CIA had/has very deep root in Europe during the Cold War. Propaganda Due and Operation Gladio were part of the story. The whole movie Godfather III was inspired by Propaganda Due.
Whoa! I knew that CIA funded Abstract Expressionist Art (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...) to underline American individualism and mental superiority over Soviet Russia (some say that's why "modern art" sucks, but see this excellent writeup: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/ifnq9v/the_cia_...). However, involvement in Paris Review boggles my mind because, I love that magazine.
Also Time magazine.
It's not uncommon to hear from people who lived behind the Iron Curtain how propagandistic American media is. If anything, it's less coarse than the Soviet variety.
So, two reasons:
1. The more conspicuous varieties of manipulation in the Soviet Union and elsewhere sensitized people to the existence of such manipulation everywhere else, even in subtler and more insidious forms.
2. The classic "fish don't know what water is": what Americans can't see, because they were raised from birth and marinating in it, foreigners can spot more readily by contrast.
And because the US was effectively a sort of godfather and guardian of countries west of the Iron Curtain following the War, it had a lot of pull with the media in those countries and cooperated with the appropriate people to promote and cement the Pax Americana.
3. You can actually afford to bring more nuanced, maybe even self-critical reports because your moral baseline is more then a superficial symbol like "freedom".
How to make heavy handed propaganda out to be a virtue.
>to underline American individualism
"So individual that it's manipulated by a state agency!"
That really showed them those commies manipulated by their state agencies, ...oh wait!
The best manipulation makes you think it was your idea in the first place.
They didn't just establish abstract expressionist art, they crafted a whole culture around art and the humanities. They won over the western bias. Aesthetics, depth, reason and humanity in the west was defined through the lens of the CIA. It was done so well it still resonates.
Dr. Gabriel Rockhill does excellent work expounding on this in his discussion "The Intellectual World War: Class Struggle in Theory". He studied in France under Derrida, Iragray, Badiou, Foucaultians, and other prominent thinkers and came to discover the connections himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q521mBZ7ThU
It's kind of a long lecture, but absolutely mind blowing.
It always struck me as a government funded Mad Men agency.
Kind of like how InQTel is like a government funded Kleiner Perkins
They didnât âestablishâ abstract expresssionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture. It was not like CIA developed art or jazz musicians in a lab, they just realized it was great marketing for US culture, especially as communist-bloc art and culture became increasingly bland and conformist.
It was probably one of the best investments CIA ever made.
>> They didnât âestablishâ abstract expressionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture.
I've heard it claimed that they generally don't try to start movements because it's too difficult, but instead just promote and amplify things that are already leaning the direction they want them to go or is beneficial to their agenda somehow. Makes sense to me!
âEstablishâ often means âto ensure it takes holdâ. For example, âestablishingâ a diplomatic presence means setting up an embassy and making sure it doesnât disappear - and gets noticed.
This is what conspiracy theorists fail to keep in mind: in politics usually you do not create anything, you reframe and exploit whatever events happen to occur. Same idea with this left-wing idea that "no revolutionary has ever made a revolution to happen".
I believe it's particularly hard for people whose profession is to think, design and engineer, to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history.
This is just high brow conspiracist stuff.
I find it fascinating sometimes that both the left and the right are fundamentally conspiracist in their worldview. For the left itâs a Marxist class conspiracy and for the right it tends to be a variety of conspiracies by out groups (Jews, gays, supposed devil worshippers, etc.) to undermine the social order. The failure of far left and far right experiments is always explained by conspiracies. And of course the far left and the far right are conspiracies from each others point of view!
They truth is the US state promoted and funded all kinds of US culture to boost US cultural exports and influence the world, hopefully away from the Soviet sphere. What the culture was was less important than the fact that it was not Soviet.
It wasnât some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that donât seem to be too âredâ and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems âredâ explains the funding of modern âaaaahtâ devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since itâs always a safe choice in the bureaucracy.
Not saying it was great. They funded a lot of shite which probably distorted things and boosted a lot of stuff that would have been footnotes in art history otherwise.
Thereâs also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. Itâs basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but itâs obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.
Too many people believe you have to be one side or the other. Just because there are two choices doesn't mean (A) they are different and (B) one is better.
You do know COINTELPRO and MKULTRA not only existed, but were organized efforts with significant funding and energy behind them, right?
And that Area 51 not only exists, but does a lot of work under the veil of explicit, organized, secrecy? And has for a very, very long time now?
Just because there are bullshit conspiracy theories doesnât mean there arenât very real conspiracies going on too.
> It wasnât some sophisticated conspiracy.
It definitely was. There's nothing more annoying than the "of course all of this is true, but only crazy people think that people planned and did it on purpose."
The real conspiracy, it always seems, is that intelligence agencies ever do anything on purpose, or have any goals. They were supposed to fight the Soviets, but who decided on that? It is a mystery. Did they come up with plans? No, everybody just blundered around and did their own thing.
People are claiming that there were no plans and no coordination in offices where the same people sat at the same desks for 40 years, and were replaced by their children. It would be bizarre if you were talking about any other subject other than praise for authority and the diagnosis of people who deny its selfless goals.
> Not saying it was great.
How generous of you.
> Thereâs also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. Itâs basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but itâs obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.
You don't know that there are offices that deal with this in the military all day, and that they both help finance films and deny access to equipment and depictions of equipment to productions who don't agree to their terms? The military provides soldiers and equipment to films. This is true for all military divisions and intelligence agencies, and to my knowledge has been true since the FBI started funding and working productions in the 50s.
If you think all this stuff just sort of happens through random collisions, it's going to distort your perceptions of the world. Or specifically in my experience, to ascribe magical qualities to "the market."
One of the current funny clips is Claire Danes being silenced on the Colbert show when talking about the relationship of the show Homeland's creators to the CIA (one's father and cousin), how all the actors were invited to "spy school" every year, and how it was explained to her by somebody at CIA school that the CIA was having to deepen its similar partnerships in media to bolster support for itself against Trump (during the first term) before being quickly silenced by Colbert. She's a perfect example of people participating in every aspect of this process, yet still being unaware that it really exists. She'd call you a conspiracy theorist for mentioning it.
The CIA funded an enormous amount of the anti-Communist left and elite art. It was the best investment they ever made.
I'm sorry, but that confident citation of the reddit thread is the same confident dismissal that CIA funded outlets were giving contemporaneously. The CIA didn't "come up" with abstract expression, it poured money into it (and mostly the ecosystem around it) and made it far more dominant than it would have been. The way you got a book published about art is to have indirectly taken money from the CIA at many points in your career, likely with absolutely no awareness of it.
The reasons those paintings were selling for enormous amounts of money, especially to institutions, is because intelligence would grease the wheels on some other deal they wanted to make, and buying a painting that was just paint splatter was the payment. That created a market that unconnected people would enter organically, and tastes would reconfigure around what sold (because art is what rich people will pay for.)
It's a tactic that is still very much active for the intelligence services. They offer quid pro quo to shills who finance things that they want to happen. They finance media outlets who employ critics and pundits with the tastes they want to encourage, and fluff the incomes and find tax breaks (or just direct grants) for the people that produce the stuff. And upper-middle class elites follow the herd and ridicule the people who don't understand nuance.
Now it's so cheap, too. They just have to hand out "upvotes" and get control of the algorithms. They don't even have to write the comments, just virtually praise establishment-loving morons who will say anything for more praise. Also make sure they never go broke or stay in jail for more than a week or two.
Some days, everything feels like one big psyop.
TBQH there was never a time when it didn't seem like a psyop to see paint splashed on canvas being treated as a monumental artistic achievement and if anybody didn't agree they were just outing themselves as uncultured swine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command_(Star_Trek:_T...
<sigh>
We are all pysops, comrade.
On a more serious note, he's actually making a very good point. This isn't something just the CIA does. You'll see industry trade groups and big business do it too. They just have less money so they're more surgical about it.
You are waking up. Agent Smith might need to pay you a visit.
On the relationship of CIA and the media there is always the 1977 classic https://www.carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-...
An interesting tidbit I found, somewhat related:
> Employees of soâcalled CIA âproprietaries.â During the past twentyâfive years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapersâboth English and foreign languageâwhich provided excellent cover for CIA operatives. One such publication was the Rome Daily American, forty percent of which was owned by the CIA until the 1970s. The Daily American went out of business this year,
The Church Committee also produced interesting documents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee#External_link...
As a consequence a lot of such activities were instead moved over to special operations forces, as detailed by Seth Harp in his recent book The Fort Bragg Cartel.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730414/the-fort-bra...
Seconding the recommendation of Harp's book, it's excellent.
this is a fantastic book. immediately what i thought about the instant you mentioned the church committee.
"Proprietaries" are also known as "cutouts", and the CIA uses those extensively in order to do things they really aren't allowed to do and to provide plausible deniability. Mike Benz [0] is a good introduction to how the CIA (and, by extension, the state department and Pentagon) work.
I promise "The History of the Intelligence State" is worth your time.
Any source on CIA's old involvement in India's press?
They absolutely didn't have their finger on the pulse in 1998 ...
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-672.html
They grilled some Australian bush pilots no end over that, wanting to know how they knew what the CIA didn't.
Two quotes from OA
> "He had left the agency in 1953, after about two years, but he never divulged the details of his work for the organization"
Seems part of the deal for these kinds of job?
> "In terms of other materials, the CIA wouldnât give me anything. I filed FOIA requests. I talked to their entertainment liaison, who works with Hollywood. But they donât declassify personnel records."
The reciprocal part of the deal.
The 'old boys network' recruitment as we call it in the UK fits the pattern. I suppose that there was a desire to have eyes and ears among the new elite peer group.
I imagine that the Agency was compartmentalised so a cultural adjutant in Paris would not necessarily know about activities in Iran.
(The Snow Leopard remains a favourite book of mine).
The online troll farms of today make me nostalgic for an age when intelligence agencies were putting effort into promoting jazz and modern art for national security reasons.
In 100 years, people will be looking at vintage memes in university classes and writing papers on them.
Trolling is to discourse what modern art is to art.
"Given that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apoliticalârecall William Styronâs famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as a home for âthe non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grindersââMatthiessenâs CIA involvement has raised questions and eyebrows since its revelation in the seventies."
This is actually a bit of a tell, because the best way to make ideology palatable is to make it seem like common sense (which is easy if that ideology is already in power). As zizek said, it is when you believe you have stepped outside ideology that you are most fully ensnared by it.
A lot of people think, "I am not ideological, I just use common sense, I am apolitical." Sorry but this is a game you must play whether you want to or not- trying to avoid making a choice is still making a choice.
Its like with fashion, for example- you may think that by wearing khaki shorts and sandals with socks that you are avoiding making fashion choices, but what is actually happening is that you are simply making very bad fashion choices.
I rather think that one of the psychological principles beneath authoritarianism is that making choices requires effort, and so people try to avoid it, and the easiest way to do that is by copying whatever everyone else is doing. When a person in this mode sees other people doing things that are different or unusual or out of place, they are reminded that in fact they have free will, and that other choices were always possible, and that is a disturbing and uncomfortable thought.
Fashion may not be the best example, given the propensity of fashion trends to drive large numbers of people to do ridiculous things. My recent favorite is the mania for women wearing a loose sweater but tucking it in to their waistband in the front. Iâm sure it has a name, but I donât know what itâs called.
EDIT: itâs called the âmillenial tuck.â
I guess what Iâm saying is that I wear shorts, I know some people think thatâs bad, but their opinion is invalidate by their own ugly clothing choices. So weâre all guilty.
It's called a French Tuck.
Sure- when I talk about trying to avoid choices when it comes to fashion, I am describing myself. I thought when I was young that people who i saw presenting themselves in a way that seemed deliberate were being artificial, and in order to be authentic i should avoid trying to present any specific image to the world.
What I was actually doing was wearing whatever my relatives gave me for Christmas. So, in my attempt to avoid making any choice I just ended up dressing like a nerd- which of course, I was, but I guess the point is that trying to avoid a choice is also a choice. We are all guilty, as you say!
Very much agree that not making a choice is itself a choice. That said, the intentionality (or lack thereof) is pretty obvious.
I have an impeccably-dressed coworker and I still remember that one time (years ago) he complimented my watch. I doubt I would have thought much about if someone who dresses like me had said the same thing.
Now we have American Dynamism. So unsubtle that they say the quiet part out loud way before it's history: https://a16z.com/storytelling-in-american-dynamism-lessons-f...
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