Stalin: The Enduring Legacy

II Stalinism and the Art of ‘Rootless Cosmopolitanism’

The contending outlooks of Stalinist Russia and the USA on the arts during the ‘cold war’ era have been referred to as the ‘Cultural Cold War’. The arts were◦– and remain◦– an important part of US subversion against the traditional cultures of the world in the US bid for a ‘new world order’. ‘Cultural imperialism’ is a primary means of imposing the ‘American dream’ over the world by breaking down the unique cultures of peoples and nations, to be replaced by the ‘American’ concepts of the ‘Global Shopping Mall’ and the ‘Global Factory’, with a uniform ‘world culture’, and world consumer market.

Stalinist Russia recognised the importance of the cultural question in maintaining its own cultural integrity and resisting American globalism. Stalinist Russia realised that nihilistic trends in the Left, including those within the USSR, were a corrupting influence, and worked in conjunction with America’s ‘Cultural Cold War’. As previously seen, Zhdanov had already launched an attack on corrupting trends in the arts, and sought to define a ‘Soviet culture’ that was rooted more in the folk-soul of Russia and of Europe, than in Marxist doctrine.

In 1949, the same year that America launched a decade’s long world offensive in the arts, Chernov returned to and developed Zhdanov’s theme, and termed cultural degeneracy ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. The term is precise in describing the character of artistic nihilism. Rootless cosmopolitans produce their art as narcissists detached◦– rootless◦– from any cultural heritage. Here, as in foreign policy, anti-Stalinist Leftists, anarchists and Trotskyites converged with the American ‘Establishment’ against a common enemy: the USSR. Ironically, the USSR served as a bulwark of classical Russo-European culture, purged of Leftist doctrines, while the USA promoted cultural-Bolshevism and patronised sundry extreme Left artists and art theorists, and continues to promote ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in the arts as a strategy.

Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically so-called ‘American’ art movement. Jackson Pollock, the central figure in Abstract Expressionism, was sponsored by the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. He had worked in the Federal Artist’s Project, 1938-42, along with other Leftist artists painting murals under Roosevelt’s New Deal regime. Abstract Expressionism became the primary artistic strategy of the Cold War offensive against the socialist realism sponsored by the USSR from the time of Stalin. As in much else, Stalin reversed the original Bolshevik tendencies in the arts that had been experimental and as one would expect from Marxism, anti-traditional. On the other hand, American Social Realism, which had been the popular American art form until the 1930s, was by the late 1940s displaced as art critics and wealthy patrons began to promote the Abstract Expressionists.

Many of the theorists, patrons and practitioners of Abstract Expressionism were Trotskyists or other types of anti-Stalinist Leftists, who were to become the most ardent Cold Warriors. Modernist art during the Cold War became a factor in the USA foreign policy. In 1947 the US State Department organised a modernist exhibition called ‘Advancing American Art’ which was intended for Europe and Latin America, reaching as far as Prague.[73]

The Trotskyites had formed an alliance with the anarchists of the modernist movement on the basis of Trotskyite condemnation of Stalinist art policy. It was a cultural offensive that was to be taken on board by the CIA, the Rockefellers and other globalists and ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, to use the Stalinist phrase. In 1938 André Breton[74], Mexican communist muralist Diego Rivera[75] and Leon Trotsky issued a manifesto entitled: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art[76]. The manifesto was published in the Autumn 1938 issue of The Partisan Review, a Marxist magazine that was of significance in the Cold War. Trotsky, according to Bretton, had written the Manifesto, which states:

Insofar as it originates with an individual, insofar as it brings into play subjective talents to create something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance, that is to say, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity… Specifically, we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity takes place, nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws that govern intellectual creation.

In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible… The regime of Hitler, now that it has rid Germany of all those artists whose work expressed the slightest sympathy for liberty, however superficial, has reduced those who still consent to take up pen or brush to the status of domestic servants of the regime… If reports may be believed, it is the same in the Soviet Union… True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time◦– true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society… We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clean the path for a new culture. If, however, we reject all solidarity with the bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet Union it is precisely because, in our eyes, it represents, not communism, but its most treacherous and dangerous enemy…[77]

The criterion for art given here by Trotsky seems more in the nature of Breton’s anarchism and of the future New Left than of the collectivist nature of Marxism. However, Trotsky, like the CIA and the wealthy American patrons of modernism, recognised the value of modernism as a method of subversion. F Chernov, whose important statement on the arts from a Stalinist viewpoint will be considered below, was to refer to such art as ‘nihilism’. Given that the manifesto was published in The Partisan Review, which was later to receive subsidies from the CIA, Trotsky’s theories provided the basis for the CIA’s ‘cultural cold war’, and for the modernist art movement that developed as an assault upon tradition with the eager patronage of ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ plutocrats such as the Rockefellers and Saatchis.[78]

As Trotsky exhorted in his manifesto, this art is divorced from any cultural legacy or tradition, individualised and uprooted. There is no room for a national or ethnic culture, nor even the ‘proletarian◦– folk◦– culture’ that ‘socialist realism’ represented in Stalinist Russia, but only for cosmopolitan, nihilistic, hyper-individualised art-forms; what American conservative theorist Wilmot Roberston called ‘the atomisation of art’.[79] It is from this milieu that the CIA and the globalists recruited their agents and dupes to create their world cultural revolution.

Trotsky wrote Towards a Free Revolutionary Art as a call for mobilisation by artists throughout the world, an ‘Artists of the World Unite!’ Manifesto, to oppose on the cultural front Fascism and Stalinism, which to many Leftists and Communists are synonymous. Trotsky wrote:

The two individuals who did most to promote Abstract Expressionism were art critic Clement Greenberg, and wealthy artist and art historian Robert Motherwell[81] who was vigorous in propagandising on the subject. Greenberg was a New York Trotskyite and a long-time art critic for The Partisan Review and The Nation. He had first come to the attention of the art world with his article in The Partisan Review, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in 1939,[82] in which he stated that art was a propaganda medium, and equally condemned the ‘socialist realism’ of Stalinist Russia and the volkisch art of Hitler’s Germany, his criticism of Soviet art policy being consistent with the 1938 Trotsky manifesto.

Greenberg was a particular enthusiast for Jackson Pollock, one of the seminal figures of Abstract Expressionism, and in a 1955 essay ‘American Type Painting’[83], he lauded Abstract Expressionism as the next stage of modernism. Greenberg considered that after World War II the USA had become the guardian of ‘advanced art’. On this basis Abstract Expressionism was adopted by the ‘Establishment’ and the CIA as a method of cultural subversion during the Cold War.

Greenberg became a founding member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF)[84], and was involved with ACCF ‘executive policymaking’.[85] Greenberg continued his support for the Congress for Cultural Freedom even after the exposé by the NY Times and Ramparts in 1966 of CIA sponsorship of the CCF and of influential magazines such as Encounter. Typical of a good Trotskyite, he continued to undertake work for the US State Department and the US Department of Information.[86]

Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses◦– yes, even among the soldiers◦– of Stalin’s own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people. Professor Sidney Hook, 1949.[87]

Following the publication in The Partisan Review of Trotsky’s Towards a Free Revolutionary Art the Trotskyites set up an international artists’ association to build an anti-Fascist and anti-Stalinist movement among artists. This was called the FIARI (Fédération Internationale de l’Art Révolutionnaire Indépendant). The idea for what became the Congress for Cultural Freedom after World War II, for the purposes of mobilising artists and literati behind an anti-Stalinist movement, seems to have first been created by the Trotskyites of FIARI.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was formally established in 1951 after several preliminary moves. The CCF had its origins in the above-mentioned American Committee for Cultural Freedom which had been organised in 1938 by Prof. Sydney Hook.[88], Hook, a leading socialist intellectual who became an outspoken proponent of US foreign policy against the USSR, and received the Congressional Medal of Freedom from President Reagan for his services, edited The New Leader, a socialist periodical, with his mentor, Prof. John Dewey, founder of American ‘progressive education’, and head of the Fabian-socialist League for Industrial Democracy. Both had instigated the so-called Dewey Commission set up in 1938 as an ‘impartial enquiry’ (sic) to repudiate the Moscow Trials against Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin et al.[89] In 1948 Hook’s new group, Americans for Intellectual Freedom came to the attention of the Office of Political Coordination, a newly formed branch of the CIA, directed by Cord Meyer.[90] Meyer, an internationalist, became a bitter opponent of the USSR when Stalin dashed the utopian dreams of internationalists to establish a ‘new world order’ after World War II.[91] Meyer was responsible for recruiting Leftists such as Gloria Steinem and psychedelic drugs guru Timothy Leary for the CIA.[92]

The founding conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1949, as a provocation to a Soviet-sponsored peace conference at the Waldorf supported by a number of American literati. The CIA states of the CCF’s founding:

The periodical Hook was editing, The New Leader, was a Marxist publication whose executive editor from 1937-1961 was a Russian emigrant, Sol Levitas, a Menshevik who had been mayor of Vladivostok[94] and who had worked with the Bolshevik leaders Trotsky and Bukharin.[95] These Mensheviks and Bolsheviks became fanatically anti-Soviet,[96] with the triumph of Stalin over his political rivals. Saunders quotes Tom Braden of the CIA as stating that The New Leader was kept alive through subsidies that Braden gave to Levitas.[97] Partisan Review,[98] the Leftist magazine that had published Trotsky’s art manifesto, was saved from financial ruin by the Rockefeller and other Foundations and by the CIA.[99]

The CCF was able to recruit some prominent Leftists, including David Rousset, editor of Franc-Tireus[100]; and Melvin J Lasky[101], who had edited The New Leader and was editing Der Monat, a US sponsored newspaper in Germany, and later the influential magazine Encounter;[102] and Franz Borkenau, a German academic who had been the official historian of the Comintern,[103] had fallen afoul of the Communist Party as a Trotskyist, and became one of the founding members of the CCF.[104]

A socialist conference was called in Berlin in 1950 to extend the CCF into a global movement, organised by Lasky; Ruth Fischer, formerly a leader of the German Communist party who had been expelled from the party along with her faction on orders from Moscow; and the above named Franz Borkenau [105] Honorary chairmen included John Dewey and Bertrand Russell.[106] The CIA states of this conference:

To say that the CCF and fellow-travellers were ‘anti-communist’, as the CIA rationalises its support, is nonsense. While the CCF and other CIA and Foundation protégés included non-communist Leftists, such as liberals, social democrats and Menshevik veterans, it is wholly inaccurate to refer to this cultural subversion as ‘anti-Marxist’. The cultural offensive and the factor that united disparate elements was anti-Stalinist and such was the obsessive hatred of many Marxists, especially Trotskyites, against the USSR that they were willing to become conscious tools of the CIA and the Foundations of the wealthy. They saw Stalinism as a betrayal of Communism, to the extent of regarding US imperialism as a necessary means of fighting the Stalinists, and provided the ideological foundations for the Cold War and what continues to be mistakenly called ‘Right-wing’ and ‘conservative’.

Around the same time that the Trotskyite-capitalist-CIA axis was planning a world cultural revolution apparently based on the Trotsky-Breton-Diego manifesto, the USSR began a cultural counter-offensive, building on Zhdanov’s 1948 speech outlining a definition of ‘Soviet culture’ and repudiating ‘leftism’ in the arts.

In 1949 in the organ of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, F Chernov condemned the infiltration of cosmopolitanism in Soviet arts, sciences and history.[108] The article stands as a counter-manifesto not only to the Trotskyites and the ‘cultural cold war’ of the time, but also as an enduring and relevant repudiation of modernism and rootless cosmopolitanism as it continues to manifest in the present age of chaos. I would go so far as to suggest that the Chernov article, despite the occasional splattering of Marxist rhetoric, and some time-specific issues, provides a perceptive critique of the modern world in accord with Conservative thinking.

Chernov began by referring to articles appearing in Pravda and Kultura i Zhizn (‘Culture and Life’), which ‘unmasked an unpatriotic group of theatre critics, of rootless cosmopolitans, who came out against Soviet patriotism, against the great cultural achievements of the Russian people and of other peoples in our country’. Chernov described this coterie as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, and ‘propagandists for decadent bourgeois culture’, while they were ‘defaming Soviet culture’. The culture of the ‘West’ is described as ‘emaciated and decayed’, a description with which any Conservative critic of Western modernism, such as the poets T S Eliot and W B Yeats or the philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler, would concur. The ‘Soviet culture’ referred to by Chernov is the classic ‘great culture of the Russian people’, and is therefore of a folkish-national character and there is nothing Marxist about it. By 1949 the highest Soviet authority◦– Stalin◦– whose views Chernov must have been conveying, had perceived that the USSR was the target of broad-ranging cultural subversion:

It seems that these ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ were stupid◦– or arrogant and conceited◦– enough to believe that they were in a State that was still pursuing Marxian ideas, despite the repudiation of all the main tenets of the original Bolshevik regime of Trotsky and Lenin. One, comrade Subotsky had, as presumably a good Marxist, sought to undermine the concept of nationality, and repudiate the idea of the heroic ethos that had become an essential ingredient of Soviet life and doctrine, especially since the ‘Great Patriotic War’ (World War II). Hence Chernov wrote damningly of this ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ whose views on culture seem suspiciously Trotskyite:

The USSR had become a nationalist state founded on the Russian cultural heritage, nationality and traditions; advocating nationalism and folk-culture antithetical to the internationalism and materialism of classical Marxist ideology.

Chernov continued: ‘These cosmopolitan goals of Subotsky are directed against Soviet patriotism and against Party policy, which always has attached great significance to the national qualities and national traditions of peoples’.

Chernov next described an ‘antipatriotic group’ promoting ‘national nihilism’ in theatre criticism, this concept being, ‘a manifestation of the antipatriotic ideology of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, disrespect for the national pride and the national dignity of peoples’.

Chernov directed his attention to individuals of a ‘national nihilist’ tendency in the sciences and philosophy, citing one Kedrov, who had sought to develop a ‘world philosophy’ devoid of ‘national distinctions and features’:

Here, Kedrov’s cosmopolitan orientation is obvious, advocating a scornful attitude toward the character of nations, towards their distinctive qualities, making up the contribution of nations to world culture. Denying the role of national aspect and national distinctive features in the development of science and philosophy, Kedrov spoke out for ‘solidarity’ with reactionary representatives of so-called stateless and classless ‘universal’ science. Meanwhile, the slogan ‘united world science’ is profitable only to our class enemies.[111]

Chernov was repudiating any notion of universalism, even in areas of science that are still generally perceived as ‘universal’, as belonging to everybody and nobody, such universalism being seen as a tool of the enemies of the USSR. Chernov cogently warned that ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in the name of ‘international solidarity’ has as its goal the ‘spiritual disarmament’ of the Soviet◦– i.e., Great Russian◦– people:

Chernov identified ‘rootless cosmopolitism’ as part of a specific foreign agenda, which was certainly formalised that year◦– 1949◦– with the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom:

In the calculation of our foreign enemies they should divert Soviet literature and culture and Soviet science from the service of the Socialist cause. They try to infect Soviet literature, science, and art with all kinds of putrid influences, to weaken in such a way these powerful linchpins of the political training of the people, the education of the Soviet people in the spirit of active service to the socialist fatherland, to communist construction.[113]

Despite the necessary allusions to ‘communism’, the context of the article is overtly one of Great Russian nationalism that has repudiated all notions of ‘international solidarity’ and ‘universalism’ as corrosive to the ‘spiritual’ health of the people, nation, state and culture, regardless of the rhetoric used.

That traditional folk culture was the foundation of so-called ‘Soviet culture’ was explained by Chernov in referring to an episode in which the Central Committee of the party had condemned an opera, ‘The Great Friendship’, despite its focus on the traditional music and dances of the Caucasian folk. Stalin in particular was outraged at Muradeli for attempting ‘improvements’, Muradeli having composed one of the ‘traditional tunes’ himself.[114] According to Chernov the Central Committee resolution of 1948 had, ‘subjected to a scathing denunciation the direction of some composers who had neglected the great musical legacy of the brilliant Russian composers’. The ‘great Russian musical legacy’ is specifically not that of dialectical materialism, or any other such Marxist notion, but clearly that of traditional folk culture, and no ‘improvisations’, adaptations or new interpretations were going to be acceptable. What becomes clear is that the aim of ‘Soviet culture’ was to create ‘socialist realism’ in the arts uncompromisingly founded on a bedrock of traditional folk culture. As indicated by Trotsky’s art manifesto, Marxists along with liberals and globalists in the West saw something disturbingly similar between Soviet ‘socialist realism’ and ‘Fascist’ art.[115]

Chernov was predicting what would be a major and long-lasting offensive against the Soviet, at the same time (1949) that Sidney Hook, et al, in league with the CIA, Rockefeller and other such interests, were planning to launch a world cultural revolution founded on what Stalinism was condemning as ‘rootless’ or ‘bourgeois’ cosmopolitanism’. Chernov warned of what is today called the ‘cultural cold war’, stating that this would be part of the ‘ideological weapon’ for the encirclement of the USSR:

The most poisonous ideological weapon of the hostile capitalist encirclement is bourgeois cosmopolitanism. Consisting in part of cringing before foreign things and servility before bourgeois culture, rootless-cosmopolitanism produces special dangers, because cosmopolitanism is the ideological banner of militant international reaction, the ideal weapon in its hands for the struggle against socialism and democracy. Therefore the struggle with the ideology of cosmopolitanism, its total and definitive unmasking and overcoming acquires in the present time particular acuity and urgency.[116]

Chernov explained cosmopolitanism in terms that are thoroughly conservative and traditionalist:

At the foundation of this ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ is the rule of money; the worship of Mammon, and Chernov’s description is again prescient as to the present nature of international capitalism or what is today called ‘globalisation’:

As of necessity, Chernov resorts to citing Marx in stating that ‘bourgeois patriotism… degenerated into a complete sham after its financial, commercial, and industrial activity acquired a cosmopolitanist character’. Yet the Stalinist critique and cultural manifesto of Chernov is as much a repudiation of the Marxian as the plutocratic-capitalist attitudes towards nation and nationality. Marx had seen this internationalisation of capital as part of the dialectical process that would lead to the internationalisation of the proletariat, paving the way to world socialism. Marx was for that reason◦– dialectically◦– a supporter of Free Trade:

Of Free Trade Marx wrote:

Contrary to Marx’s dialectics, Stalinist Russia held that nationalism and patriotism are the basis upon which their socialism must be constructed. It might be rationalised that this was itself a dialectical process for the eventual establishment of the world communist society in which all nations would disappear including the Russian. Yet the exhortation of the Stalinists for loyalty to the ‘Socialist Motherland’ was based on a nationalism which was stridently folkish and made the ‘Great Russians’ a unique nationality, not because they were citizens of the first ‘Socialist state’ or any other such nebulous ideological formulae, but due to what Chernov described in un-Marxian terms as their innate and superior characteristics.

Chernov cogently stated precisely the agenda of the ‘cultural cold warriors’ that was about to emerge from the USA: ‘In the era of imperialism the ideology of cosmopolitanism is a weapon in the struggle of imperialist plunderers seeking world domination’.[120] And so it remains, as will be outlined in the concluding paragraphs.

If any doubt remained as to what Chernov meant by nationalism as the bulwark against international capital, and that Stalinism was an explicit repudiation of Marxist notions of internationalism despite Chernov’s necessary ideological allusions to Lenin, Chernov makes it plain that it is precisely the type of nationalism condemned by Marx that was nonetheless the foundation of the Soviet State of the Great Russians:

If Chernov and even Stalin had been free to express themselves outside the bounds of Marxism-Leninist rhetoric they could have added that Marx himself was among those who◦– like the ‘predatory imperialists’◦– preached that ‘national sovereignty was obsolete’. Those who did follow the Marxist line of ‘rootless cosmopolitism’, such as the Trotskyites, were then teaming up with the ‘predatory imperialists’ in the USA and elsewhere to launch their offensive against the USSR: ‘The ruling cliques of nations, being the objects of American expansion go all out so as to spit upon and fault the yearning of the masses for the preservation of their national sovereignty, thus rendering aid to American imperialism’.[122]

Chernov showed that the USSR and the Soviet bloc considered their own historic mission not as the centre for ‘world revolution’, the ideal of the Trotskyites, but as the bulwark against one-worldism:

The above passage must be put into the context of the ‘Cold War’ that was emerging, as the result of Stalin’s rejection of the US demand for a United Nations as the vehicle for ‘universal government’, and the Soviet repudiation of the ‘Baruch Plan’ which would have given such a ‘universal government’ control over atomic energy.[124] Indeed, if the reader did not realise that the above passage was written by a Soviet functionary, would it not be assumed to be the statement of a ‘right-wing extremist’? Chernov continued, drawing on the 1948 speech of Zhdanov: ‘Comrade A A Zhdanov showed that bourgeois cosmopolitism and, in particular, the cosmopolitan idea of “one-world government” have a strikingly expressed anti-Soviet orientation’.[125]

This was the background against which the ‘cultural cold war’ was formulated: that of a Trotskyite-liberal-plutocratic alliance against an intransigently nationalistic USSR that had rejected firstly the ‘world revolution’ of Trotsky, and secondly the ‘one-world government’ proposed by the USA in the aftermath World War II.

The leading patron of American Modernism has been the Rockefeller founded and owned Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).[126] John J Whitney, formerly of the US Government’s Psychological Strategy Board, was a trustee of the Museum, and he supported Jackson Pollock and other modernists.[127] According to the archives of the Rockefeller Center, Abby, Nelson and David Rockefeller were particularly important to the ‘founding and continuous success of the museum’.[128]

Abby Rockefeller had co-founded MoMA in 1929. Her son Nelson had been museum president through the 1940s and 1950s.[129] Nelson was an enthusiastic promoter of Abstract Expressionism, and described it as ‘free enterprise painting’,[130] while others promoted it because of its revolutionary socialist virtues. Nelson Rockefeller became president of the Museum in 1939[131]. After his service as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, he resumed the role in 1946. While Nelson was Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, the Department organised exhibitions of ‘contemporary American painting’, nineteen of which were contracted to the MoMA.[132] He was closely linked with the CIA, according to Tom Braden.[133] In 1954 Nelson became President Eisenhower’s special adviser on Cold War policy.[134]

John Whitney was a MoMA Trustee, while also serving as chairman and president of the board. He had served with the CIA-forerunner, the OSS during the war, after which he continued to work with the CIA. William Burden, who joined the museum as chairman of its Advisory Committee in 1940, worked with Nelson Rockefeller’s Latin American Department during the war. A ‘venture capitalist’ like Whitney, he had been president of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation; and in 1947 was appointed chairman of the Committee on Museum Collections, and in 1956 as MoMA’s president.[135] Other corporate trustees of MoMA were William Paley, owner of CBS, and Henry Luce of Time-Life Inc., who both assisted the CIA.[136] Joseph Reed, Gardner Cowles, Junkie Fleischmann, and Cass Canfield were all simultaneously trustees of MoMA and of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation. There were numerous other connections between the CIA and the museum, including that of Tom Braden, who had been executive secretary of the museum through 1947-1949 before joining the CIA.[137] Clearly MoMA has long been considered a major element in the globalist strategy for a ‘new world order’.

In 1952 MoMA launched its world revolution of Abstract Expressionism via the International Program. This received a five year annual grant of $125,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, under the direction of Porter McCray, who had also worked with Nelson’s Latin American Department, and in 1950 as an attaché of the cultural section of the US Foreign Service.[138] Russell Lynes, writing of this period stated that MoMA now had the entire world to ‘proselytise’ with what he called ‘the exportable religion’ of Abstract Expressionism.[139]

While the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom no longer exists, the cultural-bolshevism it was set up to promote set the trend for a nihilism that has not abated in the world of the Arts, but has rather accelerated. All criteria for what constitutes art and culture generally has been rendered redundant, and derided as ‘old fashioned’ and ‘reactionary’, while Modernism remains a tool for those who see the Arts as a means of creating a universal ‘culture’ as the basis for a ‘universal state’, or ‘new world order’ as it is now called. Chernov’s Stalinist analysis of the arts in 1949 predicted what would take place.

Despite the fall of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War there has been no cessation of the globalist cultural offensive. The National Endowment for Democracy was formed by neo-Trotskyites with the help of neo-conservatives and funding from US Congress to assume the role of the CIA and CCF in instigating global subversion.[140] A new ‘Cold War’ era was declared with the so-called ‘war on terrorism’. With the destruction of the Soviet bloc a new was bogey was invented: ‘Islamofascism’, a term coined by Trotskyite-turned neo-con, Stephen Schwartz, Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism; thereby making Islam the new Stalinism/Hitlerism.[141] Like World War II, this new era of tension is supposed to herald a one world government or what President George H W Bush referred to as a ‘new world order’. Again, Russia threw a spanner in the works, and the post-Yeltsin regime under Putin has been uncooperative, while the globalists warn of an ominous return to Stalinism in Russia.

The cultural offensive is being continued as a primary strategy for the ‘emaciation’[142] of nations, cultures and peoples. America as the historic centre of world Bolshevism has its own version of Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution’ which US strategists call ‘constant conflict’. Major Ralph Peters[143], a prominent military strategist, appears to have coined the term. Peters has written of this in an article by that name:

Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you? There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure …The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.[144]

Peters is stating that this ‘global information empire’ led by the USA is ‘historically inevitable’. This ‘historical inevitability’ is classic Karl Marx, just as ‘constant conflict’ is classic Trotsky. This is a ‘cultural revolution’, which is buttressed by American firepower. Peters continues:

It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry ‘American culture’, with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites◦– figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians◦– human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary. Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviours, most are not. The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience◦– ease◦– and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx’s dream, and his nightmare.[145]

Peters’ enthusiastic messianic prophecies for the ‘American Century’ are reminiscent of Huxley’s Brave New World where the masses are kept in servitude not by physical force but by mindless narcosis, but addiction to the puerile,[146] everything that is in a word ‘American’ in the modern sense.

Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made the identical mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather ‘Baywatch.’ America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine. There is no ‘peer competitor’ in the cultural (or military) department. Our cultural empire has the addicted◦– men and women everywhere◦– clamoring for more. And they pay for the privilege of their disillusionment.[147]

The ‘constant conflict’ is one of world cultural revolution, with the armed forces used as backup against any reticent state. The world is therefore to be kept in a permanent state of flux, with a lack of permanence, which Peters’ calls Americas’ ‘strength’, as settled traditional modes of life do not accord with the aim of infinite industrial, technical and economic ‘progress’. Peters:

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.[148]

Peters refers to certain cultures trying to reassert their traditions, and again emphasises that the globalist ‘culture’ that is being imposed is one of a Huxleyan ‘infectious pleasure’. The historical inevitability is re-emphasised, as the ‘rejectionist’ (sic) regimes will be consigned to what Trotsky called the ‘dustbin of history’.

Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities – usually with marginal, if any, success◦– and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious, a plague of pleasure, and you don’t have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness. The very struggle of other cultures to resist American cultural intrusion fatefully diverts their energies from the pursuit of the future. We should not fear the advent of fundamentalist or rejectionist regimes. They are simply guaranteeing their peoples’ failure, while further increasing our relative strength.[149]

Michael Ledeen[150] in similar terms to that of Peters, and in neo-Trotskyist mode, calls on the USA to fulfil its ‘historic mission’ of ‘exporting the democratic revolution’ throughout the world. Like Peters, Ledeen bases this world revolution as a necessary part of the ‘war on terrorism’, but emphasises also that ‘world revolution’ is the ‘historic mission’ of the USA and always has been. Writing in National Review Ledeen states:

Ledeen gives credit to the USA for bringing down not only the Soviet bloc, but also the white Afrikaners in South Africa, as part of the ‘historic world revolutionary mission’ that the USA has had since its founding. However, he states that the task of world revolution was left uncompleted, since the Third World has yet to be brought into the globalist orbit. Ledeen urged then president Bush to support revolutionary movements, such as the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Was the USSR ever as subversive and revolutionary in its internationalism, in its desire to impose a mono-political-cultural-socio-economic model on the entire world?