“An invisible government”

Liberals mugged by reality? No, Trotskyists turned by the CIA.

Here is a fascinating scholarly essay on the secret intellectual history of the last century.

"In minute detail, Stonor Saunders explains not only how, as the Cold War started, the Americans and the British started up a massive covert operation to fund anti-communist intellectuals, but also – crucially – how much of their attention and activity was directed at left-wingers, in many cases Trotskyites who had abandoned their support for the Soviet Union only in 1939, when Stalin signed his non-aggression pact with Hitler, and in many cases people who had previously worked for Münzenberg. The key point, for our understanding of today’s politics, is that many of the cultural figures at this juncture between Communism and the CIA at the beginning of the cold war were future neo-conservatives luminaries, especially Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling.

"The left-wing and even Trotskyite origins of neo-conservatism are well-known – though new details still astonish, viz. Lionel and Diana Trilling were married by a rabbi for whom Felix Dzherzhinsky - the founder of the Bolsehvik secret police, the Cheka (forerunner of the KGB), and the Communist equivalent of Heinrich Himmler - represented a heroic paragon." -- John Laughland

The whole essay deserves to be read, and, by some, the books to which it refers.