The International Association for Cultural Freedom (previously known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom) was an anti-communist political group best known for being revealed in 1967 as a covert operation of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
Creation of the CCF
The Congress started at the Titania Palace in West Berlin in 26 June, 1950 as a society of intellectuals in opposition to the theory that bourgeois democracy was less compatible with culture than communism. It may have been started in response a March, 1949 peace conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City in which many prominent pacifists urged for peace with Stalin's Soviet Union.
Activites
The Congress managed to obtain enough funding to permit it to operate offices in thirty-five countries, maintain a large staff, sponsor events internationally, and produce numerous publications.
The IACF received significant funding from the Ford Foundation.
CCF/IACF-funded publications
Some of the Congress publications include:
- Quadrant - a political publication of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom
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Encounter - published in the United Kingdom for international distribution
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Solidarity - a cultural, intellectual and literary monthly magazine in the Philipines
Involvement with the CIA
In 1967, Ramparts magazine and the Saturday Evening Post reported on the CIA's funding of a number of anti-communist cultural organizations aimed at winning the support of Soviet-sympathizing liberals worldwide. These reports were lent credence by a statement made by a former CIA covert operations director admitting to CIA financing and operation of the CCF.
In July, 2004, the Australian political party Citizen's Electoral Council (CEC), a member of the Lyndon LaRouche movement, released a pamphlet called Children of Satan III—The Sexual Congress For Cultural Fascism, claiming that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA cultural warfare unit sponsoring hideous modernist and postmodernist "art" in an effort to undermine the population's ability to think, and claimed Jackson Pollock was a supporter of the CCF, to that end.
Theories about the Australian arm of the IACF have abounded since 1975, when then Australian Governor-General John Kerr, an IACF member, dismissed the government of then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, a move that some at the time interpreted as coup d'etat engineered from the United States.
Transition to the "Association"
After the CIA contraversy of 1967, the Congress technically dissolved, but in actuality changed little more than its name (to the International Association for Cultural Freedom instead), which quietly resumed operations until 1979.
The IACF held its Executive Council in Paris.
Today
Today, records of the International Association for Cultural Freedom and its predecessor the Congress for Cultural Freedom are stored at the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago's Library.
External Links
Last updated: 05-13-2005 07:56:04
