Customer Reviews

Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960

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Science of Coercion is an excellent study of how ideas can be shaped by powerful groups. Most revealing is the way in which the researchers themselves allowed this to happen. Many of them were mildly progressive politically, yet they seemed to have no reservations about being involved in military-sponsored projects. Simpson argues that the most important factor in helping the academic researchers to accept the military connection was insulation from the effects of psychological warfare, especially the use of violence.

Simpson provides extensive documentation for his argument: there are only 115 pages of text and more than 60 pages of notes. Given that it is strictly about the US experience, it would be nice to have a comparison with experiences in other countries. His study provides a worrying reminder about the extent to which standard ideas in many fields of research may be shaped to serve the interests of powerful interest groups and elite academics.

This book will be of great interest to communications majors and social historians with muckraking tendencies. In an intriguing display of investigative research, Christopher Simpson uncovers the darker side of early communications studies. The field was defined as an academic discipline during and after World War II, and much of the early research that built the foundation of modern communications studies was actually a part of American (and occasionally German) war efforts. Government-funded social scientists built the communications knowledge base while researching and developing the tools of propaganda and psychological warfare, and occasionally disinformation techniques that were used on the American people by their own government. Even some of the highly respected founders of communications were involved, including Harold Lasswell and Wilbur Schramm, and many of their influential studies did not have purely academic motives. Simpson compiles valuable insights into how communications and other social sciences have been co-opted by government for nefarious ends, and some fields may have never gotten off the ground were it not for wartime funding. The only problem with this book is that Simpson occasionally ruminates on the darker philosophical ramifications of these trends, but only rarely, so the deeper insights that can be gained by the reader are often held back by research minutiae and occasionally tiresome historical coverage. [~doomsdayer520~]

This book is primarily a documentation of the extensive influence of government and corporate agendas on the development of communications science. The title is misleading in two ways: the actual book is neither about the science itself nor is it about coercion, which generally involves the use of force. A more accurate title would have been "Propaganda and the Development of Communication Science" or something like that.

Buy this book if you really want to know the details of every government grant that supported the foundation of communication science.

Do not buy this book if you want to understand what those grants--or those foundations--actually were all about.

A case could be made that super geek military historians and military intelligence specialists might here detect the origins of certain ideas that have in recent years matured and have gone operational in some distant sense. I'm thinking specifically of overt and covert media manipulations found in certain stanzas of what we today call MOOTW (military operations other than war). Weaponizing public relations is not an especially new idea, however. Some very high falootin' American public relations firms, who are still around, were operating in foreign capitals during the Cold War. They were also classic fronts for CIA operators. The natural skill sets any public relations "ad man" would naturally use at work would be extremely useful to any covert organization interested in influencing foreign elections, channeling foreign press coverage and manipulating foreign public opinion about America and her opponents.

If you are looking for mean spirited read about institutional manipulators or cloak and dagger sensationalism, this is not the book for you.

This book might make a decent supplemental text in an introductory course about institutional behaviors. Mostly its for specialists.

This is a bad book. It is full of sly innuendo, tabloid reporting, and blatant propaganda: scholasticism posing as scholarship. A quotation and some facts suffice to indicate the degree of its bias. The quotation is the book's conclusion: "The role of the United States in world affairs during our lifetimes [circa 1994] has often been rapacious, destructive, tolerant of genocide, and willing to sacrifice countless people in the pursuit of a chimera of security that has grown ever more remote" (116--117). That is it. Simpson offers no balance, no counterpoint. He states that the people of the "principal battlegrounds" of the Cold War (he lists the Philippines, Turkey, Indonesia, Panama, and the former Soviet Union) are "poorer today both materially and spiritually, less democratic, less free, and often living in worse health and greater terror" than before the superpower confrontation (116). Ironically, Simpson's conclusion in 1994 is, in my view false, but it is also largely true when applied to current US world affairs.
Simpson's book presents no data anywhere to support even one of those claims. On the other hand, UN, World Bank, and Amnesty International data showed those claims false. People in these countries in 1994 were richer, more democratic, freer, and in better health than they were from 1945--1960. As for the charge of "rapacious, destructive, tolerant of genocide," Simpson's bald assessment of the United States in 1994 was not balanced by even a single negative word about the counterpart Cold War roles of the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, or North Vietnam. An uninformed reader of Simpson's book would never know about the psychological warfare of the first fifteen years of the Cold War, or that these latter countries even practiced propaganda or psychological warfare from 1945--1960.
A few facts indicate Simpson's biased and false assessment of the United States role in the period from 1945 to 1960. Take his assertion of "poorer spiritually." When roll was taken in the Philippine Army, the name "Douglas MacArthur" was read, and a sergeant responded, "Present in spirit." This tradition, fifty years after the general strode ashore at Leyte, symbolizes the security, self-reliance, and national pride that the United States helped to bring to many on the Cold War battlefields Simpson noted.
Take the charge of "worse health." The American occupation's post-World War II public health programs in Japan saved more lives (2.1 million--relative pre-1945 mortality) from communicable diseases than all of Japan's wartime battle deaths and three times as many as Japan's civilian losses to the wartime bombing.
Many East Europeans firmly believe that they owe their present security from Soviet domination and their independence from communist dictatorship in great measure to United States psychological warfare. One such East European is Vaclav Havel, who stopped his motorcade in Washington personally to thank the employees at the Voice of America (VOA). Another is Lech Walesa. Yet another is Boris Yeltsin, who faxed his thanks to VOA for its help during the 1991 attempted coup.
Ironically, much of what Simpson asserted about 1945-1960 has come to pass in the consequences of US propaganda from 2001-2007. "The pursuit of security" has "grown ever more remote" in these more recent times. Many of the charges Simpson made with weaker support for 1945-1960 US propaganda effects are now clearly apparent in the results of 2001-2007 US propaganda. Indeed, we are less secure, less trusted, less respected (but perhaps more feared) in 2007 than in 2000.
So while Simpson's conclusions on United States psychological warfare from 1945-1960 cannot be accepted at face value, especially his claim that the lessening of security in that time frame, his concerns (if not his scholarship) were prescient and should inform our assessments of US propaganda today. While this book is an anti-United States polemic, its author's concerns are real and should be shared today by many. Some of his arguments and rationale might inform an examination of propaganda and public diplomacy in the Bush Administration and their effects on US security and world stability. [Originally reviewed in "Journal of Interdisciplinary History"]