Dude, who even knows.
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Jesus Jones – Right Here, Right Now (1991)
In the early ‘90s we decided this was the official song of the end of the Cold War, like how Fortunate Son signifies the Vietnam War. Sorry.
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So how did the Cold War security state react to domestic corporate espionage? Like, there’d be actual agents attached to Boeing projects to keep the Russians from knowing what they were doing, how did they deal with Lockheed trying to look into it?
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kontextmaschine once implied that the ‘cultural marxism’ stuff was pushed by capitalism against actual marxism. was that a thing?
Yeah, well, The Establishment, and the CIA, being fairly exempt from electoral pressure, had the latitude to be competent. After WWII there was a lot of actual, real support for communism in Europe, on either side of the Iron Curtain. Partially for the same reason as the fascist renaissance in ex-Warsaw bloc countries - they reaped the goodwill of being the ones to really stand up against The Hated Occupiers - partially because there really were a lot of poor ex-peasants coming from a century-long tradition of struggling to cast off the remnants of feudalism.
And the Marshall Plan and all that, we tried to guide who we could to Yay Capitalism, and rig electoral systems to keep the commies out - huge cash dumps to friendly parties, election rules weighted to get NATO-friendly results, skullduggery where necessary - above all we kept the interior ministries (who pay the police and count the votes) friendly - coups where necessary.
But there were some people we were never going to get with that, so we at least tried to guide them to less-bad fallback positions. If you want ownership of productive forces in common, in accordance with the general will of the people, how about a welfarist social democracy with nationalized industry! Like England, which spent most of the Cold War under a Labor party proclaiming Clause IV. And if they were absolutely dedicated to communism, they were guided towards a form that was at least not a cadet branch of the Lenin dynasty ruling in Moscow.
And that happened domestically, too. The Soviets did promote communism in America for their own purposes yes, but it’s not like communism hadn’t had a following in America before that, particularly among the downtrodden and the thoughtful types. Communism didn’t firmly equal Marxism equals Russia until the Russian Revolution, but Edward Bellamy didn’t even live to see the 20th century. And so they were ripe for co-opting too.
If blacks organize and press identitarian claims as blacks, or pan-Africanists, well at least they weren’t organizing and pressing their claims as communists, which was a real, live possibility. If the students are pressing their claims as hedonists… (there was major campus unrest in the 1950s over “in loco parentis” parietal rules, because what’s the point of having women around but to fuck them?)
And of course, to the extent the Soviets were actively trying to undermine and fracture our society with art and ideas, we were doing the same thing. Am I saying we were morally equivalent? Yes, of course. Everything is morally equivalent to everything at a value of null. More importantly, strategically equivalent.
Encounter magazine, dissident authors, abstract expressionism. We didn’t stir up tensions along racial lines so much as religious - Muslims in the ‘Stans, yes, also Catholics in Poland (JPII wouldn’t be the first time a papal election turned out awfully convenient for a dominant power, and we were into some darkside shit in Italy that touched the Vatican at the margins…) and Jews in Russia.
You know, in national mythology, “the Nazis were bad because” didn’t really end in “the Holocaust” until the 1970s? “The Jews” were awfully communist-associated, after all. But then the white ethnics were integrated into white, and the various Israeli wars shook things up to the point they ended up on our side (and transformed their public image from kibbutzim to Rambos), and we managed to cast “Jewish repression” as the bad thing they did, and so it goes, so it goes.