Watching Twitter discover today that area studies research in the 1950s and early 1960s was greased with CIA money. The CIA/NSA stuff has been known since 1967. Scholars have been writing about this for decades. Wait to you hear about Clifford Geertz. mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/cu…
George McT. Kahin, the most humane and decent liberal in Cold War area studies, served in the Army, started the Modern Indonesia Project and SEA Studies Program at Cornell partly w/CIA $ and after 1960 became the most prominent academic opponent of the Vietnam War! People change.
"I would never have taken a year to travel the world on the National Student Association's/CIA's dime," we all say. But many 1950s liberals made this choice, before even area experts knew about the Vietnam War, when becoming a CIA analyst was a viable career path.
Scott was a liberal kid in 1960 who became a radical, and virtually no one knew about CIA covert ops, etc. He wasn't Geertz, who cheered the mass murder of Indonesians in 1965 *as it was happening.* And no I'm not a lackey of empire, etc. I've actually written about this.
Lots have written on Geertz, whose anti-communist politics were loathsome. As historians, maybe we can imagine what the world looked like to a liberal student in 1960 and why such a choice made sense. As for Geertz, he was unrepentant to the end:
https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1010170899176144897
For those interested, this is the best recent academic account of the early nexus of CIA funded anthropology in the early Cold War: dukeupress.edu/cold-war-anthr…
For those not deep in the replies, its worth noting that Scott's actual explanation of these events is entirely consistent with his politics:
https://twitter.com/lromeranth/status/1492965492700631040?s=20&t=vckTAfr3W8yR4s1bBxjqSw
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