The Blindboy Podcast - CIA involvement in 20th century literature

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Art has been appropriated for military purposes throughout the 20th century. Camouflage was inspired by Cubism, Abstract art was used as anti-soviet propaganda and In the 1950's the CIA covertly funded literary magazines to service US Imperialism.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eavesdrop on the evening beeswax, you steaming ephes. What's the crack? Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. You are profoundly welcome, you glorious ghouls. If this is your first podcast, maybe go back and listen to some other episodes. I always recommend that new listeners try and listen to some of the back catalogue to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. Although I do think this podcast episode will be accessible to first-time listeners because this is going to be a little

hot take episode about art and conspiracy, some of my favourite topics. And I reckon I have some new listeners this week because this podcast was recommended on The Guardian last week right but it was recommended in the food section of The Guardian I'm like what the fuck why the fuck are the food section

of The Guardian recommending my podcast and they gave me a lovely review and the review said Blind By Ball club's hugely popular weekly podcast contains some of the best food writing being published anywhere right now now thank you very much the guardian i'll take a compliment if it's thrown at me but i was quite shocked i'm'm like, what the fuck? My podcast is food writing? And the review went on to say, recent podcasts have taken in everything

from Subway's roots in submarines built by Irish Republicans, custard creams and the CIA, Salt Bae, how one chicken shop in Limerick is the custodian of the original KFC recipe. But Blind Boy's masterpiece is the extended riff on the chicken fillet roll, which manages to tell the economic story of 21st century Ireland through a sandwich. And then I went, fucking hell. I have done loads of podcasts about food, haven't I? There was the podcast about the history of pineapples. There was the podcast about

lobsters and the colour purple. There was the podcast about people in the 18th century in New York eating rubber sandwiches and how effervescent fizzy drinks were invented because of excess marble created by St. Patrick's Cathedral and I went

holy fuck I am doing a lot of podcasts about food but in my mind I'm like these aren't food podcasts they're just podcasts about culture and history I just happened to use food to tell that story for me it was just

interesting storytelling like that podcast about the rubber sandwiches it was called Soda Jerk and it was from June 2020 but that podcast was a history of anti-Irish racism in 19th century America when there was excessive alcoholism

amongst Irish immigrants because that addiction is how they were dealing with the trauma of the fucking famine and I wanted to tell that story but an interesting way to tell that story is let me tell you why people ate sandwiches made out of rubber in New York in the 1890s because that's storytelling that's the mechanics of fiction writing then you have someone's attention so I didn't know I was doing food writing so thank you to the Guardian for saying that I'm doing good food writing I suppose the reason I often use food as an entry into a podcast is it's a very simple technique called establishing authority. And I use this technique when I write short stories or when I'm writing TV scripts. means opening a story with a statement

or a fact that's intriguing and interesting and when the reader reads it or hears it they go I need to know where the fuck he's going with this and then you have the reader's attention and then once you have their attention

you tell the actual story that you want to tell I'm feeling particularly limber and flexible this week because I went for a neuropathic massage so I gave myself all sorts of injuries over lockdown because I love exercising I adore exercising and I try to do it six days a week if I can. But over lockdown the gyms were closed so all I could do was run. But while I was running, I was running every single day, wasn't listening to my body and I gave myself a terrible Achilles heel injury,

completely my own fault. But fuck it, what was I going to do? I couldn't stay inside all the time. With lockdown I was going stone mad. And then what else happened was, so I was running my usual 10 kilometers, which is quite a bit. But through years and years of going to the gym and lifting weights, I developed these muscles all over my body. And these muscles, my chest, my back, my legs, these were all acting as shock absorption when I was running. So when the gyms

closed all that muscle went away. So when I was running it was a bit like cycling a bike with a flat tyre. It's difficult, you can do it for a little bit but eventually the wheel will buckle. So that happened and I ended up with a myriad of problems on the right hand side of my body. In particular a pinched ulnar nerve in my shoulder which is a continual pain from hand side of my body. In particular, a pinched ulnar nerve in my shoulder, which is a continual pain from the back of my shoulder all the way down my arm to my baby finger. And I don't have full mobility of my arm and it gets worse every time I go to the gym and it means I can't enjoy lifting weights anymore.

A very annoying and depressing affliction that I've had for the past year. So this is making me feel miserable. A very annoying and depressing affliction that I've had for the past year. So this is making me feel miserable. So I went for a fucking neuropathic massage, which I'd never gotten before. And it was phenomenal. Now it wasn't the experience of it was fucking horrible. Like this woman really, really hurt me.

She identified all the trapped nerves. And all the muscles in my body. That were getting stuck against bone. And she stuck cups onto my back. And she basically. Ripped into my body. And pulled muscle. Away.

From bone. And put it back where it was supposed to be. It was like a drunk person giving me a tattoo with a hammer on my ribcage. She literally, like she identified a problem in my ribcage too and she had to poke her fucking fingers in between my ribs and pull muscles away. I was howling and screaming in pain.

This was a very painful 90 minutes and I'm covered in bruises but fuck me did it work and then she gave me stretches and exercises so some of my mobility is back I'm gonna have to return to her for the neuropathic massage until I'm fully sorted but what was incredible about the massage wasn't necessarily the massage but the emotional experience of the massage afterwards. Particularly the sleep that I had that night.

Like this is the bit I can't explain because western medicine doesn't appear to have a fucking explanation for it. But I've basically spent a year with a continual non-stop persistent pain in my shoulder. Nothing excruciating.

Just can't move my neck properly. Can't move my arm properly. A consistent pain that's always there and never leaves at any point in the day. And the thing is with a pain like that, because it doesn't stop, you just kind of get used to it. So my brain would just get used to it. But at all times, I'm tense. I'm tense for a year. And this physical tension that I'm not consciously aware of anymore

is causing me stress, anger. The overall emotion of it is a sensation of unfairness. Let's call it that. When you have a pain for an entire year there's a hum of unfairness I would then search for themes of unfairness in my day and start viewing my life through a lens of unfairness thinking quite negatively and with an emotional home of unfairness comes a sense of anger about it and a sense of anxiety and worry because the anxiety and worry is will it ever end but all of these feelings are kind of unconscious I'm not consciously aware of them all the time so when I had that fucking

neuropathic massage. And I left. The massage office. Or whatever you call it. Where massages happen. The massage office. When I left it. And I'm like holy fuck I can move my neck.

My god I can move my arm. I had this overwhelming sense of calm. But that night when I was in bed. I was getting night terrors waking up with sudden sense of fucking anxiety I was sweating I was experiencing

hypnagogic dreams which are not pleasant at all they're a first cousin of sleep paralysis hypnagogic dream is when you're under stress and you wake up suddenly in the middle of the night and nothing feels real and you don't really know where you are like I couldn't tell where I was or what was happening and then that becomes kind of frightening and scary but I couldn't believe

all of these intense negative emotions were just flowing through me because someone had released a trapped nerve in my fucking shoulder it was as if my sore muscles were storing emotions and then they came out as soon as that muscle was relieved I couldn't believe it because I don't know if western science has an answer for that but that was my legitimate experience and you know what else it was magnificent for? It was like a ritual in frustration tolerance. Like a huge part of my job, a huge part of life is tolerating

the frustration of discomfort in order to achieve a larger goal like having to sit down and have someone rip all my muscles apart in utter agony but sticking with it because I know at the end of it I'm going to feel better that was a wonderful experience that was a lovely ritual the whole thing left me with so many questions because this was lived experience of my body apparently storing emotions it's the only language i can use for it right now so i started reading a book during the week i've only begun it it's fucking fascinating and i highly recommend it and the book is called the Keeps the Score by a psychologist called Bessel van der Kok. But it's all about unifying Western psychology and bringing in the idea that yes, the body can store pain and the body can store emotions.

This week's podcast isn't about that. That was just a little siege that was a siege that I needed to do to get that off my chest so I can move forward I have a very busy week ahead

I've got four fucking gigs on Thursday I'm in London in the Troxy on Friday I'm in Manchester in the Academy

then on Saturday I'm back in Ireland I'm at Body and Soul and then on Sunday I'm at the Docky Book Festival and I'm doing a live podcast four fucking live podcasts in a row in different locations with a lot of travelling so come along if you're around

they're going to be tremendous crack I can't wait this week's podcast I want to speak about the relationship between fine art and military power and how those two worlds often intersect with each other. Like if you think of war from like the 1700s onwards you think of like Napoleon in his famous red tunic or you think of the American Revolutionary Wars with the red coats. And how the British were famous for their red coats. And you're thinking to yourself.

Jeez all these cunts were at war. Why the fuck were they dressed so dandy and so colourful? What's the point of that? Well like the Napoleonic Wars or the American Revolutionary Wars. They were fought on a battlefield with like horseback and muskets and cannons. These weapons weren't very long range. They weren't very accurate. The battlefield was almost entirely covered with smoke. A lot of the combat was close and hand-to-, like a giant game of soccer.

You needed to know what colour jersey people were wearing, so you don't actually kill someone who's in your own army. Also, bright colourful uniforms were used as a type of spectacle. If you see a giant army on a hillside and they're all wearing red coats, they become one. It becomes frightening. The scale of all that red on the horizon stops being individual soldiers and becomes one giant block of red that's going to kill you. It was psychological theatrics. So why did that stop? Why at the end of the 19th century all of a sudden did soldiers start becoming camouflaged? Why did soldiers all of a sudden not want to be seen? They started wearing khaki. Even the word khaki comes from the Urdu language,

which is around Pakistan and India, and it means the colour of the earth. And what happened is that war became industrial. Machines started to become involved. Long-range rifles, long-range artillery, guns that don't produce smoke, planes that could drop bombs. Like even at the start of World War I in particular, the French were still wearing colourful bright uniforms and running over the trenches and

getting picked off at a distance from machine guns or being bombed overhead from planes that could very easily identify these colored moving spots on the battlefield bright dots against the brown mud so the French were the first ones to adopt and invent what we'd call a modern camouflage pattern like if you think of combat pants you know that pattern that's on them that's broken abstract shapes of browns and greens and yellows. It was the French who came up with that because of the huge casualties they were experiencing in World War I because of their bright coloured coats. But how did they come up with it? Two podcasts back I spoke about the history of Cubism.

Two podcasts back I spoke about the history of Cubism. I spoke in particular about the paintings of Pablo Picasso, who's credited with discovering Cubism. But I spoke specifically about how Picasso essentially stole Cubism from African art. Because Western painting had traditionally been constricted by Western concepts of time. Western painting was always obsessed with stopping and capturing time in one moment and trying to represent stillness. Whereas African art, because in African cultures it had a different view of time, African art would incorporate time and movement into its art and it's from this where artists like Picasso came up with cubism. I'm not just going to paint someone sitting still, I'm going to paint the person from multiple different angles with multiple instances of movement and time incorporated into the painting and I'm doing this because I'm a

modernist and I'm responding to the new invention of the camera. The camera can now capture stillness so what can I as a painter do to do what a camera can't? Well I can incorporate movement, time and multiple perspectives and that's what cubism is. But when the French army wanted to create a situation where their soldiers could not be seen they didn't imply military people to do this. They implied artists. In particular a type of artist known as a camoufleur. So what you see here is military power appropriating from the world of fine art for violence and one artist who was implied by the french military to design camouflage one of these camouflage was a fellow called louis

guignol and guignol was he's credited with inventing the first camouflage pattern for military uniforms but what guign did, because this was 1914, which would have been about five years after Picasso and those lads had invented Cubism, Guignard took from Cubism. Because like I said, Cubism is a way of painting where you're not painting stillness. You're incorporating time and movement into your painting. So Guignol invented the camouflage pattern by appropriating from Cubism. The camouflage pattern doesn't simply just look like the background that you're trying to camouflage against. Otherwise you'd dress up wearing bushes.

The camouflage pattern was an optical illusion as such. The reason the camouflage pattern worked on the battlefield and the reason a soldier in a camo pattern can't be seen is because it distorts the perception of movement and time. Your eye will try to fix on the one spot, try and search for that person standing still in the camouflage pattern and at a distance you can't tell you don't know are they moving you don't know are they still you don't know if they're there so that's what camouflage is it's applied cubism it's cubist art used for violence and the great great irony is that the Cubist art was stolen from the African art. But those African countries where that art was produced

were colonized by the French, who would have colonized Africa in brightly colored uniforms. So it's like a sick twisted circle. And that's not a hot take. That's actually what it is. The camouflage were literally looking at cubist art as a way to create camouflage and since then

throughout the 20th century militaries and intelligence organisations have always they've looked towards the world of fine art to incorporate techniques from fine art or literature or theatre

into evil shit that they're doing. In particular, the likes of the CIA. I've done a full podcast before about the history of CIA involvement in the abstract expressionist movement in art around the 1950s and 1960s the name of that podcast is Abstract Art

and the CIA but the CIA have done lots of incredibly fucked up shit like when you truly look deep into the mad shit the CIA did and you see that it's not conspiracy theory

it's actual conspiracy where there's facts and evidence you know they did this shit when you really look into it you can kind of lose track of reality like in 2016 they found that the CIA was making fake Al-Qaeda videos

like they paid a UK PR firm 600 million dollars to make loads and loads of Al-Qaeda videos really secretly now I mean fucked up videos with executions, beheadings videos that looked exactly like Al-Qaeda propaganda

and you're going what the fuck readings, videos that looked exactly like Al-Qaeda propaganda. And you're going, what the fuck? Why would they spend 500 million making Al-Qaeda videos? It's America. Why is America making Al-Qaeda videos? So what they'd do is this UK firm made these videos. They'd put them on CD-ROMs. The CD-ROMs would be placed all over Iraq and then anyone who played the CD-ROM

anyone who willingly opened up this Al-Qaeda video in Iraq and played it and watched it on their computer the CD-ROM also had hidden software that tracked their IP address and then the Yanks would know, okay, this person's interested in watching Al-Qaeda videos. And then a month later, they might get droned. Or you look at what the CIA did in the Philippines,

where the CIA borrowed from the world of theatre and folklore and storytelling to commit bizarre acts of evil so in the Philippines after World War II the country had been devastated and the Philippines contained

huge amounts of natural resources massive amounts of natural resources and the Americans were like well we want those natural resources we would we would like those natural resources but the philippines didn't want american companies in the philippines mining silver or taking timber or mining copper but the philippines was devastated from war and didn't have a lot of money so So America went to the Philippines and said,

right, we're going to give you $800 million to rebuild your country. And in exchange, you have to let a lot of American companies come into the Philippines and then take all your natural resources. There was a group of freedom fighters in the Philippines called the Hux. And they were having none of this. They were like, no fucking way. The Philippine government is now handing over the sovereignty of the country and all our natural resources to America.

We're not having this. So in the late 1940s, early 1950s, the Hux, these Philippine insurgents, started a war. And they wanted to sabotage any American companies that come to the Philippines to set up mining companies and to do everything they could to keep the Americans out. So what did the CIA do? They didn't want to engage in an all-out war with these insurgents in the Philippines. They didn't want it to be as public as that. They didn't want it to look like America was secretly colonizing and extracting resources from the

Philippines. So the CIA stepped in and they looked towards the language of theater and they looked towards local folklore and they found that within the folklore of the Philippines, in particularly amongst rural people, there were these creatures known as Aswang. Now Aswang would be like the Irish version of Puka or the fairies, supernatural characters that exist in folklore that you have to be afraid of and mindful of, quite similar to Irish folklore actually because a lot of these demons that are present in Filipino folklore like there's one in particular

called the Manananggal which is a type of vampire but at night time it's this terrifying vampire but in day time it can disguise itself as a human which is something the fairies in Ireland can do too but people were particularly afraid of this Mananangal. She was kind of like a banshee but a much more terrifying banshee.

The Mananangal was a woman with giant wings like a bat and she could separate her upper body so it would fly up into the air like a bat but at night time it would find a victim in the woods bite its neck and suck all the blood from its body and like rural Irish people in the 1940s rural Filipino people in the 1940s this was their culture this was their folklore they would have been genuinely afraid of these supernatural beings this was part of their culture so what the CIA did is they would pick an area in the countryside or in the forest where they knew an American mining company was going to come and build a mine or build a railway or build an oil rig they'd wait till night time they'd send teams of CIA military operatives into the forest

wherever the Hucks were operating. The Hucks were the insurgents. And the CIA officers would find a group of these insurgents, kill them all, then put puncture holes in their necks and drain their bodies of blood. and they'd leave these bodies hanging all around the forest so the next day when the huck fighters found their comrades dead with all the blood drained from their body and holes in their necks they didn't think that like secret military officers had come in the night time they 100% believed that it was one of these fucking vampires. That it was one of these vampires from folklore. It terrified them all so much that the Huck organisation basically fell apart. The fighters weren't willing to go into the jungle because they were genuinely afraid of vampires.

Giant vampire bats that were going to suck all the blood out of their body. And they surrendered in 1954. So what we have there is the CIA not engaging in conventional warfare but instead borrowing from the language of theatre. Like that's the spectacle of theatre right there. That's theatre that's informed by local folklore. But they're borrowing from the world of art to engage in colonising warfare. Very sneaky stuff.

Because the whole shtick with America, especially after World War II, America was the hero of the world. America was the country with all the money that's rebuilding the rest of the world after World War II. America was the saviour, the liberator, coming to the Philippines with $800 million to help them rebuild, the victors of World War II, liberating the concentration camps and now bringing their generosity to the Philippines. They weren't their fuck. They were extracting their resources and they couldn't be seen to the Filipino people to be engaging in warfare and killing and murdering Filipino people.

So instead they just said, let's pretend we're vampires. And I've heard the CIA described before as the the organized crime wing of the US governments government because that's what they do they gather intelligence but mostly throughout the 20th century the cia's interest was in toppling democratically elected governments using really evil, covert, illegal criminal tactics in a sneaky way that could never be pinned on him. But the CIA also put huge, huge effort, resources and money

into controlling and influencing culture in the 20th century. In particular, the art world. Now, like I said, I did do a full podcast on how the CIA funded visual art, visual fine art. But just to synopsise it, why would the CIA pump millions into funding abstract painters, American abstract painters of the 1950s? Painters who were painting weird shit on canvases. Painters like Jackson Pollock, who was literally throwing paint

at a canvas and saying, this is art. Why would the CIA fund that? How does that help them win wars? It was ideological. In the 1950s and the 1960s, that was the height of the Cold War. You had two massive superpowers. You had America and you had the Soviet Union and this was the world after World War II. America represented the ideology of capitalism and democracy. The Soviet Union represented communism. One narrative that the Soviet Union would use against America in the 50s and in the 60s was. America might have money and might have capitalism but they have no culture. America is a cultureless place. They don't have culture and history the way that Russia does or the way that Europe does. America isn't legitimate, it's shallow.

So America wanted to change that narrative by associating America with the most progressive and free-thinking art in the world because artistic expression was suppressed in the Soviet Union. Most visual art in the Soviet Union was state-sponsored art. It was known as Soviet realism. A lot of radical painters and radical artists from the Russian Revolution ended up as state-funded artists in the Soviet Union. So Russian realism as a type of painting was kind of blatant propaganda art. Paint a painting and the painting has to look exactly like what you're painting. And you should only really paint paintings of Soviet people working for the good of the government and the people. So that's what a lot of Soviet art was.

Controlled by the government, paintings of the people working in the field, working in factories. All of the approved art, visual art in the Soviet Union, visual art in the Soviet Union overtly, deliberately and explicitly conveyed the message of the state, which was communism. So America wanted to do the opposite. If in the Soviet Union, the government says you must only draw people and places in a realistic way that represents the government's message. Well, here in America, you can paint whatever you want. So these painters like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, that were painting very, very abstract paintings, like no representation, no people, just shapes and colours.

These paintings were the grandchildren of Cubism. The CIA secretly funded these artists because they wanted to promote the idea that abstract expressionist art represents freedom, democracy and capitalism. The American dream. In America you can literally throw paint at a blank canvas and sell it for millions. That's what America is. The blank canvas is the American frontier and the paint is the colonization of it. Abstract expressionism is frontierism and it's very lucrative. But here's the thing. The American government can't like fund artists. The American government can't decide what art is to promote the values of that government.

The American government can't be openly seen to fund art as state propaganda. Sure isn't that what the Russians are doing with their Soviet realism? But the Yanks were doing the exact same thing. Ten steps removed from the artist. Secretly funneling the money in. Creating state sponsored propaganda art.

Just like the Soviets. Now a lot of these painters were actually quite left leaning. Socialists. Some of them were even communist. They didn't fucking know. That all of their funding was coming from the CIA. The CIA kept it secret. The CIA would pretend to be like art dealers and buy these paintings for millions and inflate their value.

And the artists hadn't a clue. They were part of an ideological war and their paintings were being used as tools to promote American capitalist values. But what I found out recently and what I've been doing research into is that the CIA not only funded abstract art but they funded a huge amount of 20th century literature as well and a lot of huge 20th century writers were given the platforms that they were given because of secret covert CIA funding and I'm going to talk about that right after the ocarina pause. I don't have the ocarina this week because I'm in my office. I'm in my office right now late at

night but I do have my Puerto Rican guero So let's have the Puerto Rican guero pause. And you're going to hear some adverts. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you.

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This podcast is my full-time job. This podcast is how I earn a living. As you can tell, quite a large amount of research and writing goes into making this podcast each week because it's a monologue essay podcast. And I adore doing this work. I fucking love doing it. But I wouldn't be able to do it every week if it wasn't my full-time job and I couldn't dedicate all of my time to it. So if you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you entertainment,

comfort, solace, a break, whatever this podcast does to you, if you're consuming that work, please consider paying me for that work. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or the price of a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. That's how I earn a living and pay my bills. once a month. That's it. That's how I earn a living and pay my bills. But if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. If you can afford it, please consider subscribing to the Patreon and becoming a patron because you're paying for the person who can't afford it to listen for free. So everybody gets a podcast and I earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on soundness and kindness. Also what it does is it keeps this podcast independent.

I don't have to worry about being secretly funded by the government. But I do have to worry about being funded by advertisers. Now there are adverts on this podcast in order for me to fulfil my contract with Acast. But the Patreon gives me control around that. I can tell advertisers to fuck off if I want to because quite a lot of advertisers what they want in exchange for advertising and sponsoring a podcast is a degree of creative control. If this podcast episode was sponsored by an advertiser I would have to give them the podcast episode in advance, they'd have to sign off

on it and they could say no I don't think we want you doing the podcast about the relationship between art and the military who the fuck wants to listen to that why don't you do a podcast about something that's trending, Love Island is really popular right now

I think we want you to do a podcast this week about Love Island because we're sponsoring this podcast. All this arty farty stuff, that's not our brand. I don't ever want to do that because then I'm not making a podcast that I'm passionate about, that I enjoy. And that model there is why so much television is shit and why so much radio is shit. So please support independent podcasters because the podcast environment is changing, it's becoming very corporate, smaller podcasts

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Leave reviews. Follow podcasts. Share podcasts on your social media of independent creators. Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast. Oh one little gig plug as well actually. I'm doing the Ballybunion Arts Festival at the end of July. If you're down around Kerry. Come down to Ballybunion Arts Festival at the end of July if you're down around Kerry come down to Ballybunion

it's a fucking gorgeous place Kerry's a beautiful place come down to the Ballybunion Arts Festival at the end of July and come to my live podcast it's going to be great crack in a beautiful setting

in a beautiful area and you'll find those tickets online if you just google them actually if you want your little excuse to experience the beauty of Kerry because you know about three or four podcasts ago I did a podcast about the Dingle Peninsula and the Shleve Mish Mountains and the mythology around that area if you want to visit that beautiful area the Ballybunion Arts Festival is a good excuse to

have a little staycation it's quite close to the Dingle Peninsula. It's about a 20-30 minutes drive. So, on to the subject of 20th century literature. There's a literary magazine called the Paris Review, which could possibly be the most important literary magazine of the 20th century. It's still released today, four times a year. The Paris Review would have helped to launch the international careers of writers like

Samuel Beckett, or Jack Kerouac, George Louis Barre. Like in the 20th century, it would have mostly male writers, to be honest, unfortunately. Like in the 20th century it would have mostly male writers to be honest, unfortunately. But it would have... Anyone who was anyone in mid-20th century writing was getting published in the Paris Review. This magazine was deciding what's hot and what's not in writing. And you know where I'm going with this. It was founded by the CIA. It also published established writers at the

time like T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway. It set the global tone for what was considered important writing. Now of course none of these writers would have had any idea whatsoever that the Paris Review would have been involved with the CIA. It was founded in 1953, and in the 1950s, people didn't really know how evil, fucked up and weird the CIA were. Like, 53 is the same year that the CIA were in the Philippines pretending that vampires were real. People didn't really know that democratically elected governments around the world were being toppled by the CIA and puppet governments being put in their place. Paris Review was founded by three people, Harold Humes, Peter

Matheson and George Plimpton. I want to speak about Harold Humes first. Harold Humes wasn't in the CIA. He was just like an eccentric American rich kid who moved to Paris in the 1940s and really loved literature and while he was in Paris he wanted to start a literary magazine so he started it with Matheson and Plimpton now this is where conspiracy goes to conspiracy theory so Harold Humes who founded the magazine

at some point in the 1950s he met the LSD scientist Timothy Leary. And Humes took a huge amount of LSD and lost his mind. He became highly eccentric and he would speak frequently about believing that he was being followed. He would speak about

thinking that his bedposts were tapped and they were recording him and he would speak about the CIA and specifically he would speak about the CIA MK Ultra LSD experiments because the CIA in the 1950s and 60s and this is fact had a secret a secret operation called MK Ultra where they were testing LSD and all other substances on American citizens to try and... It was a mind control program run by a fella called Sidney Gottlieb who was friends with Timothy Leary

who gave Hume the LSD that drove him mad. Now, Hume ended up institutionalised. He had gone fully psychotic and became institutionalized and the person Peter Matheson the other person who founded the Paris Review with Hume ended up feeling sorry that his friend who he founded the magazine with, had gone psychotic, had become paranoid, thought he was being followed. And Matheson went to Hume in the psychiatric hospital and said, you know what, you're right. All this time I've been a CIA agent. You can't tell anyone, but you're correct. I've been a CIA agent all along and the Paris Review has been a covert CIA

operation now publicly to this day I don't think Matheson has been that open and clear he is honest in saying yeah ok I was a CIA agent but the CIA didn't like tell us what to publish in the Paris Review

but come on like also in the 70's Hume applied for a Freedom of Information Act and it turns out, yes, he was being followed by the CIA because he's running a magazine that's run by the CIA, but he doesn't know it. So if you're thinking, like, why the fuck would the CIA fund the Paris Review? Well, it was about controlling narrative.

The Paris Review would have been read all the world over by intellectuals and by the CIA having a hand in that narrative they could control how intellectuals around the world viewed the USA.

They would also fund magazines in Latin American countries. Like a very important literary movement in South America in the 20th century is known as magical realism with writers like George Louis Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marquez who were published in the Paris Review. And there's a theory that the CIA wanted to promote writers who were writing about like magical realism is is very abstract very fantastical surreal almost fantasy and by the CIA promoting and funding these writers and putting these to the forefront of what literature is, it then suppresses the writers who are writing more revolutionary political stuff in countries that the CIA are actively toppling governments in.

So we're going to pump a bunch of money into writers that are left-leaning, that are thinking about the world, but we're going to make sure that the ones that get seen are not the ones that are critiquing American foreign policy too much. So like with how the CIA funded abstract expressionist painting they get to control

the tastes of the world when it comes to art and literature and effectively creating propaganda for America, but also at all times using the logic of if we don't do it, the Russians will. If we don't fund secretly the left-leaning writers, the left-leaning publications,

if we don't have a hand in here and a control and knowledge and intelligence, then Russia, the Soviet Union is going to fill up that space and now they'll fund writers that promote a communist message like when I'm trying to understand the fucking madness of the CIA I often think of the example of the north of Ireland now this hasn't been proven this one hasn't been proven but a lot of people say that like the IRA brought a lot of American guns into the north of Ireland in the 70s and 80s

armolites, American weapons ships from Boston full of guns made it to the north of Ireland and these guns were going to be used by the IRA to fight the British now some people say there is no fucking way north of Ireland and these guns were going to be used by the IRA to fight the British. Now some people say there is no fucking way that the IRA could have gotten entire ships full of guns out

of America to Ireland without CIA help. It just couldn't have happened, not possible and then you think why the fuck would the CIA help the IRA bring American guns to the north of Ireland for those guns to be used against British soldiers, Britain being a main ally of America? Why the fuck would the CIA do that? Well, the people who reckon it's true would say, control and involvement. The IRA are going to bring in guns from somewhere. So if we don't do it, what if the Soviets do? What if the IRA go to the Soviets and now the Soviets are bringing guns to the IRA? What if the Soviets implant communism in the north of Ireland? So we better make sure that we're giving the IRA their guns.

They're still getting guns, but at least we control it, we know how many they have, and it's not the Soviets.ets now that there is conspiracy theory because i don't think anyone's proven that the cia helped the ira bring guns in but it's an example of the type of logic that the cia use we can't stop left-leaning writers from publishing we can't stop them that would be too soviet of us so instead, we're going to fund them, give them money, and then we get to control and decide who gets hired and who doesn't. And we're going to do it in a way that the writer's having a fucking clue. So it is fact, it's actual fact, that one of the founders of the Paris Review was a CIA agent

as a way to shape and control fucking modern literature. But something that's a bit more controversial is the CIA also funded writers' workshops in America. In particular, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which is a master's of fine arts and creative writing in America, which produced quite a lot of famous American writers. But by the 1950s, it was receiving funding from CIA front organizations. There's a book called Workshops of Empire by Eric Bennett,

and he argues that anti-communist organizations and CIA fronts funded these writer workshops, in particular the Iowa Writers Workshop, and fundamentally changed how creative writing was to be written. And some of the things that were taught were, when you're writing, you write sensations, not doctrines. Experiences, not dogmas. Memories, not philosophies. And it's argued that this was a way to depoliticize american writing

make the work abstract metaphorical individualist open to interpretation to be too literal to be too overtly political is bad writing by contrasting it with so art, like with the abstract expressionists and Soviet realism, Soviet realist painting was make very explicit, blatant political paintings that reflect the views of the state. Well, these anti-communist organisations that were funding the writers' workshops were saying, no, no, that's bad art, that's bad writing. And one, this is highly contested but one highly contested theory is that there's a phrase within writing called show don't tell you'll find this in the writing of arnest hemingway in particular but show don't tell basically means don't be

explicit don't don't explain your character's actions or thoughts here's the most cliched example that you'll know this from TV and cinema this is the most cliched show don't tell if a character in TV or in movies is sad don't show him crying show them looking out a window and on the window is rain

so instead we the viewer get the implicit suggestion that the window is rain. So instead we the viewer get the implicit suggestion that the character is upset but we don't get to see their literal tears that would be too explicit. But some argue that show don't tell was deliberately thought in these workshops to make writing more vague, more abstract, more open to interpretation and less literal and ideological and blatant like Soviet work. But from these workshops and from the Iowa Writers Workshop you get writing like people like Raymond Carver and Carver kind of established the style, the dominant style of the American 20th century short story. But Carver definitely embodies that show don't tell style.

Like what makes Raymond Carver's writing beautiful. Like he's got a book called What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which is a collection of short stories. And it's fucking amazing. Because what Carver can do is, they're barely of short stories and it's fucking amazing because what Carver can do is they're barely even short stories they're like collections of just scenes but you could read a Raymond Carver short story

and you're having a fucking clue what happened you're almost left finishing the story going is that it? but he's such a master of that style that when you read a Raymond Carver short story you're left with that confusion of what the fuck just happened? what was that about?

but it will stick with you for days the way that a dream will stick with you when you have a dream and you're like what the fuck was that dream? but you can't stop trying to figure it out and think about it for days. Raymond Carver can do that with his short stories. And I love it.

But it is an example of that American Writers Workshop style, which was funded by the CIA. And that style is sensations, not doctrines, experiences, experiences not dogmas, memories not philosophies. It's heavily present in Carver's work and that shaped a very popular way to write short stories. So that last bit there about the CIA funding the writers workshops in America, that's the bit that's a bit more hazy the CIA definitely did fund

but how much control they had over the writing style or whether that was ideological that's the bit that's contested and that you'll get arguments about the Paris Review shit that's, we know that because in 1967

it all came out the CIA had to admit to it in 1967 a CIA officer called Tom Braden came out and said look yeah we've been funding

tons of literary magazines all around the world this is what we've been doing and everyone was shocked going what the fuck you're supposed to be the cia you're funding you're funding magazines and why the cia up to now because this shit becomes a lot more difficult when you have the internet there wasn't as much free access to information back

then but the weird thing now is the cia are kind of open about what they're explicitly funding. Something which was not the case in the 50s, 60s and 70s. It was all covertly hidden. So there's a company called In-Q-Tel. I-N-Q-Tel. And In-Q-Tel is like the venture capital arm of the CIA. It's out in the open. You can go to the In-Q-Tel website. And you go to the In-Q-Tel website. And it's like, how are you getting on lads? We're the CIA it's out in the open you can go to the In-Q-Tel website and you go to the In-Q-Tel website

and it's like how are you getting on lads we're the CIA and we get billions off the government each year and what we do is we pick companies and we invest in these companies so that these private companies can do the CIA's work and you can go to the In-Q-Tel website and see it all. They're mostly investing in companies that are into artificial intelligence, cyber security, climate change shit. And that's all out there in the open. But my guess is, is that's just the CIA going, look, you all have the internet.

You all know what we've done in the past. You all know the crack with us. So we're going to give the illusion of being hugely open by showing you everything that we're investing in. But they obviously have a bunch of shit that they're doing right now that we haven't a clue about. Because that's what they do. Like I did a podcast a few years back showing how,

remember Pokemon Go? Like Pokemon Go, few years back showing how remember pokemon go like pokemon go the the technological infrastructure of that was funded by incutel and the cia they were making pokemon appear in places all over the world and then people were chasing the pokemon with their phones but really what they're doing is they're collecting the visual data of the area and then the cia are taking that visual data to create maps. Like, my biggest conspiracy theory of all, completely unfounded, talking out of my arse, just a hunch that I have,

but Twitter really... If I found out that Twitter was a CIA operation, I'd go, yeah, I can see why that's the case. Because here's the thing with fucking Twitter. The internet is a wonderful space where people all over the world can have discussions about really important things. Race, gender, equality, inequality, the standard of living, criticising governments. We can all do this on the internet. For some fucking reason, however, the website where the most important conversations happen is Twitter.

Anyone who has left-leaning politics, who wants to speak about left-leaning issues in particular, they all flock to Twitter. Now, have you ever seen a decent, constructive conversation happen around politics on Twitter? No. It immediately descends into hostility and performative cruelty. I have seen groups of people, left-leaning people, who have the same goals, who have the same wants and desires I've seen them rip the absolute shit out of each other and descend into chaos and frenzy because the conversation in this

is happening on Twitter. Twitter is a space where the most important conversations happen and the infrastructure of Twitter itself is designed to make people fight and fall out with each other so nothing gets resolved. But at all times you have the illusion of actually having meaningful discourse. Twitter is points-based combat where the website will only let you have a conversation in the least amount of words in a hostile environment. So every single conversation must descend into combat. That sounds to me like a fucking dream for any intelligence organisation who's trying

to split up and cause dissent among any group of people who has a set of ideas that they disagree with. I have zero evidence for that. Zero. All I'm saying is that if I found out that Twitter was run by the CIA all along I'd go that makes sense and you know what the reason I have to distance myself from that statement and explicitly say I am not saying that I genuinely believe Twitter is a CIA operation. I've no evidence. It's a feeling in my belly. I'm talking out of my hole. The reason I have to say that is to protect that statement from Twitter because some absolute gaol will tweet. Blind

was on his podcast today saying that Twitter is run by the CIA and they'll misrepresent me for clout and retweets and then my mentions will be a living fucking hell for a week, which will then ravish my mental health. So no, I'm not saying that Twitter is run by the CIA.

It just does the type of thing they like to do. And also, Blind Buy said on his podcast today that show don't tell was created by the CIA no I didn't I presented an argument that I read online where someone said that but it's to be taken with a pinch of salt because every so often someone will tweet show don't tell was invented by the, and it just seems to annoy the most annoying people, and I could do without that. Alright, I'll chat to you next week. This was an enjoyable rambling hot take

into the relationship between art and the military and CIA. Mind yourselves, rub a dog, enjoy the sun,ell the air. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto

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