Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature,

history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

THE UNREASON OF PURE REASON

           

            For a number of years now, I have been familiar with a certain sort of popular polemic and handbook, which presumes to set the world straight by preaching the virtues of pure reason.

            Many moons ago I read Madsen Pirie’s The Book of the Fallacy - A Handbook for Intellectual Subversives (1985) and later his How to Win Every Argument – The Use and Abuse of Logic (2007). I read Jamie Whyte’s Crimes Against Logic (2003). More recently, there was Joe Bennett’s Double Happiness – How Bullshit Works (2012), which I got to review for the New Zealand Listener, and which is a cruder, jokier, newspaper-column-style once-over-lightly of the type of thing Pirie and Whyte had already done.

            Though different in style, all these books have the same basic technique and outlook. What they say is that, if everybody knew how to reason properly, there would be no confusion and no differences in the world. Reason and logic would wipe away all fallacious beliefs and set us on those sunny uplands in which human beings would be liberated by the power of the human mind alone.

            All the books I have named organize themselves as exposes of specific forms of false argument. Fallacies. Emotive language. Appeals to God or to the greater social good. Undistributed middles. Post hoc ego propter hoc. Argumentum ad hominem. Argumentum ad insulam. Non sequiturs. Circular argument. Terms mis-defined. Stereotyping. Begging the question. And so forth.

            The assumption lurking behind all of them is that, if only these nasty misuses of logic and avoidances of reason were eliminated, humanity would agree on one irrefutable, measurable and objective standard or truth, ruled entirely by Reason.

            And at this point I rebel.

            Certainly reason is (like imagination) a great human faculty. It is also worthwhile to teach people how reason can by misused or by-passed, and how fallacious arguments are constructed.

            But to enthrone Reason as a guiding principle – or value - in itself is pure nonsense. Reason is a technique and a process. It is not a value.

            The authors of all the books I have mentioned would probably gag at my next statement,  but I have to make it anyway.

            Reason always comes after belief, and always builds on belief.

            If the word “belief’ upsets you because of its religious connotations, you may substitute the word “assumption”.

            I can think of dozens of reasons and logical arguments to support my beliefs that all human races should be treated with equal dignity; that slavery is a great evil; and that it is wrong to exploit people. But all my reasons will in effect be rationalisations of something which I already believe. I have to believe in the worth of human beings in the first place before my reason gets to work on the case.

            If I were a racist or slave-trader, my very same logical reasoning faculty would handily give me reasons to support a quite different set of beliefs.

            All this is simply a roundabout way of saying that reason and logic are only as good as their premises. (To avoid this truism, some logicians prefer to talk of “axioms” when they begin to reason out and justify what they already believe.)

            I recall a famous folk-tale of (I think) a French king centuries ago, sitting in judgement on some pauper wretch accused of stealing food.

            “But your majesty”, said the accused, “I have to live.”

            To which the king is said to have replied “I see no reason for that.”

            And of course in terms of logic and reason, there is no way of definitively proving that anybody has the right to live, unless we already believe in (or assume, or consider axiomatic) the value of human life in the first place. Those who do not believe in this value can use their reason and logic to construct all manner of logical and intellectually-satisfying means to exploit, enslave or destroy people. I’m sure the chap who installed Zyklon-B fumigation for Auschwitz was a chap who used his reason and deployed the very best scientific knowledge. A pity his assumptions and premises were so inhumane.

            None of what I’m saying here denies the need for reasoning and good logic. You want to solve a mathematical problem, tabulate statistics, construct a building that doesn’t fall over, prescribe drugs and medical treatments that don’t kill people? Of course you have to use logic and reason, and know the pitfalls of the misuse of these things.

            You want to talk about values, attitudes, and the priorities we should have in running human societies? Logic and reason are a very useful part of the process when ways and means are being discussed, but they can never of themselves define the parameters of morality. Even for agnostics and atheists, it is belief  (assumptions; axioms) which does that.

            You will note, by the way, that the very existence of the word “rationalisation”, which I have already used in this rant, indicates that most people are fully aware of the distinction I am making. Basically, a “rationalisation” means a use of reason of which we disapprove.

            “Why shouldn’t I knock things off from the company? Everybody else is doing it.”

            Reason is being used in this statement. In fact is it exactly the same reason that sociologists use when they define morality solely in terms of what is socially acceptable. But seen in a blunt statement like this, we understand at once that this is reason in the service of self-justification for something dodgy, and we slap on the label “rationalisation”.

            We are acknowledging that belief, attitude and assumptions come before reason.

Off-the-issue footnote: There is another reason for me to be mildly sceptical of pop handbooks purporting to preach reason. They very quickly segue into sneer-fests. Certainly the mentality of the reductionist schoolboy, who cannot see the value in anything because he has “logically” disproved it, haunts Joe Bennett’s Double Happiness – How Bullshit Works. Interestingly, too, the writings of Madsen Pirie lead him to endorse monetarism, untrammelled free-market capitalism and competition as the ordering principle of society. All these things are perfectly reasonable and logical – if you do not begin with the assumption (= belief) that society should be organised to serve the interest of all its members, not just those who know how to play the competition game.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“SWEET TOOTH” by Ian McEwan (Random House / Jonathan Cape, $NZ37:99)

            At the heart of Ian McEwan’s latest novel is a very simple conceit. Serena Frome, a nice young woman fresh from Cambridge, is hired by MI5, Britain’s spy service. This is in the early 1970s, so the Cold War is still on. At first, Serena has little more than what amount to filing duties. Then one of her superiors gives her a more interesting assignment, codenamed “Sweet Tooth”. Claiming to belong to a cover organization that dispenses literary grants, she is to approach a junior academic and writer of short-stories, T.H.(Tom) Haley , and offer him a generous grant to write a novel.

            As MI5 calculate it, it’s possible that Haley, who has penned the odd anti-communist article, can be turned into a major anti-communist literary figure. Like other artistic talents covertly funded by the organization, he could be a counter-balance to all those left-ish literary figures who are too forgiving of the Soviet Union, or who argue that there’s no practical difference between the USSR and the Western Alliance.

            Serena is at first not too enthusiastic about the assignment, which seems small beer compared with the mighty task of outwitting Soviet agents or pursuing counter-terrorism against the Provisional IRA (a big concern of MI5 in the early 1970s). But once she meets Haley, gets to know him, and gets to read his work, she feels differently about him. In fact she falls in love with him.

            And there we have our very simple conceit – the degrees of deception the agent has to maintain in order to carry out her task. It’s a case of love, duty and the strong temptation to blow her own cover.

            A number of reviewers have already complained about the difficulty of trying to examine a novel like this, without giving away the twists and surprises of its plot. Like those reviewers, I respect the convention that one does not give spoilers on a new novel. So I will offer no detailed synopsis beyond this set-up. Suffice it to say that the novel has multiple examples of betrayal and broken confidences, where espionage and personal feelings overlap. We soon learn not to be surprised that people are not always what Serena takes them to be.

            Beyond this appearance-and-reality matter, McEwan has an added agenda. He wants to show his literary cleverness. As is established in the opening pages, Serena is an avid reader of novels. These are repeatedly referenced as she tells her own story in the first person. Sharper readers are supposed to see how her reading not only influences the way she sees the world, but also echoes the facts of her own story.

            Then there is the device of having her read – and give detailed synopses of – Tom Haley’s short stories as she undertakes Operation “Sweet Tooth”. One story is about a man surrendering to a woman’s reckless love after she has mistaken him for somebody else. Another has a man objectifying women to the point of being in love with a mannequin. A third has a wife betraying a husband. Mistaken love, exploitation, betrayal – yes, they are all meant to underscore Serena’s own situation. And some of them are re-hashes of stories McEwan himself wrote in earlier years. In fact, elements of Tom Haley are an autobiographical portrait of McEwan. As a six-time nominee for the Booker Prize, and one-time winner, McEwan also has some fun at the expense of literary awards. He name-checks some of his literary friends.

            Read as a sub-Le Carre story, Sweet Tooth has its points. Obviously part of McEwan’s inspiration was the “soft” Cold War, in which both Soviet bloc and Western Alliance secret services tried to influence covertly the literary and intellectual life of the West. The Encounter affair is referenced a number of times – a modest, intelligent, liberal-left but anti-communist magazine, which turned out to have accepted some CIA funding. There is some interest in McEwan’s depiction of MI5 modi operandi and recruitment procedures. In an early passage where Serena is being vetted, she tells us how she gave the recruiters exactly those opinions the service found acceptable:

            “I spoke the language of a Times leader, echoing patrician, thoughtful-sounding opinions that could hardly be opposed. For example, when we arrived at the ‘permissive society’ I cited The Times’s view that the sexual freedom of individuals had to be balanced against the needs of children for security and love. Who could take a stand against that? I was getting into my stride. Then there was my passion for English history. Again [the MI5 recruiter] perked up. What in particular? The Glorious Revolution. Ah now, that was very interesting indeed! And then, later, who was my intellectual hero? I talked of Churchill, not as a politician but as an historian (I summarised the ‘incomparable’ account of Trafalgar), as the Nobel Laureate for Literature and then as the watercolourist….” (Pg.35-36)

            This is almost an anthology of all the Tory prejudices that were then MI5’s intellectual touchstones. At the same time, the early 1970s were a time when the spy service was just beginning to recruit women and people with non-U accents, such as Serena’s sometime friend Shirley. There’s even a passing reference to a “Millie Trimingham” (Pg.39), transparently Stella Rimington who was to become MI5’s director-general in the 1990s.

            Serena narrates all this from the perspective of 40 years later – but here we have a major problem. Men novelists can successfully adopt the voice of a woman; and women novelists can successfully adopt the voice of a man. But I was never wholly convinced of the reality of Serena. She seemed to have been neatly concocted by McEwan to illustrate his intended lecture on the Relationship of Life and Literature. In fact well before midway point I was irritated by the thought that she reminded me of nothing so much as Ian Fleming’s unsuccessful attempt to have a woman narrate his weakest James Bond yarn, The Spy Who Loved Me. (Incidentally, Ian Fleming is specifically referenced late in Sweet Tooth.)

            A reason is ultimately offered for some of the things I complain of here – but that’s one of those things I can’t tell you lest I push the spoiler button.

            I admit to having a limited and bumpy relationship with McEwan’s novels. I enjoyed Enduring Love, despite its pervasive sardonic tone; found On Chesil Beach an interesting, if limited, reflection on defunct sexual mores; and believe Amsterdam to be the slightest, and probably least worthy, novel ever to have won the Booker. (Gossip says it won as compensation to McEwan for not winning with better novels in previous years). I admit to not having read Atonement, which some people rate McEwan’s best. (I read the “Dunkirk” section when it was extracted in Granta, but apart from that only saw the movie version.)

            In the NZ Listener, Guy Somerset wrote a largely negative review of Sweet Tooth, eventually dismissing it as ”a career novelist going through the motions”. [You can access his review on the Listener’s website.] A little harsh, maybe, but I can see Somerset’s point. Sweet Tooth is diverting enough while you are reading it. The author is an erudite, well-read chap who produces a clean and readable prose. But you do not finish it feeling you have been enlightened about the world or given insights that you did not have before. You finish it thinking it was an intellectual game, noting the glib trickiness of its ending and remarking “That was kinda clever”. Then you move on to what you hope will be something more engaged and heartfelt.

Enraging footnote: If you have the intention of reading Sweet Tooth, DO NOT look up the article on it on Wikipedia. Not only does it give away the novel’s ending, but it spoils all its other twists as well. I don’t mind committing those crimes when I am discussing one of my “Something Old” choices that have been in circulation for years, but it is very rough treatment indeed for a novel that is still hot off the press.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“OPEN SECRET -  The Autobiography of the former Director General of MI5” by Stella Rimington (first published 2001; written 1998-99)

           

            By their very nature, security (i.e. spy) services are secretive and their operatives fairly anonymous – more like the grey, seedy bureaucrats of a Le Carre thriller than like that flashy fantasy figure James Bond.

            So when, a few years back, I sat down to read Stella Rimington’s memoirs, I wasn’t expecting a jolt a minute. But I was surprised at how incredibly bland and dull the book was.

            Famously, Rimington was the first woman to become director-general of MI5, in which role she served from 1992 to 1996, supervising Britain’s counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism. She got there because, for some years, the secret service had been working very hard to shuck off its image as a boys-only outfit dominated by the Old School Tie of the better-known “Public” Schools and Oxbridge – the background that furnished Burgess, McLean and Philby among other embarrassments. A respectable number of women were now being recruited, including some who dropped their aitches or had regional accents. Rimington wasn’t from Oxbridge, but had been educated at Edinburgh and Liverpool universities.

            The secret service was also under much pressure to become as “open” as was consonant with being a spy service. Rimington was the first head of spooks to give regular TV interviews during her tenure.

            When she got to writing this memoir, she apparently had to do a little battle with the Official Secrets Act and she made some public fuss about how she had to self-censor. For all her noise, though, the result is fairly anonymous. Especially in its closing chapters, it is also fairly repetitive. Rimington treads and re-treads the same ideas about necessary secrets even in an open society; about security services as the protector and defender of democracy; about the need for as much openness and transparency as is consistent with security; about the glibness and distortions of the press; and about the glass ceiling for women, which lingers in both private corporations and the government sector.

            There is a clear tension between the frequent “girls-can-do-anything” theme, and the author’s more conservative instincts as a patriot who likes order and method.

            She is very careful not to betray any party-political biases or tendencies. She pleads that the security services serve and brief impartially any democratically-elected government. She refutes the rumour that (long before her time as boss) MI5 in any way sought to undermine Harold Wilson’s Labour government. However she does make it clear that MI5 had evidence of opportunistic Soviet infiltration of the anti-nuke “peace” movement (Greenham Common etc.) and of the National Union of Miners at the time of Arthur Scargill and the miners’ rolling strikes. Nowhere does she say these movements were dominated by Soviet infiltration and her testimony is credible. That most of her stories of interface with the prime minister are with John Major is presumably simply indicative of the fact that he was PM during her tenure. Even so, given her background (lower-middle-class, later diplomatic service in India) and some of her attitudes, it’s hard not to think of her as a Tory in something of the Margaret Thatcher mould.

            As in all memoirs, there are big gaps. She became estranged and separated from her husband without the two of them divorcing, but the marriage break-up is passed over in a few sentences. Most disappointing, there is virtually nothing specific about any of the espionage she oversaw– obviously self-censorship and the Official Secrets Act at work. The only revelation to me was that Peter Wright was such a flake in his Spycatcher book. I was also a little rocked by the naivete of Rimington and her service in cuddling up to ex-KGB personnel when the Soviet Empire collapsed.

            When I first read Open Secret, I could have sworn that it was written by a ghost-writer, so dully did its prose thud along. On second thoughts, it could well have been written by a woman used to filing official reports. I say this because,  since her retirement and the writing of Open Secret, Rimington has published six spy novels. She has also been one of the “celebrity” judges for the Booker awards and was one of those who made a fuss about how unreadable so many long-listed literary novels were.

            It is interesting to read on-line reviews of this book. They divide evenly between those outraged that she hasn’t said more and those congratulating her for holding the line. The Guardian got Labour MP Chris Mullin to review it. He disputed some of Rimington’s facts but generally approved of the book. When it first appeared, parts of Open Secret ran as a serial in the Guardian, its distaste for Tory attitudes being no match for its hunger for topicality.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

AN ENCOUNTER WITH BLACK PROPAGANDA     

            One of the best loved ditties of British soldiers and schoolkids in the mid-twentieth century was the one about the testicular deficiencies of the Nazi leadership. (“Hitler has only got one ball….” etc.) It was sung cheerfully on parade-grounds and playgrounds to the tune of the Colonel Bogey march. Squaddies and kiddies alike had the happy sensation that they were singing something rude and subversive, but nevertheless broadly aligned to their nation’s interests.

            It has now been almost certainly confirmed that the first version of this rude  ditty was actually written by Toby O’Brien early in the war, when he was employed by the British Council. It was deliberately popularised in pubs and barracks by Britain’s propaganda apparatus. Un-broadcast-able at the time, of course, it was a massive hit nevertheless, allowing its millions of singers to imagine that they and their mates had actually thought it up themselves. Nazi leadership was castrated in one healthy piece of popular smut.

            This is an illustrious example of what is known as black propaganda. Quite rightly, African writers have frequently criticised the tendency of Europeans and their descendants to use “black” as a synonym for evil, so I use the term “black propaganda” with some trepidation and only because the term is now an established one.

            What is black propaganda?

            It is propaganda which pretends to be from a source other than its real one. It is designed to appear as impartial comment from plain folks who do not have a political or governmental agenda. But it always has an agenda, and that agenda is what we would now call “spin” – getting people to see things a certain way without their realizing that they are being manipulated.

            Blatant propaganda tries to sell things openly. Vote for me. Join my party. Join my cause. Join my church. We can easily see it for what it is, and accept it or reject it on those terms. Black propaganda is much more insidious. It works by not appearing to be propaganda at all.

            During the Second World War, the supreme master of black propaganda was Sefton Delmer. While Goebbels’ and Lord Haw-Haw’s overt propaganda broadcasts were countered overtly by the BBC, Delmer and his team (financed by British intelligence) set about creating a series of “German” radio stations. Really broadcast from England, by means of what was then the world’s most powerful radio transmitter, “Aspidistra”, they purported to be covert or dissident voices from within Nazi Germany itself. Sometimes they even expressed Nazi views, just slipping in the odd story that would unsettle German listeners. As best it could be judged after the war, it worked like a charm. At least thousands of German listeners believed demoralising or embarrassing stories about Germany’s war effort and leadership which they thought they had heard from an impeccably German source. (Delmer’s wavelengths were inhabited by native German-speakers who were all refugees from the Nazis).

            Towards the end of the war, Delmer’s system had a more direct application when German-language military broadcasts were made, deliberately sending false instructions on how troops were to be deployed. Sometimes these broadcasts were even cheeky enough to issue warnings to German soldiers against any false military broadcasts they might hear. This appears to have had some impact on the way the Germans responded to Operation Overlord and positioned their forces.

            When we hear about all of this now, we tend to applaud Delmer’s ingenuity. Any stratagem to defeat Nazis sounds good to us. Not everybody applauds, mind. I remember seeing David Hare’s 1978 British TV play Licking Hitler, clearly based on Delmer and his methods, which presented a much darker view of a system intended to deceive people.

            Delmer was not the first to practice black propaganda on a big scale. Far longer-running and more widespread were the efforts of the Comintern and (later) Cominform on behalf of Stalin’s Soviet Union, both before and after the Second World War. As well as its direct propaganda (including sponsored – and carefully-supervised - trips to the Soviet Union for celebrities and intellectuals), the Comintern and its successor ran and covertly financed, in both Western Europe and America, a host of magazines and other outlets which were designed to appear liberal or at best only vaguely centre-left, and which of course had no overt connection with the Soviet Union or local Communist parties. But by an insinuation here, a passing comment in the editorials there, they managed to promote a rosy view of the Soviet Union or at least suggest that it was no worse a place to live than the West (this at a time of famines, terror, purges etc.). Sometimes those who wrote for such publications were convinced and knowing Stalinists (like Lillian Hellman) who pretended they were something else. Sometimes they were genuinely innocent folk who thought they were simply advancing the cause of peace. The system was the essence of “spin”.

            The presiding genius of this black propaganda offensive was the German Communist Willi Munzenburg (ironically, he was eventually purged and murdered by the Stalinists). He perfected the art of setting up “front” organizations to advance Soviet interests in the guise of apolitical philanthropy. The best book about him and his influence is Stephen Koch’s Double Lives, first published in 1994 and subtitled “Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals”.

            Among other things, Koch’s book confirmed the suspicions I always had about the over-praised British journalist Claud Cockburn – a man of many talents who, outside his largely fictitious memoirs, was a witty essayist and wrote some decent thrillers.

            The Cockburn legend is of the valiant lone crusading journalist, whose little cyclostyled newsletter The Week was set up in 1933 and designed solely to give its small and select (but influential) readership the inside story on the nasty things the British government was up to. My suspicions were aroused when I first read his wife Patricia Cockburn’s book The Years of the Week. First published in 1968, her book (a thoroughly dishonest one as it turns out) is filled with stories on how her clever husband just happened to stumble on an important piece of inside information, or just happened to overhear people talking about a secret government initiative, and then went off and wrote his brilliant expose about it in The Week – purely in the public interest, of course.

            To the alert reader, there are so many such stories in Mrs Cockburn’s book that it soon sounds highly implausible – and it is. Mrs Cockburn never mentions that throughout the whole time he was producing The Week, Claud Cockburn was in fact advised (and funded) by a Soviet controller who told him which stories to play up and which would cause maximum embarrassment to the British government (which, of course, really did have its dirty secrets). The controller also fed him enough secret, but genuinely factual, information to make stories in The Week credible.

            Here we have our old friend black propaganda – the real purpose of The Week was always to advance Soviet interests, with a hint here and an insinuation there, but without ever directly talking about it.

            Ultimate proof of this? The British government prosecuted Cockburn and shut The Week down. This was at a time – in early 1941 - when Britain was at war with Nazi Germany, while Hitler still was in alliance with Stalin. Communists worldwide were instructed to present the war as a mere shindy between rival capitalist powers, a party line which Cockburn dutifully followed (as did Communists in New Zealand such as Tom Spiller and Elsie Locke, parts of whose book Peace People are as mendacious as The Years of the Week, even if Locke wrote it long after ceasing to be a Communist).

            The British government finally lifted its ban on The Week. But Mrs Cockburn blandly tells us in her book that now Claud no longer wanted to produce it and it was discontinued. What she fails to note is that, by the time the ban was lifted, the Soviet Union was allied to Britain and at war with Hitler. Cockburn’s Soviet controller made it clear that a subversive journal undermining the British government no longer suited the Soviet interest. No point in black propaganda in such circumstances.

            By this stage – if you have read thus far – you may wonder why I am this week banging on about black propaganda.

            I have just read and written a review of Ian McEwan’s less than stellar novel Sweet Tooth. It concerns a British (MI5) attempt at black propaganda during the Cold War. A number of times McEwan makes reference to the Encounter affair.

            To give a brief outline of it: Encounter was a modest English political, cultural and literary magazine, founded in 1953 and at first edited by the left-ish poet Stephen Spender. As contributors, it attracted a very wide range of well-known academics, intellectuals, critics and imaginative writers. Its essays and literary criticism were among the best. Its politics were impeccably liberal and centre-left. It featured much good poetry. Nobody could accuse it of being reactionary or madly conservative. If you access back-numbers or reprints, you will still find much to admire in it. But (here’s the rub) it had no liking for the Soviet Union and, whenever it mentioned the topic, it suggested that it was better for Europe to be allied to Washington than subjected to Moscow. In this, it was at one with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which opposed Communist “front” groups by publicising the lack of intellectual freedom in the Soviet Union and by publishing writers who had been banned there and in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.

            In 1967, an article in the left-wing American magazine Ramparts revealed that Encounter – like many other Congress of Cultural Freedom initiatives – was supported and partly funded by the CIA. The situation has been deplored and decried in a rather hysterical book by Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War published in 1999. (It was published in the United States under the title The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters). The book has a shock-horror tone. Saunders would have us believe that an anti-Communist Left in Europe  was merely the creation of American subversion (and capital) and black propaganda. Everything from abstract-expressionist art to the publications of Solzhenitsyn is all part of a CIA plot.

            Despite his academic style, a far more reasoned riposte to Saunders is Giles Scott-Smith’s The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA and Post-war American Hegemony, first published in 2002. Scott-Smith points out that an extensive anti-Communist Left intelligentsia already existed in Britain and the rest of Europe before the CIA started backing it; that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was more direct, and less devious, in its aims and methods than contemporaneous Soviet “front” groups were; and that, in the end, what Encounter and its ilk were saying was objectively true, as became more and more evident the nearer the USSR came to its eventual disintegration. The Soviet Union really was an oppressive totalitarian society with limited respect for civil rights and no place for intellectual freedom. These objective facts were not the creation of the CIA.

            So what does all this say about black propaganda?

            It is absolutely right and proper that historians untangle the webs of influence behind political writings (or cultural writings with political resonance). It is right and proper that that the backers of black propaganda be revealed and their agendas exposed. It is also fair to say that, in general, the contributors to Encounter tended to go far too easy on the faults of the USA and its foreign policy.

            But to me the bobbsy-dai some parts of the Left still kick up over Encounter etc. has an air of desperation to it. What America’s spy service was doing in the cultural arena was at best a pale imitation of what the Comintern and its successor had been doing for years. Worse, by the 1950s, Soviet black propaganda wasn’t working as well as it had in the days of the “Popular Front”. It had become decidedly moth-eaten. Without having to be prompted, all but the veriest ninnies could now see that “Peace” movements with Soviet backing really meant propaganda for Soviet foreign policy. All Europe could see that their interests would never be served by the power which held show trials in the 1940s, stomped on East German workers and Hungarian rebels in the 1950s, and stomped on the Prague Spring in the 1960s. They didn’t need Encounter or the CIA to tell them; although intellectuals (who are often more gullible than the general population) may have needed Encounter and its ilk to give them an intellectual rationale for what the rest of the population already understood.

            Am I therefore being an apologist for black propaganda? Not really. I would prefer a world in which people say openly who they are and what their agenda is. I am not advancing the dodgy argument that “two wrongs make a right”. Nor am I approving the (frequently Marxist) notion that “the end justifies the means”. But, as in my opinion of Sefton Delmer’s campaigns, I can’t help judging black propaganda at least in part in terms of the cause it is serving. Encounter closed down in 1991, just after the Soviet Union fell apart. The fact that the CIA funded it for some years doesn’t keep me awake at night.

Insulting Footnote: If you are interested in checking out such things, you will find that the CIA’s own website (easily accessed on line) gives a favourable review to Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters.  Their take is that she overrates the CIA’s influence, but that she has written a genuinely interesting book about a past era. They describe it as a book about an “historical curiosity”. I’m not sure that Ms.Saunders would be too happy to know this.