This Is Not Propaganda — Pomerantsev (2019)
Full title: This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality Author: Peter Pomerantsev Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2019
Overview
This Is Not Propaganda is Peter Pomerantsev’s second major work on authoritarian information warfare, following his earlier memoir Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014), which documented the surrealist information environment of Putin-era Russia. Where the first book was primarily personal and descriptive, This Is Not Propaganda is analytical and global: it argues that the techniques pioneered in Russia — and independently developed by authoritarian and populist movements elsewhere — represent a qualitatively new form of information warfare that is not propaganda in the classical sense but something structurally different and more dangerous: warfare against the epistemic conditions required for democratic politics to function.
Pomerantsev is a British-Ukrainian journalist and academic, a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and one of the most analytically precise writers working on information warfare as a practice rather than an abstraction. His work is rooted in direct experience of information environments across Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom.
Core Argument: Epistemic Warfare, Not Persuasion
The book’s central analytical claim requires careful formulation because it runs against intuitive assumptions about what propaganda is for.
Classical propaganda — as theorized by Harold Lasswell, practiced by totalitarian states, and analyzed in retrospect by communication scholars — is designed to persuade. It promotes a particular interpretation of reality, a set of claims, an ideological framework. Its success is measured by whether target audiences come to believe those claims.
Contemporary authoritarian information warfare, Pomerantsev argues, operates by a different logic. Its objective is not persuasion but epistemic paralysis: the destruction of audiences’ confidence that reliable knowledge about political reality is accessible at all. The goal is not that people believe the Kremlin’s version of events but that they believe no version of events — that all claims are equally suspect, that facts are always contested, that “truth” is merely a rhetorical move in political conflict.
The consequences of this paralysis are structural. Democratic politics depends on the possibility of shared factual reference points: a public that can agree on at least some facts can argue about values and make collective decisions. When epistemic confidence collapses — when every claim is treated as spin, every institution as corrupt, every expert as an interest-serving liar — the informational preconditions for democratic deliberation dissolve. What remains is raw identity politics, emotional affect, and tribal loyalty: precisely the terrain where authoritarian mobilization excels.
The Firehose Model
Pomerantsev synthesizes — and illustrates through global case studies — the RAND Corporation research on what researchers Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews called the “firehose of falsehood”: the Russian model of high-volume, high-speed, internally contradictory information output.
The model is counterintuitive. Classical propaganda maintains internal consistency — repetition of core claims, denial of contradictions, maintenance of a coherent alternative narrative. The firehose operates differently: it floods the information environment with claims that contradict each other, that change rapidly, that are impossible to verify fast enough to respond to in real time. The objective is not coherent belief formation but cognitive overwhelm and exhaustion.
Key features of the firehose model:
- Volume over accuracy: produce more content than the adversary’s fact-checking capacity can process
- Speed over verifiability: plant claims before they can be refuted; by the time corrections appear, the original claim has already shaped initial reactions
- Contradiction as strategy: contradictory claims signal that “nobody really knows” — reinforcing epistemic paralysis rather than coherent alternative narrative
- Distributed amplification: troll farms and bot networks amplify regardless of content consistency, because the goal is volume, not message discipline
See Cognitive Warfare and Algorithmic Disinformation and Active Measures for how these techniques operate in documented influence operations.
Global Case Studies
One of the book’s most important contributions is its documentation of how epistemic warfare techniques have been adopted, adapted, and sometimes independently invented across very different political contexts.
Philippines (Rodrigo Duterte): Pomerantsev documents the social media operation that produced Duterte’s rise — not primarily by promoting him but by systematically attacking the credibility of his critics, mainstream media, and the concept of human rights as an authoritative framework. The goal was to make Duterte’s extrajudicial violence unaccountable by destroying the information infrastructure that would hold him accountable.
United Kingdom (Brexit): The information environment around the 2016 referendum is analyzed as an instance of epistemic warfare — not necessarily directed from Moscow, but exhibiting the same structural features: high-volume contradictory claims, systematic delegitimization of expert opinion, emotional tribal mobilization overriding policy analysis.
Hungary: The Orbán government’s systematic dismantling of independent media is analyzed not primarily as censorship but as epistemic infrastructure replacement — creating a monopoly on trusted information sources so that the concept of an independent epistemic standard becomes practically inaccessible.
United States: The 2016 electoral information environment is analyzed through the same framework, with the Russian active measures operation understood as exploitation of pre-existing epistemic vulnerabilities rather than their creation.
Structural and Personal Dimensions
The book is organized around Pomerantsev’s family history in ways that give it analytical depth unusual in journalism. His parents were Soviet intellectuals who emigrated and worked for the BBC Russian Service; for them, the BBC represented the possibility of truth as a standard against which Soviet lies could be measured. Pomerantsev asks what “truth” means, and what it means to fight for truth, in a world where the information landscape is designed to make truth-claims structurally indistinguishable from propaganda.
This framing gives the book an analytical seriousness that purely technical treatments of disinformation lack: it is not only about specific techniques but about the political epistemology of democratic societies and the conditions under which it can survive sustained attack.
Analytical Significance for This Vault
Shift from classical propaganda: The book is the clearest short statement of the distinction between classical persuasion-propaganda and contemporary epistemic warfare. This distinction is analytically load-bearing for Propaganda notes across this vault: the same term covers structurally different operations.
Transnational diffusion: Pomerantsev documents that epistemic warfare techniques are not simply Russian exports; they have been independently developed and then cross-pollinated across authoritarian and populist movements. This makes the Russian Federation the origin point but not the exclusive practitioner of contemporary information warfare.
Complement to Herman/Chomsky: Where Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky & Herman (1988) analyzes the structural biases of the media system that information operations seek to exploit, Pomerantsev analyzes the active operations themselves and their epistemic objectives. Both frameworks are necessary: the propaganda model explains the baseline vulnerabilities; the firehose model explains how those vulnerabilities are operationalized.
Practical intelligence utility: For assessing specific information operations — across Ukraine War, the Taiwan Strait, or Middle East information environments — the epistemic-warfare framework generates more precise analytical questions than “who is lying”: it asks what the operation is designed to do to its target audience’s epistemic capacities, not just what claims it is promoting.
Relationship to disinformation taxonomy: Pomerantsev’s framework should be cross-referenced with Thomas Rid’s Active Measures for the historical genealogy of active measures doctrine, and with Renée DiResta’s work on algorithmic amplification for the technical infrastructure.