Description
Since 2016, ‘psychological warfare’ has returned in dramatic fashion to Western political discourses. However, the history of psychological warfare is poorly understood. This paper argues that, not only are these discourses made possible through structured practices of historical amnesia, but that they have transformed certain forms of popular political knowledge into prerequisites for national security. This paper examines three periods of psychological warfare: its origins in the Second World War, its formalisation during the Cold War, and its contemporary ‘cyber’ revival. I show that in each period, the power of psychological warfare is said to be underwritten by secret and esoteric forms of knowledge capable of frictionless manipulation of populations across space. Correspondingly, I show that defense against psychological warfare is routinely framed in terms of personal knowledge. Discourses of psychological warfare have therefore produced what Foucault calls an “obligation to know” in which personalised forms of knowledge and ignorance are said to determine balances of national security and geopolitical power. I argue, however, that built into these exercises is an historical amnesia concerning the role of secrecy and deception in constructing and circulating these narratives. I conclude that the kinds of popular knowledge upon which security against psychological war is said to rest is highly uneven and contingent upon modes of ignorance and forgetting.
