“This is not propaganda. Adventures in the war against reality”
By Peter Pomerantsev
Publishers’ synopsis-
We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we’ve lost not only our grip on peace and democracy–but our very notion of what those words even mean.
Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age, where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, “behavioral change” salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia–but the answers he finds there are not what he expected.
“This Is Not Propaganda- quietly frightening”
Review by Steve Bloomfield in The Guardian, Aug 2019
from the review…
“War used to be about capturing territory and planting flags,” observes Peter Pomerantsev in his beautifully written, carefully reported and quietly frightening new book. But what was happening in Ukraine was an early example of something different – the information battle was becoming just as important, some times more so, than the actual fighting.
In Odessa, a group of citizens launched their own investigation, which established the truth. Not that it made a difference – hardly anyone was interested. “Everyone lives in their own reality, everyone has their own truth,” said Tatyana Gerasimova, one of the organisers of the investigation. As Pomerantsev puts it: “Faced with wildly conflicting versions of reality, people selected the one that suited them.”
Part memoir, part investigation, part cry for help, This Is Not Propaganda tours the world and delves into archives, telling the stories of the new information wars, interwoven with passages about Pomerantsev’s parents’ lives. Igor and Lina were Soviet dissidents, harassed by the KGB and eventually deported, for “the simple right to read, to write, to listen to what they chose and to say what they wanted”.
Digging Deeper…
This and all the books we Spotlight are available at fine, independent booksellers across the country, in person or online. Let us take this opportunity to recommend one of Sellwood’s favorites, Wallace Books. Say hi to Julie for us!
And let us recommend another deep dive into propaganda… an extensive article we wrote for our Dec 2016 newsletter, “The News That Makes Us ALL Furious… PROPAGANDA!” in which we tackle the issue from every viewpoint we could imagine.
