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From the socialist journal, New Politics.
Michael Pugliese
http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue31/johnso31.htm
The Cultural Cold War: Faust Not the Pied Piper
Alan Johnson
[from New Politics, vol. 8, no. 3 (new series),
whole no. 31, Summer 2001]
ALAN JOHNSON is a reader in the Center for Studies in the Social
Sciences, Edge Hill of Higher Education, England. He is writing a
biography of Hal Draper and is a member of the NEW POLITICS editorial
board.
I got hold of Sartre and asked him: "What would you say if in certain
circumstances you were imprisoned in a city where there was a
Communist government, and I, knowing you were innocent, started a
campaign against the communists on your account?" "Ah," said Sartre,
"that is an extremely difficult question. It all depends. But it is
just possible that I in my prison might nevertheless think it better
that I should be condemned than that my case should be made the
occasion for an accusation against the cause which in the long run is
that of the proletariat." I said: "It seems to me that the only good
cause has always been that of one person unjustly imprisoned --
whether this has resulted in habeas corpus or a furious campaign
conducted by Voltaire in pamphlets." Sartre: "That's the whole drama.
That perhaps we live in a situation in which the injustice against one
person no longer seems to apply."
(extract from the journal of Stephen Spender, March 30, 1956, inThe
Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People 1933-75)
At certain times and in respects to certain crucial issues, instead of
saying "neither- nor" and looking for viable alternatives, we must
recognize an "either- or" and take one stand or the other.
(Sidney Hook, Out of Step. An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century)
IN THE COLD WAR PROGRESSIVE POLITICS WERE DESTROYED because much of
the left entered one or other Faustian pact of the mind. Two "lefts"
took the view that "the times" or "the situation" dictated their
temporary, knowing, intellectual and practical subordination to state
power in Russia or the United States. The result was that both ended
up no sort of left at all. Both, like Goethe's Faust, lost their
souls. Both discovered that state power, like Mephistopheles, strikes
a hard bargain: "The Devil is an egoist/And is not apt, without a why
or a wherefore/'For God's sake', others to assist."
The first left stretched well beyond card- carrying Communists. It
developed, as William Phillips has put it, a Stalinist Unconscious.
Viewing anti-Stalinism as quixotic or, worse, "objectively pro-
Imperialist," this left broke the bonds between reason, socialism,
liberty, and democracy and put power-worship, "lesser-evilism" and
sophistry in their place. Unable to rouse itself to oppose widespread
slave labor and political murder in "its camp" it could be moved to
paroxysms of anger by the fate of the Rosenbergs or the fact that the
Congress of Cultural Freedom received some of its money from the
Central Intelligence Agency. Paul Sweezy, editor of Monthly Review,
wrote "The restrictions of liberty which are characteristic of Soviet
Russia [i.e. torture, mass judicial murder, slave labor camps --AJ]
are far less symptomatic of the time than the crisis of liberty in the
United States."1 This left -- its ranks swelled by the Maoists of the
New Left -- has not gone away. Its mental habits (in particular
"campism," i.e. the disastrous idea that "my enemy's enemy is my
friend") its sensibility (power-worship, pseudo-realism, arm- chair
militarism) and its poverty-stricken idea of what socialism is (Sweezy
famously defined socialism as "a system which disallows private
property") are largely intact and morphing into new forms. It can be
found on the Internet raving that Milosovic is the Castro of the
Balkans.
The second postwar "left," stretching well beyond groups like the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, was a social- democratic and liberal
left that entered a Faustian Pact with the "the West" as a bulwark
against Stalinism. Some, like Sidney Hook, began by speaking
eloquently of truth and beauty but ended up receiving the Medal of
Honor from Ronald Reagan as a reward for dressing up the Contra
butchers as freedom fighters.
Who Paid The Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War* by Frances
Saunders is the fullest account yet of the CIA's penetration, funding
and manipulation of this liberal and social- democratic left during
the Cold War. The basic story is well known. The CIA realized that
psychological or political warfare was as important as military
capability in the Cold War. C.D. Jackson, special advisor to President
Eisenhower, played a pivotal role in forcing this understanding on the
U.S. political class. Secretary of State Edward Barrett said: "a
highly skillful and substantial campaign of truth is as indispensable
as an air force." Truman, urged on by George Kennan, had already set
up the Psychological Strategy Board on April 4,1952. The PSB operating
statement PSB D-33/2 remains classified though it is known to have
called for lavishly funded worldwide "political warfare" on Russia.
The psychological warfare budget, $34 million in 1950, was quadrupled.
Saunders speculates that James Burnham was the author of PSB D-33/2,
pointing to its resemblance to Burnham's book The Machiavellians. One
might also mention, more plausibly, Burnham's 1947 The Struggle for
the World. The CIA aimed to fund an intellectual and cultural war in
order to create, in Saunders phrase, "a beachhead in western Europe
from which the advance of Communist ideas could be halted."
Once this course had been decided the CIA soon realized that pretty
much the only people with both the practical knowledge to conduct such
a war against Stalinism, and a popular base in Europe, was the non-
Communist Left, tagged the "NCL" by the CIA. According to Michael
Warner, a historian working for the CIA's history staff, the NCL was
"the theoretical foundation of the Agency's political operations
against Communism over the next two decades."
The CIA supported, covertly, the establishment of the Congress for
Cultural Freedom (CCF) in 1950. The CCF linked ex-communists, ex-
Trotskyists, social-democrats and liberal artists, writers and
intellectuals. Well- funded national sections were created in many
European and many non-European countries. Ostensibly opposed to all
state restraint of cultural freedom and intellectual expression, the
CCF concentrated its fire on Communism. A new CIA Division, the
International Organizations Division (IOD) ran agents, Michael
Josselson and Lawrence de Neufville, at the heart of the CCF,
sanctioned by National Security Directive, NSC-68. Tom Braden, IOD
Chief, fought for the establishment of the Division. "I was more
interested in the ideas which were under fire from the Communists then
I was in blowing up Guatemala." To protect his assets, Braden issued
these instructions to IOD posts: "Limit the money to amounts private
organizations can credibly spend; disguise the extent of American
interest; protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring
it to support every aspect of official American policy."
As Saunders points out, "Cultural Freedom did not come cheap." In
fact, "Over the next seventeen years, the CIA was to pump tens of
millions of dollars into the Congress for Cultural Freedom and related
projects. With this kind of commitment, the CIA was in effect acting
as America's Ministry of Culture." It was Allen Dulles' idea to
organize most of this funding at arms length, through a "consortium"
of "philanthropic foundations, business corporations, and other
institutions and individuals, who worked hand in hand with the CIA to
provide the cover." Dulles had moved to the CIA in 1950 as the case
officer of the National Committee for a Free Europe, whose fund-
raising wing was helped by a young actor, Ronald Reagan. The CIA role
increased in 1954 when Cord Meyer replaced Tom Braden bringing fresh
ideas and agents and stepping up the cultural war. The truth about the
CIA's role in the CCF broke with the Patman revelations in 1964, the
New York Times investigation of 1966 and the famous Ramparts expose
of 1967.
SAUNDERS BOOK HAS FIVE GREAT STRENGTHS. First, it does not use the
sins of the CCF to exculpate the crimes of Stalinism. Whatever
perversion of "freedom" was involved in CCF intellectuals accepting
CIA money Saunders is clear that "Freedom of any kind certainly wasn't
on the agenda in the Soviet Union, where the writers and intellectuals
who were not sent to the gulags were lassoed into serving the
interests of the state." She acidly points out "None of the Communist-
backed lobbies formed to defend the Rosenberg's publicized the fact
that on the same day the Rosenberg Defense Committee was founded in
France, eleven former leaders of the Czech Communist Party were
executed in Prague."
Second, the book is a very impressive research effort. Though she
leans on previous investigations, she has also conducted her own
interviews with many of the key players and tracked down new documents
"scattered across the dusty recesses of a number of archives." The
narrative is fast-paced and easy to read (though it did feel in places
like a 500- page magazine article). And she has a sense of humor,
alive to the many absurdities of the tale, such as Arthur Koestler's
enrichment by the French Communist Party which bought up every copy of
his anti-communist novel Darkness at Noon, ensuring reprint after
reprint rolled off the press.
Several CIA operations are revealed in detail. Her account of the
CIA's Hollywood operation, "Militant Liberty" is well handled. We
learn of Carleton Alsop, the CIA agent at Paramount persuading casting
directors to place "well-dressed Negroes" in movies, part of the CIA's
"Hollywood Formula" on how movies should depict to the world a free,
equal and democratic America. The CIA financed the animation of
Orwell's anti- Stalinist novel Animal Farm, but tailored its ending to
cut its Third Camp message reversing Orwell's own intent. The efforts
of CIA agent Sol Stein to doctor 1984 to the ideological needs of the
USA are also carefully documented.
Saunders traces the CIA's role in funding the European Youth campaign,
and those European political factions -- such as the British
"revisionists" around Gaitskill -- who were moving closer to the idea
of a united Europe linked to a democratic capitalist America. Jay
Lovestone's role at the heart of this European operation is made
clear. The smoking gun that shows the CIA funded the British Fabian
Society journal, Venture, is here, alongside the claim that Denis
Healy fed information about Labor Party members and trade unionists to
the Information Research Department at the British Foreign Office.
When the Labor Party beat the Conservatives in the 1964 general
election, Michael Josselson, the CIA agent in the CCF wrote to Daniel
Bell, "We are all pleased to have so many of our friends in the new
government."
Third, the book demolishes the idea that the core CCF members did not
know about the CIA's role in the CCF. Mind you this is hardly a scoop.
Sidney Hook admitted in his 1987 memoir that those in the CCF who did
not know "did not want to know." More interestingly, Saunders makes an
intriguing argument about the CIA role in deliberately breaking its
connection to the "NCL" in the late 1960s. Tom Braden, CIA chief
controller of the CCF until 1954, wrote an article for the Saturday
Evening Post in May 1967 ("I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral"), which gave
solid proof of the CIA-CCF link complete with names, dates and places.
Josselson was devastated. Saunders speculates that Braden, ostensibly
retired, was still acting for the CIA, possibly for President Lyndon
Johnson. Her thesis is that the CIA broke the link to the non-
communist left not just because Ramparts had blown its cover but also
because the "NCL" -- under the impact of the war in Vietnam -- was
proving unreliable. James Burnham wrote an article in The National
Review in 1967 which Saunders quotes at length. She speculates that
Burnham was either in touch with, or was the author of, or had divined
the thinking behind, the calculated cutting loose of the CCF by Braden
and the CIA. Burnham wrote:
The CIA mounted most of these activities in the perspective of "the
non- Communist Left." The CIA estimated the NCL as a reliably anti-
Communist force [but] this political estimate is mistaken. The NCL is
not reliable. Under the pressure of critical events the NCL loosened.
A large portion -- in this country as in others -- swung toward an
anti-American position, and nearly all the NCL softened its attitude
toward Communism and the Communist nations. Thus the organizational
collapse is derivative from the political error. The political error
is the doctrine that the global struggle against Communism must be
based on the NCL -- a doctrine fastened on the CIA by Allen Dulles.
Cuba, the Dominican Republic and above all Vietnam have put the NCL
doctrine and practice to a decisive test. A large part of the
organizations and individuals nurtured by the CIA under the NCL
prescription end up undermining the nation's security. (401)
Saunders quotes CIA agent Jack Thompson, the longest serving Executive
Director of the Fairfield Foundation, which was used by the CIA to
channel funds to the CCF. "I have an imaginary scenario: President
Johnson is sitting at his desk in the Oval office, and he's shuffling
through some papers. He finds a copy of Encounter magazine. And he
says 'Hey, what's this?' And someone says, 'It's your magazine, Mr
President.' And he says, 'My magazine? My magazine! These are guys who
think my war is wrong and they're writing in my magazine?' And that's
it."
The fourth strength of Saunders book is the insight it provides into
the world- view and sensibility of the early CIA and CCF. Both, it
seems, possessed that self- image akin to Harry and his men at
Agincourt: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers," the last
defenders of culture and civilization against the Goths and
philistines. This was no simple cloak and dagger affair. Many,
especially in the early days of the CIA, possessed an almost Eliotic,
modernist, even cerebral sensibility. This elitism helped to bond
those witting and unwitting figures in the CIA-CCF nexus, from James
Jesus Angleton to Irving Kristol to Lionel Trilling. Saunders depicts
the CCF as a mix of crusading politics and gravy-train. The zeal of
the CCF in its early days is compared by Diana Josselson to "the first
hundred days of the Kennedy administration . . . It was electric. You
felt you were in touch with everything going on everywhere. Things
were blossoming, it was vital . . . it was like the French Revolution
or the Oxford Movement. That's what it felt like."
But the scale of the largesse, claims Saunders, meant "scores of
western intellectuals were now roped to the CIA by an "umbilical cord
of gold." She takes her reader to the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio,
northern Italy, "available to the Congress as an informal retreat for
its more eminent members -- a kind of officers mess where frontliners
in the Kulterkampf could recover their energies." The awe-struck
Hannah Arendt [who had experienced the inside of a Nazi detention
camp], writes to her friend Mary McCarthy that "You feel as if you are
lodged in a kind of Versailles. The place has 53 servants, including
men who take care of the gardens. The staff is presided over by a kind
of headwaiter who dates from the time of the 'principassa' and has
face and manner of a great gentleman of fifteenth-century Florence."
Top-table CCF stars were housed at the Connaught in London, the
Inghilterra in Rome, or, if calling on Irving Brown in Paris, the
Royal Suite at the Hotel Baltimore. A fight for freedom paid for by
the Central Intelligence Agency.
Fifth, the book shows that the choice "for the West" corroded
political and intellectual independence. The phenomenon of
Stalinophobia does not refer to being "too anti- Stalinist." One can
no more be "too anti-Stalinist" than one can be "too anti-Nazi."
Stalinophobia is the loss of political bearings because, in one's
mind, the crimes of Stalinism have overwhelmed all else, most
importantly the crimes of capitalism and imperialism. Saunders quotes
Phillip Rahv on the nature of Stalinophobia when he warned, "Anti-
Stalinism has become almost a professional stance. It has come to mean
so much that it excludes nearly all other concerns and ideas, with the
result that they are trying to turn anti-Stalinism into something
which it can never be: a total outlook on life, no less, or even a
philosophy of history." The feel of Stalinophobia was captured by Mary
McCarthy when writing to Hannah Arendt in March 1952 about the mindset
of some of her fellow CCF members:
They live in terror of a revival of the situation that prevailed in
the thirties, when the fellow travellers were powerful in teaching,
publishing, the theater etc., when Stalinism was the gravy train and
these people were off it. These people were . . . really traumatized
by the brief Stalinist apogee of the thirties . . . In their dreams,
this period is always recurring; it is "realler" than today. Hence
they scarcely notice the deteriorating actuality and minimize Senator
McCarthy as not relevant.
In his 1969 essay, "The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom," Christopher Lasch argued that choosing
the demigod 'the West' stilled the criticism of the men who presided
over the West. In the ensuing silence grew a murmuring and then a
clamor of celebration. Lasch was right that Encounter magazine
"consistently approved the broad lines and even the details of
American policy." When Dwight Macdonald, in 1958, submitted an article
to Encounter, wittily titled "America! America!" -- a critique of the
celebratory discourse about the U.S. then popular among intellectuals
-- it was rejected. Melvin Lasky's original dream of a CIA-backed
journal with an "unafraid self-critical tone . . . a living
demonstration of how the democratic mind works" was simply ridiculous.
That's not how Faustian pacts work. Goethe had Mephistopheles set out
very clearly the nature of the pact Faust was entering: "Here, an
unwearied slave, I'll wear thy tether/ And to thine every nod obedient
be:/ When There again we come together/ Then shalt thou do the same
for me." Macdonald commented that for the editors of Encounter, "the
publication of my article might embarrass the Congress [for Cultural
Freedom] in its relations with the America foundations which support
it." The rejection of Macdonald's article gives the lie to Sidney
Hook's claim that "there is not a single action that the Congress took
or failed to take that could be attributed to the fact that it was
subsidized in part indirectly by United States funds." More obvious
still, if the CCF had been committed to civil liberties in the U.S. it
would have energetically opposed McCarthyism from the outset.2 In
fact, as Saunders shows, detail piled on detail, "the American
Congress of Cultural Freedom (ACCF) like Encounter, sought to deny or
minimize the risks to culture of McCarthyism."
Lasch was also right that choosing "the West" led, over time, to self-
censorship by those who had "so completely assimilated the official
point of view that they were no longer aware of the way in which their
writing had come to serve as rationalizations of American world
power." Lasch related this self- censorship to the changing social
function and status of the intellectual. The Leviathan state needed to
absorb intellectuals on a larger scale than ever before and few
intellectuals were complaining. "As a group, intellectuals had
achieved a semi-official status which assigned them professional
responsibility for the machinery of education and for cultural affairs
in general. Within this sphere -- within the schools, the
universities, the theater, the concert hall and the politico-literary
magazines -- they had achieved both autonomy and affluence, as the
social value of their services became apparent to the government, to
corporations and to the foundations." Saunders cites Time magazine,
"The man of Protest has given way to the man of Affirmation." Far from
the intellectual "speaking the truth to power" Partisan Review's
Lionel Trilling summed up the new relationship: "Intellect has
associated itself with power, perhaps as never before in History."
Saunders main charge against the CCF is precisely that "the natural
procedures of intellectual enquiry" were distorted by this new
relationship to the state.
Yes, despite these strengths, the framework adopted by Saunders -- the
CIA calling the tunes played by its bought piper, the CCF -- is too
limiting. The fundamentally political and ideological nature of the
choices made by the CCF intellectuals during this extreme moment of
the twentieth century are missed amid the tales of 'secret agents' and
'assets.' There is a heavy price to pay for telling the story of the
CCF as a conspiracy story.
A CIA Wurlitzer?
THE CCF WAS NOT GROTESQUE AND RIDICULOUS PEOPLE stuffing their faces
with CIA food and talking pompously about "freedom" while shadowy
"operatives" run their prize "assets." The CIA did not call tunes nor
pay "pipers" to play them. Saunders accepts the CIA's narcissistic
description of the CCF as a "Wurlitzer" the CIA could play at will.
But this is no better than telling the story of the corruption of the
Communist Parties in terms of "Moscow Gold."3 A richer understanding
of the tragedy of the CCF -- and real understanding will be the best
guarantee that the tragedy is not repeated -- would require, first, an
empathetic understanding of the motivation of its partisans, grasping
the political complexity of the historical moment in which so many
intellectuals "chose the West" and, second, holding up the alternative
of those anti-Stalinists who maintained an equally coruscating
critique of U.S. imperialism.
That moment was marked by three catastrophes. First, the rolling
across Europe, and Asia, of the Stalinist armies and the imposition of
totalitarianism wherever they conquered. The politically conscious
"third-campers" aside, those who did not make the choice for the West
usually persuaded themselves this represented some kind of progress.
In other words most indulged what Julian Symons called the "selfish
refusal to face disillusionment." The second catastrophe was what
Orwell called the "intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive
scale" of the fellow traveller. This was a world in which
"socialists" wrote odes to Stalin (Neruda) and painted portraits of
Stalin (Picasso). It was a world in which Stalinized French doctors
backed Stalin's ravings about a [Jewish] "Doctors Plot" in Russia in
1953. (The "Doctors Plot" was the signal for a pogrom of the Jews but
mercifully Stalin died first.) In other words this was a period of
intense political warfare that the Stalinists seemed to be winning and
in which large chunks of the left were debasing themselves.4 The third
catastrophe, and the most crucial, was the collapse of hope in the
prospects of a democratic socialist Third Camp emerging in Europe,
opposed to both Moscow and Washington and led by the working class.
In his memoirs, Irving Howe, a severe critic of the CCF who called its
partisans "not even free men," sought to recreate for his reader that
extreme moment in 20th century history when he deserted the Third Camp
and "chose the West":
The fear of World War was real. It was a warranted fear . . . Wherever
Stalinism conquered, freedom vanished. It was necessary, therefore, to
strengthen resistance among the bourgeois democratic states in Europe,
as they existed at that moment, and not wait for some presumed
perfection in the future. This meant to support the Marshall Plan . .
. to help, if possible, the liberal anticommunist forces . . . It was
an uncomfortable politics . . . but I think it was a correct politics.
That the Communists in France and Italy never came close to taking
power is by no means evidence that we overestimated the danger: I
would say it is evidence of how necessary it had been to put barriers
in their path. And real barriers -- power, money, politics --not just
articles in intellectual journals.
To this Sidney Hook added:
Our conviction was that we were already in fact if not de jure,
engaged in a defensive war with Communism -- the war was actually
raging in Korea -- and our fears that its flames would spread and
engulf Western Europe. We were in daily contact with a stream of
refugee intellectuals, whose harrowing tales of persecution not only
moved us deeply but gave us a sense of guilt. Yes, there was an
element of deception in not making public what we knew or suspected
[about the CIA funding -- AJ]. In war even more deplorable deceptions
are accepted even by the most honorable. ( . . . ) Our conviction that
in all likelihood we would soon be involved in a European war,
triggered by the advance of the Red Army or an attempt by the
Communist party in France or Italy to take power, accounted for the
stilling of uneasiness about our funding.5
These memoirs, as I read them, describe a tragic Faustian Pact with
Mephistopheles/"the West." They do not amount to "pipers" bought and
paid for and "playing" CIA tunes.
"Cold War Rhetoric"?
ANOTHER TROUBLESOME ASPECT OF THE BOOK is that it coquettes, perhaps
unwittingly, in places, with some mental reflexes and ways of thinking
that sustained the old pro-Russian left and which still threaten the
intellectual health of the left today.
Stalinism dissolved the left as an independent force not only by
torture, murder and the Gulag but also by forcing on it mental
reflexes which destroyed its capacity for independent thinking. Truth
and justice were held at a distance, arrived at cautiously,
instrumentally, once the consequences for your favored "camp" -- one
state power or another -- had been worked out. Left-wingers schooled
in this way became inveterate self-deceivers and pollutants of the
culture of the left. Sartre's convoluted apologia for tyranny, which
began this review, would be a case in point. The shameful response of
much of the left to Solidarnosc would be another. Why did many
socialists eulogize Pablo Neruda (composer of Ode to Stalin) but say
nothing -- scared of being accused of "Cold War rhetoric" perhaps --
about Osip Mandelstam (the great poet who perished in the Gulag
because he wrote a poem with the line "His cockroach whiskers leer/And
his boot tops gleam")? Do not such "socialists" bear responsibility
for Mandelstam's fate? And how many Osip Mandelstam's were there?
We have to broach these questions, painful as they are. We have to
plumb the gists of what -- in our theory and practice, our ethics, our
conception of socialism -- made such disastrous accommodation to
totalitarian power possible. In the absence of our comprehensive
democratic socialist account the gap is being filled by the "Red
Genocide" framework of the 800 page Black Book on Communism produced
by the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique in Paris, which
traces an unbroken line of criminal continuity from Marx to Pol Pot.
A simplistic ex cathedra dismissal of those socialist and social-
democratic intellectuals who "chose the West" in the 1940's and 1950's
will prevent us critically reappropriating what remains valuable in
their legacy. Elements of that legacy might yet contribute to clearing
up the theoretical and normative confusion about what socialism is and
has been. This confusion predated Stalinism and can be traced back to
the fact that socialism has always meant two very different things --
the authoritarian imposition by an elite of a blueprint for a planned
society, necessarily anti- democratic, illiberal and doomed to
stagnation, and popular democratic control of society, "of the immense
majority in the interests of the immense majority": the two "souls of
socialism." But Stalinism made that chronic historic confusion about
the meaning of socialism into an acute, full-blown, near-fatal crisis.
The majority of "socialists" throughout the world became exactly what
the liberals said they were: authoritarians.
Our retrieval of liberty and democracy as constitutive of socialism --
a necessary condition for the future viability of socialism as a
political project -- has a long way to go. It will not be helped by a
mental reflex, which Saunders book might unwittingly strengthen: the
fear of giving succor to "the" enemy that stops us speaking the truth.
For example Saunders routinely labels as "Cold War rhetoric" the
statement of Alfred Barr that "The modern artist's non-conformity and
love of freedom cannot be tolerated within a monolithic tyranny and
modern art is useless for the dictator's propaganda." But what Barr
said was true. Another example of this mental reflex is Jason
Epstein's view, invoked by Saunders, that, "Come Vietnam and . . .
anti- Stalinism gets used to justify our own aggression. These people
get into a real bind now. They're caught with their pants down: they
have to defend Vietnam because they've toed the anti-Communist line."
We have to realize just how disastrous this argument has been for the
left. Its "logic" (which the example of Mary McCarthy, to mention only
her, refutes) is that anti-Stalinism=anti- Communism=support for the
Vietnam War. The argument relegates the left to the status of
satellite, destined to revolve in the orbit of one state power or
another.
Saunders book unwittingly chimes in with this mental reflex because
its piper/ tune framework suggests militant opposition to Russia was
the antechamber to the CIA check-book and neo-conservatism. For
example, Saunders tells us Malcolm Muggeridge's truthful account of
the Soviet Union, Winter in Moscow (1933), "marked the beginning of
his political transformation into an agent for MI6." Despite Saunders
intentions, such statements might be read as saying that it was the
very fact of his militant truth-telling about Russia which led him
into the arms of MI6, the British spying organization. I think this
matters, today, because the mental reflex itself is alive and well and
as damaging as ever. How many failed to face the truth about murderous
Serbian sub-imperialism, or to rouse opposition to it, because their
overriding concern was to "give no comfort to NATO"? How many
effectively became critical supporters of NATO, refusing to oppose the
bombing of Serbia, because their overriding concern was to "give no
comfort to Milosovic"?
This "campist" mentality is unwittingly indulged by Saunders. For
instance she quotes approvingly the cold contempt of Deutscher for
George Orwell ("a Freudian sublimation of persecution mania") while
what we really need is a sober realization that Deutscher -- still
near-universally eulogized on the left -- was a man who opposed all
the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe and said "Eastern Europe
(Hungary, Poland and East Germany) found itself on the brink of
bourgeois restoration at the end of the Stalin era; and only Soviet
armed power (or its threat) stopped it there."
Another example is Saunders's treatment of the famous 1948 Russian
backed and fellow-traveller-organized Waldorf Astoria "Peace
Conference." A small ad hoc group, Americans for Intellectual Freedom,
led by the still youngish Sidney Hook, disrupted the Waldorf
conference by raising in session after session the question of
Stalinist abuses of human rights, exposing the hypocrisy of the
sponsors and the fellow- travellers who attended, and pointing out
that the real purpose of the event was political warfare for the
Soviet state. Yet Saunders seeks to enlist us, emotionally, to the
side of the conference organizers and supporters such as Arthur
Miller. She sneers at the Hook group and finds their behavior
"appalling" for embarrassing the Russian visitors. The faux naïf words
of Arthur Miller are passed on a good coin, "The conference was an
effort to continue a good tradition." What good tradition can he mean?
The power-worship of the intellectual? The selfish refusal to face
disillusionment? Apologetics for "Uncle Joe"? One has such a choice.
When one considers the actual exchanges at the Waldorf conference it
becomes odder and odder that sympathy should be extended to its
organizers and contempt poured on those who tried to challenge them (I
suspect Saunders is here following the lead of Garry Wills' dreadful
introduction to Lillian Hellman's book, Scoundrel Time). A typical
exchange went thus. An AIF supporter stands up at the panel on
"Planning and Building" and proposes a resolution calling on Russia to
rehabilitate eighteen architect- victims of the purges. The Chair
dismisses this as unconstructive and moves on. A left that finds it
hard to take sides when it looks back at this exchange does not
deserve a 21st century future.
Anti-Stalinism Was Not Quixotic
SAUNDERS BOOK COULD THEREFORE BE READ AS DENYING the very possibility
of an anti-Stalinism independent of the U.S. government's patronage or
political orbit. Yet this "Third Camp" tradition did exist.6 Political
warfare was waged against Stalinism in ways that gave no succor to
Washington. Orwell in 1946 proposed a democratic international and a
new "League for the Rights of Man" to defend human rights and
intellectual freedom. There is the noble failure of the Europe-
America Groups led by Dwight Macdonald. It can be found in the
collaboration between the U.S. Workers Party -- which coined the
slogan "Neither Washington Nor Moscow but the Third Camp of
Independent Socialism" -- and French anti-Stalinists organized in the
Rassemblement Democratique Revolutionnaire (RDR). It can be seen in
the International Day Against Dictatorship and War, organized by David
Rousset. Even in Berlin in 1950, at the launch of the CCF, there were
still those who said political warfare meant first a fight for social
justice, prosperity and, probably, European federation. These forces
tended to think, with varying degrees of consistency and
sophistication, in terms of a two-front fight by a Third Camp. It was
the collapse of the EAG, the RDR, Politics and Horizon, and the
marginalization of the revolutionary socialist Third Camp voice in
Europe and America, which made it easier for the CIA to move in and
yoke the non-Communist left "to Washington's version of political
warfare against Moscow, transfer the operation to Paris, dump Lasky,
bring in Josselson, and gradually increase the CIA influence."7
Yankee Doodles?
SAUNDERS CLAIMS THAT THERE WAS A "really deep connection between
abstract expressionism and the cultural Cold War." Again, though the
connection is undeniable, her too-small "piper/tune" framework is
incapable of grasping the tragedy and pathos of the story.
The facts are well known. Despite a philistine assault on the abstract
expressionists in the U.S. Congress, led by George Dondero, the CIA
realized the potential of abstraction to be manipulated as a tool in
the cultural Cold War as an embodiment of western freedom contrasted
sharply against grey Stalinist conformity. Bypassing the U.S.
Congress, the CIA worked with the Museum of Modern Art to promote the
abstract expressionists, funding touring exhibitions in Europe.
President Eisenhower himself, no fan of Still, Rothko, Newman or
Pollock one suspects, endorsed MoMA, and its modern art program, as "a
pillar of liberty."
According to Saunders it was for political -- not aesthetic -- reasons
that abstract expressionism was promoted by MoMA. She reduces abstract
expressionism to its Cold War context. She writes, of Jackson Pollock,
"In his splurgy, random knot of lines which threaded their way across
the canvas and over the edges, [Pollock] seemed to be engaged in the
act of rediscovering America," and upholding "the Great American myth
of the Lone Voice." Saunders finds "eerily prophetic" a yahoo-
philistine attack on the abstract expressionists carried in the
Stalinist magazine Masses and Mainstream in 1952 titled "Dollars,
Doodles and Death." This is all in line with the "art criticism" of
Serge Guilbaut, the author of How New York Stole the Idea of Modern
Art (the anti-Americanism and Gallic nationalism of sections of the
French left is beyond parody). This book crudely reduced abstract
expressionism to a tool of U.S. foreign policy. (Of course, Guilbaut
promoted the Stalinist socialist-realist tool Andre Fougeron, a true
Zhdanovist who attacked Picasso for the lack of reverence in his
portrait of Stalin.) Saunders' sneer at Pollock's "splurgy, random
knot of lines" appears in a chapter titled "Yankee Doodles." She also
passes on as a penetrating insight Ad Reinhardt's jibe that Pollock
was just a "Harpers Bazaar bum," and implies abstract expressionism
was a giant fraud played out on the public. We are told, via the voice
of Jason Epstein, "this stuff is rubbish."
There are political, aesthetic and historiographical problems with all
this. First, why is it so hard to admit that abstract expressionism
was proof of the greater cultural freedom of "the West"? Take the year
1948. In Russia, Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural policeman, gathered
together composers and critics and issued his cultural edicts and
orders and banishments. In response, Shostakovitch, criticized for his
Ninth Symphony, duly composed a piece in praise of Stalin's forestry
plan as an apology.8 In the same year Clyfford Still painted 1948-D,
Philip Guston The Tormentors, Barnett Newman, Onement 1, Robert
Motherwell's magnificent Spanish Elegies series was underway, and
Jackson Pollock painted his masterpiece Number 1A. It was a moment of
remarkable human artistic power and creativity. That's what the CIA
saw! That's why they could use it!
Saunders reduces all this to "random," "splurgy," "doodles" and CIA
cash. We are, thankfully, spared the cliché, "a five year old could do
it." The best antidote to anyone infected with this philistinism is to
get him or her to spend five minutes in front of Pollock's masterpiece
Lavender Mist. Those lines are not random. I suspect that lurking in
Saunders account is a sheer disbelief that the USA (of all places!)
could produce the greatest art movement of the mid-twentieth century.
The tragedy of abstract expressionism lay in the political
impossibility of that aesthetic project at that historical moment, and
here is the real parallel to the CCF intellectuals, I think. They were
driven, said the late Peter Fuller -- listen to the echo of the Howe
and Hook memoirs quoted earlier -- "by what they felt as the necessity
of bearing witness to their experience of that terrible moment of
history through which they lived." The real connections between the
abstract expressionist artists and CCF intellectuals lie here, first,
in the impulse to take a stand for individual personality and freedom
in an age of tyranny and conformity, This impulse was absorbed into
the "official" culture via the fatal embrace of state patronage,
prestige, wealth and success. They failed to maintain their
independence. Second, both were isolated from a social agency or a
political project that consistently stood for freedom and was able to
sustain a movement, artistic or intellectual, not dependent on one
form or other of state patronage. Unable to see any alternative to a
spiritually bankrupt consumer- capitalism and a totalitarian
"socialism" both retreated: the artists to the "ancient" the
"timeless" the "mythical" and the private cultivation of the "self,"
and to alcohol (not to the "rediscovery of America" as Saunders says),
the intellectuals to a notion of "freedom," which shut its eyes to the
un-freedom of corporate power, American imperialism and McCarthyism.
Their respective Faustian pacts with Power -- theorized by Clement
Greenberg for the abstract expressionists, for the CCF by Hook and
others -- produced over time a descent into, respectively, "art
officiel" and "house intellectual" and a decline into mere mannerism.
All this is rather more complicated than a piper playing a tune. In
fact what David Anfam has said -- in irritated response to Guilbaut's
notion that New York "stole" modern art and turned it into a weapon of
the Cold War -- could stand as a criticism of Saunders notion that the
CIA played the intellectual opposition to Stalinism like a Wurlitzer.
Pointing out the "unrelenting narrowness" of Guilbaut's thesis Anfam
asked "What might Marx himself have made of these foreclosed horizons
whereon bad faith masquerades as acuity. Firstly, the art [or, here,
the ideas of the CCF -- AJ] is turned into a cipher because it
receives little serious attention. Once effaced, its features then
mirror solely those of the original Cold War climate and its ambient
political strategies."9
Brightlier, Build It Again
THIS REVIEW BEGAN WITH GOETHE'S Faust and his fateful pact with a
demigod and there it can end. Phyllis Jacobson, writing in New
Politics in 1976, reviewing Lillian Hellman's book about McCarthyism,
Scoundrel Time, pointed out the baleful consequences for the left when
it opts for one demigod or another:
Lillian Hellman has more in common with her reactionary anti-Stalinist
enemies than she realizes. Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook and friends
practice the kind of politics dear to Hellman's heart. Having opted
for "the West" they are loud and clear in their defense of the victims
of Stalinism with barely a word about those persecuted by U.S.
imperialism and its client countries. They have not "come forward" to
defend Smith Act or McCarthy victims. We hear nothing from them today
about those persecuted by the CIA and the FBI. Lillian Hellman having
chosen "Stalin Communism" never came forward to defend or support the
victims of Stalinism. On the contrary, in her Stalinist zeal she
attacked them. She defended and supported only the victims of Western
imperialism. Both practiced the vulgar politics dictated by the notion
that the enemies of my enemy are my friends. As camp followers they
were mirror images of each other."10
Indeed. And one way to read Faust is as a morality tale about the
importance of self-reliance and the dangers of putting faith in
demigods. Goethe has a Chorus of Spirits observe Faust strike his pact
with the Devil. They warn Faust: "Woe! Woe!/ Thou hast it destroyed/
The beautiful world/With powerful fist/ In ruin tis hurled/By the blow
of a demigod shattered!" But then, in words I find relevant for the
left today -- as we stand amid the rubble of the "workers states" but
with the glorious green shoots of a global anti-capitalist movement
poking up around our feet -- the Chorus of Spirits urges on Faust the
possibility of an alternative based on self-reliance:
"Brightlier/Build it again/In thine own bosom build it anew/ Bid the
new career/ Commence, / With clearer sense/And the new songs of
cheer/Be sung thereto!"
Notes
*Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances
Stonor Saunders, London; Granta Books, 1999, 509 pp. return
Sweezy is quoted in Irving Howe, "Authoritarians of the Left," in his
Steady Work. Essays in the Politics of Democratic Radicalism, 1953-
1966, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1966, p. 300. return
For an argument that "Sidney Hook's assault on civil liberties and
academic freedom represented a force for McCarthyism, freed of the
liabilities of McCarthy," and that "The American Congress for Cultural
Freedom as a whole, along with most of its leading personalities were
apologists for McCarthyism, some promoting it more aggressively than
others," see Julius Jacobson, "Revising the History of Cold War
Liberals," New Politics, (New Series) No. 28, 2000. return
Saunders' reductive treatment of the Congress is reinforced by a
tendency to treat her CIA sources rather uncritically. Surely CIA
operatives, when reporting to their superiors, have an interest in
overstating their influence and control over "assets"? return
See David Caute, The Fellow Travellers, Quartet Books, London, 1977;
Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims, Travels of Western Intellectuals
to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, Harper Colophon Books, New York,
1983; Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, Penguin, London, 1980 (1953).
return
And it is not just a question of 1948. The brute fact is that when
Sidney Hook called Christopher Lasch's 1969 essay on the Congress for
Cultural Freedom "profoundly ignorant" about the realities of life
inside the Soviet Union he was right. Such ignorance played a role in
the sudden collapse of "French Marxism," in the late 1970's, one
reading of The Gulag Archipelago washing much of it away overnight.
return
Alan Johnson, "The Third Camp as History and a Living Legacy," New
Politics (New Series) No. 27, 1999. return
See S. A. Longstaff, "Dwight Macdonald and the Anti-Stalinist Left,"
in New Politics (New Series), No. 18, 1995. return
Leszek Kolakowski, The Main Currents of Marxism Volume III: The
Breakdown, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978, p.123. return
David Anfam, "Of War, Demons, and Negation," Art History, Vol. 16. No.
3., 1993, p. 480. return
Phyllis Jacobson, "A Time of Assorted Scoundrels," New Politics (First
Series) Vol. XI, No. 4, 1976. p. 24. return
Contents of No. 31
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