How to Win an Information War by Peter Pomerantsev

How To Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler

by Peter Pomerantsev

PublicAffairs 2024

Unsung war heroes, those street folk who can do no ill, are often the hackneyed inclusions of a desperate historian. They give us the retired postmaster swaggering into shell fire or the insurgent dinner lady poisoning the pies in enemy kitchens. But Peter Pomeramtsev’s new book, teasingly titled How To Win an Information War, tells the vital story of a German-born Englishman Sefton Delmer whose witty, inventive and sometimes salacious radio broadcasts, produced in Britain but made to seem of German origin, were used to subvert Goebbels’ propaganda. Pomerantsev strives to combine a biography with a whistle stop tour of WW2 machinations, a heartfelt personal memoir and a conceptual commentary. 

Readers might expect a writer whose own backstory tallies with his subject matter to dawdle about with Delmer’s upbringing, but the early pages are terse and insightful as the young boy’s identity crisis in a military-minded Germany baying for his own countrymen’s blood are given as the antecedents of the wily strategist Delmer would become. “Perhaps someone like Delmer, someone unable to join in the communal patriotic ecstasies yet still drawn to them,” Pomerantsev writes, “would be more attuned to how people change themselves and are changed by the roles and words around them.” By interspersing Delmer’s own memoirs and his own shrewd judgements, Pomerantsev manages to wobble along the high wire act of quotation and consideration without one side ever barging for prominence against the other. 

It’s to Pomerantsev’s shame then, and our pencil-snapping dismay, that specious psychoanalysis burdens the work to such an insufferable extent. Columbia University’s Erich Fromm is beckoned onto stage to explain “the allure of Nazism as a form of sadomasochism.” Apparently German masses who saluted Hitler’s manic sputum were “aiming at dissolving oneself in an overwhelming strong power.” Anybody who thinks a university education and a doctoral thesis is required to state such truisms as “suffering, submission, or suicide is the antithesis of positive aims of living” might need a session or two on the couch themselves. The flummoxing regularity of these titbits offers no solid grounding for the appeal of the Austrian corporal and bogs the text down with inevitable circumlocution. Pomerantsev does eventually shove the Freudian jaws shut and gives us his own infinitely more preferable depiction of what Sefton Delmer’s Information War consisted of, citing Hitler’s (and later Vladimir Putin’s) ability to concoct apocryphal narratives, popularise self-pity and legitimise hatred of an invasive ‘other.’

Stand-alone studies of the unsung war hero can quickly slide into soppy hagiographic adoration. Pomerantsev, however, never lets a reader think too highly of Delmer the mawkish reporter for the Daily Express in the Weimar Republic “who was alarmingly accommodating to his guests’ whims” when hosting Ernst Rohm and other deplorable gauleiters. By detailing the repugnant nature of Delmer’s radio programmes (sexual misconduct and anti-semitism) Pomerantsev is able to show us how he knew his subversive output had to be believable in order to create adversaries of the foul, career-minded gruppenfuhrers and the merely patriotic German soldiers. This self-avowedly mendacious counter-propaganda “perceived people as potentially active, curious, their minds in movement. His media wasn’t trying to ‘brainwash’ them but to stimulate them into curiosity, thought, individuality.” All of this gathers to convey a man of mettle, yet hidden. An effective propagandist in whose antics we delight.

It may be an odd fault to find and a pithy reviewer to find it, but How To Win an Information War is begging to be an eight-hundred-page biography of Sefton Delmer rather than this sprightly, chimerical, (albeit entertaining), roadmap. Just as we’re settling into another of Delmer’s extravaganzas atop the billiard table of a quiet country seat, we’re met with eye-witness accounts of the war in Ukraine, with similar motifs of propaganda given as an explanation for this segue. For those coming to the book for an expert’s tuition or an expert’s oar to navigate the choppiness of flawed, misleading or flat-out false twenty first century media organs and our timeless proclivity towards propaganda, one soothing lozenge in the closing remarks is meant to satisfy: don’t be ordinary. 

Pomerantsev asserts that “propaganda at its most malign exploits this need [to be ordinary], impels a type of belonging where you give up the capacity to differentiate between good and bad.” Here we have a thought-provoking, sober, and unequivocal approximation of human susceptibility to posters, radio messages and sponsored ads that prizes a herd mentality and that most puerile of sentiments - complete unity. It’s a pity that this book, with all its bursts of brilliance and its criticism of normalcy, is itself really rather run-of-the-mill. 

Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull.