Dear Friends,
On Wednesday of last week, Peter Pomerantsev—an English author about whom I had no prior knowledge—came to give an author talk in the Family Room at MPC. I attended the author talk because the subject matter looked interesting: propaganda.
The author began his adult life as a producer of reality TV shows in Russia. During his tenure behind what once was the Iron Curtain, he witnessed (and became distressed by) the ways in which the Putin regime used misinformation first to come to power and then to maintain its hold on the reigns of the Russian State. After more than a decade working in Moscow, Mr. Pomerantsev returned to England, only to find that the propaganda had followed him West. The methods of sowing disinformation in Russian elections were being used in the UK in support of Brexit and in the US in support of Donald Trump. In response the author gave up his career in television and started writing about how repressive regimes use disinformation to gain and to maintain power and to circumvent democratic institutions.
After hearing Mr. Pomerantsev talk, I purchased his book. This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality and I’ve read it with alternating feelings of fear and amazement. If the author is right (and I believe he is), then we are all being used as pawns in global propaganda campaigns, and our complicity comes through our use of social media and other internet-based forms of communication.
Because so many of us are so entirely connected to the
internet through our phones, computers, smart speakers, and even, sometimes,
through home appliances, it’s hard to know how to disentangled from the
propaganda.
I know that I’m far too tied into social media to step back entirely, but I
also know that I can spend an increasing share of each day unplugged, and it
seems such disengagement is the best way of refusing to be used in the
propaganda campaigns that prop up the powerful at the expense of the common
good. And maybe by God’s grace and a little hard work and discipline, I will
one day be able to set aside my electronic attachments, thus freeing myself
from participation in the perpetration of propaganda.
But until that day comes, I will try to read more poetry. If ever there was an
activity that sets itself against the modern world, it is the reading of
poetry. Poetry is for dreamers. Poetry takes time. The best poems are revisited
again and again, added nuance being the benefit of each subsequent reading.
Since few purchase the work of poets, the writing and publication of poetry
usually is a labor of love and not an overly successful commercial enterprise.
Except perhaps in it’s brevity, poetry is the opposite of social media, and
therefore exactly the wrong place for the fostering the deceit of modern
propaganda.
So three cheers for poetry and for poets.
I’ll leave you with a poem by a poet whose work I love. Feel free to use it as a means of breaking free—even if for a moment—from social media, the internet, and the war against reality endemic to online environments.
At the Cathedral’s Foot
Adam Zagajewski (trans. Clare Cavanagh)
In June once, in the evening,
returning from a long trip,
with memories of France’s blooming trees
still fresh in our minds,
its yellow fields, green plane trees
sprinting
before the car,
we sat on the curb at the cathedral’s foot
and spoke softly about disasters,
about what lay ahead, the coming fear,
and someone said this was the best
we could do now-
to talk of darkness in that bright shadow.
God’s Peace,
Ben