
THE NEW DARK AGE- The Frankfurt School and "Political Correctness"

           by Michael J. Minnicino



The Frankfurt School:

Bolshevik Intelligentsi


   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 proteaageaa 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 faaur 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 Schoaunberg, 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.



   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.''




   Social Control: The ``Radio Project''



   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.''



   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 OS



   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: 

   * conventionalism--rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class value

   * authoritarian aggression--the tendency to be on the look-out for, to
     condemn, reject and punish people who violate conventional value

   * projectivity--the disposition to believe that wild and dangerous
     things go on in the worl

   * 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' 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 emigreaa 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 Juaurgen 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 proteaageaa 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.



   Counterculture



   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:


   *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.''



   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, 
Astarteam, Ashtoreth; by killing her, Jewish monotheistic moralism drove
pleasure from the world.''

   Gross's solution was to recreate the cult of Astarteam 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.




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

------------------------------------------------
(This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the
Patriot FTP site by S.P.I.R.A.L., the Society for the Protection of
Individual Rights and Liberties. E-mail alex@spiral.org)

