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Loading... Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind (original 2024; edition 2024)| 66 | None | 421,315 | 
(4) | 1 | In Stories Are Weapons, best-selling author Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats--the essential tool kit for psychological warfare--have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America's deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin's Revolutionary War-era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online. America's secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling. And there's a reason for that: operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry. Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, psyops have found their way into the hands of culture warriors, transforming democratic debates into toxic wars over American identity. Newitz zeroes in on conflicts over race and intelligence, school board fights over LGBT students, and campaigns against feminist viewpoints, revealing how, in each case, specific groups of Americans are singled out and treated as enemies of the state. Crucially, Newitz delivers a powerful counternarrative, speaking with the researchers and activists who are outlining a pathway to achieving psychological disarmament and cultural peace. Incisive and essential, Stories are Weapons reveals how our minds have been turned into blood-soaked battlegrounds--and how we can put down our weapons to build something better.… (more) |
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For anyone who has been told that they should not be alive. Together we will survive this war.  | |
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It's hard to write about a war while it's raging. Especially when there are no craters in the ground, no missiles streaking overhead - just words and images that are inflicted a form of psychological damage that is impossible to measure, impossible to prove. When I started researching this book in mid-2020, the world was locked down in the pandemic that was unleashing a torrent of propaganda the likes of which I had never seen. As a friend of mine lay dying of COVID on a ventilator, President Donald Trump promised that we could cure the disease with light and deworming medication for horses. -Preface: The Brain Fog of War Modern psychological warfare began in the plush Vienna offices of an early twentieth-century doctor named Sigmund Freud, who popularized a new scientific discipline called psychoanalysis. In his writing and lectures, Freud argued that psychoanalysis had identified "the unconscious," a veiled part of the mind that motivates people even when they aren't aware of it. -Chapter 1, The Mind Bomb | |
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Propaganda is, after all, a story we tell to win allies and frighten enemies. The more compelling and emotionally engaging the story is, the more people will want to read, watch, or listen to it. Linebarger argued in his work that successful propaganda always contains a slice of the truth: it refers to actual events and true histories, but decontextualizes them, relocates them to an imaginary terrain of mythical good guys and bad guys. And that's why it gets us in our hearts and guts. Lippmann, who had witnessed military propaganda firsthand during the war... believed that propaganda was more coercive than journalism or advertising. Their disagreement persists among experts to this day, which is why so much political propaganda goes unchecked—it exists in a gray area between psyops and advertising. There are three major psychological weapons that combatants often transfer into culture war: scapegoating, deception, and violent threats. As journalist Nesrine Malik argues in We Need New Stories,18 culture wars have flooded our public sphere with tales built on “consensual dishonesty,” or lies based on a shared mythical past. One way out of this prison house of mythology is to seek narratives that describe plausible democratic futures based on justice and repair. The success of figures like Lord Haw-Haw led to another of Linebarger's important observations about propaganda: it is nearly always built on truth. “Opinion analysis pertains to what people think; propaganda analysis deals with what somebody is trying to make them think.” The government wanted to turn Indigenous kids from many nations into adults who truly believed in European cultural values and would spread those values in their communities until there were no more Indians. The Authoritarian Personality. In it, they broke down the psyches of latent fascists. People with “authoritarian personalities” were often cynical about humanity: they believed the strong would always rule the weak and that force was the only way to resolve conflicts. Authoritarians also had deep ethnocentric feelings that led to hatred of all manner of people unlike themselves: Jews, immigrants, homosexuals, political adversaries. They had a strong mistrust of science, which they associated with too much rapid social change. The higher a person scored on the F-Scale, the more likely they would fall for fascist propaganda. And yet, as Frenkel-Brunswik and her colleagues discovered, people with authoritarian leanings often didn't realize it. Sociologist Jürgen Habermas, a colleague of Theodor Adorno from the Authoritarian Personality group, called this a “legitimation crisis.” In such a crisis, social consensus and even simple communication become impossible because people disagree about the legitimacy of basic scientific and historical truths. This “feeling of intellectual credibility” is also a formidable weapon to use against anyone who disagrees. On the internet, this weapon is often called tone policing...Anyone who disagrees is deemed too irrational or too stupid to understand the “truth” This is a classic failure mode in psyops: the propagandist's own biases cause him to underestimate or simply miss his _target. Unfortunately, seeing through a psyop doesn't make it disappear—especially when the warriors who produced it have the bully pulpit of the media and serve in Congress. When activists take away the right to discuss LGBT identity in school, they are participating in a larger project to eliminate LGBT people from the next generation of Americans. Paul Linebarger wrote in Psychological Warfare that there are two classes of propaganda: wartime and peacetime. “In war, the action sought by [the propagandist] is something militarily harmful to the enemy,” he asserted. “[In] peacetime propaganda, the action sought is against the war-making capacity of the audience—against war itself.” The DCBlackout/DCSafe operation was an example of what disinformation experts call “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Though nobody has identified the perpetrators of this particular psyop, it was certainly coordinated by operatives—possibly foreign—and then amplified by regular people tuning in to the hashtag. what had changed between the presidential election cycles in 2016 and 2020, both of which included significant digital propaganda. He said one obvious difference was the source of influence operations: in 2015, a significant number of operations were foreign, but in 2020 most were done by Americans to Americans. “an open conspiracy,” where people kept adding more supposed evidence from the ground: ...open conspiracies as a form of worldbuilding, where people generate stories out of suggestive hints dropped by operatives. a handful of influencers can create the illusion of a widespread problem, by cherry-picking a few tweets and inspiring their millions of followers to share them. When a piece of information is suddenly everywhere on social media, that doesn't make it true—in fact, that could be a sign of an influence campaign. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions In Stories Are Weapons, best-selling author Annalee Newitz traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats--the essential tool kit for psychological warfare--have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools in domestic culture wars. Newitz delves into America's deep-rooted history with psychological operations, beginning with Benjamin Franklin's Revolutionary War-era fake newspaper and nineteenth-century wars on Indigenous nations, and reaching its apotheosis with the Cold War and twenty-first-century influence campaigns online. America's secret weapon has long been coercive storytelling. And there's a reason for that: operatives who shaped modern psychological warfare drew on their experiences as science fiction writers and in the advertising industry. Now, through a weapons-transfer program long unacknowledged, psyops have found their way into the hands of culture warriors, transforming democratic debates into toxic wars over American identity. Newitz zeroes in on conflicts over race and intelligence, school board fights over LGBT students, and campaigns against feminist viewpoints, revealing how, in each case, specific groups of Americans are singled out and treated as enemies of the state. Crucially, Newitz delivers a powerful counternarrative, speaking with the researchers and activists who are outlining a pathway to achieving psychological disarmament and cultural peace. Incisive and essential, Stories are Weapons reveals how our minds have been turned into blood-soaked battlegrounds--and how we can put down our weapons to build something better. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description |
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