Thursday, September 5, 2019

Getting into bed with Beelzebub – The CIA, Cultural Marxism and the death of Western Liberalism



I intend to quote my sources with little elaboration for one simple reason, I want my readers to understand I have not invented yet another conspiracy theory. I will let the facts speak for themselves and I invite my readers to investigate this for themselves. Then I encourage each of you to share your conclusions with me as well as with others. Remember George Carlin’s famous line, “Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.”? The necessities of war, even for the noblest of causes such as in defeating the Nazis, will have far reaching and lasting consequences, especially if those consequences involve creating secret organizations whose entire intent is to sew unrest and create instability at home and abroad. It also needs to be understood that such organizations inevitably operate contrary to the principles of constitutional limits on government.

Also, if you notice that you are reading an edited version of this blog please understand I will continue to edit as I receive your feedback. A Norwegian economist was kind enough to share his learned opinions with me. His critique is well received and therefore I would like to clarify certain points.

The new left is no longer founded on the Marxist idea of the proletariat rising up against the bourgeoisie. The Cultural Marxist paradigm replaces that with an ongoing struggle between oppressed identity groups and what is define as the patriarchal tyranny, namely Western Liberal Culture. To the new left modern Liberal Western Democracies are essentially tyrannies. Their structure must be torn down starting with the family. The new left rejects the liberalism that resulted from the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment. In short Critical Theory posited by the Cultural Marxists and Postmodernists rejects all the grand narratives upon which the West has been built. 

Here are some of the new left's core tenets:

First “that was not real socialism” is the claim made by those who, despite socialism’s brutal history, think that they are so morally superior that if they were in to be put in charge of the social experiment to create utopia they would succeed. May I remind you that utopia means “no place”? Utopia does not nor cannot exist. Also, anyone who makes such a claim is utterly unaware of the malevolence that resides in each of us. Power is corrupting. Understand that the new left subscribes to an odd admixture of Postmodernism and Critical Theory who view life as essentially a struggle to acquire power. Therefore the ONLY thing they want is greater clout, influence, and leverage in spite of their pious smoke screen of helping the downtrodden.


“Bad men,” said the famous Classical Liberal economist Hayek, “have no inhibitions about running peoples’ lives. Good men, however, are not interested in doing so. They are willing to allow others to live their lives without interference as long they’re not harming anyone.”


It is “the unscrupulous and uninhibited” — mean people — he wrote, who “are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.” We’re not a totalitarian society. But as Hayek says, there is a “ruthlessness required” to install socialism.


Secondly, I wish you to understand that I refer to socialism in its broadest terms. By this I mean a society, so hell bent on conformity of opinion that they view it as necessary to have strict government regulation and control over virtually every cloying aspect of human activity, not merely the economy. This is why we see a government who constantly talks diversity yet wants everyone to sound alike. They have literally passed laws to make dissenting opinion illegal. Such a society invariably tends toward authoritarian illiberalism. If it moves – tax it, if it keeps moving – regulate it and if it stops moving -subsidize it defines what I view as a government which is moving toward utter social control of the economy while Bill C-16 and other pronouncements made by parliament label any who disagree with the state collective as racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc., etc.  Such states invariably ensure their schools, the schools they run, indoctrinate children into believing that the government must be given virtually unlimited authority since only the socialist elite know what is best for society at large.

Thirdly, no such authoritarian and illiberal system can emerge without a socio-cultural tendency toward “tall poppy syndrome” where individuality is not only strongly discouraged, but disparaged. Scandinavia had a brilliant author by the name of Sandemose. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/11/the-law-of-jante/


“Sandemose’s works are little read these days, except, that is, for a small fragment of one novel, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, published in 1933. The book is a thinly veiled roman à clef about the people of Nykøbing, which in the book is renamed “Jante.” It caused a storm of controversy, satirizing life in small-town Denmark as being ruled by pettiness, envy, backbiting, gossip, inverted snobbery, and small-mindedness. Naturally, the book generated some especially indignant spluttering in Nykøbing, exposing as it did the mean-spirited behavior of its residents, many of whom were easily identifiable.
The fragment of A Fugitive that has come both to define and to torment the Danes is a list of rules by which the residents of the fictional town of Jante were said to abide. These rules set out the Law of Jante (Janteloven), a kind of Danish Ten Commandments, the influence and infamy of which have spread beyond their home country throughout the Nordic region.
These are the rules of Jante Law, the social norms one should apparently be aware of if one is planning a move to the north:
  1. You shall not believe that you are someone.
  2. You shall not believe that you are as good as we are.
  3. You shall not believe that you are any wiser than we are.
  4. You shall never indulge in the conceit of imagining that you are better than we are.
  5. You shall not believe that you know more than we do.
  6. You shall not believe that you are more important than we are.
  7. You shall not believe that you are going to amount to anything.
  8. You shall not laugh at us.
  9. You shall not believe that anyone cares about you.
  10. You shall not believe that you can teach us anything.”

I have experienced this myself as well as witnessed loved ones’ lives made very unpleasant indeed by petty and jealous people who demand that aiming for the lowest common denominator is somehow desirable. It takes a society which lives under the influence of such strict social codes to become socialistic.

So, for the purpose of further developing my reasoning “tall poppy syndrome” otherwise known as “Janteloven” forms the bedrock for all socialist societies.

 “Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. by FRANZ NEUMANN, HERBERT MARCUSE, and OTTO KIRCHHEIMER. edited by RAFFAELE LAUDANI. Princeton University Press, 2013, 704 pp. $45.00.

War makes for strange bedfellows. Among the oddest pairings that World War II produced was the bringing together of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — a precursor to the CIA — and a group of German Jewish Marxists he hired to help the United States understand the Nazis.

Donovan was a decorated veteran of World War I and a Wall Street lawyer linked to the Republican Party. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt tapped him to create the United States’ first dedicated nonmilitary intelligence organization. At that time, many in the foreign policy establishment saw intelligence and espionage as somewhat undignified, even unimportant. So Donovan cast a wide net, recruiting not only diplomats and professional spies but also film directors, mobsters, scholars, athletes, and journalists.

Even in that diverse group, Franz Neumann stood out. Neumann, a Marxist lawyer and political scientist, had fled Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He arrived in the United States a few years later, where he was hailed as an expert on Nazi Germany after the 1942 publication of his book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, which depicted Nazism as a combination of pathological, monopolistic capitalism and brutal totalitarianism. Neumann’s work brought him to the attention of Donovan, who was eager to mobilize relevant expertise regardless of its bearer’s political views.

During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School–Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer–worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time.

These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler’s regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war.

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany features a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.

Franz Neumann (1900-1954) was a labor lawyer and political activist in Germany before the Nazi period, and was a professor of political science at Columbia University after his work in the OSS and at the Nuremberg Trials. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a philosopher who made important contributions to the Frankfurt School critical theory of society. He taught at Brandeis and San Diego universities after his work in the OSS. Otto Kirchheimer (1905-1965) worked for the OSS until 1952. Later he was professor of political science at the New School for Social Research and Columbia. Raffaele Laudani is assistant professor of the history of political thought at the University of Bologna.”

"This collection brings alive with exceptional force the real politics behind critical theory. It highlights the range and sophistication of a vast array of intelligence reports about the structures of power and domination under National Socialist rule, compiled through the teamwork of Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer. Their cool objectivity is remarkable, and reminds us just how indebted we remain to their pioneering work."—Duncan Kelly, University of Cambridge

"An intellectual dispossessed is an intellectual driven to understand the techniques of his dispossession. This indispensable volume assembles key texts by three German-Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who contributed to America's wartime effort and the planning for postwar reconstruction. A fascinating archive for historians and political theorists alike, it reminds us that the Institute for Social Research carried to our shores not only philosophers but also worldly critics of modern dictatorship. Their insights have lost none of their relevance or power."—Peter E. Gordon, Harvard University”

The Law of Unintended Consequences: Critical Theory’s effects on Western thought and its institutions:

In order to understand Critical Theory, we must understand how the Frankfurt School came to be, who its key players were and the nature of their ideology. I love Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s statement that “ideologies are parasites on religious substructures”. Ideologies stand in the place of religious beliefs. Critical Theory rose like a phoenix from the ruins of the failures of Marxism, the Frankfurt School argued that reason is dangerous, mass culture deadening, and the Enlightenment a disaster.

Read this article and see how in a Critical Theorist’s own words they propose a complete restructuring of Western Civilization; Critical Theory and the Crisis of Social Theory By Douglas Kellner (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html)

It is clear they sought with more than a fair amount of success to alter the perception the West had not only of itself, but of the foundational principle of Western thought, that the individual was created in the image of God endowed with inherent rights and obligations to his fellows. It is also built on the notion that man will be corrupted by power and that therefore governments must be limited by constitutional law which will prevent too much power from falling to any one branch of the government, that all three branches should limit one another and that an individual's rights under such laws are sacrosanct.

“Understanding Critical Theory
by
Updated January 24, 2019

Critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it. Critical theories aim to dig beneath the surface of social life and uncover the assumptions that keep us from a full and true understanding of how the world works.
Critical theory emerged out of the Marxist tradition and it was developed by a group of sociologists at the University of Frankfurt in Germany who referred to themselves as The Frankfurt School.

“History and Overview:


Critical theory as it is known today can be traced to Marx's critique of the economy and society put forth in his many works. It is inspired greatly by Marx's theoretical formulation of the relationship between economic base and ideological superstructure and tends to focus on how power and domination operate, in particular, in the realm of the superstructure.

Following in Marx's critical footsteps, Hungarian György Lukács and Italian Antonio Gramsci developed theories that explored the cultural and ideological sides of power and domination. Both Lukács and Gramsci focused their critique on the social forces that prevent people from seeing and understanding the forms of power and domination that exist in society and affect their lives.

Shortly following the period when Lukács and Gramsci developed and published their ideas, The Institute for Social Research was founded at the University of Frankfurt, and the Frankfurt School of critical theorists took shape. It is the work of those associated with the Frankfurt School, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Herbert Marcuse, that is considered the definition and heart of critical theory.

Like Lukács and Gramsci, these theorists focused on ideology and cultural forces as facilitators of domination and barriers to true freedom. The contemporary politics and economic structures of the time greatly influenced their thought and writing, as they existed within the rise of national socialism, including the rise of the Nazi regime, state capitalism, and the rise and spread of mass-produced culture.

Max Horkheimer defined critical theory in the book Traditional and Critical Theory. In this work, Horkheimer asserted that a critical theory must do two important things: it must account for the whole of society within a historical context, and it should seek to offer a robust and holistic critique by incorporating insights from all social sciences.

Further, Horkheimer stated that a theory can only be considered a true critical theory if it is explanatory, practical, and normative, meaning that the theory must adequately explain the social problems that exist, it must offer practical solutions for how to respond to them and make change, and it must clearly abide by the norms of criticism established by the field.
With this formulation Horkheimer condemned "traditional" theorists for producing works that fail to question power, domination, and the status quo, thus building on Gramsci's critique of the role of intellectuals in processes of domination.

Key Texts

Texts associated with the Frankfurt School focused their critique on the centralization of economic, social, and political control that was transpiring around them. Key texts from this period include:
  • Critical and Traditional Theory (Horkheimer)
  • Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer)
  • Knowledge and Human Interests (Habermas)
  • The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas)
  • One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse)
  • The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin)”

Talk about opening Pandora’s Box, old “Wild Bill” Donovan unleashed a mind worm through the forerunner of the CIA which has placed the entire Western World into a spiritual, moral and constitutional crisis. Which is why the new “Postmodern Left” has taken deconstructionism to an entirely new level. Postmodern types question the very nature of reality itself by claiming that anyone who speaks of that which is real are using facts to “oppress others”. Under Critical Theory through to Postmodernism there has emerged an entire cadre of professors who have deliberately corrupted the Academy. They have gone from teaching “what is” and how to reason based upon reality to instructing “what ought to be” while rejecting reason itself. It is as though simply by wishing something was something it is not that they have the power to reconstruct the world.The following video is important to watch: 


Stephen Hicks: Postmodernism: Reprise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwW9QV5Ulmw  


If you are not concerned where we are headed after watching that video, you ought to be. We are in the fight of our lives because we are confronting forces that would undo the very underpinning substructures of Western Democratic Liberalism. Why? How did we get here? Because we have taken our faith and our freedom for granted and are no longer conscious of the debt we owe to those who have gone before and the liberty their sacrifices made possible.


The Malaise in the Soul of our Culture: Sir Roger Scruton/Dr. Jordan B. Peterson: Apprehending the Transcendent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvbtKAYdcZY&t=7s


All the claims of the neo-Marxists make about caring for the oppressed are smoke screens for the fact that all they want is power.

“Postmodernism: definition and critique (with a few comments on its relationship with Marxism) by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
This is from today’s AMA on Reddit: http://j.mp/2s2TIEL

DEFINITION AND CRITIQUE
Postmodernism is essentially the claim that (1) since there are an innumerable number of ways in which the world can be interpreted and perceived (and those are tightly associated) then (2) no canonical manner of interpretation can be reliably derived.

That’s the fundamental claim. An immediate secondary claim (and this is where the Marxism emerges) is something like “since no canonical manner of interpretation can be reliably derived, all interpretation variants are best interpreted as the struggle for different forms of power.”
There is no excuse whatsoever for the secondary claim (except that it allows the resentful pathology of Marxism to proceed in a new guise).

The first claim is true, but incomplete. The fact that there are an unspecifiable number of interpretations does not mean (or even imply) that there are an unspecifiable number of VALID interpretations.

What does valid mean? That’s where an intelligent pragmatism comes into it. Valid at least means: “when the proposition or interpretation is acted out in the world, the desired outcome within the specific timeframe ensues.” That’s a pragmatic definition of truth (from within the confines of the American pragmatism of William James and C.S. Pierce).

Validity is constrained by the necessity for iteration (among other fators). Your interpretations have to keep you, at minimum, alive and not suffering too badly today, tomorrow, next week, next month and next year in a context defined by you, your family, your community and the broader systems you are part of. That makes for very tight constraints on your perception/interpretations/actions. Games have to be iterable, playable and, perhaps, desirable to the players– as Jean Piaget took pains to point out, in his work on equilibration.

RELATIONSHIP TO MARXISM:

It’s not as if I personally think that postmodernism and Marxism are commensurate. It’s obvious to me that the much-vaunted “skepticism toward grand narratives” that is part and parcel of the postmodern viewpoint makes any such alliance logically impossible. Postmodernists should be as skeptical toward Marxism as toward any other canonical belief system.
So the formal postmodern claim, such as it is, is radical skepticism. But that’s not at all how it has played out in theory or in practice. Derrida and Foucault were, for example, barely repentant Marxists, if repentant at all. They parleyed their 1960’s bourgeoisie vs proletariat rhetoric into the identity politics that has plagued us since the 1970’s. Foucault’s fundamental implicit (and often explicit) claim is that power relations govern society. That’s a rehashing of the Marxist claim of eternal and primary class warfare. Derrida’s hypothetical concern for the marginalized is a version of the same thing. I don’t really care if either of them made the odd statement about disagreeing with the Marxist doctrines: their fundamental claims are still soaked in those patterns of thought.
You can see this playing out in practical terms in fields such as gender studies and social work (as well as literary criticism, anthropology, law, education, etc.).

There are deeper problems as well. For example: Postmodernism leaves its practitioners without an ethic. Action in the world (even perception) is impossible without an ethic, so one has to be at least allowed in through the back door. The fact that such allowance produces a logical contradiction appears to bother the low-rent postmodernists who dominate the social sciences and humanities not at all. Then again, coherence isn’t one of their strong points (and the demand for such coherence can just be read as another patriarchal imposition typifying oppressive Western thought).

So: postmodernism, by its nature (at least with regard to skepticism) cannot ally itself with Marxism. But it does, practically. The dominance of postmodern Marxist rhetoric in the academy (which is a matter of fact, as laid out by the Heterodox Academy, among other sources) attests to that. The fact that such an alliance is illogical cannot be laid at my feet, just because I point out that the alliance exists. I agree that it’s illogical. That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
It’s a very crooked game, and those who play it are neck deep in deceit”


On the corruption of the Academy: if you can subvert the validity of university’s proper role of teaching the young “how to think” and replace that with instructing young people “what to think” then Cultural Marxism will have succeeded without all that nasty business of the revolution envisioned by Marx. The remarkable thing about those who accept Cultural Marxist Critical Theory and Postmodernism is that they have no idea that they have come under their influences. As previously mentioned to the new left this is no longer a struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as Marx asserted, but a struggle between the oppressor labelled as the "patriarchal tyranny" and oppressed groups, especially the intersectionally oppressed!  As a result schools in Britain are teaching children that there are over 100 possible genders.

https://premium.telegraph.co.uk/newsletter/article3/how-dare-the-bbc-teach-children-that-there-are-100-genders/?WT.mc_id=e_DM1095020&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Edi_New_Reg&utmsource=email&utm_medium=Edi_Edi_New_Reg20190912&utm_campaign=DM1095020

To the new left the individual exists ONLY as an extension of their group identity.


From “POSTMODERNISM AND THE CORRUPTION OF THE ACADEMIC INTELLIGENTSIA” by JOHN SANBONMATSU

“The tide began to turn against truth, and in postmodernism’s favour, in the late 1970s. It was then that French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault first boldly put truth in scare quotes. ‘“Truth”’, he declared, ‘is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements …. “Truth” is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it’.2 No longer would ‘the true’ be understood, as it had for millennia, as that which is ‘in accordance with fact or reality’. From now on, for a growing and influential sector of the intelligentsia, the true would be posed as a problem to be solved. The prerogative of truth was thus transformed from a right of the oppressed into an object of study for the technical or academic expert. Only the qualified ‘specific intellectual’ or ‘genealogist’ could speak meaningfully of truth – or rather, could investigate the conditions of the possibility of ‘truth’. What discourses give rise to the appearance of truth? How does ‘truth’, as a form of power, a system of ‘constraints’, function and manifest itself? How does knowledge, as power, disguise itself as truth, in order to achieve its effects? These questions are not uninteresting. The trouble is that poststructuralism insists we are entitled to ask only such questions, and so conflates inquiry into the ways that discourse about truth produces particular effects with endorsing the claim that truth-telling as such is impossible.

This fateful move can be traced to Friedrich Nietzsche, the intellectual forefather of poststructuralism. The faith in truth of the Christian and Jewish traditions, Nietzsche held, was merely a distorted or intellectualized version of the frustrated will to power of the oppressed. It was for this reason that Nietzsche viewed truth with deep suspicion and hostility, seeing it as the origin of nihilism in European culture. ‘There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind’, he wrote. Rather, only the free, unapologetic exercise of power – power as power over – over the self, over others – could provide a ground for new human values. But the ancient prophets and theologians were not wrong to believe that the oppressed, lacking power, have only the truth to console them. Deny the oppressed even this – the right to bear witness to the way things really are – and they have nothing. Surrender the possibility of truth, and one surrenders too the possibility of comparing the way things are with the way things ought to be. Nietzsche’s contempt for justice (which is at root always and only a claim of truth against power), was thus an attack on the very desirability of general or social liberation.”


So, this plan, put into play so many years ago by the Frankfurt School, has had catastrophic results, has spread systematically throughout government and society via the Academy, not the least of which has been the normalization of intersectional sexuality with discussion of accepting pedophilia as just another expression of normal human sexuality.

On top of this, we are living in a pan-humanist age as artificial intelligence is developed. You can only imagine the depths of depravity which will result if that technology is manipulated by the Postmodern types.  Today the very notion of the sovereign individual created in the image of God has been murdered even more brutally than Nietzsche imagined because in his eyes we had killed God with science and logic while the Postmodern view has rejected reason and reality itself while making Postmodernists into their own god


The economy and Cultural Marxism/Postmodernism - in defence of the working man:

I want to remind us that the war in Vietnam ended only when the US got into bed with Communist China by making a trade deal with them. The result of which was to send North American manufacturing to them. It goes without saying that the Cultural Marxists within the CIA proposed this plan. They hated the success of capitalism and didn’t care how this would affect North American workers. The only way that Communist China could succeed economically was by taking advantage of markets in the capitalist west. By doing so the political elite and crony capitalists sold the American worker down the Yangtze River and dealt the first blow to Middle Class America which had emerged after WWII. Of course, the new left hated the fact America had become so prosperous and therefore launched a plan that led to the destruction of the Middle Class! Our current trade war with China has resulted from the crony capitalist senior management of the Big Three and other large manufacturers and our corrupted political class wanting access to China's cheap labour.

I was in China in 2009 with a firm that supplies the wire and cable industry. I saw firsthand working conditions for Chinese workers. I witnessed women being handled as pawns to advance their boss’s aspirations. I was in the first group of “round eyes” to be granted access to the Communist Party of China’s Economic Development Headquarters in Hefei. If you think they aren’t gunning for us, then your either incredibly naïve or something far worse. Patent laws mean nothing to them, they can and will make a fake anything if they can make a buck from it.


The Secret Services and The Deep State:


Thank you for reading this blog. Please share and comment. Most importantly, take your responsibility ensuring the continuance of liberty under law, free thinking, and, yes, free markets seriously. You are the resistance against ever increasing statism and social control. The sovereign individual is the most persecuted minority today. Our democracy and way of life based are as fragile as a beautiful crystal glass bowl. That precious bowl is slipping from our hands and is about to be shattered into shards on the stone cold floor of Postmodern nihilism. Oh, and be wary of secret organizations claiming to defend democracy while operating in an unconstitutional manner. These organizations have far too much power and do not answer to the public. Their stock and trade are lies and deception. They are, in fact, professional deceivers trading in secrets, lies, innuendo and unrest. The end never justifies the means. Largely because of them we are living in one of the most divided times in Western history. Populism is on the rise. Wars have been waged without finding the weapons of mass destruction they assured us would be found. Innocents and combatants have died for what, to further their perverse game? And here at home many are now unwilling to place faith in their elected representatives for the simple reason they no longer represent the people. “Wild Bill” Donovan's legacy is one of fulfillment of the law of unintended consequences, because if these consequences were intended then he must have been a monster.



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