Anti-Communism and the CIA A Comment
Walzer, Michael
I have one major disagreement with Lew Coser's article: this concerns his firm belief in the long-run ineffectiveness of CIA subversion in the fight against Communism. His example is a...
...When the act accuses, does the result excuse...
...A modem political tragedy occurs, Coser suggests in his paraphrase of Scheler, when the idea of anti-Communism "appears to be leading to the destruction of higher values...
...But if this describes the present situation, and if it were really tragic, there would be no reason to sympathize only with the "victims" of the CIA...
...I think that CIA agents and victims are not tragic figures because their anti-Communism was not simply a moral commitment parallel to a commitment to Scheler's "idea of Justice...
...His example is a democratic union in India struggling against a Maoist union...
...The case becomes much more interesting (and indignation less easy) if we assume what I expect is the case, that CIA subversion is at least sometimes effective in weakening local Communist forces...
...The price for the right to be indignant is self-scrutiny and public worry...
...If not, why not...
...It was also a convenient ideology, a compound, in varying proportions, of interest, patriotism, conformity, apocalyptic vision, and sometimes helpless, sometimes willful, ignorance—all of these justified (but inadequately) by the genuine moral importance of opposition to Stalinist regimes and parties...
...For if the danger of a Communist take-over of India were really very great, and if the result of such a take-over was certain to be a totalitarian regime, surely a secret U. S. subsidy to an anti-Communist union—assuming there were no better way of giving assistance—would be perfectly justified...
...Their anti-Communism led them also to risk higher values, and doubtless many of them were aware of the risks they were taking and thought themselves justified...
...Then we must ask: does this victory justify the means employed...
...It depends on how strong the democratic union has grown during the period when the subsidies were secret, on its capacities for internal reform once secrecy is broken, on what has happened in the meantime to Maoism in China, on the internal cohesion of the Maoist union, on the strategic skills of its leaders, etc...
...These are not, I think, tragic errors...
...But there is nothing inevitable about the outcome...
...He writes: "the minute it is revealed that this supposedly indigenous organization in effect relied on American secret subsidies, it will inevitably succumb to the onslaught of its Maoist rivals...
...Well, maybe...
...Surely, there is no invisible hand at work, guaranteeing that policies that make us indignant will also be politically ineffective...
...Are they tragic figures...
...What is necessary now is to separate out the morality from the ideology and to distinguish the actions which follow from each...
...they don't have that dignity...
...It is especially important that the democratic Left participate in this second exposure, for many of us (I don't mean to exclude myself) acquiesced in the myths, even if we generally opposed the policies that followed from them...
...And I suspect that making either of them will require some re-examination of the anti-Communism both of the U. S. generally and of the democratic Left...
...I won't pretend that this is an easy separation to make, but it seems to me that it is only by making it that we can express what was wrong with CIA activities: that they served political and material interests which often had little to do with anti-Communism, and that they rested upon a gross and to some degree deliberate exaggeration of the dangers posed by Communist subversion...
...It seems to me that the only way we can say no to these questions is by denying in each specific case that the danger posed by Communism is as great as the CIA, the U. S. government generally, and a very considerable number of American citizens believe it to be...
...If we are not willing to make either of these arguments, then I do not see that we have any business being indignant with the CIA...
...Why not with the agents of the CIA as well...
...But if we want to say, as Coser does and I do, that defeat of the Maoists cannot justify the secret subsidy, then we must argue either that their victory is not imminent or likely, or that its consequences would not be morally catastrophic...
...Not justified merely by success: they thought themselves justified in advance of success or failure by the terrible threat of Communist totalitarianism...
...The exposure of the CIA must be followed by a less exciting but more important exposure of the myths, misunderstandings, and distortions of cold-war thought that justified the CIA...
...nor is it obvious that the people who made the errors are the ones who suffer for them...
Vol. 14 • May 1967 • No. 3
