Making sense to win the information war

Peter Pomerantsev is one of the most compelling analysts of digital propaganda and disinformation today. His latest book, How to Win an Information War (Faber, 2024), is not a conventional history – though if it were, it would likely be banned in every self-respecting autocracy. Because while it tells the almost cinematic story of a little-known British psychological warfare operation during World War II, its questions are uncannily contemporary: What can we do with today’s digital-age Goebbelses? How do we reach those who have long abandoned facts? And what happens when the grotesque, not the rational, becomes the winning weapon?

At the heart of the book is Sefton Delmer, a former Berlin-based journalist turned British intelligence operative, who in 1941 launched a radio station from a quiet English country estate – Gustav Siegfried Eins. Its name echoed German military call signs, and its voice pretended to be that of a disillusioned Nazi insider.

This wasn’t classic Allied propaganda. The broadcasts didn’t attack Hitler directly. Instead, they went after the Nazi elite – their indulgences, their orgies, their hypocrisy – all described in lurid, tabloid-worthy detail. The target audience? “The good German”: patriotic, war-weary citizens disenchanted with, if not the Führer, but the corrupt excesses of the SS leadership. The broadcasts were not about truth – they were about effect. They told fictional stories designed not to inform, but to stick.

Delmer and his team crafted narratives where emotional impact outweighed factual accuracy. What mattered was not evidence, but resonance. The broadcasts tapped into real emotional currents – frustration, anxiety, envy, betrayal – already simmering beneath the surface of Nazi society. They didn’t confront beliefs head-on; they nudged them off balance from within.

This is where Pomerantsev’s book moves beyond historical curiosity. Delmer’s story becomes a springboard for a deeper reflection: propaganda doesn’t succeed because it convinces – it succeeds because it connects. It offers a sense of belonging. People don’t just believe propaganda – they live inside it. The relativism of truth is not the point. The comfort of illusion is.

So the question today is not how we argue against propaganda rationally – but how we construct narratives that are emotionally calibrated and thematically indirect, but effective. Where are the pressure points in a closed belief system? What myths can be cracked – and what alternative stories can we offer in return?

Pomerantsev himself has spent the past years battling the Kremlin’s propaganda machine from within Ukraine – a regime that represents the high-tech evolution of the same manipulation model Delmer once subverted. The parallels are not academic. They’re immediate, urgent, and ongoing.

That’s why this book is essential reading for anyone working in political communication, digital campaigning, or resisting the forces of destructive populism. Today’s online propaganda doesn’t just distort – it gives meaning. And anyone hoping to counter it needs more than facts. They need creativity, cultural fluency, and emotional precision.

Counter-propaganda, as Pomerantsev shows us, is not a manual. It’s a battle of narratives, waged with the tools of theatre, vulgarity, satire, and psychological drama – a mythological reconquest of public imagination, where rationality alone has already lost.