The Cultural Cold War - Chapter 1
On the relevance of Stonor’s book in today’s geopolitics. A highlight Reel of Chapter 1.
Stonor re-visists one of the most sinister foreign policy decisions of the Cold War era that today is especially prescient, as they playbook of the imperialist seems to run in circuits and circles, repeating itself with ever greater ferocity. This article dives into Chapter 1 of her book “The Cultural Cold War” and connects it to today’s geopolitical brewing storm.
We begin with a history of post WWII germany - and the reconstruction project the US ambitiously proposed. The Marshal Plan, for economic dominance, but there was something missing, the suits in Washington couldn’t figure out why the minds of the post world war Europe were still hanging onto communist thought. Enter the CIA.
If psychological warfare propaganda was being carried out openly by the Congress for cultural freedom until it was embarrassed in the 1960. (A CIA cutout itself), The new psychological warfare of today has shifted to the digital realm, to private foundation endowments, and to NATO’s sixth domain, the human mind itself. We covered that here.
It seems we’re fighting the same war today against Empire, only their tools are more effective and advanced. We have to update ours as well.
Sowing seeds of a communism that speaks the language of the American worker in the present moment is the goal. We can see a deep discontent in the american psyche. The working masses know something isn’t right. How can we help aim their anger at the correct problem?
Take a look at liberal twitter, all the performative Ukraine flags, all the CNN articles and talking points in line with rehabilitating Nazis. This is nothing new for the Western oligarchy. A view front he past:
Whitewashing literal Nazis to own the soviets. Man history has such s circuitous demeanor. Learning from the past, Ukraine Azov rehabilitation campaign began before the war was even over.
Prolekult. Cultural hegemony. Stalin seemingly had a firm grasp on Gramscian theory. Gramsci was Italy’s representative to the Soviet international congress before he was jailed by Mussolini.
Stalin was a master dialectician. And was surrounded by a very capable team of advisers.
The only thing that’s lacking from this book so far is the proper treatment of Soviet society. As the USSR was far from monolithic.
It’s more a reflection of the metaphysical duality built into the writer’s cognition than it is a failure of her research. She wasn’t researching the USSR post war period, but the US and western side of the culture industry as a war tool.
Just goes to show, that even those researching the propaganda apparatus aren’t immune to the propaganda themselves. But the author, she does often try to give the soviets a fair treatment, at least some charity before deciding how she feels about the Stalin era.
This is particularly damning to US unipolar dominion goals. They very thing the ruling class was campaigning against, they became. This more readily applies to the transnational monopolists today than it ever did the any socialist project, in the pasts or ongoing.
What is Truman speaking of America or the USSR?
At the time of course the audience thought such a speech, speaking of state controlled media and the imposition of the world of a few on the many by tyrannical rule, was that of the Soviets.
In retrospect we see the oligarchs to transnational corporations in the monopolies existence give vindication to Lenin, Marx, Stalin, Mao, Deng, and Xi.
We saw perestroika Destroy the quality of life for millions of people. And we saw neoliberalism destroy the quality of life for millions more.
Truman was projecting from the darkest annals of Washington and London’s psyches, the nature of its own essence. Postwar America assumed the incidental form of the totalitarianism it vowed to vanquish from the world.
And today we have Blackrock and it’s various connected hydra like holding companies, we have silicon valley technocracy enmeshed with the state department, we have the only manufacturing jobs left in this country being weapons manufacturing and war making. We have the disaster we, gave lip service to try to avert.
Meanwhile operation paperclip took place behind the scenes. In Argentina, a pipeline of amnesty for Nazis existed do you say Germany’s massive 1850 Capital infusion into the country Lenin chronicled.
It’s not like teaming up with Nazis has been a strange thing for western powers. This is been the recurrent thing, The red scare, McCarthyism, we are seeing it replayed in real time— The Russia Ukraine conflict is merely the symbolic form of a more primordial battle of ideology. And an existential one for Russia.
Despite much I disagree with Alexandr Dugin on, this metaphor made me think of the geopolitics of land and sea. How interesting, a nautical metaphor, Atlanticist in its unconscious. Show supposed to get the Soviets, or in more metaphorical terms the Soviet behemoth.
Monster of sea, monster of land. Dripping with postmodern nihilism.
We see traces of Hobbes Leviathan in the Western unconscious with their oars constantly trying to hinder land bridge unity.
Let’s switch to a more modern and relevant example today. In the past, there were literary magazines, high society style cultural pushes. Today, with he standard of education in the US dropping drastically post-neoliberal reforms, the average reading level of most Americans is 6th grade. It’s pitiful and sad really. So instead of culture for the high-minded, we make culture for the mid-wits. Since the early 2000s, america has been a caricature of the marvel comic universe; movies celebrating authoritarian cops and military might, rigidly defining “good” and “evil” in metaphysical dualism. They are opposed forces and one must crush the other, so the folklore goes.
Today we get instead on the Internet frontier the likes of contrapoints, Vaush, Hasan—the compatible left. The left that pays lip service to a Socialism that is completely non-threatening to capital.
Influencing the masses and the intellectuals at the same time two birds one stone. It is no surprised that platforms like twitch acquiesce to demands of similar Foundations — this time not the Ford foundation — the open society foundation funded by George Soros money. In the great game they have brilliantly set up the definitions. Because to say Soros name, is to be immediately labeled an anti-semi despite the fact that a Zionist lobby does exist.
Speaking of Soros, he is also heavily invested in Ukraine. In 1990 the year before the fall of the Soviet union he established, at the same address of the US Embassy in Kiev, The international renaissance foundation, in order to promote “freedom and democracy” in former Soviet states.
Taking down revolutionary communist contact that actually spoke to the masses instead of a small boutique, compatible left, The technocracy cannot be separated in form from the Pentagon, cannot be separated formally from the deep state or the state department itself.
The propaganda culture war never stopped, It merely gained a new tools, new technologies. and new forms. Aided with Ai and algorithms, This new enemy is more affordable than anything we knew during the initial Cold War. Cold War 2.0 will be fired on the battleground of information warfare and we are on the front lines.
We’re playing a dangerous game, a country acting like a senile old man, thinking he can take on Russia and China at the same time. Too stubborn in his thinking to find a way forward peacefully, one with mutual development and cooperation, instead we insist, or rather our state department insists at the expense of investment int american people that the two other global powers are a threat to the american way of life. And by american, they mean the Oligarchs way of life. Let’s be real for a second, Russia and China do threaten the profits of the oligarchs. Capitalism in it’s short-sighted quarter to quarter planning for shareholder profits, can’t compete with five year plans and nationalized industries. When the production in society goes to benefit the people, the people win. So in that way, the strangling of the global economy that was once the American’s sole position, has been eroded to a shell of itself.
Thus, seeing the extent of propagandized minds of the American masses, the new multi polar world has shifted its focus from the only weapon that it had in the past, the culture war—psychological warfare and psyops, into the combined warfare that we see today.
Russia, destabilizing the petrodollar.
China, destabilizing the dollar en masse at a whim if it wanted to.
The dragon and behemoth, the land based response tot he Leviathan, wrapped around the global economy, castrating and neutering capital as they shred the sea-snake’s grip on their civilizational domains.
And both of those countries, with modern armies adept and battle ready, ironically maintain them to repress kinetic warfare and avert nuclear warfare.
The war in Ukraine, can be seen as the culmination of the Marshall plan. After 14 Eastward expansion of NATO, Eurasian redlines were crossed one too many times.
Economic sanctions are becoming impotent from the US as the BRICS bloc of economic development now is replacing dependence on american consumerism.
The fight, the battle, in Kyiv is not a solely Ukrainian ones. Ukraine is the just the theater, Zelensky the puppet, but this war is one of ideology.
We are in the midst of a world historic moment, and a hopeful end to the American century.
In its place the rise of civilizational cooperation coexistence spheres of influence at the various new poles of power.
To this any communist can only say: Pushin Z.
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