Knihu často ve svých pořadech doporučuje k přečtení V.V.Pjakin 😊, a proto jsme se rozhodli ji publikovat na pokračování v mírně upraveném, ale v podstatě automatickém, českém překladu. První díl již brzy! Zde je originál v angličtině:
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
Frances Stonor Saunders
In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders presents for the first time the shocking evidence that the CIA infiltrated every niche of the cultural sphere during the postwar years. In a “hammer-blow of a book” (The Spectator, London) that draws together recently declassified documents and exclusive interviews, the author narrates the extraordinary story of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West became instruments of the American government. The CIA’s front organizations and the philanthropic foundations that channeled its money also organized conferences, mounted exhibitions, arranged concerts, and flew symphony orchestras around the world.
Many of the period’s foremost intellectuals and artists appear in the book: Isaiah Berlin, Clement Greenberg, Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol, Robert Lowell, Henry Luce, André Malraux, Mary McCarthy, Reinhold Neibuhr, George Orwell, Jackson Pollock, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Stephen Spender, among others. While many were unwitting participants in the CIA’s cultural operation, others were willing collaborators.
Short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, The Cultural Cold War is “a rivetingly told story” (The Times Literary Supplement, London) of covert patronage unprecedented in modern history that is “quite unputdownable” (The Literary Review). Zdroj.
You know all that paranoia that besides politics and economics, the CIA also has infiltrated all kinds of cultural institutions — academic journals, music, international academic conferences, popular journals, export of popular music? Well now your paranoia can be exorcised, because it is all true!
Read this book and weep. Weep, not at the blood, and torture, and killing — this book has none of that. This is drip, drip, drip of the CIA’s backing of cultural influence. Sort of akin to finding out that US food aid policy is legislated to make profits from 3rd worlders and re-structure their eating habits. (I Will mention 2 books that deal with that later)
Read enough of this stuff and pain becomes laughter! Because it is funny actually to consider how much of our conscious life is built around denial. Funny — in that nitrous oxide sense of your gut hurts from so much laughing. I mean it.