7 ms·

They didn't just establish abstract expressionist art, they crafted a whole culture around art and the humanities. They won over the western bias. Aesthetics, d

by Atlas667 11mo ago

They didn't just establish abstract expressionist art, they crafted a whole culture around art and the humanities. They won over the western bias. Aesthetics, depth, reason and humanity in the west was defined through the lens of the CIA. It was done so well it still resonates. Dr. Gabriel Rockhill does excellent work expounding on this in his discussion "The Intellectual World War: Class Struggle in Theory". He studied in France under Derrida, Iragray, Badiou, Foucaultians, and other prominent thinkers and came to discover the connections himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q521mBZ7ThU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q521mBZ7ThU It's kind of a long lecture, but absolutely mind blowing.

bazoom42 11mo ago
They didn’t “establish” abstract expresssionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture. It was not like CIA developed art or jazz musicians in a lab, they just realized it was great marketing for US culture, especially as communist-bloc art and culture became increasingly bland and conformist. It was probably one of the best investments CIA ever made.
- ta12653421 11mo ago
  ...and dont forget McDonalds and the famous Marlboro Guy :-D
- rixed 11mo ago
  This is what conspiracy theorists fail to keep in mind: in politics usually you do not create anything, you reframe and exploit whatever events happen to occur. Same idea with this left-wing idea that "no revolutionary has ever made a revolution to happen". I believe it's particularly hard for people whose profession is to think, design and engineer, to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history.
  - jack_tripper 11mo ago
    >to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history Except the stuff people actually care about like purchasing power, bills, wages, and housing are manipulated by purposely designed economic policies and not by randomness.
    - joachimma 11mo ago
      It seems perfectly plausible to me that the economic incentives are such that there is no need to "design" any of this, no smoke-filled back room needed.
      - jack_tripper 11mo ago
        What?! That statement is self contradictory. If you have economic incentives then somebody or a group of people put those incentives into place in order to reach a desired outcome(typically accumulation of wealth and/or power for a target group). We're not talking about facts of nature like gravity or the speed of light. You don't exist in a truly random system but one where you're playing by the rules made by someone else, rules that can change on a whim, as the government intervenes at every level to manipulate the scales, for better and for worse, resulting in it picking winners and loosers.
      - Retric 11mo ago
        Economic incentives never point in just one direction. There’s always tradeoffs around time horizons, risks, etc which is where individual people’s decisions come into play. Should we subsidize industry X is rarely a question decided on economic merits alone. And so it goes with individual interests shaping the entire global economy in surprisingly profound ways. Extreme ultraviolet lithography for example shapes industries, but has a history steeped in various public/private partnerships and global politics.
  - pjc50 11mo ago
    It's a bad day for anti-conspiracy theorists when there's a dump of Epstein emails which are basically all "hey guys any news on the conspiracy? would you like some underage girls to go with that?" I would note that the public conspiracy theorists tend to be "exactly wrong", though. Claiming that everything is a conspiracy, without evidence, except the things that have documentary evidence about the conspiracy.
    - krapp 11mo ago
      >It's a bad day for anti-conspiracy theorists when there's a dump of Epstein emails which are basically all "hey guys any news on the conspiracy? would you like some underage girls to go with that?" "anti-conspiracy theorists" aren't claiming that conspiracies don't exist, so no. I don't think anyone is actually "debunking" Epstein other than conspiracy-minded Trumpists who were laser-focused on the Pizzagate/satanic cabal/Monarch deprogramming bullshit until for some reason they decided Epstein was a cool guy who did nothing wrong. Many such cases.
    - toyg 11mo ago
      > Claiming that everything is a conspiracy, without evidence, except the things that have documentary evidence Because where is the fun in that? If something is documented, your brain is not doing any work; it's where the canvas is clean, that you get a sense of satisfaction by firing synapses in original ways. Conspiracy-theorism, at its core, is fundamentally a creative endeavour. It's not a coincidence that, in the '90s, that world overlapped pretty hard with fandoms of open-world franchises like Star Trek, where it's easy to expand and enrich the original content with your own productions.
      - lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
        Conspiracy theories appeal to people for various reasons. 1. It's something for bored people to do and to believe. 2. It's something that offers supposed explanations for various real or imaginary events or states of affairs at a lower cost than actual explanation. 3. It gives people something more satisfying than "shit happens", and in this way, gives people a feeling of the possibility of control over the unpredictable (superstitions like astrology and fortune telling have the same motive). 4. It allows people to rationalize their misfortunes, dissatisfaction, and grievances, and to deflect responsibility from themselves, or to give their envies the appearance of a moral basis.
  - MangoToupe 11mo ago
    It sounds more like you're describing paranoid schizophrenics or antisemites than conspiracy theorists.
    - krapp 11mo ago
      >It sounds more like you're describing paranoid schizophrenics or antisemites than conspiracy theorists. 99% of the time, this is the same picture. Peel back the layers of just any popular conspiracy theory, study its origins and the people who started it, and eventually you'll get to the part where "it was the Jews all along."
      - lazide 11mo ago
        Considering how clearly Abraham appeared to have something going on - maybe schizophrenia? - it’s all a jumble of the same noise anyway?
        krapp 11mo ago
        I think there is an argument to be made for conspiracy theory as a modern form of folk religion. Although a lot of that is due to the overlap between the religious and conspiracy communities, and thus very intentional, they do seem to serve many of the same social and psychological functions.
        MangoToupe 11mo ago
        > folk religion This seems a bit of a contradiction, no? "folk" beliefs seem like the opposite of religion (which, to my ear, requires organization and some sort of canon).
        krapp 11mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_religion
  - jasonvorhe 11mo ago
    As a conspiracy nut I always wonder how much mental effort it takes to actually find reasons to believe all these takes when basically every somewhat relevant historic event of the last ~200 years surfaces at least a dozen rabbit holes involving people, institutions and connections that often intertwine.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  - Atlas667 11mo ago
    Well in my comment I said they established modern art. Keyword: established. And the CIA definitely creates some things/narratives. But on the note of natural development, I do agree. You can call it conspiracies or incentives, its the same, really. If its not democratic its conspiratorial by definition. They use tax money (and drug money, possibly) to do this, so they have a lot of funds. If you watch the video I link he talks about HOW they actually do this. He doesnt claim they sit down and brief professors, he says they built an apparatus that simply filters through them and fund the right ones. He talks about how its hard to find jobs if you dont peddle the right narratives and topics.
    - bazoom42 11mo ago
      This is an even crazier claim. Modern art was created by Braque, Picasso, Duchamp, and many others, primarily in Europe, and it was established as a major artistic movement a long time before CIA existed. The more realistic claim is that CIA promoted abstract expressionism which is a primarily American 1950s art movement which is of course a sub-movement in modern art.
      - Atlas667 11mo ago
        You are right, I just repeated it wrong, see my original comment. I do claim they established abstract expressionist art, but that is also beside the point. This art would have existed either way. The wider claim is that they controlled the dissemination and narrative around art and the humanities in the US and around the world in order to inflate the opinion of the United States while promoting narratives about the Soviet Union that even the CIA knew were false, as stated by them in released memos. This is the claim: that large sections of the art and humanities were funded and controlled by the CIA for propaganda purposes.
- lazide 11mo ago
  ‘Establish’ often means ‘to ensure it takes hold’. For example, ‘establishing’ a diplomatic presence means setting up an embassy and making sure it doesn’t disappear - and gets noticed.
- neom 11mo ago
  Similarly: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399414351/how-the-south-korean-government-made-k-pop-a-thing https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399414351...
  - aspenmayer 11mo ago
    See also Cool Japan, which saw the power of pop idols, as well as anime and manga, as tools of soft power in the region and worldwide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan which was inspired by the success of Cool Britannia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Britannia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Britannia
    - red-iron-pine 11mo ago
      China trying to copy that via gatcha games
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
- phkahler 11mo ago
  >> They didn’t “establish” abstract expressionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture. I've heard it claimed that they generally don't try to start movements because it's too difficult, but instead just promote and amplify things that are already leaning the direction they want them to go or is beneficial to their agenda somehow. Makes sense to me!
  - dredmorbius 11mo ago
    This is how effective propaganda works best generally. Find existing propagation lines (whether positive or negative), and gently encourage them. Much recent online propaganda, particularly from Russia and China (though those are hardly the only actors) operates along these lines. Russia generally tries to stir up fracture points amongst its adversaries, China seeks more to distract through diversion (e.g., TikTok) though it also has active antagonistic campaigns. Another classic CIA tactic was not to seek out intelligence, but to plant it, through manufactured journalism. This came out in several 1970s US Congressional investigations of the Agency, by the Church Committee and others. See "CIA and the Media: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence" (1978): <https://archive.org/details/CIAMedia1978Hearings/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/CIAMedia1978Hearings/page/n3/mod...> Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) wrote a multi-part series on this, which I've indexed here: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/cdec9a80ce3b0139a0df002590d8e506 https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/cdec9a80ce3b0139a0df00...> - “The CIA’s 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World’s Views” (1977-12-25) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/25/archives/the-cias-3decade-effort-to-mold-the-worlds-views-agency-network.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/25/archives/the-cias-3decade...> - “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.” (1977-12-26) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propaganda-network-built-by-the-cia-a-worldwide-network.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propag...> - “C.I.A. Established Many Links To Journalists in U.S. and Abroad” 1977-12-27) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/27/archives/cia-established-many-links-to-journalists-in-us-and-abroad-cias.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/27/archives/cia-established-...> - “Colby Acknowledges U.S. Press Picked Up Bogus C.I.A. Accounts” (1977-12-28) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/colby-acknowledges-us-press-picked-up-bogus-cia-accounts-tells.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/colby-acknowledg...> - “U.S. Correspondents Give Views on C.I.A.” (1977-12-29) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/29/archives/us-correspondents-give-views-on-cia-4-at-a-house-hearing-say-any.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/29/archives/us-correspondent...> - “Ex‐Envoy Says Risk of Exposure Negated C.I.A. Propaganda Value” (1977-12-30) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/30/archives/exenvoy-says-risk-of-exposure-negated-cia-propaganda-value.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/30/archives/exenvoy-says-ris...>
- Atlas667 11mo ago
  Yes, they literally "established" it. Thats what that word means. They drove the perspective for the sake of propaganda. They promoted american movies and art everywhere. And it worked. This is how they got young kids in Europe, Asia and S.America to side with them. Through a vague notion of coolness, individual liberty, sophistication, and tying that to progress and to America. If you look at anti-colonial documentaries you can see it very evidently. One that comes to mind is "The hour of the furnaces" about the argentinian US backed dictatorship. There is a chapter in there where all the yuppie city dwellers are very counter culture oriented and welcome the external influence in their country. The way they infiltrate the youth is through this very cultural operation. The world wide phenomenon of counter culture was a CIA fabrication. PS: Communist bloc art is not bland and conformist, it's just about daily life or about collective life. Some of the best western art is also about daily life and society. But thats just my opinion.
  - gopher_space 11mo ago
    Another way to look at this is that the US has been unable to suppress their own youth culture to any significant degree.
api 11mo ago
This is just high brow conspiracist stuff. I find it fascinating sometimes that both the left and the right are fundamentally conspiracist in their worldview. For the left it’s a Marxist class conspiracy and for the right it tends to be a variety of conspiracies by out groups (Jews, gays, supposed devil worshippers, etc.) to undermine the social order. The failure of far left and far right experiments is always explained by conspiracies. And of course the far left and the far right are conspiracies from each others point of view! They truth is the US state promoted and funded all kinds of US culture to boost US cultural exports and influence the world, hopefully away from the Soviet sphere. What the culture was was less important than the fact that it was not Soviet. It wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that don’t seem to be too “red” and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems “red” explains the funding of modern “aaaaht” devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since it’s always a safe choice in the bureaucracy. Not saying it was great. They funded a lot of shite which probably distorted things and boosted a lot of stuff that would have been footnotes in art history otherwise. There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.
- yubblegum 11mo ago
  Top Gun is obvious stuff. Recently they are doing SEO too. "Project Monarch" for example is mostly known to the younger generation as a (fictional) CIA project to kill Godzilla ... I love the openning sequence of that film - obfuscating all sorts of stuff. Nothing wrong with "high brow conspiracist" which in straight forward language is more like 'looking into top down efforts to social engineer society and control masses'. Or you going to actually argue that has never been a thing in US and the West?
  - api 11mo ago
    I’m not saying there aren’t attempts to control society. It’s what governments, think tanks, ad agencies, activist groups of all stripes, etc do for a living. There’s just tons of them and they’re at each others throats half the time. There are groups of people who think they run the world. They’re delusional. There’s people who aspire to run the world who are also delusional. They can do a lot of damage sometimes before they fail.
caycep 11mo ago
It always struck me as a government funded Mad Men agency. Kind of like how InQTel is like a government funded Kleiner Perkins
- red-iron-pine 11mo ago
  In-Q-tel is the CIA's version of DARPA

bazoom42 11mo ago

They didn’t “establish” abstract expresssionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture. It was not like CIA developed art or jazz musicians in a lab, they just realized it was great marketing for US culture, especially as communist-bloc art and culture became increasingly bland and conformist. It was probably one of the best investments CIA ever made.

ta12653421 11mo ago
...and dont forget McDonalds and the famous Marlboro Guy :-D
rixed 11mo ago
This is what conspiracy theorists fail to keep in mind: in politics usually you do not create anything, you reframe and exploit whatever events happen to occur. Same idea with this left-wing idea that "no revolutionary has ever made a revolution to happen". I believe it's particularly hard for people whose profession is to think, design and engineer, to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history.
- jack_tripper 11mo ago
  >to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history Except the stuff people actually care about like purchasing power, bills, wages, and housing are manipulated by purposely designed economic policies and not by randomness.
  - joachimma 11mo ago
    It seems perfectly plausible to me that the economic incentives are such that there is no need to "design" any of this, no smoke-filled back room needed.
    - jack_tripper 11mo ago
      What?! That statement is self contradictory. If you have economic incentives then somebody or a group of people put those incentives into place in order to reach a desired outcome(typically accumulation of wealth and/or power for a target group). We're not talking about facts of nature like gravity or the speed of light. You don't exist in a truly random system but one where you're playing by the rules made by someone else, rules that can change on a whim, as the government intervenes at every level to manipulate the scales, for better and for worse, resulting in it picking winners and loosers.
    - Retric 11mo ago
      Economic incentives never point in just one direction. There’s always tradeoffs around time horizons, risks, etc which is where individual people’s decisions come into play. Should we subsidize industry X is rarely a question decided on economic merits alone. And so it goes with individual interests shaping the entire global economy in surprisingly profound ways. Extreme ultraviolet lithography for example shapes industries, but has a history steeped in various public/private partnerships and global politics.
- pjc50 11mo ago
  It's a bad day for anti-conspiracy theorists when there's a dump of Epstein emails which are basically all "hey guys any news on the conspiracy? would you like some underage girls to go with that?" I would note that the public conspiracy theorists tend to be "exactly wrong", though. Claiming that everything is a conspiracy, without evidence, except the things that have documentary evidence about the conspiracy.
  - krapp 11mo ago
    >It's a bad day for anti-conspiracy theorists when there's a dump of Epstein emails which are basically all "hey guys any news on the conspiracy? would you like some underage girls to go with that?" "anti-conspiracy theorists" aren't claiming that conspiracies don't exist, so no. I don't think anyone is actually "debunking" Epstein other than conspiracy-minded Trumpists who were laser-focused on the Pizzagate/satanic cabal/Monarch deprogramming bullshit until for some reason they decided Epstein was a cool guy who did nothing wrong. Many such cases.
  - toyg 11mo ago
    > Claiming that everything is a conspiracy, without evidence, except the things that have documentary evidence Because where is the fun in that? If something is documented, your brain is not doing any work; it's where the canvas is clean, that you get a sense of satisfaction by firing synapses in original ways. Conspiracy-theorism, at its core, is fundamentally a creative endeavour. It's not a coincidence that, in the '90s, that world overlapped pretty hard with fandoms of open-world franchises like Star Trek, where it's easy to expand and enrich the original content with your own productions.
    - lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
      Conspiracy theories appeal to people for various reasons. 1. It's something for bored people to do and to believe. 2. It's something that offers supposed explanations for various real or imaginary events or states of affairs at a lower cost than actual explanation. 3. It gives people something more satisfying than "shit happens", and in this way, gives people a feeling of the possibility of control over the unpredictable (superstitions like astrology and fortune telling have the same motive). 4. It allows people to rationalize their misfortunes, dissatisfaction, and grievances, and to deflect responsibility from themselves, or to give their envies the appearance of a moral basis.
- MangoToupe 11mo ago
  It sounds more like you're describing paranoid schizophrenics or antisemites than conspiracy theorists.
  - krapp 11mo ago
    >It sounds more like you're describing paranoid schizophrenics or antisemites than conspiracy theorists. 99% of the time, this is the same picture. Peel back the layers of just any popular conspiracy theory, study its origins and the people who started it, and eventually you'll get to the part where "it was the Jews all along."
    - lazide 11mo ago
      Considering how clearly Abraham appeared to have something going on - maybe schizophrenia? - it’s all a jumble of the same noise anyway?
      - krapp 11mo ago
        I think there is an argument to be made for conspiracy theory as a modern form of folk religion. Although a lot of that is due to the overlap between the religious and conspiracy communities, and thus very intentional, they do seem to serve many of the same social and psychological functions.
        MangoToupe 11mo ago
        > folk religion This seems a bit of a contradiction, no? "folk" beliefs seem like the opposite of religion (which, to my ear, requires organization and some sort of canon).
        krapp 11mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_religion
- jasonvorhe 11mo ago
  As a conspiracy nut I always wonder how much mental effort it takes to actually find reasons to believe all these takes when basically every somewhat relevant historic event of the last ~200 years surfaces at least a dozen rabbit holes involving people, institutions and connections that often intertwine.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- Atlas667 11mo ago
  Well in my comment I said they established modern art. Keyword: established. And the CIA definitely creates some things/narratives. But on the note of natural development, I do agree. You can call it conspiracies or incentives, its the same, really. If its not democratic its conspiratorial by definition. They use tax money (and drug money, possibly) to do this, so they have a lot of funds. If you watch the video I link he talks about HOW they actually do this. He doesnt claim they sit down and brief professors, he says they built an apparatus that simply filters through them and fund the right ones. He talks about how its hard to find jobs if you dont peddle the right narratives and topics.
  - bazoom42 11mo ago
    This is an even crazier claim. Modern art was created by Braque, Picasso, Duchamp, and many others, primarily in Europe, and it was established as a major artistic movement a long time before CIA existed. The more realistic claim is that CIA promoted abstract expressionism which is a primarily American 1950s art movement which is of course a sub-movement in modern art.
    - Atlas667 11mo ago
      You are right, I just repeated it wrong, see my original comment. I do claim they established abstract expressionist art, but that is also beside the point. This art would have existed either way. The wider claim is that they controlled the dissemination and narrative around art and the humanities in the US and around the world in order to inflate the opinion of the United States while promoting narratives about the Soviet Union that even the CIA knew were false, as stated by them in released memos. This is the claim: that large sections of the art and humanities were funded and controlled by the CIA for propaganda purposes.
lazide 11mo ago
‘Establish’ often means ‘to ensure it takes hold’. For example, ‘establishing’ a diplomatic presence means setting up an embassy and making sure it doesn’t disappear - and gets noticed.
neom 11mo ago
Similarly: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399414351/how-the-south-korean-government-made-k-pop-a-thing https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399414351...
- aspenmayer 11mo ago
  See also Cool Japan, which saw the power of pop idols, as well as anime and manga, as tools of soft power in the region and worldwide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan which was inspired by the success of Cool Britannia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Britannia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Britannia
  - red-iron-pine 11mo ago
    China trying to copy that via gatcha games
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
phkahler 11mo ago
>> They didn’t “establish” abstract expressionist art. They helped promote it just as they helped promote jazz music and other US culture. I've heard it claimed that they generally don't try to start movements because it's too difficult, but instead just promote and amplify things that are already leaning the direction they want them to go or is beneficial to their agenda somehow. Makes sense to me!
- dredmorbius 11mo ago
  This is how effective propaganda works best generally. Find existing propagation lines (whether positive or negative), and gently encourage them. Much recent online propaganda, particularly from Russia and China (though those are hardly the only actors) operates along these lines. Russia generally tries to stir up fracture points amongst its adversaries, China seeks more to distract through diversion (e.g., TikTok) though it also has active antagonistic campaigns. Another classic CIA tactic was not to seek out intelligence, but to plant it, through manufactured journalism. This came out in several 1970s US Congressional investigations of the Agency, by the Church Committee and others. See "CIA and the Media: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence" (1978): <https://archive.org/details/CIAMedia1978Hearings/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/CIAMedia1978Hearings/page/n3/mod...> Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) wrote a multi-part series on this, which I've indexed here: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/cdec9a80ce3b0139a0df002590d8e506 https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/cdec9a80ce3b0139a0df00...> - “The CIA’s 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World’s Views” (1977-12-25) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/25/archives/the-cias-3decade-effort-to-mold-the-worlds-views-agency-network.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/25/archives/the-cias-3decade...> - “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.” (1977-12-26) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propaganda-network-built-by-the-cia-a-worldwide-network.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propag...> - “C.I.A. Established Many Links To Journalists in U.S. and Abroad” 1977-12-27) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/27/archives/cia-established-many-links-to-journalists-in-us-and-abroad-cias.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/27/archives/cia-established-...> - “Colby Acknowledges U.S. Press Picked Up Bogus C.I.A. Accounts” (1977-12-28) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/colby-acknowledges-us-press-picked-up-bogus-cia-accounts-tells.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/colby-acknowledg...> - “U.S. Correspondents Give Views on C.I.A.” (1977-12-29) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/29/archives/us-correspondents-give-views-on-cia-4-at-a-house-hearing-say-any.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/29/archives/us-correspondent...> - “Ex‐Envoy Says Risk of Exposure Negated C.I.A. Propaganda Value” (1977-12-30) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/30/archives/exenvoy-says-risk-of-exposure-negated-cia-propaganda-value.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/30/archives/exenvoy-says-ris...>
Atlas667 11mo ago
Yes, they literally "established" it. Thats what that word means. They drove the perspective for the sake of propaganda. They promoted american movies and art everywhere. And it worked. This is how they got young kids in Europe, Asia and S.America to side with them. Through a vague notion of coolness, individual liberty, sophistication, and tying that to progress and to America. If you look at anti-colonial documentaries you can see it very evidently. One that comes to mind is "The hour of the furnaces" about the argentinian US backed dictatorship. There is a chapter in there where all the yuppie city dwellers are very counter culture oriented and welcome the external influence in their country. The way they infiltrate the youth is through this very cultural operation. The world wide phenomenon of counter culture was a CIA fabrication. PS: Communist bloc art is not bland and conformist, it's just about daily life or about collective life. Some of the best western art is also about daily life and society. But thats just my opinion.
- gopher_space 11mo ago
  Another way to look at this is that the US has been unable to suppress their own youth culture to any significant degree.

api 11mo ago

This is just high brow conspiracist stuff. I find it fascinating sometimes that both the left and the right are fundamentally conspiracist in their worldview. For the left it’s a Marxist class conspiracy and for the right it tends to be a variety of conspiracies by out groups (Jews, gays, supposed devil worshippers, etc.) to undermine the social order. The failure of far left and far right experiments is always explained by conspiracies. And of course the far left and the far right are conspiracies from each others point of view! They truth is the US state promoted and funded all kinds of US culture to boost US cultural exports and influence the world, hopefully away from the Soviet sphere. What the culture was was less important than the fact that it was not Soviet. It wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy. Bureaucracy gets a mandate: promote America as a product. Bureaucrats look for things that are American or Western that don’t seem to be too “red” and fling money in their general direction. The bias against anything that seems “red” explains the funding of modern “aaaaht” devoid of coherent intellectual content. Art backed by bureaucrats always tends to be bland since it’s always a safe choice in the bureaucracy. Not saying it was great. They funded a lot of shite which probably distorted things and boosted a lot of stuff that would have been footnotes in art history otherwise. There’s also a long history of military recruitment propaganda through Hollywood. It’s basically a genre of film. Some of them are damn good popcorn movies but it’s obvious that they are propagandizing young men to join up. Top Gun comes to mind.

yubblegum 11mo ago
Top Gun is obvious stuff. Recently they are doing SEO too. "Project Monarch" for example is mostly known to the younger generation as a (fictional) CIA project to kill Godzilla ... I love the openning sequence of that film - obfuscating all sorts of stuff. Nothing wrong with "high brow conspiracist" which in straight forward language is more like 'looking into top down efforts to social engineer society and control masses'. Or you going to actually argue that has never been a thing in US and the West?
- api 11mo ago
  I’m not saying there aren’t attempts to control society. It’s what governments, think tanks, ad agencies, activist groups of all stripes, etc do for a living. There’s just tons of them and they’re at each others throats half the time. There are groups of people who think they run the world. They’re delusional. There’s people who aspire to run the world who are also delusional. They can do a lot of damage sometimes before they fail.

caycep 11mo ago

It always struck me as a government funded Mad Men agency. Kind of like how InQTel is like a government funded Kleiner Perkins

red-iron-pine 11mo ago
In-Q-tel is the CIA's version of DARPA