Cold War policy sciences retooled Orientalist stereotypes for national-security manipulation

Evidence

But modern Orientalists—or area experts, to give them their new name—have not passively sequestered themselves in language departments. On the contrary, they have profited from Gibb’s advice. Most of them today are indistinguishable from other “experts” and “advisers” in what Harold Lasswell has called the policy sciences. Thus the military–national-security possibilities of an alliance, say, between a specialist in “national character analysis” and an expert in Islamic institutions were soon recognized, for expediency’s sake if for nothing else. After all, the “West” since World War II had faced a clever totalitarian enemy who collected allies for itself among gullible Oriental (African, Asian, undeveloped) nations. What better way of outflanking that enemy than by playing to the Oriental’s illogical mind in ways only an Orientalist could devise? Thus emerged such masterful ploys as the stick-and-carrot technique, the Alliance for Progress, SEATO, and so forth, all of them based on traditional “knowledge” retooled for better manipulation of its supposed object. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 301

Categorization

• XREF: Links the Orientalism toolkit to the biopolitics/governmentality vocabulary the reader is building — expert knowledge as instrument of governance. — connects to: Cold War counterinsurgency logic fused foreign and domestic Arab threats; The 1958 National Defense Education Act enlisted universities in Cold War empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 745; Orientalist stereotypes project producers’ fears rather than describing their targets (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how ‘national character analysis’ as a policy science legitimized Cold War manipulation, and its echoes in modern counter-extremism.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 301