Preface

Science of Coercion documents how US military, intelligence, and propaganda agencies spent tens of millions of dollars to underwrite, influence, and apply the work of dozens of leading US social scientists during the first decades of the Cold War. These agencies routinely selected scientists, professors, and journalists to gather intelligence on societies and national movements that challenged US power. They applied insights from psychology, sociology, and anthropology in covert operations, interrogation, torture, and large propaganda campaigns both inside the United States and abroad.

The book also chronicles the impact of national security sponsorship on the emergence of university-based communication research. This is an interdisciplinary aspect of sociology specializing in how mass media shapes people’s perceptions and attitudes, and it has become the primary academic discipline used for training today’s public relations specialists, journalists, and “communication” advisers for business and government clients.

Science of Coercion names the names and charts the flows of money, university status, and key theories during the founding of the field. The sponsors and scientists nurtured academic theories and research particularly useful to the national security–commercial complex of the day. These myths and preconceptions of the national security state crystallized among social scientists, mass media, and intellectuals in the form of conventional wisdom about what public communication “is” and how it is said to “work.”

These myths and preconceptions are quite important because much of the scientific output in the field since the 1950s has focused on devising means for elites to manage the ideology and public opinion of masses of people who are largely disenfranchised from democratic decision making. The dominant paradigm of the field, so to speak, has long been a paradigm of domination. Many of these preconceptions remain central to the work of major media, universities, intelligence, and propaganda specialists, and other knowledge-based enterprises today.

Said another way, most modern communication studies have taken one form of communication characteristic of twentieth-century consumer- and propaganda-based societies and substituted that for communication as such. Domination as communication and its partner, consumption as communication, are often presented in academic training seminars and in mass media as acceptable, inevitable, or even as “human nature.” Today’s elite objectives for social communication emphasize the cradle-to-grave seductions of consumerism and, at least for the moment, public rituals that reproduce a self-blinding and self-binding ideology that is transferable from one generation to the next.

For much of the twentieth century, other approaches to understanding communication remained largely unexamined, poorly understood, and at times directly suppressed by information-rich elites. Today’s power struggles over copyrights, patents, privacy, and Internet surveillance illustrate the point.

Even so, new voices have continued to emerge. Alternative communication paradigms include ritual communication studies, as James Carey and numerous crosscultural communication specialists have pointed out, and the social learning, counterpropaganda, and postpropaganda analyses explored by Noam Chomsky, Ed Herman, Metanoia Films, and many grassroots groups loosely associated with international Occupy movements. Yochai Benkler and others offer studies of knowledge and information ecologies while the Critical Art Ensemble and, separately, the Electronic Frontier Foundation have encouraged deeper critiques of digital media as such. Herbert Schiller’s, and more recently, Bob McChesney’s, extensive works on the political economics of communication systems continue to influence global understandings of information industries. Versions of Guy Debord’s critique of Information Age statist capitalism, Society of the Spectacle,¹ continue to resonate worldwide. Meanwhile, systematic studies of alternatives to colonization of knowledge have emerged in a half dozen other academic fields, such as anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, and citizen science movements.

Much remains to be done to create substantial, fact-based critiques of the interlaced ideologies and social structures within which social scientists, mass media, and policy makers operate. Authors from several fields have demonstrated how thinkers and activists can accomplish those critiques. For example, careful dissections of historical and contemporary anthropology by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, David Price, Roberto González, Catherine Lutz, Hugh Gusterson, and others provide useful studies that are gradually crystallizing into an academic movement to rethink the role of anthropology as such in contemporary society.² Ellen Herman has contributed important insights into the institutionalization of psychology during World War II and the Cold War.³ More recently, widely known scandals continue to erupt concerning the role of psychologists, social psychologists, psychiatrists, and doctors in institutionalized torture during the invasion of Iraq and in the domestic US prison system. Feminist scholars have repeatedly opened extraordinary new understandings of almost every aspect of gender, sexuality, performance, knowledge, and power. WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have helped establish far better public and academic understanding of government-financed security doctrines such as information warfare, cyberwar, “total information awareness” surveillance, “soft power,” and public diplomacy. Jeremy Crampton has contributed insightful critiques of the growth of geographic information systems, Internet mapping, and cyberspace.⁴ Larry Soley and many others have documented techniques of corporate and military manipulation of university programs⁵, while magazines as varied as the Atlantic, Adbusters, and Monthly Review regularly raise provocative challenges to the basic assumptions and viability of today’s mainstream study of economics.

My hope for the publication of Science of Coercion in this new Open Road digital edition is that it might spur readers to ask new questions of today’s experts. Take note of the publications and authors mentioned above, critique them, and share them as widely as possible. Ready or not, new ideas are loose in the world, and they shall shape the century to come.

Christopher Simpson

Washington, DC

Summer 2014

1 There are at least three translations of this work available in English. These include the “no copyright” edition by Black & Red (Detroit) published in 1970, with an expanded edition in 1983; and the Verso (London) edition of Malcolm Imrie’s translation in 1990. Zone Books (New York) published Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation of Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1994.

2 See: Network of Concerned Anthropologists (2009), The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press; Price, David H. (2008), Anthropological Intelligence: Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, Durham: Duke University Press; and Price (2011), Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State, Oakland & Petrolia, CA: Counterpunch and AK Press.

3 Herman, Ellen (1995), The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts. Berkeley: University of California Press.

4 Crampton, Jeremy (2003), The Political Mapping of Cyberspace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5 Soley, Lawrence (1995), Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia. Boston: South End Press.