What happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
"So individual that it's manipulated by a state agency!"
That really showed them those commies manipulated by their state agencies, ...oh wait!
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.
the equivocation and whataboutism here is mindboggling
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?
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 was probably one of the best investments CIA ever made.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
which was inspired by the success of Cool Britannia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Britannia
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!
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...>
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/01/narrative-thinking-...
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.
Capital requires no conspiracy to drive the world. It's the liberals who think that individual agency plays a major role.
the reader has no way to know if you’re talking about “conspiracies”,
or “conspiracy theories”,
due to colloquial (ignorant) interchangeable use.
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."
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.
For some.
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 brilliance of Manufacturing Consent is that it neither relies on conspiracy, nor precludes it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
COINTELPRO: <https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/White%20Hate%20Groups/COIN...>
And the CIA on MKULTRA: <https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/06760269>
Kind of like how InQTel is like a government funded Kleiner Perkins
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command_(Star_Trek:_T...
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
... no, CIA funding modern art was not good
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.
But I suppose that there's plenty of evidence that it doesn't.
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.
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.
> A dynamic where you really would have to know your oppressor better than they know themselves, or you.
People from the East Europe will tell you that American media is clearly a propaganda machine, but they themselves grew up during difficult times and the one lesson they all learnt is: don't trust. You cannot trust your neighbors, you cannot trust your friends, you cannot trust anyone.
Therefore, media in the West appears as a big pile of propaganda (which in many cases is true). However, they also have their own propaganda, maybe "drier" and more straightforward, but one way or another, all countries need to keep the flock of humans in line.
Learning that US schoolchildren recite the pledge of allegiance in school baffled my mind when I first realized it was actually true. As an outsider, it sounded like an obvious parody/caricature of nationalism, especially with the religious part.
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,
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...
selected docs: https://maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1107
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2017-06...
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.
I promise "The History of the Intelligence State" is worth your time.
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.
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.
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!
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.
This seems like it would make it the perfect corollary to ideology…?
> "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).
But you really should say that kids will be telling LLMs to write a paper about the memes.
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.
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.