The CIA and culture

[peaccenicked]

This is funny. Hysterical even
you have to listen on real or watch. wait for the punchline.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/media/01/v...hahn/index.html (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/media/01/volkerBerghahn/index.html)

According to the author of this next site,
if you enter you automatically go on a FBI file. I did so without the warning.
http://members.aol.com/bblum6/American_holocaust.htm

no such warning here.
Information on CIA
http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/CIAtimeline.html

(Edited by peaccenicked at 6:49 pm on Jan. 26, 2002)

[peaccenicked]

Saunders on the CIA and Culture

Readers of the NI will need no reminding of how our world has been sullied by the dirty politics and destabilizations of the US Central Intelligence Agency. Lesser known, perhaps, is the vast and complex web of ‘foundations’ and slush funds by which the CIA sought to influence the artistic and literary life of Europe; a ‘Cultural Cold War’ running parallel to the military and political struggle with the Soviet Union.

Frances Stonor Saunders’ fascinating book shows how, over more than two decades following World War Two, the CIA pumped millions of dollars into the cash-strapped European cultural scene in a covert attempt to woo intellectuals away from pro-communist positions and promote the view that US hegemony was benign and disinterested. The scale of the operation was staggering; few artistic endeavours, from art exhibitions to literary journals, were untouched by the insidious hand of the CIA and there were few intellectuals who did not, wittingly or unwittingly, take their share of this Yankee version of ‘Kremlin Gold’. In these years the CIA operated, in effect if not in intention, as the US Ministry of Culture.

Interestingly, the CIA focused not on right-wingers but on the ‘non-communist left’ and people such as Arthur Koestler, Melvin Lasky and Stephen Spender were active participants throughout the whole operation. Central to the book is a detailed examination of the literary magazine Encounter, edited by Lasky and Spender, entirely CIA-funded and functioning, as one critic memorably put it, as ‘the police review of the American-occupied countries’.

There were also moments of low farce and high comedy, as when Arthur Koestler’s 1948 novel Darkness at Noon sold out rapidly as 50,000 copies were bought and distributed by the intelligence services and many more were purchased by the French Communist party to keep them out of circulation!

Does any of this matter? After all, this was the Cold War and the USSR had its own front-organizations and sponsored conferences. Stonor Saunders argues persuasively that the malign and corrupting effect of the operation springs directly from the dissonance between the stated aims of the US and the methods used by the CIA. Claiming to defend democracy and cultural freedom, and decrying any left bias among writers and thinkers, it peddled a stultifying pro-American party line in which what was defended was not ‘democracy’ but power and privilege.

Frances Stonor Saunders deserves credit for shining a light into this dark and shoddy corner of the US-European relationship. In a very real sense we are still bringing in the harvest from this pax americana; from the Cold War to Banana wars, from Vietnam to Kosovo the constant factor has been that the US has loudly proclaimed its altruism and benevolence while aggressively and single-mindedly pursuing its own partisan interests.