NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/alt/activism/21516

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From: [e-mail] (John Covici)
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Subject: The New Dark Age: Frankfurt School & Political Correctness: part 1
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Date: 28 Jan 93 19:29:14 GMT
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In response to several requests for more background material on the
destruction of our "culture", I am posting this article.  The series
will be continued when more information becomes available.

THE NEW DARK AGE
    The Frankfurt School and ``Political Correctness''

                 by Michael J. Minnicino



The people of North America and Western Europe now accept
a level of ugliness in their daily lives which is almost
without precedent in the history of Western civilization.
      Most of us have become so inured, that the death of
millions from starvation and disease draws from us no
more than a sigh, or a murmur of protest. Our own city
streets, home to legions of the homeless, are ruled by
Dope, Inc., the largest industry in the world, and on
those streets Americans now murder each other at a rate
not seen since the Dark Ages.
   At the same time, a thousand smaller horrors are so
commonplace as to go unnoticed. Our children spend as much
time sitting in front of television sets as they do in
school, watching with glee, scenes of torture and death
which might have shocked an audience in the Roman
Coliseum. Music is everywhere, almost unavoidable--but
it does not uplift, nor even tranquilize--it claws at
the ears, sometimes spitting out an obscenity. Our plastic
arts are ugly, our architecture is ugly, our clothes are
ugly.
      There have certainly been periods in history where
mankind has lived through similar kinds of brutishness,
but our time is crucially different. Our post-World War II
era is the first in history in which these horrors are
completely avoidable. Our time is the first to have the
technology and resources to feed, house, educate, and
humanely employ every person on earth, no matter what the
growth of population. Yet, when shown the ideas and proven
technologies that can solve the most horrendous problems,
most people retreat into implacable passivity. We have
become not only ugly, but impotent.
   Nonetheless, there is no reason why our current
moral-cultural situation had to lawfully or naturally turn
out as it has; and there is no reason why this tyranny of
ugliness should continue one instant longer.
   Consider the situation just one hundred years ago, in
the early 1890's. In music, Claude Debussy was completing
his{ Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,} and Arnold
Scho@aunberg was beginning to experiment with atonalism;
at the same time, Dvorak was working on his Ninth
Symphony, while Brahms and Verdi still lived. Edvard Munch
was showing {The Scream,} and Paul Gauguin his
{Self-Portrait with Halo,} but in America, Thomas
Eakins was still painting and teaching. Mechanists like
Helmholtz and Mach held major university chairs of
science, alongside the students of Riemann and Cantor.
Pope Leo XIII's {De Rerum Novarum} was being
promulgated, even as sections of the Socialist Second
International were turning terrorist, and preparing for
class war.
   The optimistic belief that one could compose music
like Beethoven, paint like Rembrandt, study the universe
like Plato and Nicolaus of Cusa, and change world society
without violence, was alive in the 1890's--admittedly, it
was weak, and under siege, but it was hardly dead. Yet,
within twenty short years, these Classical traditions of
human civilization had been all but swept away, and the
West had committed itself to a series of wars of
inconceivable carnage.
    What started about a hundred years ago, was what
might be called a counter-Renaissance. The Renaissance of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a religious
celebration of the human soul and mankind's potential for
growth. Beauty in art could not be conceived of as
anything less than the expression of the most-advanced
scientific principles, as demonstrated by the geometry
upon which Leonardo's perspective and Brunelleschi's great
Dome of Florence Cathedral are based. The finest minds of
the day turned their thoughts to the heavens and the
mighty waters, and mapped the solar system and the route
to the New World, planning great projects to turn the
course of rivers for the betterment of mankind.
      About a hundred years ago, it was as though a long
checklist had been drawn up, with all of the wonderful
achievements of the Renaissance itemized--each to be
reversed. As part of this ``New Age'' movement, as it was
then called, the concept of the human soul was undermined
by the most vociferous intellectual campaign in history;
art was forcibly separated from science, and science
itself was made the object of deep suspicion. Art was made
ugly because, it was said, life had become ugly.
   The cultural shift away from the Renaissance ideas
that built the modern world, was due to a kind of
freemasonry of ugliness. In the beginning, it was a formal
political conspiracy to popularize theories that were
specifically designed to weaken the soul of
Judeo-Christian civilization in such a way as to make
people believe that creativity was not possible, that
adherence to universal truth was evidence of
authoritarianism, and that reason itself was suspect. This
conspiracy was decisive in planning and developing, as
means of social manipulation, the vast new
sister industries of radio, television, film, recorded
music, advertising, and public opinion polling. The
pervasive psychological hold of the media was purposely
fostered to create the passivity and pessimism which
afflict our populations today.
      So successful was this conspiracy, that it has
become embedded in our culture; it no longer needs to be a
``conspiracy,'' for it has taken on a life of its own. Its
successes are not debatable--you need only turn on the
radio or television. Even the nomination of a Supreme
Court Justice is deformed into an erotic soap opera, with
the audience rooting from the sidelines for their favorite
character.
   Our universities, the cradle of our technological and
intellectual future, have become overwhelmed by
Comintern-style New Age ``Political Correctness.'' With
the collapse of the Soviet Union, our campuses now
represent the largest concentration of Marxist dogma in
the world. The irrational adolescent outbursts of the
1960's have become institutionalized into a ``permanent
revolution.'' Our professors glance over their shoulders,
hoping the current mode will blow over before a student's
denunciation obliterates a life's work; some audio-tape
their lectures, fearing accusations of ``insensitivity''
by some enraged ``Red Guard.'' Students at the University
of Virginia recently petitioned successfully to drop the
requirement to read Homer, Chaucer, and other DEMS (``Dead
European Males'') because such writings are considered
ethnocentric, phallocentric, and generally inferior to the
``more relevant'' Third World, female, or homosexual authors.
   This is not the academy of a republic; this is
Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD rooting out
``deviationists,'' and banning books--the only thing
missing is the public bonfire.
   We will have to face the fact that the ugliness we
see around us has been consciously fostered and organized
in such a way, that a majority of the population is losing
the cognitive ability to transmit to the next generation,
the ideas and methods upon which our civilization was
built. The loss of that ability is the primary indicator
of a Dark Age. And, a new Dark Age is exactly what we are
in. In such situations, the record of history is
unequivocal: either we create a Renaissance--a rebirth of
the fundamental principles upon which civilization
originated--or, our civilization dies.



I.  The Frankfurt School:
     Bolshevik Intelligentsia

   The single, most important organizational component of
this conspiracy was a Communist thinktank called the
Institute for Social Research (I.S.R.), but popularly
known as the Frankfurt School.
   In the heady days immediately after the Bolshevik
Revolution in Russia, it was widely believed that
proletarian revolution would momentarily sweep out of the
Urals into Europe and, ultimately, North America. It did
not; the only two attempts at workers' government in the
West-- in Munich and Budapest--lasted only months. The
Communist International (Comintern) therefore began
several operations to determine why this was so. One such
was headed by {{Georg Lukacs,}} a Hungarian aristocrat, son of
one of the Hapsburg Empire's leading bankers. Trained in
Germany and already an important literary theorist, Lukacs
became a Communist during World War I, writing as he
joined the party, ``Who will save us from Western
civilization?'' Lukacs was well-suited to the Comintern
task: he had been one of the Commissars of Culture during
the short-lived Hungarian Soviet in Budapest in 1919; in
fact, modern historians link the shortness of the Budapest
experiment to Lukacs' orders mandating sex education in
the schools, easy access to contraception, and the
loosening of divorce laws--all of which revulsed
Hungary's Roman Catholic population.
   Fleeing to the Soviet Union after the
counter-revolution, Lukacs was secreted into Germany in
1922, where he chaired a meeting of Communist-oriented
sociologists and intellectuals. This meeting founded the
Institute for Social Research. Over the next decade, the
Institute worked out what was to become the Comintern's
most successful psychological warfare operation against
the capitalist West.
   Lukacs identified that any political movement capable
of bringing Bolshevism to the West would have to be, in
his words, ``demonic''; it would have to ``possess the
religious power which is capable of filling the entire
soul; a power that characterized primitive Christianity.''
However, Lukacs suggested, such a ``messianic'' political
movement could only succeed when the individual believes
that his or her actions are determined by ``not a personal
destiny, but the destiny of the community'' in a world
``{that has been abandoned by God} [emphasis
added-MJM].'' Bolshevism
worked in Russia because that nation was dominated by a
peculiar gnostic form of Christianty typified by the
writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. ``The model for the new
man is Alyosha Karamazov,'' said Lukacs, referring to the
Dostoyevsky character who willingly gave over his personal
identity to a holy man, and thus ceased to be ``unique,
pure, and therefore abstract.''
   This abandonment of the soul's uniqueness also solves
the problem of ``the diabolic forces lurking in all
violence'' which must be unleashed in order to create a
revolution. In this context, Lukacs cited the Grand
Inquisitor section of Dostoyevsky's {The Brothers
Karamazov,} noting that the Inquisitor who is
interrogating Jesus, has resolved the issue of good and
evil: once man has understood his alienation from God,
then any act in the service of the ``destiny of the
community'' is justified; such an act can be ``neither
crime nor madness.... For crime and madness are
objectifications of transcendental homelessness.''
    According to an eyewitness, during meetings of the
Hungarian Soviet leadership in 1919 to draw up lists for
the firing squad, Lukacs would often quote the Grand
Inquisitor: ``And we who, for their happiness, have taken
their sins upon ourselves, we stand before you and say,
`Judge us if you can and if you dare.'|''

   The Problem of Genesis

   What differentiated the West from Russia, Lukacs
identified, was a Judeo-Christian cultural matrix which
emphasized exactly the uniqueness and sacredness of the
individual which Lukacs abjured. At its core, the dominant
Western ideology maintained that the individual, through
the exercise of his or her reason, could discern the
Divine Will in an unmediated relationship. What was worse,
from Lukacs' standpoint: this reasonable relationship
necessarily implied that the individual could and should
change the physical universe in pursuit of the Good; that
Man should have dominion over Nature, as stated in the
Biblical injunction in Genesis. The problem was, that as
long as the individual had the belief--or even the
hope of the belief--that his or her divine spark of reason
could solve the problems facing society, then that society
would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation
which Lukacs recognized as the necessary prerequisite for
socialist revolution.
   The task of the Frankfurt School, then, was first, to
undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy through an
``abolition of culture'' ({Aufhebung der Kultur}
in Lukacs' German); and, second, to determine new
cultural forms which would {increase the alienation of
the population,} thus creating a ``new barbarism.'' To
this task, there gathered in and around the Frankfurt
School an incredible assortment of not only Communists,
but also non-party socialists, radical phenomenologists,
Zionists, renegade Freudians, and at least a few members
of a self-identified ``cult of Astarte.'' The variegated
membership reflected, to a certain extent, the
sponsorship: although the Institute for Social Research
started with Comintern support, over the next three
decades its sources of funds included various German and
American universities, the Rockefeller Foundation,
Columbia Broadcasting System, the American Jewish
Committee, several American intelligence services, the
Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, the
International Labour Organization, and the Hacker
Institute, a posh psychiatric clinic in Beverly Hills.
   Similarly, the Institute's political allegiances:
although top personnel maintained what might be called a
sentimental relationship to the Soviet Union (and there is
evidence that some of them worked for Soviet intelligence
into the 1960's), the Institute saw its goals as higher
than that of Russian foreign policy. Stalin, who was
horrified at the undisciplined, ``cosmopolitan'' operation
set up by his predecessors, cut the Institute off in the
late 1920's, forcing Lukacs into ``self-criticism,'' and
briefly jailing him as a German sympathizer during World
War II.
   Lukacs survived to briefly take up his old post as
Minister of Culture during the anti-Stalinist Imre Nagy
regime in Hungary. Of the other top Institute figures, the
political perambulations of {{Herbert Marcuse}} are
typical. He started as a Communist; became a prote@aage@aa
of philosopher Martin Heidegger even as the latter was
joining the Nazi Party; coming to America, he worked for
the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and
later became the U.S. State Department's top analyst of
Soviet policy during the height of the McCarthy period; in
the 1960's, he turned again, to become the most important
guru of the New Left; and he ended his days helping to
found the environmentalist extremist Green Party in West
Germany.
   In all this seeming incoherence of shifting positions
and contradictory funding, there is no ideological
conflict. The invariant is the desire of all parties
to answer Lukacs' original question: ``Who will save
us from Western civilization?''

   Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin

   Perhaps the most important, if least-known, of the
Frankfurt School's successes was the shaping of the
electronic media of radio and television into the powerful
instruments of social control which they represent today.
This grew out of the work originally done by two men who
came to the Institute in the late 1920's, {{Theodor Adorno}}
and {{Walter Benjamin.}}
   After completing studies at the University of
Frankfurt, Walter Benjamin planned to emigrate to
Palestine in 1924 with his friend {{Gershom Scholem}} (who
later became one of Israel's most famous philosophers, as
well as Judaism's leading gnostic), but was prevented by a
love affair with {{Asja Lacis,}} a Latvian actress and
Comintern stringer. Lacis whisked him off to the Italian
island of Capri, a cult center from the time of the
Emperor Tiberius, then used as a Comintern training base;
the heretofore apolitical Benjamin wrote Scholem from
Capri, that he had found ``an existential liberation and
an intensive insight into the actuality of radical
communism.''
   Lacis later took Benjamin to Moscow for further
indoctrination, where he met playwright {{Bertolt Brecht,}}
with whom he would begin a long collaboration; soon
thereafter, while working on the first German translation
of the drug-enthusiast French poet Baudelaire, Benjamin
began serious experimentation with hallucinogens. In 1927,
he was in Berlin as part of a group led by Adorno,
studying the works of Lukacs; other members of the study
group included Brecht and his composer-partner {{Kurt Weill;}}
{{Hans Eisler,}} another composer who would later become a
Hollywood film score composer and co-author with Adorno of
the textbook {Composition for the Film}; the
avant-garde photographer {{Imre Moholy-Nagy}}; and the
conductor {{Otto Klemperer.}}
   From 1928 to 1932, Adorno and Benjamin had an
intensive collaboration, at the end of which they began
publishing articles in the Institute's journal, the
{Zeitschrift fa@aur Sozialforschung.}  Benjamin was
kept on the margins of the Institute, largely due to
Adorno, who would later appropriate much of his work. As
Hitler came to power, the Institute's staff fled, but,
whereas most were quickly spirited away to new deployments
in the U.S. and England, there were no job offers for
Benjamin, probably due to the animus of Adorno. He went to
France, and, after the German invasion, fled to the
Spanish border; expecting momentary arrest by the Gestapo,
he despaired and died in a dingy hotel room of
self-administered drug overdose.
   Benjamin's work remained almost completely unknown
until 1955, when Scholem and Adorno published an edition
of his material in Germany. The full revival occurred in
1968, when {{Hannah Arendt,}} Heidegger's former mistress and
a collaborator of the Institute in America, published a
major article on Benjamin in the {New Yorker}
magazine, followed in the same year by the first English
translations of his work. Today, every university
bookstore in the country boasts a full shelf devoted to
translations of every scrap Benjamin wrote, plus exegesis,
all with 1980's copyright dates.
   Adorno was younger than Benjamin, and as aggressive
as the older man was passive. Born Teodoro
Wiesengrund-Adorno to a Corsican family, he was taught the
piano at an early age by an aunt who lived with the family
and had been the concert accompanist to the international
opera star Adelina Patti. It was generally thought that
Theodor would become a professional musician, and he
studied with Bernard Sekles, Paul Hindemith's teacher.
However, in 1918, while still a {gymnasium} student,
Adorno met {{Siegfried Kracauer.}} Kracauer was part of a
Kantian-Zionist salon which met at the house of {{Rabbi
Nehemiah Nobel}} in Frankfurt; other members of the Nobel
circle included philosopher {{Martin Buber,}} writer
{{Franz Rosenzweig,}} and two students, {{Leo Lowenthal}}
and {{Erich Fromm.}} Kracauer, Lowenthal, and Fromm would
join the I.S.R. two decades later. Adorno engaged Kracauer
to tutor him in the philosophy of Kant; Kracauer also
introduced him to the writings of Lukacs and to Walter
Benjamin, who was around the Nobel clique.
   In 1924, Adorno moved to Vienna, to study with the
atonalist composers {{Alban Berg}} and {{Arnold
Scho@aunberg,}} and became connected to the avant-garde
and occult circle around the old Marxist {{Karl Kraus.}}
Here, he not only met his future collaborator, Hans
Eisler, but also came into contact with the theories of
Freudian extremist {{Otto Gross.}} Gross, a long-time
cocaine addict, had died in a Berlin gutter in 1920, while
on his way to help the revolution in Budapest; he had
developed the theory that mental health could only be
achieved through the revival of the ancient cult of
Astarte, which would sweep away monotheism and the
``bourgeois family.''

   Saving Marxist Aesthetics

   By 1928, Adorno and Benjamin had satisfied their
intellectual wanderlust, and settled down at the I.S.R.
in
Germany to do some work. As subject, they chose an aspect
of the problem posed by Lukacs: how to give aesthetics a
firmly materialistic basis. It was a question of some
importance, at the time. Official Soviet discussions of
art and culture, with their wild gyrations into
``socialist realism'' and ``proletkult,'' were idiotic,
and only served to discredit Marxism's claim to philosophy
among intellectuals. Karl Marx's own writings on the
subject were sketchy and banal, at best.
   In essence, Adorno and Benjamin's problem was
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century, Leibniz had once again obliterated the
centuries-old gnostic dualism dividing mind and body, by
demonstrating that matter does not think. A creative act
in art or science apprehends the truth of the physical
universe, but it is not determined by that physical
universe. By self-consciously concentrating the past in
the present to effect the future, the creative act,
properly defined, is as immortal as the soul which
envisions the act. This has fatal philosophical
implications for Marxism, which rests entirely on the
hypothesis that mental activity is determined by the
social relations excreted by mankind's production of its
physical existence.
   Marx sidestepped the problem of Leibniz, as did
Adorno and Benjamin, although the latter did it with a lot
more panache. It is wrong, said Benjamin in his first
articles on the subject, to start with the reasonable,
hypothesizing mind as the basis of the development of
civilization; this is an unfortunate legacy of Socrates.
As an alternative, Benjamin posed an Aristotelian fable in
interpretation of Genesis: Assume that Eden were given to
Adam as the primordial physical state. The origin of
science and philosophy does not lie in the investigation
and mastery of nature, but in the {naming} of the
objects of nature; in the primordial state, to name a
thing was to say all there was to say about that thing. In
support of this, Benjamin cynically recalled the opening
lines of the Gospel according to St. John, carefully
avoiding the philosophically-broader Greek, and preferring
the Vulgate (so that, in the phrase ``In the beginning was
the Word,'' the connotations of the original Greek word
{logos}--speech, reason, ratiocination, translated as
``Word''--are replaced by the narrower meaning of the
Latin word {verbum}). After the expulsion from Eden and
God's requirement that Adam eat his bread earned by the
sweat of his face (Benjamin's Marxist metaphor for the
development of economies), and God's further curse of
Babel on Nimrod (that is, the development of nation-states
with distinct languages, which Benjamin and Marx viewed as
a negative process away from the ``primitive communism''
of Eden), humanity became ``estranged'' from the physical
world.
   Thus, Benjamin continued, objects still give off an
``aura'' of their primordial form, but the truth is now
hopelessly elusive. In fact, speech, written language,
art, creativity itself--that by which we master
physicality--merely furthers the estrangement by
attempting, in Marxist jargon, to incorporate objects of
nature into the social relations determined by the class
structure dominant at that point in history. The creative
artist or scientist, therefore, is a vessel, like Ion the
rhapsode as he described himself to Socrates, or like a
modern ``chaos theory'' advocate: the creative act springs
out of the hodgepodge of culture as if by magic. The more
that bourgeois man tries to convey what he intends about
an object, the less truthful he becomes; or, in one of
Benjamin's most oft-quoted statements, ``Truth is the
death of intention.''
   This philosophical sleight-of-hand allows one to do
several destructive things. By making creativity
historically-specific, you rob it of both immortality and
morality. One cannot hypothesize universal truth, or
natural law, for truth is completely relative to
historical development. By discarding the idea of truth
and error, you also may throw out the ``obsolete'' concept
of good and evil; you are, in the words of Friedrich
Nietzsche, ``beyond good and evil.'' Benjamin is able, for
instance, to defend what he calls the ``Satanism'' of the
French Symbolists and their Surrealist successors, for at
the core of this Satanism ``one finds the cult of evil as
a political device ... to disinfect and isolate against
all moralizing dilettantism'' of the bourgeoisie. To
condemn the Satanism of Rimbaud as evil, is as incorrect
as to extol a Beethoven quartet or a Schiller poem as
good; for both judgments are blind to the historical
forces working {unconsciously} on the artist.
   Thus, we are told, the late Beethoven's chord
structure was striving to be atonal, but Beethoven could
not bring himself {consciously} to break with the
structured world of Congress of Vienna Europe (Adorno's
thesis); similarly, Schiller really wanted to state that
creativity was the liberation of the erotic, but as a true
child of the Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant, he could not
make the requisite renunciation of reason (Marcuse's
thesis). Epistemology becomes a poor relation of public
opinion, since the artist does not consciously create
works in order to uplift society, but instead
unconsciously transmits the ideological assumptions of the
culture into which he was born. The issue is no longer
what is universally true, but what can be plausibly
interpreted by the self-appointed guardians of the
{Zeitgeist}.

   ``The Bad New Days''

   Thus, for the Frankfort School, the goal of a
cultural elite in the modern, ``capitalist'' era must be
to strip away the belief that art derives from the
self-conscious emulation of God the Creator; ``religious
illumination,'' says Benjamin, must be shown to ``reside
in a profane illumination, a materialistic,
anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or
whatever else can give an introductory lesson.'' At the
same time, {new cultural forms must be found to
increase the alienation of the population,} in order
for it to understand how truly alienated it is to live
without socialism. ``Do not build on the good old days,
but on the bad new ones,'' said Benjamin.
   The proper direction in painting, therefore, is that
taken by the late Van Gogh, who began to paint objects in
disintegration, with the equivalent of a hashish-smoker's
eye that ``loosens and entices things out of their
familiar world.'' In music, ``it is not suggested that one
can compose better today'' than Mozart or Beethoven, said
Adorno, but one must compose atonally, for atonalism is
sick, and ``the sickness, dialectically, is at the same
time the cure....The extraordinarily violent reaction
protest which such music confronts in the present society
... appears nonetheless to suggest that the dialectical
function of this music can already be felt ... negatively,
as `destruction.'|''
   The purpose of modern art, literature, and music must
be to destroy the uplifting--therefore, bourgeois --
potential of art, literature, and music, so that man,
{bereft of his connection to the divine,} sees his
only creative option to be political revolt. ``To organize
pessimism means nothing other than to expel the moral
metaphor from politics and to discover in political action
a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images.'' Thus,
Benjamin collaborated with Brecht to work these theories
into practical form, and their joint effort culminated in
the {Verfremdungseffekt} (``estrangement effect''),
Brecht's attempt to write his plays so as to make the
audience leave the theatre demoralized and aimlessly
angry.

   Political Correctness

   The Adorno-Benjamin analysis represents almost the
entire theoretical basis of all the politically correct
aesthetic trends which now plague our universities. The
Poststructuralism of {{Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault,}} and
{{Jacques Derrida,}} the Semiotics of {{Umberto Eco,}} the
Deconstructionism of {{Paul DeMan,}} all openly cite Benjamin
as the source of their work. The Italian terrorist Eco's
best-selling novel, {The Name of the Rose,} is little
more than a paean to Benjamin; DeMan, the former Nazi
collaborator in Belgium who became a prestigious Yale
professor, began his career translating Benjamin;
Barthes' infamous 1968 statement that ``[t]he author is
dead,'' is meant as an elaboration of Benjamin's dictum on
intention. Benjamin has actually been called the heir of
Leibniz and of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the philologist
collaborator of Schiller whose educational reforms
engendered the tremendous development of Germany in the
nineteenth century. Even as recently as September 1991,
the {Washington Post} referred to Benjamin as ``the
finest German literary theorist of the century (and many
would have left off that qualifying German).''
    Readers have undoubtedly heard one or another horror
story about how an African-American Studies Department has
procured a ban on {Othello}, because it is
``racist,'' or how a radical feminist professor lectured a
Modern Language Association meeting on the witches as the
``true heroines'' of {Macbeth}. These atrocities
occur because the perpetrators are able to plausibly
demonstrate, in the tradition of Benjamin and Adorno, that
Shakespeare's intent is irrelevant; what is important, is
the racist or phallocentric ``subtext'' of which
Shakespeare was unconscious when he wrote.
   When the local Women's Studies or Third World
Studies Department organizes students to abandon classics
in favor of modern Black and feminist authors, the reasons
given are pure Benjamin. It is not that these modern
writers are better, but they are somehow more truthful
because their alienated prose reflects the modern social
problems of which the older authors were ignorant!
Students are being taught that language itself is, as
Benjamin said, merely a conglomeration of false ``names''
foisted upon society by its oppressors, and are warned
against ``logocentrism,'' the bourgeois over-reliance on
words.
   If these campus antics appear ``retarded'' (in the
words of Adorno), that is because they are designed to be.
The Frankfurt School's most important breakthrough
consists in the realization that their monstrous theories
could become dominant in the culture, as a result of the
changes in society brought about by what Benjamin called
``the age of mechanical reproduction of art.''



II.  The Establishment Goes Bolshevik:
     ``Entertainment'' Replaces Art

   Before the twentieth century, the distinction between
art and ``entertainment'' was much more pronounced. One
could be entertained by art, certainly, but the experience
was active, not passive. On the first level, one had to
make a conscious choice to go to a concert, to view a
certain art exhibit, to buy a book or piece of sheet
music. It was unlikely that any more than an infinitesimal
fraction of the population would have the opportunity to
see {King Lear} or hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
more than once or twice in a lifetime. Art demanded that
one bring one's full powers of concentration and knowledge
of the subject to bear on each experience, or else the
experience were considered wasted. These were the days
when memorization of poetry and whole plays, and the
gathering of friends and family for a ``parlor concert,''
were the norm, even in rural households. These were also
the days before ``music appreciation''; when one studied
music, as many did, they learned to play it, not
appreciate it.
   However, the new technologies of radio, film, and
recorded music represented, to use the appropriate Marxist
buzz-word, a dialectical potential. On the one hand,
these technologies held out the possibility of bringing
the greatest works of art to millions of people who would
otherwise not have access to them. On the other, the fact
that the experience was infinitely reproducible could tend
to disengage the audience's mind, making the experience
less sacred, thus increasing alienation. Adorno called
this process, ``demythologizing.'' This new passivity,
Adorno hypothesized in a crucial article published in
1938, could fracture a musical composition into the
``entertaining'' parts which would be ``fetishized'' in the
memory of the listener, and the difficult parts, which
would be forgotten. Adorno continues,

   The counterpart to the fetishism is a regression of
listening. This does not mean a relapse of the individual
listener into an earlier phase of his own development, nor
a decline in the collective general level, since the
millions who are reached musically for the first time by
today's mass communications cannot be compared with the
audiences of the past. Rather, it is the contemporary
listening which has regressed, arrested at the infantile
stage. Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with
the freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for
the conscious perception of music .... [t]hey fluctuate
between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into
recognition. They listen atomistically and dissociate what
they hear, but precisely in this dissociation they develop
certain capacities which accord less with the traditional
concepts of aesthetics than with those of football or
motoring. They are not childlike ... but they are
childish; their primitivism is not that of the
undeveloped, but that of the {forcibly retarded.}
   <el5>
   This conceptual retardation and preconditioning
caused by listening, suggested that programming could
determine preference. The very act of putting, say, a
Benny Goodman number next to a Mozart sonata on the radio,
would tend to amalgamate both into entertaining
``music-on-the-radio'' in the mind of the listener. This
meant that even new and unpalatable ideas could become
popular by ``re-naming'' them through the universal
homogenizer of the culture industry. As Benjamin puts it,

   Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction
of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward
a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction
toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is
characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and
emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the
expert.... With regard to the screen, the critical and
receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive
reason for this is that the individual reactions are
predetermined by the mass audience response they are about
to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in
the film.

   At the same time, the magic power of the media could
be used to re-define previous ideas. ``Shakespeare,
Rembrandt, Beethoven will all make films,'' concluded
Benjamin, quoting the French film pioneer {{Abel Gance,}}
``... all legends, all mythologies, all myths, all founders
of religions, and the very religions themselves ... await
their exposed resurrection.''

   Social Control: The ``Radio Project''

   Here, then, were some potent theories of social
control. The great possibilities of this Frankfurt School
media work were probably the major contributing factor in
the support given the I.S.R. by the bastions of the
Establishment, after the Institute transferred its
operations to America in 1934.
   In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation began funding
research into the social effects of new forms of mass
media, particularly radio. Before World War I, radio had
been a hobbyist's toy, with only 125,000 receiving sets in
the entire U.S.; twenty years later, it had become the
primary mode of entertainment in the country; out of 32
million American families in 1937, 27.5 million had radios

-- a larger percentage than had telephones, automobiles,

plumbing, or electricity! Yet, almost no systematic
research had been done up to this point. The Rockefeller
Foundation enlisted several universities, and
headquartered this network at the School of Public and
International Affairs at Princeton University. Named the
Office of Radio Research, it was popularly known as ``the
Radio Project.''
   The director of the Project was {{Paul Lazersfeld,}} the
foster son of Austrian Marxist economist Rudolph
Hilferding, and a long-time collaborator of the I.S.R.
from the early 1930's. Under Lazersfeld was {{Frank Stanton,}}
a recent Ph.D. in industrial psychology from Ohio State, who
had just been made research director of Columbia
Broadcasting System--a grand title but a lowly position.
After World War II, Stanton became president of the CBS
News Division, and ultimately president of CBS at the
height of the TV network's power; he also became Chairman
of the Board of the RAND Corporation, and a member of
President Lyndon Johnson's ``kitchen cabinet.'' Among the
Project's researchers were {{Herta Herzog,}} who married
Lazersfeld and became the first director of research for
the Voice of America; and {{Hazel Gaudet,}} who became one of
the nation's leading political pollsters. Theodor Adorno
was named chief of the Project's music section.
   Despite the official gloss, the activities of the
Radio Project make it clear that its purpose was to test
empirically the Adorno-Benjamin thesis that the net effect
of the mass media could be to atomize and increase
lability--what people would later call ``brainwashing.''

   Soap Operas and the Invasion from Mars

   The first studies were promising. Herta Herzog
produced ``On Borrowed Experiences,'' the first
comprehensive research on soap operas. The ``serial radio
drama'' format was first used in 1929, on the inspiration
of the old, cliff-hanger ``Perils of Pauline'' film serial.
Because these little radio plays were highly melodramatic,
they became popularly identified with Italian grand opera;
because they were often sponsored by soap manufacturers,
they ended up with the generic name, ``soap opera.''
   Until Herzog's work, it was thought that the immense
popularity of this format was largely with women of
the lowest socioeconomic status who, in the restricted
circumstances of their lives, needed a helpful escape to
exotic places and romantic situations. A typical article
from that period by two University of Chicago
psychologists, ``The Radio Day-Time Serial: Symbol
Analysis'' published in the {Genetic Psychology
Monographs}, solemnly emphasized the positive, claiming
that the soaps ``function very much like the folk tale,
expressing the hopes and fears of its female audience, and
on the whole contribute to the integration of their lives
into the world in which they live.''
   Herzog found that there was, in fact, no correlation
to socioeconomic status. What is more, there was
surprisingly little correlation to content. The key factor

-- as Adorno and Benjamin's theories suggested it would be


-- was the {form} itself of the serial; women were

being effectively addicted to the format, not so much to
be entertained or to escape, but to ``find out what happens
next week.'' In fact, Herzog found, you could almost double
the listenership of a radio play by dividing it into
segments.
   Modern readers will immediately recognize that this
was not a lesson lost on the entertainment industry.
Nowadays, the serial format has spread to children's
programming and high-budget prime time shows. The most
widely watched shows in the history of television, remain
the ``Who Killed JR?'' installment of {Dallas}, and
the final episode of {M*A*S*H}, both of which were
premised on a ``what happens next?'' format. Even feature
films, like the {Star Wars} and {Back to the
Future} trilogies, are now produced as serials, in order
to lock in a viewership for the later installments. The
humble daytime soap also retains its addictive qualities
in the current age: 70% of all American women over
eighteen now watch at least two of these shows each day,
and there is a fast-growing viewership among men and
college students of both sexes.
   The Radio Project's next major study was an
investigation into the effects of {{Orson Welles'}} Halloween
1938 radioplay based on H.G. Wells' {War of the
Worlds.} Six million people heard the broadcast
realistically describing a Martian invasion force landing
in rural New Jersey. Despite repeated and clear statements
that the show was fictional, approximately 25% of the
listeners thought it was real, some panicking outright.
The Radio Project researchers found that a majority of the
people who panicked did not think that men from Mars
had invaded; they actually thought that {the Germans} had
invaded.
   It happened this way. The listeners had been
psychologically pre-conditioned by radio reports from the
Munich crisis earlier that year. During that crisis, CBS's
man in Europe, {{Edward R. Murrow,}} hit upon the idea of
breaking into regular programming to present short news
bulletins.  For the first time in broadcasting, news was
presented not in longer analytical pieces, but in short
clips--what we now call ``audio bites.'' At the height of
the crisis, these flashes got so numerous, that, in the
words of Murrow's producer {{Fred Friendly,}} ``news bulletins
were interrupting news bulletins.'' As the listeners
thought that the world was moving to the brink of war, CBS
ratings rose dramatically. When Welles did his fictional
broadcast later, after the crisis had receded, he used
this news bulletin technique to give things
verisimilitude: he started the broadcast by faking a
standard dance-music program, which kept getting
interrupted by increasingly terrifying ``on the scene
reports'' from New Jersey. Listeners who panicked, reacted
not to content, but to format; they heard ``We interrupt
this program for an emergency bulletin,'' and ``invasion,''
and immediately concluded that Hitler had invaded. The
soap opera technique, transposed to the news, had worked
on a vast and unexpected scale.

   Little Annie and the ``Wagnerian Dream'' of TV

   In 1939, one of the numbers of the quarterly
{Journal of Applied Psychology} was handed over to
Adorno and the Radio Project to publish some of their
findings. Their conclusion was that Americans had, over
the last twenty years, become ``radio-minded,'' and that
their listening had become so fragmented that repetition
of format was the key to popularity. The play list
determined the ``hits''--a truth well known to organized
crime, both then and now--and repetition could make any
form of music or any performer, even a classical music
performer, a ``star.'' As long as a familiar form or
context was retained, almost any content would become
acceptable. ``Not only are hit songs, stars, and soap
operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable
types,'' said Adorno, summarizing this material a few
years later, ``but the specific content of the
entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears
to change. The details are interchangeable.''
   The crowning achievement of the Radio Project was
``Little Annie,'' officially titled the Stanton-Lazersfeld
Program Analyzer. Radio Project research had shown that
all previous methods of preview polling were ineffectual.
Up to that point, a preview audience listened to a show or
watched a film, and then was asked general questions: did
you like the show? what did you think of so-and-so's
performance? The Radio Project realized that this method
did not take into account the test audience's atomized
perception of the subject, and demanded that they make a
rational analysis of what was intended to be an irrational
experience. So, the Project created a device in which each
test audience member was supplied with a type of rheostat
on which he could register the intensity of his likes or
dislikes on a moment-to-moment basis. By comparing the
individual graphs produced by the device, the operators
could determine, not if the audience liked the whole show

-- which was irrelevant--but, which situations or

characters produced a positive, if momentary, feeling
state.
   Little Annie transformed radio, film, and ultimately
television programming. CBS still maintains program
analyzer facilities in Hollywood and New York; it is said
that results correlate 85% to ratings. Other networks and
film studios have similar operations. This kind of
analysis is responsible for the uncanny feeling you get
when, seeing a new film or TV show, you think you have
seen it all before. You have, many times. If a program
analyzer indicates that, for instance, audiences were
particularly titilated by a short scene in a World War II
drama showing a certain type of actor kissing a certain
type of actress, then that scene format will be worked
into dozens of screenplays--transposed to the Middle
Ages, to outer space, etc., etc.
   The Radio Project also realized that television had
the potential to intensify all of the effects that they
had studied. TV technology had been around for some years,
and had been exhibited at the 1936 World's Fair in New
York, but the only person to attempt serious utilization of
the medium had been Adolf Hitler. The Nazis broadcast
events from the 1936 Olympic Games ``live'' to communal
viewing rooms around Germany; they were trying to expand on
their great success in using radio to Nazify all aspects
of German culture. Further plans for German TV development
were sidetracked by war preparations.
   Adorno understood this potential perfectly, writing
in 1944:

   Television aims at the synthesis of radio and
film, and is held up only because the interested parties
have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will
be quite enormous and promise to intensify the
impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by
tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial
culture products can come triumphantly out in the open,
derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the
{Gesamtkunstwerk}--the fusion of all the arts in one
work.

   The obvious point is this: the profoundly irrational
forms of modern entertainment--the stupid and eroticized
content of most TV and films, the fact that your local
Classical music radio station programs Stravinsky next to
Mozart--don't have to be that way. They were designed to
be that way. The design was so successful, that today, no
one even questions the reasons or the origins.



III. Creating ``Public Opinion'':
     The ``Authoritarian Personality'' Bogeyman and the OSS

   The efforts of the Radio Project conspirators to
manipulate the population, spawned the modern
pseudoscience of public opinion polling, in order to gain
greater control over the methods they were developing.
   Today, public opinion polls, like the television
news, have been completely integrated into our society. A
``scientific survey'' of what people are said to think
about an issue can be produced in less than twenty-four
hours. Some campaigns for high political office are
completely shaped by polls; in fact, many politicians try
to create issues which are themselves meaningless, but
which they know will look good in the polls, purely for
the purpose of enhancing their image as ``popular.''
Important policy decisions are made, even before the
actual vote of the citizenry or the legislature, by poll
results. Newspapers will occasionally write pious
editorials calling on people to think for themselves, even
as the newspaper's business agent sends a check to the
local polling organization.
   The idea of ``public opinion'' is not new, of course.
Plato spoke against it in his {Republic} over two
millenia ago; Alexis de Tocqueville wrote at length of its
influence over America in the early nineteenth century.
But, nobody thought to {measure} public opinion before
the twentieth century, and nobody before the 1930's thought
to use those measurements for decision-making.
   It is useful to pause and reflect on the whole
concept. The belief that public opinion can be a
determinant of truth is philosophically insane. It
precludes the idea of the rational individual mind. Every
individual mind contains the divine spark of reason, and
is thus capable of scientific discovery, and understanding
the discoveries of others. The individual mind is one of
the few things that cannot, therefore, be ``averaged.''
Consider: at the moment of creative discovery, it is
possible, if not probable, that the scientist making the
discovery is the {only} person to hold that opinion
about nature, whereas everyone else has a different
opinion, or no opinion. One can only imagine what a
``scientifically-conducted survey'' on Kepler's model of
the solar system would have been, shortly after he
published the {Harmony of the World:} 2% for, 48%
against, 50% no opinion.
   These psychoanalytic survey techniques became
standard, not only for the Frankfurt School, but also
throughout American social science departments,
particularly after the I.S.R. arrived in the United
States. The methodology was the basis of the research
piece for which the Frankfurt School is most well known,
the ``authoritarian personality'' project. In 1942, I.S.R.
director {{Max Horkheimer}} made contact with the American
Jewish Committee, which asked him to set up a Department
of Scientific Research within its organization. The
American Jewish Committee also provided a large grant to
study anti-Semitism in the American population. ``Our
aim,'' wrote Horkheimer in the introduction to the study,
``is not merely to describe prejudice, but to explain it
in order to help in its eradication.... Eradication means
reeducation scientifically planned on the basis of
understanding scientifically arrived at.''

   The A-S Scale

   Ultimately, five volumes were produced for this study
over the course of the late 1940's; the most important was
the last, {The Authoritarian Personality,} by Adorno,
with the help of three Berkeley, California social
psychologists.
   In the 1930's Erich Fromm had devised a questionnaire
to be used to analyze German workers pychoanalytically as
``authoritarian,'' ``revolutionary'' or ``ambivalent.''
The heart of Adorno's study was, once again, Fromm's
psychoanalytic scale, but with the positive end changed
from a ``revolutionary personality,'' to a ``democratic
personality,'' in order to make things more palatable for
a postwar audience.
   Nine personality traits were tested and measured,
including:
ang Indent Bulleted List
   * {{conventionalism}}--rigid adherence to
     conventional, middle-class values
   * {{authoritarian aggression}}--the tendency to
     be on the look-out for, to condemn, reject and punish,
     people who violate conventional values
   * {{projectivity}}--the disposition to believe
     that wild and dangerous things go on in the world
   * {{sex}}--exaggerated concern with sexual
     goings-on.
   From these measurements were constructed several
scales: the E Scale (ethnocentrism), the PEC Scale
(poltical and economic conservatism), the A-S Scale
(anti-Semitism), and the F Scale (fascism). Using Rensis
Lickerts's methodology of weighting results, the authors
were able to tease together an empirical definition of
what Adorno called ``a new anthropological type,'' the
authoritarian personality.
      The legerdemain here, as in all psychoanalytic
survey work, is the assumption of a Weberian ``type.''
Once the type has been statistically determined, all
behavior can be explained; if an anti-Semitic personality
does not act in an anti-Semitic way, then he or she has an
ulterior motive for the act, or is being discontinuous.
The idea that a human mind is capable of transformation,
is ignored.
   The results of this very study can be interpreted in
diametrically different ways. One could say that the study
proved that the population of the U.S. was generally
conservative, did not want to abandon a capitalist
economy, believed in a strong family and that sexual
promiscuity should be punished, thought that the postwar
world was a dangerous place, and was still suspicious of
Jews (and Blacks, Roman Catholics, Orientals, etc. --
unfortunately true, but correctable in a social context of
economic growth and cultural optimism). On the other hand,
one could take the same results and prove that anti-Jewish
pogroms and Nuremburg rallies were simmering just under
the surface, waiting for a new Hitler to ignite them.
Which of the two interpretations you accept is a
political, not a scientific, decision.
      Horkheimer and Adorno firmly believed that all
religions, Judaism included, were ``the opiate of the
masses.'' Their goal was not the protection of Jews from
prejudice, but the creation of a definition of
authoritarianism and anti-Semitism which could be
exploited to force the ``scientifically planned
reeducation'' of Americans and Europeans away from the
principles of Judeo-Christian civilization, which the
Frankfurt School despised. In their theoretical writings
of this period, Horkheimer and Adorno pushed the thesis to
its most paranoid: just as capitalism was inherently
fascistic, the philosophy of Christianity itself is the
source of anti-Semitism. As Horkheimer and Adorno jointly
wrote in their 1947 ``Elements of Anti-Semitism'':

   Christ, the spirit become flesh, is the deified
sorcerer. Man's self-reflection in the absolute, the
humanization of God by Christ, is the {proton pseudos}
[original falsehood]. Progress beyond Judaism is coupled
with the assumption that the man Jesus has become God. The
reflective aspect of Christianity, the intellectualization
of magic, is the root of evil.

   At the same time, Horkheimer could write in a
more-popularized article titled ``Anti-Semitism: A Social
Disease,'' that ``at present, the only country where there
does not seem to be any kind of anti-Semitism is
Russia''[!].
   This self-serving attempt to maximize paranoia was
further aided by Hannah Arendt, who popularized the
authoritarian personality research in her widely-read
{Origins of Totalitarianism}. Arendt also added the
famous rhetorical flourish about the ``banality of evil''
in her later {Eichmann in Jerusalem:} even a simple,
shopkeeper-type like Eichmann can turn into a Nazi beast
under the right psychological circumstances--every
Gentile is suspect, psychoanalytically.
   It is Arendt's extreme version of the authoritarian
personality thesis which is the operant philosophy of
today's Cult Awareness Network (CAN), a group which works
with the U.S. Justice Department and the Anti-Defamation
League of the B'nai B'rith, among others. Using standard
Frankfurt School method, CAN identifies political and
religious groups which are its political enemies, then
re-labels them as a ``cult,'' in order to justify
operations against them. (See box.)


   The Public Opinion Explosion

   Despite its unprovable central thesis of
``psychoanalytic types,'' the interpretive survey
methodology of the Frankfurt School became dominant in the
social sciences, and essentially remains so today. In
fact, the adoption of these new, supposedly scientific
techniques in the 1930's brought about an explosion in
public-opinion survey use, much of it funded by Madison
Avenue. The major pollsters of today--{{A.C. Neilsen,
George Gallup, Elmo Roper}}--started in the mid-1930's, and
began using the I.S.R. methods, especially given the
success of the Stanton-Lazersfeld Program Analyzer. By
1936, polling activity had become sufficiently widespread
to justify a trade association, the American Academy of
Public Opinion Research at Princeton, headed by
Lazersfeld; at the same time, the University of Chicago
created the National Opinion Research Center. In 1940, the
Office of Radio Research was turned into the Bureau of
Applied Social Research, a division of Columbia
University, with the indefatigable Lazersfeld as director.
   After World War II, Lazersfeld especially pioneered
the use of surveys to psychoanalyze American voting
behavior, and by the 1952 Presidential election, Madison
Avenue advertising agencies were firmly in control of
Dwight Eisenhower's campaign, utilizing Lazersfeld's work.
Nineteen fifty-two was also the first election under the
influence of television, which, as Adorno had predicted
eight years earlier, had grown to incredible influence in
a very short time. Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne --
the fabled ``BBD&O'' ad agency--designed Ike's campaign
appearances entirely for the TV cameras, and as carefully
as Hitler's Nuremberg rallies; one-minute ``spot''
advertisements were pioneered to cater to the
survey-determined needs of the voters.
   This snowball has not stopped rolling since. The
entire development of television and advertising in
the 1950's and 1960's was pioneered by men and women who
were trained in the Frankfurt School's techniques of
mass alienation. Frank Stanton went directly from the
Radio Project to become the single most-important leader
of modern television. Stanton's chief rival in the
formative period of TV was NBC's {{Sylvester ``Pat'' Weaver}};
after a Ph.D. in ``listening behavior,'' Weaver worked
with the Program Analyzer in the late 1930's, before
becoming a Young & Rubicam vice-president, then NBC's
director of programming, and ultimately the network's
president. Stanton and Weaver's stories are typical.
   Today, the men and women who run the networks,
the ad agencies, and the polling organizations, even
if they have never heard of Theodor Adorno, firmly
believe in Adorno's theory that the media can, and
should, turn all they touch into ``football.'' Coverage
of the 1991 Gulf War should make that clear.
   The technique of mass media and advertising developed
by the Frankfurt School now effectively controls American
political campaigning. Campaigns are no longer based on
political programs, but actually on alienation. Petty
gripes and irrational fears are identified by
psychoanalytic survey, to be transmogrified into
``issues'' to be catered to; the ``Willy Horton'' ads of
the 1988 Presidential campaign, and the ``flag-burning
amendment,'' are but two recent examples. Issues that will
determine the future of our civilization, are scrupulously
reduced to photo opportunities and audio bites--like Ed
Murrow's original 1930's radio reports--where the
dramatic effect is maximized, and the idea content is
zero.

   Who Is the Enemy?

   Part of the influence of the authoritarian
personality hoax in our own day also derives from the fact
that, incredibly, the Frankfurt School and its theories
were officially accepted by the U.S. government during
World War II, and these Cominternists were responsible for
determining who were America's wartime, {and
postwar,} enemies.
     In 1942, the Office of Strategic Services, America's
hastily-constructed espionage and covert operations unit,
asked former Harvard president James Baxter to form a
Research and Analysis (R&A) Branch under the group's
Intelligence Division. By 1944, the R&A Branch had
collected such a large and prestigeous group of emigre@aa
scholars that H. Stuart Hughes, then a young Ph.D., said
that working for it was ``a second graduate education'' at
government expense. The Central European Section was
headed by historian {{Carl Schorske;}} under him, in the
all-important Germany/Austria Section, was {{Franz Neumann,}}
as section chief, with {{Herbert Marcuse, Paul Baran,}} and
{{Otto Kirchheimer,}} all I.S.R. veterans. {{Leo Lowenthal}}
headed the German-language section of the Office of War
Information; {{Sophie Marcuse,}} Marcuse's wife, worked at the Office of
Naval Intelligence. Also at the R&A Branch were: {{Siegfried
Kracauer,}} Adorno's old Kant instructor, now a film
theorist; {{Norman O. Brown,}} who would become famous in the
1960's by combining Marcuse's hedonism theory with {{Wilhelm
Reich's}} orgone therapy to popularize ``polymorphous
perversity''; {{Barrington Moore, Jr.,}} later a philosophy
professor who would co-author a book with Marcuse; {{Gregory
Bateson,}} the husband of anthropologist {{Margaret Mead}} (who
wrote for the Frankfurt School's journal), and {{Arthur
Schlesinger,}} the historian who joined the Kennedy
Administration.
      Marcuse's first assignment was to head a team to
identify both those who would be tried as war criminals
after the war, and also those who were potential leaders
of postwar Germany. In 1944, Marcuse, Neumann, and
Kirchheimer wrote the {Denazification Guide}, which
was later issued to officers of the U.S. Armed Forces
occupying Germany, to help them identify and suppress
pro-Nazi behaviors. After the armistice, the R&A Branch
sent representatives to work as intelligence liaisons with
the various occupying powers; Marcuse was assigned the
U.S. Zone, Kirchheimer the French, and Barrington Moore
the Soviet. In the summer of 1945, Neumann left to become
chief of research for the Nuremburg Tribunal. Marcuse
remained in and around U.S. intelligence into the early
1950's, rising to the chief of the Central European Branch
of the State Department's Office of Intelligence Research,
an office formally charged with ``planning and
implementing a program of positive-intelligence research
... to meet the intelligence requirements of the Central
Intelligence Agency and other authorized agencies.''
      During his tenure as a U.S. government official,
Marcuse supported the division of Germany into East and
West, noting that this would prevent an alliance between
the newly liberated left-wing parties and the old,
conservative industrial and business layers. In 1949, he
produced a 532-page report, ``The Potentials of World
Communism'' (declassified only in 1978), which suggested
that the Marshall Plan economic stabilization of Europe
would limit the recruitment potential of Western Europe's
Communist Parties to acceptable levels, causing a period
of hostile co-existence with the Soviet Union, marked by
confrontation only in faraway places like Latin America
and Indochina--in all, a surprisingly accurate forecast.
Marcuse left the State Department with a Rockefeller
Foundation grant to work with the various Soviet Studies
departments which were set up at many of America's top
universities after the war, largely by R&A Branch
veterans.
    At the same time, Max Horkheimer was doing even
greater damage. As part of the denazification of Germany
suggested by the R&A Branch, U.S. High Commissioner for
Germany John J. McCloy, using personal discretionary
funds, brought Horkheimer back to Germany to reform the
German university system. In fact, McCloy asked President
Truman and Congress to pass a bill granting Horkheimer,
who had become a naturalized American, dual citizenship;
thus, for a brief period, Horkheimer was the only person
in the world to hold both German and U.S. citizenship. In
Germany, Horkheimer began the spadework for the full-blown
revival of the Frankfurt School in that nation in the late
1950's, including the training of a whole new generation of
anti-Western civilization scholars like {{Hans-Georg Gadamer}}
and {{Ju@aurgen Habermas,}} who would have such destructive
influence in 1960's Germany.
      In a period of American history when some
individuals were being hounded into unemployment and
suicide for the faintest aroma of leftism, Frankfurt
School veterans--all with superb Comintern credentials

-- led what can only be called charmed lives. America had,

to an incredible extent, handed the determination of who
were the nation's enemies, over to the nation's own worst
enemies.



IV. The Aristotelian {Eros}:
    Marcuse and the CIA's Drug Counterculture

   In 1989, Hans-Georg Gadamer, a prote@aage@aa of Martin
Heidegger and the last of the original Frankfurt School
generation, was asked to provide an appreciation of his
own work for the German newspaper, {Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung.} He wrote,

   One has to conceive of Aristotle's ethics as a true
fulfillment of the Socratic challenge, which Plato had
placed at the center of his dialogues on the Socratic
question of the good.... Plato described the idea of the
good ... as the ultimate and highest idea, which is
supposedly the highest principle of being for the
universe, the state, and the human soul. Against this
Aristotle opposed a decisive critique, under the famous
formula, ``Plato is my friend, but the truth is my friend
even more.'' He denied that one could consider the idea of
the good as a universal principle of being, which is
supposed to hold in the same way for theoretical knowledge
as for practical knowledge and human activity.

   This statement not only succinctly states the
underlying philosophy of the Frankfurt School, it also
suggests an inflection point around which we can order
much of the philosophical combat of the last two millenia.
In the simplest terms, the Aristotelian correction of
Plato sunders physics from metaphysics, relegating the
Good to a mere object of speculation about which ``our
knowledge remains only a hypothesis,'' in the words of
Wilhelm Dilthey, the Frankfurt School's favorite
philosopher. Our knowledge of the ``real world,'' as
Dilthey, Nietzsche, and other precursors of the Frankfurt
School were wont to emphasize, becomes {erotic,} in
the broadest sense of that term, as object fixation.
      The universe becomes a collection of things which
each operate on the basis of their own natures (that is,
genetically), and through interaction between themselves
(that is, mechanistically). Science becomes the deduction
of the appropriate categories of these natures and
interactions. Since the human mind is merely a sensorium,
waiting for the Newtonian apple to jar it into deduction,
humanity's relationship to the world (and vice versa)
becomes an erotic attachment to objects. The comprehension
of the universal--the mind's seeking to be the living
image of the living God--is therefore illusory. That
universal either does not exist, or it exists
incomprehensibly as a {deus ex machina;} that is, the
Divine exists as a superaddition to the physical universe

-- God is really Zeus, flinging thunderbolts into the

world from some outside location. (Or, perhaps more
appropriately: God is really Cupid, letting loose
golden arrows to make objects attract, and leaden arrows
to make objects repel.)
      The key to the entire Frankfurt School program, from
originator Lukacs on, is the ``liberation'' of
Aristotelian {eros,} to make individual feeling
states psychologically primary. When the I.S.R. leaders
arrived in the United States in the mid-1930's, they
exulted that here was a place which had no adequate
philosophical defenses against their brand of
{Kulturpessimismus} [cultural pessimism]. However,
although the Frankfurt School made major inroads in
American intellectual life before World War II, that
influence was largely confined to academia and to radio;
and radio, although important, did not yet have the
overwhelming influence on social life that it would
acquire during the war. Furthermore, America's
mobilization for the war, and the victory against fascism,
sidetracked the Frankfurt School schedule; America in 1945
was almost sublimely optimistic, with a population firmly
convinced that a mobilized republic, backed by science and
technology, could do just about anything.
      The fifteen years after the war, however, saw the
domination of family life by the radio and television
shaped by the Frankfurt School, in a period of political
erosion in which the great positive potential of America
degenerated to a purely negative posture against the real
and, oftentimes manipulated, threat of the Soviet Union.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of the young
generation--the so-called baby boomers--were entering
college and being exposed to the Frankfurt School's
poison, either directly or indirectly. It is illustrative,
that by 1960, sociology had become the most popular course
of study in American universities.
      Indeed, when one looks at the first stirrings of the
student rebellion at the beginning of the 1960's, like the
speeches of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement or the Port
Huron Statement which founded the Students for a
Democratic Society, one is struck with how devoid of
actual content these discussions were. There is much
anxiety about being made to conform to the system--``I
am a human being; do not fold, spindle, or mutilate'' went
an early Berkeley slogan--but it is clear that the
``problems'' cited derive much more from required
sociology textbooks, than from the real needs of the
society.

   The CIA's Psychedelic Revolution

   The simmering unrest on campus in 1960 might well
too have passed or had a positive outcome, were it not for
the traumatic decapitation of the nation through the Kennedy
assassination, plus the simultaneous introduction of
widespread drug use. Drugs had always been an ``analytical
tool'' of the nineteenth century Romantics, like the French
Symbolists, and were popular among the European and
American Bohemian fringe well into the post-World War II
period. But, in the second half of the 1950's, the CIA and
allied intelligence services began extensive
experimentation with the hallucinogen LSD to investigate
its potential for social control.
      It has now been documented that millions of doses of
the chemical were produced and disseminated under the
aegis of the CIA's Operation MK-Ultra. LSD became the drug
of choice within the agency itself, and was passed out
freely to friends of the family, including a substantial
number of OSS veterans. For instance, it was OSS Research
and Analysis Branch veteran Gregory Bateson who ``turned
on'' the Beat poet {{Allen Ginsberg}} to a U.S. Navy LSD
experiment in Palo Alto, California. Not only Ginsberg,
but novelist {{Ken Kesey}} and the original members of the
Grateful Dead rock group opened the doors of perception
courtesy of the Navy. The guru of the ``psychedelic
revolution,'' {{Timothy Leary,}} first heard about
hallucinogens in 1957 from {Life} magazine (whose
publisher, {{Henry Luce,}} was often given government acid,
like many other opinion shapers), and began his career as
a CIA contract employee; at a 1977 ``reunion'' of acid
pioneers, Leary openly admitted, ``everything I am, I owe
to the foresight of the CIA.''
      Hallucinogens have the singular effect of making the
victim asocial, totally self-centered, and concerned with
objects. Even the most banal objects take on the ``aura''
which Benjamin had talked about, and become timeless and
delusionarily profound. In other words, hallucinogens
instantaneously achieve a state of mind identical to that
prescribed by the Frankfurt School theories. And, the
popularization of these chemicals created a vast
psychological lability for bringing those theories into
practice.
      Thus, the situation at the beginning of the 1960's
represented a brilliant re-entry point for the Frankfurt
School, and it was fully exploited. One of the crowning
ironies of the ``Now Generation'' of 1964 on, is that, for
all its protestations of utter modernity, none of its
ideas or artifacts was less than thirty years old. The
political theory came completely from the Frankfurt
School; {{Lucien Goldmann,}} a French radical who was a
visiting professor at Columbia in 1968, was absolutely
correct when he said of Herbert Marcuse in 1969 that ``the
student movements ... found in his works and ultimately
{in his works alone} the theoretical formulation of
their problems and aspirations [emphasis in original].''
      The long hair and sandals, the free love communes,
the macrobiotic food, the liberated lifestyles, had been
designed at the turn of the century, and thoroughly
field-tested by various, Frankfurt School-connected New
Age social experiments like the Ascona commune before
1920. (See box.) Even Tom Hayden's defiant ``Never trust
anyone over thirty,'' was merely a less-urbane version of
Rupert Brooke's 1905, ``Nobody over thirty is worth
talking to.'' The social planners who shaped the 1960's
simply relied on already-available materials.

   {Eros and Civilization}

   The founding document of the 1960's counterculture,
and that which brought the Frankfurt School's
``revolutionary messianism'' of the 1920's into the 1960's,
was Marcuse's {Eros and Civilization,} originally
published in 1955 and funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation. The document masterfully sums up the Frankfurt
School ideology of {Kulturpessimismus} in the concept
of ``dimensionality.'' In one of the most bizarre
perversions of philosophy, Marcuse claims to derive this
concept from Friedrich Schiller. Schiller, whom Marcuse
purposefully misidentifies as the heir of Immanuel Kant,
discerned two dimensions in humanity: a sensuous instinct
and an impulse toward form. Schiller advocated the
harmonization of these two instincts in man in the form of
a creative play instinct.
      For Marcuse, on the other hand, the only hope to
escape the one-dimensionality of modern industrial society
was to liberate the erotic side of man, the sensuous
instinct, in rebellion against ``technological
rationality.'' As Marcuse would say later (1964) in his
{One-Dimensional Man,} ``A comfortable, smooth,
reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced
industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.''
      This erotic liberation he misidentifies with
Schiller's ``play instinct,'' which, rather than being
erotic, is an expression of charity, the higher concept of
love associated with true creativity. Marcuse's contrary
theory of erotic liberation is something implicit in
{{Sigmund Freud,}} but not explicitly emphasized, except for some
Freudian renegades like {{Wilhelm Reich}} and, to a certain
extent, {{Carl Jung.}} Every aspect of culture in the West,
including reason itself, says Marcuse, acts to repress
this: ``The totalitarian universe of technological
rationality is the latest transmutation of the idea of
reason.'' Or: ``Auschwitz continues to haunt, not the
memory but the accomplishments of man--the space
flights, the rockets and missiles, the pretty electronics
plants....''
   This erotic liberation should take the form of the
``Great Refusal,'' a total rejection of the ``capitalist''
monster and all his works, including ``technological''
reason, and ``ritual-authoritarian language.'' As part of
the Great Refusal, mankind should develop an ``aesthetic
ethos,'' turning life into an aesthetic ritual, a
``life-style'' (a nonsense phrase which came into the
language in the 1960's under Marcuse's influence).
      With Marcuse representing the point of the wedge,
the 1960's were filled with obtuse intellectual
justifications of contentless adolescent sexual rebellion.
{Eros and Civilization} was reissued as an inexpensive
paperback in 1961, and ran through several editions; in
the preface to the 1966 edition, Marcuse added that the
new slogan, ``Make Love, Not War,'' was exactly what he
was talking about: ``The fight for {eros} is a
{political} fight [emphasis in original].'' In 1969, he
noted that even the New Left's obsessive use of obscenities
in its manifestoes was part of the Great Refusal, calling
it ``a systematic linguistic rebellion, which smashes the
ideological context in which the words are employed and
defined.''
      Marcuse was aided by psychoanalyst Norman O. Brown,
his OSS protege, who contributed {Life Against Death}
in 1959, and {Love's Body} in 1966--calling for man
to shed his reasonable, ``armored'' ego, and replace it with
a ``Dionysian body ego,'' that would embrace the instinctual
reality of polymorphous perversity, and bring man back
into ``union with nature.'' The books of Reich, who had
claimed that Nazism was caused by monogamy, were
re-issued. Reich had died in an American prison, jailed
for taking money on the claim that cancer could be cured
by rechanneling ``orgone energy.''
      Primary education became dominated by Reich's
leading follower, {{A.S. Neill,}} a Theosophical cult member
of the 1930's and militant atheist, whose educational
theories demanded that students be taught to rebel against
teachers who are, by nature, authoritarian. Neill's book
{Summerhill} sold 24,000 copies in 1960, rising to
100,000 in 1968, and 2 million in 1970; by 1970, it was
required reading in 600 university courses, making it one
of the most influential education texts of the period, and
still a benchmark for recent writers on the subject.
      Marcuse led the way for the complete revival of the
rest of the Frankfurt School theorists, re-introducing the
long-forgotten Lukacs to America. Marcuse himself became
the lightning rod for attacks on the counterculture, and
was regularly attacked by such sources as the Soviet daily
{Pravda,} and then-California Governor Ronald Reagan.
The only critique of any merit at the time, however, was
one by Pope Paul VI, who in 1969 named Marcuse (an
extraordinary step, as the Vatican usually refrains from
formal denunciations of living individuals), along with
Freud, for their justification of ``disgusting and
unbridled expressions of eroticism''; and called Marcuse's
theory of liberation, ``the theory which opens the way for
license cloaked as liberty ... an aberration of instinct.''
      The eroticism of the counterculture meant much more
than free love and a violent attack on the nuclear family.
It also meant the legitimization of philosophical
{eros}. People were trained to see themselves as
objects, determined by their ``natures.'' The importance
of the individual as a person gifted with the divine spark
of creativity, and capable of acting upon all human
civilization, was replaced by the idea that the person is
important because he or she is black, or a woman, or feels
homosexual impulses. This explains the deformation of the
civil rights movement into a ``black power'' movement, and
the transformation of the legitimate issue of civil rights
for women into feminism. Discussion of women's civil
rights was forced into being just another ``liberation
cult,'' complete with bra-burning and other, sometimes
openly Astarte-style, rituals; a review of {{Kate Millet's}}
{Sexual Politics} (1970) and {{Germaine Greer's}} {The
Female Eunuch} (1971), demonstrates their complete
reliance on Marcuse, Fromm, Reich, and other Freudian
extremists.

   The Bad Trip

   This popularization of life as an erotic, pessimistic
ritual did not abate, but in fact deepened over the twenty
years leading to today; it is the basis of the horror we
see around us. The heirs of Marcuse and Adorno completely
dominate the universities, teaching their own students to
replace reason with ``Politically Correct'' ritual
exercises. There are very few theoretical books on arts,
letters, or language published today in the United States
or Europe which do not openly acknowledge their debt to
the Frankfort School.
   The witchhunt on today's campuses is merely the
implementation of Marcuse's concept of ``repressive
toleration''--``tolerance for movements from the left,
but intolerance for movements from the right''--enforced
by the students of the Frankfurt School, now become the
professors of women's studies and Afro-American studies.
The most erudite spokesman for Afro-American studies, for
instance, Professor {{Cornell West}} of Princeton, publicly
states that his theories are derived from Georg Lukacs.
      At the same time, the ugliness so carefully nurtured
by the Frankfurt School pessimists, has corrupted our
highest cultural endeavors. One can hardly find a
performance of a Mozart opera, which has not been utterly
deformed by a director who, following Benjamin and the
I.S.R., wants to ``liberate the erotic subtext.'' You
cannot ask an orchestra to perform Scho@aunberg and
Beethoven on the same program, and maintain its integrity
for the latter. And, when our highest culture becomes
impotent, popular culture becomes openly bestial.
      One final image: American and European children
daily watch films like {Nightmare on Elm Street} and
{Total Recall}, or television shows comparable to
them. A typical scene in one of these will have a figure
emerge from a television set; the skin of his face will
realistically peel away to reveal a hideously deformed man
with razor-blade fingers, fingers which start growing to
several feet in length, and--suddenly--the victim is
slashed to bloody ribbons.
      This is not entertainment. This is the
deeply paranoid hallucination of the LSD acid head. The
worst of what happened in the 1960's is now daily fare.
Owing to the Frankfurt School and its co-conspirators, the
West is on a ``bad trip'' from which it is not being
allowed to come down.
   The principles through which Western Judeo-Christian
civilization was built, are now no longer dominant
in our society; they exist only as a kind of underground
resistance movement. If that resistance is ultimately
submerged, then the civilization will not survive--and,
in our era of incurable pandemic disease and nuclear
weapons, the collapse of Western civilization will
very likely take the rest of the world with it to Hell.
   The way out is to create a Renaissance. If that
sounds grandiose, it is nonetheless what is needed.
A renaissance means, to start again; to discard the
evil, and inhuman, and just plain stupid, and to go
back, hundreds or thousands of years, to the ideas
which allow humanity to grow in freedom and goodness.
Once we have identified those core beliefs, we can
start to rebuild civilization.
   Ultimately, a new Renaissance will rely on
scientists, artists, and composers, but in the first
moment, it depends on seemingly ordinary people who will
defend the divine spark of reason in themselves, and
tolerate no less in others. Given the successes of the
Frankfurt School and its New Dark Age sponsors, these
ordinary individuals, with their belief in reason and the
difference between right and wrong, will be
``unpopular.'' But, no really good idea was ever popular,
in the beginning.


BOX 1:




   The Frankfurt School devised the ``authoritarian
personality'' profile as a weapon to be used against its
political enemies. The fraud rests on the assumption that
a person's actions are not important; rather, the issue is
the psychological attitude of the actor--as determined by
social scientists like those of the Frankfurt School. The
concept is diametrically opposed to the idea of natural
law and to the republican legal principles upon which the
U.S. was founded; it is, in fact, fascistic, and identical
to the idea of ``thought crime,'' as described by George
Orwell in his {1984,} and to the theory of
``volitional crime'' developed by Nazi judge Roland Freisler
in the early 1930's.
   When the Frankfurt School was in its openly
pro-Bolshevik phase, its authoritarian personality work
was designed to identify people who were not sufficiently
revolutionary, so that these people could be
``re-educated.'' When the Frankfurt School expanded its
research after World War II at the behest of the American
Jewish Committee and the Rockefeller Foundation, its
purpose was not to identify anti-Semitism; that was merely
a cover story. Its goal was to measure adherence to the
core beliefs of Western Judeo-Christian civilization, so
that these beliefs could be characterized as
``authoritarian,'' and discredited.
   For the Frankfurt School conspirators, the worst
crime was the belief that each individual was gifted with
sovereign reason, which could enable him to determine what
is right and wrong for the whole society; thus, to tell
people that you have a reasonable idea to which they
should conform, is authoritarian, paternalistic extremism.
   By these standards, the judges of Socrates and Jesus
were correct in condemning these two individuals (as, for
example, I.F. Stone asserts in one case in his ``Trial of
Socrates.'') It is the measure of our own cultural
collapse, that this definition of authoritarianism is
acceptable to most citizens, and is freely used by
political operations like the Anti-Defamation League and
the Cult Awareness Network to ``demonize'' their political
enemies.
   When Lyndon LaRouche and six of his colleagues faced
trial on trumped-up charges in 1988, LaRouche identified
that the prosecution would rely on the Frankfurt School's
authoritarian personality fraud, to claim that the
defendants' intentions were {inherently} criminal. During
the trial, LaRouche's defense attorney attempted to
demonstrate the Frankfurt School roots of the
prosecution's conspiracy theory, but he was overruled by
Judge Albert Bryan, Jr., who said, ``I'm not going back
into the early 1930's in opening statements or in the
testimony of witnesses.''





BOX 2: To be illustrated with, either (1) environmental
extremists emphasizing ``Gaia'' or ``mother Earth'' in
their signs, etc.; or (2) a family staring in front of a
television set.


The Frankfurt School's original 1930's survey work,
including the ``authoritarian personality,'' was based on
psychoanalytic categories developed by Erich Fromm. Fromm
derived these categories from the theories of J.J.
Bachofen, a collaborator of Nietzsche and Richard Wagner,
who claimed that human civilization was originally
``matriarchal.'' This primoridial period of ``gynocratic
democracy'' and dominance of the Magna Mater (Great Mother)
cult, said Bachofen, was submerged by the development of
rational, authoritarian ``patriarchism,'' including
monotheistic religion. Later, Fromm utilized this theory
to claim that support for the nuclear family was evidence
of authoritarian tendencies.
   In 1970, forty years after he first proclaimed the
importance of Bachofen's theory, the Frankfurt School's
Erich Fromm surveyed how far things had developed. He
listed seven ``social-psychological changes'' which
indicated the advance of matriarchism over patriarchism:
   BULLETS*^``The failure of the
patriarchal-authoritarian system to fulfill its
function,'' including the prevention of pollution
   *^``Democratic revolutions'' which operate on the
basis of ``manipulated consent''
   *^``The women's revolution''
   *^``Children's and adolescents' revolution,'' based on
the work of Benjamin Spock and others, allowing children
new, and more-adequate ways to express rebellion
   *^The rise of the radical youth movement, which fully
embraces Bachofen, in its emphasis on group sex, loose
family structure, and unisex clothing and behaviors
   *^The increasing use of Bachofen by professionals to
correct Freud's overly-sexual analysis of the mother-son
relationship--this would make Freudianism less
threatening and more palatable to the general population
   *^``The vision of the consumer paradise.... In this
vision, technique assumes the characteristics of the Great
Mother, a technical instead of a natural one, who nurses
her children and pacifies them with a never-ceasing
lullaby (in the form of radio and television). In the
process, man becomes emotionally an infant, feeling secure
in the hope that mother's breasts will always supply
abundant milk, and that decisions need no longer be made
by the individual.''







BOX 3: To go across the two-thirds or three-quarters of a
two-page spread. Illustrated by a picture comparison from
Ascona and Haight-Ashbury.




An overwhelming amount of the philosophy and artifacts of
the American counterculture of the 1960's, plus the New
Age nonsense of today, derives from a large-scale social
experiment sited in Ascona, Switzerland from about 1910 to
1935.
      Originally a resort area for members of {{Helena
Blavatsky's}} Theosophy cult, the little Swiss village
became the haven for every occult, leftist and racialist
sect of the original New Age movement of the early
twentieth century. By the end of World War I, Ascona was
indistinguishable from what Haight-Ashbury would later
become, filled with health food shops, occult book stores
hawking the {I Ching}, and {Naturmenschen}, ``Mr.
Naturals'' who would walk about in long hair, beads,
sandals, and robes in order to ``get back to nature.''
      The dominant influence in the area came from Dr.
Otto Gross, a student of Freud and friend of Carl Jung,
who had been part of Max Weber's circle when Frankfurt
School founder Lukacs was also a member. Gross took
Bachofen to its logical extremes, and, in the words of a
biographer, ``is said to have adopted Babylon as his
civilization, in opposition to that of Judeo-Christian
Europe.... if Jezebel had not been defeated by Elijah,
world history would have been different and better.
Jezebel was Babylon, love religion, Astarte@am, Ashtoreth; by
killing her, Jewish monotheistic moralism drove pleasure
from the world.''
      Gross's solution was to recreate the cult of Astarte@am
in order to start a sexual revolution and destroy the
bourgeois, patriarchal family. Among the members of his
cult were: {{Frieda and D.H. Lawrence}}; {{Franz Kafka}}; {{Franz
Werfel,}} the novelist who later came to Hollywood and wrote
{The Song of Bernadette;} philosopher {{Martin Buber}};
{{Alma Mahler,}} the wife of composer Gustave Mahler, and
later the liaison of Walter Gropius, Oskar Kokoschka, and
Franz Werfel; among others. The Ordo Templis Orientalis
(OTO), the occult fraternity set up by Satanist {{Aleister
Crowley,}} had its only female lodge at Ascona.
      It is sobering to realize the number of
intellectuals now worshipped as cultural heroes who were
influenced by the New Age madness in Ascona--including
almost all the authors who enjoyed a major revival in
America in the 1960's and 1970's. The place and its philosophy
figures highly in the works of not only Lawrence, Kafka
and Werfel, but also Nobel Prize winners {{Gerhardt
Hauptmann}} and {{Hermann Hesse, H.G. Wells, Max Brod, Stefan
George,}} and the poets {{Rainer Maria Rilke}} and {{Gustav
Landauer.}} In 1935 Ascona became the headquarters for Carl
Jung's annual Eranos Conference to popularize gnosticism.
      Ascona was also the place of creation for most of
what we now call modern dance. It was headquarters to
{{Rudolf von Laban,}} inventor of the most popular form of
dance notation, and {{Mary Wigman. Isadora Duncan}} was a
frequent visitor. Laban and Wigman, like Duncan, sought to
replace the formal geometries of classical ballet with
re-creations of cult dances which would be capable of
ritualistically dredging up the primordial racial memories
of the audience. When the Nazis came to power, Laban
became the highest dance official in the Reich, and he and
Wigman created the ritual dance program for the 1936
Olympic Games in Berlin--which was filmed by Hitler's
personal director {{Leni Reifenstahl,}} a former student of
Wigman.
      The peculiar occult psychoanalysis popular in Ascona
was also decisive in the development of much of modern
art. The Dada movement originated in nearby Zurich, but
all its early figures were Asconans in mind or body,
especially {{Guillaume Apollinaire,}} who was a particular fan
of Otto Gross. When ``Berlin Dada'' announced its creation
in 1920, its opening manifesto was published in a magazine
founded by Gross.
      The primary document of Surrealism also came from
Ascona. Dr. {{Hans Prinzhorn,}} a Heidelberg psychiatrist,
commuted to Ascona, where he was the lover of Mary Wigman.
In 1922, he published a book, ``The Artwork of the
Mentally Ill,'' based on paintings by his psychotic
patients, accompanied by an analysis claiming that the
creative process shown in this art was actually more
liberated than that of the Old Masters. Prinzhorn's book
was widely read by the modern artists of the time, and a
recent historian has called it, ``the Bible of the
Surrealists.''
                   -30-






From the magazine Fidelio published by the Schiller Institute, v1 #1.

----
         John Covici
          [e-mail]