Today I will discuss one in particular : how because Modernity had both the technological means and the (wrong) ideological beliefs , the mass creation of Faux Power was almost inevitable.
Believe me, this expanded Faux Power was a nasty new companion to traditional humanitarian Soft Power and geo-climate Hard Power and the main reason why WWII was humanity's deadliest and most immoral war.
If Faux Power is seen merely as the combination of a very little soft and hard power mixed in with lots and lots of false hype about both , then it is really timeless.
But its mass communication , combined with successful mass self-censorship, was newly tried in WWI and only really successful in WWII .
We generally expect that if your over-the-top hype about something new is actually matched by its performance results in tests by non-biased observers, there is no real need to gild censorship on top of your propaganda.
But it is a consistent hallmark of Faux Power that its new objects are always a strange combination of on one hand , boastful propaganda, and on the other hand , hyper-secrecy.
Few new objects were better publicized than the two A-Bombs that fell over Japan in August 1945 , yet they were also the subjects of intense secrecy - which itself was also very well publicized.
The deliberate controversy stirred up over the new "Born Secret" doctrine (about all knowledge about things atomic being born secret) was only the best known.
Norden pickled the truth... in barrels
But if we look back at the PR hype around the Norden Bombsight from only a few years earlier we see the same pattern.
The Norden bombsight was kept a 'total' secret for years - even from the British, even in their darkest hours in the Fall of 1940.
The US Navy bomber types even tried to keep it a secret from the US Army Air Force for years !
So, on one hand , its technical details were shielded even from the best of friends.
On the other hand, no effort was spared to boast to the world media that American heavy bombers had a war-preventing bombsight - it was even named eventually as the Norden bombsight.
A bombsight that would let one blast invading ships out of the water out in mid ocean , from miles up in the air and just as easily as it is to shoot fish in a pickle barrel.
The paradox about public secrecy
Why all this highly public secrecy about this highly expensive , long gestated and as yet untested in combat weapon system ?
(Contrast the wartime Norden to the wartime (not postwar) Manhattan Project - the Manhattan was typical of the more conventional private secrecy: secret secrecy.
The Germans, ungentlemanly, decided to find out and stole the blueprints of the Norden bombsight.
They tested the results and decided that the Norden a disappointing dud.
So they kept to their original plan to blast targets up close and personal with smaller dive bombers.
The Norden actually was a dud and all the later American secrecy was designed to hide that fact and to try to recoup some of its billion dollar costs by selling its sizzle not its steak.
A total dud that is once away from the perpetually sunny daylight skies and windless conditions of the American south west, once away from a make-believe war with no fighters and flak coming at you, once used by non-experts ill practised in the use of the bombsight.
Real wars had intense cloud cover and high winds, heavy flak and fighters on your tail , it had teenage bomb setters out on their first scary mission, it had inadequate maps and 'targets' hard to pick out against the similar terrain surrounding them.
Real wars had reality - in spades - something the bombsight tests had deliberately avoided like the plague.
It was all part of the bomber promoters' bureaucratic attempt to grow its own "jobs, jobs, jobs" at the expense of the American land forces and ships ---- and at the expense of the defence of their country.
But let us be clear - the bomber division Norden testers did not think it was a dud - that only came as poor combat results kept rubbing that fact in their faces.
The most earnest consumers of their own hype was themselves.
(This confirms for me their complete Modernity.)
They never let any of the critics of the emphasis of spending so much scarce defence dollars on bombers onto the test sites to critique the results.
Critics who might have suggested at least mock fighter attacks and heavy cloud cover and ill-trained bomb setters , in an effort to at least approach real world combat.
"But battleship captains and tank commanders would just have been jealous of all the new defence money going to us and not them".
True --- but that does not invalidate their legitimate criticisms of the Norden's unrealistic testing conditions.
Hype a dud's supposed successes (propaganda) but conceal its true failings (censorship) was a hallmark of all of WWII's militaries - from September 2nd 1939 to September 2d 1945.
In part 2 on this subject , I will discuss how the ideology of Modernity allowed this 'hype and censor' system to work among an educated world population eagerly willing to believe the best of any new technology.
In part 3 , we will discuss the hype and censor around the 1945 A bombs ....
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