There is now a widespread tendency on the political left to label all anti-establishment journalism as "right-wing conspiracy theory." Previously acclaimed figures like Seymour Hersh, Max Blumenthal and Russell Brand are marginalized and pilloried because they are contradicted by leaders of Western progressivism like Amy Goodman, Paul Mason, and Bhaskar Sunkara, and because some of their anti-establishment claims are echoed on the right.
This springs from the assumption that progressive institutions are generally great watchdogs on abuses of power by the national security state. History shows this not to be the case however, and the pillars of the American left have regularly been manipulated by state intelligence operations and elite money. Some of the episodes are now fairly well-known, like the 1950s Congress for Cultural Freedom, and its 1960s stepchild involving Gloria Steinem and other student leaders; there was also the widespread progressive denial when it was revealed that the CIA supported cocaine smuggling in the 1980s. But these are hardly the only documented cases.
I resort to listicle here because it concisely demonstrates a number of important things. Firstly, it’s possible for the government to conceal major scandals, not just for short periods of time, but for long periods of time. Secondly, there is a well-documented history of faux socialists collaborating with Western intelligence, so it is not far-fetched to believe it continues today—the recent exposure of Paul Mason colluding with deep state agents affirms this. And lastly, there is a long track record of the mainstream US left ignoring these things. In the cases of Korea, Vietnam and Rwanda cited below, this ignorance and gullibility cost millions of lives.
Here are five—out of the many times—that state intelligence operations manipulated the Western Left:
1. South Korean Atrocities Blamed on North Korea
For decades, the Western world was led to believe that the worst atrocities of the Korean War, “the Bodo League Massacres” (particularly the mass executions in Taejon) were perpetrated by the Communist forces of the North. In reality, the slaughter was ordered by the dictatorial regime of Syngman Rhee that was backed by the US and the United Nations, a fact belatedly admitted by South Korea in the Truth-and-Reconciliation hearings of the 1990s.
After the Bodo League false flag, American liberals who had formerly been opposed to the war fell in line with government propaganda on the “primitive Northern Koreans.” Pro-peace leader Henry Wallace wrote an article titled “Where I Was Wrong” shortly afterward, and actor Humphrey Bogart—formerly a harsh critic of McCarthyism and the Red Scare—narrated a documentary putting sole blame for the massacres on the Communists.
2. Google Won’t “Be Evil”
When Google appeared on the scene in the early 2000s, it was accepted as an independent-minded start up that wanted to democratize information; this was solidified when Google threw its weight behind the hip young progressive Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary. But Google’s founders had emerged out of a Stanford University program that was funded and directly overseen by US intelligence agents, and its Google Earth tech was discreetly developed with the CIA. Google has had a secretive role in some of the worst recent abuses of government like mapping targets in the Iraq War and assisting in NSA spying on US citizens. Establishment scholarship has only recently named Google as “the pioneer…lead practitioner, role model, and diffusion hub of surveillance capitalism,” but that may have been the company’s purpose all along. According to Shoshanna Zuboff of Harvard Business School, the Google system has created “unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power…
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