Now available in an affordable paperback edition, The Cultural Cold War presents for the first time shocking evidence of cultural manipulation during the Cold War. This "impressively detailed" (Kirkus Reviews) book draws together newly declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA's astonishing campaign wherein some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom became instruments of the American government. Those involved included George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Gloria Steinem. The result is "a tale of intrigue and betrayal, with scene after scene as thrilling as any in a John Le Carre novel" (The Chronicle of Higher Education).
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You know all that paranoia that besides politics and economics, the CIA also has infiltrated all kinds of cultural institutions -- academic journals, music, international academic conferences, popular journals, export of popular music? Well now your paranoia can be exorcised, because it is all true! Read this book and weep. Weep, not at the blood, and torture, and killing -- this book has none of that. This is drip, drip, drip of the CIA's backing of cultural influence. Sort of akin to finding out that US food aid policy is legislated to make profits from 3rd worlders and re-structure their eating habits. (I Will mention 2 books that deal with that later) Read enough of this stuff and pain becomes laughter! Because it is funny actually to consider how much of our conscious life is built around denial. Funny -- in that nitrous oxide sense of your gut hurts from so much laughing. I mean it.
تحفة بحثية قدمتها لنا الشابة البريطانية فرانسيس ستونر قبل تسع سنوات، كانت جديرة بالضجة التي قرعت رأس الغرب صحيح ان هذه المسألة لم تكن ذات وقع مؤثر في مواجهة الاعلام الموجه، خصوصا وانها تحكي عن تاريخ قد مضى في توجيه الرأي العام ومنهجة قناعاته بالفن والثقافة والسياسة،لكنها تركت اثرا يستدل به في عصر الحرب الثقافية الجديدة ضد الأمة العربية.. استشهادات بسيطة يمكننا عكسها مما اتت به فرانسيس مما كان موجها ضد المنظومة الاشتراكية لنعكسه على واقعنا المعاصر خلق اليسار الجديد المتأمرك لمجابهة الشيوعية، الاسلام المتأمرك لمواجهة حركات المقاومة استخدام كتاب ورسامين وموسيقيين وانشاء ودعم جدد لاتأثير على الوعي العام.. وسائل الاعلام الحديثة والمفردات التغريبية كيفية استغلال مفاهيم الديمقراطية والحرية لتبرير خيانات وخلق بلبلة.. الحال لا يختلف الا في الزمان واتساع رقعة المكان أكثر كتاب مهم يلقي نظرة الى الوراء لشرح الكثير من الحاضر.. الحرب الثقافية الباردة
This book is written for an audience that already knows something about the Cold War and US politics in the 1950s, and for me it was an uphill climb since I know little about this period in American history. Fortunately Saunders is a good writer and manages to make most of it fairly interesting, although there are lots of quotations from government documents and people's letters that are laborious to wade through. Her thesis is that the CIA and its predecessors tried to engage the Communist enemy on a cultural level as well as a military / political one, with surprising results. She tells a few humorous tales along the way--books being air-dropped into the USSR as a means of "converting" the populace, and some tragic tales too: The eventual disintegration of the CIA's cultural wing, The Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the disillusionment of its staff as they drifted away to do other things. Recommended only for hard-core students of CIA history.
update: couldn't really get through it but will be a great reference. this book was written for exactly the kind of nerd i am.... it's about the intersecting worlds of politics and art, viewed through the telescopic, at times blinder-ed, lens that is history. i did not know how heavily abstract expressionists were financed during the cold war as part of a covert campaign to undermine the social realism of art emerging from the soviet bloc. (its crime was portraying the grittiness and indignity of poverty. nevertheless, i still really dig abstract expressionism, not in some creepy 1984 way, and cannot take the whole CIA as an aesthetic manipulator thing too seriously...)
Essential non-fiction. Everyone should read this book to get a deeper (shocking!) understanding of the Cold War. Who knew Jackson Pollack's ab-ex paintings were tools of the CIA to stop the spread of Communism!! The only negative effect of reading this book is coming away with the feeling that the CIA has infiltrated absolutely every nook and cranny of American life.
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