We are most grateful to Anthony Fraser over at the
APROPOS site for permission to use his translation of this excellent analysis of the Frankfurt School written by the renowned Arnaud de Lassus. Those who wonder how we got to where we are today will find many of the answers in this article.
When we think of school shootings, the twisted thinking of government, the raw sewage flowing at us from the entertainment industry, "knockout games", the strange addiction to video games, the general cultural malaise, not to mention our own self-destructive attitudes, and not to mention the self-destructive attitudes of many a notable Churchman, we might peruse de Lassus' article for guidance in understanding
[A pdf printable version of this article can be found at the APROPOS site
here.]
The Genesis of the Cultural Revolution
The Frankfurt School
by
Arnaud de Lassus
(This study first appeared in French in July 2001 published by Action Familiale et Scolaire, BP 80833 -75828 Paris, Cedex 17, France. It was translated by ASF & MT and appeared in Apropos, No. 21 Lent 2003. The Apropos website may be found at www.apropos.org.uk )
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Sources
1. Marx's initial intuition… and that of the Freemasons
2. The communist failures of the 1920's. The Cultural Revolution Project:
• Exported revolution
• The lesson to be learned from failures in central Europe and Italy
• The meeting at the Moscow Marx-Engels Institute at the end of 1922
• The ideas of W. Munzenberg and of G. Lukacs
3. The Frankfurt School - The German phase ( 1923-1932)
• The importance of Frankfurt
• The Institute for Social Research.
4. The Frankfurt School in the United States ( 1933-1950 ) and its field of activity
• The reception by American universities
• The use of degenerate musical forms
• Fight against "prejudices"
• Cultural revolution through film and television
• Action on the school front
• Partial return of the Frankfurt School to Germany
5. Some key ideas of cultural revolution
• The concept of cultural revolution
• The Process
• The Marxist exploitation of Freud's ideas - Pansexualism
• Pansexualism ( continued)
• To exploit the male- female dialectic
• The processes of psychological action
6. The results obtained in the United States and in Europe
• Inspiring anti-establishment movements
• Counterculture
• The invasion of pansexualis
• The cybernetic project
7. The Cultural revolution today
• The continuation of the cybernetic project
• Video games, instruments of cultural revolution
Conclusion
INTRODUCTION
Types of Revolution
In general terms, one can identify two types of Revolution:
Political revolution: the gaining of power through violence and the use of terror. The revolutions of 1789-1793 in France, and of 1917 in Russia, provide a good illustration of this type;
Cultural revolution: one demolishes, from within, the basis of civilization in the country one wants to conquer: its culture, its way of life, its beliefs, its morality, its scale of values ... It is a long-term action, undertaken without visible violence, by applying the formula: "Modern forms of subjection are marked by mildness " (1).
Why study the process of Cultural Revolution
Why is it important to study the process of cultural revolution, which is generally less known than that of political revolution? Because it shows itself to be particularly effective in Catholic countries. Poland gives us a typical example of this: Here is a country which for fifty years had resisted Marxist political power and which, in spite of it, had preserved its religion and its morality. However within a few years of a cultural revolution arriving from the West, morality and customs were penetrated by anti-Christian influences and were adapted to Western standards, which has made us fear a rapid de-Christianisation of the country.(2)
Not a new phenomenon
Cultural revolution is not a new phenomenon. Joseph de Maistre, at the beginning of the l9th century, characterized it as follows:
' 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?’ (3)
But the cultural revolution was systemised particularly since the 1920's, following from an initiative of Lenin and the creation of what was called The Frankfurt School.
We propose to produce some basic information about this initiative and the Frankfurt School and to demonstrate how they contributed powerfully to the counterculture which triumphs today.
The study which we present is in summary form; it will be completed when we have access to wider sources than those mentioned below.
SOURCES
“The Dialectical Imagination - A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950”, by Martin Jay. Publisher University of California Press, 1996.
“The Frankfurt School - Its History, Theories, and Political Significance”, by Rolf Wiggershaus. Publisher: The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998.
Unpublished study by Ralph de Toledano, entitled
The Frankfurt School ( 2000 )
Unpublished study by Jeffrey Steinberg,
Draft Report on Manchurian Children ( 2001 ).
Article by Gerard L. Atkinson,
“Who placed American Men in a Psychic Iron Cage, Part II "The Thread of Cultural Marxism" published by the review, The Resister, Summer - Autumn edition, 1998.
Eros and Civilisation by Herbert Marcuse. Les Editions de Minuit 1997 ( First published in English in 1955).
The first two books are written by authors sympathetic to the Frankfurt School. The remaining authors, other than Marcuse, have a critical view of cultural revolution.
1. MARX'S INITIAL INTUITION... AND THAT OF THE FREEMASONS
In 1843, some five years before the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote to a friend:
'Here is what we have to accomplish: ruthless criticism of all that exists. Ruthless in two ways: the criticism should neither be afraid of its own conclusions nor of the conflicts with the powers that be.'
Ruthless criticism of all that exists: by this he meant not only politics, religion, law and family but all the elements of Western culture.
These ideas of Marx corresponded with those brought into play by the Freemasons at the same time. It will be suffice to quote two texts by members of the Italian Alta Vendita (4).
‘To propagate light, it is both fit and useful to set everything which aspires to move in motion. The essential thing is to isolate men from their families, to make them lose their morals’. Piccolo Tigre(5) 1822(6)
'Catholicism is no more afraid of the sharp dagger than are monarchies ; but these two bases of social order can collapse by corruption : let us therefore never grow tired of corrupting. Pervert hearts and you will have no more Catholics '. Vindice(7) 1838(8)
After the Communist Party Manifesto of 1848, Marxism concentrated on political and economic actions. Its attack on western culture moved on to the second phase. We will have to wait until the 1920’s to see Marxists methodically taking up again Marx’s ideas of 1843.
2. THE COMMUNIST FAILURES OF THE 1920'S - THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION PROJECT
Exported revolution
After the October Revolution in Russia, one of Lenin's ideas had been to export revolution to Central and Western Europe to save it in Russia. It was a failure. Revolution almost failed in Russia and was saved only thanks to American financial support.
It failed in Hungary too, where Bela Kun was not able to maintain a Communist regime for more than 133 days (in 1919).
It failed in Germany: the Spartacus League, founded in 1916 by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg organized an uprising in Berlin in 1919 which was fiercely suppressed.
It failed in Italy, where communist parties and unions were subjected to a crushing defeat by the ex-socialist Mussolini.
Lessons to be learned from the failures in Central Europe and Italy
A methodical reflection on the aforementioned failures led to the following conclusions:
• Marx had predicted that industrialization would lead to intolerable conditions for the working classes and the elimination of the lower middle class. These predictions were shown to be erroneous: the increase in productivity improved the quality of life of all classes.
• The proletariat, the class so vaunted by the workers, could never be the tool to overthrow the industrialised West and to import revolution there.
• It was necessary to abandon the barely realistic idea of a frontal assault against the bourgeoisie and capitalism in the developed countries of the West.
• The West could only be overthrown after destruction of its living strength through the treason of intellectuals.
Thus, they were led to rediscover those intuitions which Marx had had before the Manifesto of 1848, and to begin a cultural revolution of the Marxist type (in other words by exploiting thoroughly all the forms of dialectic).
The meeting held at the end of 1922 at the Marx - Engels Institute in Moscow
To give concrete effect to the previous reflections, a meeting was organized at the end of 1922, on Lenin's initiative, at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. It clarified the concept of cultural revolution and the basis of its organization. 'It was perhaps more harmful to Western civilization than the Bolshevik Revolution itself ‘, writes Ralph de Toledano (9). The following participated in the meeting:
Karl Radek, Lenin's representative;
Felix Dzherzhinsky (10), to ensure that whatever strategy emerged would be integrated into the Soviet worldwide network of murder and subversion;
Willi Munzenberg;
Georg Lukacs.
Let us consider the two most influential members at this meeting, Willi Munzenberg and Georg Lukacs.
Willi Munzenberg played an important role in the creation of the Komintern (11); He is presented as a German communist leader in the inter-war period in J.P. Nicolas's book
"1789-1989 - 200 ans de guerre
révolutionnaire",( 200 years of revolutionary war), p. 107. He brought a sense of organisation to the proposed cultural revolution. He was to be murdered on the orders of Stalin on a date we cannot establish.(12)
Georg Lukacs ( 1885-1971 ), came from a rich Jewish family from Hungary, he rebelled against his parents who nevertheless supported him throughout his life, He was the People's Commissar for Culture and Education in Bela Kun's Communist government in Hungary.
As a good Marxist theoretician he developed the subject "Revolution and Eros ", in other words the sexual instinct used as instrument of destruction. In the cultural revolution project, his role was decisive: he brought his ideas to it and it benefited from his knowledge of the cultural field and his relations with German-speaking artists and intellectuals.
The ideas of W. Munzenberg and G. Lukacs
The force of small numbers
'They both ( Munzenberg and Lukacs) knew that societies and civilizations are not propelled by mass movements. The Bolshevik revolution had not been brought about by mass demonstrations, but by the disintegration of Tsarism, the corruption of the ruling class, and by the erosion of that class's faith in itself and its will to hold to power. Lenin's theoretical journal, Iskra, which was instrumental in bringing down the imperial regime had a circulation of 3000 - and all of them intellectuals.'(13)
A cultural revolution to break up the West
'The success of a strategy which would bring about that disintegration, corruption, and erosion in the West, the cultural revolution could alone produce the pre-emptive conditions for a Communist revolution (…)
The obstacle was Western civilization itself and the culture it engendered (…)
Western civilization was made up of many mansions - the morality that derives from religion, the family, respect for the past as a guide to the future, the restraint of man's baser instincts, and a social and political organisation which guaranteed freedom without inviting licence. And of these obstacles, the two greatest were an immanent God and the family.
This was the message of the Marx of 1843, before he launched into pseudo-scientific economics history. His call then was for the ruthless criticism of everything existing, but particularly religion, science and the family.. Then, with Western man "liberated" of his humanity and rooting in the mud, the new, politically correct society would arise’ (14).
How would it be brought about?
The first key-idea - to act upon the intellectuals:
'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 '(15).
The second key-idea - to exploit Freud's ideas in a Marxist way:
' The start of conceptual debasement of man's sexual instincts has been begun by Sigmund Freud… Sex, the most explosive aspect of the human psyche, was to be unleashed. An amalgam of neo-Freudianism and neo-Marxism were to destroy the fragile defences of Western civilization’s immune system ' (16).
3. THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL - ITS GERMAN PHASE (1923-1932 )
To put flesh on this programme, an Institute for Marxism was founded at Frankfurt, in 1923. It quickly took a more neutral label: ‘The Institute for Social Research' (in German: Institut für Sozialforshung ) (17).
Importance of Frankfurt
Since the Middle Ages, Frankfurt has been one of the most important centres of influence in Germany.
• It was the city of origin of several financial dynasties those of Rothschild, Shiff, Speyer, Stern), Frankfurt was considered, in the l9th century, as the main centre of Jewish finance in Germany.
• In the 18th century, it was Frankfurt where one found the main centre of the Bavarian Illuminati (High Masonry which played a key role in the preparation of the French Revolution).
• It was at Wilhemsbad near Frankfurt where, in 1781 , a Masonic conventicle decided upon the death of Louis XVI and that of the King of Sweden.
• In the 20th century:
'Frankfurt: a city which had the highest percentage of Jews in the population of any German town and the best known and, after Berlin, the second largest Jewish community. (..) It was a city in which the number of middle-class sympathisers with socialism and communism was unusually high.' (18)
It is therefore logical that it was at Frankfurt that the research institute for the study of the planning stage of cultural revolution, The Institute for Social Research, and which, after 1960, was to be called The Frankfurt School, should be set up.
The Institute for Social Research
From1923 to 1930, the Institute was directed by Carl Grünberg, of Austrian origin and Marxist convictions (but without being affiliated to a party) and known and respected in academic circles. From 1930 to 1958, it was directed by Marx Horkheimer, a doctor of philosophy, and also of Marxist orientation.
Georg Lukacs having supplied the Institute with a good number of its basic ideas left it afterwards; but
‘Whatever the disagreements that separated them in subsequent years - and they were serious - the Institut and Lukacs spoke to similar questions from within a common tradition’.(19)
The other important personalities at the Institute were :
Erick Fromm, Theodor Adorno ( 1903-1969 ), author of the book
The Authoritarian Personality, which we will address below,
Karl Korsch, Wilhem Reich, Friedrich Pollock, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse ( 1898-1979 ) (who was accepted as a member of The Institute in 1932). It is important to note that Herbert Marcuse's arrival strengthened the group of those, within the Institute, who had adopted 'a dialectical rather than a mechanical understanding of Marxism " (20). This means that the Marxists of the Institute held ideas more akin to Trotskyism ( revolution spread throughout like a virus) rather than of Stalinist monolithism.
In his book
The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay insists on the homogeneity of the group constituting the Institute for Social Research and presents this as
'an avowedly Marxist organisation, staffed almost exclusively by men of Jewish descent - at least by Nazi standards'. (21).
4 THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL IN THE UNITED STATES (1933-1950) AND ITS FIELDS OF ACTIVITY.
On the 30th January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor and took power in Germany. Simultaneously, the Institute closed its doors in Frankfurt and re-organised itself in the United States. It appears that this decision had been made prior to Hitler's accession to power. What follows is a decription by Geoffrey Steinberg in his (as yet unpublished) study 'Draft Report on Manchurian Children' (22) of the installation of the institute in the United States and its different fields of activity in the years 1932-1950 ( The sub-headings are ours)
The Reception By American Universities
‘By the early 1930s, the Frankfurt School (23)
abandoned pre-Hitler Germany, where they had already played a mighty role in the cultural decadence that fostered the Nazis, and, after a brief sojourn in Switzerland, settled in the United States. Courtesy of Columbia University, Princeton University, the London School of Economics, the British Fabian Society, education subversive John Dewey, the Rockefeller family foundations, and others, leading figures in the Frankfurt School were given privileged positions in the elite American universities. Columbia University became the official "American home" of the Frankfurt School’
The Use Of Degenerate Musical Forms
‘At Princeton University, Frankfurt School member Paul Lazarsfeld headed the Radio Research Project, an early social engineering and social profiling effort, bankrolled by the Rockefeller foundations and the U.S. Army. Frankfurt School leader Theodor Adorno became the head of the music studies unit under Lazarsfeld, where he wrote, in the 1930s and 40s, about the prospects of unleashing atonal and other forms of popular music as a weapon to destroy society. In his seminal work, The Theory of Modern Music, Adorno advocated the use of such degenerate forms of music to promote mental illness~-including necrophilia--on a mass scale. He wrote elsewhere that the United States could be brought to its knees via the use of radio and television, to promote a culture of pessimism, despair and self-hatred.’
The Struggle Against "Prejudices"
‘In the early 1940s, the American Jewish Committee hired Horkheimer and Adorno, along with a majority of the Frankfurt School refugees, to direct a decade-long Studies in Prejudice, which produced five major works. The most famous of the Studies, The Authoritarian Personality (24)
, trashed American postwar morality, arguing that, because the vast majority of Americans still believed in the virtues of God, nation and family, America was ripe for a fascist authoritarian takeover. For the Frankfurt School social revolutionaries, any belief in a transcendent God was fascist.
It was from this struggle against "prejudices" that "political correctness", which triumphs today, was born.’
The Cultural Revolution Through Film And Television
‘Some leading Frankfurt School personalities, including Adorno and Max Horkheimer, had, by the late 1930s, migrated to Hollywood, where they joined the ranks of Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Igor Stravinsky and Alexander Korda, in pioneering the use of the new emerging "mass culture industry" as a vehicle for mass cultural subversion and the furtherance of their "Cultural Pessimism" project. Not coincidentally, Korda was a graduate of the Ministry of Culture and Education of the Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, where he served directly under the Frankfurt School's founder and top Comintern spy, Lukacs. The Englishmen, Huxley and Isherwood were veterans of British Fabian psychological warfare projects.’(25)
‘Simple-minded anti-Communists, oblivious of the Frankfurt School's Comintern agenda of "culture war" spent so much time looking for subliminal revolutionary messages in the Hollywood cinemas that they failed to take note of the fact that the movie industry was increasingly turning out trash films that glorified sex, murder and drug abuse. Had they studied the twisted writings of Horkheimer and Adorno, or their Hollywood fellow travelers Huxley and Isherwood, they would have realized, long ago, that the name of the game was psycho-cultural subversion.
As early as the 1950s, Adorno was writing, in various "critical theory" journals, that once the majority of Americans had been trapped into spending their leisure time in front of the television set or the movie theater screen, the process of destroying "bourgeois's capitalist society" would be completed. Aldous Huxley described this process of brainwashing, enhanced by psychedelic drug use, as a "kind of concentration camp without tears," and as the "final revolution."’
Action In Schools
‘At the same time that Hollywood was being invaded by Frankfurt School members and fellow travelers, the American educational system, from kindergarten to postgraduate, was also being assailed by the same apparatus. The authors of this report provided an in-depth account of how the Frankfurt School, in league with John Dewey and his cohorts at the National Educational Association, and Kurt Lewin's National Training Labs, have subverted the American educational system (see "The Crisis in American Education," 1995, by Jeffrey Steinberg and Paul Goldstein). The fact is, by the end of World War II, the transformation of our public schools, from educational institutions dedicated to preparing young people to function as citizens of a democratic republic, into experimental laboratories testing murderous theories of mass mind control and Marxist-Freudian social revolution, was well underway. The University of Chicago, a hotbed of Frankfurt School and Deweyite subversion, contributed one of the seminal studies on how to transform American education, edited by Prof. Benjamin Bloom, called “Taxonomy of American Educational Reform”.
Several years later, Lord Bertrand Russell wrote, in The Future of Science, "I think the subject that will be of the most importance politically is mass psychology... 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 influences of the home are obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten... It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies of policemen.’(26)
Let us clearly understand what Jeffrey Steinberg is saying in the preceding text. It is not a question of attributing the totality of the subversion in the domains of music, film, television, and school to the Frankfurt School; it is a question simply of showing that, in these various domains, the Frankfurt School had explained in advance what must be done and then piloted it.
The Partial Return of the Frankfurt School to Germany
In 1950 , three of the main members of the Frankfurt School, M. Horkheimer, T. Adorno and F. Pollock left the United States to re-settle in Frankfurt and to set up a new " Institute for Social Research ", the building of which was inaugurated on November 14, 1951.
The Institute pursued its activities until Theodor Adorno's death in 1969.
A part of the team ( which included H. Marcuse) remained in the United States.
The principal work of the Frankfurt School was therefore spread over a period of 46 years: from 1923 to1969. In 1969, the movement was well established and younger men would take charge.
5. SOME KEY-IDEAS OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
In the previous chapters, was already outlined the general concept of cultural revolution, as it was conceived by the Frankfurt School.
What follows is a more systematic explanation drawn from the works of Herbert Marcuse.
Why Herbert Marcuse? Because he has explained clearly the main ideas conceived and put into practice by him and his colleagues at The Frankfurt School (ideas known by the name of "Critical Theory”); and because he is, to our knowledge, the only member of The School to have several works (about ten) translated into French and still available:
The Concept of Cultural Revolution
' One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society. The traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution have ended. These ideas are old fashioned...what we must understand is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.' (27).
The Process of Cultural Revolution
A quiet revolution
Cultural subversion will be wide-spread not through terrorist processes but slowly, subtly, peacefully. Hence the idea of a cultural revolution which would be a 'quiet revolution ' (28).
A new revolutionary sensibility
If the classic class struggle is abandoned (the working class not being revolutionary anymore), this will be to the benefit of a new revolutionary sensibility. the revolt will have to be developed in two new areas:.
· non-material needs (of self-determination, human relations)
· the physiological dimensions of existence (race, sex)
Freudo-Marxism
In conformity with this new revolutionary sensibility, one will exploit Freud's ideas but from a Marxist rather than a bourgeois perspective.
This system is called " Cultural Marxism ". The ideological part of which is known under the name of "Critical Theory".
Let us recall that the book already cited The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno (published in 1950) can be considered as a sort of manifesto of the "Critical Theory".
To Exploit Freud's Ideas In A Marxist Way - Pansexualism
We wish to emphasize this point, which constitutes one of the main basic ideas of The Frankfurt School.
A Summary of Freud by H. Marcuse
Marcuse summarized Freud's theory as follows:
a) The essence of being is Eros, the search for pleasure (pansexualism);
b) The individual has to accept the cultural control of his instinctive needs, otherwise there would be no possibility of civilized society;
c) From this arises the conflict between the principle of pleasure (free satisfaction of instinctive needs) and the principle of reality ( where needs are controlled).
Cultural Marxism's interest in Freudianism
The Marxist is interested in conflict, in the dialectic, and all that can incite these. His idea of civilization is different from that of Freud. In the Freudian scheme of things summarized above, he will accept a) but not b).
Freudian ideas will be used as a dialectical element to destroy existing civilization and serve to support ' a civilization developing from libidinous relations and supported by them’.
Pansexualism must be thus developed methodically with all its destructive effects.
Pansexualism ( Continued).
Freud only systematized pansexualism the origin of which goes back to the Kabbalah (29) (and is also found in heathen religions).
It is a rather complex theory the main elements of which can be can be summarized thus:
According to the Kabbalah , God can be considered in himself or in his manifestation;
In himself God is an indefinite being, vaguely called En Sof (who has no limits) or Ayin (non-being);
In his manifestation; God shows himself by
emanations by which he perfects himself: from whence comes the idea of an evolutionary God, and that of pantheism (the notion of creation being replaced by that of emanation);
These emanations number 10 and are called Sefiroth. Three of them are male, the other three female;
The Sefiroth, Victory (male) and Glory (female) are concentrated in the Sefirah, Foundation,(30) the symbol of which is the organ of generation.
One understands, in these conditions, that the sexual principle, presented as an integral part of the divinity, has a tendency to permeate everything.
Because it is rooted in the Kaballah, the pansexualism of the Frankfurt School (and of the cultural revolution to which it contributed so powerfully) has therefore a religious connotation
.
The Exploitation of the Dialectic Between Man and Woman
Pansexualism - in other words the outburst of the instinctive needs of man - constitutes the first exploitation of the difference between the sexes.
It contains within it another which will be used systematically: the overthrow of the traditional relationships between men and women brought about by the following actions which are methodically pursued:
To attack the authority of the father; to deny the specific roles of the father and mother;
To abolish differences in the education of boys and girls;
To abolish forms of male superiority: hence the presence of the women in the armed forces;
To consider women and children as an oppressed class, and men as the class of oppressors.
In support of this overthrow there exists an ideology: radical feminism.
Using pansexualism and the overthrow of the relationship between men and women, the founders of the cultural revolution have at their disposal two powerful means of destroying the family.
Processes of Psychological Action
The Frankfurt School knew how to draw in a remarkable way on the scientific progress of its day: the progress in the means of communication (cf. its action with regard to music and films, which we referred to above; the progress of the psychological sciences).
In this last domain, through its protegé, Abraham Maslow, it played a important role in perfecting from 1943, those methods of pyschological conditioning known in France as " group dynamics ' and in the United States as ' sensitivity training ' or " T groups ' .(31)
6. RESULTS OBTAINED IN THE UNITED STATES AND IN EUROPE
The Inspiration of Anti-Establishment Movements
Many movements were inspired by the ideas coming from the Frankfurt School.
Let us quote a few examples:
The new American left of the1960's;
The women's liberation movement of 1960's (Betty Friedan's book,
The Feminine Mystique dates from 1963);
The May, 1968 movement in France (cf. the role played by H.Marcuse)
The ' Counterculture '
The ideas of the Frankfurt School were embodied in what one called “counterculture”, the “cultural movement” which dominated the American left circles until the late 1960's and which has been described as follows:
' Counterculture is the cultural basis of the new left. It includes the effort to discover new types of communities, new models of family, new sexual customs, new styles of life, new aesthetic forms, new personal identities opposed to power politics, the bourgeois lifestyle and the Protestant work ethic' .(32)
This description dates from 1968. It is equally true today, but with one significant difference, however: this counterculture - characterized among other things by pansexualism, the destruction of paternal authority, and feminism - has became not only the cultural basis of the new American left but of almost the whole of society throughout the United States and Europe.
The Invasion of Pansexualism
Let us return to pansexualism; it is undoubtedly the most dangerous element given its religious origin. It is necessary to recognize that it has invaded our society, that is what accounts for female fashion pushing indecency to the limits, the posters and advertisements, magazines, films and television broadcasts, the behavior of the young people and the not-so-young, for sex education; pansexualism supported by the State and which has even penetrated into traditional Catholic circles (cf. the dress adopted for church and pilgrimages by a certain number of young women and girls).
To give an example, here is the recent testimony of a priest of French origin exercising his ministry in the Lebanon :
It is important to look at the evidence: whether they are Catholic, Orthodox or Moslem, one does not have the impression that the religious authorities of this country (Lebanon) realise the galloping degradation of morals that has taken place. Particularly through the means of language and American and Anglo-Saxon models.
At the very least ecclesiastical authorities should react. But how does one publicly seek the censorship of squalid publications (for the greater part in English) or of disgusting television programs, when the pastors have the custom of remaining silent in their own churches when faced with the glistening of bare flesh offered to their blasé parishioners who are not averse to sharing what is on offer?.
But what is striking in the Near East, is that this tide of pornography, these dubious deviances and this display of vice appear only in "Christian" regions. It is not in the neighbouring countries, with a Moslem majority, that one would find, visa and residence permits granted to the 7000 prostitutes who come from Eastern Europe and whose blonde hair may lead astray some young (and not so young) Lebanese.
It is alarming all the same to be told in Damascus by a very holy monk: " Here, Islam protects Christianity, because it does not allow the importation of moral corruption ".
It would do good to read once more, in Revelation, what Our Lord said to the angel of the Church of Laodicea. And to agree with it.(Apocalypse 3 , 14-22)'.(33)
The Cybernetic Project
What are cybernetics? According to the
Le Robert Dictionary, it is
‘the science comprising the collection of theories grouping studies relative to communications and to regulation in the human being and the machine’.
This "science", which was developed in the United States from 1942, rests on the (false) hypothesis of the
‘essential unity of the problems of communication and control ( understood in the sense of command) in machines and human beings' (34). It is presented as a mixture of well-founded scientific theories (mainly the theory of information) and of materialist ideology (man is only a sophisticated machine; and machines – one does yet talk about computers - will allow us to reproduce the functioning of the human brain and even to surpass it).
It was in New York, in May, 1942, at a conference organized by the Josiah Macy Foundation, when the working party at the origin of cybernetics. was launched. It would be known later under the name of the Cybernetics Group. The initial activities, called the
“Man-Machine Project", had as its object
‘to draw together a group of electrical engineers, biologists, anthropologists and psychologists to devise experiments in social control, based on the belief that the human brain was nothing more than a complex input/output machine, and that human behaviour could, in effect be programmed, on both an individual and societal scale.' (35).
The group’s works took shape only after second world war, with the support of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).(36)
Ten conferences organized under the auspices of the Macy Foundation were held between 1964 and 1953 and marked its stages.
And it is here that one sees the appearance of members of the Frankfurt School which had, since the beginning, caught the attention of the cybernetic project for their more general enterprise of cultural revolution.
While directing the groups of studies on prejudices (cf. above, p.7-8), Max Horkheimer, director of the Frankfurt School, collaborated with the Cybernetics Group. In 1948, he participated at Paris at the foundation of the World Federation of Mental Health (WFMH), one of the more harmful projects stemming from the Cybernetics Group.
Kurt Lewin, a fellow traveller of the Frankfurt School, played an important role within this same group (he had founded at MIT the research centre for group dynamics, then created the National Training Laboratories active in the same domain. With Karl Korsch, another member of the Frankfurt School, he had set up a foundation to develop artificial intelligence).
Here is how Jeffrey Steinberg presents the role of the Frankfurt School and the associated group, the Tavistock Institute (37), in the cybernetic project:
‘What Lukacs and his Frankfurt School proteges despised about Western Christianity was its belief in the sanctity of the individual soul, the idea that every individual human being was created by God in his living image, and that every individual had a divine spark of creativity that could serve the betterment of all mankind. Lukacs and company understood, all too well, that no revolution could succeed in the West for very long, until the principle of Imago Viva Dei (man in the living image of God) had been destroyed and replaced by a far more bestialized and pessimistic notion of mankind.
It is here where the "Kulturkamp?' of Lukacs and Adorno and Horkheimer and Marcuse directly impacted upon the postwar technological revolution in mass communication. The convergence point was a little-known project, launched in the early 1940s, by a virtually unknown tax-exempt foundation, the Josiah P. Macy Foundation. Macy bankrolled a decade-long "Man-Machine Project" which came to be known among its initiates as the Cybernetics Group.
Although the two most famous individuals associated with the invention of the term "cybernetics" were John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, several other individuals were in reality the dominant figures within the group. The real "pioneers" of the so-called "information revolution" were Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Kurt Lewin, Max Horkheimer and Dr. John Rawlings Rees -all pivotal figures in the Frankfurt School, Tavistock, or both.
The Cybernetics Group borrowed a page from Georg Lukacs' gameplan for social revolution. They argued that there was nothing divine about man. Indeed, man-made machines would soon be superior "thinking machines" to the human mind.(38).’
7. CULTURAL REVOLUTION TODAY.
Thirty years after the death of T. Adorno in 1969; twenty years after that of the H. Marcuse in 1979, the cultural revolution continues by remaining impregnated with the ideas of the Frankfurt School, whose key idea was expressed thus by Willi Munzenberg:
"We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks"(39).
We have already addressed at length the subject of pansexualism, more current today than ever (cf. the quotation of the page 12).
We shall confine ourselves to the cybernetic project and video games as another element of the current situation where the legacy from the Frankfurt School is demonstrated.
The continuation of the Cybernetic Project
As indicated above, the Frankfurt School had greatly inspired the Cybernetics Group during the 1940’s and 1950’s. In bodies stemming from this group, one finds the same inspiration.
Here is the example of the Media Lab:
'By the 1980s, MIT had spawned the Media Lab, another direct outgrowth of the 1940s and 50s Cybernetics group. Here social engineers worked hand in glove with the engineers and machine designers who were developing high speed computers, computer graphics, holographics, and the first generation of computer simulators.(...) According to the initial proposal the laboratory was to provide for the 'intellectual mix of two rapidly evolving and very different fields; information technologies and the human sciences' (Steve Joshua Heims, The Cybernetics Group) "(40).
Which was the state of mind of these researchers? In his book The Cybernetics Group, which we have already quoted, Steve Joshua Heims indicates that in the 1980's, the cybernetics milieu had created its own religion, a pagan system in full agreement with what Timothy Leary called " scientific paganism".
The scientific paganism of the researchers was one thing; entirely different, and more grave to boot, was the fact that the results obtained by these researchers allowed them to develop scientific paganism on a grand scale and more generally the cultural revolution of which scientific paganism is an element.
‘The Media Lab of MIT and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab were two of the magnets for this money and the research work which fuelled both the Pentagon training-simulation programs and the evolving video-game industry.' (41).
We find therefore that The Frankfurt School, the Cybernetics Group, Media Lab and other bodies, and the video-games industry, provides one of those relationships which allowed the putting into place of a technique which is one of the most effective instruments of the cultural revolution today, the video-game (Media Lab is obviously not responsible for the fundamentally immoral orientation of a great number of video-games).
Video-Games, Instruments of Cultural Revolution
The Expansion of second-generation video-games in the United States is very fast. According to Jeffrey Steinberg (op.cit. P. 93), the video-games industry "of point-and-shoot games" has an annual turnover of 9 to 11 billion dollars.
These games are a perfection of role-playing, which were practised from the late 1970's. They allow one to while one's hours away in a virtual world where one can be anybody one wants to be and can act without having to suffer for the consequences of one's acts. A person - young or not-so-young can therefore be habitually divorced from reality and easily manipulated in the direction suggested by the game. Even if the orientation of the game is good it can still nevertheless have an ill-effect resulting from the time, often very long, spent in a virtual world.
But very frequently the orientation of the game is bad: one finds in them violence of various sorts, very realistic shooting simulations (which is useful for training soldiers in a military unit, but evidently dangerous for young people left to themselves), pornographic aspects (pansexualism is everywhere),
incitement to indulge in magic (the spectator-actor casts spells which, on the screen, are effective), Satanism, and in a general way the excitement of the lust for power linked to a materialist conception of life.
Here is example of how a production company presents the video game "Gangsters" (which, according to some seems harmless):
'This gives you the opportunity to be a gangster in a Chicago-style city of the 1920s. Controlling an underground organisation dealing in extortion, illegal liquor, prostitution, violence, intimidation, blackmail, gambling, gang warfare, bribery of officials, permanent elimination of individuals and a host of money-making activities.' (42)
This gives a general outline to the game , but here is what the player must do:
' The aim of the game is to build your gang and business empire to rule the city. To do this you will have to beat three other gangs operating in the city, and avoid arrest by the authorities.' (43).
A young person who actively plays in such a scenario for hours on end will be tempted to transpose some of his virtual experience into the real world. (44)
This is what has happened in the United States during the murders of young people by some of their classmates (in the age group 11-17 years), which occurred over the last few years. Inquiries have shown that the young murderers had fired like professionals, and that they had acquired their mastery in shooting and the desire to put it into practice through the use of video games containing that type of simulation (45).
We must recognize that a great number of video-games at present circulating in the United States correspond well to the objectives of the Frankfurt School: to spread a 'culture' based on pessimism, depravity, sexual licence, violence and drugs.
CONCLUSION
· It was in 1923 that The Frankfurt School begin its work.
From the 1950's, the cultural revolution which it inspired (it was not the only one to do so) developed in the United States then in Europe. About twenty years later, the revolution of May, 1968, under the influence of Marcuse, marks an important stage. About another thirty years after 1968 would be needed to see the triumph of the counterculture which began eighty years earlier.
We are dealing with a long term operation which was brilliantly conceived. The men of thought and action who devised it had the foresight to understand what had to be done and to carry it out consistently by selecting priority sectors (universities, music, media broadcasting, psychological and educational action), to put at their service the networks which were offered to them. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
· How can we explain how this action met with the same success, in Catholic countries, as it did in Protestant countries? Without doubt this was because Catholics had another cultural revolution to face, as well as that inspired by the Frankfurt School: the one which since the 1960's, has raged inside the Church. It was a general disturbance: a new evolutionary Mass, a new calendar, the abandonment of Latin and the religious habit, the organ and traditional songs replaced by profane music, transformation of religious art (cf. the cathedral of Evry) (46), churches becoming conference rooms rather than temples of the Lord, inconsistent catechesis proposing a formless and undemanding religion. ( ... ) The Catholic environment appeared to degrade and disappear at the very moment when the faithful needed it most ... Hence the uprooting of Catholics from their culture resulting in their abandoning religious practice en masse and thus all the more vulnerable to the cultural revolution which came from Frankfurt via the United States.
· The parallels between the two cultural revolutions is remarkable:
They occurred barely within 10 years of one another; political leaders favoured the first whereas religious leaders supported the second or allowed it to happen. This begs the question as to whether there are not a number of connections between them.
· What do we do if the mystery of iniquity is so very powerfully installed? It is necessary obviously to protect, in our fields of action, our Catholic and French culture, to keep alive the rest of Christendom which remains among us, not following the general train of things under the excuse that it is the way things are. Jean Vaquié's very beautiful text,
La bataille préliminaire (The Preliminary Battle), is published in this issue of Apropos and deserves to be meditated upon in relation to this subject.
All this supposes a certain asceticism; it consists in suppressing what ought to be suppressed to avoid being contaminated by the counterculture, just as the Christians of the first centuries refrained from going to baths and the circus to escape the corruption of their time.
· In conclusion, let us emphasise the usefulness of knowing - all the better to fight it - the process of destruction so intelligently implemented by the Frankfurt School and its followers. We must not neglect such facts, because, as Abbot Joseph Lemann (47) remarked in the book
L'entrée des Israélites dans la société française (p. 205):
' He who does not take account in history of not only Providence, but also Hell, will only ever have an inaccurate view and will only provide incomplete explanations. God and Satan fight for the heart of the man, each of us knows that; but they also battle for the direction of society, its developments and its stages. The first page of the Bible reveals it; Christ reminded us regarding the Church, that the Gates of Hell will not prevail; and since then, the history of these eighteen centuries lets us clearly see, over and above our quarrels over cities, countries, nations, races, the spectacle of these two immense forces in combat. Infernal malice devastating society, and divine grace repairing, supporting and always advancing it.’
Arnaud de Lassus
NOTES:
1 A socialist formula from 1968. See further details of this subject, in
Pascal Bernardin's L'Empire écologique, chapter V “Techniques of
non-aversive control”. and the commentary on same in Ecology and
Globalism in this issue of Apropos.
2 See Maciej Giertych's article " The Political and Economic Situation in Poland ".
3 Quoted by Philippe Ploncard d' Assac in Le nationalisme français, p. 26.
4 The Alta Vendita was a high-level Masonry which, during the first half of the 19th Century, dominated European Masonry.
5 The pseudonym of an Alta Vendita agent
6 Letter of 18th January 1822; quoted by Cretineau-Joly, L’eglise romaine en face de la Revolution, t.11, p.104.
7 The pseudonym of an Alta Vendita agent
8
Letter of 9th August 1838; quoted by Cretineau-Joly, op.cit. t.11,
p.128. Cf. the AFS brochure, Connaissance elementaire de la
franc-maconnerie, p.110
9 The Frankfurt School p.11. This study shows how the idea of cultural revolution was born and piloted by the Frankfurt School
10 The creator of the Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka.
11Third
Communist International, founded in 1919 by Lenin and dissolved by
Stalin in 1943. It was reconstituted at Sofia in 1995.
12 The Marxist Encyclopedia states that he was murdered in 1944. (Editor, Apropos)
13 Ralph de Toledano, op.cit. P. 23
14 Ralph de Toledano , Op. cit p.14-15
15 Willi Munzenberg, quoted by Ralph de Toledano, op.cit. p.5
16 Ralph de Toledano, op.cit. P. 24. This point will be developed below, p.X
17 Official Date of its creation in February 3, 1923 by a decree of the
Ministry of Education (cf. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p.
10).
18 Ralf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, p. 17.(Wiggerhaus
cites this among the reasons for the extremely favourable circumstances
at the outset of the Institute for Social Research).
19 Martin Jay, op.cit., p.175
20 Martin Jay, op.cit. P. 29.
21 Martin Jay, op.cit. P. 29
22 A study on video-games and their destructive effect
23 Called in future The Frankfurt School Institute for Social Research
24
Published in 1950 by Harper & Brothers NY. It was written by
Adorno, along with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J Levinson, R Nevitt
Sanford, in collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson and
William Morrow.
25 The Fabian Society : an English, Socialist movement founded in 1883. It was the origin of the Labour Party.
26 Jeffrey Steinberg, Michel Steinberg, Anton Chaitkin, “Draft Report on Manchurian Children “ p. 5 to 8 ( Study of 2001).
27 Text of H. Marcuse, quoted in The Resister, Summer/ Autumn, 1998.
28
At the same time as the work was being carried out by The Frankfurt
School, these ideas were being developed in parallel by the Italian
Marxist theoretician, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) who remained in prison
from 1926 until his death.
29 In Jewish thought, one generally associates esoteric and mystical
education with the Kabbalah. In the widest meaning of a word, this
describes the successive esoteric currents which developed from the end
of the period of the Second Temple and which became the dynamic elements
in the history of Judaism - (Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Judaism,
article The Mystical Jew).
30 The sefiroth, Victory, Glory and Foundation are in Hebrew called Netzach, Hod and Yesod respectively. (Editor, Apropos)
31 Cf. The Resister, Summer - Autumn, 1998, p. 54.
On group dynamics,
See the Apropos pamphlet " Elementary knowledge of the New Age", p. 33
to 37. See also the book by Ed. Dieckermann Jr. Sensitivity Training and
the Cult of Mind Control.
32 Theodore Roszah, “Youth and the great refusal ", The Nation, on 1968. Quote by News Weekly, in February 10, 2000
33 Bulletin de l’Association de St Pierre d’ Antioche et de tout l’
Orient (Les Sablons, 61560 Bazoches-sur-Hoeur), no. XXIII, March, 2001,
article Repens-toi, Laodicée ).
See the articlehaving the same title in n°155 (in June, 2001) of A.F.S.
34 P. de Latil., La pensée artificielle , quoted by Le Robert.
35 J. Steinberg, op.cit. P. 86.
36 Usually indicated by the abbreviation M.I.T. (Massachussetts Institute of
Technology).
37 British Centre of the psychological group of which John Rawling Rees was Director.
38
J. Steinberg, op.cit. p. 12-13. This author is not a Catholic; the
above phrase: ' Every individual possesses a divine spark of creativity
is a little ambiguous, and should be understood as meaning: ' Every
individual can possess divine grace’.
39 Quote by Ralph de Toledano, op.cit. P. 26.
40 J. Steinberg, op.cit. p.90-91
41 J. Steinberg, op.cit. P. 93.
42 Quote by J. Steinberg, op.cit. P. 55.
43 Ditto
44 One will find, in the often quoted study of J. Steinberg, other examples of scenarios of video games
45
See the study by J. Steinberg, second part “The killer children: a
chronology” which analyzes ten cases of child murderers of children,
including that at Columbine College Littleton (Colorado), on April 20,
1999.
46 Cf. the A.F.S. brochure “A sign of the times, Evry Cathedral.
47
Abbot Joseph Lemann ( 1836-1915 ), a Jew who was converted at the same
time as his brother Augustine. He is the author of remarkable works on
the French Revolution.
