Day: September 15, 2025

A new group of 32 families, comprising 139 people, has relocated to Kalbajar as part of Azerbaijan’s ongoing Great Return program, which facilitates the return of…

The post Next group of families resettles in Azerbaijan’s liberated Kalbajar first appeared on The South Caucasus News – SouthCaucasusNews.com.

The post Next group of families resettles in Azerbaijan’s liberated Kalbajar first appeared on The World Web Times – worldwebtimes.com.

It has been about four decades now since courses on Western Civilization began to disappear from American high schools and colleges. In retrospect, the golden age of the Western Civ textbook fell in the decades from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Courses on the subject were a standard curricular offering, often required, for most of the Cold War period. The typical survey course covered Western history from the ancient Greeks and Romans through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ending with the Enlightenment and the contemporary West. In our parents’ and grandparents’ time, the Western Civ survey was commonly the linchpin for other humanities courses, providing a framework for deeper study of Western literature, philosophy, and the arts.

Starting in the mid-1980s, however, the requirement began to disappear. A 2011 report by the National Association of Scholars noted a sharp decline in mandatory courses in Western history since 1989. By 2010, none of the top 50 US universities required Western Civ, and only 16 of them even offered it as an option. Only 2 percent of all US colleges at that time required a Western history survey, even for history majors. By then, the subject had also been abolished as a required social studies course for public high schools by most Departments of Education throughout the 50 states.

Why did this happen? At the time, four decades ago, getting rid of Western civ courses looked like a no-brainer to many academics and administrators. After the turbulence of 1968, elite universities had set themselves the goal of becoming more international, and the ethnic and national origins of the student body were changing rapidly. The percentages of college students of European origin and of those having English as their first language grew smaller. Businesses were globalizing, and international NGOs were multiplying. Professors were becoming ever more specialized in their research and resented the burden of teaching general surveys. The cost of college was rising dramatically, which made students less biddable about required courses. They were paying top dollar, and they were going to study whatever they wanted to study.

Moreover, the generation of academics that grew to adulthood during the Vietnam War had been radicalized politically. Younger profs tended to see the whole subject of Western civilization as hopelessly tainted by American imperialism. Many radicals, their zeal outrunning their knowledge, denounced the West as uniquely racist, sexist, colonialist, or homophobic. Even the term “civilization” itself was problematic, as it implied that some societies might be more civilized than others. The new generation of “tenured radicals” preferred the term “culture” in its anthropological sense. Radical democrats themselves promulgated the dubious doctrine that all cultures were created equal.

Suddenly, outside a few bastions like Columbia and the University of Chicago, no college faculties were willing to identify specific texts or periods of history that students needed to know in order to qualify as educated people. Core courses were replaced with less controversial distribution requirements. Western civ courses were replaced with world history courses, where the naive assumption was often made that the West was the principal aggressor in a world filled with innocent victims of Western greed and violence. The Western past for Americans had always been, to some extent, a foreign country. Now it has become an enemy country.

About the same time, the false narrative was being spread that courses on Western civilization, or even the whole idea of Western civilization itself, were a recent artifact, an invented tradition put about by war-mongering propagandists. During the First World War, it was said, militarists were eager to seduce young men into joining the armed forces. The Western civ course was originally designed to manufacture loyalty to foreign countries that most Americans cared little about. Western Civ, it was claimed, had been revived again during the Cold War for the same insidious purpose—to justify the American empire.

To those who bothered to inform themselves about the history of education, of course, all this was perfect nonsense. The term “Western civilization” became current, not during the First World War, but in the mid-nineteenth century. Its emergence as a concept was originally in the service of an anti-imperial program and had nothing to do with the racist discourse of the time. The same subject matter covered in twentieth-century Western civ courses—Greek and Roman history, medieval and modern European history—had been the backbone of historical study in schools and colleges since the Renaissance. Early America read about ancient, medieval, and modern European history in the pages of William Robertson’s A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (1769). These same fields of study were required of Harvard gentlemen after Jared Sparks’s reform of the history curriculum in the 1820s. They formed the subject matter of François Guizot’s brilliant History of Civilization in Europe (1828, translated by William Hazlitt in 1846). In 1887, the historian of education Charles Baxter Adams, basing himself on extensive surveys, declared Guizot’s book to be the most widely used history text in American colleges.

Thus, the revolt against Western Civ of the last forty years blithely swept away a tradition that was in fact centuries older than most people at the time recognized. As usual with sudden preference cascades, nobody in the academic herd stopped to ask what might be the result of joining the stampede away from the study of the Western tradition. Now, however, forty years later, the downside of our willful plunge into ignorance of the Western past has become all too visible.

Most obviously, students today have next to nothing between their ears to block the negative stories being told them about the Western past. Yes, the Western past is marred by racist and sexist beliefs, by the practice of chattel slavery, and by exploitative forms of colonialism. But no, it’s not true that these civilizational failures are unique to the West. In fact, the West is more enlightened (by modern standards) when compared to other world civilizations. It was in the West, after all, that modern efforts to remove these ugly blemishes began, spreading from Britain, America, and Europe to the rest of the world.

Students today also know next to nothing about the positive achievements of the West. The learning loss is not trivial. Without understanding the struggle in the West over millennia to preserve liberty; without understanding the uniquely rich development of the Roman law tradition; without appreciating the roles that argument, hypothesis, mathematical modeling, and replicable experiment have had in Western science since the Greeks, the young are more likely to acquire the frivolous state of mind, now common, that thinks great civilizational achievements can be jettisoned without loss, once found guilty of “white supremacy.” Without a grasp of the frightful history of religious warfare and the tyrannical abuses of lordly power; without understanding how unproductive and even harmful science can be when it becomes dogmatic; without understanding the centuries of violence and oppression that led to the Western embrace of religious freedom, freedom of expression, and economic freedom—without understanding all that, the young will never comprehend the reasons why it is so vital to preserve the Western tradition. It should come as no surprise that the recent generations of Westerners who believe that the West is uniquely evil have been taught nothing at all about it.

We who live now in Western countries, from whatever part of the world our parents and grandparents came, have received an extraordinary—and yes, unique—inheritance from the Western tradition. If we want our children and grandchildren to understand and enrich themselves by reading Western literature and philosophy, if we want them to understand the architectural languages of the buildings that surround them, if we want them to love the great art and music on offer in our museums and concert halls, built at great cost by past generations, we must lift the pall of negativity that now hangs over Western civilization in the minds of the young. And the best way we can do that is by actually studying it.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse? The reasons are complex and manifold, and it is not clear which, if any, may have been more decisive than others. The answers fall into two broad categories, the “realist” and the “ideational.” The former maintains that the Soviet Union, unable to maintain parity with the US and working within a centralized economic structure, imploded economically, or that Gorbachev’s attempted reforms guided by Glasnost (“openness”) and Perestroika (restructuring) produced centrifugal political instability in various Warsaw Pact nations, especially Poland. 

Proponents of the latter category, the ideational, argue that throughout the Soviet Bloc, to varying degrees, nationalist sentiments were never extinguished and began to revive. The illegitimacy of the ideas that rationalized Soviet repression became increasingly apparent, and religious sentiment also grew, especially in Poland, where communist repression made the country not less, but more fiercely Roman Catholic. In June of 1979, Pope John Paul II undertook a nine-day visit to his native Poland, and approximately 11 million of the population of 36 million greeted him, celebrated Mass, and absorbed his homilies. One year later, Solidarity, the non-communist Polish labor union, was born.  

There is yet another ideational phenomenon, “wholly unnoticed in the West during the Cold War,” which may have played a decisive role. This was the CIA-sponsored book program in which the US coordinated the distribution of books to key individuals, libraries, research institutes, cultural organizations, and universities and schools, in six Warsaw Pact countries (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and late in the program, the Soviet Union) from mid-1956 through 1991. That material, over time, found its way to much of the general public. The program, according to one CIA officer, was “perhaps the most successful covert action program, regardless of [any] standard of measure.” Or, as a program participant put it, the book program was “ideological, political, cultural, and psychological warfare all wrapped up in one.” According to one testimony, “those books in the hands of the intellectual elites of Central and Eastern Europe might rival or even exceed Radio Free Europe in influencing the course of history.”

This program is the subject of two books, one published in 2013 and the other in 2025, that reveal the hidden story of the secret book distribution program to Eastern Europe during the Cold War. At its height between 1957 and 1970, the book program was one of the least known but, arguably, most effective methods of penetrating the Iron Curtain. This is the subject of Charlie English’s The CIA Book Club, released earlier this year, which offers a focused narrative of the dynamics of the program, principally in Poland, the most crucial of the five countries that served as targets for the program. This work adds to a short-but-worthy list of books on this subject, most important among them Alfred Reisch’s 2013 Hot Books in the Cold War. As someone intimately involved in the program in Hungary for fifteen years, Reisch offers the more comprehensive study, but English, a former correspondent for the London-based Guardian, knows how to tell a story. 

The Program and Material

Though there are leading personalities, Reisch explains, “To sum up the story of the origins of the Cold War covert book project, the idea came to a lot of people at the same time, with the CIA in on the project from the beginning.” It is estimated that the program reached at least ten million people behind the Iron Curtain as it extended beyond targeted elites to the general population. English reports that by 1962, the program involved coordination with “500 organizations” that were sending books on the CIA’s behalf. They included “Doubleday, Barnes & Noble, the Oxford English Dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, Allen and Unwin, Faber and Faber, MacMillan and Hachette—among hundreds more. Somehow, and against all odds, even into the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when the CIA came under unfavorable scrutiny, the book program remained a secret. 

The material fell into several categories. The first consisted of explicit political propaganda, which, preceding the book program, had been delivered by hot air balloons that indiscriminately littered the Soviet Bloc countries where tracts were dropped. The balloon program was suspended in 1957 at the behest of the West German government, which objected, not to the message, but to the means of delivery. The material continued to be distributed by other methods for a time, but the shape of the program eventually shifted as many people came to believe that stoking popular uprisings was less prudent than trying to achieve change gradually by a change in the hearts and minds of the citizenry and the elite leadership. 

The latter, it was hoped, might lead to a gradual internal reform. Revolution, it was feared, would produce political instability; or, public protests and popular agitation might provoke greater repression, as happened in Poland in 1981, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Hungary in 1956. In this later phase, the program distributed periodicals, especially émigré publications like the Polish Kultura, published in Paris, and the Czech Svědectví; also, weeklies: principally News from Czechoslovakia, News from Hungary, and News from Poland. Some of these periodicals contained literary and scientific articles, easing the suspicion of censors. In at least one instance, select clippings from Kultura were sent to 500 strategically chosen individuals, with the expectation that some would be shared, or better yet, disseminated. Sent as well were “the original texts of protests against Soviet hegemony raised in Yugoslavia and East Germany, and unpurged history books and ethnic literature otherwise not available,” as well as critiques by intellectual defectors of the Communist system.

A second category had to do with explicitly anti-totalitarian political fiction, the most prominent of which was George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, and Alexandre Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Although not as explicitly political, Dr. Zhivago was popular; a copy was even requested by a member of the Sejm (Polish Parliament). 

The third category was a potpourri of fiction and non-fiction, ranging from manuals on engineering, art history, medical references, literature, philosophy, architecture, music, and film and theater guides. Little of this is explicitly political but was chosen to rouse the curiosity and expand the imagination of readers—and, once again, to lull the censors into complacency. Over half of the books smuggled through the Iron Curtain fall into this category. Emphasis was put on the “popularization of unfamiliar aspects of Western cultural achievements and of general works on the history of Western ideas, philosophy, and traditions. All of this was intended to remedy the “lack of humanistic thinking” and to foster in the target countries “a feeling of communion in this world” and “integration into the intellectual and spiritual life of our age.”

It is this latter category that might be the most fascinating for contemporary advocates of the liberal arts. These books included Albert Camus’ The Rebel, Alexander Eliott’s Three Hundred Years of American Painting, the Anthology of English and American Poetry, and mysteries by Agatha Christie. Other authors were William Faulkner, Hannah Arendt, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka, Gunnar Myrdal, Reinhold Niebuhr, Jean-Paul Sartre, and José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses. More fiction came from authors Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as the plays of Václav Havel. John le Carré’s spy thrillers were popular. Even writing advice from Virginia Woolf made it from West to East. 

Dominos Falling 

By organizing his book around the activity in Poland, English provides the best description of the intricate mechanics of how the books were smuggled into the communist-led countries. At times, his book reads like a spy thriller. The stakes were high as those involved risked lengthy sentences in communist-run jails. Meeting locations rotated, conversations were packed with ever-changing code words, surveillance was constant, and anyone could be an informant. It was high-stakes intrigue. Over the years of the program, Poland received far more books than any other country, and more books were requested by the Polish elite and other citizens. Indeed, one of the most important features of the program was correspondence and material shipments from the West to the East. Those behind the Iron Curtain were able to communicate with their benefactors, requesting certain books, and expressing their thanks for the program’s patronage. 

English asserts, “The impact of this literary tide was huge. Poland was the most crucial of Eastern Bloc nations: when communism collapsed in 1989, this was the first domino to fall, and it was literature that won the war here.” English quotes Polish dissident Adam Michnik, who asserted,

I am convinced it was books that were victorious in the fight. A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity. A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad. (English, p. 343)

Clearly, the program had a deep impact on many people. How much credit, though, should the program get for the fall of communism generally? In his lengthy and careful introduction to the Reisch book, Professor Mark Kramer, current director of the Cold War Institute at Harvard University, explains that proving the success of the book program requires addressing multiple and complicated variables. That said, the evidence that Reisch presents, and the careful narrative that English reconstructs, are convincing, and their conclusions are persuasive. For example, Reisch argues that books were a means of “breaking down the ideological and cultural Iron Curtain … opening wide a window on the culture and achievements of the free Western world.”

The program’s manager, George Minden, explains,

All book distribution is politically significant because all books—political and literary—accomplish the political task of making the ideological isolation of Eastern Europe difficult and thus frustrate one of the communists’ main political objectives. For the communists, too, all Western books, whether political or non-political, are politically significant and feared as such. (Reisch, p. 522)

A beneficiary of the program later wrote, 

Books gave us the tools to understand this world. … We read poetry and literature. It showed us that there are likeminded people who … we can empathize with, who admire beauty, who admire virtue. (English, p. 281)

All of this speaks importantly to the current state of the liberal arts. First, it affirms the power of a liberal arts education, both formal instruction in youth and the cultivated habit of reading and participation in artistic and musical culture. It is evident that among the many benefits of the liberal arts is a quest for freedom and a love of liberty.

Secondly, it illuminates a red flashing light in response to the denigration of a Western liberal arts education—by those in the West. There exist at least two fronts in the war on this side of the Atlantic: one is ideological as detractors promote cultural relativism, discounting “Western-centric” learning. Rap is as good as Tchaikovsky. “Who am I to judge?” Secondly, sweeping through education today is a complaint—not so much from students as from their educators—that symphonies and novels are just too long and difficult for today’s students. 

In fairness, parents may be as guilty as educators when they complain that reading Dostoevsky is just too tough—and besides, what’s the use? Reisch and English put the lie to the “too difficult” complaint: English, for example, explains in excruciating detail the danger and convoluted logistics in smuggling and reprinting material in Poland on typewriters, printing presses, offset presses, and copy machines. Sometimes, the only edition of Solzhenitsyn’s works available to Polish readers was microscopic copies of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago clandestinely nestled in a baby’s diapers. 

At the very least, these two books ensure that the book distribution program will now be included in the history of the Cold War as it should.