‘Fighting Criminal Networks’ — Peter Pomerantsev Rallies Democracies to Embrace New Tools of War
In an interview with Ukrainian journalist Ievhen Matiushenko, British journalist and author Peter Pomerantsev encourages the West to defeat dictatorships by using tech and smarter messaging
I am awake each night researching, writing, and checking my email for late-night SubStacks from HCR, Joyce Vance, and EuroFile — Monique Camarra’s roundup of detailed updates on Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and related events in Europe.
In our respective work, Camarra and I share an intense focus on information warfare and Russia’s rolling insurrections.
We often spot Russian interference in global events before corporate newspapers lazily get around to it.
Yesterday, when news broke that a chainsaw-wielding TV goon was now president of Argentina, it took me 34 seconds to find the Russian proxy billionaire funding him.
It took me longer to find a GIF of Chris Farley’s entrance to David Letterman as evidence that the new president Javier Milei was doing a weak impersonation of Farley when he hits the stage. I only regret the GIF cuts out before Farley’s marvelous cartwheels.
I also was reminded of this feature from a year ago that contains a Farley vignette, back when I still had time to write Hollywood memoirs on this platform:
Shortly after posting my billionaire-funder find, OSINT ninja Gal Suburban had already found Milei’s Bannon ties, and so it goes. To those of us who do this work, the patterns are rather obvious — we smell the fash bro love from continents away.
‘Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible’
So last week, when up reading EuroFile at midnight, I opened an interview with Peter Pomerantsev — one of the great British journalists to analyze and focus on Russian propaganda and disinformation. His books ‘Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible’ and ‘This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality’ are vital tomes for our times.
I have now listened to his interview with Ukrainian journalist Ievhen Matiushenko so many times on UkrinformTV that I felt it was critical to share their words with my Bette audience. The more great minds we mine here, the better and more adept and informed warriors we become.
Here is a print version of their interview:
UTV: Currently, it seems that the world has plunged into a series of local wars, this conflict is gaining momentum. And it's going on in different parts of the globe. So what do you believe are the reasons for the latest exacerbation of modern day armed conflicts? What are the main reasons behind it?
PP: I'm not a grand theoretician of what happens in the world, I study one thing, and I write nonfiction books about propaganda and people… But what is very obvious is that Russia is in the middle of it constantly. And it's kind of a pattern, a repeating pattern, whether it's obviously bringing genocide to the hearts of Europe, but also clearly deeply embedded in a network of of deeply nefarious dictatorial regimes, which include North Korea, Iran — helping their proxies like Hezbollah for many years. So there's a recurring pattern in the kind of destruction of the so-called ‘rules based order’ and that pattern is Russia.
UTV: So do you believe this so-called Axis of Evil has already been formed as such? Or is it still on the way?
PP: I do think about language a lot. And I do think we sometimes need to find new language, that's very important. And what is it exactly? Axis is a little bit strong, isn't it? It's a… network united by corruption, by financial gains, but also by a deep resentment towards democracy and democratic allies, their own interests then always coincide. I don't think Iran and Russia are happy allies… but they are network, also terrorist networks, criminal networks, so they're more like, a criminal network, really.
UTV: Given your field, we should talk about propaganda, and the fight against it. And we see how Russia skillfully adapts its propaganda, guidebooks and its tools to react to what's going on exactly in this period of time, and to try to tailor its messages to concrete audiences to make sure they get through. And we now see the conflict in Israel and Gaza developing and how Russia also uses this, to undermine Western assistance to Ukraine, by switching the focus by further downplaying the importance of what's going on in Ukraine and the fight we're in. So do you think we're doing enough? Or do you think we're doing the right things at the moment in terms of fighting this propaganda, as it develops, as it brings in new narratives, new messages to the Western world?
PP: So when Russia advocates openly and obviously, for what you just said, you know, ‘forget about Ukraine, thinking about the Middle East’, nobody listens to them. That is not a winning narrative, because it's Russia, and everyone can see it. That's not the clever bit of their propaganda.
What they're doing is much more nefarious. And when it's effective, it's when it's indirect. Direct propaganda can work if your cause is just and people support you. But everybody kind of knows now in Western countries, that Russia is not a partner or anybody you can ever believe.
What they're doing in Europe is much more cunning and much more risky to our interests. They are simultaneously stoking anti-Western, anti-Israel and anti-semitic feeling among huge Muslim populations in Europe. We see very large protests against the actions of Israel and the West, in places like Germany.
While at the same time stoking, anti-immigrant, in this case, Muslim immigrant, but general anti-immigrant feeling among the rightwing, again, in somewhere like Germany.
So what they're doing is — they're not even in that fight. But they're strengthening those contradictions. Probably thinking about creating a maximum anti-refugee sentiment, especially in Germany, where they're very invested. And probably calculating that when their bombardment of Ukraine starts, there'll be another wave of refugees from Ukraine, which will be coming into a country that was already super anti-refugee.
That's the game that they're playing — clever and effective propaganda. You know that. So when Russia is saying stuff, maybe that works for some audiences, but not for any audiences that matter very much? No, what they're playing is much more potentially effective.
UTV: What about the United States, we see that the MAGA wing is getting stronger by the day and the messages that we want to get to them are not getting through…
We see religious propaganda gaining momentum — we see how religious conservatives, they're jumping on this bandwagon of Ukraine allegedly banning all Christianity in our country. I mean, these are messages that we find ridiculous. But for average Americans, many people from rural America, they (work)… so do you think we are able to try to win the hearts of Republicans in this case? Or should we focus on something else?
PP: So I'm doing a lot of research about public opinion toward Ukraine in America. The first thing I would say is support for Ukraine is still very, very, very strong.
So I think in America, we have a bigger crisis, which is American politics no longer represents American people, there is a huge divide between the grotesque polarization in American politics and the reality of America.
If there was a centrist party in America, it would be in peril all the time… the vast majority of Americans have the right instincts and the right ideas about Ukraine, the right instincts and the right priorities about Putin, we're just in a very weird place where five extremist politicians can hold the whole of the Republican Party hostage.
We have a tiny amount of extremist politicians playing to a very specific cohort of society, which is around 15%, who they need to stay in power in their states.
So we have a very messed up system. So please don't get confused with the American public opinion, which is vastly in favor of Ukraine, and vastly against Russia. For talking about the MAGA vote, it's around maybe half of Republicans. And again, they're not pro Russia.
The thing is, they really hate Biden, and they hate Biden more than they hate Putin. And they are anti-Ukraine, because they're anti-Biden, not because they're anti-Ukraine. Once you are anti-Biden, you will look for any evidence to be anti-Biden — ‘corruption, Nazis in Ukraine’, it doesn't matter.
But it's that motivation, which starts it. So if you want to appeal to this segment of society, which again, is around — it's half of Republican voters. So it's maybe 15 to 20% of Americans. You have to understand what they really care about. They don't care — and this sounds really hard — they don't care about Russia or Ukraine, they care about America, and they care about their version of America.
And here's the interesting thing about these people, that the research shows — they're the people who more than anybody else in America think America needs to be the strongest country in the world and show its strength.
So if you want to engage these people, you have to talk to them about American strength. You have to talk to them about how Russia is a force in the world that wants to undermine American strength, which it is. You have to talk to them how Russia works with countries like Iran, to hurt America and to humiliate America.
And you have to explain that to them and show them how Russia does it. When it's something that threatens the primacy of American strength, then it's something they can get very engaged with. It's worth recalling that it was Trump who bombed Assad, and not Obama, not Biden.
So even to these audiences, there's a way to reach them, but you have to understand what motivates them. And I wouldn't get too distracted by the disinformation — people will choose whatever disinformation they want, when they want to. And if you give people a stronger reason to be on your side, they'll leave their side.
Sadly, these are audiences where truth doesn't matter very much. You really got to get to their values and their emotional core. And there is a way in which you just have to understand what they care about. And everybody in America hates Putin, you just have got to make it clear that it's their cause as well.
UTV: So it’s best to say that Putin is preventing you from making America great again.
PP: Yeah! Yeah, that's exactly it, you've got it, you've already got a good start. On the churches thing I think there's a very strong moral case to make about why it's necessary to fight Russia.
So again, these are all audiences that can be reached. The only audience which I think are completely lost, actually, are the weird left — the truly isolationist audiences, who truly don't want American involved.
They're not actually the rightwing audience. It's paradoxical. Once you get into the data, you start seeing a lot of these cliches fall away.
What MAGA audiences don't care about is stuff like the rules-based international order, or NATO. They don't care about any of that. They're ready for America to leave NATO. They already are. So those arguments weren't worth talking about, you know, the international architecture of like the world order. They're like, we hate the world order. So don't do that argument.
UTV: I understand. Well, you mentioned propaganda, and fighting it. And a lot of work is being done to try to gather evidence to eventually bring to justice those who spread that propaganda who foment hatred or enmity, who actually contribute to genocidal efforts that the Russian army is committing in Ukraine. And could you please tell what would be the right way to maybe not only collect that evidence, but to spread awareness, including among Russian propagandists, pundits and hosts and politicians that they will eventually be held accountable?
PP: Yeah, it's more complicated than it sounds because Russian propagandists use obviously genocidal speech — they call to wipe out Ukrainian statehood, wipe out Ukrainian identity, they call for indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations.
And that is important already, that could already be a crime in itself. Different types of speech can be crimes. But for it to be a really strong case, you've got to tie it to things that actually happened.
So if you're going for genocidal speech, you want to do that with genocide. And genocide is very hard to prove. I think there’s a very strong case against Russia. But it's hard. It's not a quick route.
So I think we're gonna focus on specific war crimes. And the relationship between propaganda and war crimes. What's changed with the digital era is that you can do a lot more research, showing how propaganda is combined with military actions, before it was just the guy on the radio and then something happened. Now you can start following the digital traces.
You know, was there an increase in digital activity that helped aid and abet a specific war crime in the lead up to that crime? It's much easier to do that now.
So we live in a new media age, and no one's really tried to hold propagandists legally accountable in this age — it's happened before — at Nuremberg, some Nazi propagandists were held accountable — Yugoslavia. Frankly, propagandists usually get away with it. There's a few cases where they're found guilty in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Nazi Germany, but overall, the propagandists usually walk away. They say, ‘it was just words, words don’t kill anyone’ and they say, ‘we didn't know, ‘we're just a little propagandist, we're just guys, we get given a piece of paper, we don't know what's going to happen’. So they usually get away with it. The job is to prove that they're actually integrated into the machine of war crimes.
UTV: So their actions must be proven to be deliberate. And there has to be a cause and effect.
PP: Cause and effect can be many different things. So it's not like you say something, someone picks up a gun, someone shoots something, it can be much, much more loose than that. It can be around aiding and abetting, it can be around incitement, it can be about legitimization. It's not like, I heard someone yawn, I picked up a gun, and I killed someone. Cause and effect is much more diffuse than that. Nobody's looking for that sort of linear, cause and effect. So when you do want to tie it to things on the ground, what I mean is simply saying, ‘Oh, they said terrible things’. That is a crime — hate speech can be a crime, propaganda for war. In some jurisdictions is a crime, just the speech itself can be a crime, that could already be something to get them on. But the more you tie it to real crimes on the ground, and real harms, the stronger and bigger the charge will be.
UTV: You've been talking about the digital era and the ways that propaganda is spreading, and the tools that you now have, as an expert, and your colleagues have to trace how this propaganda spreads, how those links work. But on the other end, we have those propagandists who use the same technology or better technology in some cases that they created in Russia. That was it guys, to work with big data, and to tailor their messages to address certain audiences. What do you think will be the next level? Do you have any vision of how it will develop in the short term? What are we about to see? In terms of influences? Have you been working on that?
PP: Technology's always developing and propaganda develops with technology. It always has done so — whatever Chat GBT will come next, or deep fakes.
So technology is always developing. And in that sense, propaganda is always reinventing itself. But the more I look at it, and I've been looking at it historically a lot, as well, for a new book, the more it also stays the same.
It is about a race to who can understand people better understand their motivations better. And who's going to win that race? Is it going to be the propagandists or those who want to communicate democratic values…
And it's about tapping into people's anger and hatred and making that hatred normal. And creating an environment where you can commit different types of crimes. So none of that changes — that stays the same from century to century, and from technology to technology. But of course, it also transforms with the latest challenges — to Chat GTP fixation or deep fake — it’s always changing. But actually, it also comes down to something very old and human, and about good and evil.
UTV: Well, we see that the West is desperately trying to seize back the initiative in, you know, in public spaces worldwide — if we see the anti-semitic statements spreading like dramatically around the world, as we noticed in Europe, and also United States. We see the protests, we see famous people speaking up on subjects that they don't know anything about, just on emotions, you know. Do you think the West was just simply not ready for this level of escalation?
PP: There's a paradox because so many of the technologies are developed in the West. So many of the social research and sociology are developed in the West, but they're developed around things like elections or advertising.
And what we have stopped doing in the West is thinking about whatever you want to call it, political warfare, information war, you know, this reality that Russia, China, Iran, terrorists, have embraced.
They've embraced the new technologies, and made it a tool of their foreign policy and a tool of their Information Warfare, if you want to call it that, we kind of haven't — it's more an institutional thing.
You know, we just don't … whose job is it, and there's no one whose job it is to do it. This is not public diplomacy, or PR or anything like that. This is really understanding how you use informational tools for in our case, the survival of democracy and the victory of democracies over dictatorships.
And we stopped doing it. We did in the Second World War, we did it in the Cold War. And then and then we stopped, for many reasons. And the question is, will we be able to start again?
UTV: What do you think?
PP: I think if we want to survive, we'll have to. I mean, we'll have to come up with our own version. We know how the other side work, they work through disinformation, campaigns, conspiratorial TV channels, seeding, doubt, cynicism, we have to embrace the modern technology and its possibilities, embrace the modern research and its possibilities in order to stand up for democracy. And if we don't do it, we'll just lose.
UTV: So would it be right to suggest that those people who are ready, and they're trying to defend democracy, but they're doing it the old way — in classic terms, let's say — are they not ready to embrace the role of a bad guy, and in the type of way to not mirror the actions of the of the bad guys or the actual bad guys, but to actually find them to be effective? Maybe they're not ready for this role?
PP: I think it’s something we just forgot to do. I think we're kidding ourselves. We didn't do it. We did it in the Second World War, the British had something called a Political Warfare Executive, which fought Nazi propaganda. We did it in the Cold War, the Americans have something called the US Information Agency.
And it's not about good or bad — it's about are we going to compete? Are we going to compete in this space or not? And at the moment, we're just not. It's not the job of journalism to do this — journalism does something else and is having its own crisis, by the way. But it's not the job of journalism to do this.
It's the job of what I think will have to be a new generation of information warriors, who fights for democracy.
And it'll involve understanding audiences, it'll involve thinking about effects and impacts in really concrete ways not in a diffuse way. It's not like we do good stuff, but like, what are we trying to achieve with which audiences and why. So it'll involve all those kinds of thinking, which we all have, but they just never been used to do political aims, or for foreign policy ends.
I mean, we use them all the time in elections, and we use them all the time in campaigns. If you want a good example, the people who've been terrific at it has been the Green Movement, Greenpeace, all these movements, they've been fantastic at understanding audiences doing campaigns, pushing their agenda, politicizing it, they have done fantastic work.
So this is not about good and bad, the cause is good or bad. But somebody has to invest in it. And somebody has to do it. And so far it is unclear whose job it is. There's no department to do this, no institutions to do this. I think, slowly we're getting there. But, you know, we're way behind the dictators.
UTV: Do you see any parallels in modern day information warfare with World War Two? The something that you've been writing about in your new book that's coming out?
PP: The new book that's gonna come out next year, I look at British attempts to undermine Nazi propaganda in Germany, so ways to reach German people. And it was a real mixed experience. There was obviously the BBC and then there was something side of the British activity, it was called many different things. And that did much more playful and cunning things. Some which worked, some which didn't work. But we have experience from the Cold War as well, which is much more recent. But it does mean fighting. There's many different tricks you can use, many different methodologies you can use. There's many different ways you can engage audiences, but somebody has to do it. Someone has to compete.
UTV: And just one last question — about anti-semitism — how do you feel this trend is going? Is it too artificial to sustain by those who try to push it? Or does it have chances to develop further into a global ideological thing?
PP: I don't know. I haven't looked at it specifically, I think it's continued to be very prevalent in large bits of the world. So I don't think it ever went away. I think there was a taboo on it in Europe. But maybe that taboo has been lifted. I don't know, it was taboo after the Second World War. Maybe that's changing. I don't know, I'm not an expert on anti-semitism as a trend. But the amount of anti-semitic hate crime is rising. So there's data that would say that it's getting more of a problem.
UTV: What will be your message for these hard times to Ukrainian journalists?
PP: It’s very hard being a journalist during a war, because it's your war, too. And you know, the classic aim of a journalist is to give your government hell, but then we're all fighting a war together.
So it's really hard doing that balance. I get asked this a lot. I mean, the international experience is that being critical is actually at the end of the day better for national morale, because then there's trust.
And there's trust to the whole system. So famously, the BBC, which had huge restrictions during World War Two, started talking about British military losses, and was quite honest about what was going on on the front.
And that was a big deal. But it was a decision that was taken in order to make sure that there was trust — that audiences trusted it. And, you know, the BBC completely saw its role as supporting the morale of the nation, keeping up the morale of the nation, played a big part...
But they made this decision, because losing trust would have been a bigger problem. So it's really hard to get the balance right, between maintaining cohesion. Because we're all citizens — we all want to win together.
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Here is the video clip of the interview. I hope you enjoyed learning from Peter and Ievhen as much as I did transcribing their important interview for you.
Thank you as always for your big hearts, for caring and for supporting me and other independent media outlets as we do this work.
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