[CIMC-work] (f.y.i. -- in the context of IMC grantwriting) The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited

[Chris Kaihatsu]

http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=370242&group=webcast

The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited (english)
James Petras 8:43am Thu Dec 11 '03
 article#370242

The CIA's cultural campaigns created the prototype for today's seemingly
apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from
popular struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working
classes and their proximity to prestigious foundations.
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold
War (London: Granta Books).

James Petras

This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA
penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through
its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford
and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details
how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized
concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed
the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any
social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that
criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized
for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA
was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom
in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some
intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved
with CIA "projects," and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming
ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publicly
exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the
political tide to the left.

U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect
funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and
many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA
were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney
Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary
McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe,
the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the "Democratic Left"
and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler,
Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.


The CIA, under the prodding of Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, was
instrumental in funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a kind of
cultural NATO that grouped together all sorts of "anti-Stalinist" leftists
and rightists. They were completely free to defend Western cultural and
political values, attack "Stalinist totalitarianism" and to tiptoe gently
around U.S. racism and imperialism. Occasionally, a piece marginally
critical of U.S. mass society was printed in the CIA-subsidized journals.


What was particularly bizarre about this collection of CIA-funded
intellectuals was not only their political partisanship, but their pretense
that they were disinterested seekers of truth, iconoclastic humanists,
freespirited intellectuals, or artists for art's sake, who counterposed
themselves to the corrupted "committed" house "hacks" of the Stalinist
apparatus.


It is impossible to believe their claims of ignorance of CIA ties. How could
they ignore the absence in the journals of any basic criticism of the
numerous lynchings throughout the southern United States during the whole
period? How could they ignore the absence, during their cultural congresses,
of criticism of U.S. imperialist intervention in Guatemala, Iran, Greece,
and Korea that led to millions of deaths? How could they ignore the gross
apologies of every imperialist crime of their day in the journals in which
they wrote? They were all soldiers: some glib, vitriolic, crude, and
polemical, like Hook and Lasky; others elegant essayists like Stephen
Spender or self-righteous informers like George Orwell. Saunders portrays
the WASP Ivy League elite at the CIA holding the strings, and the vitriolic
Jewish ex-leftists snarling at leftist dissidents. When the truth came out
in the late 1960s and New York, Paris, and London "intellectuals" feigned
indignation at having been used, the CIA retaliated. Tom Braden, who
directed the International Organizations Branch of the CIA, blew their cover
by detailing how they all had to have known who paid their salaries and
stipends (397-404).


According to Braden, the CIA financed their "literary froth," as CIA
hardliner Cord Meyer called the anti-Stalinist intellectual exercises of
Hook, Kristol, and Lasky. Regarding the most prestigious and best-known
publications of the self-styled "Democratic Left" (Encounter, New Leader,
Partisan Review), Braden wrote that the money for them came from the CIA and
that "an agent became the editor of Encounter" (398). By 1953, Braden wrote,
"we were operating or influencing international organizations in every
field" (398).


Saunders' book provides useful information about several important questions
regarding the ways in which CIA intellectual operatives defended U.S.
imperialist interests on cultural fronts. It also initiates an important
discussion of the long-term consequences of the ideological and artistic
positions defended by CIA intellectuals.


Saunders refutes the claims (made by Hook, Kristol, and Lasky) that the CIA
and its friendly foundations provided aid with no strings attached. She
demonstrates that "the individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA
were expected to perform as part ... of a propaganda war." The most
effective propaganda was defined by the CIA as the kind where "the subject
moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his
own." While the CIA allowed their assets on the "Democratic Left" to prattle
occasionally about social reform, it was the "anti-Stalinist" polemics and
literary diatribes against Western Marxists and Soviet writers and artists
that they were most interested in, funded most generously, and promoted with
the greatest visibility. Braden referred to this as the "convergence"
between the CIA and the European "Democratic Left" in the fight against
communism. The collaboration between the "Democratic Left" and the CIA
included strike-breaking in France, informing on Stalinists (Orwell and
Hook), and covert smear campaigns to prevent leftist artists from receiving
recognition (including Pablo Neruda's bid for a Nobel Prize in 1964 [351]).


The CIA, as the arm of the U.S. government most concerned with fighting the
cultural Cold War, focused on Europe in the period immediately following the
Second World War. Having experienced almost two decades of capitalist war,
depression, and postwar occupation, the overwhelming majority of European
intellectuals and trade unionists were anticapitalist and particularly
critical of the hegemonic pretensions of the United States. To counter the
appeal of communism and the growth of the European Communist Parties
(particularly in France and Italy), the CIA devised a two-tier program. On
the one hand, as Saunders argues, certain European authors were promoted as
part of an explicitly "anticommunist program." The CIA cultural commissar's
criteria for "suitable texts" included "whatever critiques of Soviet foreign
policy and Communism as a form of government we find to be objective (sic)
and convincingly written and timely." The CIA was especially keen on
publishing disillusioned ex-communists like Silone, Koestler, and Gide. The
CIA promoted anticommunist writers by funding lavish conferences in Paris,
Berlin, and Bellagio (overlooking Lake Como), where objective social
scientists and philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Daniel Bell, and Czeslow
Milosz preached their values (and the virtues of Western freedom and
intellectual independence, within the anticommunist and pro-Washington
parameters defined by their CIA paymasters). None of these prestigious
intellectuals dared to raise any doubts or questions regarding U.S. support
of the mass killing in colonial Indochina and Algeria, the witch hunt of
U.S. intellectuals or the paramilitary (Ku Klux Klan) lynchings in the
southern United States. Such banal concerns would only "play into the hands
of the Communists," according to Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, and the Partisan
Review crowd, who eagerly sought funds for their quasi-bankrupt literary
operation. Many of the so-called prestigious anticommunist literary and
political journals would long have gone out of business were it not for CIA
subsidies, which bought thousands of copies that it later distributed free.


The second cultural track on which the CIA operated was much more subtle.
Here, it promoted symphonies, art exhibits, ballet, theater groups, and
well-known jazz and opera performers with the explicit aim of neutralizing
anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and creating an appreciation of U.S.
culture and government. The idea behind this policy was to showcase U.S.
culture, in order to gain cultural hegemony to support its military-economic
empire. The CIA was especially keen on sending black artists to
Europeparticularly singers (like Marion Anderson), writers, and musicians
(such as Louis Armstrong)to neutralize European hostility toward
Washington's racist domestic policies. If black intellectuals didn't stick
to the U.S. artistic script and wandered into explicit criticism, they were
banished from the list, as was the case with writer Richard Wright.


The degree of CIA political control over the intellectual agenda of these
seemingly nonpolitical artistic activities was clearly demonstrated by the
reaction of the editors of Encounter (Lasky and Kristol, among others) with
regard to an article submitted by Dwight MacDonald. MacDonald, a maverick
anarchist intellectual, was a long-time collaborator with the CIA-run
Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter. In 1958, he wrote an article
for Encounter entitled "America America," in which he expressed his
revulsion for U.S. mass culture, its crude materialism, and lack of
civility. It was a rebuttal of the American values that were prime
propaganda material in the CIA's and Encounter's cultural war against
communism. MacDonald's attack of the "decadent American imperium" was too
much for the CIA and its intellectual operatives in Encounter. As Braden, in
his guidelines to the intellectuals, stated "organizations receiving CIA
funds should not be required to support every aspect of U.S. policy," but
invariably there was a cut-off pointparticularly where U.S. foreign policy
was concerned (314). Despite the fact that MacDonald was a former editor
ofEncounter, the article was rejected. The pious claims of Cold War writers
like Nicola Chiaromonte, writing in the second issue of Encounter, that
"[t]he duty that no intellectual can shirk without degrading himself is the
duty to expose fictions and to refuse to call `useful lies,' truths,"
certainly did not apply to Encounter and its distinguished list of
contributors when it came to dealing with the `useful lies' of the West.


One of the most important and fascinating discussions in Saunders' book is
about the fact that CIA and its allies in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)
poured vast sums of money into promoting Abstract Expressionist (AE)
painting and painters as an antidote to art with a social content. In
promoting AE, the CIA fought off the right-wing in Congress. What the CIA
saw in AE was an "anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free
enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent it was the very antithesis
of socialist realism" (254). They viewed AE as the true expression of the
national will. To bypass right-wing criticism, the CIA turned to the private
sector (namely MOMA and its co-founder, Nelson Rockefeller, who referred to
AE as "free enterprise painting.") Many directors at MOMA had longstanding
links to the CIA and were more than willing to lend a hand in promoting AE
as a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Heavily funded exhibits of AE were
organized all over Europe; art critics were mobilized, and art magazines
churned out articles full of lavish praise. The combined economic resources
of MOMA and the CIA-run Fairfield Foundation ensured the collaboration of
Europe's most prestigious galleries which, in turn, were able to influence
aesthetics across Europe.


AE as "free art" ideology (George Kennan, 272) was used to attack
politically committed artists in Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom
(the CIA front) threw its weight behind abstract painting, over
representational or realist aesthetics, in an explicit political act.
Commenting on the political role of AE, Saunders points out: "One of the
extraordinary features of the role that American painting played in the
cultural Cold War is not the fact that it became part of the enterprise, but
that a movement which so deliberately declared itself to be apolitical could
become so intensely politicized" (275). The CIA associated apolitical
artists and art with freedom. This was directed toward neutralizing the
artists on the European left. The irony, of course, was that the apolitical
posturing was only for left-wing consumption.


Nevertheless, the CIA and its cultural organizations were able to profoundly
shape the postwar view of art. Many prestigious writers, poets, artists, and
musicians proclaimed their independence from politics and declared their
belief in art for art's sake. The dogma of the free artist or intellectual,
as someone disconnected from political engagement, gained ascendancy and is
pervasive to this day.


While Saunders has presented a superbly detailed account of the links
between the CIA and Western artists and intellectuals, she leaves unexplored
the structural reasons for the necessity of CIA deception and control over
dissent. Her discussion is framed largely in the context of political
competition and conflict with Soviet communism. There is no serious attempt
to locate the CIA's cultural Cold War in the context of class warfare,
indigenous third world revolutions, and independent Marxist challenges to
U.S. imperialist economic domination. This leads Saunders to selectively
praise some CIA ventures at the expense of others, some operatives over
others. Rather than see the CIA's cultural war as part of an imperialist
system, Saunders tends to be critical of its deceptive and distinct reactive
nature. The U.S.-NATO cultural conquest of Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR
should quickly dispel any notion that the cultural war was a defensive
action.


The very origins of the cultural Cold War were rooted in class warfare.
Early on, the CIA and its U.S. AFL-CIO operatives Irving Brown and Jay
Lovestone (ex-communists) poured millions of dollars into subverting
militant trade unions and breaking strikes through the funding of social
democratic unions (94). The Congress for Cultural Freedom and its
enlightened intellectuals were funded by the same CIA operatives who hired
Marseilles gangsters to break the dockworkers' strikes in 1948.


After the Second World War, with the discrediting in Western Europe of the
old right (compromised by its links to the fascists and a weak capitalist
system), the CIA realized that, in order to undermine the anti-NATO trade
unionists and intellectuals, it needed to find (or invent) a Democratic Left
to engage in ideological warfare. A special sector of the CIA was set up to
circumvent right-wing Congressional objections. The Democratic Left was
essentially used to combat the radical left and to provide an ideological
gloss on U.S. hegemony in Europe. At no point were the ideological pugilists
of the democratic left in any position to shape the strategic policies and
interests of the United States. Their job was not to question or demand, but
to serve the empire in the name of "Western democratic values." Only when
massive opposition to the Vietnam War surfaced in the United States and
Europe, and their CIA covers were blown, did many of the CIA-promoted
and -financed intellectuals jump ship and begin to criticize U.S. foreign
policy. For example, after spending most of his career on the CIA payroll,
Stephen Spender became a critic of U.S. Vietnam policy, as did some of the
editors of Partisan Review. They all claimed innocence, but few critics
believed that a love affair with so many journals and convention junkets, so
long and deeply involved, could transpire without some degree of knowledge.


The CIA's involvement in the cultural life of the United States, Europe, and
elsewhere had important long-term consequences. Many intellectuals were
rewarded with prestige, public recognition, and research funds precisely for
operating within the ideological blinders set by the Agency. Some of the
biggest names in philosophy, political ethics, sociology, and art, who
gained visibility from CIA-funded conferences and journals, went on to
establish the norms and standards for promotion of the new generation, based
on the political parameters established by the CIA. Not merit nor skill, but
politicsthe Washington linedefined "truth" and "excellence" and future
chairs in prestigious academic settings, foundations, and museums.


The U.S. and European Democratic Left's anti-Stalinist rhetorical
ejaculations, and their proclamations of faith in democratic values and
freedom, were a useful ideological cover for the heinous crimes of the West.
Once again, in NATO's recent war against Yugoslavia, many Democratic Left
intellectuals have lined up with the West and the KLA in its bloody purge of
tens of thousands of Serbs and the murder of scores of innocent civilians.
If anti-Stalinism was the opium of the Democratic Left during the Cold War,
human rights interventionism has the same narcotizing effect today, and
deludes contemporary Democratic Leftists.


The CIA's cultural campaigns created the prototype for today's seemingly
apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from
popular struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working
classes and their proximity to prestigious foundations. The CIA role model
of the successful professional is the ideological gatekeeper, excluding
critical intellectuals who write about class struggle, class exploitation
and U.S. imperialism "ideological" not "objective" categories, or so they
are told.


The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA's Congress of Cultural
Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies,
but their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the
idea of excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the
influential cultural and political media. The issue is not that today's
intellectuals or artists may or may not take a progressive position on this
or that issue. The problem is the pervasive belief among writers and artists
that anti-imperialist social and political expressions should not appear in
their music, paintings, and serious writing if they want their work to be
considered of substantial artistic merit. The enduring political victory of
the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political
engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship.
Today at the opera, theater, and art galleries, as well as in the
professional meetings of academics, the Cold War values of the CIA are
visible and pervasive: who dares to undress the emperor?

www.rebelion.org/petras/english/271101jp.htm