Did you know that the CIA funded socialist journals in the 1950s and 1960s to actively polemicize against existing socialisms and communist-led states?
A brief thread.
In response to the Soviet Union’s 1948 World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, the CIA founded and funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom—an anti-communist advocacy group which, at its height, operated in 35 countries and published over 20 journals.
Through the CCF, as well as by more direct means, the CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War — the closest thing that the U.S. government had to a Ministry of Culture. This left a complex and disturbing legacy, paving the way for U.S. interventions.
The CIA was also responsible for secretly financing a large number of “civil society” groups, such as the National Student Association and many socialist European unions, in order to counter the efforts of parallel pro-Soviet, pro-communist, and global peace organizations.
In short, through an intellectual and a monetary co-option—what we might call a repressive tolerance—of uncritical “left” scholars during the era, the CIA was able to turn socialists into de facto agents of anti-communism along CIA and U.S. lines.
Socialists for capitalism.
In 1967, ex-CIA agent Tom Braden wrote that, “[I]n much of Europe in the 1950’s, socialists, people who called themselves ‘left’ — the very people whom many Americans thought no better than Communists — were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.”
Let’s take a look at a few of the CIA/CCF journals.
The New Leader was founded in the 1920s as a voice for American socialism, but by the dawn of the Cold War, it focused incessantly on establishing the totalitarian and imperialist character of the Soviet Union.
Der Monat was a German magazine founded in 1948 by New Yorker Melvin Lasky; the magazine was his attempt to put his desired politics of “cultural freedom” into action, and was originally published under the authority of the U.S. military government in divided Germany.
The Kenyon Review was founded by John Crowe Ransom in 1939. The intellectuals and CIA officers who ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom loved Ransom, and used him and his literary networks to locate promising students and literary friends they could recruit to work for them.
Peter Matthiessen, one of the co-founders of the Paris Review, had been recruited into the CIA and the magazine initially served as part of his cover. But he maintained that the connections ended there, and that the Paris Review was not a part of the CCF.
We’re not so sure.
In the late 30s/early 40s, when the neoconservative Partisan Review was funded primarily by the painter George Morris—prior to CIA funding—it was controlled by an avant-garde group of “literary Trotskyists” interested in fusing cultural modernism with political anti-Stalinism.
The London-based Encounter was considered the crown jewel of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s publishing program. Created in 1953, Encounter was edited by Irving Kristol and later, Melvin Lasky, and frequently featured the “witty” anti-Communism of Leszek Kolakowski.
The CCF programs were not limited to Europe. And, in the mid-60s, the CCF was trying to shift its Latin American operation from one that was ineffectively fighting the regional pro-Soviet parties to one that would subtly undermine the appeal of Castro’s Cuba.
Enter Mundo Nuevo.
Like other CCF journals, Mundo Nuevo published essays critical of US policy in Latin America and Vietnam. But its defense of the responsibility of the artist as an independent critic of power, rather than part of the machinery of revolutionary social transformation, was a grift.
And herein lies the ruse.
The CCF magazines were not openly pro-capitalist; they professed socialism. What they fostered, however, was the sentiment that revolutionary power—people’s power—was somehow authoritarian and totalitarian; that socialism must remain forever an ideal.
In closing, we ask: how do the undercurrents and professments of the contemporary socialist journals align with real-world socialist policies? Do they support real-world socialist states?
Or do they foster a neutral apathy which conveniently aligns with US State Dept. doctrine?
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