The ACW Review examined the corrosive
work of the “Frankfurt
School" -- a group of German-American scholars who developed highly
provocative and original perspectives on contemporary society and culture,
drawing on Hegel,
Marx,
Nietzsche,
Freud,
and Weber.
Not that their idea of a "cultural revolution" was particularly new.
"Until now," wrote Joseph
Comte de Maistre (1753- 1821), who for 15 years was a Freemason,
"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 workers’ revolution would
sweep into Europe and, eventually, into the United States. But it did not
do so. Toward the end of 1922 the Communist
International (Comintern) began to consider what were the reasons.
On Lenin’s initiative
a meeting was organized at the Marx-Engels
Institute in Moscow. Its aim was to clarify the concept of, and give
concrete effect to, a Marxist cultural revolution.
Amongst those present were Georg
Lukacs (a Hungarian aristocrat, son of a banker, who had become a Communist
during the First World War; a good Marxist theoretician he developed the
idea of "Revolution and Eros" -- sexual instinct used as an instrument
of destruction) and Willi
Munzenberg (whose proposed solution 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 cofounder of the
National
Review, a meeting “perhaps more harmful to Western civilization than
the Bolshevik Revolution itself."
Lenin died in 1924. By this time, however,
Stalin
was beginning to look on Munzenberg, Lukacs, and like- thinkers as “revisionists."
In June 1940, Munzenberg fled to the south of France where, on Stalin’s
orders, a NKVD
assassination squad caught up with him and hanged him from a tree.
In the summer of 1924, after being attacked
for his writings by the Fifth Comintern Congress, Lukacs moved to Germany,
where he chaired the first meeting of a group of Communist-oriented sociologists,
a gathering that 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
f?r Sozialforschung. To begin with, school
and institute were indistinguishable. In 1923 the institute was officially
established, and funded by Felix
Weil (1898-1975).
Weil was born in Argentina and at the
age of nine was sent to attend school in Germany. He attended the universities
in T?bingen and Frankfurt, where he
graduated with a doctoral degree in political science. While at these universities
he became increasingly interested in socialism and Marxism. According to
the intellectual historian Martin
Jay, the topic of his dissertation was "the practical problems of implementing
socialism."
Carl
Gr?nberg, the institute’s director from 1923-1929, was an avowed Marxist,
although the institute did not have any official party affiliations. But
in 1930 Max
Horkheimer assumed control and 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 migrated to major U.S. universities -- Columbia, Princeton,
Brandeis, and Berkeley.
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 license cloaked as liberty"); Max Horkheimer; Theodor
Adorno; the popular writer Erich
Fromm; Leo
Lowenthal, and Jurgen
Habermas -- possibly the school’s most influential representative.
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 socialist revolution.
Their task, therefore, was as swiftly
as possible to undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy. To do this they called
for the most negative destructive criticism possible of every sphere of
life which would be designed to de-stabilize society and bring down what
they saw as the “oppressive" order. 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 -- but giving us no ideas about their plans for the
future -- the School recommended (among other things):
1) The creation of racism offenses.
2) Continual change to create confusion.
3) The teaching of sex and homosexuality
to children.
4) The undermining of schools and teachers’
authority.
5) Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6) The promotion of excessive drinking.
7) Emptying of churches.
8) An unreliable legal system with bias
against victims of crime.
9) Dependency on the state or state
benefits.
10) Control and dumbing down of media.
11) Encouraging the breakdown of the
family.
One of the main ideas of the Frankfurt
School was to exploit Freud’s idea of “pansexualism" -- the search for
pleasure, the exploitation of the differences between the sexes, the overthrowing
of traditional relationships between men and women.
To further their aims they would:
Attack the authority of the
father, deny the specific roles of father and mother, and wrest away from
families their rights as primary educators of their children.
Abolish differences in the
education of boys and girls.
Abolish all forms of male dominance
-- hence the presence of women in the armed forces.
Declare women to be an "oppressed class"
and men as “oppressors."
Munzenberg summed up the Frankfurt School’s
long-term operation thus: “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks."
The school believed there were two types
of revolution: a) political and
b) cultural.
Cultural revolution demolishes from
within. “Modern forms of subjection are marked by mildness." They saw it
as a longterm project and kept their sights clearly focused on the family,
education, media, sex, and popular culture.
The Family
The school’s "Critical
Theory" preached that the “authoritarian
personality" is 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, about the radical notion of a “community of women" and
in The German Ideology of 1845, 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 necessity of breaking down the contemporary
family. The Institute scholars 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."
Following Karl Marx, the school stressed
how the “authoritarian personality" is a product of the patriarchal family
-- it was Marx who wrote so disparagingly about the idea of the family
being the basic unit of society. 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. In 1933, Wilhelm
Reich, one of their members, wrote in The
Mass Psychology of Fascism that matriarchy was the only genuine
family type of "natural society." Eric Fromm was also an active advocate
of matriarchal theory. Masculinity and femininity, he claimed, were not
reflections of “essential" sexual differences, as the romantics had thought
but were derived instead from differences in life functions, which were
in part socially determined. His dogma was the precedent for the radical
feminist pronouncements that, today, appear in nearly every major newspaper
and television program.
The revolutionaries knew exactly what
they wanted to do and how to do it. They have succeeded.
Education
Lord
Bertrand Russell joined with the Frankfurt School in its effort at
mass social engineering and spilled the beans in his 1951 book, The
Impact of Science on Society.
He wrote:
"Physiology and psychology
afford fields for scientific technique which still await development."
The importance of mass psychology “has been enormously increased by the
growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is
what is called ‘education’. . . .
“The social psychologists of the future
will have a number of classes of schoolchildren 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."
Writing in 1992 in Fidelio Magazine (“The
Frankfurt School and Political Correctness"), Michael
Minnicino observed how the heirs of Marcuse and Adorno now 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 Frankfurt 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."
Drugs
Dr.
Timothy Leary gave us another glimpse into the mind of the Frankfurt
School in his account of the work of the Harvard University Psychedelic
Drug Project, “Flashback."
He quoted a conversation that he had with Aldous
Huxley: “These brain drugs, mass produced in the laboratories, will
bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you
or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution,
Timothy, is the Bible."
Leary then went on: “We had run up against
the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that
has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs
that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic
view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion
based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism had
arrived."
One of the directors of the Authoritarian
Personality project, R.
Nevitt Sanford, played a pivotal role in the usage of psychedelic drugs.
In 1965, he wrote in a book issued by the publishing arm of the UK’s
Tavistock Institute, "The nation, seems to be fascinated by our 40,000
or so drug addicts who are seen as alarmingly wayward people who must be
curbed at all costs by expensive police activity. Only an uneasy Puritanism
could support the practice of focusing on the drug addicts (rather than
our 5 million alcoholics) and treating them as a police problem instead
of a medical one, while suppressing harmless drugs such as marijuana and
peyote along with the dangerous ones."
The leading propagandists of today’s
drug lobby base their argument for legalization on the same scientific
quackery spelled out all those years ago by Dr. Sanford.
Such propagandists include the multibillionaire
atheist George
Soros who chose, as one of his first domestic programs, to fund efforts
to challenge the efficacy of America’s $ 37-billion-a-year war on drugs.
The Soros-backed Lindesmith
Center serves as a leading voice for Americans who want to decriminalize
drug use. “Soros is the ‘Daddy Warbucks’ of drug legalization," claimed
Joseph
Califano Jr. of Columbia University’s National Center on Addiction
and Substance Abuse’ (The Nation, September 2, 1999).
Music, Television, And
Popular Culture
Adorno was to become head of a “music
studies" unit, where in his Theory
of Modern Music he promoted the prospect of unleashing atonal and
other popular music as a weapon to destroy society, degenerate forms of
music to promote mental illness. He said the U. S. could be brought to
its knees by the use of radio and television to promote a culture of pessimism
and despair -- by the late 1930s he (together with Horkheimer) had migrated
to Hollywood.
The expansion of violent videogames
also well supported the school’s aims.
Sex
In his book The
Closing of the American Mind, Alan
Bloom observed how
“Marcuse appealed to university
students in the sixties with a combination of Marx and Freud. In Eros
and Civilization and One
Dimensional Man, Marcuse promised that the overcoming of capitalism
and its false consciousness will result in a society where the greatest
satisfactions are sexual. Rock music touches the same chord in the young.
Free sexual expression, anarchism, mining of the irrational unconscious,
and giving it free rein are what they have in common."
The Media
The modern media -- not least Arthur
“Punch" Sulzberger Jr., who took charge of The New York Times in 1992
-- drew greatly on the Frankfurt School’s study The Authoritarian Personality.
(New York: Harper, 1950). In his book Arrogance (Warner Books, 1993),
former CBS News reporter Bernard
Goldberg noted of Sulzberger that he “still believes in all those old
sixties notions about ‘liberation’ and ‘ changing the world man’. . . .
In fact, the Punch years have been a steady march down PC Boulevard, with
a newsroom fiercely dedicated to every brand of diversity except the intellectual
kind."
In 1953 the institute moved back to
the University of Frankfurt. Adorno died in 1955 and Horkheimer in 1973.
The Institute of Social Research continued, but what was known as the Frankfurt
School did not. The "cultural Marxism" that has since taken hold of our
schools and universities -- that "political correctness," which has been
destroying our family bonds, our religious tradition and our entire culture
-- sprang from the Frankfurt School.
It was these intellectual Marxists who
later, during the anti-Vietnam demonstrations, coined the phrase, “make
love, not war"; it was these intellectuals who promoted the dialectic of
"negative" criticism; it was these theoreticians who dreamed of a utopia
where their rules governed. It was their concept that led to the current
fad for the rewriting of history, and to the vogue for “deconstruction."
Their mantras: “sexual differences are a contract; if it feels good, do
it; do your own thing."
In an address at the U.S. Naval Academy
in August 1999, Dr.
Gerald L. Atkinson, CDR USN (Ret)., gave a background briefing on the
Frankfurt School, reminding his audience that it was the “foot soldiers"
of the Frankfurt School who introduced the "sensitivity
training" techniques used in public schools over the past 30 years
(and now employed by the U.S. military to educate the troops about “sexual
harassment").
During "sensitivity" training, teachers
were told not to teach but to “facilitate.
" Classrooms became centers
of self-examination where children talked about their own subjective feelings.
This technique was designed to convince children they were the sole authority
in their own lives."
Atkinson continued:
"The Authoritarian personality,
studied by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s and 1950s in America, prepared
the way for the subsequent warfare against the masculine gender promoted
by Herbert Marcuse and his band of social revolutionaries under the guise
of ‘ women’s liberation’ and the new left movement in the 1960s. The evidence
that psychological techniques for changing personality is intended to mean
emasculation of the American male is provided by Abraham
Maslow, founder of Third
Force Humanist Psychology and a promoter of the psychotherapeutic classroom,
who wrote that, '. . . the next step in personal evolution is a transcendence
of both masculinity and femininity to general humanness.'"
On April 17, 1962, Maslow gave a lecture
to a group of nuns at Sacred Heart, a Catholic women’s college in Massachusetts.
He noted in a diary entry how the talk had been very "successful," but
he found that very fact troubling. "They shouldn’t applaud me," he wrote,
"they should attack. If they were fully aware of what I was doing, they
would [ attack]" (Journals, p. 157).
The Network
In her booklet Sex
and Social Engineering (Family Education Trust, 1994), Valerie
Riches observed how in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were intensive
parliamentary campaigns taking place emanating from a number of organizations
in the field of birth control (i.e., contraception, abortion, sterilization).
“From an analysis of their
annual reports, it became apparent that a comparatively small number of
people were involved to a surprising degree in an array of pressure groups.
This network was not only linked by personnel, but by funds, ideology,
and sometimes addresses: it was also backed by vested interests and supported
by grants, in some cases by government departments. At the heart of the
network was the Family
Planning Association (FPA) with its own collection of offshoots. What
we unearthed was a power structure with enormous influence."
"Deeper investigation revealed that
the network, in fact extended further afield, into eugenics, population
control, birth control, sexual and family law reforms, sex and health education.
Its tentacles reached out to publishing houses, medical, educational and
research establishments, women’s organizations and marriage guidance --
anywhere where influence could be exerted. It appeared to have great influence
over the media, and over permanent officials in relevant government departments,
out of all proportion to the numbers involved."
"During our investigations, a speaker
at a Sex Education Symposium in Liverpool outlined tactics of sex education
saying: ‘If we do not get into sex education, children will simply follow
the mores of their parents.’ The fact that sex education was to be the
vehicle for peddlers of secular humanism soon became apparent."
“However, at that time the power of
the network and the full implications of its activities were not fully
understood. It was thought that the situation was confined to Britain.
The international implications had not been grasped."
“Soon after, a little book was published
with the intriguing title The
Men Behind Hitler: A German Warning to the World. Its thesis was that
the eugenics movement,
which had gained popularity early in the century, had gone underground
following the holocaust in Nazi Germany, but was still active and functioning
through organizations promoting abortion, euthanasia, sterilization, mental
health, etc. The author urged the reader to look at his home country and
neighboring countries, for he would surely find that members and committees
of these organizations would cross-check to a remarkable extent."
“Other books and papers from independent
sources later confirmed this situation. . . . A remarkable book was also
published in America which documented the activities of the Sex
Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). It
was entitled The
SIECUS Circle: A Humanist Revolution. SIECUS was set up in
1964 and lost no time in engaging in a program of social engineering by
means of sex education in the schools."
“Its first executive director
was Mary
Calderone, who was also closely linked to Planned
Parenthood, the American equivalent of the British FPA. According to
The SIECUS Circle, Calderone supported sentiments and theories put forward
by Rudolph
Dreikus, a humanist, such as:
merging or reversing the sexes or sex roles
liberating children from their families
abolishing the family as we know it
In their book Mind
Siege (Word Publishing, 2000) Tim
LaHaye and David
A. Noebel confirmed Riches’ findings of an international network.
“The leading authorities of
Secular Humanism may be pictured as the starting lineup of a baseball team:
pitching is John
Dewey; catching is Isaac
Asimov; first base is Paul
Kurtz; second base is Corliss
Lamont; third base is Bertrand
Russell; shortstop is Julian
Huxley; left fielder is Richard
Dawkins; center fielder is Margaret
Sanger; right fielder is Carl
Rogers; manager is ‘Christianity is for losers’ Ted
Turner; designated hitter is Mary
Calderone; utility players include the hundreds listed in the back
of Humanist
Manifesto I and II, including Eugenia
C. Scott, Alfred
Kinsey, Abraham
Maslow, Erich
Fromm, Rollo
May, and Betty
Friedan."
“In the grandstands sit the sponsoring
or sustaining organizations, such as the . . . Frankfurt School; the left-wing
of the Democratic Party; the Democratic
Socialists of America; Harvard University; Yale University; University
of Minnesota; University of California (Berkeley); and two thousand other
colleges and universities."
A Practical Example
A practical example of how the tidal
wave of Maslow-think is engulfing English schools was revealed in an article
in the National Association of Catholic Families’ Catholic Family newspaper
(August 2000), where James
Caffrey warned about the Citizenship (PSHE) program which was shortly
to be drafted into the National Curriculum.
“We need to look carefully
at the vocabulary used in this new subject," he wrote, “and, more importantly,
discover the philosophical basis on which it is founded. The clues to this
can be found in the word ‘ choice’ which occurs frequently in the Citizenship
documentation and the great emphasis placed on pupils’ discussing and ‘clarifying’
their own views, values and choices about any given issue.
This is nothing other than the concept
known as ‘Values
Clarification’ -- a concept anathema to Catholicism, or indeed, to
Judaism and Islam."
If we allow their subversion of values
and interests to continue, we will, in future generations, lose all that
our ancestors suffered and died for. We are forewarned, says Atkinson.
A reading of history (it is all in mainstream historical accounts) tells
us that we are about to lose the most precious thing we have -- our individual
freedoms.
“What we are at present experiencing,"
writes Philip Trower in a letter to this writer, “is a blend of two schools
of thought; the Frankfurt School and the liberal tradition going back to
the 18th-century Enlightenment. The Frankfurt School has of course its
remote origins in the 18th-century Enlightenment. But like Lenin’s Marxism
it is a breakaway movement. The immediate aims of both classical liberalism
and the Frankfurt School have been in the main the same (vide your 11 points
above) but the final end is different. For liberals they lead to ‘improving’
and ‘perfecting’ Western Culture, for the Frankfurt School to bringing
about its destruction."
“Unlike hard-line Marxists, the Frankfurt
School does not make any plans for the future. [But] the Frankfurt School
seems to be more far-sighted than our classical liberals and secularists.
At least they see the moral deviations they promote will in the end make
social life impossible or intolerable. But this leaves a big question mark
over what a future conducted by them would be like."
Meanwhile, the Quiet Revolution rolls forward. |