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The AIH Transcript for November 03, 2020

Hosts: Carol Off and Chris Howden

Prologue

CAROL OFF: Hello. I'm Carol Off.

CHRIS HOWDEN: Good evening. I'm Chris Howden. This is As It Happens.

[Music: Theme]

CH: Tonight:

CO: The Florida Keys, the Sunshine State will play a big role in the U.S. election, which is why an election lawyer in Miami says he's keeping a close eye on the polls there tonight.

CH: Shots mired. If there's been one clear message about this year's flu season, it's that anyone who can get the vaccine should — except that a shortage in Ontario especially means many who could can't.

CO: Half measures. Slovakia administered COVID tests to more than half its population this past weekend. Which one Slovak doctor says was an impressive feat, but not such a great idea.

CH: At vice versa. Author Shani Mootoo got the opposite of the usual writing guidance from the late V.S. Naipaul, and she says it helped put her back on the Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist.

CO: And... Tub stumper. We revisit a shockingly dirty conversation with a doctor and author, James Hamblin. Shocking because it's been years since Dr. Hamblin has had a shower.

CH: And... dirty for pretty much the same reason. In an encore presentation of a feature interview with Carol, he explains why we should make a clean getaway from our excessive cleaning products.

CH: “As It Happens”, the Tuesday edition. Radio that figures he's chasing a soapless cause.

Part one: Miami-Dade vote, flu vaccine shortage, Slovakia country testing

Miami-Dade vote

Guest: Juan-Carlos Planas

CH: They don't call Florida a battleground state for nothing. Especially after one of the most contentious, combative election campaigns in U.S. history. And now, Floridians could be heading for a nail-biter of a night. Donald Trump feels hopeful about the Sunshine State going his way. Here's what the U.S. President told his campaign staff and reporters today from Virginia.

DONALD TRUMP: Right now, I'm looking at different locations, and we're seeing lines of people, and they're wearing a lot of red material, [crowd laughs] including hats. But now, we’re seeing in certain areas that would be Trump areas we're seeing lines of people that are extended for miles. I think we're going to have a great night in Texas, Arizona. A few of them are looking really, very, very strong. Florida looking very, very strong. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Florida. But the people of Florida, they know I love them, and they love me. You know, we just have an automatic bond.

CH: Juan-Carlos Planas wouldn't say he has an "automatic bond" with the President. He's an election lawyer and a former Republican state representative. But this year, he's supporting Joe Biden. And he's keeping his eye on polling sites all day, making sure things are running smoothly. We reached Mr. Planas in Kendall, Florida — just outside of Miami.

CO: Mr. Planas, you have seen your fair share of election days in Florida. How does this one compare?

JUAN-CARLOS PLANAS: You know, it's a little bit less of a turnout because so many people voted early in person as well as to mail ballots. But the truth is, I've been doing this for a while, and this is very normal and very typical of other elections.

CO: We were anticipating, well, your country and I guess around the world, watching to see if there was going to be chaos at the polls, militias showing up, people being turned away. And yet we're not seeing any of the sort of chaos that was projected. Are you seeing anything in Florida, not just in Miami-Dade. Are you seeing anything else going on?

JCP: We had one incident at one location where people were showing up to the wrong location, and we were trying to give them the right one. And the Trump poll watcher got mad and tried to stop us from doing that. But other than that, that's the only issue we've seen so far today.

CO: What does that tell you that the Trump poll watcher wanted you not to tell people they are at the wrong place?

JCP: You know, it's very unfortunate. I was part of the Republican legal team for 14 years before, and we always wanted folks to be able to go to the right precinct. And we always encourage folks to make sure that they informed the voters where they could go. This is obviously something that is different than the norm. But then again, Trump's Republican Party is different than the Republican Party I used to be a part of.

CO: The votes as they're coming in, this enormous number of mail-in ballots are being counted in real-time in Florida, unlike other places. And so how closely are those votes being scrutinized, and who is scrutinizing them?

JCP: Well, by law in Florida, you have to have a county canvassing board that will review all the ballots. At that process, which not only is being live-streamed, but it's also open to the public, you see representatives from both sides making objections and such. You know, ever since 2000, we've done some wonderful changes to our election laws here in Florida. And it's a very fair process even when you don't agree with the result.

CO: When you mentioned 2000, of course, that was the Gore-Bush election. It was so close, that vote, that it ended up in the courts. And that everything hanging on a chad, as they say. So are those technical issues no longer a problem in Florida?

JCP: Once we went to these paper optical scan ballots, we have really seen a very dead-on accuracy of the results. We're always going to have close elections. We’re that type of state. There's a very good chance that we will have recounts in this election, because if anybody wins with less than half a percentage point, it goes to a machine recount. It really depends on the one unknown. The polls right now suggest that Biden is winning the nonparty affiliated voters by 55 per cent. And if that's the case, just based on the turnout, Biden would likely eke out a win in Florida.

CO: Is there a chance that Joe Biden will win by a convincing margin tonight in Florida? Any chance of that?

JCP: There is a chance. I mean, if Joe Biden wins by over 100 thousand votes, which is what Trump won four years ago. It's very hard to tell at this point. But I think at nine o'clock tonight, we'll have a good indication of where Florida is headed.

CO: But Donald Trump keeps insisting in the comments he's making even today, he said, we should be entitled to know who won on November 3rd. That it’s ridiculous that they should go beyond that.

JCP: You know, the funny thing is it again shows Donald Trump's disdain for history and for knowledge. We never, ever have final results on election night. That's why the laws in most states allow to the end of the week to certify results. The only times that we know who won on election night is if there is a very strong margin. But when you have a closely divided electorate, until all votes are counted, you never know.

CO: You are a Republican. You didn't vote for Donald Trump in 2016 but you didn't vote for Hillary Clinton either; you wrote in a candidate. How many Republicans are like you out there?

JCP: I think there's a good amount. One of the things that's interesting is Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were equally unpopular. I think Joe Biden is a better retail politician, a better candidate. The truth is, I regret not voting for Hillary Clinton. And part of the reason I've worked so hard for the Biden campaign this time around is because, number one, Trump has been much worse than I even thought he would be. And I guess I'm atoning for my sins.

CO: What makes you nervous about tonight?

JCP: You know, [deep sigh] right now, all of the metrics, all of the statisticians, and there's a website called 538. You know, these folks give probabilities, and they have Biden with an 89 per cent chance of winning the election. At this point, pollsters have done their job. If Trump were to pull it off, it would mean that individuals purposely lied to pollsters, that all of Trump's behaviour, all of the ways in which Trump has mismanaged the coronavirus have all of a sudden been ratified as acceptable by a large swath of the American electorate. And I think that's very dangerous. The other issue is right now, it seems almost certain, not just that Joe Biden will win the popular vote, but that he will get a majority of the popular vote. And that more than 50 per cent of this country will reject Donald Trump. And if he is somehow able to eke out an Electoral College win with so much of the country against him, it's nerve-racking as to where the country goes from here. It is easier for Joe Biden to convey to Trump voters that he cares about what they want and is willing to listen to them than it is for Donald Trump as a human being to do the same thing to Biden voters. So the fear is always that we could end up being more divided as a country.

CO: Mr. Planas, there is so much at stake, as you point out, in this election in the United States. And I appreciate you telling us about it. Thank you.

JCP: Thank you. It's my pleasure to speak with you.

CO: Bye.

CH: Juan-Carlos Planas is a former Republican state representative and an election lawyer. We reached him in Kendall, Florida.

[Music: Jazz]

Flu vaccine shortage

Guest: Nili Kaplan-Myrth

CH: With COVID-19 numbers trending the wrong way, there's one thing Canadians tend to put off that we're being urged to do this year: get vaccinated. Not for COVID. Not yet, anyway. But for the regular, old flu. The trouble is that in much of the country — Ontario in particular — a lot of people say they can't do that. Rexall pharmacies have temporarily cancelled vaccination appointments due to a shortage of doses. And some primary care clinics are sounding the alarm too. Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth is a family doctor who has spent the past month struggling to get sufficient doses for her Ontario clinic. We reached her in Ottawa.

CO: Dr. Kaplan-Myrth, I understand you now have enough flu vaccine doses for your patients at your clinic, but what did you have to do to make that happen?

NILI KAPLAN-MYRTH: I had to make a lot of noise, and that is not the way that it's meant to be. But this is a repeating pattern. If we yell and scream and say the community isn't being supported and we need more flu shots in our clinic — and literally drive down to Public Health and say we're here to pick up the flu shot — then we ended up with enough. But it’s not the process that it's meant to be. You know, our provincial leaders say that there's going to be enough and then the hospitals pose the CEOs and the politicians getting their flu shots and getting chocolate bars. And in the meantime, in the community, we don't have enough.

CO: Now, I understand your son actually had to go and try and [chuckling] wheel and deal to get some of these?

NKM: He did. So, you know, I'm working full-time. And basically, it came down to I worked last week. I did a 10-hour shift at the Public Health kind of centralized system to see 150 of my own patients because we were told that if we did that, there'd be enough flu vaccine there. At the end of that night, I asked the nurse if I could please just take some of the supplies so that I could bring it back to my office. And, you know, I was told, no, you'll have to get it through public health. And finally, my staff got through to them and said, look, Dr. Kaplan-Myrth is gonna send somebody to Public Health. Can you please have a cooler ready so that she can pick it up? And so, yeah, my son was our courier and went over with the cooler and brought it back, yeah.

CO: Yeah, but now, this demand for the flu vaccine was so anticipated, wasn't it? And the plan was to have a massive vaccine, probably 80 per cent coverage. How is it that we don't have the vaccine?

NKM: So I don't know. But that is part of this question about the lack of transparency. Because when we're told, don't worry, don't panic, there'll be enough for everybody. And then literally, like even now, I have doctors and teachers who I've given the flu shot to. They're not my patients, but they haven't been able to get it for themselves. And I know that my colleagues across Ontario are struggling with the same thing. Pediatricians and family doctors where, you know, we spend a lot of time booking patients for flu shots and then we're already working 60 hours a week and we don't have then time to cancel everybody when we've run out. And it's also demoralizing when we say, but we don't have it. And then the politician says, oh, yes, but there's more than enough to go around. Just be patient. And it's symptomatic of this larger problem, right?

CO: Ontario Premier Doug Ford, he said that there would be — the flu shot — will be available. He addressed the issue yesterday. I just want to play a bit of what he had to say and get to to respond to it. So here's Premier Doug Ford.

DOUG FORD: Let me flip this around. Isn't this great news that we've seen an increase of flu shots of 500 per cent? People are listening. And we're doing everything we can. As for Rexall, my friends in Rexall, you knew the allocations that you had. So don't overbook people. It's very simple as that. You knew exactly how many flu shots you had, similar to Shoppers. So don't overbook. If you know you have X amount of flu shots, book X amount of flu shots. But, you know, if you have 100 flu shots, don't book 200 people.

CO: All right, that is Premier Doug Ford. Just for people who don't know that reference to Rexall. This is the drugstore that was was designated to be a place where you could get the vaccine and they ran out. So how do you respond to the premier?

NKM: So I think we call that gaslighting. For Premier Doug Ford to say that they've done everything that they can and then it's the fault of the pharmacists for overbooking, it's not actually addressing the issue, which is that there was never enough flu vaccine ordered. And it's all crumbs. It's crumbs that we're getting where we’re, told, well, if doctors can't cope, then there must be something wrong with doctors. If nurses can't cope, there must be something wrong with nurses. If PSWs are quitting their jobs, there must be something wrong with them. As opposed to there's something wrong with our health care system, there's a lack of support, a lack of infrastructure, you know?

CO: Right.

NKM: Telling people, well, you just obviously booked too many patients in for the flu shot [disgusted chuckle] isn't addressing the problem, which is there is no flu vaccine there. And how is this going to work when it comes to the COVID vaccine? That's the really scary thing, ‘cause it's going to be the same people who have the resources and who can pull strings who are going to have access to a vaccine, while the people who most need it are not going to have access to it. And we are going to be blamed. We're gonna be told, well, there's something wrong with the community if you're not getting the vaccine out.

CO: Other provinces are also struggling with long waits and these logistic problems. And then, as you just mentioned, pile this on top of the issue with COVID and what’s called the “twindemics” — the threat of both. So what are Canadians faced with — people in Ontario and Canada — if we can't fix this, if we can't get access to these vaccines?

NKM: Well, in terms of the flu vaccine, what we're worried about is that we don't have the capacity for people to be hospitalized with influenza as well as COVID. And we hear sometimes even for influenza, we hear, well, it's just the flu. And we take issue with that because influenza can kill. And in the longer term, so much emphasis is put on, well, you know, don't worry, Candida is going to develop a vaccine for COVID. Don't worry, we're going to make sure that every Canadian can get this vaccine. Why shouldn't we be worrying, like, nothing has happened that was supposed to happen. Health care workers are burning out. Educators are burning out. We don't have enough support in the community. And we don't have transparency. Public health messages are, you know, we're told one thing and then something else actually happens in our offices. So it's exhausting, and it's demoralizing, and we're worried for our patients.

CO: Dr. Kaplin-Myrth, it's a very distressing situation that you've described, and I appreciate that you laid out for us. Thanks so much.

NKP: You're welcome. My pleasure.

CO: Bye.

NKP: Bye-bye.

CH: Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth is a family doctor in Ottawa. And for more on this story, visit our website at: www.cbc.ca/aih.

[Music: Glassy guitar]

Slovakia country testing

Guest: Alexandra Brazinova

CH: Last weekend, Slovakia tested two-thirds of its entire population for COVID-19. That meant roughly three million people swabbed, with the help of the military, local volunteers, and health workers from outside the country. The quick-turnaround tests produced tens of thousands of positive results — which adds to the evidence that Slovakia is in the grips of a COVID surge. But Alexandra Brazinova isn't convinced that this was a useful exercise in public health. Dr. Brazinova is an epidemiologist with the Medical Faculty of Comenius University. We reached her in Bratislava.

CO: Dr. Brazinova, how difficult is it to test your population of a country over a couple of days?

ALEXANDRA BRAZINOVA: Well, it was really very ambitious. It took a lot of people, of course, and an enormous amount of resources to organized and then implement. And I have to say that this was all done on a very short notice. Because only two weeks ago, the prime minister announced that this will be done. So the army that was responsible for the organization and then the health care workers and administrative workers and everybody else had to do their best to actually do this.

CO: And how would you rate the effort? How well did they do?

AB: It all went very well, even though a few hours before the testing started, some of the testing sites still didn't have the health care professional to do the nasal swab itself. But the health care professionals volunteered. So, in the end, from the logistic point of view, it's a real success. And it's really great to know that there is so much energy and willingness to volunteers in our nation.

CO: OK. So from a logistical point of view, you say that they did a really good job. You give them high marks. But what do you think of the whole idea of doing a mass testing in Slovakia?

AB: OK, that's another thing. The plan to do this mass testing was not discussed with experts beforehand. It was a political decision. And I personally, and many other professionals that are active in this epidemic situation, we were very surprised to hear this plan because, first of all, this testing was done by antigen tests. And we know that they're are not as sensitive, as specific as the PCR tests.

CO: Okay, so the difference between these two tests, both are nasal swab, but the PCR is more accurate. It has to go back to the lab, takes more time and the antigen test is simpler. But what? The success rate of identifying the disease is, what, about 30 per cent false positives, false negatives, is it not?

AB: Exactly. With antigen test, we find only maybe half of all the people that are infected.

CO: OK, so your government, Slovakia, is saying, well, to know that many people, to be able to find out that many infections, is better than nothing, we do it quickly. What do you think is wrong with that? What damage can it do to do this mass antigen testing?

AB: Of course, I admit that it's good to identify as many people with positive results as possible and then isolate them. And we will hope that this will slow down the spread of the infection. But with the false negatives, there is this risk that they spread the infection further because they got a certificate that they are negative, so they think they're OK. So they behave in a way that they don't take any protective measures. They are close with their relatives and so on, so they can spread the infection further. And by mass testing, by testing a lot of people, we have a lot of these false negatives.

CO: Why did the government decide to do this mass test?

AB: Well, that's a hard question, and I don't really know the answer. From all the discussions that we had among the experts, I think this is like a desperate solution in a really bad situation. When we saw — and we still see — a steep increase of new cases of coronavirus, and steep increase of hospitalized people, and also increase of people that die. So the government decided to take these measures as an ultimate step to slow down or ideally to stop the spread of the infection. And we will see. I mean, it's really hard to say right now. It's been only a few days ago. So we will see within two or three weeks if it worked.

CO: Slovakia was doing quite well with COVID-19 back in the spring. You started to warn the country that there could be a second wave, a surge in cases, that this you thought was coming, which actually is what's happened. What reaction did you get when you were warning that this was going to happen?

AB: Yes. Right after the opening of the borders, we saw that new cases of COVID-19 were identified in Slovakia, after a period when we had zero cases per day. So I published an article, and I got a lot of criticism because people were really happy after the period of the first wave. And I was like a bad profit saying that things are not as good as they appear. So I got a lot of criticism. And basically, for the whole July and August, no new measures were implemented and the numbers kept increasing. So it took until the end of August when the government started to take measures again.

CO: Do you think the government might start listening to you now?

AB: [chuckle] Well, I'm not a member of any of this government-level decision committees, so I'm more of a freelance academician and epidemiologist that sometimes expresses the opinion in media. [CO laughs] So maybe, but it's hard to say.

CO: [still laughing] I think that you're more than someone who expresses opinions in media since you got it right and they didn't. But some are saying that, well, it's better to do this mass testing than to have a complete lockdown in order to get control. But is it possible that that that's going gonna happen anyways, that lockdown in Slovakia is inevitable?

AB: Well, it's absolutely possible that the complete lockdown will happen because the situation in the hospitals, it's quite critical. So if this continues over the next few days or a couple of weeks, we'll need to do the complete lockdown. So it might have been wiser and safe a lot of resources to do the lockdown Three weeks ago instead of these mass testing.

CO: It’s going to be a long winter, isn't it?

AB: Yes, absolutely.

CO: Dr. Brazinova, I appreciate speaking with you tonight. Thank you.

AB: Thank you very much.

CH: Alexandra Brazinova teaches epidemiology at the Medical Faculty of Comenius University. She was in Bratislava, Slovakia.

[Music: Ambient]

Shani Mootoo reading

SHANI MOOTOOO: [reading] Were we really safe enough, though? I still wonder about that sometimes. Sitting in the car, the only people on that road facing an expanse of frozen water, as far as one could see, metres from us, massive iceberg-like formations, frozen waves piled one atop the other. Knife-edge cliffs jutted out of the ice boulders into the sky and then dropped off into gem-like blue and green canyons. I brought my window down a fraction and we listened, a heaving, thumping rebellion came from beneath the surface. It wasn't a stretch to imagine water undulating, restless, captive, wanting an escape from all that ice.

CH: Shani Mootoo, reading from her Giller Prize-nominated novel, Polar Vortex. The winner of the 100-thousand dollar award will be announced on Monday. For more, visit: www.cbcbooks.ca.

Part two: Encore: No showering doctor

Encore: No showering doctor

CH: We've all had that moment at least once this year — where the stress and uncertainty of 2020 just feels completely overwhelming. Maybe you went outside for a walk, or watched "The Bachelorette" from inside a blanket fort. Or maybe you took a hot bath, or shower, with some soothing eucalyptus soap. And a large glass of everything in the liquor cabinet mixed together. James Hamblin might have done those things this year. Except the bathing or showering. The American doctor hasn't showered in years. Oh, he'll rinse if he has dirt on him. And he washes his hands regularly. But long showers with or without soothing eucalyptus soap are a thing of the past for him. Dr. Hamblin is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health. This summer he published a book called "Clean: The New Science of Skin" -- which he wrote before the pandemic. And in it, he asks whether we need all the personal care products we're using -- and looks at how so many of them ended up on our shelves. James Hamblin spoke with Carol at the beginning of September. Here's an encore presentation of that conversation.

CO: James, what can you remember about the last time you had a nice, good, lingering, lathery shower?

JAMES HAMBLIN: [Chuckles] You know, it faded away. It faded from my life. So there was not and I don't recommend that anyone quit cold turkey because it tends not to go well. So this was something I just sort of weaned myself off of slowly.

CO: When you say that you don't recommend going cold turkey, we should point out to listeners you are not in the room with me, so I can't independently verify anything you say. But if you were, would I know that you have not really lathered up in five years?

JH: I'm told no. And this is by people who I trust to tell me if I did in fact smell that you come to smell okay. You know, when you're stopping deodorants, when you're stopping body washes, you go through periods of being oily and smelling like body odor. But eventually those periods become more and more infrequent.

CO: And this you have from people who love you telling you this.

JH: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I pursued this, you know, as a personal and journalistic voyage. So I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing anything. And I have colleagues and friends and loved ones who can attest to all of it. You know, you don't look and smell the same as after you go through an elaborate skin care regimen or even, you know, have lathered yourself in fine smelling soaps. But you don't smell terrible either. You're just sort of in equilibrium and you smell, as I'm told, like a human, okay.

CO: [Laughs] That could be a lot of things, actually, James, when you think about it. So how long did it take before the flora and fauna on your skin found some kind of equilibrium?

JH: It was somewhere between six months and a year that I started to feel like I was pretty reliably not going to need the emergency deodorant that I was carrying in my bag and that I felt like I was going to look generally okay. And that will probably vary for a lot of people. So it's not a prescription. But when you start talking about how you've done this, it turns out a lot of people have quit at least specific things like deodorant or shampoos. And it seems like that's about the timeframe where people -- where we sort of let our bodies break out of these cycles of, you know, washing and then oiliness and whatever exactly happens with the microbes during that time, it doesn't happen overnight.

CO: We'll get to the microbes in a moment. But on the product level, and I do know other people who have in some ways cut back on products. I know there's a no poo movement like no shampoo. And people realizing that outbreaks of rashes and eczema and dry skin was being caused by the very things that were supposed to be good for your skin, right?

JH: Yes. For some people at least, you know, I'm in no way saying that all soap is bad. Washing your hands is very important as a health intervention. For some people who are doing just fine and enjoying their daily regimens and not having any skin issues, you know, I say more power to you. But there are plenty of people out there kind of getting in these cycles of having flares of acne or eczema and trying to, you know, use more and more products and clean more and more aggressively. And there's a big segment of that population who finds that actually things get better when you taper off. And it doesn't necessarily mean going to zero, but it can mean thinking sort of the opposite way that we normally think, which is instead of finding another product or another treatment to apply you know, just trying to break out of the cycles that we're in.

CO: Anyone who is doing inventory in their bathrooms like I did and finding how many products are there, just the soaps and then the creams to deal with the dryness from the soaps and the shampoos and the cream rinses and the detanglers and this and that. And then products just for men and for women, just for kids. How do we become so obsessed with being clean?

JH: It is a brilliant story of marketing, which I tried to detail in the book. But there's much more to it than I could even get into. But, you know, even hundred years ago, it was not the norm to have multiple products, even for everybody to have a store -bought soap and to have running water, which was only, you know, becoming commonplace. And so we really quickly transition from the idea of a soapy bath being an occasional luxury to a daily necessity, you know, within a few decades and also during that time transition from kind of the idea of a family having one bar of soap being something that was, you know, nice to have and the norm to everyone has multiple products lining the shelves, lining the bathtub. And it's basically a process of segmenting and growth by the big corporations that have sold us these things and found ways to make products slightly differentiated so that they are maybe a little different colour, a little different scent, a little different concentration and making home-made products out of them.

CO: But isn't that, though, based on an awareness over those, about 100 years, of germs, of infection, of needing to be clean, of trying to keep our bodies clear of things that could infect a sore or create the conditions of a virus -- isn't that the whole purpose that I mean, maybe the marketing piled on top of that, but isn't there a basis for that need to be clean?

JH: Absolutely. And that's where it started. You know, it started with hand-washing, with washing, you know, contaminated surfaces, washing after we might, you know, use the bathroom, making sure that we don't have any bodily fluids, we're not bleeding, there's not vomit or feces on us that would spread disease. That's being too graphic but those are the sort of medical considerations when you're really talking about not spreading disease. And then we really quickly took that into the realm of signifiers of hygiene, whereas things like, you know, removing the oils from your hair, things like smelling like flowers and having white teeth, things that are actually not at all related to disease, that are sort of signifiers of, well, if you look a certain way, you must be of a certain class and station who can afford to do the hygienic practices and therefore you are, "clean." But it really quickly devolved away from actual disease prevention practices and toward wealth and class signifiers.

CO: So are you saying basically that BO is BS?

JH: [Chuckles] No, I mean, I think it's very real. I think we've all experienced it ourselves and have ridden with someone on a subway who is experiencing it as well. So, I don't deny that reality. But, you know, it is the product of bacteria living off of the oils that we're secreting from our skin and producing that smell. And it's logical to think that we did not evolve to smell in ways that would repulse other people and to need to apply aluminum deodorants under our arms every day lest everyone want to get away from us. So, you know, the idea is that it's those bad smells, the objectively disgusting ones are due to imbalances of the microbes in those areas, which, you know, we're meant to produce odors, we're meant to smell certain ways. And once you sort of find an equilibrium in that microbial ecosystem, you don't smell terrible offensive to people.

CO: I'm speaking with Dr. James Hamblin and he is the author of the book Clean: The New Science of Skin. And James, I want to ask you about those microbes, because, I mean, reading your book and I would look at my arm, which seems like a banal place, but it's a jungle in there, isn't it?

JH: Yeah. And, you know, not so much your forearm as like the underarms and growing the flexeril creases, the places that are oilier have more microbes, but they are all over us all the time. So. We are never without the skin microbiome. We wouldn't want to be. It's a normal feature of us. And, you know, we're really just starting to understand the depths of it, the importance of what those microbes are doing and how to keep that microbiome healthy. But it does seem clear that the answer is not to try to simply clear cut the forest as much as possible.

CO: So what are those microbes doing?

JH: That's a great question. Well, they feed off of our oils. They help us produce smells. The ways that we smell that we are signaling to other human beings and other, you know, the way that dogs can recognize us, the way the dogs can even sometimes detect diseases. They are keeping equilibrium that seems to be something neutral, essentially, such that it prevents the invasion of one species that would cause sort of flare of, you know, inflammatory skin diseases. I'm speaking vaguely because we don't entirely know. But we know that we have them all over us and that they are playing a role in maintaining our skin's homeostasis.

CO: So what can you tell us about that? I mean there's a lot we don't know, but when we suffer from eczema and dystrophic skin conditions is it because that forest has been clear cut or that it's been damaged in some way? It's lost its sort of balance?

JH: In part, it seems to be. At least that's one trigger for it. So there is a certain level at which some people have a genetic propensity. There's another level at which some people will be experiencing acute stress, not eating well, not sleeping well. These things that we know affect, you know, outbreaks or affect the functioning of all of our body, but manifest on our skin. And then there are different topical things that we may or may have not done that have perturb that biome or changed it in a way that has not necessarily caused an infection in the traditional sense, but has just kind of shifted the proportions such that the person's immune system gets flared up and gets triggered. And the answer we usually have found is to, you know, sometimes try topical antibiotics, we will try to suppress the immune system with steroids. But something that is exciting and new is the idea of possibly just trying to rebalance that microbiome, to, you know, undo the trigger.

CO: You're talking about probiotics for the skin.

JH: I hesitate to use the term because as exciting as the concept is, the products that are out there right now, you know, are kind of shots in the dark. We don't know that they're working. Exciting idea, but it remains to be proven in terms of what actual bacteria we put on there or whether we would just be putting products on there that themselves are sort of prebiotic that would feed the bacteria, that would change their propensity to grow in certain places. So a very exciting concept. Not something I would spend money on just this moment.

CO: But when you think of spending money on things, I mean one of the biggest industries has got to be around acne and especially teenagers, young people suffering horrible embarrassment from something that happens to someone because of hormones principally. And they put all kinds of things on the skin, as I did, in order to deal with acne. Is there anything that can reverse that? Is there any way to find a microbial imbalance in skin that might help all those young people?

JH: You know, I think it would be hard to do worse than we're doing against acne right now. Most people, and I too, just tried kind of everything that you could, including washing really aggressively -- antibiotics. There is hope absolutely. Because we have not been able to trace acne to a single bacterial infection, a single type of bacteria being present or not present that will be able to reshape that microbiome into something that at least is less prone to acne. And, you know, that's just sort of like this missing piece of the therapeutic puzzle where it at least involves thinking in the other direction and at least maybe trying less hard to kill microbes and leaning away from antibiotics and from aggressive cleaning regimens that are quite possibly perpetuating the cycle of imbalance.

CO: What's been the reaction to your book?

JH: You know, I think if people take the time to read the whole book, they're pretty into it. But the reaction to people from people who haven't is a fair and I would say deserved skepticism. I hope that by the end of it, though, people have sort of gone along with me on this journey to trace our beliefs and our practices and come out at the other end sort of questioning what is really necessary and what is not. I think a lot of people who are in contact with me, having already read it, were already sort of on board. They were the early people to read the book because they had already lived through this sort of experience. So I'm interested in the next wave of people who came to it with extreme reluctance or skepticism.

CO: I have Dr. James Hamblin on the line and he is the author of a book called Clean: The New Science of Skin. I know you have working on this for some time and experimenting with it. But I wonder if there was a better time to have released your book than in the middle of a pandemic where people are obsessed with hygiene?

JH: Yeah, well, you know, in some ways we are and in some ways we aren't. I think there's long overdue attention to hand-washing, to not touching your face, rubbing your eyes, picking your nose, to being conscious of where you're directing your respiratory droplets, not coughing and sneezing on people or anywhere near people. But at the same time, a lot of people are working from home, working partly remotely, spending a lot more time at home as it is, and being more relaxed about some of the well, not hygiene practices, but self-care practices that weren't really necessary in the first place. So I think we're sort of doubling down on the important health driven behaviours and maybe being given a little more leeway to question the ones that were social and cultural customs that we didn't really enjoy or need in the first place.

CO: What do you make of the fact that your president -- well, the president of your country -- has decided to make it a personal crusade to increase the pressure of showerheads in order to have more water and to have a more intense shower experience.

JH: Yeah. And that goes hand-in-hand with a lot of germophobia, germophobic tendencies that he has shown from reluctance to shake hands with some people, to being into fast food because apparently of the consistency of its production where he believes that the standardization of the process is more likely to keep germs out.

CO: He's also suggested people might drink bleach in order to deal with COVID-19.

JH: Yeah. Yeah. You know, without psychoanalyzing anyone, there are clear tropes with purity and cleanliness that become very easily tied up in toxic ways toward thinking that, you know, you just want to eradicate all foreign entities. And throughout the history of the idea of cleanliness, it has been used maliciously, it has being used to justify racism and xenophobia. And we've called other groups unclean since before we had germ theory as a way of just differentiating ourselves and justifying plunder. And I think that is where you start to see very clearly a propensity to just think of all germs are bad and purity is good as this hyper simplified version of the actual way that we should be thinking about our skin and our microbial worlds.

CO: And you said that people who are rather like minded to you are people who already kind of disposed to these ideas, will embrace your book. But do you think that there are a lot of people like Donald Trump out there?

JH: Oh, yeah. And I think, you know, this is not a book that is advocating anyone change. I am certain that people will read it and come out the other end saying, well, I learned some things and I'm going to go right back to doing what I did before and I'm fine with that. This was an exploration for me of the culture, of the marketing and of the science. And it turns out that there is a lot of value to some people in the rituals, you know, whether it be a feeling of safety and protectiveness that even that they may know is false or whether it's just, you know, the grounding ritual in the morning of getting into a hot shower and lathering up and smelling the way that you're always used to smelling and doing the routines you're used to doing. You know, there can be real value.

CO: I'm sure people find pleasure in that, right. I mean, the Romans had the baths and the bathhouses are an old concept too. And the Egyptians had different ways of socially bathing. And we go to spas and have facials and coffee scrubs and all kinds of things. I mean, it's kind of relaxing, isn't it?

JH: Absolutely. And I think you mentioned coffee scrubs and we're seeing vitamins pop up in all kinds of products. The overlap with food and the culinary world, I think is not incidental in that, you know, there are some people who can eat beans and salad and the same cold cut sandwich every single day, and they would find someone who's a gourmet chef to be wasteful and decadent and was spending too much time and money and worry. But that gourmet chef may derive a lot of pleasure. Sure, it certainly does from that activity, you know, there's social bonding and stuff that far transcends the grams of protein per dollar of what you're consuming. So it's really complex.

CO: Just one last area that we haven't talked about, which is important, and that's, I guess, the consequences of all these products that are used. Because the other thing that we become aware of is all the micro plastics that have passed through our hair and our showers and gone into the system that are damaging the environment. So just maybe say a bit about what do you think the larger ecological consequences are of all this scrubbing?

JH: You know, when you add them up, they are vast. You have microbeads, microplastics, you've mentioned there's macroplastics, of course, the bottles themselves. There's the carbon imprint of shipping these products all around the world. There are petroleum based detergents, which, of course, have their own environmental issues. There are preservatives in many of our products that help them last longer, be more shelf stable, but which end up being washed down the drain. There are anti-microbial agents like triclosan and which made its way into our soil and water and into our bodies. And so no single one of those things is, you know, absolutely destroying our planet. But taken together, these are not insignificant things. And if people are curious about cutting back or they never enjoyed certain practices anyway, and would like to try cutting back, you know, I think there's good reason to think you could save some time, money, water and have some environmental benefit as well.

JH: But you're not saying to people they should do this. Would you recommend it, would you say to people, especially during a pandemic -- do you think that this is a time to actually experiment with not showering?

JH: This is not the right time to experiment with hand-washing. Any less, it's never the right time. We should always be hand-washing quite a lot. But if people are working from home and if they find the book to be a compelling social history that makes them want to experiment, it might be actually a great time.

CO: And you're going to continue -- this is no longer an experiment, this is a lifestyle, I guess.

JH: I am a convert. Yes.

CO: James, it's great to talk to you. Thank you.

JH: Thank you so much for having me.

CH: That was Dr. James Hamblin speaking with Carol back in September. His book "Clean: The New Science of Skin" was published this summer by Riverhead Books. For more on this story, visit our website: www.cbc.ca/aih.

Part three: Encore: This is Not Propaganda

CH: Peter Pomerantsev knows about how the powerful work to silence their critics. His father was arrested and eventually exiled from his home in Ukraine during the Cold War era, for distributing banned literature. Now the British journalist reports from what he calls the frontlines of the war on truth. And one of those lines — as we've seen during the U.S. election campaign that ends today — runs right through one of the world's leading democracies. What Mr. Pomerantsev has discovered is that censorship is now enacted through noise — by drowning out inconvenient facts and voices with a flood of misinformation. In September of 2019, Peter Pomerantsev sat down with Carol for a feature interview — just a few weeks before the last federal election in Canada. And we thought the timing was right to bring you that conversation again tonight.

CO: Well one of the things that you do which I think takes it to a different level -- another level -- is that you you frame it with your own family experiences. And so the reportage is excellent but it's also a memoir. And you contrast your parents' experiences with what's happened today. Your mom and dad Igor and Lina. Taking this back into 1970s you were born in Soviet Union in Ukraine. And your father, Igor, he paid the price didn't he for refusing to be censored, for demanding free speech. Just tell us first of all what happened to Igor after he was arrested?

PETER POMERANTSEV: Sure. So Igor -- my father -- was arrested for what now seems an absurd thing. He was arrested for giving friends his copies of Vladimir Nabokov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novels which even now that sounds crazy when you think about it. He was interrogated for over two years and all his friends and relatives brought in sort of get them to break and give evidence that he committed this heinous crime. And at the end he was exiled. So that was quite common in the late 1970s the politburo had sort of decided that it was easier to get rid of dissidents than to make them martyrs inside the country. And that's when poets like Joseph Brodsky left and a lot of musicians. My father was a poet. So he was from that kind of media. So he ended up in the west with me and my mother and he ended up working on the other side working for the BBC Russian service and then Radio Free Europe which was the American kind of -- depends how you want to frame it -- the American propaganda broadcaster back at the Soviet Union. And really getting very involved in the great kind of Cold War propaganda battles. I mean propaganda neutrally rather than a kind of jaundiced way. The book is modeled on the idea that the way we fought our media battles in the 20th century is kind of defunct now. So my father was fighting for freedom of expression and he was fighting for a kind of a way of writing and expressing yourself that's very impressionistic and very focused on the self and that now is pretty relevant. So I'm trying to understand today's challenges in media manipulation and public opinion manipulation by contrasting it with the 20th century.

CO: And one of the things -- one of the ways you do that is to show that at the time when the Soviet Union and dictatorships in general would limit the amount of information people can get. And now you look at a time when they flood people with information and muddy the waters and fill their senses and propagandize people with excesses almost of information. And you went to various places including to the Philippines to show how people like now President Rodrigo Duterte today ever been able to have an effect -- have the same kind of effect -- by filling people's senses with ideas. Can you describe that.

PETER POMERANTSEV: Sure. I mean like the 20th century was an age of what academics call information scarcity more or less. Yeah. And authoritarian regimes especially would control their societies by constricting speech through censorship. Now even China but certainly sort of like these populist authoritarian regimes like Russia or the Philippines or Turkey I mean there's only limited amounts they could ever achieve through that style of censorship. It's just very hard to censor the Internet and digital media in any effective way. But they've worked something else out. And this actually starts probably in Russia in 2010. Also there's some research on it. They've kind of realized that by using troll files by using bots by just churning out avalanches of nonsense and intimidation they can achieve similar effects -- a sort of censorship through noise. And they don't have to go all the way to kind of hate speech and death threats which are obviously illegal. They can still stick within the confines of legitimate political speech but they can undermine trust and critical voices. They can alienate them from society so effectively. The difference now is that they didn't have to have their fingerprints on it. I mean back in the Cold War whether it was the Soviets or the Marcos regime in the Philippines you know it was pretty clear who were the agents of censorship and intimidation. It was the military police or the Secret Service. Now it's some sort of troll file. You'll never prove that it's actually directly related to the government. The government can just go well look we have no control over this. These are just concerned citizens exercising their freedom of expression online. Go and prove that we have anything to do with this. And that's really hard for pro-democracy activists because we've always fought for freedom of expression. Now we're kind of being hoist by our own petard.

CO: And this is what you learned from Maria Ressa who is a journalist in the Philippines -- we've had her on this show -- she and her team put out the news website "Rappler" and she's been a victim of it and someone who is trying to expose what Duterte is up to. I just want to quote from a speech she gave saying, "Exponential lies on social media incite hate and stifle free speech. We battle impunity from the Philippine government and from Facebook. Why should you care? Our problems are fast becoming your problems. Boundaries around the world collapse and we can begin to see a kind of global playbook." What is that global playbook as far as you've been able to find out?

PETER POMERANTSEV: So the global playbook is for regimes -- actually democratic regimes as much as non-democratic ones to use different methods of drowning out their critics. They do this in different ways. They can just hire troll farms or they can insights online mobs or they can hire out cyber militias through proxy business interests. You know we see various forms of it from the U.S. through Latin America and now Europe and South Asia. And they appear to be learning from each other and we really don't have a kind of a conceptual framework let alone institutional framework to deal with this. Russia is very famous for this. There was this great moment when the Facebook started taking down some of the pages posted by Russian troll farms and the Russian troll farm sort of said well look we're going to sue you because you're subverting our freedom of speech. I don't know if they ever did it. They were just trolling. But still the argument was still there.

CO: You look at all the other populists who have successfully used this -- mentioning President Duterte in the Philippines, President Bolsonaro...you don't talk about him but he's doing the same thing all the populist who have successfully used the same strategy through YouTube, through Facebook, through social media. But how are people and why are people so gullible? Why do they take all the sort of conspiracy theories, the lies, the distortions that these very very successful populists have been able to put out -- why do people accept them?

PETER POMERANTSEV: There's been lots and lots of sort of social science research over many decades really showing that people will cleave or they will lean towards what they think is the dominant opinion. If there's a lot of something out there, people who will start taking it on. Information doesn't work by one bot or one troll convincing you. It's about creating the sense that a certain subject is important and then framing it in a certain way. And people just start adopting and sort of moving towards that. I think that is just part of human psychology. If you hear a thousand messages about you know Hillary Clinton is somehow corrupt. I mean you might not think she is in one or two instances, but at one point you just start building that association in your head and start parroting it. So I mean this is something that scholars have looked into for decades. I think the difference is that with TV our defenses are more up. We're more aware that there was a TV owner manipulating us somewhere. While with social media I think our defenses are down because the information is coming from our friends, it's an up kind of well what used to be thought of as our private space though. I think that idea is out the window of social media. So it's kind of our critical defenses are more down. But I don't think it's a question of gullibility. I think it's just a question of how the human mind works.

CO: The effect of this -- the ability for populists to use media in the same way that President Duterte in the Philippines did, what we saw played out in the United States in the 2016 election was quite extraordinary. And President Trump has continued to produce well-documented lies and conspiracy theories or to re-tweet conspiracy theories and they've morphed into all kinds of other things. We're seeing even the United States and possibly Canada are not immune to this.

PETER POMERANTSEV: No not at all. I'd America is actually kind of one of the most problematic countries out there at the moment in terms of sort of a lot of the kind of pathologies in public opinion that I talk about also the sort of hyper polarization, the sort of like rampant spread of inaccurate information. So America is kind of a global leader. I don't think it's a citadel of of a healthy information space at all which just shows this is not about underdeveloped countries or stupidity or cleverness. These are kind of systemic things. You know there seems to be more of this in countries where there is a very very high Internet penetration so in Europe -- and Britain is one of the leading countries where these problems are coming through while countries where Internet penetration is lower there's a little bit less of it. In the Philippines of course Facebook is your Internet. So Philippines's got very high Internet penetration -- it's got one of the highest amounts of sort of social media use per capita in the world. So I think that's partly that deciding thing -- the levels of Internet penetration rather than the levels of democratic development.

CO: We are speaking with Peter Pomerantsev who is talking to us about his latest book called "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality." And Peter what you also describe is how these ideas that we have -- these pillars of democracy like the idea of free speech that we have defended and your father defended, the ideas turned on its head that the Russians say that you're censoring free speech if we don't allow what they put out. We see President Trump who says that those who accuse him of lying are part of the fake media. How has this whole idea of what is free speech been turned on its head?

PETER POMERANTSEV: I mean that's an absolute brilliant question. I mean I do think free speech as we thought about it and the way it was sort of codified within the U.N. and international law and international human rights law was really kind of like came out of an era where you had authoritarian regimes stamping on people. So I think in the new information environment the rules will change. By no means by the way do I think that censorship is the answer. A) I think that's foolish. I don't think you can censor one's [inaudible] law having much one's wants to. But since it was never the answer it's even less the answer in the social media age where content is often user generated. I do think there is a way of approaching this though -- still thinking about within the paradigms of democratic ideals. So my sense is in the world where are at the moment online that we are surrounded by Internet campaigns that we can't even understand what there prominence is -- who's behind them, why they're being targeted at us. Now we can live in this world we don't understand how the information environment around us is being formed, we don't understand why algorithms sort of why Google or Facebook shows one piece of information not another. In a way I think that's a form of censorship itself. I think we need to radically make the Internet much much more transparent so that we do have oversight of algorithms and how they choose information. So we do understand that every piece of content we see online who is behind it, is it organic, is it a campaign. Anonymity can be allowed without a doubt that's a security issue often. But we should be able to understand whether somebody is using an avatar for a reason that's fine but should be able to know whether it's an avatar. And Internet campaigns will develop. But I think the principle has to change. And that brings us back to a language of rights. That's the rights of the user online to understand how and why what they see is there and how they're being influenced and how their own data is being used to influence them. That's still actually about freedom of expression. Freedom expression is just not the rights to speech it's also the right to receive information. So I think that's where we have a lack now. And that's somewhere where we're kind of the authoritarians who have packed into the language of freedom expression. That's why they're very vulnerable because Putin certainly doesn't want us to know that something that we see online is actually being created in St. Petersburg not in Ottawa or Tennessee. And Putin doesn't want his own population to understand how the KGB influence over Internet companies is making them change what information people see. So there is a way of fighting back, of taking the language of freedom of expression back but that's something that has to be done with a fair amount of coherence and craft by democracies which we're not quite there yet.

CO: But when we see the manipulation of the troll farms and what President Putin can or we believe he is associated -- the Kremlin is associated with the troll farms and the St. Petersburg campaigns is that we presume that they have direct connections to candidates they want to see elected, the outcomes they want, but it really appears to be that for the most part they just muddy the waters, they make it so that there is no truth, there is no reality. Everyone has their own version of what's true -- their own alternate facts as President Trump's say. And so I guess in Canada as we face a federal election, how do we figure out what is true? How do we know what is factual?

PETER POMERANTSEV: So I do look at fact checkers which have become a really you know a wonderful and moral and to be admired global movement. Now I actually go -- booked a conference that fact checkers now have where fact checkers from across the world gather to kind of define the future of fact checking and their very mission based. They are very like we are the avant garde return factual discourse. And I really like them and these are people who often actually do fact checking at great personal risk. However I don't think that is going to be the ultimate answer even though it's very very important. I think there's two things we have to look at. One is factuality -- you know I think it's less about that it's much more about being able to have a shared conversation where you have to be able to agree on a minimum facts to have that. So the question is how do we create a shared public sphere -- a shared public space? I mean in the old days it was far from perfect. But the idea was that a mix of media pluralism and kind of public service ethics balance objectivity all these things kind of brought different sides of society together and we had some sort of debates obviously in parliament but also through the media -- very troublingly that has been undermined. We've seen pluralism lead to such polarization that people are in separate bubbles and that's then reinforced by actors like the Kremlin. While kind of the virtues of public service broadcasting the idea that can have objectivity balance you know they've come under attack philosophically.

CO: And you attacked them too. You question the value of this objectivity where nobody calls what they see. They just fall back on this idea of being impartial and balanced.

PETER POMERANTSEV: Yeah. That you're accused straight away -- this is done now by everyone from the Kremlin -- and US. Oh that's just your opinion. There's no such thing as objectivity. Everybody's bias. There's no way of being above the fray. So I think there's two things One is I think is partly up to us in the media to construct a journalism that creates a conversation where facts matter again. Now what do I mean by that? I mean we don't have a post truth conversation when we talk about building a bridge for example suddenly then everyone agrees on the facts you know. And suddenly facts become very very necessary. So I think facts are very very linked to a discussion about a practical future. They're very very connected. And I don't think it's a coincidence that Putin, Trump, Duterte, Bolsonar, Boris Johnson are all nostalgists. Yeah when you're talking about dreamy pasts you really don't need the facts. It's up to us I think as journalists to drive the conversation away and really pin these politicians for a really practical pragmatic conversation about what they're going to do about very very specific things and hold them accountable to those words.

CO: You pointed to something very important which is that people -- the reason why this populism has an appeal is that people are themselves nostalgic for some other time and the populist are able convince people well I'll take you back to that time that you might vaguely remember when everything was okay though it probably never was. The public itself is inclined toward this kind of propaganda, is it not?

PETER POMERANTSEV: Yeah completely. Especially now. The sort of the central thesis of my book is that during the Cold War and the period after, there was a clear ideological competition about the future. So it was communism vs. democratic capitalism. They both claimed that we will deliver the better future for you and they each had to show evidence that they were doing that, evidence was part of the conversation, part of the way you talked. I mean even when the Soviets lied which they did frequently -- it is a lie in a way that sounded factual. And the central thesis of my book is is you know after the Cold War the first communism falls away and then later you know a simplistic version of democratic capitalism kind of starts to come apart and probably finally does so in 2008 with the financial crash. And people have no idea of the future that they can build irrational facts driven conversation around so yes nostalgia becomes much much more appealing and kind of becomes the place where we all are. But I think that's already a step forward. If we move away from trying to catch out people on the facts and realize that actually what's at stake, what we have to do is try to foster a conversation about the future so that fact starts mattering again. That's already a big step forward than sort of you know whack-a-mole fact checking -- without understanding the deeper ideological crisis behind it. I'm not saying it's going to be easy by the way but I think with small practical things that we can do especially in the media to help foster that.

CO: You're listening to a feature conversation with Peter Pomerantsev. He's the author of "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality." And Peter one of the characters -- one of the people you spend time with is really a fascinating man Srdja Popvic -- who was part of what they called the "Otpor" revolution in Serbia. He was part of a really extraordinary movement that ended in the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in the late 1990s. And then he inspired and actually went and helped train people in a series of other revolutions the color revolutions Arab Spring. What do you take away from Srdja Popovic and how he was able to influence people?

PETER POMERANTSEV: Yes. So Srdja Popovic is kind of a really one of the great characters of our current world. But really the story that I tried to tell through him is how -- well there is two things. I mean the big thing is that he always felt and political scientists always felt that all these uprisings 89 obviously when the Soviet Union falls and apartheid falls and then the Arab Spring, the color revolutions they are all part of a greater story of really historical inevitability that we were all proceeding towards more democracy and a better world. And also that the language of street protests of lots of people out on the street together you know challenging authoritarians in their high towers was always a positive image you know it is that imagery of people out on the streets which was so powerful in 1989 and again in the square and in Belgrade and this larger sense that all of this is part of a greater story of more and more democracy everywhere. And in my chapter on Srdja I look at how authoritarian regimes have learned so something that Russia has managed to do is crawl inside the imagery of street protests and A) make them seem very very very dangerous by associating them with -- not with peace and prosperity and democracy but with violence. And it sort of started using a lot of these tactics itself. And by using them itself it sort of is almost parodying them by organizing street protests in Ukraine and Estonia. So it was parodying them to say look there is no a priori logic between people powered revolutions and democracy. There is no greater story here.

CO: I'm speaking with Peter Pomerantsev who is in London right now speaking to us about his book "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality." And Peter among the many activists and people you spoke with a Mexican man -- Alberto Escorcia -- I am not sure I am saying that right -- who said to you I see the Internet and metaphysical terms a war between love and fear. Are you concerned that fear might be winning right now?

PETER POMERANTSEV: Yeah. That's Alberto Escorcia who interviewed in Mexico. And he meant something very specific by love and fear. By love he meant technological [inaudible] which is you can almost see that when you look at Internet maps of people building interaction and community and thoughts online. And by fear he meant polarization -- when all that breaks apart and people break apart into little groups which can be engineered through various forms of manipulation. What we're seeing at the moment is a period of often enforced polarization after the kind of initial romantic ideas of the Internet that will bring everyone together which is embedded in Facebook's language -- now -- in a period of vast polarization. As those who support a more interactive democracy. Get their heads around the challenge. Maybe we are going to turn a corner soon. But clearly you know we have elections approaching in the U.S. very little has been done to change the ground rules.

CO: I have to say the same would be true of Canada. And people are very concerned that the ground rules remain the same here. Some tweaks and some adjustments and some awareness. But as your Alberto said to you -- he said Peter dark days are coming, a new generation of bots and trolls are pushing us further and further into a world of pure simulation. And among the many things that is so alarming in your book I read this and wonder how we are going to approach the election in this country?

PETER POMERANTSEV: So it's probably far too late now isn't it? I mean the slight problem is the political elites who would have to pass regulation that would give us the possibility to communicate with each other as equals again and not in these kind of clouds of lack of clarity about who is behind what's and why they're doing things. I mean you do need regulation for that. But the political elites who would have to enact that regulation they're very reluctant to do it because they're all using these techniques. I mean whether on very very aggressive ways like Canadian alt-right or Trump in America. But actually everyone use them to a certain extent. And political elites tend to be very reluctant to saw off the twig that they're precariously sitting on. Sadly the historical experiences that we have to reach some sort of massive crisis before we do anything about anything. It's fantastic because actually Canada has some of the best researchers on the subjects in the world. I mean Citizen Lab which is a Canadian research centre has been at the forefront of researching this throughout the world for the last 10 years. So there's certainly not a lack of kind of expertise in Canada.

CO: We began and your book covers so well your family's experiences and your father and mother -- the stories are chilling and extraordinary. You now have children of your own. What hopes and fears do you have for them given this environment of information and propaganda?

PETER POMERANTSEV: The book is partly about what's the knowledge we pass on and what is the stories we pass on generation to generation. And so in the book I always try to do that through my family. I try to sort of see what it is there in my parents experience that is still relevant today given that a lot isn't relevant but what is still relevant in their battles against authoritarian regimes in the 20th century to today. And the book sort of ends with my parents talking to my kids -- to their grandkids. And there are huge similarities as well. Even though on the surface everything seems very different. When you go deep into what my parents were fighting against was a kind of totalitarian psychology of them and us where the other can be crushed very very easily because its humanity wasn't admitted. I mean that's a very old old problem. But that was there as well in the 20th century. That's coming out now today in very different forms so it ends with you know with the idea that my children will be able to learn a lot from their grandparents that actually continuity can be restored and there's lessons that they can control from them. So ends with that hope really. And I think it ends with the importance of that search. What exactly? That will have to be the next book. [Laughter] I mean this is basically a trilogy. My first book was about Russia and Russian propaganda. And my second book was about how Russian propaganda goes global and why Russia is so important in understanding our current propaganda wars.

CO: I'll mention the title of that first book: "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible." And this one is "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality." We look forward to the third part of this trilogy. Very very important work. Very very well written. Peter thank you.

PETER POMERANTSEV: Thank you so much.

CH: That was Peter Pomerantsev, the author of "This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality". He was speaking with Carol in September 2019. The book is published by Public Affairs Books. You can find that interview on our website: www.cbc.ca/aih.

November 03, 2020 Episode Transcript

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