The first third of Stories Are Weapons offers a prehistory of psychological warfare, beginning with the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century. America’s story about its westward expansion, as Newitz points out, was dependent on a paradox. On the one hand, there is what scholars refer to as “the myth of the vanishing Indian”—the repeatedly pushed line that we’d seen the Last of the Mohicans (and every other Native people) come and go, and the West was “a virgin land for whites to settle.” And yet, Newitz continues, it’s a “matter of public record that the U.S. War Department appropriated millions of dollars to fight the Indian Wars in the nineteenth century. If the enemy had already vanished … why the need for all that funding?” This contradiction was essential to ginning up public support for genocide, which had to be portrayed as a melancholic, foregone conclusion by a reluctant nation carrying out its destiny.
By establishing that America’s history with disinfo began with the Indian Wars, Newitz makes clear that these tactics, as scary and frustrating and anti-American as they may seem now, were crucial to the formation of the country as we understand it. Westward expansion could not have happened without this marriage of total war and psyops. And what becomes clear in Newitz’s timeline is how regularly narratives are built for the purpose of making violence seem inevitable. Stories limit interpretation, they exclude as outlying noise elements that may support counternarratives, and they create an emotional investment for a desired outcome.
From there, Stories Are Weapons turns to twentieth-century American military tactics of psychological warfare and—crucially—how those tactics differ from the kinds of weaponized storytelling that most of us now face every time we open a social media app. Among the more fascinating discussions in Newitz’s book is how very different the military’s use of psychological warfare is from the kinds of disinformation most of us are dealing with on a day-to-day basis. The American military’s use of PSYOPS turns out to have had a mixed success record, at best: For all the experimentation (via programs like the CIA’s MKULTRA) to create a Manchurian Candidate–style brainwashing program, the government has never been able to successfully condition people to act against their will. Rather, much of American propaganda has combined variations on the bog-standard “leaflets-and-loudspeakers” approach with hoping for the best. This strategy tended to work better during the Cold War, particularly in the wake of the Marshall Plan, when the United States was heavily invested—financially as well as ideologically—in winning hearts and minds.