Science Friday - How Psychological Warfare Moved From Battlefields To Politics

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

When you think about connections between science and war, the obvious links are in technology—advanced radar, spy satellites, more powerful explosives—and in medical innovations that seek to heal the wounds caused by conflict. But in a new book, Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, author Annalee Newitz says that stories and narrative can be weapons too, used in battle on a psychological battlefield.Ira talks with Newitz about the history of psychological warfare, from Sun Tzu to Benjamin Franklin, and its modern American incarnation under the guidance of Paul Linebarger, who was also a science fiction author known by the pen name Cordwainer Smith. They discuss the characteristics of a psyop, how techniques of psychological warfare have been co-opted into modern politics, and whether there’s a route toward “psychological disarmament.”Read an excerpt from Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

There's an old saying, sticks and stones may break by bones, but words will never hurt me. But that doesn't hold true in the world of psychological warfare. It's not the opening stage in a debate. It is a weapon. They're delivering weaponized messages that can't be met with rational responses. It's Tuesday, June 11th. You're listening to Science Friday. I'm sci-fi producer Charles Bergquist. Today, author Annalie Newitz joins Ira to talk about the history. history of psychological warfare, from Sun Tzu's Art of War to Benjamin Franklin, about its modern

American incarnation, and how military psychological warfare techniques are being brought to modern politics. When we talk about war and conflict on this program, it's often a technology story. Faster planes, more resilient armor, powerful lasers, or spy satellites, or it's a medicine story, how to help heal those devastated by warfare. But my next case, guest says that narrative in psychology are parts of that fabric too. Annalie Newitz is a science journalist based in San Francisco, and author of the new book Stories Are Weapons, Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Annalie, always great to talk to you. Yeah, thanks again for having me back. You're welcome. All right, tell us what led you to write this book. You know, it really grew out of my

interest in history. I had started noticing, of course, like all of us, that we are in the midst of a really difficult culture war here in the United States. And I started to get curious about where it was that culture war had come from. And I realized that one of the architects of it was actually a science fiction writer whose work I knew really well. He wrote under the name Cordwainer Smith in the 1950s and 60s, But in his other life, his name was Paul Linebarger, and he worked in military intelligence and wrote the very first Army manual on psychological war. And as someone who writes science fiction and who's interested in history and science,

I had to know more. And so I dove deeply into Linebarger's life. I visited his archive at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. And I just discovered all of these really interesting connections between the way that storytellers manipulate our minds and manipulate our emotions, and the actual doctrine that the military uses to create these psychological weapons to undermine our enemies in warfare. Can we define some terms? Let's talk about some of them. Misinformation, propaganda, psychological warfare. Tell us what they mean. Yeah, that's a great question. And I think the

terms often get really confused. So psychological warfare is specifically launched by a military, a state, power or a non-state actor. And a sciop, a psychological operation, is kind of the smallest unit of psychological warfare. And this is a message that is intended to traumatize or harm the enemy by undermining morale or by confusing them. And ultimately, the goal of a sci-op is always to get an adversary to surrender in a warfare situation. And today, we've seen a tremendous what I would call a weapons transfer program that really gets started during the Cold War, where a lot of these military psychological weapons start getting used in domestic cultural conflicts. And that's when you start to see things like misinformation being propagated for political purposes,

essentially lies that serve a particular political purpose. And you start to see propaganda being used oftentimes. by U.S. politicians and leaders against Americans, which goes against military doctrine. A SIOP is only supposed to be used against a foreign adversary. So once it spills over into the domestic space, then you start entering into weirder territory. Yeah, because that implies that we're seeing each other as foreign adversaries. I mean, things are so polarized. That's right. And I think that's one of the ways that we've kind of lost sight of the point of our public sphere, our domestic public sphere, where we debate and discuss and argue over all kinds of

political issues from climate change to how we handle pandemics. And when we start transferring siops into that public sphere, we can no longer have conversations as a democratic nation. We start, as you say, treating each other like foreign adversaries and it shuts conversation down. You know, when you were talking before, I was reminded that this is really not a new phenomenon. I mean, Sun Tzu's art of war is full of it, isn't it? That's right. I mean, this is certainly something that goes way back to our earliest recorded descriptions of war. irregular warfare or simply trickery in war is super common as a strategy. But in the United States, we have a really specific brand of Psiops that really grows out of the 19th century wars that the U.S. government was making on hundreds of indigenous tribes in the West as the nation kind of

expanded outward from its original shape. And what we see is this really specific pattern of the U.S. military using a combination of science, sometimes it's psychology, sometimes it's anthropology in the 19th century, and using pop culture. You just see a ton of effort being put into making these propaganda messages, these siops, essentially fun. And that was one of the reasons why Paul Linebarger, who of course lived a double life as a science fiction writer and a sciop crafter, why he was so important because he was one of the folks who said, listen, we have to learn from movies. We have to learn from popular books how to make America just sound really cool and get our enemies to come over to our side because we're just awesome. And in the 19th century, where this starts really is with James Finimore Cooper's incredibly popular novel, The Last of the Mohicans, which spreads this cultural idea,

SIEP that indigenous tribes are dying out. Now, if you were to show this book to the many Mohicans who are still alive and hanging out today, they would say, no, there is no Last Mohican. It hasn't happened yet. But that was a very powerful meme at the time. And it really helped the U.S. government justify expansion into the West by saying, well, listen, you guys all read Last of the Mohicans. You know that these guys are just about to die out. So we might as well just go ahead and take their land. One person who was in full was Mark Twain as a reviewer. He took that book apart. I remember reading his review of the last of the movie. Good for him. Yeah. But, you know, talking about fun, that's really interesting because when I think of fun and propaganda, I'm thinking of advertising,

right? I mean, that's what the whole point is to get you to buy a product. This thing is fun. It's going to help you, you know, buy an idea and a motion. That's right. And you really nailed it because advertising is another huge influence on psychological war in the United States. That's one of our big innovations as a country. And several of the people in the early 20th century who are basically creating the professional field of public relations and advertising are also very involved in military intelligence operations. So a great example is Edward Bernays, who was one of the very first public relations experts. He was Sigmund Freud's nephew, and he loved using psychology in his work. And he also, in the 1950s, worked with the CIA to help overthrow the leftist leaders in Guatemala.

So he kind of divided his time between advertising bananas, which was one of his big areas of interest and trying to overthrow governments or advocate on behalf of governments using advertising. And so by the time the military is codifying what it means to create a SIOP when Paul Linebarger is writing his book, advertising is the model. You know, the military talks about finding a target audience in the same way that advertisers talk about finding a target market. And the point is to, again, to make the SIOPs fun and engaging. And it's a huge aspect of, you know, of American policy to do this. Are there any common techniques, no matter what the topic, to create an us versus them

situation? Is that like a textbook to tell you how to do this? In fact, there is. There actually, of course, is. There are many textbooks in the military on creating siops. And there's really two ingredients that make a sciop. One is that it includes lies. It often has a kernel of truth somewhere, a really effective.

effective sciop always has a little bit of truth that's been decontextualized or recontextualized so that it provides a message that is beneficial to the sender and can undermine the enemy. The other thing that's really important to know about siops is they almost always include violent threats. And this is how you can always tell the difference in a culture war when we're talking about, you know, domestic debates. When one side of that argument, is something like those people over there shouldn't exist. Those people should be rounded up. Those people are criminals.

Anytime that message goes along with a political idea, you're in the realm of siops because all of those things are violent threats. You know, it's scary to hear that because we're sort of living through that today with the political climate we have. We absolutely are. And this is one of the reasons I wrote the book was I wanted people to understand that when someone comes at you with that kind of comment, it's not the opening stage in a debate. It is a weapon.

They're delivering weaponized messages that can't be met with rational responses. We have to change the conversation. We have to say, no, we're not going to talk about how we're going to beat each other up anymore. We're going to start a new conversation where we say, well, what do we each want out of this situation? What do we want from the future of America and not talk about who we want dead and who we want in jail, but just where are we going next? Can we please start discussing that? You know, back in the day, and I'm a child of the 60s, I used to listen on my shortwave radio to Radio Moscow, and I was trying to figure out what was real and what was made up, and it was very hard to do that. I mean, sometimes it can be very personal and, like you say, violent, but sometimes it can be really subtle, can it? It can be really subtle.

And one of the things that a number of the experts I talked to pointed out is that the Russian style of Sciopra at the time, you were listening to Soviet style, really is to sort of flood the zone with chaos. So there's so many messages that are untrustworthy that you never really know what's going on. That is a way of pacifying people and undermining their sense of what's real. And that's something that's now been imported into the United States, too. And we see that a lot. One of the things that's happening right now on social media with the flood of AI-generated messages is that no one's really sure if they're talking to a person or a bot or if the image they're seeing is real or invented.

And so we're kind of, again, this is a way in which the American. American people are throwing sciops at each other's heads. You mentioned Corduainer-Smith. There's this interesting line throughout the book about connections and parallels between popular science fiction and propaganda operations. And part of it ties into the idea of world building. Having a believable world can help create a reality. Tell us about that.

Yeah, one of the things that you see a lot, especially in in Cyops after the Cold War, that have really been influenced by Cordwainer Smith, but a lot of other science fiction writers who also have been involved in military intelligence is that when we create these pieces of propaganda, we try to make them as realistic as possible using the tools of storytelling that science fiction writers often deploy. So when you're watching, say, a Star Wars movie,

one of the things that makes it really immersive is that you have characters speaking different languages, You have spaceships that aren't just big blobs in the sky, but actually have like nuts and bolts and all kinds of little details that really make us feel like there's a kind of technological or scientific plausibility there. I mean, if you ignore the FTL and the midaclorians and all of that. But part of world building is to create a world where people feel like the fiction is real. And that is an incredibly powerful tool for sciops and propaganda. what you want is for your adversary to start believing your message. And there's all kinds of ways that this can be done.

It's obviously very easy now online to create all kinds of fictional images and movies and messages that feel very real. But back in World War II, there were very simple ways that this kind of thing was pulled off. There's a great sciop that Linebarger talks about in his work where the Japanese dropped leaflets on Americans who were in the Philippines, and the leaflets were supposed to be from the U.S. Army. So it was a black propaganda pretending to be coming from their adversary. And it just said, warning, venomous snakes rampant in jungles. And so U.S. soldiers who were getting these leaflets thought that the army was warning them that they were about to walk into a jungle full of deadly snakes. And if they brought that leaflet to their commanding officer and said, what the heck is this, the officer would

deny it because, of course, it hadn't come from the military. So it was a perfect way to create a conspiracy theory. Even though it was just a simple slip of paper, it was so evocative. It was like, oh my gosh, this came from us. This is about a real threat because there really are some snakes there. It would undermine morale. It would create confusion. So anything that, you know, you can make sound plausible and really immerse your target audience in a story. that's going to work great as a sci-op. Well, let's talk about if stories are weapons, are there any shields?

Are there any bulletproof vests that we might adopt? That's a great question, and that's a huge part of what I investigated in this book. What are the ways that we can create new kinds of stories? How do we change the conversation away from throwing weapons at each other to offering ideas? Historically, we've seen lots of examples of, of ways that people pushed back against a psychological warfare.

In the 19th century, indigenous nations in the West became fascinated by the ghost dance, which was a social movement. It was spiritual and political. And it was a way to gather together confederacies of tribes to sing and dance and tell stories about what America would look like without white settlers. It was a change of conversation. It wasn't responding to the military. Terry, it was saying, no, we're going to tell our own story based on our own traditions about a future we would like to see.

And then later in the 20th century, in a completely different context, you had a psychologist writing a comic book called Wonder Woman, which he intended as a sciop. He actually said that he wanted to create basically a feminist siop, a kind of culture bomb that would push back against sexist stories about women. And so Wonder Woman became this really powerful story embraced by feminists who told a tale of female triumph and autonomy at a time when women were being really discouraged from joining the political sphere or the public sphere. So we know that people living in the United States have come up with alternative stories. And people are still doing that now. We're telling stories about our communities. We're telling stories about science. We are insisting on the fact that we deserve to be alive and we deserve to be out of jail,

and we should continue doing that. The whole goal is put more stories out there that can raise morale and give people hope that we can reach an end to the culture war, that we can reach disarmament. That's great to hear, Annali. It's always a pleasure to have you on our radio program. Oh, is happy to be here. Thanks so much. Annalie Newitz, science journalist based in San Francisco, author of the new books,

Stories are weapons, psychological warfare, and the American mind. It's a great book. I suggest you go out and get a copy. And you can read an excerpt of the book at ScienceFriiday.com slash propaganda. And that's it for today. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including Emma Gomez, Annie Niro. George Harper. Next time, two stories from the plant world, a tiny fern with a huge genome,

and phytomining efforts to harvest metals using. plants. I'm SciFri producer Charles Berkwist. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you soon.