Kevin Carson: Watch What You Say

Kevin Carson: Watch What You Say

It’s just come out that Paul Harvey was a close friend of J. Edgar Hoover and regularly ran his columns by the FBI for vetting.

That’s nothing new, of course. The Congress on Cultural Freedom was a CIA front that funded all sorts of think tanks, periodicals and advocacy groups. As a matter of fact, I think the CIA still owns the movie rights to Orwell’s Animal Farm. If you’ve noticed the various film versions of Animal Farm seem a lot lamer than the book, and come down almost entirely on the pigs rather than the humans, it’s probably not a coincidence. In the last Hallmark movie version, Jones was a scandal to all the decent farmers living nearby, and at the end the pigs’ regime collapsed and the farm was taken over by a kindly, Kennedyesque young family man with Fats Domino blasting out the speakers of his convertible. He didn’t recreate Yeltsin’s seige of Parliament, but I guess that’s for the sequel.

Tom Braden, who ran the CIA’s covert cultural division in the 1950s, argued that “If the other side can use ideas that are camouflaged as being local rather than Soviet-supported or -stimulated, then we ought to be able to use ideas camouflaged as local ideas.” Uh, yeah, except that, in the civics book version of democracy, the CIA is supposed to be part of a government that takes orders rather than giving them, and the orders the government takes is supposed to come from those “local ideas.”

Lest the reader dismiss this as all a relic of the Cold War, consider the following examples (in no particular order):

Several years back the proposed Total Information Awareness program sparked controversy because one of its missions was to engage in “information warfare,” which included directing misinformation toward the governed population as part of their larger campaign to manipulate the enemy.

Continued. . .