Truth, lies and manipulation

[I was intending to write this post two weeks ago, but my father's death intervened.]

Peter Pomerantsev's latest book, This Is Not Propaganda, should be compulsory reading for anyone wondering how society got itself into the mess it's in. The author, son of Soviet dissidents who were expelled from the USSR in the 1980s, examines how the nascent social media first armed citizens, and then authoritarian rulers - with a set of tools for effecting change.

Change of a good sort, change of a bad sort. Since the end of 2012 (coincidentally the end of the Mayan Long Cycle Calendar, when the world was going to end, remember), things in the West have not been going well. Changes of a bad sort have been encroaching our daily lives, in Poland, in the UK, in the US. A bad moon rising.


Whilst I have been banging on for the last five years on this blog and on Twitter (and to a lesser extent on Facebook) about Russian troll armies destabilising the West, Pomerantsev paints a broader picture. Yes, Russia is highly skilled at using the West's social media to exacerbate social fractures, indeed it is part of its military doctrine. But it's not only Russia. Pomerantsev visits the Philippines, to show how President Duterte skilfully cranked up his brutal war on drug dealers online. The author visits Mexico where drug cartels use social media to intimidate and silence their foes. He considers the Arab Spring and how social media brought nations out onto the streets to oust their rulers - and failed to secure reforming replacements. He looks at the Balkans - in particular Serbia - to see how inter-communal hatreds were stoked for nefarious political ends, and how social media was used to fight back. He looks at ISIS and talks to the Muslims working within their communities to deradicalise those at greatest risk of joining the Caliphate. Brexit Britain and Trump's America of course get a look-in.

The book offered me a new breadth of vision, extending my limited purview beyond Poland, the UK, the EU, USA and Russia. The common factor is the way that truth is distorted, fakery is peddled and lies blatantly told to the extent that the ordinary citizen-voter finds it hard to tell what's really going on.

The four 'D's of Russian dezinformatsya - deny, distract, distort and dismay - are stocks-in-trade of any ruler wishing to effectively beat up the opposition without having to resort to more direct means.

Pomerantsev visits the Donbas, crossing the lines to talk to both sides in the conflict. He makes very clear how the Russian playbook works - create polar opposites - patriots and traitors - get the other side to parrot the same terms, and within months people can take up arms against their neighbours.

The book is frightening. It shows how the liberal consensus built up since the fall of the Berlin Wall is unable to fight back against methods that are crude in their appeals to the primitive mind yet highly sophisticated in terms of the algorithms used to get the message where it works.

Pomerantsev offers no antidotes. Not everyone has a sufficiently critical mind to see through the distractions and distortions interspersed with downright lies. This is Putin's ultimate ambition - that the people of the West no longer know white from black, good from evil, barbarism from humanity.

We are at another tricky juncture in human history. May it go better for us this time - better than it did for my parents' generation.

This time last year:
First frost, 2018

This time four years ago:
Cameron, Paris, ISIS, PiS and Brexit

This time six years ago:

Work restarts on Jeziorki Ponds redevelopment

This time seven years ago:
Foggy days and Warsaw's airports

This time nine years ago:
Local elections - the lure of ultra-localism