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

In the summer of 1941, Britain was struggling to combat Hitler’s powerful propaganda machine. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against Germany’s wave of disinformation. Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine whose listeners included German soldiers and citizens, as well as politicians in Washington DC who were debating getting into the war. And--most importantly--Der Chef was a fiction. He was a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war. In How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, Peter Pomerantsev provides an inventive biography of Sefton Delmer while also confronting hard questions about the nature of information war: what if you can't fight lies with truth? Can a propaganda war ever be won? In flashes forward to the present day, Pomerantsev weaves in what he's learning from Delmer as he seeks to fight against Vladimir Putin's tyranny and lies.

Join New America's Future Security Program as they welcome Peter Pomerantsev, to discuss his new book How to Win an Information War. Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he co-directs the Arena Initiative. He is the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, which won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and of This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality. 

PARTICIPANTS

Peter Pomerantsev
Author, How to Win an Information War
Senior Fellow, SNF Agora Institute at John Hopkins University

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University