How America Turned Stories Into Weapons of War

STORIES ARE WEAPONS: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, by Annalee Newitz

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.