Banned
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Originally Posted by Astrocloud
Host not to play into your threadjack but what "Conservative News" would you consider legitimate? The National Review? The American Conservative?
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Astrocloud, I have no way of knowing where the neoconservative movement begins and the CIA funding and influence end....Buckley, founder of National Review, and uncle of Brett Bozzell, is...as are both George Bushes, a Yale "bonesman", and was...as were Irving Kristol and George Bush '41...on the CIA "payroll"....
To this day...the National Review magazine contains scant corporate advertising, has never turned a profit, and depends on "donations" for it's coninued publication. The post WWII conservative "moement" in the US, seems to have been funded by the CIA:
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http://www.salon.com/people/feature/...fb/index1.html
William F. Buckley Jr. | page 1, 2
WFB was born in 1925 in New York City. He was the sixth of 10 children of a conservative Catholic oil man. His early years were spent on the family estate in Sharon, Conn., where he was raised by Mexican household help. His first language was Spanish; he mastered English while attending day school in London. He entered the military shortly before the end of World War II, and then found his way to Yale, from which he graduated in 1950. Then he worked briefly for the CIA.
"For 50 years," he recently told me, "I never talked about what I did in the CIA because I had pledged not to. But I just picked up a book in England [Frances Stonor Saunders' 'Who Paid the Piper,' not yet available in the United States] that describes what I did do." With the story on the public record, he no longer saw any reason to keep it a secret.
Stationed in Mexico, WFB edited "The Road to Yenan," a detailed account of Communist designs for world hegemony by Eudocio Ravines, an influential Communist in pre-war Peru.
Shortly thereafter, he entered the public spotlight and never left. At 25, he penned "God and Man at Yale," a broadside against creeping secularism at his alma mater. He ran a symbolic campaign for mayor of New York in 1965, and served as public delegate in the mind-numbing bureaucracy of the United Nations in 1973. But as a writer and architect of the modern conservative movement he truly made his mark. He founded National Review in 1955 at age 30, when the world considered conservative intellectuals a genetic impossibility. Just nine years later, NR would prove instrumental in Barry Goldwater's rise to the GOP nomination for president. In 1980, Goldwater protégé Ronald Reagan won the White House, and made National Review mandatory reading for his entire staff.
In 1976, Buckley wrote "Saving the Queen," the first of 11 spy novels chronicling the life of Blackford Oakes, a striking and brilliant deep-cover CIA agent. Buckley created Oakes because in the rest of the spy genre the CIA and KGB were often portrayed as moral equivalents, two sides of the same macabre coin. For Buckley, what separated the two agencies, even if they shared some tactics, were their ends, and that made all the difference. America was a force for freedom and democracy, the U.S.S.R. for atheistic oppression and genocide.
The Cold War may be over, but it remains Buckley's foremost political preoccupation, as evidenced by his new book, "The Redhunter." Mainstream critics reviewed it unfavorably, often seeing it as an effort to "resurrect" McCarthy, the great bogeyman of American politics.
Buckley's approach is more complex. His portrayal of Oakes' expeditions into Cuba, Berlin, Vietnam and elsewhere were commentaries on American foreign policy. But "The Redhunter" is Buckley's critique of America's domestic Cold War. He paints a warts-and-all portrait of McCarthy, showing the recklessness, poor judgment, browbeating, grandstanding and alcoholism. But he separates the man from the anti-communist movement he at first embodied and later discredited. "I have thought for a long time," Buckley has observed, "that McCarthy did more damage to his cause than benefit."
Buckley is more than an observer of the Cold War; he is also a veteran, having known almost all the major players on the Western side. He peppers his novels with first-person historical insights and anecdotes. Lengthy quotations from Whittaker Chambers in "The Redhunter," for example, come directly from letters the former communist once wrote to the author. The book features a scene in which Joe McCarthy wakes up fictional protagonist Harry Bontecou in the middle of the night to hear his plan for the liberation of China. The episode is real. Here, as elsewhere, Bontecou is a stand-in for WFB.
Buckley sees little reason to accord democratic privileges to Stalinists who plot to overthrow American democracy. Nor does he believe in extending constitutional protections to those who, if they ever came to power, would immediately rescind them. Certain ideas, he believes -- such as Nazism and communism -- are simply "unassimilable," and have no place in a liberal society. He voices this sentiment through the character of Columbia professor Willmoore Sherrill (a proxy for Willmoore Kendall, WFB's mentor and CIA recruiter at Yale), who argued that there are people who don't fit under the "American tent."
It's the sort of position that critics would categorize as extreme, but it's more moderate than a First Amendment absolutism that would allow those sympathetic to a hostile foreign power to be privy to national-security secrets. WFB is passionately anti-communist, but prudent enough to have recognized McCarthy's excesses, and to have decisively rejected the John Birch Society in its heyday. He is opposed to gun control, but cannot fathom the NRA's opposition to banning so-called assault rifles. He supports drug legalization, but wants distribution managed and regulated by the federal government. Such positions may be, as Eric Alterman says, "far divorced from the mainstream," but they are tempered, and not dogmatic -- which may be why even his most severe critics find him unthreatening.
One almost forgets, when WFB refers to lunch with Henry, a stroll with Ronald or a trip with Milton, that he is speaking of a former secretary of state, a former president or a Nobel Prize-winning economist. But if Bill Buckley walks with kings, he has not lost the common touch. At a recent celebration commemorating Ronald Reagan's 88th birthday, Buckley, the keynote speaker, was seated at the head table with Nancy Reagan, two former cabinet secretaries and the ex-governor of California. The moment the dinner ended, he ditched the dignitaries, dodged hundreds of autograph seekers and sneaked out to the parking lot to meet old friends for a nightcap.....
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http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...31/ai_13991708
My cold war - Irving Kristol, political philosopher, intellectual
National Interest, The, Spring, 1993
THIS PAST FALL, in what used to be East Berlin, I attended a commemorative conference on "The Cold War and After." It was sponsored by the late, lamented Encounter magazine, <b>which had been founded in London in 1953 by Stephen Spencer and myself, and which ceased publication last year. Though I left the magazine at the end of 1958, to return to New York, I have always felt a special sense of solidarity with it.
Encounter was accused of being a "Cold War" magazine, which in a sense was true enough. It was published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was later revealed to be financed by the CIA.</b> As a cultural-political journal, it published many fine literary essays, literary criticism, art criticism, short stories, and poetry, and in sheer bulk they probably preponderated. But there is no doubt its ideological core--its "mission," as it were--was to counteract, insofar as it was possible, the anti-American, pro-Soviet views of a large segment of the intellectual elites in the Western democracies and in the English-speaking Commonwealth.....
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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/031800-02.htm
Published on Saturday, March 18, 2000 in the New York Times
How the Central Intelligence Agency Played Dirty Tricks With Our Culture
by Laurence Zuckerman
Many people remember reading George Orwell's "Animal Farm" in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it "impossible to say which was which."
That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film's secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell's pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to "Animal Farm" from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.
Rewriting the end of "Animal Farm" is just one example of the often absurd lengths to which the C.I.A. went, as recounted in a new book, "The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters" (The New Press) by Frances Stonor Saunders, a British journalist. Published in Britain last summer, the book will appear here next month.
Much of what Ms. Stonor Saunders writes about, including the C.I.A.'s covert sponsorship of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom and the British opinion magazine Encounter, was exposed in the late 1960's, generating a wave of indignation. But by combing through archives and unpublished manuscripts and interviewing several of the principal actors, Ms. Stonor Saunders has uncovered many new details and gives the most comprehensive account yet of the agency's activities between 1947 and 1967. click to view the rest click to show This picture of the C.I.A.'s secret war of ideas has cameo appearances by scores of intellectual celebrities like the critics Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling, the poets Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott and the novelists James Michener and Mary McCarthy, all of whom directly or indirectly benefited from the C.I.A.'s largesse. There are also bundles of cash that were funneled through C.I.A. fronts and several hilarious schemes that resemble a "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon more than a serious defense against Communism.
Traveling first class all the way, the C.I.A. and its counterparts in other Western European nations sponsored art exhibitions, intellectual conferences, concerts and magazines to press their larger anti-Soviet agenda. Ms. Stonor Saunders provides ample evidence, for example, that the editors at Encounter and other agency-sponsored magazines were ordered not to publish articles directly critical of Washington's foreign policy. She also shows how the C.I.A. bankrolled some of the earliest exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting outside of the United States to counter the Socialist Realism being advanced by Moscow.
In one memorable episode, the British Foreign Office subsidized the distribution of 50,000 copies of "Darkness at Noon," Arthur Koestler's anti-Communist classic. But at the same time, the French Communist Party ordered its operatives to buy up every copy of the book. Koestler received a windfall in royalties courtesy of his Communist adversaries.
As it turns out, "Animal Farm" was not the only instance of the C.I.A.'s dabbling in Hollywood. Ms. Stonor Saunders reports that one operative who was a producer and talent agent slipped affluent-looking African-Americans into several films as extras to try to counter Soviet criticism of the American race problem.
The agency also changed the ending of the movie version of "1984," disregarding Orwell's specific instructions that the story not be altered. In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is entirely defeated by the nightmarish totalitarian regime. In the very last line, Orwell writes of Winston, "He loved Big Brother." In the movie, Winston and his lover, Julia, are gunned down after Winston defiantly shouts: "Down with Big Brother!"
Such changes came from the agency's obsession with snuffing out a notion then popular among many European intellectuals: that East and West were morally equivalent. But instead of illustrating the differences between the two competing systems by taking the high road, the agency justified its covert activities by referring to the unethical tactics of the Soviets.
"If the other side can use ideas that are camouflaged as being local rather than Soviet-supported or -stimulated, then we ought to be able to use ideas camouflaged as local ideas," Tom Braden, who ran the C.I.A.'s covert cultural division in the early 1950's, explained years later. (In one of the book's many amusing codas, Mr. Braden goes on in the 1980's to become the leftist foil to Patrick Buchanan on the CNN program "Crossfire.")
The cultural cold war began in postwar Europe, with the fraying of the wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow. Officials in the West believed they had to counter Soviet propaganda and undermine the wide sympathy for Communism in France and Italy.
An odd alliance was struck between the C.I.A. leaders, most of them wealthy Ivy League veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services and a corps of largely Jewish ex-Communists who had broken with Moscow to become virulently anti-Communist. Acting as intermediaries between the agency and the intellectual community were three colorful agents who included Vladimir Nabokov's much less talented cousin, Nicholas, a composer.
The C.I.A. recognized from the beginning that it could not openly sponsor artists and intellectuals in Europe because there was so much anti-American feeling there. Instead, it decided to woo intellectuals out of the Soviet orbit by secretly promoting a non-Communist left of democratic socialists disillusioned with Moscow.
Ms. Stonor Saunders describes how the C.I.A. cleverly skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan to finance its activities, funneling the money through fake philanthropies it created or real ones like the Ford Foundation.
"We couldn't spend it all," Gilbert Greenway, a former C.I.A. agent, recalled. "There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing."
When some of the C.I.A.'s activities were exposed in the late 1960's, many artists and intellectuals claimed ignorance. But Ms. Stonor Saunders makes a strong case that several people, including the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Stephen Spender, who was co-editor of Encounter, knew about the C.I.A.'s role.
"She has made it very difficult now to deny that some of these things happened," said Norman Birnbaum, a professor at the Georgetown University Law School who was a university professor in Europe in the 1950's and early 1960's. "And she has placed a lot of people living and dead in embarrassing situations."
Still unresolved is what impact the campaign had and whether it was worth it. Some of the participants, like Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr., who was in the O.S.S. and knew about some of the C.I.A.'s cultural activities, argue that the agency's role was benign, even necessary. Compared with the coups the C.I.A. sponsored in Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere, he said, its support of the arts was some of its best work. "It enabled people to publish what they already believed," he added. "It didn't change anyone's course of action or thought."
But Diana Josselson, whose husband, Michael, ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, told Ms. Stonor Saunders that there were real human costs among those around the world who innocently cooperated with the agency's front organizations only to be tarred with a C.I.A. affiliation when the truth came out. The author and other critics argue that by using government money covertly to promote such American ideals as democracy and freedom of expression, the agency ultimately stepped on its own message.
"Obviously it was an error, and a rather serious error, to allow intellectuals to be subsidized by the government," said Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia University. "And when it was revealed, it did undermine their credibility seriously."
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....except for it's anti immigration bent, I don't see that the American Conservative Magazine is propagandist or associated with CNP, Moon, CIA, Bozell, or politically active evangelical christians.
Here is a description of the American Conservative Magazine's most prominent columnist:
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http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article134737.ece
A racist rant too far? Police investigate Taki the playboy pundit
By Sholto Byrnes
Published: 01 February 2003
.....Such casual racism is the stock-in-trade of Taki, who is known mainly by his first name. In 1997 he described Puerto Ricans in New York as "a bunch of semi-savages ... fat, squat, ugly, dusky, dirty." In 2001 he called himself a "soi-disant anti-Semite" and has also referred to Kenya as "bongo-bongo land".
Repulsive though such comments are, they are what pass for humour in the Eurotrash plutocratic circles in which Taki mixes. His world skis at Gstaad, goes to the Ascot races – a crowd of "society" figures who are slowly departing for the great gambling tables of the hereafter.
Married to Princess Alexandra Schoenburg, Taki inherited a fortune from his father John and divides his time between a $5m house in New York's Upper East Side and Gstaad, where he recently crashed his car.
His strict treatment at the hands of the local police is what prompted his musings on crime problems in Britain.
His friends and acquaintances are the characters that fill his friend Nigel Dempster's pages. The Daily Mail gossip columnist refers to Taki as the "Greek sportsman", a description he has earned through his past participation in the Davis Cup and captaining of the Greek karate team.
He was close to Gianni Agnelli. His friendship with the Fiat magnate lasted 45 years until his recent death. "K", the Aga Khan, was a friend and he boasts an on-off friendship with Mohamed al-Fayed, English aristocrats, obscure European royalty and any pretty girl who chances across his path.
He is famously libidinous and is happy to call himself a "playboy".
His interest in right-wing politics comes from his father, and he is proud of the fact that not much thought has gone into his views. "Why make up your own mind when someone else can make up your mind for you?" he has asked.
Along with the Duke of Devonshire and the Earl of Portsmouth he was one of the backers of Neil Hamilton's failed libel bid against Mr Fayed, although he was not best pleased when he later found himself being pursued for Mr Fayed's costs.
Taki is happy to admit, as readers of his Spectator column know, to taking a line so right-wing it borders on the fascist. When building a new house he declared that he would name it "Palazzo Pinochet", after the Chilean dictator. General Franco is another of his heroes........
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....and I thought that this should increase conservative readership, dontcha think?
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http://www.laweekly.com/general/feat...-a-wrong/3329/
Do Two Rights Make a Wrong?
Not this time: New mag publishers Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos take on the neoconservatives
By Brendan Bernhard
Wednesday, December 11, 2002 - 12:00 am
....If Buchanan the anti-war crusader isn't enough of a surprise, here's another one: His partner in crime at The American Conservative (TAC) is Peter Theodoracopulos (universally known as "Taki"), a columnist and Greek-American playboy who once spent three months in a British jail for possession of cocaine. Taki, normally so right-wing he's off the charts, isn't sounding like much of a fascist these days either, even if he does have a dog named Benito. He calls Bill Kristol, the neoconservative editor of The Weekly Standard, "a little dictator who wants Kristol first, the U.S. second and the world third, in that order."....
<i><b>Taki:</b> 'We’re sending The
American Conservative to every
fucking policy wonk in Washington.
I’ve had 35 years as a journalist,
and now I want a little bit
more gravitas. I’m not going to
be writing about how I got
drunk and fell on the floor
and chased some pussy.'</i>
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So....I think that you can tell when a conservative news source is "not on message"....a more unique presentation of opinion, I have not encountered in the conservative "press"!
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