Gather round and let’s all put our tinfoil hats on together because I have a story to tell:

I recently drafted an effortpost on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the other half of the narrative that is sorely lacking from discourse on it.

In doing this, I had to track down specific telegrams sent to and from JFK. I know they exist, I know roughly their content, I know the people involved etc. and the JFK archive has so much material but wouldn’t you know it - there’s this funny little quirk that I notice and it plays out every time I go digging into primary sources! There’s the materials which support the mainstream narrative which are well organised, orderly, often transcribed into digital text on a page and/or with searchable text in the document itself, and typically they’re listed prominently and individually. They are almost always indexable by search engines. A lot of the flattering or downright innocuous stuff also gets treated this way too.

But all that material which paints the regime in a terrible light, which implicates political leaders and reveals their cynical motivations and damning actions?

Why, they are invariably found in a file that is a collection of poorly-scanned, half faded typewritten documents or, worse yet, scrawled handwriting. There’s no table of contents, no OCR, no transcribed text, it’s often out of chronological order and in illogical order (i.e. not categorised by anything like the complete correspondence between two particular parties, correspondence regarding a particular topic, all correspondence sent by the same author etc.) and no guidance on matters of importance like glossaries or handy disclaimers stating that when you’re looking for a telegram to JFK from his advisor named Richard Goodwin that you also need to be on the look out for anything signed “Dick” as well.

So you have to pour over documents, sometimes hundreds of pages, trying to remember names, nicknames, code names, approximate date ranges, the geographical source of the correspondence, abbreviations and political lingo of the day, and you’re spending maybe 30 seconds on each page before you’re confident that you can move on to the next one (which doesn’t sound like a lot but it adds up very quickly.)

This is not an infrequent experience that I’ve had.

The only other thing you need in that mix is reasonable suspicion of doubt (maybe that it goes against the prevailing narrative?) or crowding out the signal with a whole bunch of noise (a la Alex Jones) so that most people hear conflicting or downright incredible information and they try searching Google for it, they find no hits, maybe maybe they search a relevant archive and they don’t get their information served up on a nice little Wikipedia-esque platter so they leave frustrated and confused, deciding that it’s all a mess and so they revert to the default position of being skeptical about anything they hear about the topic if not losing all interest in the matter entirely.

Now, if the topic is very recent all you need to do is wait until the dust settles and the subject at hand passes into Wikipedia.

Once it’s there, you cherry-pick some quotes and craft a narrative (e.g. the WEB DuBois Wikipedia entry up until recently held that he was a vocal critic of Stalin and was editorialised in a way to heavily imply that he was opposed to the USSR. The source used to back this up was actually completely incorrect at the time I last looked. I’ve just checked that entry again and it leads with the “tyrant Stalin” quote and favours the narrative that he was in opposition to Stalin/the USSR, but [finally!] makes note of his rather flattering eulogy to Stalin and of course some lib biographer’s opinion takes precedence and his position on the USSR is basically handwaved away as a matter of political expediency by the biographer. At no point is the idea entertained that WEB DuBois’ opinion of the USSR and Stalin developed over time or why he would go from “tyrant Stalin” to glowing praise but instead it’s presented as some sort of quirk rather than representing his actual position. The exact same thing could be done with Einstein - he shifted his position on the USSR as he received more information and he shifted it significantly over time. I could cherry-pick at least a couple of sources with some juicy quotes and paint Einstein as a dogged anti-communist who had only disdain for the USSR and it would be compelling. After all, who actually checks the sources in the first place and then who reads beyond the sourced quote and into the surrounding materials, taking into account the way that his opinion develops over time?) and you’re pretty much set.

Shit’s wild especially when you start digging into the sources for yourself.

Open it as a pdf and it’ll let you search for words.

Trust the process! 🙌