New Left Review I/44, July-August 1967
Conor Cruise O’Brien
Some Encounters with the Culturally Free
In 1963, Encounter issued a commemorative anthology entitled Encounters to mark its tenth year of publication. I reviewed this in the New Statesman. My review may be found in my book, Writers and Politics. In the review I questioned certain rash assertions made by Sir Denis Brogan in his preface to this anthology, in, which he claimed that Encounter, ‘from its foundation, has been, a journal de combat, an organ of protest against the trahison des dens’. I pointed out that the political side of Encounter was consistently designed to support the policy of the United States Government: ‘One of the basic things about Encounter is supposed to be its love of liberty; it was love of liberty that brought together, we are told, the people who, in the Congress of Cultural Freedom, sponsored Encounter. Love of whose liberty? This is conditioned—as it would be for a communist, but in reverse—by the overall political conflict. Great vigilance is shown about oppression in the communist world; apathy and inconsequence largely prevail where the oppression is non-communist or anti-communist. This generalization needs to be qualified. Silence about oppression has been, if possible, total where the oppressors were believed to be identified with the interests of the United States. Thus the sufferings of Cubans under Batista evoked no comment at the time from the organ of those lovers of liberty, well informed though they undoubtedly are. For Nicaragua, Guatemala, South Vietnam and South Korea the same held good. The Negro problem—that is, the problem of the oppression of Negroes in large areas of the United States today—was consistently played down until quite recently, when the news made it impossible to play it down in the old way.’
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