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The Pentagon and CIA have shaped thousands of movies into effective propaganda

173 points by myshpa 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
myshpa 3y ago
Original title: The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda Relevant articles: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unofficial-propaganda-arm-of-the-u-s-military-1.5560575 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unof... How Hollywood became the unofficial propaganda arm of the U.S. military https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2022/08/04/new-documentary-scrutinizes-pentagon-hollywood-relationship-but-is-it-propaganda/ https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2022... New documentary scrutinizes Pentagon-Hollywood relationship — but is it propaganda? https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129369 https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129369 The Historical Roots of CIA-Hollywood Propaganda https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/26/top-gun-for-hire-why-hollywood-is-the-us-militarys-best-wingman https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/26/top-gun-for-hir... Top Gun for hire: why Hollywood is the US military’s best wingman https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-hollywood-star-lobbies-the-eu-for-more-surveillance/ https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho... How a Hollywood star lobbies the EU for more surveillance The European Union debates a new law that could force platforms to scan all private messages for signs of child abuse. Its most prominent advocate is the actor Ashton Kutcher.
mikece 3y ago
I'm curious: for how many people is this news? For those more inquiring you should look into the Smith-Mundt Act, which makes it illegal for the US Government to directly propagandize the American people; it was effectively repealed in 2012.
- vuln 3y ago
  Thanks Obama. :)
- the_optimist 3y ago
  Is there a difference between propaganda and false information? This is a practical question. If they say “propaganda” but in practice simply plant false information, is that still in scope?
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Actually propaganda is quite often very not false information. That's the whole point. You take a kernel of truth and surround it with false pretenses and warped context to make something that is one way seem completely different. That kernel of truth is absolutely essential for your sycophants to use to beat everyone else over the head with, pushing that the legitimacy of this one bit of truth legitimizes the rest of the bullshit.
  - serf 3y ago
    my take: propaganda is engineered to distort a view, perhaps to advantage. 'false information' is used to throw others through a loop or get them to investigate false leads, thus slowing/tangling them. most propaganda has an obvious assumption/take included with it; "China is taking our work, so hate China." "While our troops are fighting for freedom against Evil Dictator in Etcistan." most false information has an open premise ; "could be aliens. how do you know the world isn't flat, have you seen it? she could be a lizard person.." but to be clear : both are used by governments to enact methods of power and control.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    > Is there a difference between propaganda and false information? Yes, not all propaganda is false. Propaganda uses both truth and lies freely, choosing whichever is most convenient for the narrative being promoted. Often propaganda tells you things which are true, while simply omitting other truths. Propaganda also uses statements which are neither true nor false, e.g. subjective value claims. From the other angle, not all false information is propaganda. This statement is false: My hair is red. That's false, but it's not propaganda. Propaganda and false information are overlapping sets, but neither is a strict subset of the other.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
- calgarymicro 3y ago
  It wasn't repealed, it was amended[0] to allow the US AGM (formerly BBG) to broadcast in the US - in other words, VOA, RFE/RL, RFA, etc. Still pretty easy to look out for. [0]https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736...
- hulitu 3y ago
  > which makes it illegal for the US Government to directly propagandize the American people That was never a problem. All american propaganda outlets are sponsored by NGOs. The main advantage is that propaganda suddenly looks like your local news.
tstrimple 3y ago
This must be the left wing media everyone is always talking about.
yieldcrv 3y ago
I didnt realize this until I went to a film festival in another country and saw war movies about conflicts the US eventually was involved in, but during time periods before or after and heros and protagonists from other countries in the war. It was a mixture of noticing how Hollywood has barely any of this, and the awkwardness of rooting for the hero. Just a juvenile cognitive dissonance being overwritten.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
"The loan was followed in 1948 by a free grant of $2.3 billion from the Marshall Plan, with no repayment. In exchange, French cinemas would replace the numerical quota with a "screen quota". This meant that French cinemas were required to show French-made films for four weeks out of every thirteen and leave the other nine weeks of every quarter open to free competition, namely from American films.[5]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Byrnes_agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Byrnes_agreement
- Dig1t 3y ago
  Wow that's insane. If China did that same thing today, we would be up in arms.
  - tough 3y ago
    Spain has quotas for regional languages too, this made Netflix had to produce on those languages. Governments keep doing this, it's just bad if the one doing it is also the -global- leader of right now... Random article talking about this https://www.catalannews.com/culture/item/spain-s-netflix-law-criticized-over-lack-of-quotas-for-catalan-language https://www.catalannews.com/culture/item/spain-s-netflix-law...
  - runjake 3y ago
    Perhaps the Chinese government funded this very article?
    - trasz4 3y ago
      [dead]
  - goneri 3y ago
    Insane? Really? There is nothing wrong with defending your language and the artistic industry. They've got also some similar quotas for the song in French on the radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law.
nocoiner 3y ago
In all sincerity: so what? And I have a few reasons for that reaction, only one of which is empty whataboutism (so I’ll get that one out of the way first). 1. Do the citizens of this he democratic west imagine that our adversaries don’t engage in propaganda? Please, get real. Not saying two wrongs make a right, but unilateral disarmament in the battle for hearts and minds doesn’t seem particularly prudent either. 2. This particular article is scattershot to the point of being incoherent. Also, it’s funny when it criticizes “Clear and Present Danger” for not being true to reality … when … it’s a move based … on a novel. Uhhhh. 3. The article talks about the movies that have resisted military influence and assumes they are better for it, but what about the stories that were improved by military influence? For a variety of obvious reasons, war and the battlefield is pretty fertile ground for human storytelling. It’s natural that these stories get told. It isn’t inevitably and automatically a bad thing if the military has an influence on how these stories are told.
- scarecrowbob 3y ago
  "what about the stories that were improved by military influence?" This is the best thing I have read this week thus far, and will probably haunt me for the rest of my week. When I was looking at "Triumph of the Will" with film classes I taught, there was a certain beauty in that horror. The story it tells is definitely less unsettling than the reality it presents.
dash2 3y ago
If this content-free nonsense isn't Russia-funded, I'll eat my hat.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  You need Russia to pay money to tell you the obvious things everyone already knew? Sounds like a pretty bad use of their money. Feels like meddling in the elections would yield a better ROI.
wil421 3y ago
Similar things have been said about the rise of FSP games. I’ve heard the military basically created FPS games for their combat simulators. They also pushed or gave money to developers to popularize FPS games. FPS=first person shooter.
- giobox 3y ago
  I've never heard this argument ever for FPS games - the history of the FPS is extremely well documented. The earliest FPS games are frankly far too basic to be of much use for military training.
  - fidotron 3y ago
    Indeed, the market demand for Doom was basically pre existing. There was a sort of assumption this was what people wanted and what was preventing it to that point was the technology. I am not sure you see too many situations like that. Spotting them in advance is much harder than hindsight.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    > "The earliest FPS games are frankly far too basic to be of much use for military training." That didn't stop them from trying to use Doom to train "military thinking" and "exercise and develop their decision making abilities": https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019/11/06/the-corps-authorized-marines-to-play-a-special-version-of-doom-in-the-late-90s-to-help-train-for-combat/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019... Related: Human silhouette targets at firing ranges, low fidelity as they are, were developed to reduce inhibitions against shooting people. They are used by police and military for this purpose and probably work.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  That doesn't sound true, but they did make one of the best shooters (America's Army) and released it for free as an advertisement basically.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
nsxwolf 3y ago
I wonder if "Contagion" was propaganda. It really made me believe that if a SARS pandemic ever happened, a bunch of incredibly competent scientists and government agents would swoop in and save us all. The "Olympus Has Fallen" series also made me believe that if a mob ever stepped foot on the White House lawn, a bunch of auto turrets would pop up and gun them all down. The last few years has shown that the world is run by a bunch of jokers, no different than me. That's comforting in some ways, horrifying in others, and sadly has ruined the illusion of some of my favorite movies.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Contagion got things pretty much spot-on. Conspiracy theorists with fake cures, political officials who fight mitigation measures, contact tracing, panic buying, at-home substitutes for school events, fairly rapid vaccine development and the initial scarcity of it. The major difference was the mortality rate; the movie's virus killed something like 25%. One of the odd difficulties with COVID is it's deadly enough (especially pre-vaccine) to make a serious pile of excess deaths on a population-level scale, but low enough people can just get used to it.
  - elteto 3y ago
    Contagion also compressed time quite a bit because it’s a movie meant to entertain. It couldn’t show the long months of research, development and testing that actual science requires. Still a great movie.
    - vxNsr 3y ago
      Fun fact: I worked in the office building where they filmed the CDC scenes (spoiler: it’s not and never was the CDCs real office), was kinda cool to walk the halls and enter the clean room they used.
    - jibe 3y ago
      It wasn’t too bad, the movie spanned 4 months from outbreak to vaccine. Pfizer’s Covid trial started 5 months after outbreak. If Covid was killing 20% like the virus in the movie, we could have matched or beaten the movie timeline.
tennisflyi 3y ago
Yes and everything else. "Walt Disney shaped 20+ Hollywood Films into Super Effective Marvel Ads"
- ausbah 3y ago
  US military has its fingers in Marvel to. Captain America, Iron Man, and Captain Marvel all used military assets in exchange for looking good
ilaksh 3y ago
War is probably not possible without propaganda. Wars are strategic, but people generally won't participate in mass killing or property destruction without an (invented or exaggerated) ethical justification. The most significant cause of global insecurity are myths like good, evil, ethicality and fairness between nations, etc. My hope is that tracking resources and making them more abundant and distributing first-party true information uniformly might help. But I don't think there will be any "real" global security without a fully integrated political framework. Selfishness, resource limitations, poorly distributed information about resources, dated technology, racism, and myths like I mentioned above are blockers for integration. Maybe the crux of it is that war IS the way we do geopolitical integration. If that is the case, then one fantasy alternative might be for the leaders to fight it out instead of whole societies tearing each other apart instead.
- imglorp 3y ago
  Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will -- Joseph Goebbels
- uLogMicheal 3y ago
  What if the propaganda gets set up to keep us always in war?
jhoechtl 3y ago
[flagged]
robd003 3y ago
Remember in the 1980s when movies were good? Can we go back to that?
maerF0x0 3y ago
In the early 90's my moms friend group was passing around this VHS where a guy who claimed to be ex military nervously explained that a lot of hollywood production was the government easing secrets it knew and legally had to disclose to the public so it would put them into hollywood movies. Things like spy stuff or aliens. I have no idea how I'd ever find the source or original of that. Would be interesting to see if the internet knows.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 3y ago
  In those same groups that made those VHS tapes, there's a theory on the name Hollywood itself. The wand that Merlin used to cast spells was made from holly. This was a core part of their evidence that the movie industry is meant to keep the populace under the spell of their illusions, or some such logic Sadly, I have way too much familiarity with these VHS tapes and 'zines and radio programs. Once the internet took off, it was like gasoline on a fire for the spreading of this stuff.
  - maerF0x0 3y ago
    Are they archived somewhere for viewing? I wonder because I was too young to really understand it much and it'd actually help me sort out part of my childhood.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      I will not be a part of willfully spreading that information. If you're that interested, it's not hard to find
      - maerF0x0 3y ago
        Yeah to be clear I do not see it as "Information" as in factual accounts, but more like "information" like these kinds of movies existed, those people made such claims (perhaps without evidence). Kind of like a police report can say "So and so alleges X" . Anyways if they're not hard to find I'll have to dig some more.
ElMocambo_x4 3y ago
Yet another "conspiracy theory" that turned out to be true.
- have_faith 3y ago
  Good point, I'm going to believe all conspiracy theories from now on.
  - Julesman 3y ago
    There are three types of people circling around conspiracy theories. 1) Literate people who care about history and know that industry does what's best for profit at all costs. 2) People who don't read much looking for a hobby. 3) Liberals hoping to pass off their empty skepticism as allegiance to the mainstream.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      > The term 'conspiracy theory' was itself a product on CIA influence operations in this country, specifically intended to squash interest in the assassination of JFK. The ol' "conspiracy theory conspiracy": https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-conspiracy-theory-jfk-941578119864 https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-conspiracy-theory-jfk-...
      - Julesman 3y ago
        Thanks for the correction. I think it would have been better for me to say that counter-intelligence operations in the country have long intentionally colored inconvenient facts as wild conjecture, regardless of their historical foundation.
        deleted 3y ago
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      - Julesman 3y ago
        I found this telling. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy+theory&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy+the...
someoldgit 3y ago
Ayn Rand Wrote a Guide for Hollywood on How to Make Pro-Capitalist Movies. https://gizmodo.com/ayn-rand-wrote-a-guide-for-hollywood-on-how-to-make-pro-1776242190 https://gizmodo.com/ayn-rand-wrote-a-guide-for-hollywood-on-... Link to copy of the book. http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/screenguideamericans.pdf http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/screenguideamericans.pd...
- wrftaylor 3y ago
  The last section on "Don't smear political institutions" is ever more relevant today.
oneshtein 3y ago
Discussed in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835933
Workaccount2 3y ago
I simply can't take a source like this seriously. Am I denying that the government has interest in and lobbies for friendly content portrayals? No. Will I get information about it from charged up ideologue who clearly has a strong slant against the US government/military. No. It's effectively random blog tier credibility.
- ghusto 3y ago
  Have to agree, though I thought it was common knowledge (at least in circles such as this) that the U.S.A. government does this? Didn't they admit as much long ago?
- acqq 3y ago
  The sources exist: The book, $13: https://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Cinema-Government-Hollywood/dp/1548084980 https://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Cinema-Government-H... The article about the book: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/27/nsec-f27.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/27/nsec-f27.html "Using the Freedom of Information Act, the authors gained access to files that exposed the extent of government censorship in films between 1911 and 2017. The DOD (Department of Defense, or Pentagon) provided military equipment and “advice,” and even allowed members of the military to make appearances, in exchange for some degree of control over the content of 814 films. The authors continue, “If we include the 1,133 TV titles in our count, the number of screen entertainment products supported by the DOD leaps to 1,947. If we are to include the individual episodes for each title on long-running shows like 24, Homeland, and NCIS, as well as the influence of other major organisations like the FBI, CIA and White House then it becomes clear that the national security state has supported thousands of products.”" The movie discussed in the title article, streaming $4.75: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theatersofwar https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theatersofwar
- webmobdev 3y ago
  You do know that "communist" artists in Hollywood were spied on, harassed and even blacklisted? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
JustifyContent 3y ago
[flagged]
- imwillofficial 3y ago
  It’s working guys
- ndndkejwndn 3y ago
  [flagged]
mcpackieh 3y ago
This effects not only the movies we see, but also influences which movies get made in the first place. There's little telling what kind of anti-war movies we might have gotten, which withered on the vine because producers knew it wouldn't be possible to make the movie on a reasonable budget to the standard audiences have come to expect (e.g. real aircraft instead of mediocre scale models or CGI.) Try making an anti-Navy response to Top Gun; you won't get access to real fighter jets so your movie is doomed to look like second-rate shit, while simultaneously requiring a huge special effects budget to even get close. Bigger budget for an inferior product is a recipe for a commercial failure, so it just doesn't happen.
- DesiLurker 3y ago
  right, the shrinking of overton window is the real win here for 'them'.
macinjosh 3y ago
Someday, I hope, the general US voting public will get past this propaganda and become aware that they are an unwitting cog in a wheel of war and destruction across the world. We have been repeatedly lied to about how, when, and why the US engages in war, coups, and other violent actions disguised as "intelligence activities." These are powers the Constitution attempted to restrict to the people (e.g. congress), and not the executive branch. One example, not many people know that Obama's administration unilaterally executed a 16 year old US citizen by drone. No trial, no rights, just killed by the CIA and military because his dad was a very bad guy. Trump did the same to his little sister years later. Source: https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-old-american-in-yemen-trump-just-killed-his-8-year-old-sister/ https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-o...
- dylan604 3y ago
  I don't know why this seems so strange. Throughout history, every leading nation has done this. The US is just the most recent version. The British empire, the Romans, the Persians are just examples of the precedent. The US has just dropped language like empire and replaced with humanitarian
gumby 3y ago
After the end of the vietnam war, the pentagon embarked on a deliberate program of propaganda as the attitude towards the military was at an all time low. This has only only involved hollywood (Apocalypse Now was filmed in the Philippines with Philippine military gear because the Pentagon wanted script control) but also professional sports, who get billions a year from the pentagon these days. I understand that (and why) the military's reputation was at a nadir, but they have gone too far in the opposite direction. Even in WWII when people depended on the military for what they thought was an existential battle, the general attitude was one of SNAFU, i.e. "sure, it's incompetent and fucked up but it's the best we've got so let's try to make it work". A healthier attitude.
- BashiBazouk 3y ago
  My family had a friend who was an officer in the Marines. In the Vietnam war he was one of the people who went in and burned villages, you know the bad stuff. When Apocalypse Now came out he got a copy on Beta-max, brought it over and insisted all his friends watch it. He said it was the only movie that really captured the insanity of that war.
  - dudul 3y ago
    Hum, I don't know, FMJ does a pretty good job too I think.
    - BashiBazouk 3y ago
      True, but almost a decade late for the family friend to make his point and not mentioned in the parent comment...
teh_klev 3y ago
One of the co-producers of Theaters of War, Tom Secker, has a podcast called ClandesTime where he explores FOIA'd documents from the various entertainment liasion offices run by the DoD, FBI etc. Well worth a follow and listen if this is your kind of thing: https://www.spyculture.com/podcasts/ https://www.spyculture.com/podcasts/
trasz4 3y ago
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thw99 3y ago
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js2 3y ago
Former Navy SEAL who's a technical advisor to Hollywood is worried about politicians interfering with the Pentagon's ability to continue to shape movies into effective propaganda over tensions with China: > The Green amendment misunderstands film distribution in China, and more important, it misses the U.S. military’s long and productive relationship with Hollywood. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/opinion/contributors/china-american-movies.html?unlocked_article_code=iMzsk1z5rKPW-oCIzvJEEKG1N4VOj_-ig7D6mqRXbrNIjQmUW1l2Jo0KMYO5PQYhtuc_4v8KjDxrlNM4TMsJTq9w1RHzvaQOF07ofMPla4LYhRnDqOs1HsniWIj_IDOcs4_1h1MOFb0Bl9KMn681Tqj0Sn4UeO0E2emL9VQu-gZOCJNU84HD2d8KhDNuu7MvidkRKsKlTYY5xT6gOa32JSvXVKkFK3uFWZncCjTQO0adMIvDNpiymJskB4HoP4rHY72nT4iL7B6fEaotSYM6r2EBtu7ude3lD2j0DyIVUvSko4foPSyaZ-MI46sv4UuALL7ybMZDXrS2WOdJyp_Gjd8BTvRoDfLE2MRt9g&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/opinion/contributors/chin...
seer 3y ago
Of course they did, I’m kinda surprised this is news. However the ongoing invasion of ukraine kinda showed everybody that western nations are not just “duped” into following USA, they actually want it - its an alinement of values not of convenience. Read a very good analysis of this from the acoup blog - https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/ https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coa... Which kinda suggest that things would have moved in a similar direction even without the efforts of USA to shape public opinion. And to be fair the way they went about it in europe was incredibly conscience, given the position of power they had.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Yeah, the big difference compared to a certain former superpower is that the US seems to be well capable of recognizing a win/win as a victory, not as a tie bordering on defeat.
cobertos 3y ago
> The military has written policies on what it approves and disapproves. It disapproves depictions of failures and crimes, which eliminates much of reality. It rejects films about veteran suicide, racism in the military, sexual harassment and assault in the military Regardless of the articles truth related to the military, I do think Hollywood _in general_ has a problem depicting failure, crime, relationships, intimacy, and other complex topics with any basis in reality. Black and white approval/disapproval policies only make this worse by throwing out subtleties in the interplay between some of these topics. The problem though is how it imparts a warped view on the viewer. We value the themes learned (sometimes not _a lot_ of value, but enough) but assigning _any_ value to them is dangerous because they are so far away from true lived experience. We're always only given a quick, simplistic overview of things causing us to Dunning-Kruger so many concepts causing us to reinforce societal norms we wouldn't have otherwise.
steve76 3y ago
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DesiLurker 3y ago
I remember listening to this on citations pod couple of years ago. https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-hollywood-and-the-pentagon-a-follow-up-conversation-with-oliver-stone https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-hollywood-and-... they also had a similar coverage of Copaganda in media: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-the-growing-pushback-to-copaganda https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-the-growing-pu... btw this has been going on for a while. I recently finished an excellent compilation of Vietnam war realities & lies in a book called 'kill anything that moves' & its basically the same propaganda machine reshaping public perception for its benefits.
tomaskafka 3y ago
All mainstream aliens movies till the end of cold war, and many now, are about how anyone foreign is a great and must be preemptively neutralized. I wonder how much of this is following the crowd, and how much of it is shaping it?
ndndkejwndn 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney's_World_War_II_propaganda_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney's_World_War_II_pro... It’s probably safe to assume literally all mainstream media is propaganda
- wmeredith 3y ago
  Agreed. My father is a full on MAGA hat wearing hater of the “liberal media” which I find to be a laughable phrase. The mainstream media in this country is controlled by what? Three or four corporations that have a massive incentive to keep things just the way they are. That they would present any sort of liberal viewpoint that’s more than skin deep is utter fantasy.
  - mikrotikker 3y ago
    Three or four companies owned by companies that also own pharmaceutical and weapons companies among others so everything is tailored to protect the shareholders and you lose any semblance of real journalism.
winrid 3y ago
See Also: Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/ https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
wkat4242 3y ago
I always wondered if those countless military/intelligence shows like 24, Jack Ryan etc were sponsored as propaganda. They always show off the US intelligence services as the good guys, in unrealistically cool nightclub style offices. But the story is always the same 'anything goes to defeat the bad guys'. Which is exactly the attitude of those services as exposed by Snowden. Sometimes I wonder if they're trying to bend our mindset to make us believe these things are necessary. They make for mildly interesting entertainment but I always wondered if there's more behind it like the article says.
- pangolinja 3y ago
  wait till you find out why they were so keen to spread the idea of America fighting against the Nazis in all those movies and shows; it was so you didn't question who had established the Nazis from the very beginning, who had been funding them all the way to 1942 and beyond, who had secretly supported key Nazi evasion of post war justice, and the covert funding, establishment and maintenance of fascist and neo Nazis paramilitary groups and structures across Europe and the world ever since. the Military propaganda was the cover to keep Dulles and Bush and the rest of the Nazis in good public standing.

173 points by myshpa 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Original title: The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies into Super Effective Propaganda Relevant articles: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unofficial-propaganda-arm-of-the-u-s-military-1.5560575 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unof... How Hollywood became the unofficial propaganda arm of the U.S. military https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2022/08/04/new-documentary-scrutinizes-pentagon-hollywood-relationship-but-is-it-propaganda/ https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2022... New documentary scrutinizes Pentagon-Hollywood relationship — but is it propaganda? https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129369 https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129369 The Historical Roots of CIA-Hollywood Propaganda https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/26/top-gun-for-hire-why-hollywood-is-the-us-militarys-best-wingman https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/26/top-gun-for-hir... Top Gun for hire: why Hollywood is the US military’s best wingman https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-hollywood-star-lobbies-the-eu-for-more-surveillance/ https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho... How a Hollywood star lobbies the EU for more surveillance The European Union debates a new law that could force platforms to scan all private messages for signs of child abuse. Its most prominent advocate is the actor Ashton Kutcher.

mikece 3y ago

I'm curious: for how many people is this news? For those more inquiring you should look into the Smith-Mundt Act, which makes it illegal for the US Government to directly propagandize the American people; it was effectively repealed in 2012.

vuln 3y ago
Thanks Obama. :)
the_optimist 3y ago
Is there a difference between propaganda and false information? This is a practical question. If they say “propaganda” but in practice simply plant false information, is that still in scope?
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Actually propaganda is quite often very not false information. That's the whole point. You take a kernel of truth and surround it with false pretenses and warped context to make something that is one way seem completely different. That kernel of truth is absolutely essential for your sycophants to use to beat everyone else over the head with, pushing that the legitimacy of this one bit of truth legitimizes the rest of the bullshit.
- serf 3y ago
  my take: propaganda is engineered to distort a view, perhaps to advantage. 'false information' is used to throw others through a loop or get them to investigate false leads, thus slowing/tangling them. most propaganda has an obvious assumption/take included with it; "China is taking our work, so hate China." "While our troops are fighting for freedom against Evil Dictator in Etcistan." most false information has an open premise ; "could be aliens. how do you know the world isn't flat, have you seen it? she could be a lizard person.." but to be clear : both are used by governments to enact methods of power and control.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > Is there a difference between propaganda and false information? Yes, not all propaganda is false. Propaganda uses both truth and lies freely, choosing whichever is most convenient for the narrative being promoted. Often propaganda tells you things which are true, while simply omitting other truths. Propaganda also uses statements which are neither true nor false, e.g. subjective value claims. From the other angle, not all false information is propaganda. This statement is false: My hair is red. That's false, but it's not propaganda. Propaganda and false information are overlapping sets, but neither is a strict subset of the other.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
calgarymicro 3y ago
It wasn't repealed, it was amended[0] to allow the US AGM (formerly BBG) to broadcast in the US - in other words, VOA, RFE/RL, RFA, etc. Still pretty easy to look out for. [0]https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736...
hulitu 3y ago
> which makes it illegal for the US Government to directly propagandize the American people That was never a problem. All american propaganda outlets are sponsored by NGOs. The main advantage is that propaganda suddenly looks like your local news.

tstrimple 3y ago

This must be the left wing media everyone is always talking about.

yieldcrv 3y ago

I didnt realize this until I went to a film festival in another country and saw war movies about conflicts the US eventually was involved in, but during time periods before or after and heros and protagonists from other countries in the war. It was a mixture of noticing how Hollywood has barely any of this, and the awkwardness of rooting for the hero. Just a juvenile cognitive dissonance being overwritten.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

"The loan was followed in 1948 by a free grant of $2.3 billion from the Marshall Plan, with no repayment. In exchange, French cinemas would replace the numerical quota with a "screen quota". This meant that French cinemas were required to show French-made films for four weeks out of every thirteen and leave the other nine weeks of every quarter open to free competition, namely from American films.[5]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Byrnes_agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Byrnes_agreement

Dig1t 3y ago
Wow that's insane. If China did that same thing today, we would be up in arms.
- tough 3y ago
  Spain has quotas for regional languages too, this made Netflix had to produce on those languages. Governments keep doing this, it's just bad if the one doing it is also the -global- leader of right now... Random article talking about this https://www.catalannews.com/culture/item/spain-s-netflix-law-criticized-over-lack-of-quotas-for-catalan-language https://www.catalannews.com/culture/item/spain-s-netflix-law...
- runjake 3y ago
  Perhaps the Chinese government funded this very article?
  - trasz4 3y ago
    [dead]
- goneri 3y ago
  Insane? Really? There is nothing wrong with defending your language and the artistic industry. They've got also some similar quotas for the song in French on the radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law.

nocoiner 3y ago

In all sincerity: so what? And I have a few reasons for that reaction, only one of which is empty whataboutism (so I’ll get that one out of the way first). 1. Do the citizens of this he democratic west imagine that our adversaries don’t engage in propaganda? Please, get real. Not saying two wrongs make a right, but unilateral disarmament in the battle for hearts and minds doesn’t seem particularly prudent either. 2. This particular article is scattershot to the point of being incoherent. Also, it’s funny when it criticizes “Clear and Present Danger” for not being true to reality … when … it’s a move based … on a novel. Uhhhh. 3. The article talks about the movies that have resisted military influence and assumes they are better for it, but what about the stories that were improved by military influence? For a variety of obvious reasons, war and the battlefield is pretty fertile ground for human storytelling. It’s natural that these stories get told. It isn’t inevitably and automatically a bad thing if the military has an influence on how these stories are told.

scarecrowbob 3y ago
"what about the stories that were improved by military influence?" This is the best thing I have read this week thus far, and will probably haunt me for the rest of my week. When I was looking at "Triumph of the Will" with film classes I taught, there was a certain beauty in that horror. The story it tells is definitely less unsettling than the reality it presents.

dash2 3y ago

If this content-free nonsense isn't Russia-funded, I'll eat my hat.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
You need Russia to pay money to tell you the obvious things everyone already knew? Sounds like a pretty bad use of their money. Feels like meddling in the elections would yield a better ROI.

wil421 3y ago

Similar things have been said about the rise of FSP games. I’ve heard the military basically created FPS games for their combat simulators. They also pushed or gave money to developers to popularize FPS games. FPS=first person shooter.

giobox 3y ago
I've never heard this argument ever for FPS games - the history of the FPS is extremely well documented. The earliest FPS games are frankly far too basic to be of much use for military training.
- fidotron 3y ago
  Indeed, the market demand for Doom was basically pre existing. There was a sort of assumption this was what people wanted and what was preventing it to that point was the technology. I am not sure you see too many situations like that. Spotting them in advance is much harder than hindsight.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > "The earliest FPS games are frankly far too basic to be of much use for military training." That didn't stop them from trying to use Doom to train "military thinking" and "exercise and develop their decision making abilities": https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019/11/06/the-corps-authorized-marines-to-play-a-special-version-of-doom-in-the-late-90s-to-help-train-for-combat/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2019... Related: Human silhouette targets at firing ranges, low fidelity as they are, were developed to reduce inhibitions against shooting people. They are used by police and military for this purpose and probably work.
ndriscoll 3y ago
That doesn't sound true, but they did make one of the best shooters (America's Army) and released it for free as an advertisement basically.
- ryandrake 3y ago

nsxwolf 3y ago

I wonder if "Contagion" was propaganda. It really made me believe that if a SARS pandemic ever happened, a bunch of incredibly competent scientists and government agents would swoop in and save us all. The "Olympus Has Fallen" series also made me believe that if a mob ever stepped foot on the White House lawn, a bunch of auto turrets would pop up and gun them all down. The last few years has shown that the world is run by a bunch of jokers, no different than me. That's comforting in some ways, horrifying in others, and sadly has ruined the illusion of some of my favorite movies.

ceejayoz 3y ago
Contagion got things pretty much spot-on. Conspiracy theorists with fake cures, political officials who fight mitigation measures, contact tracing, panic buying, at-home substitutes for school events, fairly rapid vaccine development and the initial scarcity of it. The major difference was the mortality rate; the movie's virus killed something like 25%. One of the odd difficulties with COVID is it's deadly enough (especially pre-vaccine) to make a serious pile of excess deaths on a population-level scale, but low enough people can just get used to it.
- elteto 3y ago
  Contagion also compressed time quite a bit because it’s a movie meant to entertain. It couldn’t show the long months of research, development and testing that actual science requires. Still a great movie.
  - vxNsr 3y ago
    Fun fact: I worked in the office building where they filmed the CDC scenes (spoiler: it’s not and never was the CDCs real office), was kinda cool to walk the halls and enter the clean room they used.
  - jibe 3y ago
    It wasn’t too bad, the movie spanned 4 months from outbreak to vaccine. Pfizer’s Covid trial started 5 months after outbreak. If Covid was killing 20% like the virus in the movie, we could have matched or beaten the movie timeline.

tennisflyi 3y ago

Yes and everything else. "Walt Disney shaped 20+ Hollywood Films into Super Effective Marvel Ads"

ausbah 3y ago
US military has its fingers in Marvel to. Captain America, Iron Man, and Captain Marvel all used military assets in exchange for looking good

ilaksh 3y ago

War is probably not possible without propaganda. Wars are strategic, but people generally won't participate in mass killing or property destruction without an (invented or exaggerated) ethical justification. The most significant cause of global insecurity are myths like good, evil, ethicality and fairness between nations, etc. My hope is that tracking resources and making them more abundant and distributing first-party true information uniformly might help. But I don't think there will be any "real" global security without a fully integrated political framework. Selfishness, resource limitations, poorly distributed information about resources, dated technology, racism, and myths like I mentioned above are blockers for integration. Maybe the crux of it is that war IS the way we do geopolitical integration. If that is the case, then one fantasy alternative might be for the leaders to fight it out instead of whole societies tearing each other apart instead.

imglorp 3y ago
Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will -- Joseph Goebbels
uLogMicheal 3y ago
What if the propaganda gets set up to keep us always in war?

jhoechtl 3y ago

[flagged]

robd003 3y ago

Remember in the 1980s when movies were good? Can we go back to that?

maerF0x0 3y ago

In the early 90's my moms friend group was passing around this VHS where a guy who claimed to be ex military nervously explained that a lot of hollywood production was the government easing secrets it knew and legally had to disclose to the public so it would put them into hollywood movies. Things like spy stuff or aliens. I have no idea how I'd ever find the source or original of that. Would be interesting to see if the internet knows.

deleted 3y ago
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dylan604 3y ago
In those same groups that made those VHS tapes, there's a theory on the name Hollywood itself. The wand that Merlin used to cast spells was made from holly. This was a core part of their evidence that the movie industry is meant to keep the populace under the spell of their illusions, or some such logic Sadly, I have way too much familiarity with these VHS tapes and 'zines and radio programs. Once the internet took off, it was like gasoline on a fire for the spreading of this stuff.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  Are they archived somewhere for viewing? I wonder because I was too young to really understand it much and it'd actually help me sort out part of my childhood.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I will not be a part of willfully spreading that information. If you're that interested, it's not hard to find
    - maerF0x0 3y ago
      Yeah to be clear I do not see it as "Information" as in factual accounts, but more like "information" like these kinds of movies existed, those people made such claims (perhaps without evidence). Kind of like a police report can say "So and so alleges X" . Anyways if they're not hard to find I'll have to dig some more.

ElMocambo_x4 3y ago

Yet another "conspiracy theory" that turned out to be true.

have_faith 3y ago
Good point, I'm going to believe all conspiracy theories from now on.
- Julesman 3y ago
  There are three types of people circling around conspiracy theories. 1) Literate people who care about history and know that industry does what's best for profit at all costs. 2) People who don't read much looking for a hobby. 3) Liberals hoping to pass off their empty skepticism as allegiance to the mainstream.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > The term 'conspiracy theory' was itself a product on CIA influence operations in this country, specifically intended to squash interest in the assassination of JFK. The ol' "conspiracy theory conspiracy": https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-conspiracy-theory-jfk-941578119864 https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-conspiracy-theory-jfk-...
    - Julesman 3y ago
      Thanks for the correction. I think it would have been better for me to say that counter-intelligence operations in the country have long intentionally colored inconvenient facts as wild conjecture, regardless of their historical foundation.
      - deleted 3y ago
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    - Julesman 3y ago
      I found this telling. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy+theory&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy+the...

someoldgit 3y ago

Ayn Rand Wrote a Guide for Hollywood on How to Make Pro-Capitalist Movies. https://gizmodo.com/ayn-rand-wrote-a-guide-for-hollywood-on-how-to-make-pro-1776242190 https://gizmodo.com/ayn-rand-wrote-a-guide-for-hollywood-on-... Link to copy of the book. http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/screenguideamericans.pdf http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/screenguideamericans.pd...

wrftaylor 3y ago
The last section on "Don't smear political institutions" is ever more relevant today.

oneshtein 3y ago

Discussed in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835933

Workaccount2 3y ago

I simply can't take a source like this seriously. Am I denying that the government has interest in and lobbies for friendly content portrayals? No. Will I get information about it from charged up ideologue who clearly has a strong slant against the US government/military. No. It's effectively random blog tier credibility.

ghusto 3y ago
Have to agree, though I thought it was common knowledge (at least in circles such as this) that the U.S.A. government does this? Didn't they admit as much long ago?
acqq 3y ago
The sources exist: The book, $13: https://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Cinema-Government-Hollywood/dp/1548084980 https://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Cinema-Government-H... The article about the book: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/27/nsec-f27.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/27/nsec-f27.html "Using the Freedom of Information Act, the authors gained access to files that exposed the extent of government censorship in films between 1911 and 2017. The DOD (Department of Defense, or Pentagon) provided military equipment and “advice,” and even allowed members of the military to make appearances, in exchange for some degree of control over the content of 814 films. The authors continue, “If we include the 1,133 TV titles in our count, the number of screen entertainment products supported by the DOD leaps to 1,947. If we are to include the individual episodes for each title on long-running shows like 24, Homeland, and NCIS, as well as the influence of other major organisations like the FBI, CIA and White House then it becomes clear that the national security state has supported thousands of products.”" The movie discussed in the title article, streaming $4.75: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theatersofwar https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theatersofwar
webmobdev 3y ago
You do know that "communist" artists in Hollywood were spied on, harassed and even blacklisted? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist

JustifyContent 3y ago

[flagged]

imwillofficial 3y ago
It’s working guys
ndndkejwndn 3y ago
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mcpackieh 3y ago

This effects not only the movies we see, but also influences which movies get made in the first place. There's little telling what kind of anti-war movies we might have gotten, which withered on the vine because producers knew it wouldn't be possible to make the movie on a reasonable budget to the standard audiences have come to expect (e.g. real aircraft instead of mediocre scale models or CGI.) Try making an anti-Navy response to Top Gun; you won't get access to real fighter jets so your movie is doomed to look like second-rate shit, while simultaneously requiring a huge special effects budget to even get close. Bigger budget for an inferior product is a recipe for a commercial failure, so it just doesn't happen.

DesiLurker 3y ago
right, the shrinking of overton window is the real win here for 'them'.

macinjosh 3y ago

Someday, I hope, the general US voting public will get past this propaganda and become aware that they are an unwitting cog in a wheel of war and destruction across the world. We have been repeatedly lied to about how, when, and why the US engages in war, coups, and other violent actions disguised as "intelligence activities." These are powers the Constitution attempted to restrict to the people (e.g. congress), and not the executive branch. One example, not many people know that Obama's administration unilaterally executed a 16 year old US citizen by drone. No trial, no rights, just killed by the CIA and military because his dad was a very bad guy. Trump did the same to his little sister years later. Source: https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-old-american-in-yemen-trump-just-killed-his-8-year-old-sister/ https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-o...

dylan604 3y ago
I don't know why this seems so strange. Throughout history, every leading nation has done this. The US is just the most recent version. The British empire, the Romans, the Persians are just examples of the precedent. The US has just dropped language like empire and replaced with humanitarian

gumby 3y ago

After the end of the vietnam war, the pentagon embarked on a deliberate program of propaganda as the attitude towards the military was at an all time low. This has only only involved hollywood (Apocalypse Now was filmed in the Philippines with Philippine military gear because the Pentagon wanted script control) but also professional sports, who get billions a year from the pentagon these days. I understand that (and why) the military's reputation was at a nadir, but they have gone too far in the opposite direction. Even in WWII when people depended on the military for what they thought was an existential battle, the general attitude was one of SNAFU, i.e. "sure, it's incompetent and fucked up but it's the best we've got so let's try to make it work". A healthier attitude.

BashiBazouk 3y ago
My family had a friend who was an officer in the Marines. In the Vietnam war he was one of the people who went in and burned villages, you know the bad stuff. When Apocalypse Now came out he got a copy on Beta-max, brought it over and insisted all his friends watch it. He said it was the only movie that really captured the insanity of that war.
- dudul 3y ago
  Hum, I don't know, FMJ does a pretty good job too I think.
  - BashiBazouk 3y ago
    True, but almost a decade late for the family friend to make his point and not mentioned in the parent comment...

teh_klev 3y ago

One of the co-producers of Theaters of War, Tom Secker, has a podcast called ClandesTime where he explores FOIA'd documents from the various entertainment liasion offices run by the DoD, FBI etc. Well worth a follow and listen if this is your kind of thing: https://www.spyculture.com/podcasts/ https://www.spyculture.com/podcasts/

trasz4 3y ago

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thw99 3y ago

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js2 3y ago

Former Navy SEAL who's a technical advisor to Hollywood is worried about politicians interfering with the Pentagon's ability to continue to shape movies into effective propaganda over tensions with China: > The Green amendment misunderstands film distribution in China, and more important, it misses the U.S. military’s long and productive relationship with Hollywood. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/opinion/contributors/china-american-movies.html?unlocked_article_code=iMzsk1z5rKPW-oCIzvJEEKG1N4VOj_-ig7D6mqRXbrNIjQmUW1l2Jo0KMYO5PQYhtuc_4v8KjDxrlNM4TMsJTq9w1RHzvaQOF07ofMPla4LYhRnDqOs1HsniWIj_IDOcs4_1h1MOFb0Bl9KMn681Tqj0Sn4UeO0E2emL9VQu-gZOCJNU84HD2d8KhDNuu7MvidkRKsKlTYY5xT6gOa32JSvXVKkFK3uFWZncCjTQO0adMIvDNpiymJskB4HoP4rHY72nT4iL7B6fEaotSYM6r2EBtu7ude3lD2j0DyIVUvSko4foPSyaZ-MI46sv4UuALL7ybMZDXrS2WOdJyp_Gjd8BTvRoDfLE2MRt9g&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/opinion/contributors/chin...

seer 3y ago

Of course they did, I’m kinda surprised this is news. However the ongoing invasion of ukraine kinda showed everybody that western nations are not just “duped” into following USA, they actually want it - its an alinement of values not of convenience. Read a very good analysis of this from the acoup blog - https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/ https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coa... Which kinda suggest that things would have moved in a similar direction even without the efforts of USA to shape public opinion. And to be fair the way they went about it in europe was incredibly conscience, given the position of power they had.

usrusr 3y ago
Yeah, the big difference compared to a certain former superpower is that the US seems to be well capable of recognizing a win/win as a victory, not as a tie bordering on defeat.

cobertos 3y ago

> The military has written policies on what it approves and disapproves. It disapproves depictions of failures and crimes, which eliminates much of reality. It rejects films about veteran suicide, racism in the military, sexual harassment and assault in the military Regardless of the articles truth related to the military, I do think Hollywood _in general_ has a problem depicting failure, crime, relationships, intimacy, and other complex topics with any basis in reality. Black and white approval/disapproval policies only make this worse by throwing out subtleties in the interplay between some of these topics. The problem though is how it imparts a warped view on the viewer. We value the themes learned (sometimes not _a lot_ of value, but enough) but assigning _any_ value to them is dangerous because they are so far away from true lived experience. We're always only given a quick, simplistic overview of things causing us to Dunning-Kruger so many concepts causing us to reinforce societal norms we wouldn't have otherwise.

steve76 3y ago

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DesiLurker 3y ago

I remember listening to this on citations pod couple of years ago. https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-hollywood-and-the-pentagon-a-follow-up-conversation-with-oliver-stone https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-hollywood-and-... they also had a similar coverage of Copaganda in media: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-the-growing-pushback-to-copaganda https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/news-brief-the-growing-pu... btw this has been going on for a while. I recently finished an excellent compilation of Vietnam war realities & lies in a book called 'kill anything that moves' & its basically the same propaganda machine reshaping public perception for its benefits.

tomaskafka 3y ago

All mainstream aliens movies till the end of cold war, and many now, are about how anyone foreign is a great and must be preemptively neutralized. I wonder how much of this is following the crowd, and how much of it is shaping it?

ndndkejwndn 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney's_World_War_II_propaganda_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney's_World_War_II_pro... It’s probably safe to assume literally all mainstream media is propaganda

wmeredith 3y ago
Agreed. My father is a full on MAGA hat wearing hater of the “liberal media” which I find to be a laughable phrase. The mainstream media in this country is controlled by what? Three or four corporations that have a massive incentive to keep things just the way they are. That they would present any sort of liberal viewpoint that’s more than skin deep is utter fantasy.
- mikrotikker 3y ago
  Three or four companies owned by companies that also own pharmaceutical and weapons companies among others so everything is tailored to protect the shareholders and you lose any semblance of real journalism.

winrid 3y ago

See Also: Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/ https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/

wkat4242 3y ago

I always wondered if those countless military/intelligence shows like 24, Jack Ryan etc were sponsored as propaganda. They always show off the US intelligence services as the good guys, in unrealistically cool nightclub style offices. But the story is always the same 'anything goes to defeat the bad guys'. Which is exactly the attitude of those services as exposed by Snowden. Sometimes I wonder if they're trying to bend our mindset to make us believe these things are necessary. They make for mildly interesting entertainment but I always wondered if there's more behind it like the article says.

pangolinja 3y ago
wait till you find out why they were so keen to spread the idea of America fighting against the Nazis in all those movies and shows; it was so you didn't question who had established the Nazis from the very beginning, who had been funding them all the way to 1942 and beyond, who had secretly supported key Nazi evasion of post war justice, and the covert funding, establishment and maintenance of fascist and neo Nazis paramilitary groups and structures across Europe and the world ever since. the Military propaganda was the cover to keep Dulles and Bush and the rest of the Nazis in good public standing.