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Is Political Correctness an organic part of our society or was it a creation of men  ?
Here is discussed the history of the Frankfurt School marxists, who they were, what
their beliefs and intentions were and how they created the culture of PC in America
...and the World.
 
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Satan’s Secret Agents:

The Frankfurt School and their Evil Agenda

Based on an original article (see here) by Timothy Matthews.
Abbreviated and adapted with additional material  by Lasha Darkmoon.

 

“GOD  IS  DEAD! . . . BEHOLD, I GIVE YOU THE SUPERMAN!”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

 

Let’s begin by considering the corrosive work of the Frankfurt School: a group of

German-American scholars, mostly Jewish, who developed highly provocative and

original perspectives on contemporary society and culture, drawing on Hegel,

Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber.

 

Their idea of a “cultural revolution” was not particularly new. Joseph, Comte de Maistre

(1753-1821), who for fifteen years had been a Freemason, had this to say: “Until now,

nations were killed by conquest, that is by invasion. But here an important question arises:

can a nation not die on its own soil, without resettlement or invasion, by allowing the flies

of decomposition to corrupt to the very core those original and constituent principles

which make it what it is?”

 

What was the Frankfurt School?

 

Well, in the days following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, it was believed that a Workers’

Revolution would sweep into Europe and, eventually, into the United States. It failed to

do so. Towards the end of 1922, the Communist International (Comintern) began to conside

r the reasons for this failure.

 

On Lenin’s initiative, a meeting was organized at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow.

The aim of the meeting was to throw light on the meaning of Marx’s Cultural

Revolution. What did “cultural revolution” entail?  What was it all about?

 

First, among those present, was Georg Lukács, a Jewish Hungarian aristocrat and son

of a banker. He had become a Communist during World War I. A good Marxist theoretician,

he had developed the idea of “Revolution and Eros” — sexual instinct used as an

instrument of destruction.

 

Then there was Willi Münzenberg, another revolutionary Jew whose proposed solution to

the problems besetting society was to organize the intellectuals and use them to make

Western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values

and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

 

“It was”, said Ralph de Toledano (1916-2007), the conservative author and co-founder of

the National Review, “a meeting more harmful to Western civilization than the Bolshevik

Revolution itself.”

 

Lenin died in 1924, but by that time Stalin had risen to power and was beginning to look

on Willi Munzenberg, George Lukács and other Jewish revolutionaries (like Trotsky) as

dangerous Marxist “revisionists”, introducing concepts into Marxism that were alien to

Marxism and which served only a Jewish agenda.

 

In June 1940, on Stalin’s orders, Münzenberg was hunted down to the

south of France by a NKVD assassination squad and hanged from a tree.

 

In the summer of 1924, after being attacked for his writings by the Fifth Comintern

Congress, Lukács moved to Germany. Here he chaired the first meeting of a group of

Communist oriented sociologists. This gathering was to lead to the foundation

of the Frankfurt School.

 

This “School”, designed to put flesh on their revolutionary program, was started at the

University of Frankfurt in the Institut für Sozialforschung. To begin with, school and

institute were indistinguishable. In 1923, the Institute had been officially established, and

funded by Felix Weil (1898-1975). Weil, born in Argentina into a wealthy  Jewish family,

was sent to attend school in Germany at the age of nine. He attended the universities in

Tübingen and Frankfurt, where he graduated with a doctoral degree in political science.

While at these universities he became increasingly interested in socialism and Marxism.

 

Carl Grünberg, the Institute’s Jewish director from 1923-1929, was an avowed Marxist,

although the Institute did not have any official party affiliations. But in 1930 Max Horkheimer

(also Jewish) assumed control. He believed that Marx’s theory should be the basis

of the Institute’s research.

 

When Hitler came to power, the Institute was closed and its members, by various

routes, fled to the United States and ended up as academics at major

US universities: Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and California at Berkeley.

 

LD:  The fact that they spoke very poor English was no disqualification. They

were Jewish, and so they managed to obtain prestigious academic appointments

through Jewish influence, i.e., through networking — a system that works

exceptionally well even today and which accounts for the huge and unfair

preponderance of Jews in academia.

 

The School included among its members the 1960s guru of the New Left Herbert Marcuse

— denounced by Pope Paul VI for his theory of liberation which “opens the way for [sexual]

licence cloaked as liberty” — Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, the popular writer Erich

Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and Jurgen Habermas. All these individuals except Habermas

were of Jewish origin.

 

Basically, the Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief

— or even the hope of belief — that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing

society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and

alienation that they considered necessary to provoke a socialist revolution.

 

Their task, therefore, was as swiftly as possible

to undermine the “Judaeo-Christian legacy.”

 

LD:  “Judeo-Christian” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, given that

Judaism and Christianity are at opposite ends of the religious spectrum. Since

most Jews are  actively hostile to Christianity, and since Talmudic Jews actually

take pleasure in the thought of Christ being boiled in excrement in hell,

to speak of the “Judeo-Christian legacy” is clearly nonsensical.

 

To undermine Western civilization, the Frankfurt School Jews called for the most negative

and destructive criticism possible of every sphere of life. To de-stabilize society and bring it

to its knees, to engineer collapse, to produce crisis and catastrophe — this became the aim

of these maladjusted and mentally sick Jewish revolutionaries masquerading as

high-powered intellectuals.

 

Their policies, they hoped, would spread like a virus — “continuing the work

of the Western Marxists by other means”, as one of their members noted.

 

To further the advance of their “quiet” cultural revolution, the Frankfurt School made the

following twelve recommendations — all of them calculated to undermine

the foundations of society and create the dystopia we now see all around us:

 

1.  The creation of racism offences and hate speech laws.


2.  Continual change to create confusion (e,g., in school curricula).


3.  Masturbation propaganda in schools, combined with the homosexualization of children

and their corruption by exposing them to child porn in the classroom.


4.  The systematic undermining of parental and teachers’ authority.


5.  Huge immigration to destroy national identity and foment future race wars.


6.  The systematic promotion of excessive drinking and recreational drugs.


7.  The systematic promotion of sexual deviance in society.


8.  An unreliable legal system with bias against the victims of crime.


9.  Dependency on state benefits.


10. Control and dumbing down of media. (Six Jewish

companies now control 96 percent of the world’s media. LD).


11.  Encouraging the breakdown of the family.


12.  All all-out attack on Christianity and the emptying of churches.

 

LD:  In the Soviet Union, under Stalin and his Communist Jews, the emptying

of churches was accomplished by the simple expedient

of burning the churches down—thousands of them.

 

(See here, here, here, here and here for more details on the systematic destruction

of Christian churches and the persecution of Russian Christians under the

Jewish leaders of the Russian Revolution. See also extended endnote.)

 

Coincidentally, most of the 12 aims and objectives mentioned above were set

out prominently in the pages of that alleged  “forgery”, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The Jewish philosophers of the Frankfurt School, it seems, had been heavily

influenced by the Protocols. They were clearly impressed by what they read

there and decided to implement its recommendations in their own sinister agenda.

 

One of the main ideas of the Frankfurt School was to exploit Freud’s idea of

“pansexualism”: the search for indiscriminate sexual pleasure, the promotion

of “unisex”, the blurring of distinctions between the sexes, the overthrowing

of traditional relationships between men and women, and, finally, the undermining

of heterosexuality at the expense of homosexuality — as, for example, in the

idea of “same-sex marriage” and the adoption of children by homosexual couples.

 

Willi Münzenberg summed up the Frankfurt School’s long-term

operation thus: “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.”

 

          
“We must organise the intellectuals and use them TO MAKE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

STINK! Only then, after they have CORRUPTED ALL ITS VALUES AND MADE LIFE

IMPOSSIBLE, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Emphasis added)

LD:  According to Sean McMeekin’s The Red Millionaire: A political biography

of Willi Münzenberg, Münzenberg was “the perpetrator of some of the most

colossal lies of the modern age…. He helped unleash a plague of moral blindness

upon the world from which we have still not recovered.”

 

 

The Frankfurt School believed there were two types of revolution: (a) Political revolution

and (b) Cultural revolution. They were more concerned with cultural revolution, the demolition

of the established order from within. “Modern forms of subjection are marked by mildness”,

they taught. So-called “reforms” were to be made so slowly and subtly that these changes

for the worse were barely perceptible. The School saw the undermining of the social order

as a long-term project.

 

LD:  The systematic erosion of Christian moral values and the promotion

of sexual perversion is known as cultural Marxism. Today, thanks to the efforts

of organized Jewry which controls 96 percent of the world’s media, cultural

Marxism has largely triumphed and Christianity lies in ruins. To many dispassionate

observers, society has now reached its rockbottom moral nadir — as Jewish Marxists

such as Willi Munzenberg (see quote above) would have been

only too happy to witness — had he been around today. 

 

These iconoclasts kept their sights firmly fixed on the family, education, media,

sex and popular culture. Each of these would be their target. If things did not

go from bad to worse, year after year, they were not succeeding. To these

revolutionary Jewish thinkers, bad was good — and worse was better.

The Destruction of the Family and the Promotion of Feminism

 

The School’s Critical Theory preached that the “authoritarian personality” was a product of

the patriarchal family — an idea directly linked to Engels’ Origins of the

Family, Private Property and the State, which promoted matriarchy.

 

Already Karl Marx had written, in the Communist Manifesto (1848), about the radical

notion of a “community of women”. In The German Ideology (1845), he had written disparagingly

about the idea of the family as the basic unit of society. This was one of the

basic tenets of the Critical Theory: the need to break down the family unit.

 

LD: All families were essentially evil, these thinkers believed — even happy

families — so they had to be destroyed. It was better if children had no parents,

or did not know who their parents were. Or if they were orphans of the state.

It was better if romantic love between the sexes, leading to stable long-term

marriages, were destroyed in favor of short-term, unstable, promiscuous relationships.

After all, the former might lead to happiness for all concerned, and that was

clearly impermissible — for the whole point of the Cultural Revolution was

“to create a culture of pessimism” (Lukács) and “to make life impossible for

everyone.” (Münzenberg).

 


“I want a culture of pessimism … a world abandoned by God”

 ...Georg Lukacs (1885 - 1971)

 

The Institute scholars therefore preached that “Even a partial breakdown of parental authority

in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change.”

 

LD:  These neo-Freudian Marxist philosophers of the Frankfurt School were

clearly out to create trouble: to drive a wedge between parent and child and

sow division in the family. Whatever was good in human relationships simply

had to be destroyed. If people didn’t have problems, then problems would

have to be manufactured “to make life impossible.” (Munzenberg).

 

All this prepared the way for the warfare against the masculine gender promoted by Marcuse

under the guise of “Women’s liberation” and by the New Left movement in the 1960s.

They proposed transforming our culture into a female-dominated one.

 

LD:  The idea that women should run society and wear the trousers, telling

men what to do, had an enormous appeal to certain bossy types of women

with a surplus of testosterone, particularly to butch lesbians and man-hating

matriarchs. Many of these misguided females were to become evangelists for

radical  Feminism, some even proposing to cut themselves off from the male

sex completely and live in communes of their own. Curiously enough,

the numberof Jewish feminists is huge—out of all proportion to

their percentage in the population.

 

 

In 1933, Wilhelm Reich, an honored and adulated member of the Frankfurt School, wrote

in The Mass Psychology of Fascism that matriarchy was the only genuine family

type of “natural society.” He was, as such, to be an inspiration to the feminists.

 

LD:  Reich, incidentally, a compulsive masturbator and sexual pervert, had

entertained incestuous longings for his own mother and

practiced bestiality with horses while still a child. (See here).

 

This versatile sexual deviant, now a cult figure on the left, along with the

equally sex-obsessed Herbert Marcuse—popularizer of the slogan MAKE LOVE,

NOT WAR—were to be godfathers of the Sexual Revolution of

the 1960s as well as the patron saints of the Feminist movement.

The Indoctrination of Children through Education

 

Bertrand Russell was to join the Frankfurt School in their efforts at mass social engineering.

He spilled the beans in his 1951 book, The Impact of Science on Society. He wrote:

“The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children

on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that

snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of

home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins

before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are

very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid

taste for eccentricity.

 

But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover

exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and

how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.

 

When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge

of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the

need of armies or policemen.”

 

LD:  The irony is unmistakable, but that is beside the point. Russell was all

for turning the world upside down and ushering in Brave New World: atheism, feminism,

and “sexual liberation” i.e., the green light to promiscuity, perversion, and abortion on demand.

 

The devaluation of values so sought after by the luminaries of the Frankfurt

School  has now largely been achieved through sex education and media propaganda:

in particular, by the promotion of masturbation, pornography, and the systematic high

pressure salesmanship of  homosexuality in schools.   

 

LD:  This, then, is the secret agenda of organized Jewry as represented by the

Cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School: the destruction of traditional values, the

destruction of the moral order, the destruction of the family unit, the destruction of

religion, the destruction of meaning and purpose, and, finally, the destruction of

happiness itself.

 

These are the people who now rule over us. They are in control. They create new

wars with the same rapidity that a stage magician pulls rabbits from a hat. And they

make sure that the people they rule over, their subject populations, are either demoralized

debt slaves in insecure jobs or unemployed bums living on state benefits and a diet of

junk food and sleazy junk entertainment laid on by the Jews.

 

Satan’s Secret Agents have been only too successful in creating

a New World Order that bears a remarkable resemblance to hell.

 

*          *          *

Endnote by Lasha Darkmoon

 

American historian Edwin Schoonmaker writes:

Fifteen years after the Bolshevist Revolution was launched to carry out the

Marxist program, the editor of the American Hebrew could write: “According

to such information that the writer could secure while in Russia a few

weeks ago, not one Jewish synagogue has been torn down, as have

hundreds—perhaps thousands of the Greek Catholic Churches… In

Moscow and other large cities one can see Christian churches in the

process of destruction… the Government needs the location for a

large building,” (American Hebrew, Nov. 18, 1932, p. 12) Apostate Jews,

leading a revolution that was to destroy religion as the “opiate of the

people” had somehow spared the synagogues of Russia.” (“Democracy

and World Dominion,” 1939, p.211). 

 

Wikipedia tells us that the Communist state after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution  was

“committed to the destruction of religion”, and destroyed churches, mosques and temples

— no mention of synagogues being destroyed  and that it “ridiculed, harassed and

executed [Christian] religious leaders, flood[ing] the schools and media with atheistic propaganda.”

 

Since the Russian Revolution was essentially a Jewish revolution, with an overwhelmingly

high percentage of its leaders being Jewish, one can understand why synagogues were NOT

destroyed. The animosity of the Jewish leadership was directed almost exclusively toward

the Christian clergy and their churches. Monks, nuns and priests were put to death in large

numbers, often after being cruelly tortured in the process, their eyes gouged out and in

some instances being boiled alive. (For graphic details of the systematic torture of Christians

under the Bolsheviks, see here and section 7, “Fiendish tortures devised by the Jewish cheka”, here).

 

According to the Atlantic, September 1991, p.14, “In 1919, three-quarters of the Cheka

staff in Kiev were Jews, who were careful to spare fellow Jews. (See footnote 21, here)

 

For more on the specifically Jewish character of the Russian Revolution, see here and here.

 

Russian-born Jewish writer Sonya Margolina goes so far as to call the Jewish role in supporting

the Bolshevik regime the “historic sin of the Jews.” She points, for example, to the prominent

role of Jews as commandants of Soviet Gulag concentration and labor camps, and

the role of Jewish Communists in the systematic destruction of Russian churches.

Moreover, she goes on, “The Jews of the entire world supported Soviet power,

and remained silent in the face of any criticism from the opposition.”

 

In light of this record, Margolina offers a grim prediction:

 

“The exaggeratedly enthusiastic participation of the Jewish Bolsheviks in

the subjugation and destruction of Russia is a sin that will be avenged.

Soviet power will be equated with Jewish power, and the furious hatred

against the Bolsheviks will become hatred against Jews.” (Cited here)

  _______________________________________________________________ 
 
 

 

 ________________________________

 

The Frankfurt School and “Critical Theory”

 

Index to the biographies and writings of members of the “Frankfurt School”, or Institute

for Social Research, set up by a group of Marxist intellectuals in Germany in 1923,

affiliated to the University of Frankfurt and independently of the Communist Party, which

has been influential in the development of Marxist theory ever since.

 

The founding of the Institut marked the beginning of a current of “Marxism” divorced from

the organised working class and Communist Parties, which over

the decades merged with bourgeois ideology in academia.


Creation of the Institut für Sozialforschung, Martin Jay, 1973.
group who attended the Marxist Work Week in 1923 which led to the launching of the Institut: Friedrich Pollock, Georg Lukacs, Felix Weil, Karl Wittfogel, Rose Wittfogel, Christiane Sorge, Karl Korsch
 

The Institut für Sozialforschung (Institut) was the creation of Felix Weil, who was able to

use money from his father's grain business to finance the Institut. Weil was a young Marxist

who had written his PhD on the practical problems of implementing socialism and was

published by Karl Korsch.

 

Felix Weil

With the hope of bringing different trends of Marxism together, Weil organised

a week-long symposium (the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche) in 1922

attended by Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel, Friedrich

Pollock and others. The event was so successful that Weil set about erecting

a building and funding salaries for a permanent institute. Weil negotiated

with the Ministry of Education that the Director of the Institut would be a

                       full professor from the state system, so that the Institut would have

the status of a University.

 

Weil himself was an orthodox Marxist, who saw Marxism as scientific; the role of the Institut

would be social and historical research mainly on the workers' movement. Indeed, in its

early years, the Institut did fairly orthodox historical research. However, one of Weil's

central objectives was also cross-disciplinary research, something which the

German University system made impossible.

 

Karl Korsch

Although Georg Lukacs and Karl Korsch both attended the Arbeitswoche which had

included a study of Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy, both were too committed to

political activity and Party membership to join the Institut, although Korsch participated in

publishing ventures for a number of years.

 

                          The way Lukacs was obliged to repudiate his History and Class Consciousness, published

in 1923 and probably a major inspiration for the work of the Frankfurt School, was an

indicator for others that independence from the Communist Party was necessary for genuine

theoretical work.

 

Friedrich Pollock

Friedrich Pollock was one of those who had been involved with the Institut from the beginning,

and took over the role of Director on the death of Carl Grünberg. Pollock was content to

concern himself with administrative matters, but he was also a life-long friend and associate

of Max Horkheimer, who is probably the figure most identified as the leading representative

of the Frankfurt School.

 

Max Horkheimer

Max Horkheimer [Archive] later himself became Director of the Institut,

and it was Horkheimer who guided the Institut into its innovative

exploration of cultural aspects of the development of capitalism.


See Horkheimer’s opening address on becoming Director.

 

Wittfogel

Karl August Wittfogel was a participant from the beginning, but was a Party member and

had a more orthodox, “scientific” view of Marxism. It is Wittfogel who established

the classic Marxist analysis of “Asiatic Despotism.”

 

 

Richard Sorge

Richard Sorge worked at the Instiut, but as it turned out was only there in his role as a Soviet spy.

 

David Ryazanov [Archive] was assigned to Germany to compile the writings of Marx and Engels a

nd publish the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, and worked closely with the Institut.

 

In 1931/32 a number of psychoanalysts from the Frankfurt Institute of Psychoanalysis and

others who were acquainted with members of the Institut began to work systematically

with the Institut. These included Franz Borkenau, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich

, Karl Landauer and Heinrich Meng.

 

Erich Fromm

In joining what was predominantly a “Hegelian-materialist” current of Marxists, these

psychologists gave the development of Marxist theory an entirely new direction, which

has left its imprint on social theory ever since.

 

Erich Fromm [Archive] dealt with psychological aspects of social control, delusion

and conformity and became one of the founders of “socialist humanism”.

 

Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich developed his own doctrine of sexual liberalism as an

antidote to political conformism and social psychosis.

 

Other young German Communist intellectuals who were associated with the Institut,

but after the Nazi takeover, wound up in the United States, were Kurt Lewin and Adolph Löwe.

 

Kurt Lewin Raymond Aron 1905-1983

They all went on to make significant contributions to social theory, though

only distantly related to their initial Communist inspirations. Kurt Lewin for

instance contributed to the emergence of group-dynamics and social

action theory as specialised disciplines. Adolph Lowe made

important contributions to the development of political economy.

 

Raymond Aron was a French journalist and sociologist.

 

Adolph Lowe

Leo Lowenthal [Archive] was one of the early workers at the Institut

whose principal interest was in the sociology of literature.

 

Marcuse

Later he was joined by the Hegelian philosopher Herbert Marcuse [Archive]

who was probably the only member of the Institut who achieved

wide influence among political activists, in the 1960s.

 

Leo Lowenthal

When Hitler came to power, the Institut was closed down, and by various

routes, most of the participants in the Institut regrouped themselves in New York, with a

new Institute affiliated to Columbia University. They continued to publish in German, even

though very few people would have been reading their work in that language.

However, after the War, the Institut returned to Frankfurt.

 

Theodor Adorno Walter Benjamin

Perhaps two of the most famous figures who were in the central core

of the Institut were Theodor Adorno [Archive] and Walter Benjamin, both

renowned for their studies of literature and mass culture

which would become so influential from the 1960s on.

 

Jurgen Habermas

After the Institut re-established itself in Germany after the War, the main

figure of the younger generation was Jürgen Habermas [Archive] who

continued to develop the “critical theory” in the Hegelian tradition of Adorno

and Marcuse. Habermas was instrumental in the 1960s in developing the

theory of “networks,” but in later years Habermas has focussed on communicative

ethics in the tradition of Immanuel Kant, and departed

not only from the Marxist, but even the Hegelian tradition.

 

Axel Honneth

Currently Axel Honneth represents the third generation, continuing the work of Jürgen

Habermas, but with a partial return to Hegel, still quite remote from any reading of Karl Marx.

 

 

Agnes Heller

After the isolation and Stalinisation of the Soviet Union, and the consequent

decline of the Communist Parties in the “West,” the possibilities for the

fruitful development of Marxism as a revolutionary-critical theory in

close connection with the practical-critical activity

of the workers movement, became extremely restricted.

 

Nancy Fraser

The current generation of Critical Theorists, unlike previous generations, is led by

women, such as Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib and Agnes Heller:

 

Seyla Benhabib

Jurgen Habermas with students 1960

The intellectuals who founded the Frankfurt Institut

deliberatively cut out a space for the development of

Marxist theory, inside the “academy” and

independently of all kinds of political party.

 

The Institut in 1950

The result was a process in which Marxism merged

with bourgeois ideology. A parallel process took place

in post-World War Two France, also involving a merging with Freudian ideas. One of the

results was undoubtedly an enrichment of bourgeois ideology. In this connection

Paul Mattick's Marcuse: One Dimensional Man In Class Society (

1972) is worth reading. But also, despite everything, the Frankfurt School makes an

important critique of orthodox Marxism, and their work should be taken seriously.

 ___________________

 

 


 


 
_____________________________________

 
This is the long overdue study of the Frankfurt School
and Cultural Marxist philosophy which now controls
Western intellectualism, politics, and culture. It was by design;
it was created by an internationalist intelligentsia to
eradicate Western values, social systems, and European
racial groups in a pre-emptive attempt to spark global,
communist (think liberal) revolution. Andrew Breitbart's
historical notes are taken into the narrative.
 
 
 
 

Click on this text to watch a condensed version titled: "The Architects of Western Decline: A Study on the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism"...

 _______________

 

The Birth Of Cultural Marxism:

How The "Frankfurt School" Changed America

Tyler Durden's picture


The 1950s were a simple, romantic, and golden time in America.

 

California beaches, suburbia, and style. Atlas Shrugged was

published, NASA was formed, and Elvis rocked the nation.

Every year from 1950–1959 saw over 4 million babies

born. The nation stood atop the world in every field.

 

It was an era of great economic prosperity in The Land of the Free.

 

 

So, what happened to the American traits

of confidence, pride, and accountability?

 

The roots of Western cultural decay are very deep, having first sprouted a century ago.

It began with a loose clan of ideologues inside Europe’s communist movement. Today,

it is known as the Frankfurt School, and its ideals have perverted American society.

 

When Outcomes Fail, Just Change the Theory

 

Before WWI, Marxist theory held that if war broke out in Europe, the working

classes would rise up against the bourgeoisie and create a communist revolution.

 

Well, as is the case with much of Marxist theory, things didn’t go too well. When war

broke out in 1914, instead of starting a revolution, the proletariat put on their uniforms

and went off to war.

 

After the war ended, Marxist theorists were left to ask, “What went wrong?”

 

Two very prominent Marxists thinkers of the day were Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács.

Each man, on his own, concluded that the working class of Europe had been blinded by

the success of Western democracy and capitalism. They reasoned that until

both had been destroyed, a communist revolution was not possible.

 

Gramsci and Lukács were both active in the Communist

party, but their lives took very different paths.

 

Gramsci was jailed by Mussolini in Italy where he died in 1937 due to poor health. 

 

In 1918, Lukács became minister of culture in Bolshevik Hungary. During this time, Lukács

realized that if the family unit and sexual morals were eroded, society could be broken down.

 

Lukács implemented a policy he titled “cultural terrorism,” which focused on these two

objectives. A major part of the policy was to target children’s minds through

lectures that encouraged them to deride and reject Christian ethics.

 

In these lectures, graphic sexual matter was presented to

children, and they were taught about loose sexual conduct.

 

Here again, a Marxist theory had failed to take hold in the real world. The people

were outraged at Lukács’ program, and he fled Hungary when Romania invaded in 1919.

 

The Birth of Cultural Marxism

 

All was quiet on the Marxist front until 1923 when the cultural terrorist turned

up for a “Marxist study week” in Frankfurt, Germany.

There, Lukács met a young, wealthy Marxist named Felix Weil.

 

Until Lukács showed up, classical Marxist theory was based solely on the economic changes

needed to overthrow class conflict. Weil was enthused by Lukács’ cultural angle on Marxism.

 

Weil’s interest led him to fund a new Marxist think tank—the Institute for Social

Research. It would later come to be known as simply The Frankfurt School.

 

In 1930, the school changed course under new director Max Horkheimer. The team began

mixing the ideas of Sigmund Freud with those of Marx, and cultural Marxism was born.

 

In classical Marxism, the workers of the world were oppressed by the ruling classes.

The new theory was that everyone in society was psychologically oppressed by the

institutions of Western culture. The school concluded that this new focus would need

new vanguards to spur the change. The workers were not able to rise up on their own.

 

As fate would have it, the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933.

It was a bad time and place to be a Jewish Marxist, as most of the school’s faculty

was. So, the school moved to New York City, the bastion of Western culture at the time.

 

Coming to America

 

In 1934, the school was reborn at Columbia University.

Its members began to exert their ideas on American culture.

 

It was at Columbia University that the school honed the

tool it would use to destroy Western culture: the printed word.

 

The school published a lot of popular material.

The first of these was Critical Theory.

 

Critical Theory is a play on semantics. The theory was simple: criticize every pillar

of Western culture—family, democracy, common law, freedom of speech, and

others. The hope was that these pillars would crumble under the pressure.

 

Next was a book Theodor Adorno co-authored, The Authoritarian Personality. It redefined

traditional American views on gender roles and sexual mores as “prejudice.”

Adorno compared them to the traditions that led to the rise of fascism in Europe.

 

Is it just a coincidence that the go-to slur for the politically correct today is “fascist”?

 

The school pushed its shift away from economics and toward

Freud by publishing works on psychological repression.

 

Their works split society into two main groups: the oppressors and the victims.

They argued that history and reality were shaped by those groups who controlled

traditional institutions. At the time, that was code for males of European descent.

 

From there, they argued that the social roles of men and women were due to gender

differences defined by the “oppressors.” In other words, gender

did not exist in reality but was merely a “social construct.”

 

A Coalition of Victims

 

Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Germany when WWII ended. Herbert Marcuse, another

member of the school, stayed in America. In 1955, he published Eros and Civilization.

 

In the book, Marcuse argued that Western culture was inherently

repressive because it gave up happiness for social progress.

 

The book called for “polymorphous perversity,” a concept crafted by Freud.

It posed the idea of sexual pleasure outside the traditional norms. Eros and Civilization

 would become very influential in shaping the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

 

Marcuse would be the one to answer Horkheimer’s question from the 1930s:

Who would replace the working class as the new vanguards of the Marxist revolution?

 

Marcuse believed that it would be a victim coalition

of minorities—blacks, women, and homosexuals.

 

The social movements of the 1960s—black power, feminism, gay rights, sexual

liberation—gave Marcuse a unique vehicle to release cultural Marxist ideas into

the mainstream. Railing against all things “establishment,” The Frankfurt

School’s ideals caught on like wildfire across American universities.

 

Marcuse then published Repressive Tolerance in 1965 as the various social movements in

America were in full swing. In it, he argued that tolerance of all

values and ideas meant the repression of “correct” ideas.

 

It was here that Marcuse coined the term “liberating tolerance.” It called for tolerance

of any ideas coming from the left but intolerance of those from the right. One of the overarching

themes of the Frankfurt School was total intolerance for any viewpoint but

its own. That is also a basic trait of today’s political-correctness believers.

 

To quote Max Horkheimer, “Logic is not independent of content.”

 

Recalling the Words of Winston (Not That One)

 

The Frankfurt School’s work has had a deep impact on American culture. It has

recast the homogenous America of the 1950s into today’s divided, animosity-filled nation.

 

In turn, this has contributed to the undeniable breakdown of the family unit,

as well as identity politics, radical feminism, and racial polarization in America.

 

It’s hard to decide if today’s culture is more like

Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World.

 

Never one to buck a populist trend, the political establishment in America has fully

embraced the ideas of the Frankfurt School and has pushed

them on American society through public miseducation.

 

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the beacons of progressivism,

are both disciples of Saul Alinsky, a devoted cultural Marxist.

 

And so we now live in a hyper-sensitive society in which social memes and feelings have

overtaken biological and objective reality as the main determinants of right and wrong.

 

Political correctness is a war on logic and reason.

 

To quote Winston, the protagonist in Orwell’s dystopia,

Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4.”

 

Today, America is not free.

 

___________________________

 

 



This article is reprinted from the Winter, 1992 issue of FIDELIO Magazine.


  
         
     
 



The people of North America and Western Europe now accept a level of ugliness in their daily lives

which is almost without precedent in the history of Western civilization. Most of us have become

so inured, that the death of millions from starvation and disease draws from us no more than a sigh,

or a murmur of protest. Our own city streets, home to legions of the homeless, are ruled by Dope, Inc.,

the largest industry in the world, and on those streets Americans now murder each other at a rate not seen since the Dark Ages.

 

At the same time, a thousand smaller horrors are so commonplace as to go unnoticed. Our children spend as much time sitting in front of television sets as they do in school, watching with glee, scenes of torture and death which might have shocked an audience in the Roman Coliseum. Music is everywhere, almost unavoidable—but it does not uplift, nor even tranquilize—it claws at the ears, sometimes spitting out an obscenity. Our plastic arts are ugly, our architecture is ugly, our clothes are ugly. There have certainly been periods in history where mankind has lived through similar kinds of brutishness, but our time is crucially different. Our post-World War II era is the first in history in which these horrors are completely avoidable. Our time is the first to have the technology and resources to feed, house, educate, and humanely employ every person on earth, no matter what the growth of population. Yet, when shown the ideas and proven technologies that can solve the most horrendous problems, most people retreat into implacable passivity. We have become not only ugly, but impotent.

 

Nonetheless, there is no reason why our current moral-cultural situation had to lawfully or naturally turn out as it has; and there is no reason why this tyranny of ugliness should continue one instant longer.

 

Consider the situation just one hundred years ago, in the early 1890's. In music, Claude Debussy was completing his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and Arnold Schönberg was beginning to experiment with atonalism; at the same time, Dvorak was working on his Ninth Symphony, while Brahms and Verdi still lived. Edvard Munch was showing The Scream, and Paul Gauguin his Self-Portrait with Halo, but in America, Thomas Eakins was still painting and teaching. Mechanists like Helmholtz and Mach held major university chairs of science, alongside the students of Riemann and Cantor. Pope Leo XIII's De Rerum Novarum was being promulgated, even as sections of the Socialist Second International were turning terrorist, and preparing for class war.

 

The optimistic belief that one could compose music like Beethoven, paint like Rembrandt, study the universe like Plato and Nicolaus of Cusa, and change world society without violence, was alive in the 1890's—admittedly, it was weak, and under siege, but it was hardly dead. Yet, within twenty short years, these Classical traditions of human civilization had been all but swept away, and the West had committed itself to a series of wars of inconceivable carnage.

 

What started about a hundred years ago, was what might be called a counter-Renaissance. The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a religious celebration of the human soul and mankind's potential for growth. Beauty in art could not be conceived of as anything less than the expression of the most-advanced scientific principles, as demonstrated by the geometry upon which Leonardo's perspective and Brunelleschi's great Dome of Florence Cathedral are based. The finest minds of the day turned their thoughts to the heavens and the mighty waters, and mapped the solar system and the route to the New World, planning great projects to turn the course of rivers for the betterment of mankind. About a hundred years ago, it was as though a long checklist had been drawn up, with all of the wonderful achievements of the Renaissance itemized—each to be reversed. As part of this "New Age" movement, as it was then called, the concept of the human soul was undermined by the most vociferous intellectual campaign in history; art was forcibly separated from science, and science itself was made the object of deep suspicion. Art was made ugly because, it was said, life had become ugly.

 

The cultural shift away from the Renaissance ideas that built the modern world, was due to a kind of freemasonry of ugliness. In the beginning, it was a formal political conspiracy to popularize theories that were specifically designed to weaken the soul of Judeo-Christian civilization in such a way as to make people believe that creativity was not possible, that adherence to universal truth was evidence of authoritarianism, and that reason itself was suspect. This conspiracy was decisive in planning and developing, as means of social manipulation, the vast new sister industries of radio, television, film, recorded music, advertising, and public opinion polling. The pervasive psychological hold of the media was purposely fostered to create the passivity and pessimism which afflict our populations today. So successful was this conspiracy, that it has become embedded in our culture; it no longer needs to be a "conspiracy," for it has taken on a life of its own. Its successes are not debatable—you need only turn on the radio or television. Even the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice is deformed into an erotic soap opera, with the audience rooting from the sidelines for their favorite character.

 

Our universities, the cradle of our technological and intellectual future, have become overwhelmed by Comintern-style New Age "Political Correctness." With the collapse of the Soviet Union, our campuses now represent the largest concentration of Marxist dogma in the world. The irrational adolescent outbursts of the 1960's have become institutionalized into a "permanent revolution." Our professors glance over their shoulders, hoping the current mode will blow over before a student's denunciation obliterates a life's work; some audio-tape their lectures, fearing accusations of "insensitivity" by some enraged "Red Guard." Students at the University of Virginia recently petitioned successfully to drop the requirement to read Homer, Chaucer, and other DEMS ("Dead European Males") because such writings are considered ethnocentric, phallocentric, and generally inferior to the "more relevant" Third World, female, or homosexual authors.

 

This is not the academy of a republic; this is Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD rooting out "deviationists," and banning books—the only thing missing is the public bonfire.

 

We will have to face the fact that the ugliness we see around us has been consciously fostered and organized in such a way, that a majority of the population is losing the cognitive ability to transmit to the next generation, the ideas and methods upon which our civilization was built. The loss of that ability is the primary indicator of a Dark Age. And, a new Dark Age is exactly what we are in. In such situations, the record of history is unequivocal: either we create a Renaissance—a rebirth of the fundamental principles upon which civilization originated—or, our civilization dies.

 

I. The Frankfurt School: Bolshevik Intelligentsia

 

The single, most important organizational component of this conspiracy was a Communist thinktank called the Institute for Social Research (I.S.R.), but popularly known as the Frankfurt School.

 

In the heady days immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, it was widely believed that proletarian revolution would momentarily sweep out of the Urals into Europe and, ultimately, North America. It did not; the only two attempts at workers' government in the West— in Munich and Budapest—lasted only months. The Communist International (Comintern) therefore began several operations to determine why this was so. One such was headed by Georg Lukacs, a Hungarian aristocrat, son of one of the Hapsburg Empire's leading bankers. Trained in Germany and already an important literary theorist, Lukacs became a Communist during World War I, writing as he joined the party, "Who will save us from Western civilization?" Lukacs was well-suited to the Comintern task: he had been one of the Commissars of Culture during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet in Budapest in 1919; in fact, modern historians link the shortness of the Budapest experiment to Lukacs' orders mandating sex education in the schools, easy access to contraception, and the loosening of divorce laws—all of which revulsed Hungary's Roman Catholic population.

 

Fleeing to the Soviet Union after the counter-revolution, Lukacs was secreted into Germany in 1922, where he chaired a meeting of Communist-oriented sociologists and intellectuals. This meeting founded the Institute for Social Research. Over the next decade, the Institute worked out what was to become the Comintern's most successful psychological warfare operation against the capitalist West.

 

Lukacs identified that any political movement capable of bringing Bolshevism to the West would have to be, in his words, "demonic"; it would have to "possess the religious power which is capable of filling the entire soul; a power that characterized primitive Christianity." However, Lukacs suggested, such a "messianic" political movement could only succeed when the individual believes that his or her actions are determined by "not a personal destiny, but the destiny of the community" in a world "that has been abandoned by God [emphasis added-MJM]." Bolshevism worked in Russia because that nation was dominated by a peculiar gnostic form of Christianty typified by the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. "The model for the new man is Alyosha Karamazov," said Lukacs, referring to the Dostoyevsky character who willingly gave over his personal identity to a holy man, and thus ceased to be "unique, pure, and therefore abstract."

 

This abandonment of the soul's uniqueness also solves the problem of "the diabolic forces lurking in all violence" which must be unleashed in order to create a revolution. In this context, Lukacs cited the Grand Inquisitor section of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, noting that the Inquisitor who is interrogating Jesus, has resolved the issue of good and evil: once man has understood his alienation from God, then any act in the service of the "destiny of the community" is justified; such an act can be "neither crime nor madness.... For crime and madness are objectifications of transcendental homelessness."

 

According to an eyewitness, during meetings of the Hungarian Soviet leadership in 1919 to draw up lists for the firing squad, Lukacs would often quote the Grand Inquisitor: "And we who, for their happiness, have taken their sins upon ourselves, we stand before you and say, 'Judge us if you can and if you dare.' "

 

The Problem of Genesis

 

What differentiated the West from Russia, Lukacs identified, was a Judeo-Christian cultural matrix which emphasized exactly the uniqueness and sacredness of the individual which Lukacs abjured. At its core, the dominant Western ideology maintained that the individual, through the exercise of his or her reason, could discern the Divine Will in an unmediated relationship. What was worse, from Lukacs' standpoint: this reasonable relationship necessarily implied that the individual could and should change the physical universe in pursuit of the Good; that Man should have dominion over Nature, as stated in the Biblical injunction in Genesis. The problem was, that as long as the individual had the belief—or even the hope of the belief—that his or her divine spark of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation which Lukacs recognized as the necessary prerequisite for socialist revolution.

 

The task of the Frankfurt School, then, was first, to undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy through an "abolition of culture" (Aufhebung der Kultur in Lukacs' German); and, second, to determine new cultural forms which would increase the alienation of the population, thus creating a "new barbarism." To this task, there gathered in and around the Frankfurt School an incredible assortment of not only Communists, but also non-party socialists, radical phenomenologists, Zionists, renegade Freudians, and at least a few members of a self-identified "cult of Astarte." The variegated membership reflected, to a certain extent, the sponsorship: although the Institute for Social Research started with Comintern support, over the next three decades its sources of funds included various German and American universities, the Rockefeller Foundation, Columbia Broadcasting System, the American Jewish Committee, several American intelligence services, the Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, the International Labour Organization, and the Hacker Institute, a posh psychiatric clinic in Beverly Hills.

 

Similarly, the Institute's political allegiances: although top personnel maintained what might be called a sentimental relationship to the Soviet Union (and there is evidence that some of them worked for Soviet intelligence into the 1960's), the Institute saw its goals as higher than that of Russian foreign policy. Stalin, who was horrified at the undisciplined, "cosmopolitan" operation set up by his predecessors, cut the Institute off in the late 1920's, forcing Lukacs into "self-criticism," and briefly jailing him as a German sympathizer during World War II.

 

Lukacs survived to briefly take up his old post as Minister of Culture during the anti-Stalinist Imre Nagy regime in Hungary. Of the other top Institute figures, the political perambulations of Herbert Marcuse are typical. He started as a Communist; became a protégé of philosopher Martin Heidegger even as the latter was joining the Nazi Party; coming to America, he worked for the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and later became the U.S. State Department's top analyst of Soviet policy during the height of the McCarthy period; in the 1960's, he turned again, to become the most important guru of the New Left; and he ended his days helping to found the environmentalist extremist Green Party in West Germany.

 

In all this seeming incoherence of shifting positions and contradictory funding, there is no ideological conflict. The invariant is the desire of all parties to answer Lukacs' original question: "Who will save us from Western civilization?"

 

Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin

 

Perhaps the most important, if least-known, of the Frankfurt School's successes was the shaping of the electronic media of radio and television into the powerful instruments of social control which they represent today. This grew out of the work originally done by two men who came to the Institute in the late 1920's, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.

 

After completing studies at the University of Frankfurt, Walter Benjamin planned to emigrate to Palestine in 1924 with his friend Gershom Scholem (who later became one of Israel's most famous philosophers, as well as Judaism's leading gnostic), but was prevented by a love affair with Asja Lacis, a Latvian actress and Comintern stringer. Lacis whisked him off to the Italian island of Capri, a cult center from the time of the Emperor Tiberius, then used as a Comintern training base; the heretofore apolitical Benjamin wrote Scholem from Capri, that he had found "an existential liberation and an intensive insight into the actuality of radical communism."

 

Lacis later took Benjamin to Moscow for further indoctrination, where he met playwright Bertolt Brecht, with whom he would begin a long collaboration; soon thereafter, while working on the first German translation of the drug-enthusiast French poet Baudelaire, Benjamin began serious experimentation with hallucinogens. In 1927, he was in Berlin as part of a group led by Adorno, studying the works of Lukacs; other members of the study group included Brecht and his composer-partner Kurt Weill; Hans Eisler, another composer who would later become a Hollywood film score composer and co-author with Adorno of the textbook Composition for the Film; the avant-garde photographer Imre Moholy-Nagy; and the conductor Otto Klemperer.

 

From 1928 to 1932, Adorno and Benjamin had an intensive collaboration, at the end of which they began publishing articles in the Institute's journal, the Zeitschrift fär Sozialforschung. Benjamin was kept on the margins of the Institute, largely due to Adorno, who would later appropriate much of his work. As Hitler came to power, the Institute's staff fled, but, whereas most were quickly spirited away to new deployments in the U.S. and England, there were no job offers for Benjamin, probably due to the animus of Adorno. He went to France, and, after the German invasion, fled to the Spanish border; expecting momentary arrest by the Gestapo, he despaired and died in a dingy hotel room of self-administered drug overdose.

 

Benjamin's work remained almost completely unknown until 1955, when Scholem and Adorno published an edition of his material in Germany. The full revival occurred in 1968, when Hannah Arendt, Heidegger's former mistress and a collaborator of the Institute in America, published a major article on Benjamin in the New Yorker magazine, followed in the same year by the first English translations of his work. Today, every university bookstore in the country boasts a full shelf devoted to translations of every scrap Benjamin wrote, plus exegesis, all with 1980's copyright dates.

 

Adorno was younger than Benjamin, and as aggressive as the older man was passive. Born Teodoro Wiesengrund-Adorno to a Corsican family, he was taught the piano at an early age by an aunt who lived with the family and had been the concert accompanist to the international opera star Adelina Patti. It was generally thought that Theodor would become a professional musician, and he studied with Bernard Sekles, Paul Hindemith's teacher. However, in 1918, while still a gymnasium student, Adorno met Siegfried Kracauer. Kracauer was part of a Kantian-Zionist salon which met at the house of Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel in Frankfurt; other members of the Nobel circle included philosopher Martin Buber, writer Franz Rosenzweig, and two students, Leo Lowenthal and Erich Fromm. Kracauer, Lowenthal, and Fromm would join the I.S.R. two decades later. Adorno engaged Kracauer to tutor him in the philosophy of Kant; Kracauer also introduced him to the writings of Lukacs and to Walter Benjamin, who was around the Nobel clique.

 

In 1924, Adorno moved to Vienna, to study with the atonalist composers Alban Berg and Arnold Schönberg, and became connected to the avant-garde and occult circle around the old Marxist Karl Kraus. Here, he not only met his future collaborator, Hans Eisler, but also came into contact with the theories of Freudian extremist Otto Gross. Gross, a long-time cocaine addict, had died in a Berlin gutter in 1920, while on his way to help the revolution in Budapest; he had developed the theory that mental health could only be achieved through the revival of the ancient cult of Astarte, which would sweep away monotheism and the "bourgeois family."

 

Saving Marxist Aesthetics

 

By 1928, Adorno and Benjamin had satisfied their intellectual wanderlust, and settled down at the I.S.R. in Germany to do some work. As subject, they chose an aspect of the problem posed by Lukacs: how to give aesthetics a firmly materialistic basis. It was a question of some importance, at the time. Official Soviet discussions of art and culture, with their wild gyrations into "socialist realism" and "proletkult," were idiotic, and only served to discredit Marxism's claim to philosophy among intellectuals. Karl Marx's own writings on the subject were sketchy and banal, at best.

 

In essence, Adorno and Benjamin's problem was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Leibniz had once again obliterated the centuries-old gnostic dualism dividing mind and body, by demonstrating that matter does not think. A creative act in art or science apprehends the truth of the physical universe, but it is not determined by that physical universe. By self-consciously concentrating the past in the present to effect the future, the creative act, properly defined, is as immortal as the soul which envisions the act. This has fatal philosophical implications for Marxism, which rests entirely on the hypothesis that mental activity is determined by the social relations excreted by mankind's production of its physical existence.

 

Marx sidestepped the problem of Leibniz, as did Adorno and Benjamin, although the latter did it with a lot more panache. It is wrong, said Benjamin in his first articles on the subject, to start with the reasonable, hypothesizing mind as the basis of the development of civilization; this is an unfortunate legacy of Socrates. As an alternative, Benjamin posed an Aristotelian fable in interpretation of Genesis: Assume that Eden were given to Adam as the primordial physical state. The origin of science and philosophy does not lie in the investigation and mastery of nature, but in the naming of the objects of nature; in the primordial state, to name a thing was to say all there was to say about that thing. In support of this, Benjamin cynically recalled the opening lines of the Gospel according to St. John, carefully avoiding the philosophically-broader Greek, and preferring the Vulgate (so that, in the phrase "In the beginning was the Word," the connotations of the original Greek word logos—speech, reason, ratiocination, translated as "Word"—are replaced by the narrower meaning of the Latin word verbum). After the expulsion from Eden and God's requirement that Adam eat his bread earned by the sweat of his face (Benjamin's Marxist metaphor for the development of economies), and God's further curse of Babel on Nimrod (that is, the development of nation-states with distinct languages, which Benjamin and Marx viewed as a negative process away from the "primitive communism" of Eden), humanity became "estranged" from the physical world.

 

Thus, Benjamin continued, objects still give off an "aura" of their primordial form, but the truth is now hopelessly elusive. In fact, speech, written language, art, creativity itself—that by which we master physicality—merely furthers the estrangement by attempting, in Marxist jargon, to incorporate objects of nature into the social relations determined by the class structure dominant at that point in history. The creative artist or scientist, therefore, is a vessel, like Ion the rhapsode as he described himself to Socrates, or like a modern "chaos theory" advocate: the creative act springs out of the hodgepodge of culture as if by magic. The more that bourgeois man tries to convey what he intends about an object, the less truthful he becomes; or, in one of Benjamin's most oft-quoted statements, "Truth is the death of intention."

 

This philosophical sleight-of-hand allows one to do several destructive things. By making creativity historically-specific, you rob it of both immortality and morality. One cannot hypothesize universal truth, or natural law, for truth is completely relative to historical development. By discarding the idea of truth and error, you also may throw out the "obsolete" concept of good and evil; you are, in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, "beyond good and evil." Benjamin is able, for instance, to defend what he calls the "Satanism" of the French Symbolists and their Surrealist successors, for at the core of this Satanism "one finds the cult of evil as a political device ... to disinfect and isolate against all moralizing dilettantism" of the bourgeoisie. To condemn the Satanism of Rimbaud as evil, is as incorrect as to extol a Beethoven quartet or a Schiller poem as good; for both judgments are blind to the historical forces working unconsciously on the artist.

 

Thus, we are told, the late Beethoven's chord structure was striving to be atonal, but Beethoven could not bring himself consciously to break with the structured world of Congress of Vienna Europe (Adorno's thesis); similarly, Schiller really wanted to state that creativity was the liberation of the erotic, but as a true child of the Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant, he could not make the requisite renunciation of reason (Marcuse's thesis). Epistemology becomes a poor relation of public opinion, since the artist does not consciously create works in order to uplift society, but instead unconsciously transmits the ideological assumptions of the culture into which he was born. The issue is no longer what is universally true, but what can be plausibly interpreted by the self-appointed guardians of the Zeitgeist.

 

"The Bad New Days"

 

Thus, for the Frankfort School, the goal of a cultural elite in the modern, "capitalist" era must be to strip away the belief that art derives from the self-conscious emulation of God the Creator; "religious illumination," says Benjamin, must be shown to "reside in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson." At the same time, new cultural forms must be found to increase the alienation of the population, in order for it to understand how truly alienated it is to live without socialism. "Do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones," said Benjamin.

 

The proper direction in painting, therefore, is that taken by the late Van Gogh, who began to paint objects in disintegration, with the equivalent of a hashish-smoker's eye that "loosens and entices things out of their familiar world." In music, "it is not suggested that one can compose better today" than Mozart or Beethoven, said Adorno, but one must compose atonally, for atonalism is sick, and "the sickness, dialectically, is at the same time the cure....The extraordinarily violent reaction protest which such music confronts in the present society ... appears nonetheless to suggest that the dialectical function of this music can already be felt ... negatively, as 'destruction.' "

 

The purpose of modern art, literature, and music must be to destroy the uplifting—therefore, bourgeois — potential of art, literature, and music, so that man, bereft of his connection to the divine, sees his only creative option to be political revolt. "To organize pessimism means nothing other than to expel the moral metaphor from politics and to discover in political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images." Thus, Benjamin collaborated with Brecht to work these theories into practical form, and their joint effort culminated in the Verfremdungseffekt ("estrangement effect"), Brecht's attempt to write his plays so as to make the audience leave the theatre demoralized and aimlessly angry.

 

Political Correctness

 

The Adorno-Benjamin analysis represents almost the entire theoretical basis of all the politically correct aesthetic trends which now plague our universities. The Poststructuralism of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the Semiotics of Umberto Eco, the Deconstructionism of Paul DeMan, all openly cite Benjamin as the source of their work. The Italian terrorist Eco's best-selling novel, The Name of the Rose, is little more than a paean to Benjamin; DeMan, the former Nazi collaborator in Belgium who became a prestigious Yale professor, began his career translating Benjamin; Barthes' infamous 1968 statement that "[t]he author is dead," is meant as an elaboration of Benjamin's dictum on intention. Benjamin has actually been called the heir of Leibniz and of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the philologist collaborator of Schiller whose educational reforms engendered the tremendous development of Germany in the nineteenth century. Even as recently as September 1991, the Washington Post referred to Benjamin as "the finest German literary theorist of the century (and many would have left off that qualifying German)."

 

Readers have undoubtedly heard one or another horror story about how an African-American Studies Department has procured a ban on Othello, because it is "racist," or how a radical feminist professor lectured a Modern Language Association meeting on the witches as the "true heroines" of Macbeth. These atrocities occur because the perpetrators are able to plausibly demonstrate, in the tradition of Benjamin and Adorno, that Shakespeare's intent is irrelevant; what is important, is the racist or phallocentric "subtext" of which Shakespeare was unconscious when he wrote.

 

When the local Women's Studies or Third World Studies Department organizes students to abandon classics in favor of modern Black and feminist authors, the reasons given are pure Benjamin. It is not that these modern writers are better, but they are somehow more truthful because their alienated prose reflects the modern social problems of which the older authors were ignorant! Students are being taught that language itself is, as Benjamin said, merely a conglomeration of false "names" foisted upon society by its oppressors, and are warned against "logocentrism," the bourgeois over-reliance on words.

 

If these campus antics appear "retarded" (in the words of Adorno), that is because they are designed to be. The Frankfurt School's most important breakthrough consists in the realization that their monstrous theories could become dominant in the culture, as a result of the changes in society brought about by what Benjamin called "the age of mechanical reproduction of art."

 

II. The Establishment Goes Bolshevik: "Entertainment" Replaces Art

 

Before the twentieth century, the distinction between art and "entertainment" was much more pronounced. One could be entertained by art, certainly, but the experience was active, not passive. On the first level, one had to make a conscious choice to go to a concert, to view a certain art exhibit, to buy a book or piece of sheet music. It was unlikely that any more than an infinitesimal fraction of the population would have the opportunity to see King Lear or hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony more than once or twice in a lifetime. Art demanded that one bring one's full powers of concentration and knowledge of the subject to bear on each experience, or else the experience were considered wasted. These were the days when memorization of poetry and whole plays, and the gathering of friends and family for a "parlor concert," were the norm, even in rural households. These were also the days before "music appreciation"; when one studied music, as many did, they learned to play it, not appreciate it.

 

However, the new technologies of radio, film, and recorded music represented, to use the appropriate Marxist buzz-word, (see box) a dialectical potential. On the one hand, these technologies held out the possibility of bringing the greatest works of art to millions of people who would otherwise not have access to them. On the other, the fact that the experience was infinitely reproducible could tend to disengage the audience's mind, making the experience less sacred, thus increasing alienation. Adorno called this process, "demythologizing." This new passivity, Adorno hypothesized in a crucial article published in 1938, could fracture a musical composition into the "entertaining" parts which would be "fetishized" in the memory of the listener, and the difficult parts, which would be forgotten. Adorno continues,

 

The counterpart to the fetishism is a regression of listening. This does not mean a relapse of the individual listener into an earlier phase of his own development, nor a decline in the collective general level, since the millions who are reached musically for the first time by today's mass communications cannot be compared with the audiences of the past. Rather, it is the contemporary listening which has regressed, arrested at the infantile stage. Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with the freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for the conscious perception of music .... [t]hey fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear, but precisely in this dissociation they develop certain capacities which accord less with the traditional concepts of aesthetics than with those of football or motoring. They are not childlike ... but they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded. [emphasis aded]

 

This conceptual retardation and preconditioning caused by listening, suggested that programming could determine preference. The very act of putting, say, a Benny Goodman number next to a Mozart sonata on the radio, would tend to amalgamate both into entertaining "music-on-the-radio" in the mind of the listener. This meant that even new and unpalatable ideas could become popular by "re-naming" them through the universal homogenizer of the culture industry. As Benjamin puts it,

 

Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.... With regard to the screen, the critical and receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that the individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film.

 

At the same time, the magic power of the media could be used to re-define previous ideas. "Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will all make films," concluded Benjamin, quoting the French film pioneer Abel Gance, "... all legends, all mythologies, all myths, all founders of religions, and the very religions themselves ... await their exposed resurrection."

 

Social Control: The "Radio Project"

 

Here, then, were some potent theories of social control. The great possibilities of this Frankfurt School media work were probably the major contributing factor in the support given the I.S.R. by the bastions of the Establishment, after the Institute transferred its operations to America in 1934.

 

In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation began funding research into the social effects of new forms of mass media, particularly radio. Before World War I, radio had been a hobbyist's toy, with only 125,000 receiving sets in the entire U.S.; twenty years later, it had become the primary mode of entertainment in the country; out of 32 million American families in 1937, 27.5 million had radios — a larger percentage than had telephones, automobiles, plumbing, or electricity! Yet, almost no systematic research had been done up to this point. The Rockefeller Foundation enlisted several universities, and headquartered this network at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Named the Office of Radio Research, it was popularly known as "the Radio Project."

 

The director of the Project was Paul Lazersfeld, the foster son of Austrian Marxist economist Rudolph Hilferding, and a long-time collaborator of the I.S.R. from the early 1930's. Under Lazersfeld was Frank Stanton, a recent Ph.D. in industrial psychology from Ohio State, who had just been made research director of Columbia Broadcasting System—a grand title but a lowly position. After World War II, Stanton became president of the CBS News Division, and ultimately president of CBS at the height of the TV network's power; he also became Chairman of the Board of the RAND Corporation, and a member of President Lyndon Johnson's "kitchen cabinet." Among the Project's researchers were Herta Herzog, who married Lazersfeld and became the first director of research for the Voice of America; and Hazel Gaudet, who became one of the nation's leading political pollsters. Theodor Adorno was named chief of the Project's music section.

 

Despite the official gloss, the activities of the Radio Project make it clear that its purpose was to test empirically the Adorno-Benjamin thesis that the net effect of the mass media could be to atomize and increase lability—what people would later call "brainwashing."

 

Soap Operas and the Invasion from Mars

 

The first studies were promising. Herta Herzog produced "On Borrowed Experiences," the first comprehensive research on soap operas. The "serial radio drama" format was first used in 1929, on the inspiration of the old, cliff-hanger "Perils of Pauline" film serial. Because these little radio plays were highly melodramatic, they became popularly identified with Italian grand opera; because they were often sponsored by soap manufacturers, they ended up with the generic name, "soap opera."

 

Until Herzog's work, it was thought that the immense popularity of this format was largely with women of the lowest socioeconomic status who, in the restricted circumstances of their lives, needed a helpful escape to exotic places and romantic situations. A typical article from that period by two University of Chicago psychologists, "The Radio Day-Time Serial: Symbol Analysis" published in the Genetic Psychology Monographs, solemnly emphasized the positive, claiming that the soaps "function very much like the folk tale, expressing the hopes and fears of its female audience, and on the whole contribute to the integration of their lives into the world in which they live."

 

Herzog found that there was, in fact, no correlation to socioeconomic status. What is more, there was surprisingly little correlation to content. The key factor — as Adorno and Benjamin's theories suggested it would be — was the form itself of the serial; women were being effectively addicted to the format, not so much to be entertained or to escape, but to "find out what happens next week." In fact, Herzog found, you could almost double the listenership of a radio play by dividing it into segments.

 

Modern readers will immediately recognize that this was not a lesson lost on the entertainment industry. Nowadays, the serial format has spread to children's programming and high-budget prime time shows. The most widely watched shows in the history of television, remain the "Who Killed JR?" installment of Dallas, and the final episode of M*A*S*H, both of which were premised on a "what happens next?" format. Even feature films, like the Star Wars and Back to the Future trilogies, are now produced as serials, in order to lock in a viewership for the later installments. The humble daytime soap also retains its addictive qualities in the current age: 70% of all American women over eighteen now watch at least two of these shows each day, and there is a fast-growing viewership among men and college students of both sexes.

 

The Radio Project's next major study was an investigation into the effects of Orson Welles' Halloween 1938 radioplay based on H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Six million people heard the broadcast realistically describing a Martian invasion force landing in rural New Jersey. Despite repeated and clear statements that the show was fictional, approximately 25% of the listeners thought it was real, some panicking outright. The Radio Project researchers found that a majority of the people who panicked did not think that men from Mars had invaded; they actually thought that the Germans had invaded.

 

It happened this way. The listeners had been psychologically pre-conditioned by radio reports from the Munich crisis earlier that year. During that crisis, CBS's man in Europe, Edward R. Murrow, hit upon the idea of breaking into regular programming to present short news bulletins. For the first time in broadcasting, news was presented not in longer analytical pieces, but in short clips—what we now call "audio bites." At the height of the crisis, these flashes got so numerous, that, in the words of Murrow's producer Fred Friendly, "news bulletins were interrupting news bulletins." As the listeners thought that the world was moving to the brink of war, CBS ratings rose dramatically. When Welles did his fictional broadcast later, after the crisis had receded, he used this news bulletin technique to give things verisimilitude: he started the broadcast by faking a standard dance-music program, which kept getting interrupted by increasingly terrifying "on the scene reports" from New Jersey. Listeners who panicked, reacted not to content, but to format; they heard "We interrupt this program for an emergency bulletin," and "invasion," and immediately concluded that Hitler had invaded. The soap opera technique, transposed to the news, had worked on a vast and unexpected scale.

 

Little Annie and the "Wagnerian Dream" of TV

 

In 1939, one of the numbers of the quarterly Journal of Applied Psychology was handed over to Adorno and the Radio Project to publish some of their findings. Their conclusion was that Americans had, over the last twenty years, become "radio-minded," and that their listening had become so fragmented that repetition of format was the key to popularity. The play list determined the "hits"—a truth well known to organized crime, both then and now—and repetition could make any form of music or any performer, even a classical music performer, a "star." As long as a familiar form or context was retained, almost any content would become acceptable. "Not only are hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types," said Adorno, summarizing this material a few years later, "but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable."

 

The crowning achievement of the Radio Project was "Little Annie," officially titled the Stanton-Lazersfeld Program Analyzer. Radio Project research had shown that all previous methods of preview polling were ineffectual. Up to that point, a preview audience listened to a show or watched a film, and then was asked general questions: did you like the show? what did you think of so-and-so's performance? The Radio Project realized that this method did not take into account the test audience's atomized perception of the subject, and demanded that they make a rational analysis of what was intended to be an irrational experience. So, the Project created a device in which each test audience member was supplied with a type of rheostat on which he could register the intensity of his likes or dislikes on a moment-to-moment basis. By comparing the individual graphs produced by the device, the operators could determine, not if the audience liked the whole show — which was irrelevant—but, which situations or characters produced a positive, if momentary, feeling state.

 

Little Annie transformed radio, film, and ultimately television programming. CBS still maintains program analyzer facilities in Hollywood and New York; it is said that results correlate 85% to ratings. Other networks and film studios have similar operations. This kind of analysis is responsible for the uncanny feeling you get when, seeing a new film or TV show, you think you have seen it all before. You have, many times. If a program analyzer indicates that, for instance, audiences were particularly titilated by a short scene in a World War II drama showing a certain type of actor kissing a certain type of actress, then that scene format will be worked into dozens of screenplays—transposed to the Middle Ages, to outer space, etc., etc.

 

The Radio Project also realized that television had the potential to intensify all of the effects that they had studied. TV technology had been around for some years, and had been exhibited at the 1936 World's Fair in New York, but the only person to attempt serious utilization of the medium had been Adolf Hitler. The Nazis broadcast events from the 1936 Olympic Games "live" to communal viewing rooms around Germany; they were trying to expand on their great success in using radio to Nazify all aspects of German culture. Further plans for German TV development were sidetracked by war preparations.

 

Adorno understood this potential perfectly, writing in 1944:

 

Television aims at the synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out in the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk—the fusion of all the arts in one work.

 

The obvious point is this: the profoundly irrational forms of modern entertainment—the stupid and eroticized content of most TV and films, the fact that your local Classical music radio station programs Stravinsky next to Mozart—don't have to be that way. They were designed to be that way. The design was so successful, that today, no one even questions the reasons or the origins.

 

 

III. Creating "Public Opinion": The "Authoritarian Personality" Bogeyman and the OSS

 

The efforts of the Radio Project conspirators to manipulate the population, spawned the modern pseudoscience of public opinion polling, in order to gain greater control over the methods they were developing.

 

Today, public opinion polls, like the television news, have been completely integrated into our society. A "scientific survey" of what people are said to think about an issue can be produced in less than twenty-four hours. Some campaigns for high political office are completely shaped by polls; in fact, many politicians try to create issues which are themselves meaningless, but which they know will look good in the polls, purely for the purpose of enhancing their image as "popular." Important policy decisions are made, even before the actual vote of the citizenry or the legislature, by poll results. Newspapers will occasionally write pious editorials calling on people to think for themselves, even as the newspaper's business agent sends a check to the local polling organization.

 

The idea of "public opinion" is not new, of course. Plato spoke against it in his Republic over two millenia ago; Alexis de Tocqueville wrote at length of its influence over America in the early nineteenth century. But, nobody thought to measure public opinion before the twentieth century, and nobody before the 1930's thought to use those measurements for decision-making.

 

It is useful to pause and reflect on the whole concept. The belief that public opinion can be a determinant of truth is philosophically insane. It precludes the idea of the rational individual mind. Every individual mind contains the divine spark of reason, and is thus capable of scientific discovery, and understanding the discoveries of others. The individual mind is one of the few things that cannot, therefore, be "averaged." Consider: at the moment of creative discovery, it is possible, if not probable, that the scientist making the discovery is the only person to hold that opinion about nature, whereas everyone else has a different opinion, or no opinion. One can only imagine what a "scientifically-conducted survey" on Kepler's model of the solar system would have been, shortly after he published the Harmony of the World: 2% for, 48% against, 50% no opinion.

 

These psychoanalytic survey techniques became standard, not only for the Frankfurt School, but also throughout American social science departments, particularly after the I.S.R. arrived in the United States. The methodology was the basis of the research piece for which the Frankfurt School is most well known, the "authoritarian personality" project. In 1942, I.S.R. director Max Horkheimer made contact with the American Jewish Committee, which asked him to set up a Department of Scientific Research within its organization. The American Jewish Committee also provided a large grant to study anti-Semitism in the American population. "Our aim," wrote Horkheimer in the introduction to the study, "is not merely to describe prejudice, but to explain it in order to help in its eradication.... Eradication means reeducation scientifically planned on the basis of understanding scientifically arrived at."

 

The A-S Scale

 

Ultimately, five volumes were produced for this study over the course of the late 1940's; the most important was the last, The Authoritarian Personality, by Adorno, with the help of three Berkeley, California social psychologists.

 

In the 1930's Erich Fromm had devised a questionnaire to be used to analyze German workers pychoanalytically as "authoritarian," "revolutionary" or "ambivalent." The heart of Adorno's study was, once again, Fromm's psychoanalytic scale, but with the positive end changed from a "revolutionary personality," to a "democratic personality," in order to make things more palatable for a postwar audience.

 

Nine personality traits were tested and measured, including:

 

 

 

  • conventionalism—rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values


  • authoritarian aggression—the tendency to be on the look-out for, to condemn, reject and punish, people who violate conventional values


  • projectivity—the disposition to believethat wild and dangerous things go on in the world


  • sex—exaggerated concern with sexual goings-on.

From these measurements were constructed several scales: the E Scale (ethnocentrism), the PEC Scale (poltical and economic conservatism), the A-S Scale (anti-Semitism), and the F Scale (fascism). Using Rensis Lickerts's methodology of weighting results, the authors were able to tease together an empirical definition of what Adorno called "a new anthropological type," the authoritarian personality. The legerdemain here, as in all psychoanalytic survey work, is the assumption of a Weberian "type." Once the type has been statistically determined, all behavior can be explained; if an anti-Semitic personality does not act in an anti-Semitic way, then he or she has an ulterior motive for the act, or is being discontinuous. The idea that a human mind is capable of transformation, is ignored.

 

The results of this very study can be interpreted in diametrically different ways. One could say that the study proved that the population of the U.S. was generally conservative, did not want to abandon a capitalist economy, believed in a strong family and that sexual promiscuity should be punished, thought that the postwar world was a dangerous place, and was still suspicious of Jews (and Blacks, Roman Catholics, Orientals, etc. — unfortunately true, but correctable in a social context of economic growth and cultural optimism). On the other hand, one could take the same results and prove that anti-Jewish pogroms and Nuremburg rallies were simmering just under the surface, waiting for a new Hitler to ignite them. Which of the two interpretations you accept is a political, not a scientific, decision. Horkheimer and Adorno firmly believed that all religions, Judaism included, were "the opiate of the masses." Their goal was not the protection of Jews from prejudice, but the creation of a definition of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism which could be exploited to force the "scientifically planned reeducation" of Americans and Europeans away from the principles of Judeo-Christian civilization, which the Frankfurt School despised. In their theoretical writings of this period, Horkheimer and Adorno pushed the thesis to its most paranoid: just as capitalism was inherently fascistic, the philosophy of Christianity itself is the source of anti-Semitism. As Horkheimer and Adorno jointly wrote in their 1947 "Elements of Anti-Semitism":

 

Christ, the spirit become flesh, is the deified sorcerer. Man's self-reflection in the absolute, the humanization of God by Christ, is the proton pseudos [original falsehood]. Progress beyond Judaism is coupled with the assumption that the man Jesus has become God. The reflective aspect of Christianity, the intellectualization of magic, is the root of evil.

 

At the same time, Horkheimer could write in a more-popularized article titled "Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease," that "at present, the only country where there does not seem to be any kind of anti-Semitism is Russia"[!].

 

This self-serving attempt to maximize paranoia was further aided by Hannah Arendt, who popularized the authoritarian personality research in her widely-read Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt also added the famous rhetorical flourish about the "banality of evil" in her later Eichmann in Jerusalem: even a simple, shopkeeper-type like Eichmann can turn into a Nazi beast under the right psychological circumstances—every Gentile is suspect, psychoanalytically.

 

It is Arendt's extreme version of the authoritarian personality thesis which is the operant philosophy of today's Cult Awareness Network (CAN), a group which works with the U.S. Justice Department and the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith, among others. Using standard Frankfurt School method, CAN identifies political and religious groups which are its political enemies, then re-labels them as a "cult," in order to justify operations against them.

 

The Public Opinion Explosion

 

Despite its unprovable central thesis of "psychoanalytic types," the interpretive survey methodology of the Frankfurt School became dominant in the social sciences, and essentially remains so today. In fact, the adoption of these new, supposedly scientific techniques in the 1930's brought about an explosion in public-opinion survey use, much of it funded by Madison Avenue. The major pollsters of today—A.C. Neilsen, George Gallup, Elmo Roper—started in the mid-1930's, and began using the I.S.R. methods, especially given the success of the Stanton-Lazersfeld Program Analyzer. By 1936, polling activity had become sufficiently widespread to justify a trade association, the American Academy of Public Opinion Research at Princeton, headed by Lazersfeld; at the same time, the University of Chicago created the National Opinion Research Center. In 1940, the Office of Radio Research was turned into the Bureau of Applied Social Research, a division of Columbia University, with the indefatigable Lazersfeld as director.

 

After World War II, Lazersfeld especially pioneered the use of surveys to psychoanalyze American voting behavior, and by the 1952 Presidential election, Madison Avenue advertising agencies were firmly in control of Dwight Eisenhower's campaign, utilizing Lazersfeld's work. Nineteen fifty-two was also the first election under the influence of television, which, as Adorno had predicted eight years earlier, had grown to incredible influence in a very short time. Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne — the fabled "BBD&O" ad agency—designed Ike's campaign appearances entirely for the TV cameras, and as carefully as Hitler's Nuremberg rallies; one-minute "spot" advertisements were pioneered to cater to the survey-determined needs of the voters.

 

This snowball has not stopped rolling since. The entire development of television and advertising in the 1950's and 1960's was pioneered by men and women who were trained in the Frankfurt School's techniques of mass alienation. Frank Stanton went directly from the Radio Project to become the single most-important leader of modern television. Stanton's chief rival in the formative period of TV was NBC's Sylvester "Pat" Weaver; after a Ph.D. in "listening behavior," Weaver worked with the Program Analyzer in the late 1930's, before becoming a Young & Rubicam vice-president, then NBC's director of programming, and ultimately the network's president. Stanton and Weaver's stories are typical.

 

Today, the men and women who run the networks, the ad agencies, and the polling organizations, even if they have never heard of Theodor Adorno, firmly believe in Adorno's theory that the media can, and should, turn all they touch into "football." Coverage of the 1991 Gulf War should make that clear.

 

The technique of mass media and advertising developed by the Frankfurt School now effectively controls American political campaigning. Campaigns are no longer based on political programs, but actually on alienation. Petty gripes and irrational fears are identified by psychoanalytic survey, to be transmogrified into "issues" to be catered to; the "Willy Horton" ads of the 1988 Presidential campaign, and the "flag-burning amendment," are but two recent examples. Issues that will determine the future of our civilization, are scrupulously reduced to photo opportunities and audio bites—like Ed Murrow's original 1930's radio reports—where the dramatic effect is maximized, and the idea content is zero.

 

Who Is the Enemy?

 

Part of the influence of the authoritarian personality hoax in our own day also derives from the fact that, incredibly, the Frankfurt School and its theories were officially accepted by the U.S. government during World War II, and these Cominternists were responsible for determining who were America's wartime, and postwar, enemies. In 1942, the Office of Strategic Services, America's hastily-constructed espionage and covert operations unit, asked former Harvard president James Baxter to form a Research and Analysis (R&A) Branch under the group's Intelligence Division. By 1944, the R&A Branch had collected such a large and prestigeous group of emigré scholars that H. Stuart Hughes, then a young Ph.D., said that working for it was "a second graduate education" at government expense. The Central European Section was headed by historian Carl Schorske; under him, in the all-important Germany/Austria Section, was Franz Neumann, as section chief, with Herbert Marcuse, Paul Baran, and Otto Kirchheimer, all I.S.R. veterans. Leo Lowenthal headed the German-language section of the Office of War Information; Sophie Marcuse, Marcuse's wife, worked at the Office of Naval Intelligence. Also at the R&A Branch were: Siegfried Kracauer, Adorno's old Kant instructor, now a film theorist; Norman O. Brown, who would become famous in the 1960's by combining Marcuse's hedonism theory with Wilhelm Reich's orgone therapy to popularize "polymorphous perversity"; Barrington Moore, Jr., later a philosophy professor who would co-author a book with Marcuse; Gregory Bateson, the husband of anthropologist Margaret Mead (who wrote for the Frankfurt School's journal), and Arthur Schlesinger, the historian who joined the Kennedy Administration. Marcuse's first assignment was to head a team to identify both those who would be tried as war criminals after the war, and also those who were potential leaders of postwar Germany. In 1944, Marcuse, Neumann, and Kirchheimer wrote the Denazification Guide, which was later issued to officers of the U.S. Armed Forces occupying Germany, to help them identify and suppress pro-Nazi behaviors. After the armistice, the R&A Branch sent representatives to work as intelligence liaisons with the various occupying powers; Marcuse was assigned the U.S. Zone, Kirchheimer the French, and Barrington Moore the Soviet. In the summer of 1945, Neumann left to become chief of research for the Nuremburg Tribunal. Marcuse remained in and around U.S. intelligence into the early 1950's, rising to the chief of the Central European Branch of the State Department's Office of Intelligence Research, an office formally charged with "planning and implementing a program of positive-intelligence research ... to meet the intelligence requirements of the Central Intelligence Agency and other authorized agencies." During his tenure as a U.S. government official, Marcuse supported the division of Germany into East and West, noting that this would prevent an alliance between the newly liberated left-wing parties and the old, conservative industrial and business layers. In 1949, he produced a 532-page report, "The Potentials of World Communism" (declassified only in 1978), which suggested that the Marshall Plan economic stabilization of Europe would limit the recruitment potential of Western Europe's Communist Parties to acceptable levels, causing a period of hostile co-existence with the Soviet Union, marked by confrontation only in faraway places like Latin America and Indochina—in all, a surprisingly accurate forecast. Marcuse left the State Department with a Rockefeller Foundation grant to work with the various Soviet Studies departments which were set up at many of America's top universities after the war, largely by R&A Branch veterans.

 

At the same time, Max Horkheimer was doing even greater damage. As part of the denazification of Germany suggested by the R&A Branch, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany John J. McCloy, using personal discretionary funds, brought Horkheimer back to Germany to reform the German university system. In fact, McCloy asked President Truman and Congress to pass a bill granting Horkheimer, who had become a naturalized American, dual citizenship; thus, for a brief period, Horkheimer was the only person in the world to hold both German and U.S. citizenship. In Germany, Horkheimer began the spadework for the full-blown revival of the Frankfurt School in that nation in the late 1950's, including the training of a whole new generation of anti-Western civilization scholars like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, who would have such destructive influence in 1960's Germany. In a period of American history when some individuals were being hounded into unemployment and suicide for the faintest aroma of leftism, Frankfurt School veterans—all with superb Comintern credentials — led what can only be called charmed lives. America had, to an incredible extent, handed the determination of who were the nation's enemies, over to the nation's own worst enemies.

 

IV. The Aristotelian Eros: Marcuse and the CIA's Drug Counterculture

 

In 1989, Hans-Georg Gadamer, a protégé of Martin Heidegger and the last of the original Frankfurt School generation, was asked to provide an appreciation of his own work for the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He wrote,

 

One has to conceive of Aristotle's ethics as a true fulfillment of the Socratic challenge, which Plato had placed at the center of his dialogues on the Socratic question of the good.... Plato described the idea of the good ... as the ultimate and highest idea, which is supposedly the highest principle of being for the universe, the state, and the human soul. Against this Aristotle opposed a decisive critique, under the famous formula, "Plato is my friend, but the truth is my friend even more." He denied that one could consider the idea of the good as a universal principle of being, which is supposed to hold in the same way for theoretical knowledge as for practical knowledge and human activity.

 

This statement not only succinctly states the underlying philosophy of the Frankfurt School, it also suggests an inflection point around which we can order much of the philosophical combat of the last two millenia. In the simplest terms, the Aristotelian correction of Plato sunders physics from metaphysics, relegating the Good to a mere object of speculation about which "our knowledge remains only a hypothesis," in the words of Wilhelm Dilthey, the Frankfurt School's favorite philosopher. Our knowledge of the "real world," as Dilthey, Nietzsche, and other precursors of the Frankfurt School were wont to emphasize, becomes erotic, in the broadest sense of that term, as object fixation. The universe becomes a collection of things which each operate on the basis of their own natures (that is, genetically), and through interaction between themselves (that is, mechanistically). Science becomes the deduction of the appropriate categories of these natures and interactions. Since the human mind is merely a sensorium, waiting for the Newtonian apple to jar it into deduction, humanity's relationship to the world (and vice versa) becomes an erotic attachment to objects. The comprehension of the universal—the mind's seeking to be the living image of the living God—is therefore illusory. That universal either does not exist, or it exists incomprehensibly as a deus ex machina; that is, the Divine exists as a superaddition to the physical universe — God is really Zeus, flinging thunderbolts into the world from some outside location. (Or, perhaps more appropriately: God is really Cupid, letting loose golden arrows to make objects attract, and leaden arrows to make objects repel.) The key to the entire Frankfurt School program, from originator Lukacs on, is the "liberation" of Aristotelian eros, to make individual feeling states psychologically primary. When the I.S.R. leaders arrived in the United States in the mid-1930's, they exulted that here was a place which had no adequate philosophical defenses against their brand of Kulturpessimismus [cultural pessimism]. However, although the Frankfurt School made major inroads in American intellectual life before World War II, that influence was largely confined to academia and to radio; and radio, although important, did not yet have the overwhelming influence on social life that it would acquire during the war. Furthermore, America's mobilization for the war, and the victory against fascism, sidetracked the Frankfurt School schedule; America in 1945 was almost sublimely optimistic, with a population firmly convinced that a mobilized republic, backed by science and technology, could do just about anything. The fifteen years after the war, however, saw the domination of family life by the radio and television shaped by the Frankfurt School, in a period of political erosion in which the great positive potential of America degenerated to a purely negative posture against the real and, oftentimes manipulated, threat of the Soviet Union. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of the young generation—the so-called baby boomers—were entering college and being exposed to the Frankfurt School's poison, either directly or indirectly. It is illustrative, that by 1960, sociology had become the most popular course of study in American universities. Indeed, when one looks at the first stirrings of the student rebellion at the beginning of the 1960's, like the speeches of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement or the Port Huron Statement which founded the Students for a Democratic Society, one is struck with how devoid of actual content these discussions were. There is much anxiety about being made to conform to the system—"I am a human being; do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" went an early Berkeley slogan—but it is clear that the "problems" cited derive much more from required sociology textbooks, than from the real needs of the society.

 

The CIA's Psychedelic Revolution

 

The simmering unrest on campus in 1960 might well too have passed or had a positive outcome, were it not for the traumatic decapitation of the nation through the Kennedy assassination, plus the simultaneous introduction of widespread drug use. Drugs had always been an "analytical tool" of the nineteenth century Romantics, like the French Symbolists, and were popular among the European and American Bohemian fringe well into the post-World War II period. But, in the second half of the 1950's, the CIA and allied intelligence services began extensive experimentation with the hallucinogen LSD to investigate its potential for social control. It has now been documented that millions of doses of the chemical were produced and disseminated under the aegis of the CIA's Operation MK-Ultra. LSD became the drug of choice within the agency itself, and was passed out freely to friends of the family, including a substantial number of OSS veterans. For instance, it was OSS Research and Analysis Branch veteran Gregory Bateson who "turned on" the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to a U.S. Navy LSD experiment in Palo Alto, California. Not only Ginsberg, but novelist Ken Kesey and the original members of the Grateful Dead rock group opened the doors of perception courtesy of the Navy. The guru of the "psychedelic revolution," Timothy Leary, first heard about hallucinogens in 1957 from Life magazine (whose publisher, Henry Luce, was often given government acid, like many other opinion shapers), and began his career as a CIA contract employee; at a 1977 "reunion" of acid pioneers, Leary openly admitted, "everything I am, I owe to the foresight of the CIA." Hallucinogens have the singular effect of making the victim asocial, totally self-centered, and concerned with objects. Even the most banal objects take on the "aura" which Benjamin had talked about, and become timeless and delusionarily profound. In other words, hallucinogens instantaneously achieve a state of mind identical to that prescribed by the Frankfurt School theories. And, the popularization of these chemicals created a vast psychological lability for bringing those theories into practice. Thus, the situation at the beginning of the 1960's represented a brilliant re-entry point for the Frankfurt School, and it was fully exploited. One of the crowning ironies of the "Now Generation" of 1964 on, is that, for all its protestations of utter modernity, none of its ideas or artifacts was less than thirty years old. The political theory came completely from the Frankfurt School; Lucien Goldmann, a French radical who was a visiting professor at Columbia in 1968, was absolutely correct when he said of Herbert Marcuse in 1969 that "the student movements ... found in his works and ultimately in his works alone the theoretical formulation of their problems and aspirations [emphasis in original]." The long hair and sandals, the free love communes, the macrobiotic food, the liberated lifestyles, had been designed at the turn of the century, and thoroughly field-tested by various, Frankfurt School-connected New Age social experiments like the Ascona commune before 1920. (See box.) Even Tom Hayden's defiant "Never trust anyone over thirty," was merely a less-urbane version of Rupert Brooke's 1905, "Nobody over thirty is worth talking to." The social planners who shaped the 1960's simply relied on already-available materials.

 

Eros and Civilization

 

The founding document of the 1960's counterculture, and that which brought the Frankfurt School's "revolutionary messianism" of the 1920's into the 1960's, was Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, originally published in 1955 and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The document masterfully sums up the Frankfurt School ideology of Kulturpessimismus in the concept of "dimensionality." In one of the most bizarre perversions of philosophy, Marcuse claims to derive this concept from Friedrich Schiller. Schiller, whom Marcuse purposefully misidentifies as the heir of Immanuel Kant, discerned two dimensions in humanity: a sensuous instinct and an impulse toward form. Schiller advocated the harmonization of these two instincts in man in the form of a creative play instinct. For Marcuse, on the other hand, the only hope to escape the one-dimensionality of modern industrial society was to liberate the erotic side of man, the sensuous instinct, in rebellion against "technological rationality." As Marcuse would say later (1964) in his One-Dimensional Man, "A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress." This erotic liberation he misidentifies with Schiller's "play instinct," which, rather than being erotic, is an expression of charity, the higher concept of love associated with true creativity. Marcuse's contrary theory of erotic liberation is something implicit in Sigmund Freud, but not explicitly emphasized, except for some Freudian renegades like Wilhelm Reich and, to a certain extent, Carl Jung. Every aspect of culture in the West, including reason itself, says Marcuse, acts to repress this: "The totalitarian universe of technological rationality is the latest transmutation of the idea of reason." Or: "Auschwitz continues to haunt, not the memory but the accomplishments of man—the space flights, the rockets and missiles, the pretty electronics plants...."

 

This erotic liberation should take the form of the "Great Refusal," a total rejection of the "capitalist" monster and all his works, including "technological" reason, and "ritual-authoritarian language." As part of the Great Refusal, mankind should develop an "aesthetic ethos," turning life into an aesthetic ritual, a "life-style" (a nonsense phrase which came into the language in the 1960's under Marcuse's influence). With Marcuse representing the point of the wedge, the 1960's were filled with obtuse intellectual justifications of contentless adolescent sexual rebellion. Eros and Civilization was reissued as an inexpensive paperback in 1961, and ran through several editions; in the preface to the 1966 edition, Marcuse added that the new slogan, "Make Love, Not War," was exactly what he was talking about: "The fight for eros is a political fight [emphasis in original]." In 1969, he noted that even the New Left's obsessive use of obscenities in its manifestoes was part of the Great Refusal, calling it "a systematic linguistic rebellion, which smashes the ideological context in which the words are employed and defined." Marcuse was aided by psychoanalyst Norman O. Brown, his OSS protege, who contributed Life Against Death in 1959, and Love's Body in 1966—calling for man to shed his reasonable, "armored" ego, and replace it with a "Dionysian body ego," that would embrace the instinctual reality of polymorphous perversity, and bring man back into "union with nature." The books of Reich, who had claimed that Nazism was caused by monogamy, were re-issued. Reich had died in an American prison, jailed for taking money on the claim that cancer could be cured by rechanneling "orgone energy." Primary education became dominated by Reich's leading follower, A.S. Neill, a Theosophical cult member of the 1930's and militant atheist, whose educational theories demanded that students be taught to rebel against teachers who are, by nature, authoritarian. Neill's book Summerhill sold 24,000 copies in 1960, rising to 100,000 in 1968, and 2 million in 1970; by 1970, it was required reading in 600 university courses, making it one of the most influential education texts of the period, and still a benchmark for recent writers on the subject. Marcuse led the way for the complete revival of the rest of the Frankfurt School theorists, re-introducing the long-forgotten Lukacs to America. Marcuse himself became the lightning rod for attacks on the counterculture, and was regularly attacked by such sources as the Soviet daily Pravda, and then-California Governor Ronald Reagan. The only critique of any merit at the time, however, was one by Pope Paul VI, who in 1969 named Marcuse (an extraordinary step, as the Vatican usually refrains from formal denunciations of living individuals), along with Freud, for their justification of "disgusting and unbridled expressions of eroticism"; and called Marcuse's theory of liberation, "the theory which opens the way for license cloaked as liberty ... an aberration of instinct." The eroticism of the counterculture meant much more than free love and a violent attack on the nuclear family. It also meant the legitimization of philosophical eros. People were trained to see themselves as objects, determined by their "natures." The importance of the individual as a person gifted with the divine spark of creativity, and capable of acting upon all human civilization, was replaced by the idea that the person is important because he or she is black, or a woman, or feels homosexual impulses. This explains the deformation of the civil rights movement into a "black power" movement, and the transformation of the legitimate issue of civil rights for women into feminism. Discussion of women's civil rights was forced into being just another "liberation cult," complete with bra-burning and other, sometimes openly Astarte-style, rituals; a review of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970) and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1971), demonstrates their complete reliance on Marcuse, Fromm, Reich, and other Freudian extremists.

 

The Bad Trip

 

This popularization of life as an erotic, pessimistic ritual did not abate, but in fact deepened over the twenty years leading to today; it is the basis of the horror we see around us. The heirs of Marcuse and Adorno completely dominate the universities, teaching their own students to replace reason with "Politically Correct" ritual exercises. There are very few theoretical books on arts, letters, or language published today in the United States or Europe which do not openly acknowledge their debt to the Frankfort School.

 

The witchhunt on today's campuses is merely the implementation of Marcuse's concept of "repressive toleration"—"tolerance for movements from the left, but intolerance for movements from the right"—enforced by the students of the Frankfurt School, now become the professors of women's studies and Afro-American studies. The most erudite spokesman for Afro-American studies, for instance, Professor Cornell West of Princeton, publicly states that his theories are derived from Georg Lukacs. At the same time, the ugliness so carefully nurtured by the Frankfurt School pessimists, has corrupted our highest cultural endeavors. One can hardly find a performance of a Mozart opera, which has not been utterly deformed by a director who, following Benjamin and the I.S.R., wants to "liberate the erotic subtext." You cannot ask an orchestra to perform Schönberg and Beethoven on the same program, and maintain its integrity for the latter. And, when our highest culture becomes impotent, popular culture becomes openly bestial. One final image: American and European children daily watch films like Nightmare on Elm Street and Total Recall, or television shows comparable to them. A typical scene in one of these will have a figure emerge from a television set; the skin of his face will realistically peel away to reveal a hideously deformed man with razor-blade fingers, fingers which start growing to several feet in length, and—suddenly—the victim is slashed to bloody ribbons. This is not entertainment. This is the deeply paranoid hallucination of the LSD acid head. The worst of what happened in the 1960's is now daily fare. Owing to the Frankfurt School and its co-conspirators, the West is on a "bad trip" from which it is not being allowed to come down.

 

The principles through which Western Judeo-Christian civilization was built, are now no longer dominant in our society; they exist only as a kind of underground resistance movement. If that resistance is ultimately submerged, then the civilization will not survive—and, in our era of incurable pandemic disease and nuclear weapons, the collapse of Western civilization will very likely take the rest of the world with it to Hell.

 

The way out is to create a Renaissance. If that sounds grandiose, it is nonetheless what is needed. A renaissance means, to start again; to discard the evil, and inhuman, and just plain stupid, and to go back, hundreds or thousands of years, to the ideas which allow humanity to grow in freedom and goodness. Once we have identified those core beliefs, we can start to rebuild civilization.

 

Ultimately, a new Renaissance will rely on scientists, artists, and composers, but in the first moment, it depends on seemingly ordinary people who will defend the divine spark of reason in themselves, and tolerate no less in others. Given the successes of the Frankfurt School and its New Dark Age sponsors, these ordinary individuals, with their belief in reason and the difference between right and wrong, will be "unpopular." But, no really good idea was ever popular, in the beginning.

 

 





     
   
     


   
 

Nazi-Communist Hippies of the 1920’s

An overwhelming amount of the philosophy and artifacts of the American counterculture of the 1960's, plus the New Age nonsense of today, derives from a large-scale social experiment sited in Ascona, Switzerland from about 1910 to 1935.

Originally a resort area for members of Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy cult, the little Swiss village became the haven for every occult, leftist and racialist sect of the original New Age movement of the early twentieth century. By the end of World War I, Ascona was indistinguishable from what Haight-Ashbury would later become, filled with health food shops, occult book stores hawking the I Ching, and Naturmenschen, "Mr. Naturals" who would walk about in long hair, beads, sandals, and robes in order to "get back to nature." The dominant influence in the area came from Dr. Otto Gross, a student of Freud and friend of Carl Jung, who had been part of Max Weber's circle when Frankfurt School founder Lukacs was also a member. Gross took Bachofen to its logical extremes, and, in the words of a biographer, "is said to have adopted Babylon as his civilization, in opposition to that of Judeo-Christian Europe.... if Jezebel had not been defeated by Elijah, world history would have been different and better. Jezebel was Babylon, love religion, Astarte, Ashtoreth; by killing her, Jewish monotheistic moralism drove pleasure from the world." Gross's solution was to recreate the cult of Astarte in order to start a sexual revolution and destroy the bourgeois, patriarchal family. Among the members of his cult were: Frieda and D.H. Lawrence; Franz Kafka; Franz Werfel, the novelist who later came to Hollywood and wrote The Song of Bernadette; philosopher Martin Buber; Alma Mahler, the wife of composer Gustave Mahler, and later the liaison of Walter Gropius, Oskar Kokoschka, and Franz Werfel; among others. The Ordo Templis Orientalis (OTO), the occult fraternity set up by Satanist Aleister Crowley, had its only female lodge at Ascona. It is sobering to realize the number of intellectuals now worshipped as cultural heroes who were influenced by the New Age madness in Ascona—including almost all the authors who enjoyed a major revival in America in the 1960's and 1970's. The place and its philosophy figures highly in the works of not only Lawrence, Kafka and Werfel, but also Nobel Prize winners Gerhardt Hauptmann and Hermann Hesse, H.G. Wells, Max Brod, Stefan George, and the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Gustav Landauer. In 1935 Ascona became the headquarters for Carl Jung's annual Eranos Conference to popularize gnosticism. Ascona was also the place of creation for most of what we now call modern dance. It was headquarters to Rudolf von Laban, inventor of the most popular form of dance notation, and Mary Wigman. Isadora Duncan was a frequent visitor. Laban and Wigman, like Duncan, sought to replace the formal geometries of classical ballet with re-creations of cult dances which would be capable of ritualistically dredging up the primordial racial memories of the audience. When the Nazis came to power, Laban became the highest dance official in the Reich, and he and Wigman created the ritual dance program for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin—which was filmed by Hitler's personal director Leni Reifenstahl, a former student of Wigman. The peculiar occult psychoanalysis popular in Ascona was also decisive in the development of much of modern art. The Dada movement originated in nearby Zurich, but all its early figures were Asconans in mind or body, especially Guillaume Apollinaire, who was a particular fan of Otto Gross. When "Berlin Dada" announced its creation in 1920, its opening manifesto was published in a magazine founded by Gross. The primary document of Surrealism also came from Ascona. Dr. Hans Prinzhorn, a Heidelberg psychiatrist, commuted to Ascona, where he was the lover of Mary Wigman. In 1922, he published a book, "The Artwork of the Mentally Ill," based on paintings by his psychotic patients, accompanied by an analysis claiming that the creative process shown in this art was actually more liberated than that of the Old Masters. Prinzhorn's book was widely read by the modern artists of the time, and a recent historian has called it, "the Bible of the Surrealists."





   

The New Age Paradigm Shift

The Frankfurt School's original 1930's survey work, including the "authoritarian personality," was based on psychoanalytic categories developed by Erich Fromm. Fromm derived these categories from the theories of J.J. Bachofen, a collaborator of Nietzsche and Richard Wagner, who claimed that human civilization was originally "matriarchal." This primoridial period of "gynocratic democracy" and dominance of the Magna Mater (Great Mother) cult, said Bachofen, was submerged by the development of rational, authoritarian "patriarchism," including monotheistic religion. Later, Fromm utilized this theory to claim that support for the nuclear family was evidence of authoritarian tendencies.

In 1970, forty years after he first proclaimed the importance of Bachofen's theory, the Frankfurt School's Erich Fromm surveyed how far things had developed. He listed seven "social-psychological changes" which indicated the advance of matriarchism over patriarchism:

  •  "The women's revolution;"

  •  "Children's and adolescents' revolution," based on the work of Benjamin Spock and others, allowing children new, and more-adequate ways to express rebellion;

  •  The rise of the radical youth movement, which fully embraces Bachofen, in its emphasis on group sex, loose family structure, and unisex clothing and behaviors;

  •  The increasing use of Bachofen by professionals to correct Freud's overly-sexual analysis of the mother-son relationship—this would make Freudianism less threatening and more palatable to the general population;

  •  "The vision of the consumer paradise.... In this vision, technique assumes the characteristics of the Great Mother, a technical instead of a natural one, who nurses her children and pacifies them with a never-ceasing lullaby (in the form of radio and television). In the process, man becomes emotionally an infant, feeling secure in the hope that mother's breasts will always supply abundant milk, and that decisions need no longer be made by the individual."


 

The Theory of the Authoritarian Personality

The Frankfurt School devised the "authoritarian personality" profile as a weapon to be used against its political enemies. The fraud rests on the assumption that a person's actions are not important; rather, the issue is the psychological attitude of the actor—as determined by social scientists like those of the Frankfurt School. The concept is diametrically opposed to the idea of natural law and to the republican legal principles upon which the U.S. was founded; it is, in fact, fascistic, and identical to the idea of "thought crime," as described by George Orwell in his 1984, and to the theory of "volitional crime" developed by Nazi judge Roland Freisler in the early 1930's.

When the Frankfurt School was in its openly pro-Bolshevik phase, its authoritarian personality work was designed to identify people who were not sufficiently revolutionary, so that these people could be "re-educated." When the Frankfurt School expanded its research after World War II at the behest of the American Jewish Committee and the Rockefeller Foundation, its purpose was not to identify anti-Semitism; that was merely a cover story. Its goal was to measure adherence to the core beliefs of Western Judeo-Christian civilization, so that these beliefs could be characterized as "authoritarian," and discredited.

For the Frankfurt School conspirators, the worst crime was the belief that each individual was gifted with sovereign reason, which could enable him to determine what is right and wrong for the whole society; thus, to tell people that you have a reasonable idea to which they should conform, is authoritarian, paternalistic extremism.

By these standards, the judges of Socrates and Jesus were correct in condemning these two individuals (as, for example, I.F. Stone asserts in one case in his "Trial of Socrates.") It is the measure of our own cultural collapse, that this definition of authoritarianism is acceptable to most citizens, and is freely used by political operations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Cult Awareness Network to "demonize" their political enemies.

When Lyndon LaRouche and six of his colleagues faced trial on trumped-up charges in 1988, LaRouche identified that the prosecution would rely on the Frankfurt School's authoritarian personality fraud, to claim that the defendants' intentions were inherently criminal. During the trial, LaRouche's defense attorney attempted to demonstrate the Frankfurt School roots of the prosecution's conspiracy theory, but he was overruled by Judge Albert Bryan, Jr., who said, "I'm not going back into the early 1930's in opening statements or in the testimony of witnesses."

 
 
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
 
 
AND THEN THERE IS TAVISTOCK
 

kurt-lewin.jpg

Kurt Lewin (1890 – 1947) was a Jewish psychologist,

who pioneered the Tavistock Institute, the Illuminati’s 

center for mass brainwashing. He advocated the use of terror 

to induce a passive state in the public.

 

(from April 21, 2006)

By Henry Makow Ph.D.

 

It is more effective to manage society by mind control than by physical coercion.

The events of  9-11 and the “war on terror” mostly are exercises in mass brainwashing.

 

German psychiatrist Kurt Lewin developed the thinking behind 9-11.

In the book “Mind Control World Control” (1997) Jim Keith writes: 

 

“Lewin is credited with much of the original Tavistock research into mass brainwashing

applying the results of repeated trauma and torture [of individuals] in mind control to society at large.”

 

“If terror can be induced on a widespread basis into a society, Lewin has stated, then society reverts to

a tabula rasa, a blank slate, a situation where control can easily be instituted from an external point.” 

“Put another way: By the creation of controlled chaos, the populace can be brought to the point where it willingly

submits to greater control. Lewin maintained that society must be driven into a state equivalent to an ‘early

childhood situation.’ He termed this societal chaos ‘fluidity.'” (Page 44) 

 

Elite planners designed Sept. 11 for its shock value. In the aftermath, they were able to impose a security

crackdown, a costly military build-up and a war in Afghanistan and Iraq on a stunned population. 

Keith cites a Tavistock researcher Dr. William Sargent author of “Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing” (1957):

“Various types of beliefs can be implanted after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by …deliberately induced fear, anger or excitement.” (48) 

 

This blueprint was laid out long before Sept. 11, 2001. The official story of that tragedy

doesn’t bear scrutiny. There was no wreckage at the Pentagon. All three buildings were

demolished by explosives. Our “leaders” are accomplices to the murder of over 3000 Americans

and the destruction of an American icon. The plan is to fold the US into a “world government”

controlled by London-based central bankers. Our cultural, economic and political elite is complicit

in the ongoing cover-up.

 

FUTURE SHOCK

 

Most political and cultural events are contrived by the elite for their psychological effect.

JFK could have been disposed of in more humane ways. (He had many health problems.)

Instead, for its shock value, they shot him down, in Mort Sahls’ words, “like a dog in the street.”

 

Jim Keith: “The Kennedy assassination was a British Intelligence, i.e. Tavistock

hit, and its purpose was to shock the American consciousness into a near-comatose

state for reprogramming, the standard Tavistock modus operandi.” (p.143)

 

The same can be said for the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

It all climaxed with the beatings of demonstrators at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention.

After that, my generation turned inward as we were programmed to do. “Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out” 

said CIA funded pied piper Timothy Leary.

 

[“I mean who was I supposed to work for, the KGB?” Leary quipped.

(Keith p.99) Leary didn’t realize that there wasn’t a big difference.]

 

Many young people became “dead heads” after

Jerry Garcia’s Grateful Dead. Keith writes:

 

“An FBI internal memo from 1968 mentions the employment of the Grateful Dead as an

avenue ‘to channel youth dissent and rebellion into more benign and non-threatening directions.’

[They] performed a vital service in distracting many young persons

into drugs and mysticism, rather than politics.” (179)

 

Keith goes on to document CIA connections to the creation of mind control cults used

to create “controlled chaos.” These include the Symbionese Liberation Army, Jim Jones,

Charles Manson, Scientology, the Unification Church, Son of Sam and

Heaven’s Gate. The John Lennon assassination also ties in. (183)

 

To bring the picture up to date, (circa 2006) add the murder of Princess Diana, Columbine,

the blowing of the levees in New Orleans, the burning of Black churches, and the bird flu

scare. (After 2006, Sandy Hook, Nice, Paris, London, Toronto…the instances of false

flag terror are too numerous to mention.) What we have is an ongoing secret war

by the central bankers against society, a drumbeat of psychological

torture designed to keep society off balance or zoned out.

 

THE BITTER TRUTH

 

The most significant thing about our life is that we are victims of elite mind control. We

have been trained to be apathetic, trivia-minded and self -absorbed. Apart from the political

shocks,  we are hardly aware of the vicious attack on our natural heterosexuality by a

psy-op known as “feminism” and homosexuality masquerading as “women’s

and gay rights.” Pretty soon men will be punished for even looking at a woman.

 

We get our values, identity, meaning, and love from our family roles. Women were

brainwashed to abandon the female role and compete for the male role. A woman who

 dedicated herself to husband, home and children were stigmatized. This is part

of the long-term elite program to eliminate the institutions of marriage and family.

 

Tavistock Institute has developed such power in the USA, that no one achieves prominence

in any fieldunless he has been trained in behavioral science at Tavistock, or one of

its subsidiaries. Tavistock directs hundreds of elite think tanks and corporations

in the United States. The degree of elite coordination is breathtaking.

 

For example, Century 21 has a new ad where a real estate agent is greeting a middle-class

Chinese couple arriving to settle in America. The voice-over says something like:

“This is the shape of the future. We are agents of change.”

 

Obviously, this ad will not appeal to Americans looking for a realtor. Rather, it conditions

them to embrace immigration. Central banker dupes and lackeys have

used the term “change agents” to describe themselves for decades.

 

Mankind is in the grip of a satanic force and is sinking into a coma. Our “leaders” work for an

occult cabal of super-rich perverts and criminals who secretly plot the end of Western

Civilization and world tyranny. They see us as animals to be trained or culled.

 

The good news is that the animals “owe” them a lot of money for their fiat currency. So if

we can tune out their madness, we can relax. The chaos is controlled. Wars are

all orchestrated and they love money too much to destroy us, at least not yet.

 
 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

THE SEXUAL DECADENCE OF WEIMAR GERMANY

“The decay of moral values in all areas of life—the period of deepest German

degradation—coincided exactly with the height of Jewish power in Germany.” 

— Dr Friederich Karl Wiehe, Germany and the Jewish Question. [1]

 



Berlin in the heyday of the Weimar Republic: a hedonistic hellpit of sexual depravity.
 
 

No account of the Jewish Question in Germany can be complete without some mention

of the tidal wave of sexual immorality that was to engulf the country during the period of

the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) following World War One. This also happened to be

the apogee of Jewish power in Germany. Every single sphere

of major influence had now fallen under Jewish control.

 

1.  THE CULTURAL TAKEOVER OF GERMANY BY THE JEWS  

 

Dr Karl Wiehe, in his Germany and the Jewish Question,

is painstaking in the details he provides:

 

Well before 1933 the Jews had taken possession of the film industry even more

thoroughly than of the theater. That was understandable, because the earnings

in the film industry overshadow the earnings of any other artistic activity….

 

The biggest step in the direction of the decline of the German cultural life [however]

was taken in the field of the light entertainment genre. Here—in the genre of musical

comedy and above all in revue and burlesque—frivolity and lasciviousness were

to rear their ugly heads. So much so that during these years Berlin

was quite correctly considered the most immoral city in the world.

 

It was Jews who introduced this pornographic “art form” to Germany, a debased

genre completely unknown before the Great War, and so it is the Jews

who can be held responsible for the general decline in morals.

 

The Jewish sexologists Ivan Bloch and Magnus Hirschfeld became the

representatives of “sex research” camouflaged as science—a bogus science that

was merely an excuse for pornography and propaganda designed to

destroy the institute of marriage and the sanctity of the family.  [2]

 

Wiehe provides the following useful facts and statistics:

In 1931, over 60 percent of German films were produced by Jews and 82 percent of the

film scripts were written by Jewish writers, though Jews made up less than 1 percent of

the German population (0.9o%). A quick look at the names of directors, producers,

stage managers, actors, script writers and critics, “revealed everywhere an

overwhelming preponderance of Jews.”

 

 


A cursory survey of the film titles, Wiehe tells us, shows us that the Jews had only one thing

on the brain: sex. Here are some typical titles: “Moral und Sinnlichkeit” (Morals and Sensuality);

“Was kostet Liebe?” (What is the Price of Love); “Wenn ein Weib den Weg verliert” (When

a Woman loses her Way); “Prostitution” (Prostitution); “Sündige Mutter”

(Sinful Mama); “Das Buch des Lasters” (The Book of Vices).

 

“The sensational titles correspond to the sleazy contents,” Wiehe complains. “All wallow

in filth and display with cynical frankness the vilest scenes of sexual perversion.” [3]

 

Light entertainment (revue/burlesque) was a Jewish innovation. The revue theaters, all

concentrated within great cities such as Berlin, were owned and run almost exclusively by

Jews. Shows consisted of little more than excuses for sexual titillation involving the display

of the female form in lascivious dances that were to degenerate later into striptease and scenes

of public masturbation. “In these revues,” Wiehe notes indignantly, “the uninhibited sex drive

surrendered itself to disgusting orgies. All life was reduced to a common denominator of

lust and its satisfaction. Chastity and self-discipline were mocked as old-fashioned prejudices.”

 

The Jews had managed, in the space of a mere fourteen years, to bring about a major

“transvaluation of values” [4] in Weimar Germany. The vices of the past

were now its virtues. The only vice that remained was chastity.

 

A glance at the revue titles is again sufficient:  “Zieh dich aus” (Get Undressed); “Tausend

nackte Frauen” (One Thousand Naked Women); “Die Sünden der Welt” (The Sins

of the World); “Häuser der Liebe” (The Houses of Love); “Streng Verboten!”

(Strictly Forbidden!);  “Sündig und Süss” (Sweet and Sinful). [5]

 

Finally, there was the rich field of sexology: a new science consisting largely of dubious

“case histories” purporting to reveal the depraved sexual habits of various anonymous

patients. In order to give an air of academic respectability and erudition to these

masturbatory fantasies—thrilling adventure stories involving necrophilia, bestiality and

handkerchief fetishism—the more exciting details were often given in vulgar Latin “in order

to exclude the lay reader.” [6] However, it was not long before the Latin was diligently

translated into the vernacular for the benefit of the unlatined lay reader,

thus defeating the purpose of the prim “schoolmaster’s Latin”.

 

Wiehe reels off a long list of Jewish sexologists who he claims were in the forefront of

writing such salacious treatises that were no more than pornography masquerading as

science. Drs Magnus Hirschfeld [7] and Ivan Bloch [8] were the star writers in this field,

their books still read avidly today by a gullible public hungry for details of the bizarre, the

kinky and the perverse. Drs Ludwig Lewy-Lenz, Leo Schidrowitz, Franz Rabinowitsch,

Georg Cohen, and Albert Eulenburg are some of the names Wiehe mentions.

 

 

Here are some of their depressing titles: “Sittengeschichte des Lasters” (The History of

Perversions); “Sittengeschichte des Schamlosigkeit” (The History of Shamelessness);

“Bilderlexikon der Erotic” (Picture Lexicon of Eroticism); “Sittengischichte des Geheime

und Verbotene” (The History of the Secret and the Forbidden). And here are some of

the titles published by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin [9]:

Aphrodisiacs, Prostitution, Sexual Catastrophes, Sexual Pathology, The Perverted.  

Wiehe describes all these books as “the filthy publications of these pseudo-scientists”,

all of them written by Jewish authors and published by Jewish publishers. He

continues in the same acerbic vein:

 

These books were allegedly supposed to be scientific treatises, their ostensible

purpose being to “educate” the broad masses about the dangers of sexual excesses.

Under the guise of science, however, they speculated in the lust and lower instincts

of their audience. Criminals, prostitutes and homosexuals took center stage in their

repertoire. One looks in vain for any known non-Jewish “sexual scientist”! [10]

 

Wiehe points out that masturbation, hitherto a hole-in-corner vice, began to be shamelessly

promoted for the first time in Weimar Germany by Jewish-run organizations. He mentions

Dr Max Hodan, Jewish medical officer for Berlin, and ticks him off for circulating

a booklet recommending regular masturbation for the working classes.

 


It was in Weimar Germany, long before Hannibal Lecter, that the serial killer was
to become an iconic figure — a source of secret fantasies and frissons.
 
 

It is worth noting that one of the world’s worst serial killers, Peter Kürten,

committed all his crimes in Germany during the 1925-1930 period.

 

This was of course the  heyday of the Weimar Republic when the German people lay

completely under Jewish domination and when the first dress rehearsal

for the later Sexual Revolution of the 1960s was arguably being run.

 

Significantly, when asked what his primary motive for murder

was, Kürten replied: “to strike back at an oppressive society.” [11]

 

This was a society in which the serial killer was to become a popular icon, enough to

create a whole genre of sensational sex crime literature. (See book title on left).  [12]

 

 

2.  THE DESCENT INTO SEXUAL DEPRAVITY

 

British historian Sir Arthur Bryant describes throngs of child prostitutes outside the doors

of the great Berlin hotels and restaurants. He adds: “Most of them—the night clubs and

vice resorts—were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews

among the promoters of this trade who were remembered in after years.” [13]

 

Arriving in Berlin during the hyperinflation crisis (1923), Klaus Mann—son of the great

German novelist Thomas Mann—remembered walking past a group of dominatrices:

 

Some of them looked like fierce Amazons, strutting in high boots made of green,

glossy leather. One of them brandished a supple cane and leered at me as I passed

by. ‘Good evening, madam,’ I said. She whispered in my ear, ‘Want to be my slave?

Costs only six billions and a cigarette.’ [14]

 


 
Prostitutes and their clients in the red-light district… this is how they
actually dressed and paraded themselves in the garish, lamp-lit streets.
 

10-year-old children turned tricks in the railway stations. A group of 14-year-old Russian

girls, refugees from the Red Terror in Stalin’s Communist slaughter house, managed to

make a lucrative living in Berlin as dominatrices. Little girls were freely available for sex not

only in child brothels and pharmacies but could be ordered by telephone and delivered to

clients by taxi, like takeaway meals. Particularly bizarre were mother-and-daughter teams

offering their services to the same client simultaneously. Mel Gordon writes: “One French

journalist, Jean Galtier-Boissière, described, in sickly pornographic detail, the creeping

horror of feeling a nine-year-old girl’s tiny, but proficient, fingers stroking his upper thigh

while the broken-toothed mother covered his face with hot sucking kisses.” [15]

 

In Mel Gordon’s Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, we enter a

depressingly sordid milieu akin to the subterranean world of the sewer rat: a world which

owed its existence in large part to German Jewry. Without Jewish money and influence,

such a world would never have come into being. Nor was there anything the Germans

could do to extricate themselves from this artificially created hothouse of

erotomania and sexual deviance in which they now found themselves ensnared.

 

There were no fewer than 17 different prostitute types in this Jew-created brothel city:

eight outdoor types and nine indoor ones, each with their specialities and slang terminology.

 

Outdoor prostitutes:  (1) Kontroll Girls: legal prostitutes checked for venereal disease. 

(2) Half-Silks: part-time amateurs with day jobs as office workers, secretaries and shopgirls;

evening and weekend workers.  (3) Grasshoppers: lowly streetwalkers who gave handjobs

and standup sex in dark alleys.  (4) Nuttes: Boyish teenage girls who worked for “pocket

money” after school without their parents’ knowledge.  (5) Boot-girls:  dominas (or dominatrices)

in shiny patent leather boots who offered to stamp all over their clients.  (6) Tauentzien girls:

Chic mother-and-daughter teams, fashionably dressed, who offered their services to men

who wanted threesomes.  (7) Münzis: Heavily pregnant women who waited under lampposts

(very expensive, since they offered an erotic speciality). (8)  Gravelstones: hideous hags

with missing limbs, hunchbacks, midgets, and women with various deformities. “The most

common German word for them was Kies. In other accounts, they were referred

to as Steinhuren.” [16]

 



 

Indoor prostitutes(1) Chontes: Low-grade Jewish prostitutes, mostly Polish, who picked

up their clients in railway stations.  (2) Fohses (French argot for “vaginas”): Elegant females

who discreetly advertised in magazines and newspapers as private masseuses and manicurists.

  (3) Demi-castors (or “half-beavers”): Young women from good families who worked in

high-class houses in the late afternoons and early evenings.  (4) Table-ladies: Ravishingly

beautiful escorts of exotic appearance who came with the reserved table in an exclusive nightclub.

Clients had to be fabulously rich in order to afford the cultured conversation of these high-class

call girls who accompanied the caviar and champagne and who later unveiled their charms

in a sumptuously furnished chamber of delights. (5) Dominas: Leather-clad women, athletic

and Amazonian, who specialized in whipping and erotic humiliation. They were often found

in lesbian nightclubs which also catered for kinky males.  (6) Minettes (French for “female cats”):

Exclusive call girls who offered S&M fantasy scenes, foot worship, bondage, and enforced

transvestism. They worked in top class hotels.  (7) Race-horses:  Masochistic prostitutes

who let themselves be whipped in “schoolrooms” or “dungeons” liberally supplied with

instruments of torture. Clients were carefully screened to make sure they didn’t go too far. 

(8) ‘Medicine’: Child prostitutes (age 12-16), so called because they were prescribed as

“medicine” in pharmacies. All  the client needed to do was tell the pharmacist how many

years he had suffered from his ailment (e.g., 12), without mentioning what ailment it was,

and  request the color of the pill he preferred (e.g., red). He was then escorted to a cubicle

where his “medicine” awaited him: a 12-year-old redhead. (9) Telephone-girls (often billed

as “virgins”): expensive child prostitutes (ages 12-17) ordered by telephone like

a takeaway meal; the nymphettes were delivered by limousine or taxi. [17]

 

Luigi Barzini, in his social memoir The Europeans, describes the saturnalian scene in the

Tingel-Tangels or sleazy bordellos of sex-crazed Berlin in the 1920s, the Golden Age of the Jews:

 

I saw pimps offering anything to anybody: little boys, little girls, robust young

men, libidinous women, animals. The story went the rounds that a male goose whose

neck you cut at just the right ecstatic  moment would give you the most delicious

frisson of all—as it allowed you to enjoy sodomy, bestiality, homosexuality, necrophilia

and sadism at one stroke. Gastronomy too, as one could eat the goose afterwards.  [18]

 

In October 1923, when one US dollar could buy 4.2 billion marks and six wheelbarrows of

banknotes could barely buy a loaf of bread, it was said that “the most exquisite blow

job to be had in Berlin never cost an American tourist more than 30 cents.” [19]

 


“Berlin nightlife, my word, the world hasn’t seen anything like it!” Klaus Mann, son of

the great German author Thomas Mann, enthused sardonically.

“We used to have a first-class army. Now we have first class perversions.” [20]

 

German author Erich Kästner, writing of Weimar Berlin, was to reflect on the topography

of the soul sickness that had now taken possession of the once proud city: “In the east

there is crime; in the center the con men hold sway; in the north resides

misery, in the west lechery; and everywhere—the decline.” [21]

 

German Jewish author Stephan Zweig has much to say about homosexuality, pointing

out that even in Ancient Rome—where fourteen of the first fifteen Roman emperors were

homosexual—the degree of drunken depravity and public shamelessness was far less

shocking than in Weimar Berlin:

 

Bars, amusement parks, honky-tonks sprang up like mushrooms. Along the

entire Kurfürstendamm powdered and rouged men sauntered and they were not

all professionals; every high school boy wanted to earn some money and in the

dimly lit bars one might see government officials and men of the world of finance

tenderly courting drunken sailors without any shame. Even the Rome of Suetonius

had never known such orgies as the pervert balls of Berlin, where hundreds of men

costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent

eyes of the police. In the collapse of all values a kind of madness gained hold. Young

girls bragged proudly of their perversion; to be sixteen and still under suspicion of

virginity would have been a disgrace.” [22]

 


 

3.  CONCLUSION: WEIMAR GERMANY AS A DRESS REHEARSAL

FOR THE SUBSEQUENT SEXUAL REVOLUTION OF THE 1960s

 

My own impression, though I could well be mistaken here, is that Weimar Germany

can be seen as a trial run or dress rehearsal for the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s,

a revolution in attitudes and behavior that was to convulse America

and then spread like a moral virus to Europe and the rest of the world.

 

Recollect that it was in Germany during the Weimar period—in 1923 to be exact—that

the Institut für Sozialforschung was set up at the University of Frankfurt. Financed by the

Argentian Jew Felix Weil, this was later to become the infamous Frankfurt School. [23]

 

It is my own hypothesis that the Germans were to be the initial guinea pigs of these

Cultural Marxists [24], all of them initially Jewish apart from Habermas. These were

revolutionaries intent on complete social control by the imposition of their Marxist worldview

on the rest of society. It is self-evident that there is no other way to get control of a society

with strong moral values than to weaken those values. The formula is simple: destroy the

belief system on which that society is founded, especially its religion and its traditional codes

of honor and decency. Promote godlessness and a philosophy of despair. To put it

in even plainer language: reduce men to beasts if you wish to control them.

 

It was George Lukács [25], one of the founding fathers of the Frankfurt School, who had

called for “a culture of pessimism and a world abandoned by God.” [26] And it was one

of their most fanatical ideologues, Willi Munzenberg [27], who had said he wanted

to turn the world upside down and make life a hell on earth. His exact words:

 

We must organize the intellectuals and use them TO MAKE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

STINK! Only then, after they have CORRUPTED ALL ITS VALUES AND MADE LIFE

IMPOSSIBLE, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat. [28, emphasis added]

 

With Jewish intellectuals like this at the helm, doing their utmost to promote moral anarchy

and create an Orwellian dystopia, is it any wonder that the Germans went

helter-skelter down the slippery slope and ended up where they did?

 

In America the Cultural Marxists were to apply a variation of their Weimar techniques,

but refined and honed to a high degree. This time, they would use multiculturalism as a

weapon of mass destruction in addition to moral corruption. They would flood the country

with immigrants, legal as well as illegal. They would turn race against race (engineered

ethnic conflict), parent against child (attack on authority), and man against woman (radical

feminism). Above all, they would teach the non-White races to regard the White race as

the ultimate evil: “the cancer of human history”, to quote Jewish feminist Susan Sontag. [29]

 

The above comments are admittedly controversial and will elicit anger in many quarters.

For this I apologize. My purpose is simply to give voice to an urgent and widespread

perception. Not to be able to say what many people increasingly believe is clearly undesirable.

 

What did the cultural Marxists learn from Weimar Germany?

 

They learned that the Sexual Revolution, in order to succeed, had to be a slow and gradual

process. “Modern forms of subjection,” the Frankfurt School had learned, “are marked by

mildness.” [30] Weimar had failed because the pace had been too frenetic.

People were aware they were being corrupted. That was fatal.

 

To corrupt a nation effectively one must make sure that the descent into degradation

is an infinitely slow and imperceptible process, one miniscule step at a time—just as

those who wish to cook frogs alive in a saucepan, reducing them to a state of comatose

stupor, are advised to place them in cold water and boil them to death as slowly as possible. [31]

 

Lest I be accused of antisemitism by this portrayal of the systematic sexual corruption of the

German people at the hands of their Jewish masters—a classic instance of social engineering

practiced on an entire population—let me allow a well-known and respected Jewish authority

on the Weimar era to have the final word. He is Dr Manfred Reifer,

and he is writing in a prestigious Jewish publication:

 

Whilst large sections of the German nation were struggling for the preservation

of their race, we Jews filled the streets of Germany with our vociferations. We supplied

the press with articles on the subject of its Christmas and Easter and administered to

its religious beliefs in the manner we considered suitable. We ridiculed the highest

ideals of the German nation and profaned the matters which it holds sacred.” 

—  Dr Manfred Reifer, in the German Jewish magazine Czernowitzer Allegemeine

Zeitung, September 1933

 

In the same month those words were written, September 1933, Adolf Hitler removed every

single Jew from positions of influence in the mass media: from the fields of literature, art,

music, journalism, the cinema, and popular entertainment in general [32]. The influence that

the Jews had exerted on the German psyche was to be regarded henceforth, rightly or wrongly,

as pernicious. And Kulturbolschewismus, or “Bolshevik culture”, a derogatory term for Jewish

culture itself, became synonymous with moral anarchy and sexual decadence.

 

*            *            *

ENDNOTES

[1]        Dr Friedrich Karl Wiehe, Germany and the Jewish Question.  Published in 1938 in Berlin by  the Institute for Studies of the Jewish Question, this eight-part booklet runs to approximately 23,500 words in the English translation. As I have quoted this important work extensively both here and in my forthcoming 4-part essay How the Jews Rose to World Power, I felt it would be advisable to paraphrase/translate the defective Germanic English of the English version completely, quoting the original translation only when the English was free from grammatical and orthographical  errors. Readers who know German are invited to consult the original German essay here:

Deutschland und die Judenfrage.

[2]       Wiehe, Ibid.
[3]       Wiehe, Ibid.
[4]       “transvaluation of values”
[5]       Wiehe, Ibid.
[6]       Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis
[7]       Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935). The first advocate for homosexual and transgender rights  and himself a homosexual, Hirschfeld figured out that there were 64 different types of male, ranging from the extremely masculine heterosexual male to the extremely feminine homosexual male. Whether there are also 64 different types of females, ranging from the extremely feminine heterosexual female to the extremely masculine butch lesbian, is not clear. Described as the “the Einstein of Sex”, Hirschfeld thought abortion was a good thing and approved of miscegenation and the mongrelization of the White race.
[8]       Ivan Bloch (1872-1922).  Like Hirschfeld, Bloch was a Jewish homosexual whose main interest in life was sexual perversion. Author of the 3-volume Handbuch der gesamten Sexualwissenschaft in Einzeldarstellungen (“Handbook of Sexology in its Entirety Presented in Separate Studies”), Bloch was an expert on sadism and helped to popularize the work of the Marquis de Sade. He apparently discovered the manuscript of de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom and published it under a pseudonym in 1904, presumably pocketing the royalties.
[9]      The Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft). Founded in 1919 in Berlin, the Institute was housed in a villa purchased by Hirschfeld not far from the Reichstag building. It housed his immense library of sex books, most of them pornographic, and offered the public advice on their sex problems (“medical consultations”). People from around Europe visited the Institute, including the homosexual duo Auden and Isherwood, “to gain a clearer understanding of their sexuality.” (Wikipedia).  The Institute, which encouraged “educational” visits from school children, included a Museum of Sex full of pornographic pictures, dildos, “masturbation machines”, and other curiosities of a similar nature. In May 1933, after the Nazis had come to power, the Institute was attacked and thousands of its pornographic books and erotic artifacts destroyed in a “bonfire of the vanities” — this event later being portrayed by Jewish interests as a tragic loss to civilization, comparable only to the burning of the Great Library at Alexandria in 645 AD.
[10]      Wiehe, Ibid.
[11]       Peter Kurten, “to strike back at an oppressive society.”
[12]      An example: Marina Tatar’s Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany.
[13]      Sir Arthur Bryant, Unfinished Victory (1940), pp. 144-145
[14]      Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, p.39
[15]      Mel Gordon, Ibid., p.43
[16]      Mel Gordon, in an email to this author (1 March 2013).
[17]      Mel Gordon, Ibid., pp.28-32
[18]      Quoted in Stephen Lemons, Paradise regained: Weimar Berlin’s depraved, sin-filled nights tantalize the imagination anew in Mel Gordon’s “Voluptuous Panic”.
 [19]     Stephen Lemons, Ibid.  If 30 cents for a blowjob was considered a bargain for the American tourist in Weimar Germany, it is of interest to note that the blowjob rate for sex tourists in Moldova today is considerably lower—only  20 cents a pop. We learn this from a book originally published in Hebrew in Israel (In Foreign Parts: Trafficking in Women in Israel, by Ilana Hammerman. Am Oved. 199pp). “The local rate for sex services at the Chisinau  train station,” we are told, “is about NIS 0.70 for a blowjob.” (Quoted in “Land of Filth and Honey”, by Eli Shai, Jerusalem Post, November 5, 2004).  0.70 New Israeli shekels works out to 20 cents. Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, where the average income is US $300 per month and 20 percent of the population live in abject poverty on $3 per day, is a favorite destination for European and Israeli sex tourists, especially for pedophiles. Chisinau is the capital of Moldova, and it is at its railway station that gaunt, hollow-eyed children—some of them as young as 7—line up to offer their services to the incoming sex tourists. (See here).
[20]     Klaus Mann, The Turning Point (1942), quote.
[21]      Erich Kästner, quoted in “Institute for the study of western civilization: the twentieth century. Lecture 9: Weimar Culture.”
[22]     Quoted in Columbia University Press review of Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, edited by Noah Isenberg
[23]     The Frankfurt School: Wikipedia. For an alternative and more dissident viewpoint, see The Frankfurt School: Metapedia and its numerous links.
[24]     Readers who wish to know more about the philosophical milieu of modernity—i.e., the cultural swamp of sexual bolshevism in which the benighted masses are forced to flounder today—are advised to make a careful study of the following eight core articles:
(1)   Arnaud de Lassus’s The Frankfurt School: Cultural Revolution
(2)  Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, Chapter 5
(3)  William S. Lind, What is Cultural Marxism?
(4)  William S. Lind, Who Stole our Culture?
(5)  Timothy Matthews, The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt.  (Or my own shorter adaption of this with extended commentary, Satan’s Secret Agents: The Frankfurt School and its Evil Agenda.)
(6)  Michael Minnicino, The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’
(7) Cultural Marxism: (Metapedia).
(8) Sexual Bolshevism: (Metapedia).
[25]     Georges Lukács, Wikipedia.
[26]     Timothy Matthews, The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt.
[27]     Willi Munzenberg, Wikipedia.  See also Sean McMeekin’s The Red Millionaire: A political biography of Willi Münzenberg, where Münzenberg  is described as “the perpetrator of some of the most colossal lies of the modern age…. He helped to unleash a plague of moral blindness upon the world from which we have still not recovered.”
[28]     Lasha Darkmoon, The Plot Against Art  (Part 1).
[29]     “The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Ballanchine  ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”  — Susan Sontag, Partisan Review,   Winter 1967, p. 57. This infamous quote, once cited in the Wikipedia article on Sontag, has recently been removed.
[30]     Arnaud de Lassus, The Frankfurt School: Cultural Revolution.
[31]      Boiling Frog (Wikipedia)
[32]    The Holocaust Timeline

 
CONTEMPORARY JEW LEADERS
 
A Secret Meeting to Plot War?