Suzanne Labin: socialist, anti-communist and ‘Globalist’

Abstract

This article follows the transnational career of Suzanne Labin, a French socialist and anti-communist professional, in order to analyse the roles and agencies of individuals while the global connectivity of anti-communist actors was growing during the ‘long 1960s’ (approximately 1955–1980). Retrospective analysis, as well as accounts from contemporaries, describes this period as a time of multi-polarisation and globalisation. I will chart Labin’s path from anti-Stalinist circles in France to conservative circles in the US, to finally becoming the first and only female permanent member of the global anti-communist umbrella organisation, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), chairing its French chapter in 1972. An analysis of Labin’s seemingly ambiguous alliances as a socialist with anti-communist and right-wing organisations will shed light on the particularities of international anti-communism during the ‘long 1960s’ on three levels. First, it will show the dynamics between anti-communist networks and actors on national, transatlantic and global levels, especially their contact points. Second, it will underline the diversity of anti-communism and its capacity to integrate several (even contradictory) ideologemes. Third, by following Labin’s global anti-communist engagement within the WACL and her cosmopolitan lifestyle, this article will argue that anti-communist actors were actively involved in the process of globalisation during the ‘long 1960s’.

Introduction

French journalist and anti-communist expert Suzanne Labin (1916–2001) was described by her contemporaries as a “French socialist with extreme right-wing leanings”.¹ Labin cooperated with anti-communist actors around the globe during the 1960s and 1970s to openly criticise the détente policy and to vocally advocate for the creation of a global anti-communist front against a perceived communist threat. By retracing Labin’s transnational career as an anti-communist professional, this article will analyse the roles and the agencies of individuals in the growing global connectivity of anti-communist actors during the ‘long 1960s’² (defined here as approximately the period from 1955 to 1980). Those years were especially characterised by an increasing spatial mobility, a transnationalisation of communications and interactions as well as by a border-crossing adaption of norms and values.³ This article contributes to the ongoing discussion on the agency of anti-communist actors in the US and Europe, who were opposed to the détente policy, and their decision “to go global”.

Originally part of leftist anti-Stalinist circles in France, Labin, despite her socialist convictions, would for most of her professional life be connected to extremely anti-communist, conservative, nationalist and right-wing organisations. An avid critic of the détente policy espoused by the US government and its Western European allies, she established herself as one of the leading voices in the critique of communism and the call for a global coordination of anti-communist forces against this threat. Her 1960s were marked by an intense engagement with highly conservative circles in the US. In the 1970s, she expanded from a transatlantic field of activity to a global one, becoming the first and only female permanent member of the global anti-communist umbrella organisation, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). By following the anti-communist career of the “extraordinary Suzanne Labin”,⁴ I will ask how it was possible that Labin, who always considered herself a socialist, worked alongside far-right, nationalist, and conservative organisations for most of her career. This analysis of Labin’s seemingly ambiguous alliances will shed light on the particularities of international anti-communism during the ‘long 1960s’ on three intertwined levels:

First, it will show the dynamics between anti-communist networks and actors on national, transatlantic and global levels, especially as regards their contact points. Second, it will highlight the diversity of transnational anti-communism. This focus will underline the multiplicity of anti-communist groups in Europe and the US, the wide spectrum of their political orientation, as well as their ideological, political and financial rivalries. Third, by referring to the transnational⁵ as an analytical framework, I will examine how Labin’s conception of ‘nationalism’, ‘internationalism’ and the ‘global’ fostered her anti-communism and her career as an anti-communist professional.

By following Labin’s global political engagement, this article will argue that anti-communist actors were actively involved in the process of globalisation. Labin contributed to this development because she wanted to, and did, transcend national space and political discourse. As a global organisation, the WACL would become her sphere of activity in a time that was mostly marked by détente in Europe and the US. An analysis of Labin’s biography also demonstrates that conservative forces were indeed an active part of this continued process of transnationalisation and globalisation during the ‘long 1960s’, as they made use of these new social and political developments for their own agenda.

Only a few publications on Labin exist and Élie Hatem’s biography resembles in parts more a hymn on Labin than an objective biography.⁶ This analysis is mostly based on her publications, her private correspondence with the conservative networker, Marvin Liebman, as well as on statements from other anti-communist actors, such as François Bondy of the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF). These sources are complemented by reports from the French police, who monitored Labin and her husband from the mid-1930s onward, as well as from assessments received by the German Foreign Office on international conferences organised by Labin in the early 1960s.

From Marxism to anti-Stalinism

Suzanne Devoyon was born in 1916, the oldest of three children in a working-class family near Vincennes in Paris. She grew up sympathetic to the communist movement. Funded by a government bursary, she studied chemistry at the Sorbonne, followed by studies in philosophy and languages (German, English, Italian and Spanish) as well as journalism at the Ecole Supérieure d’Études Internationales.⁷ During her education, she was involved in the student communist movement in France, where she also met her future husband, Édouard Labin, over a spilled cup of tea. S. Labin’s name first came up in a French police report on É. Labin as he was active in communist circles around Boris Souvarine, who became a mentor to the young couple.⁸ Souvarine’s critique of the Stalinist regime would become the catalyst, as well as the basis, for the Labin couple’s political engagement and for S. Labin’s anti-communism.

Reacting to the purge of the Red Army after Lenin’s death and the growing authoritarian character of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Souvarine criticised the ‘Soviet experience’ and ‘bolshevism’ in its actual form. He demanded a democratisation of the actual communist movement via a critique of Lenin and Stalin.⁹ S. Labin decided to join the ranks of the anti-Stalinists. Concurring with Souvarine, in her first publications she criticised the oblivious and non-critical way socialists in France accepted the growing authoritarian character of the Soviet Union under Stalin’s influence. She further denounced the continuation of Stalin’s personality cult within Parisian intellectual circles.¹⁰ Those publications and the meticulous research she did on the Soviet Union and Stalin were a turning point for Labin’s ideological and political orientation. She commented on her shift from Marxism to anti-communism in her biography: “Learning about the killings in the Soviet Union, I became aware that under false pretences I had been given false information and that I had been made to believe that Russia was a paradise”.¹¹ The lack of transparency and personal liberties, and its consequences would become the basis of her critique of Stalin’s regime. Labin concluded that Stalin’s inquisition and personality cult had erased all freedoms and every form of critical thinking and sources of talent. “The inquisition of Mister Stalin’s government has succeeded where even the Tsars’ inquisition failed. Therefore, one has to fear that it will obliterate those who are literate in Russia”.¹²

Labin planned to present her anti-Stalinist opinions in a monograph on Stalin and the situation in the Soviet Union to reflect on the changes that had to be made in the French communist and socialist movements to preserve a libertarian-democratic society.¹³ But her studies and her publishing projects were interrupted by the Second World War and the Nazi Occupation of France. In June 1940, Labin and her Jewish husband left Paris for Lyon, planning to head for the US.¹⁴ There, they were both engaged in the Resistance. Receiving notice in September 1941 that É. Labin would be sent to a concentration camp, the young couple fled that same month to Buenos Aires.¹⁵ In Argentina, they quickly became involved in leftist anti-Stalinist circles.¹⁶

During her time in Argentina, Labin continued work on her first monograph, Staline le Terrible (the book was titled Stalin’s Russia in the English version), and published it upon her return to France in 1948. The book identified Stalinism as the foremost threat to the Free World. She argued that its totalitarian character, with its brutality, lack of freedoms and the regime’s lies and propaganda, catered only to the needs of a newly formed elite. Thus, Stalinism had nothing to do with Marxism or socialism. Soviet expansionism was just the continuation of an aggressive pan-Slavism and the result of the establishment of a new ambitious elite that could only be seen as a perversion of the ideal of socialist internationalism.¹⁷ In Labin’s eyes, her opposition to Stalin and the Soviet Union was in many ways just the continuation of an “anti-fascist resistance”, as: “Tied to Russian Stalinism, you will become the accomplice of a new fascism. Return to your ideals [by leaving Stalinism behind] and your independence, and you will contribute to the saving of civilisation”.¹⁸ Identifying nationalism as the root of totalitarian rule and expansionism, Labin demanded a spirit of socialist internationalism to overcome nationalism and to create a peaceful world without national borders. From now on, Labin’s anti-communist analysis and her fight against communism were based on a decidedly globalist approach. She ended her analysis of the Soviet threat with a hymn on globalisation: “Above all, we must efface those stifling frontiers […] Nationalist prejudices must be overcome. We must preach the fusion of all peoples, all races and tongues—in short, we must devote ourselves without further loss of time to the task of all tasks: the unification of the world”.¹⁹

With her publications, Labin aspired to be recognised as an intellectual, anti-communist expert who came to conclusions based on research and facts, while still being passionate about the subject. She mainly acquired her evidence by relying on eyewitness accounts and on location research as well as referencing the works of other anti-communist ‘experts’.²⁰ Ever since her first publication, Stalin’s Russia, she developed a very distinct style by combining, as Arthur Koestler pointed out in his foreword to that book, “the scrupulous objectivity of the research scientist with the pathos and eloquence of a French Jacobin […] [I]ts passion is derived not from bias or belief but from facts unearthed and assembled with painstaking care, mainly from official Soviet sources: books, statistics, newspapers and radio”.²¹ Labin herself justified her passionate and provocative tone by claiming: “We are objective in our investigations but we are not neutral in the face of its results. However, where we have expressed judgment, they have been conditioned only by those criteria of liberty, justice and human well-being, which are inseparable from any civilised outlook”.²² This distinct form of writing—mixing the provocative and polemic with an academic style—would become one of the trademarks of her anti-communist engagement and a step** stone, as well as a catalyst, for her career.

Marrying anti-Stalinism to McCarthyism

Returning from Argentina, Labin chose to become a member of the Parti Socialiste and to reactivate her former connections to the anti-Stalinist, left-wing circles in France. From her close connections to Souvarine, Raymond Aron and Arthur Koestler, Labin became involved with the CCF, participating at its founding session in 1950 in Berlin.²³ The CCF was created by left-wing, liberal and decidedly anti-communist intellectuals from Europe and the US. With an anti-totalitarian and avowedly internationalist orientation, the CCF was supposed to become a platform to expose the authoritarian character of Stalin’s regime and personality cult, to oppose communist propaganda and to promote the unity of the West. Its aim was to fight the international influence of Stalinism and to reactivate numerous pre-war anti-Stalinist networks.²⁴ But what started out as a potentially promising collaboration, soon turned sour as the polarising nature of Labin’s character and the polemical style of her writing led to a quarrel between her and Bondy over the editorship of the CCF’s first monthly magazine Preuves so that she was excluded from the editorial team in 1952.²⁵ Labin, however, maintained her connections to the CCF, even becoming the first recipient of the Prix de Liberté, a prize created in the mid-1950s to honour publications advancing the anti-communist cause.²⁶ She nonetheless slowly distanced herself from the CCF during the 1950s as they increasingly lost the common ground in their respective anti-communist arguments. This development was due to a fundamental shift of anti-communist reasonings and approaches since the mid-1950s. In the wake of the Korean War, Chairman Nikita Khrushchev and Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai confronted the West at the Geneva Conference of 1954 with their newly developed concept of peaceful co-existence.²⁷ ‘Psychological warfare’ became a key element of the Cold War as US foreign policy now would have “to convince people abroad that the US stands and works for peace, and for a peace which is more meaningful than simple co-existence of two blocs of nations”.²⁸ This new strategy shaped anti-communist discourse, which was until then dominated by the concepts of liberation and containment policy. Under the influence of peaceful co-existence, and as East–West exchanges became part of foreign policy, new voices entered the transatlantic anti-communist discourse. This new camp sought to benefit from the processes of détente by using East–West exchanges on cultural, political and academic levels to demonstrate the superiority of the Western model. This approach was described by the INTERDOC network, an anti-communist think tank, as ‘positive’ anti-communism, contrasting it to the ‘negative’ anti-communism held by supporters of the ‘traditional’ anti-communist school that demanded a liberation policy.²⁹

Following this new concept of ‘positive’ anti-communism, the CCF also transitioned during the 1950s from an anti-Stalinist group to a circle that valued liberal reformism³⁰; whereas Labin firmly established herself in the ‘negative’ anti-communist camp. Since the mid-1950s, Labin not only demanded the continuation of the liberation policy in order to counter the threats to the ‘Free World’, but she also paired her anti-Stalinist convictions, equalling Soviet communism, authoritarianism and imperialism, with McCarthyistic logic and arguments that framed communism as a worldwide conspiracy. In her eyes, peaceful co-existence and détente were nothing more than the communist means of subversion that would eventually help to undermine the ‘Free World’.³¹ As Michael Butter points out in his analysis on anti-communism as a conspiracy theory, McCarthyism viewed communism as a global threat. Due to its conspiratorial character, it could infiltrate (American) society (or all Western societies) from within and could be identified by societal moral decay. Such analysis of the communist threat was often conveyed by a dramatic rhetoric underlining the imminence of the danger.³²

Labin integrated those conspiratorial elements in her growing ‘us vs. them’ reasonings in which one was either on her (anti-communist) side or automatically an agent for the communist cause. This becomes very clear when tensions in her already fraught relationship with Bondy finally escalated in 1962. Labin at this point warned the CCF in a Confidential Report of a communist infiltration based on the fact that several of her articles were declined for publication by the editors of Preuves.³³ Her ‘circular’ (McCarthyist) reasoning was made evident by Bondy’s response to this report. “B. does not care for Mme Labin’s writings and, since she is anti-communist, he must be a fellow-traveller [sic]. B. is a fellow-traveller and therefore does not care for Mme Labin’s writings”.³⁴

The rupture between Bondy and Labin, which was certainly based on mutual dislike (Bondy described the Labin couple as insufferable and self-important),³⁵ should therefore also be seen in the context of the transition within the transatlantic anti-communist discourse; one arguing for the continuation of the liberation policy while the other adopted a ‘positive’ anti-communism using the means of détente. Labin therefore slowly distanced herself from the CCF in order to find other partners for collaboration to promote her pro-liberation policy amid the competition between the two anti-communist camps. This unlocked the next stage of Labin’s anti-communist career.

Labin’s short-lived efforts to coordinate anti-communist forces

The battle for ‘hearts and minds’ prompted by the emergence of the concept of peaceful co-existence called for new tactics and alternative ways of international exchange in addition to traditional diplomatic channels. During the following years, anti-communist experts, think tanks and groups became an essential part of international and transnational interactions, given their skills in intercultural domains.³⁶ With a growing tendency to coordinate and professionalise psychological warfare and increasing anti-communist transnational, even global, interactions, the “personally and politically ambitious”³⁷ Labin saw a chance to establish herself as an expert in communist matters in an increasingly fractured anti-communist landscape.

Her main argument in this debate was that communist subversion could only be successfully countered by uniting different anti-communist circles with different political affiliations. She therefore pronounced herself strictly against every form of East–West contact.³⁸ Coordinated counter-propaganda and education should be the solution as “it is not to underdeveloped countries that aid is urgently necessary but to underdeveloped minds, including Western ones”.³⁹ In her book, Il est moin cinq- propaganda et infiltration soviétique, Labin further elaborated that the actual difficulties for the ‘Free World’ in effectively countering communist subversion came from the fact that anti-communist forces were divided into “dwarf organisations” with no remarkable influence, while the communists’ efforts were centralised.⁴⁰

Therefore, in order to warn the ‘Free World’ of its “impending defeat by the gigantic apparatus of propaganda, infiltration and subversion against which, unfortunately, the Western World remains passive”,⁴¹ Labin promoted the idea of creating an international, democratic and independent organisation—the League of Liberty—to help different national and regional anti-communist organisations exchange experiences, harmonise projects and develop a common understanding of the communist menace. Labin wanted this League to be associated with NATO, while staying formally independent so as not to be controlled by NATO regulations. Furthermore, it should work together with so-called Freedom Missionaries and Freedom Academies to counter the communist infiltration.⁴²

Labin hereto organised two Conferences on the Political Warfare of the Soviets, in Paris in 1960 and in Rome the following year.⁴³ Using her connections to French syndicalists and socialists as well as to US anti-communist circles, mainly from the ‘China Lobby’, she invited participants from different political affiliations (from the right and left of the spectrum) to unite along their shared anti-communist convictions and to reunite them in their fight against what she defined as “La chose soviétique” (The Soviet Thing): a totalitarian regime that tries to grow with whatever means possible and has nothing to do with Marx or Engels. In this way, she encouraged socialist or even communist actors to leave behind their political and ideological affiliations. She declared, during an interview with Radio France II in December 1960, that “Khrushchev is as far away from Marx today as Pope Alexander Borgia has been from Christ” as “the doctrine has become nullified and the Committee has become everything”.⁴⁴

Both conferences were very well attended with over 500 participants from 25 countries with different political, social and cultural backgrounds. Indeed, they might have become “a platform for personal encounters between persons, institutions and prominent members of anti-communist organisations actively engaging in the anti-communist fight”,⁴⁵ but the participants were in the end too divided by their political affiliations as well as by their struggle for financial resources from governments. Therefore, Labin’s efforts did not lead to the hoped-for cooperation.⁴⁶

A third conference, though envisaged with high hopes, did not receive the necessary funding and failed to mobilise enough potential participants. It became evident that anti-communists with different affiliations were only in theory willing to exchange thoughts on ways to join forces. It made the limits of Labin’s integrative and cross-partisan approach apparent as the participants in the end were not able to overcome their political differences and to create a common organ.

Labin’s League of Liberty mainly existed on paper and largely confined to the publication of her own writings. Labin was therefore unable to establish herself as a political analyst for NATO.⁴⁷ There was one main reason for this failure: ‘Positive’ anti-communism had certainly won the race between the two anti-communist camps in Europe. Due to the détente policy and the intensification of East–West exchanges following the Cuban Crisis of 1962, Western administrations started to look for fewer radical voices and approaches in their dealings with the Soviet Union.

Labin’s anti-communist battle continued to be based on her identification of the ‘communist subversion’ and the ‘communist conspiracy’ as global threats to the ‘Free World’. She was neither interested in reflections on the uses of détente nor, as a staunch anti-nationalist, in French national topics.⁴⁸ Her fixation on the communist question and her mainly globalist perspective thereof certainly led to her marginalisation in French political and social discourse. Instead of adapting her fields of interest and her activities to the tones in France and Europe, the rather uncompromising Labin decided in the early 1960s to shift her attention to another audience: conservative circles in the US.

The ‘Joan of Arc of Freedom’: Labin and the ‘China Lobby’

In the early and mid-1960s, Labin extended her lecture tours and publishing projects to the US, where mushrooming anti-communist groups were launching a plethora of anti-communist media outlets and research institutes. In continuity with McCarthyism, such organisations pursued psychological warfare focussed on ‘national security’. Some of them were able to create an extensive organisational apparatus and to influence conservative politicians in their decision making.⁴⁹ Labin’s activities in the US were mainly sponsored by the ‘China Lobby’. This term referred to several non-Chinese anti-communist groups that had formed in the late 1940s in the US following the Communist’s seizure of power in mainland China and the Kuomintang’s escape to Taiwan. The main goal of the ‘China Lobby’ was to support Chiang Kai Shek’s Formosan government-in-exile and to prevent any kind of international or diplomatic recognition of the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC). During the 1950s and 1960s, the ‘China Lobby’ became a platform where right-wing activists collaborated with US and Asian elites to fight communism on the Asian continent. According to these groups, Asia was the new front of the Cold War.⁵⁰ The ‘China Lobby’ can be seen as a prototype of what Sara Diamond calls an elite anti-communist organisation, as its protagonists had access to government officials and had influence with large, glossy media productions.⁵¹

In the mid-1950s, Labin had got in touch with one of the instigators of the ‘China Lobby’, businessman Alfred Kohlberg through Souvarine.⁵² Her ties to this milieu were tightened when she met the conservative networker and lobbyist, Marvin Liebman, as well as by her contact with Democratic Senator Thomas J. Dodd, who participated in the Conference on the political war of the Soviets in Paris in 1961.⁵³ Liebman was an active member of several anti-communist organisations. He was closely connected to William F. Buckley Jr. and involved in Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). He would also be part of the Goldwater campaign in 1964. As one of his projects, he founded the Committee of One Million against the admission of the PRC to the UN. The Committee’s goal was to prevent the Eisenhower administration from recognising the PRC and to foster negative opinion of it in the US and at an international level to prevent its admission into the United Nations. The Committee of One Million would also establish contacts between the YAF and the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL) in the form of an educational exchange programme between groups from both organisations in 1966.⁵⁴ Over the years, the Labins would develop a friendship with Liebman through their different publishing projects and as it became increasingly difficult for S. Labin to find sponsors for her work in Europe. In a letter to Liebman, E. Labin desperately declared: “Suzanne produces the best anti-communist materials but there are so many stumbling blocks that our way begins to resemble Golgotha […] The net result is that Suzanne is on the edge of a breakdown”.⁵⁵

But what made her incompatible with the European political discourse made her all the more attractive for certain conservative movements in the US. Her demand to ramp up psychological warfare and to create freedom academies in order to sensitise the population of the ‘Free World’ to potential infiltration and subversion by communist actors, her vocal critique of ‘positive’ anti-communism, her warning not to fall into the ‘trap’ of peaceful co-existence set out by the communists as well as increasing interest in the Asian region were exceedingly compatible with the political goals of the ‘China Lobby’ and Dodd.⁵⁶ In the early 1960s, Dodd relied heavily on Labin’s documentations of Soviet subversion. In a speech given to the US Senate, he praised her expertise and introduced her as the “Joan of Arc of Freedom”, taking up a formulation from an article written by Eugene Lyons for The American Legion Magazine in December 1962.⁵⁷

Nonetheless, even with support from Senator Dodd and the ‘China Lobby’, Labin’s publications were also criticised in the US for their biased and one-sided interpretations. The Congressional Record disparaged her book, Vietnam. An Eye-Witness Account,⁵⁸ for its lack of factual information, as she “blatantly denie[d] torture and […] adduce[d] some pretty fantastic statistics”. Commenting on the style and her argumentative line, the report pointed out: “Her book has at least, on the average, two fully capitalised lines per page, completed with exclamation points […] Her line is simple: the weak-kneed Communist-loving United-States sold out the Ngo Dinh Diem regime because it was ‘winning the war against the Communist’. And she has no hesitation in naming her chief target: ‘the junto [sic] in the State Department […] There may be much wrong with the way the State Department handled Vietnam over the years, but lack of anti-communism was not part of that”.⁵⁹

But Labin’s position was not only criticised by the moderate and liberal anti-communist voices from the ‘positive’ anti-communist camp. She also got into a public dispute with Robert Welch and the John Birch Society over the Vietnam question. Labin was on Diem’s side, whereas Welch supported Bao Dai.⁶⁰

Interestingly, both sides of this dispute pursued a McCarthyistic logic in their critique of the US government’s actions in Vietnam by concluding that the US government must have been infiltrated by communists. The public quarrel with Welch should therefore be interpreted as a further demonstration that rightist movements were not monolithic. The pillars of the US rightist movement might have been libertarianism, anti-communist militarism and traditionalism, but as Diamond points out, there existed a spectrum: each group held different positions on those subjects as they had different stances towards prevailing power structures, which were partially oppositional and partially system-supportive.⁶¹ Labin’s discord with Welch and the John Birch Society should be seen as emblematic of the rivalling factions within the ‘negative anti-communist’ camp and the efforts of several rightist groups to distance themselves from the John Birch Society.⁶²

At the end of the 1960s, Labin’s connections to rightist circles in the US weakened. This was partly due to the fact that Labin was neither a US citizen nor living in the US. The main reason for the development was, however, the transformation of US conservatism, with grassroots social movement activism gaining influence in the Republican Party as a result of Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. From now on, conservatives in the US stuck to new topics and tactics, focussing on issues such as the economy, race and interreligious dialogue.⁶³ Labin had other concerns. As a convinced globalist, everything that was remotely ‘nationalistic’ regardless if it was a French cause or an American one was of little interest to her.

Suzanne Labin and the World Anti-Communist League (WACL)

Labin’s first connections to APACL⁶⁴ were established shortly after her encounter with Ku Cheng Kang, chairman of APACL and representative of its Taiwanese Chapter, during the Congress on the Russian Psychological Warfare in Paris in 1960. Labin became the European correspondent for APACL and took part in the creation of the Freedom Center in Seoul in 1964, which was inspired by the Freedom Academies promoted by Labin and members of the ‘China Lobby’ such as Senator Dodd.⁶⁵

Following the Sino-Soviet split, as well as developments in Vietnam and the growing support for détente in the West, APACL decided to finally initiate an anti-communist organisation with global aspirations. The so-called World Anti-Communist League (WACL) was founded in 1967 in Seoul. During the following years, WACL became an umbrella organisation, incorporating about 50 anti-communist groups from over 23 countries. WACL was organised into national chapters. During its first years, it was mostly dominated by APACL and the interests of its South Korean and Taiwanese protagonists. Taking a clear stance against détente, WACL asked for a continuation of the liberation and rollback policies.⁶⁶ Their goal was “to wipe out communism, destroy the slave labour systems and to counter all attempts of aggression until a total victory is attained by all the freedom-loving people of the world”.⁶⁷

While those ambitions were identical to Labin’s demands, she expressed some doubts about WACL’s organisational structure. In her eyes, not every anti-communist group or organisation should be allowed to become a WACL member. She wanted to exclude organisations that put their “peculiar nationalistic views […] above the anti-communist goal”, accepted “intellectual or factual collaboration […] with fascism” or preached anti-communism “strictly and exclusively on the base of reactionary ideas”.⁶⁸ Being an anti-nationalist, she vehemently advised against an organisation of WACL around national chapters as she considered national affiliation to be “entirely irrelevant” in the fight against communism. “We are not building the sorts of diplomatic outfits where country traditions command the distribution of roles according to countries represented. We have to build a militant over-partisan and over-national group”.⁶⁹

It might very well be that the main targets of Labin’s anti-national rhetoric were Yaroslav Stetsko and his Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations (ABN). Stetsko’s anti-communist goals and his vocal demand for the continuation of the liberation policy were mainly motivated by his ambition to re-establish an independent Ukrainian nation state. It was also a well-known fact that Stetsko, as a prominent leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), had welcomed the German occupation in Ukraine following the Wehrmacht’s attack on the Soviet Union during the Second World War.⁷⁰

Despite those reservations, Labin still joined WACL. In the subsequent decades, she actively participated in its annual meetings and workshops. Apparently, she enjoyed the recognition that her research and publications received among many WACL members and that seemed to confirm her status as an expert in the analysis of communist subversion. The honorary Chairperson of APACL, Ku Cheng Kang, was willing to cover her travelling expenses as apparently “several delegates […] came to tell him that an international anti-communist conference without Suzanne Labin was like a meal without salt (In French we say, like a kiss without a moustache)”.⁷¹ In 1972, she became the chairperson of WACL’s French chapter, the only women to lead a national chapter.⁷²

Her growing involvement in APACL and WACL from the mid-1960s onwards was also reflected in her publishing projects as she adapted more and more to the tastes and concerns of her WACL audience. At the same time, Labin’s publications from this period were mainly based on sources provided to her either by the ‘China Lobby’ or through her contacts with APACL and WACL. Labin’s focus moved from relations between the USSR and the US to the PRC and Asia as the new battleground between the communist threat and the ‘Free World’. Labin took a firm stand against General de Gaulle’s decision to normalise relations with the PRC in 1964, ending diplomatic relations with Taiwan and with Kissinger’s and Nixon’s rapprochement with the PRC from the late 1960s. Even after the official recognition of the PRC by the UN in 1972, Labin continued to plead for the recognition of Taiwan.⁷³ Labin certainly had a talent for identifying the global developments of her time, linking them to her anti-communist doctrine. She adapted her conspiratorial argument to actual international and social developments and made her case by ‘globalising’ the communist threat coming from the PRC. For example, she traced the hippie movement and the growing opioid crisis in the US back to a systematic flooding of the ‘Free World’ with drugs to undermine the West’s morale, to recruit agents for the communist cause and to make easy money. Labin argued that these subversive actions, led by the communist regimes in Moscow and Bei**g, would impact the overall dynamics of the Cold War and become a universal threat.⁷⁴ In complete alignment with WACL’s political demands, she radically globalised the communist danger, delegitimating any kind of détente policy: “As long as the Soviets are members, the United Nations is, and can only be, a popular front at the level of states. And it can have only the fate of all common fronts with communists: the emergence of a single head: Communists!”.⁷⁵

During the 1970s and 1980s, WACL was indeed able to become the most important transnational platform for radical anti-communists. It attracted a growing number of activists from the US and Western Europe who were disappointed by the CSCE process and former US President Jimmy Carter’s strategy of rapprochement. This development did not remain unnoticed. In 1986, Jon Lee and Scott Anderson, two investigative journalists scrutinised WACL’s role as part of the ‘private’ Contra supply network and WACL’s connections to the Reagan administration via former Major General John Singlaub, who had served as WACL’s chairman since 1981.⁷⁶ While Labin protested against such accusations, she found herself again associated with extreme, right-wing anti-communist groups.⁷⁷

From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, Labin’s publishing projects and her political activism covered a large variety of subjects related to the continued global communist threat. Labin supported the Pinochet Regime in Chile, she defended Israel and denounced international terrorism as a communist plot.⁷⁸ But her massive output of books and articles was marked by “a decline in quality […] demonstrated by repetitious writing and the fact that she is increasingly unable to find a publisher”.⁷⁹ The little political interest her writings may have held for conservative anti-communist circles in the US and in Europe during the 1980s was completely lost with the fall of the Iron Curtain. Especially as Labin continued to insist that communist efforts to further undermine the West were underfoot even after the end of the Soviet Union: “In the face of this collapse of the communist regimes in the East, it is surprising that their international subversive war apparatus did not collapse with them. The reason being that the brains of the free world remain poisoned by communist propaganda and lies […] The free world which, without flinching, allowed Sovietophile Syria to annex Lebanon, accepts now that Communist Serbia is martyring Croatia”.⁸⁰

Labin: the globalist

Labin’s (unintended) achievements were certainly that, against all odds, she was able to establish herself as an expert in conservative anti-communist circles and as a leading figure of the WACL, both as a staunch anti-nationalist and a member of the French Socialist Party. This long-lasting ambiguous and even seemingly contradictory cooperation was ironically due to Labin’s socialist ideal of internationalism, which led to her utopia of a world without national borders. She adopted a ‘globalist’ anti-communist analysis that was not bound to any national agenda. Pairing her anti-Stalinist convictions, resulting from her belief that Stalinism had hijacked and made a travesty of the Marxism she once supported, with a McCarthyist logic, Labin became compatible with global conservative movements of the ‘negative’ anti-communist camp as she retraced all global, political, social and economic problems back to communist subversion. It was this strategy of identifying the communist threat as global, and her mantra-like appeal for a worldwide coordination of anti-communist efforts that became the vehicle for her cooperation with the members of the ‘China Lobby’ and later the WACL. As Labin was unable to establish herself as a political expert in the transatlantic sphere due to her globalist attitude as well as to her opposition to the détente policy adopted by Western governments, the WACL became the ‘last resort’ for her intellectual activities and political visions. An anti-nationalist at heart, Labin’s global engagement and her cosmopolitan lifestyle transcended a world order that continued to be structured along national lines and affiliations. Following the different stages of Labin’s national, transatlantic and global engagement therefore not only shows how divided the anti-communist bloc was in its response to communism and the concept of peaceful co-existence during the 1960s and 1970s, but it also makes apparent the considerable role anti-communist actors played in greasing the skids for globalisation.