TV Tuesdays 18: The CIA and JKF

Welcome to the 18th TV Tuesday!

I’m currently listening to The Devil’s Chessboard for the second time because I didn’t come close to getting everything the first go-round. It’s a very dense, fast-paced book with a lot of absolutely batshit stuff that I nonetheless mostly believe because the author brings a ton of receipts but not so much detail that it feels embellished.

Three things strike me most about the book. First, former CIA director Allen Dulles had innocent people murdered, overthrew a few democratically elected national leaders, colluded with Nazis during and after the Holocaust, neglected to raise a finger to save Jewish lives, and at the very least played a central role in covering up for JKF’s real killer/s and may have played a role in his assassination. And that’s just what we have good evidence for.

But that’s not what gets me. What gets me is that for all this, he still couldn’t afford high-quality long-term care for his son who suffered a traumatic brain injury in Korea. He clearly did not do all this dirt for the money. It seems more likely that he just liked doing it, he liked power, and liked doing favors for his friends.

The second thing that strikes me about this book is that it does the best job I’ve yet encountered of explaining why the US defense establishment and corporate media is and has always been so obsessed with communism and simultaneously so tolerant of fascism. Because like, the actual likelihood of global communism ever gaining enough military advantage to threaten the US as a whole when the USSR and red China couldn’t figure out a way to prevent mass starvation seems… low. Fascism, however, was and remains an actual threat to US lives. So it’s just weird to be so focused on the lesser threat and tolerant of the greater.

I want to make another point about the book and communism. But first, two asides.

Aside 1: Don’t get me wrong, I oppose communism. I guess, in sum, because, if I have to choose, I prioritize ending scarcity over ending inequality. And, I’m a neoliberal because I believe we should fight scarcity and inequality at the same time because they reinforce each other.

Aside 2: Here I should admit to a profound ignorance about all history and goings on outside the US with the rather weird exception of 500–1500 Europe because ya girl got into medieval and renaissance history audiobooks in pandemic and never stopped.

Here’s the point. In practice, it’s my understanding that communism hasn’t actually empowered “the people” too much where it’s been tried. But like, how much of that is the CIA? Because from the book, it sure looks like every time a “communist” leader of any country that the US wasn’t afraid to fuck with tried to empower the people in any way that could decrease a large corporation’s profits the CIA did a lil coup action.

Again, this is less a defense of communism and more an indictment of the CIA. Call me crazy, but it seems like it would be better if corporate leaders negotiated with democratically elected leaders rather than forcing them out or killing them for non-compliance?

The third thing that strikes me about the book is that, by-and-large, the power players in the defense, and especially intelligence, establishment all went to the same few schools (Yale), were in the same clubs (Skull and Bones), went to the same summer camps growing up. And guess who else showed up to these schools, clubs, and camps? The CEOs of all the transnational corporations who stand to lose profits if the CIA allows democracy to prevail.

So yeah, it just seems like the people who run transnational corporations and anti-democratic state apparatuses prefer:

1. Corporate profits at the cost of human lives and fledgling democracies
2. Elite capture of powerful institutions
3. Ongoing military engagements (war is the health of the CIA)

And those people tend to get what they want because:

1. Power entrenches itself
2. No one benefits more by fighting them than they do by fighting for their own interests. It’s an example of the special interest problem.
3. The CIA and intelligence establishment works with the media and think tank world to convince the people that these orgs must operate with almost zero transparency to “keep us safe.” Though I find it interesting that in 50 years of leaks and narrow, strategic disclosures I can’t think of one example of a CIA operation “keeping us safe” from any threat that wasn’t created or exacerbated by the US government itself. Commenters, please let me know what I’ve missed!

What the book ultimately leaves me with is the reminder that evil doesn’t require evil people going out of their way to be evil. And that money is a powerful incentive, but friendship and power are sometimes more salient. Evil only requires friends doing favors for each other without sufficient oversight, transparency, and accountability.

Anyway, to the TV part, since this is TV Tuesday and not an edition of Cathy reads books. Though, it probably should have been.

The Oliver Stone movie JFK is a great companion to The Devil’s Chessboard. Is it a great movie? Not really. Is it a relatively entertaining way to quickly grok the basic outline of the case against the CIA, or at least against the “official story” via the Warren commission of the JFK assassination? Definitely.

And, finally, my babies, I come to the question I always ask when discussing conspiracy theories: Does any of this matter? I think it does. The CIA is still operating and still operating largely without transparency or accountability. Maybe this is a good idea. I’m open to that argument. I’d love to see the evidence.