Terrorism in china
En route to the United States after my Paris years, I participated in this conference. terrorism in china Islam-+-terrorism. Thanks to Frances Stonor Saunders, I now know that the Asia Foundation was a CIA front, and that 42 years ago I unwittingly benefited from the CIA's largesse. The Cultural Cold War offers a history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), founded in 1950 with CIA funding to counter Soviet propaganda, particularly among the noncommunist left. Using CIA dollars channeled through dummy (and sometimes legitimate) foundations, the CCF published journals, most notably Encounter; sponsored arts festivals and cultural conferences; and launched some 35 national committees, including the contentious American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), where liberals like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. terrorism in china Terrorism and world security. , and conservatives like James Burnham battled for supremacy and feuded over McCarthyism and other issues. The broad outline of Saunders's story is well-known. The CIA's funding of the CCF (as well as of other organizations not discussed in this book, such as the National Student Association) was exposed in the 1960s by the New York Times, The Nation, Ramparts, the New York Review of Books, and other periodicals, and in Christopher Lasch's The Agony of the American Left (1969). terrorism in china Drugs-as-funding-for-terrorism. Indeed, these exposes, coming as the Vietnam War escalated, fatally undermined the CCF, which finally collapsed in 1979. More recently, Stephen Whitfield, in The Culture of the Cold War (1991), and other historians have retold the story. But Saunders, having interviewed key survivors and immersed herself in archival sources, offers a minutely detailed account of the CCF, beginning with its origins in the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and in ad hoc cultural efforts in early postwar Berlin. She also documents at great length the role of such figures as the CIA's Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, Tom Braden, and Cord Meyer; CCF's executive director, the Estonian-born Michael Josselson, and its general secretary, the emigre Russian composer Nicholas Nabokov; Encounter's unlikely editorial duo Stephen Spender and Melvin Lasky; and a large supporting cast including Schlesinger, Isaiah Berlin, Malcom Muggeridge, Dwight Macdonald, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Diana Trilling, and the Cincinnati yeast-and-gin tycoon Julius ("Junkie") Fleischmann. The exhaustive research and attention to detail has its merits, particularly as Saunders traces the tortuous money trail of CIA funds. Her accounts of CIA cultural ventures, like Robert Lowell's 1962 South American goodwill tour (during which he stopped taking his medication and in Buenos Aires delivered a pro-Hitler harangue and then stripped naked and mounted an equestrian statue in a city square), are diverting. But her preoccupation with minutia has its drawbacks. Saunders sometimes pursues long-ago disputes and personality clashes to the neglect of more substantive interpretive issues. She quotes at length the opinions of participants and observers (often identified only in the endnotes) without fully developing her own assessment. The epilogue, where one hopes for a thoughtful summing-up, simply provides a synopsis of the after-history of her major figures, like the crawl at the end of a movie telling us what happened to the characters. (The black comedy of Nicholas Nabokov's 1978 funeral, where his four ex-wives competed in their displays of grief, merits a paragraph. ) Saunders's background as an independent film producer is evident throughout, as in the following passage: "Michael [Josselson] sat in silence, his slender, well-manicured fingers drumming the desk. " Of a Foreign Service officer, she writes: "[He was] by all accounts a sinister figure. Physically ugly, he taunted other men with his homosexuality by tweaking their nipples at staff meetings. "The preoccupation with personalities also leads to extended speculations about who knew what when. "Could [Isaiah Berlin] have managed not to know?" she asks rhetorically; others "must have known," she surmises. As for Stephen Spender, she quotes an informant: "I know people who knew he knew. " One is left wishing for less guesswork and gossip, and more reflection and analysis. A more substantive problem is that we learn practically nothing about the actual impact of the many CIA-funded cultural activities described in this book. Thus it becomes difficult to assess Arthur Schlesinger's claim that, overall, the entire effort was "worthwhile and successful. "But for all its flaws, the book is valuable for the way it illuminates this fascinating byway of Cold War history, demonstrating how profoundly that global conflict affected the intellectual and cultural life of the West in general, and the United States in particular. Saunders shows how closely this cultural offensive mirrored-and consciously emulated-the activities of the Communist Information Bureau (COMINFORM) and other Moscow-inspired initiatives. In a key chapter, Saunders digresses from the CCF story to examine the CIA's role in influencing 1950s movies. While delaying the filming of Edna Ferber's Giant for its unflattering portrayal of Texans, the CIA's man in Hollywood also strenuously encouraged the studios to give better, more positive roles to African Americans to counter Soviet exploitation of American racism.
Terrorism in china
Domestic || American-terrorist-attacks || Drugs-as-funding-for-terrorism || Definition-terrorism