The automated disappearance of harmless Instagram posts en masse, without review or human intervention, has led to The Wire’s revelations of Facebook’s ‘XCheck’ programme, which shields VIP users from due process. The allegation is that the posts were removed arbitrarily, only because BJP IT cell nucleus Amit Malviya said that they had to go. The nature of the content did not matter, only the person ordering the takedown did. Facebook/Meta has scoffed at the evidence produced, but the global attention that the story is drawing is doing nothing good for the platform.
To be fair, Facebook had made no secret of its allegiance in India’s culture wars. PM Narendra Modi’s first term had featured an extended schmoozefest with Mark Zuckerberg and his top executives. Later, the weather forecast turned blustery with allegations of partiality in policing hate speech, and Facebook’s public policy head Ankhi Das quit in 2020. In 2021, it faced a parliamentary probe. Now, it is alleged to have given God-tier rights to the ham-fisted Malviya. India is not the only country where Facebook’s public perception is poor. And they say that corporations work better than governments!
Historically, the US government has extended its influence far more successfully than the Silicon Valley giant is doing. One of the most successful covert operations of the post-war era offers a sharp contrast to Facebook/Meta’s endless public relations meltdown. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1950 in West Berlin to gently marshal European intellectuals and the liberal Left against the growing influence of Russian communism on academia and culture.
The conference at which the CCF was founded was attended by the finest Western thinkers and creative minds, including Bertrand Russell, Tennessee Williams, A J Ayer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Benedetto Croce and Arthur Koestler, who drafted the manifesto.
Future shock was 16 years away. In 1966, the New York Times ran a series of stories which revealed that the CCF’s operations in 35 countries were funded by the CIA through front organisations. By that time, it had launched dozens of publications, hosted conferences, instituted awards and touched hundreds of major figures in culture and politics, across continents.
CCF worked against the Russian culture blitz of the Cold War, which was out in the open and visibly successful. In India, Progress Publishers produced highly subsidised editions of party-approved Russian classics. To the general enrichment of the public, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and, strangely, a great fat edition of Mikhail Sholokov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, became popular wedding presents. From the Seventies, Russia’s other passion, chess, won over the metros. Madras took the lead with the Tal Chess Club, established by India’s first International Master, Manuel Aaron—he was learning Russian to translate chess journals for Indians, and Russian diplomats made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. The Botvinnik Chess Clubs of Bombay and Delhi, and the Alekhine Chess Club of Calcutta, were established thereafter.
These initiatives in publishing and chess looked harmless—when Vishwanathan Anand won against Russian-born Boris Gelfand in 2012, he told Vladimir Putin that he had started playing in the Tal Club, located in a Russian Cultural Centre. The Russian president responded wryly: “So we brought this upon ourselves!” Such projects in several countries were designed to demonstrate that unlike American capitalism, Soviet communism was a natural ally of the life of the mind. They slid effortlessly into the lives of urban people and were instrumental in making them look favourably upon communism.
The CCF combated this on an epic, global scale by recruiting Western liberal thinkers to the war against communism and flooding the zone. It became a cultural tsunami which touched the lives of everyone who mattered. And so, when the CIA connection was outed, almost every great thinker of the world felt used. In 1967, Stephen Spender stepped down as editor of Encounter magazine, which was founded in 1953 and benefited from CCF. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who had written for an ‘influenced’ magazine, felt like a “cuckold”.
In India, major successes associated with CCF included the influential magazines Imprint and Quest. The name of Minoo Masani was prominently associated with the movement. Jayaprakash Narayan took a dim view of the revelations about CCF, and concluded that no matter what benefit accrued to Indian literature and politics from publishing some of its most interesting writers on CIA money, it had to be in the CIA’s interest, even if the motive was not obvious.
Actually, it was quite obvious. In Europe, the CCF wanted to urge pacifists, and others who rose above the war between capitalism and communism, to take sides. In India, Non-Alignment stood in the way of polarisation, and encouraging the non-communist Left to move to its side of the field was of benefit to the US. In addition, there was an irritating conundrum to be solved: Non-Aligned India exclusively armed by the Russians, denying American arms suppliers a market.
However, many publications helped by CCF survived its ignominious demise and achieved independence. Encounter remained in print until 1991. In India, China Report, founded by the New Delhi office of CCF, widened its ambit and is now the very respected journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies. The bilingual poet Dilip Chitre, who was involved in the original Quest, revived its spirit in New Quest in 1978, and once more, with feeling, in 2001.
There’s no evidence for this, but one has always suspected that the ‘foreign hand’ so beloved of Mrs Gandhi, political cartoonists, satirists and CPI(M) wall artists is a race memory of the CCF operation. It was very successful in India and remains a lesson to messy babies in the geopolitical playpen, like Facebook, about how to influence without alienating.
Pratik Kanjilal
Editor of The India Cable
(Tweets @pratik_k)