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Showing posts with label Frankfurt School. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Frankfurt School. Show all posts

21 September 2013

Review of Kerry Bolton’s “Revolution from Above"

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The global revolution that had its origins at the time of the Russian Revolution persisted in the Western world throughout the postwar era, even if not by violent means, and was backed by the same forces that had financed the Revolution of 1917. Since the Second World War, the revolutionary strategy pursued in the West has focused on seeding culturally destructive ideas and promoting anti-social behavior in order to break down the cultural, intellectual and moral fabric of society. This is always done in the name of — what else? — “liberation.”

The agenda of the gradual destruction of the White, Christian West was first expressed clearly and coherently by the Frankfurt School, in the form of “critical theory.” The explicit purpose of this purportedly scientific endeavor was the destructive criticism of morals, tradition, faith, family, and nation — in short: all the cornerstones of Western civilization. Bolton notes that political correctness, the intellectual disease which has infected the contemporary mentality in general and academia in particular for almost half a century, can be directly traced to the Frankfurt School.

As the name suggests, this neo-Marxist school of thought was developed at the University of Frankfurt, Germany’s financial capital. An organization affiliated with the university, the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), was founded there in 1924, funded by the wealthy Argentinian-German Jew, Felix Weil.

It attracted young, almost exclusively Jewish, socialist intellectuals from all over Central Europe who, even if they remained Communists, had lost faith in the “revolutionary potential” of the working class. In the eyes of these academic revolutionaries, the workers were instinctively conservative. The destruction of the despicable civilization of Christianity demanded a more thorough revolution in mentality. That was the underlying notion that united Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and their ilk.

The first chapter in the history of the Frankfurt School ended in 1933, when Hitler came to power. Then, this entire group of Jewish Communist academics, humorously enough, relocated from the German capital of finance, Frankfurt, to the world capital of capitalism, New York, where the exiled Institute was hosted by Columbia University. Prominent members such as Herbert Marcuse and Franz Neumann spent the 1940s in dividing their time between the prestigious Ivy League university and the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Later, in the 1960s, Marcuse was to become the Grand Old Man of the “New Left” and on a par with his colleague Wilhelm Reich as the main ideologue of the “sexual revolution.” Bolton documents how abortion, homosexuality, feminism, psychedelic music, and degenerate art has been fostered by the CIA and lavishly funded by Big Money’s tax-exempt foundations such as Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller. The feminist icon Gloria Steinem has admitted to having worked with the CIA. Evidence has also been uncovered linking drug guru Timothy Leary, propagator of the “turn on, tune in, drop out” catch-phrase of the hippies, to the CIA.

Really, this should come as no surprise to anyone. It goes without saying that if these “subversives” had not had the approval and support of those truly in power, they would have remained in obscurity. It’s that simple.

Source: http://bit.ly/16o7Wei

02 November 2012

What is Cultural Marxism?

William S. Lind

http://www.marylandthursdaymeeting.com/Archives/SpecialWebDocuments/Cultural.Marxism.htm

In his columns on the next conservatism, Paul Weyrich has several times referred to “cultural Marxism.” He asked me, as Free Congress Foundation’s resident historian, to write this column explaining what cultural Marxism is and where it came from. In order to understand what something is, you have to know its history.

Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union. It is commonly known as “multiculturalism” or, less formally, Political Correctness. From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as “multiculturalism.”

Cultural Marxism began not in the 1960s but in 1919, immediately after World War I. Marxist theory had predicted that in the event of a big European war, the working class all over Europe would rise up to overthrow capitalism and create communism. But when war came in 1914, that did not happen. When it finally did happen in Russia in 1917, workers in other European countries did not support it. What had gone wrong?

Independently, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came to the same answer: Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interest that Communism was impossible in the West until both could be destroyed. In 1919, Lukacs asked, “Who will save us from Western civilization?” That same year, when he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, one of Lukacs’s first acts was to introduce sex education into Hungary’s public schools. He knew that if he could destroy the West’s traditional sexual morals, he would have taken a giant step toward destroying Western culture itself.

In 1923, inspired in part by Lukacs, a group of German Marxists established a think tank at Frankfurt University in Germany called the Institute for Social Research. This institute, soon known simply as the Frankfurt School, would become the creator of cultural Marxism.

To translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the members of the Frankfurt School - - Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, to name the most important - - had to contradict Marx on several points. They argued that culture was not just part of what Marx had called society’s “superstructure,” but an independent and very important variable. They also said that the working class would not lead a Marxist revolution, because it was becoming part of the middle class, the hated bourgeoisie.

Who would? In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question: a coalition of blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals.

Fatefully for America, when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Frankfurt School fled - - and reestablished itself in New York City. There, it shifted its focus from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to destroying it in the United States. To do so, it invented “Critical Theory.” What is the theory? To criticize every traditional institution, starting with the family, brutally and unremittingly, in order to bring them down. It wrote a series of “studies in prejudice,” which said that anyone who believes in traditional Western culture is prejudiced, a “racist” or “sexist” of “fascist” - - and is also mentally ill.

Most importantly, the Frankfurt School crossed Marx with Freud, taking from psychology the technique of psychological conditioning. Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do something like “normalize” homosexuality, they do not argue the point philosophically. They just beam television show after television show into every American home where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt School’s key people spent the war years in Hollywood).

After World War II ended, most members of the Frankfurt School went back to Germany. But Herbert Marcuse stayed in America. He took the highly abstract works of other Frankfurt School members and repackaged them in ways college students could read and understand. In his book “Eros and Civilization,” he argued that by freeing sex from any restraints, we could elevate the pleasure principle over the reality principle and create a society with no work, only play (Marcuse coined the phrase, “Make love, not war”). Marcuse also argued for what he called “liberating tolerance,” which he defined as tolerance for all ideas coming from the Left and intolerance for any ideas coming from the Right. In the 1960s, Marcuse became the chief “guru” of the New Left, and he injected the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now America’s state ideology.

The next conservatism should unmask multiculturalism and Political Correctness and tell the American people what they really are: cultural Marxism. Its goal remains what Lukacs and Gramsci set in 1919: destroying Western culture and the Christian religion. It has already made vast strides toward that goal. But if the average American found out that Political Correctness is a form of Marxism, different from the Marxism of the Soviet Union but Marxism nonetheless, it would be in trouble. The next conservatism needs to reveal the man behind the curtain - - old Karl Marx himself.

(The Free Congress Foundation’s website, www.freecongress.org, includes a short book on the history and nature of cultural Marxism, edited by William S. Lind. It is formatted so you can print it out as a book and share it with your family and friends.)

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