"Despite gathering years of NSA-worthy surveillance on the philosophers, Hoover’s agents were never able to discern the ideological program of the French. “I can’t work out,” wrote one in a note in Sartre’s file, “if he’s pro-Communist or anti-Communist."
I feel the same.
Lévy often seems to be a manichean ideologue, but I found his Sartre book revealing:
"Levy depicts Sartre as a man who could succumb to the twentieth century’s catastrophic attraction to violence and the false messianism of its total political solutions, while also being one of the fiercest critics of its illusions and shortcomings."
Levy is not regarded as a serious person. He once quoted a made up philosopher and has some dubious interests. In the french speaking world most people treat him as a joke.
> "Despite gathering years of NSA-worthy surveillance on the philosophers, Hoover’s agents were never able to discern the ideological program of the French. “I can’t work out,” wrote one in a note in Sartre’s file, “if he’s pro-Communist or anti-Communist."
Honestly, what's crazy about that to me is the idea that he _must_ be one or the other. The idea that every writer is actively and wholeheartedly trying to advance exactly one side or the other of a geopolitical struggle is kind of silly. Maybe sometimes he thought about other stuff besides that?
> The black-and-white, spy-vs-spy world of the FBI left little room for philosophical nuance and literary ambiguity, after all.
It's classic authoritarian thinking where even the perception of a small stain ruins the entire outfit.
But then, in stating the above that way I have, that could be an example of the same; putting into a small box those who put others into a small box.
In defense of my argument: it is the policy and process of intelligence services and law enforcement that creates the small box thinking, not the individuals who are employed to pursue it, whilst those they are putting into the small boxes are individuals with all the many colours of opinion, subjectivity, and experience that make up their whole, and cannot be accurately small-boxed.
There is necessarily no cross-links between all of them, but there is a link. If you can't imagine that a state that is obsessively dreaming about the world revolution and has a wide spy network and large group of naive sympathisers doesn't try to infiltrate all the possible influential counter cultures then you are a little too naive.
> If you can't imagine that a state that is obsessively dreaming about the world revolution and has a wide spy network and large group of naive sympathisers doesn't try to infiltrate all the possible influential counter cultures then you are a little too naive.
Being able to imagine something isn't concrete proof that it exists. "There's a first time for everything" isn't literally true; plenty of totally plausible things don't end up happening.
I mean, that's kinda fair. But it's also a much lower bar to suspect that a group might be infiltrated when we're talking about an entity with a proven track-record of infiltrating and espionage. Doubly so during the cold war, when this kind of thing was normalized.
I also wouldn't be that surprised if you told me the CIA managed to infiltrate some philosophy group. Hell, they funded Jackson Pollock.
Using public French intellectuals who dabble in socialism to plot the assassination of an American president would be the dumbest thing imaginable. (If that is what the topic is about? The submitted article is awfully vague about what the McCharthian fears were even about.)
"If you can't imagine" is a bad start. If you're imagining people obsessively dreaming about destroying you, and using the naive "blacks" to do it, you're about a millimeter away from joining the fight against "Judeo-Bolshevism."
> If you can't imagine that a state that is obsessively dreaming about the world revolution and has a wide spy network and large group of naive sympathisers doesn't try to infiltrate all the possible influential counter cultures then you are a little too naive.
How are Blacks, communists and poets “counter cultures”?
I take the most favorable interpretation and I presume that the young age is in play in such large ignorance.
Obviously the notion of poets doesn't contain all of them like the ones who write rhymes for children but poetry has since Age of Enlightenment been a tool of political critique if not earlier. The same applies to philosophy. I'm hope that you for sure have heard of Marx.
I also hope that you have learned about civil rights movement of the black people and Martin Luther King.
So which one of all of the four has the support of a large superstate with an extensive spy network?
And what comes to McCarthy then he had every right to be extremely paranoid about the activities of Soviet Union in attempts to secretly influence American politics from the within. The work of American counter intelligence agencies is a clear proof of it.
no because a healthy politics does include alternative views. It is the unhealthy security mindset that becomes inflexible @! and does anyone now support the activity of Senator Joe McCarthy, honestly?
> I take the most favorable interpretation and I presume that the young age is in play in such large ignorance.
The US are just one of the 195 countries in the World; don’t assume that everyone on the Internet is 1- living in the US and/or 2- familiar with the US culture as if it were the center of the world.
I'm not from US, but fair enough, just the article is very obviously about US if you cared to read it even superficially.
But now I'm curious from where you are from and how you don't know about civil rights movement of blacks in US. Does the name Martin Luther King tell you anything?
The comment talked about "world revolution" and a "wide spy network" so it was not immediately clear to me that the infiltration you were taking about where only on domestic soil like what the article was about.
OK. The only communist "world power" at the time was USSR (Soviet Union) that was factually dominated and controlled by Russia. They had from the very beginning (revolution in Russia) dreamed about the world domination. They tried already right after the revolution to overtake Europe but were stopped by Poland. Next attempt was during WW2 but they were first stopped by Germany and then by US (partially, as even part of Germany was occupied by them).
USSR had very wide spy network and they had considerably infiltrated US.
China was also overtaken by communists and had some influence among some naive Western intellectuals but I don't know about direct influence in US (maybe it existed, I'm just not aware of it).
These days of course both Russia and China are actively attempting to extend their influence through spy networks or by manipulations in social media (and yes, there are also obvious shill accounts here).
Or perhaps they were born in the last twenty or so years.
In America, today, Black culture IS culture and communism isn't viewed critically for the murderously-bad idea that it is.
Most of the immigrants that fled here from communism are either old, boring or dead. Kids today rarely have the benefit of speaking to older folks who fled Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, the USSR and others.
Instead they're following influencers on Twitch and Youtube who have extremely privileged lives speaking from ignorance about communism with no pushback.
It truly does seem like it would be an easy thing to ascertain just from knowing about the existence of the Black National Anthem, the Communist Manifesto, and Howl.
Then again, it's also characteristic of mainstream American culture to try to discourage people from acknowledging them.
American culture is, indeed, a mix of culture. It exists only thanks to external influences.
Black culture is at the heart of American culture (jazz, soul, and more music), great athletes in the best team...
And it's good. The point was that part of it was clearly a counter culture in opposition of white dominated main culture. This is completely something that a state level adversary may attempt to infiltrate given an opportunity.
And they tried and keep trying. A little recent refresher
> You don't understand American culture at all if you can even ask this question sincerely.
Some people on HN always assume that this is a website a US-only audience. No, not all people understand American culture and that’s normal because it’s not universal. I interpreted the comment as a general affirmation, not something specific to a single country. I’m downvoted and almost insulted for asking a question.
I loved that game, but in my friendless highschool youth I never found anyone interested in playing the version I had (the "New World Order" card game).
I do remember the Talented and Gifted English teacher at my school randomly saw me with cards for the "John Birch Society" and "FNORD" and guffawed.
I'm pretty sure that "... there must be some kind of conspiracy" is the literal definition of a Conspiracy Theory. Nice to see that even the FBI is into that fun stuff.
Could it be that instead of attempting to falsify anything I had merely been attempting to promote a really fun game? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes!
Conspiracies can be dismissed if they are presented without convincing evidence. After all, the space of possible conspiracies is vast; all but a tiny fraction must be nonexistent.
Funny enough, if you look at polling data of Americans... amongst people who actually lived during the JFK assassination & later investigation and kept up with all the details.... only about 11% believed the official narrative. More than 80% thought the official narrative was a lie.
Nowadays (when most Americans have just read about it in history textbooks), it feels like most people believe the official narrative and dismiss conspiracy theories as "crazy".
It seems that a majority doubt the official narrative these days (that LHO acted alone), but it was much lower in the past.
There are, of course, limits to polling. People will tend to lie about things with social consequences, but you specifically call out polling data in your post.
So many Americans are prone to conspiracy theories. Most of the flat-earther, no-climate-urgency, election-was-stolen are Americans who have access to lots of facts, but still are in denial
> Nowadays (when most Americans have just read about it in history textbooks), it feels like most people believe the official narrative and dismiss conspiracy theories as "crazy".
A significant confounding factor here is the encompassing and totalizing nature of modern conspiracy theories: there's a substantial difference in breadth, depth, and assumed priors between a JFK assassination conspiracy (painted against the backdrop of 1960s social and political upheaval) and something like QAnon.
Put another way: American culture is prone to conspiratorial beliefs, but isn't (yet) prone to Big Lies.
I think it's very prone to it. In fact I think *most Western democracy's cultures are prone to such beliefs In some countries it now affects half of the population in others 'merely' 30%. But there isn't a country where this isn't a problem.
>Put another way: American culture is prone to conspiratorial beliefs, but isn't (yet) prone to Big Lies.
Lost Cause mythology, pretty much everything related to the popular conception of mid-century American society, "It's not a recession because hiring and consumer spending are strong," etc.
I don’t think any of these things are conspiracy theories. Lost Cause mythology is definitely revisionist pseudohistory and not a conspiracy; I don’t know what the alleged recession conspiracy would be.
(To my original point about breadth and depth: the adoption of non-conspiratorial but otherwise fringe views is a large part of what makes contemporary conspiracy both syncretic and naturally limiting — a “big tent” policy around conspiracies makes it hard to latch onto a single Big Lie.)
>In the years immediately following the Civil War, there was a systematic and concerted effort to reframe the war in order to reunite the nation, quell bitterness, and assuage the ego of the defeated Southerners. Known as the “Lost Cause” narrative, this version of the Civil War downplays the conflict over slaveholder rights, amplifies the notion of “states’ rights,” and embraces the honorable valor of soldiers on both sides.
Government, industry, and academia conspired to disseminate a narrative regarding the Civil War that they knew not to be factual but that served their sociopolitical purposes. This is the textbook definition of a Big Lie, and it was the standard interpretation of events for more than one hundred years in large swathes of this country.
>I don’t know what the alleged recession conspiracy would be.
Because it was successful.
You didn't address the mid-century, so I'll expound: the Big Lie of a stable and affluent 50s, where the standard American nuclear family lived in a modest home in a nice suburb and espoused traditional values that kept the country on the straight-and-narrow (adopted most infamously in the various incarnations of "Make America Great Again", which were absolutely centralized campaigns by an identifiable set of figures) is oft taken to be the truth - never mind that this was the era of McCarthyism, war in Asia, "urban renewal", racial strife, PTSD-addled fathers and drunk housewives inflicting Baby Boomers with trauma that warps the American social landscape to this day, etc. There is a non-trivial part of America that wants to go back to an era that never existed, because they bought the Big Lie of its utopianism.
I think this conflates conspiracy and conspiracy theory: there was a concerted post-reconstruction effort to distort the facts of the civil war. You could even call that a conspiracy. But it lacks the “hidden” narrative of a conspiracy theory: both the Lost Cause and actual civil war history were taught in the open.
I don’t think the 1950s American Dream is a Big Lie. A Big Lie is specifically a gross and intentional, top-down fabrication that displaces truth (because the lie is inconceivable). 1950s America is none of these things: it’s a collective fantasy based on distorted and politicized memories. It’s also not taught as a normative history (although that may unfortunately change).
This is perhaps pedantic, but I think there’s value in splitting these things apart: the US is chock full of rosy lies about its past, actual conspiracies, and conspiracy theories. But the closest thing we’ve had in living memory to a Big Lie is the lie of a stolen 2020 election, which (as of yet) has not achieved the kind of astounding dominance needed to survive as a Big Lie. But we will see.
>I think this conflates conspiracy and conspiracy theory: there was a concerted post-reconstruction effort to distort the facts of the civil war. You could even call that a conspiracy. But it lacks the “hidden” narrative of a conspiracy theory: both the Lost Cause and actual civil war history were taught in the open.
This just exposes your perspective bias. Black families would tell you that it was an obvious lie that was hidden from white America, which was increasingly made up of people with no familial memory of the antebellum period (and even fewer with direct contact to either slavery or the Civil War). To characterize (perhaps liberally): you had white people of influence and a longer-lived ancestral presence in the country, colluding to distort facts about an event that the families of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation immigrants were not here to witness. It was not just a Big Lie, it was a Grand Lie, spanning decades and becoming so normalized that its influence on political sentiment remains even after the lie itself has been largely (though not completely) dispelled. You also see echoes, bolstered by the preceding lie, in the "race riots" (more correctly termed "massacres") of the early 1920s.
>1950s America is none of these things: it’s a collective fantasy based on distorted and politicized memories. It’s also not taught as a normative history (although that may unfortunately change).
I don't think this is correct. It was a view of America that was propagandized at the time. It was inconceivable (particularly to industrialists who were relying on a "return to normalcy" to shore up national morale after the nightmare of total war) that America could emerge from WWII, get the Good End, and yet still have all of these problems. So, as instructed by our elites, we pretended they didn't exist, slowly building the powderkeg that exploded in the 60s and 70s. It's a testament to its strength as a Big Lie that it still lives past its nominal reconciliation.
I'll add climate change denial (energy companies) and public health concerns about smoking (cigarette companies) to the list.
>But the closest thing we’ve had in living memory to a Big Lie is the lie of a stolen 2020 election.
Iraq, as it turns out, does not have WMDs, though I imagine that the proportion of American flag kitsch-to-population remains higher than pre-2003.
I'm a little concerned that you're so adamant that we've not experienced this seemingly common phenomenon. Perhaps we need to discuss "American Exceptionalism"?
I don't think the snark is warranted: we aren't in material disagreement whatsoever about American racism (past and present), jingoism, or exceptionalism. What we're in disagreement about is how to categorize it. Plenty of things can be bad, including the bulk of this country's history, without them meeting the definition of a Big Lie.
Your point about WMDs in Iraq is a great example. I would consider that a Big Lie, and so I stand corrected.
This makes sense to me, because after all this time if we don't have anything which backs up the conspiracy theories it is sensible to believe that the results of the official investigation are largely accurate.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations was established to investigate the assassinations of JFK and MLK.
After their investigation, they concluded that the official narrative was most likely wrong and they found a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy.
There were no investigations after that..
> Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy. Other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the President. Scientific evidence negates some specific conspiracy allegations.
> The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.
For me the real kicker from the HSCA is George Joannides:
> At the HSCA, Joannides had been specifically assigned to handle queries about the DRE and its relations with the CIA. The Agency had assured the committee that he had no connection whatsoever to the matters under investigation; that, in fact, he was merely an Agency lawyer and had not been “operational” in 1963. These assurances were self-evidently false. At one point, Joannides informed the committee that the identity of the DRE’s case officer at the time of the Kennedy assassination — Joannides himself — could not be determined.
The HSCA conclusions were largely based on the now discredited acoustic analysis of the police channel dicabelt recording. If it weren't for that the findings would have largely supported that of the Warren Commission.
The House Select committee didn't do a very good job and did not have access to accurate information. There has been, of course, plenty of investigating done on the assassination since then. A well-known overview is Gerald Posner's Case Closed, it goes over the deficiencies of that and many other assassination theories with a fine-toothed comb.
You can just read. The most surprising thing about WWII, at least to many Nazis, is that the US and Britain didn't join the Axis. German theories about race were largely drawn from British and American sources. The US fought WWII with a racially segregated military.
White American culture is also kind of dominated by descendants of German immigrants. I recall seeing some historical racist media that was praising Anglo-German supremacy in contrast to Irish, southern and eastern Europeans etc. People forget this because the latter groups are all considered white now.
I personally think this puts some weight into the "race is a social construct" theory. That and the existence of mixed race people, and the stories of how they and their families have been arbitrarily treated based on varying perceptions. It's all pretty absurd.
stop, stop right there. There was no single "White American culture" .. that is a misrepresentation with a purpose!
The original collection of States were formed exactly to let groups divide. There were vastly different cultures, both culturally bonded, and also diverse, that were included from the earliest days.
source: anti-war, anti-slavery "whites" from that time
When Pearl Harbor happened, we [Roosevelt's advisors] were desperate. ... We were all in agony. The mood of the American people was obvious – they were determined that the Japanese had to be punished. We could have been forced to concentrate all our efforts on the Pacific, unable from then on to give more than purely peripheral help to Britain. It was truly astounding when Hitler declared war on us three days later. I cannot tell you our feelings of triumph. It was a totally irrational thing for him to do, and I think it saved Europe.
That is more an indication of how fundamentally naive many Nazis were. British rulers always aimed to break up any significantly large European power, it's been their obvious geopolitical imperative from before Elizabethan times. That necessity trumps any vague sympathy or political affinity du jour. They would never have allowed Hitler to take over the whole continent.
It's a bit more complicated than that, though. Because the alternative was to let the Soviets take over the whole continent. And in that 'framework' the UK aligning with the Nazis was actually more natural choice.
At the time the USSR wasn't thought capable to reach France. Maybe if Hitler had attacked Stalin first, the reasoning could have worked; but he went for the Molotov-Ribbentropp instead, which from outside made it look very much like he was on the same page as Joe.
Regardless, Britain would not have supported a cohesive Europe-wide power even to fight the USSR, as proven by the postwar bickering with DeGaulle.
A core part of Nazism was Germany's greatness, even beyond others of the same race. They "tolerated" the British "race". So I doubt the claim that German theories about race were drawn from British and American sources unless you're talking about pro-German idealogues.
The ideas of racial hygiene and eugenics certainly drew upon American science of the time, as well as German archaeology and anthropology. Their racial policies carried forward the ideas of American eugenics to its extreme but logical conclusion. To the extent that British were frowned upon, it was because of the presence of genetic contributions from the pre Yamnaya/Caucasian indigenous population. I remember there was a PBS American Experience: Eugenics episode that covered the Nazi party inspiration from American racial science.
