A few links on how the US cultivates a "compatible" unthreatening left.

• In COINTELPRO, FBI used anarchism to 'disrupt left', attack Vietnam & USSR
• The CIA reads french postmodernist theory: how the CIA pushed "post-Marxist" theory to build support for imperialism.

In internal documents, the FBI stressed that “the publisher and the writers should be strictly anarchist.” Why? Because the cops recognized that “the anarchist position could take any direction, such as an attack on Vietnam policies as well as an attack on the Soviets in Czechoslovakia.”

“The anarchists point of view is the most disruptive element in the New Left and should be capitalized on in the most confusing ways,” the feds added.

The FBI recognized that anarchist ideology could be used to de-politicize the leftist struggle, writing that the publication would “reach wider circulation if it were not so political as to be tied to dogma such as the line of MAO or CHE GUEVARA.”

In the same vein of de-politicizing the struggle, the FBI also recognized it could weaponize culture against the left. It insisted that the anarchist paper should cover lurid topics, just as VICE magazine made its name.

The cops wrote that “the newsletter should also cover vigorously such aspects of the New Left as underground cinema, music, sex, dope, humor and so on,” in order to “increase reader interest.”