[Atlas667]

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

It's kind of a long lecture, but absolutely mind blowing.

[bazoom42]

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.

[phkahler]

>> 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]

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/mod...>

Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) wrote a multi-part series on this, which I've indexed here:

<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...>

- “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.” (1977-12-26) <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-...>

- “Colby Acknowledges U.S. Press Picked Up Bogus C.I.A. Accounts” (1977-12-28) <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-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-ris...>

[neom]

Similarly: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/04/13/399414351...

[aspenmayer]

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

which was inspired by the success of Cool Britannia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Britannia

[red-iron-pine]

China trying to copy that via gatcha games

[Atlas667]

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]

Another way to look at this is that the US has been unable to suppress their own youth culture to any significant degree.

[lazide]

‘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.

[ta12653421]

...and dont forget McDonalds and the famous Marlboro Guy :-D

[rixed]

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]

>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]

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.

[Retric]

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.

[jack_tripper]

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.

[pjc50]

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.

[toyg]

> 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]

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.

[matthewdgreen]

Of course there are conspiracies in the world. The problem with “conspiracy theorists” is not that they’re wrong about the existence of organized conspiracies, it’s that they’re so routinely, 180 degrees wrong about the specifics, and so easily mislead into being useful idiots.

For example, the loudest Epstein conspiracy theorists have spent the past ten years screaming about a conspiracy of pedophiles in their specific outgroup, while ignoring every hint of evidence that indicated their preferred leader was somehow tied to the mess (remember when Trump appointed Epstein’s sweetheart-deal prosecutor to his cabinet during his first term. Wtf!) They were led by the nose to a conclusion that anyone could have seen was highly questionable, because their reasoning and judgement absolutely sucks.

[krapp]

>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.

[jasonvorhe]

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.

[MangoToupe]

It sounds more like you're describing paranoid schizophrenics or antisemites than conspiracy theorists.

[krapp]

>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]

Considering how clearly Abraham appeared to have something going on - maybe schizophrenia? - it’s all a jumble of the same noise anyway?

[krapp]

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.

[Atlas667]

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]

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]

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.

[caycep]

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]

In-Q-tel is the CIA's version of DARPA

[api]

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.

[nxor]

Too many people believe you have to be one side or the other. Just because there are two choices doesn't mean (A) they are different and (B) one is better.

[api]

There's a lot of choices.

[lazide]

You do know COINTELPRO and MKULTRA not only existed, but were organized efforts with significant funding and energy behind them, right?

And that Area 51 not only exists, but does a lot of work under the veil of explicit, organized, secrecy? And has for a very, very long time now?

Just because there are bullshit conspiracy theories doesn’t mean there aren’t very real conspiracies going on too.

[dredmorbius]

Note too that the FBI directly hosts much of the evidence of these programmes, for those with doubts as to their veracity:

<https://vault.fbi.gov/>

COINTELPRO: <https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/White%20Hate%20Groups/COIN...>

And the CIA on MKULTRA: <https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/06760269>

[red-iron-pine]

CONINTELPRO was FBI and was based on domestic surveillance against real and perceived communist influence. It did indeed have significant funding and push behind it.

90% of what they did was aggressive and likely unconstitutional, but make no mistake there were absolutely agitators in the US being pushed by the USSR -- and which date back to the original "Active Measures" pushed by the USSR.

[etc-hosts]

Main funder of the US Communist Party during the COINTELPRO era was... surprise.. the FBI, they wanted to use the CP to keep tabs on possible spying or agitation efforts by Soviet Union's in the US.

[lazide]

squints and this makes it not a conspiracy…. How?

Especially since evidence was only discovered because of a random copy of documents they forgot to shred, but did shred all the rest of them.

[TeeMassive]

I don't think dividing opinions into conspiracist and not conspiracist is not a good epistemological basis. Opinions can be judged on the facts they are based on facts and how they are based on logical arguments or not regardless of their conspiracistness.

[yubblegum]

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]

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.

[yubblegum]

I think you are overmodulating the conclusions bit here. It is more than just "attempts".

Possibly the difference in our views here have to do with what degree of (collective mind) control is of sufficient utility to various interested parties. Does one need to "run" the world or "100% control everything". I doubt it. I am thinking of the analogy of shifting the course of rivers here, where the (collective) river ends up behaving in the expected manner, and (individual) water molecules are (relatively) free to do wheelies or flow the other way or whatever remains possible within the overall boundaries of the river and its 'set course'.

[potato3732842]

This. People have a hard time wrestling with the fractional nature of it.

You don't need to convince everyone that Iraq has WMDs or that Stanley travel mugs are hot shit, just enough people to get done what you're trying to get done.

[lo_zamoyski]

The distinction (as others make) is between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Of course conspiracies exist. Conspiracy theories, however, are flaky, unsubstantiated substitutes for genuine explanation that hinge on improbable or impossible conditions and powers to hold [0], often in the face of contradictory and much more reasonable alternatives.

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/01/narrative-thinking-...

[pessimizer]

> It wasn’t some sophisticated conspiracy.

It definitely was. There's nothing more annoying than the "of course all of this is true, but only crazy people think that people planned and did it on purpose."

The real conspiracy, it always seems, is that intelligence agencies ever do anything on purpose, or have any goals. They were supposed to fight the Soviets, but who decided on that? It is a mystery. Did they come up with plans? No, everybody just blundered around and did their own thing.

People are claiming that there were no plans and no coordination in offices where the same people sat at the same desks for 40 years, and were replaced by their children. It would be bizarre if you were talking about any other subject other than praise for authority and the diagnosis of people who deny its selfless goals.

> Not saying it was great.

How generous of you.

> 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.

You don't know that there are offices that deal with this in the military all day, and that they both help finance films and deny access to equipment and depictions of equipment to productions who don't agree to their terms? The military provides soldiers and equipment to films. This is true for all military divisions and intelligence agencies, and to my knowledge has been true since the FBI started funding and working productions in the 50s.

If you think all this stuff just sort of happens through random collisions, it's going to distort your perceptions of the world. Or specifically in my experience, to ascribe magical qualities to "the market."

One of the current funny clips is Claire Danes being silenced on the Colbert show when talking about the relationship of the show Homeland's creators to the CIA (one's father and cousin), how all the actors were invited to "spy school" every year, and how it was explained to her by somebody at CIA school that the CIA was having to deepen its similar partnerships in media to bolster support for itself against Trump (during the first term) before being quickly silenced by Colbert. She's a perfect example of people participating in every aspect of this process, yet still being unaware that it really exists. She'd call you a conspiracy theorist for mentioning it.

https://youtu.be/d6mBbyb-vIA?t=360

[potato3732842]

>One of the current funny clips is Claire Danes being silenced on the Colbert show when talking about the relationship of the show Homeland's creators to the CIA (one's father and cousin), how all the actors were invited to "spy school" every year, and how it was explained to her by somebody at CIA school that the CIA was having to deepen its similar partnerships in media to bolster support for itself against Trump (during the first term) before being quickly silenced by Colbert. She's a perfect example of people participating in every aspect of this process, yet still being unaware that it really exists. She'd call you a conspiracy theorist for mentioning it.

>https://youtu.be/d6mBbyb-vIA?t=360

Watched it on mute with subtitles because work. The body language there is amusing. She's just blathering away unaware until Colbert throws a "shit shit shit we don't talk about how the sausage was made on the air" exception.

[MangoToupe]

> For the left it’s a Marxist class conspiracy

We don't need conspiracy, we have dialectic materialism. Similar to how for the most part manufacturing consent also doesn't rely on conspiracy (the New York Times and Dick Cheney nonwithstanding).

The failure of liberals may be a failure to read and understand the past.

[mikkupikku]

> "Similar to how for the most part manufacturing consent also doesn't rely on conspiracy (the New York Times and Dick Cheney nonwithstanding)."

The brilliance of Manufacturing Consent is that it neither relies on conspiracy, nor precludes it.

[some_random]

You're more than welcome to call your conspiracies other things, doesn't make them any less conspiratorial though.

[DANmode]

Best part about your comment:

the reader has no way to know if you’re talking about “conspiracies”,

or “conspiracy theories”,

due to colloquial (ignorant) interchangeable use.

[mikkupikku]

The colloquial muddying of language concerning "conspiracy theory" was probably a government psyop in response to the JFK assassination. There, the officially endorsed theory was a lone wolf theory, that one guy did it by himself without any help or encouragement, and virtually all other theories were theories that involved one or more people conspiring in some way. From there, "conspiracy theory" morphed in media to mean any theory running counter to the official theory, even when the official theory was itself a theory about a conspiracy.

[MangoToupe]

taps the sign to read

Capital requires no conspiracy to drive the world. It's the liberals who think that individual agency plays a major role.

[immibis]

So, right-wing conspiracy theories tend to be more like: these three people secretly own everything through a hidden system of written contracts. Like "there's a secret room beneath Comet Pizza, specifically, where they buy and sell a chemical extract from the blood of scared babies"

And left-wing conspiracy theories tend to be more like: all the people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. Like "billionaires are fucking us over. Since media companies are owned by billionaires a large part of what they broadcast is just pro-billionaire propaganda."

[potato3732842]

I think the filter bubble might be confining your observations a bit.

[krapp]

Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is.

And the right definitely believes that people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us. The "they" behind Pizzagate was "the Democratic Party."

And then there's "Cultural Marxism" (a conspiracy theory about the nefarious communist influence of Jews in academia), the "groomer" panic (a conspiracy theory that transgender identity is a cover for organized pedophile rings) white replacement theory, DEI, China anything and countless other conspiracies the right believes in that are based on some kind of racial or gender essentialism or prejudice.

The left has its share of that too, but the distinction you're trying to draw here makes no sense.

[mikkupikku]

> "Conspiracy theories involve "people who share a certain set of characteristics have similar incentives and therefore act in similar ways that aren't good for the rest of us" by definition, that's what a "conspiracy" is."

No, that's not conspiracy. Conspiracy requires deliberate collusion between members of the conspiracy, it requires conspiring. If you have several people behaving in a way that appears coordinated because those people have aligned values and incentives, then it might be possible that those people have talked to each other and come up with some sort of a plan, which would make it a conspiracy, but it's also possible that no such organization exists and they're each independently doing whatever they think is correct in their circumstance. In that case, the emergent group behavior looks like a conspiracy but literally isn't a conspiracy.

This is what Manufacturing Consent talks about. I wish people would read it.

[DANmode]

> The "they" behind Pizzagate was "the Democratic Party."

For some.