The Geriatric Left and Progressive Right

First of a Three Part Series on the Decivilization of Africa

This is the first of a three part series on America’s role in the decivilization of Africa in the 20th Century. America’s support for decolonization and leftist causes in Africa from 1950-1970 is not well understood: it was very much an American-Soviet partnership against European interests and pro-Western local leaders. Here in the first part I will introduce the problem and its importance in the context of the left’s desperate desire not to seem senile. The next sections will address many examples from subsaharan Africa and the Congo Crisis.

1. The Left’s Geriatric CIA religion and why it gets angry—

There are four or five reliable ways you can trigger leftist rage nerve center and masturbation reaction online. They will inevitably stop letting their “far right” proxies do the work for them and engage themselves if triggered on certain approaches to race, on the Troon Question, and when beautiful male physiques are displayed. This last is what I’d call provisionally “Handsome Thursday”-related matters, or the repurposing of youth culture for broadly anti-leftist orientations. For example they bizarrely erupted when I posted physiques of youth with the message that dutiful POC were tending to their pedicures, etc., at our summer compound in Suriname after a year of crushing International Reds worldwide. It caused an internet-wide stir and mass leftist hysteria when a young frog provisionally named Megumin posted his physique after mocking the fat hog roastie models used on a new dating site, The Right Stuff. Besides the mockery of transsexuals and the display of youthful physiques or defiance on the part of young men against the condominium of pensioners and middle aged women running America’s cultural establishments, another reliable provocation of leftist hysteria has to do with race, especially if approached from the same direction. For example, it will enrage them if online or in person you do anything like the mention of beige People of Color above or in other contexts showing them as servile and more akin to 4’7 Oaxacans waiting in line at Home Depot rather than cool or fashionable. Portrayals of Haitians doing the manicures of local Syrian-Lebanese elites or hunting cats and roadkill for food will also get leftists very upset. Remarks that hip hop, the NBA, gays as fashion arbiters, etc., are all mostly Oldtroon and Gen X fixations that are spent as cultural forces, and so on, will enrage leftists more than anything else. In all these cases an angry reaction is provoked because the left desperately doesn't want to be shown up as senile.

My own “Handsome Thursday” is modeled on a so-called Strength Through Joy program which was previously also mimicked by actual Reds in Soviet propaganda; following which there was a second wave repetition of this same pattern in the United States when late 19th Century German naturist and youth culture as represented by Fidus among others was reintroduced in the late 1950’s in California, only then again to be appropriated immediately by the new left. In 1950’s Japan this same sensibility was reproduced by progressive right wing authors Yukio Mishima and Shintaro Ishihara as well, and then copied by other and opposing left wing reactionary elements. It’s possible to understand the course of recent cultural history as advancements or discoveries in the spirit of youth by men of the progressive right, with immediate appropriation and distortion by the left and the liberals—a pretense to youth the left can keep up as long as it’s plausibly in the opposition. Upon victory however, the inherently reactionary and geriatric orientation of the left—the politics ultimately of safety, full stomachs, and homogenizing egalitarian consensus—quickly reemerges. But they can never let go of their self-conception as the party of youth and freedom. In this however the left at least has the good political instincts to realize that not having this image, that lacking the claim to youth, freedom, and progress in a world in which there aren't really any living or vital traditions remaining is a kind of suicide. This is something most conservatives and reactionaries on the right don't have the good sense to see.

Another and related way I’ve triggered the left has been to deny their mythology of CIA omnipotence and in particular activities against leftism or communism during the Cold War.

You can make them reliably chimp out in mass rage if you point out something so mild: that the CIA supported left wing regimes as often or more often than it tried to topple them, or if you emphasize that the primary target of American foreign policy was European colonialism, European interests and the “hard right” much more often than the far left. It’s enough simply to question the whole hoary posture of Pinochet-Mossadegh-Lumumba-United Fruit Co. that comes up every time one of these piledrivers has to comment on what they know of recent history. This is one of the left’s most dearly held myths. The image of the CIA as right-wing, maybe even crypto-Nazi all-powerful spook fulfills many functions for them; most important: their self-conception as scrappy youthful rebels against an entrenched old-guard establishment.

There is a deeper layer to this: the CIA or Capital function for the far left as a religious stand-in for a sinister Demiurge who was and is able to control all sides of every dispute, plan twenty moves ahead, and therefore function as explanatory principle for the failures of Marxism, Marxist economic theory or in general for leftist and liberal understanding of human nature. It is a way to shift responsibility from the left for the sorry results of our present age: “It’s not the left or the Red cause that is to blame, it is the Wrecker Deity, CIA-Capital-Neoliberalism, etc.” In many cases also for leftists who haven’t secured one of the many sinecures available to their side, it functions as a personal ego salve to explain their lack of success or marginalization in a world that otherwise favors those like them. (I’ve encountered similar thinking myself—since the publication of my book in 2018, dozens of pundits on the left, the “dissident” right and among establishment conservatives have speculated the success of Bronze Age Mindset can only be explained by a massive conspiracy, which also conveniently explains why their own “books” aren’t doing well).

Recently, “right wing Populist dissidents” such as Tucker Carlson and Mike Benz have adopted similar words, with a picture of the CIA as amoral powerful string-puller and far-seeing Machiavellian calculator, recycling old leftist sob stories about Pinochet and similar Nazi-CIA affronts against empathy and human rights. I wait to see who the first Right Wing Populist Pundit will be who Remembers the Martyrdom of Lumumba. That this is also the image of the CIA (and shadowy “Capital”) promoted by Hollywood for decades, and piledriven and chopped up and re-plated by tedious old hags like Noam Chomsky and the whole of the academic left since at least 1960 ought to make these people hesitate for a moment. After all, why is the powerful CIA allowing a culturally dominant left and Hollywood slander them so? Or is it cynicism? Do these people rely on audience forgetfulness that this is the line about the CIA, shadowy “international corporations,” Big Oil, Big Tobacco, etc.? These have been portrayed as stock villains of Hollywood for more than fifty or sixty years now.

Whatever the perceptions or motivations of these aspiring media figures, the consensus among the left, the liberals, and now a good portion of Populist Dissidents as well, is also the default self-image of mainstream American culture since 1960-70: intrepid Hollywood screenwriters and academics with the affect of Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting standing up to a shadowy cabal plotting in smoke-filled rooms. This was depicted as hysterical psychodrama in The Good Shepherd, where JFK’s failure at the Bay of Pigs is transformed through a totally-made-up story, reattributed to a reimagined James Jesus Angleton, in this incarnation 100% WASP (as opposed to real-life half-Mexican) whose Stepford Wives 1950’s stodgy Midatlantic-accent reserve and family psychodrama problems are to blame instead. If only the Irish Matt Damon doing a Boston Brahmin minstrel show had had some of that Ellis Island vibrancy in him! It's unclear why Populist Dissidents like Tucker Carlson, Bannon and Mike Benz want to assume this worn-out rag of an image for themselves. I can only guess it’s very sticky because it's convenient and at-hand, it's the ready-made image of Standing Up to the Man. And so maybe they assume their audience has no way to imagine the Man other than Operation Paperclip Deep-State Nazi Dark Billionaire Machiavellian Schemers. It's more flattering than the reality of the CIA Kabul station chief who finally got herself and everyone else blown up after years of unknowingly doing assassinations on behalf of Al Qaeda and eliminating her own allies.

I recently again provoked the left and Dissident spheres’ geriatric religion nerves in this way, this time without examples, knowing that it would lead to a mass response. I was not surprised to find in the replies, among dozens of pinkos, both of the editors of Compact Magazine. For my European readers this is the American magazine, different from the German of the same name. It is a malding zine partially funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundation primarily directed toward extolling the virtues of Traditional Catholic Socialism against the depredations of Neoliberalism. The editors brought up along with the ritual mentions of Pinochet the other stock example of the Congo. Lumumba, the first postcolonial leader of the Congo in 1960, has had a kind of martyr status among the international left. Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow was used to train generations of African leaders in subsequent decades. His image was almost as popular for varieties of the international left as Che Guevara. There were massive worldwide saccharine protests and parades both during Lumumba’s ascent prior to his election and Congo's independence from Belgium in early summer of 1960, and especially after his assassination in January of 1961. The recent contrived figures of Barack Obama and George Floyd in our own time came accompanied by similar mania. The editors of Compact are irrelevant as such but I'm bringing them up because they exhibited the typical attitude of the American establishment toward this event: on one hand, handwringing over the evil of the CIA in supposedly orchestrating this coup and assassination of a popular leftist populist leader; on the other hand, a certain pride, or at least respect for the far-seeing "Cold Warriors” of the CIA who admittedly did support the non-communist left (NCL) worldwide but did so out of hard-headed Machiavellian realpolitik motivations, to promote a version of the left friendly to America, as opposed to one beholden to the Soviets.

2. The American Policy of Support for the “Noncommunist Left” in Cold War

Whenever I bring up America’s support for the international left and really in the end what amounted to collusion with the Reds in the Third World, specifically against the then-existing European world order, I am sometimes asked incredulously whether I think a man like Allen Dulles was a Red agent or infiltrator. I don't need to go so far or to endorse Bircher theories that Eisenhower was a communist. The record on all this is quite plain and no special access to secret knowledge is needed: Dulles himself didn't determine the CIA’s or State Department’s international orientation. In the early 1950’s he outsourced this policy to one Tom Braden, who later became a journalist and media personality—I think he was Pat Buchanan’s first counterpart in what was to become the TV show Crossfire. But in the early 1950’s Dulles had delegated to him and men like him the task of determining the CIA’s international posture. These intermediaries decided to support the noncommunist left. The assumption, maybe unspoken, must have been that the triumph of Marxist logic was an inexorable historical certainty and that if the United States didn't get ahead of the Soviet Union with its own version of Bolshevism, it would be left behind.

One of the chief paths Tom Braden and others like him in the CIA pursued was to empower leftist international labor unions and conglomerates like the AFL-CIO and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) under figures like Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone. Others involved in the actual hands-on organization of the international left—the CIA, again, delegated all these functions—included Austrian antifascist and Socialist politician Joseph Buttinger and labor activist Leo Cherne working through outfits like the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Research Institute of America (RIA). In turn in the colonial world these acted with and through other NGO’s like the American Friends of Vietnam and American Committee on Africa. On the labor side in Africa for example, the AFL-CIO and ICFTU further delegated functions to local “labor unions,” providing them with funding and directives for action, but asking them to keep up a pretense of independence from American labor control:

FROM MARCH 3 to 17, 1961, ICFTU's Executive Committee, under Belgian Transports leader Omer Becu, sat in session. The outstanding decision: Approval of the action formula proposed by AFL-CIO, labeled "Internal Relations in the International Movement". The vital phrase: "In some cases it is possible and even preferable that affiliated unions pursue their activities independently in the international field, on condition that the ICFTU be fully consulted." Translated, this means, "At times, in the case of agitating against a NATO ally (such as Portugal, in Angola, or Britain, in Kenya) it is best that AFL-CIO and ICFTU be kept out of it, but we are to tell you what to do.” [Hilaire du Berrier Reports, June 1961]

Since the FDR administration, American embassies included not only a military, naval and air attaché, but also a labor attaché, who was to represent the interests of "labor" in the said country, providing money, organizational and logistical know-how, coordination with international labor, etc., to local “labor leaders.”

The quotation marks for "labor leaders” in, say, Ghana or Guinea are justified, and not used merely for effect. Most of Africa had no industry. These American-directed "labor leaders” often acted in an unindustrialized Africa or other parts of the Third World supposedly to preempt Soviet organizing, “defend democracy,” or ideally to place in governments its own leftist leaders friendly to America as opposed to the Soviets.

On the "NGO" side, organizations like the American Friends of Vietnam and American Committee on Africa were run since the 1950’s by people such as Angier Biddle Duke (later JFK’s chief of protocol for the State Department), Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger and others. Which is to say, not Latvian communists (excuse—“noncommunist labor organizers”) like Jay Lovestone as in the international activities of the AFL-CIO and ICFTU, but good solid WASP left-liberals of the FDR variety. (The American Friends of Vietnam had formerly been called the Vietnam-American Friendship Association when this organization supported Ho Chi Minh in the late 1940’s, but the name was changed to AFoV when they switched support for Diem, a Catholic socialist and brother of a prominent labor organizer in Vietnam.) There were also very active church and religious groups, particularly Methodist, acting in similar capacity as “NGO's" in Africa and elsewhere. In particular the World Council of Churches was another American-led institution that consistently transferred American tithes to Third World leftist regimes, in much the same way as American labor union members’ dues were transferred by Irving Brown and the AFL-CIO and ICFTU to anti-French and anti-Portuguese agitation in Algeria, Angola, and so forth.

Which is all to say that it was not Allen Dulles himself or even necessarily his lieutenants like Tom Braden directly managing America's support for the international left. Rather, it was outsourced and delegated to a coalition of labor organizers from FDR years and also to left-aligned liberals. Being "out to lunch” or neglectful of who you delegate to is characteristic of the ruling classes of this time. A famous document of the 1940’s attributed to and supposedly emblematic of Protestant liberal progressivism and universalism was likewise delegated to a different type of writer—this happened often. It is plausible that among the many NGO heads to which America delegated its foreign policy were certainly some Kim Philby types—a type present also in the FDR administration, that is, direct Soviet agents; but it's not necessary to believe this. Between outright Soviet spies and simply naive liberal idiots there are many gradations of types: Leo Cherne, Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown were functional Bolsheviks in all their beliefs and activities, and didn't need direct orders from or coordination with Moscow; they wanted the same thing, and all they needed to do to get CIA and American government funding was to say they were doing it in the name of democracy or to oppose Communism—for which there is no evidence that they ever did.

Carelessness in general actually played a big role in the story of decolonization on the European side as well. Very often anticolonialist leftists (and now, “Dissidents”) think the European powers were more interested in colonialism than they actually were. But many times by the mid-20th Century they had come to see their colonies as nuisances. I remember making a prominent leftist academic very angry once by pointing out that England got rid of Aden unceremoniously with a simple budget item crossed out with a line. (The JFK and Johnson administrations were of course very quick to recognize and support the anti-European Yemen “independent” regimes). As I will show soon, carelessness—literally a minister being out on a weekend fishing trip—contributed much to France losing French Congo to the Reds. The podcaster style, and more generally the democratic and pleb mind must see vastly coordinated events and far-seeing central planning in all historical developments. But momentous changes for the world and in the lives of millions worldwide often are decided by stupid small things….

Whatever the precise mechanism of its actions abroad, explicit support for the international noncommunist left is the CIA and State Department line and claim for decades; it's not secret or controversial. I’m weary of having to hear it brought up from people who think it's a great revelation, as if I have to discuss babby’s first Cold War geopolitics all over again. It was expressed for decades in hundredfold ways, whether under Arthur Schlesinger’s old book of liberal activism The Vital Center, or Talcott Parsons’ own homegrown racial Bolshevism based on Americanist and Protestant values:

Talcott Parsons on Black Citizenship

This last was meant to take the wind out of what was understood to be the Soviets’ and Maoists’ otherwise triumphal racial Bolshevism and leadership of Colored Third World revolution.

When in the late 1960’s “it was revealed” by far left groups in America that Tom Braden had supported Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone’s international activities through the AFL-CIO, the IFCTU and so on, it was the least well-kept secret of any: Braden proudly owned it and got a frisson out of admitting how "immoral" and Machiavellian he was. In fact it was widely known that international labor was meddling in the Third World and Africa by the mid-1950's and even before; they were publicly justifying their activities even at the time with the claim they were "supporting democracy." The episode of the left’s chimpout over the "revelation" that the CIA supported the international labor left in the Third World has been repeated over and over again in subsequent decades and in our own day as well: the “Old Left” chimp out over revelations of CIA meddling and subversion, whether in Third World nations or in the form of “subversion” of the left itself, with the CIA wink-winking at its own supposed far-seeing manipulations of every side in every conflict. As Netflix in recent years never stops reminding its audience, the CIA is omnipotent and godlike.

The motivation for all this was, again, partly realpolitik "we have to preempt the Soviets,” partly based on Marxian-Hegelist religious predictions about the inevitable course of History, partly—and in my view crucially—the expression of an inherent leftist, egalitarian liberation theology that was genuinely believed by these men. Remember that FDR’s common declaration with Stalin at Tehran in 1943 in favor of decolonization and against European imperialism precedes the start of the Cold War. This joint Soviet-American declaration of a crusade against European imperialism happened even before the end of World War 2, and before any serious indications that European presence in the colonial world was at all shaky against a then-assailed Bolshevism (as a matter of fact Lenin in the 1920’s had proclaimed already the Soviet Union's eventual leadership of the colored Third World, heralded already in the Third International, but these plans were temporarily put on hold by Stalin in the 1930’s due to other looming problems in Europe. American alliance and the Lend-Lease program of the 1930’s saved the Soviets from that danger). The preferences of people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Angier Biddle Duke, and others involved with the American Committee on Africa, the American Friends of Vietnam and a number of other similar organizations, some dating from the late 1940's when these same supported Ho Chi Minh, at the time known to French and English intelligence as a member of the Comintern and not merely a nationalist, cannot be attributed primarily to a desire to preempt the Soviets, but to a shared genuine commitment—shared with the Soviets and the international Reds I should emphasize—to facing down fascism, colonialism and imperialism.

But if all this worked, then what is the problem? If America managed by these methods to keep the Soviets out of the Third World, to deny them access, then this surely was a successful and far-seeing policy that helped America's interests, whatever its original motivations. The problem is that this didn’t in fact work. In almost every case where this policy was put in action, it was the Soviets and their allies who won. This policy was certainly sold to the American people and to congress, with demands for funding, under the pretext that it would “help democracy" and ward off Soviet influence, but that’s not in fact what happened in almost any case. The most famous example, and one of the clearest, though still unknown to the general public, is that of Vietnam. But similar things happened all over the world, including most of Africa. An entire book could be written about the African cases alone. One of the best political books of the 20th Century was written about the Vietnam example, where America erected Diem, an unknown, constipated, wholesome Catholic socialist labor leader in a Buddhist country with no popular base of support, who under the guise of defending democracy and fighting communism proceeded never to fight communism and instead spent untold American funding to destroy all anticommunist factions in South Vietnam, leaving America by 1965 in an impossible situation. (https://www.amazon.com/Background-Betrayal-Hilaire-Du-Berrier/dp/B000GQV0YI —sorry for the price, it's actually my fault. After I talked about this book with Moldbug on number one sex show Caribbean Rhythms it has since become impossible to find a remaining physical version. I hear that the John Birch Society, which holds the rights, will soon reprint it. Until then, maybe look online).

This series, in three parts, is just a short introduction to America's support for leftist and anticolonialist causes in subsaharan Africa from the late 1950’s to around 1970. To the detriment of its own interests and those of its NATO allies, and to the benefit of the Soviets, China, and the international left.

Part two of this series will address various examples of American pro-leftist and anticolonialist meddling in subsaharan Africa—stay tuned.

This article and series makes use of the invaluable work of Hilaire du Berrier and in particular his little-studied newsletter from 1955-2002, the best history of the second half of the 20th Century. I high recommend this important resource: https://sorenbh.dk/page22.html