In 1782, toward the end of the American Revolutionary War, the owner of a Philadelphia printing press created a fake newspaper meant to erode the British public’s confidence in their government.
Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
By Annalee Newitz
W.W. Norton, 272 pages
Release date: June 4, 2024
The Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle featured horrifying made-up stories about British war atrocities, including a shocking report on how Seneca Indian soldiers fighting on England’s side were being directed to kill and collect the scalps of hundreds of U.S. soldiers, women, and children.
In Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, journalist Annalee Newitz tells how this entirely false report “went viral, eighteenth-century style.” It was reprinted in dozens of colonial papers and powerfully served, as the printer intended, to “sour British people on what their rulers were doing in North America.” (It also badly stained the reputation of the Seneca soldiers, Newitz writes, “fomenting hatred between U.S. settlers and Indigenous people.”)
The printer’s name was Benjamin Franklin, and this was, Newitz says, “one of the first American psychological operations.” Stories Are Weapons tracks several more psyops, including the false mid-1800s narrative that Indigenous people had somehow mostly just disappeared; the mass hysteria that erupted in the 1950s over comic books, spurred by an alarmist psychologist who largely fabricated his research findings; and the disreputable science concocted in the 1990s to peg Black people as intellectually inferior.
Propaganda, which Newitz calls “a story we tell to win allies and frighten enemies,” has been dropped in leaflets from planes and projected as images on screens. It’s a tool of the military and of corporations. It was deployed by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, in the Lucky Strike campaign of the 1930s, which turned the desire of women for independence into an urge to smoke cigarettes. It has been used by actors both foreign and domestic to sow distrust in the electoral process and discord among the U.S. populace by seeking to “undermine persuasion with confusion.”
W.W. Norton
In 2016, Russian operatives made up two phony groups on Facebook, “Heart of Texas” and “United Muslims of America,” and got supporters of both to show up on opposite sides of a “Save Islamic Knowledge” rally, unaware that “they were all victims of Russian psyops.”
Newitz also examines the role of psyops in the so-called culture wars, used to purge “homosexuals” from government jobs, cast LGBTQ+ people as groomers, and to bar high school teachers from displaying rainbow stickers. Culture warriors, Newitz says, rely on three weapons: scapegoating, deception, and violent threats. “These weapons are what separate an open, democratic debate from a psychological attack.”
Stories Are Weapons holds that it is possible to counter, contain, and even conquer the deleterious effects of psychological warfare. For instance, Newitz notes, the “Ghost Dance” movement of the late 1890s served as a means for Indigenous people to push back against cultural alienation, spurring efforts to reclaim their identity that continue to this day.
Relief can also come from a more proactive and concerted response to disinformation spread on social media. “Because online psyops campaigns move so quickly, we have to be ready for them in advance,” Newitz explains. “It’s a bit like disaster preparation. We need skilled responders at tech platforms, moderators, and safety managers who can spot propaganda outbreaks and put them out before they explode.”
Newitz urges people to take other, more inward steps to protect themselves from the constant efforts being made to change their minds. The book’s final chapter is about learning to appreciate the silence of a library, in contrast to the cacophony of constant propaganda.
When stories are used as weapons, it’s possible to free our minds by crafting what Newitz calls “narratives that describe plausible democratic futures based on justice and repair.” But, they add, “Achieving psychological peace doesn’t always require us to tell new kinds of stories. Instead, it involves understanding how many social interactions are shaped by the stories we’ve heard. It’s about recognizing weaponized stories when they come flying at us, instead of accepting them as factual or unquestionably good.”
Stories Are Weapons is a noteworthy contribution to this process of disarmament.