Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
By Annalee Newitz
Norton, 2024
Like Annalee Newitz, Americans are bombarded daily with things that are incomprehensible to the rational mind….conspiracy theories on X, presidential and vice presidential candidates claiming immigrants are eating dogs, quack cures for COVID, demonization of scientific expertise, one could go one….and, far worse, people shooting at, sometimes killing, other people on the basis of exaggerated, competing ideologies. In “Stories are Weapons,” she amplifies her fears and tries to make broader sense of how psychological warfare is tearing the country apart. In her own words, it’s part (progressive) manifesto and part intense research project (205). It’s certainly timely and, to the uninitiated, quite interesting, but organized and presented in ways that limit its appeal and potential impact.
Newitz defines PSYOP’s (psychological operations) as a form of warfare designed to defeat an external enemy without physically hurting him (xvii). She grounds the concept in the works of military theoreticians Sun Tzu and Paul von Clausewitz, as well as psychologist Sigmund Freud, and explains its early non-military applications by people like Edward Bernays, who got more women to smoke cigarettes by linking it subconsciously to their nascent political liberation. On the darker side, she showed how White Americans were bombarded with the myth of the vanishing Indian (e.g. “The Last of the Mohocans”) to both justify expansion into tribal lands and ignore the mistreatment of the Native Americans themselves, i.e. “how could they be mistreated if they no longer exist?”
In a diverse, pluralist, capitalist democracy like the US, it did not take long to translate all this into the political sphere. Ideology became the new race or nationality; in Newitz’ telling real Americans were conservative Whites and the “Indians” were liberals and immigrants who wanted to see the US destroyed. Newitz does not hide her ideology and her list of “psyop” perpetrators is familiar….Cambridge Analytica, the Russian Internet Research Agency, Steve Bannon, Qanon and Charles Murray….all of which helped deliver and redeliver Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 and 2024.
If it’s possible, “Stories are Weapons” is both too short and too long. It’s fine to rail against these people and organizations, but putting them in a broader historical context shows that she was not just screaming polemics into the wind; this length is welcome. At the same time, the book seems to ramble organizationally – for example Native American anecdotes are sprinkled throughout – which causes it to lose continuity and focus.
Newitz writes of the redemptive powers of DDR, disarm and demobilize the warring parties and reintegrate them into a more civil society (163). One wonders, ironically, if Trump, the clear beneficiary of psyops, could also be the source of its demise. Whether one loves or hates him, the President is not exactly a psyop warrior out of central casting. Impulsive, angry, coarse and garrulous, Trump aims more to bludgeon the conscious rather than subtly appeal to the subconscious mind; it’s kinetic, not psychological warfare. Other politicians ape him; will there be any need for psyops if everything is out in the open? When Trump passes from the political scene, there may be some sort of Thermidorian course correction, but if Newitz is right and domestic psyops are baked into America’s very being, new permutations will appear, making “Stories are Weapons” prophecy as well as history/polemic.