-Nazi messages, hoping through these anonymous postcards to inspire people, you know, to express their their their resentment to the Nazis. This is an area of Berlin that had always voted communist. This is a working class area. And towards the end of the book, they get arrested and the Gestapo man who arrested them says, guys, you realize all that happens is that people see these things and they're so overtly dangerous and rebellious, they bring them to us and give them to us. People are too scared to even hold them or put them back down because that looks as if they didn't do enough. You don't understand the society you live in. There's a very, very interesting moment in the book. Where. I think when the Gestapo come around to find the evidence that this couple were behind these postcards, they find one of the cards in an old transistor radio set that the son who died belongs to. So they're caught because they left a piece of evidence in a radio. I was even going to do a whole half chapter in my book about this. Because what Delvin was saying, OK, I'm going to cloak the radio. I'm not going to be these obvious anti-Nazi things. I'm going to make it look like a Nazi radio and a Nazi postcard, which is very subtly undermining the Nazis. So there's almost like an opening that I was going to have a whole sequence in my book about the book and then the radio would leap to bed for a chair. But. I guess I didn't go full full pinching in this book. I kept it quite conservative, a bit of a wish as I had, but Hans Flatter is in the book, but like literally it's one half paragraphs explaining that people were really scared and therefore you needed to do all these weird masquerades. Well, Peter, thank you for the brilliant presentation. Thanks to the audience for tuning in. If you want to buy the book, you can on the button on the right. And good luck with your book to Peter. Thank you for appearing today.