Recent writing on CIA’s role in the kulturkampf against the Red Menace paints an image of debonair spooks recruiting the most interesting Western artists and using them, unbeknownst, as a liberal wedge against radical movements at home and abroad. The Agency created cultural institutions, magazines and, most importantly, a financial market to support movements such as Abstract Expressionism; it penned articles in favor of a liberal-leftish ideology of self-expression that could exist only in the ‘democratic’ West; it organized exhibits, printed books, organized press conferences and it paid grants. Episodes from the operations resemble the work of a paranoid comic programmer with sinister preoccupations. It is as if Thomas Pynchon, MK GRVTI 49, was behind the whole thing, perhaps working both sides against the middle, like one of his characters.
-- Martin Billheimer
assassins-of-the-image-the-cia-as-cultural-gatekeeper
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we should be wary that a faux “movement” may be manufactured on the backs of real movements that have sought to upend that political and ...
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