Russiagate, again

"As it turns out, [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller can walk and chew gum at the same time," writes Digby Parton. (Beware, President Trump: Robert Mueller is just getting started Salon 03/01/2018)

All of us trying to pay attention to the Trump-Russia scandal by following the evidence are constantly challenged to be able to do the same thing. I wrote about this a month ago in Russia-Russia-Russia (again) 02/02/2018.

It's also very clear that establishment Democrats are now trying to smear progressives as Russian dupes. This might seem counter-intuive, since the Putin regime has the greatest ideological appeal to rightwing nationalists and white supremacists. But it's happening. Here's Hillary Clinton last fall: "And now that some of the potential 2020 candidates are starting to get public attention, they're getting hit, from both the left and the right, and sometimes, when it comes from the left, you're not sure if it's a Russian pretending to be an American on the left or not." (my emphasis) (Russia-gate, then and now 12/21/2017)

It was the Clinton campaign immediately after the election that took the position of blaming the results of the 2016 Presidential election on Russian interference. And, if anything, establishment Dems are even more insistent on that now. But if the Russian were not only determined to get Trump elected as President but succeeded in doing so, aren't the Hillaryites stepping on their own message by making the left particularly to blame for reflecting Russian propaganda?

But accusing opponents of being suckers for hostile foreign powers is a deeply-ingrained habit in American politics. In some cases, it's even been true. In the case of Russia, the accusation of collaboration and foreign sympathies usually fell onto the left and center-left. Jackson Lears in What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking London Review of Books 40:4 01/04/2018 describes the current round this way:

A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.

It seems pretty clear from what's in the public record so far that the Russian government or people working for it hacked the DNC. But the Lears' assertion that the Democrats have been making a clumsy effort effort to suppress criticism - especially "when it comes from the left" in Hilary's words - as being tainted by Russian deception and/or sympathy.

If the corporate Dems weren't so intent of fighting the Democratic left - about the only case in which they show a real willingness to fight - they were drop the Russia-determined-the-election bit and instead treat the Russian collaboration in which the Trump campaign indulged to some degree as one part of the mind-blowing brand of corruption and lawlessness on which the Trump Administration operates. The Trump-Russia collaboration is serious. The Russian direct meddling in the election is serious despite the invalidity of claiming it affected the outcome. Illegal Russian campaign funding is serious. Obstruction of justice is serious. the over-the-top corruption of running the White House as the holding company for the Trump family business.

How many of those serious issues turn out in (further) criminal charges remain to be seen. Nor is the scope of the problems. The point is the real story on all of those things needs to be told on a reliable basis for the public record.

Al Jazeera's Inside Story has an episode discussing the current level of corruption in the Trump Administration, Conflicts of interest in the White House? 03/04/2018. YouTube now dutifully notes below its videos that "Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government." Something I've known from the time I first started hearing about Al Jazeera. But if you're worried a 30-minute video will hypnotize you with subliminal programming that will turn you into a Qatari cutout, I would recommend skipping the video.

Miriam Elder and Charlie Warzel make an important point in Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything Buzzfeed 02/28/2018, specifically relating to the social media bots that the Democratic are gnashing their teeth over:

The thing is, nearly every time you see a story blaming Russian bots for something, you can be pretty sure that the story can be traced back to a single source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard, founded by a group of respected researchers, including Clint Watts and JM Berger, and currently run under the auspices of the German Marshall Fund. ...

The dashboard monitors 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence efforts online,” according to its own description, which means the accounts are not all directly traced back to Kremlin efforts, or even necessarily to Russia. “They are not all in Russia,” Watts said during a phone interview last week. “We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.” So, not bots.

We’ll likely never know the contents of the list for sure — because the researchers decline to divulge the identity of who they are monitoring. (The reasons they give for secrecy include worries that the accounts would then change their behavior and concerns over identifying accounts that are not, in fact, linked to Russian influence efforts, aka making a mistake.)

The action of bots - not just Russian ones = is also a legitimate concern. But for people trying to follow the evidence, retaining a critical perspective on the claims is important.

Jackson Lears takes an obviously different perspective that I'm using here. But he gives numerous reasons for a skeptical and critical approach to claims about Russian interference with reducing his point to a claim of a Deep State plot against Trump. I want to highlight one of his judgments here, "it is not only the Democratic establishment that is embracing the deep state. Some of the party’s base, believing Trump and Putin to be joined at the hip, has taken to ranting about ‘treason’ like a reconstituted John Birch Society." I worry that writing off the claims about Russian mischief and crimes around Trump and his Presidency campaign as a cynical power play by the "Deep State" risk validating the Republican/FOX News/Breitbart perspective that the whole thing is purely partisan politics. It's not. There are serious national security issues and concerns about the integrity of American elections involved. And those need to be clarified and adjudicated in the courts where appropriate.

The following section in Lears' piece feels to me uncomfortably close to saying that there is nothing especially heinous about the Trump Administration and his demagogic politics:

It’s hard for me to understand how the Democratic Party, which once felt scepticism towards the intelligence agencies, can now embrace the CIA and the FBI as sources of incontrovertible truth. One possible explanation is that Trump’s election has created a permanent emergency in the liberal imagination, based on the belief that the threat he poses is unique and unprecedented. It’s true that Trump’s menace is viscerally real. But the menace posed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was equally real. The damage done by Bush and Cheney – who ravaged the Middle East, legitimated torture and expanded unconstitutional executive power – was truly unprecedented, and probably permanent. Trump does pose an unprecedented threat to undocumented immigrants and Muslim travellers, whose protection is urgent and necessary. But on most issues he is a standard issue Republican. He is perfectly at home with Paul Ryan’s austerity agenda, which involves enormous transfers of wealth to the most privileged Americans. He is as committed as any other Republican to repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act. During the campaign he posed as an apostate on free trade and an opponent of overseas military intervention, but now that he is in office his free trade views are shifting unpredictably and his foreign policy team is composed of generals with impeccable interventionist credentials. [my emphasis]

But I can't really argue with that particular comparison. The Cheney-Bush Administration practiced a horrifying degree of lawlessness, from the criminal invasion of Iraq, to the torture program, to the Valerie Plame exposure, and on and on and on. "Halliburton" became a political synonym for stunning levels of corruption. The Iraq Provisional Government, aka, Young Republicans Abroad, was a caricature of incompetence in government. Karl Rove became the poster boy for exceptionally sleazy authoritarian politics.

And the Obama Administration with its self-selected goal of creating Bipartisan harmony gave the Chenyites the one thing they couldn't give themselves: a subsequent Administration of the other party that would refuse to prosecute the most serious crimes of the previous Administration.

This is one point where I'm consciously out of step with the prevailing Democratic attitude, reflected also in the prevailing assumption of mainstream media, that legal action against former officeholders is inappropriate and inherently a symptom of authoritarianism. If people really did commit crimes, they should be prosecuted. The failure to prosecute the torture perpetrators of the Cheney-Bush Administration has always been my primary criticism of the Obama Administration. Purely political prosecutions are wrong and illegitimate. But where real and serious crimes were committed, the perpetrators should be held legally accountable. The idea, and too often the reality, of Presidential impunity before the law is a poisonous assumption, incomparable with democracy and the rule of law.

The foreign policy aspect of the anti-Russian rhetoric is also important. From a realist perspective, it should be possible for Russia and the United States to compete in some areas, even on an adversarial basis, and cooperate on others like nuclear arms control and climate change. Being able to walk and chew gum at the same time is also a very practical attitude in foreign policy.

The Democratic Party's position toward the Soviet Union suggests a concern that they are making similar mistakes to those the party made in the 1950s. John Kenneth Galbraith in his signature dry, ironic style describes that position in The Age of Uncertainty (1977). The Secretary of State under Eisenhower was John Foster Dulles. Galbraith recalls that Dulles successfully defined the Cold War as a semi-religious mission for the United States, "The Cold War was a moral crusade. It was also a religious crusade. And it came close to being a Christian crusade. There was more than a hint that a strong, even militant policy, so long as it avoided 'brute power,' would have the endorsement of Jesus." (This, by the way, is something to remember when anti-militarists point to Eisenhower as pragmatic advocate of peace.)

Galbraith proceeds to describe the Democratic opposition to Eisenhower's policies:

The nineteen-fifties in Washington were the years not of Eisenhower but of Dulles. The idea of the irrepressible conflict went virtually unchallenged. The questioning to which, in a democratic socie ty, every important action of the state should be subject was almost comple tely in abeyance. I saw this, in a minor way, at first hand. I was cochairman with Dean Acheson in the latter fifties of one of the subsidiary organs of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Advisory Council. Acheson was chairman for foreign policy, I for domestic policy. The Council was, by common agreement, the most liberal wing of the opposition - the leading edge. At our meetings [Truman's Secretary of State Dean] Acheson attacked Dulles lucidly, brilliantly and with resourceful invective for being too soft on the Soviets. The debate on his draft foreign policy resolutions consisted almost exclusively of efforts - by Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Herbert Lehman and other moderate members - to tone down his declarations of war. That was the opposition to Dulles. [my emphasis]

Establishment Democrats have already gone a long way down that same reckless road in the current situation.

They should be able to do better.

Syria, "isolationism" and Beltway Village hackery

I hate to think of Michael Tomasky as a hack.

But when it comes to foreign policy, he's certainly starting to sound that way. (Not that it will be bad for his journalistic career.)

His stinker of a column When Liberals Enable Tyrants Daily Beast 09/06/2013 was a big sign of that tendency. (I griped about that one here.)

In The Case Against Isolation Daily Beast 09/13/2013, he's less crass but more stereotypically conventional. In that piece, he's whacking the favorite straw-man of the foreign policy establishment, isolationism.

Andrew Bacevich, who is studiously ignored by the Very Serious People to whom Tomasky is conforming here, has pointed out that "isolationism" in a serious sense was never the threat to US foreign policy that it was conventionally taken to be in the Cold War and now in the Long War, an extension of the Cold one. Actual isolationists are people of the Ron "Papa Doc" Paul variety, who want to pull military bases out of all other countries, has always been a fringe position. Those advocating a less aggressive, less militarized foreign policy are with few exceptions advocating a different kind of engagement in the world, not the creation of some autarkic US island nation cut off from the rest of the world. Even the fans of Papa Doc and Rand "Baby Doc" Paul hold up economic relations as the salvation of US foreign policy.

It's true that Baby Doc has become more prominent in the Republican Party as a Senator than Papa Doc ever was. And it's also true that far right ideology is more dominant in the Republican Party today than it ever has been. And that's what gives Tomasky's stodgy take on the situation some superficial plausibility:

The foreign-policy history of the Republican Party is a history of the battle between the nativist isolationists and the bellicose internationalists. I’ve always found it interesting that the GOP should encompass both frothing extremes, while the Democrats have tended to occupy the saner (not always so sane, admittedly) middle ground. Historically, I would argue, the GOP defaults toward isolationism, because that was the natural reflex of many of the party's key constituent elements in the early 20th century (Southern and Midwestern agrarians, self-made capitalists).

It takes a cataclysmic and frightening event for the warmonger wing of the party to win the day. The Iron Curtain and the advent of the Cold War was one such effect. One can thus think of the GOP's general hard-line posture during the Cold War as a break from the norm, albeit a very long one indeed. September 11 was another. But this interregnum lasted not 40 years, but 12; so now, a dozen years and two expensive and wearying wars later, the war caucus is losing again, and the party is reverting to its original isolationist roots.

Can such a well-known political journalist as Michael Tomasky really be this clueless about the last century or so of American political history? I'll get to the two fundamental misunderstandings of what Republican "isolationism" actually is about in a minute. But first:

• The Republican Party's "key constituent elements in the early 20th century" also included black voters, Progressives and some union voters.
• Republican President and later Bull Moose Party progressive leader Teddy Roosevelt was anything but an isolationist; on the First World War, he was as militant a jingoist as one could find.
• Despite the strong level of antiwar sentiment prior to Pearl Harbor, the 1940 Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie was a liberal and not just relative to the Troglodytes in his Party; Willkie supported key Roosevelt interventionist policies like the Lend-Lease Act that were bitterly opposed by isolationists.
• Republicans belligerence and paranoia about the Soviet Union long preceded the "cataclysmic and frightening" events of the Second World War, the postwar establishment of Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe and the victory of the Communists in China.
• Tomasky's math is a bit confusing, but if we take 1949 as the start of the Cold War, he apparently thinks that in only, well, 52 of the last 64 years the Republican Party was non-isolationist, but that isolationism should be seen as the norm for Republican foreign policy.
• Anyone checking the foreign policy positions of Republican Presidents, Presidential candidates and Members of Congress from, say, 1989 to 09/11/2001 may be surprised to see that the saber-rattling and chest-thumping rhetoric and the endless demands for more military spending and accusations that the Democrats are weak on foreign policy amount to "isolationism."

But even we assume for the sake of argument that the Papa Doc/Baby Doc/John Birch Society brand of isolationism is now the Republican Party new-old normal, there are two things about it that Tomasky seems to miss completely.

The far right brand of isolationism is based on xenophobia, extreme nationalism and militarism.

Papa Doc in one of the Presidential debates in the last cycle let it slip that even though he was opposed to foreign military bases, he wasn't necessarily opposed to having the same number of bases we currently have just, but he wanted to see them all inside the United States. The "libertarian" ideology to which such isolationism is joined at the hip is highly authoritarian and regards the military and the police as about the only legitimate public institutions. And while the ideologues like Papa Doc and Baby Doc may grip about particular wars, the generally militaristic and xenophobia attitude to which they pander and encourage is generally pretty supportive of a muscular foreign policy.

Tomasky may not have much noticed. But the Republican Party in Congress today is crassly, narrowly partisan. The fact they might criticize or oppose some military action of the Obama Administration doesn't mean they're doing so out of pacifist principle. They oppose many Obama Administration policies just because they are Obama Administration policies that they would cheerfully and self-righteously support under a Republican President.

(Tomasky does acknowledge this, but he puts is down to hypocrisy and opportunism, which he considers less morally reprehensible than wicked isolationism.)

If their candidate is running the war, it's good. If the Kenyan Muslim socialist Islamist atheist userper currently in the White House is running it, it's bad. Claire Conner's autobiography of growing up Bircher, Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America's Radical Right (2013), gives some good descriptions of how this thinking works. Although it may often be more a clinical psychological symptom than thinking. She recalls that in the 1960s, the Bircher position was that US involvement in the Vietnam War was a big Jew Commie plot. But that if their favorite George Wallace were to become President and fought the same war, it would be an anti-Communist war. Or something.

The point is that even in actual isolationism, one needs to read the lips of its advocates pretty closely.

Tomasky is also stuck on the favorite conceit of the foreign policy establishment and especially the neocons, the idea that we're always fighting "Hitler" or about to fight "Hitler": "If there had been more isolationist Republicans in Congress in 1940, we'd never have armed Britain, and there’s every chance Britain would have fallen to Hitler."

Tomasky proceeds to explain that it was too dang isolationist to not pick up the Soviets' war in Afghanistan immediately after they decided they'd had enough of it:

The last Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989. Then the civil war started. The United States of course had armed the mujahedeen. But at the end of the Cold War, there was no appetite in Congress for American involvement in a remote and barren little country’s civil war. The United States left matters in the hands of the warlords, which in reality meant leaving them in the hands of Pakistan and to some extent Saudi Arabia. The U.S. withdrawal was seen as a betrayal by many Afghans. It created the vacuum into which the Taliban finally stepped in 1994. The Taliban made common cause with Al Qaeda and gave its leaders and soldiers a safe haven, and I believe you know what happened next. So our decision in the early 1990s to wash our hands of Afghanistan helped set off a series of events that brought us September 11.

Dude, are you serious? I already know the answer to that: no, he's Very Serious. And this passes for good sense among the Very Serious People. The idea that we might have though through matters a little more carefully when we were promoting a toxic new brand of Islamic jihadism back in the 1980s is not something that easily penetrates into the hermetically sealed world of our VSPs.

He does allow, "If our advisers had maintained a presence in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, we’d quite possibly have done something wrong or terrible in some other direction." The idea that we might have gone one doing something questionable or downright stupid in Afghanistan does not seem to have occurred to him.

And since the Dead Babies appeal he was previously using to promote a US war against Syria seems to have fallen flat for the moment, he's going for neo-dominoes:

That is what will happen in the Middle East if we aren't engaged. Iran will have the run of the place. Assad will butchers tens of thousands more people. Hezbollah will control Lebanon and arm itself to the teeth for the next war with Israel. Put humanitarian concerns — for example, that we should step in to stop the slaughter of innocents — completely to the side. There's a hard-headed argument against isolationism, and it’s precisely this: A world without the United States military and United Nations peacekeepers would in fact be an operatically more violent and ruthless world than the one we have, and one in which blowback would be much more likely to hit us where we live one day.

So, if we let Iran and Israel be the ones to decide to have war after war after war in the Middle East, that will make people there hate Americans more than if the United States is the one that has war after war after war in the Middle East.

And, yes, in the Beltway Village, this actually passes for Seriousness.

For additional aspiring hackery, he can check Tomasky's OK, John Kerry, You’re On Daily Beast 09/11/2013, in which he has a big sad because the Secretary of State may have fumbled starting that war with Syria that Michael Tomasky was so looking forward to: "Kerry has been rather shaky on Syria up to this point. Loose lips. Some very strange remarks, especially that one about an 'unbelievably small' attack. Yikes. I don't know what made him say those particular words ..." In the Village, avoiding an unnecessary war counts as a big disappointment.

Tags: cold war, isolationism, syria

Obama, Eisenhower and Syria

Jon Western at the foreign policy blog Duck of Minerva draws a comparison between Obama's decision-making on the recent attempt at a military invention in Syria and Dwight Eisenhower's during the French crisis at Dienbienphu, Obama's Dienbienphu Moment? 09/12/2013.

President Dwight Eisenhower, King Saud of Saudi Arabia, Vice President Richard Nixon, 1957

One might get the impression reading about the anti-Vietnam War movement that it was an unprecedented moment of unpopularity for a foreign war.

But the Korean War was also unpopular, though it didn't generate the same kind of protests the Vietnam War would a decade and a half later. Still, Westerns's piece reminds us that the general public in those early Cold War years wasn't in some wild warmongering mood all the time. Writing about the 1953-4 period when France's troubles in holding out in Indochina became acute, he says that Eisenhower faced a real barrier in public opinion to more active involvement in support of the French:

The problem was that public opinion was overwhelming opposed to intervention. In September of 1953, Gallup polling revealed that only 9% of the public supported fighting in Indochina. George Gallup made a striking notation by footnoting an editorial comment in the release of the September poll: "The size of the disapproval vote is unusually significant. Rarely in the polling annals has opinion divided in such a lopsided fashion as it does in the case of the troops to Indochina issue." That number ran consistently below 15% support throughout the spring of 1954 as the crisis escalated. Other polls suggested wider support, but only if the action included broad international support and active contribution from others.

That opposition came from multiple sources. First, in the wake of Korea (and the legacy of a bad war) there was a strong aversion in the public – and among the Never Again crowd in the U.S. Army – against launching another limited land-war in Asia. Second, there was a general opposition on the basis of estimated costs of war. Korea had been initially sold as likely to be a relatively cheap and easy effort, it wasn't. And, finally, there were many who opposed intervening on behalf of French colonialism – both for moral and prudential reasons. Many saw Ho Chi Minh's rebellion more as a nationalist inspired, not communist driven, campaign. [my emphasis]

And there were other times in which public reluctance to getting drawn into war was particularly strong:

There are many cases where we’ve seen the constraints of public opinion on presidential decisions: Roosevelt faced a deeply embedded isolationist Congress and public on the war in Europe from September of 1939 until Pearl Harbor; Clinton, and much of the international community, clearly floundered on Bosnia because of concerns of widespread public opposition to intervention; and, Reagan desperately believed that the United States should do more to support the Contras in Nicaragua – and despite his popularity, landslide victory in 1984, and his label as the "Great Communicator," he was blocked by Congress and overwhelming public opposition in his efforts to shift American policy to support the Contras – a constraint [that] ultimately led to the administration’s attempt to do an end run on Congress and the Iran-Contra crisis.

Western's piece is also a reminder that Eisenhower as President was not the kind of dove some liberal and progressive commentators now try to make him out to be. Yes, he was right about the military-industrial complex and had more pragmatic restraint in foreign policy than some later Presidents. But Western argues that he would liked to have been able to intervene directly to save the French colonial cause in Indochina.

Tags: barack obama, cold war, eisenhower, syria, vietnam war

The War on Terrorism and the Cold War

Patrick Smith raises a point that I'm glad to see people raising in There is no terrorist threat: The feds want you to think there is, compliant media goes along Salon 08/09/2013:

After a week of ghost stories about an imminent but vaporous plot on the part of an al-Qaida "affiliate" — this is the big new word — it is hard to decide which is more disheartening: 1) The White House’s blithe if clumsy deployment of factoids, 2) the supine complicity of the media (and this, frankly, is my choice), or 3) the willingness of honorable liberals and capital-D Democrats to go along with the show simply because Obama is maestro and one stays with Obama no matter what he does.

Nothing can be said for certain as to what prompted the State Department to close more than 20 embassies and consulates in the Middle East and North Africa last Sunday, and this is by design. But it is no excuse not to raise the possibility that Americans are eating a summer salad of nonsense served to justify objectionable surveillance practices now coming in for scrutiny.

There also seems to have been a rejuvenation of the term "Al Qaeda" for all Muslim terrorists and terrorist-wannabes. (Except the ones that may momentarily be on Our Side, of course, like the MEK group that was recently de-listed from the US designation as a terrorist organization.) "Al Qaeda" has taken on the role of all-purpose bogeyman that Communism was assigned during the Cold War.

And while the start of the Cold War is considerably more complicated that the following quote describes, it's a good historical reminder:

Now that we are onto history and the purposeful production of paranoia, let us revisit the late winter of 1947 — March 12, to be exact. That is the day Harry Truman began the Cold War, by the reckoning of many (not all) scholars. Truman wanted to send $400 million to the Greek monarchy to suppress a popular, mixed-bag rebellion. But would a stingy, isolationist Congress buy into this momentous move? The American public was in no mood, either. (In the bargain, the monarchy in Athens was crypto-fascist even by the accounts of State Department diplomats.)

Truman found a friend in the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Arthur Vandenberg, who delivered a line long famous among Cold War historians. Come to the Hill, Vandenberg urged. "Make a personal appearance before Congress and scare the hell out of the American people." Truman did, Congress clapped, the Greeks got the military aid, and Americans got desirably scared. So ensued the wastage of the next 42 years.

Tags: cold war, domestic spying

Political violence and "existential politics"

I've posted an essay at SCRIBD.com that I just completed called Herbert Marcuse, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Political Violence and "Existential Politics."

We think of the "culture war" in the United States as largely a product of "the Sixties", which in American political-cultural terms extended to 1972 (the McGovern-Nixon election) or 1973 (the formal end of direct US participation in the Vietnam War).

But there was also a conventional liberal front in the "culture war" which found them partially on the same side as conservatives. On the one hand, the liberals sided with the civil rights movement against the segregationists, and there was a considerable overlap between liberals and the civil rights movement. But liberals were also supportive of the general direction of Cold War policies and, to varying degrees, many were supportive of the Vietnam War although that supported waned with time and military failure there. One of the things that distinguished George McGovern’s position on foreign policy from what McGovern's adherents in 1972 were known to deride as "Cold War liberals" was his straightforward opposition to the Vietnam War and his broader criticism of Cold War assumptions about the special virtue of American power and the external threat of Communism.

As I was reading a 1968 article by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "Existential Politics and the Cult of Violence", largely devoted to criticizing Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the New Left movement with which he was identified, it occurred to me that Schlesinger's argument had an awful lot in common with the more bewildered reactions to the Occupy movement. (Schlesinger's piece appeared in The Phi Delta Kappan 50/1 (Sept 1968), pp. 9-15. The text is based on an address Schlesinger gave on June 5, 1968, the day after Robert Kennedy’s assassination.)

Engaging with Schlesinger's piece led me to compose the essay, which covers several themes of particular concern for me: political violence; the complex relationship of political ideology/philosophy and political practice; the liberal variant of Cold War political ideology in the US; the thought of the Frankfurt School, framed by Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse as "critical theory"; and, in particular, the enduring insights contained in Marcuse's essay "Repressive Tolerance" which Schlesinger attempted to skewer in 1968.

Much of Schlesinger's criticism of Marcuse and his "Repressive Tolerance" essay of 1965 borders on the tendentious, apparently due to an attempt to pigeonhole Marcuse's thought as a familiar Marxism that could be ritually refuted, a Marxism that was defined as part of "that which is not of the Establishment" in the "publicized and administered" language of the day, to use Marcuse's words from "Repressive Tolerance".

Schlesinger's actual discussion of "Repressive Tolerance" doesn't even qualify as a bad caricature either of Marcuse’s thought or specifically of the essay on which he focuses. Schlesinger basically rolled out some of his favorite Cold War, anti-Communist clichés, found passages in "Repressive Tolerance" on which to hang them, and threw in an "evil" here and a "Stalinist" there.

It certainly doesn't rise to the level of Schlesinger’s professional historical work.

And perhaps ironically, Schlesinger shares with Marcuse and the Sen. Jack Kennedy of the famous "Algeria” speech of 1957 a straightforward recognition that political violence in the real world has played and continues to play a real and significant role, even recognizing that (in Schlesinger’s own words) a "limited amount of violence may stimulate the process of democratic change."

Despite his eagerness to brand Marcuse as an instigator of violence, he provides no real solution to the real-life dilemma that, even though, "Violence [and] the irresponsible promotion of insurrections are bad practices in democracy," (Mario Wainfeld, La chispa y las realidades Página/12 23.12.2012) nevertheless a "limited amount of violence may stimulate the process of democratic change" (Schlesinger).

In his caricature of Marcuse's political thought, Schlesinger makes use of a dubious concept of "existentialist politics" which doesn't seem to be founded on a real understanding of either Herbert Marcuse's thinking or of the philosophy of existentialism. In the process, Schlesinger provides a good illustration of what narrow constraints that framework of Cold War liberalism could impose on clear thought.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, cold war, existentialism, franz fanon, herbert marcuse, political violence

John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: The Fatal Competition", the Cold War

Continuing with John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 documentary series, The Age of Uncertainty, Episode 8, The Fatal Competition, this one dealing with the Cold War:

Galbraith himself was in Germany in the days following the end of the Second World War in Europe. In the companion volume, he says the following about that period:

Soldiers, businessmen, civil servants, diplomats, assorted idlers and black marketeers were gathered in the city [Berlin] for the tasks of the occupation. By 1946, two parties were taking form: one party wanted very much to get along with the Russians. They - I should say we, for I was among them - saw little hope for a world in which there was conflict between the two powers. [I.e., if there were conflict between the US and the USSR, there would be little hope for the world.] There were things to encourage us. When we met socially with the Russians, we learned how grim had been their experience with war, how passionate was their fear of another. Some of our senior army people were similarly moved. They had experienced war and wanted no more of it. We had as symbolic allies our enlisted men. They were meeting regularly with their Russian counterparts for the sale and exchange of merchandise; the market was in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate which stands between East and West Berlin. Thus they showed that trade was above ideology, that when the armed representatives of capitalism met the armed might of Communism, the natural tendency was not to fight but to do a little business.

There was a second party. It regarded our hopes as ridiculously soft-headed. (There is an interesting point here: political wisdom is thought always to lie with the hard, impervious head and the tough, unyielding mind. One wonders why.) Some members of this group were only concerned to show how tough and hence how intelligent they were. But some, the Foreign Service Officers especially, spoke out of a genuine knowledge of Stalin and the great purges and a genuine concern for his intentions. Also the Soviet activities in Eastern Europe left no room for doubt. It was easy to assume that these would be the same in Western Europe as well.

Present too were the pathologically belligerent, those who even more than the poor are always with us. And there were a few for whom the war had been an exciting thing, a blessed ·escape from dull jobs, dull wives, deadly routine. Better another war than going back to Toledo, Ohio, or Nashua, New Hampshire. [my emphasis]

And, he observes, "On occasion, the debate became rather intense."

Galbraith was not adverse to noting the existence and influence of what President Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial complex:

The Air Force, in particular, had expanded wonderfully in power, prestige, men and airplanes [during the Second World War]. And a whole new industry had come into existence to provide the equipment and technology and share the gains. There followed a very simple, very practical point, far too obvious to be ignored. If there were a continuing menace, these gains would be continued. If not, they would be lost. The Soviets, not the French, not the British, not the Germans, were obvious candidates to be the new menace.

No one - certainly not many - argued that the gains of war should be preserved by the invention of a new menace . This is not the kind of thing that is said openly; the world has little to fear from forthrightly cynical men. Not many admitted this motivation even to themselves. Personal interest always wears the disguise of public purpose, and no one is more easily persuaded of the validity or righteousness of a public cause than the person who stands personally to gain therefrom . Those who perceive the underlying role of self-interest often hesitate to cite it. Nothing so interrupts the flow of polite conversation and so badly repays an invitation to drink and dine. [my emphasis]

Tags: age of uncertainty, cold war, john kenneth galbraith

Postpartisanship, classic Daniel Bell version (2): All the big problems are solved ("in the West")

Part 1 of this post looked at the political environment in which Daniel Bell was writing the essays collected as The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960; I'm using the 1965 revised edition here). He was very much a part of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and others associated with their outlook. As discussed in Part 1, the CCF was covertly funded by the CIA to provide a highbrow counter to anti-Cold War advocacy by prominent intellectuals.

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Simply dismissing Communism and Marxism as we see today in the popular press was not an option for such a grouping of intellectuals in the 1950s. With the Communist world  - or the "socialist camp" as they themselves preferred to call it - then including the USSR, China and the Warsaw Pact nations, an effective Cold War approach for such a group would have to address their doctrines more directly. The End of Ideology represents Bell's attempt to perform just that task.

On one level, it seems odd to think of the 1950s as an "end of ideology" period. There were intense political controversies in the US at the time over issues like civil rights, the Korean War, and alleged Communist infiltration of the federal government (McCarthyism). Under their high risk nuclear doctrine known as Tripwire/Massive Retaliation, the Eisenhower Administration kept a lid on military expenditures, while the Democrats heartily criticized them for doing so. When the Russians put Sputnik into orbit in 1958, there was no shortage of bitter recriminations against each other among American politicians.

But the kind of Cold War end-of-ideology consensus represented by a group like the CCF didn't deny those differences. It included conservatives and left-liberals. And the focus of the CCF on combating Communism and promoting the Cold War in western Europe and the US meant that it couldn't be restricted to narrow conservatism. Ex-Trotskyists like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol who later became famous as neoconservatives fit well into that niche, because they could address Marxist ideology on its own terms and also make arguments that liberals couldn't simply dismiss as die-hard anti-New Deal grumping. The more conservative among the CCF-type intellectuals might be more attentive to arguments from business for lighter regulation, the more left-leaning to efforts at establishing American-style democracy in the segregated Deep South states. But they were united in a triumphal narrative that considered any fundamental challenge to the American brand of democratic government and capitalist economy to be fully settled.

In the US, there was also the particulars of the two-party arrangement. Defenders of Southern segregation and champions of Keynesian economic policy were united in the Democratic Party, while the Republicans also had their conservative hardliners like Robert Taft but a President generally considered a moderate, and there were actual liberals within the Party. Ideological differences didn't break down obviously along party lines in many instances, and the need to fudge them within both parties was an incentive to fuzzy, non-ideological rhetoric around them.

Bell's The End of Ideology is not an argument that such controversies as civil rights or labor disputes were unimportant. It is an argument against any kind of fundamental criticism of the Cold War or the American political and economic system. Criticisms that fell outside that consensus were not respectable, not ones that would be recognized as valid by what Paul Krugman today calls the Very Serious People.

The End of Ideology is reminiscent of a Tom Friedman column. But without the taxi drivers. There are strains in society, he argues, but the comfortable assumptions of the society have moved beyond serious question. "The intellectual rehabilitation of American capitalism is being completed while the reality itself is rapidly changing," he writes. (p. 94)

The first essay in the book is called "America as a Mass Society: A Critique," based on a 1955 paper for the CCF. The 1950s saw a great deal of what became known as "mass society" analysis focused on the homogenizing tendencies of modern societies, a matter that was given new urgency by the rise of powerful mass communication instruments like radio and television and the mass mobilizations seen in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. One might think an argument that modern society had such homogenizing effects would be attractive to someone wanted to demonstrate an "end of ideology." But Bell rejects the notion:

The moralist may have his reservations or give approval - as some see in the breakup of the family the loss of a source of essential values, while others see in the new, freer marriages a healthier form of companionship - but the singular fact is that these changes emerge in a society that is now providing one answer to the great challenge posed to Western - and now world - society over the last two hundred years: how, within the framework of freedom, to increase the living standards of the majority of people and at the same time maintain or raise cultural levels. For these reasons, the theory of the mass society no longer serves as a description or Western society but as an ideology of romantic protest against contemporary life. [my emphasis] (p. 38)

Postwar US society, we might say, was the best of all possible worlds. It was certainly solving the problems of capitalism that had given rise to the classic Marxist challenge to that system. To admit that some fundamental problem exist in capitalist civilization, or in "modernity", would open the way to fundamental criticism that could not be allowed within the Cold War dichotomy.

But this wasn't a killer-capitalism or Gilded Age perspective in which the losers were losers because of their moral failures and the rich wealthy because of God's favor or their superior personal qualities. What looked to other like a threat to the integrity of individual people or even a menace to self-government was for Bell a virtuous solving of the problems of the last 200 years: "The mass society is the product of change - and is itself change. It is the bringing of the 'masses' into a society, from which they were once excluded." (p. 38)

And the problems of that society are reassuringly manageable:

The key question remains one of political economy. On a technical level, economic answers to the organization of production, control of inflation, maintenance of full employment, etc. are available. Political answers, in an interest-group society like ours, are not so easy. But in the long run the problems of the distribution of burdens and the nature of controls cannot be deflected. The "statist" needs of a semi-war economy with its technical imperatives must clash with the restless anti-statist attitudes of the corporate managers. The first Republican administration in twenty years, even though it represents these anti-statist corporate managers, is not able to change drastically the course of government spending. The international situation imposes the same imperatives on Republicans as on Democrats, and the semi-war that is made necessary by it inevitably casts government in the role of controller and dominator of the economy. The real political question in domestic affairs will then become which of the groups will bear the costs of the added burdens. [my emphasis in bold] pp. 93-4)

The Cold War is beyond respectable challenge in that view. Democrats and Republicans are agreed on the basic size and function of government. And the Cold War - forced entirely by the "international situation" and certainly not by some class interest, military-industrial complex or cynical political calculation - has the happy effect of keeping Republicans and Democrats in line with respectable opinion, the "conventional wisdom," as John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed it in The Affluent Society (1958).

He devotes a chapter to attacking C. Wright Mills' widely-known book The Power Elite (1956), pronouncing Wright to be "a 'vulgar' Marixst" (p. 62) for suggesting that there might be a dominant economic class in the US that also seeks to exercise political power. Mills, Bell argues, "is motivated by his enormous anger" because, after all, "Many people do feel helpless and ignorant and react in anger." He specifically objects to Mills' suggestion that there might be any internal business or other interest that might have some less-than-completely-patriotic interest in the Cold War. He writes (emphasis his), "United States foreign policy since 1946 ... was not a reflex of any internal social divisions or class issues in the United States but was based on an estimate of Russia's intentions." (p. 72) The Vietnam War would eventually make such criticisms much more prominent, however much Daniel Bell and the Very Serious People of 1960 might have wished to ban them from respectable discussion, as uncouth "anger" on the part of the "helpless and ignorant."

The chapter on "The Failure of American Socialism" makes an argument that is a staple of what American Republicans today proudly call American Exceptionalism, a phrase apparently invented by Joseph Stalin. The core of Bell's version of the argument is that socialists and anyone of similar inspiration are essentially religious fanatics, like the leader in the German Peasant War of 1524–25, Thomas Münzer, or the "radical Anabaptists," known for their theocratic city-state in Munster of 1533-5. Bell argues that "not only the anarchist, but every socialist, every convert to political messianism, is in the beginning something of a chiliast," which in Bell's understanding is someone engaged in "the ecstatic effort to realize the Millennium at once." (pp. 280-1)

Anabaptists, Commies: Daniel Bell thought they were all the same
Here Jan van Leiden (1509-1536) prepares for the beheading of one of his 16 wives, Elisabeth Wantscherer for criticizing him

His argument comes down to the fact that Communists and socialists are inherently fanatics and can't operate in democratic politics because they are determined to be Anabaptists hacking off heads. The "twentieth-century Communist" is completely stuck with Anabaptist fanaticism. "He is the perpetual alien living in the hostile enemy land. ... His is the ethic of 'ultimate end'; only the goal counts, the means are inconsequential. Bolshevism thus is neither int he world nor of it it, but stands outside." A socialist may step out of that rigid fanaticism, but then he cease to be serious about his inherently Utopian goal. He praises US Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas for being what he seems to regard as an amiable loser. "If [Eugene] Debs was, at bottom, the sentimentalist of American socialism, Norman Thomas has been its moral figure." Thomas, he says, was "a man whose instincts are primarily ethical" and that has made him "the genuine moral man in the immoral society." But as such, he found himself "caught inextricably in the dilemmas of expediency, the relevant alternatives, and the lesser evil." (pp. 289, 290)

Somehow in Bell's presentation, Thomas both retained his moral purity, making him like unto a religious prophet, but nevertheless avoided doctrinaire purity and engaged in ethical behavior by entering into the practical compromises of real-world democratic politics, and apparently both things made him an ineffectual figure. Because this whole socialism business is just un-American. Or something. He concludes, "For the socialist movement, living in but not of the world, [compromise] was a wisdom which it could not accept. Doctrine remained; but the movement failed." This being a highbrow presentation, it wouldn't have been prudent for him to add the implied, "And thank God for that! Dang Commies!!" But the tone fits.

A chapter taken from a paper presented to a 1958 CCF conference, "Two Roads From Marx: The Themes of Alienation and Exploitation and Workers' Control in Socialist Thought," indicates how central Cold War concerns were to Bell's end-of-ideology position. The paper has some nice things to say about social-democratic attempts to improve workers' control of the workplace, and even gives a nod to the unorthodox experiment in that regard then taking place in Yugoslavia, which had broken away the Soviet Union in 1948 in its foreign policy. He also praises in a limited way Georg (György) Lukács and his work on Hegelian influences on Marx' thought. Lukács had fallen out of official favor in the Soviet bloc, serving as he did as Hungarian Minister of Culture during the revolt of 1956. The postwar Soviet philosophical line strongly de-emphasized Hegel's influence on Marxist thought, which caused some amount of upheaval in East Germany philosophy and, in a perhaps surprising twist, retarded the study of physics in the Soviet bloc. Lukács and Ernst Bloch were particular targets of criticism for their Hegelian emphasis in Marxist philosophy.

But Bell wasn't going very far down the road of praising dissident East European thinkers:

What is remarkable, in fact, is that in the last few years in Europe, a whole school of neo-Marxists, taking inspiration from Lukacs, have gone back to the early doctrines of alienation in order to find the basis for anew, humanistic interpretation of Marx. To the extent that this is an effort to find a new, radical critique of society, the effort is an encouraging one. But to the extent-and this seems as much to be the case-that it is a form of new myth-making, in order to cling to the symbol of Marx, it is wrong. For while it is the early Marx, it is not the historical Marx. The historical Marx had, in effect, repudiated the idea of alienation. [my emphasis in bold] (p. 365)

That last idea is highly questionable, as his insertion of "in effect" indicates. It's notable that in this essay he undertook to show some grasp of the German philosophical background of Marxism, though he makes sure to tell us that even on his philosophical insight on alienation, "Marx's followers drew the 'vulgar' implications from these conclusions." And Marx "in effect" repudiated them anyway, in Bell's view. He concludes the essay by arguing that enlightened management techniques can address whatever problems might be bound up with the nature of work. "The fullness of life must be found in the nature of work itself," he argues, and "the work place itself ... must be the center of determination of pace and tempo of work." (p. 392) Whatever psychological-social problems of "alienation" might exist, they could be addressed as a technical management issue. Neither the class structure of society nor the organization of economic enterprises were especially relevant.

His epilogue is called "The End of Ideology in the West," and is several pages of polemics against Anabaptist Marxism. Here he's explicit about what he means by the famous phrase of the book's title: "The end of ideology closes the book, intellectually speaking, on an era, the one of easy 'left' formulae for social change." (my emphasis) American Exceptionalism has obviously triumphed, the great economic problems of depressions have been solved, American and European capitalism justified as the Hegelian end of history, and we can finally be done with those abominable "'left' formulae for social change."  Also all the troubling griping about modernity and class conflict and alienation and the truncating of democracy by the power of wealth and so on. From now own, we can follow the Very Serious People in contemplating "individual issues on their individual merits." (pp. 405-6)

Bell's concept of the end of ideology indeed envisioned an end of ideology "in the West," a West united in an open-ended Cold War and nuclear arms race, a West in which questions about serious dysfunctions in society, even calamitous ones, are just not raised. A West in which the bases of even screaming economic disparities, overt militarism and blatant social injustice are not seriously questioned in respectable thought.

Bell's "end of ideology" is framed in Cold War terms primarily as a criticism of the Other Side and its official Marxist ideology. But it's also very much a quietism perspective that rejects the possibility that there may be any kind of deep-rooted or fundamental problems in the societies of the United States and Europe. This at a time when African-Americans were largely denied the vote and other basic civil rights in the Deep South, when Spain and Portugal were ruled by dictatorships, and even France and gone through a six-month period in 1958 when the National Assembly handed full power to Charles De Gaulle to avert a civil war over Algeria, which at the time The End of Ideology was published was still colonized by France. Bell framed his perspective as anti-Communism. But it was "anti" more than that.

The hope for such a convenient state of affairs for the One Percent is alive and well today. The advocates of neoliberalism internationally seek to achieve that end but taking the most decisive economic questions off the table of public discussion, leaving only technocratic questions as to how much public money to spend on education. Or the exact terms of international trade treaties, so long as the their basic antilabor provisions and their protections for the uninhibited movement of capital are beyond question.

Andrew Bacevich has suggested that the Cold War is usefully seen as a phase of a Long War that is still continuing. Daniel Bell insisted that US actions in the Cold War in the 1950s were driven by the actions of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, the Long War clicks right along with wide bipartisan support and an amorphous enemy known as The Terrorists. And our Very Serious People today also consider it beyond the pale of respectable opinion to suggest that the Long War might be driven even in part by anything so worldly as war profiteering.

Like Bell's End of Ideology theory, neoliberalism and the Long War are also end-of-ideology ideologies. Just before the 2012 election, President Obama laid out his own end-of-ideology ideology of postpartisanship and the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Sabrina Siddiqui reported in Obama, In Morning Joe Interview, Predicts War Inside Republican Party If He Is Reelected Huffington Post 10/29/2012:

"There are a whole range of issues I think where we can actually bring the country together with a non-ideological agenda," Obama said in a pre-taped interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." ...

"I truly believe that if we can get the deficit and debt issues solved, which I believe we can get done in the lame-duck or in the immediate aftermath of the lame-duck, then that clears away a lot of the ideological underbrush," he said. "And then now we can start looking at a whole bunch of other issues that, as I said, historically have not been that ideological." [my emphasis]

And yet those "vulgar" ideological problems keeping coming up, no matter how badly the Very Serious People want them to go away.

Tags: daniel bell, cold war, end of ideology, grand bargain, long war, neoliberalism

Postpartisanship, classic Daniel Bell version (1): Bell and the Cold War ideology of the Congress for Cultural Freedom

I've referred a number of times to the similarity of President Obama's no-red-America-no-blue-America postpartisan vision with the "end of history" imagined by neoconservatives after the fall of the Soviet Union and with an earlier incarnation by a pioneering neocon writer Daniel Bell, the "end of ideology."

Bell's collection of essays The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties was originally published in 1960; I'm working here from the revised edition of 1965. The phrase "end of ideology" became famous and was often mocked in the 1960s, which turned out to be a decade in which ideological divisions became dramatic in the US and much of the Western world.

The essays in the book were all from the 1950s. Bell's account in the Acknowledgment section are more revealing today than there would have been to the general reader in 1965:

These essays were written during the years I was labor editor of Fortune magazine. ...

A number of these essays appeared first in the pages of Commentary and Encounter, and my most enduring obligation is to Irving Kristol, who, as an editor for the two magazines, prompted these articles, and, as friend, wrestled to bring order out of them. ...

Three of the longer essays were first presented as papers from conferences sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international organization of intellectuals opposed to totalitarianism. I was fortunate in being able to work for a year in Paris, in 1956-57 (while on leaves from Fortune), as director of international seminars for the Congress.

He also cites his intellectual and professional debts to Raymond Aron, Nathna Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset, all of whom figured as intellectuals in the neoconservative mode of thinking.

Irving Kristol was one of the leading lights of neoconservatism and his son Bill is a former staffer to Republican Vice President Dan Quayle and a major advocate of the Iraq War. The neocons are much better known today because of their prominent and highly influential role in the foreign policies of the Cheney-Bush Administration, and especially the invasion and destruction of Iraq. In light of recent events in Boston, it's worth noting that the neocons also happily promoted anti-Russian terrorism by Chechens against Russia in the not-too-distant past, as Coleen Rowley explains in Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons Consortium News 04/19/2013.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), later renamed International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF), was secretly sponsored by the CIA as a Cold War propaganda instrument against the Soviet Union. This was unknown to many of the participants, many of whom like Bell were established scholars. And they were publishing CIA press releases under their own names, so their association with the CCF doesn't invalidate their work. But it can help situate it in the politics of the Cold War. Laurence Zuckerman in How the Central Intelligence Agency Played Dirty Tricks With Our Culture New York Times 03/18/2000, also via Common Dreams, writes that the CIA during in the 1950s was obsessed "with snuffing out a notion then popular among many European intellectuals: that East and West were morally equivalent. But instead of illustrating the differences between the two competing systems by taking the high road, the agency justified its covert activities by referring to the unethical tactics of the Soviets."

The CIA website has a redacted version of an internal memo on the history of the CCF, Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50, which it says was posted in 2007 but does not specify the actual date of the document. It gives a version of the CIA's perspective on this "soft power" Cold War field of conflict.

Willi Münzenberg: model for the CIA organizing a front group?

The paper contains assertions about supposedly pro-Communist groups and individuals that should not be taken as fact on the basis of the CIA document. This is the first I'd seen it suggested, for instance, that the famous Comintern propagandist, Willi Münzenberg (1889-1940) was the mastermind of the "popular front" technique of building "front groups"; the claim in the CIA paper is at best a careless generalization. Münzenberg is probably best known today for popularizing the story, built from circumstantial evidence but generally regarded by historians of the event today as false, that the Nazis themselves planned and instigated the Reichstag Fire in 1933. Markus Schulz in Linke Grabenkämpfe. Der Konsensmacher in the Spiegel history publication Einestages 01.12.2009 describes how the Comintern in 1935 finally decided to give up its general direction against Communist Parties in Western countries forming coalitions with Social Democratic and "bourgeois" parties and adopted the United Front/Popular Front strategy of cooperating with other democratic parties, the Communists formally understanding themselves as the radical left of democracy.

Münzenberg was the head of propaganda for the Comintern, and he was known as an enthusiastic advocate of the United Front line, which wasn't always shared by his fellow members of the German Communist Party (KPD). In French exile after Hitler came to power in 1933, he did organize conferences against Nazism that featured prominent non-Communists. It's apparently this to which the CIA paper refers in garbled form. Obviously, the United States and Britain found it advisable to make a common front with the Communist Soviet Union eventually. In Münzenberg's case, he wasn't so terribly successful with his efforts to forge a coalition with the German Social Democrats (SPD), whose leaders still refused to make a formal alliance with their old enemy the KPD. Because of his criticism of the Moscow Trials and Party purges, he was expelled from the KPD and the Comintern in 1938. He was killed in France in 1940 by parties still unknown. The Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) timeline lined above notes that Münzenberg may have committed suicide, but either the German Gestapo or Soviet agents could also have been responsible.

The CIA document explains how Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) within the agency in 1949 looked for ways to counter protests by prominent writers and intellectuals against US Cold War policies which the OPC regarded as manipulated by the USSR. Wisner wrote at time in an appeal for funds from another agency:

Now the theme [of the Cold War critics] is that the United States and the Western democracies are the war-mongers and Fascists and the Kremlin and its stooges the peace-loving democracies. And there is a better than even chance that by constant repetition the Commies can persuade innocents to follow this line. Perhaps not immediately but in the course of the next few years because there is a tremendous residue of pacificism [sic], isolationism and big business [sic] to be exploited. For example, a recession in the United States might cause people to lose interest in bolstering Europe .... I think you will agree that this phony peace movement actually embraces far more than intellectuals and that any counter-congress should emphasize also that the threat to world peace comes from the Kremlin and its allies.

This paragraph from the report gives an idea of the general perspective of those looking to implement the kind of project the CIA would be interested in supporting:

In August 1949, a crucial meeting took place in Frankfurt. American journalist Melvin J. Lasky, together with a pair of ex-Communists, Franz Borkenau and Ruth Fischer, hatched a plan for an international conference of the non-Communist Left in Berlin the following year. Lasky, only 29, was already prominent in German intellectual circles as the founding editor of Der Monat, a journal sponsored by the American occupation government that brought Western writers once more into the ken of the German public. Borkenau too had been in Paris the previous April as a disappointed member of the German delegation. Fischer--whose given name was Elfriede Eisler--was the sister of Gerhart Eisler, a Soviet operative dubbed in 1946 ``the Number-One Communist in the US'' and convicted the following year for falsifying a visa application. She herself had been a leader of the German Communist Party before her faction was expelled on orders from Moscow, leading her to break with Stalin (and with her brother Gerhart).

A naturalized American named Michael Josselson with a flair for covert work played a major part in organizing the project:

In Josselson's capable hands the still-amorphous Fischer plan took specific shape. Where Fischer had proposed an essentially political gathering, the self-taught Josselson sensed that an explicitly cultural and intellectual conference, to be called "the Congress for cultural freedom," could seize the initiative from the Communists by reaffirming "the fundamental ideals governing cultural (and political) action in the Western world and the repudiation of all totalitarian challenges."

With the backing of several prominent Berlin academics, a committee of American and European thinkers would organize the event and invite participants, selecting them on the basis of their political outlook, their international reputation and their popularity in Germany. In addition, the congress could be used to bring about the creation of some sort of permanent committee, which, with a few interested people and a certain amount of funds, could maintain the degree of intellectual and rhetorical coordination expected to be achieved in Berlin. The Josselson proposal reached Washington in January 1950.

Michael Josselson's interest in the congress idea gave Lasky all the encouragement he needed. Lasky, unwitting of OPC's hand in the plan, forged ahead while official Washington made up its mind. He sent a similar proposal of his own to Sidney Hook, his old boss, who liked the idea. In February, Lasky enlisted Ernst Reuter, Lord Mayor of West Berlin, and several prominent German academics, who endorsed the plan and promised their support. Together these men formed a standing committee and began issuing invitations.

Lasky's freelancing, however, was not all for the good. As an employee of the American occupation government, his activities on behalf of the congress struck more than a few observers, both friendly and hostile, as proof that the US Government was behind the event. This would later cause trouble for Lasky.

OPC officers also liked Josselson's plan. Headquarters produced a formal project proposal envisioning a budget of $50,000. Time was of the essence, although OPC soon realized that the congress would have to postponed to May or even June. Wisner approved the project outline, which essentially reiterated Josselson's December proposal, on 7 April, adding that he wanted Lasky and Burnham kept out of sight in Berlin for fear their presence would only provide ammunition to Communist critics of the event.

Bell's Acknowledgment also cites Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, the former as the one "who taught me the appreciation of ideas", the latter as "an old comrade."

The founding conference took place in Berlin in 1950:

It was already too late to rein in Lasky. He had appointed himself the driving force behind the event, inviting participants and organizing programs. Josselson defended Lasky when informed of Wisner's comment. Josselson explained that Lasky's name on the event's masthead as General Secretary had been largely responsible for the enthusiasm that the congress had generated among European intellectuals. "No other person here, certainly no German, could have achieved such success," cabled Josselson.

The congress in Berlin rolled ahead that spring gathering sponsors and patrons. World-renowned philosophers John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to lend gravitas to the event as its honorary chairmen. OPC bought tickets for the American delegation, using [several intermediary organizations] as its travel agents. Hook and another NYU philosophy professor named James Burnham took charge of the details for the American delegation. The Department of State proved an enthusiastic partner in the enterprise, arranging travel, expenses, and publicity for the delegates. Indeed, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Jesse MacKnight was so impressed with the American delegation that he urged CIA to sponsor the congress on a continuing basis even before the conclave in Berlin had taken place.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom convened in Berlin's Titania Palace on 26 June 1950. American delegates Hook, James Burnham, James T. Farrell, playwright Tennessee Williams, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., actor Robert Montgomery, and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission David Lilienthal had been greeted on their arrival the previous day with the news that troops of North Korea had launched a massive invasion of the South. This pointed reminder of the vulnerability of Berlin itself heightened the sense of apprehension in the hall. The Congress's opening caught and reflected this mood. Lord Mayor Reuter asked the almost 200 delegates and the 4,000 other attendees to stand for a moment of silence in memory of those who had died fighting for freedom or who still languished in concentration camps. [my emphasis]

Ironically, writer Arthur "Koestler had once worked for Soviet operative Willi Mnzenberg [sic] managing front groups for Moscow, and now he was unwittingly helping the CIA's efforts to establish a new organization designed to undo some of the damage done by Stalin's agents over the last generation," according to the CIA memo.

And it memo notes something very relevant to understand the end-of-ideology outlook: "Josselson's Congress for Cultural Freedom would later be criticized (by American anti-Communists, in particular) for tolerating too much criticism of America's own shortcomings by figures on the anti-Communist left."

Michael Josselson was the CCF's Administrative Secretary for 16 years, including the 1956-7 period when Daniel Bell was their "director of international seminars."

In a review of Peter Coleman's book The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress For Cultural Freedom And The Struggle For The Mind Of Postwar Europe (1989) in Foreign Affairs (Winter 1989/90), Andrew Pierre summarized the CCF's history briefly:

The activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom constitute an important and controversial chapter in the intellectual and political history of Western Europe after World War II. Founded in 1950 in the aftermath of a series of Soviet-sponsored international "peace" conferences, the congress sought to combat the appeal of communist propaganda to intellectual and student circles. By the mid-1960s, with the Vietnam War, détente and the transformation of the liberal-conservative debate, it had lost some of its support; the final death knell was sounded with the revelations of CIA funding.

On the CCF, see also: Joel Whitney, Exclusive: The Paris Review, the Cold War and the CIA Salon 05/27/2012; Frances Stonor Saunders, Modern art was CIA 'weapon' The Independent 10/22/1995; and, Hilton Kramer, What was the Congress for Cultural Freedom? New Criterion (Jan 1990), the latter an enthusiastic defense of the CCF and its CIA backing.

This gives an idea of the political setting of Bell end-of-ideology arguments in the 1960 book of that title. We'll look at those directly in Part 2.

Tags: daniel bell, cold war, end of ideology

Yalta and the beginning of the Cold War/Long War

The Yalta Conference of February, 1945 was a key summit meeting in the last year of the Second World War, in which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet leader Generalissimo Joseph Stalin agreed on various aspects of the postwar world. It was to become a major point of contention during the Cold War, primarily because of the agreements made on the fate of eastern European nations.

Fraser Harbutt in Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads (2010) takes a new look at the conference and the years of wartime negotiation that led up to it. He particularly focuses on Anglo-Soviet relations during that period. He frames his discussion in terms of two large processes at work in the network of relationships between Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union: the attempt of Churchill and Stalin to establish a stable postwar order in Europe divided into a western zone dominated by Britain and an eastern zone under Soviet dominance; and, the effort of the Americans to draw the Soviets into active cooperation in a functional postwar United Nations structure for the international order.

Prime Minister Churchill, President Roosevelt and Generallisimo Stalin at the Yalta Conference, 1945

Hindsight may be 20-20 but it looks along the lines of what actually occurred. From the viewpoint of the later Cold War and now from the continuing Long War, Yalta was a major event in the historical process of a heavy US involvement in Europe, Americans leaders and the public having recognized the mistake of withdrawing from major involvement in the Old Continent and the League of Nations after the First World War. But FDR had to work to build the consensus in Congress and the general public for such an major change in long-term policy. The Yalta Conference and the optimistic vision of it that the Roosevelt Administration presented in the last weeks of the President's life became an important moment in that process.

But prior to Yalta, it was by no means clear to Stalin and Churchill that the US would become the major postwar player in Europe that it did. Nor was it apparent until late in the war to Churchill that it would no longer be able to play the large role in western Europe it had previously, in part because the Indian independence movement was becoming much stronger and the US was serious about pushing for decolonization of the British overseas possessions. So until late in the war, Stalin and Churchill assumed that the USSR and Britain would be the mutual leaders of an east-west alignment after the war. He writes of the state of play in early 1944:

Both Stalin and Churchill were Clausewitzian to their fingertips and acutely sensitive to the evolving political implications of the war. During 1944 their geopolitical interests in and around the European arena began to converge as the compression of the Axis center brought them physically closer together, even as they began to confront the potentially discordant and often ideologically tinged struggles for local dominance in the European states they were liberating. (p. 143)

The summit meeting between Churchill and Stalin in October 1944 plays a large role in Harbutt's account. This encounter is mainly remembered by this moment of drama:

The crucial exchanges began with a somewhat garish scene engraved on the memories of all modern diplomatic historians. Churchill, thinking the moment "apt for business," pushed a piece of paper across the table to Stalin. It contained certain percentages reflecting the actual or projected degree of British or Soviet influence in each Balkan state: Britain to have 90:10 in Greece; the Soviet Union to have 90:10 in Rumania; Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Hungary to be shared 50:50. Stalin, according to Churchill, examined the document for a moment, placed a large blue tick upon it and returned it to Churchill. (p. 176)

This is typically treated as a diplomatic exercise that involved little practical consequence and was not a binding commitment. Nevertheless, the scene embodies the way in which both the British and the Russians understood their approach to the postwar world. Here, writes Harbutt, "both by explicit agreement and natural political implication it endorsed the Soviet grip upon virtually all the parts of Eastern and Central Europe that later came under its full sway." (p. 178) Here, the British conceded Hungary to Soviet dominance, but the future of Poland remained to be settled. This was a major issue at Yalta and the topic of bitter recriminations against Roosevelt in particular ever since.

Harbutt's book is regular old diplomatic history. He gives minimal attention to military developments and none to social history. But he does remind us of the bare realities of the military realities at the end of the war. The Red Army was in control of eastern Europe. The Western powers could not have dislodged them without a new world war, which would have been madness to launch. But he does not try to evaluate the interesting question of whether FDR and Churchill won more at the negotiating table over the future of eastern Europe than battlefield realities alone would have permitted.

But he does examine what went wrong in the Yalta agreements and the British-US-Soviet relationships that led to an East-West confrontation that we now know as the Cold War. In the third lecture in his History and Freedom, Theodor Adorno relates how at the beginning of the Third Reich, two policeman showed up at his door and did a house search. He reflects on the fact of that search that the search itself is a basic fact that was experienced in the most immediate way. Yet the fact cannot be fully understood without knowing about the larger context. A house search under a normal democratic regime with the rule of law would be unpleasant; it's a different experience for a Jewish household under a newly-established dictatorship with a strong anti-Semitic orientation.

The aftermath of Yalta is a dramatic example of how larger forces work themselves out in a set of particular events and decisions that leaves us wondering whether with a different set of players that things might have turned out more happily. The left-revisionist view of the beginning of the Cold War usually treats Roosevelt's death and Harry Truman's accession to the Presidency as a decisive turning point toward the Cold War. Examining the East-West tensions within the wartime allowance at the time of FDR's passing, Harbutt writes:

... the fact that the Anglo-American front had reached this point of development by early April should surely caution us against a cavalier dismissal of the immediate post-Yalta period, sometimes brushed aside by historians who, looking for a crucial turning point, move too quickly from Roosevelt's supposedly sophisticated summit accommodationism to President Harry Truman's initial militance. For, focusing entirely on a "high politics" approach, we have seen a serious falling out among the Big Three since Yalta, due both to British and American concern about the stalemate in the Polish negotiations and to Soviet upset over the disjunction between the conference itself and the divergent presentation of it to an essentially captive world audience by the Western powers. The effects of this can be quickly summarized: a drift toward an East/West line-up, a trend exacerbated by Roosevelt's utopianism that, when challenged, turned slowly but perceptibly to a show of resistance to Moscow; Stalin's harsh correctives in Poland and Eastern Europe; and Churchill's exploitation of the growing United States-Soviet divide in the hope of a fundamental reorientation. By April 12 [Roosevelt's death] this tendency - involving a fading Europe/America scenario and a growing East/West line of thought and action - was already well under way. (pp. 354-5)

It's important to recognize these individual factors in terms of looking at what future negotiators and strategists might do better. Despite the fact that the Iraq War and the practice of austerity economics in the EU and the US during the current depression both give reason to wonder how much the Very Serious People ever learn from history.

Harbutt argues that Cold War began in early 1946 with the confrontation in the UN Security Council over the Soviet troops stationed in Iran and political dealings shenanigans they were pulling there. This established the Cold War line-up of a Western bloc dominating the United Nations aligning itself against the Soviet Union. He argues against taking the use of the atomic bomb against Japan as the beginning of the Cold War:

... it is very clear that after the Truman administration turned away from confrontation in late May 1945, a quieter period followed. There were innumerable distractions ranging from the apparent Big Three collaboration at Potsdam, through the shocks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to victory over Japan, and then the turn of public attention to the agitations of demobilization and socioeconomic reconversion. The Soviets, for their part, were busy consolidating their position in Eastern Europe; the British turned during the summer to a domestically oriented Labour government.

But none of [the major] issues [among the Big Three], important as they seemed at the time or in retrospect, were inflamed enough in 1945 to drive the United States and the Soviet Union into a general political confrontation. Few scholars accept today, for instance, the revisionist argument that the atomic bomb was used against Japan primarily to intimidate the Soviets. It undoubtedly fostered anxiety and suspicion in Moscow and inspired Stalin to accelerate his own nuclear program. Truman, and especially Byrnes, privately viewed the American monopoly as a diplomatic asset, but they were studiously unprovocative in public and by November had committed the United States to the principle of international control, hardly the action of a state bent on intimidation." (p. 373)

This seems to me to be a fair evaluation of Truman's considerations of the effects of using the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a demonstration of anti-Soviet intentions. As Harbutt notes, the Truman Administration was very much aware of the potential diplomatic usages of the Bomb. But any such considerations were, at best, very much secondary ones in that case. How the Soviet leaders perceived those usages of the atomic bomb is another question, one into which Harbutt does not enter in this book. Even Gar Alperovitz, a leading revisionist historian on the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (1995) doesn't go further than circumstantial suggestions that such a motive on the part of the Truman Administrations may have played a larger role than generally recognized.

Could the Cold War have been avoided and what role did the Yalta plans for the postwar world play in it? Harbutt suggests that there was a basic contradiction between the universalist structure envisioned in the United Nations project and the insistence of the Soviet Union on practical dominance in eastern Europe. In selling Yalta to Congress and the American public as the triumph of the universalist vision and attempting to hide the practical agreement by Britain and the US to Soviet desires in eastern Europe, Roosevelt set the conditions that Churchill and others who were enthusiastic for an East-West confrontation after the war later exploited to portray the Soviet Union as a relentlessly hostile power. Harbutt:

One tantalizing question remains. Could the Anglo-Soviet concert - the long-anticipated scenario so suddenly subverted by Yalta - have avoided, had it survived the post-Yalta shakeout, the Cold War? Many during World War II had envisioned an ostensibly solid postwar structure, with Europe divided reasonably harmoniously between a Soviet-dominated East and a British-led West and a still-detached United States presiding benevolently: in North America. The flaw in that design, increasingly obvious after the frenzy of destruction in Western Europe early in I945, was the comparative weakness of the Western European grouping in relation to the Soviet bloc. There were, as we have seen, several personal and material causes for this. But much of the political responsibility lies with Winston Churchill. For despite a brief if vigorous effort in late I944, his influence was on the whole destructive. His passionate response at Yalta to a paper from the British embassy in Moscow advocating support for a postwar Western bloc give us a clue to his deeper preoccupations. His reply was succinct: "to make Britain safe she must become responsible for the safety of a cluster of feeble states. We ought to think of something better than these." (p. 407)

Tags: cold war, yalta

Britain and the post-Second World War plans for Europe

I think watching The Americans has given me a real case of Cold War nostalgia.

Fraser Harbutt in his diplomatic history of Second World War diplomacy among the US, Britain and the USSR, Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads (2010) examines the wartime diplomacy that ultimately issued into the Cold War, whatever the intentions of the participants. Harbutt emphasizes the intra-European dimension of wartime negotiations over the shape of the postwar Europe, of which the British-Soviet relationship was the most important. As he describes it, he traces "the basic distinction ... between an autonomous European political arena (where Stalin could rely for practical cooperation upon his preferred association with Britain) and the very different American polity, with its introspective and effusively moralistic political culture." (p. 134)

He points out that Churchill's own accounts of wartime diplomacy and those of his admirerers have "done much to give it an East/West cast," at the expense of recognizing the often ruthlessly pragmatic approach to postwar questions in which the Soviet Union and Britain both indulged. He writes:

All this needs some radical qualification. It is of course true that Churchill was the dominating figure in Britain's wartime affairs. But he was decidedly more "European" than "Anglo-American" in his approach to the war's international politics. It is also true that he made a great show throughout the war of fidelity to the ideal of Anglo-American fraternity. It is not at all clear, however, how deeply felt or sincere this was. It is often overlooked that Churchill had throughout his long public life exhibited a lively apprehension of American hegemonial ambitions. And, as we have just seen, he saw Europe as his "primary concern." It seems likely, on the whole, that the taproot of his wartime commitment to the Anglo-American alliance was British necessity and self-interest rather than the transatlantic romanticism that often bubbles effervescently in World War ll's memoir literature. The fact is that British necessity during the war required the United States for survival and then for the maintenance of its war effort. It also needed the Soviet Union for victory and postwar political tranquility. Churchill behaved accordingly. [my emphasis]

Tags: cold war, second world war