The pursuit of truth and the survival of freedom.(The Media)

THE OCTOBER issue of Quadrant properly heralded on its cover that this was the 400th number. Apart from that simple statement the editor exercised admirable restraint--too admirable, I believe--in not elaborating on the extraordinary accomplishment represented in the survival of Quadrant for nearly fifty years. Not survival for survival's sake (or for monetary gain), as with most publications, but in the interest of providing reading space for points of view often blocked out of larger, better-financed publications. Quadrant's survival, indeed its continuing relevance and incorruptibility, is an achievement to be applauded.

I recall Quadrant's founding at the hands of Richard Krygier and James McAuley. And I remember with great warmth my two-week speaking tour in Australia as Quadrant's guest. That was some thirty years ago during the height of the Cold War. It is well to note Quadrant's origin with pride. The magazine was assisted at birth by the Congress of Cultural Freedom. So, too, were Encounter, Survey, and several other distinguished magazines that provided public access to intellectuals who recognised that there was, indeed, a cultural war deeply embedded in the more obvious political and military conflicts of the Cold War.

These magazines were supported at birth by the Congress of Cultural Freedom with funding from the American CIA. But while many diverse publications worldwide were created and largely controlled from the Soviet Union or its willing or deluded supporters in democratic countries, the CIA did not control editorial policy or the selection of authors or their output in the magazines created by the Congress of Cultural Freedom. There was, indeed, an understanding that Quadrant and the others were firmly committed to human freedom, human rights, academic freedom, and the revelation of opposite motivations and objectives in the cultural war then openly and widely engaged. When the early CIA funding was revealed, the magazines received private support. They were frequently belaboured, nevertheless, for early CIA funding. Their far better funded opponents, however, were not so encumbered for their close association with the Soviet Union or its vast series of front organisations.

For several decades, as executive director of Freedom House in New York, I helped raise significant funds to keep alive Encounter and Survey. They folded just as the Cold War ended. But

I Quadrant continues, happily. For the cultural wars are far from ended. They are more complex today than when Moscow was clearly the centre of a vast conspiracy to enlist intellectual support for the ultimate oppression that would harness the very intellectuals enlisted--knowingly or unknowingly--in nefarious efforts. Indeed, your October number clearly discussed the current struggle for "hearts and minds" in the article by Dennis O'Keeffe.

IT SOMETIMES TAKES decades for the truths of earlier years to reach the eyes of generations born long after the events examined. Yet those early events shaped the ideas, the geopolitics, the worldview of generations long passed from the active scene. We have a startling example these days in New York. In 1932, the Pulitzer Prize jury of the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University decided to award its prestigious prize--the highest honour in American journalism--to Waiter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times. Duranty, born in Liverpool, England, had lived in Moscow from 1922 to the 1930s. During the formative years of Stalin's dictatorship Duranty set the tone for ...