/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

Basically whenever someone talks about “the cia” in the 1950s, they’re mostly talking about the whims of Allen Dulles, and the relative effectiveness of the various shenanigans he approved has been endlessly exaggerated and overblown year after year as new biographies come out trying to have something sensational and new to sell.

Like the reality is that from all the “the cia overthrew x country” memes to the “the cia was responsible for shaping culture” memes, it was like a bunch of aloof yacht club daddy’s boys just spitballing random stuff based on whatever was relevant and topical at the time and then doing a half-assed shotgun approach/ spaghetti on the wall strategy and just seeing what happened. They were, and are, WAY less competent or aware of what they were doing than pop historians like to pretend they were like 80 years later.

They didn’t “make Pollock rich” by using his art to fuck with the Soviets like a decade after he was the hottest artist in New York. It’d be like saying the CIA “made Lady Gaga Rich” by using her music to fuck with Russians in 2018.