Category: The Debate That Never Happened

In 1956, amid mounting Cold War tensions and growing frustration with Western imperialism, Jean-Paul Sartre made a dramatic and controversial decision: he accepted exile to East Berlin under the West’s newly enacted Welcome to Leave policy. Departing Paris by train, accompanied by a flurry of journalists, anti-Gaullist activists, and a tearful Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre…

By the early 1950s, amid Red Scare hysteria and the rise of NATO, Western governments began reimagining how to handle their most vocal internal critics: the leftist thinkers, poets, professors, and protest singers who refused to conform. But rather than silencing them through imprisonment or blacklisting, a new, unsettling policy took shape—one cloaked in civility,…