Soft power

Could the CIA Have Planted Hair-Metal Propaganda During the Cold War?

In 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, West German band the Scorpions released their prescient ballad “Wind of Change.” With earnest lyrics about togetherness and the “children of tomorrow,” the song sounds like an anthem to the end of the Cold War. But, according to The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, there’s reason to believe the hit ballad could have been a CIA concoction created to aid in the West’s fight against communism.

In the eight-part podcast Wind of Change, produced by Spotify, Pineapple Street Studios, and Crooked Media, Keefe takes listeners along on his reporting journey, through interviews with musicians and their fans, ex-CIA spooks and historians, as he tries to piece together the true story of the song.

Part spy caper, part Cold War-era music lesson, Wind of Change discusses the U.S. government’s history of exerting cultural influence overseas, especially through music, like in the 1950s and early 1960s, when President Eisenhower sent jazz performers Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong to introduce the American art form to listeners in the Middle East and Africa, respectively.

Soft power

Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op?

In the battle for “hearts and minds,” modern art was particularly effective. John Hay Whitney, both a president of MoMA and a member of the Whitney Family, which founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, explained that art stood out as a line of national defense, because it could “educate, inspire, and strengthen the hearts and wills of free men.”

Whitney succeeded Rockefeller as President of the Museum of Modern Art in January 1941, so that Nelson could turn his entire attention to his Coordinator duties. Under Whitney, MoMA served as “A Weapon of National Defense.” According to a Museum press release dated February 28, 1941, MoMA would “inaugurate a new program to speed the interchange of the art and culture of this hemisphere among all the twenty-one American republics.” The goal was “Pan-Americanism.” A “Traveling Art Caravan” through Latin America “would do more to bring us together as friends than ten years of commercial and political work.”

Soft power

China is building soft power in U.S. schools, Senate report warns

A new bipartisan report by a Senate investigative panel has found that the Chinese government has the potential to use a popular Mandarin language program it funds at hundreds of U.S. universities and K-12 schools to shape and even stifle the discussion of controversial Beijing policies.

Although the findings are cause for concern, the report did not show a pattern of egregious incidents of U.S. academic research being squashed or that campus debate had been overtly stifled on matters that China views as sensitive such as Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen Square massacre. But the report did say the institutes fostered a climate where self-censorship on those topics was more likely to occur among university officials and students.

The findings of the 96-page report, released Wednesday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, revealed that much is still unknown about the scope and intentions behind the Confucius Institutes, despite an eight-month Senate committee investigation and a parallel assessment by the Government Accountability Office. Since 2006, China has spent $158 million to build and maintain a network of Confucius Institutes in the United States.