War and Ideology

Anne Applebaum points out this week that amidst all the mourning for Reagan, and the seemingly endless flow of leaders and op eds about the dead statesman, little attention was paid to the death in Berlin some three weeks ago of a figure who was of equal importance to the West's victory in the Cold War - the author, editor, and political analyst Melvin J. Lasky:

Of course the West's prosperity appealed to the East. But so did the West's cultural self-confidence and its open political debate. Throughout the Cold War, Mel Lasky was one of the people who fought hard to keep that debate going. Finding himself in Berlin in the early days of the Cold War, deeply disturbed by the intellectual enthusiasm for communism that he found all around him, Lasky helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a movement designed to promote not just pro-Americanism but the principles of democracy and capitalism among European and American intellectuals. The group — funded in part by the CIA — in turn supported Encounter magazine, which was edited first by Irving Kristol and then by Lasky, from 1958 to 1990.


After considering Lasky's extraordinary and multi-faceted contribution to the ideological war against Communism, Applebaum wonders where, in the war against militant Islam, the new Congress for Cultural Freedom is going to come from. With Washington - and much of the US - in a profoundly anti-European mood, and with "hardware solutions" to the threat increasingly taking precedence over methods of ideological warfare, there is a danger that the lessons of the Cold War will remain unlearned:

Instead of thinking how to explain and promote moderate Islam, too many argue that "force is the only language they understand." Instead of academic exchanges, our immigration bureaucrats have effectively clamped down on the number of students coming here from Muslim countries. Next year there will be fewer than ever before.

It's worth remembering this week as politicians scramble to claim Reagan's mantle. Plenty will be willing to denounce the "evil" of radical Islam as he once denounced the evil of communism. Just as many are convinced that they have learned, from Reagan, the importance of superior weaponry. They are right, but only partially so. The war on terrorism can achieve a permanent victory only after it has found its Mel Lasky as well.