Chapter 3
Black Music: Cold War "Secret Weapon" *

Is black music an instrument of United States cold-war diplomacy?

Late in 1965 a controversy over that question erupted in the pages of Jazz magazine (now Jazz & Pop), set off by the revelation of Willis Conover, music consultant for the Voice of America, that a European musician had reported to him: "The uncommitted people may very well indeed be attracted to the American [cold war] position by your broadcasts of American music." "And meanwhile," Conover himself added, "our music helps maintain contact with people already inclined to sympathize with the United States..."

Subsequently criticized for employing jazz to counteract the increasingly unfavorable impression created by U.S. foreign policy, especially in Vietnam, Conover issued a disclaimer: the conversation quited above had taken place "some years ago, before we were in Vietnam." Leaving aside the fact that U.S. involvement in Vietnam goes back to 1948, when this country began to assume roughly 70 percent of the cost of France's war to repress the Viet Minh, Conover's denial is implausible on the face of it, as is made quite clear by an examination of his employer, the Voice of America. The VOA grew out of the Office of War Information, a central ministry of propaganda of the sort established by every wartime government, at the close of the Second World War. As the U.S. began to transform its policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union from one of cooperation to one of military "containment," the VOA was converted (in Conover's words) into "the radio arm of the United States Information Agency," which, as is well known, supervises the dissemination of pro-U.S. and anti socialist propaganda throughout the world.

Notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, Conover still maintains that his efforts at the Voice of America do not amount to cold-war propaganda: "my purpose in doing the Voice of America program is...to show us as we are." One may be permitted to express a modicum of doubt. Conover's version of the United States "as we are" will scarcely be recognized by the reader. He insists, for example, that "what's changed is the circumstances most of us live in, changed for the better, and continuing to change for the better," and that "in ten years at the most, there'll be nothing but a few illitrate old die hard racists left in a few backwoods Southern shanties" as the last vestiges of segregation. By way of supporting his contention, he informs us that now "Sarah Vaugh and I can dance at the White House," whereas twenty years ago, when "Washington was a segregated Southern town, we had to go to an illegal uptown after-hours club" [emphasis added.]

Conover's distortions of life in the United States are not merely accidental; they are part of a larger USIA attempt aimed at picturing this country, and its black-white relations in particular, in the most roseate of tones. As I was completing this article, I came upon deposed President of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah's description of the USIA broadcasts in Africa as: "The chief executor of U.S. psychological warfare, [glorifying] the U.S. while attempting to discredit countries [like Ghana under Nkrumah] with an independent foreign policy," and "planning and coordinating its activities in close touch with the Pentagon, CIA and other Cold War agencies, including even armed forces intelligence centers." Dr. Nkrumah also reveals that when governments in Togo and the Congo (Leopoldville) wished to permit information centers from the Soviet Union as well as the United States, "Washington threatened to stop all aid, thereby forcing these two countries to renounce their plan."

The evidence is that Dr. Nkrumah's picture of the USIA is an accurate one. The Deputy Director of the USIA, Donald M. Wilson, told the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee that his agency had "very close" relations with the CIA. "We have daily contact with them [CIA and other intelligence agencies] on a number of levels..."

But, as was illustrated by a pair of recent events in such widely separated spots as Lisbon, Portugal, and Dakar, Senegal, the VOA-USIA complex is not the only official governmental agency to make use of jazz in furthering cold-war diplomacy. In the first of these incidents, reported in the jazz magazine Down Beat of March 10, 1966, under the headline, "Jazz Halts Viet Protest," a scheduled demonstration by students at the Lisbon University Medical Faculty against U.S. intervention in Vietnam was "called off...after a concert at the University...by a jazz sextet from the Springfield, a U. S. Sixth Fleet cruiser in Lisbon for a five-day call."

The second item dates from a few weeks later. Again the headline (from a story in The New York Times, april 30, 1966) is most enlightening on the way in which Washington views the cold-war utility of jazz:

The "win" of Ellington's referred to had taken place at Senegal's first World Festival of Negro Arts; and to underline the point that more was involved that merely art-for-art's sake, the story's author, Lloyd Garrison, wrote that Soviet poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko "had been urgently summoned from Moscow to do for Soviet propaganda what Duke Ellington had done for the Americans..."

..."if the Times had wanted to be more thorough (not to say more ironic), it could have followed up its account of Ellington's "triumph" in Dakar by pointing out that the same Ellington had been rejected for a Pulitzer Prize in music less than a year ago.

____________________________
* The title of this chapter derives in part from a front-page article in The New York Times of November 6, 1955, by Felix Belair, Jr. Datelined Geneva, Switzerland, Belair's story reported:
"America's secret weapon is a blue note in a minor key. Right now its most effective ambassador is Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong. a telling propaganda line is the hopped up tempo of a Dixieland band heard on the Voice of America in far-off Tangier...
"American Jazz has now become a universal language. It knows no national boundaries, but everybody knows where it comes from and where to look for more...

Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, p. 109-112

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One argument sometimes advanced to distinguish American hegemony from British empire is qualitative. American power, it is argued, consists not just of military and economic power, but also of "soft" power. According to Joseph Nye, the dean of Harvard's Kennedy School, "A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in the world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulation its examples, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openess." Soft power, ino ther words, is getting what you want without "force or inducement," sticks or carrots" It is the ability to entice and attract. Soft power arises in large part from our values."

But does this make American power so very different from imperial power? On the contrary. If anything, it illustrates how very like the last Anglophone empire the United States has become. The British Empire too sought to make its values attractive to others, though initially--before the advent of modern communications technology--the job had to be done by "men on the spot."...Their aim was without question to "entice and attract" people towards British values. Moreover, these footslogging efforts were eventually reinforced by new technology. After the advent of transoceanic telegraphs, London-based press agencies could supply newspapers around the world with Anglocentric content, but it was the advent of the wireless radio--and specifically the creation of the British Broadcasting Corporation--that really ushered in the age of soft power in Nye's sense of the term. On Christmas Day 1932 King George V was able to broadcast to the entire British Empire. Within six years the BBC had launched its first foreign language service--in Arabic--and by the end of 1938 it was broadcasting in all the major languages of continental Europe. There is no question that the BBC played an important part in encouraging dissent in the Axis-occupied territories during the war; why else did Joseph Goebbels so obsessively prosecute Germans caught listening to it?

...This raises the question of how much America's soft power really matters today. If the term is to denote anything more than cultural background music to more traditional forms of dominance, it surely needs to be demonstrated that the United States can secure what it wants from other countries without coercing them or suborning them, but purely because its cultural exports are seductive...It may well be that a high level of exposure to American cinema and television is one of the reason why people in Western Europe, Japan and Latin America are still, on the whole, less hostile to the United States than their counterparts elsewhere. Still the fact remains that the range of American soft power is more limited than is generally assumed. The Middle East, where the BBC began its foreign language broadcasting, is now much more resistant to the charms of "anglobalization" than it was then. The advent of Al Jazeera shows that the entry barrier into the soft power game is now quite low. Even in war-torn Somalia, American forces found their foes able to dominate the local airwaves with anti-American propaganda. Soft power could not avert genocide in Rwanda: when the United Nations Secretary-General Butrous Butrous-Ghali asked the Clinton administration to jam the murderous broadcasts of Radio Mille Collines, he was informed that such as step would be too expensive.

... Like the British Empire, in any case, the United States reserves the right to use military force, as and when it sees its interests threatened--not merely reactively but on occasion preemptively. Thus President Bush's "National Security Strategy" asserts that the United States reserves the right to "act preemptively...to forestall or prevent...hostile acts by our adversaries...even if uncertainly remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack." Soft power is merely the velvet glove concealing an iron hand.

Niall Ferguson, Colossus, The Price of America's Empire, p.19-24

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What should our policy be towards non-Marxist ideas? As far as unmistakable counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs of the socialist cause are concerned, the matter is easy: we simply deprive them of their freedom of speech. But incorrect ideas among the people are quite a different matter. Will it do to ban such ideas and deny them any opportunity for expression? Certainly not. It is not only futile but very harmful to use summary methods in dealing with ideological questions among the people, with questions concerned with man's mental world. You may ban the expression of wrong ideas, but the ideas will still be there. On the other hand, if correct ideas are pampered in hot-houses without being exposed to the elements or immunized from disease, they will not win out against erroneous ones. Therefore, it is only by employing the method of discussion, criticism and reasoning that we can really foster correct ideas and overcome wrong ones, and that we can really settle issues.

Inevitably, the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie will give expression to their own ideologies. Inevitably, they will stubbornly express themselves on political and ideological questions by every possible means. You cannot expect them to do otherwise. We should not use the method of suppression and prevent them from expressing themselves, but should allow them to do so and at the same time argue with them and direct appropriate criticism at them. We must undoubtedly criticize wrong ideas of every description. It certainly would not be right to refrain from criticism, look on while wrong ideas spread unchecked and allow them to monopolize the field. Mistakes must be criticized and poisonous weeds fought wherever they crop up. However, such criticism should not be dogmatic, and the metaphysical method should not be used, but efforts should be made to apply the dialectical method. What is needed is scientific analysis and convincing argument. Dogmatic criticism settles nothing. We are against poisonous weeds of any kind, but we must carefully distinguish between what is really a poisonous weed and what is really a fragrant flower. Together with the masses of the people, we must learn to differentiate carefully between the two and use correct methods to fight the poisonous weeds.

At the same time as we criticize dogmatism, we must direct our attention to criticizing revisionism. Revisionism, or Right opportunism, is a bourgeois trend of thought that is even more dangerous than dogmatism. The revisionists, the Right opportunists, pay lip-service to Marxism; they too attack "dogmatism". But what they are really attacking is the quintessence of Marxism. They oppose or distort materialism and dialectics, oppose or try to weaken the people's democratic dictatorship and the leading role of the Communist Party, and oppose or try to weaken socialist transformation and socialist construction. Even now, after the basic victory of the socialist revolution in our country, there are a number of people who vainly hope to restore the capitalist system and are fighting the working class on every front, including the ideological one. And their right-hand men in this struggle are the revisionists.

Mao Tse-Tung, Four Essays on Philosophy: On the Correct Handling of the Contradictions Among the People p.117-119

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This, this then this and this. Oh, and also, this.

Related?

Is it

a: More interesting than music
b: As interesting as music
c: Boring boring boring

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