Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)

This was a whole cottage industry during the cold war, kind of like it is now that we're in another sort of cold war.

The Soviets would fund anyone applying Marxist thought to this or that. There may be some interesting ideas for those willing to sort out the chaff, but for the most part you know exactly what they're going to say if you're already familiar with the propaganda that came before.

Well, was it wrong what they said?

Yes. In general that's why you resort to propaganda and polemics rather than giving a formal argument that can be disproved.

I completely agree that Marxism and its descents are bankrupt ideas, but I’m not getting the connection to Illich.

I’ve only read one of his books, Energy and Equity, but I don’t really recall any strain of Marxism or leftism, though it was a long time ago so maybe I’ve forgotten.

He's connected with liberation theology, which is what the KGB was promoting in Catholic countries to recruit for militant groups. Similar to how they promoted revolutionary Islam to people like Goddafi. I think the Soviets actually claim to have invented liberation theology, but who knows.

His deschooling and Limits to Medicine stuff were standard Soviet tropes and still are today. The obvious purposes are to get the US to weaken its education and medical systems. They ran similar strategies to get the US to weaken its nuclear system and to me it looks like they're also trying to weaken adoption of AI through similar ideas. But basically schools are bad, medicine is bad. Claims we're "pathologizing" everything. You see the same ideas in socialist spaces online today. Especially these days around psychology. Similarly with the "factory school" trope.

When Energy and Equity was written in 1974 it was a year after the 1973 oil crisis. The Soviet Union was destabilizing countries in the middle east and wanted to secure access to oil especially at the expense of the US. Their normal propaganda would be about American imperialism and how they're evil and oil producing countries should side with the Soviet Union instead. I haven't read the book, but that would be the Soviet take at the time.

I don't know whether he was supported by the Soviets. He was a public intellectual who traveled a lot especially to South America. It's very likely he was approached and attempted to be recruited by the KGB. But whether he rebuffed them or not isn't public knowledge.

One thing we're learning as more stuff gets declassified is how many household names were more actively involved in the cold war than we realized. For example, Howard Zinn being actively involved in communist organizations despite lying about it for years. Or Earnest Hemingway actively collaborating with the KGB (although in the end wasn't very successful). There are a few other examples.

Interesting information. Most of what Illich says applied equally to the USSR regime though

Was it available in the USSR?

> He's connected with liberation theology, which is what the KGB was promoting in Catholic countries to recruit for militant groups. [...] I think the Soviets actually claim to have invented liberation theology, but who knows.

Any reputable sources for these claims? Sounds like American Cold War propaganda.

The ideals of Illich's work are so far removed from the centralized, institutionalized Soviet socialism, I really doubt the Soviets would've been very happy if people in the USSR started talking that way. Anyone who is swayed by Illich will loathe the idea of five year plans, concerted efforts for more technological progress, and the propaganda that goes with it ("Plan is law, fulfillment is duty, over-fulfillment is honor!").

But who knows, maybe the communist spooks just saw someone geographically close to the US propounding ideas that were radically different from capitalism and didn't mind that they were also radically different from communism. The same has happened enough times in the other direction.

Usually the idea of critique was to create dissatisfaction with democracy, not to advocate for what the USSR was doing. For example, the KGB heavily promoted the US peace and anti-nuclear movements despite being strongly pro-war and pro-nuclear within the Soviet Union.

It's a bit like the fundamentalist religious people who talk a lot about how immoral everyone else is but then make excuses for the immoral things their leadership is doing. Or the congresspeople who talk about how important the family is but are serially unfaithful and don't see their kids.

It's more about having a useful way to attack people than an advocacy for a specific position or way of life.

Some of their activities are described in this interview [0]. The claims come from 2015 not from the Cold War. And they're from a communist intelligence defector, not America.

There's no shortage of interviews from former intelligence people talking about Cold War era South America and much of it is well known. The basic gist is it was before modern ICBMs, the USSR wanted nuclear missiles close to the US and they wanted military bases there. This is where the FARC, Fidel Castro, Che Guevera etc all come from. And famously it's what led to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Bay of Pigs Invasion. A lot of this can best be understood in the context of what ideas the Soviets were promoting in other parts of the world, like revolutionary Islam.

There are also many essays on the connections between Marxism and liberation theology, many (maybe most?) of them written by liberation theology proponents during the Cold War years.

Some of the claims made in the interview

> On October 26, 1959, Sakharovsky and his new boss, Nikita Khrushchev, came to Romania for what would become known as "Khrushchev's six-day vacation." He had never taken such a long vacation abroad, nor was his stay in Romania really a vacation. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who had exported communism to Central and South America. Romania was the only Latin country in the Soviet bloc, and Khrushchev wanted to enroll her "Latin leaders" in his new "liberation" war.

> The movement was born in the KGB, and it had a KGB-invented name: Liberation Theology.... The birth of Liberation Theology was the intent of a 1960 super-secret "Party-State Dezinformatsiya Program" approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party's international policies. This program demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool. The WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.

and so on.

There are lots of details you can check out and try to fact check. But it would be a research project and my guess would be hardly any of the classified information is public now. As a general rule, we get books and interviews from defectors and former intelligence officers, but they're based on first-hand recollection and contemporaneous notes backed by still-classified information.

So it's up to you to decide how much weight to give the various pieces of evidence. But certainly what he says in the interview is consistent with how the KGB operates. But we can't know things like whether he was lied to by the KGB at the time, or whether he's misremembering facts, or whether he's embellishing here or there.

[0] https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/31919/former-soviet-...