CIA and the shaping of western culture

March 12th, 2006 at 17:41 Björn Hallberg

Defense Tech has dug up a piece of CIA history, namely the making of covert propaganda movies blending with contemporary culture. Such was the case with the animated 1955 version of “Animal Farm” for instance. The rights to the story were acquired and the script was edited to be more in line with the official message. More critical of communism and less so of capitalism (Orwell was critical of both).

It could be argued that this has been known for quite some time, but it is nevertheless worth repeating as psyops are once more back in style. Like with planted newspaper stories and internet disinformation campaigns as well as the stranglehold of the so called free press via precious access to officials, neoliberal aggregation and military embedding. Not to mention how Hollywood has managed to get even cosier with the U.S. military in the last two decades and ventured to produce even more recruitment flicks. Don’t expect all propaganda material to be as overt as “Animal Farm” or indeed “Top Gun” though. As a rule of thumb, if a feature movie, or cultural meme, is not explicitly and completely critical of the U.S., it can be considered to be supportive of American policies.

The complete CIA list reveals quite a few interesting tidbits. For instance I noticed a number of critical propaganda documentaries and news reels targeting Sweden. If one had the time it would surely be worthwhile to check each and every one of those entries to see what they are and if they were billed as connected to the CIA or the U.S. government at the time or indeed covertly produced and disseminated.

Entry 482 filed under: Social Science. This entry was posted 2 years, 8 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.