The CIA and the New Dialect of Power. By River Page

By Dilip - Friday, February 18, 2022

Wokeness serves two functions for today’s ruling elites. The first is a kind of ideological control directed against Western working classes: wokeness covers over concrete class and economic injustices - massive wealth inequality, health precarity, stagnant wages and so on - with a thick fog of mystification. It creates an impression of furious change and even revolutionary activity. Yet what is in fact taking place is mostly intra-elite competition and redistribution: a disabled trans woman may be on the board, but workers still have to relieve themselves in bottles for lack of sufficient breaks...

The CIA and the New Dialect of Power

The CIA was heavily invested in mid-twentieth-century art and cultural production through the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF), and was involved in the noncommunist Left more broadly, much to the chagrin of conservatives at the time. The CCF’s tendrils were seemingly endless, even reaching the preeminent postcolonial writer Derek Walcott. The CIA was consistent in its anti-communism, but it was never conservative. The feminist Gloria Steinem went so far as to characterize the CIA as “liberal, nonviolent and honorable.” Steinem would know - she freely admitted to working with the CIA through a front organization called the Independent Research Service. The CIA’s Harry Lun encouraged her to become the face of the organization, sending her to lead a group which would disrupt proceedings at the Marxist Vienna Youth Festival in 1959, and later to Helsinki in 1962.

These affiliations were hardly a problem for Steinem on the left; she long served as an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America until such positions were abolished in 2017. The DSA officially condemned Steinem a year later in 2018 in its magazine—not for being a CIA agent, but rather for her insinuation that young women supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton because “the boys are with Bernie.”

Of course, the CIA’s flirtation with the New Left soon became untenable, as leftist groups like the Weather Underground began picking up arms and setting bombs. The most radical elements of the New Left would be arrested or killed. Some, like the former Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, would later help launch the political career of one Barack Hussein Obama. Many others retreated to academia, the site of professional class reproduction, and there cultivated a form of radical liberalism from which the new dialect of power arose. In addition to education and law, many new academics, who placed a premium on diversity, would find work in various “area studies” -which, as Bruce Cumings points out, were a pet project of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s immediate predecessor....

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/11/the-cia-and-the-new-dialect-of-power/

Victor Jara murder: ex-military officers sentenced in Chile for 1973 death

Andrew Bacevich: High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the Fading American Century

Conversation with Lawrence Lifschultz: The American reporter who investigated the assassination of Mujibur Rahman

Mauritius formally challenges Britain’s ownership of Chagos Islands

Robert Reich - Beware of this deadly mix: oligarchic economics and racist, nationalist populism

America isn't breaking. It was already broken. By Andrew Gawthorpe // Why This Time Is Different. By Dahlia Lithwick

TOM ENGELHARDT: A World at the Edge

Alfred McCoy: The crumbling delusion of Washington's endless world dominion

In 1953, the Republican Party overthrew the Iranian Government; in 2021 it used the same techniques against the elected US President

Mohammed Hanif: The rest of the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise

Donald Trump's gift to America: Realizing we've never been a liberal democracy. By PAUL ROSENBERG