The Liberal Conspiracy, by Peter Coleman
Muggeridge, John
BOOK REVIEWS IT n May 1967, Thomas Wardell Bra- den revealed to Saturday Evening Post readers that as part of the Cold War effort CIA funds laundered through American foundations had been used to...
...And of course it was among the Belles-lettresgate conspirators themselves that anguish and rage levels rose highest...
...Everything, that is, except protestations of innocence by British magazine editors...
...And here perhaps is the one drawback to Coleman's otherwise impeccable piece of historical reconstruction...
...their very faith in the possibility of social amelioration depended on ensuring that the Free World's future did work...
...State Department...
...Coleman, then, has no time for the anguish-and-rage brigade...
...T he great virtue of the Cold War was that it turned this obligation to innovate into a patriotic duty...
...one would like to ask Spender)—Coleman doesn't even bother addressing it...
...When, therefore, one hundred writers, artists, and scientists found themselves invited to Berlin in June 1950 to launch the Congress for Cultural Freedom, few of them can have doubted that they owed their presence there to the U.S...
...Muggeridge was the one who had first suggested ofJohn Muggeridge teaches history at Niagara College in Welland, Ontario...
...We were all," he remembers, "hellishly uncomfortable, suspended in no man's land...
...Coleman quotes a prophecy concerning Spender made by his friend W. H. Auden...
...He simply assumes that the war of ideas Lasky and his fellow anti-Stalinists had signed up to fight in was a just one...
...Thus he views the Communist party line not as a polite fiction which honest intellectuals must sooner or later stop pretending to take seriously, but rather as a snapped tightrope into whose safety net he and his fellow travelers find themselves deposited...
...It could have had a wider perspective...
...The defense of intellectual liberty today," so the Congress for Cultural Freedom explained in its 1950 Berlin Manifesto, "imposes a positive obligation: to offer new and constructive answers to the problems of our time...
...Even "Julian" Fleischmann (so Spender feels more comfortable calling his shipboard friend) replied with a flat "No" when the anxious editor wrote asking whether there was any truth to the rumor that Farfield fronted for the CIA...
...It was their equivalent of Tetzel selling indulgences...
...Not Lasky...
...He even stumbled on the Farfield connection—not by reading the check that arrived every other month to defray his office expenses, but, according to his memoirs, by chatting with Farfield's president himself during an Aegean cruise on the latter's yacht—and still the penny did not drop...
...Consider the case of Dwight Macdonald...
...The Liberal Conspiracy rightly views the rise and fall of the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a chapter in the history of freedom, but doesn't it belong as appropriately to the history of leftism...
...It was a civil war on the left, a Marxist Protestant reformation, the great theological question under dispute being whether truth resides in the Communist party or in the hearts of individual believers...
...what enraged them, any suggestion that they themselves might knowingly have contributed to it...
...What has been saved, of course, is commitment to modernity and progress...
...Try as he may, Koestler seems unable to keep Christian imagery out of his novels, while his essay in The God That Failed has as its central concern the anguish that accompanies religious disillusionment...
...Encounter, for example, did not hesitate to combine support for the British Labour party's campaign to redistribute income, legalize homosexuality, democratize public schools, abolish capital punishment, freeze the sale of farmland, legislate racial equality, and press for world government while lamenting the persistence of political dogmatism...
...Love of truth obliged Spender to resign from Encounter, while Melvin J. Lasky, the very American editor he had proved guilty of culpable silence, not only stayed on staff, but, two decades later, continues to preside over the magazine's fortunes...
...Extensions of the American Way of Life just don't seem sinister to him...
...Nor do they seem to have felt the slightest compunction at accepting hospitality from such a quarter...
...No," he insists, "I don't feel personally responsible for Vietnam...
...Government, moreover, is the proper province of intellectuals...
...More accurately they were incorrigible believers...
...What restored their equilibrium was the Cold War...
...And this same Gladstonian Marxist goes on to claim that Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone, contributors with Spender to The God That Failed, a famous 1949 collection of essays by fallen-away Stalinists, "in the absolute sense .. . probably never were communists...
...Muggeridge, a founding father of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and president of the British Society for Cultural Freedom, had used his wartime spy contacts to get MI6 (Britain's CIA) to pay Encounter the equivalent of the coeditor's salary...
...That Macdonald knew his way around Encounter's backstage can also be inferred from his close friendship with Malcolm Muggeridge...
...Silone, who had once served on the executive of the Communist International, remained, despite his breach with Moscow, a faithfulsocialist, and in later life even added to the collection of external authorities requiring his submission of mind and will by publicly re-embracing Christianity...
...Not around the world, perhaps, but certainly in left-wing circles on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Some credit for having helped bring on this access of left-wing ecumenism must surely go to the Congress for Cultural Freedom...
...New Leftists turned out to be just another generation of terrible simplifiers whose resort to bigotry and violence Old Leftists never tired of drawing morals from...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 35...
...After all, as Spender in his contribution to the above-mentioned Commentary symposium recalls a fellow literato having recently remarked to him, it was hardly surprising that he had been lied to about CIA support for Encounter...
...Individual disavowers of Soviet peace-mongering might capture a microphone here, or publish Stalin's latest atrocity there, but like all behind-the-lines resistance fighters, without organized support from abroad, they had no hope of seriously discomfiting the enemy...
...For Koestler, moreover, it does not matter whether your faith is in this world or the next...
...Rather it was looked upon as the political philosophy which an enlightened freedom-lover would naturally aspire to...
...So they plumped for 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 Menshevism, and fought the Cold War to make the world safe for progress as well as democracy...
...But alas, in a world where everything is lies, honesty is bound to come out second best...
...Even transatlantic ones, so Spender would soon discover to his cost, were more likely to succumb to the uncandid spirit of the age...
...Less formal ties with the magazine are suggested, however, by a photograph in Coleman's book showing Macdonald with one arm affectionately draped over the shoulder of Julius Fleischmann, the Cincinnati millionaire whose Farfield Foundation was the very Laundromat used by the CIA to freshen up Macdonald's salary...
...This time the stranded leftist acrobats could get back on their feet only by dropping out of the Cold War effort and denouncing American imperialism...
...And as for Spender's worry that CIA involvement in arts funding had "introduced an element of backroom politics into intellectual activities which had previously been free from such things" (previous to when...
...22.95 John Muggeridge THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 33 snuffling after the New Left...
...No doubt he wrote "I think" just in case Braden's testimony should ever be successfully overturned...
...My anti-communism in the fifties," writes his son, "was based on the view that communism was something right that had gone wrong...
...At least it has managed to ensure that when President Gorbachev insists on the inseparability of glasnost and perestroika, he will get no serious argumentfrom our side of what less than a year ago was still an iron curtain...
...The Cold War, as Coleman so fascinatingly demonstrates, began by pitting not atheists against Christians or statists against libertarians or even socialists against capitalists, but progressives against progressives...
...Thus, when, four months after Braden squealed, Macdonald wrote about his Encounter involvement in the rueful tones of a man who admits to having been tricked into receiving stolen goods from a worthy-looking street vendor, skeptics had no basis for challenging his credibility...
...I was a special editor," Macdonald confesses in September 1967 to a Commentary symposium on "Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited," "unwittingly and `unwittily' as they say, and I think I was played for a sucker and I am still sore about it...
...here comes anguish...
...You will be a poet," Auden had once warned, "because you will always be humiliated...
...Moscow had after all started it by unleashing against the Free World what amounted in Coleman's estimation to cultural blitzkrieg...
...In a word, we could expect conservatism...
...In their version of contemporary history, they hadn't conspired...
...It taught us to assume that Stalin's regime was reactionary for one reason only: it was theocratic...
...Spender senior belonged to the British Liberal party, the central tenet of whose credo was that the British Constitution had been corrupted by Tories and High Churchmen...
...Macdonald had served for one year as Encounter's special editor...
...Interestingly enough, Encounter survived the scandal and so did encounterism...
...But the cold-warring non-dogmatic leftist par excellence was surely Daniel Bell, who in 1960 actually published a book called The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, only to refute his own thesis by confessing some twenty years later to having been "a lifelong Menshevik...
...Certainly it was enough of a blitzkrieg to have generated its own crop of quislings...
...So much so, in fact, that even H. G. Wells, its most venerable apostle, died damning humanity...
...Encounter got us used to the idea that any serious attack on Soviet totalitarianism must come from the left...
...What anguished these covertly funded writers and artists was above all the sorry state of American political morality Braden's article pointed to...
...In Vietnam we see . . . a sinister extension of 'the American way of life.' " Another babe in the Encounter woods was Stephen Spender...
...So has Menshevism entered our national soul, and now apparently also the national soul of our late Bolshevik opponents...
...Everything was lies nowadays...
...It was a case of either staying hellishly suspended over no man's land or plumping for Menshevism...
...But how could it have done so, given the conspiracy of silence the hapless Spender claims to have had to contend with...
...Bell's generation of post-Christian humanists had seen the Soviet future, and it didn't work...
...Why change a winning combination...
...warmongering at the 1949 Waldorf-Astoria International Peace Conference in Manhattan...
...By 1945, with atom bombs exploding, concentration camps giving up their ghastly secrets, and avant garden having no where else left to advance to but nihilism, the whole modernist-progressivist project of the last two hundred years seemed to be in jeopardy...
...Or even, given that outside China, Cuba, and Albania the 1903 schism between Lenin and Martov is now over, to the history of Marxism...
...Thanks to the Cold War, organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom have not only breathed new life into Menshevism, but have helped make it the Free World's established religion...
...It wasn't just that they were more conspired against than conspiring...
...Imagine John Dean writing not Blind Ambition, but Injured Innocence...
...As Moscow's strategy of plugging its amplifiers into Western intellectual power circuits continued to carry all before it, the need for a response in kind from Washington became moreand more obvious...
...Nor did Koestler make any better fist at practicing the high-minded rationalism Spender expected of him...
...Nor has Lasky had to give political ground...
...And both secret services backed leftism...
...In the same Commentary submission, Macdonald not only expresses annoyance at having been made a fool of by the CIA, but also dons collective sackcloth and ashes...
...Coleman neatly puts into perspective the furor over Belles-lettresgate by printing a photograph of Norman Mailer, author of one of the angriest and most self-righteous responses to Braden's revelations, posing in younger, curlier-headed days with Alexandr Fadeyev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Arthur Miller, and Olaf Stapledon, four of his fellow disavowers of U.S...
...Nor was this just because the postwar European right, having been libelously identified with the fascist dictatorships and thus discredited, had no where else to turn...
...Above all, the draft-card burners and blood spatterers should remind us to shun revolution and welcome enlightened change, to say no to the sort of feminism espoused by lesbians and witches, but yes to the variety incorporated in parliamentary statutes...
...losing it will cause pain...
...Nobody puts the Reform case more clearly than Stephen Spender, whose father had been a pillar of Edwardian Liberalism...
...he was, moreover, a frequent guest at the bimonthly luncheons during which Farfield's directors, in Muggeridge's words, "acted out the comedy" of voting subsidies for Encounter as a patriotic duty...
...So much for rage...
...There was a Cold War on, and war is the proper province of government...
...Then, providentially, an international crisis arose which necessitated renewed commitment to modernity and progress in the name of saving Western civilization...
...In the embattled forties and fifties it went without saying that the KGB backed "Peace" and the CIA, freedom...
...The truth is that in 1960 the sort of democratic socialism espoused by Mensheviks did not count as an ideology...
...No—they complain about the lack of it...
...In fact, Lasky gives Coleman's book a dust jacket plug which expresses, no doubt with utter sincerity, the veteran editor's wish that he could have written it himself...
...From 1947 on, no international arts festival or peace forum was complete without its resolution condemning militarism and fascist reaction in Washington, London, Paris, Taipei, or whatever other Free World capital happened to come in handiest, and there was never a dearth of local pacifists with no obvious Communist connections to lend the proper air of objectivity to such congresses for cultural surrender...
...fering an editorship to Macdonald, and it is, at least to this reviewer, whose duties then included that of family wine steward, beyond the realm of possibility that the two of them had not joked over after-dinner Scotch about Encounter's unlikely angel...
...He is what he has been since his student days: an anti-Communist progressive, and Encounter is edited accordingly...
...The trouble is there are no Muggeridge tapes...
...BOOK REVIEWS IT n May 1967, Thomas Wardell Bra- den revealed to Saturday Evening Post readers that as part of the Cold War effort CIA funds laundered through American foundations had been used to finance pro-Western intellectual enterprises such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and in particular its most prestigious offspring, Encounter...
...The ensuing scandal, so Peter Coleman claims in The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe, "caused anguish and rage around the world...
...The guilt one feels for such atrocities [his list of which, incidentally, includes not only "Vietnam" and "the development of the atomic bomb and its use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki," but also "Stalin's forced-labor camps" and "Hitler's wartime 'death camps' "1 is not personal but national: my country did these things, I am part of it, I have helped to shape it and have been shaped by it...
...For Coleman argues that the "liberal conspiracy" mentioned in his title, far from having irreversibly polluted public life in the Western democracies, provided such a "brilliant" and "timely" expose of Soviet totalitarianism that those same democracies were persuaded to continue resisting it...
...Spender, ever the ideological bloodhound, may have caught a fresh scent and, as readers of his The Year of the Young Rebels will recall, gone BELLES-LETTRESGATE THE LIBERAL CONSPIRACY: THE CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE MIND OF POSTWAR EUROPE Peter Coleman/The Free Press/247 pp...
...And no doubt had not modesty prevented him, Lasky would have written it himself...
...rather, according to Spender, they were incorrigible individualists who "had been merely pretending to themselves and to others that they had no doubts about the party line...
...Belles-lettres-gate made giving up the bourgeois ship seem reasonable...
...And now to complete Spender's poetic humiliation the task of chronicling Belles-lettresgate has fallen, not to some fellow New Leftist parnassian, but to Peter Coleman, editor of the Australian Encounter, Quadrant, and every inch as much a liberal cold warrior as Lasky...
...Do environmentalists or AIDS specialists chafe at federal funding...
...wherever orthodoxy came out of the barrel of a gun, we could expect, as in Soviet Russia, that art would be reduced to banality, science to superstition, public morality to KGB-enforced puritanism, and social policy to satisfying the special needs of party high-ups...
...For all the staunchness with which he himself had resisted it—no man more richly deserved his nickname: "Stainless Stephen"—Spender was still old-fashioned enough to feel surprise "that one editor—the American—," as he told Commentary readers, "should have concealed from his English colleague the fact known to him—now, on his own admission—for the past four years, that the magazine up till 1963 received funds deriving from the CIA and that, having this knowledge, he should have misled his colleagues into making false statements...
...It landed them safe and sound on the Free World side of no man's land, from which vantage point they could conveniently continue supporting left-wing causes while at the same time taking part in the current crusade among Western intellectuals to stamp out isms of every sort, including leftism...
...Spender, also a long-time acquaintance of Malcolm Muggeridge, spent fourteen years in the editorial chair at Encounter without once having reason to suspect the true identity of his paymasters...
...It continues to offer its readers the selfsame blend of advanced literary criticism, new poetry, and scholarly misgivings about Moscow's latest "reforms" that had proved so popular with them in the fifties and sixties...
...For haven't our congressmen for cultural freedom been hammering into us at least since 1950 that "the defense of existing freedoms, the reconquest of lost freedoms, and the creation of new freedoms are parts of the same struggle...
...But then came Vietnam and another snapping of tightropes...
Vol. 23 • June 1990 • No. 6
