Tag: politics

Review: Charlie English. The CIA Book Club.

By John Fraser

This book proves the wisdom of the timeless adages that the pen is mightier than the sword and that the truth will set you free.

For three decades, the CIA ran a highly secretive operation to smuggle literature, magazines and art books across the Iron Curtain into the countries of the Warsaw Pact.

This was to stimulate thought and dialogue, and to provide ideas and inspiration to people who were trapped in countries where they were being force-fed communist ideology and were starved of free speech and debate.

“What some suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that the uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance,” Charlie English writes in The CIA Book Club.

“It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation known in Washington as the ‘CIA book program’, and part of the programme’s strategy was to build up circulating libraries of illicit books on the far side of the Iron Curtain.

“As well as glossy lifestyle magazines such as Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan, the CIA sent copies of the New York Review of Books and Manchester Guardian Weekly, works by the Nobel winners Boris Pasternak, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky; philosophical texts by Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and Bertrand Russell; literary fiction from Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut; writing advice from Virginia Woolf; the plays of Václav Havel and Bertolt Brecht; and the spy thrillers of John le Carré, to name a few.”

He suggests that the number of items smuggled into the Eastern Bloc over the 30 years was almost 10-million.

“Books arrived by every possible means: smuggled in trucks, aboard yachts, sent by balloon, in the post or in travellers’ luggage. Mini-editions were hidden in the sheet music of touring musicians, packed into food tins or Tampax boxes. In one instance, a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a flight to Warsaw hidden in a baby’s nappy,” English informs us.

“From the late 1970s, banned books and pamphlets were also reproduced in huge quantities by underground printers in Poland, on presses smuggled in from the West, amplifying the literature’s effect.

“Increasingly, the underground would publish home-grown titles, too, and by the mid-1980s, the so-called ‘second circulation’ of illicit literature in Poland grew so large that the system of communist censorship began to break down.”

As the operation was most intense in Poland, The CIA Book Club gives a detailed insight into the lives of several Poles who actively countered the propaganda onslaught of their oppressors, with insightful accounts of those who assisted in the distribution of smuggled books as well as in carrying out illegal printing activities.

“By 1962, at least 500 organisations were sending books on the CIA’s behalf, including some of the most prestigious names in publishing: Doubleday, Barnes & Noble, the Oxford English Dictionary, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Allen & Unwin, Chatto & Windus, Faber & Faber, Macmillan, Gollancz, Bertelsmann and Hachette,” he records.

“No country responded with greater enthusiasm to these gifts than Poland, the largest of the ‘captive nations’ and the most liberal.”

Collection points in cities such as Paris were also arranged for the provision of books to visiting Poles, to be taken back to their native country, also funded by the CIA.

The period covered by The CIA Book Club was a turning point in Polish history, as it endured the depths of repression, followed by the emergence of Solidarity, then a new wave of oppression, before, finally, freedom.

English gives a detailed account of the organisation of the literature distribution operation from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

It was largely successful, but he also gives an account of one smuggling run that went badly wrong because the organisers had been infiltrated by the Polish secret police. The planners threw caution to the wind and weapons were included in a huge shipment, whose capture handed a propaganda victory to the Polish state.

However, the overall hit rate for the smugglers was high.

English counters the very valid concern that the programme to provide banned literature to people in the Eastern Bloc was an exercise in cultural imperialism — noting that in the later years of the programme, the most popular works that were distributed were often by Soviet or East European writers, chosen and edited by people who lived in the bloc, or by émigrés.

Decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, almost all files about this clandestine operation remain classified, as do those documenting the CIA’s wider operation in support of the Polish opposition.

It is, of course, impossible to accurately quantify the impact of the CIA Book Club operation, but it surely must have helped to keep the flames of free thought alive in territories where the political classes did their very best to subjugate and subdue the masses.

“Some of the censor’s rulings made little sense even within the bizarre logic of the Party: an anthology of Grimms’ fairy tales could be published by one house but not by another, a book about growing carrots was destroyed for implying that vegetables could sprout in individuals’ gardens as well as in those run by collectives,” English notes.

He provides valuable insight into the sort of repressive society to which the CIA Book Club operation chose to send its eye-opening books and magazines.

Its focus on Poland means that we learn far less about activities in the other countries that were targeted, but this can be justified as Poland was the country where the most action seems to have taken place.

Above all, the book provides a valuable reminder of the power and importance of free thought and the flow of ideas, and that books matter.

This review was first published in Business Day.

Review: On Democracies and Death Cults. Douglas Murray

By John Fraser

Many will dismiss this book, rubbish its conclusions and berate its author. It is a book that provides a solid argument in favour of Israel and against Hamas, with the writer seeing Israel as a democracy and Hamas as the death cult.

Douglas Murray, a successful author and journalist, is no stranger to controversy. His previous books about the dangers of woke ideology and mass migration into Europe have won him praise from many but also made him enemies.

He has spent a lot of time in Israel since the Hamas incursions, massacre and kidnappings of October 7 2023, and he provides extensive and harrowing accounts of the barbarity that took place.

“Within hours the sheer scale of the assault started to become apparent. The terrorists had come into Israel not just by land vehicles and on foot but by boat and on hang gliders; perhaps as many as six thousand in total,” he writes.

“Wherever they arrived they brought death — with rifles, grenades, incendiary weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, and more. It would take weeks — in fact months — to identify the number of people killed that day. The final body count was not identified until ten months later. The death toll turned out to be just short of 1,200 people.”

An underlying theme of this book — and it is an unapologetically controversial one — is that in the Gaza conflict, there is a fundamental difference between the Israelis and the Hamas fighters.

The atrocities of October 7 were well documented by those who enacted them, and Murray suggests that there was delight among the Hamas fighters in participating in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Murray gives an account of one Hamas invader who joyfully contacted his family to beam them the evidence of the killings he had just carried out and notes the enthusiastic praise and blessings he received from his relatives.

In contrast, Murray suggests that it is love — not hate — that motivates the Israelis.

“From the south of Gaza to the south of Lebanon and the West Bank, none take a joy or pleasure in the task they have to do. They did it not because they loved death but exactly because they love life. They fought for life. For the survival of their families, their nation, and their people.”

Critics of this book will counter that Israel has pummelled Gaza with great force over many, many months and that the death toll has been enormous — with Palestinian victims including women and children, doctors, journalists and aid workers.

It is instructive to read of the vast wealth accumulated by Hamas leaders — Murray suggests they became billionaires by pocketing international aid — and how aid to Gaza was also diverted into building a network of underground tunnels that are longer than the London Underground. Unlike the Underground, these tunnels have a primarily military purpose — enabling the stealthy movement of fighters and the concealment of weapons and hostages.

Another important theme of this book is that the backlash against Israel began not after it had launched its retaliatory attacks on Gaza and begun its efforts to secure the return of the hostages — but on October 7th itself.

“Within a couple of months of the war starting there was a narrative that went something like this: Israel had the world’s sympathy and support in the immediate aftermath of the 7th but had squandered it by prosecuting its war against Hamas in Gaza,” Murray suggests.

“I also wondered why the citizens of Israel seemed so unique among victims. Why they seemed to be the only people on earth who, when savagely attacked, either didn’t gain the world’s sympathy or gained it only for a matter of hours — if that.

“I also feared — correctly, as it turned out — that a great wave of denial would sweep across the world, that what turned out to be the biggest massacre of Jews anywhere in the world since the Holocaust would swiftly be denied just as surely as neo-Nazis and others chose to try to deny the Nazi Holocaust after it had happened.”

He argues this is because there is a seam of anti-Semitism running through Western society.

“As the late rabbi Jonathan Sacks, among many others, pointed out, Jews were once hated because of their religion. Then sometime after the Enlightenment it became hard to hate people because of their religion. At that point, the Jews were hated because of their race. Then, after the twentieth century, it became unacceptable to hate people because of their race. So, in the twenty-first century, when civilized people cannot hate the Jews for their religion or their race, Jews can be hated for having a state — and for defending it.”There is one important question Murray poses, but is unable to answer: How did Israel’s security services not predict and prevent the incursions of October 7?

This is the same highly sophisticated state apparatus that was able to place explosives into thousands of hand-held pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies intended for use by Hezbollah — and then detonate them.

Murray recalls questioning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and receiving the lame response that what went wrong on October 7 would be determined later by an official inquiry.

He records that a watch post staffed by young female Israeli soldiers did report suspicious movements inside Gaza before the Hamas attacks, but the reports did not seem to have been taken seriously.

“From the moment the State of Israel was created there was one certainty above all: as embattled as Israel might be, and as hated as it often seemed to be from every side, at least this was a place where Jews could be safe and protect themselves. And then 7 October happened, and a doubt spread among Jews in Israel and around the world. What if we aren’t safe in Israel either,” Murray notes.

Just as opinions on the rights and wrongs of the Gaza conflict are polarised, so will opinions about On Democracies and Death Cults.

For some, it will be a naked and unconvincing exercise in pro-Israel propaganda.

For those with more open minds, it is a disturbing, distressing and thought-provoking analysis of a conflict that has brought suffering, misery and despair to so many. On both sides.

This review was first published in Business Day.