Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Superstitions Fueled 1950s Psychological Warfare

"When they weren’t designing rocket ships or calculating how long it would take to cook the world with nuclear warheads, the RAND Corporation kept themselves busy working out how best to scare the hell out of ‘peasants, old people and… ignorant workers’, particularly in the Soviet Union. That anyway, was the aim of this fascinating 1950 paper, The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare"

Check out more about the art of psychological warfare over at Mirage Men

1 comment:

Sharon Day said...

This reminds me of my father in WWII. He was in the Asiatic fleet. They were in the Phillipines when the Japanese rounded up the military as POWs and the local citizens. He and 20 other men stole a French merchant ship and got away. With cases of wine on board, they pretty much got drunk and lost, ended up in Australia, but on the way they ran into a Japanese boat. THey took all the hats from below and put them on everything they could on deck to look like a ship load of men. It didn't work and they shot a torpedo at my father's ship. They thought they were goners. Ended up to be a flat bottomed boat. Missed them. They survived, but later in military records the ship was listed as an American ship possession and not as something we stole from the French. I love the way they make it work when they need to. Nothing really amazes me. They've tried it all.