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Review essay of ‘Orwell’s List’, Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books, September 25, 2003. The embers of a forlorn hope have long smoldered in the breasts of a considerable segment of what might be called “the progressive intelligentsia”. This seldom realized hope is that surely there must have been important Western intellectuals who, during the long political struggles of the Cold War, actually belonged to the independent left. However, it is not as easy as it initially seems to give a cogent characterization of what it would mean to be “independent” in the appropriate fashion. It might seem obvious that an independent leftist should not be employed by government agencies, but this is too restrictive. For example, should we condemn Noam Chomsky for accepting grants from the U.S. Navy to fund some of his linguistic research? Or should Gilbert Ryle be condemned for having been an officer in the British army during World War II? A more interesting case is that of the Marxist scholar Herbert Marcuse, who was employed by the U.S. government for about nine years (1942-51). Marcuse first worked for the Office of War Information, then for the Office of Secret Services (the immediate predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency), and finally for the U.S. State Department’s Eastern European Division, even at last becoming Acting Head of the Eastern European Division. Claiming to have become disenchanted by U.S. foreign policy at the beginning of the Cold War, Marcuse resigned, though it is equally true that this was at the time Senator Joseph McCarthy was making his assaults on the U.S. State Department. Marcuse then took successive research and teaching positions at Columbia and Harvard and involved himself in the study of Soviet Marxism. He ended his career in the midst of intense controversy in successive positions at Brandeis University and the University of California, San Diego. What do these cases have in common? Only that the three intellectuals were somehow being funded or paid by agencies of a national government for certain services. But a crucial difference is that Chomsky and Marcuse are well-known as uncompromising critics of the U.S. government, especially in regard to foreign policy, so that had it been their political writings that had been subsidized by the government, their independence as leftist intellectuals would have at least been suspect. But similar observations do not pertain to Ryle in the U.K., even apart from the fact that Ryle was participating in a war against the odious German Nationalist Socialist regime, for he had no serious reputation as a critic of the West to compromise. On the other hand, what should we say in the case of Bertrand Russell, an obvious candidate for the role of spokesman for the independent left in the Cold War period? The issue is vexed because there was an apparent radical shift in Russell’s views on the Cold War between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, when Russell went from being a zealous anti-communist to being a critic of the West some of whose writings could have emanated from the propaganda machines of one of several communist countries. But it is even more vexed by the fact that only recently have we learned that Russell worked as an agent of propaganda for a secret arm of the British foreign office during one of the most dangerous phases of the Cold War. It appears, then, that our idol had at times feet of clay that were decidedly pointing in different directions, and that Russell had been at different times an abettor of both anti- and pro-communist propaganda machines. As such, it is difficult to maintain confidence in his political judgment. But these are larger issues. Here I shall be principally concerned with the context of Russell’s 1953 anti-communist writings that were spon-sored by a secret branch of the British Foreign Office. Timothy Garton Ash, who now has joint appointments at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has achieved a wide hearing as the polyglot chronicler of the Eastern European anti-communist movements that led to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Much of his commentary on these dramatic events in Eastern Europe was published in such venues as The New York Review of Books prior to its appearance in book form. More recently, Garton Ash has turned his attention to George Orwell’s last years when the desperately ill Orwell had just gone through the arduous task of getting Animal Farm published and 1984 in publishable form. Although the author of the earlier Homage to Catalonia had become a strong opponent of communism, these last major works represented an extremely bitter Orwell who had become the prototypical Cold Warrior. After all, the Oxford English Dictionary cites Orwell as the first to use the term ‘Cold War’, in 1945 and 1946. (Only in 1947 did the term come into common usage, when Walter Lippmann used the expression in the title of his book The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy, and the New York Times also began using the term. And according to a JSTOR keyword search, only in 1948 did academics begin using the term in scholarly journals.) Nevertheless, Orwell has also frequently been acclaimed as that rare specimen of modern humanity, the genuinely "virtuous man", the term used by the Cold War liberal Lionel Trilling to describe Orwell's character in Trilling’s 1952 Introduction to the American edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. But such veritable apotheosis becomes almost risible in view of what we now know. In The New York Review of Books of September 25, 2003, Garton Ash published an article called ‘Orwell’s List’. In this article, Garton Ash gives an account of his research concerning an astonishing list of thirty-eight names of journalists, politicians, and others compiled by Orwell. In some cases, Orwell appended com-ments, some being anti-Semitic or homophobic, as well as vocational information. Those on the list were generally labeled as “crypto-communists” or “fellow travelers”. Others were said to be merely “appeasers” (of the U.S.S.R.), “reliably pro-Russian” or “sympathizers only”. Quite a few on the list are well known to those in Russell studies, for they include such figures as E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Kingsley Martin and J.B. Priestley. Orwell turned this list over to a secret department of the British Foreign Office on May 2, 1949 through the agency of a close friend, Celia Kirwan, an employee of the department and a woman to whom Orwell was emotionally bound in unrequited love. Orwell had met Celia in 1945 when he spent Christmas in Wales with his friend Arthur Koestler and Koestler’s wife Mamaine, Celia’s twin sister. Ironically, Mamaine had once been the object of unwelcome amorous advances from Russell. As a result, relations between Koestler and Russell became strained to the extent that their working together in the anti-communist cause was for a while curtailed. At the time Orwell sent his list to Celia Kirwan she had recently been employed by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD). Among other tasks, this secret de-partment was officially charged with conducting what Labor foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, its founder, called “anti-communist publicity”. At first the department was primarily engaged in gathering information concerning Soviet and communist misdeeds and sharing this information with sympathetic journalists, politicians and trade unionists. It is therefore unsurprising that the de-partment employed the now well-known historian of Stalinist terror, Robert Conquest, who at one point shared an office with Celia Kirwan. In the course of events, however, the department came to sponsor anti-communist publications. It goes without saying that this sponsorship was hidden from public view. In particular, the IRD was eager to sponsor publication of anti-communist works by well-known and reputedly “independent” leftists. It is therefore clear why the IRD would be eager to have Russell, a well-known anti-communist on the political left, as one of their authors. At the same time, the IRD was equally eager to weed out prospective authors who were not politically reliable. This is a major reason why the IRD welcomed Orwell’s list. For, as Orwell himself said, such individuals should be prevented from writing works under the aegis of the IRD. But what Garton Ash does not mention is that in case of need, this list was also to be used to ferret out suspicious intel-lectuals and others, perhaps in a political crisis, though there is no indication Orwell himself knew this. Accordingly, in a telephone interview conducted by Francis Stonor Saunders, Adam Watson, a senior IRD veteran and Celia Kirwan’s supervisor, would not cat-egorically deny that the list was to be used against those on it. He would only say in an artfully qualified way that “Its immediate usefulness was that these were not people who should write for us,” but went on to add that “[their] connection with Soviet-backed organizations might have to be exposed at some later date”.[1] It thus seems to have been intended that the list could be concomitantly used as a tool of ideological suppression or even political control under certain unspecified untoward circumstances. Notice, moreover, that it has previously been thought that the U.K. never approximated the virulent and destructive anti-communism dominating American culture and politics at this very time. However, this new information concerning the IRD would suggest the need to slightly revise this received view. In addition, attention is called to the fact that anyone associated with the IRD at this time would almost certainly have been looked upon askance or otherwise considered suspect by those who prize civil liberties and individual human rights. Any liberal-minded observer would pay close heed to the possibility that an individual running afoul of the IRD would at the least run the risk of losing his or her livelihood, as was not unusual in the U.S. in analogous circumstances. Russell had three short political books published by Batchworth Books in their Background Books series, Why Communism Must Fail (1951), What is Freedom? (1952), and What is Democracy? (1953). And we now know that their publication was financed by the IRD. According to Garton Ash, IRD insiders told him that Russell, unlike some others, knew full well that Background Books was surreptitiously funded by a propaganda wing of the Foreign Office. Presumably, the earnings received by Russell from the sale of these books were funneled through the IRD as well. Even more disconcerting is the fact that Russell chose to re-print two of these short booklets as component essays in his collection Fact and Fiction. Fact and Fiction was published in the U.K. by Allen and Unwin in 1961 and in the U.S. by Simon and Schuster in 1962. It is noted in both editions that the two pieces were revised in 1960. Obviously, this revision was undertaken to take account of what Russell believed were positive changes in the U.S.S.R. in the early post-Stalin period. Nonetheless, it goes without saying that there is no mention of the fact that the original publication by Batchworth Press was subsidized by the IRD. In my view, the upshot is that Russell compromised himself in two important respects. The first is that he violated his own belief in the paramount importance of the individual being able to make judgments on their merits without societal or political pressure, in the full light of evidence that should be freely available to all. By hiding the fact that he had engaged in surreptitious propaganda Russell deeply compromised himself. He also compromised himself by presenting himself as a detached, independent observer of political trends, one who was not beholden to hidden or special interests. In effect, therefore, Russell lied to his readers by not revealing the provenance of the writing of these works. Some historians of the IRD, for example, Paul Lashmar and James Oliver in their book on the IRD entitled Britain's Secret Propaganda War (1998), and Lyn Smith in ‘Covert British Propaganda: The Information Research Department 1947-1977’ (in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 1980), have asserted that there is no evidence that writers’ views were trimmed to fit a particular line, but that Background Books simply picked authors whose independent opinions were congruent with its requirements. (Lashmar and Oliver, p. 102.) For example, Lashmar and Oliver quote Bryan Magee, who wrote a book for the IRD without knowing of their government affiliation, that "No one had attempted to influence what I wrote, and my book was published just as I wrote it, down to the last comma." (Ibid.) Nonetheless, when he discovered the full truth about IRD Magee was outraged at being used for political ends of which he knew nothing. I shall simply observe that a vast moral chasm opens between Magee and Russell regarding what they had done in writing for IRD, and pass on without even the suggestion of an invidious comparison since the matter speaks for itself. In contrast to the historians just cited, however, Andrew Bone, of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre at McMaster Uni-versity, has pointed out (in an email message of 9/24/2003 to the online Russell Studies Discussion Group russell-l) that in Russell’s correspondence with his editors at Background Books, Colin Wintle and Stephen Watts, “the ideological thrust of the project comes across quite clearly.” And, moreover, that Russell even received explicit editorial guidelines from Wintle for What is Freedom?, namely, that Russell “should accept the proposition that the pro-spects of freedom are better outside Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and develop arguments to show why this is so.” Thus, as letters in the Russell Archives at McMaster University reveal, Russell clearly wrote anti-communist propaganda on explicit instruction from the anti-communist propaganda machine of a government agency. In addition, in these letters, Russell indicates that he well understands the direct ideological nature of the publications he was to prepare. This gives some reason to believe that what the IRD veterans have said is true and that Russell did know the function of Background Books and the identity of its backers. The next task would be to analyze What Is Freedom?, What Is Democracy?, and Why Communism Must Fail in order to determine their precise ideological content, and to compare the results with what we now know of the policy of the IRD and other contemporary propaganda agencies. We would thus be in a better position to see concretely how Russell managed the task he was given and to see how strictly he conformed to official policy in writing these three short works in 1951-1953, an ominous period in the history of the Cold War. I hope to present such an analysis in a future issue of the BRS Quarterly. To anticipate, perhaps even worse to say is that further analysis will reveal that the three works are mediocre and as a whole detract from Russell’s reputation on purely scholarly grounds. They contribute virtually nothing to political theory or analysis when compared with other anti-communist writers like Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, émigré scholars in Great Britain with at least broadly comparable political views who wrote on similar themes at about the same time. But then, Russell's purpose was not to make a scholarly contribution to political theory or analysis. On the contrary, the purpose was to persuade those intellectually incapable of grasping the limitations of the works they were reading that the views being expressed were both cogent and correct. But the tools of persuasion were little more than the considerable grace with which the works were written and the great intellectual and social prestige enveloping their author. This episode in Russell's life lamentably once again illustrates that the greatest of figures can yet be guilty of Benda's infamous trahison des clercs, and this even in the midst of a world situation redolent of impending cataclysmic. At least Pugwash and the Russell-Einstein Manifesto will fairly soon go far in redeeming Russell's blemished reputation. Nonetheless, it must be said that it would have been much better had Russell at least frankly acknowledged his unsavory association with the IRD. No doubt Russell had his own reasons for not broaching the issue when he had ample opportunity to do so, but to scout such possible reasons would be so speculative as to be tangential to what has been attempted here.
Maebashi Kyoai Gakuen College
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