A small announcement: I’ve created a handful of pages containing ‘primary source’ material over the last few years. These pages include document images from William Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ leaks, as well as MK ULTRA images that were released to me through an FOIA request. You can find them all through the ‘Primary Sources‘ page in the main menu at the bottom of the screen.
January 1945: David Sarnoff, of RCA, receiving his brigadier general’s star from Major General Harry C. Ingles, chief signal officer of the US Army. Thank you, Wikipedia.
I’m concerned about the narrow range of opinion presented on US-inspired T.V. programming, on university campuses and in literature. I remember being a kid in the eighties and hearing pundits sound off on this narrowness after The Closing of the American Mind was published– I know I’m neither cutting-edge nor alone in my concern.
I attribute this narrowness, at least in part, to the mobilization of our culture during WWII and the Cold War. An awful lot of money poured into academia, publishing and the arts so that ‘creators’ would promote a unified front to fight against 1) National Socialist ideas and then 2) Russian elites.
The first time that this massive operation was ‘outed’– that I’m aware of– was in the February 1962 edition of the World Marxist Review by a mysterious author who used the pen name ‘Ernst Henri’. I’ve provided a full text of Henri’s article, including images of the original journal, here.
Everybody needs to read this article, because even though *it appears* to be written in the service of Russian-funded communism, the article is truthful about how our culture was mobilized through the exploitation of ‘philanthropic’ foundations like the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation to name a few. Anyone who currently makes their living by writing or spending grant money will be shocked by how little has changed.
Ernst Henri wrote about this abuse of the philanthropic system four years before it was safe for The New York Times to do so. The information contained in the article would have been available from public sources, but it would have been very time-consuming and costly to collect without having somebody on the ‘inside’ of the operation providing data. While the article beats the drum about reactionary anti-communists in Washington, it is careful never to mention that the message Washington promoted was also a left-wing message– you could read this whole article under the misapprehension that the Rockefellers were conservatives!
Henri’s article is of particular interest to me, because the gold-standard exposé of the Congress for Cultural Freedom written by Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, doesn’t mention this 1962 article or Henri. I do not believe that Saunders was unaware of Henri’s writing, because the article reads like a synopsis of her book. The next question is: Why didn’t Saunders– a British author– acknowledge Henri’s writing?
I think the answer lies in Henri’s connection to Aleister Crowley and Tom Driberg, which I’ll be writing about soon. In the meantime, here are some choice snippets from ‘Ernst Henri':
At the head of these international anti-communist organizations are bourgeois politicians, diplomats, intelligence agents, writers, “philosophers” and clergymen. Each is known to be in some way associated with the State Department, U.S. Intelligence and with one or another government or private agency in the United States. On closer scrutiny, however, the leading core of each turns out to be one of the same group: the American tycoons and their lieutenants.
The deviousness of “American tycoons and their lieutenants” is one point where ‘Ernst Henri’, Leonid Andreyev and Mikhail Bulgakov would see eye-to-eye.
I’d like to draw readers attention to the business interests of these “tycoons” as Henry describes them; their business interests bear an eerie similarity to those of the millionaires who Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle hit up for money:
The CCF (Congress for Cultural Freedom) leaders strike a sanctimonious pose of moral righteousness, but the fat salaries they draw come from the sale of automobiles, tanks and oil…
Buchman claimed that one such meeting, held in Brazil, was attended by 400 “leading industrialists and businessmen” including representatives of Ford, Mitsui, General Electric, etc…
The “Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League” in Saigon is subsidized by … the Giannini, Kaiser and Hearst groups…
This division also coordinates its activities with the Mellon group, the United Fruit Company, the Guggenheims and other monopolies that have been plundering the natural wealth of Latin America for decades…
The American Heritage Fund … board includes, or at one time included, representatives of the Ford and Rockefeller concerns; Paramount, the big cinema firm; General Electric and also the two reactionary trade union leaders– Meany and Reuther.
The American Heritage Fund was set up by David Sarnoff, who readers will remember from my posts on the origins of dragnet spying: The Empire is Listening, The Fabulous Marconi and Marconi Lives!
Henri says this about intelligence asset/radio magnate Sarnoff:
Another big “philanthropic” organization in the United States which engages in international anti-communism is the “American Heritage Foundation,” one of the organizers of the “Crusade for Freedom.” Its sponsor, David Sarnoff, is the author of a whole “program of political offensive against world communism,” news of which leaked out in the press in 1955.
One of the anti-communist measures Sarnoff proposed was the formation of special armed gangs to engineer putsches and subversion in the socialist and newly-independent countries. He urged that these elements should be well organized and financed, and used to the maximum. In all probability the events in Guatemala in 1954, in Hungary in 1956 and in Cuba in 1961 were attempts to carry out the schemes of the anti-communist strategists.
The American Heritage Fund is an advertising agency set up by the monopolies for the purpose of financing publicity for the bourgeois parties, influencing voters during election campaigns, etc. … Sarnoff acts as the spokesman of these circles when he calls for an offensive against communism and democracy through terror, military coups and “psychological warfare.”
Wouldn’t it be something if the father of American television was also the father of ‘color revolutions’? Sarnoff’s company, RCA, had Marconi, General Electric and US Navy backing.
I encourage everyone to read Ernst Henri’s article.
