THE FPRI INTELLECTUALS, RACISM, AND HUMAN RIGHTS

In 1973, Possony wrote a memorandum to the American Council for World Freedom (ACWF) in which he denounced the extreme right-wing membership and ideology of the Latin American chapters of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The ACWF functioned as the American chapter of the WACL, an umbrella organization dedicated to the global struggle against communism. Possony warned that the Latin American and especially the Mexican chapters of the WACL had been penetrated by fascist émigrés such as the Romanian Iron Guardists and Croat Ustashis and seemed to be “connected with several neo-fascist movements” (Anderson and Anderson, Reference Anderson and Anderson1986, p. 85). The Mexican WACL literature, Possony complained, contained “no references to representative government, none to democracy or national self-determination,” being instead replete with anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic calls to arms (Anderson and Anderson, Reference Anderson and Anderson1986, p. 86). According to Possony, this type of discourse was ultimately anti-American, and therefore dangerous. Possony and the ACWF left the WACL in 1975, but Possony would return into the League’s ranks in 1980, although none of the fascist organizations denounced by him in 1973 had been purged from the organization (Bellant Reference Bellant1991). In fact, Possony had a long history of collaboration with the American extreme right, and his on-off-and-on-again relationship with the WACL was no mere accident.

Thus, in 1968, Possony published an article on “UNESCO and Race: A Study in Intellectual Oppression,” in the January issue of Mankind Quarterly, a journal founded in 1960 by the Scottish physical anthropologist Robert Gayre with the explicit purpose of promoting White supremacist arguments (Billig Reference Billig1979). Among the founding members of Mankind Quarterly were the British anthropologist Roger Pearson, who would go on to become a member of the editorial board of the FPRI (Anderson and Anderson, Reference Anderson and Anderson1986); Robert E. Kuttner, an eugenicist affiliated with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago; Corrado Gini, a sociology professor at the University of Rome who had been counted among the more racist academics of Mussolini’s Italy; and Otmar von Verschuer, a German eugenicist who had conducted experiments at Auschwitz where his assistants included Josef Mengele (Schmuhl Reference Rose2008). Kuttner was the president of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), the publisher of Mankind Quarterly (Tucker Reference Strausz-Hupé, Kintner and Possony2002), and claimed that racism provided an answer to forced “Communist equalitarianism” (Tucker Reference Strausz-Hupé, Kintner, Dougherty and Cottrell1996). Kuttner was one of the more prominent members of the Liberty Lobby, a White supremacist organization founded in 1955 by Willis A. Carto, a shadowy book publisher who deplored the fall of the Third Reich and had founded Liberty Lobby in order to strike “the strongest blow against the power of organized Jewry” by deporting African Americans to Africa (Winston Reference Weyl1998).

Channeling for his own purposes the American political tradition of articulating national identity and crucial political battles in terms of opposition to dictatorship (Alpers Reference Alpers2003), Possony established himself right from the start of the article as the valiant defender of the freedom of academic research against the thought control “exercised on a global scale” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the name of its anti-racist “dogmas” (Possony Reference Possony1968a, p. 115). Possony’s immediate targets were UNESCO’s “Final Report,” published on December 14, 1967, and synthetizing the results of a “Meeting of Experts on Race and Racial Prejudice” which took place September 18-26, 1967 at the UNESCO House in Paris; four conferences on race problems sponsored by UNESCO; and the United Nations’ Resolution 116B (VI) 1948, all pointing out that race is a “social myth,” that there are no race hierarchies, and that all human groups are similar in mental capacities and dynamic in their physiological makeup (Conklin Reference Conklin2013). Indeed, in 1950, the French Maussian anthropologist Alfred Metraux became head of a UNESCO division dedicated to the study of racial questions. The cultural pluralism and racial relativism sponsored by UNESCO found expression in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s in a series of publications authored by, among others, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Leiris, Otto Klineberg, Harry Lionel Shapiro, Juan Comas (a stern opponent of Mankind Quarterly), and Arnold Marshall Rose (Conklin Reference Conklin2013).

UNESCO’s campaigns against racial prejudice were inspired by the anti-racist and anti-Nazi “manifesto” issued in 1939 by the Seventh International Genetics Congress. But Possony complained that, whereas in 1939 the scientific community had merely rejected the existence of any innate psychological, cultural, or intellectual characteristics associated with physical differences between “races,” the post-WWII UNESCO statements regarding race included demands for social reforms such as the improvement of the educational and welfare systems, the amelioration of problems with urban housing and public services, and “economic reconstruction.” Possony disparaged all these demands as examples of expert ignorance, of geneticists talking as public intellectuals about “economic and social problems[] about which they had no competence or even rudimentary knowledge” (Possony 1968a, p. 116). Worse than that, the UNESCO experts stressing the importance of environment over that of heredity were guilty of adopting “a purely Marxist philosophy” (Possony Reference Possony1968a, p. 116). Sharing the feelings of defense intellectuals such as Anthony Bouscaren, who warned that “75 per cent of all speeches and memoranda in the UN emanate from Soviet sources” (Reference Bouscaren1953, p. 59), Possony found that UNESCO’s campaign was “basically a plan for psychological operations” seeking to stifle free speech in democratic countries and to “propose socio-political reconstruction and revolution” in the name of legal and political equality (1968a, pp. 117-118). As such, anti-antiracism had to become a priority for all the intellectuals dedicated to the defense of the Free World.

While he insisted that recognizing the existence of “real differences” among races would not imply the refusal of “equal treatment to unequal persons,” Possony worried in essentialist terms about the harmful effects of legal equality: “For example, it would be unjust to apply the same criminal code to two different groups, one with a high frequency of the disorder known as ‘running amok,’ the other without this trait” (1968a, p. 119). Possony’s essentialism translated in fear of miscegenation, for while he conceded that racial purity is a myth, he noted that even Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Joseph Arthur Gobineau—the founding fathers of racial anthropology whose writings discarded the concept of pure races—were concerned about “the impact of migration and resultant mixing” (Reference Possony1968a, p. 121). Possony dashed the hopes of those who believed that intermarriages would eventually lead to the extinction of African Americans by pointing out that, instead of making them vanish, interracial breeding would only “propagate” African-American genes “more widely” (1968b, p. 320).

Possony’s attack on UNESCO was steeped in the Mankind Quarterly orthodoxy represented by Kuttner, Gayre, or Pearson and read like a sequel of his collaboration with Nathaniel Weyl, a pillar of Mankind Quarterly, and a contributor to the FPRI journal, Orbis (Weyl Reference Tucker1963). Weyl studied economics, philosophy, and history at Columbia University and at the London School of Economics. After publishing a handful of anti-Nazi and anti-communist works, Weyl started churning out a string of books and articles dedicated to race problems. Weyl’s The Negro in American Civilization (1960) argued that African Americans were inferior and could never hope to become a productive part of the American urbanized society. The book received good reviews in some academic journals (Gregor Reference Gregor1963; Stuckert Reference Strausz-Hupé, Cottrell, Dougherty, Hahn and Herber1962), was well received by mainstream conservative publications (Kendall Reference Kendall1960), and was praised by Nathan Glazer as “clearly free of any prejudice” (Glazer Reference Glazer1960).^{Footnote 4}Mankind Quarterly touted it as a victory in the struggle against the anthropology promoted by UNESCO and a step toward replacing the “cult of equality” with the “emphasis placed upon individual liberty” (Fox Reference Fox1961).

Weyl’s next book was The Geography of Intellect (1963), a book he co-authored with Possony. The Geography of Intellect attempted to demonstrate the racial and intellectual superiority of the “races” living in the temperate zones over those inhabiting the warmer climates. Some academic reviewers were horrified by Weyl and Possony’s argument that, since only the elites contributed to the progress of civilization, the West should embrace certain eugenic measures such as the sterilization of the “races with inferior performance,” and the artificial insemination of women with the “sperm of men of genius” (Dunn Reference Dunn1964). Yet, Mankind Quarterly praised it (Anonymous 1964), and the reviewer of the conservative quarterly Modern Age, founded by Russell Kirk in 1957, hoped the book would impress upon the public that the desegregation of African Americans and the resulting “deterioration in population quality” weakened the hand of the United States in the struggle against communism, and that a “satisfactory eugenics program” ought to have included the discouragement of mixed marriages (McGurk Reference McDougall and Strausz-Hupé1964, p. 422). The sociologist John H. Burma (Reference Burma1962) did not fail to notice the merits of the book, while the Indiana University professor Stephen Sargent Visher wrote that it was impossible to read The Geography of Intellect without coming to agree with its major conclusions regarding the genetic nature of intelligence and the fact that “extraordinary intellect (genius)” is extremely rare “among Negroes,” people living in the “hot regions,” and “manual laborers” (Visher 1964). By the latter, he was referring to the Mexican braceros, or highly skilled agricultural laborers, imported by U.S. companies between 1942 and 1964 in order to alleviate the shortages of manual labor caused by the sudden but continuous growth of industry during and after WWII. Even Seymour Martin Lipset (Lipset and Ladd, Jr., 1971) quoted Weyl, and not in order to criticize him.

Understanding and dealing profitably with racial differences was therefore essential for waging the Cold War in defense of the Western civilization (Newby Reference Naftali1969). Whereas UNESCO’s 1964 and 1967 statements found that the racial differences were of “limited scientific interest” and encouraged the study of differences between individuals, Possony argued that the racial study of populations was of the greatest political and social interest and represented a “legitimate” (1968a, p. 125) field of study, especially at a time when the politics of race exploded on the American political scene (in the 1960s). Possony found that it was impossible to tackle the problem of African American integration (the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’ “self-imposed and perplexing task”) through assimilationist methods and court orders such as the 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, mandating the desegregation of schools (1968b, pp. 320-321). The demands for racial equality had no political answer because only science was able to deal with what intelligence tests indicated to be the significant IQ gap between racial groups. Possony claimed that, even though both genetic endowment and the environment interacted and shaped the development of any human being, the impact of environment was significant only in the case of those with IQ scores situated between 70 and 90. Based on this data, Possony advanced the standard neoliberal argument that man’s epistemological weakness makes social planning as inefficient as economic planning, that whatever our attitude toward poverty, inequality of chances, equal access to education, nutrition, family practices, and all the other factors that fall under the heading of “environment,” the sad conclusion was that “psycho-socio-economic environmental ‘planning’” was an “illusion” (1968a, pp. 125-127, 129).

Possony was an early member of what historians called the “neoliberal thought collective” (Denord Reference Denord, Mirowski and Plehwe2009). Possony was close to Ludwig von Mises in the 1930s, and both of them would participate, together with Friedrich Hayek, at the Colloque Walter Lippmann (CWL) in Paris, France, from August 26 through August 30, 1938. The Colloque marked the emergence of neoliberalism as an answer to the challenge of socialism and the CWL’s anti-statist program would be revived after the war by the Mont Pèlerin Society, the very influential neoliberal think tank founded by Hayek in 1947 and counting Possony among its members (Hülsmannn Reference Hülsmannn2007). Skeptical about the benefits of the state’s intervention in the economy or involvement with social welfare, Possony argued that the capacities of “underperforming” or “handicapped” races could be improved only through “medical action,” infinitely cheaper than a “social revolution whose cost is exorbitant and whose outcome is uncertain” (1968a, p. 129). As part of the clinical approach to the “mind-body problem,” Possony called for the revival of “ethnic brain studies” and of “electrophysiological research,” and pointed out that medical treatments such as electroshocks might offer a solution: “The memory of mice can be improved by injections with metrazol and other drugs, by implanting strychnine crystals into a particular brain region, and by implanting electrodes into the brain and effecting tiny electrical shocks. Interesting enough, the less intelligent strains of mice benefit more from such treatment than the more intelligent strains. All this is not more than suggestive, but it illuminates the way we should take to solve the problem” (1968a, p. 144). Possony reiterated his arguments in favor of a technological solution to the “dysfunctions” and the “intellectual handicaps” of certain social and ethnic groups as late as 1974, when he published in the same Mankind Quarterly an article praising the eugenic research of Nobel laureate William Shockley, a Stanford physicist (Possony Reference Possony1974). Shockley’s eugenicist discourse was a throwback to the days of Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau, being developed around concepts such as “population pollution,” “degeneracy,” and “bad heredity.” Like Possony (Glaser and Possony, Reference Glaser and Possony1979), Shockley argued that welfare programs were unable to cope with the social problems generated by the “growing frequency of insufficient human intelligence” (Possony Reference Possony1974, p. 36) and that, instead of spending billions of dollars on social welfare programs, the U.S. government should invest in medical research and in the development of new technologies capable of tackling this problem (Possony Reference Possony1974, p. 39). Shockley proposed to lighten the genetic burden of the American society by the introduction of state-run programs of compulsive sterilization of criminals, offering persons with low IQs financial incentives to accept voluntary sterilization, and in general targeting “the dysgenic fertility of the black population” (Ramsden Reference Possony and Pournelle2006, p. 37; Connelly Reference Connelly2009). For Possony, Shockley and Carleton Coon were “contemporary Galileos” (1974, p. 36) persecuted by liberal intelligenstia for their pathbreaking research on racial differences and eugenics.

Besides being cheaper than the modification of social patterns and cultural traditions, technology was an essential component of the Western identity for, according to Possony, the West itself was a “technological-commercial-military civilization” whose cultural achievements were “in large part, attributable to men of genius” (1968a, p. 141). As Strausz-Hupé also liked to point out, the Western culture was not the product of any particular nation but of the entire “white race”: “Western culture, including its technology, is the product not only of environmental factors, physical and historical, but also of a race, to wit, the white race” (1952, p. 111). While avoiding any discussion of whether or not the “white race” was “superior” to other races, Strausz-Hupé pointed out that the “white race” was clearly superior to all the other races, “the yellow included,” in technological matters (1952, p. 111). Therefore, there was nothing wrong with appealing to medical technology to close the cultural gap between different ethnic groups. And there was nothing amiss either with Possony’s fear that mating outside one’s ethnic group would lead to a contraction of the superior IQ levels, for a desegregated society would have fewer of the geniuses whose accomplishments allowed the West to flourish. The cultural war against UNESCO’s equalitarian, left wing “dogmatism” was part and parcel of the global confrontation between the Western Civilization and its various Communist, or “colored,” politically or racially non-aligned foes. The racial problem was therefore a national security problem.

Indeed, Lt. Colonel William R. Kintner (1915-1997)—who co-authored with Strausz-Hupé and Possony seminal FPRI books such as Protracted Conflict (1963[1959]) and A Forward Strategy for America (1961), and who would serve as director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute between 1975 and 1982—argued in his 1950 book The Front is Everywhere: Militant Communism in Action (1950) that the Communist leaders’ favorite tactics was that of “termite warfare,” of “bit by bit” disintegration of the enemy by “deliberate cultivation of social dislocations, moral breakdowns, ideological bankruptcy, leadership failures, economic paralysis, and social hatred” (p. 172). Considered from this perspective, the Civil Rights Movement appeared as a suspicious-looking “termite” attempt to subvert the United States by challenging the public orthodoxy and the social order on any number of issues, from economics to ethics.

Possony ranked The Front is Everywhere among the “major studies” dedicated to the question of “soviet strategy and tactics” (1953, pp. vii-viii, 122) and agreed with Kintner that, in their quest for world domination, the Soviets would use the anti-colonial movements to weaken the Western civilization. Possony also estimated that, since the advances of American technology and social welfare had made American workers immune to the obsolete Communist promises, the role of the proletariat would be played in the United States by African Americans, whose revolutionary potential had already been singled out by the Theses of the Sixth Comintern Congress (1928) (Horne Reference Horne and Gayle Plummer2003). Possony warned that International Communism would exploit “the growth of the Negro proletariat” in the United States by giving orders to their local agents to: stimulate the “struggle for a complete and real equality of the negroes,” set up Black revolutionary organizations, demand the right of self-determination for “the predominantly Negro areas in the United States,” and set up Soviet -backed Black independent states in the South of the United States (1953, p. 165). Still, both Possony (Reference Possony1953) and Strausz-Hupé (Reference Smoot1960) urged their readers to keep their eye on the potentially subversive Chinese minority, presented by the two authors as a monolithic, secretive, well-off group more loyal to its ethnic group or distant homeland than to its host countries.

Possony’s interest in the subversive potential of the struggle for national liberation and civil rights survived the successes of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the cultural shift toward a more liberal American society in the 1970s. Samuel Moyn (Reference Moulin2010) has suggested that the “breakthrough year” for the human rights discourse was 1977, when Amnesty International received the Nobel Peace Prize and President Jimmy Carter’s Inaugural Address announced a new bipartisan, anti-Soviet, U.S. foreign policy based on the global defense of human rights. Moyn’s thesis is confirmed in a tortuous way by Victims of Politics: The State of Human Rights (1979), the fruit of Possony’s collaboration with Kurt Glaser, professor of government at Southern Illinois University and a staunch apartheid supporter (Archer Reference Archer1976; Kuper Reference Kunina1974). Academic reviewers noted that the book was part of a wave of publications stirred by President Carter’s human rights turn (Campbell Reference Campbell1979). Yet some reviewers (Fitzgerald Reference Fitzgerald1980; Quigley Reference Possony and Rhoodie1980) noticed that Glaser and Possony’s heavy treatise on human rights was an academic calzone stuffed with right-wing ideological leftovers from the 1950s and 1960s. Glaser and Possony still fought for the merits of segregation and argued that the American school system, where “the goal of integration has been interpreted in terms of racial mixing,” oppressed the White children: “The mixing retards the education of and thus discriminates against the higher achievers, who are usually white” (Glaser and Possony, Reference Glaser and Possony1979, p. 323). However, the two authors made no reference to Pearson, Kuttner, McGurk, and other Mankind Quarterly/“IAAEE” “experts” who bashed IQ tests for being too culturally determined to serve as universal standard and who translated in neoliberal economic terms Possony’s earlier more openly racist arguments.

Defining discrimination as “deprivation or denial of rights, privileges, or property a person or group might otherwise enjoy,” Glaser and Possony objected to what they perceived to be the U.N.’s failure to explicitly distinguish between “discrimination,” “segregation,” and “separation” in the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965) (1979, pp. 18, 21). The point was an important one, since Glaser and Possony argued that, in certain instances, human rights included the right of ethnic groups to live apart, and sometimes non-discrimination required segregation and separation, as in the case of the South African “separate development” policies endorsed by the two authors for their humanitarianism (Glaser and Possony, Reference Glaser and Possony1979, pp. 24, 145; Possony Reference Possony1968b). In fact, racism consisted precisely in the denial of “the right of independent group development” through “the imposition of artificial handicaps and hindrances” on certain classes (such as the upper-middle class, beset by progressive taxation) or ethnic groups (such as the American Whites suffering because of affirmative action, and the South African Whites fighting against “domination” by the “racially alien” Black majority) (Glaser and Possony, Reference Glaser and Possony1979; Possony Reference Possony1968b, p. 331). Victims of Politics saw affirmative action as harmful and insisted on the subversive nature of the graduated income tax, “one of ten program points advocated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848) as steps toward abolishing bourgeois conditions of production” (Glaser and Possony, Reference Glaser and Possony1979, p. 97). Like Weyl (Reference Van der Bergh1972), Glaser and Possony complained that the progressive taxation that made possible the creation of the welfare state was in itself a violation of human rights since it took away “property and economic liberty without due process of law” and prevented people from increasing their wealth “through the market” (1979, p. 329).

However, the merits of the free market and decentralization stopped at the door of population control, essential for Possony’s brand of “togetherness.” Taking a cue from the South African government, Glaser and Possony explained the benefits of internal migration control. The irony was that, on the one hand, Possony (Reference Possony1968b) claimed that the South African government implemented inner migration control policies as part of a plan to create so-called “independent” nation states for the Blacks and to keep at bay the alleged danger of Black majoritarian tyranny. On the other, Glaser and Possony’s arguments in favor of internal migration control and the end of the “open housing” policies aimed to discourage Black separatism while insisting that such measures would strengthen African Americans’ local and national political representation (1979, p. 402). Moreover, Glaser and Possony did not venture to explain how the bureaucracy fostered by South Africa’s “pass laws” (Brookes and Macaulay, Reference Brookes and Macaulay1958), restricting the movement of Blacks in the cities, would have squared off with the “small government” they advocated for in the same breath with the introduction of inner migration control measures in the United States. The target of the proposed legislation was the rural population spurred by “unrealistic expectations aroused by the glimpses of the modern economy” to move from the countryside to barrios, bidonvilles, and ghettos. Once in the cities and unable to get a job, these migrants became prone to crime, disease, and, most of all, to the political radicalism generated by the revolution of rising expectations, or the “radicalism generated by the proximity of wealth and poverty” (Glaser and Possony, Reference Glaser and Possony1979, pp. 328, 402). Social engineering worked only for repressive purposes; improving the education or the healthcare system was futile, but restricting the freedom of movement of poor Black and White Americans saved them from alienation and hence from falling prey to subversive communist demagogues.

The thrust of Possony and Glaser’s argument was that, in the context of the Cold War, national security considerations should prompt Americans to think about ways of altering or discarding altogether traditional concepts such as “liberty, equality, democracy, self-determination, and anticolonialism” (Glaser and Possony, Reference Glaser and Possony1979, p. 547). The authors insisted that in order to function successfully, democracy must be based on “unified body politics,” and on “substantial homogeneity in political behavior” (Glaser and Possony, Reference Glaser and Possony1979, p. 548). In “Nationalism and the Ethnic Factor,” an article published in 1967 in the FPRI journal, Orbis, Possony argued that nationalism was a set of ideas regarding the improvement of “the management of the ethnic factor,” a way to defend “ethnic integrity” (Possony Reference Possony1967a, p. 1223). This concern for the ethnic factor was “rational and mandatory,” because governments need the trust of the people they govern in order to negotiate with foreign nations, and therefore “the rational policy is to ensure that each ethnic group is run by a government of its own ‘kith and kin’” (Possony Reference Possony1967a, p. 1229). Therefore, the one-man-one-vote democratic principle was “non-oppressive” only in monolithic nation-states, and since this principle served well only the numerical majorities, this system would have to be abandoned if the “American Negro” and “the Indian” were to “achieve effective representation” (Possony Reference Possony1967a, p. 1230). Possony’s racialized understanding of democracy led him to argue that multinational or multitribal areas could be ruled only in a non-democratic—colonial or domestic—fashion, that nations should seek to preserve their homogeneity by choosing not to assimilate people perceived as radically alien, and that dominant White minorities or majorities should strive to maintain their hegemony if forced to cohabitate with other ethnic groups (Glaser and Possony, Reference Glaser and Possony1979).

The best embodiment of these social Darwinist ideals was South Africa, one of the most active members of the Free World in the fight against the twin evils of racial and social equality—that is, miscegenation and communism. Possony defended South African apartheid not only in writing, but also by taking the stand and testifying on behalf of the South African government in front of the International Court of Justice in October 1965. In 1958, Possony had denounced South Africa as a “racist” state ruling by “oppression,” like the Communist states (Possony Reference Possony1958, p. 40). Yet, in 1965, Possony couched his testimony in front of the Hague International Court of Justice in the language of axiological pluralism. The complainants from the African Bloc argued that the apartheid regime enforced policies violating the “international human rights norm of non-discrimination or non-separation” as formulated in the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the General Assembly’s Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. In his testimony, widely disseminated by South African propaganda (directed by Eschel Rhoodie), Possony rejected any appeal to a global order underpinned by universal human rights and stressed the importance of cultural diversity, of “continuity and respect for the historical tradition,” warning that: “Mankind with all its diversities has never accepted a single writ. To impose a single formula would be ideological imperialism” (Possony Reference Possony1967b; International Court of Justice 1966, p. 708).

As both this trial and Possony’s 1979 book on human rights indicate, Moyn’s thesis that in the 1960s the Third World preferred to fight for decolonization in the name of national rights and national independence, and not of human rights, needs perhaps to be qualified. For during 1965-1966, the African Bloc countries appealed to human rights in order to challenge South Africa’s right to exercise a U.N. mandate over West Africa, but the argument was rejected by Possony, and finally even by the decision of the International Court of Justice, in the name of historicist arguments based on the concept of national sovereignty (Irwin Reference Irwin2010). Yet, despite historicist appeals to axiological diversity and attacks on the European “universalism” and “cultural imperialism,” Possony defended in the South African apartheid regime precisely its European-ness, ultimately resting his defense on the fact that White South Africans had created a corner of Europe in Africa—that they had built a stable, industrialized, and thus modern society—according to the neoevolutionist pattern of Eurocentric modernization theories devised by W. W. Rostow and Samuel Huntington (Brick Reference Brick, Solovey and Cravens2012; Harootunian Reference Harootunian2004).

The point was emphatically made by the South African propaganda expert Eschel Rhoodie in his book, The Third Africa (1968), to which Possony contributed a substantial concluding chapter. For Rhoodie, the “Third Africa” was the southern part of the continent, dominated by Whites, as opposed to the Arabic Africa in the North and the Black Africa in the center. The Third Africa stood for the superiority of Western civilization over the “warring, primitive,” “illiterate,” “immature, uneducated and economically backward” tribes of Africa that European colonial empires hoisted from the “iron age” into the first stages of civilization (Rhoodie Reference Quigley1968, pp. 118, 189). According to Rhoodie, before the advent of the European colonizers, the native African cultures of Third Africa had completely ignored not only the wheel, a writing system, paper, or the rudiments of sailing, but even the noble art of gardening and the right way to pray. But, as Rhoodie argued, the “Western, or Christian, civilization” imposed on the African natives a whole new way of life characterized by “the rule of law, freedom of religion, free enterprise, state aided education, modern communications, a monetary system, postal and telephone services, health services and a limit to the absolute power of the Chiefs” (Rhoodie Reference Quigley1968, p. 10). The secret to these accomplishments was the refusal of a dogmatically and misinformed liberal-egalitarian approach to the problems of multi-racial, multi-national Southern Africa (Glaser Reference Glaser1973; Rhoodie Reference Quigley1968).

Possony backed Rhoodie’s case with a substantial conclusion in which he blamed the outrage of American public opinion on the subject of apartheid on two factors. First, South Africa played the “role of surrogate scapegoat” for the United States’ own troubled relationship with the African American minority. Secondly, Possony blamed the “melting pot” American ideology for leading Americans to believe that there was no obstacle in the integration of different ethnic strains in the fabric of one unitary culture. Possony protested that the melting pot functioned effectively only with persons of European descent, and that it was impossible to throw in the melting pot ethnic groups with “distinct racial characteristics and living at clearly distinguishable ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ cultural levels” (1968b, 311-313). Possony found that South Africans coped openly with the “fear” of miscegenation that haunted the psyche of the American White majority but was mentioned only in private conversations, “while public objections are raised on different grounds; but the private fears and attitudes regulate behavior, and the public language serves to veil the reality” (1968b, p. 319). As we have seen, Glaser and Possony’s Victims of Politics would translate these private fears in the public language of economics and of human rights.

In September 1966, Possony traveled to Pretoria, South Africa, to take part in a conference of the National Council to Combat Communism. The conference was organized by the Inter-Church Anti-Communist Action Committee of the Dutch Reformed Church with the goal of defending South Africa’s “Christian heritage” against Communist subversion. In fact, the “subversive” activities targeted by the organizers of the 1966 conference were not necessarily inspired by communist ideology or carried out by Communist party members since, according to the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), any form of protest against the apartheid regime could be classified and punished as statutory communism (Frye Reference Frye1968; Modisane 1986). The chair of the conference was J. D. Vorster, a brother of Johannes Balthazar Vorster, the South African prime-minister between 1966 and 1978. Other participants included Suzanne Labin, who would become head of the French section of the WACL, and Nathaniel Weyl, a great admirer of South Africa and Rhodesia (Weyl Reference Unna1967). Hendrik Johan van den Bergh, the head of the South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS) and a close associate of Rhoodie,^{Footnote 5} delivered the main address of the conference talking about how the Communists subverted the White South African way of life by engaging in “psychological sabotage” (Van den Bergh Reference Sulzberger1967, p. 21). Van den Bergh pointed out that the leaders of these Communist attacks were “white so-called intellectuals,” most of whom, he pointed out in answer to a question coming from the floor, were Jewish, because “Communism was the highest form of capitalism” (Van den Bergh Reference Sulzberger1967, pp. 21-45). Possony (Reference Possony1967c) warned that mixing anti-Semitism with anti-Communism risked harming the anti-Communist cause because “the emotionalism” of the anti-Semites made them natural allies of the equally irrational Communists (Anonymous 1967, p. 29). Possony’s address might have been an attempt to answer the consistently pro-Nazi van den Bergh, but van den Bergh’s position was endorsed by the leaders of the White supremacist and anti-Semitic Candour League of Rhodesia, which collaborated with Robert Gayre, the tutelary spirit of Mankind Quarterly (Macklin Reference Lyons and Morton2010).

Possony’s collaboration with Mankind Quarterly and with Rhoodie indicated that, at the end of the 1960s, the White Western anti-Communist card trumped any concern he might have had about the anti-Semitism prevalent in the radical anti-Communist milieus he frequented.

FPRI, COLONIALISM, AND NEOCOLONIALISM

The FPRI literature produced by Possony, Strausz-Hupé, Kintner, and their constant collaborators argued that the only way to defend White Western Civilization against Communist “Oriental despotism” was the development out of a military confederation such as NATO of an Atlantic Union— a political confederation under American hegemony, and, as Possony argued as early as 1949, the creation of a world police (Possony Reference Phillips1949, Reference Possony1953). This institutional structure would allow “Western democracies” a virtual monopoly on technology, natural resources, and violence. As a Cold Warrior impatient with the “verbal magic” of the empty legal formulas of international organizations and agreements, Possony maintained that there was no other way to maintain peace than war and the increase of the capacity to wage war, defined as “the purge of the enemies of the new order” (1949, pp. 294-295). For Strausz-Hupé, the United States was “the most powerful nation of European stock” (1945, p. 108), a fact of enormous importance according to the theories of Third Reich geopolitician Michael Hess, quoted by Strausz-Hupé. Hess argued that only the “white race”—through its mastery of technology—was “truly ‘space-bridging,’” the other races being of the space-bound variety (Strausz-Hupé Reference Skidmore1942, p. 91). That meant that both the geographical position and its technological prowess designated the United States as the main “arsenal” of an “international police force,” and as the master of the “nucleus” of great powers that would control the balance and the stability of the “new and universal order” after the defeat of the Axis powers (Strausz-Hupé Reference Skidmore1942, p. 194-195). Quoting Karl Haushofer’s judgment that the United States “possessed all the geopolitical prerequisites” for achieving global hegemony, Strausz-Hupé warned that Haushofer had hoped that the Americans would eventually fail in their bid for world supremacy because they were “race-biologically retarded” and torn apart by internal racial tensions (Strausz-Hupé Reference Skidmore1942, pp. 66-67).

The keen interest manifested by Strausz-Hupé, Possony, and Kintner for the role played by “race” during the Cold War seems to betray their fear that Haushofer was right and that lack of racial homogeneity would indeed compromise the U.S. bid for global leadership (Glaser and Possony, Reference Glaser and Possony1979). It is indeed difficult to understand Strausz-Hupé’s work without taking into consideration the way in which Nazi geopolitical theories informed his racialized approach to the Cold War (Crampton and Tuathaila, Reference Crampton and Tuathail1996; Raffestin et al., Reference Possony1995). Nazi Geopolitik—with its concept of a dynamic frontier and perpetual international instability fostered by the dynamic of growing, expanding versus shrinking, and dying, states—was interpreted by Strausz-Hupé in terms of an opposition between the stable, “civilized order” of Europe and “the Asiatic aversion to fixed boundaries” (Strausz-Hupé Reference Skidmore1942, p. 220). Europeans, Strausz-Hupé argued, could not be reasonably expected to forget the “pungent meaning of Asia” (1942, p. 91). Strausz-Hupé discovered some sense even in Hitler’s frenzied attacks on “Asiatic bolshevism” and warned that, since the history of Russia bore the mark of the Mongols and since Russia had inherited the role of Asian oppressor of Europe, the Cold War was merely another stage of the eternal clash of “men of the steppe against the man of the sown; the mounted horde against the dwellers of the city; mass against form” (1952, p. 82). These premises allowed FPRI intellectuals to defend both the legacy of old-fashioned European colonialism and new-fangled American imperialism by denouncing any anti-colonial movement or non-aligned state as an “Asiatic,” unruly, “primitive” threat against the “real,” civilized, democratic “New Order” dominated by the United States (Strausz-Hupé Reference Skidmore1942, p. 196). The United States led the Free World in a global struggle for the “preservation of the Western Community” (Strausz-Hupé Reference Sklar1952, p. 3).

Since this struggle was a psychomachia, a clashing of spiritual worlds, Strausz-Hupé rejected any “optimistic idea” about a meeting of the cultures and argued that only a “whole,” “unitary,” and pure Western culture could hope to successfully meet the challenge of the East. According to Strausz-Hupé, one of the ways in which the West could transform the “discrete whole” of European culture into a world culture was to abandon the antiquated and ultimately petty cult of national heroes and promote instead the “heroes of its common undertakings,” the conquerors and colonizers who were the true global heralds of the West: “The exploits of Cortes, Pizzaro, Clive, Stanley, Bugeaud, Lyautey, Rhodes, Muraviev were conquests on an Asiatic scale” (1952, pp. 7-8, 12-13). Western colonial expansion indicated a thriving Western culture (although the West was supposed to be at the same time essentially static, a victim of Asiatic restlessness). In order to defend this way of life, America had to vigorously embrace military, economic, and cultural imperialism, a benign form of imperialism whose weapons were not merely “military force or political coercion,” but also “anti-imperialist” discourses (Strausz-Hupé Reference Sklar1952, p. 294). It also had to create an Atlantic Union and increase spending on propaganda in order to advance the vertical and horizontal integration of Western culture, that is to discourage the multiplication of people with lower IQ levels and to encourage the adoption of the same Weberian pro-capitalist Protestant values by the entire “Free World.” The creation of an Atlantic Union would be both the result and the safeguard of these efforts.

It is hard not to notice that FPRI books insisted on the idea of the eugenic value of the free market economy. Thus, William Yandell Elliott, a Southern Conservative and FPRI pillar who taught in the Government Department at Harvard and played mentor to Henry Kissinger, argued that, like Western democracy, the free market was another non-ideological, “natural” product of a superior way of life: The operations of the free market depended upon the diverse natural endowments of different nations and ethnic groups and as such put an end to the demographic growth of economically irresponsible and politically immature populations (Elliott Reference Elliott, Strausz-Hupé and Hazard1958). Modernization and population control—or even depopulation as in the case of southern Vietnam (Brick Reference Brick, Solovey and Cravens2012)—were interconnected: “The device of the market tends to produce a division of labor that corresponds to the capabilities of the inhabitants. It does not offer the nostrum of sharing the wealth in accordance with counting heads where there is no limit to the creation of heads” (Elliott Reference Elliott, Strausz-Hupé and Hazard1958, p. 450).

The Atlanticist Léo Moulin, professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, argued in Orbis that “Europeanization,” “Westernization,” “Americanization,” and “Atlanticization” were all synonyms, since they all signified the process whereby the White European and American powers colonized and “civilized” the globe in the name of the Western universal values (Moulin Reference Modisane1967, p. 1093). Moulin ridiculed European intellectuals who deplored the “Americanization” of the Old World. The so-called “Americanization,” Moulin pointed out, quoting Raymond Aron, was merely an example of the industrialization of traditional European society, the assimilation of the last pre-modern corners of the continent into a scientifically-organized society dedicated to mass production, and the increase of productivity. For Moulin, the Asian and African national liberation movements, and even Marxism-Leninism, were instruments of the Europeanization of the Third World, while the anticolonial “tirades” of the colonial nations were a “pathetic and simplified” rehashing of previous European anticolonial ideas by “the colored man.” Unable to complete his own “intellectual decolonization,” the “colored man” failed to find his own voice. Therefore, “every time they spoke, often with great eloquence, it was still Europe that spoke,” argued Moulin (1967, p. 1094), illustrating what Blaut (Reference Blaut1987) would later identify as one of the major neocolonial tropes: that of nationalism as a Eurocentric “diffusion” of modernization.

Moulin welcomed this unshakeable Europeanization of the colonial nations, and saw in it the harbinger of world peace and unity. But in order to achieve that unity, the Europeanization had to transform not only the intellectual discourse of the colonials, but their way of life too—their most intimate and, at the same time, most socially imbedded behavior. As Moulin argued, a civilization possessed an organically integrated and structured set of forms and values, and Western technology was culturally embedded: “Our techniques are also values, Western or Atlantic values” (1967, pp. 1095-1096). Western technology was in this way, like Western democracy or the free market, naturalized. But their naturalness did not preempt their export; it merely changed the order of priorities.

This osmosis between culture and technology, between a set of beliefs and a set of techniques, precluded the successful adoption of the techniques without the assimilation of the Western cultural values and a change in the whole way of life of those seeking to duplicate Western technological prowess and economic success. In particular, Moulin warned that Asian and African peoples would not make any economic progress while remaining bound by traditional structures. The neoliberal path to development depended upon the abandonment of all the traditional safety networks and traditional patterns of behavior: “One cannot move the economy to the ‘take-off’ point while enjoying the advantages of social security. One cannot continue to bring children into the world at the same rate as in prepenicillin days and expect to live in comfort and plenty” (Moulin Reference Modisane1967, pp. 1095-1096).

Moulin’s notional “Europeanization” was in fact very much a “Protestantization” of mankind, since his criticism was leveled not only at the Third World countries, but also, in some respect, at the Southern European, Catholic countries that did not fit the Weberian archetype of the “Protestant ethic” favoring the development of capitalism. Moulin explained clearly that Europeanization, or Atlanticization, depended upon the adoption of the “socio-cultural traits of puritanism,” whose activism was more progressive than the Catholic virtues of “general resignation on the part of the pauper” (1967, p. 1097). By contrast, Moulin’s notional and arch-Weberian Puritanism stood for all the progressive virtues that made the modern world possible: “individualism, rationalization of behavior and motives, careful management of one’s resources, a spirit of abstinence and frugality, an individual’s concern for his own welfare, confidence in social institutions, punctuality and the prudent use of time” (1967, p. 1098). Moulin found that neither most of the European Catholic countries,^{Footnote 6} nor Latin American, African, or Asian nations exhibited any of the mandatory “traits of puritanism” that made “good government,” or “Western democracy” possible (1967, p. 1099). Although by the late 1960s numerous anthropologists published a significant body of literature that dispelled the myth of the irrational economic behavior of colonial peoples or the idea that traditional cultures did not value saving because they were “indifferent toward the future,” Moulin based his contribution on outdated literature and dubious generalizations and closed his argument by stating that his convictions were not steeped in “Western or Atlantic ethnocentrism,” or in the feeling of “racial superiority” (1967, p. 1101). He was merely convinced that the invincible strength of the Atlantic community was in Atlantic values, characterized by “universalism,” the “basic belief in the unity of mankind,” and a universally applicable rationalism, while the nationalism of the emerging nations was the most “regressive” “factor of stagnation” blocking the orderly development of the Third World nations in cooperation with the West (Moulin Reference Modisane1967, p. 1102). By stressing the importance of individual psychological characteristics, Moulin recycled the arguments of a modernization theory that both confirmed the exemplarity of the American society and path to development and denied the responsibility of Western colonialism for the “underdevelopment” of former colonial areas (Park Reference Paret1995).

FPRI Atlanticism was deeply influenced by Strausz-Hupé’s familiarity not only with the ideas of European federalists such as Moulin, but also with the written work and institutional networks of Clarence K. Streit, author of tracts such as Union Now: A Proposal for a Federal Union of the Leading Democracies (1939) and Freedom’s Frontier (1940) (Strausz-Hupé Reference Strausz-Hupé1995, pp. 173-174). Strausz-Hupé was a member of the board of the International Movement for Atlantic Union (IMAU), founded in Paris on July 3-4, 1955. The President of IMAU was Streit, whose “one-worldism” was shared by many influential bankers, industrialists, and intellectuals active in the Bilderberg Group and the Atlantic Institute. This vast network militating for Atlantic unity was partially financed by the CIA and grew out of the American interest in discouraging European isolationism and anti-Americanism, especially among the elites. As such, one of their main targets was Charles de Gaulle. Strausz-Hupé would recruit many of the collaborators for his volume on the Idea of Colonialism, such as Moulin, or for the special issue of Orbis dedicated to Kohn in 1967 from these “Atlanticist” circles (Aubourg Reference Aubourg2003; Osborn Reference Nielsen1958; Strausz-Hupé Reference Stewart-Smith1961b). The insistence of many Atlanticists on the preamble of the North Atlantic Treaty (1949) affirming the determination of the “Parties” to “safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their people”^{Footnote 7} reads rather ominously in light of their insistence on a certain cultural orthodoxy or eugenic homogeneity.

One of the most active Atlanticists was the Southern industrialist Hugh Moore, whose Malthusianism influenced the emphasis of the Draper Report on population control in Third World countries.^{Footnote 8} Due to the Draper Report, population control became part and parcel of the U.S. anti-communist crusade and foreign aid policies seeking to secure the stability of Third World countries and, thus, the safe access of NATO countries to their raw materials (Hartmann Reference Hartmann2002; Hoff Reference Hoff2012). Moore’s interest in eugenics prompted him to become, in the 1960s, the president and financial benefactor of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization (AVS), founded in 1937. The AVS leadership attempted to persuade obstetricians to “be more sterilization minded” and to talk “those who need fertility control the most—the morons, the ignorant, the irresponsible,” and the “half wits” into accepting sterilization (Dowbiggin Reference Dowbiggin2002, pp. 63-64). Under Moore’s leadership, the AVS changed its focus from the domestic to the international arena and lobbied for the introduction of mass sterilization programs in overpopulated countries such as India. Like Possony, Moore warned that the domestic increase of the population with poor intellectual or genetic quality would mandate the increase of taxes in order to fund the welfare state. As revealed by Donald Critchlow (1999, p. 32), Moore also confessed to John D. Rockefeller III that he feared “the use which Communists make of hungry people in their drive to conquer the earth.” Rockefeller concurred and, as president of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, created by President Nixon, urged the Congress to control the movements of population and warned that any further population increase would only sap the “vitality of business” (The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future 1972, p. 4).

The Hugh Moore Fund’s racially controversial advertisements advocating population control and pleading with the U.S. government to save the world from communist enslavement by bolstering the foreign aid programs with programs to regulate the fertility of Third World nations appeared in all the major U.S. publications and were endorsed by, among others, William Shockley (Dowbiggin Reference Dowbiggin2002). President Nixon found in 1969 that Moore’s “dedication to easing the problems of world population growth” had led to “significant public service” (Lader Reference Kuper1971, p. 84). Moore was also, like Strausz-Hupé, one of most active members of the Atlanticist think-tanks. According to Kohn and his fellow FPRI Atlanticists with whom he organized the “Conference on the North Atlantic Community” in Bruges in 1957, the United States was NATO, and NATO was Western civilization, or “Christian civilization,” as the conservative Russell Kirk wrote in praising the conference (Gordon Reference Gordon2010, Reference Gordon2011; Kirk, Reference Kintner and Pfaltzgraff1958).

Strausz-Hupé would return to the idea of an Atlantic Union and of U.S. benevolent hegemony in three very well received “Foreign Policy Research Institute Books”— Protracted Conflict (1959), A Forward Strategy for America (1961), and Building the Atlantic World (1963)—co-authored with Possony, Kintner, James E. Dougherty, Alvin J. Cottrell, and several other, less well-known FPRI lights. The gist of these books was that the United States was engaged in a decades-long “struggle for the mastery of the globe,” that the Soviet Union used colonial conflicts to hurt the West, and that the West allowed itself to be “Blackmailed” by “‘backward peoples” who exploited Western guilt (Strausz-Hupé et al., Reference Strausz-Hupé1963, pp. 4, 22, 26). This FPRI trilogy helped the Cold War effort by casting the conflict between the West and “the Rest” into a clash between “Open Society” and “Closed Societies” (Strausz-Hupé et al., Reference Strausz-Hupé1963, p. 133).^{Footnote 9} Democracy was the way in which Western society functioned and, as such, it was non-ideological, while communism was an ideological construct and therefore inherently totalitarian, as postulated by the entire body of Cold War conservative literature dedicated to the nature and dangers of ideologies (McDonald Reference Massoglia, McMullan and Dillard2004). The purpose of the U.S. Lincolnian struggle on behalf of the global “open society” was to free the slaves of the closed societies by finding ways to “adapt democracy and the Western concept of human dignity to new environments” (Strausz-Hupé et al., Reference Strausz-Hupé1961, p. 36). Since it was dedicated to a pragmatic, empirical, “non-ideological,” open-ended political philosophy, the West was ready to accept that there was no universally valid blueprint for world order, and that colonial and developing peoples might find certain Western concepts of political democracy too “advanced” for them. Quoting the examples of such Western allies as King Saud in Saudi Arabia or Shah Reza Pahlevi of Iran, Strausz-Hupé, Kintner, and Possony hastened to point out that the West must not allow its prejudices to stand in the way of a just understanding of the usefulness of authoritarian and military regimes friendly to the United States (Strausz-Hupé et al., Reference Strausz-Hupé1961, pp. 60, 269). Building a democratic society was an arduous task and a very long process punctuated by revolts, famine, civil war, corruption, and a host of other ills. Sometimes only authoritarian or one-party regimes could provide the kind of “dependable and effective government” strong enough to build a democracy (Strausz-Hupé et al., Reference Strausz-Hupé1961, p. 239), while insisting on freedom for certain parts of the colonial world would actually diminish the sphere of freedom by creating the “ideal precondition for a communist takeover” (Bouscaren Reference Bouscaren1953, pp. 185-186).

The contributors to The Idea of Colonialism, published under the auspices of the FPRI in 1958, that is to say at the beginning of the most important decolonization decade, argued that the reality of Western colonialism was much more benign than the “myth” peddled by enemies of the West such as the Soviets and their Third World cronies (Heckscher Reference Heckscher1958). Hans Kohn’s opening essay “Reflections on Colonialism” (1958) started from the idea that anticolonial sentiments were the product of liberal colonial regimes, and that oftentimes anti-colonialism was simply xenophobia, and as such it could and should be prevented in the name of higher, cosmopolitan ideals. “Russia” shared its tyranophilia, “agrarian backwardness,” and “lethargy of its church and its masses,” with the Asian nations, who therefore looked more favorably upon the Soviet Union than on the “dynamic, individualistic, and progressive West” (Kohn Reference Kloman, Strausz-Hupé and Hazard1958, p. 8). Against the “widespread propaganda” claims that Western powers impoverished, exploited, and discriminated against the Asian and African populations which they subjugated, Kohn argued that the Western powers were not guilty of injustices and cruelties worse than “the normal cruelties in Asia and Africa,” continents rife with tribal warfare, caste systems, and racial discrimination (1958, p. 11).

Possony agreed that colonialism was merely “the emotional issue of the decade,” and that by pushing for decolonization, Western liberals played right into the hands of those inciting racial strife as part of their plot for a “world-wide Communist revolution” (1958, p. 17). Like Kohn, Possony argued that there was no universal recipe for colonial or decolonization policies, and that some ethnic groups were not “eligible” for national self-determination. “Wholly illiterate populations” still “indulging in pagan blood rites” could not be seriously considered ripe for self-government (Possony Reference Possony1958, p. 20-21). Countries with festering class or ethnic conflicts were also disqualified from the right to divorce the metropole; so was any still “violent and undisciplined” people. Unevolved political societies such as tribes or populations unable to “practice self-restraint” could merely aspire to having their interests “considered” and their rights protected by the colonial government (Possony Reference Possony1958, p. 23). But legitimately raising the question of independence was out of the question since “the fundamental premise of colonialism—that some populations need to be governed by outside states which are administratively and militarily capable—(. . .) appears to be basically sound” (Possony Reference Possony1958, pp. 26-29). According to Possony (Reference Possony1958), instead of bursting into nation states, colonial empires should have evolved into federations, with the control over the colonial areas transferred from the European powers to the international system of alliances dominated by the United States. As Strausz-Hupé’s FPRI manifesto, published in the first issue of Orbis, put it, “the mission of the American people” was “to bury the nation state, lead their beheaved [sic] peoples into larger unions, and overawe with its might the would be saboteurs of the new order,” that is of the “American universal empire” (1957, pp. 26-27).

Once decolonization was recast as merely one of the battles of the Cold War, the FPRI defense intellectuals could safely attack the national liberation movements in the name of the cultural evolutionism and fake idealism that characterized much of the mid-century U.S. foreign policy discourse on colonialism (Krenn Reference Kohn1999). The FPRI intellectuals blasted resistance to the United States’s global anti-Communist crusade and imperial deployment as xenophobic, backward, isolationist, and totalitarian, and argued that the West had to pool together all of its propaganda resources in order to help the “Western man” carry out his noble task of helping the underdeveloped nations “break away from a primitive past” and launch into a “difficult and challenging future” (Kloman, Jr. 1958, p. 382; Possony Reference Possony1958, p. 20). Harry W. Hazard and Paul M. A. Linebarger, who worked for the Operations Research Office, noted that the term “pre-literate societies” was only “a nice, modern sociologically sound euphemism applied to peoples who once were called ‘barbarians,’ then ‘savages,’ and, more recently, ‘primitives’” (1958, p. 462).

The cultural evolutionism of the FPRI intellectuals was made even more corrosive by their penchant for pathologizing and attacking anti-colonial positions as emotionally imbalanced states. According to the FPRI psychosociological approach, anti-colonialism was not just wrong, it was a virus, a disease, a psychological complex. Neutrality was, according to Linebarger and Hazard, “a pustulent symptom of a profound and persisting spiritual malignancy,” a “neurotic or paranoid pattern” that disqualified the afflicted individuals or nations from contributing to global prosperity (1958, p. 468). Since colonialism was approved as “a normal phenomenon in history, which has served a legitimate, constructive end,” it was only logical, for example, that Jawaharlal Nehru’s concerns regarding colonialism would be those of a “monomaniac,” and India’s non-alignment a symptom of a “post-puberty self-consciousness in India’s attitude to colonialism,” “something adolescent,” an “immaturely one-dimensional” understanding of the normal human relationships (Kloman, Jr. 1958, p. 364). The Latin American countries, fearing the U.S. manipulation of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (better known as the Rio Treaty 1947), and seeking to resist any “hemispheric anti-Communist movement” supported by Washington, D.C., were berated by Arthur Whitaker for their irrational attitude and lack of political “maturity” (1958, pp. 177, 185). Commenting on the non-aligned Asian and African countries that had gathered at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, the FPRI collaborator Irene W. Meister sarcastically noted that communists preyed on the lack of economic maturity of underdeveloped countries who conceived of any economic exchange as one pitting the inimical camp of foreign investors against the interests of their own nation (Meister 1958). As a result of this nationalist mistrust in foreign investors cultivated by Communist forces in many non-aligned nations, Western companies were unable to attain from many Third World governments mutually rewarding deals for the exploitation of oil and other natural resources (Fraser Reference Fraser and Gayle Plummer2003).

William Elliott agreed that communist propaganda obscured the fact that modern Western colonialism was nothing else than a manifestation of the Western interest in, and capacity to defend, the “rights” of the colonized peoples and of native minorities (1958, p. 434). Beyond and above these rights, lay what Elliott identified as the right of “the world” to have access to the natural resources that newly independent nations tended to keep for themselves. Elliott protested that national sovereignty should not allow the ragtag coalition of tribal rulers and immature nations to threaten the vital resources of the West, that is of the “most civilized peoples, who bear the hopes of a free world” (1958, pp. 444-445). Elliott proposed the creation of a type of “international servitude” guaranteeing the right of NATO countries to “develop” the subsoil resources of countries incapable of doing so (1958, p. 447). The protection of minority rights and of the Western right to exploit the natural resources essential to the development of the West and of the entire world made colonialism, “good colonialism,” both “inevitable and necessary” (Elliott Reference Elliott, Strausz-Hupé and Hazard1958, pp. 436-437, 439).

It is hard not to notice that the FPRI defense intellectuals and their government sponsors shared a common conceptual universe when reading in a CIA memorandum written in preparation for the 1954 Guatemalan coup that the socio-economic reforms initiated by the democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman were nothing else than “an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the ‘Banana Republic.’”^{Footnote 10} The de-legitimization of neutrality depended upon the demotion of Third World nationalism to the status of just another form of “envy” of the haves by the have-nots, and thus to an ignoble form of class-struggle. In order to defend the Free World, the FPRI defense intellectuals appealed to mutations of orthodox Marxism by way of Cold War psychosocial theories.