The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War
Joseph Horowitz, "The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War "
English | ISBN: 0252045270 | 2023 | 248 pages | PDF | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 0252045270 | 2023 | 248 pages | PDF | 2 MB
The perils of equating notions of freedom with artistic vitality
Eloquently extolled by President John F. Kennedy, the idea that only artists in free societies can produce great art became a bedrock assumption of the Cold War. That this conviction defied centuries of historical evidence–to say nothing of achievements within the Soviet Union–failed to impact impregnable cultural Cold War doctrine.
Joseph Horowitz writes: “That so many fine minds could have cheapened freedom by over-praising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War.” He shows how the efforts of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom were distorted by an anti-totalitarian “psychology of exile” traceable to its secretary general, the displaced Russian aristocrat/composer Nicolas Nabokov, and to Nabokov’s hero Igor Stravinsky.
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