Truth, Territory, Terror

Abstract

Abstract This chapter details how, upon entry into World War II, the United States developed its own programs to wage psychological war. It shows how American psychological warfare heralded itself as an abstract and idealized ‘strategy of truth’ that could rise above the fray of territorial and geopolitical contests. Contrary to this anti-geopolitical framing, this chapter argues that American psychological warfare was in fact a deeply territorial project to advance Allied fronts, pacify the populations behind them, open new markets for US cultural exports, and establish the network of information outposts that would become the United States Information Agency (USIA). In addition, this chapter explores how American psychological warfare became tied and subordinated to strategies of aerial bombing. While on the American home front the ‘strategy of truth’ claimed to be a humane, social-scientific alternative to the violence of war, in the European and Pacific theatres it increasingly became a punitive strategy that provided both rationales and justifications for the bombing of civilian populations.