Nonfiction corner: How America turned stories into weapons of war

By Jennifer Szalai

NEW YORK: A story can entertain and inform; it can also deceive and manipulate. Perhaps few stories are as seductive as the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves — those reasonable, principled creatures so many of us presume ourselves to be.

As Annalee Newitz writes in “Stories Are Weapons,” propaganda is premised on exploiting the discrepancy between surface beliefs and unconscious motives. A clever propagandist can get any number of people who see themselves as invariably kindhearted to betray their ideals. Newitz gives the example of anti-immigration campaigns: Make humans so fearful that even pious, churchgoing grandmothers will countenance rounding up their fellow humans in detention camps.

Not that Newitz, a journalist and science fiction author who uses they/them pronouns, depicts all propaganda as necessarily evil. “Stories Are Weapons,” an exploration of our culture wars’ roots in psychological warfare, contains a chapter on comic book artists like William Moulton Marston, the psychologist and creator of Wonder Woman, who “wanted to empower women” and believed that “propaganda was a progressive force.” But much of the book is about stories that have been used to undermine, to exclude and to wound: myths about the frontier and the “last Indian”; pseudo-intellectual treatises expounding junk-science racism; conspiracy theories about “pizza-eating pedophiles”; and moral panics about rainbow stickers.

And then there are the stories that sow confusion. Newitz explains that they began researching this book in the middle of 2020, while the pandemic was raging and the president was promoting the healing powers of sunlight and bleach. The gutting of reproductive rights and the introduction of anti-trans bills, Newitz says, made them feel as if they were under siege.

“For anyone who has been told that they should not be alive,” Newitz writes on the dedication page. “Together we will survive this war.” Stories are weapons — but Newitz argues that they can also open up pathways to peace. “As a fiction writer, I knew there were other ways to get at the truth, to make sense of a world gripped by absurdity and chaos. I had to tell a story.”

That story is introduced through the exploits of two central figures. The first is Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, a pioneer in the field that became known as “public relations.” To sell Lucky Strike cigarettes to women, Bernays devised a publicity campaign that linked the product to women’s desires for freedom. “Bernays had successfully turned his uncle’s project to promote mental health into a system for manipulating people into behaving irrationally,” Newitz writes, recounting how he later worked with the C.I.A. to drum up antipathy toward Guatemala’s democratically elected government. A prime beneficiary of the eventual coup was Bernays’s client, United Fruit, which owned huge swaths of Guatemalan land.

Newitz contrasts Bernays’s cynicism with the idealism of Paul Linebarger, who wrote a handbook for the U.S. Army in 1948 called “Psychological Warfare” — offering “the opportunity of strategic advantage without the cataclysmic danger of a worldwide showdown” — and published novels under various pen names. As Cordwainer Smith, he wrote science fiction; he had formidable “worldbuilding” skills that he was able to carry over into the military’s psychological operations, or psyops, designed to influence adversaries’ opinions and behaviors. Given that he believed the alternative to words was the bomb, Linebarger was prone to think about his work in optimistic terms. “Psychological warfare is good for everybody,” he declared, deeming it “the affirmation of the human community against the national divisions which are otherwise accepted in war.”

The book goes on to narrate numerous instances of weaponized storytelling at work. Newitz is so skillful at elucidating such a tangled, morally contentious history that I never felt lost, though I sometimes thought that the word “psyop” was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Is Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s “The Bell Curve,” which claimed that racial disparities in economic success were due mainly to genetics, more usefully characterized as a “psyop” or a terrible, odious book? What kind of analytical purchase is gained by using the phrase “the psyops known as Jim Crow laws” to describe racist legislation whose primary purpose wasn’t just to demoralize Black Americans in the South but to restrict their actual bodies?

Of course, military lingo packs an emotional payload, which is presumably why Newitz uses it. Tell people that they’re being pummeled by propaganda or a psyop, and you put them on guard. After all, nobody likes to think they are easily manipulated. Newitz shows how conservatives are well versed in the tactic of declaring harm, too: Denouncing something as “woke propaganda” can mobilize people to boycott Wonder Woman or ban a book.

There is a tension, then, between the imperative to seek the truth and the imperative to win the war. The vocabulary of war divides the world into stark binaries: Whatever helps the cause is good; whatever hampers the cause is bad. Complexities that don’t fit neatly into the ironclad narratives brandished by either side can get obscured.

“Stories Are Weapons” critiques this dynamic, but sometimes Newitz succumbs to the urge to oversimplify. The Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election by slipping anti-Democratic propaganda into people’s social media feeds, “unleashed a new kind of psyop on the American people,” Newitz writes, presenting the presidency of Donald Trump as proof of concept: “It’s hard to argue with results like the ones we saw in the 2016 election.”

But people have done just that, maintaining that Russian trolls weren’t the decisive factor in Trump’s victory. Even Newitz recognizes that the metaphor of war is constraining and can take their story only so far. They condemn how online disagreements swiftly degenerate into violent recriminations and death threats — something that appalls Newitz, but is arguably made more likely when stories are equated with violent attacks.

Psychological disarmament, along with a commitment to a shared future, is made harder by the decimation of trust during wartime. Still, Newitz is hopeful. Weapons, whether rhetorical or physical, offer the power to dominate, but there’s so much more they cannot do. “We do not reach consensus by threatening one another with death,” Newitz writes. “Instead, we promise one another a better life.”