I think about Melville's The Confidence Man a lot these days. It feels like the scam is more and more the model of American political and economic life.

Making more friends

Making new friends

When you’re baroquely attacked

“She knows what she wants”

The book concludes with a critique of psychological war's counterinsurgency turn in Vietnam, considering why, given its many failures, it continues to be seen as an effective and humane way to wage war.

I show how US psychological warriors sought to obscure this violence through the production of a so-called 'strategy of truth' which painted the global imperial reach of US propaganda networks in the colours of freedom, democracy, and liberty.

From here the book traces how the United States developed its own psychological warfare agencies, and how despite its claim to represent a humane alternative to killing, psywar became central to the Allied rationale for its 'strategic bombing' campaigns in Germany and Japan.

The book therefore follows US intelligence actors like William 'Wild Bill' Donovan who worked to build an image of 'German psychological warfare' as a new and terrifying scientific innovation that dramatically placed ordinary individuals at the centre of modern war.