The Weekly, March 25, 2024
Hi all,
I'm still making my way through Pomerantsev's How to Win an Information War. It's a fascinating book, but also a disturbing one. The book is largely a biography of Sefton Delmer, a Brit who had grown up in Germany and traveled as a journalist with the Nazis before returning to Britain and, eventually, joining up with a group that ran British propaganda campaigns in Germany.
I say "disturbing" because it becomes apparent about halfway through the book exactly how far Delmer was willing to go to undermine the Nazis. One of his more successful campaigns was a radio broadcast built around a character called "Der Chef." Der Chef presented as an ex-military type who resented the National Socialist party leaders for their decadence and corruption. In a sense, Delmer used the Der Chef character to hit the Nazis from the right.
He approached it that way because he was of the belief that what propaganda did was it gave people a sense of belonging. So if you tried to counter propaganda with argumentation, moralizing, and reasoning, you were effectively taking the proverbial knife to a gun fight. Instead, Delmer believed, you had to create doubt in the minds of listeners not about whether or not the Nazis were right, but about whether or not the Nazis were on their side.
As an analysis of propaganda, I suspect this is quite correct. Certainly, it correlates nicely with Arendt's discussion of totalitarianism. Additionally, I think it's correct to say there are limits to what reason can accomplish and that there are times where engaging an opponent with the belief that things are on the level, both of you are interested in the truth, and therefore you can reason together is quite naive. That said, it seems to me one can grant all those points without endorsing the extremes to which Delmer went.
Put another way, the fact that argumentation is not always or even usually what persuades people does not mean that we can become entirely indifferent to what is true or that our relationship to the truth is relativized by our need to win. To make that move is to go down a dark path, I think—and Delmer's own story suggests as much.
Eventually, Delmer branched out into other propaganda campaigns in Germany. One of them was built around pamphlets featuring pornographic drawings that were actually made by his wife. The drawings depicted German women at home sleeping with foreign men and they were dropped via air on the German front lines with the goal of demoralizing German soldiers. The crudity and profanity of it all was such that when word got out about the campaign many British officials condemned Delmer's tactics.
In another instance, Delmer actually tried to start a wave of civilian suicides in Germany through sharing stories of mass despair amongst German civilians, a suicide epidemic, etc. His thought was that an outbreak of suicide would destabilize the nation, such that they could not continue fighting the war. This, too, met with much condemnation by British officials who were aware of the campaign. For those officials, there were lines one could not cross, even while fighting the Nazis.
One of the problems that the past decade has exposed in the American context is that for many American believers there is no capacity to imagine a time in which martyrdom—that is to say, "a temporal defeat"—can be a licit Christian calling. Temporal defeat is the great enemy that can't be tolerated or entertained as a possibility.
Much like Delmer, many Christians find themselves adopting a "no holds barred" mentality to our own culture war—and, I think, with far less legitimacy than Delmer had given that he was facing the people who were carrying out the Holocaust. But there are times where Christian faithfulness does call us to defeat. And the only thing that can comfort us in those times is the knowledge that evil does not finally triumph, that goodness and life are ultimately unconquerable because there is a resurrection and a judgment coming. Indeed, Holy Week itself is a reminder of this, for on Friday we will remember when God himself was defeated. But we know that that defeat wasn't final; indeed, that defeat was the swallowing up of all the world's violence and hatred and evil so that it would never have final victory. Holy Week is a reminder to us that we can fight the Lord's battles using the Lord's means and no other means precisely because we know that God always wins his battles. Evil does not conquer.
On that note: Today is March 25, the feast of the annunciation and also the date of the crucifixion in some traditions. It is also the date in Tolkien's legendarium when the ring of Sauron is destroyed. Consider:
'Noon?' said Sam, trying to calculate. 'Noon of what day?'
'The fourteenth of the New Year,' said Gandalf; 'or if you like, the eighth day of April in the Shire reckoning. But in Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty-fifth of March when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King. He has tended you, and now he awaits you. You shall eat and drink with him. When you are ready I will lead you to him.'
That's Tolkien. Now here is Tom Shippey, the best Tolkien scholar around for my money.
No one any longer celebrates the twenty-fifth of March, and Tolkien's point is accordingly missed, as I think he intended. He inserted it only as a kind of signature, a personal mark of piety. However, as he knew perfectly well, in old English tradition, 25th March is the date of the Crucifixion, of the first Good Friday. As Good Friday is celebrated on a differentd ay each year, Easter being a mobile date defined by the phases of the moon, the connection has been lost, except for one thing. In Gondor the New Year will always begin on 25th March. One might note that in the Calendar of dates which Tolkien so carefully wrote out in Appendix B, December 25th is the day on which the Fellowship sets out from Rivendell. The main action of The Lord of the Rings takes place, then, in the mythic space between Christmas, Christ's birth, and the crucifixion, Christ's death.'
Happy Holy Week, friends.
Books
I started Joy Clarkson's latest over the weekend and am really enjoying it so far. There's something about Joy's broader intellectual project that I find both really fascinating and really hard to define. Maybe this is a way of saying it: I mentioned before that when you listen to Malcolm Guite reading Tolkien, the power of it isn't just in Tolkien's writing, splendid as that is. The power also comes from the undeniable evidence that Guite has drunk from the same wells as Tolkien and Lewis. To use an image of Tolkien's, the leaf mould of Guite's mind is much like the leaf mould of Tolkien's. The sense I get when I read Joy is that she is much the same.
Though perhaps it is better to say "Lewis" rather than "Tolkien." There is an intellectual generosity in Lewis that is there in spades in Guite and Joy but was only occasionally present in Tolkien, whose particular sort of Catholicism, I suspect, kept him from ever going the ways that Lewis did—for good and for ill. You won't find some of the howlers you get in Lewis around something like the imprecatory Psalms in Tolkien, for example. But I'm also not sure Tolkien ever creates a character like Orual in Till We Have Faces.
In any case, I think we have far too little of both Tolkien and Lewis's intellectual spirit today and what is thrilling about Joy's work is the clear indebtedness to that tradition without simply being derivative of it or regurgitating what it has already said. Joy manages to be a daughter of that tradition and to speak in her own voice about the issues she is most engaged with—which is perhaps the best possible tribute one could give Lewis, in fact.
Articles
Timothy Snyder on the strongman fantasy
JD Flynn on including disabled children in Christian schools
Kirsten Sanders on patriarchy
L. M. Sacasas on dopamine culture
Darel Paul on the permanent sexual revolution
Leah Sargeant on invisible, essential, relational work
Myles Werntz on Cassian and gluttony
Faith Hill on why fewer teens are babysitting
Tano Santos and Luigi Zingales on how big tech undermines democracy
Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell on the tyranny of smartphones
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate on how the cloud is a bigger carbon sink than the airline industry
Elsewhere
As long as we're talking about Tolkien so much, here's an excellent cover of "Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold":
Under the Mercy,
~Jake