Weaponized Immigrants and the History of America's Imperial Propaganda
Machine
When did America start deploying immigrants as tools of imperial power? And
who are these immigrant groups? Check out my new historical and
investigative miniseries.
Yasha Levine
2 hr
I've written a bit about how my fellow Soviet immigrants actively weaponize
themselves on behalf of American Empire - whether as journalists,
documentary filmmakers, thinktankers, party insiders, or some other kind of
functionaries working inside our country's vast imperial bureaucracy.
Of course, this weaponization goes beyond just us Soviets and encompasses
immigrant groups from across the world. The regions that are most
represented are the ones where the Empire continues to meet "resistance"
from the natives: Iran, Iraq, China, Russia, Syria, Cuba, the two Koreas,
Vietnam, Georgia, Ukraine, Venezuela.The list is long. But you get the idea.
These weaponized immigrants don't get a lot of attention, but they are
extremely important. They form the backbone of our Empire's sprawling,
multi-billion dollar soft (and not so soft) power apparatus. They inhabit
everything from positions within the foreign policy structures of our
government, to traditional media outlets and newspapers, to cleaned-up CIA
fronts like Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, to privatized spook ops like
the National Endowment for Democracy, to all sorts of oligarch funded
non-profits and smaller regime change lobbies like Free Russia and the
Uyghur Congress - and all the way down to half-forgotten rebranded
Vietnamese terror groups and bizarre Chinese and Iranian cults.
It's a giant semi-privatized bureaucracy, and it's vital to the Empire.
These days, it's less about broadcast propaganda abroad and more about
helping sell war and interventions people here at home. And none of this
infrastructure would have been built - nor would it continue to operate -
without the intimate involvement of weaponized immigrants from across the
globe.
When did this begin? When did America start deploying immigrants as tools of
imperial power? Who are these people? And why do they do it?
Well, that's what I want to get into.
I've been working on a couple of pieces about the history of America's
foreign propaganda apparatus but I realized that the topic is so vast and
sprawling that it's best to tell the story through an extended series,
rather than few big essays and investigations.
So that's what I'm gonna do starting next week: I'm going to start releasing
a limited series about the history and origins of America's propaganda
machine - and the central role that weaponized immigrants, including people
from my own Soviet Jewish community, play in it.
The series will start in the past by will eventually get to the present and
catch up to current events. What kind of current events? Well, weaponized
immigrants are still at the forefront of our soft power apparatus, massaging
people's minds and convincing us that imperialism for the benefit of our
oligarchic class is actually altruistic and humane and good for everyone
involved - and especially the natives!
There are all sorts of weaponized immigrant groups operating today. They
include outfits like Falun Gong, the crazy pro-Trump Chinese cult that's
been playing a huge and successful role in whipping a "War with China"
propaganda campaign in the wake of COVID-19. They're the ones flooding
people's mailboxes with newspapers and clogging their Facebook feeds with
"Wuhan virus" and "CCP virus" documentaries.
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There's been some great reporting on a few of these recent campaigns - most
of it coming from my friends over at The Greyzone - but I want to dig a
little deeper into the core history of these ops.
Many of the dispatches in this miniseries are going to be released to paid
subscribers only. So.subscribe to support the project and to read them all.
A few stills from a forgotten 1960s documentary about Radio Liberty about
the plan to weaponize the Soviet Union's diverse ethnicities.
There are all sorts of places I can start, but I think I think the natural
place to begin is with the creation of what we now know as Radio Liberty, a
CIA psychological warfare project originally known as "Radio Liberation from
Bolshevism."
The Radio Station was launched right after World War II.
The CIA, along with the State Department, envisioned it as a sort of public
works project for the horde of anti-communist immigrants who were bumming
around Western Germany after World War II. The point of the station was to
use these natives to foment unrest and revolution inside the Soviet Union -
or, as a secret State Department report described it: to "utilize the forces
of the Soviet emigration against the Soviet regime." And that's exactly what
Radio Liberty did.
It was a massive broadcasting operation with offices and correspondents
around the world, and it was cleverly run to maximize America's image as a
place of free speech and political openness - like when it aired an
interview with Martin Luther King. The station was also incredibly costly.
Just the energy input into the radio's massive transmitters could have
powered a city of with a population of 150,000.
Anyway, I'm working on this installment now - focusing on some of the
weaponized immigrant personalities that were central to the creation of the
station. Look for it in your inbox next week.
-Yasha Levine