2,623 words
Part 2 of 3, Part 1 here
Yockey and Huxley on “Soft” Totalitarianism
Understanding Yockey’s views of American “ethical syphilis” and “spiritual leprosy” is aided by a familiarity of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World.[1] Huxley was much more prescient than Orwell and quite precisely described how “world controllers” would impose a global dictatorship not by force of arms, but by the slavery of “pleasure.” The ready availability of sex and drugs would be used to create a narcotized society where everyone is happy with his servile lot. Appraising Brave New World in 1958, Huxley described the regime as:
. . . a world-state in which war has been eliminated and where the first aim of the rulers is at all cost to keep their subjects from making trouble. This they achieve by (among other methods) legalizing a degree of sexual freedom (made possible by the abolition of family) that practically guarantees the Brave New Worlders against any form of destructive (or creative) emotional tension.[2]
In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.[3]
A drug called “Soma” maintains social conditioning. Huxley calls this drugged state “not a private vice” but “a political institution.”[4]
It was the very essence of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. But this most precious of–the subjects’ inalienable privileges was at the same time one of the most powerful instruments of rule in the dictator’s armory. The systematic drugging of the individuals for–the benefit of the State . . . was a main plank in the policy of the World Controllers . . .[5]
In Brave New World, population control is enforced and non-reproductive sex, including mass orgies, or “orgy-porgys” where participants go into a frenzy induced by narcotics and repetitive rhythms.[6] These orgies also serve as religious rites or “solidarity” events.
Yockey had a similar understanding of the workings of soft totalitarianism. In The Proclamation of London, he writes:
The degradation of social life did not merely happen, it was planned, deliberately fostered and spread, and the systematic undermining of the entire life of the West continues today.
The instruments of this assault and the weapons of propaganda, press, radio, cinema, stage, education. These weapons are controlled at this moment in Europe almost entirely by the forces of Culture-disease and social degeneration.
The “chief fount” is Hollywood, which “spews forth an endless series of perverted films to debase and degenerate the youth of Europe” after having successfully destroyed the youth of America.[7]
Concomitantly “a vicious literature” promotes the “destruction of healthy individual instincts, of normal familial and sexual life, of disintegration of the social organism into a heap of wandering, colliding, grains of human sand.”
The message of Hollywood is the total, significance of the isolated individual, stateless and rootless, outside of society and family, whose life is the pursuit of money and erotic pleasure. It is not the normal and healthy love of man and wife bound together by many children that Hollywood preaches, but a diseased erotic-for-its-own sake, the sexual love of two grains of human sand, superficial and impermanent. Before this highest of all Hollywood’s values everything else must stand aside: marriage, honor, duty, patriotism, sternness dedication to self to a higher aim. This ghastly distortion of sexual life has created the erotomaia that obsesses millions of victims in America, and which has now been brought to the Mother-soil of Europe by the American invasion.[8]
Keep in mind that Yockey was writing this in 1948, not last month, or even a decade ago. We now look back on the era Yockey was describing with such misgivings and consider it a time of innocence and purity in comparison to our own. Who can deny that this process of “social degeneration” has multiplied beyond the ability to calculate?
Yockey also wrote of the rise of “feminism” at a time when we would now barely recognize any such thing as “feminism’ in comparison to our own day:
Hollywood-feminism has created a woman who is no longer a woman but cannot be a man, and a man who is devirilized into an indeterminate thing. The name given to this process is “the setting from” of woman and it is done in the name of “happiness,” the magic word of the liberal-communist-democratic doctrine.[9]
Yockey died on the eve of the 1960s with its manufactured “cultural revolution.” Yet he surely would have regarded the counter culture’s sexual liberation, feminism, and drug use not as a “revolution” against the US establishment, but merely as a phase of its pursuit of world domination through the destruction of traditional culture and morals.
The Cultural Cold War
The origins and implementation of the strategy can now be historically traced with great precision. The seeds of the 1960s were planted as early as 1949, at the start of the Cold War, when Stalin gave the first indications that he was not going to continue the wartime alliance as a subordinate partner in a United Nations-based World State.
The CIA, with funding from the Rockefellers and the like, gathered a gaggle of old Trotskyites, Mensheviks, and other Leftists disaffected with Stalin’s uncouth Slavic “Bolshevism.” The result was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) under the direction of “lifelong Menshevik” Prof. Sidney Hook (who would be awarded the Medal of Freedom by Pres. Reagan, for services to US hegemony), along with his old mentor Dr John Dewey,[10] and luminaries such as Bertrand Russell (who once advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR to ensure “world peace”), Stephen Spender, and Arthur Koestler. “Counter-culture rebels” recruited by the US Establishment at the same time included Gloria Steinem[11] and Timothy Leary.[12]
The founding conference of the CCF was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1949, as a provocation to a Soviet-sponsored peace conference at the Waldorf supported by a number of American literati. The CIA article on this states:
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sidney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the [pro-Soviet] Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist [should read anti-Stalinist] himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.[13]
Through the CCF, the CIA was able to control much of the cultural life of the West during the Cold War era, and subsidized influential magazines such as Encounter.[14]
When the CCF was shut down after the implosion of the Soviet bloc, other institutions were established, this time under private auspices, including in particular the Soros network[15] and the National Endowment for Democracy, the latter another collaboration between neo-Trotskyites,[16] the US Government, and neo-conservatives; both Soros and NED working in tandem to create revolutions, much like the manipulated “youth revolts” of the 1960s, to install regimes favorably disposed to globalization and privatization, especially in the former Soviet bloc.
The cultural front remains pivotal to the expansion of American global hegemony, the spreading of cultural pathology being far more insidious and intrusive than bombs or even debt, as Yockey was among the first to warn, while much of the rest of the “Right” including Rockwell’s American Nazis aligned themselves with the US Establishment vis-à-vis the USSR and American hegemony.
While America sought to export its lethal “culture” in the form of jazz and Abstract Expressionism, to cite two primary examples, Stalin condemned “rootless cosmopolitanism” and was thus fully aware of the consequences of America’s cultural exports. Indeed “Abstract Expressionism” became the de facto “state art” of the American regime of the “culture distorters,” just as “socialist realism” was the de jure state art of the USSR.
Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically so-called “American” art movement. Jackson Pollock, the central figure, was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He had worked in the Federal Artist’s Project, 1938–42, along with other Leftist artists, painting murals under Roosevelt’s New Deal regime, or what Yockey called the second “1933 Revolution.”[17] Abstract Expressionism became the primary artistic strategy of the Cold War offensive against the “socialist realism” sponsored by the USSR from the time of Stalin. As in much else, Stalin reversed the original Bolshevik tendencies in the arts, which had been experimental and, as one would expect from Marxism, anti-traditional.[18] On the other hand, Social Realism, which had been the popular American art form until the 1930s, was by the late 1940s being displaced as art critics and wealthy patrons began to promote the Abstract Expressionists.[19]
Many of the theorists, patrons, and practitioners of Abstract Expressionism were Trotskyists or other anti-Stalinist Leftists, who were to become the most ardent Cold Warriors. Modernist art during the Cold War became a factor in the USA’s world revolution. In 1947 the US State Department organized a modernist exhibition called “Advancing American Art” which was intended for Europe and Latin America, reaching as far as Prague.[20]
The two individuals who did most to promote Abstract Expressionism were art critic Clement Greenberg and wealthy artist and art historian Robert Motherwell[21] who was vigorous in propagandizing on the subject. Greenberg was a New York Trotskyite and a long-time art critic for The Partisan Review and The Nation. He had first come to the attention of the art world with his article in The Partisan Review, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939,[22] in which he stated that art was a propaganda medium, and condemned the socialist realism of Stalinist Russia and the volkisch art of Hitler’s Germany.[23]
Greenberg was a particular enthusiast for Jackson Pollock, and in a 1955 essay “American Type Painting,”[24] he lauded Abstract Expressionism and its proponents as the next stage of modernism. Greenberg considered that after World War II the US had become the guardian of “advanced art,” just as others were to regard America as the only genuine vehicle for a “world revolution” as a stage for world socialism, as opposed to the USSR.
Greenberg became a founding member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF)[25] and was involved with “executive policymaking.”[26] He continued his support for the CCF even after the 1966 exposé by the NY Times and Ramparts that the CCF and magazines such as Encounter had been sponsored by the CIA. Typical of a good Trotskyite, he continued to work for the US State Department and the US Department of Information. [27]
Another key institution in the service of culture distortion is the Rockefeller dynasty’s Museum of Modern Art. John J. Whitney, formerly of the US Government’s Psychological Strategy Board, was a trustee of the Museum, and he supported Pollock and other modernists.[28]
Note the connection with psychological warfare. William Burden, who joined the museum as chairman of its Advisory Committee in 1940, worked with Nelson Rockefeller’s Latin American Department during the war. Burden had been president of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation which channeled funds to sundry fronts and lackeys; and in 1947 he was appointed chairman of the Committee on Museum Collections, and in 1956 as MoMA’s president. [29] Other corporate trustees of MoMA were William Paley of CBS, and Henry Luce of Time-Life Inc. both of whom assisted the CIA.[30] Joseph Reed, Gardner Cowles, Junkie Fleischmann, and Cass Canfield were all simultaneously trustees of MoMA and of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation. There were numerous other connections between the CIA and the museum, including that of Tom Braden, who had been executive secretary of the museum through 1947–1949 before joining the CIA.[31]
In 1952 MoMA launched its world revolution of Abstract Expressionism via the International Program which had a five year annual grant of $125,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, under the direction of Porter McCray, who had also worked with Nelson’s Latin American Department, and in 1950 as an attaché of the cultural section of the US Foreign Service.[32] Russell Lynes, writing of this period stated that MoMA now had the entire world to “proselytize” with what he called “the exportable religion” of Abstract Expressionism.[33]
Notes
[1] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969).
[2] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (Britain: Harper and Row, 1958), 26–27.
[3] Brave New World Revisited, 27.
[4] Brave New World Revisited, ch. 8, “Chemical Persuasion.”
[5] Brave New World Revisited.
[6] Brave New World, ch. 5.
[7] Yockey, “Social Degeneration,” Proclamation of London, 14.
[8] Proclamation of London
[9] Proclamation of London, 14–15.
[10] Hook and Dewey had in 1937 established a so-called commission of inquiry to investigate the Moscow Trials against Trotskyites, for the purpose of white-washing Trotsky under the guise of a neutral judicial inquiry. However, one of the commissioners, Carleton Beals, one of the party that went with Dewey, et al. to Mexico to question Trotsky, resigned in disgust, labeling the inquiry “Trotsky’s pink tea party.” C. Beals, “The Fewer Outsiders the Better: The Pink Tea Party Trials,” Saturday Evening Post, June 12, 1937.
[11] On Steinem and the CIA manipulation of the National Students’ Association see Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 36–39. Gloria Steinem the seminal feminist was an Establishment creation.
[12] Leary was the perfect CIA/Establishment lackey, a mouthpiece for the System-invented psychedelic generation. Journalist Mark Riebling posed the question: “Was the Sixties rebellion a Government Plot?” in Mark Riebling, “Tinker, Tailor, Stoner, Spy: Was Timothy Leary a CIA Agent? Was JFK the ‘Manchurian Candidate’? Was the Sixties Revolution Really a Government Plot?,” http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html
[13] Central Intelligence Agency, “Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949–50.
[14] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999).
[15] The Soros networks support the legalization of narcotics and the promotion of feminism, including liberalized abortion, in states that maintain a vestige of tradition and therefore pose a stumbling block to globalization. The former Soviet bloc is a particular target for Soros subversion. One such Soros front is the Drug Policy Alliance Network, which includes Establishment luminaries such as George Schultz, Paul Volcker, Vaclav Havel, and Soros himself. Drug Policy Alliance Network, About DPA Network, http://www.drugpolicy.org/about/
[16] The National Endowment for Democracy was the brainchild of Trotskyite Tom Kahn. See below.
[17] Yockey, “The American Revolution of 1933,” Imperium, 492–501.
[18] See the wailing about this in Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed.
[19] K. R. Bolton, “The Art of ‘Rootless Cosmopolitanism’: America’s Offensive Against Civilisation,” in The Radical Tradition: Philosophy, Metapolitics & Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Troy Southgate (New Zealand: Primordial Traditions, forthcoming).
[20] The Cultural Cold War, 256.
[21] “Motherwell was a member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom,” the US branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as was Jackson Pollock (The Cultural Cold War, 276). Both Partisan Review editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips became members of the American committee of the CCF (The Cultural Cold War, 158).
[22] Clement Greenberg,. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939): 34–49. The essay can be read at: http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html
[23] Bolton, “The Art of ‘Rootless Cosmopolitanism.’”
[24] Clement Greenberg, “American Type Painting,” Partisan Review, Spring 1955.
[25] John O’Brien, “Introduction,” The Collected Essays and Criticism of Clement Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), vol. 3, xxvii.
[26] The Collected Essays and Criticism of Clement Greenberg, vol. 3, xxviii.
[27] The Collected Essays and Criticism of Clement Greenberg, vol. 3, xxviii.
[28] The Cultural Cold War, 263.
[29] The Cultural Cold War, 263.
[30] The Cultural Cold War, 262. Luce’s Life magazine featured Jackson Pollock in its August 1949 issue, making Pollock a household name (The Cultural Cold War, 267).
[31] The Cultural Cold War, 263.
[32] The Cultural Cold War, 267.
[33] Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern Art: An Intimidate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), cited by Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 267.
1 comment
FYI — far-left Asiatic American photographer on Oswald Spengler: http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2010/08/spengler-for-dummies.html
“For clues into Beck’s thinking, one shouldn’t look at any Civil Rights leader, but Oswald Spengler. Spengler was obsessed with the decline of civilization, particularly White civilization. He equated culture with honor, which is inculcated and apotheosized by the military. With its hierarchy and stress on duty, the army provides the ideal social model. Equality means anarchy. Spengler even dismissed rationalism, defining it as “the arrogance of the urban intellect, which, detached from its roots and no longer guided by strong instinct, looks down with contempt on the full-blooded thinking of the past and the wisdom of ancient peasant stock.”
The Beck crowd also don’t much care for urban intellectuals, for these tend to be “politically correct” and “liberal.” These don’t pray on their knees, if at all. They mix with other races. Some of them are gay. Spengler despised liberalism, which he saw as a gateway drug to all forms of decadence: pacifism, nihilism, freedom of the press, even jazz and “negro dances.” Spengler complained that liberals were striving for “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” How dreadful. Enfeebled by liberalism, the white race was becoming vulnerable to usurpation by the “Yellow-Brown-Black-Red menace.” Spengler lamented, “How far in fact have the white nations advanced towards pacifism? Is the outcry against war an intellectual gesture or a serious abdication from history at the cost of dignity, honour, liberty? Yet life is war.”
A war between the races, that is. Within each race, however, there is also a threat from below, from the riff raff, less refined elements of society, especially the types that swarm and fester in the city. Spengler, “The Western Civilization of this century is threatened, not by one, but by two world revolutions of major dimensions. In both their real compass, their profundity, and their workings have so far escaped recognition. The one comes from below, the other from without: class war and race war.”
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