This Is Not Propaganda

Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev

Learn how the perception of truth has been weaponized in modern politics with this “insightful” account of propaganda in Russia and beyond during the age of disinformation (New York Times).

When information is a weapon, every opinion is an act of war.

We live in a world of influence operations run amok, where dark ads, psyops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, and Trump seek to shape our very reality. In this surreal atmosphere created to disorient us and undermine our sense of truth, we’ve lost not only our grip on peace and democracy — but our very notion of what those words even mean.

Peter Pomerantsev takes us to the front lines of the disinformation age—from Kiev to Manilla–where he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, “behavioral change” salesmen, Jihadi fanboys, Identitarians, truth cops, and many others. Forty years after his Ukranian dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, Pomerantsev finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia — but the answers he finds there are not what he expected.

Blending reportage, family history, and intellectual adventure, This Is Not Propaganda explores how we can reimagine our politics and ourselves when reality seems to be coming apart.

Paperback | 256 pages | PublicAffairs | 2020

Peter Pomerantsev is a senior fellow 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.