The Frankfort School: Cultural Revolution

For some time now it has been apparent to me that our culture has taken a shift, and not necessarily in the right direction.  In fact I can say without pause that our society has taken a turn for the worse; our mores and values have become inverted, seemingly to the point of no return. But why, and how? What is the origin of this cultural revolution?

The following is a study which first appeared in a publication in Paris, France.  Originally written in French in 2001, it was translated into English a few years later.  After having read this you might better understand just how our world has been turned upside down.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.
Isaiah 5:20

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
Ecclesiastes 1:18

Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you.
Proverbs 4:6

Enter in through the narrow gate, because wide is the gate and broad is the road which leads to destruction, and they are many who are entering in through it! But because narrow is the gate and distressed the road which leads to life, then they are few who are finding it.
Matthew 7:13

The Frankfort School: Cultural Revolution

by Arnaud de Lassus  (July 2001)

In general terms, one can identify two types of Revolution. First, there is political revolution: the gaining of power through violence and the use of terror. The revolutions of 1789-93 in France and of 1917 in Russia provide a good illustration of this type. Second, there is cultural revolution in which one demolishes from within the basis of civilization in the country one wants to conquer–its culture, way of life, beliefs, morality, scale of values, etc. It is a long-term action undertaken without visible violence by applying the formula: “Modern forms of subjection are marked by mildness.”[1]

The Frankfort School

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 that for 50 years had resisted Marxist political power and, 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-Christianization of the country.[2]

Cultural revolution is not a new phenomenon. Joseph de Maistre, at the beginning of the 19th century, characterized it as follows:

The Marxists of Critical Theory

“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]

The cultural revolution has been systematized particularly since the 1920s, following 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.

MARX AND 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 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 Manifesto of 1848, Marxism concentrated on political and economic action. Its attack on Western culture moved on to the second phase. It was not until the 1920s that we saw Marxists methodically taking up again Marx’s ideas of 1843.

COMMUNIST FAILURES AND THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION PROJECT

After the October Revolution in Russia, one of Lenin’s ideas had been to export revolution to Central and Western Europe in order to save it in Russia. It was a failure. Revolution almost failed in Russia, but was saved thanks to American financial support. It failed in Hungary, too, where Bela Kun in 1919 was not able to maintain a Communist regime for more than 133 days. It failed in Germany, where the Spartacus League, founded in 1916, 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.

Reflection on these failures led to conclusions regarding methodology. First, 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. Second, it became clear the proletariat could never be the tool to overthrow the industrialized West and allow importation of revolution there. Third, it was necessary to abandon any idea of a frontal assault against the bourgeoisie and capitalism in the developed countries of the West. Fourth, the West could only be overthrown after destruction of its living strength through the treason of intellectuals.

Thus, Communists were led to rediscover those intuitions that Marx had had before the Manifesto of 1848 and to begin a cultural revolution of the Marxist type by exploiting thoroughly all the forms of dialectic. 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] Participants in the meeting were 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; and 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 Comintern.[11] He was a German Communist leader in the inter-war period who brought a sense of organization to the proposed cultural revolution. He was later murdered on the orders of Stalin.[12] Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) was of a Jewish family from Hungary. 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, to use sex instinct as an 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 POWER OF A SMALL NUMBER

Munzenberg and Lukacs both 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 Czarism, 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 3,000–and all of them intellectuals.[13]

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 organization which guaranteed freedom without inviting license. 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 economic 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 was 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 was to exploit Freud’s ideas in a Marxist way:

The start of conceptual debasement of man’s sexual instincts had 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 defenses of Western civilization’s immune system.[16]

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL’S GERMAN PHASE (1923-32)

To incarnate this worldview, an Institute for Marxism was founded at Frankfurt in 1923. It quickly took a more neutral label: “The Institute for Social Research.”[17]  Frankfurt was not chosen accidentally. Since the Middle Ages, Frankfurt has been one of the most important centers of influence in Germany. Frankfurt was the city of origin of several financial dynasties. In the 18th century, Frankfurt was the center of the Bavarian Illuminati, of that High Masonry which played a key role in the preparation of the French Revolution. It was near Frankfurt where, in 1781, a Masonic assembly decided upon the death of Louis XVI and the King of Sweden. In the 20th century:

Frankfurt was the German city that had the highest percentage of Jews in the population of any German town; the Jewish community residing there was the best known and, after Berlin, the second largest Jewish community….It was a city in which the number of middle-class sympathizers 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

From 1923-30, the Institute was directed by Carl Grünberg, known and respected in academic circles, of Austrian origin and Marxist convictions. From 1930-58, it was directed by Max Horkheimer, a doctor of philosophy and of Marxist orientation. After having supplied the Institute with a good number of its basic ideas, it was said of Georg Lukacs, who left it afterwards, “Whatever the disagreements that separated them in subsequent years–and they were serious–the Institute and Lukacs spoke to similar questions from within a common tradition.”[19]

The other important personalities at the Institute were: Erich Fromm (1900-80); Theodor Adorno (1903-69), author of the book The Authoritarian Personality, which we will address below; Karl Korsch (1886-1961); Wilhem Reich (1897-1957); Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970); Walter Benjamin (1892-1940); and 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 Trotsky (revolution spread throughout like a virus) rather than of Stalin’s monolithism.

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL IN THE U.S.

When in 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the Institute closed its doors in Frankfurt and re-organized itself in the United States. What follows is a description by Jeffrey Steinberg in his (as yet unpublished) study Draft Report on Manchurian Children[21] on the installation of the Institute in the United States and its fields of activity in the years 1932-50.

By the early 1930s, the Frankfurt School[22] 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 U.S. Courtesy of Columbia and Princeton Universities, 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.

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 1940s, 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.

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,[23] 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.

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, Georg Lukacs. Englishmen Huxley and Isherwood were veterans of British Fabian psychological warfare projects.[24]

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 1950’s, 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 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.”

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 Educational Objectives.

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.”[25]

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.

In 1950, three of the main members of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer,  Adorno, and  Pollock, left the U.S. to resettle in Frankfurt and to set up a new “Institute for Social Research.”  The Institute pursued its activities until Theodor Adorno’s death in 1969. A part of the team, which included Herbert Marcuse, remained in the U.S.

The principal work of the Frankfurt School was therefore spread over a period of 46 years–from 1923-69. By 1969, the movement was well established and younger men would take charge.

KEY IDEAS OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

In the previous sections, we 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 clearly explained the main ideas conceived and put into practice by him and his colleagues at the Frankfurt School. Marcuse had this to say about 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 diffused and dispersed disintegration of the system.[26]

Regarding the process of cultural revolution, especially the fact that it is “quiet,” he writes that the 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.”[27]

If classic class struggle is abandoned because the working class is no longer revolutionary, this will be to the benefit of a new revolutionary sensibility. The revolt will have to be developed in two new areas, those being non-material needs (of self-determination, human relations) and the physiological dimensions of existence (race, sex, etc.). In conformity with this new revolutionary sensibility, the ideas of Freud will be exploited 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 (1950) can be considered a sort of manifesto of “Critical Theory.”

We wish to emphasize this point, which constitutes one of the main basic ideas of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse summarized Freud’s theory as follows:

a) The essence of being is “eros,” the search for pleasure, that is, “pansexualism”;  

b) The individual has to accept the cultural control of his instinctive needs, otherwise there is 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).

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.

Freud systematized pansexualism, but the origin of it goes back to the Cabala[28] and heathen religions. It is a rather complex theory, the main elements of which can be can be summarized this way: According to the Cabala, God can be considered in Himself or in His manifestations. In Himself God is an indefinite being, vaguely called En Sof (who has no limits) or Ayin (non-being). In His manifestations, God shows himself by “emanations” by which he perfects himself, 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 ten and are called Sefiroth. Three of them are male, and three others are female. The Sefiroth Victory (male) and Sefiroth Glory (female) are concentrated in the Sefirah Foundation,[29] 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 Cabala, the pansexualism of the Frankfurt School and of the cultural revolution to which it contributed so powerfully has therefore a religious connotation. [See Angelus Press English Edition of SiSiNoNo, The Angelus, May 2006, No.69–Ed.]

EXPLOITING THE MALE-FEMALE DIALECTIC

“Pansexualism”–in other words, the unleashing of the base passions of man–constitutes the first exploitation of the difference between the sexes. Another aspect of the differences between the sexes will be systematically exploited to bring about the overthrow of the traditional relationship between men and women. This is to be accomplished by attacking the authority of the father, by denying the specific roles of the father and mother, by suppressing differences in the education of boys and girls, by abolishing forms of male superiority (hence the presence of the women in the armed forces), and by considering women and children as an oppressed class and men as the 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 two powerful means by which to destroy the family. The Frankfurt School knew how to draw in a remarkable way on the scientific progress of its day–progress in the means of communication (its action in regard to music and films), and progress in the psychological sciences. In the field of psychology, Abraham Maslow, a protégé of the cultural revolution, played an important role in perfecting methods of psychological conditioning known as “group dynamics” and “sensitivity training.”[30]

RESULTS IN THE WEST

The principles of the Frankfurt School were embodied in what came to be called “counterculture,” the “cultural movement” that especially dominated the highly influential American left until the late 1960s, 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.[31]

This description dates from 1968. But today, the counterculture characterized by pansexualism, the destruction of paternal authority, and radical feminism is not only the cultural basis of the American left but of almost the whole of society throughout the entire West.

Let us return to pansexualism. Given its religious origin, it is undoubtedly the most dangerous element. It has invaded society at large, accounting for indecent fashions, for titillating posters and advertisements, magazines, films, TV and radio broadcasts, for the degraded behavior of young and old, for sex education; pansexualism is supported by the State, and has its effect even in traditional Catholic circles. To give an example, here is the recent testimony of a priest 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) realize 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 taking in what is on display?

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 neighboring countries, with a Moslem majority, that one would find visa and residence permits granted to the 7,000 prostitutes who come from Eastern Europe and whose blond 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 Apocalypse, what Our Lord said to the angel of the Church of Laodicea (Apoc. 3:14-22), and to concur.[32]

CYBERNETICS

What is “cybernetics”? It is defined as “the study of communication and control processes in biological, mechanical, and electronic systems.” This “science,” developed in the United States, rests on the false hypothesis of the essential similarity of communication and control (understood in the sense of command) in machines and human beings.[33] 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 will allow us to reproduce the functioning of the human brain and even to surpass it).

It was in New York (1942), at a conference organized by the Josiah Macy Foundation, where the cybernetics brain-trust group was launched. It would be known later as the Cybernetics Group. The initial activity, 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 behavior could, in effect, be programmed, on both an individual and societal scale.[34]

The group’s works took shape after the Second World War with the support of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[35] Ten conferences organized by the Macy Foundation were held between 1953 and 1964 and marked its stages.

It is here that one sees the appearance of members of the Frankfurt School, who had, from the beginning, grasped the importance of the cybernetics project for their more general enterprise of cultural revolution. While directing the groups of studies on prejudices, 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 traveler of the Frankfurt School, played an important role within this same group. He had founded at MIT the Research Center 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,[36] in the cybernetics project:

What Lukacs and his Frankfurt School protégés 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 “Kulturkampf” of Lukacs, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse directly impacted upon the postwar technological revolution in mass communications. The convergence point was a little-known project, launched in the early 1940’s, 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’s game plan 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.[37]

CULTURAL REVOLUTION TODAY

Almost 40 years after the death of Adorno in 1969, almost 30 years after that of 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.”[38]

We have already addressed at length the subject of pansexualism, more popular today than ever. 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. As indicated above, the Frankfurt School had greatly inspired the Cybernetics Group during the 1940s and 1950s. 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 Cybernetics Group of the 1940s and 1950s. 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).[39]

What was the state of mind of these researchers? In his book The Cybernetics Group, Steve Joshua Heims indicates that in the 1980s, 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, but more serious was 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 fueled both the Pentagon training-simulation programs and the evolving video-game industry.[40]

The Frankfurt School, the Cybernetics Group, Media Lab and other bodies, the video-game industry: here is one of the relationships that enabled the technical perfection of one of the most effective instruments of the cultural revolution today–the video game. This is not to say, however, that Media Lab is responsible for the fundamentally immoral orientation of the greater number of video games.

The second generation video-game market in the United States is expanding rapidly. According to Jeffrey Steinberg (“Draft Report,” p. 93), “point-and-shoot” video games bring in nine to eleven billion dollars annually. These games represent the perfecting of role-playing games which have been developed since the late 1970s. They allow one to while away hour after hour in a virtual world where one can be anybody one wants to be and can act without having to suffer the consequences of one’s actions. Any person–young or not-so-young–can 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 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. There is in them violence of various sorts. There are very realistic shooting simulations (useful for training soldiers, perhaps, 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 an 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 organization 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.[41]

This gives a general outline of 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.[42]

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.[43] This is what has happened in the United States recently with the brutal murders of young people by some of their high school classmates. Inquiries have shown that the young murderers fired like professional marksmen 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.[44] We must recognize that a great number of video games correspond well to the objectives of the Frankfurt School to spread a “culture” based on pessimism, depravity, sexual license, violence, and drugs.

CONCLUSION

It was in 1923 that the Frankfurt School began its work. Though it was not exclusively responsible, the cultural revolution which it inspired starting in the 1950s developed in the US and then Europe. About 20 years later, the cultural revolutions of 1968, under the influence of Marcuse, mark an important stage. About another 30 years after 1968 would be needed to see the triumph of the counterculture which began 80 years earlier.

We are dealing with a long-term, brilliantly conceived operation. 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 the fact that this plan 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 1960s has raged inside the Church. It was a general disturbance: a new revolutionary 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,[45] churches becoming conference rooms rather than temples of the Lord, and inconsistent catechesis proposing a formless and undemanding religion. The Catholic environment dissolved at the very moment when the faithful needed it most, hence the uprooting of Catholics from their culture, their abandonment of religious practice en masse and thus becoming all the more vulnerable to the cultural revolution which came from Frankfurt via the United States. The parallel between the two cultural revolutions is remarkable. They occurred barely within ten years of each other. Political leaders favored 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 culture, to keep alive the rest of Christendom which remains among us, and not follow the general train of things under the excuse that it is just the way things are. All this supposes a certain asceticism. It consists in suppressing what ought to be suppressed in order 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 emphasize 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 remarked:

In history, he who does not take account, not only of Providence, but also of Hell, will only ever have an inaccurate view and will only provide incomplete explanations. God and Satan fight for the heart of 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, and races, the spectacle of these two immense forces in combat: Infernal malice devastating society, and divine grace repairing, supporting, and always advancing it.[46]

This study first appeared in July 2001, published by Action Familiale et Scolaire, 31 rue Rennequin, 75017–Paris, France; the English version was originally published in Apropos, No. 21, March 2003.

About the Author

Citations:

    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 the March 2003 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 January 18, 1822; quoted by Cretineau-Joly, L’eglise romaine en face de la Revolution, XI, 104.

    7    The pseudonym of an Alta Vendita agent.

    8    Letter of August 9, 1838; quoted by Cretineau-Joly, op.cit., XI, 128. Cf. the AFS brochure, Connaissance Élémentaire de la franc-maçonnerie, p.110.

    9    Ralph de Toledano, The Frankfurt School, (manuscript, 2000), 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.

    11    Third 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.–Ed., Apropos.

    13    De Toledano, The Frankfurt School, p. 23.

    14    Ibid., pp. 4-15.

    15    Willi Munzenberg, quoted by Ralph de Toledano, ibid., p. 5.

    16    Ibid., p. 24. This point will be developed below.

    17    Official date of its creation in February 3, 1923, by a decree of the Ministry of Education (cf. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, [University of California Press, 1996], p. 10).

    18    Ralf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p.17 (Wiggerhaus cites this among the reasons for the extremely favorable circumstances at the outset of the Institute for Social Research).

    19    Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 175.

    20    Ibid., p. 29.

    21    A study on video games and their destructive effect.

    22    Called in future the Frankfurt School Institute for Social Research.

    23    Published in 1950 by Harper & Brothers, New York. 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.

    24    The Fabian Society: an English, Socialist movement founded in 1883. It was the origin of the Labor Party.

    25    Jeffrey Steinberg, Michael Steinberg, and Anton Chaitkin, “Draft Report on Manchurian Children,” (unpublished study, 2001), pp. 5-8.

    26    Text of H. Marcuse, quoted in The Resister, Summer-Autumn, 1998.

    27    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.

    28    In Jewish thought, one generally associates esoteric and mystical education with the Cabala. 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, s.v. “The Mystical Jew”).

    29    The sefiroth Victory, Glory, and Foundation are in Hebrew called Netzach, Hod, and Yesod respectively.–Ed., Apropos.

    30    Cf. The Resister, Summer–Autumn, 1998, p. 54. On group dynamics, see the Apropos pamphlet “Elementary Knowledge of the New Age,” pp. 33-37. See also the book by Ed. Dieckermann, Jr., Sensitivity Training and the Cult of Mind Control.

    31    Theodore Roszah, “Youth and the Great refusal,” The Nation, on 1968. Quote by News Weekly, February 10, 2000.

    32    “Repens-toi, Laodicée,” Bulletin de l’Association de St Pierre d’Antioche et de tout l’ Orient (Les Sablons, 61560 Bazoches-sur-Hoeur), No. 23, March, 2001. See the article having the same title in Action Familiale et Scolaire, No. 155 (June, 2001).

    33    P. de Latil., La pensée artificielle, quoted by Le Robert.

    34    J. Steinberg, Draft Report on Manchurian Children, p. 86.

    35    Usually indicated by the abbreviation MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology).

    36    British Center of the Psychological Group, of which John Rawling-Rees was Director.

    37    J. Steinberg, Draft Report, pp.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.”

    38    Quote by Ralph de Toledano, The Frankfurt School, p. 26.

    39    J. Steinberg, Draft Report, pp. 90-91.

    40    Ibid., p. 93.

    41    Quote by J. Steinberg, ibid., p.55.

    42    Ibid.

    43    One will find in the oft-quoted study of J. Steinberg other examples of scenarios of video games.

    44    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 High School, Littleton, Colorado (April 20, 1999).

    45    Cf. the A.F.S. brochure A Sign of the Times: Evry Cathedral.

    46    L’Entrée des Israélites dans la société française (The Entrance of the Israelites into French Society) (p. 205). 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.

SOURCES

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.

Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950. University of California Press, 1996.

Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998.

De Toledano, Ralph. The Frankfurt School (Unpublished study, 2000).

Steinberg, Jeffrey. Draft Report on Manchurian Children (Unpublished study, 2001).

Atkinson, Gerard L. “Who Placed American Men in a Psychic Iron Cage?”; Part II “The Thread of Cultural Marxism,” The Resister, Summer–Autumn, 1998.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilisation. 1955; French edition: Les Editions de Minuit, 1997.

Taken from:

http://www.angelusonline.org/index.php?section=articles&subsection=print_article&article_id=2514

http://www.angelusonline.org/index.php?section=articles&subsection=show_article&article_id=2514

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