‘Cultural Marxism’ and ‘critical theory’ are concepts developed by agroup of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded theInstitute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute,modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as theFrankfurt School [3]. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany,the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States. Whilehere, they migrated to major U.S. universities (Columbia, Princeton,Brandeis, and California at Berkeley). These intellectual Marxistsincluded Herbert Marcuse, who coined the phrase, ‘make love, not war,’during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
by Dr. Gerald L. Atkinson CDR USN (Ret.)
Copyright 1 August 1999
If you have absorbed any of the background materialpresented in this series of essays on “‘Cultural Marxism’ at the U.S.Naval Academy,” you should be quite concerned that our future navalofficers are being subjected to psychic intimidation and indoctrinationby behavioral psychologists and clinicians whose methods descend fromWilhelm Wundt [1]. The ‘facilitators’ and civilian professors in the’Leadership and Ethics’ program at the Academy are Wundtians all. The’cultural Marxism’ that has invaded our military academies and othermilitary institutions is pervasive. As a result, these future navalofficers will not have an understanding of the essence of what they arechosen to protect, that is, American civilization [2] — the most vitaland precious descendent of Western civilization.
One must wonder who ‘they’ are. Who in America today is at workdestroying our traditions, our family bonds, our religious beginnings,our reinforcing institutions, indeed, our entire culture? What is itthat is changing our American civilization?
Indeed, a thoughtful person should ask himself or herself whether ornot all this ‘change’ from America’s traditional culture is simply arandom set of events played out by a random set of players, allindependent of each other — all disconnected from any central premiseor guidance. It is entirely possible that chance is at work here andall of these ‘threads’ of American culture are the random workings ofthe human intellect (the pursuit of what is possible, vice what isappropriate) in a free, democratic society.But suppose youwere to learn that nearly all of the observations made in this seriesof essays are completely consistent with a ‘design’ — that is aconcept, a way of thinking, and a process for bringing it about. Andsuppose one could identify a small core group of people who designedjust such a concept and thought through the process of infusing it intoa culture. Wouldn’t you be interested in at least learning about such acore group? Wouldn’t you want to know who they were, what they thought,and how they conjured up a process for bringing their thoughts intoaction? For Americans with even a smidgeon of curiosity, the answershould be a resounding yes!
If such a core group could be found, then it would still depend on yourpersonal ‘world view’ as to its significance. If you believe in the’blind watchmaker,’ that is, all cosmic and social events are randomand guided only by the laws of nature, ‘evolutionary’ in the sense ofcompeting with other random events for survival in a ‘stochastic’world, you may choose to believe that such a core group was meaningless– it may have existed but so what? It may have been only one of anuncountably large number of such ‘groups’ in the world’s history. Andyou may believe that any particular group’s ‘window of opportunity’ toinfluence future generations was passed by and did little to influencethe course of America’s history.
If you believe, instead, that nature has a ‘design,’ and that allevents can be connected and we humans can make sense out of many ofthem if we will only ‘connect all of the dots,’ then you may believethat this small core group has great influence, even today, in AmericanCulture. If this is your world view, you may (but not necessarily) evenbelieve in a ‘conspiracy. and ‘conspirators’ which and who aim to alterour culture on a vast scale.
It is clear, however, that irrespective of one’s ‘world view,’ it isinformative to at least know of such a core group (if it, indeed,existed), what it believed, what it set out to accomplish, and whatmethods it followed to take action on its beliefs.
Just such a core group did, indeed, exist. That is, history identifiesa small group of German intellectuals who devised concepts, processes,and action plans which conform very closely to what Americans presentlyobserve every day in their culture. Observations, such as those made inthis series of essays, can be directly traced to the work of this coregroup of intellectuals. They were members of the Frankfurt School,formed in Germany in 1923. They were the forebears of what someproclaim as ‘cultural Marxism,’ a radical social movement that hastransformed American culture. It is more commonly known today as’political correctness.’
‘Cultural Marxism’ and ‘critical theory’ are concepts developed by agroup of German intellectuals, who, in 1923 in Germany, founded theInstitute of Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute,modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, became known as theFrankfurt School [3]. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany,the members of the Frankfurt School fled to the United States. Whilehere, they migrated to major U.S. universities (Columbia, Princeton,Brandeis, and California at Berkeley). These intellectual Marxistsincluded Herbert Marcuse, who coined the phrase, ‘make love, not war,’during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
By promoting the dialectic of ‘negative’ criticism, that is, pointingout the rational contradictions in a society’s belief system, theFrankfurt School ‘revolutionaries’ dreamed of a utopia where theirrules governed [4]. “Their Critical Theory had to contain a stronglyimaginative, even utopian strain, which transcends the limits ofreality.” Its tenets would never be subject to experimental evidence.The pure logic of their thoughts would be incontrovertible. As aprecursor to today’s ‘postmodernism’ in the intellectual academiccommunity, [5] “…it recognized that disinterested scientific researchwas impossible in a society in which men were themselves not yetautonomous…the researcher was always part of the social object he wasattempting to study.” This, of course, is the concept which led to thecurrent fetish for the rewriting of history, and the vogue for ouruniversities’ law, English literature, and humanities disciplines –deconstruction.
Critical theory rejected the ideal of Western Civilization in the ageof modern science, that is, the verification or falsifying [6] oftheory by experimental evidence. Only the superior mind was able tofashion the ‘truths’ from observation of the evidence. There would beno need to test these hypotheses against everyday experience.
The Frankfurt school studied the ‘authoritarian personality’ whichbecame synonymous with the male, the patriarchal head of the Americanfamily. A modern utopia would be constructed by these idealisticintellectuals by ‘turning Western civilization’ upside down. Thisutopia would be a product of their imagination, a product notsusceptible to criticism on the basis of the examination of evidence.This ‘revolution’ would be accomplished by fomenting a very quiet,subtle and slowly spreading ‘cultural Marxism’ which would apply toculture the principles of Karl Marx bolstered by the modernpsychological tools of Sigmund Freud. Thus, ‘cultural Marxism’ became amarriage of Marx and Freud aimed at producing a ‘quiet’ revolution inthe United States of America. This ‘quiet’ revolution has occurred inAmerica over the past 30 years. While America slept!
What is ‘cultural Marxism?’ Why should it even be considered when theworld’s vast experiment with the economic theory of Karl Marx hasrecently gone down to defeat with the disintegration of Sovietcommunism? Didn’t America win the Cold War against the spread ofcommunism? The answer is a resounding ‘yes, BUT. We won the 55-yearCold War but, while winning it abroad, we have failed to understandthat an intellectual elite has subtly but systematically and surelyconverted the economic theory of Marx to culture in American society.And they did it while we were busy winning the Cold War abroad. Theyintroduced ‘cultural Marxism’ into the mainstream of American life overa period of thirty years, while our attention was diverted elsewhere.
The vehicle for this introduction was the idealistic Boomer elite,those young middle-class and well-to-do college students who became thevanguard of America’s counter-culture revolution of the mid-1960s –those draft-dodging, pot-smoking, hippies who demonstrated against theVietnam War and who fomented the destructive (to women) ‘women’sliberation’ movement. These New Totalitarians [7] are now in power asthey have come to middle-age and control every public institution inour nation. But that is getting ahead of the story.
The cauldron for implementing this witches brew were the elites of theBoomer generation. They are the current ‘foot soldiers’ of the originalFrankfurt School gurus. The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s wasset in motion and guided intellectually by the ‘cultural Marxists’ ofthe Frankfurt School — Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm, Theodor Adorno,Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, and others [8,9]., Its influence is nowfelt in nearly every institution in the United States. The eliteBoomers, throwbacks to the dangerous idealist Transcendental generationof the mid-1800s, are the ‘agents of change,’ who have introduced’cultural Marxism’ into American life.
William S. Lind relates [10] that ‘cultural Marxism’ is an ideologywith deep roots. It did not begin with the counter-culture revolutionin the mid-1960s. Its roots go back at least to the 1920s and thewritings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci [11]. These roots,over time, spread to the writings of Herbert Marcuse.
Herbert Marcuse was one of the most prominent Frankfurt Schoolpromoters of Critical Theory’s social revolution among college anduniversity students in the 1960s. It is instructive to review what hehas written on the subject:
“One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the
whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society …
there is one thing we can say with complete assurance. The traditional idea of revolution
and the traditional strategy of revolution have ended. These ideas are old-fashioned …
what we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”
This sentiment was first expressed by the early 20th century Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci, a young communist who died in one of Mussolini’s prisons in1937 at the age of 46, conjured up the notion of a ‘quiet’ revolutionthat could be diffused throughout a culture — over a period of time –to destroy it from within. He was the first to suggest that theapplication of psychology to break the traditions, beliefs, morals, andwill of a people could be accomplished quietly and without thepossibility of resistance. He deduced that “The civilized world hadbeen thoroughly saturated with Christianity for 2,000 years…” and aculture based on this religion could only be captured from within.
Gramsci insisted that alliances with non-Communist leftist groups wouldbe essential to Communist victory. In our time, these would includeradical feminist groups, extremist environmental organizations,so-called civil rights movements, anti-police associations,internationalist-minded groups, liberal church denominations, andothers. Working together, these groups could create a united frontworking for the destructive transformation of the old Judeo-Christianculture of the West.
By winning ‘cultural hegemony,’ Gramsci pointed out that they couldcontrol the deepest wellsprings of human thought — through the mediumof mass psychology. Indeed, men could be made to ‘love theirservitude.’ In terms of the gospel of the Frankfurt School, resistanceto ‘cultural Marxism’ could be completely negated by placing theresister in a psychic ‘iron cage.’ The tools of mass psychology couldbe applied to produce this result.
The essential nature of Antonio Gramsci’s revolutionary strategy isreflected in a 1990s book [12] by the American Boomer author, CharlesA. Reich, ‘The Greening of America.’ “There is a revolution coming. Itwill not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with theindividual and the culture, and it will change the political structureas its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and itcannot be successfully resisted by violence. This is the revolution ofthe New Generation.” Of course this New Generation would be Reich’selite Boomer generation. And the mantra for these New Age ‘footsoldiers’ of the Frankfurt School prophets, would be ‘have the courageto change [13].’
The Frankfurt School theorized that the ‘authoritarian personality’ isa product of the patriarchal family. This idea is in turn directlyconnected to Frederich Engels’ ‘The Origins of the Family, PrivateProperty and the State,’ which promotes matriarchy. Furthermore, it wasKarl Marx who wrote about the radical notion of a ‘community of women’in the Communist manifesto. And it was Karl Marx who wrotedisparagingly about the idea that the family was the basic unit ofsociety in ‘The German Ideology’ of 1845.
‘The Authoritarian personality,’ studied by the Frankfurt School in the1940s and 1950s in America, prepared the way for the subsequent warfareagainst the masculine gender promoted by Herbert Marcuse and his bandof social revolutionaries under the guise of ‘women’s liberation’ andthe New Left movement in the 1960s. The evidence that psychologicaltechniques for changing personality is intended to mean emasculation ofthe American male is provided by Abraham Maslow, founder of Third ForceHumanist Psychology and a promoter of the psychotherapeutic classroom,who wrote that, ‘…the next step in personal evolution is atranscendence of both masculinity and femininity to general humanness.’The Marxist revolutionaries knew exactly what they wanted to do and howto do it. They have succeeded in accomplishing much of their agenda.
But how can we claim the ’causes’ of the breakdown of our schools, ouruniversities, indeed, the very fiber of our culture were a product of atiny group of intellectuals who immigrated from Germany in 1933? Givenall of the special-interest groups involved in these activities, howcan we trace these ’causes’ to the Frankfurt school? Look at some ofthe evidence.
As an example, postmodern reconstruction of the history of WesternCivilization (now prevalent in our universities) has its roots in theCritical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This rewriting of history bythe postmodern scholars in America has only recently come under attack.Keith Windschuttle, in his book, ‘Killing of History,’ has severelycriticized the rush to ‘relativism’ by historiographers. What is trulyastonishing, however, is that ‘relativism’ has largely supplanted thepursuit of truth as a goal in historical study [14]. George G. Iggers’recently published book, ‘Historiography in the Twentieth Century: FromScientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge,’ reminds us of thenow famous line by Hayden White, a postmodernist, “Historicalnarratives…are verbal fictions, the contents of which are moreinvented than found.” He quotes other postmodernists, mostly non-historians, who [15] “…reinforce the proposition that truth andreality are primarily authoritarian weapons of our times.” We nowrecognize the source of this postmodern assault — the culturalMarxists of the Frankfurt School who became experts in criticizing the’authoritarian personality’ in American culture.
Herbert London refutes White’s proposition by observing, “…if historyis largely invention, who can say with authority that the AmericanRevolution came before the French Revolution?” He observes thatevidence has taken a back seat to inventiveness. He thus cuts right tothe chase — the inventions of postmodernism, which are cuttingsuccessive generations of Americans off from their culture and theirhistory, evolved directly from the ‘cultural Marxist’ scholars of theFrankfurt School.
How did this situation come about in America’s universities? GertrudeHimmelfarb has observed [16] that it slipped past those traditionalacademics almost unobserved until it was too late. It occurred so’quietly’ that when they ‘looked up,’ postmodernism was upon them witha vengeance. “They were surrounded by a tidal wave of faddishmulticultural subjects such as radical feminism, deconstructedrelativism as history and other courses” which undermine theperpetuation of Western Civilization. Indeed, this tidal wave slippedby just as Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School had envisioned — a’quiet’ revolution. A revolution that could not be resisted by force.
It is of interest to note that the ‘sensitivity training’ techniquesused in our public schools over the past 30 years and which are nowemployed by the U.S. military to educate the troops about ‘sexualharassment’ were developed during World War II and thereafter by KurtLewin [17] and his proteges. One of them, Abraham Maslow, was a memberof the Frankfurt school and the author [18] of ‘The Art ofFacilitation’ which is a manual used during such ‘sensitivity’training. Thereby teachers were indoctrinated not to teach but to’facilitate.’ This manual describes the techniques developed by KurtLewin and others to change a person’s world view via participation insmall-group encounter sessions. Teachers were to become amateur grouptherapists. The classroom became the center of self-examination,therapeutic circles where children (and later on, military [19]personnel) talked about their own subjective feelings. This techniquewas designed to convince children they were the sole authority in theirown lives.
It is important to realize that this movement, ‘cultural Marxism,’exists, understand where it came from, and what its objectives were –the complete destruction of Western Civilization in America. That is,these ‘cultural Marxists’ aimed to destroy, slowly but surely from thebottom up, the entire fabric of American Civilization.
By the end of World War II, almost all the original Frankfurt Schoolmembers had become American citizens. This meant the beginning of a newEnglish-speaking audience for the school. Now the focus was on Americanforms of authoritarianism. With this shift in subject matter came asubtle change in the center of the Institute’s work. In America,authoritarianism appeared in different forms than its Europeancounterpart. Instead of terror or coercion, more gentle forms ofenforced conformism had been developed. According to Martin Jay, [20]”Perhaps the most effective of these were to be found in the culturalfield. American mass culture thus became one of the central concerns ofthe Frankfurt School in the 1940s.”
Since the 1940s, subtle changes appeared in the Frankfurt School’sdescriptions of their work. For example, the opposite of the’authoritarian personality’ was no longer the ‘revolutionary,’ as ithad been in previous studies aimed at Europeans. In America, it was nowthe ‘democratic’ who opposed the ‘authoritarian personality.’ Thus,their language matched more closely the liberal [21] “…New Dealrather than Marxist or radical..” language. Education for tolerance,rather than praxis for revolutionary change, was the ostensible goal oftheir research. They were cleverly merging their language with themainstream of liberal left thought in America while maintaining their’cultural Marxist’ objectives.
Toleration had never been an end in itself for the Frankfurt School,and yet the non-authoritarian (utopian) personality, insofar as it wasdefined, was posited as a person with a non-dogmatic tolerance fordiversity [22]. This thought is dominant in today’s power elite of theBoomer generation, the New Totalitarians.
One of the basic tenets of Critical Theory was the necessity to breakdown the contemporary family. The Institute scholars preached that [23]”…Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family mighttend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept socialchange.” The ‘generation gap’ of the 1960s and the ‘gender gap’ of the1990s are two aspects of the attempt by the elite Boomers (taking apage out of ‘cultural Marxism’) to transform American culture intotheir ‘Marxist’ utopia.
The transformation of American culture envisioned by the ‘culturalMarxists’ is based on matriarchal theory. That is, they proposetransforming American culture into a female-dominated one. This is adirect throwback to Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School member whoconsidered matriarchal theory in psychoanalytic terms. In 1933, hewrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism that matriarchy was the onlygenuine family type of ‘natural society.’
Eric Fromm, another charter member of the Institute, was also one ofthe most active advocates of matriarchal theory. Fromm was especiallytaken with the idea that all love and altruistic feelings wereultimately derived from the maternal love necessitated by the extendedperiod of human pregnancy and postnatal care. “Love was thus notdependent on sexuality, as Freud had supposed. In fact, sex was moreoften tied to hatred and destruction. Masculinity and femininity [24]were not reflections of ‘essential’ sexual differences, as theromantics had thought. They were derived instead from differences inlife functions, which were in part socially determined.” This dogma wasthe precedent for today’s radical feminist pronouncements appearing innearly every major newspaper and TV program, including the televisionnewscasts. For these current day radicals, male and female roles resultfrom cultural indoctrination in America — an indoctrination carriedout by the male patriarchy to the detriment of women. Nature plays norole in this matter.
But in terms of destruction and disintegration, Critical Theoryabsorbed by the ‘change agents’ and other social revolutionaries hasled them to declare their intent to restructure America. As theyproclaim, this means their activities have been directed toward thedisintegration of the traditional white male power structure. As anyonewith eyes to view present-day television and motion pictures canconfirm, this has been largely achieved. In other words, CriticalTheory, as applied mass psychology, brought forth a ‘quiet’ psychicrevolution which facilitated an actual physical revolution that hasbecome visible everywhere in the United States of America.
It was the destructive criticism of the primary elements of Americanculture that inspired the 1960s counter-culture revolution. As the nameimplies, this false ‘spiritual awakening’ by the idealist Boomers intheir coming-of-age years was an effort to transform the prevailingculture into an inverted or opposite kind of culture that is anecessary prelude to social revolution. Now that these elite Boomersare in positions of power in the United States, they are completingtheir work of destroying every institution that has been built up over200 years of American history. Their aim is to destroy any vestige ofthe Anglo-American path [25] taken by Western Civilization in formingthe unique American culture.
Most Americans do not yet realize that they are being led by socialrevolutionaries who think in terms of the destruction of the existingsocial order in order to create a new social order in the world. Theserevolutionaries are the New Age elite Boomers, the New Totalitarians[26]. They now control every public institution in the United States ofAmerica. Their ‘quiet’ revolution, beginning with the counter-culturerevolution of their youth, is nearly complete. It was based on theintellectual foundation of the ‘cultural Marxists’ of the FrankfurtSchool. Its completion depends on keeping the American male in hispsychic ‘iron cage.’
The confluence of radical feminism and ‘cultural Marxism’ within thespan of a single generation, that of the elite Boomers (possibly themost dangerous [27] generation in America’s history), has imposed thisyoke on the American male. It remains to be seen whether or not he willcontinue his ‘voluntary submission’ to a future of slavery in a newAmerican matriarchy, the precursor to a state of complete anarchy.
If we allow this subversion of American values and interests tocontinue, we will (in future generations) lose all that our ancestorssuffered and died for. We are forewarned. A reading of history — it isall in mainstream historical accounts — tells us that we are about tolose the most precious thing we have — our individual freedoms.
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Footnotes:
1) Lionni, Paolo, “Leipzig Connection,” Heron Books, 1993. Wundt, inthe 1870s, advanced the then-radical notion of man as an ‘animal,’ notaccountable for his conduct, which was said to be caused entirely byforces beyond his control. According to Wundt’s thinking, in a humanbeing there is nothing there to begin with but a body, a brain, and anervous system. Therefore, teachers must try to educate a person byinducing sensations in that nervous system. Through these experiences,the individual will learn to respond to any given stimulus, with the’correct’ response. Thus, a child’s actions are thought to bepreconditioned and beyond his control, because he is simply astimulus-response mechanism.
2) Vazsonyi, Balint, “America’s 30 Years War: Who is Winning?,’ Regnery, 1998.
3) Raehn, Raymond V., “The Historical Roots of ‘Political Correctness,'” Free Congress Foundation, Number 44, June 1997.
4) Jay, Martin, “The Dialectical Imagination: A History of theFrankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950,” pp.77, University of California Press, 1973.
5) Ibid, pp. 81.
6) Ibid, pp. 82.
7) Atkinson, Gerald L., “The New Totalitarians: Bosnia as a Mirror of America’s Future,” Atkinson Associates Press, 1996.
8) Jay, Martin, “The Dialectical Imagination: A History of theFrankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950,”University of California Press, 1973.
9) Wiggershaus, Rolf, “The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance,” The MIT Press, 1994.
10) Lind, William S., “What is ‘Political Correctness?,” Essays on our Times, Free Congress Foundation, Number 43, March 1997.
11) Ibid.
12) Reich, Charles A., “The Greening of America,” Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1995.
13) A phrase commonly heard during the 1992 Presidential campaign.
14) London, Herbert, “Discipline of history under assault,” The Washington Times, 26 October 1997.
15) Ibid.
16) Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Panel on ‘Academic Reform: Internal Sources,’National Association of Scholars, NAS Sixth General Conference, 3-5 May1996.
17) Marrow, Alfred Jay, “The Practical Theorist: The Life and Work ofKurt Lewin,” Teachers College Press, new York, 1977. Kurt Lewin was aprimary figure in the wartime research that was later translated intothe techniques used today in ‘sensitivity training.’
18) Raehn, Raymond V., “Critical Theory: A Special Research Report, 1 April 1996.
19) Editorial, “The crying of the admirals,” The Washington Times, 3November 1995. The U.S. Naval Academy has added female ‘role models’ tothe faculty. In August 1994, the Academy placed a new emphasis onconflict resolution and consciousness-raising. “As ‘Lean On Me’ startedplaying, Master Chief Liz Johns gave the plebes her final orders: standin a circle, sway to the music, sing along, and hug. From the circlecame the sharp sniffle of sobs. The future admirals of America werecrying.”
20) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 172.
21) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 227.
22) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 248.
23) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 135.
24) Ibid, Jay, Martin, pp. 95.
25) Vazsonyi, Balint, “America’s Thirty Years War: Who is Winning?,” Regnery, 1998.
26) Ibid, Atkinson, Gerald L.
27) Strauss, William and Howe, Neil, “Generations: The History ofAmerica’s Future — 1584 to 2069,” pp. 382, William Morrow &Company, 1991. “We can foresee a full range of possible outcomes, fromstirring achievement to apocalyptic tragedy…Boomers can best servecivilization by restraining themselves (or by letting themselves berestrained by others) until their twilight years, when their spiritualenergy would find expression not in midlife leadership [for which theyare not equipped], but in elder stewardship.”
http://www.newtotalitarians.com/FrankfurtSchool.html