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rdr, you're being deliberately obtuse.

Postby banned » Sun Nov 20, 2005 4:05 am

Each time someone contradicts your point, you move to another one.<br><br>MY point is, what artists never DID get a chance to be heard/seen because the CIA was pushing their slate?<br><br>As far as allowing a wide latitude of views as long as NONE of them are a real threat to the imperial hegemony--surely you've read Marcuse? Allowing people to 'vent' divergent views actually sucks away the energy that builds up when people are silenced and which eventually explodes into revolution.<br><br>With traditional censorship, if you say anything other than a very specific party line, they shut you up--thereby creating a resistance movement which can become a revolutionary one.<br><br>In our society you can SAY pretty much anything you want--it just won't matter. You can SAY that the US government is committing atrocities in Iraq, yessir you can say it in the Internet or (at least if you live where I do, the SF Bay Area) you can even say it in a Letter to the Editor of your local newspaper. Jay Leno can depict George W. Bush as a moron or a monkey.<br><br>AND IT DOESN'T MATTER. It doesn't change anything.<br><br>The people who really understand how the system works are a tiny minority and when they speak or write they're preachin' to the choir. Most people believe the myth we have a 2 party system and think that if the Democrats elect the next President or retake control of Congress, everything will be okey dokey hokey shmokey. These people would not sit down and read a history of what the CIA has done in other sovereign nations for the last 60 years unless you literally forced them to at gunpoint. <br><br>Now, that history is well known in the rest of the world, whether it is seen as a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, it is not denied.<br><br>YOU are a typical American whose reaction to finding out that the CIA has had its hand in the cultural pie is to deny it or claim it was no big deal.<br><br>This is why by and large the rest of the world has gone from thinking Americans were merely ignorant and immature to believing that we are arrogant and dangerous.<br><br>Maybe some Americans--you for example--think that most of the world when they hear 'American' think 'Elvis' or 'Steinbeck' or 'Marty Scorsese' but they don't.<br><br>They think 'depleted uranium', 'white phosphorus', 'Abu Ghraib' and 'Gitmo.' <p></p><i></i>
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PS didn't see your last post...

Postby banned » Sun Nov 20, 2005 4:19 am

...and how does all this self indulgent yuppie mind-freeing BULLSHIT put skin back on people that "Willie Pete" burned it off of, or pay them back for the curse of birth defects unto the children of the children?<br><br>Sorry, but any so called novelist, musician, painter or playwright who sits back now and is silent gets no respect from me. That doesn't mean that I demand they deal with these issues in their work in a knee jerk 'socialist realism' style--only that a so-called artist who isn't moved to speak out against the murder of innocents can shove their instrument, paintbrush or laptop up their ASS as far as I'm concerned. To me a free mind doesn't stand by while other minds are enslaved--or slaughtered.<br><br>In the 1930s idealistic artists including Hemingway went to Spain to fight. Yes, many soon became disillusioned, but they felt they HAD to take a stand in the most important issue of their time which was taking a stand against Fascism.<br><br>To me taking a stand against the shredding of the Constitution and the dump-taking on International Law by the Bush Administration and the US Congress (both GOP and Dems) is not optional.<br><br>I may not play Eminem all the time on my iPod, but he stands higher in my estimation for "Mosh". And it's damned sad that to find novelists who speak out fearlessly you have to go to senior citizens like Vonnegut and Vidal.<br><br>To me commitment to art is commitment to TRUTH and COURAGE. It isn't masturbation that makes the artist feel good and it isn't jerking off the artist's audience to make it feel good. If that's your idea of art, then it's not surprising you don't feel the outrage that I do at the idea of the CIA funneling money on the sneak to its gutless mouthpieces. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: rdr, you're being deliberately obtuse.

Postby robertdreed » Sun Nov 20, 2005 4:21 am

"MY point is, what artists never DID get a chance to be heard/seen because the CIA was pushing their slate?"<br><br>I dunno. You tell me. I don't think that "CIA interference" was the reason that, say, The Looters never broke as a popular success. <br><br>The arts are a crapshoot, this is widely acknowledged. Often, it's a matter of timing.<br><br><br>It isn't fair. I don't get why the Sons of Champlin didn't make it, and Chicago did. I don't get why Danny Gatton didn't make it, and Stevie Ray Vaughn did. I don't know why Dan Penn never got his own record contract. I don't know why John Kennedy Toole had to kill himself before someone acknowledged his talent and published his first novel. I don't know why Michael Jackson sold a zillion records while the Neville Brothers were playing for $300 a week. <br><br>But I think that the answers lie outside of the arena of political conspiracy. ( Except for maybe the Michael Jackson story...that's a big maybe, though. ) <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 11/20/05 2:27 am<br></i>
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Again, you're totally evading the point.

Postby banned » Sun Nov 20, 2005 4:27 am

I don't think you are making a good faith argument, I think you're slinging bullshit and I have better things to do than waste my time reading the same jejune shite over and over on your part.<br><br>CIA support for certain cultural figures is not CONSPIRACY it's FACT, and you don't know who didn't make it because you never HEARD of the people who weren't allowed to be heard.<br><br>That's so obvious, that it isn't obvious to you makes me really wonder what your real motive is. When smart people act dumb, they have to have a reason.<br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: rdr, you're being deliberately obtuse.

Postby robertdreed » Sun Nov 20, 2005 4:27 am

"...and how does all this self indulgent yuppie mind-freeing BULLSHIT put skin back on people that "Willie Pete" burned it off of, or pay them back for the curse of birth defects unto the children of the children?"<br><br>It doesn't. <br><br>Neither does the work done by a plumber keeping the pipes fixed. <br><br>You want to indict everyone who has access to a microphone for not using it to blast George Bush? <br><br>My response is "don't tell people their business." <br><br>Professional musicians tend to have enough humility- or at least good sense- not to browbeat their audience. It's a lot less productive as a tactic than someone's armchair fantasies of revolution make it appear.<br><br>Marcuse- "repressive tolerance", come on...that's postmodernist newspeak, a circular explanation if ever I've heard one. <br><br>Somewhere amidst the accusations of "jejune bullshit" is the fact that- once again- some mighty thin gruel is being served up in terms of actual cases in point. I need to get some more factual back-up. Otherwise, it's armchair theorizing. And, for what it's worth, it's beginning to sound quite similar to the declamations and denunciations of Fundamentalist preachers. Absent references to "God", but the politicized moral high dudgeon in the rhetoric is still welling to full boil. <br><br>Your characterization of any artistic output that doesn't supply stones for the barricades of revolutionary yearning as "self-indulgent yuppie mind-freeing bullshit" puzzles me...that's an awfully wide array of artists that you've slated for condemnation, under that rubric. <br><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 11/20/05 2:37 am<br></i>
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I'm done with the argument re: the CIA...

Postby banned » Sun Nov 20, 2005 4:45 am

...because you're determined to mischaracterize the points I and others have made.<br><br>I will, however, address your comment that I, by being outraged by the use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium in Iraq, am 'just like' the Fundies who become outraged by, oh, say two consenting gay men having sex with each other, or the teaching of evolution in schools.<br><br>If you honestly think those are equivalent, you're a moral imbecile, as I told someone else who was flogging that vile canard in another thread.<br><br>But of course you don't. What your goal is is to make people who oppose war crimes afraid to speak up for fear of being equated with 'the other side'.<br><br>Well, sorry, doesn't work on me. <br><br>I know the difference between 'moralizing'--sticking your nibnose in other peoples' private lives which are none of your business--and opposing the use by our government of horrible weapons in a war that is not only, as Jack Murtha had the courage to say, "a flawed policy wrapped in illusion" but itself a crime against humanity because it was based on LIES.<br><br>You know the difference too, of course.<br><br>I ask others reading this thread to ask themselves what would motivate someone to equate, say, a father forcibly pulling a rapist off his child with the rapist himself.<br><br>?? GET IT??<br> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: I'm done with the argument re: the CIA...

Postby robertdreed » Sun Nov 20, 2005 5:02 am

well, then you're done with the argument re: the CIA.<br><br>That leaves your moral outrage- which I share. <br><br>But I'm not walking around seething with rage at everyone who "isn't doing enough." I can't say what that is, for most other people. <br><br>My outrage is mostly directed at the clowns in Congress. It's their job to be paying full attention to the ongoing catastrophe over there. I'm not blaming musicians and artists for a war- especially when many of them do, in fact, hold the same views that I do about it, and were in fact doing at least as much as myself in terms of actively working to prevent it, during the slim opening of opportunity available before the clowns in Congress caved in and gave George W. Bush his blank check. <br><br>Now we all have to live with the consequences of our views not prevailing, back then. But I'm not about starting a circular firing squad of recriminations within my own ranks over that fact. It was a damned unequal contest, and we lost a decisive round. But it still isn't over. If we can turn this thing around before the casualty (not death- casualty) totals reach 30,000 Americans and 300,000 Iraqis, it will still be many too many- but compared to the costs that mounted up before the brakes were put on the Vietnam war, that will still amount to a considerable improvement. <br><br>(side note: readers and writers, I implore you to not refer to white phosphorous by the nickname "Willie Peter." That's a bit of milspeak I find particularly loathsome. I don't think much of the all-too-inaccurate connotations of the phrase "depleted uranium", either. ) <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 11/20/05 2:24 am<br></i>
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Re: I'm done with the argument re: the CIA...

Postby Dreams End » Sun Nov 20, 2005 5:34 am

rdr, you are one of the most intelligent and well spoken writers on this board but this:<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>The ironic part of this is that proldic seems to be bitter about not being cut in for a share of the grant money.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>is so incredibly far from what proldic or anyone else on here is saying that I think the stress of the move has really done you in.<br><br>Come ON, man, you KNOW how this stuff works in the "war on drugs", you are very eloquent in that arena...this isn't that different. It's part of the same picture, in fact, as the war on drugs has so often been used to justify and/or mask funding to rightwing authoritarian regimes looking to wipe out the local "insurgency." You know this. I know you know this. You know I know you know it. Really, we are quite knowledgeable.<br><br>I simply can't believe you would even have that take on proldic's position here. It makes no sense. There have been several threads about the way foundations, say, control the agenda. You honestly think the Ford Foundation is simply being purely philanthropic with no other ACTIVE political agenda. <br><br>And proldic didn't bring up the stuff about the arts, I did. In another post, proldic or someone had posted info from FOIA files about how the CIA had specifically funneled money into art organizations to promote "abstractionist" art. No more Guernica's please! <br><br>Here's a fuller treatment of this issue in a book review. I haven't read the book but it's the first thing I hit on Google that mentioned the CIA/Rockefeller funding of MOMA to promote abstract expressionism. And screw FOUNDATIONS, this entire piece is about CIA funding an entire phony left. It's quite clear. I'm posting the whole article...the arts portion is toward the end.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books), £20.<br><br>This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA "projects," and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publicly exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political tide to the left.<br><br>U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the "Democratic Left" and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.<br><br>The CIA, under the prodding of Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, was instrumental in funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a kind of cultural NATO that grouped together all sorts of "anti-Stalinist" leftists and rightists. They were completely free to defend Western cultural and political values, attack "Stalinist totalitarianism" and to tiptoe gently around U.S. racism and imperialism. Occasionally, a piece marginally critical of U.S. mass society was printed in the CIA-subsidized journals.<br><br>What was particularly bizarre about this collection of CIA-funded intellectuals was not only their political partisanship, but their pretense that they were disinterested seekers of truth, iconoclastic humanists, freespirited intellectuals, or artists for art's sake, who counterposed themselves to the corrupted "committed" house "hacks" of the Stalinist apparatus.<br><br>It is impossible to believe their claims of ignorance of CIA ties. How could they ignore the absence in the journals of any basic criticism of the numerous lynchings throughout the southern United States during the whole period? How could they ignore the absence, during their cultural congresses, of criticism of U.S. imperialist intervention in Guatemala, Iran, Greece, and Korea that led to millions of deaths? How could they ignore the gross apologies of every imperialist crime of their day in the journals in which they wrote? They were all soldiers: some glib, vitriolic, crude, and polemical, like Hook and Lasky; others elegant essayists like Stephen Spender or self-righteous informers like George Orwell. Saunders portrays the WASP Ivy League elite at the CIA holding the strings, and the vitriolic Jewish ex-leftists snarling at leftist dissidents. When the truth came out in the late 1960s and New York, Paris, and London "intellectuals" feigned indignation at having been used, the CIA retaliated. Tom Braden, who directed the International Organizations Branch of the CIA, blew their cover by detailing how they all had to have known who paid their salaries and stipends (397-404).<br><br>According to Braden, the CIA financed their "literary froth," as CIA hardliner Cord Meyer called the anti-Stalinist intellectual exercises of Hook, Kristol, and Lasky. Regarding the most prestigious and best-known publications of the self-styled "Democratic Left" (Encounter, New Leader, Partisan Review), Braden wrote that the money for them came from the CIA and that "an agent became the editor of Encounter" (39<!--EZCODE EMOTICON START 8) --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> . By 1953, Braden wrote, "we were operating or influencing international organizations in every field" (39<!--EZCODE EMOTICON START 8) --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> .<br><br>Saunders' book provides useful information about several important questions regarding the ways in which CIA intellectual operatives defended U.S. imperialist interests on cultural fronts. It also initiates an important discussion of the long-term consequences of the ideological and artistic positions defended by CIA intellectuals.<br><br>Saunders refutes the claims (made by Hook, Kristol, and Lasky) that the CIA and its friendly foundations provided aid with no strings attached. She demonstrates that "the individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were expected to perform as part ... of a propaganda war." The most effective propaganda was defined by the CIA as the kind where "the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own." While the CIA allowed their assets on the "Democratic Left" to prattle occasionally about social reform, it was the "anti-Stalinist" polemics and literary diatribes against Western Marxists and Soviet writers and artists that they were most interested in, funded most generously, and promoted with the greatest visibility. Braden referred to this as the "convergence" between the CIA and the European "Democratic Left" in the fight against communism. The collaboration between the "Democratic Left" and the CIA included strike-breaking in France, informing on Stalinists (Orwell and Hook), and covert smear campaigns to prevent leftist artists from receiving recognition (including Pablo Neruda's bid for a Nobel Prize in 1964 [351]).<br><br>The CIA, as the arm of the U.S. government most concerned with fighting the cultural Cold War, focused on Europe in the period immediately following the Second World War. Having experienced almost two decades of capitalist war, depression, and postwar occupation, the overwhelming majority of European intellectuals and trade unionists were anticapitalist and particularly critical of the hegemonic pretensions of the United States. To counter the appeal of communism and the growth of the European Communist Parties (particularly in France and Italy), the CIA devised a two-tier program. On the one hand, as Saunders argues, certain European authors were promoted as part of an explicitly "anticommunist program." The CIA cultural commissar's criteria for "suitable texts" included "whatever critiques of Soviet foreign policy and Communism as a form of government we find to be objective (sic) and convincingly written and timely." The CIA was especially keen on publishing disillusioned ex-communists like Silone, Koestler, and Gide. The CIA promoted anticommunist writers by funding lavish conferences in Paris, Berlin, and Bellagio (overlooking Lake Como), where objective social scientists and philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Daniel Bell, and Czeslow Milosz preached their values (and the virtues of Western freedom and intellectual independence, within the anticommunist and pro-Washington parameters defined by their CIA paymasters). None of these prestigious intellectuals dared to raise any doubts or questions regarding U.S. support of the mass killing in colonial Indochina and Algeria, the witch hunt of U.S. intellectuals or the paramilitary (Ku Klux Klan) lynchings in the southern United States. Such banal concerns would only "play into the hands of the Communists," according to Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, and the Partisan Review crowd, who eagerly sought funds for their quasi-bankrupt literary operation. Many of the so-called prestigious anticommunist literary and political journals would long have gone out of business were it not for CIA subsidies, which bought thousands of copies that it later distributed free.<br><br>The second cultural track on which the CIA operated was much more subtle. Here, it promoted symphonies, art exhibits, ballet, theater groups, and well-known jazz and opera performers with the explicit aim of neutralizing anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and creating an appreciation of U.S. culture and government. The idea behind this policy was to showcase U.S. culture, in order to gain cultural hegemony to support its military-economic empire. The CIA was especially keen on sending black artists to Europe—particularly singers (like Marion Anderson), writers, and musicians (such as Louis Armstrong)—to neutralize European hostility toward Washington's racist domestic policies. If black intellectuals didn't stick to the U.S. artistic script and wandered into explicit criticism, they were banished from the list, as was the case with writer Richard Wright.<br><br>The degree of CIA political control over the intellectual agenda of these seemingly nonpolitical artistic activities was clearly demonstrated by the reaction of the editors of Encounter (Lasky and Kristol, among others) with regard to an article submitted by Dwight MacDonald. MacDonald, a maverick anarchist intellectual, was a long-time collaborator with the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter. In 1958, he wrote an article for Encounter entitled "America America," in which he expressed his revulsion for U.S. mass culture, its crude materialism, and lack of civility. It was a rebuttal of the American values that were prime propaganda material in the CIA's and Encounter's cultural war against communism. MacDonald's attack of the "decadent American imperium" was too much for the CIA and its intellectual operatives in Encounter. As Braden, in his guidelines to the intellectuals, stated "organizations receiving CIA funds should not be required to support every aspect of U.S. policy," but invariably there was a cut-off point—particularly where U.S. foreign policy was concerned (314). Despite the fact that MacDonald was a former editor ofEncounter, the article was rejected. The pious claims of Cold War writers like Nicola Chiaromonte, writing in the second issue of Encounter, that "[t]he duty that no intellectual can shirk without degrading himself is the duty to expose fictions and to refuse to call `useful lies,' truths," certainly did not apply to Encounter and its distinguished list of contributors when it came to dealing with the `useful lies' of the West.<br><br>One of the most important and fascinating discussions in Saunders' book is about the fact that CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE) painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA saw in AE was an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis of socialist realism" (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to AE as "free enterprise painting."<!--EZCODE EMOTICON START ;) --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/wink.gif ALT=";)"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> Many directors at MOMA had longstanding links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence aesthetics across Europe.<br><br>AE as "free art" ideology (George Kennan, 272) was used to attack politically committed artists in Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (the CIA front) threw its weight behind abstract painting, over representational or realist aesthetics, in an explicit political act. Commenting on the political role of AE, Saunders points out: "One of the extraordinary features of the role that American painting played in the cultural Cold War is not the fact that it became part of the enterprise, but that a movement which so deliberately declared itself to be apolitical could become so intensely politicized" (275). The CIA associated apolitical artists and art with freedom. This was directed toward neutralizing the artists on the European left. The irony, of course, was that the apolitical posturing was only for left-wing consumption.<br><br>Nevertheless, the CIA and its cultural organizations were able to profoundly shape the postwar view of art. Many prestigious writers, poets, artists, and musicians proclaimed their independence from politics and declared their belief in art for art's sake. The dogma of the free artist or intellectual, as someone disconnected from political engagement, gained ascendancy and is pervasive to this day.<br><br>While Saunders has presented a superbly detailed account of the links between the CIA and Western artists and intellectuals, she leaves unexplored the structural reasons for the necessity of CIA deception and control over dissent. Her discussion is framed largely in the context of political competition and conflict with Soviet communism. There is no serious attempt to locate the CIA's cultural Cold War in the context of class warfare, indigenous third world revolutions, and independent Marxist challenges to U.S. imperialist economic domination. This leads Saunders to selectively praise some CIA ventures at the expense of others, some operatives over others. Rather than see the CIA's cultural war as part of an imperialist system, Saunders tends to be critical of its deceptive and distinct reactive nature. The U.S.-NATO cultural conquest of Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR should quickly dispel any notion that the cultural war was a defensive action.<br><br>The very origins of the cultural Cold War were rooted in class warfare. Early on, the CIA and its U.S. AFL-CIO operatives Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone (ex-communists) poured millions of dollars into subverting militant trade unions and breaking strikes through the funding of social democratic unions (94). The Congress for Cultural Freedom and its enlightened intellectuals were funded by the same CIA operatives who hired Marseilles gangsters to break the dockworkers' strikes in 1948.<br><br>After the Second World War, with the discrediting in Western Europe of the old right (compromised by its links to the fascists and a weak capitalist system), the CIA realized that, in order to undermine the anti-NATO trade unionists and intellectuals, it needed to find (or invent) a Democratic Left to engage in ideological warfare. A special sector of the CIA was set up to circumvent right-wing Congressional objections. The Democratic Left was essentially used to combat the radical left and to provide an ideological gloss on U.S. hegemony in Europe. At no point were the ideological pugilists of the democratic left in any position to shape the strategic policies and interests of the United States. Their job was not to question or demand, but to serve the empire in the name of "Western democratic values." Only when massive opposition to the Vietnam War surfaced in the United States and Europe, and their CIA covers were blown, did many of the CIA-promoted and -financed intellectuals jump ship and begin to criticize U.S. foreign policy. For example, after spending most of his career on the CIA payroll, Stephen Spender became a critic of U.S. Vietnam policy, as did some of the editors of Partisan Review. They all claimed innocence, but few critics believed that a love affair with so many journals and convention junkets, so long and deeply involved, could transpire without some degree of knowledge.<br><br>The CIA's involvement in the cultural life of the United States, Europe, and elsewhere had important long-term consequences. Many intellectuals were rewarded with prestige, public recognition, and research funds precisely for operating within the ideological blinders set by the Agency. Some of the biggest names in philosophy, political ethics, sociology, and art, who gained visibility from CIA-funded conferences and journals, went on to establish the norms and standards for promotion of the new generation, based on the political parameters established by the CIA. Not merit nor skill, but politics—the Washington line—defined "truth" and "excellence" and future chairs in prestigious academic settings, foundations, and museums.<br><br>The U.S. and European Democratic Left's anti-Stalinist rhetorical ejaculations, and their proclamations of faith in democratic values and freedom, were a useful ideological cover for the heinous crimes of the West. Once again, in NATO's recent war against Yugoslavia, many Democratic Left intellectuals have lined up with the West and the KLA in its bloody purge of tens of thousands of Serbs and the murder of scores of innocent civilians. If anti-Stalinism was the opium of the Democratic Left during the Cold War, human rights interventionism has the same narcotizing effect today, and deludes contemporary Democratic Leftists.<br><br>The CIA's cultural campaigns created the prototype for today's seemingly apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from popular struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working classes and their proximity to prestigious foundations. The CIA role model of the successful professional is the ideological gatekeeper, excluding critical intellectuals who write about class struggle, class exploitation and U.S. imperialism—"ideological" not "objective" categories, or so they are told.<br><br>The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA's Congress of Cultural Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies, but their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the idea of excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the influential cultural and political media. The issue is not that today's intellectuals or artists may or may not take a progressive position on this or that issue. The problem is the pervasive belief among writers and artists that anti-imperialist social and political expressions should not appear in their music, paintings, and serious writing if they want their work to be considered of substantial artistic merit. The enduring political victory of the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship. Today at the opera, theater, and art galleries, as well as in the professional meetings of academics, the Cold War values of the CIA are visible and pervasive: who dares to undress the emperor?<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.monthlyreview.org/1199petr.htm">www.monthlyreview.org/1199petr.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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Granta Books

Postby robertdreed » Sun Nov 20, 2005 5:42 am

About Granta<br><br>Granta magazine and Granta's book imprint, Granta Books, are published in both London and New York under the title Granta Publications. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>They share ownership with the New York Review of Books and its book imprint, NYRB Classics.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br> <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.granta.com/about/">www.granta.com/about/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>From the 1960s to the 1990s, The New York Review of Books has posed the questions in the debate on American life, culture, and politics. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>It is the journal where Mary McCarthy reported on the Vietnam War from Saigon and Hanoi</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/about/">www.nybooks.com/about/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Someone was saying something about Mary McCarthy?<br><br>Oh yeah, here it is, a few messages up: "To me what was sinister about the CIA was that it was all done sub rosa. They didn't come right out and say in the NYT Book Review or on the book jacket "Hi, we're the Central Intelligence Agency of Langley, Virginia and we think you're really going to LOVE this new novel by Mary McCarthy." <br><br>Oh, how easy that was.<br><br>You'll have to do some "reading between the lines" to figure out what it <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>proves</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, though. <br><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 11/20/05 3:26 am<br></i>
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On the wider question...

Postby robertdreed » Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:24 am

Compared to that review summary, there's a much more comprehensive take on the situation of Eastern Establishment attempts to control the political direction of the arts in Carroll Quigley's <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Tragedy And Hope</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->. I'll have to read the book, but it would come as a real surprise to me to find that it's more revelatory than Quigley's work.<br><br>A couple of preliminary points:<br><br>1) It really doesn't come as a surprise to me that the CIA put some under-the-table money on politically sympathetic- actually more to the point, non-hostile, non-threatening- artists and artistic movements, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s. I still think you're making too much of it:<br><br>"the CIA had specifically funneled money into art organizations to promote "abstractionist" art. No more Guernica's please!"<br><br>A couple of subsidiary points- a)Picasso was Spanish. He could scarcely have cared less if the CIA didn't fund him. And he <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>really</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> couldn't have cared less if the Franco regime didn't fund him. He made his own way. Strangely, Picasso considered himself a Communist, despite the fact that the Soviet Union would have clapped him in irons had he ever memorialized the Katyn Forest massacre in the same way he memorialized Guernica. ( Genius artists and ideological allegiance = batshit. Not an ironclad law, but close enough. )<br><br>b) Just because the CIA refused to fund art with political themes, that isn't at all the same thing as saying "no more!" Any American artist who had a political take on things was permitted to depict it, and legally allowed to show it, as a First Amendment right. And I'll bet that I could find some illustrative examples from the era of which we're speaking, if I put some time and energy into it. <br><br>2) The CIA may have had some idea of how to rein in the post-war American intelligentsia of the 1940s and 1950s, but it's my impression that the counterculture completely confounded them. For the most part, even the youngsters among them were a claque of preppy squares. It's possible that there were mavericks- Gregory Bateson, say, or possibly there were a few American CIA people close to the British liberal avant-garde clique represented by Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Christopher Isherwood- but the Allen Dulles-John McCone-Richard Helms-E. Howard Hunt CIA faction didn't have a clue as to the Electric Rock scene, or the Youth Culture. It wasn't a "salon" movement, a "foundation grant" movement, a "museum venue" movement, or an "academic" movement. In terms of a influencing political attitudes via an institutional foundation of critical respectability, long-haired rock and roll was a joke. Richard Meltzer as CIA mole? Gimme a break... <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 11/20/05 4:31 am<br></i>
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Re: Granta Books

Postby Dreams End » Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:32 am

<br>In case you forgot the originating post.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> Indeed, for the CIA, the strategy of promoting the Non-Communist Left was to become 'the theoretical foundation of the Agency's political operations against Communism...' <br><br><br><br>- Michael Warner, <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Official CIA Historian</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>"Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom"<br><br>Studies In Intelligence volume 38 issue 5, Summer 1995<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>I could accept that the CIA and, by extension Granta would put out false information about the CIA. I wonder, though, what purpose these particular revelations would serve? Is it your suggestion that the "New Left", the non-communist left, is the REAL threat to the system and these items are being released so that we will not trust these new left organizations and instead embrace revolutionary ideologies?<br><br>I think you are being kind of disingenuous here, robert. I think you are VERY aware of how this stuff works...but want to continue seeing the "cold war" as good vs. evil. <br><br>I think you can maintain your anti-communist position and still admit that there were a WHOLE lot of dirty tricks played and still being played to root out any hint of revolutionary movements and keep activists within the fold of acceptable activity and acceptable speech. Sure, it's no surprise that they do this, but for those of us who feel that revolutionary movements may be the only solution here, it's good to know when you are being played and by whom. <br><br>You can keep seeing the US as the valiant purveyors of cultural freedom if you want, but I'd lay off that whole drug war research thing, because I'm afraid your image of the "good guys" will continue to tarnish.<br><br>In fact, this whole conversation is kind of surreal, since I've read your good analysis on the drug war. You do understand that when peasants are gunned down by American helicopters in Mexico or Chile or Columbia, it's not REALLY about drugs...right? <br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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New colors on the pallette

Postby Jerky » Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:41 am

"one thing is for sure is that it really seem, to an extent that would surprise most cynics even, american culture has been tightly controled for 50 years or more. Like, "paint whatever you want.... but here are the only colors you can have to workwith" I think we are finally comming out of the cultural control era and are starting to find that there's a wide range of "colors" that have been kept off our national pallet for too long."<br><br>Unfortunately, those colors are black and red. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: Granta Books

Postby robertdreed » Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:54 am

"Reading between the lines" to find my actual intent with that post on Granta- it was to point out what a silly game it is to think that there's perennially some unified plot going on, simply because of the funding and ownership of a given organization, or because it's been known to feature a writer with a history of arguably suspect associations. Fwiw, the book sounds well worth reading, to me. <br><br>I think that you need to have the intellectual honesty to admit that whatever the CIA Culture Club's attempt to channel political thought during the Cold War, at least it allowed quite a bit of latitude for dissent and pluralism. <br><br>To provide a related example to the Granta-published book, one with even more nefarious associations and connections to the American Imperialist Establishment: consider <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Foreign Affairs</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> magazine. It's a mistake to think that <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>FA</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> is worthless, or that all of the articles contained therein constitute disinformation, simply because it's the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations. While always carefully parsed, the information contained within some of those articles is often quite damning of the impending decisions of the power freaks among that membership who actually run things. <br><br>I think you could use more nuance in your analysis, rather than simply seizing on a data point like, say, Ford Foundation funding of a project, and saying "Aha! There it is..." There is what? <br><br>You also persist in conflating eras and policies, putting them all into the same hand-basket of "CIA skullduggery"- going back and forth between the CIA's Cold War era attempts to fend off Soviet Communist ideological viewpoints, and the present-day Bush administration support for paramilitaries in Colombia. That's an incoherent approach to considering the questions at hand. <br><br>The eras are not the same. And "the CIA" is not a monolithic agency. In fact, it is the farthest thing from a monolith where the members of the group exercise "mechanical solidarity", and this is by design. CIA is about "organic solidarity", where the left eye doesn't know what the right ear is doing to influence the teeth and claws. The body works, but few of the "organs" that make it up really know what the other parts are doing. And often as not, they don't have "agency" over any part but their own. <br><br>I have to admit, as a "meme", "Central Intelligence Agency" is hilariously deceptive. Dave Barry couldn't have done better.<br><br>I also think that you're underestimating the stakes in the Cold War, at least in terms of how they were presented at the time. The Soviet Union was a very formidable and opportunistic opponent. A great many people of good will let a lot of things slide in those days, because they considered the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism to be paramount. And while the hard Left of the Cold War era often possessed accurate damning information about US foreign policy activities abroad, particularly concerning the milirary and CIA, a wide range of people in the West considered that they had ample justification for bricking them out, because the "solution" proposed by the hard Left entailed empowering the collectivist totalitarian political system that comprised the opposition, and this was simply unacceptable. <br><br>The corollary to that, the implications of which I don't think a lot of reflexively anti-CIA Leftists have considered- is that with the end of the Cold War, that excuse for letting things slide disappeared. The Drug War has proved to be a shoddy replacement. And given the false notes of the Drug War, it doesn't inspire much confidence in the latest theme of a perpetual world-wide "Terror War"- especially considering the proposals of the Bush "New Deal" that entail eroding an array of civil rights protections that go back to the Magna Carta, and abrogating humanitarian provisions of the Geneva conventions. I think that accounts in large measure for what has prompted so much anti-Bush administration dissent, early retirements, and resignations in the past few years from within the CIA and other government intelligence and law enforcement agencies. (Although I suspect that proldic disagrees with me about that, and he thinks it's all a ruse.) There are more than a few Cold War-era intelligence veterans who have thought to themselves that they didn't spend years of their lives countering Soviet tyranny and emerging victorious in the Cold War only to get American tyranny as a result, instead of a peace dividend. Not every CIA person has the E. Howard Hunt right-wing quasifascist mentality. Although it's worth keeping ones guard up when considering information sources with recent or historic US intel connections, it's also worth considering that fact. <br><br>Was the Cold War a sham? Yeah, partially. But there was also an authentic, perceptible threat- an adversary with large armies, a huge military budget, nuclear weapons, space orbital capabilities, submarines, the whole nine yards. It's hard to tell how much of that amounted to a global challenge for world domination, or if it was simply about heavyweight self-defense, or even something that was designed to empower the opposition on occasion, to keep the game going. (To repeat: <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>it's hard to tell.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> Don't expect me to believe any easy answer on that one. )The point is that <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>even to the extent that the Cold War was a sham, it was often a very believable, plausible one.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> It's easy for me to see how even people of high intelligence and good will were taken in. The same degree of believable pretext for Eternal War Mobilization is lacking, these days. <br><br><br><br><br> <br><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 11/20/05 5:18 am<br></i>
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Re: truth and courage

Postby hmm » Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:12 pm

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>To me commitment to art is commitment to TRUTH and COURAGE<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>what i would find funny if it wasnt so serious is that if one wants to find truth and courage in the arts it is to be found in the comic books and science fiction of the 50's-70's.<br>And these genre's used not to be seen as art but as rubbish by the establishment.<br><br>If there is one artist that prepared me for these times it is the sci-fi author Philip k. Dick. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: truth and courage

Postby Dreams End » Sun Nov 20, 2005 2:44 pm

well, we aren't going to agree here, obviously. We'll find common ground in noticing how the Soviet "threat" was misused for all kinds of things and save debate on the ultimate reality of that "threat" and how it came about for another time. <br><br>But think about ALL that was done...COINTELPRO was not done to stop political organizing (goes the official explanation) but to defeat the communist threat in this country. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala...why did we ALWAYS back the bad guys. Again, the official explanation was freedom from communism. I know you know this, so in some ways I think we can agree.<br><br>I don't have time to go back and find the threads that got into "left gatekeeper" issues, as we've gone round about this before. How conscious are many of these foundations and gatekeepers of their role? hard to say, there are certain ideals and philosophical predispositions that are so ingrained when you are of that social class that it doesn't need a "conspiracy" all the time, just a tacit agreement that we need to keep things from getting TOO radical.<br><br>That other thread had a great admission by one foundation head...can't remember who...who specifically said he funded groups considered too radical with the idea of reigning them in or bringing them around. <br><br>But your sort of weird "defense" (if only partial) of the CIA rings really false with me. I'm sorry, but they are the bad guys. I know not every employee actually engages in assassinations and overthrowing governments, but they are two clicks away from finding out with Google and handing in their resignations. <br><br>And the piece in the Granta book, should I have time, I think would be borne out by independent research and having a look at the government paper trail. This is how the entire MKULtra thing was put together by researchers..looking at the government's own documents.<br><br>And despite your tongue in cheek approach, the info on Granta is actually relevant...I didn't know anything about them. If I get the book, I'd want to look carefully to see if there might be some agenda there. My suspicion would be that if there is, given how damaging the information is, it would be of the "limited hangout" variety...giving some crumbs and hiding other bits. However, those are some SERIOUSLY big crumbs. <br><br>So I'm not offended when people question my sources. I used to rely on Chip Berlet but learned some disturbing things about him here. I think you can use him responsibly...but why risk it? Verify...find other sources etc.<br><br>I know my reponses in this thread have been undeveloped for the most part, but we've had fuller discussions with good sources an articles elsewhere...I think one thread was simply called "edumacate me on left gatekeepers." <br><br>It doesn't require a central office running all of it, but it is VERY insidious. Have a look at the Catherine Austin Fitts thread (which has nothing to do with her anymore) and also the "rationalism" thread by Starroute. There is simply no way to avoid the fact that U.S. intelligence agencies (why limit ourselves to CIA?) are promoting the weirdest shit. I don't think they are doing it just for fun.<br><br>Now, that's all for now. Tell us how your move went...how your new place is...what sorts of culture shocks you may or may not be experiencing, etc. <br><br>Then you can go back to trying to rip my points to shreds if you want...but I'm genuinely curious about your relocation...I think you are a valuable voice, despite our frequent disagreements.<br><br>Oh, that reminds me...there were two good pieces about CIA funding of the arts by two libertarian types. Ron Paul was one and Justin Raimondo was the other. I think that if proldic and I and others are correct, despite the target being communists, it's clearly an issue of concern for libertarians. It's all about social control here. <p></p><i></i>
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