In 1948, all of our traditional War Department powers were reoriented from kinetic war, conventional war, to organized political warfare

Music As An Instrument Of Statecraft

A lightning-round overview of the CIA & State Dept’s penetration & instrumentalization of music from WW2 to present. pic.twitter.com/EluW85qKiS

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 28, 2023

The CIA is the intelligence arm of the State Department as the FBI is the intelligence arm of the Justice Department.  

In 1948, the UN Declaration of Human Rights comes out and it bans and prohibits territorial acquisition by military force.  Coming out of WWII, a whole new set of international laws, norms, and treaties were adopted that prohibited the old empire style of the past millennia where you could simply acquire a country by military force.  You had to have, from 1948 forward, the internal ratification of the people through some sort of democratic pretense.  A vote, however rigged it was, or some sort of movement or bulwark within a country that nominally said, yes, this is our government, that we the people support it, it's a democracy because it's the consent of the governed is what gives legitimacy to the government.  So in 1948, all of our traditional War Department powers.  The Defense Department was called the War Department until 1948 when it changed its name from the War Department to the Defense Department.  It was all reoriented from kinetic war, conventional war, to organized political warfare.  And there are several means of soft power projections.  Soft power projection takes the form of information influence, technological influence, economic influence, diplomatic influence through sanctions, and music plays, and has played, an enormous role in the penetration of a country's cultures for the purposes of creating political movements and mobs in order to carry out what the end stage of a regime stage operation, which is people on the streets, rioting, occupying federal buildings, shutting down the government, demonstrating that the rebellion is popular and by the people to oust the existing government and put in, for the State Department, a more favorable U.S.-backed regime.  A couple of examples.  Look up Jazz Diplomacy, which started in the 1940s.  [There's a book titled, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (American Made Music Series)].  The CIA came up with this blueprint in 1948.  There's a memo I recommend everybody read, it's called the Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare.  It is an internal CIA memo that lays out how basically we need to play micromanagement politics in every country on the map coming out of WWII in order to secure the American Century.  James Jesus Angleton shipping in Greta Garbo in Europe to bring people into the Euro-Atlantic Alignment as opposed to the Communist Russian one.  But the music diplomacy . . . music is an instrument of statecraft.  Jazz Diplomacy was a program when the State Department recruited high-level, internationally acclaimed jazz musicians, like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, for U.S. diplomacy and cultural ambassadorship with newly independent countries in Africa whom the U.S. was in a cultural clash of the titans for a capitalist economy versus a communist economy.  Jazz Diplomacy was a partnership program between the State Department and its covert little CIA cutouts and the jazz world to do diplomacy with Africa.  Simultaneously, the CIA was running something called the Congress for Cultural Freedom which onboarded dozens of classical musicians at the time, Russia was exporting classical music in a big way.  And this was part of the cultural appeal of the Soviet Union at the time, especially in Central and Eastern Europe was you had these high-level cultural figures who were world leaders in their field, including the chess world, the music world, the Olympics, and in order to create an organized cultural bulwark against that, the CIA created the Congress for Cultural Freedom.  Once the Color Revolution Playbook started getting rolled out, at a more and more sophisticated level and develop these popular rebellions.  Before WWII whenever there were coups, there were always top-down coups of military generals.  The strategy is you go into a country, you look at their high-level military brass, you bribe a sufficient proportion of the military to defect from the target government and the military simply orchestrates the coup because they have the guns.  A second means of regime change was orchestrated in the aftermath of WWII, it started a little earlier, for bottom-up revolutions.  If you could get enough people on the streets from all walks of a country's society who were aggrieved by that government, that is to say, if you created an anti-government or anti-authoritarian rebel cause to get people into the streets, then they could overturn the government from the bottom up.  Music was quickly backed as a means of doing that because music does a few things: 1) it galvanizes and unifies people in a magnet, cultural movement without even having to have overt political messaging.  That is people go to rock concerts without particularly caring with the artist or not.  Once you have people participating in massive, outdoor concerts, and you'll see this a lot from the foreign policy set, these giant-sponsored U2, Bono, Sting, Lady Gaga, and you'll see this a lot in targeted countries, countries where the U.S. is looking to do regime change or establish a larger U.S. bulwark.  In order to get people to the practice of taking to the streets and organizing and forming these little mobs, can be instrumentalized once it becomes a pattern of practice.  And a great example of this was how in 2014, USAID, which is the largest CIA funding conduit, was busted recruiting a Cuban rap collective.  They also do this in Venezuela, and a few other rap, and hip-hop groups, to author songs, one was called Patria Evida.  This became the rebel anthem of the anti-government revolutions in Cuba.  In turned out that they were sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the most notorious CIA cutout in the entire blob arsenal.  Similarly, when USAID created ZunZuneo, a Cuban Twitter clone, the internal documents revealed that they wanted to lure people into the platform first using sports and music.  And then once they had a sufficient subscribership, they would start dripping political messages and calls for the Cuban people to form "Smart Mobs" to have organized demonstrations against the Cuban government.  Again, these were Cuban rappers recruited by the CIA.  Twitter cloned platforms that used music as the cultural means to get everybody in the same sandpit for the purpose of having them take to the streets later in time once they were all in the same cohesive identity movement.  BTW, music and parades are the two that the embassies will back in a region.  And I recently talked about how the NED also sponsored Pussy Riots in Russia for the same purpose in Russia.  Parades will often be with groups who are aggrieved by their government, like ethnic identity groups, women's groups, LBGT groups.  When you do this in an authoritarian country that's set to be on the chopping block of the State Department, the US embassies love that because it gets them in the practice of taking to the streets against their government, and that is the role of music.