"There's No Way You Can Talk Back to a Gun": On Psychological Warfare
For the past few years, my partner Annalee Newitz has been learning all about the history and theory of psychological warfare. The result is a stunning book, out in one week, called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
Annalee is going on tour next week, hitting Portland, Seattle, and the Bay Area. I’ll be in conversation with Annalee at Massy Books in Vancouver on June 22. You can still pre-order the book and get a beautiful patch, by filling out this form.
For this week’s newsletter, I was excited to geek out with Annalee about where psychological warfare comes from, and how to resist it.
[The following conversation has been edited and condensed for ease of reading.]
Your previous two books, Scatter Adapt and Remember and Four Lost Cities, were both about resilience, right? They were about surviving mass extinction and about how lost cities aren't really lost, because people go on, and the cities aren't even really gone because the communities continue. How do you feel like Stories Are Weapons fits into that?
This is really a book about surviving psychological war — and specifically culture war. I got interested in this topic because we're deep in the midst of a really bloody culture war in the United States. And the more I researched, the more I realized that what we call culture war really is just an extension of something that the military codified as psychological war, long ago. And so a huge thrust of my research and writing in the book is about not just, "How do you recognize psyops?" or "How do you understand the history of them?" But also, "What do you do to survive them, and and how do you protect yourself against the trauma that they cause?"
So how does understanding the history help us to protect ourselves or to have a saner relationship with the narratives around us?
One of the ways that psyops work is that they call on myths, or stories that start long before our own lifetimes. That's part of the reason why psyops can sometimes be mistaken for common sense, and why people get fooled by them. They're like, "Oh, that sounds like something I heard before as a kid."
I'll give you a specific example, which is the myth of the groomer. We've seen this huge resurgence in homophobia and transphobia in the United States, especially over the last four or five years, and the nasty psyop that's being used is this myth that anyone who's GLBT is a child-molester. You're basically accusing an entire group of Americans of being one of the worst possible kinds of criminals — and this doesn't come out of nowhere. This is actually a long-standing story in the United States, and it really came to popularity in the 1930s, when J. Edgar Hoover was first, consolidating the group that later became the FBI. He was working on a really horrific child murder case that actually never was solved, and he decided that it had been associated with homosexual activity. He began to really create a moral panic, without evidence. So his focus in the FBI became rooting out these "sex criminals," which was again basically just attempting to surveil, arrest and harass gay people.
This reached its culmination in what's often called the lavender scare, a period during the 1950s when the U.S government started place people under surveillance, interrogating them about their sex lives, and firing them if they were gay. This is a psyop in the sense that no actual war was being declared. No one was being sent to prison, no one was being accused of any crime other than just being gay. This was a way of destroying people's lives without ever openly declaring that those people are criminals.
This myth kind of tunneled underground for a little while, particularly during the heyday of queer rights in the 1970s, but it's always been there and now that it's come back full force with politicians constantly using the term "groomer" to refer to gay people. This feels to their followers like common sense, because they're calling on this multi-generational story of what it means to be gay in America. So knowing that history of groundless persecution, and knowing that it came out of this self-interested goal of creating a law enforcement agency that would have a reason for being — it helps you realize that, yeah, this really is a myth. It's a story that people tell themselves, that again and again has been demonstrated to be nothing more than a fairy tale. But it's a powerful story and the longer it lasts, the easier it is to call upon it.
A lot of people kind of think of disinformation, and psychological warfare in general, as purely an internet thing. It's bots, it's sock puppets, it's Russian operatives — as if this is a new phenomenon created by the internet. Do you think there's any truth to that? How is it helpful to consider the context beyond the internet?
Right now, of course, we're seeing a lot of culture war and psychological war happening on the internet. And so it makes sense that we focus on that. A lot of misinformation is being amplified online.
What's really changed is just the scale of these operations. Psychological warfare during World War I would have meant creating paper pamphlets that you dropped out of physical airplanes onto people's heads, And that was something that at the time felt like it was on a mass scale, right? Well, now we can just distribute millions of them to people scattered all across the United States — and with the help of platforms like Facebook, we can actually target those pamphlets at the exact people who are going to be most receptive to them.
But what hasn't changed is the fact that psyops are still using the same playbook. One of the things I found in researching this book was that psyops grew out of advertising. A lot of the techniques that Madison Avenue was using, starting in the teens and 1920s, wound up spilling over into military strategy. And it's so interesting that when we look at what happened during the 2016 election, with the Russian election meddling, a lot of it had to do with buying ads on Facebook.
So one really startling thing in your book is how much of psychological warfare comes out of real science, but kind of twisted sideways. Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays was an innovator of propaganda. Science fiction author Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith, wrote a classic book about psychological war. How much of the roots of psyops come from pseudoscience?
One way that a psyop can be really effective is if it is crafted to give it the air of authority that comes from science. And of course, psychological warfare grows out of the field of psychology — it's literally written on the tin. And a lot of these early psychological campaigns that you see in World War I and World War II really are pop psychology — they're intended to play on people's fears and neuroses, or their sexual anxities. Like one of the really popular psyops in World War II was telling the U.S. soldiers that bad guys were back home, stealing their women [while they were fighting overseas]. Very simplistic stuff. But remember, this is at the same time that advertising is also using these same techniques and saying, "Sex sells."
But the other thing that is going on, is that a number of science fiction writers are contributing to propaganda efforts during both World War I and World War II, and up into the present. And what they bring to this project is an interest in how you create a story that's really immersive and makes your audience feel like it's real. Science fiction is really good at this because, like pop psychology, it often uses the language of science to bolster realism. Writers will describe faster-than-light ships in great detail, or depict an alien civilization in such concrete ways that you feel like an anthopologist standing there, looking at this alien world.
Science fiction writer Paul Linberger, aka Cordwainer Smith, was working in military intelligence doing propaganda during World War II. He wrote the first Army manual on psychological warfare, and he writes that a psyop needs to be fun and entertaining. That's a big theme in the twentieth century: how do you consciously bring in the tools of entertainment, whether from Hollywood or science fiction books, and make American propaganda?
So it's the combination of pseudoscience and entertainment — and the intersection of those two things is worldbuilding, right? There's a lot of good worldbuilding in a psyop. Once we understand this, how do we replace that worldbuilding with our own?
To answer that question, I actually want to take us back to the 19th century and think about, the origin of the United States itself. During the 19th century, the U.S was at war with hundreds of indigenous nations and tribes, especially in the West. And the military developed a three-pronged strategy. One part of the strategy is just military might to eradicate the enemy. One part is to use science to learn the ways of the enemy, meaning anthropology, which was a relatively new field. And the third part of it was psychological warfare in the form of residential schools, where indigenous children were taken away from their families and essentially brainwashed.
And you start to see indigenous tribes pushing back with a movement that gets called the Ghost Dance. This is a spiritual and a political movement. It's an anti-colonial movement. It takes the form of tribes coming together, and dancing and singing. The Ghost Dance itself is about describing the world as it would be without the white settlers. And it becomes this really powerful way of pushing back against the war — but more importantly, against these psyops of stealing kids and trying to teach them to reject their indigenous history. And the psyops of trying to manipulate tribes by writing down all of their traditions and using this against them. This is a way that many, many Western tribes reasserted the importance of their histories and were able to have these peaceful gatherings, where they articulated what the world would look like once these horrible white settlers were gone. In a way, it's science fiction. It was speculative worldbuilding.
So obviously, trans people are the receiving end of one of the worst psychological assaults right now. They're using the language of science against us, even though the science is not on their side. What gives you hope for trans people's ability to survive this, and to make our own narratives that nurture us instead of knocking us down?
One of the things that really does give me hope is the fact that the trans community is responding by coming together. And there are so many new stories in response, whether in popular entertainment like movies and books, or you know, non-fiction like articles and essays.
The thing about the psychological war on trans people is that oftentimes, in the mainstream media, it gets mistaken for a debate. Someone will come out with an article saying, you know, we shouldn't allow trans teenagers to exist. You shouldn't get gender, affirming care as a teenager. That's a way of saying that trans youth are simply imaginary, or or are some kind of toxic sickness.
The way that we can push back against that is to acknowledge that these are not debate topics, these are weapons. These are these are pieces of rhetoric that are being used to demoralize trans people, to traumatize trans people, and there's no way to respond to them rationally. There's no way that you can talk back to a gun. The gun doesn't have an opinion, it's just trying to hurt you. So the only way that we can respond and stay healthy and get over this, is to admit that these are traumatizing pieces of rhetoric. To say, "Actually, this is not a legitimate argument, this is you hurting me, and I'm hurt." And to admit how how wounded we are.
And then to say, "Now, let's move on and build something different." We don't need to respond to the people who are just trying to hurt us. What we need to do is build our community up to be stronger, to tell our stories. To make our stories available as much as we can, so that people who are being hurt will hear them and know that there is a place of safety and warmth and love.
I constantly am taking hope from just seeing like, amazing weird, beautiful sparkly, awesome stuff that trans people are creating to talk to each other and reassure each other that not only do we deserve to be alive, but we're fucking awesome.