This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality

by Peter Pomerantsev

When truth is a weapon, here's how to use it.

For you if

you want to know what people have actually done, at cost, to fight back against state-controlled narrative

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Pomerantsev's father was a Soviet dissident who typed uncensored poetry and passed it hand to hand; Pomerantsev himself spent years inside the Russian propaganda machine, watching the information ecosystem decompose in real time. This Is Not Propaganda is both an investigation and an inheritance — what his father taught him about truth, and what the internet has done to make those lessons necessary in new ways. The book profiles information warriors on every front: Filipino bloggers fighting Duterte's disinformation machine, Serbian activists who used humor to topple Milosevic, journalists building immune systems against lies. Pomerantsev doesn't end with hope exactly, but he ends with practice — what people have actually done, at real cost, to fight the war on reality.

Where This Book Lives

Setting: Russia
Voice: Written by a Russian author
Themes: misinformation propaganda
Topics: cold war soviet gulag

Pomerantsev's first book gave us the grammar of Russian information warfare. This one shows what fighting back looks like — through specific people in specific places, not abstractions. After Chomsky's structural model and Gessen's grief and Murgia's satire, this book answers: now what?

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