Known as the Cold War, the clash of interest between the United States and the Soviet Union played out on several fronts, and culture was one of them. On both sides, the leadership had to do what it could to persuade the public that its values were superior, in the end worth fighting for. Intellectuals therefore came into their own because they were identifiable supporters of the political and social values under which they were living, or, perhaps more crucially, because they were critics. Survival might be a matter for the military; freedom was at stake for everybody.
Duncan White, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, sketches the involvement in the Cold War of a score or so of intellectuals, most of them American or British, with select Russians thrown in. Each merits a separate chapter, mostly biographical. White’s chosen few had only a moral sense of right and wrong in support of their anti-Communism. The CIA and British intelligence services were slow to become institutions fit for the Cold War. This book’s opening page describes the moment when the best that American intelligence agents could do was to fly 500 illicit books into Poland by attaching them to inflated ten-foot balloons. White makes a case that the long war of words over Communism was always a matter of personality, and he locates its origins in the Spanish Civil War. In a famous pamphlet, 127 leading authors took the side of the Left while only six came out for the Right. The British and French official policy of bemused neutrality in the civil war left the field open for Stalin and Hitler to intervene. The clash of interests appeared simple. A Communist now became an anti-fascist. All good men are anti-fascist, and therefore objectively, as the Party would say, all good men are Communists. Hemingway’s political engagement and his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls illustrate this trite syllogism.
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