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".
That depends on whether or not the obviousness of the lies tracks with the zeal with which atrocities enabled by that dislocation from reality are undertaken.
But I suppose that there's plenty of evidence that it doesn't.
It's a little stunning how well this also describes dynamics of racism in the US. Very Baldwin-esque observations. Something to consider any time you hear criticism, on the basis of "bias", of the assessment of someone from a group who have themselves been subjected to "more conspicuous varieties" of bigotry than the average American.
Might also be applied to class consciousness. An acquaintance (liberal, Southern, white) once described the voting patterns of less-affluent white Southerners as, essentially, trying to front-run the greed and cruelty of the elite class. Give them what they think they want, even if it hurts, so that they don't linger on the subject and come up with something worse. A dynamic where you really would have to know your oppressor better than they know themselves, or you.
I like to read the propaganda / state funded media of most major nation states of the world: Al Jazeera, TRT, CGTN, RT, BBC, CBC, PBS, etc.
Western "propaganda" is the most insidious and frankly insane. At least with other state media it is clear they are being advocates and their own population don't believe it and won't defend it in private conversations. But in the West we have a way to make people want to believe, it is very uncanny. If I see another "let's go to war for Afghan/Iranian/Syrian women" documentary from the CBC I will lose my mind.
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.
They didn’t “establish” 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 didn’t “establish” 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!
This is how effective propaganda works best generally.
Find existing propagation lines (whether positive or negative), and gently encourage them.
Much recent online propaganda, particularly from Russia and China (though those are hardly the only actors) operates along these lines. Russia generally tries to stir up fracture points amongst its adversaries, China seeks more to distract through diversion (e.g., TikTok) though it also has active antagonistic campaigns.
Another classic CIA tactic was not to seek out intelligence, but to plant it, through manufactured journalism. This came out in several 1970s US Congressional investigations of the Agency, by the Church Committee and others.
See "CIA and the Media: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence" (1978):
See also Cool Japan, which saw the power of pop idols, as well as anime and manga, as tools of soft power in the region and worldwide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan
‘Establish’ often means ‘to ensure it takes hold’. For example, ‘establishing’ a diplomatic presence means setting up an embassy and making sure it doesn’t disappear - and gets noticed.
Yes, they literally "established" it. Thats what that word means.
They drove the perspective for the sake of propaganda. They promoted american movies and art everywhere.
And it worked. This is how they got young kids in Europe, Asia and S.America to side with them.
Through a vague notion of coolness, individual liberty, sophistication, and tying that to progress and to America.
If you look at anti-colonial documentaries you can see it very evidently. One that comes to mind is "The hour of the furnaces" about the argentinian US backed dictatorship. There is a chapter in there where all the yuppie city dwellers are very counter culture oriented and welcome the external influence in their country.
The way they infiltrate the youth is through this very cultural operation.
The world wide phenomenon of counter culture was a CIA fabrication.
PS: Communist bloc art is not bland and conformist, it's just about daily life or about collective life. Some of the best western art is also about daily life and society. But thats just my opinion.
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.
>to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history
Except the stuff people actually care about like purchasing power, bills, wages, and housing are manipulated by purposely designed economic policies and not by randomness.
It seems perfectly plausible to me that the economic incentives are such that there is no need to "design" any of this, no smoke-filled back room needed.
Economic incentives never point in just one direction. There’s always tradeoffs around time horizons, risks, etc which is where individual people’s decisions come into play.
Should we subsidize industry X is rarely a question decided on economic merits alone. And so it goes with individual interests shaping the entire global economy in surprisingly profound ways. Extreme ultraviolet lithography for example shapes industries, but has a history steeped in various public/private partnerships and global politics.
What?! That statement is self contradictory. If you have economic incentives then somebody or a group of people put those incentives into place in order to reach a desired outcome(typically accumulation of wealth and/or power for a target group).
We're not talking about facts of nature like gravity or the speed of light. You don't exist in a truly random system but one where you're playing by the rules made by someone else, rules that can change on a whim, as the government intervenes at every level to manipulate the scales, for better and for worse, resulting in it picking winners and loosers.
It's a bad day for anti-conspiracy theorists when there's a dump of Epstein emails which are basically all "hey guys any news on the conspiracy? would you like some underage girls to go with that?"
I would note that the public conspiracy theorists tend to be "exactly wrong", though. Claiming that everything is a conspiracy, without evidence, except the things that have documentary evidence about the conspiracy.
> Claiming that everything is a conspiracy, without evidence, except the things that have documentary evidence
Because where is the fun in that? If something is documented, your brain is not doing any work; it's where the canvas is clean, that you get a sense of satisfaction by firing synapses in original ways.
Conspiracy-theorism, at its core, is fundamentally a creative endeavour. It's not a coincidence that, in the '90s, that world overlapped pretty hard with fandoms of open-world franchises like Star Trek, where it's easy to expand and enrich the original content with your own productions.
Conspiracy theories appeal to people for various reasons.
1. It's something for bored people to do and to believe.
2. It's something that offers supposed explanations for various real or imaginary events or states of affairs at a lower cost than actual explanation.
3. It gives people something more satisfying than "shit happens", and in this way, gives people a feeling of the possibility of control over the unpredictable (superstitions like astrology and fortune telling have the same motive).
4. It allows people to rationalize their misfortunes, dissatisfaction, and grievances, and to deflect responsibility from themselves, or to give their envies the appearance of a moral basis.
Of course there are conspiracies in the world. The problem with “conspiracy theorists” is not that they’re wrong about the existence of organized conspiracies, it’s that they’re so routinely, 180 degrees wrong about the specifics, and so easily mislead into being useful idiots.
For example, the loudest Epstein conspiracy theorists have spent the past ten years screaming about a conspiracy of pedophiles in their specific outgroup, while ignoring every hint of evidence that indicated their preferred leader was somehow tied to the mess (remember when Trump appointed Epstein’s sweetheart-deal prosecutor to his cabinet during his first term. Wtf!) They were led by the nose to a conclusion that anyone could have seen was highly questionable, because their reasoning and judgement absolutely sucks.
>It's a bad day for anti-conspiracy theorists when there's a dump of Epstein emails which are basically all "hey guys any news on the conspiracy? would you like some underage girls to go with that?"
"anti-conspiracy theorists" aren't claiming that conspiracies don't exist, so no. I don't think anyone is actually "debunking" Epstein other than conspiracy-minded Trumpists who were laser-focused on the Pizzagate/satanic cabal/Monarch deprogramming bullshit until for some reason they decided Epstein was a cool guy who did nothing wrong. Many such cases.
As a conspiracy nut I always wonder how much mental effort it takes to actually find reasons to believe all these takes when basically every somewhat relevant historic event of the last ~200 years surfaces at least a dozen rabbit holes involving people, institutions and connections that often intertwine.
>It sounds more like you're describing paranoid schizophrenics or antisemites than conspiracy theorists.
99% of the time, this is the same picture.
Peel back the layers of just any popular conspiracy theory, study its origins and the people who started it, and eventually you'll get to the part where "it was the Jews all along."
I think there is an argument to be made for conspiracy theory as a modern form of folk religion. Although a lot of that is due to the overlap between the religious and conspiracy communities, and thus very intentional, they do seem to serve many of the same social and psychological functions.
This seems a bit of a contradiction, no? "folk" beliefs seem like the opposite of religion (which, to my ear, requires organization and some sort of canon).
Well in my comment I said they established modern art. Keyword: established.
And the CIA definitely creates some things/narratives.
But on the note of natural development, I do agree. You can call it conspiracies or incentives, its the same, really. If its not democratic its conspiratorial by definition.
They use tax money (and drug money, possibly) to do this, so they have a lot of funds. If you watch the video I link he talks about HOW they actually do this.
He doesnt claim they sit down and brief professors, he says they built an apparatus that simply filters through them and fund the right ones.
He talks about how its hard to find jobs if you dont peddle the right narratives and topics.
This is an even crazier claim. Modern art was created by Braque, Picasso, Duchamp, and many others, primarily in Europe, and it was established as a major artistic movement a long time before CIA existed.
The more realistic claim is that CIA promoted abstract expressionism which is a primarily American 1950s art movement which is of course a sub-movement in modern art.
You are right, I just repeated it wrong, see my original comment. I do claim they established abstract expressionist art, but that is also beside the point. This art would have existed either way.
The wider claim is that they controlled the dissemination and narrative around art and the humanities in the US and around the world in order to inflate the opinion of the United States while promoting narratives about the Soviet Union that even the CIA knew were false, as stated by them in released memos.
This is the claim: that large sections of the art and humanities were funded and controlled by the CIA for propaganda purposes.
I find it fascinating sometimes that both the left and the right are fundamentally conspiracist in their worldview. For the left it’s 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 wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that don’t seem to be too “red” and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems “red” explains the funding of modern “aaaaht” devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since it’s 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.
There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s 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.
CONINTELPRO was FBI and was based on domestic surveillance against real and perceived communist influence. It did indeed have significant funding and push behind it.
90% of what they did was aggressive and likely unconstitutional, but make no mistake there were absolutely agitators in the US being pushed by the USSR -- and which date back to the original "Active Measures" pushed by the USSR.
I don't think dividing opinions into conspiracist and not conspiracist is not a good epistemological basis.
Opinions can be judged on the facts they are based on facts and how they are based on logical arguments or not regardless of their conspiracistness.
Top Gun is obvious stuff. Recently they are doing SEO too. "Project Monarch" for example is mostly known to the younger generation as a (fictional) CIA project to kill Godzilla ... I love the openning sequence of that film - obfuscating all sorts of stuff. Nothing wrong with "high brow conspiracist" which in straight forward language is more like 'looking into top down efforts to social engineer society and control masses'. Or you going to actually argue that has never been a thing in US and the West?
I’m not saying there aren’t attempts to control society. It’s what governments, think tanks, ad agencies, activist groups of all stripes, etc do for a living. There’s just tons of them and they’re at each others throats half the time.
There are groups of people who think they run the world. They’re delusional. There’s people who aspire to run the world who are also delusional. They can do a lot of damage sometimes before they fail.
I think you are overmodulating the conclusions bit here. It is more than just "attempts".
Possibly the difference in our views here have to do with what degree of (collective mind) control is of sufficient utility to various interested parties. Does one need to "run" the world or "100% control everything". I doubt it. I am thinking of the analogy of shifting the course of rivers here, where the (collective) river ends up behaving in the expected manner, and (individual) water molecules are (relatively) free to do wheelies or flow the other way or whatever remains possible within the overall boundaries of the river and its 'set course'.
This. People have a hard time wrestling with the fractional nature of it.
You don't need to convince everyone that Iraq has WMDs or that Stanley travel mugs are hot shit, just enough people to get done what you're trying to get done.
The distinction (as others make) is between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Of course conspiracies exist. Conspiracy theories, however, are flaky, unsubstantiated substitutes for genuine explanation that hinge on improbable or impossible conditions and powers to hold [0], often in the face of contradictory and much more reasonable alternatives.
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.
> There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s 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.
>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.
Watched it on mute with subtitles because work. The body language there is amusing. She's just blathering away unaware until Colbert throws a "shit shit shit we don't talk about how the sausage was made on the air" exception.
We don't need conspiracy, we have dialectic materialism. Similar to how for the most part manufacturing consent also doesn't rely on conspiracy (the New York Times and Dick Cheney nonwithstanding).
The failure of liberals may be a failure to read and understand the past.
The colloquial muddying of language concerning "conspiracy theory" was probably a government psyop in response to the JFK assassination. There, the officially endorsed theory was a lone wolf theory, that one guy did it by himself without any help or encouragement, and virtually all other theories were theories that involved one or more people conspiring in some way. From there, "conspiracy theory" morphed in media to mean any theory running counter to the official theory, even when the official theory was itself a theory about a conspiracy.
So, right-wing conspiracy theories tend to be more like: these three people secretly own everything through a hidden system of written contracts. Like "there's a secret room beneath Comet Pizza, specifically, where they buy and sell a chemical extract from the blood of scared babies"
And left-wing conspiracy theories tend to be more like: all the people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. Like "billionaires are fucking us over. Since media companies are owned by billionaires a large part of what they broadcast is just pro-billionaire propaganda."
Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is.
And the right definitely believes that people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. The "they" behind Pizzagate was "the Democratic Party."
And then there's "Cultural Marxism" (a conspiracy theory about the nefarious communist influence of Jews in academia), the "groomer" panic (a conspiracy theory that transgender identity is a cover for organized pedophile rings) white replacement theory, DEI, China anything and countless other conspiracies the right believes in that are based on some kind of racial or gender essentialism or prejudice.
The left has its share of that too, but the distinction you're trying to draw here makes no sense.
> "Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is."
No, that's not conspiracy. Conspiracy requires deliberate collusion between members of the conspiracy, it requires conspiring. If you have several people behaving in a way that appears coordinated because those people have aligned values and incentives, then it might be possible that those people have talked to each other and come up with some sort of a plan, which would make it a conspiracy, but it's also possible that no such organization exists and they're each independently doing whatever they think is correct in their circumstance. In that case, the emergent group behavior looks like a conspiracy but literally isn't a conspiracy.
This is what Manufacturing Consent talks about. I wish people would read 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.
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.
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.
They have more than enough money, it's cheap. The astounding thing about middle-class people is that you can pay them to do this for a living, and they somehow still won't think it exists.
It wouldn't survive if they didn't provide the marketing and infrastructure.
It's important to remember that most will do it for free because they simply don't apply any standards to their defense of institutions (especially the ones who pay their rent.) You don't have to pay a ton of people to pretend that google paying firefox half a billion dollars a year for absolutely nothing makes perfect financial sense. Just pay a dozen, and praise and reward everybody who repeats it. You'll have an ocean of idiotic shallow dismissals barked out by volunteers. Give them updoots and they'll glow.
edit: here's the crackpot theory (everything else I said is documented in a million places, and not worth defending.) I think that the intensity of this tactic over the past 100 years in every aspect of Western life has been intellectually dysgenic. It has devastated western elites' thought processes in general, and the compartmentalization that allowed them to be competent in their actual jobs has failed. Things are only being held together by technicians who are aging out of the workforce.
They're literally like "there's not really any evidence of this" in a thread about the millionth piece of evidence of this. And since it's the Paris Review doing a limited hangout about the Paris Review (the minor detail that the co-founder was a CIA agent), it somehow ends up admiring him for his love of nature.
The shame is how easy it is to do this now, not that it has been done for a century. Western elites have gotten so stupid and authoritarian that you don't even need to hide the seams anymore, you can joke about them and ban people who don't laugh.
edit: also notable about the Paris Review itself is that nobody reads it, most of what was published in it at its peak was horrible and turned out to be completely ephemeral. You won't have ever heard of most of the writers in it, who went on to university appointments (or never left them.) It was a tool for providing an income to particular writers and justifications for other initiatives; a thinktank. Comic books had more staying power.
Sometimes, just hiring them and dumping later is enough. The amount of ex-FAANG (mainly Google) "volunteers" brigading in this forum to defend anything Google is astonishing.
But it did. The efforts hastened the collapse of the USSR and led to good outcomes for Central Europe. The propaganda of that era wasn't supposed to be covert because it wasn't selling something objectionable. Everyone knew who's behind Radio Free Europe, for example. It was just a way to popularize Western values, and it worked.
Mind you, it's not like the Soviets were not doing the same to export their values. They were bankrolling overseas labor organizations, academics, etc.
>if communism is so wonderful then I'm sure most of the former ComBloc countries will go back to it any day now...
Because wonderful things win over non-wonderful things in history? Yeah, sounds like a perfect criterion...
Besides, it never had a chance on an equal playing ground and have several things holding it down (including being implemented in countries that were underdeveloped to begin with, and with the full Cold War power of the biggest countries on Earth breathing down their necks, plus schemes ranging from mild like that in TFA to way worse going on against it).
Even so, for many of those that did live through it, there was a considerable pining for that era (for exampes ostalgie in ex-Eastern Germany), and some quite favorable polls in the later 90s even. Now, over 35 years on, it's mostly people who were raised entirely or in the biggest part after it that have the strongest opinions against it.
>the equivocation and whataboutism here is mindboggling
Yeah, god forbid somebody answers back... Don't they know they're supposed to just hate one side and praise the other?
> Employees of so‑called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty‑five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which 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,
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.
"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.
"Given that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apolitical—recall William Styron’s famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as a home for “the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders”—Matthiessen’s 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. I’m sure it has a name, but I don’t know what it’s called.
EDIT: it’s called the “millenial tuck.”
I guess what I’m saying is that I wear shorts, I know some people think that’s bad, but their opinion is invalidate by their own ugly clothing choices. So we’re all guilty.
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.
> "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 wouldn’t give me anything. I filed FOIA requests. I talked to their entertainment liaison, who works with Hollywood. But they don’t 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.
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.
People forget the CIA is funded by and supports the rich. They hold themselves accountable, and often operate in missions contrary to the best interest of the American people. The media, thus, captured by the CIA as we all know, does not represent the interest of the people.
Operation Mockingbird was such a wide sweeping apparatus. After Carter fired 75% of the CIA, due to the revelations in the Church and Pike Committee's, those newly unemployed spooks all got jobs directly in the news media, bypassing the need for agents or that pesky Smith-Mundt Act. Every major news outlet in the English speaking world was printing or re-printing there propaganda.
Operation Mockingbird 2.0 has been ongoing since at least 2005, and involves social media, smartphones, psychological profiles, and now AI handlers. It is still run by the CIA, but indirectly, instead using the Billionaires SummerCamp in Sun Valley Idaho as a yearly propaganda conference. Along with the bottomless purse that Citizen's United provided, they can now spend any amount of money on propaganda by using dark money superpacs.
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".
3.1. Might is right and money helps the medicine go down.
How to make heavy handed propaganda out to be a virtue.
Faced with subtle lies you may prefer the obvious ones.
That depends on whether or not the obviousness of the lies tracks with the zeal with which atrocities enabled by that dislocation from reality are undertaken.
But I suppose that there's plenty of evidence that it doesn't.
It's a little stunning how well this also describes dynamics of racism in the US. Very Baldwin-esque observations. Something to consider any time you hear criticism, on the basis of "bias", of the assessment of someone from a group who have themselves been subjected to "more conspicuous varieties" of bigotry than the average American.
Might also be applied to class consciousness. An acquaintance (liberal, Southern, white) once described the voting patterns of less-affluent white Southerners as, essentially, trying to front-run the greed and cruelty of the elite class. Give them what they think they want, even if it hurts, so that they don't linger on the subject and come up with something worse. A dynamic where you really would have to know your oppressor better than they know themselves, or you.
I like to read the propaganda / state funded media of most major nation states of the world: Al Jazeera, TRT, CGTN, RT, BBC, CBC, PBS, etc.
Western "propaganda" is the most insidious and frankly insane. At least with other state media it is clear they are being advocates and their own population don't believe it and won't defend it in private conversations. But in the West we have a way to make people want to believe, it is very uncanny. If I see another "let's go to war for Afghan/Iranian/Syrian women" documentary from the CBC I will lose my mind.
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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.
They didn’t “establish” 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 didn’t “establish” 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!
This is how effective propaganda works best generally.
Find existing propagation lines (whether positive or negative), and gently encourage them.
Much recent online propaganda, particularly from Russia and China (though those are hardly the only actors) operates along these lines. Russia generally tries to stir up fracture points amongst its adversaries, China seeks more to distract through diversion (e.g., TikTok) though it also has active antagonistic campaigns.
Another classic CIA tactic was not to seek out intelligence, but to plant it, through manufactured journalism. This came out in several 1970s US Congressional investigations of the Agency, by the Church Committee and others.
See "CIA and the Media: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence" (1978):
<https://archive.org/details/CIAMedia1978Hearings/page/n3/mod...>
Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) wrote a multi-part series on this, which I've indexed here:
<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/cdec9a80ce3b0139a0df00...>
- “The CIA’s 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World’s Views” (1977-12-25) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/25/archives/the-cias-3decade...>
- “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.” (1977-12-26) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propag...>
- “C.I.A. Established Many Links To Journalists in U.S. and Abroad” 1977-12-27) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/27/archives/cia-established-...>
- “Colby Acknowledges U.S. Press Picked Up Bogus C.I.A. Accounts” (1977-12-28) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/colby-acknowledg...>
- “U.S. Correspondents Give Views on C.I.A.” (1977-12-29) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/29/archives/us-correspondent...>
- “Ex‐Envoy Says Risk of Exposure Negated C.I.A. Propaganda Value” (1977-12-30) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/30/archives/exenvoy-says-ris...>
Similarly: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399414351...
See also Cool Japan, which saw the power of pop idols, as well as anime and manga, as tools of soft power in the region and worldwide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan
which was inspired by the success of Cool Britannia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Britannia
China trying to copy that via gatcha games
‘Establish’ often means ‘to ensure it takes hold’. For example, ‘establishing’ a diplomatic presence means setting up an embassy and making sure it doesn’t disappear - and gets noticed.
Yes, they literally "established" it. Thats what that word means.
They drove the perspective for the sake of propaganda. They promoted american movies and art everywhere.
And it worked. This is how they got young kids in Europe, Asia and S.America to side with them.
Through a vague notion of coolness, individual liberty, sophistication, and tying that to progress and to America.
If you look at anti-colonial documentaries you can see it very evidently. One that comes to mind is "The hour of the furnaces" about the argentinian US backed dictatorship. There is a chapter in there where all the yuppie city dwellers are very counter culture oriented and welcome the external influence in their country.
The way they infiltrate the youth is through this very cultural operation.
The world wide phenomenon of counter culture was a CIA fabrication.
PS: Communist bloc art is not bland and conformist, it's just about daily life or about collective life. Some of the best western art is also about daily life and society. But thats just my opinion.
Another way to look at this is that the US has been unable to suppress their own youth culture to any significant degree.
...and dont forget McDonalds and the famous Marlboro Guy :-D
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.
>to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history
Except the stuff people actually care about like purchasing power, bills, wages, and housing are manipulated by purposely designed economic policies and not by randomness.
It seems perfectly plausible to me that the economic incentives are such that there is no need to "design" any of this, no smoke-filled back room needed.
Economic incentives never point in just one direction. There’s always tradeoffs around time horizons, risks, etc which is where individual people’s decisions come into play.
Should we subsidize industry X is rarely a question decided on economic merits alone. And so it goes with individual interests shaping the entire global economy in surprisingly profound ways. Extreme ultraviolet lithography for example shapes industries, but has a history steeped in various public/private partnerships and global politics.
What?! That statement is self contradictory. If you have economic incentives then somebody or a group of people put those incentives into place in order to reach a desired outcome(typically accumulation of wealth and/or power for a target group).
We're not talking about facts of nature like gravity or the speed of light. You don't exist in a truly random system but one where you're playing by the rules made by someone else, rules that can change on a whim, as the government intervenes at every level to manipulate the scales, for better and for worse, resulting in it picking winners and loosers.
It's a bad day for anti-conspiracy theorists when there's a dump of Epstein emails which are basically all "hey guys any news on the conspiracy? would you like some underage girls to go with that?"
I would note that the public conspiracy theorists tend to be "exactly wrong", though. Claiming that everything is a conspiracy, without evidence, except the things that have documentary evidence about the conspiracy.
> Claiming that everything is a conspiracy, without evidence, except the things that have documentary evidence
Because where is the fun in that? If something is documented, your brain is not doing any work; it's where the canvas is clean, that you get a sense of satisfaction by firing synapses in original ways.
Conspiracy-theorism, at its core, is fundamentally a creative endeavour. It's not a coincidence that, in the '90s, that world overlapped pretty hard with fandoms of open-world franchises like Star Trek, where it's easy to expand and enrich the original content with your own productions.
Conspiracy theories appeal to people for various reasons.
1. It's something for bored people to do and to believe.
2. It's something that offers supposed explanations for various real or imaginary events or states of affairs at a lower cost than actual explanation.
3. It gives people something more satisfying than "shit happens", and in this way, gives people a feeling of the possibility of control over the unpredictable (superstitions like astrology and fortune telling have the same motive).
4. It allows people to rationalize their misfortunes, dissatisfaction, and grievances, and to deflect responsibility from themselves, or to give their envies the appearance of a moral basis.
Of course there are conspiracies in the world. The problem with “conspiracy theorists” is not that they’re wrong about the existence of organized conspiracies, it’s that they’re so routinely, 180 degrees wrong about the specifics, and so easily mislead into being useful idiots.
For example, the loudest Epstein conspiracy theorists have spent the past ten years screaming about a conspiracy of pedophiles in their specific outgroup, while ignoring every hint of evidence that indicated their preferred leader was somehow tied to the mess (remember when Trump appointed Epstein’s sweetheart-deal prosecutor to his cabinet during his first term. Wtf!) They were led by the nose to a conclusion that anyone could have seen was highly questionable, because their reasoning and judgement absolutely sucks.
>It's a bad day for anti-conspiracy theorists when there's a dump of Epstein emails which are basically all "hey guys any news on the conspiracy? would you like some underage girls to go with that?"
"anti-conspiracy theorists" aren't claiming that conspiracies don't exist, so no. I don't think anyone is actually "debunking" Epstein other than conspiracy-minded Trumpists who were laser-focused on the Pizzagate/satanic cabal/Monarch deprogramming bullshit until for some reason they decided Epstein was a cool guy who did nothing wrong. Many such cases.
As a conspiracy nut I always wonder how much mental effort it takes to actually find reasons to believe all these takes when basically every somewhat relevant historic event of the last ~200 years surfaces at least a dozen rabbit holes involving people, institutions and connections that often intertwine.
It sounds more like you're describing paranoid schizophrenics or antisemites than conspiracy theorists.
>It sounds more like you're describing paranoid schizophrenics or antisemites than conspiracy theorists.
99% of the time, this is the same picture.
Peel back the layers of just any popular conspiracy theory, study its origins and the people who started it, and eventually you'll get to the part where "it was the Jews all along."
Considering how clearly Abraham appeared to have something going on - maybe schizophrenia? - it’s all a jumble of the same noise anyway?
I think there is an argument to be made for conspiracy theory as a modern form of folk religion. Although a lot of that is due to the overlap between the religious and conspiracy communities, and thus very intentional, they do seem to serve many of the same social and psychological functions.
> folk religion
This seems a bit of a contradiction, no? "folk" beliefs seem like the opposite of religion (which, to my ear, requires organization and some sort of canon).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_religion
Well in my comment I said they established modern art. Keyword: established.
And the CIA definitely creates some things/narratives.
But on the note of natural development, I do agree. You can call it conspiracies or incentives, its the same, really. If its not democratic its conspiratorial by definition.
They use tax money (and drug money, possibly) to do this, so they have a lot of funds. If you watch the video I link he talks about HOW they actually do this.
He doesnt claim they sit down and brief professors, he says they built an apparatus that simply filters through them and fund the right ones.
He talks about how its hard to find jobs if you dont peddle the right narratives and topics.
This is an even crazier claim. Modern art was created by Braque, Picasso, Duchamp, and many others, primarily in Europe, and it was established as a major artistic movement a long time before CIA existed.
The more realistic claim is that CIA promoted abstract expressionism which is a primarily American 1950s art movement which is of course a sub-movement in modern art.
You are right, I just repeated it wrong, see my original comment. I do claim they established abstract expressionist art, but that is also beside the point. This art would have existed either way.
The wider claim is that they controlled the dissemination and narrative around art and the humanities in the US and around the world in order to inflate the opinion of the United States while promoting narratives about the Soviet Union that even the CIA knew were false, as stated by them in released memos.
This is the claim: that large sections of the art and humanities were funded and controlled by the CIA for propaganda purposes.
It always struck me as a government funded Mad Men agency.
Kind of like how InQTel is like a government funded Kleiner Perkins
In-Q-tel is the CIA's version of DARPA
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 it’s 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 wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that don’t seem to be too “red” and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems “red” explains the funding of modern “aaaaht” devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since it’s 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.
There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s 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.
There's a lot of choices.
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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 doesn’t mean there aren’t very real conspiracies going on too.
Note too that the FBI directly hosts much of the evidence of these programmes, for those with doubts as to their veracity:
<https://vault.fbi.gov/>
COINTELPRO: <https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/White%20Hate%20Groups/COIN...>
And the CIA on MKULTRA: <https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/06760269>
CONINTELPRO was FBI and was based on domestic surveillance against real and perceived communist influence. It did indeed have significant funding and push behind it.
90% of what they did was aggressive and likely unconstitutional, but make no mistake there were absolutely agitators in the US being pushed by the USSR -- and which date back to the original "Active Measures" pushed by the USSR.
squints and this makes it not a conspiracy…. How?
Especially since evidence was only discovered because of a random copy of documents they forgot to shred, but did shred all the rest of them.
I don't think dividing opinions into conspiracist and not conspiracist is not a good epistemological basis. Opinions can be judged on the facts they are based on facts and how they are based on logical arguments or not regardless of their conspiracistness.
Top Gun is obvious stuff. Recently they are doing SEO too. "Project Monarch" for example is mostly known to the younger generation as a (fictional) CIA project to kill Godzilla ... I love the openning sequence of that film - obfuscating all sorts of stuff. Nothing wrong with "high brow conspiracist" which in straight forward language is more like 'looking into top down efforts to social engineer society and control masses'. Or you going to actually argue that has never been a thing in US and the West?
I’m not saying there aren’t attempts to control society. It’s what governments, think tanks, ad agencies, activist groups of all stripes, etc do for a living. There’s just tons of them and they’re at each others throats half the time.
There are groups of people who think they run the world. They’re delusional. There’s people who aspire to run the world who are also delusional. They can do a lot of damage sometimes before they fail.
I think you are overmodulating the conclusions bit here. It is more than just "attempts".
Possibly the difference in our views here have to do with what degree of (collective mind) control is of sufficient utility to various interested parties. Does one need to "run" the world or "100% control everything". I doubt it. I am thinking of the analogy of shifting the course of rivers here, where the (collective) river ends up behaving in the expected manner, and (individual) water molecules are (relatively) free to do wheelies or flow the other way or whatever remains possible within the overall boundaries of the river and its 'set course'.
This. People have a hard time wrestling with the fractional nature of it.
You don't need to convince everyone that Iraq has WMDs or that Stanley travel mugs are hot shit, just enough people to get done what you're trying to get done.
The distinction (as others make) is between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Of course conspiracies exist. Conspiracy theories, however, are flaky, unsubstantiated substitutes for genuine explanation that hinge on improbable or impossible conditions and powers to hold [0], often in the face of contradictory and much more reasonable alternatives.
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/01/narrative-thinking-...
> It wasn’t 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.
> There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s 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.
https://youtu.be/d6mBbyb-vIA?t=360
>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.
>https://youtu.be/d6mBbyb-vIA?t=360
Watched it on mute with subtitles because work. The body language there is amusing. She's just blathering away unaware until Colbert throws a "shit shit shit we don't talk about how the sausage was made on the air" exception.
> For the left it’s a Marxist class conspiracy
We don't need conspiracy, we have dialectic materialism. Similar to how for the most part manufacturing consent also doesn't rely on conspiracy (the New York Times and Dick Cheney nonwithstanding).
The failure of liberals may be a failure to read and understand the past.
> "Similar to how for the most part manufacturing consent also doesn't rely on conspiracy (the New York Times and Dick Cheney nonwithstanding)."
The brilliance of Manufacturing Consent is that it neither relies on conspiracy, nor precludes it.
You're more than welcome to call your conspiracies other things, doesn't make them any less conspiratorial though.
Best part about your comment:
the reader has no way to know if you’re talking about “conspiracies”,
or “conspiracy theories”,
due to colloquial (ignorant) interchangeable use.
The colloquial muddying of language concerning "conspiracy theory" was probably a government psyop in response to the JFK assassination. There, the officially endorsed theory was a lone wolf theory, that one guy did it by himself without any help or encouragement, and virtually all other theories were theories that involved one or more people conspiring in some way. From there, "conspiracy theory" morphed in media to mean any theory running counter to the official theory, even when the official theory was itself a theory about a conspiracy.
taps the sign to read
Capital requires no conspiracy to drive the world. It's the liberals who think that individual agency plays a major role.
So, right-wing conspiracy theories tend to be more like: these three people secretly own everything through a hidden system of written contracts. Like "there's a secret room beneath Comet Pizza, specifically, where they buy and sell a chemical extract from the blood of scared babies"
And left-wing conspiracy theories tend to be more like: all the people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. Like "billionaires are fucking us over. Since media companies are owned by billionaires a large part of what they broadcast is just pro-billionaire propaganda."
I think the filter bubble might be confining your observations a bit.
Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is.
And the right definitely believes that people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. The "they" behind Pizzagate was "the Democratic Party."
And then there's "Cultural Marxism" (a conspiracy theory about the nefarious communist influence of Jews in academia), the "groomer" panic (a conspiracy theory that transgender identity is a cover for organized pedophile rings) white replacement theory, DEI, China anything and countless other conspiracies the right believes in that are based on some kind of racial or gender essentialism or prejudice.
The left has its share of that too, but the distinction you're trying to draw here makes no sense.
> "Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is."
No, that's not conspiracy. Conspiracy requires deliberate collusion between members of the conspiracy, it requires conspiring. If you have several people behaving in a way that appears coordinated because those people have aligned values and incentives, then it might be possible that those people have talked to each other and come up with some sort of a plan, which would make it a conspiracy, but it's also possible that no such organization exists and they're each independently doing whatever they think is correct in their circumstance. In that case, the emergent group behavior looks like a conspiracy but literally isn't a conspiracy.
This is what Manufacturing Consent talks about. I wish people would read it.
> The "they" behind Pizzagate was "the Democratic Party."
For some.
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.
They have more than enough money, it's cheap. The astounding thing about middle-class people is that you can pay them to do this for a living, and they somehow still won't think it exists.
It wouldn't survive if they didn't provide the marketing and infrastructure.
It's important to remember that most will do it for free because they simply don't apply any standards to their defense of institutions (especially the ones who pay their rent.) You don't have to pay a ton of people to pretend that google paying firefox half a billion dollars a year for absolutely nothing makes perfect financial sense. Just pay a dozen, and praise and reward everybody who repeats it. You'll have an ocean of idiotic shallow dismissals barked out by volunteers. Give them updoots and they'll glow.
edit: here's the crackpot theory (everything else I said is documented in a million places, and not worth defending.) I think that the intensity of this tactic over the past 100 years in every aspect of Western life has been intellectually dysgenic. It has devastated western elites' thought processes in general, and the compartmentalization that allowed them to be competent in their actual jobs has failed. Things are only being held together by technicians who are aging out of the workforce.
If the Firefox deal doesn’t make sense (too much?), then what is the hidden strategic rationale?
>Things are only being held together by technicians who are aging out of the workforce
100%. This terrifies me.
Loss of compartmentalization in society, mostly due to the internet, needs examination.
They're literally like "there's not really any evidence of this" in a thread about the millionth piece of evidence of this. And since it's the Paris Review doing a limited hangout about the Paris Review (the minor detail that the co-founder was a CIA agent), it somehow ends up admiring him for his love of nature.
The shame is how easy it is to do this now, not that it has been done for a century. Western elites have gotten so stupid and authoritarian that you don't even need to hide the seams anymore, you can joke about them and ban people who don't laugh.
edit: also notable about the Paris Review itself is that nobody reads it, most of what was published in it at its peak was horrible and turned out to be completely ephemeral. You won't have ever heard of most of the writers in it, who went on to university appointments (or never left them.) It was a tool for providing an income to particular writers and justifications for other initiatives; a thinktank. Comic books had more staying power.
> Give them updoots and they'll glow.
Sometimes, just hiring them and dumping later is enough. The amount of ex-FAANG (mainly Google) "volunteers" brigading in this forum to defend anything Google is astonishing.
You are waking up. Agent Smith might need to pay you a visit.
>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!
But it did. The efforts hastened the collapse of the USSR and led to good outcomes for Central Europe. The propaganda of that era wasn't supposed to be covert because it wasn't selling something objectionable. Everyone knew who's behind Radio Free Europe, for example. It was just a way to popularize Western values, and it worked.
Mind you, it's not like the Soviets were not doing the same to export their values. They were bankrolling overseas labor organizations, academics, etc.
Yeah that's what did it. What kind of world would we live in without art propaganda where USSR didn't collapse? Too horrific to even imagine.
The best manipulation makes you think it was your idea in the first place.
A/K/A the Art of Herding Cats.
if communism is so wonderful then I'm sure most of the former ComBloc countries will go back to it any day now...
the equivocation and whataboutism here is mindboggling
>if communism is so wonderful then I'm sure most of the former ComBloc countries will go back to it any day now...
Because wonderful things win over non-wonderful things in history? Yeah, sounds like a perfect criterion...
Besides, it never had a chance on an equal playing ground and have several things holding it down (including being implemented in countries that were underdeveloped to begin with, and with the full Cold War power of the biggest countries on Earth breathing down their necks, plus schemes ranging from mild like that in TFA to way worse going on against it).
Even so, for many of those that did live through it, there was a considerable pining for that era (for exampes ostalgie in ex-Eastern Germany), and some quite favorable polls in the later 90s even. Now, over 35 years on, it's mostly people who were raised entirely or in the biggest part after it that have the strongest opinions against it.
>the equivocation and whataboutism here is mindboggling
Yeah, god forbid somebody answers back... Don't they know they're supposed to just hate one side and praise the other?
Looking at current US political situation with left being entirely inept with strongest point being "we're not the other guys"
... no, CIA funding modern art was not good
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 so‑called CIA “proprietaries.” During the past twenty‑five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which 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...
The pike committee documents provided more information about Operation Mockingbird and the CIA's influence in the new media.
selected docs: https://maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1107
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2017-06...
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.
[0] https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber
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.
"Given that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apolitical—recall William Styron’s famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as a home for “the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders”—Matthiessen’s 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. I’m sure it has a name, but I don’t know what it’s called.
EDIT: it’s called the “millenial tuck.”
I guess what I’m saying is that I wear shorts, I know some people think that’s bad, but their opinion is invalidate by their own ugly clothing choices. So we’re all guilty.
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.
> given the propensity of fashion trends to drive large numbers of people to do ridiculous things.
This seems like it would make it the perfect corollary to ideology…?
It's called a French Tuck.
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 wouldn’t give me anything. I filed FOIA requests. I talked to their entertainment liaison, who works with Hollywood. But they don’t 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.
Maybe in 100 months or 100 days.
But you really should say that kids will be telling LLMs to write a paper about the memes.
Trolling is to discourse what modern art is to art.
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.
Most interesting. Of Matthiessen's writing I know only the Shadow Country books.
I wonder about the biographer's practical judgment, though:
> I got very ill at that altitude. A doctor, when I got back, told me I had the symptoms of pulmonary edema. But it was worth it. I’d do it all again.
[Edit] Frank Kermode's memoir Not Entitled includes some interesting pages about the CIA funding of Encounter becoming publicly known.
People forget the CIA is funded by and supports the rich. They hold themselves accountable, and often operate in missions contrary to the best interest of the American people. The media, thus, captured by the CIA as we all know, does not represent the interest of the people.
His first wife’s name was Patsy Southgate???
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...
Operation Mockingbird was such a wide sweeping apparatus. After Carter fired 75% of the CIA, due to the revelations in the Church and Pike Committee's, those newly unemployed spooks all got jobs directly in the news media, bypassing the need for agents or that pesky Smith-Mundt Act. Every major news outlet in the English speaking world was printing or re-printing there propaganda.
Operation Mockingbird 2.0 has been ongoing since at least 2005, and involves social media, smartphones, psychological profiles, and now AI handlers. It is still run by the CIA, but indirectly, instead using the Billionaires SummerCamp in Sun Valley Idaho as a yearly propaganda conference. Along with the bottomless purse that Citizen's United provided, they can now spend any amount of money on propaganda by using dark money superpacs.