"How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler" is a biography of a World War II propagandist who subverted the Nazi propaganda machine by identifying the Schweinhund within the party's ranks, spreading misinformation directly to the people inside the system, aiming to awaken them to their own self-interest. Peter Pomerantsev reveals in detail how the sausage is made and reflects it onto today's war in Ukraine with Putin's Russia. My takeaway was that the side that is only virtue and idealistic cannot hold its own when faced against the meaner drives of the human condition. A force promoting convenience, ease, and comfort creeps in passively, and a society that loses its free agency and shared reality without vigilance will suffocate, descending from the ordinary to pandemonium.

Here are some quotes from the book:

"The propagandists see this as a war in which information is a weapon, you use not to win an abstract argument, but to confuse, dismay, demoralize, and distract. It is a tool to tap into human fears, vulnerabilities and secret, often violent and cruel desires, and twist them to the benefit of the powerful forces they serve. Fact checking doesn't stand a chance."

"Delmer tells the story from the point of view of his childhood self, but he can sense the adult author implying a more mature question: Where does the private person end and the public role begin?"

"The real power of propaganda is not to convince or even confuse. It's to give you a sense of belonging."

"There were good will and good nature everywhere, and not the faintest trace of the bullying of the civic population by everything in uniform that I had become so familiar with and had grown sick of in Prussia. How good it is to be back in England. If ever I realize what liberty means, liberty of thought and liberty of conscience, it is now after having lived for nearly three years in an enemy country where there is neither."

"While my reports at the Express were read by about 12 million people before being used to light a fire, those I delivered to MI6 were distributed to several hundred persons, read by no one, and then incinerated as secret waste."

"Littman argued that optimistic notions about the democratic public sphere where citizens debate the facts and come to common policy decisions were impossible to fulfill. Instead, power had to be handed over to an enlightened elite to make decisions.

Truth was not a value in itself. It was a subset of power."

"The propaganda allowed you to both relinquish responsibility and enjoy dominance. This was part of the psychological deal the Kremlin offered people. You can identify yourself with a sense of supremacy, but you don't need to carry any moral burden."

"Even the name of Delmer's broadcaster, GS1, Gustav Siegfried Eins, was designed to make people wonder: what did it stand for? General Stab, One? Or maybe Geheim Sender, Secret Transmitter 1? In actuality, GS1 didn't stand for anything. It was just there to stimulate enquiry."

"Where the Nazis wanted to obliterate the difference between truth and lies, Delmer's careful approach to fibbing accepted the primacy of facts, respected reality, even as he twisted it. 'Never lie by accident, only deliberately' was the creed of his operation."

"It has spoken only in such a way that the idea of action is planted in the mind of the subject without letting him see that he is being influenced at all."

"For example, Delmer's programs tried the following: To make people take habit-forming sleeping drugs during air raids, it was described how the U-boat crews, who ought to know, took Von tablets before going to sleep. Von's were habit-forming. To induce panic buying of clothes, GS1 described how people were already rushing to buy clothes because they had heard that large numbers of extra ration cards were being printed."

"Garnard describes this focus on behavioral over attitudinal changes as revolutionary. Delmer and Ingrams had always favored the kind of propaganda which aims to induce action on the part of the listener. What he believed seemed to them of quite secondary importance if he could be made to act in the desired manner."

"Delcher would act appalled at some behavior that many people were doing, such as buying up clothes on the black market, thus normalizing it even as he condemned it, and making his listeners feel that it was a safe thing to do."

"Most people, Delmer reckoned, want to stay in the collective rather than stand up and stand out and take personal risk."

"Have you ever experienced that sense when you suddenly become aware of the artificial, constructed, mannered nature of the way you speak, the language you are using, how you use that language? Or have you ever glimpsed your reflection in a mirror you hadn't noticed and didn't have time to compose yourself for, and notice just how forced your behavior is? And in that moment you are paralyzed by the realization that all the times when you thought you were you, you were actually acting without knowing it. Or have you ever looked back at your old social media posts months or years after you made them—posts that perhaps you felt so passionately about at the time, and which represented your true feelings, but now you realize how artificial they sound?"

"There was an old man from Lavier
who kept a dead whore in a cave.
Said he, 'I admit, I'm a bit of a shit,
but think of the money I save.'"

"Delmer had pulled off something unprecedented with the sender. He had created media that was both for those millions who were not comfortable with taking risks—that let them hang on to their desire for a collective identity—and simultaneously thoroughly subversive. He had created media whose very interaction, the way you tuned into it, stimulated independent thought and even action."

"The Kremlin's diplomatic demand for a Russian sphere of influence denotes less something hard and definable, which can be hammered out with other great powers in some grand new geopolitical deal based on rational self-interest, but a sphere that also swells with suppressed resentment and what Dick described as 'secondary narcissism'."

"And just as scholars define different types of Russian audience today, ranging from active supporters to the larger groups of passive supporters, loyal neutrals, and apathetics, so Dicks could segment Germans. Although some Germans were a psychologically ideal fit for Nazi propaganda, not all were. He calculated that 10% of the German soldiers were fanatical Nazis, and, further, that 25% were believers with reservations. As the war neared its end, Dicks was most worried about this 25%. Their Nazism was mixed with a more general admiration of German militarism, and they could easily blend in as a good patriot in the Germany of the future without changing their underlying authoritarian predilections."

"In this, the Germans were not alone. All the peoples of Western Europe had developed the habit of blaming their misfortunes on some force out of their reach."

"Arendt tied the lack of responsibility to the Nazis' relativist attitude to truth. If you thought facts and truth were all subjective, then everyone could choose their own reality and avoid responsibility. This is why fact checks rarely work when they directly challenge a political identity. What we need to do is give people the motivation to care about truth again."

"How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler" is a biography of a World War II propagandist who subverted the Nazi propaganda machine by identifying the Schweinhund within the party's ranks, spreading misinformation directly to the people inside the system, aiming to awaken them to their own self-interest. Peter Pomerantsev reveals in detail how the sausage is made and reflects it onto today's war in Ukraine with Putin's Russia. My takeaway was that the side that is only virtue and idealistic cannot hold its own when faced against the meaner drives of the human condition. A force promoting convenience, ease, and comfort creeps in passively, and a society that loses its free agency and shared reality without vigilance will suffocate, descending from the ordinary to pandemonium.

Here are some quotes from the book:

"The propagandists see this as a war in which information is a weapon, you use not to win an abstract argument, but to confuse, dismay, demoralize, and distract. It is a tool to tap into human fears, vulnerabilities and secret, often violent and cruel desires, and twist them to the benefit of the powerful forces they serve. Fact checking doesn't stand a chance."

"Delmer tells the story from the point of view of his childhood self, but he can sense the adult author implying a more mature question: Where does the private person end and the public role begin?"

"The real power of propaganda is not to convince or even confuse. It's to give you a sense of belonging."

"There were good will and good nature everywhere, and not the faintest trace of the bullying of the civic population by everything in uniform that I had become so familiar with and had grown sick of in Prussia. How good it is to be back in England. If ever I realize what liberty means, liberty of thought and liberty of conscience, it is now after having lived for nearly three years in an enemy country where there is neither."

"While my reports at the Express were read by about 12 million people before being used to light a fire, those I delivered to MI6 were distributed to several hundred persons, read by no one, and then incinerated as secret waste."

"Littman argued that optimistic notions about the democratic public sphere where citizens debate the facts and come to common policy decisions were impossible to fulfill. Instead, power had to be handed over to an enlightened elite to make decisions.

Truth was not a value in itself. It was a subset of power."

"The propaganda allowed you to both relinquish responsibility and enjoy dominance. This was part of the psychological deal the Kremlin offered people. You can identify yourself with a sense of supremacy, but you don't need to carry any moral burden."

"Even the name of Delmer's broadcaster, GS1, Gustav Siegfried Eins, was designed to make people wonder: what did it stand for? General Stab, One? Or maybe Geheim Sender, Secret Transmitter 1? In actuality, GS1 didn't stand for anything. It was just there to stimulate enquiry."

"Where the Nazis wanted to obliterate the difference between truth and lies, Delmer's careful approach to fibbing accepted the primacy of facts, respected reality, even as he twisted it. 'Never lie by accident, only deliberately' was the creed of his operation."

"It has spoken only in such a way that the idea of action is planted in the mind of the subject without letting him see that he is being influenced at all."

"For example, Delmer's programs tried the following: To make people take habit-forming sleeping drugs during air raids, it was described how the U-boat crews, who ought to know, took Von tablets before going to sleep. Von's were habit-forming. To induce panic buying of clothes, GS1 described how people were already rushing to buy clothes because they had heard that large numbers of extra ration cards were being printed."

"Garnard describes this focus on behavioral over attitudinal changes as revolutionary. Delmer and Ingrams had always favored the kind of propaganda which aims to induce action on the part of the listener. What he believed seemed to them of quite secondary importance if he could be made to act in the desired manner."

"Delcher would act appalled at some behavior that many people were doing, such as buying up clothes on the black market, thus normalizing it even as he condemned it, and making his listeners feel that it was a safe thing to do."

"Most people, Delmer reckoned, want to stay in the collective rather than stand up and stand out and take personal risk."

"Have you ever experienced that sense when you suddenly become aware of the artificial, constructed, mannered nature of the way you speak, the language you are using, how you use that language? Or have you ever glimpsed your reflection in a mirror you hadn't noticed and didn't have time to compose yourself for, and notice just how forced your behavior is? And in that moment you are paralyzed by the realization that all the times when you thought you were you, you were actually acting without knowing it. Or have you ever looked back at your old social media posts months or years after you made them—posts that perhaps you felt so passionately about at the time, and which represented your true feelings, but now you realize how artificial they sound?"

"There was an old man from Lavier
who kept a dead whore in a cave.
Said he, 'I admit, I'm a bit of a shit,
but think of the money I save.'"

"Delmer had pulled off something unprecedented with the sender. He had created media that was both for those millions who were not comfortable with taking risks—that let them hang on to their desire for a collective identity—and simultaneously thoroughly subversive. He had created media whose very interaction, the way you tuned into it, stimulated independent thought and even action."

"The Kremlin's diplomatic demand for a Russian sphere of influence denotes less something hard and definable, which can be hammered out with other great powers in some grand new geopolitical deal based on rational self-interest, but a sphere that also swells with suppressed resentment and what Dick described as 'secondary narcissism'."

"And just as scholars define different types of Russian audience today, ranging from active supporters to the larger groups of passive supporters, loyal neutrals, and apathetics, so Dicks could segment Germans. Although some Germans were a psychologically ideal fit for Nazi propaganda, not all were. He calculated that 10% of the German soldiers were fanatical Nazis, and, further, that 25% were believers with reservations. As the war neared its end, Dicks was most worried about this 25%. Their Nazism was mixed with a more general admiration of German militarism, and they could easily blend in as a good patriot in the Germany of the future without changing their underlying authoritarian predilections."

"In this, the Germans were not alone. All the peoples of Western Europe had developed the habit of blaming their misfortunes on some force out of their reach."

"Arendt tied the lack of responsibility to the Nazis' relativist attitude to truth. If you thought facts and truth were all subjective, then everyone could choose their own reality and avoid responsibility. This is why fact checks rarely work when they directly challenge a political identity. What we need to do is give people the motivation to care about truth again."