New Yorker neglects to mention if editors and publishers were involved. The word "publish" occurs 4 times, "editor" nil. Two of the CIA authors wrote for New Yorker. Who was the editor at the time? Meta inquiry would then wonder if this very article by New Yorker is yet another CIA article, to "manage perception".
What is the perception?
'Cold War antics' of a 'bygone era'. Or is CIA still manipulating journals and content? New Yorker is silent on this topic.
How many major news outlets are covering the latest scandal involving Neil Gaiman? Somebody's still managing perception. The question is: who? And why?
It's much more than that, which you wouldn't know, because nobody's covering it. Which is my point. In a time when the major news outlets love to publish anything even hinting at salacious, this one gets a pass. Why?
False dissent and manipulating and taking control of dissent is the goal not covering up scandals.
Spook intervention in social mind space is strategic not tactical in nature. The goal is the ability to control and steer collective conversation. To take control of dissent, place its leaders, and pen its 'thoughts'.
As someone who personally despises Gaiman's works and personal politics: the allegations are extremely weak, and severely undermined by the alleged victims' text messages to him the morning after alleged assaults.
The veracity of the allegations are immaterial to the conversation. Allegations have been made by two women. The press love this stuff. But nobody's covering it. Why?
Seems to be the nature of secret governmental organizations. There is of course some need for secrecy, but at the level and to the extent that it's at now, it would be more surprising to find out it wasn't being misused.
We should really not be allowing our government to operate with such secrecy. It seems inevitable that government organizations, operating in secret, will be used against the people they're ostensibly created to protect.
Given that it's been ~75 years since George Orwell and Sonia Brownell married, do we have any idea yet whether she started working with the Information Research Department before, or after, their marriage?
Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens' attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II's of England via the Armada, Germany's twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan's bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity. This book is concerned with the last in a specific manifestation; that is, the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved. Self-interest is whatever conduces to the welfare or advantage of the body being governed; folly is a policy that in these terms is counter-productive.
> We should really not be allowing our government to operate with such secrecy.
I agree, but what can we do, and how. "Democracy" seems to be the most popular answer, except democracy is what brought us this in the first place. Maybe science....is this even on their radar (which covers "everything" so they say)?
Just like Capitalism, that term is too vague to be useful. We could pick 500 people at random, stuff them into congress, and have no elections - that would be democracy. You could have a referendum on everything, and that would be democracy.
To address these kind of issues you have to get into details of what makes a well functioning vs poorly functioning democracy, what are your KPIs - for example, you have only two parties and Byzantine process of selecting candidates, is that antidemocratic and does that allow financial interests undue influence?
>Just like Capitalism, that term is too vague to be useful.
I disagree: vagueness of words is very useful, so useful it can keep billions of people (the smarter the better) in a Stockholm Syndrome like situation indefinitely, including defending it against anyone who tried to liberate them.
It's certainly going on today, especially in various three-letter agencies trying to control the narrative and keep the truth from public view -- see the Twitter Files by Taibbi and others.
Which ideas "become a thing" also feels very controlled to me. I feel like NGOs kinda form a global para-empire that the US uses to form and control counterelites. Idk really but that's my completely ignorant conspiracy statement lol
The russkies were doing the same. Read Thomas Rid's Active Measures. Choice quote from KGB colonel on publishing in western media: "If we didn't have the free press we would have had to invent it"
Do you happen to know the name of some of those writers that are sponsored by the Russians? So I can read them, of course, I’m tired of the Western-supported writers.
Thanks! Thought for a while that that book only dealt with Cold War-era propaganda (saw KGB in your comment), but if it includes newspaper writers/columnists who are in the Russians’ payroll right now then all the better, as I said, I’m tired of the Applebaums of this world.
That's kind of the point - the US and Russia were doing the same thing. In 1961 in tge US, mobs repeatedly formed with implicit police backing and beat the hell out of white and black passengers for daring to sit next to each other, for risking their lives to affirm the idea that blacks were not less than whites. In the face of things like that, a lot of US criticism fell flat.
> In the face of things like that, a lot of US criticism fell flat.
While the absolute worst part of American society and culture did approach the more casual evils that Communism produced it all pales compared to the scale and pervasiveness of what Russians suffered and perpetrated. American criticisms were frustrated by some hypocrisy but they didn’t fall flat except to the willfully ignorant of what went on during Communism.
Funny thing I just realized: russkies is a Russian-to-English borrowing with exactly the same kind of double plural as e.g. чипсы čipsy “potato crisps/chips”, an English-to-Russian one (a number of other Slavic languages do this as well, or so I’ve heard). That is, russkie is already a (nominative) plural in the source language (the nominative singular is russkij m, russkaâ f, russkoe n; it’s a nominalized adjective, thus the gendered forms). Presumably it doesn’t sound plural to the speaker of the target language, so(?) one more plural ending it gets. The only other Slavic-to-English example of this sort I know is pierogis, from Polish (the nominative singular form is pieróg). Any others?
Funnily enough, בלינצעס blintses seems to be the native Yiddish plural, but if I’m to believe Wiktionary the English singular is blintz so might be a back-formation from it, because the Yiddish singular is בלינצע blintse.
Because it is easy to say and typical for English. In English "y" at the ends up as "ies" for plural.
Whatever the rules, eventually whatever is easier for locals to say will be what people go with.
> The only other Slavic-to-English example of this sort I know is pierogis, from Polish (the nominative singular form is pieróg).
Not speaking Polish whenever I heard "pierogis" in English, I assumed all Americans meant was Russian "pirogi". So was expecting fluffy yeast leavened baked goodies, instead I got boiled vareniky/pelimini/dumplings.
I'm a native English speaker going on twenty years of acquired Russian, since college. "Russkie" in English doesn't correspond to the plural form in Russian to my intuition. It's the singular, then pluralized in the usual English way.
Transliterations make it easy to confuse the difference between the grammatical endings of русский (singular, masculine adjective used as singular noun) and русские (plural adjective used as plural noun). The end of English "Russkie" is pronounced more like the end of "русский", while the plural "русские" would be something like RUSS-key-yay in English, ROOS-key-yay in Russian.
The general rule for making singulars plural in English is adding -s. The general rule for Russian nominative-case adjectives is adding -ые or -ие. Granted, native Russian speakers often speed through and slur unstressed grammatical endings, so the difference isn't always discernible in speech.
Oh the hand wringing. Fair's fair when the other side is doing it.
Anyway, public discourse will always have someone pushing an agenda. Nabisco, CIA, your local Instagram influencer. It's a race to the bottom. That's why bastions of unbiased investigative journalism is just such a precious thing.
I love how famous American propaganda is simply overlooked when people are whining about "Russian propaganda", the evidence of which is usually a cleverly written story (which is also propaganda).
The irony, naivete, and logical inconsistency of this planet and Westerners in particular is mind boggling.
Oh definitely. This is the same reason why probably every company that's critical to the functioning of the internet probably has moles from every major intelligence agency private and state-run
At least the other side didn't pretend to have a free press. The problem here is to pretend you're in the freest country in the world while everything is being controlled by secret agencies that think it is all fair and good.
Objectively my country is the most free, you can whip out a swastika or one of those stupid Russian Z symbols here and nobody's going to put you in jail. You might deservedly suffer reputational harm, but that's it.
The system is far from perfect, and it has suffered horribly in the part 20 years from loss of ad revenue, but my local Mercury News is going to give me better local reporting than Pravda would for Muscovites, or Xinhua for anyone.
Most of the latter ones did receive media time. None of those in the article were arrested for simply holding up political symbols like a swastika or Z symbol. In the entire article, there were only a few controversial ones, from the WW1, immediately post-WW1 era and the Vietnam era, and they have all been featured in media.
It's not what's okay, it's comparing existing or previously existing nations or systems with each other, and not an ideal. Yes everyone can and should do better.
Except that the comparison is not done in a fair way. To be specific, Americans believe their country is exponentially better than other nations like France or UK. It's not.
Libel law in the UK is nuts. I really have no idea about France, I just assumed it's some weird Napoleonic code where they guillotine you if you insult the emperor. That's the system that's there right?
I mean I agree, but that's also Russian rhetoric. Fair's fair when the other side is doing it is basically the basis of Russian foreign policy, or at least the justification for their foreign policy.
Again though I agree with you, whatboutism is just enforcing precedent.
I completely agree, I think that precedent matters. But again, that's just not how conversations go when it's the other side that's being discussed. Try bringing up the US in a Russia thread, here or elsewhere and you'll get that magic word on every single reply lol.
Then let us not descend to the level of our inferiors but maintain an intelligent standard of discussion. There is no reason to cry whataboutism which is what you are doing here in a roundabout way.
Most of what you call "whatboutism" is really expressing "Actually, this is normal and accepted. Just not for me, right?". If someone is pointing out that you are using a double standard, then the problem is not with them.
As I said in other comments, I agree with this but the issue is that whatboutism is still being used as a shield when the other side does something. My original comment was a bit sarcastic, I was just pointing out that this would be seen as whatboutism in any thread about say, Russian media control
I'm of the opinion is that even most of the enemies are made up by the agencies, both in terms of creating, enabling, supporting and amplifying them, and in making you worried about them.
Our Man in Havana is a very good book about the topic.
Secrets are a dark illiquid market where there’s high demand for things that don’t exist. So naturally there’s a lot of supply for that information. The fact that is almost all bogus is irrelevant.
This article is a short overview and review of the podcast series mini-series "Not all propaganda is art"
The podcast's self-description is:
> “Not All Propaganda is Art” tells the story of three writers who got caught up in the Cultural Cold War between the years of 1956 and 1960: New Yorker writer and “little magazine” champion Dwight Macdonald, British theater critic and “Angry Young Man” Kenneth Tynan, and legendary Native Son novelist Richard Wright, who at this time was living in exile in France in protest of American racism. All three collaborated with and were targeted by American, British, and French security agencies in Cold War propaganda battles over contested intellectual ideas like the critique of mass culture and politically engaged art.
The US won the cold war in that famous kitchen when it became clear the USSR cannot make consumer goods.
A mistake that the Chinese made certain not to replicate.
Too much importance is made on free press, elections, freedom of expression. I was involved on a trade mission to Vietnam and nobody mentioned pride month.
That's not why the USSR fell. It fell because of the oil crisis that crashed the price of oil, and with it, the export revenues of the USSR. That, and geriatric leaders who "ran the country without regaining consciousness". That latter part might remind you of something.
Oil export just prolonged the agony. Soviets could not reform without touching the institutions and could not survive without keeping the institutions intact.
Gorbachev was not geriatric, but he was not a right caliber for that job, Soviet system did not produce those.
But how free is our press? 3 companies control 99% of UK newspapers. 6 companies control most of UK press of any kind.
Our laws on Libel are so mad, that we allowed Head of Wagner to sue a British journalists for writing about him, while he was under sanctions for war crimes.
The UK has a weak media sector because it's impossible to compete with the 800-pound taxpayer-funded gorilla in the room, which doesn't need to turn a profit. The only way for UK media to remain remotely financially viable is to scour all the muck that the BBC won't touch, hence all the terrible tabloids, and even then it's touch and go at best. The libel laws are in turn a consequence of the excesses of the terrible tabloids.
I’d put a slightly different framing to you. Even in places like the US (where there is no clear comparison to the BBC when looking at audience and influence with public funding) you still see those exact same dynamics play out as you describe it with a huge rush to the bottom style mentality.
The problem wasn’t the public funding but rather that good journalism is incompatible with a profit maximising corporate structure. We saw the exact same thing play out online with how the fact that the internets primary business model is advertising and what that has done to content creation across all formats and all platforms almost without exception.
So like you’re saying but the opposite in some ways.
As a creative person, finding out how much of that whole era was an operation is demoralizing. In culture it was a time when there was a there there. Young men could reasonably aspire to growing up to become artists and writers, in a society where ideas and discourse had coherent meaning and the politics of the nation had at least some accountability to reason. Reading that it was just another spy hustle makes me want to stop writing.
However, these stories also fit into the narrative that we have no culture, it was all fake, and therefore there is nothing worth preserving or protecting, only dismantling and dissolving. It's hackneyed. Another demoralizing narrative churned out by a partisan brunch chatter factory shouldn't bring us down.
Really, the CIA and the western intelligence community had one job. I like how the west thinks it won the cold war when all of its institutions are openly occupied by the very ideologues they were formed against. Sure, CIA backed culture industries, and Hollywood is an organ of the State Department, but in spite of these stories, the sort of people our society pays to do dirty jobs are not our protagonists, and they are not the story imo.
anywhere there is a rainbow flag really, I don't know that anyone could argue against intersectionality and post-colonialism as being examples of the marxist movements that the CIA fought the cold war against. it's not even critical to say it's all very explicitly marxist, right down to "white," being defined negatively as whatever is not "red," and revolutionary, or "of-color" today. it's maoism with american characteristics.
what appears to have changed judging by the number of officials mugging for cable news shows is the intelligence community apparently sees itself as the elite in a post-national technocracy, and they are happily dismantling the confining limits of their host nations. the words for most of these sentiments are officially suppressed, but everybody knows. it's why they're afraid of memes. knowing what great artists, comedians, and writers are capable of, I'm optimistic and not entirely demoralized to read that some pseudo-intellectual sellouts sold out to some sellouts and are only remembered in the new yorker for that.
> anywhere there is a rainbow flag really, I don't know that anyone could argue against intersectionality and post-colonialism as being examples of the marxist movements that the CIA fought the cold war against
Yes, when Raytheon or some BigTech front for mass surveillance splashes the rainbow colors across their logo, that's 'Marxism' at work!
Plenty of Marxists are actually quite skeptical of intersectionality. There's vigorous debate on the left as to whether its ultimate role (if not to say its intended purpose) is to undermine class analysis and solidarity with an endless kaleidoscope of trumped-up divisions.
The idea that Marxism has captured Hollywood is likewise bollocks. The films it churns out relentlessly champion narcissism, power fantasies, fast cars, and the MIC.
> FY2012 budget states a plan to “initiate investigations into the relationship between… neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-cognition interactions, and narrative structures.”
William F. Buckley didn't just support the cold war — he actually participated in early CIA actions. In 1951 he became a deep cover CIA agent stationed in Mexico, reporting directly (and only) to E. Howard Hunt (who would later play a role in the Bay of Pigs invasion). Two years before his death, 79-year-old Buckley remembered a strange aftermath to his CIA work more than half a century before:
In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico?
Buckley's honest answer? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President."*
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadWhat is the perception?
'Cold War antics' of a 'bygone era'. Or is CIA still manipulating journals and content? New Yorker is silent on this topic.
The allegations were that he sometimes had rough sex during consensual relationships. That’s hardly front-page material.
more info here: https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/07/03/exclusive-neil-gaim...
Spook intervention in social mind space is strategic not tactical in nature. The goal is the ability to control and steer collective conversation. To take control of dissent, place its leaders, and pen its 'thoughts'.
Covering up a scandal could well be strategic, and serve to control and steer collective conversation.
Anyway, allegations like these as extremly common if there is any party with a lot of money. Let’s wait the actual juridical process if that happens.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/neil-gaiman-a...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/07/03/neil-gaiman-deni...
Go back to the #metoo coverage from 2018. How many mainstream media outlets covered those accusations?
We should really not be allowing our government to operate with such secrecy. It seems inevitable that government organizations, operating in secret, will be used against the people they're ostensibly created to protect.
Let's pin the suspicions on Celia
More: https://www.hoover.org/research/celias-office
MM-P might be the guy you are looking for. True love of Sonia, crush of Simone, disturbingly normal
>His 1947 book, Humanism and Terror, has been widely understood as defense of the Soviet farce trials.
>the (now-lost) thesis La Notion de multiple intelligible chez Plotin ("Plotinus's Notion of the Intelligible Many"),
https://old.reddit.com/r/SWORDS/comments/1bopjmi/crosscultur...
Here’s Tuchman from “The March of Folly:”
Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens' attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II's of England via the Armada, Germany's twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan's bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity. This book is concerned with the last in a specific manifestation; that is, the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved. Self-interest is whatever conduces to the welfare or advantage of the body being governed; folly is a policy that in these terms is counter-productive.
I agree, but what can we do, and how. "Democracy" seems to be the most popular answer, except democracy is what brought us this in the first place. Maybe science....is this even on their radar (which covers "everything" so they say)?
Just like Capitalism, that term is too vague to be useful. We could pick 500 people at random, stuff them into congress, and have no elections - that would be democracy. You could have a referendum on everything, and that would be democracy.
To address these kind of issues you have to get into details of what makes a well functioning vs poorly functioning democracy, what are your KPIs - for example, you have only two parties and Byzantine process of selecting candidates, is that antidemocratic and does that allow financial interests undue influence?
I disagree: vagueness of words is very useful, so useful it can keep billions of people (the smarter the better) in a Stockholm Syndrome like situation indefinitely, including defending it against anyone who tried to liberate them.
It's certainly going on today, especially in various three-letter agencies trying to control the narrative and keep the truth from public view -- see the Twitter Files by Taibbi and others.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1dgyujd/comment/l8...
While the absolute worst part of American society and culture did approach the more casual evils that Communism produced it all pales compared to the scale and pervasiveness of what Russians suffered and perpetrated. American criticisms were frustrated by some hypocrisy but they didn’t fall flat except to the willfully ignorant of what went on during Communism.
Pelmeni (пельмени) sometimes becomes pelmenis, but like with pierogi I usually see the plural form without the `s` in English (in America at least).
I think "blintzes" too, from Yiddish `blintse` by way of Slavic.
Whatever the rules, eventually whatever is easier for locals to say will be what people go with.
> The only other Slavic-to-English example of this sort I know is pierogis, from Polish (the nominative singular form is pieróg).
Not speaking Polish whenever I heard "pierogis" in English, I assumed all Americans meant was Russian "pirogi". So was expecting fluffy yeast leavened baked goodies, instead I got boiled vareniky/pelimini/dumplings.
Transliterations make it easy to confuse the difference between the grammatical endings of русский (singular, masculine adjective used as singular noun) and русские (plural adjective used as plural noun). The end of English "Russkie" is pronounced more like the end of "русский", while the plural "русские" would be something like RUSS-key-yay in English, ROOS-key-yay in Russian.
The general rule for making singulars plural in English is adding -s. The general rule for Russian nominative-case adjectives is adding -ые or -ие. Granted, native Russian speakers often speed through and slur unstressed grammatical endings, so the difference isn't always discernible in speech.
Anyway, public discourse will always have someone pushing an agenda. Nabisco, CIA, your local Instagram influencer. It's a race to the bottom. That's why bastions of unbiased investigative journalism is just such a precious thing.
Making them targets for influence. A circle of propaganda life. The soil must be tilled.
Maybe the CIA will shift into doing things “for the better” so that inherent value is raised across the world?
The irony, naivete, and logical inconsistency of this planet and Westerners in particular is mind boggling.
The system is far from perfect, and it has suffered horribly in the part 20 years from loss of ad revenue, but my local Mercury News is going to give me better local reporting than Pravda would for Muscovites, or Xinhua for anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_prisoners_in_the_Uni...
Again though I agree with you, whatboutism is just enforcing precedent.
Secrets are a dark illiquid market where there’s high demand for things that don’t exist. So naturally there’s a lot of supply for that information. The fact that is almost all bogus is irrelevant.
The podcast's self-description is:
> “Not All Propaganda is Art” tells the story of three writers who got caught up in the Cultural Cold War between the years of 1956 and 1960: New Yorker writer and “little magazine” champion Dwight Macdonald, British theater critic and “Angry Young Man” Kenneth Tynan, and legendary Native Son novelist Richard Wright, who at this time was living in exile in France in protest of American racism. All three collaborated with and were targeted by American, British, and French security agencies in Cold War propaganda battles over contested intellectual ideas like the critique of mass culture and politically engaged art.
https://theoryofeverythingpodcast.com/
A mistake that the Chinese made certain not to replicate.
Too much importance is made on free press, elections, freedom of expression. I was involved on a trade mission to Vietnam and nobody mentioned pride month.
> Leonid Brezhnev New Year's Address (1979) [Subtitled]
https://youtu.be/E66oM2iAMwM?si=W6OeT2GxdfUt-nzI
But how free is our press? 3 companies control 99% of UK newspapers. 6 companies control most of UK press of any kind.
Our laws on Libel are so mad, that we allowed Head of Wagner to sue a British journalists for writing about him, while he was under sanctions for war crimes.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/25/uk-placed-i...
Incentives and disincentives, as always.
The problem wasn’t the public funding but rather that good journalism is incompatible with a profit maximising corporate structure. We saw the exact same thing play out online with how the fact that the internets primary business model is advertising and what that has done to content creation across all formats and all platforms almost without exception.
So like you’re saying but the opposite in some ways.
However, these stories also fit into the narrative that we have no culture, it was all fake, and therefore there is nothing worth preserving or protecting, only dismantling and dissolving. It's hackneyed. Another demoralizing narrative churned out by a partisan brunch chatter factory shouldn't bring us down.
Really, the CIA and the western intelligence community had one job. I like how the west thinks it won the cold war when all of its institutions are openly occupied by the very ideologues they were formed against. Sure, CIA backed culture industries, and Hollywood is an organ of the State Department, but in spite of these stories, the sort of people our society pays to do dirty jobs are not our protagonists, and they are not the story imo.
Examples?
what appears to have changed judging by the number of officials mugging for cable news shows is the intelligence community apparently sees itself as the elite in a post-national technocracy, and they are happily dismantling the confining limits of their host nations. the words for most of these sentiments are officially suppressed, but everybody knows. it's why they're afraid of memes. knowing what great artists, comedians, and writers are capable of, I'm optimistic and not entirely demoralized to read that some pseudo-intellectual sellouts sold out to some sellouts and are only remembered in the new yorker for that.
Yes, when Raytheon or some BigTech front for mass surveillance splashes the rainbow colors across their logo, that's 'Marxism' at work!
Plenty of Marxists are actually quite skeptical of intersectionality. There's vigorous debate on the left as to whether its ultimate role (if not to say its intended purpose) is to undermine class analysis and solidarity with an endless kaleidoscope of trumped-up divisions.
The idea that Marxism has captured Hollywood is likewise bollocks. The films it churns out relentlessly champion narcissism, power fantasies, fast cars, and the MIC.
> FY2012 budget states a plan to “initiate investigations into the relationship between… neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-cognition interactions, and narrative structures.”
A review by Ken Follett, another bestselling author:
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/16/books/on-the-altar-of-ove...
William F. Buckley didn't just support the cold war — he actually participated in early CIA actions. In 1951 he became a deep cover CIA agent stationed in Mexico, reporting directly (and only) to E. Howard Hunt (who would later play a role in the Bay of Pigs invasion). Two years before his death, 79-year-old Buckley remembered a strange aftermath to his CIA work more than half a century before:
https://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2008/02/28/the-collected-contro...