western marxism is more of a school of thought, if we want to be kind to it. It transcends geographical borders - there are western marxists in the global south, trotskyists for example.
Losurdo’s bottom line was that western marxism is a school of thought that has mostly had theoretical achievements, and eastern marxism is a school of thought that has mostly had practical achievements, because they are the only ones who have seized state power. (I haven’t read the book yet either lmao, it’s on my list. but this is what people who have read it explain it as)
So he also put the bolsheviks into that eastern marxism school. I’m sure he goes into a lot more details; even that simple differentiation leads to a whole lot of implications. One thing we can infer for example is that eastern marxism (as he put it, not sure I like the name myself lol) has to contend with the realities of running a country, and inherently gets embroiled in the global contradictions of what “running a country in the 21st century” means.
I assume he doesn’t mean that eastern marxism has not made theoretical headways of its own, because they certainly have.
As the prime hegemonic power, everything the US gov can capture they will capture. Every time a new revelation comes to light, what surprises me is not so much that they used X or Y for propaganda purposes but just how far they’re willing to go. Video games like Call of Duty are financed by the US Army, and so are hollywood movies - and we’ve known this for a long time. They will provide props, locations, and actual soldiers to perform on the condition that they can revise the script.
edit: and Wikipedia too. There’s ‘a guy’ that makes pro-war edits every day of the week, from 7AM to 7PM without ever taking a day off, not even on the weekends or for Christmas or other holidays. Let’s be real, this isn’t a guy, it’s an organization behind the account (some suspect MI6, I have no idea personally). Wikimedia foundation gets money from Congress. They have the money to do so, quite frankly, they would be fools not to do it. I think liberals can understand as much lol. If you have all this money, you can just throw it at things to reinforce people’s opinion that you deserve to have all this money.
Journalism and NGOs are not spared either; the concept of brainwashing was coined by Edward Hunter, a journalist who was… actually a CIA agent. He wrote about it for a now defunct newspaper and propelled it into the collective consciousness. They still do this; there was a scandal a few years ago of CIA freelance journalists: journalists who were given a ready-made story, ready to publish, by some shady handlers. All they had to do was sign off on it. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the exact information and always forget who broke the story, but it can be found.
NGOs are basically all linked together and financed by Congress at the end of the chain. It’s always the same few names coming up, and some of them don’t even hide it - they wear proudly on their sleeve that an Act of Congress is financing them. Freedom House, for whom Proton (of protonmail and protonVPN) fundraised for and called a ‘non-partisan’ org, receives millions from Congress. Then FH goes on to fund and finance other NGOs of various sizes.
I looked into the Pulitzer Prize once, and it’s the same 5 anti-communists on the board of it - Anne Applebaum (who makes up so-bad-it’s-funny anti-soviet propaganda) and another was the Columbia U chairwoman who sent the cops to beat up her students during the encampments for Gaza. And we’re supposed to think the Pulitzer Prize means anything.
It’s a very incestuous system, and basically gives them plausible deniability. The Buzzfeed story that broke the ‘uyghur concentration camps’ story received a Pulitzer - and then you look at who is behind it, who funds the Politzer board (surprise: more Congress), and you realize oh, yeah, that makes sense. State Department, with all its capabilities to actually find the information, gives ‘independent’ media a story to break -> media happily publishes because $$$ -> they get a prize to cement the legitimacy of the story -> State Department then uses the “totally legitimate grassroots story” to say see? that independent media you trust says it’s true, so it’s true. Now let’s bomb China.
Of course, it’s not like they always need to get their hands in there.
So to my understanding, the 1950s is around the time UFO/alien stories got really big. The original ‘abductees’ (all white men from middle America of course) spoke of ‘Space Brothers’ at the time - a well-meaning race of blonde, handsome human-like aliens from Venus who were concerned about where humanity was heading. He called them Nordics, which you might still see pop up sometimes, and basically they were a paternalistic, authoritative figure. The Nordic alien was not a comrade, he was like a displeased father in the nuclear family unit.
The tones were overtly anti-communist and if your fascism radar may have gone off, it’s because it was basically fascist propaganda lol. They were concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons (by which I mean the soviet union was not allowed to defend itself), and the loss of ‘spirituality’ in humanity (returning to church). It was very individualistic: change yourself and you’ll change the world. And also overtly fascist, like I said.
By the 1980s though, the narrative got reversed: instead of concerned, mentor-like figures, we got the Greys. Suddenly aliens were machine-like, concerned with cold, surgical efficiency. They started probing you in weird places, all of them looked alike and they surrounded you like a swarm. It was basically a victim fantasy of being turned into a cog in a machine, stripped of humanity - exactly what people still say about communism.
I don’t even care about aliens and abductions (it’s vastly white people from rural america larping as victims; minorities in the US don’t need to make up stories of experiments and body violations, they lived them), so that’s about as far as I got into it.
To my knowledge none of this was paid by the CIA, but who knows. We already know the gov releases UFO stories any time they’re embroiled in a new scandal. So who knows, maybe in 10 years a document will be leaked that shows they paid people to spread their ‘abduction’ stories.