>>29460Basically if the CIA *didn’t* respect One Piece, it would be less effective at its job. Trying to own One Piece as a symbol for US backed psyops is an attempt to hold onto legitimacy. So it turns out “knowing how to read One Piece” has real geopolitical stakes rn
What people tend to misunderstand is that an intelligence agency deals in HERMENEUTICS— the founders of the OSS were obsessed with literary modernism & hermeneutics. Angleton was an editor of an avant garde poetry magazine (Furioso)— deception in general requires sophisticated hermeneutics, because one can only deceive a reader, & to understand why a reader reads & the means by which they read, is to study hermeneutics. The Intelligence Agencies are *story tellers* — they need to create a compelling narrative for their operations to have any effect (in the long term). The efficacy of the narrative is itself the efficacy of the institution. Now, to tell a story which is compelling & means different things to different people— a sort of “hieroglyphic narrative” where multiple stories are ironically juxtaposed, providing a sense of ambiguity to what is actually constructed formally (ie: authoritatively)— this is success in terms of the geopolitics of the collective imaginary. America, obviously, won this victory a long time ago, but is losing its grip. The Japanese have, I would suggest, usurped this recently— but still in service of America. Manga & anime has become the means by which “the free world” (american empire & its satellites) can conceive of itself. It has to promote anime as its legitimacy as a project is less than the legitimacy of anime as a force in the collective imaginary. American science fiction used to hold this place, but Japan has, I think, completely won on this level.