The Brief Life of Liberal Anti-Communism

It was an exhilarating moment for Arthur Koestler, on the afternoon of Thursday, June 28, 1950, as he called to a crowd of 15,000 in a public park in the British sector of Berlin: “Friends, freedom has seized the offensive!” This was the final day of the international confer ence called the “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” a name resonant of many leftist rallies. Koestler, the 45-year-old author of Darkness at Noon, was exhausted after weeks of planning, days of arguing, and hours of drafting and redrafting a liberal, anti-Communist, anti-neutralist “Freedom Manifesto,” which he now proclaimed.

But he was also triumphant: his point about seizing the offensive was that for at least 15 years, and especially since the end of World War II, liberal opinion had excused the continuing expansion of Soviet totalitarianism and justified its relentless suppression of democratic possibilities in Central and Eastern Europe as either necessary for Soviet security against Western imperialism or in any case a progressive alternative to the restoration of reactionary powers. In 1946, Partisan Review published an editorial by William Barrett that condemned the “ ‘Liberal’ Fifth Column” in America and its campaign of “concealment, misrepresentation, and deception” in the interests of the Soviet Union. But now at long last, in the ruins of post-Hitler Berlin, a coalition of liberals, social democrats, and anti-Communist leftists was finally getting organized. Perhaps, Koestler and his audience felt, this was a fateful moment in history.

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Peter Coleman

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It was an exhilarating moment for Arthur Koestler, on the afternoon of Thursday, June 28, 1950, as he called to a crowd of 15,000 in a public park in the British sector of Berlin: “Friends, freedom has seized the offensive!” This was the final day of the international confer ence called the “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” a name resonant of many leftist rallies. Koestler, the 45-year-old author of Darkness at Noon, was exhausted after weeks of planning, days of arguing, and hours of drafting and redrafting a liberal, anti-Communist, anti-neutralist “Freedom Manifesto,” which he now proclaimed.

But he was also triumphant: his point about seizing the offensive was that for at least 15 years, and especially since the end of World War II, liberal opinion had excused the continuing expansion of Soviet totalitarianism and justified its relentless suppression of democratic possibilities in Central and Eastern Europe as either necessary for Soviet security against Western imperialism or in any case a progressive alternative to the restoration of reactionary powers. In 1946, Partisan Review published an editorial by William Barrett that condemned the “ ‘Liberal’ Fifth Column” in America and its campaign of “concealment, misrepresentation, and deception” in the interests of the Soviet Union. But now at long last, in the ruins of post-Hitler Berlin, a coalition of liberals, social democrats, and anti-Communist leftists was finally getting organized. Perhaps, Koestler and his audience felt, this was a fateful moment in history.