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Notes -
The point is that the truth of the claim is far, far narrower than what is suggested.
It’s like a motte and bailey where the motte is “a core foreign policy goal of the CIA was to fracture support for Stalinism in Western European communist student and bohemian art circles, so they funded abstract contemporary art that made the socialist realism promoted as state art in the USSR seem dated, illiberal and boring to this small, niche group of leftists who already hated the United States, capitalism, the wars in Korea and later Vietnam etc” and the bailey is “the CIA deliberately promoted the replacing of traditional classical American styles of art with degenerate, abstract and ugly contemporary art to fracture American society and make us all gay abortionists”.
Actually, none of the art was for ‘fucking with the Soviets’, it was all for shaping the opinion of socialist-adjacent groups, students, professors, artists, hippies, cultural commentators, literary journal contributors and so on in the American sphere who slowly turned against the Soviet Union in the decades leading up to 1990, which was a far greater priority.
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