Benjamen Walker, the creator and host of “Benjamen Walker’s Idea of Every little thing,” is a pod-maker of the mad-scientist selection: he cooks up initiatives utilizing his personal zeal, analysis, and audacious notions, then unleashes the outcomes on the world. “Idea of Every little thing,” which originated in 2004, a decade earlier than the podcast growth, has all the time been intellectually rigorous, humorous, and kooky, with a format that David Carr, the late Occasions media reporter, once described as “What are we speaking about this week? Who is aware of! Off we go! 1984! The 12 months, not the e-book.” Lately, Walker launched his magnum opus, a nine-episode miniseries known as “Not All Propaganda Is Art,” which he began reporting whereas hunkered down on a French island within the early days of the pandemic. It bears the marks of the feverish isolation of that point, conjuring a mid-century transatlantic world of left-wing intellectuals, the cultural Chilly Warfare, the C.I.A., mass tradition, excessive tradition, post-colonialism, and a whiff of conspiracy. Fittingly, it begins with “1984”—the e-book, not the 12 months.
The sequence takes its title from the Orwell quote “All artwork is propaganda . . . then again, not all propaganda is artwork”—an thought, Walker tells us, maybe finest expressed by the 1956 movie model of Orwell’s novel, which was “secretly made by the C.I.A.” (This can be a truthful simplification.) We hear previous newsreel audio describing the movie’s glamorous London première, the place there have been night robes, tuxedos, and other people dressed as Thought Police. The novel, we recall, is a couple of totalitarian future, through which the dictator Huge Brother controls and mass-surveils the populace; it ends with its as soon as rebellious hero, Winston Smith, accepting his love for Huge Brother. The 1956 movie had two variations: one trustworthy to the novel, the opposite with a “comfortable” ending, for European audiences, screened on the première. (In it, Smith defiantly yells “Down with Huge Brother!” in entrance of a Lenin-style propaganda poster, then dies in a hail of secret-police gunfire.) Walker chats with the British historian Tony Shaw, who argues that the U.S. authorities thought the film’s “twist” made it extra “anti-Soviet.” Nikita Khrushchev had simply introduced his coverage of “peaceable coexistence” with the West, and Walker believes that the movie was the West’s unofficial response. “Peaceable coexistence: not an choice,” he says. “Solely freedom or loss of life.”
It’s a zesty starting, meant to attract us into the center of Walker’s challenge: a gaggle biography, as he calls it, of the writers Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Richard Wright, whose trajectories assist to light up the shadowy maneuverings of the cultural Chilly Warfare between 1956 and 1960. (Macdonald and Tynan contributed to The New Yorker.) All three males’s lives intersect with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a lavishly funded anti-Communist group secretly arrange by the C.I.A. and headquartered in Europe, which sponsored conferences, literary magazines, artwork exhibitions, and different initiatives. Macdonald, an ornery American essayist, was a critic of Stalin and totalitarianism, after which a critic of paranoid McCarthyism. Tynan, the influential British theatre critic for The Observer, lustily known as for political engagement in artwork, for dissent, and for “anti-anti-Americanism”; throughout the sequence’ timeframe, he lives in London and New York. Wright, the American novelist and essayist (“Native Son,” “Uncle Tom’s Children”), was dwelling in Paris, the place he had moved within the forties, partly for the liberty from American racism. An anti-Communist former Communist, he was concerned in lots of C.C.F. initiatives, and contended together with his literary antagonist and fellow-expatriate James Baldwin, who was on the C.C.F.’s radar, too.
In 1956, Walker tells us, every of those males was at a pivotal second in life, and related partially via Encounter, a London-based journal funded by the C.C.F. Wright, then one of the crucial well-known Black novelists on the planet, goes to the U.S. Embassy to warn officers about attainable Communist affect on the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, a pan-Africanism convention in Paris, which he then attends. (A provocative pro-socialism letter from W. E. B. Du Bois is learn aloud there; Baldwin additionally attends, and writes about it for Encounter.) Tynan, one other contributor to Encounter, calls British tradition a moribund “mud bowl,” and publishes his famously impassioned evaluation of the play “Look Back in Anger,” which helps to kick off the class-conscious Indignant Younger Man motion in Britain. He additionally embraces Brechtian political theatre; one evening, he comes residence and tells his spouse, the novelist Elaine Dundy, “I’ve seen ‘Mom Braveness’ and I’m a Marxist.” (Each Dundy, in archival audio, and Walker appear to seek out this amusing; Walker says that Tynan’s Marxism was extra like “champagne socialism.”) In the meantime, Macdonald is employed to write down and edit for Encounter for a 12 months, allegedly unaware that it’s a entrance operation. “So, yeah—in 1956, simply as he got down to write his grand idea of mass tradition, Dwight Macdonald began working for the C.I.A.,” Walker says.
That 12 months, Western propaganda efforts had been going robust. The C.I.A. infiltrated not simply magazines, radio, and films however youth organizations and actions like Summary Expressionism; all had been meant to encourage a reverence for democracy and freedom, a challenge that, in Walker’s telling, usually ideas into absurdity. Macdonald, for instance, is employed to assist exhibit American virtues—free speech, tolerance of criticism—however his writing defends excessive tradition from the corrupting forces of the market, and due to this fact, on some stage, from capitalism. That turns into an issue. In 1955, Macdonald writes a scathing Encounter piece on the C.C.F.’s Worldwide Way forward for Freedom convention, which left him “somewhat disturbed by the posh ambiance, luxe accommodations, meal tickets to costly eating places,” and really disturbed at its “virtually full failure as a medium for the change of concepts.” Encounter precedes the piece with a constructive account of the convention by another person. In 1957, Macdonald writes a blunt critique of American mass tradition, which prompts one other C.I.A.-sponsored publication to name Macdonald, as Walker places it, “essentially the most influential cultural Marxist of all of them.” Lastly, in 1958, Macdonald writes “America, America,” a research excoriating the nation’s mainstream tradition as, Walker summarizes, “shapeless, soulless, ill-mannered, violent, ugly.” Encounter refuses to publish it; by this time, Macdonald is seen as a traitor.
Macdonald, Tynan, and Wright all produce glorious work throughout these years, reckoning with large questions on artwork, criticism, society, and financial programs, whilst they’re being paid by entrance organizations for a propaganda scheme. (The C.I.A.’s covert cultural actions had been made public in 1966; Macdonald responded with an Esquire essay that he known as “Confessions of an Unwitty C.I.A. Agent.”) Walker, whose present is a part of the invaluable independent-podcast community Radiotopia, researches his topics with fanatic power, visiting archives in America and Europe, interviewing the writers’ buddies and friends, consulting students, and unearthing intriguing correspondence, movie footage, and archival audio. (In a companion podcast sequence, “Propaganda Notes & Sources”—a perk for subscribers—he particulars his sources for every episode.) The present, combined by Walker’s longtime collaborator Andrew Callaway, thrums with evocative music and vivid audio of the three males. Walker’s narration type is endearing—a lot of “pricey listener”s, a gung-ho conspiratorial friendliness—although it will possibly groan below the burden of his data and ambition. However “Not All Propaganda Is Artwork” by no means feels prefer it’s made by a company, a coalition of big-name producing companions, or an NPR affiliate. Its flaws and appreciable strengths are distinctly its personal. It feels virtually like propaganda itself, each for the significance of its topics and for the legacy of the cultural Chilly Warfare—an period that, in Walker’s estimation, “constructed the world we dwell in at present.” ♦
