• 3scene@lemmygrad.ml
    15·
    2 months ago

    Douglas Valentine: Sure. This is one of the primary covert operations of the CIA. Basically, the essence of its mandate is to—through sabotage and propaganda—control political and social movements in foreign countries. And they do this set up for a variety of ways. It’s been standard practice and sort of the driving principle since after World War II.

    If I can just give a little background. After World War II, the communists had really formed the underground forces of resistance against the Nazis in France and Italy and in a couple of other European nations. And so immediately after World War II, communist parties became politically influential—and I’ll just focus on France and Italy—and they, all of a sudden, were in control of the governments. But the CIA could not fight wars against France and Italy. So, they developed a program called “courting the compatible left.” In order to get France and Italy away from communism, they supported the Social Democrats, people who weren’t hardcore communists, but people who were willing to work with capitalism, accept American aid and work with the Americans. And so, the CIA resorted to very subtle ways of luring hardcore communists away from communism into its social democratic movement. And this began to bloom and blossom all across the world as a standard operating procedure. When the communists were intractable, then they would do such things as hire Corsican gangsters, which they did in Marseille right after World War II to break up communist strikes.

    But, generally speaking, they tried to do this through subtle forms of propaganda, blackmail, bribery, sabotage and methods like that. There’s a pretty good book about that… [The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders] …It’s about how the CIA waged cultural war in the 1950s and 1960s that a lot of Americans played, people like Gloria Steinem and other intellectuals in the United States, who actually helped the CIA in this effort to lure people out of the Communist Party into a social democratic movement.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20200702014722/https://covertactionmagazine.com/index.php/2019/11/21/inside-the-organized-crime-syndicate-known-as-the-cia-an-interview-with-douglas-valentine/