I just got into the most corny argument about China with a liberal I've ever experienced. (This will be long, my apologies.) This is all real. Word for word.

@TeezyZeezy · edit-2 2 years ago

I just got into the most corny argument about China with a liberal I've ever experienced. (This will be long, my apologies.) This is all real. Word for word.

@afellowkid · edit-2 2 years ago

I’m impressed you remained so calm.

Discussions like this are extremely frustrating. Atrocity propaganda can be created with virtually no effort, and it proliferates easily once set in to motion. Countering it with facts requires you to have seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of history and politics on hand at all times.

A (slightly edited) quote on war-time lies: “Man’s habit of lying is not nearly so extraordinary as his amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish.”

Anyway, here’s a quote from a guy who worked for the CIA for 25 years. I hope it can help you if you get into another conversation like this.

I want to reveal to those who still believe in the myths of the CIA what it is and what it actually does. My explanation will not include the usual pap fed to us by Agency spokesmen. My view backed by 25 years of experience is, quite simply, that the CIA is the covert action arm of the Presidency. […] The CIA is not an intelligence agency. In fact, it acts largely as an anti-intelligence agency, producing only that information wanted by policymakers to support their plans and suppressing information that does not support those plans. As the covert action arm of the President, the CIA uses disinformation, much of it aimed at the U.S. public, to mold opinion. It employs the gamut of disinformation techniques from forging documents to planting and discovering "communist” weapons caches. But the major weapon in its arsenal of disinformation is the “intelligence” it feeds to policymakers. Instead of gathering genuine intelligence that could serve as the basis for reasonable policies, the CIA often ends up distorting reality, creating out of whole cloth “intelligence” to justify policies that have already been decided upon. Policymakers then leak this “intelligence” to the media to deceive us all and gain our support. (Ralph W. McGehee, “Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA”, p. 15)

Aa shorter quote of his with the same essence: “The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. […] Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies.” (Deadly Deceits, p. 192).

You may also find this useful: Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere - he talks about how the CIA gives false stories to reporters, some reporters know this and purposely publish false stories planted by the CIA and some don’t know that they are planting CIA stories.

In my war, the Angola war, that I helped to manage, 1/3 of my staff was propaganda. […] I had propagandists all over the world, principally in London, Kinshasa, and Zambia. We would take stories which we would write and put them in the Zambia Times, and then pulled them out and sent them to journalists on our payroll in Europe. But his cover story, you see, would be what he would’ve gotten from his stringer in Lusaka, who had gotten them from the Zambia Times. We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. But after that point, the journalists, Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it. Now, our contact man in Europe was. And we pumped just dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities […] We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans, it was pure raw false propaganda to to create a an illusion of communists, you know, eating babies for breakfast and so forth, totally false propaganda.

More from him:

Another thing [the CIA does] is to disseminate propaganda to influence people’s minds, and this is a major function of the CIA. And unfortunately, of course, it overlaps into the gathering of information. You have contact with a journalist, you will give him true stories, you’ll get information from him, you’ll also give him false stories. […] You buy his confidence and set him up. We’ve seen this happen recently with Jack Anderson, for example, who has his intelligence sources, and he has also admitted that he’s been set up by them, every fifth story just simply being false. You also work on their human vulnerabilities to recruit them, in a classic sense, to make them your agent, so that you can control what they do so you don’t have to set them up. Sort of, you know, by putting one over on them so you can say, “Here, plant this one next Tuesday.” […] The Church Committee brought it out in 1975, and then Woodward and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple of years later. Four hundred journalists cooperating with the CIA, including some of the biggest names in the business, to consciously introduce the stories into the press.

Good luck talking with people in the future about things like this. Often, there is not much hope in a conversation like this with a person who is not poised to listen. But on the off chance you have some favorable conversation conditions sometime, I hope these quotes can help.

@TeezyZeezy · 2 years ago

Wow, what a response. I’ll absolutely save this comment for future reference. Thank you so much!

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