Hunter S. Thompson’s Conspiratorial 9/11 Interview: “The Public Version of the News is Never Really What Happened”

in Politics | July 17th, 2014

Having read almost everything the prolific Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson ever wrote, I don’t know if I would call him paranoid, per se. Nor do I know if I would call him not paranoid. He certainly trusted no entity with power, especially not governments, and really especially not the United States government. So by the time September 11, 2001 came around, he had little goodwill to spare for any of the major players involved in its aftermath. “The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country,” he wrote in his September 12 ESPN column. “Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides.”

A year later, Australia’s ABC Radio National got Thompson’s assessment of the situation. Host Mick O’Regan opens the now famous interview above by asking how he thought the U.S. media had performed in the new post‑9/11 reality. “ ‘Shamefully’ is a word that comes to mind,” responds Thompson. “American journalism I think has been cowed and intimidated by the massive flag-sucking, this patriotic orgy that the White House keeps whipping up. You know if you criticise the President it’s unpatriotic and there’s something wrong with you, you may be a terrorist.” And does he think 9/11 “worked in favor of the Bush Administration?” For Thompson’s full answer, blogger Scratchingdog tracked down the original recording of the interview, not the edited version actually aired on ABC, and heard this:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I have spent enough time on the inside of, well, in the White House and you know, campaigns and I’ve known enough people who do these things, think this way, to know that the public version of the news or whatever event, is never really what happened. And these people I think are willing to take that even further, so I don’t assume that I know the truth of what went on that day, and yeah, just looking around and looking for who had the motive, who had the opportunity, who had the equipment, who had the will. Yeah, these people were looting the treasury and they knew the economy was going into a spiral downward.

9/11 conspiracy theorists have made much of this response and other Thompsonian analysis found in the unedited interview, going so far as to suggest that maybe — just maybe — the writer died three years later of something other than suicide. Given Thompson’s compulsion to speak truth to power, and sometimes to wave firearms around in front of it, any fan of his work can’t help but harshly scrutinize, and often pre-emptively dismiss, any and all “official stories” they happen to hear. We’ll never know whether Thompson would have approved of the “9/11 Truth” movement in the forms it has taken today, but they do share his spirit of creative distrust. And perhaps a touch of paranoia gave his writing its distinctive verve. Nobody moves into what they unfailingly describe as a “fortified compound,” after all, without at least a little bit of it.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Harrowing, Chemical-Filled Daily Routine

Hunter S. Thompson Calls Tech Support, Unleashes a Tirade Full of Fear and Loathing (NSFW)

Noam Chomsky Schools 9/11 Truther; Explains the Science of Making Credible Claims

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The CIA’s Style Manual & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writing Like a Spook

in English Language, Politics, Writing | July 11th, 2014

Along with toppling democratically elected governments, funneling money illegally to dubious political groups and producing pornographic movies about heads of state, the Central Intelligence Agency has also been fiendishly good at manipulating language. After all, this is the organization that made “waterboarding” seem much more acceptable, at least to the Washington elite, by rebranding it as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Another CIA turn of phrase, “extraordinary rendition,” sounds so much better to the ear than “illegal kidnapping and torture.”

Not too long ago, the CIA’s style guide, called the Style Manual and Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications, was posted online. “Good intelligence depends in large measure on clear, concise writing,” writes Fran Moore, Director of Intelligence in the foreword. And considering the agency’s deftness with the written word, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s remarkably good. Some highlights:

The guide likes the Oxford or serial comma. “Most authorities on English usage recommend [the serial comma], and it is the rule for CIA publications.”
It favors using adjectives and adverbs sparingly. “Let nouns and verbs show their power.”
In all cases, it favors American over British spellings, even proper names. Thus, “Labor Party” not “Labour Party.” And for that matter, the guide isn’t terribly keen on using phrases like “apropos” and “faux pas.” “Foreign expressions should be avoided because they sound hackneyed.”
It wisely discourages writers, or anyone really, from ever using the word “enthused.”
And they caution against using exclamation points. “Because intelligence reports are expected to be dispassionate, this punctuation mark should rarely, if ever, be used.”

And then there are some rules that will remind you this guide is the product of a particularly shadowy arm of the U.S. Government.

The guide makes a point of defining “disinformation” as opposed to “misinformation.” “Disinformation refers to the deliberate planting of false reports. Misinformation equates in meaning but does not carry the same devious connotation.” Now you know.
Undeclared wars, like Vietnam, should be spelled with an uncapitalized “w.” Same goes for the “Korean war” and the “Falklands war.” It goes on to argue that the writer should “avoid ‘Yom Kippur war’ which is slangy.” Presumably, the CIA prefers the term “The 1973 Arab-Israeli war.”
The confusing split between China and Taiwan – each refuses to recognize the other — is represented confusingly here too. “For what was once called Nationalist China or the Republic of China, use only Taiwan, both as noun and as adjective. … Avoid Taiwanese as an adjective referring to the island’s administration or its officials (and do not use the term Taiwanese government.)”

It’s unclear whether or not the guide is being used for the CIA’s queasily flip, profoundly unfunny Twitter account.

If you’re looking for a more conventional style guide, remember that Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is also online.

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

Donald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Other Disney Propaganda Cartoons from World War II

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Animated Films Made During the Cold War Explain Why America is Exceptionally Exceptional

in Animation, History, Politics | June 25th, 2014

The CIA fought most of the Cold War on the cultural front, recruiting operatives and placing agents in every possible sphere of influence, not only abroad but at home as well. As Francis Stoner Saunders’ book The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters details, the agency funded intellectuals across the political spectrum as well as producers of radio, TV, and film. A well-financed propaganda campaign aimed at the American public attempted to persuade the populace that their country looked exactly like its leaders wished to see it, a well-run capitalist machine with equal opportunity for all. In addition to the agency’s various forays into jazz and modern art, the CIA also helped finance and consulted on the production of animated films, like the 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm we recently featured. We’ve also posted on other animated propaganda films made by government agencies, such as A is for Atom, a PR film for nuclear energy, and Duck and Cover, a short suggesting that cleanliness may help citizens survive a nuclear war.

Today we bring you three short animations funded and commissioned by private interests. These films were made for Arkansas’ Harding College (now Harding University) and financed by longtime General Motors CEO Alfred P. Sloan. The name probably sounds familiar. Today the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation generously supports public radio and television, as well as medical research and other altruistic projects. In the post-war years, Sloan, widely considered “the father of the modern corporation,” writes Karl Cohen in a two-part essay for Animation World Network, supposedly took a shine to the bootstrapping president of Harding, George S. Benson, a Christian missionary and crusading anti-Communist who used his position to promote God, family, and country. According to Cohen, Sloan donated several hundred thousand dollars to Harding as funding for “educational anti-Communist, pro-free enterprise system films.” Contracted by the college, producer John Sutherland, former Disney writer, made nine films in all. As you’ll see in the title card that opens each short, these were ostensibly made “to create a deeper understanding of what has made America the finest place in the world to live.” At the top, watch 1949’s “Why Play Leap Frog?” and just above, see another of the Harding films, “Meet King Joe,” also from 1949.

Just above, watch a third of the Harding propaganda films, “Make Mine Freedom,” from 1948. Each of these films, calling themselves “Fun and Facts about America,” present simplistic patriotic stories with an authoritative narrator who patiently explains the ins and outs of American exceptionalism. “Why Play Leapfrog?” tells the story of Joe, a disgruntled doll-factory worker who learns some important lessons about the supply chain, wages, and prices. He also learns that he’d better work harder to increase his productivity (and cooperate with management) if he wants to keep up with the rising cost of living. “Meet King Joe” introduces us to the “king of the workers of the world,” so called because he can buy more stuff than the poor schlubs in other countries. Joe, “no smarter” and “no stronger than workers in other lands” has such advantages only because of, you guessed it, the wonders of capitalism. “Make Mine Freedom” reminds viewers of their Constitutional rights before introducing us to a snake oil charlatan selling “ism,” a Commie-like tonic, to a group of U.S. labor disputants—if only they’ll sign over their rights and property. The assembled crowd jumps at the chance, but then along comes John Q. Public, who won’t give up his freedom for “some imported double-talk.”

You can read much more about the relationship between Sloan and Benson and the other films Sutherland produced with Sloan’s money, in Cohen’s essay, which also includes information on Cold War animated propaganda films made by Warner Brothers and Disney.

A is for Atom: Vintage PR Film for Nuclear Energy

How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Survive the Atomic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Read 9 Free Books By Noam Chomsky Online

in Books, Politics | May 28th, 2014

Image by Andrew Rusk, via Wikimedia Commons

The gross and ever-increasing degree of economic inequality in the United States has become a phenomenon that even the country’s elites can no longer ignore since the explosive publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. The book’s highly technical marshaling of data speaks primarily to economists and secondarily to liberal policymakers. Piketty’s calls for redistribution have lead to charges of “Marxism” from the other end of the political spectrum—due to some inevitable degree to the book’s provocative title. Yet in the reckoning of actual Marxist Slavoj Žižek, the French economist is still “a good Keynsian” who believes that “capitalism is ultimately the only game in town.” While the Marxist left may critique Piketty’s policy recommendations for their reliance on state capitalism, another fierce leftist thinker—Žižek’s sometime intellectual rival Noam Chomsky—might critique them for their acquiescence to state power.

Chomsky’s role as a public intellectual has placed him at the forefront of the left-anarchist fight against neoliberal political economy and the U.S. foreign and domestic policies that drive it. Whether those policies come from nominally liberal or conservative administrations, Chomsky asserts time and again that they ultimately serve the needs of elites at the expense of masses of people at home and abroad who pay the very dear cost of perpetual wars over resources and markets. In his 2013 book On Anarchism, Chomsky leaves little room for equivocation in his assessment of the role elites play in maintaining a state apparatus that suppresses popular movements:

If it is plausible that ideology will in general serve as a mask for self-interest, then it is a natural presumption that intellectuals, in interpreting history or formulating policy, will tend to adopt an elitist position, condemning popular movements and mass participation in decision making, and emphasizing rather the necessity for supervision by those who possess the knowledge and understanding that is required (so they claim) to manage society and control social change.

This excerpt is but one minute example of Chomsky’s fiercely independent stance against abuse of power in all its forms and his tireless advocacy for popular social movements. As Henry Giroux writes in a recent assessment of Chomsky’s voluminous body of work, what his many diverse books share is “a luminous theoretical, political, and forensic analysis of the functioning of the current global power structure, new and old modes of oppressive authority, and the ways in which neoliberal economic and social policies have produced more savage forms of global domination and corporate sovereignty.” And while he can sound like a doomsayer, Chomsky’s work also offers “the possibility of political and economic alternatives” and “a fresh language for a collective sense of agency and resistance.”

Today we offer a collection of Chomsky’s political books and interviews free to read online, courtesy of Znet. While these texts come from the 1990s, it’s surprising how fresh and relevant they still sound today. Chomsky’s granular parsing of economic, social, and military operations explains the engineering of the economic situation Piketty details, one ever more characterized by the title of a Chomsky interview, “The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many.” See links to nine books below. To read, click on links to either the “Content Overview” or “Table of Contents.” The books can also be found in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (1989): Based on the Massey Lectures, delivered in Canada in November 1988, Necessary Illusions argues that, far from performing a watchdog role, the “free press” serves the needs of those in power.

Deterring Democracy (1991): Chomsky details the major shift in global politics that has left the United States unchallenged as the preeminent military power even as its economic might has declined drastically in the face of competition from Germany and Japan. Deterring Democracy points to the potentially catastrophic consequences of this new imbalance, and reveals a world in which the United States exploits its advantage ruthlessly to enforce its national interests — from Nicaragua to the Philippines, Panama to the Middle East.

Year 501: The Conquest Continues (1993): Analyzing Haiti, Latin America, Cuba, Indonesia, and even pockets of the Third World developing in the United States, Noam Chomsky draws parallels between the genocide of colonial times and the murder and exploitation associated with modern-day imperialism.

Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture (1993)

What Uncle Sam Really Wants (1993): A brilliant distillation of the real motivations behind U.S. foreign policy, compiled from talks and interviews completed between 1986 and 1991, with particular attention to Central America. [Note: If you have problems accessing this text, you can read it via this PDF.]

The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (1994): A fascinating state-of-the-world report from the man the New York Times called “arguably the most important intellectual alive.”

Secrets, Lies and Democracy (1994): An interview with David Barsamian

Keeping the Rabble in Line (1994): Interviews with David Barsamian

Excerpts from Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order (1996): A scathing critique of orthodox views and government policy. See full text in pdf form here.

And for exponentially more Chomsky, see Chomsky.info, which hosts well over a hundred of his topical articles from the Vietnam era to the present.

Filmmaker Michel Gondry Presents an Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV, 1971

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 21 ) |

Slavoj Žižek Tells Jokes (NSFW)

in Comedy, Philosophy, Politics | May 16th, 2014

For Sigmund Freud, a joke was never just a joke, but a window into the unconscious, laughter an anxious symptom of recognition that something lost has resurfaced, distorted into humor. For Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek, jokes function similarly. And yet, in keeping with his commitment to leftist politics, he uses jokes not to expose the hidden terrain of individual psyches but “to evoke binds of historical circumstances hard to indicate by other means.” So writes Kenneth Baker in a brief SFGate review of the recent Žižek’s Jokes, a book-length compilation of Žižekisms published by MIT Press. Baker also points out a defining feature of Žižek’s humor: “Many of Žižek’s jokes preserve or even amplify the vulgarity of their demotic or pop cultural origins.” Take the NSFW joke he tells above at the expense of a Montenegrin friend. Žižek explains the joke as part of his maybe dubious strategy of countering racism with “progressive racism” or the “solidarity” of “shared obscenity”—the use of potentially uncomfortable ethnic humor to expose uncomfortable political truths that get repressed or papered over by politeness.

Some of Žižek’s humor is more trigger-warning worthy, such as his retelling of this old Soviet dissident joke or this “very dirty joke” he reportedly heard from a Palestinian Christian acquaintance. On the other hand, some of his “dirty jokes” replace vulgarity with theory. For example, Žižek likes to tell a “truly obscene” version of the famously filthy joke “The Aristocrats,” which you’ll know if you’ve seen, or only read about, the film of the same name. And yet in his take, instead of a series of increasingly disgusting acts, the family performs “a short course in Hegelian thought, debating the true meaning of the negativity, of sublation, of absolute knowing, etc.” This is perhaps an example of what Baker refers to as Žižekian jokes that are “baffling to readers not conversant with the gnarly dialectics of his thought, which does not lend itself easily to sampling.” Be that as it may, much of Žižek’s humor works without the theoretical context, and some of it is even tame enough for water cooler interludes. Below are four examples of “safe” jokes, culled from website Critical Theory’s list of “The 10 Best Žižek Jokes to Get You Through Finals” (which itself culls from Žižek’s Jokes). “Some of the jokes [in Žižek’s book] provide hilarious insights into Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalysis or ideology,” writes Critical Theory, “Others are just funny, and most are somewhat offensive—a characteristic Žižek admittedly doesn’t care to correct.”

#1 There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida…

about a group of Jews in a synagogue publicly admitting their nullity in the eyes of God. First, a rabbi stands up and says: “O God, I know I am worthless. I am nothing!” After he has finished, a rich businessman stands up and says, beating himself on the chest: “O God, I am also worthless, obsessed with material wealth. I am nothing!” After this spectacle, a poor ordinary Jew also stands up and also proclaims: “O God, I am nothing.” The rich businessman kicks the rabbi and whispers in his ear with scorn: “What insolence! Who is that guy who dares to claim that he is nothing too!”

#4 When the Turkish Communist writer Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the mid- 1930s, the time of the big purges…

and show trials, a Soviet apologist trying to convince him about the need for violence against the enemies evoked the proverb “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” to which Istrati tersely replied: “All right. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelet of yours?”

We should say the same about the austerity measures imposed by IMF: the Greeks would have the full right to say, “OK, we are breaking our eggs for all of Europe, but where’s the omelet you are promising us?”

#7 This also makes meaningless the Christian joke…

according to which, when, in John 8:1–11, Christ says to those who want to stone the woman taken in adultery, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone!” he is immediately hit by a stone, and then shouts back: “Mother! I asked you to stay at home!”

#8 In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic,…

a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.”

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the “red ink”: we “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict —“war on terror,” “democracy and freedom,” “human rights,” etc.—are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. The task today is to give the protesters red ink.

For more of Slavoj Žižek’s witticism, vulgarity, and humorous critiques of ideological formations, political history, and Hegelian and Lacanian thought, pick up a copy of Žižek’s Jokes, and see this Youtube compilation of the politically incorrect leftist philosopher’s humor caught on tape.

via Critical Theory

Žižek!: 2005 Documentary Reveals the “Academic Rock Star” and “Monster” of a Man

In His Latest Film, Slavoj Žižek Claims “The Only Way to Be an Atheist is Through Christianity”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Rise of the Patent Troll: An Animated Primer by Kirby Ferguson

in Law, Media, Politics | April 14th, 2014

Recently, I’ve been spending time investigating copyrights, keen to find out if it’s cricket for me to impose my vision on certain authors’ long ago work. An author myself, I freely admit, I might not cotton to it were some stranger to have her way with my work, without permission, on a stage, for all to see! Either way, I’d prefer things to be settled without a lawsuit.

My head was so full of copyright implications and loopholes, I was unaware that a parallel situation was blowing up beyond all reason in the world of patents. Such ignorance is a luxury unavailable to legions of small software designers, podcasters, and small business owners, as artist and filmmaker Kirby Ferguson of “Everything is a Remix” fame makes clear in his animated primer, “Rise of the Patent Troll.”

The problem, he says, owes to a gap between centuries old patent law and a new technology that yields “inventions” whose parts can’t be attributed as easily as your average sewing machine’s or cotton gin’s.

Depicted here as hairy, pointy-eared storybook figures, the real life baddies are much more scary—newly formed corporate entities opportunistically seeking to enforce patents for digital innovations they don’t really own. Not surprisingly, they’re targeting the little guys, individuals who don’t have the resources to defend themselves when attacked. Yes, in this context, a fairly renowned comedian can be considered a little guy.

Ferguson joined forces with digital watchdogs Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Engine to make the film, but the problem proves too slippery to fully explore in three animated minutes. I think the cartoon is actually bait, to get viewers like me to sit still for the next three minutes, in which the artist turns the camera on himself, to enumerate what citizens can do to make a proposed patent reform bill stick. If it all feels rather urgent, I’m guessing there’s a reason.

For more background on what patent trolls are all about, don’t miss this episode of This American Life.

Ayun Halliday would freak worse than a goat if one of these trolls came after her. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Richard Dawkins’ Documentary The God Delusion Tackles Faith & Religious Violence (2006)

in Film, Politics, Religion | April 9th, 2014

The very title of Richard Dawkins’ 2006 book The God Delusion was intended to provoke, and the Oxford evolutionary biologist has seemingly done nothing but, since taking his stand against religions of all kinds, particularly the big monotheisms that claim most of the world’s inhabitants. Dawkins infuriates theists on the right with his self-assured claim that “there almost certainly is no God” and skeptics on the left, who charge him with sexism and racism. Even journalist and journeyman intellectual Christopher Hedges—no friend to authoritarian religions—accuses Dawkins of the same kind of intolerance as Christian, Jewish, and Islamic fundamentalists.

Meanwhile, thousands of people who may or may not follow Dawkins’ every inflammatory tweet credit him with giving them the courage and conviction to walk away from faiths they found oppressive. In that regard, he’s accomplished his goal, and his Richard Dawkins Foundation continues to advocate strenuously for “scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering.”

If you’ve somehow missed Dawkins’ message amidst the furor over his method, you can get caught up rather quickly with the film above. Titled, like his book, The God Delusion, the film compiles the two 45-minute episodes of a documentary series produced for BBC 4 called Root of All Evil?, first broadcast in 2006 as a companion to the book. (The producers chose the title to create controversy—Dawkins has called the notion of any one thing being the “root of all evil” ridiculous.) In his introduction to the film, Dawkins proposes to explore “a world increasingly polarized by religion,” and to find out why faith has such a grip on the human mind.

Surveying regions from America’s Midwest to Israel, the film “takes a hard look at the very concept of faith: how it behaves like a kind of ‘brain virus,’ infecting generations of young minds, how it perpetuates outdated and dubious moral values.” Why, asks Dawkins, should religion “demand, and usually receive, our society’s respect”? It’s still a question worth asking, even if you don’t like Dawkins’ answers, or Dawkins himself.

You can find The God Delusion in our collection of Free Documentaries, part of our larger collection of 675 Free Movies Online.

The Origins Project Brings Together Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Flatow, and More on One Stage

Growing Up in the Universe: Richard Dawkins Presents Captivating Science Lectures for Kids (1991)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How the CIA Turned Doctor Zhivago into a Propaganda Weapon Against the Soviet Union

in Books, History, Literature, Politics | April 9th, 2014

Humanity has long pondered the relative might of the pen and the sword. While one time-worn aphorism does grant the advantage to the pen, most of us have entertained doubts: the sword, metaphorically or literally, seems to have won out across an awfully wide swath of history. Still, the pen has scored some impressive victories, some even in living memory. Take, for example, the CIA’s recently revealed use of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago as a propaganda weapon. Repressed in Pasternak’s native Russia, the book first appeared in Italy in 1957. The following year, the British suggested to America’s Central Intelligence Agency that the book stood a decent chance of winning hearts and minds behind the Iron Curtain — if, of course, they could get a few copies in there. A CIA memo sent across its own Soviet Russia Division subsequently pronounced Doctor Zhivago as possessed of “great propaganda value, not only for its intrinsic message and thought-provoking nature, but also for the circumstances of its publication. We have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read.”

That evaluation comes from one of the over 130 declassified documents used by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée in their brand new history of this act of real-life literary espionage, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book. You can read an in-depth article on some of the events involved in this operation — the CIA’s printing of both hardcover and miniature paperback Russian-language editions, the not-so-clandestine distribution of copies at 1958’s Brussels Universal and International Exposition, the CIA’s unexpected alliance with the Vatican in this mission, the inept probing by Soviet “researchers” — at the Washington Post.

You can also watch a CBS This Morning clip on the book just above. Dramatic though this “Zhivago Affair” sounds, it came as neither the first nor last American use of culture as a means of destabilizing the Soviet Union. We’ve even previously featured two others: secretly-funded abstract expressionist painting, and Louis Armstrong’s 1965 East Berlin and Budapest concerts. Cold War America may have had the sword, in the form of its vast nuclear arsenal, polished and ready, but clearly it retained a certain regard for the pen — and brush, and trumpet — as well.

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hunter S. Thompson’s Conspiratorial 9/11 Interview: “The Public Version of the News is Never Really What Happened”

The CIA’s Style Manual & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writing Like a Spook

Animated Films Made During the Cold War Explain Why America is Exceptionally Exceptional

Read 9 Free Books By Noam Chomsky Online

Slavoj Žižek Tells Jokes (NSFW)

#1 There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida…

#4 When the Turkish Communist writer Panait Istrati visited the Soviet Union in the mid- 1930s, the time of the big purges…

#7 This also makes meaningless the Christian joke…

#8 In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic,…

The Rise of the Patent Troll: An Animated Primer by Kirby Ferguson

Richard Dawkins’ Documentary The God Delusion Tackles Faith & Religious Violence (2006)

How the CIA Turned Doctor Zhivago into a Propaganda Weapon Against the Soviet Union

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