How can we ensure that democracy prevails over autocracy? Increasingly, this means engaging in information warfare — not only to defend democracy, but to go on the offense and fight back against autocratic regimes. Propaganda expert Peter Pomerantsev looks to history for answers, in the work of anti-Nazi propagandist Sefton Delmer. He also offers some original ideas on how we can use imagination and creativity to ethically fight what sometimes feels like a losing battle — and ultimately turn the tide for democracy’s rise globally. Peter Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Arena Initiative. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Peter grew up in the U.K. He is the author of several books about Russian and other authoritarian propaganda; the third of these, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, was published in 2024.
Pomerantsev was project chair for the Information Warfare Initiative of the Center for European Policy Analysis. He also led the Beyond Propaganda programme within the Legatum Institute’s Transitions Forum, where he was a Senior Fellow. Pomerantsev has been at the fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna.
Pomerantsev has given testimony on the subject of information warfare and media development to the US Congress Foreign Affairs Committee, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and the UK Parliament Defence Committee. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
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Most of this applies to the Zionist-Israeli propaganda, but nothing was mentioned about it. How strange!
Thanks for sharing this, Peter. This is about human incongruities that manifest themselves in difficult socioeconomic situations, where leaders fail to take a firm stand behind a decision they made. It is about circumventing responsibilities by pointing the preverbal finger at “the others”. How does it feel to have been told fabricated stories to get your support, only to find out that it was all a scheme? It is about denying accountability for mishandling situations and being swept under the carpet of ego-centricity and stepped upon. Subconsciousness is the silent voice that instigates everything. It tells you what to feel, think, and do. It subverts the real intentions, by igniting perversive feelings, and ignites atrocities, which were unthinkable until after the fact. Was I there? Did I participate in this? It couldn’t have been me.
This is exactly what Putin is doing to the West.
Key principals
10:18 Break the monopoly authoritarian propaganda has on strong emotions
12:39 Deliver facts that improve people’s lives and inspire agency
12:53 Foster alternative communities