The School of Ruse

Chapter 5

Indirect Action

Since its beginnings, research on psychological warfare has always rendered tribute to what it considers its precursor: the Chinese Sun Tzu and his Art of Warfare. This ancient art, twenty-five centuries old, was defined by Raymond Aron as “a school of the ruse, of trickery, and indirect action,”¹ in a classic work where he shows both the points of rupture and the continuities between this Asian tradition of war and that other branch of strategic thought inspired by Clausewitz.

But the encounter with the rules of secular wisdom of the oldest empire in the world did not realize its full dimension until what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called, at the end of the 1970s, the “war of minorities”² guerilla wars, wars of national liberation, popular wars, or revolutionary wars-all these terms designated a similar reality throughout the world and yet had very different geneses.³ This new mode of warfare appeared in the 1950s in a context marked by the nuclear threat, the indirect confrontation between superpowers and the great movement of decolonization. This war of minorities who counterposed “the movement” to the “regular state” may also be understood as a metaphor for a different model of communication: this conflict can be seen as that of a complex network of relations against a system of command both centralized and vertical, the deterritorialization of strategic space against its territorialization, nomad space against sedentary space.

It is a commonplace to note that popular war presupposes a different organic relation with the “people,” the “mass,” whose participation in the struggle is, by definition, an integral part of this type of conflict. The support of the population is as indispensable to the fighters as “water to a

fish,” as Mao Tse-tung, the foremost theoretician of popular war, put it.⁴ Hence the importance given to the knowledge and analysis of internal tensions-the economic, cultural, political, and social contradictions- that run through a people and that may be exploited. Which classes, which groups are likely to join cause with the regular state? How can bridges be built and communities of meaning created around motives for struggle linking heterogeneous groups? While seeking to sap the legitimizing discourses of its adversary, the movement must produce its own narratives of mobilization and legitimation, not only via the media but through its actions on the ground. These are the “semiotic stakes of the struggle,” its taking of form, the conditions of its acceptability to the “masses.” These were stakes that Jean-Max Noyer, analyst of strategic thought, described well in referring to the “invention of revolt”:

Using all civil and military methods, playing on the cultural and “desire” dimensions of the confrontation, multiplying the “terrains and spaces” of conflict, bringing the conflict both onto the international scene and into the very heart of the adversary’s imaginary and profiting from permanent mediatization, the popular wars are defined by a combined and more or less rationalized use of terror and pity, of calculated violence and the capacity to arouse compassion and to unleash sympathy, and the processes of “affective” investments which favor these.”⁵

This moment of inventiveness proper to a period of tension leading up to the taking of power would contrast later with the lack of imagination of most of these movements once the regular state had been captured by the party-state. The search for the diversities and mediations in the approach to “the people” would lose momentum with the return to a sedentary life, with the end of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “creative line of flight of nomadic space.”

Deterritorialization, for the war of minorities, is not only the nomadic space for its combatants but also its projection into the world-space thanks to media relays, as the military strategists in charge of countering them had intuited during the first popular wars of the modern era. Colonel Roger Trinquier, educated in the school of colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, wrote:

In view of the present-day interdependence of nations, any residual grievance within a population, no matter how localized and lacking in scope, will surely be brought by determined adversaries into the framework of the great world conflict. From a localized conflict of secondary origin and importance, they will always attempt sooner or later to bring about a generalized conflict…. But the

rallying of oppositions and study of effective means of protection have been neglected. More exactly, when the enemy’s methods and their application have been recognized, propaganda and pressures have always been powerful enough to influence a poorly informed public and to lead it systematically to refuse to study or use the same methods.⁶

The French colonel wrote this in 1961, at a time when the media’s strength of diffusion was by no means on a scale with what it would become in the following decades.

Long after the end of colonial wars, French Army officers would remember what they had experienced at the time as a betrayal: the critical attitude of the metropolitan press with respect to their actions in Algeria. Thirty years later still, during the Gulf War, when uniformed experts were omnipresent in television studios, several of them would refer to this to justify the embargo on information in time of war.

At the time when Colonel Trinquier was denouncing the danger of a “public opinion badly informed,” an emblematic text on the use of the media in wars of liberation was that of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique who had rallied to the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). In “This Is the Voice of Algeria,” he wrote:

Before 1954, radio, on the normal level, [was] already apprehended as an instrument of the occupation, as a type of violent invasion on the part of the oppressor, was, in the psychopathological realm, an evil object, anxiogenic and accursed. After 1954, the radio assumed totally new meanings. Foreign technology, which has been “digested” in the context of the national struggle, had become a fighting instrument for the people and a protective organ against anxiety.⁷

It was at the end of 1956 that the Voice of Free Algeria started broadcasting from Tunis. It is also the period when the Voice of the Arabs, the radio station of Colonel Nasser in Cairo, became the symbol of Pan-Arab revolution, and it would remain so until the Six Day War in 1967.

The “War in the Crowd”

In order to resolve the enigma posed by minority war, military thinking had to listen to its adversary.

It was the French Army that took the initiative:

At a time when most of the world was focused on traditional ideas of general war and its doctrine of retaliation, the French were in Indochina struggling with Ho Chi-Minh’s inheritance from Mao

Tse-tung-the war of “national liberation,” the Communist Revolution…. It wasn’t until Nikita Khrushchev’s speech in January 1961 and President J. F. Kennedy’s reaction to the latter during the Vienna Summit, that the highest echelons of the U.S. government began to pay serious attention to these kinds of struggle.⁸

This observation by Don A. Starry, lieutenant-colonel in the U.S. Army, was published in Military Review, the theoretical journal of the American military, in February 1967, at a crucial moment in the escalation of the wars in Southeast Asia. Already, in October 1960, in the same forum, George Kelly, associated with Henry Kissinger at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, had encouraged “the most qualified American military experts” to study “all the lessons left by the French experience” in encounters with “revolutionary war.”⁹ This war, widely covered in La Revue de Défense Nationale, was dubbed by General Nemo, veteran of Indochina, the “war in the crowd,” two years after the defeat at Diên Biên Phu (1954), in a prescient article published in the same French journal. ¹⁰ The texts that captured the attention of experts at the Pentagon and their civilian advisers were those of colonels Godard and Trinquier, two of the architects of the “pacification” and the fight against pro-independence forces during the Algerian War (1954-62), as well as those of Colonel Lacheroy. As soon as it appeared in 1961, La guerre moderne (Modern warfare) by Colonel Trinquier found an American publisher.¹¹

For Trinquier, the unprecedented character of modern warfare, which he also called the war of subversion, resided more in the scope of its actions (political, economic, psychological, military, etc.) than in the vagueness of the “enemy”:

In modern warfare, the enemy is far more difficult to identify. No physical frontier separates the two camps. The line of demarcation between friend and foe passes through the very heart of the nation, through the same village, and sometimes divides the same family. It is a non-physical, often ideological boundary, which must however be expressly delineated if we want to reach the adversary and defeat him.

In military academies and classic doctrines, “one factor essential to the conduct of modern warfare is omitted-the inhabitant…. Control of the masses… is the master weapon of this war.”¹² Lacheroy went even further: “The mass is amorphous; it is to be taken. How to take it?” “By force or brain-washing,” hastened to reply this colonel, head of the “psychological action” services, whose ambition was to wage a total struggle for the control of populations. The fight was for their “pacification,” a

term the theoreticians at the Pentagon would make their own in the 1960s. The first element in this doctrine of pacification was the systematization of political indoctrination of the population. Numerous sources attest that those who embarked with the most virulence on this path were the officers who had spent long months of captivity in the camps of the Vietminh and were subjected to “reeducation” there. Intrigued and at the same time disconcerted by the militant practice of their enemy, just as Hitler had been by the Russian revolutionaries, they tried to turn the experience around to their use. Readings of Goebbels, Hitler, Le Bon, and Chakotin became mandatory, while the army sent a number of officers back to the classroom for training in psychology and sociology. The operational organization of “psychological action” took the form of newspaper and leaflets, companies equipped with loudspeakers, paramilitary corps (SAS, or specialized administrative sections; SAU, or urban administrative sections), and various “civic actions” such as the building of schools and dispensaries. All these initiatives and organizational structures were accompanied by measures such as the ban on the sale of radios to any persons except those with permits granted by the security forces.

The second component of the pacification approach was the transfer of populations and their rehousing in controlled villages, “compartmentalized and sanitized,” in the expression of General Massu, who justified them as “a protective measure against the minority of outlaws which causes terror to reign and imposes its will on the immense majority of good citizens.” British troops were the first to engage in such massive operations in their fight against the guerillas in Malaysia in the immediate postwar period. (In fact, Her Majesty’s Army had earlier resorted to similar measures during the Boer War of 1899 to 1902, copying the tactic of reconcentrados, which had been inaugurated by the Spanish Army a few years before, against Cuban pro-independence guerillas.) This territorial and administrative control led, in Algeria, to the displacement of about a million and a half to two million Algerians.

A third element was the obtaining of “action-intelligence” by specialized teams who interrogated suspects “without holding back.” Trinquier devoted numerous commentaries to the problem posed by the “visibility” of warfare operations, particularly of a “police nature in a large city.” He wrote:

[These operations] take place in the very midst of the populace, almost in public, whereas formerly they occurred on a battlefield, to which only armed forces had access. Certain harsh actions can eas-

ily pass for brutalities in the eyes of a sensitive public. And it is a fact also that, in the process of extirpating the terrorist organization from their midst, the people will be manhandled, lined up, interrogated, searched…. Our enemies will not fail to exploit the situation for propaganda needs…. Under no pretext, however, can a government permit itself to become engaged in a polemic against the forces of order in this respect, a situation that can benefit only our adversaries, ¹³

What this officer called “inevitable brutalities” are not considered only a means of obtaining information at all costs on clandestine enemy net- works, but also a means of destroying, in each captured individual, the sense of solidarity with an organization and a collectivity.

The principal French theoreticians of “psychological action” and of “pacification” were to be ultimately dismissed after the putsch of Algiers of April 22, 1961. Some of them were to join the French terrorist movement to keep Algeria French, the Secret Army Organization (OAS), or find themselves on the numerous fronts that, everywhere in the world, recruited volunteers for antisubversion crusades.

The Internal Enemy

Apart from France in this generation, the British military would be the only ones in Europe to theorize counter-insurrectional war. According to sociologists Philip Schlesinger, Graham Murdock, and Philip Elliott, to whom we owe an in-depth study of British television coverage of “terror-ism” and its interpretation of the actions of the armed movements in Northern Ireland, the British variant of the theory of counterinsurgency “has much in common with the French school.” Its principal representative is General Sir Frank Kitson, who, after having earned his reputation in Kenya, Malaysia, and Cyprus, commanded a brigade in Ulster in the early 1970s. His book Low Intensity Operations (1971) is both the result of his own experience and the synthesis of teachings handed down by French and American theoreticians.¹⁴ The study by the three British sociologists tries to show how ideological schemas inspired by the conceptions of the struggle against “subversion” impregnated not only news reporting but also fictional representations. It remains one of the rare studies that has thought through the relation between television and political violence during a so-called “national security crisis” in a major industrial country. The strong point of the analyses of these three authors is to show how “counterinsurrectional situations” provoked new relations between

media institutions and state strategies, how “normality” and “exception” combine or are telescoped into complex modes of control and pressure that the state and the wider political establishment can bring to bear on broadcasting. This point of view is clearly summed up in their ringing conclusion-manifesto:

This book has taken issue with the prevailing orthodoxies of Right and Left. We reject the counterinsurgents’ claim that television gives extensive publicity to “terrorist” views and mobilizes sympathy and support for their causes. We also reject the commonplace radical characterization of broadcasting as a largely uncritical conduit for official views. In opposition to these one-dimensional ac- counts we have drawn attention to the diverse ways in which television handles “terrorism” and the problems this question poses for liberal democracies. Some programs are relatively “closed” and work wholly or mainly within the terms set by the official perspective. Others, though, are more “open” and provide space for alternative and oppositional views. The extent of this diversity, however, should not be overstated. Although television is the site of continual struggle between contending perspectives on “terrorism,” the contest is not an equal one. “Open” programs appear far less frequently than “closed” ones and they reach smaller audiences.¹⁵

Aside from France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, it is to Latin America that one must turn to find other substantial contributions to the theory of counterinsurgency. Very dependent, in their first phase, on the Pentagon doctrines of national security, the armed forces of the subcontinent progressively disengaged from this source of initial inspiration and elaborated their own thinking about the ways of approaching “total war” against an “internal enemy” - or “pure war,” as Paul Virilio called it in 1975, that is, a war without an enemy except for the one defined by oneself. This was the case notably among the Argentinian military (undoubtedly the one most influenced by the “French school” in its most extreme aspect), and the Peruvian and the Chilean armed forces. And it was above all the case of the famous Brazilian war college known as the “Sorbonne,” which counted among its ranks a number of theoreticians of geopolitics, such as General Golbery, whose book on the geopolitics of Brazil dates from 1955.¹⁶

After the overthrow of the constitutional government of João Goulart in 1964, this science of national security would come to fruition in the creation of a state that openly avowed this counterinsurgency doctrine. The way in which the generals in power in Brasilia managed their rela-

tion with the media clearly illustrates the tension that arises in modern dictatorial regimes between the norms of “psychological war” against the “internal enemy”-all citizens being, in fact, potential suspects for the national security state-and the norms of a mass commercial culture, which caters to and seeks to seduce the consumer public. Never before in the history of the media has the contradiction appeared so clearly between two concepts and regimes of information. The military did not succeed in imposing their schemas of total control of “hearts and minds” by means of propaganda as prescribed by the doctrine, and ended up re- lying on the mechanisms of the market. This meant that the years of dictatorship would be both the worst years of state violence Brazil would live through - and those in which her television industry took off; two decades later, the latter would be one of the most modern, if not post- modern, on the planet. This despite a particularly ferocious censorship- a troubling coincidence which I have analyzed with Michèle Mattelart at length in another book. In this work, we wrote:

The novelty of the Brazilian military regime was this: to assure a minimum of consensus for a political project that was forced to resort to coercion and police control, state power had to call on the commercial machinery of mass culture, the product of a society in which public opinion is a recognized actor in the public sphere. A mass culture linked to the idea of representative democracy and free access to the market economy of information, culture and entertainment. State power was thus forced to count on the mechanisms of societies in which “civil society” has a recognized, active institutional role, where “discipline-blockade” measures (Foucault) do not predominate. This is the paradox introduced into the traditional model of the authoritarian state by the modern phase of the market economy and its law of free flow of commodities and symbolic goods…. Closing down the “theatre of psychological operations” against the “internal enemy” is no longer conceivable in a country that has entered into an accelerated phase of industrial development and internationalization of its internal market and where television plays a pioneering role in the conquest of new market frontiers.¹⁷

As opposed to this system, in which television is in the hands of private groups in a market economy under a dictatorship, the South Korean television apparatus remains under the firm control of a national security state. It was not until 1990 that this newly industrialized state began a process of liberalization by authorizing foreign advertising agencies to do business in the country and by opening a debate on the creation of commercial channels.

The Science of Counterinsurgency

“Populations are amorphous or indifferent; it suffices to detect, then to form, an active élite, then to introduce it into the mass like a leaven which will act at the desired moment.”¹⁸ This is, in its simplest form, the French theoreticians’ vision of social differentiation of the antisubversive struggle. Although they professed faith in the virtues of “psychological action,” they remained stuck in a problematic dominated by a military logic. In short, the military demanded the principal role in all the phases of the struggle.

Their American counterparts were certainly not blind to this; they raised questions about the implications of such a doctrine with respect to the relation between army and state. Thus Don A. Starry, in the article cited above, writes:

It is significant that throughout the empires, republics, restorations, and governments that rose and fell, the army remained loyal to France. The French army avoided politics…. La guerre révolutionnaire, as they came to understand it, challenged the very core of the profession…. This is a method inimical to the structure of liberal democracy. Armed forces can surely fight against the effect of subversion, but military force in a democracy is not the proper agent to deal with the causes of subversion.¹⁹

The Pentagon, in concert with the White House, therefore drew on the arsenal of institutions and traditions of the American state to avoid a fatal slide of this type.

Two factors favored negotiation: the existence of an institutional framework of cooperation between political power and the military, as codified by a key law, the National Security Act, and an ample supply of researchers disposed to pursue the objectives of a counterinsurgency struggle.

In 1961, President John Kennedy and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, undertook to modify the spirit of the Pentagon and to restructure the institution from top to bottom. The works of Ernesto (Che) Guevara and Mao Tse-tung became required reading. This was true as well for the personnel of the State Department, and more particularly those assigned to the Third World. But it was not until the first failures in Vietnam, in 1964, that the Kennedy doctrine triumphed. The failures were due precisely to over-reliance of the experts on conventional war (at that time, the American intervention in Vietnam was confined to sending military advisers).

Yet in 1962, university specialists had tried to impress upon the gener-

als the strategic importance of the study of “insurgent behavior.” That year, two professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ithiel de Sola Pool — one of the major figures in research on international communications — and Lucian Pye, had proposed, in a report published by the Smithsonian Institution and entitled Social Science Research and National Security, a multidisciplinary approach with a view to the “formulation of analytical models of social sciences and social control in underdeveloped countries.”²⁰ But the military kept the report in a desk drawer. Only the failures of the programs of massive population transfers and regroupment into “strategic hamlets,” as well as the growing antigovernment resistance of the Buddhists, made an alliance between the social sciences and counterinsurgency necessary.

In late 1964, the secretaries of defense and the army took stock of the resources available for this type of research and made a frank evaluation of existing studies. Their conclusion: “Primarily, there is very incomplete knowledge and understanding in depth of the internal cultural, economic, and political conditions that generate conflict between national groups.”²¹

A vast program of sociological and anthropological investigation tried to fill the void by means of a research network composed of universities and private centers and financed by new bodies of ad hoc defense coordination. The research contracts in the social sciences were granted as a matter of priority to the study of minorities and elites, their values, their vulnerability to psychological operations, their social relations, and their institutions of communication. Thus much importance was attributed to the analysis of ethnic and religious minorities and the evaluation of local military authorities’ ability to assume leadership in national development. The first formal models of social system engineering began to treat counterinsurgency with their input/output grid. Scenarios were invented that “simulated” the possible behaviors and reactions of “actors in the system” in insurrectional or preinsurrectional situations: the government, the military, political parties, middle classes, peasants, workers, minorities, landowners, students, business owners, multinational companies, and so on — in Southeast Asia, but also everywhere the flame of revolt was smoldering.²²

Funds for research on counterinsurgency irrigated diverse centers of higher education: the American University, Stanford, MIT, Johns Hopkins — which included, from the end of World War II on, a research center specializing in psychological war — and many others. Ithiel de Sola Pool, who had brought himself to the attention of the Kennedy administration by developing in 1960 the first model for simulating an electoral campaign that of the future president of the United States — lent his sup-

port to the development of a counterguerilla model dubbed “Agile Coin.” The same university professor who in the 1980s would take a strong stand in favor of deregulation would also be the only one among his colleagues, in the decisive years 1965-69, to belong to the Defense Science Board, which was responsible for supervising and evaluating the results of the alliance between research and the “national security” apparatus.²³

The American university community was far from being unanimously in favor of participation in this kind of research, even if many of the re searchers did not turn their noses up at the rewards it offered. Making an overview of the entry of defense-commissioned projects into university research since the opening of the Cold War, an editor of the review Scientific American did not hesitate to write in 1965:

The new science of “human engineering” at the “man-machine interface” has brought psychology into the circle of disciplines favored by the project contract/grant. Regional research institutes, organized at the primary initiative of the Department of State and the great private foundations to illuminate hitherto dark regions on the world map, have brought sociology and anthropology into the ambience of the Department of Defense…. With funds abounding for projects in every field of learning, the university campus has come to harbor a new kind of condottieri, mercenaries of science and scholarship loaded with doctorates and ready for hire on studies done to contract specification.²⁴

Quite ironically, the only input the new social engineers forgot to incorporate into their simulations was the increasing differentiation among the political actors within the United States itself. As a disillusioned Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist who was energetic in putting his expertise at the service of counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia, would state in 1975:

The Vietnam War and, to a lesser degree, racial issues divided elite groups as well as the mass public. In addition, the number and variety of groups whose support might be necessary had increased tremendously by the 1960s…. The most notable new source of national power in 1970, as compared to 1950, was the national media, meaning here the national TV networks, the national news magazines, and the major newspapers with national reach such as the Washington Post and the New York Times. There is, for in- stance, considerable evidence to suggest that the development of television journalism contributed to the undermining of governmental authority…. Television news, in short, functions as a “dis-

patriating” agency — one which portrays the conditions in society as undesirable and as getting worse.²⁵

It was on the basis of this realization that Huntington, in collaboration with French sociologist Michel Crozier and Japanese sociologist Joji Watanuki, diagnosed in 1975 for the Trilateral Commission the “ungovernability of the great Western democracies.”²⁶

Disinformation Under Fire

“It is my generation who must halt, then turn back the incursions which the military have made in our civilian system. These incursions have subverted or muffled civilian voices within the Executive branch, weakened the constitutional role and responsibility of the Congress, and laid an economic and psychological burden on the public that could be disastrous.” ²⁷ It is with these words that Senator J. William Fulbright concluded his essay The Pentagon Propaganda Machine, published in 1971. Subjecting to minute analysis the disproportionate development of communication strategies by the military establishment, he denounced what he called the hold of the “Defense Department’s public relations activities on the shaping of public opinion.”

In March 1972, Fulbright presided over a Senate committee inquiring into the activities of the USIA (United States Information Agency). Officials of the agency, diplomats, and senators threw a spotlight on the shady operations of this central propaganda body of the American government, which employed ten thousand people spread over a hundred countries. In 1966, the same senator from Arkansas had presided over the first inquiry into the USIA’s lobbying of the press, in an effort to improve the image of the government.²⁸

In a memorandum issued in January 1963 to the director of the USIA, President Kennedy had clarified the missions of the agency, founded in 1953, in these terms:

The mission of the U.S. Information Agency is to help achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives by (a) influencing public attitudes in other nations, and (b) advising the President, his representatives abroad, and the various departments and agencies, on the implications of foreign opinion for present and contemplated U.S. policies, pro- grams and official statements. The influencing of attitudes is to be carried out by the overt use of the various techniques of communication - personal contact, radio broadcasting, libraries, book publication and distribution, press, motion pictures, television, exhibits, English language instruction and others.

By these means, he added, the USIA was “to give the U.S.A. the image of a strong, democratic and dynamic nation, qualified for leading the efforts made by the world in order to fulfill this purpose.”²⁹

In 1970, the intensification of the American involvement in Vietnam led to the assigning of a new mission to the USIA in addition to the one originally ratified by Congress: “to lend appropriate support in psychological warfare to the military command in the theater or theaters of active military operations, and provide daily guidance and basic information materials.”³⁰ The USIA had in fact already assumed this mission on the ground by creating the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUS-PAO) in Saigon, in collaboration with the high command. The objective was defined peremptorily by its own officials: “winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people to support the efforts of the American war, by influencing journalists favorably, learning the tactics of psychological war used by the enemy and weakening its moral strength.” It was in accordance with this objective that the agency had taken part in the late 1960s in the pacification project known as Phoenix, which resulted in the “neutralization” of 20,000 opponents of the Thieu regime.

But in the course of the public hearings presided over by Senator Fulbright in 1972, it was not so much this aspect of the USIA’s work that the investigation committee insisted upon. Three sources of worry were manifested in the questions addressed by its members to the agents of the propaganda body who took the stand. First, the clandestine character of certain operations that USIA agents had conducted incognito, which was expressly forbidden, since Kennedy’s instructions spoke of “overt” use of the media as opposed to the methods of bodies such as the CIA, whose explicit legal mission was covert action. The second worry was the collaboration between a public agency and big American corporations in mounting certain joint operations. Finally, there was the confusion, which only grew deeper in the course of the testimony, between “propaganda” and “information.” This reached the point where Fulbright had to admit that “these distinctions between information and propaganda are extremely difficult to make. They are not only theoretically difficult to make, but it is also practically difficult to draw the line.”³¹

Four years later, in April 1976, almost one year to the day after the fall of Saigon, another Senate committee presided over by Frank Church summoned the heads of the military and civil secret services. Under fire were the covert actions undertaken by the CIA and the Pentagon, involving activities as diverse as propaganda, economic warfare, direct preventive action (sabotage, anti-sabotage), and the subversion of hostile states (assistance to guerillas or opposition movements).

Propaganda of this sort was what the veterans of World War II would

have labeled “black propaganda,” that is, “a fundamental intelligence operation, not only because it uses intelligence material solely as its ammunition, but because it is an independent maneuver conducted in an atmosphere of surreptitiousness. Black propaganda never identifies its real source. It pretends to originate within or close to enemy or enemy-occupied territory.”³² Under this technical definition were included the fabrication and dissemination of information and rumor.

On this precise point, the Church Commission tried above all to evaluate the dangers to which the American citizen was subjected by these clandestine practices, which the violence of the ideological clash of the Cold War had, as its protagonists admitted, “rendered indispensable despite their often frankly illegal character.” It stated: “In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with U.S. journalists and media organizations.”³³ The most urgent grievances concerned the press campaigns orchestrated in 1970 by the CIA with the goal of destabilizing Salvador Allende, the socialist president-elect of Chile, in the two months preceding the transfer of power. Information disseminated in the framework of this covert action had been largely picked up by the New York Times and the Washington Post, thus “polluting” — this is the term used by the senator — news and commentaries. The inventory of this type of action did not stop there, since in the course of testimony from information agents the cases of Iran, Italy, Greece, Guatemala, and other countries were exposed. All these countries had in the previous two decades constituted “zones of subversion,” real or potential.

These two series of hearings had the great merit of attempting to formulate the problem, and indeed of recognizing that there could be a problem regarding the exercise of democratic rights. This willingness to engage in revelations in the 1970s contrasted with the chilly attitude of other major Western democracies, where unavowed actions were classified “confidential defense” and kept in the dark. The virtue of the Fulbright and Church committees was even greater in that on the other side of the Iron Curtain, absolute opaqueness was the rule.

Dezinformatsia

The revelations of former heads of secret services who defected to the West have allowed us to lift a corner of the veil covering the international apparatus of propaganda and disinformation (dezinformatsia) of the

former Soviet Union and its satellites.³⁴ This was the case, for example, when a member of the Czech politburo, General Jan Senya (one of the first high-ranking officers in this field to defect) revealed in 1968 how the secret services of the East had succeeded in 1962 in deceiving the journalists of Der Spiegel by leaking to them the “secret plans on NATO strategy.”

In the world of Western intelligence, the prevailing opinion was that Soviet intelligence operations were conducted on a scale far greater than those of the other camp. The war of evaluations of the adversary’s potential was itself an integral part of the combat of propagandists. Thus, in the Church Committee’s report, it is not at all surprising to find the following estimate: the activities of the East were equivalent to six times those of the West, and even more if one counted covert operations.³⁵ On the front of propaganda narrowly defined, the witnesses to the Fulbright Committee subscribed to the figures that alleged a net handicap for the West: in 1970 Radio Moscow broadcast to Africa an average of 235 hours per week, in 15 languages, while the Voice of America logged no more than 130 hours per week in 4 languages only (English, French, Arabic, and Swahili). But in reply to a question from Senator Fulbright about the efficiency of such a potential, the director of Voice of America admitted that “their effectiveness is no way near commensurate with the size of their effort, because in many countries their programs are judged to be so propagandistic, so unbalanced, so strident that our information would indicate that they are not listened to other than by the party or by people who are considering joining the party.”³⁶

On the domestic front, the Glavlit and the “black cabinet” confiscated at the borders magazines, academic works, correspondence between scientists, and even publications of specialized branches of the United Na tions, in which the Soviet delegates proclaimed themselves to be ardent defenders of science in the service of peace and understanding among peoples. One of the most convincing testimonies is an ethnographic study performed in the 1960s by Zhores Medvedev, a scientist who was interned in a psychiatric asylum for having conducted a study on the abuses of Lysenko, and who would later seek refuge in the West. But before doing so, he minutely reconstructed, with the means at hand, the itinerary of his own international correspondence and that of his foreign correspondents. Harassment, bizarre disappearances, confiscations, returns to sender, mysterious stamps on letters received, indicating their passage through indiscreet hands - all these violations of the right to individual correspondence provoked this scientist to bring suit, in what would have been a total and foregone loss were it not for the gain in knowledge about the censorship system, against the postal administration of his country, in

the name of a legislation claiming to be democratic. ==Comparing the delivery time of letters in various parts of Europe with that at the end of the last century, Medvedev noted a singular increase in the time it took a letter from England to reach a Moscow address: it went from 3 to 4 days in 1875-1914 to 9 to 21 days in the late 1960s==. At this rate, Lenin’s letters sent from France or Switzerland would have taken from 10 to 17 days in 1969, while at the beginning of the century they reached his family in 3 or 4 days, despite the fact that he was pursued by the czarist police!³⁷

The bulk of studies on international communications performed in socialist countries in the 1970s stigmatizes the “means of bourgeois propaganda,” the standard term of party rhetoric to characterize the Western media. A representative work is that of Georgi Arbatov, director of the Institute of the United States of the Academy of Sciences and a leading official in the Party’s section on ideological work, whose title alone summarizes the concerns of the era: The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations: The Imperialist Doctrine, Methods and Organization of Foreign Propaganda (1970),³⁸ Seeing manipulation and plots wherever ideas and opinions were expressed, studies like this turned their backs on Marx’s analysis of ideology as the lived experience of a way of life, trans- formed into the “nature of things.” This approach also neglected, of course, the essential difference between the two ideological systems and their of envisaging the role of the media. This was a difference that ways the historian Roy A. Medvedev, brother of the author of the study on correspondence, explained very simply to his American colleagues: “The United States has many political parties, organizations, and religious groups; their propaganda is simply a part of the general flow of information. But in the Soviet Union, information is merely a part of the party’s propaganda campaigns.”³⁹

With the crumbling of the communist regimes, this project of indoctrination, divorced from people’s concrete daily realities, revealed its impotence, despite its massive volume, to attain the totalization of individual and collective life that had been attributed to it.

As for the U.S. government’s civilian propaganda apparatus, its crisis was to occur in April 1991, although signs of it had been visible for fifteen years. For it was in that month that President George Bush, following the end of the Cold War, the democratic revolution in the East, and the events of the Gulf, would decide to commission studies on the reorganization of official radio and television so that these media might remain “competitive.” This had not been the case during the U.S. Marines’ intervention in Panama in December 1989, or during the Gulf War of 1990-91. These two conflicts would signal the irresistible rise of the private channel CNN (Cable News Network) as a necessary intermediary

for Bush’s muscled diplomacy. On these two occasions, one could observe how the pressure of the emotion of images was modifying the decision-making processes of political leaders. The cold logic of the experts was short-circuited by the immediacy of live news. In this strategic revision there was, however, an exception to the rule: the United States policy with respect to Castro’s regime in Cuba, for it continues to maintain a radio and television service in Florida (Martí) according to the old schema inherited from the Cold War.

The questioning of the objectives and methods of the USIA occurred roughly the same time as the calling onto the carpet of the CIA, already in trouble over Irangate, the scandal involving the channeling to the Nicaraguan Contras of funds from the secret sale of arms to Iran. Although it had some 18,000 paid officials and a budget of 3.5 billion dollars, the CIA was found wanting during the invasion of Kuwait by the troops of Saddam Hussein-nor had it been able to forecast the precise moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the attempted coup d’état in the Soviet Union in 1991. A number of factors contributed to the crisis of the CIA: too much emphasis on electronic espionage methods to the detriment of the human element in intelligence gathering; the difficulty in mastering and interpreting the flow of information delivered by technically sophisticated equipment; the lack of agents specialized in languages and foreign cultures; and, above all, the difficulty of ridding itself of a Manichean and conspiratorial conception of the world inherited from the struggle against “the Evil Empire” and facing up to an environment where not only the idea of the enemy becomes diffuse, but where facts about the industrial and technological strategies of rival powers be come as indispensable for national security as the traditional raw material of intelligence focused on political espionage.

To cling to a one-sided definition of information is inexcusable in an age when it is becoming multifaceted. Private enterprise, beginning with the Japanese some time ago, reacted to the globalization of the economy by engaging in “competitive intelligence” or even “competitive strategy. implying that this operation concerns not only technology but all the technico-economic and political data that may figure into economic a tors’ definitions of their strategy. The mission of these operations was collect, from the most diverse sources and networks (colloquia, publications, scientific and technical reports and exchanges, etc.), the”strategic information” needed by corporations in order to maintain their level of competitiveness, and to analyze it from the perspectives of various disciplines and fields of activity, calling on specialists coming from different cultures.

As for the Pentagon and its information apparatus, it was to undergo a different evolution in the wake of its future military victories.

The Gulf: A Postmodern War?

The Gulf War threw a spotlight on what had tended, in the 1980s, with the crisis of military-industrial complexes and the official celebrations of the end of the Cold War, to be a shadowy zone in the debates on the future of global systems of communication and information: the logic of surveillance and the logic of what the American geopolitical analyst James Der Derian calls the “culture of national security.”⁴⁰ Who can deny, after that conflict, that the new architecture of global networks continues despite everything to play a role in this area, too?

The Gulf War was a “communications war” in two senses. It was so first of all because of the place occupied by the censorship of information through a system of small press groups, called pools, under strict military control. The military authorized a total of eleven pools of from five to eighteen people, each covering a specific unit. These pools traveled in the war zone accompanied by a “public affairs officer” who chose the troops to be interviewed, briefed the journalists, controlled filming, and then reviewed material, suppressing any sensitive information. The result was then sent to Dhahran and distributed to the press.. Access to the pools proved to be unequal, as attested by two lawsuits, one brought by American magazines such as Harper’s, Mother Jones, the Nation, and the Village Voice, and the other by the Agence France-Presse.

From the beginning of the Gulf crisis, journalists not belonging to major media enterprises or not explicitly endorsed by governments of the coalition met with difficulty in obtaining visas from Saudi authorities. This was revealed in an inquiry conducted by the Gannett Foundation; about half the American press reporters were affected. It thus took a month for the correspondent from a Spanish-speaking channel of the United States, Univisión, to obtain his visa, while the correspondents of the major English-speaking press agencies were granted theirs in less than a week.⁴¹

The pool system was officially legitimated in the name of the Vietnam War precedent. The interpretation according to which television is the agent of defeat - which, as we have seen, was also that of Samuel Huntington and his colleagues -was brilliantly contested by Daniel C. Hallin.⁴² In his study, published in 1986, this political scientist from the University of California showed how the Vietnam conflict had not been a “living room war,” delivered live every day to the eyes of the world, as one had been led to believe. Even in the absence of government censor-

ship, the networks were far from having shown the true horror of the war, guided as they were by self-censorship dictated as much by a certain type of relation with their audiences as by the government and the army. In other words, television had been much more a follower than an opinion leader. Such conclusions led Hallin to assert, on the occasion of the Gulf War, that “one of the most persistent myths about Vietnam is the idea that saturation coverage on television turned the public against the war, and by extension that any televised war will lose public support This assumption motivated the British to place heavy restrictions on television during the Falklands War (1982), and is one of the major reasons the American media now face military censorship for the first time since Korea.”⁴³

In its classic aspect, the war of information is the heir to techniques of psychological warfare developed in the course of preceding wars. For example, the calls to desertion made to Iraqi troops had a déjà vu quality. To be convinced of this one need only reread the story told by David Hertz, Hollywood scriptwriter in civilian life and OSS officer in the U.S. First Army during the siege of Lorient, a submarine base in Brittany, in August 1944. This siege was a microcosm of the war in which every stratagem and ruse was used to sap the morale of some 28,000 German soldiers barricaded in their fortress.⁴⁴

Also classic were the operations of disinformation, the production of false news or rumors, about the enemy army’s potential, their losses, the spread of an oil slick, and so on — all forms of secret action about which Senators Church and Fulbright had expressed prescient disquiet, foreseeing the risk of contaminating the media and press agencies with so-called “black propaganda.” One of the novelties of the Gulf War’s psychological dimension was its sheer extent, made possible by the complicity of a number of journalists, either ingenuous or cynical. Nor should we neglect the pressure of the “paroxystic[paroxysmal]⁴⁵ forms” that mass national symbols assume in time of war. In the 1950s these caused Elias Canetti to remark that such periods of blindness bring back in force the “national religion,”⁴⁶

But the qualitative change in the practices of “psychological warriors” resides in the way they molded themselves to the imaginary of mass culture. They were, of course, powerfully aided by the “new aesthetics of arms,” which means that arms manufacturers are more and more attentive to the creative forms circulating in postindustrial society. It is as if, in the very design of the killing machine projected onto the TV screen, were now incorporated its dimension of media exhibition, its “desiring” dimension, its “communicating” value. The old polemic initiated by Wal-

ter Benjamin after World War I against the “aesthetic of war,” dear to his compatriot Ernst Jünger, deserves to be reread. This brings us to the second reason why the Gulf War can be defined as a “war of communication,” a war of the so-called “3CI” (control, command, communication, intelligence). The army’s putting into images of the aerial war made one representation spring out: the triumph of “intelligent weapons”-strategic missiles piloted by their own on-board computers; reconnaissance spy-satellites that familiarize pilots with their mission sites even before they climb into their airplanes (five satellites flew over Iraq and dispatched in real time the facts collected onto the consoles of Pentagon analysts, providing images of details as small as ten centimeters in size); systems of commands relayed to all the war apparatus and even to the weapons themselves. In short, we saw deployed before our eyes a complex expert system, “neural networks,” video screen networks, and numerous computer systems, ranging from large IBMS to lightweight portables, serving either as decision centers, intermediaries for data analysis, or simply as relay stations conveying information to other systems.⁴⁷

Moreover, by means of an impressive logistics of administration — of every hundred American soldiers present in the operation “Desert Shield,” only 55 were combatants — this war of communication and of information technologies was the first to manage the “tense flows.” To do so, the U.S. military borrowed the methods of management refined by Japanese auto manufacturers (computerized management, maximum diminution of stocks, ordering parts necessary for production only as required). The U.S. Air Force thus accomplished 95 percent of the logistics operations without human intervention. The major difference from the management of an auto-manufacturing corporation is that the latter administers daily no more than 100,000 references (or types of parts), while the U.S. armed forces had to manage several million. This deployment of a model of organization in time of war is such that it allows us to suppose, in the words of journalist François Came, that “the methods of management developed for the Gulf will probably change the organization of work in tomorrow’s industrial world,”⁴⁸ just as the science of organization had crossed a decisive threshold in resolving the logistic problems posed by the landings on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Since the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982, which pitted the army of the Argentinian dictatorship against British elite forces, the pioneering and full-scale use of means of automatic and automated destruction had raised new questions about what already appeared as an upsetting of the premises of classic strategy. Paul Virilio — in the course of his reflections on the “highest stage of speed,” and the strategy of “global vision”

thanks to spy-satellites, drones, and other video missiles, and above all to the appearance of a new type of headquarters-even spoke of moving be yond geopolitics and geostrategy to pure logistics, which, he says, is on the way to “becoming ‘global’ not only because of the range of the new ‘transhorizon’ weapons and the wide radius of action of missiles, but es pecially the temporal regime of all recent arms systems: the passage to the act of war is now only… the transfer of human and political responsibil ity from the stage of free decision of use on the battlefield to the stage of industrial and economic programming.”⁴⁹

Jérôme Binde went even further in the newspaper Le Monde:

In experimental form, we come to witness, as passive voyeurs and slaves, the first purely technocratic war…. The actual forces are now those of computer science and communication, of the automation of the war machine. The style of this war signals its nature: neither a liberation struggle nor a national popular war, it pits against each other military “elites” of unequal strength…. The Falklands War is the postmodern moment where military “value” is reduced to its zero degree…. The technology that allows the aggressor to massacre an enemy at a distance, sparing itself the terrible face-to-face encounter, places the aggression of war at an infantile or primitive stage: that of the “omnipotence of ideas” (Freud).⁵⁰

“Shoot and forget”: this is exactly the image of war as surgical operation that the new psychological warriors have spread with images of the pilot’s computer as he kills at long distance, without seeing his enemy and without being seen. This is the myth of antiseptic war between professionals.

One may be justly shocked by the proliferation of media-centered discussions on the transparency and ethics of information in time of war, and the bankruptcy of the fundamental debate on the “ethic” of this new electronic warfare itself, a veritable parade of Western technological brand names. For without such a debate, it is in our view illusory to lay the foundations of a morality for the media apparatus and its “voyeurs.” This is especially true in that, in contrast to the Falklands War, the Gulf War demonstrated that the heavy publicity given to the electronic war obscured another entire dimension of the conflict. Less than two weeks after the ceasefire, the Pentagon acknowledged that the high-tech war placed in the limelight by censored news reports had represented only a small part of the action. Of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait, less than 7 percent had been laser-guided. This explains why 70 percent of the bombs missed their targets, the intelligent weapons

being only used, in view of their cost, on the most precious enemy objectives, ⁵¹

The aspiration to democracy that inspired the U.S. Senate, in the 1970s, to question the use of psychological operations in time of war is unfortunately no longer present to provoke, in that same assembly, an exposure of the communicational practices of the Gulf warriors. The consensus of the victory parades submerged any such impertinence. The moment of victory — which is also that of the death instinct — is not the time for objective evaluations. As for the propaganda of the Baghdad dictatorship, which did not hesitate to take its own people hostage like pawns on the chessboard of a regional war, it pushed to an extreme point the crisis of the great narratives of national liberation that a large number of former colonies, now party- states, had long since transformed into hollow rhetoric, in the absence of other active social or political forces.

None of this should make us forget — even if we are careful not to reduce the Gulf War to a North/South conflict — that the logic of war has engendered simplistic thought, intolerance, and blind certitudes in media representations, not only regarding the opponents of the war within the major Western societies but also and especially regarding the rest of the world. The triumphalism of the major countries in the coalition engendered a royal disregard of long-term factors, such as the growing risk of resentment and the deepening of the gulf, at the level of culture and the imaginary, between the excluded populations and those who are integrated.

In the following chapters we shall leave the paths of war and take to the “paths of progress,” which thinkers such as Proudhon, at a time when the international appeared still as the invention solely of states, could only envisage in relation to war. “International relations,” he wrote in 1860, “have war as their condition and as their effect. But this manifestation of the principle that might makes right is subject to the law of progress because progress brings societies gradually to substitute the peaceful right to work for the warlike right based on force.”

Additional Material

NPR Program on Edward Bernays

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1. R. Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, Paris, NRF-Gallimard, 1976, vol. 2, p. 115.↩︎

2. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrenie, Paris, Mi­nuit, 1980 (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Min­neapolis, University of Minnesota Press).↩︎

3. G. Chaliand, Strategies de la guerilla, Paris, Mazarine, 1979.↩︎

4. See Mao Tse-tung, On Protracted War, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 3d edition, 1966. Another classic is the work by Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara, founder of Radio Rebelde, the radio station of the Castroist guerilla movement, which played a key role in the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship in 1959: Guerrilla Warfare, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1961. See also Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War, People’s Army, New York, Praeger, 1962.↩︎

5. J.M. Noyer, “De la notion de guerilla ii la notion de techno-guerilla. Evolution technologique et transformation des machines de guerre,” Etudes Internationales 21, no. 2, Universite Laval, Quebec, June 1990, p. 296.↩︎

6. R. Trinquier, La guerre moderne, Paris, La Table ronde, 1961, pp. 15-16.↩︎

7. F. Fanon, “This Is the Voice of Algeria” (1959), in Communication and Class Strug­gle, vol. 2, ed. A. Martelart and S. Siegelaub, New York, International General, 1983, p. 211.↩︎

8. D. A. Starry, “Laguerre revolutionnaire,” Military Review, February 1967. See also J. Steward Ambler, The French Army in Politics, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1966.↩︎

9. G. Kelly, “Revolutionary War and Psychological Action,” Military Review, October 1960.↩︎

10. General Nemo, “Laguerre dans la foule,” Revue de Defense Nationale, June 1956.↩︎

11. R. Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency, New York, Praeger, 1964.↩︎

12. Ibid., p. 26.↩︎

13. Ibid., p. 48.↩︎

14. F. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peacekeeping, London, Faber and Faber, 1971.↩︎

15. P. Schlesinger, G. Murdock, and P. Elliott, Televising Terrorism: Political Violence in Popular Culture, London, Comedia, 1983, p. 166. Also by P. Schlesinger, see “On the Shape and Scope of Counter-Insurgency Thought,” in Power and the State, ed. G. Littlejohn et al., London, Croom Helm, 1978.↩︎

16. General Golbery do Couto e Silva, Geopolitica do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Livraria Jose Olympio, 1967 (2d edition). For an analysis of Latin American military elites and their ideology, see the monographic issue devoted to the question by the French journal Critique (August-September 1977). Aside from historical articles, there are also analyses of the major geopolitical treatises written by the generals of the South American continent.↩︎

17. M. and A. Mattelart, The Carnival of Images: Brazilian Television Fiction, New York, Bergin & Garvey (Greenwood Press), 1990, pp. 30-31.↩︎

18. Trinquier, Modern Warfare, p. 105.↩︎

19. Starry, “Laguerre revolutionnaire.”↩︎

20. M. T. Klare, War without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams, New York, Vintage, 1972, p. 90. See also C. Brightman and M. T. Klare, “Social Research and Counterinsurgency,” NACLA Newsletter, New York-Berkeley, March 1970.↩︎

21. M. T. Klare, ibid., p. 91.↩︎

22. See also I. L. Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1967.↩︎

23. I. de Sola Pool, The Technologies of Freedom, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Universi­ty Press, 1983.↩︎

24. G. Piel quoted in Klare, War without End, p. 76. See also P. Dickson, Think Tanks, New York, Ballantine, 1971.↩︎

25. S. P. Huntington, in The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of the Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (by M. Crozier, S. P. Huntington, and J. Watanuki), New York, New York University Press, 1975, pp. 98-99.↩︎

26. The Crisis of Democracy↩︎

27. J. W. Fulbright, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine, New York, Vintage, 1971 (2d edition), p. 157.↩︎

28. See J. Aronson, The Press and the Cold War, New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.↩︎

29. U.S. Senate, USIA Appropriations Authorization, Fiscal Year 1973, hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, March 20-21 and 28, 1972, Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972, p. 55. For a description of the USIA by one of its officials, see A. C. Hansen, USIA: Public Diplomacy in the Computer Age, New York, Praeger, 1984. For a critical vision of the Voice of America: See H. Fredericks, Cuban-American War, Norwood, N.]., Ablex, 1985. On the U.S. government’s propaganda strategies, see Yves Eudes, La conquete des esprits, Paris, Maspero, 1982.↩︎

30. U.S. Senate, USIA Appropriations, session of March 20, 1972, p. 55.↩︎

31. Ibid., pp. 7-8.↩︎

32. L. Farago, War of Wits: The Anatomy of Espionage and Intelligence, Funk & Wagnalls, 1954, p. 330.↩︎

33. U.S. Senate, Foreign and Military Intelligence. Book I, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, April 26, 1976, Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976, pp. 197-98.↩︎

34. R. H. Schultz and R. Godson, *Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy, Oxford, Pergamon-Brassey, 1984.↩︎

35. U.S. Senate, Foreign and Military Intelligence, p. 539.↩︎

36. U.S. Senate, USIA Appropriations, p. 302.↩︎

37. J. Medvedev, Le secret de la correspondance est garanti par la loi, Paris, Julliard, 1972.↩︎

38. G. Arbatov, The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations: The Imperialist Doctrine, Methods and Organization of Foreign Propaganda, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1973 (original edition in Russian, 1970). For an analysis of several Soviet works of this type, see J. R. Bennett, “Soviet Scholars Look at U.S. Media,” Journal of Communication 36, no. 1, Winter 1986.↩︎

39. R. A. Medvedev, “Information in Russia: Against the Languid Flow,” International Herald Tribune, February 29, 1984, p. 4.↩︎

40. J. Der Derian, “Arms, Hostages and the Importance of Shredding in Earnest: Reading the National Security Culture,” in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, i. Angus and S. Jhally, coordinators, London and New York, Routledge, 1988.↩︎

41. E. E. Dennis et al., The Media at War: The Press and the Persian Gulf Conflict: A Report of the Gannett Foundation, New York, Columbia University, 1991.↩︎

42. D. C. Hallin, The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam, New York, Oxford University Press, 1986.↩︎

43. D. C. Hallin, “Living Room War: Then and Now,” Extra! 4, no. 3 (special issue on the Gulf War), May 1991, p. 21.↩︎

44. D. Hertz, “The Radio Siege of I.orient,” Hollywood Quarterly, no. 1, 1946.↩︎

45. Another weird (wrong!) bit of translation; a ‘paroxysm’ is a ‘sudden outburst of emotion/activity’. This word is the associated adjective.↩︎

46. E. Canetti, Masse und Macht, Hamburg, Claasen Verlag, 1960. English translation: Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, London, Gollancz, and New York, Viking Press, 1962.↩︎

47. Voir P. Class, “Sous le feu de la technologie,” 01 Informatique, January 25, 1991; S. Rosselin, “Conflit du Golfe: les satellites savent tout,” Science et Vie, September 1990.↩︎

48. F. Came, “Le casse-tete de la logistique alliee,” Liberation, January 28, 1991.↩︎

49. P. Virilio, “Guerre electronique,” Terminal, no. 11, 1984 (paper read at the sympo­sium “Mythes et imageries de la technologie,” June 3-4, 1982).↩︎

50. J. Binde, “Le terrorisme technocratique,” Le Monde, July 13, 1982.↩︎

51. F. Rousselot, “L’evenement,” Liberation, March 28, 1991.↩︎