A brilliantly inspired study of the power of propaganda to influence geopolitical narratives.
A striking account of a German-speaking Australian working for the British secret service during the era of Nazi aggression.
Pomerantsev, a disinformation expert, is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible and This Is Not Propaganda. In his latest book, he introduces us to Sefton Delmer (1904-1979), an Australian born in Berlin whose anti-Nazi radio programs in dozens of languages across Europe helped undermine the Nazi war effort. Growing up in Germany’s Weimar Republic (his father was a professor of English literature in Berlin) and often mocked for his British ways, young Delmer desperately wanted to fit in. After a stint in Britain, he returned to Berlin—now on the cusp of Nazi control—as a journalist for the Daily Express, where he witnessed and understood viscerally the power of political propaganda to promote belonging. Hence, in advising the British—who at first did not trust him, as he had interviewed Goebbels, Hitler, and others—Delmer could convey the psychological power of the Nazi message. It wasn’t enough, he argued, to simply “defend democracy,” a slogan that failed to resonate strongly; you had to “appeal to the groups vulnerable to the propaganda that plays into the desire to submit to strongmen.” Delmer became the head of Special Operations for the Political Warfare Executive, returned to journalism, and published his memoirs in the 1960s, but they have been largely forgotten or discounted. Historians continue to debate the extent to which anti-Nazi propaganda helped win the war. Delmer believed that it aided in the “corrosion” of German will, and the author demonstrates how crucial Delmer’s work was then—and still is, as Pomerantsev has advised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his efforts to counter Russian propaganda and aggression.
A brilliantly inspired study of the power of propaganda to influence geopolitical narratives.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781541774728
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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