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HeerJeet's profile
Jeet Heer
Jeet Heer
Jeet Heer
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@HeerJeet

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Jeet HeerVerified account

@HeerJeet

1. Writer, The Nation https://www.thenation.com/authors/jeet-heer/ … 2. email: jeetheer1967 at gmail dot com 3. Twitter essayist 4. Drawn by Joe Ollmann

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Joined June 2012

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    1. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

      1. I have a few thoughts on the CIA, literary modernism, abstract expressionism, Nina Simone, heavy metal music, torture podcasting, and, for old times sake, Jack Kirby.

      30 replies 54 retweets 379 likes
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    2. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

      2. There's been a lot of chatter lately about possible CIA infiltration of the left, perhaps though podcasts. On the one hand, this is absurd. On the other hand, we do for a fact that the CIA does in fact have a history of infiltrating left-wing and counter-cultural movements.

      11 replies 8 retweets 114 likes
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    3. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

      3. There's an excellent new podcast called Winds of Change from @praddenkeefe which investigates the rumor that one of the big hits of the German metal band Scorpions (1990s "Winds of Change") was in fact composed by the CIA, to spark opposition to communism.

      7 replies 5 retweets 95 likes
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    4. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

      4.The podcast "Winds of Change" usefully traces the history of CIA cultural policy back to the early days of the Cold War. As with the Olympics & the space race, the USA was in a prestige competition with the USSR & was willing to spend big (covertly) on the arts

      1 reply 6 retweets 67 likes
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    5. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

      5. The CIA had an aesthetic as well as an ideology. There was a telling difference between how it treated arts like literature & painting as against music. With lit & painting, it supposed high modernism, with music it embraced popular forms (jazz, blues, & maybe Heavy Metal).

      5 replies 5 retweets 62 likes
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    6. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

      6. The CIA's main cultural policy was very high-brow: lit mags like The Paris Review & abstract expressionist gallery shows. According to Richard Ellman, one plan was for “T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets be translated into Russian and dropped by airplane all over the Soviet Union.”

      6 replies 8 retweets 67 likes
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      Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

      7. The highbrow approach came partially from fact that early CIA was headed by Ivy League blue bloods like James Jesus Angleton, head of counterintelligence who had edited at Yale a magazine that published Ezra Pound & e.e. cummings.pic.twitter.com/ikeC2sqpDo

      8:47 AM - 29 May 2020
      • 4 Retweets
      • 69 Likes
      • Lucky Larry Leo Macneil Stephanie Asplund Robin JulieB Will Harahan Matt Holmes jason? 🍍Tommaso Sciortino🥑
      4 replies 4 retweets 69 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

          8. Angleton had been trained in the technique of close reading taught by the New Critics to understand modernism & he applied it with viciously in the torture program he ran interrogating Soviet defectors, using violence to pry out hidden meaning.

          5 replies 7 retweets 58 likes
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        3. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

          9. With music, the CIA eschewed high modernism, rejecting the experimental works of Milton Babbitt & John Cage. Instead, they suborned Louis Armstrong (via the State Department) and Nina Simone (unwittingly recruited by a CIA front organization to perform in Nigeria).

          6 replies 7 retweets 55 likes
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        4. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

          10. The preference for popular genres in music (as against literature & painting) was motivated by racial politics. Sponsoring Armstrong & Simone was a way to combat the idea America was racist & make an appeal to decolonized peoples in Africa & Asia.

          1 reply 6 retweets 53 likes
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        5. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

          11. Music -- primarily African-American music -- was the CIA's gateway into popular culture, opening the door to later adventures like using a front to recruit Jack Kirby for a fake sci-fi movie to be shot in Iran (Argo). Here's some of Kirby's never used set designpic.twitter.com/ypPpyek83r

          2 replies 9 retweets 67 likes
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        6. Jeet Heer‏Verified account @HeerJeet 29 May 2020

          12. Some more thoughts on the CIA's cultural policy here (and go listen to the Winds of Change podcast -- it's great).https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/wind-of-change-cia/ …

          13 replies 13 retweets 73 likes
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        7. End of conversation
        1. AOCRepealTaftHartley‏ @AOCTaftHartley 29 May 2020
          Replying to @HeerJeet

          CIA needs less nerds and more cool gamers.

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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        1. Egalitarian‏ @forEgality 29 May 2020
          Replying to @HeerJeet

          I admit, I was skeptical of the thread but, please continue.

          0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
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        1. New conversation
        2.  🌴  🐺 🍹Matthew Phelan  🏝️ 📡‏ @CBMDP 29 May 2020
          Replying to @HeerJeet

          Angleton was born in Boise to a former cavalry officer and a seventeen-year-old Mexican woman, Carmen Mercedes Moreno, which is why his middle name is the not-particularly-WASP-y "Jesus." So, while he attended Yale, he was never really fully apart of the Blue Blood CIA set. (1/2)

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
        3.  🌴  🐺 🍹Matthew Phelan  🏝️ 📡‏ @CBMDP 29 May 2020
          Replying to @CBMDP @HeerJeet

          This matters for a variety of reasons (some unrelated to your argument here), but I bring it up because Angleton was drawing on non-elite American mass culture for inspiration practically since the agency's inception. See this bit in "The Ghost" by @jeffersonmorley (2/2)pic.twitter.com/cmUUDf9EJi

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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