Search Results

This chapter details the correspondence between the author and the Central Intelligence Agency regarding the release of information in line with the Freedom of Information Act. At the same time the chapter builds on an emerging body of scholarship that examines the relationship between American postwar ascendancy and “cultural diplomacy” in the early years of the Cold War and decolonization. Few studies have considered how the Congress for Cultural Freedom's (CCF) underwriting reshaped and refashioned the global literary landscape, altered the relationships between writers and their publics, and rendered those whom it supported more recognizable figures than others. These practices were conceived as part of an orchestrated imperial effort to occupy a global public space that by 1948 had been largely dominated by the socialist rhetoric of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform).

This chapter suggests that INTERPOL's informal origins and the dual status of its National Central Bureaus contribute to an approach by national courts that seems not to be influenced by either a monist or dualist tradition of incorporating international law into the domestic legal order. Courts recognize the need to avoid interference with the work of INTERPOL and dispose of the preliminary objections to jurisdiction and admissibility by application of the law of the forum. In the only case that reached the stage of merits, the substantive law of the forum was used as the primary source for fencing off INTERPOL. At a certain point, a headquarters agreement with France and US Presidential Executive Order were needed to secure non-interference. As a corollary, INTERPOL responded by establishing the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL's Files (1982) to provide adequate alternative means to address the grievances of individuals and entities.

This chapter describes the outrage Michael Polanyi felt at Bernal's book The Social Function of Science, which led to him joining other scientists, as well as historians and philosophers, in establishing the Society for Freedom in Science (SFS). Polanyi's commitment to the work of the SFS was rooted in the experiences of his scientific career, and in his economic and political views, but also in his emotionally charged reactions to the arrests and persecutions of family members and scientific colleagues in the Soviet Union. In trying to get support for activities and publications aimed against the pro-Soviet “Bernalists,” Polanyi appealed successfully to the Rockefeller Foundation, and worked in the 1950s with pro-democracy and anti-totalitarian intellectuals in the international Congress for Cultural Freedom.

This chapter provides a history of Encounter, the English-language magazine of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Although the CCF, a Paris-based nongovernmental cultural-freedom organization, is notorious for the CIA's secret role in its creation and funding, the chapter focuses on Encounter's portrait of modernism as a spent force, a fading monument, but one unquestionably greater than the petty, belated artistic, and literary movements of the 1950s. Encounter survived—thrived, even—for several decades and became one of the most influential and respected cultural journals in the Anglo-American world. It contributed to the Cold War modernist project through the links it forged between artistic modernism, intellectual freedom, and anticommunism among members of the Anglo-American literary and cultural establishment.

Chapter 3 explores the post-millennial history of insurrectionary anarchism as seen thought the formation, expansion and exporting of clandestine, cells focused on carrying out attacks which are subsequently contextualized though digital communiqués. The historical account aims to present a record of a militant social movement that is still in its formative stage. This is done through an investigation of the wider movement’ three most identifiable components: the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI), the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF), and emergent networks in Mexico such as the Práxedis G. Guerrero Autonomous Cells for Immediate Revolution (CARI-PGG) and Individualists tending Towards the Wild (ITS). Following these network-specific histories the chapter explores a case study of an internationalized call to action—The Phoenix Project—carried forth by insurrectionary cells. In exploring this single campaign, the reader may begin to understand the process through which group monikers deterritorialize, expand and diffuse.