13 ms·

Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked

176 points by samclemens 11y ago

api 11y ago
In recent years I've started entertaining a bit of a heresy. I wouldn't say I believe this, but it's at least a question worth asking: Is there actually any such thing as a "grassroots" movement? Over the years I've seen so many unmasked as the product of someone or something with deep pockets: corporations, think tanks, governments. At the very least it's hard for me to think of any movement where major institutions didn't play some role. Intelligence agencies seem to figure prominently too, and not necessarily in the areas you would think. The 60s counterculture was in part seeded by CIA LSD research, and Tor was funded by the US Department of Naval Intelligence (to provide two random examples).
- jn1234 11y ago
  Bitcoin, but like any of those could be hijacked by a group with an ulterior motive. LSD and Tor were developed by the US government, but took on a life of their own, quite the opposite of what is described in the article.
  - CapitalistCartr 11y ago
    Unless you know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, Bitcoin's origins are a mystery. As for LSD, it was discovered by Albert Hofmann, a Swiss and while the US government helped the movement along a lot (mostly unintentionally), they didn't start it or control it.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  Occupy. (Note that this is not necessarily a good thing -- Occupy's leaderless, grassroots-über-alles nature is a big part of why it eventually tore itself apart.)
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Indeed. Occupy ran into the inevitable growing pains of any organization acquiring a measure of power or prestige. It attracted people who like power and prestige. They immediately proceeded to do what such people do best - fight over power and prestige while insisting loudly they do nothing of the sort.
  - AJ007 11y ago
    Very suspicious that anti-war protests vanished from the headlines as Occupy Wall Street took hold.
    - speeder 11y ago
      I am from Brazil, from my point of view Occupy was a sort of copy-cat of the spanish occupy (that spawned from the financial crisis), also vaguely related to Arab Spring. At the time, I even tought about how closely it looked to the "Stand Alone Complex" discussed in the anime series of same name, when people create a social movement, and they believe they are being copy-cats, but there is no "original" to copy. When Occupy happened, it was the same time as occupy-style protests in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, the Spanish and Portuguese called themselves "Indignados", and if you saw live feeds of the Greece movement, you could see people carrying "Indignados" banners too. Also Arab spring happened at the same time, one thing interesting was that Anonymous (the 4chan Anonymous "group") was present in all of those, sometimes doing important things, for example in the same IRC channel they organized live feeds of spanish protests, medical help in Tunisia (a couple of "Anons" with actual medical training in Tunisia roamed around in makeshift ambulances helping injured protesters) and internet infrastructure in Egypt (in Egypt after the government shutdown the internet, "Anons" drove around in vans with satellite and various forms of local connections to provide data links so people could upload photos and videos of the protests). Occupy Wall Street was a sort of natural consequence, lots of US people got involved in the overseas protests, and it does not surprise me they decided to try the same in US. The thing is, that in US the cause they could fight for was completely unrelated, in Europe the problem was the stupid austerity programs and the debt problems, in the muslim world it started as protests against corruption (the first protester, a Tunisian that set fire to himself, was upset that the Tunisian police could stroll on the market and take whatever they wanted without paying, that Tunisian was a shopkeeper). US has much less obvious corruption than Tunisia (ie: no cops stealing food from food trucks), and although US has crazy debts, the dollar being reserve currency allow the US to pretend the debt problem does not exist, so Occupy had to protest confusing stuff.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Is it possible for a movement to spawn purely out of a cultural vacuum? Sure. I'm sure the people in the Tea Party think so. Thing is, once the people notice opportunity, it isn't long until money and power follow suit. And even then it's hard to determine what was genuine feeling or subversive influence, or complex forces of history we can't even recognize. The dead are a presence among the living
- ahains 11y ago
  How about movements that direct money towards smaller or local entities? It's hard for me to imagine the eat local / farmers market movement as being quietly backed by corporations.
  - api 11y ago
    I wouldn't be absolutely shocked to learn that there are industry advocacy groups that push movements like that. I'm also suspicious about the whole organic movement and companies like Whole Foods. See also: the concept of 'food gentrification.' https://bitchmedia.org/post/foodgentrification-and-culinary-rebranding-of-traditional-foods https://bitchmedia.org/post/foodgentrification-and-culinary-...
    - mason240 11y ago
      There was actually just an AMA on Reddit from a scientist whose research group was being harassed by an organic food lobby called "US Right to Know." https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3g8l2h/an_antibiotechnology_activist_group_has_targeted/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3g8l2h/an_antibiot... Anti-GMO group that’s harassing university scientists is the real tool of corporate America http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/23847/ http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/23847/
- nosuchthing 11y ago
  Might I suggest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_tabl...
- rsync 11y ago
  "Is there actually any such thing as a "grassroots" movement?" I would hope that this would be an easy question to answer, simply by identifying some minor thing you have done that would qualify as - even as the germ of - grassroots action. I can think of one or two things I have done myself that would fall into that category, and I would hope that would be the case for everyone. Even if it's minor (as mine have been) if it welled up from within you it is ipso facto the start of a grassroots movement.
  - api 11y ago
    I wasn't suggesting there are no grassroots actions, but I was questioning whether there are (many) coherent grassroots "movements." At the very least they seem quite rare.
- kevinnk 11y ago
  GNU software? It's hard to imagine big coroporations pushed that.
  - aceperry 11y ago
    Which brings up the interesting situation of the linux kernel. Lots of corporations (with their own agendas) have contributed alongside with lots of independent devs.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- brc 11y ago
  You'd have to say that - yes, there is such a thing. But gaining momentum and power requires money and leadership. Unless a grassroots movement can create those things themselves - which would be quite rare - inevitably a true grassroots movement is going to be co-opted by someone seeking to use their popularity. Thus the origins of the movement are always likely to be questioned by the opponents, because plenty of evidence of funding and leadership are going to appear. Placing them in a chronological order to determine the 'grassrootedness' of the movement is going to be tricky, unless someone kept very careful notes. Which is also very unlikely.
- animefan 11y ago
  I think that progressives (especially Chomsky) overstate the role of hard power/money in politics. Or perhaps they understate the role of soft power. E.g. the progressive movement in the West is driven by a relatively small group of academics and journalists. It is notable how many social sciences professors are self-professed Marxists. I don't see this in a conspiratorial way (as some do), of Marxists seeking to push an agenda. But rather, the core of the progressive movement are people who think that both the economic, and also the political and social realm, are characterized by power, domination and oppression. If you don't believe this about economics, it's much harder to believe this about the rest.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Yes, there are plenty of people starting grassroots movements. However, once it gets big, it will start attracting attention and infiltrators.
kungfooguru 11y ago
Hm, wonder if samclemens reads Marxmail.... Louis sent this out a couple hours before you posted it here so thought it might be the case :)
cryoshon 11y ago
"Through the CCF, as well as by more direct means, the CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War—the closest thing that the U.S. government had to a Ministry of Culture. This left a complex legacy. During the Cold War, it was commonplace to draw the distinction between “totalitarian” and “free” societies by noting that only in the free ones could groups self-organize independently of the state. But many of the groups that made that argument—including the magazines on this left—were often covertly-sponsored instruments of state power, at least in part. Whether or not art and artists would have been more “revolutionary” in the absence of the CIA’s cultural work is a vexed question; what is clear is that that possibility was not a risk they were willing to run. " I wonder if the CIA really stopped being the Ministry of Culture?
- rch 11y ago
  I assume that's a rhetorical question...
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    I'd genuinely like to know, but I'm not sure where to get started if I were interested in finding the CIA's influence on the culture of today.
    - redblacktree 11y ago
      Maybe apply for a job.
      - emodendroket 11y ago
        Don't forget to report your findings here!
- protonfish 11y ago
  What culture? Fox News, Professional Sports, and reality TV? I miss the days when intellectuals were pandered to. Now they are just irrelevant.
speeder 11y ago
By the way, one magazine like that still exists. CIA, using Ford Foundation, co-founded the Brazillian publisher "Abril", their flagship magazine is called "Veja" (it translates to "See"), it is a sort of centrist magazine (its views resemble the US democratic party, in Brazil this is right of most parties, so the hardcore brazillian left consider "Veja" extreme right-wing, but actual right-wingers consider the magazine as left). It is interesting that although they do spouse many positions that the brazillian right wing consider left, the magazine usually is supportive of US, the few times it said something against the US is when the US pulled some obviously evil stunt (ie: something that even a stupid and ignorant person can perceive as evil). I had a hobby of buying "Veja" and "Carta Capital" (It translates to "Capital Letter"), the CC magazine is clearly leftist, usually supporting the obviously marxist and communist parties, also CC magazine is very critical of US, it is not uncommon to see Veja and CC make reports on the same thing, with completely different conclusions, or see Veja and CC taking stealth jabs at each other (example: insulting someone that has a position the other has, without naming the other directly).
- rogerthis 11y ago
  "CIA, using Ford Foundation, co-founded the Brazillian publisher "Abril" Source?
jonstokes 11y ago
If anyone can read this and /not/ believe that the security state is very much active in a covert way on social media, reddit, and even specialized forums like this... I realize that to suggest that, say, some proportion of the reddit mods are on the payroll of a .gov alphabet agency sounds like tinfoil hat territory, but it would have been dramatically crazier in the 50's to suggest that the CIA was funding socialist literary magazines, art galleries, and the like.
- RodericDay 11y ago
  iirc there was a Powerpoint slide in one of Snowden's leaks that basically explicitly discussed manipulation of such fora. I post this in hopes someone who recalls better links to it.
  - adsr 11y ago
    Was it JTRIG? In any case, here are links to the stories from the Intercept. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula... https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-domestic-law-enforcement-propaganda/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/controversial-...
- igravious 11y ago
  Not just literary magazines and social media. For instance, I went to an art exhibition in Berlin a couple of years back to see a retrospective of mid 20th century painting, and some of the info-cards claimed that the CIA sponsored a lot of the avant-garde US and European artists as a way to reject Soviet Social Realism movement. To show in a way that art in the West was freer in its imagination, execution, and scope. Quick Google, here's[1] a piece from the British newspaper, the Independent form 1995 :) It is interesting that despotic regimes tend to persecute intellectuals and artists whereas the CIA, though far from lily-white, seems to have done the opposite. Though I'd say the dossier on Chomsky is a mile long! [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-w...
- 11y ago
bediger4000 11y ago
So it's not "when did the CIA become a rogue actor", but rather "which stuff did the CIA fund", right? Also, is there anything like a "free market" in the US? It appears that some government agency or another is financing things, or feeding info to entities in just about every single market. This has been going on since WW2, at least. So when do I get to scoff at any mention of a "free market"?
- brc 11y ago
  Free markets are about freedom of choice in participation - freedom to create a business, take or leave a job, freedom to product or buy the products you want. It's about economic freedom. That the CIA interfered with things doesn't change the fact that people are still free to do those things. You could argue about whether people really free to not buy a diamond ring to announce an engagement or not, in the same way the CIA has been influencing and financing operations. But the fact of the matter is there is no state actors forcing you to do such things.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    > That the CIA interfered with things doesn't change the fact that people are still free to do those things. It certainly does interfere. The propaganda articles displaces other articles and other publications. Or, for a larger example, do you thing AT&T could be driven out of business because of their cosy relationship with the NSA? Heck no. It's more likely that AT&T's government partners will reward it regulatorily and with more contracts, and with social media astroturfing if a movement to boycott AT&T got going. Shut up and consume.
  - bediger4000 11y ago
    Any individual might be free to buy or sell or participate or not, but if there's some covert support, monetary or regulatory or informational, then the market isn't working according to the participant's input. A firm offering worse prices to consumers, but getting inside information might drive its competitors out of business, even if they offer superior service or value. The outcome is different. I don't see how re-defining a free market in terms of the participant's choice makes it work like a market in which the government agency hasn't meddled.
sloppycee 11y ago
Communism uses suppression as a means to control the population. I've never considered the converse, using 'promotion' to control the population.
- nickbauman 11y ago
  Dictatorships use suppression. Communism is a style of collective government. The USSR was never communist, the government merely used the lexicon of communism to suit its needs.
  - lexcorvus 11y ago
    The USSR was never communist By this definition, has there ever been a communist country?
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Catalonia from 1936 to 1939. Maybe.
      - nickbauman 11y ago
        Greece shortly after WWII, Maybe.
    - nickbauman 11y ago
      The term Communist Dictatorship is an oxymoron. Even though it's true that Lenin envisioned a dictatorship based on Marx's theories, this is not really anything like communism in the sense that Marx envisioned. The Jewish Kibbutz is a communist organization and notice how democratic it is.
    - sago 11y ago
      It's a no-true-scotsman fallacy at heart. Pretty common though: North Korea is a democratic state (according to its name), but not real democracy. National Socialism wasn't really socialist. The UK isn't a real monarchy. It's a language game compelled by the guilt-by-association level of political sophistication of our culture. When the debate is rarely more sophisticated than 'that's socialist, like Hitler!!!!1!', it's no wonder that the response has to be 'that wasn't true socialism'.
obrero 11y ago
George Orwell wrote in 1984 about how much effort was put into propagandizing to the professional-managerial class by the state. He should know, he was an informant against the left for the Foreign Office via Celia Kirwan. Just go to the front page of the New York Review of Books ( http://www.nybooks.com http://www.nybooks.com ). I know I just had to scan the front page to find some article condemning Arab nationalism and of course one is there, "The Mystery of ISIS" by an anonymous author. It contains pictures of people about to be executed, and a picture of someone pointing a gun at the camera, so you can guess what the text is. What it doesn't talk about is how the US in the past supported religious fanatics in the Middle East against the real US enemy - secular, left-leaning pan-Arab nationalists. Just as the US does today. The US supports Saudi Arabia, where women can't drive, yet bombed Libya, just a few years after Qadaffi had given in to the US and UK after years of Nasserite posturing. Now Islamic fundamentalists sprout there. In Iraq, we had another Nasserite, pan-Arab secular nationalist in a party with socialist roots - Saddam Hussein was overthrown and now we have ISIS in Iraq. More recently the pan-Arab secular nationalist in a party with secular roots in Syria has the US and Europe working to undermine his power. This just happened. So now ISIS controls much of Syria, and just blew up an ancient pagan temple. It's quite clear with all its work to undermine Bashar al-Assad that this is what the US was working to have happen. We can go more into the distant past as well - the secular nationalist parliament of Mossadegh being replaced by a dictatorship initially backed by the mullahs by the US/UK in the 1950s, then the persecution and execution of the secular left - eventually the mullahs changed their mind and now Iran is run by them and devoid of the secular liberals that the CIA sent lists around to be executed. I'm surprised the New York Review of Books doesn't have a nostalgic front-cover piece bashing the Warsaw Pact. Well there were just two on HN's front page the other day. It's great - while the US government is tapping its own citizens and the whole world, extraditing and torturing nationalists who oppose foreign intervention in their home countries, ringing the world with military bases - a US soldier just murdered a Filipino prostitute who he learned was a transvestite, spying on foreign corporations and stealing their industrial secrets, sending drones to willy-nilly bomb villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan and so on, everyone can focus on the errors Lenin commited a century ago, or how some ISIS militants blew up an ancient pagan temple in Syria (who the US helped back by undermining al-Assad's government - in fact investigative reporters have found the US has been actively backing jihadists in Iraq even in recent years).
nickbauman 11y ago
The Soviet Union was a dictatorship. Democratic socialists are natural foes of dictatorships the world over.
- xlm1717 11y ago
  Democratic socialists are quite capable of forming dictatorships themselves. See: Venezula under Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega.
  - triplesec 11y ago
    If they form dictatorships, they are by definition not democratic socialists
  - the_af 11y ago
    That's a very liberal (no pun intended) use of the term "dictatorship". I think we should be careful to reserve it for countries which are actually dictatorships, not just countries whose policies or methods of government we disagree with or dislike. Venezuela and Nicaragua were not dictatorships under any realistic definition of the word; they had democratically elected governments within the rule of law, with finite terms and with clear means of political participation. The problem with "dictatorship" is that it's become a curse word. There is a similar problem with "fascism": it has become a way to insult people or governments, whether their are actually fascist (unlikely) or not (more likely).
    - xlm1717 11y ago
      We can use one definition of the word, that offered on the Wikipedia page for Dictatorship: "is a form of government where political authority is monopolized by a person or political entity, and exercised through various mechanisms to ensure the entity's power remains strong." Both Chavez and Ortega regularly intimidated opposition media and relied heavily on propaganda to maintain popular support. Both abolished term limits in their respective countries to remain Presidents for Life. Chavez personally selected his successor, Nicolas Maduro, who narrowly beat Henrique Capriles, Chavez's main opposition, in the 2013 presidential elections, elections that Capriles protested as fraudulent. When Ortega couldn't get the Supreme Court to support his unlimited term limits, he replaced dissenting Justices with sympathetic ones. If these aren't all the signs of a dictatorship, I don't know what is.
cafard 11y ago
Czeslaw Milosz wrote that it was very clear that there was American government money behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom--one didn't need inside information to figure it out.
notNow 11y ago
The US financed Bin Laden and the Afghani Mujaheddin to counterbalance the Soviets in Central Asia in the 80s despite the clear signs of Islamic terrorism gathering pace in the late 70s destabilizing the region and the middle east as well. So all bets are off with these people.
stefantalpalaru 11y ago
Quote from "Tempo presente", the Italian magazine in the list (first number, opening text): > [...] sono incerti e problematici i confini del nostro mondo morale; incerte le norme del comportamento individuale; incerti il significato e i limiti dell'azione politica quale oggi la si pratica o la si propugna; incerto soprattutto il valore delle idee e delle ideologie correnti. > [...] uncertain and problematic are the confines of our moral world; uncertain the norms of individual behavior; uncertain the meaning and limits of the political action practiced or defended today; uncertain most of all the value of current ideas and ideologies. source: http://www.bibliotecaginobianco.it/flip/TEP/01/0100/#/3/zoomed http://www.bibliotecaginobianco.it/flip/TEP/01/0100/#/3/zoom...
serve_yay 11y ago
So is it just socialist publications, then? No publications of other ideological bents deserving of similar scrutiny? Fantastic.
thirstywhimbrel 11y ago
Did anyone actually read why these magazines were "highly ranked"? > the CIA actually thought that Levitas’s anti-Communism was too ferocious, unrelenting, and “conservative.” ... the CIA wanted a more moderate and “sophisticated” voice ... The New Leader remained progressive in the context of U.S. domestic politics; it was one of the first publications to publish Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. > Like other magazines affiliated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Mundo Nuevo published essays critical of U.S. policy in Latin America and Vietnam. Its usefulness, from the U.S. government’s point of view, consisted in its defense of the responsibility of the artist as an independent critic of power ... I'm probably the only one in this thread, but I actually think some of these cases fall short of crimes against humanity. I mean, of all the dirty secret squirrel things governments do, if I had to pick, then (1) funding the early publication of 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' and (2) encouraging artists to challenge entrenched power (to include US policy) would be pretty high on my list.
- dang 11y ago
  > I'm probably the only one in this thread, but I actually think some of these cases fall short of crimes against humanity. It's good to resist making generalizing statements about the community. There's little evidence here of readers objecting to the CIA having funded literary journals during the Cold War. (They funded a lot of things, including great musicians [1]. It's surprising what good taste they had.) Mostly the thread consists of extrapolation to present affairs—maybe not the most substantive discussion because it's so speculative, but probably unavoidable. 1. http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/louis-armstrong-plays-historic-cold-war-concerts-in-east-berlin-budapest-1965.html http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/louis-armstrong-plays-his...
abdias 11y ago
These are not the only magazines CIA funded. They where very active in the (radical) feminist movement and funded among other "Ms." and Gloria Steinem, who also was sent to Moscow for Socialist meet-ups, payed by the same. Also this movement is rooted in socialism (to primarily break down the family union, as we can see today). No one can say feminism is not influential in the world today. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem#CIA_ties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem#CIA_ties -> http://www.namebase.org/steinem.html http://www.namebase.org/steinem.html http://www.namebase.org/foia/festival.html http://www.namebase.org/foia/festival.html And in an interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HRUEqyZ7p8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HRUEqyZ7p8 https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-fam...
jlindsay 11y ago
Anyone read Eric Schmidt "The New Digital Age", Eric talks about cyberwar, Luddites, and geo politics as it relates to tech and data collection for the government, just replace the word the future with the present.
SZJX 11y ago
It's obviously not any news that CIA and similar agencies sponsor disruptive activities all over the world as long as they see fit to their own interest. So-called "democracy" and "freedom" etc. are just all convenient excuses, pretext of war. Maybe the only interesting thing here is the assertion that apparently leftists don't only fight capitalists, they also fight totalitarian regimes which have long abandoned their leftist roots. This might further clarifies things a bit.

176 points by samclemens 11y ago

api 11y ago

In recent years I've started entertaining a bit of a heresy. I wouldn't say I believe this, but it's at least a question worth asking: Is there actually any such thing as a "grassroots" movement? Over the years I've seen so many unmasked as the product of someone or something with deep pockets: corporations, think tanks, governments. At the very least it's hard for me to think of any movement where major institutions didn't play some role. Intelligence agencies seem to figure prominently too, and not necessarily in the areas you would think. The 60s counterculture was in part seeded by CIA LSD research, and Tor was funded by the US Department of Naval Intelligence (to provide two random examples).

jn1234 11y ago
Bitcoin, but like any of those could be hijacked by a group with an ulterior motive. LSD and Tor were developed by the US government, but took on a life of their own, quite the opposite of what is described in the article.
- CapitalistCartr 11y ago
  Unless you know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, Bitcoin's origins are a mystery. As for LSD, it was discovered by Albert Hofmann, a Swiss and while the US government helped the movement along a lot (mostly unintentionally), they didn't start it or control it.
smacktoward 11y ago
Occupy. (Note that this is not necessarily a good thing -- Occupy's leaderless, grassroots-über-alles nature is a big part of why it eventually tore itself apart.)
- Kalium 11y ago
  Indeed. Occupy ran into the inevitable growing pains of any organization acquiring a measure of power or prestige. It attracted people who like power and prestige. They immediately proceeded to do what such people do best - fight over power and prestige while insisting loudly they do nothing of the sort.
- AJ007 11y ago
  Very suspicious that anti-war protests vanished from the headlines as Occupy Wall Street took hold.
  - speeder 11y ago
    I am from Brazil, from my point of view Occupy was a sort of copy-cat of the spanish occupy (that spawned from the financial crisis), also vaguely related to Arab Spring. At the time, I even tought about how closely it looked to the "Stand Alone Complex" discussed in the anime series of same name, when people create a social movement, and they believe they are being copy-cats, but there is no "original" to copy. When Occupy happened, it was the same time as occupy-style protests in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, the Spanish and Portuguese called themselves "Indignados", and if you saw live feeds of the Greece movement, you could see people carrying "Indignados" banners too. Also Arab spring happened at the same time, one thing interesting was that Anonymous (the 4chan Anonymous "group") was present in all of those, sometimes doing important things, for example in the same IRC channel they organized live feeds of spanish protests, medical help in Tunisia (a couple of "Anons" with actual medical training in Tunisia roamed around in makeshift ambulances helping injured protesters) and internet infrastructure in Egypt (in Egypt after the government shutdown the internet, "Anons" drove around in vans with satellite and various forms of local connections to provide data links so people could upload photos and videos of the protests). Occupy Wall Street was a sort of natural consequence, lots of US people got involved in the overseas protests, and it does not surprise me they decided to try the same in US. The thing is, that in US the cause they could fight for was completely unrelated, in Europe the problem was the stupid austerity programs and the debt problems, in the muslim world it started as protests against corruption (the first protester, a Tunisian that set fire to himself, was upset that the Tunisian police could stroll on the market and take whatever they wanted without paying, that Tunisian was a shopkeeper). US has much less obvious corruption than Tunisia (ie: no cops stealing food from food trucks), and although US has crazy debts, the dollar being reserve currency allow the US to pretend the debt problem does not exist, so Occupy had to protest confusing stuff.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Is it possible for a movement to spawn purely out of a cultural vacuum? Sure. I'm sure the people in the Tea Party think so. Thing is, once the people notice opportunity, it isn't long until money and power follow suit. And even then it's hard to determine what was genuine feeling or subversive influence, or complex forces of history we can't even recognize. The dead are a presence among the living
ahains 11y ago
How about movements that direct money towards smaller or local entities? It's hard for me to imagine the eat local / farmers market movement as being quietly backed by corporations.
- api 11y ago
  I wouldn't be absolutely shocked to learn that there are industry advocacy groups that push movements like that. I'm also suspicious about the whole organic movement and companies like Whole Foods. See also: the concept of 'food gentrification.' https://bitchmedia.org/post/foodgentrification-and-culinary-rebranding-of-traditional-foods https://bitchmedia.org/post/foodgentrification-and-culinary-...
  - mason240 11y ago
    There was actually just an AMA on Reddit from a scientist whose research group was being harassed by an organic food lobby called "US Right to Know." https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3g8l2h/an_antibiotechnology_activist_group_has_targeted/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3g8l2h/an_antibiot... Anti-GMO group that’s harassing university scientists is the real tool of corporate America http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/23847/ http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/23847/
nosuchthing 11y ago
Might I suggest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method#Comparison_tabl...
rsync 11y ago
"Is there actually any such thing as a "grassroots" movement?" I would hope that this would be an easy question to answer, simply by identifying some minor thing you have done that would qualify as - even as the germ of - grassroots action. I can think of one or two things I have done myself that would fall into that category, and I would hope that would be the case for everyone. Even if it's minor (as mine have been) if it welled up from within you it is ipso facto the start of a grassroots movement.
- api 11y ago
  I wasn't suggesting there are no grassroots actions, but I was questioning whether there are (many) coherent grassroots "movements." At the very least they seem quite rare.
kevinnk 11y ago
GNU software? It's hard to imagine big coroporations pushed that.
- aceperry 11y ago
  Which brings up the interesting situation of the linux kernel. Lots of corporations (with their own agendas) have contributed alongside with lots of independent devs.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
brc 11y ago
You'd have to say that - yes, there is such a thing. But gaining momentum and power requires money and leadership. Unless a grassroots movement can create those things themselves - which would be quite rare - inevitably a true grassroots movement is going to be co-opted by someone seeking to use their popularity. Thus the origins of the movement are always likely to be questioned by the opponents, because plenty of evidence of funding and leadership are going to appear. Placing them in a chronological order to determine the 'grassrootedness' of the movement is going to be tricky, unless someone kept very careful notes. Which is also very unlikely.
animefan 11y ago
I think that progressives (especially Chomsky) overstate the role of hard power/money in politics. Or perhaps they understate the role of soft power. E.g. the progressive movement in the West is driven by a relatively small group of academics and journalists. It is notable how many social sciences professors are self-professed Marxists. I don't see this in a conspiratorial way (as some do), of Marxists seeking to push an agenda. But rather, the core of the progressive movement are people who think that both the economic, and also the political and social realm, are characterized by power, domination and oppression. If you don't believe this about economics, it's much harder to believe this about the rest.
pjc50 11y ago
Yes, there are plenty of people starting grassroots movements. However, once it gets big, it will start attracting attention and infiltrators.

kungfooguru 11y ago

Hm, wonder if samclemens reads Marxmail.... Louis sent this out a couple hours before you posted it here so thought it might be the case :)

cryoshon 11y ago

"Through the CCF, as well as by more direct means, the CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War—the closest thing that the U.S. government had to a Ministry of Culture. This left a complex legacy. During the Cold War, it was commonplace to draw the distinction between “totalitarian” and “free” societies by noting that only in the free ones could groups self-organize independently of the state. But many of the groups that made that argument—including the magazines on this left—were often covertly-sponsored instruments of state power, at least in part. Whether or not art and artists would have been more “revolutionary” in the absence of the CIA’s cultural work is a vexed question; what is clear is that that possibility was not a risk they were willing to run. " I wonder if the CIA really stopped being the Ministry of Culture?

rch 11y ago
I assume that's a rhetorical question...
- cryoshon 11y ago
  I'd genuinely like to know, but I'm not sure where to get started if I were interested in finding the CIA's influence on the culture of today.
  - redblacktree 11y ago
    Maybe apply for a job.
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      Don't forget to report your findings here!
protonfish 11y ago
What culture? Fox News, Professional Sports, and reality TV? I miss the days when intellectuals were pandered to. Now they are just irrelevant.

speeder 11y ago

By the way, one magazine like that still exists. CIA, using Ford Foundation, co-founded the Brazillian publisher "Abril", their flagship magazine is called "Veja" (it translates to "See"), it is a sort of centrist magazine (its views resemble the US democratic party, in Brazil this is right of most parties, so the hardcore brazillian left consider "Veja" extreme right-wing, but actual right-wingers consider the magazine as left). It is interesting that although they do spouse many positions that the brazillian right wing consider left, the magazine usually is supportive of US, the few times it said something against the US is when the US pulled some obviously evil stunt (ie: something that even a stupid and ignorant person can perceive as evil). I had a hobby of buying "Veja" and "Carta Capital" (It translates to "Capital Letter"), the CC magazine is clearly leftist, usually supporting the obviously marxist and communist parties, also CC magazine is very critical of US, it is not uncommon to see Veja and CC make reports on the same thing, with completely different conclusions, or see Veja and CC taking stealth jabs at each other (example: insulting someone that has a position the other has, without naming the other directly).

rogerthis 11y ago
"CIA, using Ford Foundation, co-founded the Brazillian publisher "Abril" Source?

jonstokes 11y ago

If anyone can read this and /not/ believe that the security state is very much active in a covert way on social media, reddit, and even specialized forums like this... I realize that to suggest that, say, some proportion of the reddit mods are on the payroll of a .gov alphabet agency sounds like tinfoil hat territory, but it would have been dramatically crazier in the 50's to suggest that the CIA was funding socialist literary magazines, art galleries, and the like.

RodericDay 11y ago
iirc there was a Powerpoint slide in one of Snowden's leaks that basically explicitly discussed manipulation of such fora. I post this in hopes someone who recalls better links to it.
- adsr 11y ago
  Was it JTRIG? In any case, here are links to the stories from the Intercept. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula... https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-domestic-law-enforcement-propaganda/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/controversial-...
igravious 11y ago
Not just literary magazines and social media. For instance, I went to an art exhibition in Berlin a couple of years back to see a retrospective of mid 20th century painting, and some of the info-cards claimed that the CIA sponsored a lot of the avant-garde US and European artists as a way to reject Soviet Social Realism movement. To show in a way that art in the West was freer in its imagination, execution, and scope. Quick Google, here's[1] a piece from the British newspaper, the Independent form 1995 :) It is interesting that despotic regimes tend to persecute intellectuals and artists whereas the CIA, though far from lily-white, seems to have done the opposite. Though I'd say the dossier on Chomsky is a mile long! [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-w...
11y ago

bediger4000 11y ago

So it's not "when did the CIA become a rogue actor", but rather "which stuff did the CIA fund", right? Also, is there anything like a "free market" in the US? It appears that some government agency or another is financing things, or feeding info to entities in just about every single market. This has been going on since WW2, at least. So when do I get to scoff at any mention of a "free market"?

brc 11y ago
Free markets are about freedom of choice in participation - freedom to create a business, take or leave a job, freedom to product or buy the products you want. It's about economic freedom. That the CIA interfered with things doesn't change the fact that people are still free to do those things. You could argue about whether people really free to not buy a diamond ring to announce an engagement or not, in the same way the CIA has been influencing and financing operations. But the fact of the matter is there is no state actors forcing you to do such things.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  > That the CIA interfered with things doesn't change the fact that people are still free to do those things. It certainly does interfere. The propaganda articles displaces other articles and other publications. Or, for a larger example, do you thing AT&T could be driven out of business because of their cosy relationship with the NSA? Heck no. It's more likely that AT&T's government partners will reward it regulatorily and with more contracts, and with social media astroturfing if a movement to boycott AT&T got going. Shut up and consume.
- bediger4000 11y ago
  Any individual might be free to buy or sell or participate or not, but if there's some covert support, monetary or regulatory or informational, then the market isn't working according to the participant's input. A firm offering worse prices to consumers, but getting inside information might drive its competitors out of business, even if they offer superior service or value. The outcome is different. I don't see how re-defining a free market in terms of the participant's choice makes it work like a market in which the government agency hasn't meddled.

sloppycee 11y ago

Communism uses suppression as a means to control the population. I've never considered the converse, using 'promotion' to control the population.

nickbauman 11y ago
Dictatorships use suppression. Communism is a style of collective government. The USSR was never communist, the government merely used the lexicon of communism to suit its needs.
- lexcorvus 11y ago
  The USSR was never communist By this definition, has there ever been a communist country?
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Catalonia from 1936 to 1939. Maybe.
    - nickbauman 11y ago
      Greece shortly after WWII, Maybe.
  - nickbauman 11y ago
    The term Communist Dictatorship is an oxymoron. Even though it's true that Lenin envisioned a dictatorship based on Marx's theories, this is not really anything like communism in the sense that Marx envisioned. The Jewish Kibbutz is a communist organization and notice how democratic it is.
  - sago 11y ago
    It's a no-true-scotsman fallacy at heart. Pretty common though: North Korea is a democratic state (according to its name), but not real democracy. National Socialism wasn't really socialist. The UK isn't a real monarchy. It's a language game compelled by the guilt-by-association level of political sophistication of our culture. When the debate is rarely more sophisticated than 'that's socialist, like Hitler!!!!1!', it's no wonder that the response has to be 'that wasn't true socialism'.

obrero 11y ago

George Orwell wrote in 1984 about how much effort was put into propagandizing to the professional-managerial class by the state. He should know, he was an informant against the left for the Foreign Office via Celia Kirwan. Just go to the front page of the New York Review of Books ( http://www.nybooks.com http://www.nybooks.com ). I know I just had to scan the front page to find some article condemning Arab nationalism and of course one is there, "The Mystery of ISIS" by an anonymous author. It contains pictures of people about to be executed, and a picture of someone pointing a gun at the camera, so you can guess what the text is. What it doesn't talk about is how the US in the past supported religious fanatics in the Middle East against the real US enemy - secular, left-leaning pan-Arab nationalists. Just as the US does today. The US supports Saudi Arabia, where women can't drive, yet bombed Libya, just a few years after Qadaffi had given in to the US and UK after years of Nasserite posturing. Now Islamic fundamentalists sprout there. In Iraq, we had another Nasserite, pan-Arab secular nationalist in a party with socialist roots - Saddam Hussein was overthrown and now we have ISIS in Iraq. More recently the pan-Arab secular nationalist in a party with secular roots in Syria has the US and Europe working to undermine his power. This just happened. So now ISIS controls much of Syria, and just blew up an ancient pagan temple. It's quite clear with all its work to undermine Bashar al-Assad that this is what the US was working to have happen. We can go more into the distant past as well - the secular nationalist parliament of Mossadegh being replaced by a dictatorship initially backed by the mullahs by the US/UK in the 1950s, then the persecution and execution of the secular left - eventually the mullahs changed their mind and now Iran is run by them and devoid of the secular liberals that the CIA sent lists around to be executed. I'm surprised the New York Review of Books doesn't have a nostalgic front-cover piece bashing the Warsaw Pact. Well there were just two on HN's front page the other day. It's great - while the US government is tapping its own citizens and the whole world, extraditing and torturing nationalists who oppose foreign intervention in their home countries, ringing the world with military bases - a US soldier just murdered a Filipino prostitute who he learned was a transvestite, spying on foreign corporations and stealing their industrial secrets, sending drones to willy-nilly bomb villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan and so on, everyone can focus on the errors Lenin commited a century ago, or how some ISIS militants blew up an ancient pagan temple in Syria (who the US helped back by undermining al-Assad's government - in fact investigative reporters have found the US has been actively backing jihadists in Iraq even in recent years).

nickbauman 11y ago

The Soviet Union was a dictatorship. Democratic socialists are natural foes of dictatorships the world over.

xlm1717 11y ago
Democratic socialists are quite capable of forming dictatorships themselves. See: Venezula under Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega.
- triplesec 11y ago
  If they form dictatorships, they are by definition not democratic socialists
- the_af 11y ago
  That's a very liberal (no pun intended) use of the term "dictatorship". I think we should be careful to reserve it for countries which are actually dictatorships, not just countries whose policies or methods of government we disagree with or dislike. Venezuela and Nicaragua were not dictatorships under any realistic definition of the word; they had democratically elected governments within the rule of law, with finite terms and with clear means of political participation. The problem with "dictatorship" is that it's become a curse word. There is a similar problem with "fascism": it has become a way to insult people or governments, whether their are actually fascist (unlikely) or not (more likely).
  - xlm1717 11y ago
    We can use one definition of the word, that offered on the Wikipedia page for Dictatorship: "is a form of government where political authority is monopolized by a person or political entity, and exercised through various mechanisms to ensure the entity's power remains strong." Both Chavez and Ortega regularly intimidated opposition media and relied heavily on propaganda to maintain popular support. Both abolished term limits in their respective countries to remain Presidents for Life. Chavez personally selected his successor, Nicolas Maduro, who narrowly beat Henrique Capriles, Chavez's main opposition, in the 2013 presidential elections, elections that Capriles protested as fraudulent. When Ortega couldn't get the Supreme Court to support his unlimited term limits, he replaced dissenting Justices with sympathetic ones. If these aren't all the signs of a dictatorship, I don't know what is.

cafard 11y ago

Czeslaw Milosz wrote that it was very clear that there was American government money behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom--one didn't need inside information to figure it out.

notNow 11y ago

The US financed Bin Laden and the Afghani Mujaheddin to counterbalance the Soviets in Central Asia in the 80s despite the clear signs of Islamic terrorism gathering pace in the late 70s destabilizing the region and the middle east as well. So all bets are off with these people.

stefantalpalaru 11y ago

Quote from "Tempo presente", the Italian magazine in the list (first number, opening text): > [...] sono incerti e problematici i confini del nostro mondo morale; incerte le norme del comportamento individuale; incerti il significato e i limiti dell'azione politica quale oggi la si pratica o la si propugna; incerto soprattutto il valore delle idee e delle ideologie correnti. > [...] uncertain and problematic are the confines of our moral world; uncertain the norms of individual behavior; uncertain the meaning and limits of the political action practiced or defended today; uncertain most of all the value of current ideas and ideologies. source: http://www.bibliotecaginobianco.it/flip/TEP/01/0100/#/3/zoomed http://www.bibliotecaginobianco.it/flip/TEP/01/0100/#/3/zoom...

serve_yay 11y ago

So is it just socialist publications, then? No publications of other ideological bents deserving of similar scrutiny? Fantastic.

thirstywhimbrel 11y ago

Did anyone actually read why these magazines were "highly ranked"? > the CIA actually thought that Levitas’s anti-Communism was too ferocious, unrelenting, and “conservative.” ... the CIA wanted a more moderate and “sophisticated” voice ... The New Leader remained progressive in the context of U.S. domestic politics; it was one of the first publications to publish Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. > Like other magazines affiliated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Mundo Nuevo published essays critical of U.S. policy in Latin America and Vietnam. Its usefulness, from the U.S. government’s point of view, consisted in its defense of the responsibility of the artist as an independent critic of power ... I'm probably the only one in this thread, but I actually think some of these cases fall short of crimes against humanity. I mean, of all the dirty secret squirrel things governments do, if I had to pick, then (1) funding the early publication of 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' and (2) encouraging artists to challenge entrenched power (to include US policy) would be pretty high on my list.

dang 11y ago
> I'm probably the only one in this thread, but I actually think some of these cases fall short of crimes against humanity. It's good to resist making generalizing statements about the community. There's little evidence here of readers objecting to the CIA having funded literary journals during the Cold War. (They funded a lot of things, including great musicians [1]. It's surprising what good taste they had.) Mostly the thread consists of extrapolation to present affairs—maybe not the most substantive discussion because it's so speculative, but probably unavoidable. 1. http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/louis-armstrong-plays-historic-cold-war-concerts-in-east-berlin-budapest-1965.html http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/louis-armstrong-plays-his...

abdias 11y ago

These are not the only magazines CIA funded. They where very active in the (radical) feminist movement and funded among other "Ms." and Gloria Steinem, who also was sent to Moscow for Socialist meet-ups, payed by the same. Also this movement is rooted in socialism (to primarily break down the family union, as we can see today). No one can say feminism is not influential in the world today. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem#CIA_ties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Steinem#CIA_ties -> http://www.namebase.org/steinem.html http://www.namebase.org/steinem.html http://www.namebase.org/foia/festival.html http://www.namebase.org/foia/festival.html And in an interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HRUEqyZ7p8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HRUEqyZ7p8 https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-fam...

jlindsay 11y ago

Anyone read Eric Schmidt "The New Digital Age", Eric talks about cyberwar, Luddites, and geo politics as it relates to tech and data collection for the government, just replace the word the future with the present.

SZJX 11y ago

It's obviously not any news that CIA and similar agencies sponsor disruptive activities all over the world as long as they see fit to their own interest. So-called "democracy" and "freedom" etc. are just all convenient excuses, pretext of war. Maybe the only interesting thing here is the assertion that apparently leftists don't only fight capitalists, they also fight totalitarian regimes which have long abandoned their leftist roots. This might further clarifies things a bit.