THREAD: Why is antifascism fading from Europe's official memory, while anti-communism is rising?.And what does this shift mean for democracy, the far right, and the future of political possibility?. Let's talk about memory politics — and how it shapes power.

From this book and article, "A History Best Served Cold" by Philip Mirowski in the book "Uncertain Empire.".

"After the long Sixties, a strange reversal took place, with natural scientists becoming notably more conservative and fearful of democratizing impulses, whereas the humanities came to regard themselves as the vanguard voice of the Left.".

Fascinating reversal!."It can be said to a first approximation that conservative thought was primarily located in the humanities in the 1950s, whereas the sciences frequently viewed them-.selves as allied with the planning and modernization agendas of the Left".

RT @sopjap: Americans liberated this camp (mostly leftists were there) and the US museum actually admits that the American military intell….

RT @sopjap: You'd be amazed at how many people get their vision and history of the USSR from works of fiction, George Orwell's 1984 and Ani….

"It was not only government functionaries who learned this lesson of the need to outsource interdisciplinarity in the Cold War. Powerful interest groups who were dissatisfied with the state of existing disciplines and of learning in the university tended to mimic this pattern.

This is a summary of the article: "A History Best Served Cold" by Philip Mirowski in the book "Uncertain Empire.".

To understand Cold War thought, not just Cold War policy, we must study how its logic shaped how we know, what counts as knowledge, and who gets to produce it.

The Cold War gave us a highly structured, militarized, disciplined model of intellectual life. Its collapse didn’t bring freedom—it brought a new regime of fragmented, market-driven knowledge.

We now live under open world ontologies—emergence, chaos, networks, flexibility. Think Santa Fe Institute, Latour’s Parliament of Things, or Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things.”.

But since the 1990s, closed world systems began to break down. Neoliberal restructuring has erased the boundary between universities and think tanks. Today’s knowledge economy is fragmented, privatized, and performative.

Even creativity was boxed in. It became a “trait” measurable by Cold War psychology—distinguished from “authoritarian personalities.” Risk, chaos, and uncertainty were to be eliminated.

These theories portrayed social life as self-contained systems. They kept democratic publics out of science policy. Only elite experts could speak for truth. Only trained technocrats could plan the future.

This closed-world mindset appeared across disciplines:.- Game theory (Nash equilibrium).- Rational choice theory.- AI and behavioral psychology.- Modernization theory.- Cybernetics + systems theory.

The intellectual structure of the Cold War also relied on what Paul Edwards called "closed world ontologies"—assumptions that the world was knowable, controllable, and every threat could be mapped.

Mont Pèlerin created an alternative intellectual universe, bypassing universities to reshape liberal thought in the shadow of WWII and the Great Depression. It prefigured today's political think tanks.

Meanwhile, Cold War opposition to socialism helped launch the Mont Pèlerin Society (1947), an elite anti-socialist think tank. It produced the foundations of what we now call neoliberalism.

Even when interdisciplinary centers were built inside universities, they often failed. Harvard’s Social Relations dept., Chicago’s math-bio lab, and others collapsed under disciplinary tension.

Inside universities: rigid disciplinarity + peer review = quality control + ideological conformity. Outside universities: think tanks like RAND or MIT’s Lincoln Labs could bypass academic bureaucracy.

True interdisciplinary innovation was outsourced—to RAND, Los Alamos, MITRE, etc. Outside the ivory tower, military funders could tolerate more experimental research.