The last 4T was in part an intelligence operation by the CIA

[David Horn]

(03-03-2021, 05:15 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(02-28-2021, 07:42 AM)Einzige Wrote: Per 'Who Paid The Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War' by Francis Stoner Saunders.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=w...qA_mjXDh3L

 It chronicles how the CIA, via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, lavishly funded academics, writers, art exhibitions, and journals(including dozens of socialist journals).This program began in 1951 and continued throughout the Cold War. It intentionally nurtured and fed a 'left' that was fixated on personal identity, rejected class struggle, stopped focusing on economic issues and moved the 'left's' focus to questions of racial and gender issues exclusively. In addition, it was also a left that was relentlessly hostile to the Soviet Union, Cuba, or anything that actually threatened capitalism and imperialism. Leftism in the West(and to a lesser degree in other places) stopped being a working class project aimed at actually taking power and became an individualist, petit bourgeois hobby aimed at fulfilling 'personal freedom' within capitalist consumer society.

The FBI in the 1950's and 60's were hardline, reactionary, racist Republican Neandrathals who believed in crude anti communism, reactionary cultural and social values and an opposition to even the mildest democratic reforms(including the Civil Rights movement). The CIA was far more culturally liberal, cosmopolitan and were of the mind that American capitalism had to present itself as the more open minded, "enlightened" option if it was to win 'hearts and minds' in the Cold War. The US had to expand civil rights and gender equality(or at least appear to) in order to stop the USSR from making an embarrassing propaganda weapon out of Jim Crow and other obvious forms of inegalitarianism in the 'world's greatest democracy'. The crude anti Communism of Hoover, McCarthy and the like was counter-productive for international propaganda purposes because many writers and intellectuals even in Europe, never mind the Third World, were sympathetic to socialism.

Far better than most of your posts.  Certainly, Jim Crow, the early CIA, Hoover and McCarthy are not on my list of the best aspects of America.  My only quibble is that most of those aspects were fixed due to internal concerns, not to impress foreign writers and intellectuals, not to make it harder for the communists to write propaganda.

4Ts and 1Ts are not the best time to preach tolerance and acceptance of "foreign" ideas.  The Great Power saeculum had more than its share of built-in injustices, and the extent of the threats under both the GP and WW-II guaranteed a zero-tolerance environment once the war ended.  That may apply this time too.  It's too soon to know.