THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 31
close of his first term, “had accomplished
what three-quarters of a century of Rus-
sian active measures had left undone.”
Pomerantsev describes our current
condition of uncertainty and mutual
mistrust as “the Big Tsimtsum,” a term
that he borrows from the art critic and
philosopher Boris Groys, who drew the
idea from the Kabbalah. In the legend’s
original telling, God retreats from the
world that he brings into being, leav-
ing behind a vacuum. Groys took up
the idea as a way of explaining the void
left by the collapse of Communism in
the early nineties: an “infinite space of
signs emptied of sense.” It turns out,
however, that it was not only the los-
ing party in the Cold War that faced
the reckoning of the Big Tsimtsum. Its
victors in the West are now living
through something similar, a time in
which “what was previously assumed as
normal has dissolved, and there is a race
to form new identities out of the flux,”
as Pomerantsev puts it. In this disori-
enting new reality, “truth is unknow-
able, the future dissolving into nasty
nostalgia, conspiracy replacing ideology,
facts equated to fibs, conversation col-
lapsing into mutual accusations that
every argument is just information war-
fare, and the sense that everything under
one’s feet is constantly moving, inher-
ently unstable, liquid.”
It’s tempting to think that the way
out of this morass is winning the in-
formation wars, that the problem is one
of political P.R., that better messaging
would protect Western societies from
foreign mischief. But Jankowicz is
rightly skeptical of the idea that “if the
West could only tell a more compel-
ling, more strategic, more coordinated
story, we could grapple with state-spon-
sored disinformation like the content
that Russia produces.” The real solu-
tion lies in crafting a society and a pol-
itics that are more responsive, credible,
and just. Achieving that goal might
require listening to those who are sus-
ceptible to disinformation, rather than
mocking them and writing them off.
“Although the resultant views may be
repugnant to the beholder,” Jankowicz
argues, “their origins are legitimate and
deserve to be considered.”
She also commends the model of
Finland, which has taught media liter-
acy in public schools for decades; four
years ago, a revised curriculum was in-
troduced that teaches all high-school
students to identify false stories and to
make sense of which sources of infor-
mation to trust. By contrast, civics ed-
ucation in American schools has dwin-
dled in the past decades; in 2016, only
twenty-three per cent of eighth grad-
ers performed at or above the proficiency
level on a nationwide civics exam. If
you don’t know how government actu-
ally works, you’re more likely to believe
in conspiratorial versions of its doings.
Although Twitter and Facebook have
become more active in removing or
flagging misinformation, inflammatory
and divisive content is too essential to
their business models for them to fully
root it out. And even decisive action
on this question by Congress, which
has so far proved reluctant, wouldn’t
mend the even deeper fissures caused
by partisanship, media echo chambers,
racial and economic inequality, and dis-
trust in politics—the fetid waters in
which disinformation breeds and finds
new hosts.
In 1946, Kennan, who coined the no-
tion of “political warfare,” dropped bythe Moscow Embassy code room to
relay his thoughts on how to counter
the geopolitical threat of Communism.
The Kremlin clearly had great ambi-
tions to infiltrate and weaken the West-
ern order, and considerable resources to
devote to the task. How best to com-
bat those efforts? His missive, known
as the “Long Telegram,” is a key doc-
ument in the canon of U.S. foreign pol-
icy. “Much depends on the health and
vigor of our own society,” he wrote to
his bosses back in Washington, liken-
ing the Kremlin and its ideologues to
a “malignant parasite which feeds only
on diseased tissue.” As such, he went
on, “every courageous and incisive mea-
sure to solve internal problems of our
own society, to improve self-confidence,
discipline, morale and community spirit
of our own people, is a diplomatic vic-
tory over Moscow worth a thousand
diplomatic notes and joint communi-
qués. If we cannot abandon fatalism
and indifference in the face of deficien-
cies of our own society, Moscow will
profit.” Perhaps the best defense against
active measures is a little bit of activ-
ism of our own.