The CIA calls the tune and the tune is called freedom

[imomus]

Well, we're on a roll with this "politics hidden in apparently non-political art and design" stuff. Yesterday we looked at how General Motors, in 1958, attempted to weld Modernism to the American Way. Today, let's look at a similar attempt to mix apparently-neutral cultural forms with politics that was going on at the same time. On November 29th Arte television aired When the CIA Infiltrated Culture, a documentary based on three years of research into a secret, highly ambitious "Marshall Plan of culture": the CIA's efforts to promote "the freedom of individual choice" in postwar Europe by... subsidizing the arts.

Using front organizations like the Farfield Foundation and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA channelled millions of dollars into the European cultural scene during the 1950s and 60s in an attempt to alter the intellectual DNA of the continent. If you wanted the CIA on your side, paradoxes abounded: "no ideology" had to become your ideology. You had to banish politics from your work for entirely political reasons. You were free to be anything except critical of "freedom", and you could pick any individual stance except a pro-collective individual stance. What's more, your anti-government, pro-market position had to be bankrolled by the government and protected from the market.

Since the aesthetic favoured by pro-Soviets in Europe tended to include stuff like political commitment, realism, melody, and representation -- the communists deplored "decadent formalism" above all -- the CIA (somewhat incredibly, to our eyes) threw its weight behind atonal music and Abstract Expressionism. Concerts and exhibitions of the most inaccessible, anti-populist, non-commercial avant garde artists flourished. "The ideology of the CIA was that the West had to be the most modern of the modern," says Gunter Grass, interviewed for the documentary. "The result was a sort of Kandinsky kitsch."

One direct result of the CIA's efforts was a series of literary journals which attacked European intellectuals who aligned themselves with communism. There was, it seems, one in each major European country. There was Preuves in France, Encounter in the UK, Tempo Presente in Italy and Der Monat in Germany. Presided over by impressive intellectuals like Heinrich Boll, Arthur Koestler, Solzenitsyn, Raymond Aron, Isiah Berlin, Ignazione Silone and Steven Spender, these journals regularly attacked even more impressive intellectuals who also happened to be leftists -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Charlie Chaplin, Arthur Miller, Pablo Neruda and even Thomas Mann. In the campaign against Neruda's writing, the CIA stressed that the magazine shouldn't attack him on political grounds, but "on the quality of his writing". The mud didn't stick; Neruda won the Nobel Prize in 1971.

Meanwhile, in France Preuves competed head-to-head with Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes. Raymond Aron, the editor of Preuves, had clashed with Sartre at the Ecole Normale Superieure, so it was very much a personal as well as an ideological battle for him. But Aron had American taxpayer's money giving his magazine immunity to market imperatives (ironically enough) and allowing him to pay his writers better. CIA money was also secretly buoying up -- and altering -- such venerable cultural institutions as the ICA in London and the Musee Nationale D'Art Moderne in Paris.

"We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, artists, composers, to demonstrate that the West and the USA would give opportunities for intellectual achievement without anyone dictating to them what they had to say and think, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union," says Tom Braden, the patrician CIA officer who was chief of the International Organizations Division of the Directorate of Plans, the office that ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter magazine. The CIA did, however, dictate what the recipients of its money could say and think. A negative article on America by Dwight Macdonald for Encounter was vetoed by the bosses in Paris. "The Congress for Cultural Freedom believed in all freedoms except the freedom to criticize the United States," remarked one cynic.

The CIA renounced its role as a patron of the arts only when the Vietnam war polarized politics, breaking up the middle ground and shattering the illusion that something as indirect as art could foment gentle, benign political swings. As Michael Rogin wrote in The Nation:

"With the exposure of CIA secret influence and with the divisions over the war in Vietnam, the utility of the non-Communist left in the cultural cold war had come to an end. When some of the same faces resurfaced a decade later, first in the Committee on the Present Danger (the group of intellectuals and politicians instrumental in heating up the cold war) and then in the Reagan regime, they would speak as neoconservatives."

Comments

[inuitmonster.livejournal.com]

Were people a bit slow in the past? Did no one notice that Encounter magazine seemed to pay very well for an artsy journal no one read, or that the Fairfield Foundation seemed to be rolling in cash?

Slow IN THE PAST? Yow...

[(Anonymous)]

Hi all... I chanced on this blog while googling the Paris Review CIA thing. I'm Jeff Potter, with the ULA (Underground Literary Alliance). We pushed the news about Matthiessen over a year ago, courtesy of the ignored R. Cummings. Our report was ignored just like this story still is being rather well ignored.

Anyway, what's this about people being slow *IN THE PAST* about unread literary efforts being surprisingly well funded. Good grief: no one reads or buys any novels, chaps or journals produced by the hundreds of well-funded MFA departments in the USA today. It's all *STILLLLLL* a scam! Funded by whom for what? It might as well be the CIA! What's the point of lit today: atmosphere, style, detail... Ah yes.

The parallel of today's lit to the BBC music/orchestra situation is hilarious. (People producing bad work that a boss figure will like.) Maybe this is how the "fancy" arts have always worked? Posing foisted from on high. When has it been different? ---Except in the underground.

The ULA first broke the CIA/PR/PM story. Check us out at http://literaryrevolution.com. We're the only literary activist group out there, banding together to get our voices some impact. We promote nonacademized writers from the nonNYC hinterlands who have actual fans and followings and who think relevance is still relevant. We expose the hidden workings of the MFA machine. We dare establishment flacks to debate both ideas and real-world projects.

What fun!

Re: Slow IN THE PAST? Yow...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your comment, and I will check your site.

Paul Dacre, editor of the UK's right-leaning Daily Mail newspaper, made a speech (http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/article/230107/paul_dacre_bbc_subsidariat_media_journalism_daily_mail_associated_newspapers) the other day attacking the "subsidariat" (the quality newspapers which are subsidised by the big-selling tabloids) and calling the BBC "cultural Marxists" for being more liberal in their perspective than the majority of the British public.

I think the danger with your attack on "the MFA machine" is that it might play into a right wing populist account of things, a view a bit like Dacre's. A certain amount of unpopular culture should, I think, be funded. Just not for propaganda, obviously.

Re: Slow IN THE PAST? Yow...

[(Anonymous)]

Politics is too particular for these issues. But I don't mind the larger sense of populism.

A certain amount of unpop should be funded, sure. But so should some indy lit. That's what's being denied today, not the unpop stuff.

It's interesting seeing the notion above that the CIA impact on art ended with Vietnam. Maybe the overt support is over (but why should we think that?). But it seems like their mission of turning art away from everyday life (social issues, relevancy...even politics) has succeeded and is still in place. Especially in literature. It maybe doesn't even need overt funding. The style is the rule. No, it needs funding: people wouldn't write that crap if they didn't want the money.

The indy music and film scenes seem to be thriving. Not so indy lit...yet.

The solution is easy: go to the true indy writers who've been getting the job done all along, if in obscure populist penury of the sort that funding was intended to relieve. Funny stuff.

It's amazing how both the Soviet and CIA systems resulted in credentialism. Both included with upperclass elites, too. And it's amazing the impact of their lameness. Their actual operations are always botched, but enough money does the trick.

We in the ULA have been exposing the inevitable disasters of elitist/credentialism. We gave a strong hint that it related to the CIA (by breaking that story first), but the dynamic duo of elitist/credentialism gives plenty of rope.

The CIA revelation is great because it's a shocker. We can use it to break the issue thru to the public awareness. It's rare that art gets such a hook, as you've mentioned. OK, maybe using it for clarity will be a bit tricky: showing how "freedom" works to prevent freedom... Our public has some catching up to do on what's being done in its name. Basically, it's just dropped lit entirely as something not of interest except to some sub-group of Fresh Air fans. What a win for the CIA...or credentialists...or nichifiers. OK, we know who the enemy is: it's us. To fix this we have to get lit back in the game.

The Net is a factor here. The lit establishment hasn't responded to that NYT story. And won't unless FORCED. Blogs are vital. But here's something else: Wiki is vital, too! We in the ULA are relishing this opportunity to add history/facts to subjects that we're normally censored from. Paris Review finally gets some light shed on its history whether it likes it or not. Proven (linked!) corruption can now be included in the bio's of all these players. We've greatly enjoyed watching them finally respond: with lawyers, of course---who add terms like "alleged" to our Wiki contributions. Now, who are we to worry about outlawry---the corruption we protest is the kind that prevents art and cultural evaluation. The airbrushers on both sides must hate Wiki! (Unless they can get the Net marginalized...segregated...nichified... Ah, it's already happened! Maybe what's really needed is a revival of high-impact literature as hip-pocket pulp. For those who aren't wired, if you see.)

One of our ULA oft-repeated stories is how the ex-editor of Publisher's Weekly said there were no undiscovered genius writers toiling away in the hinterlands. He'd rejected O'Toole's "Confederacy" and said he'd do it again, said the system works. (O'Toole killed himself after dozens of rejections of the book that went on to become a classic.) It's a tale that reminds us of what we're up against.

Still.