Peter Pomerantsev
688 views Dec 18, 2023 - as of Sunday, February 18, 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QerxBOQvc4I&list=PLcYhoGnK9I9QETo0SwV3or9JdeY4nDJNl
thank you very much and I'm sorry I can't be with you myself
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today so um as as uh as as K said I mean I I um I worked in Russia in TV between 2000 and 2010 uh making entertainment shows reality shows I was I was very far away from politics in the news um i' gone just gone to film School beforehand and
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and um was releasing on my future in in very far away from politics making
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entertainment and then I sort of as I lived in Russia I began to realize I was living in a regime which I want on to call a Poston dictatorship that was really being um informed to a huge amount by by the rules of of reality shows and that was being done in a very conscious way by um Putin's main propagandist um a guy called Vladislav Surkov who was one of the heroes of of my first book um which was called "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible", which is a sort of play on something that Hannah Arendt once said about Nazi Germany and um I would uh you know today I think
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that the topic of my of my talk is what is the essence of this post modern authoritarian propaganda um and I want to tell you about my search for a response so I'm just finishing a book uh which is an attempt to tell the story of a counter propagandist who I think might give us really interesting ideas about how to respond to this um propaganda of triumphant sort of cynicism that I saw in Russia and has since then spread across the world we see elements of it in in Trump and Oran but let's just very just to make sure that we understand what we're what we're talking about um I think CER actually summed it up beautifully in his
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essay which I all encourage you to read on this topic uh but I I'll sum it up again so what was the essence of of COV cir's big idea and and the idea which which has sort of gone on to develop much more sort of um I think directly fascist forms but still sits at the bottom of of Russian propaganda and it's so popular um he took the ideas of postmodernism and and very consciously perverted them for his aims um you could argue that some of them were implicit in those ideas but but that's really not my business I'm I'm not a serious philosopher nor do I claim to be I've become a a student of of propaganda um and and someone who thinks about what to do about it but what sirop did he basically said um he took the sort of the sort of bad relativism as John rules called it that was implicit in maybe some vulgar versions of prop of postmodernism the idea that um you know there is no truth or truth
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is only a subset of of power um the idea that everything around us are simulacra um and he kind of weaponized it for his own his own uses um so what do we mean by that um he sort of spread an atmosphere of of deeply intense cynicism throughout Society his propaganda didn't claim that you know Russia was the carrier of some
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great rational historical ideology um he basically said that
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everybody everywhere lies that truth is unknowable he spread the sense of
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Doubt um to an extent where it tipped into
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paity um and where it tipped into a a sense that uh there was nothing you
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could do or ever change because you could never know the truth if truth is unknowable if all ideologies are just
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word games or language games and forms of manipulation there really is nothing to fight for let alone something
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isy or Freedom um he sort of was always trying
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to show that all institutions both in the west and in Russia are um are
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so whether it's parliaments or political parties or courts of law or elections
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his claim was always that in the west they're a sham they're all controlled by a deep State and they are as well in
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Russia but that's just what life is like you know um elections were openly rigged
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but as a way of saying look how easy it is to rig elections they are just a joke they're just a joke here and they're
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just a joke there everything that you fought for is worthless um
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um he did many other things he sort of uh sort of indulged in this idea that um
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Russia had uh many parties he created the parties himself he controlled the parties himself but then he told the
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whole country how he created and controlled them so that people would have the sense that we have different
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parties who debate each other in TV shows in Parliament but everybody knows
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that their control by the Kremlin and again his point was look democracy is just a piece of reality show theater
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it's fun but it's ultimately meaningless and it's the same here and over there in the west as well the Democracy that you
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fought for at the end of the Soviet Union is just a piece of theater and he played into the sort of
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deep deep cynicism that was already very present in Russian Society he sort of um
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had a deeply theatrical nature and and sort of uh basically almost
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promoted uh an idea that uh all social
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roles and political roles or sort of masks that you wear in in a masquerade
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you know you could be a communist in the morning and a fascist in the evening and a Democrat on Sunday and this is all a
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game that that we play in a world where there are no values anymore and there is nothing to fight for there's no truth no
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ideologies and really he wins who most cynical um now at the base you would
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understand the purpose of this this this ideology or pseudo ideology anti- ideology that he spread the purpose was
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to make people passive the purpose was to make people give up and at the end of the day as we see now I was already
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starting to be apparent when I left Russia in 2010 the ultimate aim was a sort of
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postmodern fascism where at the end of the day you have no agency you can only take power by being part of the collective you can only express your agency through a strong leader and so it was a postmodern return to you know a a version of the 1930s um all done with an ironic smile and without any Grand serious claims or too serious and ideology but essentially conspiratorial thinking replaced ideology so instead of a serious communist um ideology based around Marxist leninism um you basically had a conspiratorial world view which was really the end point of not trusting anything if you don't trust anything you don't emerge into Freedom you emerge into a world which is controlled by things you just can not quite see media study after media study has shown that people who don't trust media don't become free they just become conspiratorial cynics um and he pushed that way so conspiracy replaced ideology
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conspiratorial worldview replaced ideology um I'll give you the classic example when there was a protest move in 2012 in Russia the Kremlin spread the story that not only were the protesters not only were the protesters sort of arms of the CIA that sort of of classic but actually that the protesters were all arms of the Kremlin and this was a piece of theater designed by the Kremlin to weed out potential enemies and then arrest them so everything conspiracy even the person who you think is the opposition to the kremin naly is part of us part of the conspiracy there is nothing you should ever do be passive and obey the leader and instead of okayer and ideology there was just raw
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emotional identity I mean the Kremlin youth movement which they openly modeled
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on the Hitler ugan um was called nashy us I mean it was sort of
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politics that was basically reduced to its
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Elemental uh pieces of US versus them and a kind of with did of course the
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legitimization of sadism which he developed very very strongly on
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television putting forward sort of a a whole band of prop kists who who spouted
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maybe nonsense but who legitimized a um a
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loathing and since then sort of genocidal rhetoric normalizing it so you
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know by stripping away the value of Truth by stripping
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away any hope for a future by stripping away values through a sort of perversion
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of postmodernist philosophy that says nothing is true and everything is possible he made in a way
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opened up the return to a version of totalitarian propaganda um he's sort
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of been pushed aside the last few years but this is the world he helped create and you we see versions of this
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everywhere in the world Donald Trump speech will start with undermining the
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idea of Truth or laughing at the idea of Truth or subverting uh the possibility of Truth
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and ends with you know words that are almost sort of a comic book version of
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of Freud and Leon's ideas of identification with the leader like you know I am your revenge against the
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elites and when they attack me they attack you classic Trump phrases which who were saying just
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yesterday um so that's kind of the world that Circle
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created um you know the Russians tend to be ahead of the trend on a lot of propaganda moments they were in the
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1920s they are again now we see versions of this mushrooming throughout the world
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but I think it's it's you know the aim I think really apparent now has been to or the end the effects has been to
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return all the things that we thought were taboo through a kind of backd door of postmodernism um or as my or as the
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Yale Professor um Tim Snider once Wily put posttruth as just pre
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fascism so I've been spending the last um really since I wrote the book in
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201516 I wrote in 1314 came out in 1516 so the last s of eight years thinking about what do we do about it and after
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having worked in entertainment I realized that I actually want to do
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something more serious and I now work at universities I was first the London School of economics now John Hopkins
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University where I play with ways through various research projects and
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collaboration with various media and noos trying to work out what to do about it and pretty quickly we realize that if
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you want to reach the audiences who have come under the sway of this sort of propaganda whether in
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dictatorships or whether in um
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democracies a lot of things that we thought romantically would work won't work so
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most obviously factchecking that was the first big movement hold on let's if we communicate the truth quickly and
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effectively to these audiences then we can we can you know we can return a
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sense of reality to the discourse and you know save um you know the habam
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masian public sphere um pretty soon we all realize that this didn't really work um I think
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now is common knowledge but in the first years of the struggle against this after
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2016 um there was a lot of hope these factchecking organizations sprouted everywhere and we found very quickly
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that people reject the facts when they don't shoot suit their political identities that actually I'd go deeper
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people enjoy rejecting the facts facts remind people of their limitations they remind
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people of of their mortality more than anything else death is the biggest back a leader who was promising a revolt
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against reality is deeply attracted so the idea that you could
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just counter this just with facts didn't really work and once we we realize that we we
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sort of started on a long journey of really trying to understand the
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motivation of these audiences I very much believe that to fight propaganda you have to understand people and why
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they're attracted to the propaganda and we're in a sort of race with the propagandists as to who can reach people
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better and engage them better the propagandists offer you know the false
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community of the conspiratorial crowd who are us budging together against some
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sort of mysterious them so it gives a sense of community they give a sense of
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superiority and COV of cynical superiority you felt clever than anybody else you'd seen
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through the delusions of democracy and and
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Truth they um legitimize our most uh um
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taboo feelings um including feelings of sadism um they generate those feelings
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very often they generate humiliation especially in dictatorships like Russia and then they become the way through
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which you can compensate by humiliating others now when we're in a world like
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that the idea that you could counter that with a bit of factchecking doesn't seem very
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valid so we started to sort of play around with you know we would take we try to understand why people into
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conspiracy theories for example and we found people who were um suggestible to
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conspiratorial thinking were often suffering from a deep lack of agency
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they felt they had been control over their life and the conspiratorial propaganda helped explain that and
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helped almost become a sort of uh a remedy for that a pseudo remedy but a
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remedy for that um and so the answer really wasn't you know debating the conspiracy theories or trying to prove a
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conspiracy theory was wrong but actually thinking about how do you create
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media and other forms of communication how do you create social media that Empower people that give people a sense
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of agency we've looked at things like engagement journalism where people get the chance to set the
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agenda um and to select which stories are covered by journalists the journalists are helping them and making
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them feel more powerful now those are all baby steps um
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but during my sort of Journey Through thinking about how you fight
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conspiratorial propaganda I came across a person that I wanted to tell tell you
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about today um when this happened kind of during Co when I'm sure you remember we
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couldn't travel very much much of my work has got to do with traveling around the world and looking at you know the
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problems with propaganda in the Philippines and Mexico and many other places so I had to turn inwards during
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Co and I started doing more historical reading and I came across a story of all
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things the second world war which is not something that I've ever focused on
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and I became very intrigued by a
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British plan or a British project to undermine
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Nazi propaganda in the second world war and it's a it's a story that had been
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told a little bit in the 1960s when the people who led this project uh wrote their Memoirs but then
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it faded from view for many reason reasons and what happened in the 1990s
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and 2000s is that all the classified documents that the British had about
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this operation became Declassified and there was this wonderful archist that I've been working
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with called Lee Richards who had started to gather these very very disperate documents all secret British strategy
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from World War II from their propaganda department and and put together a
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picture of what happened and he was incredibly well I could have never have done this book which will book will be
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out next year without this arist and and I love all archists and all arists are
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are are the real the real Fighters against the perversions of postmodernism
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because they really collect truth and knowledge and and show that it's that it's um that it's so powerful so I'm not
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look I'm not a historian I'm not an expert on World War II um but I wrote this book anyway
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because as I read about this operation and as I read about the man who led it I
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felt for the first time I actually felt there was something we could
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try against this post modern fascist propaganda
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spread by COV and which emanates across the
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world now it's worth telling the story of the
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man who led this operation his name was Seth
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Telma and he had a very interesting biography which I think
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um really without which you can't understand the rest of his work so I'm going to start by telling you about him
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as a person and then what he did in World War II and then what we can learn about
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it hopefully I'll leave some time for questions so Seth and
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Delma his childhood is really the most important part of his
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story he was born in Germany his father was an Australian
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academic teaching at Berlin University and sethan Delma was born in
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Germany and he was born in 1904 so at the age of 10 he is a little
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British boy at a gymnasium in Berlin at the start of the first world
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war and almost overnight the attitudes
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towards him Chang before that he'd been kind of celebrated as this
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fascinating child in charlottenburg this sort of interesting family of academics
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who all spoke perfect German his father insisted he spoke German at home not just at school so the German would be
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perfect um this fascinating British family loved by the neighbors his father
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a professor and you know you're all aware of the German educational cast system and how important it is to be a
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professor suddenly he's the enemy suddenly everybody turns on him and says
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D you know who are you you English boy in our midst all around him he can see
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the propanda building people sort of pushing away their humanity and embracing this
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uh feverish Mass identity and mass
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hatred of course this is a time when you know German newspapers and films and
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other new technologies are uniting uh Germany into a sort of a a
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propaganda community in many ways for the first time and Delma describes this
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very powerfully but what is so remarkable in his Memoirs of his early
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childhood is how he a British boy in a German School who's bullied for being
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British finds himself despite
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himself caught up in the German propaganda and there's these amazing
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scenes where he describes how he's in school and there's almost like a second
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hymn that starts to repeat the German songs the German war songs and he's
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marching along with the other kids and enjoying it he comes
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home and all the city is celebrating victories over the British victories against his country and he's about to
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hang a flag out of his apartment to celebrate as well and his mother sort of
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grabs him and pulls him back and he goes oh my God what am I doing how can I a little British
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boy suddenly be caught up in a propaganda where I am the
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enemy and this becomes an almost light Motif throughout all his work the
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honesty to admit how each of us is susceptible to
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propaganda that all of us yearn for a remedy from
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loneliness how the feelings that propaganda unlocks are so so
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powerful that they carry you away but even in this early childhood in
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Berlin he sees the Germans around him are playing a double game yes
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they perform and when they perform it they they're genuine in their performance of the propaganda all around
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them they repeat the slogans they're genuinely enthusiastic about the war but
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then there's another them they have another personality which they can switch into and when he talks about the
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director of a school who every morning is giving these sort of furite speeches
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about the evil British and how the whole world has forced Germany into this war
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in the morning on stage in school in the houra in the afternoon he meets with
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with um sethan his mother and apologizes about the war and how embarrassed he is
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and how hard it must be for a British family trapped in this ridiculous War so he begins to realize hold on people have
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different cell they can be both entranced or maybe they're acting in TR
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and they can be completely rational and this idea that there's
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multiple cells remains throughout is what
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now afterwards he goes back to Britain in 1917 where very well uh where he is
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um after having been a British boy in Berlin he's accused of being a German boy as soon as he gets back to London
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he's bullied for having a German accent because he spoke English with the German accent he's bullied for speaking Latin
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in a slightly in the way it's taught in German schools not in the way it was taught in English schools for wearing
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the wrong socks he's used to wearing these little short Berlin sailor socks and in England people wear socks up to
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their knees so you know he really starts to understand when he returns to Britain that even his britishness which he
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thought so quar to his identity is also a piece of theater that he will learn to
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play but it's not quite him now setan Delma went on to finish
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school in England he went to Oxford and then he went back to Germany interestingly despite his traumatic
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childhood he goes back to Berlin and becomes and right here I have to do a pause because I can see my my computer
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is about to die and he goes back to Berlin in the 1930s and he becomes probably the most famous British
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journalist in uh in
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Germany um covering viar Berlin covering
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all the political changes always com back
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to the Cabaret nature of social identity he's very good in his early journalism
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and describing of course the Cabaret is booming in B Berlin at the time and he
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very much describes the political games in Germany uh all the different social
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roles and artistic roles that are being experimented with as as a vast sort of
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Cabaret he speaks fluent German he probably understands German Society
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much better than any other British journalist and maybe that is the reason
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why he spots very early the development and the rise of
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the Nazis and already in the 20s he befriends the Nazi leadership
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when they're still just a you know fairly mediumsized political party he befriends the leadership in
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gratiate himself with them and basically very early on says this is going to be the future of Germany these guys are
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going to go right to the top but it's
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fascinating seeing how he described the Nazis given how he would then think
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about ways to subvert their propaganda now he gets very close to them he hosts parties for them in the
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evening where GBL and and hangle are not GBL guring and hangle are are frequent
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guests um they drink all night at his apartment in Berlin um he's not close to
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Gobles or Hitler he's closer to to to other people in the movements very close to an
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r and he gets to know them very very deeply and it's fascinating how he
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describes them he essentially describes them as a form of Cabaret he
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basically and he often Compares them to a formal cab he basically describes them
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as a a grotesque theater act which is able to express
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Germans deepest darkest desires to legitimize them to create the sense of
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community at the same time to obliterate any idea that facts even
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matter but here's the trick that he thinks the Nazis pull off rather fall into
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themselves they're a cabaret that wants everyone to think that they are not an
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act that they are a real new identity he wants PE they want people to identify
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themselves with Hitler with being an assess man with being an Aon this is an
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act that you Mentor at the end of the day fall into and become and when he talks about Hitler's
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speeches he describes it very much in this way that you know we both we have a leadership and followers who have got
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caught up inside and act that they've now started to almost fully
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inhabit however throughout the 1930s and the rise of the Nazis he's always writing how there is still a crap there
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at some level people know that they're acting at some level H Hitler is always
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acting but also at some level all the people who follow him are also acting
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yeah they may have genuine what seems like genuine enthusiasm but at some level they're
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aware of what they're doing there's actually a very famous Theodor Dono essay which argues something very simple
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that below the sort of theater of hypnotization there's always a conscious
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actor playing a so let's just go back to my original thesis about SE and Delma and sov at the
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moment they sound very similar you know both of them are sort of saying that all
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life is a masquerade that all life is theater both of them have this deeply theatrical view of
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society but as we move into I mean in that sense both of them are postm yeah both of them are deeply
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aware of of the performativity of um social
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roles but because they're so close because they're so similar is why I think
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delmare is actually where we have to go when we think about how we fight this
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sort of propaganda it's only somebody from the same almost from the same
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space uh that can actually work against this this the sort
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of the postmodern propagandist now second world war starts
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um there's a very dramatic story which I tell in my book about dma's attempts to join the British propaganda
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establishment he's actually not trusted for a long time because he was so close to the Nazis there are many people who
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think that he was actually sympathetic he wasn't at all um he was actually writing really good reports to the
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British Embassy and to his editors in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s
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saying these guys will leave Europe Europe and World War you do not understand what these guys are so his
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closeness to them actually made him understand very early the seriousness of the threat they posed but he did spend a
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lot of late nights with them and to maybe somebody looking at him from the side he may well have seen
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sympathetic so um he wasn't trusted by the British establishment who thought
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he'd been so close but also the fact he'd been broughten born in Berlin the fact that he was had still spoke
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English with a slight German accent until until the mid 1930s all made him
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see feel very very sus but finally after many checks after many
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changes in the structure of British propaganda he is welcomed into what is
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known as the political Warfare executive the political Warfare executive
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is the department set up in the war to manage all British
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propaganda and media so the political Warfare executive controls or control
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oversees the BBC overseas leaflets overseas partisan
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radios and dma's place in this world would be to take over all cob propaganda
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aimed at Germany and I'm going to talk about
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three of the projects He created and why I think there so interesting
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today now Delma thought that when you were looking at audiences in Germany who
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a little bit like audiences in Russia today or the 40% of Americans who are or
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who say they believe the previous US elections were
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rigged follows of trump and so on that's simply preaching at them about the
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virtues of democracy and the value of Truth was absolutely
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pointless they're in a space where facts didn't matter anymore they
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were in a space where they had submitted themselves
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to a leader and giving up their personal agency to a leader they're in a space
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where truth and facts were irrelevant all that man mat was being part of a
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community a political identity and the emotional satisfaction
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that you gain from it so the idea that you could tell them the truth and that would work the idea that you could read
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them lectures about the beauty of democracy and freedom was
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absurd what he said was we need some way to really tap into what these people
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care about and to sort of cleave them psychologically away from the political
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identity and the propaganda that they have put on like a a piece of
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clothing that is now stuff on the first project that he created it
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is the most famous One probably actually the least important one but it's still very very iconic and I was going to play
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you some extracts because Delma basically by the end of the war ran between 12 and 20 Cobert radio
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stations and very very little audio remains um what we do have is the
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transcripts of the radio shows that I've been going through over the last two three four
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years but there are some audio clips but we weren't sure about who owns the rights to the audio clip so we weren't
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sure whether we should play them I need to sort out whether I am allowed to play them in public because they belong to uh
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various archives I'm I'm allowed to use them in my book we not sure whether I can use them in in in public
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events so the first show though that he made was
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um was a show that if you're were a German listening into it in the
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1930s and 1940s 1941 he started was meant to
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sound like soldiers talking to one another yeah it wasn't someone lecturing
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you like the German BBC was with lectures by Thomas man telling Germans
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how bad they were they sounded like intercepts like what we today would
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think of hats or leaks and it was sold just talking to one another led by a very angry very
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foulmouthed high
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ranking Prussian officer who was simply known as
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des and you as the listener and this was on short wave Were Meant
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to Were Meant to experience a sensation where you were like Eaves dropping into
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these conversations and the things that were said on this radio station were deeply
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pornographic full of a lot of swear words and entally
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expressed a a point of view that there
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was a whole cadra of German soldiers who were deeply
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patriotic who were in many ways deeply racist and unpleasant but
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who hated not all the Nazis but
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himler Geral and the kind of Nazi middle cardas and the shows were full of these
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incredible detail of Nazi
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corruption incredible detail of sex parties that the Nazis had
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and incredible detail about the sufferings of normal
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soldiers all based on remarkable research that Delma team was collecting
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the people he worked with were former uh Social Democrat
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politicians from Germany who had access to various continuing forms of research
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about what was happening in Germany they were um lots of German journalists who
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had fled to Britain who were using their various contacts to gather details about
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what was going on in the country and um a lot of people people from the Berlin
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Cabaret scene who were the ones performing these roles a lot of them were Jewish so you had kind of Jews
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playing nais on radios in order to subvert the Nazis now on the one hand the radio was
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doing something very new but it was also seemed to be doing something very Sim yeah it was taking
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the anger and the emotions and the desire for sadism
40:27
that the Nazis capitalized on and it was redirecting it against
40:35
Nazis but here's where it gets interesting that's a fairly classic and simple maneuver to do
40:42
it's what leftwing populists try to do in the west today when they say let's redirect the
40:50
anger that Trump puts onto migrants let's redirect that anger onto
40:58
capitalists the theory of of sort of leftwing populis but that's not what Delma was doing Del was doing something
41:05
much much more interesting you weren't meant to follow
41:11
the chef as a new leader the chef was the name of the radio you weren't meant to
41:17
identify with him yeah it wasn't just redirecting
41:24
anger so that you could follow another leader that's not what he was doing at
41:29
all the show Almost worked like a piece of tabar or actually the closest thing
41:35
it worked to was Brean theater delm when he talks about
41:41
this was to talk use the language often of Nazi propaganda in a way where it was
41:48
pushed in his words into the ridiculous now this was not satire this
41:54
was not a satire show people were me to think this was the real thing this was not exaggeration to the point of
42:01
absurdity Del was very skeptical about Saturn this was something much much more subtle this was ever so
42:09
slightly taking the form and content of Nazi propaganda and doing two
42:16
things ever so slightly exaggerating it so that you started to feel a sense of
42:22
alienation from
42:28
taking those emotions and in a sense withdrawing you from them you want to
42:33
identify yourself with these characters you're meant to gain distance from them you're meant to get a relief from the
42:42
need for identifying with the leader if the argument of a Putin or a
42:50
Hitler or a trump is that they are the channel through which you can
42:59
find relief for all your resentment and anger here was a character who talked
43:05
about this almost like in a good play in a drama played out all these
43:10
feelings gave a space for their expression but then almost drag themselves away from you leaving a sort
43:17
of space think about the leader the differ TW of cult leader and and a
43:22
therapist um the therapist is also helping you express these feelings but so you can be free of them while the
43:28
cult leader wants to understand all your angers and frustrations to manipulate
43:35
them in order to make them the source of relief so that was the first stage of
43:43
what Delma was trying to do he was working with the same
43:48
underlying resentments and angers and desire for sadism that the
43:53
Nazis were and that propagandists do today and
43:59
he almost like a a surgeon like creating a little space where you could have a
44:05
little bit of you outside of those feelings and could start to think critically of the Nazis just um quickly
44:13
I'm sorry I'm very sorry to intervene shortly Peter um I'm I'm worried about uh time because the the scheduled time
44:21
slot is over but it's getting ever more exciting so no would it maybe be possible to wrap
44:28
up in five minutes and then we meet for a sequel sometime of course I'm so sorry um but
44:35
we have a 90 minute block afterwards and have to start in time with that that's okay I'm so sorry I thought it was 3:30
44:41
to 4:30 I'm so sorry I I was actually just watching my clock and I was timing things perfectly okay I'm so sorry well
44:50
then that's fine I can get through the other things faster I was going slowly on purpose um so so that was the first
44:57
thing he did he created an emotional pause between you and the
45:03
leader and in so doing he was always making you aware of the theatrical
45:08
nature of the propaganda you were surrounded so still in a sense working very closely to the space where sov sov
45:17
is also trying to show that everything is theater but serov's aim on the aim of the post probably going to say
45:23
everything is a sham everything is theater therefore you can't change anything therefore you have to have all
45:28
your experiences through me well Delma is almost reversing that he's saying the
45:33
properness surround you our theater but you can start thinking and feeling
45:39
yourself now the shows that Delma made afterwards and I'll summarize them very briefly are all
45:45
ways to make the listener feel that they
45:50
have agency again he never lectures on Democracy but everything he does is
45:57
about motivating you often for the most simple things to start thinking for
46:04
yourself again and start thinking in terms of Truth and lies again often to do with things like how to defect from
46:11
the front or how to find ways to financially survive during the
46:17
bombardments uh not financially financially and and just survive during the bombardments of German cities he
46:24
starts to play into people's self-interest but in a way that frees
46:29
them from the Nazis and makes them independent again absolutely key to this and I'll
46:36
leave it on this thought is how you are meant to experience this
46:43
media now the way that COV or Trump creates media is whether it's on TV to
46:50
make you passive and in that passivity to experience to you know give over over
46:56
your agency to Putin or to Trump or on forms of social media where you're not
47:01
act you think you're engaging personally but actually just getting caught up in an online mob an online
47:08
crowd Delma was doing something very very clever in his later radio
47:14
show they pretended to be pseudo naazi radio shows that were
47:21
quietly giving subversive information that undermined the n but here's where
47:26
it gets interesting everybody who was listening to them knew this was the
47:32
British dress up as the Nazis and the British knew that everybody knew that
47:38
these were the British dressed up as the Nazis but and they wrote this in the strategy by playing this
47:44
masquerade they gave people a psychologically and a physically safe
47:49
way to listen to them but it's very important to think about the process somebody's going going
47:56
through when they tune into a radio in this way they're no longer a passive
48:02
receiver of information they're getting involved in an active game essentially
48:09
what Delmer is saying is that in order to be yourself again in order to be active again you have to put on a mask
48:16
in a role he's involving you in a theater where you take an active part in
48:24
creating your own Ro now to do that today online is a million times easier than it was with
48:31
radio but that I think is the essence when we think about how do
48:37
we fight the postmodernist propagandists it won't be with a direct
48:43
return to the BBC of the 1980s with a voice from on high dictating the trth to
48:50
you it's going to be by stimulating active citizens so the
48:57
action of democracy the behavior of democracy psychologically and physically and which is deeply connected
49:05
to a sense that you can
49:10
reinvent the social roles that you play around you and you I'll leave it at
49:17
that um and uh thank you very much for listening to me even over
49:24
time nearly in time thank you so much Peter for this inspiring talk and I really
49:30
really deeply regret that there's no time for questions because I would have many and I'm sure my mistake my mistake
49:38
sorry please oh so I'm sorry yeah um yeah but
49:45
it was great you joined us really and making us think um it's maybe nice to leave it here would have been so many
49:51
questions about is it memes what media would have to be needed um but thank you
49:57
thank you for not only talking about Russia today but giving the conference this deep historical grounding speak
50:04
soon and we see thank you thank you we'll see each other in 10 minutes for
50:10
the lecture of Nikita danan on
50:24
truth