USAID, Soft Power, And How Solzhenitsyn Predicted This Crisis

Via OneLeggedParrot.com,

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) existed to fan America’s post-World War II brand as the guardian of democracy in the world. It was mostly an info-op euphemistically called soft power.

The mission meant that it occasionally helped people, because that made America look good. The “AID” moniker was a rhetorical trick, though. USAID handled some of the dirtiest jobs of American hegemony, like union busting, censorship, and election fixing.

Assassinations were left to the CIA, for the most part.

Last week, USAID was shut down and everyone except a skeleton staff was laid off. Its employees emerged from the woodwork, quite offended. Shutting down the agency hit a lot of Washingtonians right in their “I’m important and the world needs me!” glass jaws.

If you are a certain kind of mediocrity who has known only the circle of money and influence Washington provides, there are oodles of self-regard when a great and grand wizard at the Department of State confers on you the title Doctor of Thinkology.

“Now go, therefore, and topple the government of Bangladesh!” – is a fair summary of the valedictory. That is not an exaggeration. Soft power did that recently.

Americans are marinated from their infancy in movies, media, and television. The foreign policy establishment occupies the Walter Mitty role in the American empire. Since at least 1948, Washington bureaucrats have been on a hero’s journey built around the conceit that the United States exercises power always and only to save the world.

Having a steel desk in a stone building with discretionary control over a budget line item made you a Star Trooper wherever the Empire decided to strike back. Then 2016 happened.

Trump won the presidency on the promise that he would destroy Washington’s permanent bureaucracy – calling it the deep state. Minor state functionaries responded by saying Vladimir Putin was behind him.

In the clown cuckoo land of Washington, the Star Troopers needed to be fighting a diabolical mastermind with a Russian accent, or it was just not self-affirming. Getting mean-tweeted at by a reality show host with a wild haircut threatened their delusions of grandeur more than losing wars, which they had been doing regularly for 70 years.

The FBI officially launched Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016. A few days later, the secret agent who opened the investigation texted his secret agent lover, “We’ll stop” Trump. Out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Trump and Putin had to walk into Peter Strzok and Lisa Paige’s.

And, too, “It’s Putin and we’ll get him,” sounds better whispered over a pillow at the Fairmont Hotel in Gaithersburg, Maryland than, “people in mesh hats are exercising their democratic prerogative to stop funding our pretend world, and we may want to stay out of this one.”

At one point last week, Mike Benz – who has inhabited X for years as the bugle blowing Gunga Din of USAID’s mendacity – connected nepo baby turned playground mean girl Liz Cheney to USAID. Elon Musk retweeted Benz.

To which Liz Cheney herself responded:

Damn right, @Elon. I’m proud of what America did to win the Cold War, defeat Soviet communism, and defend democracy. Our nation stood for freedom. You may be unfamiliar with that part of our history since you weren’t yet an American citizen.

Uh-huh. After she graduated from college, Liz Cheney’s then Defense Secretary dad got her a job at USAID in Washington, and she thinks she ended the Cold War.

She went from there to law school and then in 2002 her Vice President dad got her appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, where she and her dad proceeded to wreak havoc.

She now adorably thinks that starship lassoing Elon Musk lacks street cred because his daddy never got him a job where he stopped communism.

The fake world where Dick and Liz defend democracy, and Peter Strzok and Lisa Paige bang to Putin fantasies – the world of the Washington beltway – was hatched in the aftermath of World War II.

It is an odd mix of propaganda, media, technology, and the storytelling method known as the hero’s journey.

The info-op was run out of USAID and other federal agencies, and it was meant to convince the world that the United States is a force for good that opposes tyranny wherever it finds it. In some ways, it worked.

For all anyone knows, Western Europe would have turned Communist if America did not present a “shining city on a hill” alternative. And, okay, fix elections and control information.

Meddling in other countries was only ever meant to win the peace, though.

When the peace was finally won in 1991, the minor functionaries started hatching new villains, disputes, and even viruses just so they could fight them.

Washington turned into a Cold War LARP.

The result:

• Ukraine is destroyed.
• The Taliban is governing Afghanistan and ISIS has taken Syria.
• The pipeline that supplies Germany’s energy supply has been blown up, tanking its economy. And you know what happened last time the West’s guardian of democracy project tanked the German economy. Just sayin’.
• Ancient Christianity has been expelled from every place in the Middle East where American soft power has meddled. They have set their sights on destroying Catholic-Lebanon (by law, the president of Lebanon must be Catholic – did you know that?) in a proxy war with Iran.
• Most wildly, perhaps, American bureaucrats are responsible for the greatest pandemic since the Spanish Flu. They will deny it, and say it came from a rando bat. But the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that the virus emanated from gain of function research on Coronaviruses the American bureaucracy was funding at that very moment in the very lab in the very town where COVID originated.

Which provides a helpful metaphor.

Creating a virus to fight that virus is the definition of gain of function research. Similarly, Peter Strzok fabricated Putin in the Trump campaign just so he could fight him. Washington is a gain of function experiment wrapped in hero’s journeys draped in delusions of grandeur.

Too many in Trump-world think the problem will go away if the institutions are dismantled.

Get rid of USAID and The Department of Education, and Liz Cheney gets a job at her local Walmart, where she belongs.

It is not an institutional problem, though, so much as thousands of individual pathologies.

The problem is that Liz Cheney really thinks she is important.

That is the tumor that needs to be excised.

Removing soft power’s influence on the American psyche is the most delicate surgery of all, because it slices into the sacred beliefs of everyone, including (maybe especially) Republicans. Surgery is only successful when enough people reach the conclusion, “I am being manipulated.”

This moment was predicted.

In 1978, Soviet dissident in exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn addressed the graduating class of Harvard University. He was expected to provide a stemwinder against Communism and at least an implied tribute to America.

Instead, he issued a criticism of the West, based on the narrative control exercised over people. He called it “fashion” and blamed the media:

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East, where the press is rigorously unified. One gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment; there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspaper[s] mostly develop stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day….This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era…. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events.

Soviet Communism has fallen. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia and lived happily under Putin’s rule. His books are required reading in Russian schools. The state paid tribute to him and other Russian writers in the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics held in Sochi, Russia.

America’s control of human behavior by fashion has not yet collapsed.

Today the West is facing a “pitiless crowbar of events.” Public policy could not even be formulated for a pandemic without casting every prescription as a political choice, resulting in collective behavior that have less to do with rigorous causal connections than with tribal adherence.

Politics is no longer judged by whether it serves the greater good, but by how dutifully it bows to the information regime. It resembles 14-year-old girls in the schoolyard, requiring mimesis in manner of dress and behavior under threat of bullying. In Solzhenitsyn’s word, fashion.

The availability of information on the internet means the state cannot impose its approved narrative outside of America’s groupthink urban enclaves where status is highly staked to fashion. The only way to control non-status people is to control information itself, with censorship, prosecution, and entire bureaucracies dedicated to curbing “misinformation” – i.e., alternative views that do not agree with the state.

Solzhenitsyn would eventually encounter reactions to his Harvard speech from ordinary Americans along the lines of “we know in our hearts he is right.” This led him to distinguish between what he called “the arrogant stance of the America of New York and Washington” and what he observed elsewhere:

Gradually another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small-town and robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing my speech, and to which my speech was addressed.

He expressed “a glimmer of hope” that opposition to the dictatorship of fashion could spring from the place he called “another America.”

The needless wars will not go away until both Democrats and Republicans realize that some of what emanates from the American empire are soft power seeded lies. The truth is a greater medicine than any change in policy could ever be.