CHRISTOPHER SIMPSON INTERVIEW
http://home.swipnet.se/allez/Eng/FTR78.htm
1)Short summary copied from David Emorys For
The Record program series, http://www.spitfirelist.com/ and links there
FTR-78 Interview with Christopher Simpson (Two
30-minute segments) $8.50
In 1994, Christopher Simpson published a formidable
little book entitled The Science of Coercion: Communication Research and
Psychological Warfare 1945-1960 (Oxford University Press.) This work sets
forth the profound and vitally important relationship between the
2)Below a full transcript from the interview in soundfiles FTR78a and b. The content is truthfully
reproduced although not always literally.
FTR78a
Christopher Simpson, author of The
Science of Coercion subtitled communication research and psychological
warfare, 1945-1960 oxford univ press 1994
CS also points to National
security directives of the Reagan and Bush administration, a Collecton of declassified National security council records
from the Reagan and Bush administration and it gives a good overview of what
contemporary security policy is in the words of the national security council
and the president themselves. Its a reference book to
be found in libraries.
About CS book 'The
Science of Coercion' (=TSC)
DE:In this book you collate
two basic elements of contemporary american society, Psychological
warfare(=PW) and Mass Communication Research (=MCR)
We start by giving a working definition of each.
CS:Psychological warfare first entered
the english language as a translation, a mutation of
a nazi german concept
called Weltanshaungskrieg which means world
view warfare and during WWII the Americans built on that and expanded it and
used it to mean a whole range of wartime type tactics involving propaganda,
dirty tricks, covert operations, whatever, to carry out a war. Where it emerges
into a modern reality came in the wake of the war when more so
called peace time types of essentially the same tactics emerged. For
years now the government has told us that we're living
in the world of no war no peace and what that has meant as a practical matter
is that we're living in a world of ongoing low-level warfare and one of the
early terms that was used to describe this is psychological warfare.
Nowadays they call it lowintensity warfare. Sometimes
it's called more politely 'public diplomacy'. Just
to build on that point for a minute. When you hear people talk about lowintensity warfare, it simply means lowintensity
compared to nuclear weapons.
Lowintensity warfare from the
standpoint of people who are subjected to it is quite
high intensity thank you very much! Some people would refer to it as total
warfare conducted at the grass roots level. Its
basically a form of terror.
Against union organizers,
I am talking about central America now, church people,
community activists of whatever sort. And in central
America alone you're talking about fatalities measured in the hundreds of
thousands. All right, communications research is the sort of Ivory Tower
version of much the same sort of thing. There are schools of communication
research at most major universities of the
DE:We should make the point
that psychological warfare does not in any way preclude the use of deadly
force. That the type of warfare that is called
psychological warfare is warfare that is generated for the specific purpose of
producing its primary reaction in the psychological field. This does not
necessarily imply however that no blood is shed.
CS:No, by no means and in
fact from its inception from its earliest definition in classified government
records, psychological warfare is defined to include assassinations, covert
operations, gerilla warfare counterinsurgency
etc. From its inception psychological warfare has been
the mating of violence on the one hand and what people would call today
propaganda or mass communication on the other hand. Another thing that's interesting about psychological warfare, from its
inception it has also targeted the people of the
DE:One of the points that we should make just in
passing is that the illusion that psychological warfare does not necessarily
produce bloodshed or is not necessarily very bloody appears to have contributed
to rationalizations of some of the people who bridge the gap between
psychological warfare and mass communication research, they rationalize their
use of psychological warfare by saying that this would lead to a reduction of
blood shed or less violent methods of coercion
CS:Sure and there are
circumstances where that is true. For example if you have a batallion
of surrounded troups and you can use leaflets and
loudspeakers to convince them that they are better of surrendering than
fighting to the death etc. But that's a very limited
part of how these techniques are actually used. The mean way application both
measured in terms of how often, how much money is spent, how much academic
attention is given to it. The mean use of
psychological warfare has been the suppression of rebellious, prodemocratic movements in countries that the
DE:In your discussion of psychological warfare
you talk about light propaganda, black propaganda and grey propaganda do you
think it would be appropriate to discuss the role of some of these personnages and institutions that are involved on the one
hand with psychological warfare and on the other hand with mass communication
research as perhaps a form of grey propaganda
CS:Sure, part of what the book argues is that
this area of academic study in the various schools that are connected to it and
the body of knowledge that is connected to it and most importantly, the
preconceptions that are connected to it, the preconceptions that are tied up
with communication research, emerged in very important part due to goverment psychological warfare funding at the height of
the cold war.
DE:A definition of grey
propaganda?
CS:OK, white propaganda is
like the Voice of America, its like NBC News, it is
info that is repeated constantly that has the appearance of veracity,
objectivity, naturalness and so on, but which in fact has a distinct ideological
subtext, distinct set of preconceptions about the message that one is trying to
put across. Black propaganda on the other hand is what most people would call
covert ops, assassinations, insurgencies, counterinsurgencies, dirty tricks of
a variety of sorts, sabotage, the Contra affaire in Nicaragua, and then
building on that the whole Iran-Contra business, then building on that the
whole business of the Iran Contras and the drugs. Those would be examples of
black propaganda.
Grey propaganda to get to
your question exists somewhere between the two. And it
has characteristics of both. The most common type of grey propaganda is where
the organization that's sponsoring it puts
disinformation misinformation into the news media, that have the appearance of
being independent from that sponsoring organization. A rather simple example of
this would come from, say if the CIA puts a ...back when
DE:Certainly, one of my favourite
expression is an old turkish proverb: 'He who tells
the truth gets chased out of nine villages' - - - Chris you talk about the
interrelationship between psychological warfare and mass communication research
as involving three major types of intersections: 1) You discuss US
psychological warfare as applied communication research and much of the funding
for communication research has come from national security related institutions
and that this in turn was shaping the post WWII nature of mass communication
research as an academic discipline and you traced the genesis of this
relationship to a number of different institutions which where centers of psychological warfare during the WWII, I'd like
to briefly read a quote from page 25 of TSC and ask
you to develop this further. 'Virtually all of the scientific
community that was to emerge during the 1950s as leaders in the field of mass
communication research spent the war years performing a plant study of US and
foreign propaganda, allied troop moral, public opinion both domestically and
internationally, clandestine OSS operations, or the then emerging technique of
deriving useful intelligence from analysis of newspapers magazines, radio
broadcasts and postal censorship intercepts. This old boy network had
much to do with shaping the immediate post WWII academic discipline of mass
communication research as well as psychological warfare'
CS:WWII was a particular type of
war - 'the good war' according to Studs Turkle(?)
trying to make the point that it was a time when the country was unambigously united... And this
hasn't been the case since 1945 During the war you had these networks of
psychological warfare specialists created. Moving into the cold war period the networks persist. Some of those who were quite
influential during the wartime period moved on to become the directors and
senior scientists at the main foundations like the Ford foundation and the
Rockefeller brothers foundation, the social science research council and so
forth. What is a major source of money for social research.
Some of the others went into publishing and broadcasting. A quote from Edward Beret(?) who ended up as a dean at a graduate school of
journalism in Columbia Univ, founded the Col Journal Review Talks about where
his colleagues ended up. 1953: Publishers of Time, Look Fortune,
several daily newspapers editors of magazines such as Holiday, Coronet, Parade
and Saturday Review, Editors of Denver post, New Orleans Times Deca.?, Heads of Viking press, Harper and brothers, Strass
and Young, 2 Holywood Oscar winners, a 2 time Pulitzer
price winner, the board chairman of CBS, a dozen key network executives,
president Eisenhowers chief speech writer, the editor
of Readers Digest International edition, at least 6 partners of large adverticing agencies, the point being here is not that all
of these people thought alike and where engaged in some big conspiracy but
rather that they had a common wartime experience and a series of common
preconceptions about what communication is and how its supposed to be used and
how to be studied. That has had enormous impact on what we today take to
be communication. Communication is trickier or it's
richer in meaning than it seems at first you know. The root word comes from latin Communmunia(?) sharing of burdens, a two way exchange of information...
It doesnt mean that burdens at Roman times where
equally shared, but nevertheless, but a multiway
sharing remains true. But nowadays... it means 'How I
can tell you what to do'
DE: quoting from p 62 of TSC 'As will become apparent, the
dominant paradigm of the period proves to be in subst
part a paradigm of dominance in which the appropriateness and inevitability of
the /a? lead control of communication was taken as
given. As a practical matter the key academic journals
of the day demonstrated only a secondary interest in what communication is. Instead they concentrated on how modern techology
could be used by elites to manage social change, extract political concessions
or win purchasing decisions from targetted
audiences'. Thats a very
different type of communication from the root definition. CS discusses whether
that type of communication and violence are really linked
together and gives an example.
----------------- end of FTR78a ---------------------
FTR78b
About a synthesis of
social science and national security operations
NSC 4, NSC 4a and NSC
10/2
NSC=National Security
Council the principle advisors to the president on national security issues
Up
until the end of the Roosevelt administration you had the military advisors
shouting in one corner and the political advisors shouting in the other and
president Roosevelt was crafty enough to handle both but as a new world emerged
Truman and later presidents wanted a staff to combine the military and the
political questions into a single group of advisors.
One of the first things
they worked on was psychological warfare and the combination of propaganda and
violence.
Confidential NSC 4: US
Information Agency and Voice of America for hardhitting
propaganda against the russians.
This was the officially secret but really public
definition of psychological warfare against the russians.
A confidential document is the lowest level of government secrets. Although
formally it is 'secret' information, in practise confidential information is seen on the front page of newspapers virtually every day.
Minutes after NSC4 the
national security council took up the NSC 4a which was a top
secret decision. And a top secret
classification is considerably stricter than confidential and one of is aspects
is that the existence of a top secret decision is secret. No
government official can legally acknowledge that a top secret
decision has been made.
NSC 4a said that these
propaganda operations of US Information Agency and Voice of America
in NSC 4 would be supplemented by systematic campaigns of sabotage, gerilla warfare, covert operations, assassinations,
insurgency, counterinsurgency. The authority to do
this was pretty vague because the different security
agencies were arguing who would get the brief to carry out this kind of
warfare. And the decision on that came 6 months later
as NSC 10/2
That was created in an
entirely secret government agency, the Office of
Policy Coordination and the function of this secret agency was specifically
to carry out these types of covert operations. That secret government agency
eventually became the so called Operations
Directorate of the CIA, which has basically the same functions till this
day.
DE:One of the institutions that
you mentioned as examplifying this marriage of social
science and warfare and propaganda is Public Opinion Quarterly (=POQ) a very influential academic journal which in many ways
epitomizes this bridging of that gap.
CS:Wait, Yes I would like to
talk about Public Opinion Quarterly but to get at this whole question of
the interplay between the academic and violence, I think its necessary to take
a step even further back then that. And that is to
look at how mass consumer societies spread themselves, how they work. [The mass
consumer society of today] runs on, how many Fords or Toyotas,
cans of Coke or whatever it is that the various manufacturers can sell to their
audiences. And most of the real job that the mass
media is involved in is the business of selling eye-balls to advertisers and
it's all broken out rather precisely. If you want to buy advertising on
Seinfeld or '60 minutes' the network can tell you with great precision how many
million men between the ages of 16 and 25 watch this program, how many women
with ages between 25 and 35 watch this program and so forth. If you watch the
sitcom you can see precisely..
So what a TV station
really does is not put on entertainment, where its money comes from is in
selling your eye-balls to advertisers. In order to do
that, in order to make that work, there has to be ways to count, how many eye-balls are being sold. There has to be ways to survey
this, to put forward a plausible argument from the media side to the
advertisers as to why the advertiser should come up with a $billion a year or
whatever it is to sell cosmetics for example. Or
comparable numbers to sell automobiles.
Where the academic field
of mass communication research begins was in the development of these
techniques to do precisely that type of measurement. To measure how many eye-balls (or how many ears in those years of radio) will
look at particular advertisements and what impact this had on sale. To what
degree did the person reading an advertisement remember that ad etc. And there are lots of studies
that you can find in the library that elaborate on these themes. Now to come
around to the question of violence, what we've seen
since the 1930s was the expansion of this type of consumer society and I am not
even talking about a left or right or whether one is capitalist or socialist, I
am talking about the expansion of mass consumer society around the world. What
one had seen is that that type of society precludes it overwhelms other forms
of social organisation. It counts them out. It proceeds
rather frequently with great violence often including genocide in particular
genocide of indigenous peoples as it spreads around the world. As it spreads it carries particular ideals with it with
preconceptions about what's good or what's bad and how things work. The point
that I am trying to get around to here is
1) for
consumer society to run there has to be some way to measure whats
being bought and sold.
2) It expands only at the
expense of existing society.
3) As
it overwhelms an existing society, say as it arrives in Turkey or Libanon or Egypt or in South East Asia or in Peru, it
breaks down the existing social structure and substitutes itself and that sets
off a chain of both frequently damage to the people who live there and also
resistance to these developments, so how do you manage the resistance to the arrival
of Coca Cola and Ford motor company and so forth, when the local unions when
the locla social activists when the local churches
decide they've had it about up to here with what the companies are trying to
push unto them. How do you manage these people?
Psychological
warfare and the whole field of how economic 'development' comes about.
The main centers of communication research during the 1950s to 1960s
were obsessed with these questions. What do you do if people in
DE:Chris jumping ahead to
something that follows philologically from the discussion, you write on p 53 as
follows:'At least half of all the important centres
of
CS:Development theory is an
interdisciplinary theory. It combines communication research if sociology,
political science, bits and pieces of psychology. Its idea is to figure out, its really an elegant idea, some sort of formula by which
every country in the world would 'develop' along the lines that the hegemonic
power wanted it to develop. There was a cold war going on, the Americans were
not the only players in this game. And what happened
was that various developing countries came out from under colonial yoke and
were caught in this cross fire between the russians
and the Americans and to their great disadvantage. Even pope John Paul the 2nd
who is no radical has argued that this so called
development in the midst of the cold war has in truth been extraordinarily
damaging to the people of the world. And most
particularly to the people in those countries that became centers
of contention between east and west. Development theory was what the so called best and brightest of the west attempted to work
out as a general strategy a unified field theory so to speak of how these types
of chrisis were going to be managed.
DE:One of the the institutions which served as a vehicle for the weighing
and communication of some of the concepts such as development theory developed
by the cenis(?) is the aforementioned Public
Opinion Quarterly and that publication in many ways epitomizes the
crossover between psychological warfare and communication research. Can I ask
you to discuss the 1952 issue on international communication research
which could perhaps be described as a covert operation in and of itself.
CS: Public Opinion
Quarterly is a wellknown academic journal that
specialises in how public opinion is measured and during the early 1950s it was
really rather straightforward in that it viewed itself
as participating in psychological warfare and it would publish articles
describing what the tactics of the west had been against the germans during WWII.
That was on the first and
most obvious level. The next level which I think is
what you're getting at Dave, is that that journal itself promoted particular
attitudes about what communication is, what society is, and even down to such
things as what's the correct line on strategy to deal with the russians or italians etc.
DE:I am thinking of the work
that ..
CS:So the journal itself was,
although it didn't present itself in these terms, as a practical matter it was
a propaganda organ and then on the third level what one sees is a very close
inbreeding between the senior editors and the editorial board of the journal on
the one hand and the intelligence agencies on the other hand. The founder of
the journal back in 1937 was a man by the name of DeWitt Pool who was
then on sabbatical from the state department and his specialty was
anticommunist propaganda. That's what he did for a
living. And moving into the postwar
period he eventually became a senior executive with the radio free
DE:By the way I have the title
of that article: Political extremists in
CS:And you see that same sort
of three level pattern, where you have officially and litterally
about psychological warfare. psychological warfare
report on how we convince the japanese at
Next
level of propaganda to social scientists to convince them to tell a particular
lie. And then you have this third level, where the publications
of social science themselves become tools for intelligence gathering or as
illustrated in this particular case as elements of covert operations.
DE:You discuss also the Hook
insurgency in the Filipines and similar articles that
function in connection with that covert operation. And
some of these operations were quite bloody. ..I'd like
to read a sentence from p 85 and then ask you to comment on the effects of some
of these relationships on the methodological paradigms of communication
research. 'This continuity of leading theoreticians became part of a broader
pattern through which the psychological warfare of one generation became the
"International Communication" of the next.' You talk about one of the
effects of the relationship between mass communication research and
psychological warfare as sort of an internal purge of dissident voices so to
speak. Not by the government but by the recipients of this
government largesse or positive feedback. And then
you discuss the effects of this on the zeitgeist or dominant paradigm of
communication research.
CS:I can't answer in the
remaining 3 minutes but what I will say is this: What one saw was in early cold
war that they talked frankly about psychological warfare. By the mid-1950s they realized that if they talked about being
engaged in psychological warfare against the italians
that the italians may not like that very much and
they may take exception to it. So the rethoric of the field began to change. And there's an
example from
DE:Do you think it would be
unfair to describe this as a 'kinder gentler psychological warfare'?
CS says that George Bush
was not telling the truth when he said he was a kinder, gentler Ronald Reagan.
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