Cold War Lessons

This Carlin Romano article takes as one of its texts the book that's probably up next on my reading list, John Lewis Gaddis's new history of the Cold War.

But what's interesting here is his account of two books dealing with a Cold War organization that, perhaps, we could use again: the Congress for Cultural Freedom. One is Peter Coleman's "The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe" and the other is Frances Stonor Saunders's "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters." "Both authors," Romano writes, "depict a political world frighteningly similar to ours but a vastly different cultural one. For intellectuals, they suggest not what must be done today, but what might be done."

The idea of the congress, however, grew out of a feeling among independent intellectuals on the non-Communist left, as well as American officials, that the West after World War II faced a huge Soviet commitment to propagandizing and imposing Communism, and might lose the battle for European minds to Stalinism.

So the congress — established at a 1950 Berlin meeting at which the writer Arthur Koestler declared to a crowd of 15,000, "Friends, freedom has seized the offensive!" — launched magazines, held conferences, mounted exhibitions, and generally sought to expose Stalinist falsehoods from its liberal position. At its height, according to Coleman, the CCF "had offices or representatives in 35 countries, employing a total of 280 staff members."

He notes that "almost all the participants were liberals or social democrats, critical of capitalism and opposed to colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, racism, and dictatorship." Coleman thinks the CCF played a great historical role, winning over many members of the European intelligentsia to freedom and democracy. While he concedes that the CCF self-destructed because it hid the CIA pipeline for so long, he rejects the idea that CIA money invalidated the congress's achievements. Idealistic thinkers like Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler, Edward Shils, André Malraux, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, and others didn't hold their views because of CIA backing, he argues. They were enabled by it, some knowingly, some not.

Coleman thus writes glowingly of an era in which world-class personalities like Koestler and Italian novelist Ignazio Silone crossed swords and temperaments, in which powerful media such as The New York Times inveighed against "America's foolish disregard of the importance of the cultural offensive" against Stalinism. (The Times reported that the Soviet Union's annual financing for cultural propaganda in France surpassed the U.S. allotment for the whole world.)

Saunders, by contrast, savages the congress as a "front" organization "positioning" intellectuals "like chess pieces." Not for her the notion of the CIA as a "back" organization. Her story is one of "infiltration," in which compliant congress intellectuals and artists channeled U.S. government wishes. To Saunders, the same CIA that turned de-Nazification into a jobs program for Reich alumni cynically lined up irresolute leftists to carry anti-communist water.

Regardless of which way you tilt before these rival visions, today's world intellectual scene looks pallid, atomized, by comparison. The pictures both authors present of one "La Pasionaria" or another storming stages to grab microphones, or renting hotel rooms at hostile conferences to subvert enemies, seem remote. While occasional causes, such as standing up for Salman Rushdie during the fatwa against him, have forged concerted global solidarity among engaged writers and thinkers, they've led to few ongoing institutions that promote liberal values.