[Convolutional]

> Since the CIA did not, in fact, exist, any claims of what the CIA tried to do are self-evidently false, and need no more rebuttal than the date the CIA came into being.

The CIA did not exist prior to its establishment in 1947, to use your nomenclature. So what is false? Everything it says the CIA did from 1947 to the 1960s is true.

[dragonwriter]

> The CIA did not exist prior to its establishment in 1947, to use your nomenclature. So what is false?

The claim specifically made in the article that the delay in publication from 1936 to 1946 was due to CIA action through a front group.

[Convolutional]

> The claim specifically made in the article that the delay in publication from 1936 to 1946 was due to CIA action through a front group.

It doesn't say that anywhere in the article. You've created a conditional in your head that is found nowhere in the article.

[dragonwriter]

It claims the suppression was “specifically” by the CIA, and the first example of this suppression by the CIA it gives is the publication delay, ascribed to actions of a group, which it ties into the thesis by saying was later identified as a CIA front group.

[the_af]

I assume you mean this paragraph from TFA:

> But its 1946 debut reflected a delay of more than a decade by the country’s real dictators, who disrupted the novel’s genesis and sent its author into exile. And in this act of suppression, Asturias’s censors and exilers were aided by the US, specifically the CIA.

I think it's clumsily worded. There was suppression of the novel and the author was exiled (the novel was self-published in Mexico in 1946, out of the author's own pockets). Guatemala's dictatorship was behind this and the US helped them. But the international discrediting of the author was orchestrated by the CIA through a front, and this took place many years after.

So "this" suppression that the CIA aided is not just 1946 -- that's poorly worded -- but in the ensuing years, after the CIA was already formed.

[jjk166]

No, in context "this suppression" is clearly referring to the disruption of the novel's genesis and the sending of its author into exile performed by the dictators in that period prior to 1946. The dictators are the censors and exilers being referenced in the next sentence.

It would have been easy to say that those actions were part of a broader suppression, or even just aiding in suppression with no qualifier, but specifying "this" makes it unambiguous that they are still talking about the same thing.

[the_af]

I think if you take the full article as context, where they mention specific incidents in the 50's onwards, the context is not the period prior to 1946. I think it's just this specific paragraph that's clumsily worded.

[jjk166]

No, it does say that.

[Convolutional]

You would think if it was inaccurate, the inaccuracy could be quoted from and pointed to. You do not do so.

I see claims there is an inaccuracy there.

I see people doing paraphrases and inventing conditionals and saying they are inaccurate. Which they are. But they're not the original text.

It's pretty simple, quote some text and say why it is inaccurate.

As there are no inaccuracies of the type mentioned, this does not happen because it cannot happen.

[jjk166]

> But its 1946 debut reflected a delay of more than a decade by the country’s real dictators, who disrupted the novel’s genesis and sent its author into exile. And in this act of suppression, Asturias’s censors and exilers were aided by the US, specifically the CIA.

It's in the first paragraph. Emphasis mine. How could the CIA have aided foreign dictators prior to its existence?

[Convolutional]

The first sentence blames the delay on the dictator of Guatemala, quite explicitly. Then in the next sentence it says the CIA aided in the suppression of the novel, which it did.

The text never days the CIA delayed the novel, it says the CIA aided in suppressing the novel. The CCF didn't even exist until the 1950s.

[CatWChainsaw]

OSS, maybe?

[smcin]

Asturias was by chance discussed recently in "The Inventor of Magical Realism" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35860892