YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Pomerantsev

lines on the record: 37
first: 2024-03-11
most recent: 2024-03-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thinking about what's going to help us constrain a regime like Russia's? What is the role of information in that? Does it have a role? And if it does, how do we be effective?”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the past, and so on and so forth, that would encourage, discourage them to fight and encourage them to defect and generally ruin the Russian military effort. I think that's something that should be being done, whether it's the Ukrainians who do that, whether we help them, whatever, that is something that should be being done. So that kind of, yeah, I think we do have to think much, much more in a much more kind of effects-driven way about what we're trying to achieve. Delma was not a romantic. He basically thought that simply fighting for or hoping for a democratic uprising was just naive and that what you had to do was really think about how you engage the audiences that matter. I mean, first off, that is definitely soldiers, but the other ones might be bureaucrats in the Russian system. How do you start sort of engaging with them? And what are their interests? And it means stepping back from preaching. It means stepping back from saying here is the good that you should be striving for.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, let's be really concrete. Russian army right now. The Ukrainians try to reach them. They do all sorts of clever things like doing ads on sort of porn sites and bootleg video sites. And this is stuff I know about because these sort of activists who do it trying to get Russian soldiers to defect, going where the audience is, tapping into the desires of the soldiers, not sort of lecturing them about your bad, but saying if you want to escape this hell, this is what you do. That makes a lot of sense. I would like to see, I think, a radio station being blared out at Russian soldiers all across the Eastern Front, maybe all the way down to Syria, which gave them all the sordid details of how their bosses are corrupt, of how they're not being fed properly, about how they're not, how the weapons they're getting are going to be Chinese made increasingly and are going to have an accuracy, which is much less than the Western-made ones, or the ones with Western technology they've been receiving.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think if we want to compete in a 21st century, which is going to be a complete knife fight, Gen Z referred to as great power competition, we will have to learn, relearn the craft of what was once known as political warfare. I don't know whether that's the term we want to use now, but we're going to have to sort of admit that that's what's happening and compete. And we have in the past. The idea that we've never done this is not true, but it means a policy decision that this is what's happening. Now, I don't think that means using deception, disinformation. There's military moments when you use deception. Deception is as old as the Trojan horse. That's fine. If you're preparing an Allied invasion, but it does mean sort of thinking about what are the audiences that we reach, how do we reach those audiences? If those audiences are inside Russia,”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love pro democracy media. This is a much harder edge the Delma was doing. The question is, do we start developing this harder edge? I think it's a discussion we need to have.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said, look, Delma's first. So, the lessons are both good and bad. I am in no way encouraging people to cut and paste Delma at all. There's many negative lessons in the book. And negative lessons that he talks about himself. And you'd have to read the book to find out the bad things they came out of his work. But he was very self-critical. There's several things. Firstly, we have to recognize that, I mean, I am definitely of the opinion that we are in an era where everything has been weaponized, as you have so rightly pointed out, and we might not like it, but Russia and other states are in a form of war with us. In Ukraine, there's a direct war, but also we might not want to think about it too much, but they definitely think that they're in some sort of very active struggle with us. So we have to think about what is the role of information. Now, I love the VBC.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he is popular. I mean, we have lots of sort of like feedback from people inside Germany saying the station is super popular. And he's popular because he says the unstable. I mean, he breaks through what we might call in academia the spiral of silence. I mean, he breaks in taboo of suddenly, oh my God, you could say this about the Nazis. You could say, you know, that he had this incredible value at this moment when people were just where the Nazis were still super popular and you really can say a word in defiance. But he sort of loses his novelty value. And yes, he's the most fun and colorful, you know, almost satirical, though not quite of Delma's creations. But just to be clear, he's not then the most sort of significant one.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What he was though, and it was actually the other stations which were much more like regular radio stations transmitted live with a band, with entertainment, much more mainstream, with news, with speeches by Nazi officials, and then this incredible news from the front, much more mainstream. Those were actually the huge successes which were being broadcast on medium wave and where the audiences were very much in on the game. The chef was the first one. I think what Deshev did, though, you've got to remember, it's 1941 when he starts transmitting before the debacle of the invasion of the Soviet Union. So peak popularity.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of the nut jobs, shall we say? I think that's a technical term through doing the sort of content, you're actually getting everybody else who's just a bit conformist and scared to start fearing the Nazis less because you're like, oh my God, there's all these divisions among them. So that was the end. But just to be clear, De Chef, he is the most, to the extent that Delmar is known, he's best known for Desheff. There's been a couple of documentaries about that in sort of the 90s. I think there's one in 2000s. Seems to be one documentary per decade on Delma. And everyone always focuses on Deshf. Deshev was his first experiment. It's got loads of porn, which got Delva into trouble with some members of Churchill's government who were shocked by the idea the bridge would produce these RG scenes and the RG scenes were all about sort of corruption among Nazi elites. And sort of hilarious. And even though De Chefrey remembered, he's not the one who got the biggest audiences. He got a lot of attention by...”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wasn't just going for the audience of hardcore nationalists. The idea was you'd listen to this hardcore nationalist. Talking to his compatriots, and you get a sense of oh, everything in the system isn't as strong as we think. So it was meant to actually like legitimize the desires to defect, disobey, not play an active part in whatever Nazi rallies that other people had. Now there's an interesting detail about promotion. Progotion was really trying to motivate pieces of the army that were agreed with his rather gruesome worldview. But people who followed him online and listened in weren't necessarily like that. So the people who listened to Pragoshin were often ordinary people, people who didn't want to go and serve, but who were just intrigued by these sort of fights within the system and felt, well, maybe the system will crack and so on. So it's not just exhorting”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eavesdrop on what does the army really think of Hitler? You're not meant to go and join Deschaf. You're not meant to go and follow him. You're meant to be like, it's a legitimization exercise to listen to all this criticism from a position which is psychologically safer. That's slightly different to what was going on in Russia. What's very interesting, though?”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is totally, yeah, that's a very, very good parallel, but with a big caveat or the big twist. So without a doubt, that's exactly it. Because they're these ultra-nationalists characters, they're chef Delman's character, Progoshin now, Gerkin, they feel legitimized or that you could not deliver a critique that liberals kind of wouldn't be listened to. The difference is that both Progotian and Strelkiv and Strelkov were trying to start a political movement. One was trying to lead some sort of coup within the system, the other one was trying to develop his own whatever Strolkov was trying to develop. So they were actually doing this to motivate people to join them in some sort of struggle. Delma isn't doing that. Delmer is creating this character, it's almost like a cabaret character, essentially, who through who you can”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredible detail about diseases, about lice, about dysentery, about the feeling of your fingers freezing off. So he's sort of saying in this world where you can't trust anyone or the lesson that I draw, this world that you can't trust anyone. The way to back to reality is by really getting close to the human experience. And that's how you develop a relationship. And you could just hear, I could just imagine people listening to it and go, yes, that's what it's like. This guy's actually speaking to what it's like.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going a step deeper in the sense that by talking about people's deepest, deepest experiences, he makes a connection to the audience. So some of the really powerful things that he does in the programs is these sort of really incredible solinoquies about the experience of, for example, a laborer that he's been given, I think, really strong amphetamines by the Nazis to keep on working at a factory. And he talks about the experience of a worker just being stuffed full of the amphetamines and constantly going into work and getting depressed and getting suicidal in the end. He commits suicide or something. It's an incredible story. He talks in this sort of incredible detail about the experience of the soldiers of the front while the Nazis are obviously glamorizing it. And with this like...”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But listen, the last years were doing this all the time. So the Nazis were constantly saying they were very aware of the risks of the BBC. They were constantly calling the BBC fake news. They were constantly saying, you know, those guys over there, they're lying to you. Here is the truth. I mean, there's a very famous Hannah Arendt passage, which I don't think I have in the book, but Origins of totalitarianism, where she talks about how because people were so cynical and so confused due to all the changes of early 20th century Germany, all you had to tell them was that you had a truth that was different to, she doesn't use the word mainstream media, but essentially mainstream media. So people are so discombobulated, the Nazis around and go, aha, we have a secret truth. Everything the mainstream says is a lie, we know the truth. So that was classic Nazi Nazi tactics, you know, come here, we're going to tell you the things that nobody else tells you. That was very classic. So that's, I think what Delmer is doing is...”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His first show, the chef was blowed very quickly, which is something that we know very like he'd set up a fake account and it'll get discovered at one point. So Delma kind of discovered that really what matters is not that, but that to win people over, you have to engage with their psychology and their lives. And it's really a race to understand who understands audiences best. So I don't know. I found him very, very urgent and very, very contemporary. I mean, he's trying to reach people who are, like we see today, rejecting reality, who are seemingly under the sway of a personality cult of a leader, who seem to have stopped caring about the fact. And we face all sorts of sort of situations across the world, not just in Russia where we see those symptoms.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now then you put it very well. What's so interesting is how people have stayed the same. So in a sense it's so much easier to do what Delma did. The barriers of entry are so much easier in the sense that anybody can set up a Twitter account say that it's an angry German patriot and broadcast it out. And the consequence of that is if anything, people have become even more cynical and more skeptical and they don't become more gullible. So if anything, audiences have become even more skeptical and even more suspicious. And so this kind of what Delma discovered over the war that like just put him on a mask won't really help.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Details gathering effort. And because it was so good and so reliably good, people would believe it. So I don't know if the story of the submarine checks out, but it was sort of symbolic of the extent to which the audience is trusted a media that was being broadcast by the people trying to kill them. We talk about sort of like breaking through partisanship and echo chambers. I mean, you can.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Visceral and about themselves. So he had interviews with POWs, reports from partisan groups who tell, you know, French partisans who tell the British, you know, who officers were sleeping with, which prostitutes carried which diseases and calais and stuff like that. The scores of football matches between different military teams, like these tiny details of life, they were incepting letters between Nazi officials and their relatives across the world and opening them. They would tell them details about parties that are Nazi official and had clearly circumventing rations. And many, many other sources. Oh, microphones. They put microphones in the PAW camps where German soldiers were stationed so they could gleam the latest jokes and humors and rumors. Humors and rumors, jokes and rumors that soldiers were discussing. So it was this remarkable sort of intelligence gathering.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most amazing thing that Delma did, and I think this is a lesson that's universal across anybody who wants to reach audiences that don't a priori trust them, is the amount of research his team did about the details of the lives of the soldiers and the civilians they were trying to engage. So Delma had this really research machine. He was incredibly insistent on how the most important thing was actually getting this these facts. He also peddled disinformation about where the Allies were going to land in Normandy. I don't want to make him virtuous or anything. He was fighting a war. But the essence, the reason that people believed you in the first place was the amount of research you did about your audience's lives. You never spoke down to them. You never lectured them. You never preached to them. You told them stories that were”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you've got a child born, and we'd like to congratulate you on the birth of your new child. And he hadn't been home for two years, and he was so upset that he surfaced the boat, which shows, by the way, the extent to which people trusted the information on these radio stations. Because it has to be said.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the third form of reaction is kind of these wonderful anecdotes that you get from the memoirs and sometimes from more reliable sources like the archives of people kind of surrendering due to what they'd heard on the radio. So there's this wonderful story, which I haven't been able to prove, but it is related by the OSS, which is the American sort of precursor to the CIA that was in touch with the British operation. And like the basically the submarine commander, who the British knew had a submarine off the coast of Britain. And they did a radio show to sort of just get to this guy. It wasn't a show. It was just like they had basically like a lot of the programs were music programs. So they had the host of the music program, the wonderful Agnes Burnell, say, oh, this song, especially for Captain Whatever, Wolfgang Ischenger, let's say. And we've just found out that you're...”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is they would do surveys, so sort of interviews with POWs, so German soldiers. And towards the end of the war, some like 40% said they tune into this stuff. And then there was lots of what we'd call qualitative reactions. Like, did you trust it? And the soldier said that they trusted it. They were amazed by the detail in it. But it gave them information that Nazi radio didn't give them. And we'll come back to that in a moment. And also that they really were thankful for the cover, the fact that there was cover given to them, that they could listen to it in this safe way. Then another form of feedback is reactions of the Nazis. So, you know, we have lots of reactions from Nazi officials trying to debunk these stations on air in media, telling people not to listen to them. We now have the private communications of...”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other effects like bombing in the case of a war or economic crisis and then try to separate that out. And it's really hard. Even in today's environment where you start with knowing what you're doing. So it's not an unfair question. It is just a really hard one. But this is what they did, what we know is what they did to measure it. Delmer himself always said, look, I'm contributing to the overall subversion of morale and don't judge me on these big effects. So he was evasive, which is a sensible thing to be. He always said military and economic policy comes first, information comes last. Again, I think that's pretty true today as well. You know, if you don't win on the battlefield, if you don't have the right sanctions policies, none of it's going to work. So we've got to have information in the right place. So the way they measured it, they try to measure engagement. So how many people listen to it? And the way they do that was, I mean, pretty primitive, but it's something.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not an unfair question at all. It is completely the right question. And the question they were asking themselves, and the question we ask ourselves all the time about any type of propaganda, media, election campaign, communication campaign. And the truthful and evasive answer about all of this is there are actually so many inputs into any person's environment that separating the communications worth is very, very, very hard. It's got a little bit easier today when we can sort of trace things online and we can be super targeted in our campaigns and you can almost sort of say, you know, we spent this much money, did this many ads in this area and the vote changed by this much, and you're getting closer to an answer. But to do it for real, academically, you'd have to do something we call a control group. You'd have to have a group where this didn't happen, have one where it did happen, filter out all the.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they have, I mean, they have policy papers. They have, like, we are trying to do this. And they constantly have to sort of write notes to their superiors, very, very terse, very, very detailed. So, no, no, no. They do explain what they're doing. Well, they never step back and do a big sort of big psychological theory of what propaganda is. They have theories of change. I mean, their notes are quite well written, by the way, much better written than we do these days, maybe. No, no, they're very precise. We are doing this to achieve this with this method. So they're precise, but they never kind of step back and go, and this is what this says about human psychology and what is propaganda. And they never do that big theory piece. And I kind of fill in some of that, Steve Frank. No, they do, they write terse and very, actually, actually some, sometimes they are a lesson in how you do a theory of change. This is what we're trying to do. This is how we achieve it. And this is what it's going to do is they're actually very good at that.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, amazing, amazing academics and scholars. And I was just like, amazed at the journey that they were on, even though they hardly stopped to overanalyze it, they were going at such a breathtaking pace because they're in the middle of a war. They were shooting off notes all the time, but no one sat down in a big sort of like, this is our psychological theory, you know, and they didn't have time. So we have lots and lots of their kind of...”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These complicated roles when they're listening to things and allowing themselves to say yes to something when they wouldn't when it's the BBC beaming into the room. So that made me go, okay, this is absolutely fascinating. As somebody like me who sort of fascinated by really the games people play around communication, how communication is never just a straight line where you say something and people react, there's always this huge audience piece to it as well. I thought that was fascinating. And the more I got into his memoirs, the more I started to read the actual transcripts of the radio shows because we have the transcripts, which is delicious. A lot of the transcripts. We don't have many of the recordings, but we have a lot of the transcripts. I was just amazed at the level of sophistication. And you start to read the people who are working on this. Many of them had a background in the creative arts, great writers, people from the Bauhaus, the great German modernist movement.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And secondly, and it gets very, very, I think, really quite intricate psychologically, you have psychological cover. What Delmar and his team wrote about was how people, ordinary people, not brave dissidents, not brave opposition figures, but ordinary people, the massive Germans were quite conformist, and they needed to feel that they were still part of a needed feeling of a group, still part of a common identity, still part of what Russians are called maybe a Bush and Swar, a majority, as they got to express their resentment. Even though they knew it was the British, I mean, so it was very, very interesting, the level of intricacy that Delmer thought people played sort of with their own minds, you know, which, I mean, like in communications theory, this is very sophisticated that people are actually playing.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The audience was meant to understand that this was the British cosplaying Nazis, and the audience understood that the British knew they knew. And what he described himself as doing and his colleagues described this in a lot of detail was creating a safe space where Germans could express their resentments of Nazi officialdom. A safe space technically because listening to the BBC was punishable by hanging. So if your boss or the Gestapo or an officer walked in on you listening to this sort of often very anti-Nazi content, you could go, but look, sir, I thought this was a genuine Nazi station because he'd play like Goebbels speeches in between and he'd have the Nazi kind of theme tune. That in between would give this very, very clearly subversive content, but always as if it was a genuine German station. So you had physical cover.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Based out of Woben Abbey. And I looked first at the people who was working with Ian Fleming, Muriel Spark, the novelist, first professor of psychiatry at Cambridge, the stars of the German tabaret scene who were cosplaying Nazis, so Jewish cabaret artists cosplaying Nazis. I was like, okay, something interesting here, almost made Brooks territory, you know. But then the moment when I went, wow, was when it transpired that from 1943, as Delma's work was that it”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has many of the horrid attitudes of the Nazis, but deeply hates Nazi officials. And while he likes Hitler, doesn't like Goering and Himmler and all these guys, and really reveals in really quite sordid detail the corruption and sexual perversions of Nazi officials. So Delva starts off with doing that. And when I read about that, I was like, well, that's interesting. Interesting bit of historical curiosity, but I wasn't sure I wanted to write a book about it. But then I got deeper into the material. And there was kind of a moment when I was like, oh, this is more interesting than when I thought at the start. When I looked at as Delma developed his work in 43, as his empire of tricks grew, as he was running actually at one point, dozens of radio stations in a kind of like alternative to the BBC, a sort of shadow version of the BBC.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he's called upon as somebody who can understand the Germans in a way that your regular British propagandist couldn't and the way the BBC couldn't. Do something devious and subversive. And essentially, he starts by kind of replicating what the Germans are doing, sort of answering. He starts creating stations that pretend to be German. There's one very famous one called Deschef, who's this angry, furious. Swearing German officer who sort of like”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was bullied for being too German, so he had this fascinating bicultural identity. He was a superstar journalist. His talent was really to sort of like impersonate people and use that as a journalistic technique. I mean, he's sort of a mix of Tinton and Borat was his journalistic technique. He was like the star reporter for the Daily Express. And he would sort of pretend to be Ernst Rome, the head of the stormtroopers. pretend to be his adjutant and get to report on the rise of the Nazis. And he got so close to the Nazis that they allowed him to accompany Hitler on Hitler's flights around Germany during the 28 election. So he was this very famous journalist with this genius of being able to immerse himself into the world of his subjects and his audiences.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Statecraft. So the Nazis were creating stations, pretended to be British stations. So they had a station called Workers Challenge, which pretended to be Cockneys, saying, let's bring down Churchill and his Jewish backers. And they had a Scottish station, which was full of Scottish people who were saying, let's leave, let's fight for Caledonian independence and leave this fetid union and make peace with Hitler. And they were all meant to be sort of covert stations. They were meant to be stations that British people listened to and believed were British. So Delmar was an extraordinary guy who was called upon to do the British version essentially as a response. He was remarkable. He'd grown up in Germany, was born in Germany, grew up there to Australian parents, essentially. His dad was a literature professor at Berlin University. So he grew up bicultural, when he'd lived in Germany as a kid. He'd been bullied for being to English when he came to England.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Parallels and perspectives relating to Putin's war, information war around Ukraine. But let's start with World War II. And particularly this larger than life, I think 17 stones, so quite literally, figure of Seft and Delma. So tell us about him and why you decided that he deserved to have a book about him. So Sefton Delmer was, deserves many books, and I hope I am the first of many. The reason I decided to write about him was several moments of kind of wow, kind of wow moments that as I discovered more about him, I was like, oh, this is actually something beyond the ordinary, extraordinary. And look, everybody in the Second World War was creating covert radio stations to influence the other side. It was fairly standard propaganda.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm delighted that our guest today is Peter Pomarantsev. He's a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where he studies contemporary propaganda and how to defeat it, author of some splendid books, including Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible, about the bizarre 1990s Russia. And this is not propaganda, and also co-director of the Reckoning Project, an NGO documentary war crimes during Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And today we're going to look at his most recent book, discussing the themes in how to win an information war, the propagandist who outwitted Hitler. So welcome, Peter. Thank you very much for having me. A pleasure. So the actual story of this propagandist, Sefton Delma, that you outline in the book. And you also interweave it with discussions about the contemporary world.”
2024-03-11 · Intelligence Squared · The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, with Peter Pomerantsev · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT