HOW EASILY HE'D RECOGNIZE THE TYPE WHO OPPOSE THIS WAR:

Melvin J. Lasky, Cultural Cold Warrior, Dies at 84 (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, May 22, 2004, NY Times)

Melvin J. Lasky, the editor of two major intellectual journals and a man at the vortex of the debates and controversies thrown up by the cold war, died Wednesday at his home in Berlin. He was 84. [...]

Probably no person was more associated than Mr. Lasky with the term cultural cold warrior. In a career that spanned several decades, during which he lived in London, Paris and Berlin, he edited the monthly magazine Encounter, which was not only one of Europe's leading literary and political journals but also a major force in articulating the point of view best summed up by the phrase liberal anti-Communism. [...]

Mr. Lasky was seen as a hero by his friends and intellectual allies for his fierce and uncompromising opposition to totalitarianism. In what was a kind of personal credo, he once wrote about the intellectual's responsibility to mount an unwavering defense of individual rights, or else, as he put it, "manuscripts will be banned, books will be burned, and writers and readers will once again be sitting in concentration camps for having thought dangerous ideas or uttered forbidden words."

He was himself uncompromising in his disdain for anyone who, in his view, had muddled, morally confused thoughts about the irredeemable viciousness of Soviet totalitarianism, or who committed, in his eyes, the incomprehensible error of seeing the flaws of the democratic West as somehow comparable to those of the Communist East. [...]

In 1966, The New York Times disclosed that the magazine had been secretly financed by the C.I.A., which channeled funds through an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which Mr. Lasky had helped to create to wage the intellectual battle against Communism. [...]

Melvin Jonah Lasky was born in New York on Jan. 15, 1920. He went to the City College of New York, a hotbed of left-wing "isms," where among his classmates were the men later to be known in New York intellectual life as "the two Irvings," Irving Howe and Irving Kristol.

During World War II, Mr. Lasky served as a combat historian in France and Germany, and no sooner had the war ended, than he showed what became his feisty and prickly approach to political controversy, taking part in a literary debate organized as a propaganda exercise in the Soviet occupied part of Berlin.

While most participants duly lambasted the "imperialistic" United States, Mr. Lasky, who with his goatee looked a bit like Lenin, compared the Communist system to Nazism.

MORE:
-OBIT: Obituary: Melvin J. Lasky, Editor of Encounter (The Daily Telegraph, May 21, 2004)
-OBIT: Obituary: Melvin Lasky: Cold warrior who edited the CIA-funded Encounter magazine (Andrew Roth, May 22, 2004, The Guardian)
-OBIT: Melvin J. Lasky: Cold Warrior editor of the controversially funded 'Encounter' (Albert H. Friedlander , 21 May 2004, Independent uk)
-melvin-lasky.de
-ESSAY: Babel: The return of the J-word in Germany and whether "Hey Jude" is anti-Semitic (Melvin J Lasky, April 1997, Prospect)
-Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals (pbs.org)
-PROFILE: A Brief Encounter: Melvin Lasky is a legend. Better yet, he dislikes Maureen Dowd. (TUNKU VARADARAJAN, April 6, 2001, Wall Street Journal)
-REVIEW ESSAY: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited (James Petras, November 1999, Monthly Review)
-REVIEW: of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
by Frances Stonor Saunders (MICHAEL P. ROGIN, The Nation)
-ESSAY: A Cause In Need of A Lasky (Anne Applebaum, June 9, 2004, Washington Post)