US Counterintelligence Plays Divide&Conquer With The Left
Ever wonder why so many of the people arguing with you seem brainwashed? Wonder no more!
Gabriel Rockhill lays it all out, but his article isn’t getting the attention it deserves. That’s probably because it’s a slog to read, but it’s as important as it is wordy.
He tells us about a declassified CIA report that describes exactly how the Agency helped to mastermind the current mess:
“In recognizing it was unlikely that it could abolish [the left] entirely, the world’s most powerful spy organization has sought to move leftist culture away from resolute anti-capitalist and transformative politics toward center-left reformist positions that are less overtly critical of US foreign and domestic policies.”
After all, who better to mount an all-out assault on leftist thought than the biggest counterintelligence agency on earth?
The link is dead now, I guess the report got moved to a more convenient location. Rockhill’s post is four years old, and his eloquence clearly didn’t ring the alarm bells it needed to.
It’s no coincidence that our progress feels hollow, and we find ourselves grappling with ghosts of enemies past. A philosopher at The Sorbonne himself, Rockhill describes the Agency’s “cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism.”
The CIA seems to have planted operatives everywhere to push this agenda — “the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was headquartered in Paris and later discovered to be a CIA front organization during the cultural Cold War, was among the most important patrons in world history, supporting an incredible range of artistic and intellectual activities.”
A CIA front organization was among the most important cultural patrons in world history. Let that sink in. Give an artist a gallery — Voila! Instant capitalist. Even art galleries need to pay the bills.
The agency for US counterintelligence obviously takes this part of its job just as seriously as the more glamourous stuff like coups and assassinations. “It had offices in 35 countries, published dozens of prestige magazines, was involved in the book industry, organized high-profile international conferences and art exhibits, coordinated performances and concerts, and contributed ample funding to various cultural awards and fellowships, as well as to front organizations.”
And it gets worse! Not content with consumable media, the Agency has boldly wrapped its tendrils around the pillars of modern thought.
“The CIA’s program of psychological warfare … has always been keen on understanding and transforming institutions of cultural production and distribution.”
This makes a lot of sense. Anyone can tell you what to think, but culture tells you how to think. It’s pretty logical that an organization set on bending the world to its will would be manipulating cultural institutions.
“The Agency went behind the back of the McCarthy-driven Congress in the postwar era to directly support and promote leftist projects that steered cultural producers and consumers away from the resolutely egalitarian left.
“In severing and discrediting the latter, it also aspired to fragment the left in general, leaving what remained of the center-left with only minimal power and public support (as well as being potentially discredited due to its complicity with right-wing power politics.)”
Sound familiar?
Rockhill specifically mentions the influence of French theory in Academia: “In descriptions that … should invite us to think critically about the current academic situation in the Anglophone world and beyond, the authors of the report foreground the ways in which the precarization of academic labor contributes to the demolition of radical leftism.”
A liberal professor is only as liberal as the job market will allow. Because we’re all chained to capital, given more or less slack as the Market sees fit.
Not only does their program mirror the issues blossoming in Trans ideology, the report specifically cites our old friend Foucault! “Foucault … is specifically applauded for his praise of the New Right intellectuals … reminding philosophers that ‘bloody consequences’ have ‘flowed from the rationalist social theory of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the Revolutionary era.’”
True enough! The Enlightenment taught people to think for themselves. Dynasties were toppled and the old world order eventually came crashing down at the beginning of the 20th century.
They managed to put some structure in place to replace it before the Great Neoliberal Experiment knocked the whole thing off the rails.
Not everyone wants a peaceful, democratic world.
“Foucault’s anti-revolutionary leftism and his perpetuation of … the claim that expansive radical movements only resuscitate the most dangerous of traditions … are perfectly in line with the espionage agency’s overall strategies of psychological warfare.”
Rockhill reminds us how French intellectuals earned a cutting-edge reputation through challenging mid-century conformist impulses, but points out it came at a price: “The theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on … the tradition of radical critique — meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance — surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics.”
It sure looks that way. The lameness of the left has been a topic of conversation for derisive right-wingers and disappointed liberals alike for a long time. These days it’s pretty hard not to notice there are basically two lefts, especially in feminism.
Just last month, Professor Donna Hughes published on 4W, “The American political left is increasingly diving headfirst into their own world of lies and fantasy and, unlike in the imaginary world of QAnon, real children are becoming actual victims.” Her university denounced her as ‘anti-trans,’ of course.
Because Trans Rights forms a perfect muzzle for independent thought, radical or otherwise.
We’re all sadly familiar with how crazy things have gotten. The CIA sure is. But the best part about that report perfectly describing it all? It was published in 1985! That’s right — The biggest counterintelligence apparatus in the world actually seems to have set about creating this insanity on purpose!!
So, if you can’t shake this nagging feeling that Something had to be behind how quickly all this has happened, Congrats! You’re probably right.
It’s hard not to be cynical with some of the things we have learned in recent years. Formerly famous so-called conspiracy theories proven true. Governments overthrown and regions disrupted by disgusting backroom deals and horrifying murders. That’s just the stuff we know about, and very little has been done about any of it.
Socialist thought has been marginalized my whole life, thoroughly smeared as authoritarian by decades of propaganda from all sides. Just because the Soviets weren’t really socialists wasn’t going to stop the US from seizing a golden rhetorical opportunity.
This is not to discount Rothblatt and Pritzker’s contributions, and everything Jennifer Bilek has uncovered over at her 11th Hour blog. No, I’d wager the Agency has lent a helping hand here and there, whether the Transhumanists know it or not. Considering the different ways the Agency was undermining the left 35 years ago, it’s clear that Trans Rights fits the bill perfectly.
Trans ideology has proven to be very effective at splitting and discrediting the left.
Why wouldn’t an agency dedicated to fostering bullshit liberalism to torpedo the left actively support Trans Rights?
Their size, influence and resources would explain how it was able to pop up all over so fast and effectively. But the most important question is — Why?????
Seems not everyone is cool with the idea of The People running things. We are easier to exploit for money and power if we’re ignorant and fighting. Some among us actually prefer a world where ‘Despot’ is a potential career path.
A savage world works for savage people.
