Note: This essay is part II of “The Vision Machine“.
Note: This essay is part II of “The Vision Machine”.
The Transmutation of National Security
By Schwab · 16 September 2024
The Vision Machine, Part II: How Science Fiction inspired the National Security Establishment
“As the airships sailed along they smashed up the city as a child will shatter its cities of brick and card.”
— The War in the Air, H.G. Wells
The American psyche ‘dies suddenly’ in the half-light of a world poised between wars, where old empires disintegrate and new orders emerge from trauma. National identity, like national security before it, became abstracted and transformed into a floating island upon the maelstrom of an interconnected world. MK-Ultra followed logically from “universal human rights’ just as cyber-economies will follow ‘freedom from want’ and ‘freedom from fear’ will deliver the world into a post-cognitive goontopia. Ideological boogeymen evolve into hypnagogic hat men. There can be no borders in this cosmography. Not even the social ordering axis of Sex can be protected. There is no defense of the physical here, no simple wall against invasion, but a new vision: a liberation from the dimension of human experience, a New Deal for the imagination.
The first phase of the Cold War marked the inflection point for defining “national security.” The Truman Doctrine was announced in March 1947, the Marshall Plan in June 1947, and the CIA and National Security Council were established via the National Security Act in July 1947.
These developments established a new paradigm of national security based on a doctrine that first began to crystallize during the late 1930s. President Roosevelt deployed the phrase between 1937 and 1941 more than all of his predecessors combined. This period saw a shift in American perception of self-defense, from strictly territorial to a broader, ideological scope, in response to an ever more interconnected and interdependent world in the context of globe-spanning threats and military technologies.
This novel definition of national security was an extension of American liberal “welfare state” powers, called a “New Deal for the world,” which sought to protect against global ideological threats, much like domestic policies aimed to shield citizens from economic adversities. This marked an ideological transformation within U.S. political thought and policy technology from “hemispheric” isolationism to a proactive, paranoid international stance, influenced heavily by the psycho-engineering campaigns of the mid-20th century, setting the stage for America’s long-term global engagement strategy.
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As Louis M. Hacker explains in the 1957 introduction, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 — published twenty years before the U.S. joined World War I — had “as profound an effect on the world as Darwin’s Origin of Species.” This period also saw fantastical war scares with Chile, Brazil, and China, together with the emergence of popular science fiction depicting the Yellow Peril, Demon Scientists and Anarchists with fearsome weapons influencing public perceptions of security threats.
Jack London’s 1910 science fiction story “The Unparalleled Invasion” is one example. The story envisioned a future in which Western nations, alarmed by China’s expanding population and influence, resorted to biological warfare, deploying “strange, harmless-looking missiles, tubes of fragile glass that shattered into thousands of fragments on the streets and housetops,” to decimate the Chinese populace. For London, an atheist socialist, it was a matter of simple math: “There was no combating China’s amazing birth rate. If her population was 1000 million and was increasing 20 million a year, in twenty-five years it would be 1500 millions – equal to the total population of the world in 1904.”
No one injected the idea of global destruction and hegemony through technology more than H.G. Wells. An active member of the Fabian Society in the early 1900s, Wells criticized the group’s cautious, gradualist approach and pushed for a more radical agenda. His proposals generated conflicts with Fabian Society leadership and led to his departure from the group in 1908.
The Fabian Society, founded in 1883, was a gathering of progressive intellectuals influenced by John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte as well as more esoteric sources; E. R. Pease, the society’s historian, notes the importance of Thomas Davidson, founder of the pseudo-mystical, New Age precursor Fellowship of the New Life, which evolved into New York’s Ethical Society of Culture. The Fabian Society also assimilated the utopian socialist ideas of Robert Dale Owen, an ardent Spiritualist, feminist, and architect of the Smithsonian Institute. Founder Frank Podmore was a freemason, occultist and socialist. Early members included playwright George Bernard Shaw, the socialist Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and theosophist Annie Besant.
The Fabians explored Babouvism, Marxism, Bakounist anarchism, and other social democratic groups in the context of a strategy of “permeating” other societies with their own ideas in a “slow march through the institutions.” But this march was too slow for Wells.
A central theme in H.G. Wells’ was that any entity with sufficient power could control the globe. At the beginning of The War of the Worlds (1898) he describes the experience of the Tasmanians who “in spite of their human likeness were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years.” Five years later he explored emerging battlefield technology in The Land Ironclads (1903) before depicting the destruction of New York and the collapse of human society in The War in the Air (1908). In the preface of the second edition, he writes: “It’s chaos or the United States of the World for mankind. There is no other choice. Ten years have but added an enormous conviction to the message of this book.” In the meantime, Wells had anticipated atomic warfare in The World Set Free (1914), and envisioned that the atomic bomb’s “immense destructiveness” might lead to world peace and “the blazing sunshine of a reforming world.”
This atmosphere fueled the preparedness movement of 1915-1916, predominantly supported by East Coast law firms, banks, and elite universities, which advocated for a substantial U.S. military buildup. One example was the National Security League (NSL), founded in December 1914 by Wall Street lawyer S. Stanwood Menken. Supported by substantial donations from figures including the Rockefeller family, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, Simon Guggenheim, and the Carnegie Endowment, and involving prominent former Secretaries of War Henry Stimson and Elihu Root, the NSL expanded to over 85,000 members by 1918, including chapters in Hawaii and Cuba.
Between 1914 and 1917, the United States launched a massive propaganda campaign to galvanize public support for joining World War I alongside Britain and France and ultimately to transform into a militarized industrial power with vast armed forces ready for planetary conflict. Popular media outlets like Scientific American pushed pro-armament narratives while future-war novels like J. Bernard Walker’s America Fallen! and H. Irving Hancock’s The Conquest of the United States Series depicted harrowing invasions by Germany — previously an unlikely foe in American fiction – with imagery including the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge and aerial bombings that devastated U.S. cities, stoking a fierce nationalist response that valorized American ingenuity and firepower. Meanwhile, the development of technological marvels such as Lemuel Widding’s aerial-launched torpedoes and dramatic air-sea battles adumbrated a nation-image gilded in the supremacy of American military technology and strategy, ultimately framing the U.S. as a formidable military titan poised for perpetual warfare.
During World War I President Woodrow Wilson portrayed the Central Powers in generalized, civilizational terms rather than as direct threats to U.S. sovereignty. The emphasis was on international security and the need for a stable world order. Wilson argued for nation-states to act responsibly within this community, focusing on international rather than national security in his war address to Congress.
After the end of World War I, the Wilsonian NSL shifted focus from external military threats to internal subversion. In 1919, the NSL articulated a manifesto for “Americanism,” associating it with ideals like ambition, self-denial, and thrift, underpinned by personal liberty and property rights as constitutional guarantees. At the same time, ideologies of bolshevism and anarchism were framed as “alien invasions.”
During the interwar period, the concept of “national security” was seldom mentioned in U.S. presidential rhetoric, reflecting the predominant preference for isolationism and a focus on socioeconomic stability. The nineteenth century Caroline rule articulated by Daniel Webster defined defense in classical terms as repelling a direct attack was reaffirmed and the U.S. rejected membership in the League of Nations and other international security commitments.
Following the Wall Street Crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt viewed “national security” mainly in terms of economic stability, a perspective rooted in Anglo-American traditions where it typically referred to socioeconomic well-being. However, by 1931, the concept of national security had begun to evolve beyond its traditional economic focus.
H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" illustration
H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" illustration
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The New Deal aimed to protect citizens from the uncertainties of economic crises as well as sickness and old age through government intervention. This broader conception of domestic security laid the groundwork for later expansions to include protection from international threats.
By 1938, the term national “security” was increasingly prominent in FDR’s speeches, reflecting a growing awareness of global threats from Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. This period marked a shift where U.S. foreign policy ideas began to parallel domestic policies influenced by the New Deal. “Until FDR, no American statesman had presented security as having two equal parts — physical and normative, territorial and ideological — forming an integrated, indivisible whole that applied the world over,” wrote Andrew Preston in Monsters Everywhere: A Genealogy of National Security (2014).
Roosevelt’s vision was supported by new geopolitical theories which infused realist arguments with ideology. Nicholas Spykman, an academic at the Yale Institute of International Studies, argued that, in a world reduced in time and space through new communications technology, U.S. security could no longer rely on its geographical isolation. His colleague Edward Mead Earle, a political scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a member of the CIA/OSS front “Century Club,” agreed that national security should encompass liberal values and argued that national security “is a state of affairs in which the nation’s territorial domain, political independence, rights, and vital interests are free from any substantial threat of aggression from abroad, or from internal forces operating under foreign control or influence.”
Spykman and Earle were part of a national network developed across the US during the interbellum period by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation to support liberal internationalism and counter-isolationism, incorporating think tanks, local library ‘international corners’, and radio broadcasts, university research centers including the institutes at Princeton and Yale and organizations like the CFR, Foreign Policy Association, and World Affairs Councils.
Walter Lippmann’s book U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic was probably the most developed attempt to cohere these issues into a concerted instrument. Lippmann criticized the interwar generation for neglecting power, diagnosing an American ‘habit of mind’ — the illusion of ‘free security’ without engaging in power politics. The period of ‘unearned security’ bred complacency and idealism, making America resistant to aligning resources with goals. Pacifism, Disarmament, Anti-Alliances, and Collective Security had eroded coherent strategy. Now was the moment to change course.
In 1941, Lippmann was instrumental in defining the mission of his close friend Bill Donovan’s Office of the Coordinator of Information and recommended candidates for top roles, including Nicholas Spykman. Lipmann was also the architect of the “deconstructed exposure” method, where the effectiveness of relatively unsophisticated National Socialist propaganda was exaggerated, and “objectively” analyzed in what he called “a cold, dry style” to demonstrate the democratic commitment to “reverse the totalitarian method, and instead of suppressing alien propaganda, we propose to receive it, analyze it, identify it, and make it clearly and regularly known to the public.” The same approach was employed by scholars at the Princeton University Listening Center, another academic institution founded with the Rockefeller Foundation, who analyzed boasts from Hitler and his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, and used their claims against them.
Ultimately, Lippman and others created a network of intellectuals, journalists, and policymakers that plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion to this day. He recognized the complexities of how information is processed and disseminated and carefully constructed his network within the “pseudo-environment,” the space between reality and the narratives presented to the public through media, government, and institutions.
The methods of this propaganda-counterintelligence network were highly effective. By the early 1940s, Americans had become increasingly alarmed by Nazi propaganda, fearing the involvement of domestic traitors among isolationists like the America First Committee, founded by R. Douglas Stuart, Jr. in Chicago in September of 1940. Despite claims by figures like John T. Flynn that fears of a “fifth column” were exaggerated, interventionists like James P. Warburg (scion of the German-Jewish banking dynasty whose father cofounded the Federal Reserve in 1913) and the Harvard sociologist Edward Y. Hartshorne (OSS field agent, later transferred to the Psychological Warfare Branch of the OWI, then PWD/SHAEF) argued that isolationists and Nazis shared similar propagandistic methods. The FBI, America’s main political police organization, became involved. Avedis Derounian, an undercover FBI agent infiltrated the America First movement and wrote a book under the pseudonym John Roy Carlson which claimed that isolationists were conspiring with Nazis and anti-Semites. The book went through twenty-six printings in six months.
Elite interventionists and internationalists like C. D. Jackson (OSS, CIA liaison at Luce’s Fortune, Psychological Strategy Board), Archibald MacLeish, and Cass Canfield (Publisher, CIA frontman, and intelligence network super-user) pushed for federal agencies to use propaganda more effectively. Among the ranks of the network were political scientists, cybernetic theorists, and future key World War II and Cold War strategists including Edward Bernays, Harold Lasswell, Hadley Cantril, and Leonard Doob. Their managerial philosophy was best elucidated by Laswell in 1933: ‘‘successful social and political management often depends on proper coordination of propaganda with coercion, violent or non-violent; economic inducement (including bribery); diplomatic negotiation; and other techniques.”
FDR’s own propaganda campaign between 1938 and 1941 marked a crucial shift. Using speeches and Fireside Chats to “convince Americans” (or project an illusion of convincing them) of the necessity to defend against ideological enemies who threatened not just American land, but its values. Roosevelt likened Nazi Germany to a “rattlesnake” that needed preemptive crushing. Right up to the outbreak of war, polling showed these efforts were only minimally effective. Regardless, in media, and academia, this period saw the articulation of what it meant to be American, encapsulated in the “American way of life” and the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which conceived the United States as a nation uniquely free of prejudice: an identity consciously designed to contrast with fascist ideologies.
In a world of potential military threats, the “American Way” and “Judeo-Christian tradition” became critical concepts defining what America aimed to protect. President Roosevelt enshrined these principles in January 1941 with the articulation of the Four Freedoms as the fundamental U.S. war goals.
The Four Freedoms consisted of two constitutional rights and two utopian doctrines. According to researcher Jan Herman Burgers, Roosevelt was inspired by the pre-World War II idea of granting human rights international recognition, a movement that initially achieved little political traction but penetrated mainstream consciousness and saw a surge of publications during the war.
Burgers argues that this success was owed to the influence of H.G. Wells’ “Rights of Man” transcontinental lecture tour. “The two men knew each other well,” he writes, ”in 1934 he had received a very cordial letter from Roosevelt about his Experiment in Autobiography. In November 1939, Roosevelt commented on Wells’ draft declaration of the rights of man […] Possibly, Roosevelt considered that text too overloaded and too sophisticated for enlisting mass support, and therefore worked out his own brief formula.”
Reading Wells’ Rights of Man, it seems clear that the Four Freedoms is a simplified version intended for enlisting mass support. Wells’ influence is also obvious on the UN’s Universal Declaration for Human Rights. In short, an apocalyptic science fiction expelled from the Fabians for ideological radicalism was decisive in formulating the ideological underpinnings of the fundamental post-war international security doctrine.
In 1943, Norman Rockwell created a series of posters depicting the Four Freedoms, which appeared on the covers of four issues of the Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell’s depiction of Roosevelt’s 1941 Four Freedoms downplayed the globalist and socialist implications of these ideals to repackage them into parochial scenes that resonated more with American sentiments. Instead of the anti-colonial, “one world” implicit in Roosevelt’s Freedoms, Rockwell portrayed a privatized utopia of plenty. The Office of War Information launched a nationwide tour with the paintings, attracting 1.2 million viewers and raising $130 million in war bonds. Nevertheless, response was mixed, as the Post’s editors noted:
“For millions of people throughout the world the Four Freedoms have come to represent something which gives meaning and importance to the sacrifices which the human race is now making, but these freedoms are by no means universally accepted as worthy aims for nations at war. Indeed, a not inconsiderable number of people regard the Four Freedoms as actually evil, an effort to deceive people into imagining that they will never again have to take thought for the morrow, since government will provide everything for them.”
Nationhood had traditionally been based on ethnicity, ancestry, and geography. However, thanks to the combined energies of an imperial presidency, an academia financed by plutocratic foundations, radical ideological activists, and a news media infiltrated by intelligence agencies, a new socially engineered “American identity” connecting progressive political policies to the security of the nation itself had replaced it.
Normal Rockwell's "Four Freedoms"
Normal Rockwell's "Four Freedoms"
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The United States faced the post-World War II era armed with new centralized ideological and socioeconomic structures and a new psycho-strategic agenda connected to them.
Truman’s creation of the CIA and National Security Council saw New Deal liberalism extend into the sphere of international relations, preparing the United States for its new role as a global superpower leading the “free world” against the Communist block. Yet the Soviet and American systems were more similar than they seemed. Both were materialist powers that understood progress in terms of technological advances and scientific breakthroughs. Both were centralized and bureaucratic and focused on quantifiable measures of prosperity. Both used drugs to treat psychological issues, and both attempted to “medicalize” dissent. Both maintained strong internal security and espionage networks, were politically steered by powerful oligarchies, and interpreted history economically. Many U.S. allies had statist economies, and US corporations including General Electric and Ford, invested in the USSR, showing techno-capital’s flexibility across systems. Ultimately scientific expertise, not ideology, was the key to their respective notions of justice.
The informal power structure of the CIA would come to extend far beyond the official headquarters in Langley into a tentacular network of think tanks, tax-exempt foundations, and law firms shaping policy, social movements, and even pseudo-religions on behalf of private financial interests: ultimately, the agency represented an institutionalization of pre-WWII intelligence networks connecting elites like IBM’s Thomas Watson, the Rockefellers, and the Pilgrims Society, operating parallel to official government agencies in the service of its own agenda.
This includes manipulating public perception through controlled opposition dynamics, where “liberal CIA” factions expose “conservative CIA” activities and vice-versa under general conditions of liberal dominance of mass media and academia which frames a default public perception of a “fascist” or “right-wing” CIA opposed to communist regimes around the world. In truth, as Antony Sutton, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, demonstrates in his book National Suicide (1973), the Soviet Union could not have sustained its military aggression against the free world for half a century without continuous infusions of Western technology.
According to Sutton: “possibly 95 percent of Soviet military vehicles were produced in very large plants originally designed by American engineers in the 1930s.” American companies supplied machinery for the Kama River complex, which was capable of manufacturing more heavy-duty trucks than all American manufacturers combined, and could also be adapted to produce tanks, armored personnel carriers, and rocket launchers. U.S. firms built and equipped Soviet facilities to produce military aircraft, radio communications, explosives, submarines, and motor fuel, and provided Soviet computer technology either directly or through Western European subsidiaries.
This advanced equipment shipped from the West, primarily the United States, supported the Soviet military-industrial complex. Averell Harriman, ambassador to Russia under Roosevelt, reported Stalin’s admission that “about two-thirds of all the large industrial enterprises in the Soviet Union had been built with United States help or technical assistance.” Despite continued U.S. support and technology transfers, Soviet dissidents like Andrei Sakharov noted that periods of maximum American-Soviet friendship coincided with intensified domestic oppression.
Although Sutton’s thesis was maligned by establishment academia, it has been corroborated by other researchers, and by statements from Soviet leaders themselves. “The most important things in this war are machines,” Josef Stalin stated in Tehran at the November 1943 conference. “The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through lend-lease, we would have lost the war.” Nikita Khrushchev made the same point in his memoirs:
“[Stalin] said directly that if the USA had not helped us, we would not have won this war: alone with Nazi Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one officially touched on this topic among us, and Stalin, I think, left no written traces of his opinion anywhere, but I am stating here that he noted this circumstance several times in conversations with me. He did not conduct special conversations on this issue, but when a conversation of an informal nature arose, international issues of the past and present were discussed, and when we returned to the past stage of the war, he expressed this.”
American technology enabled the Soviets to develop advanced military capabilities including ICBMs, with American companies providing necessary guidance systems, modern computers, and specialized machinery for missile production. Sutton also showed Western Europe’s role, noting that 80 percent of the engines in Soviet vessels carrying war materiel were either built or designed there. Successive U.S. administrations continued to allow these transactions even during conflicts like Korea and Vietnam. In the final analysis, the Cold War era is revealed as a global A/B test between two styles of scientific managerialism.
Roosevelt’s New Deal vision of national security did not remain tethered to American soil. In the twilight world of the postwar order, it metastasized into a totalizing worldview — a New Deal for the whole of reality. The human smoke of foreign wars stretched Roosevelt’s framework into geopolitical parafictions, setting the stage for an era where “liberal democracy” would be enforced as fiercely abroad as at home. The Truman Doctrine in March 1947 and the National Security Act that followed shortly afterward institutionalized the paradigm. With the birth of the CIA, the NSA, and their manifold organs and tentacles, national security became less about borders and more about guarding the nation-soul from a rotating cast of hatmen.
After World War II, left-liberal propaganda warriors dispersed across public and private sectors, shaping public perception and security policy for decades. The Cold War was not a conflict of materiel alone, or even primarily — it was a psychological war. The battlefield was the mind, and the front was potentially anywhere. As it expanded, so did the machinery of surveillance and the ecologies of control. What had once been designed to guard against fascism and communism morphed into something that threatened not only the liberties it was meant to protect, but the ability to even conceptualize them. Total security meant pure paranoia, and that psychosis soon turned inward, entrapping its own citizens in a web of behavioral protocols. No longer concerned with external threats, security became an ethereal, esoteric force — a non-Euclidean fortress suspended over an interconnected world, articulating itself into endless recursions. The contemporary “Culture War” is little more than the War on Terror internalized.
In the 21st Century, the machinery of total psychological war has invaded every aspect of human experience. Tools of control, once deployed to protect, now colonize the very spaces of thought — every screen, every scene — where attention and intention are consumed by infernal machines. The dystopian visions of future-war, formerly confined to the realm of imagination, have materialized in our time. As physical and psychical barriers collapse under the conceits of our own fan fiction, the tools of national security — invented to defend the world — consume it. Natural rights are cannibalized into new licenses for depravity and the rights of inhumanity now replace the human image. From this distortion, a monstrous new psychopolitics is emerging, sloughing towards the Bethlehem of a post-human future.
