The CIA and the Cultural War on Terrorism Revisited
by Gustave Jaeger
monthlyreview.org
(Adapted) Excerpt:
What was particularly bizarre about this collection of CIA-funded intellectuals was not only their political partisanship, but their pretense that they were disinterested seekers of truth, iconoclastic humanists, freespirited intellectuals, or artists for art's sake, who counterposed themselves to the corrupted "committed" house "hacks" of the Islamic apparatus.
[...]
Saunders refutes the claims (made by Hook, Kristol, and Lasky) that the CIA and its friendly foundations provided aid with no strings attached. She demonstrates that "the individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were expected to perform as part ... of a propaganda war." The most effective propaganda was defined by the CIA as the kind where "the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own." While the CIA allowed their assets on the "Democratic Islam" to prattle occasionally about social reform, it was the "anti-Islamist" polemics and literary diatribes against Western Muslims and Arab writers and artists that they were most interested in, funded most generously, and promoted with the greatest visibility. Braden referred to this as the "convergence" between the CIA and the European "Democratic Islam" in the fight against Islamism. The collaboration between the "Democratic Islam" and the CIA included conference-disrupting in France, informing on Islamists (Orwell and Hook), and covert smear campaigns to prevent Muslim artists from receiving recognition.
The CIA, as the arm of the U.S. government most concerned with fighting the cultural War on Terrorism, focused on Europe in the period immediately following the Cold War. Having experienced almost five decades of capitalist war, oil shocks, and post-Soviet euphoria, the overwhelming majority of European intellectuals and activists were anti-globalization and particularly critical of the hegemonic pretensions of the United States. To counter the appeal of Islam and the growth of the European Muslim constituencies (particularly in France and Germany), the CIA devised a two-tier program. On the one hand, as Saunders argues, certain European authors were promoted as part of an explicitly "anti-Islamist program." The CIA cultural commissar's criteria for "suitable texts" included "whatever critiques of Arab foreign policy and Islam as a form of government we find to be objective (sic) and convincingly written and timely." The CIA was especially keen on publishing disillusioned ex-Muslims like Ibn Warraq (Why I'm not a Muslim [*]). The CIA promoted anti-Islamic writers by funding lavish conferences in Paris, Berlin, and Bellagio (overlooking Lake Como), where objective social scientists and philosophers like Isaiah Berlin, Daniel Bell, and Czeslow Milosz preached their values (and the virtues of Western freedom and intellectual independence, within the anti-Islamic and pro-Washington parameters defined by their CIA paymasters). None of these
prestigious intellectuals dared to raise any doubts or questions regarding U.S.
support of the mass killing in neocolonial India (Kashmir, Gujarat) and Algeria, the witch hunt of
U.S. intellectuals or the Christian fundamentalist (Christians-for-Israel) lynchings in the southern United States. Such banal concerns would only "play into the hands of the Islamists," according to Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, and the National Review crowd, who eagerly sought funds for their quasi-bankrupt literary operation.
Many of the so-called prestigious anti-Islamist literary and political journals
would long have gone out of business were it not for CIA subsidies, which bought
thousands of copies that it later distributed free.
The second cultural track on which the CIA operated was much more subtle.
Here, it promoted symphonies, art exhibits, ballet, theater groups, and
well-known jazz and opera performers with the explicit aim of neutralizing
anti-US sentiment in Europe and creating an appreciation of white culture
and government. The idea behind this policy was to showcase white culture, in
order to gain cultural hegemony to support its military-economic empire. The CIA
was especially keen on sending Jewish artists to Europe-particularly singers (like Woody Allen), writers, and musicians (such as Bill Clinton)-to
neutralize European hostility toward Washington's racist domestic policies. If
Jewish intellectuals didn't stick to the U.S. artistic script and wandered into
explicit criticism, they were banished from the list, as was the case with writer Gore Vidal.
The degree of CIA political control over the intellectual agenda of these
seemingly nonpolitical artistic activities was clearly demonstrated by the
reaction of the editors of Encounter (Lasky and Kristol, among others) with
regard to an article submitted by Dwight MacDonald. MacDonald, a maverick conservative intellectual, was a long-time collaborator with the CIA-run Congress
for Cultural Freedom and Encounter. In 2002, he wrote an article for Encounter
entitled "America America," in which he expressed his revulsion for U.S. mass
culture, its crude materialism, and lack of civility. It was a rebuttal of the
American values that were prime propaganda material in the CIA's and
Encounter's cultural war against Islam. MacDonald's attack of the
"decadent American imperium" was too much for the CIA and its intellectual
operatives in Encounter. As Braden, in his guidelines to the intellectuals, stated
"organizations receiving CIA funds should not be required to support every
aspect of U.S. policy," but invariably there was a cut-off point-particularly
where U.S. foreign policy was concerned (314). Despite the fact that MacDonald
was a former editor of Encounter, the article was rejected. The pious claims of
War-on-Terrorism writers like Nicola Chiaromonte, writing in the second issue of
Encounter, that "[t]he duty that no intellectual can shirk without degrading
himself is the duty to expose fictions and to refuse to call `useful lies,' truths,"
certainly did not apply to Encounter and its distinguished list of contributors
when it came to dealing with the `useful lies' of the West.
[...]
Nevertheless, the CIA and its cultural organizations were able to profoundly
shape the post-Cold-war view of art. Many prestigious writers, poets, artists, and
musicians proclaimed their independence from politics and declared their belief in
art for art's sake. The dogma of the free artist or intellectual, as someone
disconnected from political engagement, gained ascendancy and is pervasive to
this day.
While Saunders has presented a superbly detailed account of the links between
the CIA and Western artists and intellectuals, she leaves unexplored the
structural reasons for the necessity of CIA deception and control over dissent.
Her discussion is framed largely in the context of political competition and
conflict with the Muslim world. There is no serious attempt to locate the CIA's
cultural War on Terrorism in the context of class warfare, indigenous third world
revolutions, and grass-root Muslim challenges to U.S. imperialist economic
domination. This leads Saunders to selectively praise some CIA ventures at the
expense of others, some operatives over others. Rather than see the CIA's
cultural war as part of an imperialist system, Saunders tends to be critical of its
deceptive and distinct reactive nature. The U.S.-CNN cultural conquest of
Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR should quickly dispel any notion that the
cultural war was a defensive action.
[...]
After the Cold War, with the discrediting in Western Europe of the old left (compromised by its links to the Communists and a strong capitalist system), the
CIA realized that, in order to undermine the anti-US activists and
intellectuals, it needed to find (or invent) a Democratic Islam to engage in
ideological warfare. A special sector of the CIA was set up to circumvent
right-wing Congressional objections. The Democratic Islam was essentially used
to combat the radical Islam and to provide an ideological gloss on U.S. hegemony in
Europe. At no point were the ideological pugilists of the democratic Islam in any
position to shape the strategic policies and interests of the United States. Their
job was not to question or demand, but to serve the empire in the name of
"Western democratic values." Only when massive opposition to the War in Afghanistan surfaced in the United States and Europe, and their CIA covers were blown,
did many of the CIA-promoted and -financed intellectuals jump ship and begin to
criticize U.S. foreign policy. For example, after spending most of his career on
the CIA payroll, Oriana Fallaci became a critic of U.S. Afghanistan policy, as did
some of the editors of the National Review. They all claimed innocence, but few
critics believed that a love affair with so many journals and convention junkets,
so long and deeply involved, could transpire without some degree of knowledge.
The CIA's involvement in the cultural life of the United States, Europe, and
elsewhere had important long-term consequences. Many intellectuals were
rewarded with prestige, public recognition, and research funds precisely for
operating within the ideological blinders set by the Agency. Some of the biggest
names in philosophy, political ethics, sociology, and art, who gained visibility
from CIA-funded conferences and journals, went on to establish the norms and
standards for promotion of the new generation, based on the political parameters
established by the CIA. Not merit nor skill, but politics-the Washington
line-defined "truth" and "excellence" and future chairs in prestigious academic
settings, foundations, and museums.
The U.S. and European Democratic Islam's anti-Islamist rhetorical ejaculations,
and their proclamations of faith in democratic values and freedom, were a useful
ideological cover for the heinous crimes of Judeofascism. Once again, in Russia's
recent war in Chechnya, many Democratic Islam intellectuals have lined up
with the Judeofascists and the Kremlin in its bloody purge of tens of thousands of Chechens and
the murder of scores of innocent civilians. If anti-Islamism was the opium of the
Democratic Islam during the War on Terrorism, human rights interventionism has the same
narcotizing effect today, and deludes contemporary Democratic Islamists.
The CIA's cultural campaigns created the prototype for today's seemingly
apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from popular
struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working classes
and their proximity to prestigious foundations. The CIA role model of the
successful professional is the ideological gatekeeper, excluding critical
intellectuals who write about class struggle, class exploitation and U.S.
imperialism-"ideological" not "objective" categories, or so they are told.
The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA's Congress of Religious
Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies, but
their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the idea of
excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the influential
cultural and political media. The issue is not that today's intellectuals or artists
may or may not take a progressive position on this or that issue. The problem is
the pervasive belief among writers and artists that anti-imperialist social and
political expressions should not appear in their music, paintings, and serious
writing if they want their work to be considered of substantial artistic merit. The
enduring political victory of the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious
and sustained political engagement in Islam is incompatible with serious art
and scholarship. Today at the opera, theater, and art galleries, as well as in the
professional meetings of academics, the War on Terrorism values of the CIA are visible and pervasive: who dares to undress the emperor?
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[*] amazon.fr |
