Oops
Sharlet: File this under "roads not taken": In Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (published by U. of Kansas press last year), historian Kenneth Osgood offers a brief account of the U.S. propaganda puffing of Buddhism during the 1950s. Not long after Henry Luce famously instructed his editors to "puff Graham" -- Billy, that is -- a network of agencies dedicated to Cold War "psychological warfare" -- the U.S. gov't term -- began promoting Buddhism to the American people, sponsoring research, exchanges, and the all around general celebration of Buddhism. Enlightenment thinking? Hardly. Buddhism fell under the heading of anything-but-communism. Anything, that is, but Islam, which, according to Osgood, the "total war" never got around to addressing.
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Sharlet: File this under “roads not taken”: In Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (published by U. of Kansas press last year), historian Kenneth Osgood offers a brief account of the U.S. propaganda puffing of Buddhism during the 1950s. Not long after Henry Luce famously instructed his editors to “puff Graham” — Billy, that is — a network of agencies dedicated to Cold War “psychological warfare” — the U.S. gov’t term — began promoting Buddhism to the American people, sponsoring research, exchanges, and the all around general celebration of Buddhism. Enlightenment thinking? Hardly. Buddhism fell under the heading of anything-but-communism. Anything, that is, but Islam, which, according to Osgood, the “total war” never got around to addressing.