Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe

[See also : Reframing the Enemy, Bill Berkowitz, Intelligence Report, No.110, Summer 2003.]

Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe
Martin Jay
Salmagundi
No.168/9, Fall 2010/Winter 2011

On August 18, 2010, Fidel Castro contributed an article to the Cuban Communist Party paper Granma in which he endorsed the bizarre allegations of an obscure Lithuanian-born conspiracy theorist named Daniel Estulin in a 2005 book entitled The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club.[1] In an Associated Press wire story written by Will Weissert, which was quickly picked up by scores of sites online, Castro’s infatuation went viral, and suddenly Estulin was unknown no more. Soon after, he was invited to Havana for a meeting with his new admirer, who was untroubled by Estulin’s ambiguous political affiliations, and before the day was out, the aging Cuban leader and his unexpected friend had declared that Osama Bin Laden was really a secret CIA agent and the United States was planning to destroy Russia’s still potent military forces, if necessary by nuclear means.[2]

Estulin’s claim in the book that captivated Castro goes something like this: beginning with a meeting in 1954 in the Bilderberg Hotel in a Dutch town, a group of powerful men—heads of state, economic tycoons, even the occasional monarch—have gathered annually in order to decide the fate of the world. Among the usual suspects, the Rockefeller family, the Rothschilds, Prince Bernhard and Henry Kissinger are prominent eminences grises. With the ultimate goal of installing a world government—or more precisely, a “one-world corporation”—under their control, they pull the strings of the economy, aiming to create chaos, and plot to narcotize the population by any means possible. Perhaps their most effective gambit has been the concoction and dissemination of mass culture, in particular the rock and roll that turned potential social revolutionaries into countercultural stoners.

After decades of battling actual conspiracies dedicated to overturning his Revolution, the 84-year-old Castro is, I suppose, as entitled as anyone to paranoid fantasies. But what makes his embrace of Estulin’s book especially risible is the subordinate argument—and this is the part that most concerns me here—that the inspiration for the subversion of domestic unrest came from Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal and their colleagues at the Institute for Social Research in the 1950s. To cite the Associated Press condensed version: “The excerpt published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave the way for rock music to ‘control the masses’ by diverting attention from civil rights and social injustice.”[3] The Radio Research Project under the direction of Paul Lazarsfeld, which had hired Adorno when he came to America in 1938, had, after all, been funded the Rockefeller Foundation. It was here that the techniques for mind control via pop music had been developed. And then according to Estulin, the task of realizing their sinister potential was given to no less a luminary than Walter Lippmann (!), who was somehow able to engineer the Beatles’ conquest of the American media in the 1960s. What followed was a new and more powerful opium of the people (although, to be sure, opium or substitutes were doing a pretty good job as well). For after all, didn’t John Lennon admit as much when he so memorably sang, “you say you want a revolution… you know you can count me out, don’ you know it’s gonna be all right, all right, all right.”

Here we have clearly broken through the looking glass and entered a parallel universe in which normal rules of evidence and plausibility have been suspended. It is a mark of the silliness of these claims that they have even subjected to ridicule by Rush Limbaugh on his August 20, 2010 radio show. Even he had to point out that the Beatles were on the side of social change, not opposed to it. Limbaugh, to be sure, ignored the other most blatant absurdity in Estulin’s scheme, which was attributing to the Frankfurt School a position precisely opposite to what its members had always taken. That is, when they discussed the “culture industry” it was with the explicit criticism, ironically echoed here by Castro, that it functioned to reconcile people to their misery and dull the pain of their suffering. Whether or not the Frankfurt School’s argument is fully plausible is not the issue here, but rather the pathetic miscomprehension of Estulin and the credulity of Castro in seeing them as agents of the Bilderberg project to make the world safe for capitalist elites. The even weirder fantasy about their assigning Lippmann the job of reconciling theory and practice is so outlandish that it is impossible even to guess how it might have been concocted.

I have no stake in exonerating or blaming the Bilderberg gang for ruining the world. Until this episode, I had, in fact, never heard of them. Like other candidates for the role of chief conspiratorial clique—the Masons, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the denizens of Bohemian Grove, take your pick—they can surely take care of themselves. Anyone, moreover, who believes, to take one of Estulin’s sillier claims, that Watergate was a frame-up devised by Bilderberg kingpin Kissinger to get rid of Nixon because he was failing to carry out their orders is not going to convince many sober-minded observers. What concerns me here instead is the transformation of “the Frankfurt School” into a kind of vulgar meme, a charged unit of cultural meaning that reduces all the complexities of its intellectual history into a sound-bite sized package available to be plugged into a paranoid narrative able to sucker no less a figure than Fidel Castro.

Although the process was foreshadowed in the 1960s when Herbert Marcuse became the media’s favorite “guru” of the New Left and was often portrayed in simple-minded terms, it wasn’t really until a decade or so ago that the School as a whole entered the netherworld of garbled memedom, and began circulating in a wide variety of narratives, such as that promoted by Estulin and Castro. Most of these, to be sure, came from a very different political direction. Patrick Buchanan’s 2001 best-selling screed against the nefarious impact of immigration, The Death of the West, was one major source, stigmatizing as it did the Frankfurt School for promoting “cultural Marxism” (a recycling of the old Weimar conservative charge of “cultural Bolshevism” aimed at aesthetic modernists). But the opening salvo had, in fact, been fired a decade earlier in a lengthy essay by one Michael Minnicino called “New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’,” published in 1992 in the obscure journal Fidelio.[4] Its provenance is particularly telling: it was an organ of the Lyndon Larouche movement cum cult, one of the less savory curiosities of nightmare fringe politics.

Larouche and his followers have, to be sure, always remained on the fringe of the fringe, too confused in their ideology to be taken seriously by either radical left or right, with little, if any significant impact on the real world. But the germ sown by Minnicino was ultimately to bear remarkable poisonous fruit. The harvester was the Free Congress Foundation, a paleo-conservative Washington think tank founded by Paul Weyrich, who was also in on the creation of the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority movement. Much of the financial support came from his collaborator Joseph Coors, who knew how to turn all that pure Rocky Mountain water into a cash flow for the radical right. The FCF sponsored a satellite television network called National Empowerment Television, which churned out slickly produced shows promulgating its various opinions.

In 1999, it broadcast an hour-long, skillfully crafted exposé of “Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School,” which was put together largely by William Lind, one of Weyrich’s colleagues at the Foundation and head of its Center for Cultural Conservatism. Weyrich himself appeared only at the end during a question-and-answer session with viewers who called in. In addition to Lind, a number of the usual suspects—the right-wing pundits Roger Kimball and David Horowitz, and the former football star and homophobic religious preacher Reggie White—comment on the School’s history. There is as well one anomalous figure, the author of the first history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination. The book was itself displayed at the end of the show, and recommended to anyone interested in the full story, albeit with the cautionary reminder that its author was himself a dangerous apologist for the School’s philosophy. Later Lind would crow in a column in The American Conservative, “The video is especially valuable because we interviewed the principal American expert on the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay, who was then the chairman of the History Department at Berkeley (and obviously no conservative). He spills the beans.”[5]

Ever since that lamentable broadcast I have often been asked how I fell among such dubious characters, and so let me beg the reader’s indulgence for a moment to explain before moving on to the larger issues at hand. When I was approached for the interview, I was not informed of the political agenda of the broadcasters, who seemed very professional and courteous. Having done a number of similar shows in the past on one or another aspect of the history of the Frankfurt School, I naively assumed the end results would reflect my opinions with some fidelity, at least within the constraints of the edited final product. But what happened instead was that all my critical remarks about the hypocrisy of the right-wing campaign against political correctness were lost and what remained were simple factual statements confirming the Marxist origins of the School, which had never been a secret to anyone. Interweaving my edited testimony into the larger narrative may have given it an unearned legitimacy, which I now, of course, regret, but it’s likely the effect would have been pretty much the same without my participation as “useful idiot.” Those beans I allegedly spilled had already been on the plate for a very long time, and it would have taken no effort at all to confirm that, yes, they were Marxists, and yes, they thought cultural questions were important, and yes, they—or at least Marcuse—worried about the effects of “repressive tolerance.”

In any event, the “documentary,” soon available on the net, spawned a number of condensed textual versions, which were reproduced on a number of radical right-wing sites. These in turn led to a welter of new videos now available on You Tube, which feature an odd cast of pseudo-experts regurgitating exactly the same line. The message is numbingly simplistic: all the ills of modern American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation and gay rights to the decay of traditional education and even environmentalism are ultimately attributable to the insidious influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930s. The origins of “cultural Marxism” are traced back to Lukács and Gramsci, but because they were not actual émigrés, their role in the narrative is not as prominent. Nor do most of the commentators attribute responsibility to the Communist International, although occasionally, as in the case of Cry Havoc!, a 2007 book by a founder of the National Review, Ralph de Toledano, the crackpot claim is actually advanced that the Frankfurt School was a Commie front set up by Willi Muenzenberger.[6]

There is a transparent subtext in the original CFC program, which is not hard to discern and has become more explicit with each telling of the narrative. Although there is scarcely any direct reference to the ethnic origins of the School’s members, subtle hints allow the listener to draw his own conclusions about the provenance of foreigners who tried to combine Marx and Freud, those giants of critical Jewish intelligence. At one point, William Lind asserts that “once in America they shifted the focus of their work from destroying German society to attacking the society and culture of its new place of refuge,”[7] as if the very people who had to flee the Nazis had been responsible for what they were fleeing![8] Airtime is also given to another of Weyrich’s colleagues at the FCF, Lazlo Pasztor, who is innocently identified as a “leader of the Hungarian resistance against Communism,” but had already been discredited a decade earlier as a former member of the pro-Nazi “Arrow Cross,” who had to leave the Bush campaign in 1988 when he was outed.

A number of years later a fringe neo-Nazi group called “Stormfront” could boldly express what had hitherto only been insinuated, and in so doing really spill some foul-tasting beans:

Talking about the Frankfurt School is ideal for not naming the Jews as a group (which often leads to a panicky rejection, a stubborn refusal to listening anymore and even a “shut up”) but naming the Jew by proper names. People will make their generalizations by themselves – in the privacy of their own minds. At least it worked like that with me. It was my lightbulb moment, when confusing pieces of an alarming puzzle suddenly grouped to a visible picture. Learn by heart the most important proper names of the Frankfurt Schoolers – they are (except for a handful of minor members and female “groupies”) ALL Jews. One can even quite innocently mention that the Frankfurt Schoolers had to leave Germany in 1933 because “they were to a man, Jewish,” as William S. Lind does.[9]

Now that the real origins of political correctness in the cultural Marxism devised by a clever bunch of foreign-born Jews had been revealed, the full extent of the damage they had caused could be spelled out. Here is a list cited verbatim from many of the websites devoted to the question:

1. The creation of racism offences

2. Continual change to create confusion

3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children

4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority

5. Huge immigration to destroy identity

6. The promotion of excessive drinking

7. Emptying of churches

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

9. Dependency on the state or state benefits

10. Control and dumbing down of media

11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family[10]

Well, I suppose at least the second plank has been realized, with perhaps the self-inflicted help of the sixth. In this confused world, it is only a short step to blaming everything from Roman Polanski’s lust for underage girls to the allegedly liberal curriculum at the Naval Academy to Obama’s health care initiative—these are among many of the wild assertions one can find online—on the sinister influence of Horkheimer and his friends. One site even asserts that the Fabian Society, the reformist intellectuals of late 19th-century British socialism, was “a division of the Frankfurt School,” which suggests that linear chronology can be swept aside when it comes to exposing the work of the devil. The ultimate goal of “cultural Marxism” in their telling is thus far more than the leftist thought-control that denies alternative positions under the guise of restricting hate speech. It is the subversion of Western civilization itself.

It is, frankly, very difficult to know what to make of all of this and even harder to imagine a way to counter it. The radical Left, it has to be conceded, has at times also scapegoated émigré intellectuals for their sinister, covert influence. After Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the neo-conservatives supposedly inspired by Leo Strauss and his followers were blamed for inspiring a foreign policy that was ultimately in Israel’s interest. Here too a certain anti-Semitic subtext could easily creep into the discourse.[11] And as we see in the unholy alliance of Castro and Estulin, the Frankfurt School could be assigned the same role by leftists also fighting against the shadowy string-pullers allegedly running the universe. Indeed, if we go back to Estulin’s original Spanish text and look for the source that he cites to make his absurd claim that was swallowed whole by the gullible Castro, we find the very same 1992 essay by the Lyndon Larouche minion Michael Minnicino that was the source of the Free Congress Foundation video![12] But the vast majority of accusations of this sort come out of a swamp of shockingly ill-informed, logically challenged demagogues on the radical right, whose easy access to the internet allows them blithely to spread the most egregious nonsense.

Does the sheer quantity of sites devoted to disseminating it, almost always drawing on the same obsessively repeated pseudo-facts and unfounded speculations, suggest a genuinely widespread phenomenon? Although it may be hard to gauge its real extent, the momentum of the dissemination has certainly accelerated in the past few years. What began as a bizarre Lyndon Larouche coinage has become the common currency of a larger and larger public of addled enragés. As the case of Pat Buchanan shows, it has entered at least the fringes of the mainstream. Indeed, if you include right-wing radio demagogues with sizeable audiences like the thuggish Michael Savage, it has now become their stock in trade as well.[13] Can it be doubted that if you polled the crowds at Tea Party rallies about the influence of “cultural Marxism” on the decline of American culture, which they want to “take back” from immigrants, recent and otherwise, you would find significant familiarity with this discourse?

Until very recently and then only in passing has the radical right’s obsession with “cultural Marxism” and the Frankfurt School even been noticed, let alone systematically analyzed.[14] There has, in contrast, been a sustained scholarly interest in the ways in which Critical Theory has been received in America, including scrupulously researched and judiciously argued new books by David Jenneman and Thomas Wheatland about the ways in which they interacted with American culture during their actual time as émigrés.[15] But only their influence on and interaction with other intellectuals has attracted real attention. There is little, if any, connection between this reception and the one detailed above. The latter functions instead on the far lower level of the demagogic propaganda spewed by the very “prophets of deceit,” to cite the title of Lowenthal’s contribution to the Institute’s Studies in Authority, who were analyzed sixty years ago by the Frankfurt School itself.[16]

It is very disheartening to see how robust this phenomenon remains today, and a source of bitter irony to observe how the School itself has become its explicit target. But if there is one positive implication of these developments, it is the perverse tribute today’s radical right pays to the School’s acuity in revealing the workings of their deplorable ideology and its origins in their political and psychological pathologies. In looking for a scapegoat for all the transformations of culture which they can’t abide, they have recognized the most acute analysts of their own condition. In the fog of their blighted understanding, they have discerned a real threat. But it is not to some phantasm called “Western civilization,” whose most valuable achievements they themselves routinely betray, but rather to their own pathetic and misguided worldview and the dangerous politics it has spawned in our climate of heightened fear and despair.

The answer should not be to replace one scapegoat with another and trace all critiques of political correctness and the anxieties of those who level them back to the machinations of an extremist cult. Only a solution in which the deeper sources of those anxieties can be reduced will lessen the attraction of such theories to the people who find them persuasive. But perhaps at least exposing the paper trail leading from Lyndon Larouche to both Paul Weyrich and Fidel Castro can cause some of the more gullible to pause before they leap into the abyss. If not, at least we can always fall back on those death panels mandated by our foreign-born Muslim socialist president, himself a tool of the Frankfurt school,[17] to keep those who resist our plot to destroy Western civilization in line. Oops, sorry, more beans spilled…

Notes

[1] http://www.granma.cu/ingles/reflections-i/19agosto-34reflexiones1.html. Originally written in Spanish as La Verdadera Historia del Club Bilderberg, the book is translated as The True Story of the Bilderberg Group (Waterville, Or., 2007). In the English translation, all references to the Frankfurt School, Walter Lippmann and the Beatles are purged.

[2] Daniel Estulin and Fidel Castro, “Humanity Must Preserve Itself in Order to Live for Thousands of Years,” Granma Internacional, Tuesday, August, 31, 2010.

[3] Castro’s paraphrase of Estulin reads as follows: “The responsibility of devising a social theory of rock and roll fell to the German sociologist, musicologist, and composer Theodor Adorno, ‘one of the leading philosophers at the Frankfurt School of Social Research…’ Adorno was sent to the United States in 1939 to direct the Princeton Radio Research Project, a joint effort between Tavistock and the Frankfurt School with the aim of controlling the masses, which was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and founded by one of David Rockefeller’s trusted men, Hadley Cantril…” One of Estulin’s main players in the Bilderberg conspiracy, it should be noted, is the Tavistock Institute for Social Relations in London.

[4] Michael Minnicino, “New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness,” Fidelio, 1(1991-1992); reprinted by the Schiller Institute: http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html

[5] www.amconmag.com/…/the-roots-of-political-correctness/

[6] Ralph de Toledano, Cry Havoc! The Great American Bringdown and How it Happened (Washington, 2007).

[7] In later incarnations of his narrative, Lind would elaborate this point, arguing in a chapter of a 2007 book edited by Pat Boone and Ted Baehr, The Culture-Wise Family: Upholding Christian Values in a Media-Wise World: “The Frankfurt School was well on the way to political correctness. Then suddenly, fate intervened. In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, where the Frankfurt School was located. Since the Frankfurt School was Marxist, and the Nazis hated Marxism, and since almost all its members were Jewish, it decided to leave Germany. In 1934, the Frankfurt School, including its leading members from Germany, was re-established in New York City with help from Columbia University. Soon, its focus shifted from destroying traditional Western culture in to doing so in the United States. It would prove all too successful.” www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55833.

[8] www.stormfront.org/forum/t633959-3/. For a similar anti-Semitic rant, see www.thejewishquestion.com/…/jews-created-spread -political-correctness-to-destroy-western-civilization.

[9] www.stormfront.org/forum/t633959-3/. Although it’s not clear that the website really represents a group or just a lone psycho, he is clearly not alone. For similar anti-Semitic rants against the Frankfurt School, see www.thejewishquestion.com/…/jews-created-spread-political-correctness-to-destroy-western-civilization; and buchanan.org/…/kevin-macdonald-pat-buchanan-is-censored-by-human-events-3754. Kevin Macdonald, a Professor of Psychology at California State, Long Beach, has written several unapologetically anti-Semitic books blaming the Jews for the fall of Western civilization, in which the Frankfurt School figures prominently.

[10] Timothy Matthews, “The Frankfurt School: Conspiracy to Corrupt”, Catholic Insight, March, 2009: http://catholicinsight.com/online/features/article_882.shtml

[11] When the invasion took place, I was asked to support a commission set up in Belgium by Lieven de Cauter on the model of the Russell Tribunal during Vietnam to have a public trial of the perpetrators, who turned out in the first version of the initiative to share certain ethnic traits. When I pointed this out to de Cauter, he publically acknowledged my warning. See his blog of March, 18, 2003: www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00582.html

[12] Estulin, La Verdadera Historia del Club Bilderberg, p. 15, footnote 25.

[13] See Savage’s show on You Tube entitled “Liberalism and Frankfurt School Marxism” where he blames Obama on the influence of the evil Herbert “Marcoosee.”

[14] See the incredulous response to one of the more prominent conservative voices, Andrew Breitbart, in the May 24, 2010 New Yorker by Rebecca Mead and the internet piece by John Knesel on May 18, 2010: trueslant.com/…/who-let-andrew-breitbart-into-the-critical-theory-section-of-the-book-store/ [here]. They focus on Breitbart’s claim that Obama was a tool of the Frankfurt School, but do not comment on the larger phenomenon.

[15] David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis, 2007) and Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis, 2009).

[16] Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (New York, 1949).

[17] For an example of the link, see James Simpson, “Frankfurt Reigns Supreme at Notre Dame,” American Thinker, September 8, 2010: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/ frankfurt_school_reigns_suprem.html

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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11 Responses to Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe

  1. anon says:

    Thanks for posting this. The Telegraph (UK) and its readers love mentioning that list and how every single problem in the world can be blamed on The Frankfurt School. It sadly has entered the mainstream. I wonder how long it will be until someone like Senator Bernardi goes nuts over this stuff?

  2. @ndy says:

    Dunno if Bernardi himself has written about it (haveta check) but his followers certainly have, spec inre Lind’s essay. Thus B founded the ‘Conservative Leadership Foundation’ in 2009. Last yr it ran an essay comp and published entries. One essay (by Stewart Hazelton) includes ref to Lind:
    http://www.conservative.org.au/Writing-Competition/2011/2011%20CWC%20Book%20WEB.pdf

    Political correctness is everywhere. It is an insidious invisible phantom force that sweeps through every corner of society, leaving no conversation or nativity scene untouched. It has been instilled in the mindset of the cowardly left and has frightened common sense into submission. Political correctness is a phantom…

    Proof that political correctness is a wolf in sheep’s clothing is obvious once its origins are understood. Many believe that the term derives from a modern school of thought that came about in the 1960’s along with the hippie movement (Bill Lind 2000). It was a way for society to modify words so that no individual or group would feel excluded, insulted or made out to be inferior (Gary Martin 1996). As nice and fuzzy as this sounds, believing in this somewhat less sordid misconception of origin already begins to dangerously encroach on free speech.

    In truth, the sinister origins stem back to 1923 when a young man by the name of Felix Weil, the son of a millionaire German trader, set out to establish a think tank to interpret economic Marxism into cultural terms (Bill Lind 2000). He began by sponsoring the ‘First Marxist Work Week’ in the town of Ilmenau, Germany (The Frankfurt School n.d.).

    The most noteworthy of attendees included György Lukács, Hungarian Marxist Philosopher and founder of Western Marxism (M.I.A. Library n.d.), Karl Korsch, Communist Minister of Justice (1923) Thuringian, Germany (Wikipedia 2011), Richard Sorge, infamous soviet spy (Encyclopedia.com 2001), Friedrich Pollock, co-founder of the Institute for Social Research and member of the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist theory (Wikipedia 2011) and Karl Wittfogel, playwright, historian and fervent member of the Communist Party of Germany. Wittfogel later denounced communism – which is said to be attributed to his anger towards the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 1939 (Waterhistory n.d.).

    After the so-called success of the meeting, the seed of political correctness was planted, which later sprouted into founding the ‘Institute for Social Research’ by Felix Weil & Friedrich Pollock (Wikipedia 2010). The original name of the institute was alleged to be ‘The Institute for Marxism’ (Bill Lind 2000). However the individuals behind its creation decided that the institute as well as its engineered social products such as political correctness was better not directly associated with Marxism (Bill Lind 2000).

    A central question at the heart of this cancerous institute in its founding days was why their communist beliefs of a united Marxists utopian paradise wasn’t spreading like wildfire around the world? Why wasn’t the world-embracing communism? The reason they settled on was Western democracy (Sonia Deuber 2007). Their method to combat freedom, liberty and the belief in the individual was not to rely on the merits of their own beliefs, thus winning the world over through the so-called ‘pros’ of communism. Instead they developed a malevolent means to wear away at the foundations of free society, eroding away core principles such as free speech.

    Political correctness was officially “weaponised” when it was partnered with ‘Critical Theory’ in 1937 (Bill Lind 2000). The basic idea of the theory is similar to a screaming snivelling five-year-old that sticks its fingers in their ears and cries, “I want it my way”. Critical Theory quite simply means to criticise everything you don’t like and refuse to lay down any alternative (Bill Lind 2000). According to Marxists, putting forth their own alternatives would be impossible to do so, as long as society is forced to live in tyranny and under the oppressive ideals of freedom, equality and free speech of the wicked West.

    This deadly combination received its cloak of secrecy from Marxism in the 1960’s (the time when many people believe Political Correctness was created) and launched into mainstream society by Herbert Marcuse. He saw the student rebellions in the 60’s as an excellent opportunity to put ‘meaning’ behind the angst of student rebellions all around the United States. His book ‘Eros of Civilization’ became the unofficial bible of the radical left, dubbing Herbert Marcuse as the ‘father of the New Left’ (The European Graduate School n.d.).

    The link between Marxism in 1923 and political correctness today is immediately understood upon the realisation that Herbert Marcuse was a leading academic and theorist for the Institute of Social Research. Herbert Marcuse effectively packaged dangerous Marxist products designed by the Institute of Social Research and delivered it to the mainstream in an enticing attractive form, especially to young people, who are now senior citizens today!

  3. frub says:

    Hazelton neglects to add the qualifier that Felix Weil was a Jew. He also declines to mention that around 80% of the Russian revolutionary leadership was Jewish. He forgets that the British parliamentary committee declared communist revolution and Jews are inseparable. Many people in the late 1910s and early 1920s reached the same conclusion. Oddly some Jews in Eastern Europe expressed surprise when their fellow (commie) Jews hurled bombs into synagogues, however l digress.

    Socialism and Jews cannot be separated, though perplexingly Jews are reluctant to claim ownership of the 50 million dead bodies – the ones that had to die in Russia and the Ukraine and elsewhere in that happy commie experiment (50 million being the most up-to-date figure). But it doesn’t matter that so many had to die because the Jewish commie dreamers had a… dream, and dreams are really important, the bigger the fantasy the better lol. Such a shame that we goyim can’t escape to Israel when the socialist/multiculti experiments being forced on the White countries go pear shape – but then we can always convert lol, they’ll let us in for sure then!

  4. frub says:

    Sorry Carson you cant own your own cow, you cant have your own culture, you cant have your own country – whites can no longer have their own countries!
    The only thing you can have is loads and loads of brainwashing and reprogramming!
    And when youre blended out there wont be a racist problem any more – because only whites are racist, Carson, so just get on with it and die and then the world will be wonderful – and rightfully ruled by a Jewish/Chinese cartel lol. Drink the kool aid, Carson.

  5. frub says:

    I cant see where Jay actually attempts to refute that Jews and socialism are so intertwined such that you cannot [separate] one from the other. Usually no one, Jew or gentile, attempts such a refutation, usually the only response is silence.

  6. frub says:

    The people who want to rid the world of Whites – thats who youre working for Andy. Its the only game in town – the only item on their agenda. All your so called anti- right diatribe leads to one outcome only – White genocide. Its the only possible outcome. There can never be any other outcome. Its illogical and silly to imagine the direction we are going in can lead to a destination other than this. This is what you and every anarchist is working for. Every socialist is working for this. Liberal, Labor and the Greens are working for this. I dont expect you to admit it but youd have to be as dumb as dogshit if you cant see it. White disappearance is the only consequence of your political beliefs.

  7. Marcuse wrote a book of criticisms against the Soviet system. It was called: “Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis”.

    Gramsci wasn’t even part of The Frankfurt School.

    Georg Lukács criticized The Frankfurt School calling them the beautiful and comfortable “Grand Hotel Abyss” which teetered on the edge of absurdity and nothingness.

    …so who does that leave as an actual “Cultural Marxist”?

    …Adorno perhaps? With his criticisms of pop-culture which he despised? Or perhaps Horkheimer who gave up on Marxism entirely?

    The truth is that feminism, gay rights, civil rights, atheism and secular humanism all pre-date The Frankfurt School (which hasn’t been influential in academia for 45 years now) and all these movements that get called “Cultural Marxism” have other sources, reasons and intentions behind their existence.

    “Cultural Marxism” is a term for the true believers of Conservative dogma. One for the crowd, not for the individualist. One to rally the team, but nothing to wander into a debate carrying.

    Personally I hope that conservatives try to spread this relic of cold war paranoia far and wide. It will do wonders for showing the world the nature of their ideology – “We may not have the answers – but god damn it we’ll keep you safe from the USSR!!!”

    Also – show me a corporation and I’ll find the person there in charge of giving sexual harassment seminars. McDonalds and Coke both like to put blacks and asians in their advertisements as to appeal to the widest audiences of racial super-friends… but is capitalism being looked at as the source of Multiculturalism, feminism, or political correctness?

    NO. Because it makes sense that companies would want women to feel comfortable working for them. That advertisers want to seem appealing and friendly to everyone. That religion is going to fall away as the world of science gains explanatory power. These aren’t expressions of Marxist theory infecting our culture – they’re functions of capitalism and good will. Plain and simple, but those who push this Christian Conservative conspiracy theory won’t accept what I’ve said here as an explanation – because they are as much ideologues as a hardcore Marxist Soviet could ever dream of being.

  8. ablokeimet says:

    Fick: ” ‘Cultural Marxism’ is a term for the true believers of Conservative dogma.”

    This much I had already worked out. Reading Martin Jay’s account, however, has taught me something else. Many of the people grouching about Cultural Marxism are probably not aware of it, but they are peddling the code words of the vilest of anti-Semites. So they’re helping them along, knowingly or unknowingly, spreading their vicious lies about a Global Jewish Conspiracy.

  9. Dr Ian Gardner says:

    An alternative account on the First Marxist Work Week and the founding of the Frankfurt School which more accurately reflects the documentary record can be found in my recent article on Medium.

    https://medium.com/@ian_gardner/the-first-marxist-work-week-an-argentine-riddle-wrapped-in-mystery-inside-an-enigma-22a3d1b15cb2

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