I just listened to a really useful podcast from Fresh Air on NPR. It’s in interview with Johns Hopkins University Professor Peter Pomerantsev, “whose new book, How to Win an Information War, is about the man he describes as the "forgotten genius" of propaganda. Throughout WWII, Sefton Delmer ran propaganda campaigns for the British against Hitler's regime.” I’ll leave it to you to listen to the podcast to get some more juicy details about Mr. Delmer-and you should, it’s really fascinating!
But for our purposes, I want to talk about some really interesting insights about propaganda and changing peoples’ minds, which is something I am very interested in. Let’s just get started.
- Delmer use radio to break the taboo of criticizing the Nazis. There was a “spiral of silence” that kept people from breaking away. His aim was to associate negative elements like disease and moral decay with the Nazis countering their propaganda that always blamed others.
- There is a very direct parallel to what we see from MAGA on social media. They do not dare criticize the positions they have been indoctrinated to hold list they be seen as apostates.
- Delmer specifically tried to turn Nazi propaganda on the Nazis. While the Nazis were comparing the Jews to vermin and accusing them of spreading disease and poisoning the blood of Germany, etc., Delmer turned that around and show that the Nazis were actually the spreaders of disease and destroying the country.
- One of Delmer’s underlying premises was that you couldn’t change people’s minds or break them out of the spiral of silence with facts and logic He had to appeal to baser instincts. And I would argue, offer them permission to dissent (agency). And a place – and people! - To escape to.
- It doesn’t help to preach. I’ve covered this in prior posts, and even though we liberals live in a fantasy where we can change people’s minds with a reasoned discourse, it just doesn’t work.
- Pomerantsev “His take was that the psychological bond between Hitler and the Germans was so deep and so twisted, in a way, that trying to just win out with abstract lectures about virtue was not going to work. And what you really had to do was, you know, drill down into that relationship and drill down into people's desire for authoritarian leaders.”
- Further: “He's very obsessed with finding the facts that mattered to people. German audiences would reject the facts they didn't want to hear about. So how can you get facts back into the world of people who are, you know, in some sense, bewitched or pretending to be bewitched by an authoritarian leader and who often don't want to hear the truth?”
- Delmer directed many of his broadcasts at the soldiers directly. German soldiers were not living the good life that the elite were living. Very much like MAGA. Delmer would use the language and idiosyncrasies of the Nazis to create familiarity. This would allow him to insert the truth, or at least his propaganda into his broadcasts.
- Delmer loved to use gossip. He loved to use the stories about the elite in Germany to show the contrast and to show how the regular people, who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of all this, were being left out.
- Delmer’s philosophy was “not about persuasion. It's about allowing people to do what they wanted to do in the first place, you know. It's not really about - you know, it's not about changing people's minds. It's about finding the thing that they really want to do…and give them an excuse to do it.”
- I think there are opportunities, even in the MAGA faithful, to do this. Do they really want to go that listen to another painful Trump rally? Do they really want to vote for people who will limit abortion access, contraception, fight any and all gun safety legislation, increase income inequality, fight against higher wages, etc., etc.
- There are so many of these 60 – 40, 70 – 30 issues that the MAGA faithful know the majority to be the correct side, and yet continue to vote Republican to remain part of the MAGA crowd.
- Can we begin inserting little bits of these subversive messages into our conversations with them? Can we begin to create shards of cognitive dissonance that could lead to something? Do they really want to continue voting for politicians who will continue to vote against all the really important issues that matter in their lives just so they can support Trump?
- Delmer believed that the solidarity the Nazis created, the community, was based on the idea that individuality didn’t matter, it was only the community that the Nazis created that matter. His counterattack was that you, the soldier, the regular person or individuals. You have agency. You can make up your own mind.
- This is interesting, and might create the opportunity for a little jujitsu against MAGA. One of the things you hear from the hard right all the time is that liberals are all about collectivism. I can’t think of anything more servile than being a member of the MAGA community, and I think we need to make them realize that.
- How servile must one be to believe all of the lies of Donald Trump? To believe that he’s a self-made man? To believe that he even has one ounce of good in him? To believe that the entire country conspired against him to steal the election? To believe that everyone who speaks out against him is a paid actor or some other such nonsense?
- POMERANTSEV: “Conspiracy theories are often related to a lack of a sense of agency. You feel that you can't change things yourself, so you look to a strongman leader to lead you through the muck. So you explain things away through conspiracy theories where you have no responsibility because, you know, somebody somewhere else is controlling everything. So to counteract that, I think you have to go right to that psychological dynamic. You've got to work with people's sense of agency, their sense that they can change something themselves and that they don't need these strongmen leaders to lead them through a dark and complicated world.”
- Pomerantsev argues that joining MAGA gives the illusion of status in the sense of supremacy to compensate for the lack of real agency.
- MAGA argues that they are the only “real Americans.”
- MAGA argues that there is a simplistic macho view of masculinity and “manlyhood” that makes them superior to the effeminate and the “cucks.”
- I think this also is true of their warped version of Christianity. This MAGA evangelical Christianity is wrapped around Christian nationalism, masculinity, subservience of women, and large amounts of weaponry.
- He makes the point that Putin has done this with Ukraine. To be a Ukrainian for him means to be a bad Russian or a corrupt aggression. A lesser person, less than human. That’s why calling all the Ukrainians Nazis was a way to dehumanize the Ukrainians, but also to rationalize the invasion. Obviously, evil Nazis bring on their own destruction.
- Key tactic of Moscow from Soviet days to the present is to undermine truth.
- “The idea of truth was being undermined very, very aggressively by the Kremlin. You know, its main message then was, you can't trust anything. The West is just corrupt as we are. There is no real media out there. The BBC is propaganda. We do propaganda. Everything is disinformation. Don't trust anything. Truth just doesn't matter. What we need is a strong man to lead us through this dark time. And that was incredibly effective because it capitalized on feelings of disorientation that many Russians had - sort of huge social, economic, civilizational, maybe, changes that have been happening the last 20 years where sort of, you know, Russia had seen one political system collapse after another one, and in this real sort of swirling confusion about identity.”
- This is of course, exactly what Steve Bannon does (“flood the zone with shit”) and what Trump does (“Fake News,” “What you are hearing and seeing…”) every single day.
- To wit: “And everybody understands in Russia that the elections are rigged. By having a rigged election, though, the government is saying, we're so well-organized that we can rig elections. Elections everywhere are rigged. If we can rig it, the deep state over there in America is rigging it, too, yeah? Everybody is as corrupt as we are.”
- This is why you have Trump saying that “we kill people, too,” and sycophant Tucker Carlson echoing this. We are all corrupt, the world is corrupt, you have to have us as your strongmen leaders to keep order.
You will likely note that this needs some polish and maybe an ending, even. But sometimes I think it is important to get the work out there, even if incomplete for the insights to be gleaned. So be gentle with me!