This book went to press at the exact moment its subject came to a head. On 29 December 1983 the United States gave formal notice that it would leave UNESCO at the end of 1984, and the immediate cause was the fight this book is about: the campaign, carried by the non-aligned states and backed by the Soviet bloc, for a New World Information and Communication Order. Britain gave notice a year after that and left at the end of 1985. Our text does not know this. In its chapter "The War Against UNESCO" the American exit is still a menace on a list — "threats of sanctions, almost a blockade (this form of dialogue with the world is a favorite with U.S. Presidents), an end of U.S. contributions to the UNESCO budget and even U.S. withdrawal from the organization." A book written a month later could not have written that sentence.
That is the best evidence we have for the date of the text, because the copyright page did not survive into our copy. What remains of the front matter gives Moscow, a translator (Dmitry Beliavsky), a designer (Vadim Novikov) and no author at all; whoever wrote it cannot be recovered from the volume we hold, and this introduction will not guess. Nor does the imprint statement survive — the seven occurrences of "Progress Publishers" in the text are all footnotes to the English Collected Works of Lenin and Marx, not the book's own colophon. It is an anonymous book, which for its purposes is the point: it speaks in the voice of a position rather than a person. Nothing in the internal evidence contradicts a manuscript closed in the second half of 1983 and published in English in 1984. The latest datable events are all from that year: Pravda of 4 May 1983, the January 1983 Warsaw Pact conference in Prague, the February 1983 announcement of what Washington called Project Democracy, and the 1983 USIA budget of 640 million dollars. Yuri Andropov is quoted as living General Secretary; he died on 9 February 1984. Grenada appears once, in an appended document from October 1981, as a revolution to be defended — the American invasion of 25 October 1983 is nowhere. One year token looks later than 1983: an Organisation of African Unity session dated "24 to 27 June 1987". That is scanner damage for 1981, the year of the OAU's eighteenth ordinary session, and it is not evidence of anything.
So: an Andropov-era book, written in the last winter of détente and published in English just as the thing it warned of was happening.
Begin with what is true in it, because a good deal is, and the criticism that follows is worth nothing if this part is fudged.
The core factual case is sound and was sound. In the early 1980s four Western agencies — AP, UPI, Reuters and Agence France-Presse — did supply the overwhelming majority of international news consumed in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The book's estimate that "almost 80 per cent of the information disseminated in capitalist and developing countries originates in the four largest bourgeois news agencies" is of the right order, and its opening image — a Latin American reader for whom six stories in ten come from those four wires — is not invented for the occasion. It was the kind of finding the UNESCO-sponsored studies of the 1970s kept producing, and it was what made the non-aligned demand a demand rather than a grievance. The asymmetry it describes, "the flow of information from developed capitalist nations to Asian, African and Latin American countries, where the majority of mankind lives, is 100 times the amount of news going in the opposite direction," is a contemporary estimate rather than a measurement, and the book does not pretend otherwise, but the direction and the order of magnitude were not in dispute among people who studied it.
Better still are the concrete instances, which are the parts of the book a reader will remember. Telecommunications inherited whole from the colonial cable network: "The Ivory Coast can call Zaire only via the Paris telephone network; a call from Kenya to neighboring Tanzania is routed through London; and a call from Bolivia to neighboring Paraguay, via New York." The price of a newspaper measured in labour — an annual subscription costs a teacher in Bombay "the money he earns in 23 days". Eight African countries publishing no newspaper at all; thirty Asian and African countries with no television. And a formulation that earns its keep: "Now, the teletypes of Western news agencies serve the aims gunboats used to serve in the imperial era."
The book is also careful, by the standards of the genre, about where it got things. It works from Herbert Schiller, from Rita Cruise O'Brien's Sussex paper, from the UNESCO report Television Traffic — a One-Way Street?, from Christopher Nascimento, Guyana's Minister of Information. Its account of the diplomatic sequence — the Ljubljana symposium of 1968, the Montreal experts' conference of 1969, the Byelorussian draft resolution at the 16th General Conference in 1970, the Colombo summit of 1976, the 1978 Mass Media Declaration, the MacBride Commission, the Talloires Declaration of May 1981 by which the Western agencies declared war on the whole project — is a usable chronology, and one that most Western accounts of the same years simply omitted. It quotes the other side at length and in its own words, including a long passage, taken from Intermedia of March 1981, from a speaker it identifies as Sarah Goddard Power, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Human Rights and Social Affairs, laying out with unusual frankness what was at stake for the United States: that restrictions on the cross-border flow of images and data "would seriously handicap AP (Associated Press), UPI (United Press International) and other news services, as well as IBM and the hundreds of other US-based multinational corporations", the information industry being "the second largest export enterprise in the United States". That is the sort of quotation that does the arguing for you, and the book was right to find it.
Its account of American state propaganda is likewise substantially accurate. Project Truth was authorised by the National Security Council in August 1981; Charles Wick did testify to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on 17 March 1982; the parallel the book draws with Truman's "Campaign of Truth" of April 1950 is a real parallel and a good one. Nobody serious now denies that the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were instruments of American foreign policy, or that the CIA had worked through journalists.
None of that is what is wrong with this book. What is wrong with it is a single, structural thing, and the book is an unusually pure specimen of it because its whole subject is who controls information and who is denied the right to answer back.
Count the word censor in these 57,709 words. It occurs once. It is used of the Governor-General of India, who in 1780 obstructed the circulation of The Bengal Gazette. Jamming occurs zero times. Samizdat, zero. Glavlit — the Chief Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs, the body that actually decided what could be printed in the Soviet Union, and which was operating throughout the writing of this book — zero. These are not scanning artefacts. The scan of this volume is damaged in the ordinary ways — it prints an OAU session of 1981 as 1987, and "disctatorship" for dictatorship — so each absence was tested against the transliterations and character substitutions this corpus is known to produce. They survive all of them.
Radio Liberty is named five times, Radio Free Europe eight, the Voice of America nine. The book has a chapter called "The Radio Armaments Race". It records, precisely, that after 13 December 1981 the Voice of America raised its Polish output from two and a half to five hours a day. It never mentions that the Soviet Union was jamming these stations — which it had resumed doing in August 1980, over Poland, and was doing continuously as the manuscript was written. A reader is invited to be indignant that the signal is transmitted and is not told that it is being blocked.
The Helsinki Final Act is the sharpest case, because here the book does not keep silent — it makes a claim, and the claim is checkable. Helsinki is invoked thirteen times, always as a shield: the signatories undertook not to interfere in one another's internal affairs, therefore Western broadcasting is unlawful. But the Final Act's third basket also commits its signatories to information, and to the book's credit it says so. It reports accurately that the conference "agreed to aid in a broader and freer dissemination of all types of information", and it summarises the section on "Improvement of Working Conditions for Journalists" — "an accord on favorable treatment of journalists' visas, freer permission of trips around the host country, freer direct access to representatives of organizations and official agencies, journalists' right to import the technical equipment necessary for the performance of their professional duties". Then it states the conclusion: "The Soviet Union has taken specific steps in this direction, in full accordance with the decisions of the European Conference… The Soviet Union and other socialist countries implement these accords in an exemplary fashion."
Not one instance is given. The claim is made in the same book that has just spent a hundred and fifty pages demonstrating, case by named case, that Western declarations of press freedom are contradicted by Western practice. The method is applied outward with real rigour and inward not at all.
And when the book turns to the Soviet press directly, the category it has been prosecuting throughout simply changes its name. Soviet media, it says, are not "free from social responsibility": "The Soviet Union has banned the propaganda of war, racial and ethnic hatred, immorality and violence, as well as slander of the Soviet social and state system." The first four items are the sort of restriction most legal systems recognise. The fifth is not like them. "Slander of the Soviet social and state system" was not a metaphor; it was the substance of Article 190-1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, and of Article 70 above it, under which people went to camps and to psychiatric hospitals throughout the years this book covers. The book states the rule and does not state that anyone is punished under it. In the same passage it derives Soviet press freedom from the 1977 Constitution's guarantee of "broad dissemination of information".
The general principle appears a few pages earlier, and it is the whole book in a sentence: "States are entitled to restrict access to their territories of information which contains ideas condemned by the international community." Written by an author in a state that had recently barred the entry of a great deal of information, and who nowhere applies the word censorship to that act.
This is the test worth putting to any volume in this series, and it is not a test about vocabulary. Progress authors are perfectly capable of admitting that their own side made mistakes; several books in this catalogue do. What never happens is that the category turns inward. Error is admissible; the classification is not. Across this catalogue as a whole, ninety passages place the language of opportunism within a few lines of "the CPSU" or "our Party", and in every one the Party is the subject combating it, never the object of the charge. This book contains the word opportunism not once — its classifier is different, its subject being different — but the shape is identical. Monopoly control of the means of information, denial of access, the manufacture of consent, the propaganda blockade: every one of these is a real thing that the book describes accurately, and not one of them is ever a thing that a socialist state might do.
Two specific falsifications should be named, because generalities are cheap.
In the chapter "The Propaganda Blockade" the book prints a list of what it calls manufactured news about Afghanistan. The last item on the list is: "Soviet army officers took part in the execution of over 1,000 civilians in the Afghan village of Kerala." Whether Soviet officers were present at Kerala, in Kunar province, on 20 April 1979 has been argued about. That something on that scale happened there has not been seriously argued about since; it is among the best-attested massacres of the war, reported by survivors who reached Pakistan, and it was carried out by the Afghan government's own forces some months before the Soviet entry. The book's technique is to quote the claim in its most contestable form — the participation of Soviet officers — and dispose of the event by disposing of the clause.
The same list contains "chemical weapons used by the Soviets in Afghanistan" and "toxic agents used by the Vietnamese in Kampuchea", and here honesty requires a concession. The "yellow rain" allegation was a genuine American overclaim, and the scientific case against it — that the samples were largely bee faeces — was made and has held. The book is closer to right on that item than its critics were. But it sits in the same list as an item about which the book is flatly wrong, and elsewhere the book denies the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak of April 1979 as another Western invention, "some 'bacteriological weapons accident in the Urals'". That accident happened, at a military microbiology facility, and the Soviet state maintained the denial for thirteen more years. The list makes no distinction between the fabrication and the fact, because its sorting principle is not evidential.
The second is a silence, and it meets the strict condition: the author had the fact, had a reason to use it, and did not. Martial law in Poland is named twice, both times dated exactly to 13 December 1981, and both times only as the occasion for an increase in Western broadcasting. What martial law did to the Polish press — the suspension of publication across the board, the re-licensing of journalists that removed a substantial part of the profession, the internment of editors, the closure of Solidarność's own papers — does not appear. This is a book about the right of a people to inform itself, written by someone tracking Polish media week by week closely enough to know the Voice of America's Polish schedule to the half-hour.
What did the other tradition say? Here the honest answer is uncomfortable, and it should be printed before anything else, because it cuts against this introduction as much as against the book.
It said almost nothing. Intercontinental Press ran weekly from 1968 to August 1986 — the whole life of the New World Information and Communication Order, from Ljubljana to the American exit — and across all 763 issues there is no article on UNESCO as a political arena, none on the MacBride Commission or its 1980 report, none on the American or British withdrawal, and no sustained critique of the four agencies. Seán MacBride turns up a handful of times and always in his other capacities — chairman of Amnesty, United Nations Commissioner for Namibia, member of an investigative team sent to North Vietnam — never once as chairman of the commission that bears his name. Herbert Schiller, the author this book leans on hardest, appears nowhere in Intercontinental Press or in International Viewpoint; every "Schiller" in the archive is Karl Schiller, the West German finance minister, or an American publicist of the same name. The plainest measure is the endgame itself: across 1983 to 1986, the years of the American withdrawal, UNESCO is mentioned thirteen times in the whole paper, and every one of the thirteen is incidental — a source of literacy statistics, an aid donor, a name in a list of agencies. Not one is about the fight. The French review Quatrième Internationale, publishing across 1983–85 in exactly these years, is equally silent: no UNESCO, no MacBride, no NOMIC, no Schiller in 1.17 million words. So the silence is not an artefact of one review or one language.
In the entire archive there is a single reference to the demand itself, and it is not in our own voice. It is Maurice Bishop, speaking in solidarity on 3 November 1981 and printed in Intercontinental Press vol. 19 no. 47, 21 December 1981, under the title "Grenada Is Not Alone": informing the world about his revolution "is part of the broad struggle against the imperialist, monopoly control of the media and for a new world information order." A Caribbean revolutionary said it; the paper printed his speech; nobody took up the argument.
And in the same eighteen years that paper covered Soviet and East European control of information continuously and in detail. That asymmetry is the finding, and it runs both ways: the book was written to deflect precisely the subject our tradition pursued, and our tradition never engaged the subject the book was right about.
Take the reply the book's own chapters invite. Against "The Radio Armaments Race" — pages of accurate complaint about the Voice of America and Radio Liberty, with no mention of jamming — set Pyotr Grigorenko's open letter to the French, Italian and British Communist Parties, carried by the Fourth International's Inprecor and reprinted in Intercontinental Press vol. 15 no. 29, 1 August 1977. Grigorenko is writing to Western Communists as a Soviet Communist: "the only sources of information we have are the BBC, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and other radio stations of this type. But these are jammed. Yes, dear comrades, they are jammed… The country is covered with jamming equipment. But look in the budget for the record of the funds spent on this." That is the missing half of our book's chapter, published seven years before it, by a man who had been held in a special psychiatric hospital for saying so.
Against the claim that the socialist countries implement the Helsinki accords "in an exemplary fashion", set Gerry Foley's interview with Paweł Bąkowski of the Polish Workers' Defence Committee, Intercontinental Press vol. 16 no. 30, 31 July 1978. Bąkowski describes the Third Basket working exactly as far as it was allowed to: "On the basis of the Third Basket of the Helsinki Agreements, International Press clubs have been opened in many places, where you can find Newsweek, Time, l'Humanité, and so on. But strangely in the last two years I have not seen one article about Poland." When the Italian party's l'Unità wrote about Poland, he says, that issue did not appear. And in the universities, "all books in Polish published abroad are forbidden, as are books by writers that the government claims are enemies of People's Poland." (The scan renders books as hooks and but as hut — the b→h fault that runs through this archive; corrected here.)
And on Poland itself, where our book has its most conspicuous silence, the archive is dense. Four months before martial law, a Solidarity organiser interviewed in vol. 19 no. 30, 24 August 1981, explains what the government's draft censorship bill was for: it "is heading toward censorship of union bulletins. Solidarity says that censorship of the union bulletins would be the beginning of the end of the free trade union, because all the independent publications of the union are one of the most important accomplishments of the union." When the coup came, the Bureau of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International issued a statement on 17 December 1981 — printed in vol. 20 no. 1, 18 January 1982 — listing among the counter-revolution's aims the "abolition of the free and uncensored working-class press". Ten months into martial law the paper reported that some 1,700 underground bulletins and newspapers were being published, and that several union radio stations were still broadcasting (vol. 20 no. 32, 18 October 1982). The Polish press did not stop; it went under the floor, and the count of it exists.
The sharpest item of all comes two years after our book, and it makes the argument from inside. In January 1986 Intercontinental Press printed the text of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's speech to the Soviet Writers' Congress with the passages the censors had cut set in italics (vol. 24 no. 1, 13 January 1986). One of the cut passages is this book's thesis turned around: "How long are we going to go on helping all those foreign Maria Alekseyevnas who happily concoct at least half their poisonous radio menus from things that we hide and hush up? A nation that allows itself to analyze its own mistakes and tragedies bravely knocks the ideological weapon out of its enemies' hands, for it is spiritually invincible." A Soviet poet told a Soviet audience that concealment is what feeds the foreign broadcasters — the very broadcasters our book devotes a chapter to — and the censors cut the sentence in which he said it. There is no more exact demonstration available of what was wrong with the book's argument, and it was produced by the system the book was defending.
Two things complicate this, and they belong in the record. First, on the largest information event of the year the book went to press, our tradition and this book converge. Intercontinental Press vol. 21 no. 17, 19 September 1983, led with Steve Wattenmaker's "Korean jet uproar: U.S. launches anti-Soviet propaganda barrage", which reads much like a chapter of the volume in your hands — Washington "manipulating the air disaster", the Western press repeating the official account "without hesitation", the facts beginning to undermine the case. Second, the archive's hardest attack on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty is not the cultural-imperialism argument this book makes but a documentary one: that the stations employed men who had governed the German puppet administration in Byelorussia, among them Stanislaw Stankievich, who in 1941 "ordered the police to round up the city's 6,500 Jews and kill them all in one day, which they did" (vol. 20 no. 22, 14 June 1982). Where our tradition hit these stations hardest, it hit them with names and dates. That is the difference the reflexivity test is really measuring, and it is a difference of method rather than of side.
But the argument this book needs answering had been answered, in its strongest form, forty-six years earlier and in exactly the setting the book cares about — a dependent country whose press was foreign-owned. In August 1938, in Mexico, Trotsky wrote the editorial for the first issue of Clave against a campaign by the CTM leadership to curb the reactionary press by censorship or ban. He conceded the entire premise. "The real tasks of the workers' state do not consist in policing public opinion, but in freeing it from the yoke of capital. This can only be done by placing the means of production – which includes the production of information – in the hands of society in its entirety." Having conceded it, he refused the conclusion: "only those blind or simpleminded could think that the workers and peasants could be freed from reactionary ideas by the banning of reactionary press. In fact, it is only the greatest freedom of expression that can create favorable conditions for the advance of the revolutionary movement in the working class." And he named what the Soviet arrangement was: "We have before us a living example of such a dynamic, with the hated suppression of the freedom of expression and of the press in the Soviet Union. And this has nothing to do with the interests of the dictatorship of the proletariat. On the contrary, it helps protect the interests of the new caste in power against the attacks of the workers' and peasants' opposition." The positive proposal is the one this book could not make: that "all currents of opinion which have not taken arms against the dictatorship of the proletariat must be able to express themselves freely", and that it is the duty of the workers' state "to put in their hands, to all according to their numeric importance, the technical means necessary for this, printing presses, paper, means of transportation." (The text was found in the Trotsky Archive at Harvard around 1977; the version quoted here is the marxists.org translation from the French and Greek.)
The Fourth International restated this in its own name almost immediately after our book appeared. Its Twelfth World Congress of January 1985, in the thesis on proletarian dictatorship and socialist democracy printed in Quatrième Internationale nos. 17–18 (September 1985), held that ideological struggle can only fully succeed under conditions of open confrontation — meaning freedom for the defenders of reactionary ideologies to defend their ideas, and cultural and ideological pluralism, so long as they do not take violent action against workers' power. Ernest Mandel put the material argument back on its feet in Quatrième Internationale no. 28 (April–June 1988), replying to Alec Nove's claim that a free press requires a market because printing requires scarce means of production. Mandel accepted the premise and asked why a society that can allocate resources to arms cannot allocate one per cent of them to presses, printers and paper, so that every group of readers gets the paper it wants. The alternative, he wrote, is a limitation of press freedom by centralised control — by big capital, or by the state, or by both. That third disjunct is the one this book cannot see. It is not a rebuttal of the book's case against the wire agencies. It is the completion of it.
Which is why the book's own thesis survives its author's tradition better than the author would have liked. Read it for what it documents and it is a serious brief: the four agencies, the colonial cable map, Talloires, the money at stake, the sequence from Ljubljana to MacBride. The demand for a right of reply was not a Soviet invention and did not die with the Soviet Union; the concentration it described has since become far greater than anything in these pages, and the question of who owns the pipes is more urgent now than it was in 1983. The damage the book does is to that case, and it does it by supplying the answer its opponents wanted. When Rosemary Righter and the Talloires signatories argued that the new information order was a licence for governments to control the press, the most useful evidence available to them was a book like this one, published in Moscow by a state house, which held that governments are entitled to restrict information containing ideas the international community condemns, and that the state doing the restricting had implemented its Helsinki obligations in exemplary fashion. The case for a new information order was always stronger than the states that carried it. It is stronger still now that they are gone.
There is a last accounting, and it is ours. For eighteen years the anti-Stalinist left had a weekly paper and a clear view, and it used them, rightly, on the jammers, the censors and the imprisoned. It never once took up the argument this book gets right. The wire agencies, the cable map, the terms on which a poor country may speak: those pages went unanswered, because the case was being made by people we could not stand beside, and it was easier to leave it to them. That was a mistake, and the cost of it is on both sides of the ledger. The book cannot be trusted because it exempts itself. The reply is thin because it conceded the ground. A reader in 1984 deserved better than either, and a reader now can at least have both halves in one hand.