Non-Communist Left
"Non-Communist Left", or NCL, was a designation used in the U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) referring mainly to leftist intellectuals who had become disillusioned by Stalin. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. highlighted the group's growing power in a popular 1948 essay titled "Not Right, Not Left, But a Vital Center", making a case for a permanent end to the Left as a unified bloc. Another key publication was The God that Failed (1948), a complation of essays from six former communists.
Winning over and harnessing the power of the NCL became central to the US propaganda struggle against the USSR during the early Cold War. This strategy directly inspired the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), as well as international journals like Der Monat and Encounter; it also influenced existing publications such as the Partisan Review.
Under these auspices (and consequently in fashionable intellectual circles in the US and Europe), anti-Stalinism became "almost a professional stance", "a total outlook on life, no less, or even a philosophy of history." Prominent figures in this group include Arthur Koestler, Melvin J. Lasky, Dwight Macdonald, Sidney Hook, Stephen Spender, Nicolas Nabokov, and Isaiah Berlin. (The NCL notably excluded Jean-Paul Sartre because it could not accept his individualistic existentialist views.) Key organizers of the CIA's Non-Communist Left operation, titled QKOPERA, included Frank Wisner, Lawrence de Neufville, Thomas Braden, C.D. Jackson, and Michael Josselson. (Other supporters within the intelligence community included George F. Kennan, Averell Harriman, and General Lucius D. Clay.)
The NCL began to loose its cohesion and its appeal to the CIA during the radicalism of the late 1960s. Opposition to the Vietnam War fractured the coalition, and 1967 revelations of CIA funding (by Ramparts and others) were embarrassing for many of the intellectuals involved. Soon after the story broke, Braden (with tacit support from the CIA) wrote an article in the Saturday Evening Post which exposed CIA involvement with the Non-Communist Left and organized labor. Some argued that this article represented an intentional and final break of the CIA with the NCL.
Read more about this topic: Anti-Stalinist Left
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