Twitterers of the World Unite!
The Digital New Left as Controlled Opposition, Part 1

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Part 1 of 4

Ukrainian translation here, German translation here

An enlightening article by Tony Cartalucci,[1] entitled “Google’s Revolution Factory – Alliance of Youth Movements: Color Revolution 2.0,” has been published by Global Research.[2] Here Cartalucci focuses on the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM), a.k.a. Movement.org.

Cartalucci states that Movement.org was started in 2008 to co-ordinate “radical” youth movements of what he calls a “left-liberal” nature. Among the founding groups was the April 6 Youth Movement, which has been the vanguard of the revolt in Egypt. What the naïve, the ill-informed and those who have the disadvantage of a University miseducation will find perplexing is that these young revolutionaries have been sponsored by corporations such as Pepsi, by sundry globalist think tanks and NGOs and by the US State Department. Cartalucci comments on this:

It is hard, considering these men’s affiliations, to believe that the change they want to see is anything less than a generation that drinks more Pepsi, buys more consumerist junk, and believes the United States government every time they purvey their lies to us via their corporate owned media.

While the activists attending the Movements.org summit adhere to the philosophies of “left-leaning” liberalism, the very men behind the summit, funding it, and prodding the agenda of these activists are America’s mega-corporate combine. These are the very big-businesses that have violated human rights worldwide, destroyed the environment, sell shoddy, overseas manufactured goods produced by workers living in slave conditions, and pursue an agenda of greed and perpetual expansion at any cost. The hypocrisy is astounding unless of course you understand that their nefarious, self-serving agenda could only be accomplished under the guise of genuine concern for humanity, buried under mountains of feel-good rhetoric, and helped along by an army of exploited, naive youth.[3]

Been There, Done That: The Old New Left

A pseudo-revolutionary youth movement controlled by Establishment wire-pullers is not a new phenomenon. The CIA, tax exempt foundations, and corporate America experimented with AYM’s precursors during the 1960s as a means of dialectical “controlled opposition.” One of these dialectical aims was to push the USA in a moderately(?) Leftist direction by sponsoring the extreme New Left nihilists. A concomitant part of this was to also sponsor the “Women’s Lib” of Gloria Steinem et al. which has assisted the corporate elite in detaching women from the family and incorporating them into the workforce as part of the capitalist production process behind the facade of “equality.”

The ideological foundations for the 1960s “youth rebellion” were laid by dissidents of the Old Left mostly from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, whose members fell out with Stalin, escaped from Hitler, and ended up in the USA at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. This coterie from Europe came in under the direct sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Emergency Program for European Scholars, which had last say in who was to be selected.[4]

Under the direction of Theodor Adorno, this coterie produced the seminal study The Authoritarian Personality,[5] the purpose being to show by the use of personality questionnaires that those who believed in traditional values and especially the family and parental authority were mentally ill, whereas those with a Leftist outlook (presumably like Jim Jones, for example) were mentally healthy.[6] Hence, the ideological basis was laid for a revolt against familial bonds, including traditional gender roles.

From out of this ideological fermentation the individual most responsible for laying the intellectual foundations of the New Left was Herbert Marcuse, who got his start in the USA as one of the refugees sponsored by the Rockefeller program. During World War II he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, and then for the US State Department until 1950.[7] During the 1960s Marcuse became the “guru of the New Left’,” he was “often discussed” by the mass media, and his students began to gain influential academic positions and to promote his ideas, making him a major force in US intellectual life.[8] Marcuse’s Eros & Civilization became the manifesto of the 1960s counter-culture. He received Rockefeller funding for his book One Dimensional Man.[9]

Timothy Leary, like Gloria Steinem, was “handled” by CIA operative Cord Meyer.[10] Leary later credited Meyer with, “helping me understand my political cultural role more clearly.” In 1953 the CIA established a front, The Society for Human Ecology, and spent $25 million on a research program at Harvard, Stanford and Berkley universities, to experiment with mind-altering drugs, particularly mescaline and LSD. In 1960 Frank Barrow of the CIA established at Harvard the Psychedelic Drug Research Center. At the time Leary was a lecturer in psychology at Harvard. It is here, under Barrow’s direction, that Leary began his experiments with LSD. Leary later stated, “Some powerful people in Washington have sponsored all this drug research.”[11]

By 1967 Leary had become the icon of the counter-culture, his slogan being: “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out.” The involvement of the Establishment in promoting the drug counter-culture was frankly stated by Leary in an interview with High Times, a leading counter-cultural magazine of which he was an editor, in 1978:

If you look back, many things that we thought were coincidences turned out not to have been accidents. The entire LSD movement itself was sponsored originally by the CIA to whom I give great credit. I would not be here today if it were not for the foresight and prestige of the CIA psychologists. So give the CIA credit for being a truly intelligence agency.[12]

In 1937 the “Radio Project” was established at Princeton University with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation. The head of the Project was Paul Lazarsfeld, an Austrian socialist[13] who had been brought to the USA as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow[14], and became one of the most influential social scientists in America as the founder of “public opinion research.” At Princeton Lazarsfeld established the Office of Radio Research. Lazarsfeld’s students were to become the heads of the CBS, NBC and ABC corporations. A biography of Lazarsfeld states:

In 1939 the Rockefeller Foundation radio research grant was transferred from Princeton to Columbia University, where Lazarsfeld became a professor of sociology. In 1944 the Office of Radio Research was renamed the Bureau of Applied Social Research,[15] which became in the 1950s and 1960s the leading university-based social research institute in the United States.[16]

Theodor Adorno was one of the major research scientists employed by the Radio Project as director of the project’s Music Division. His research was nicknamed The Little Annie Project. This examined the emotional reactions of listeners to characters and scenes, so that a scriptwriter could influence the response in an audience. Adorno described addiction to music as similar to other forms of addiction and as a means for the socialization of individuals into a mass.

This is the background of what New Left luminary Jerry Rubin described as the formula of the “youth revolt”: sex, drugs, and music, according to Rubin’s revolutionary manifesto Do It! (obligingly published by Simon and Schuster): “We’ve combined youth, music, sex, drugs, and rebellion with treason, and that’s a combination hard to beat.”[17]

Organization and Funding

The same type of corporate and Government-connected sponsorship that has been creating the present reanimated “New Left” to act as the vanguard of the world “velvet revolution” pulled the same stunt on youngsters during the 1960s. The specific institution from which the New Left emerged was the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) initially funded by James Warburg,[18] a scion of the Warburg international banking dynasty, and “by the Warburg family” (sic).[19]

According to Sidney Blumenthal who conducted interviews with IPS for The Washington Post in 1986, “IPS became a bridge between liberalism and the New Left during the 1960s and 1970s.”[20] IPS co-founder Marcus Raskin for example was associated with the Radical Education Project of the primary New Left movement, Students for a Democratic Society. The IPS continues to receive funding from the major Foundations, including Ford and Rockefeller.[21]

The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was born from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). This was the youth wing of the Rockefeller-funded, League for Industrial Democracy, (LID)[22] the US branch of Fabian-socialism. According to Political Research Associates, a prominent Left-wing think tank, SLID was the US affiliate of an international socialist youth movement which received CIA money: LID’s Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) was an associate member of the CIA-financed International Union of Socialist Youth.[23] SLID received money to maintain its international contacts from the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, a major CIA conduit for funds.[24] Another recipient of CIA funding since 1950 was the US National Student Association.[25] Philip Agee states that the NSA provided an important basis for the New Left, and was closely associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the SDS:

. . . [M]embers of Students for a Democratic Society provided important leadership for campus-based activities.[26] According to Angus Johnston, who had been secretary of the US Students Association, “. . . NSA played a vital role in the wave of student activism that rose in the early 1960s, doing much to advance a student-centered vision for the American university. Many of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) became involved in national activism through NSA . . .”[27]

One of those involved with founding the SDS, James Kunen, writes in his memoir The Strawberry Statement that Big Business sought to channel funds to the SDS as part of a dialectical process:

In the evening I went up to the University to check out a strategy meeting. A kid was giving a report on the SDS convention. He said that at the convention men from Business International Roudtables, the meetings sponsored by Business International for their client groups and heads of government—tried to buy up a few radicals. These men are the world’s leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the boys who wrote the Alliance for Progress. They’re the left wing of the ruling class.

They agree with us on black control and student control . . .

They want McCarthy[28] in. They see fascism as the threat, see it coming from Wallace[29]. The only way McCarthy could win is if the crazies and young radicals act up and make Gene look more reasonable. They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago.

We were also offered Esso (Rockefeller) money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the center as they move to the left. [30]

This Big Business dialectic with the New Left is confirmed independently by Gerald Kirk, who as a student at the University of Chicago, and became active in the SDS, the DuBois Club[31], the Black Panthers, and the Communist Party, as an informant for the FBI. Kirk broke from the Left in 1969. The following year, he testified before the House and Senate Internal Security panels:

Young people have no conception of the conspiracy’s strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below. . . . They have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they’re fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don’t realize that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes.[32]

The manner by which the dialectical process works was specifically demonstrated in 1968 when the SDS Columbia chapter instigated a student revolt and take-over of the University. Revolutionary leadership was taken out of the hands of the SDS and was taken over by the Students for a Restructured University (SRU)[33] that had been funded with a $40,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.[34] The Ford Foundation 1968 annual report states that:

At the University of California (Berkeley), a grant of $500,000 was given for a new university Office of Educational Development that enlists both students and faculty in the planning and conduct of educational experiments. These include new interdisciplinary courses that reflect contemporary social, political, and economic issues, and a system of residential colleges linked to specific student interests rather than to academic fields.[35]

The Ford Foundation was funding in Berkeley, noted as the center of New Left radicalism, the institutional promotion of New Left ideology. Note the reference to “educational experiments,” “courses that reflect contemporary social, political and economic issues,” and the promotion of a system of so-called “specific student interests.” The 1968 Foundation report states further:

To facilitate thoughtful student involvement in academic affairs, the Foundation granted $315,000 to the National Student Association for a three-year program. The grant will assist two principal activities: a national dissemination program to inform students of various patterns of educational innovation and change and participation of N.S.A. staff as advisers in student reform efforts.

At Columbia University, which was severely disrupted by student demonstrations in the spring, grants were made to three groups studying and redefining the roles of faculty, students, administrators, and trustees. They included a faculty committee and a student organization that was active in the demonstrations but is dedicated to restructuring, not overturning, the university.

The Foundation report cryptically mentions “a student organization” active in the New Left demonstrations with the SDS, Black Panthers and others, referring here to the Students for a Restructured University, without naming the SRU as the recipient. Students for a Restructured University presented themselves as the “moderate” wing of the student uprising, the strategy being to threaten that if their “moderate” demands were not met, the University administration would have to deal with the SDS and other extremists. This was the dialectical strategy in operation.

Notes

1. Tony Cartalucci, Land Destroyer, http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/

2. Cartalucci, “Google’s Revolution Factory – Alliance of Youth Movements: Color Revolution 2.0,” Global Research, February 23, 2011, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23283

3. Cartalucci, “Google’s Revolution Factory.”

4. “(3) Emergency Program for European Scholars, 1940–1945,” Rockefeller Foundation Archives, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:tXK4eQ5oXbAJ:www.rockarch.org/collections/rf/refugee.php

5. T. W. Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper Row, 1950).

6. K. R. Bolton, “‘Sex Pol’: The Influence of the Freudian-Marxian Synthesis on Politics and Society,” Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Washington, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 2010.

7. Encyclopaedia of World Biography on Herbert Marcuse, http://www.bookrags.com/biography/herbert-marcuse/

8. Douglas Kellner, “Marcuse, Herbert,” The American National Bibliography, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:5_KUmmTtH7QJ:www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell12.html

9. Herbert Marcuse, “Acknowledgements,” One Dimensional Man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society, See for the acknowledgement: http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=63QdLKsuqCwC&pg=PR9&lpg=PR9&dq

10. “Gloria Steinem and the CIA: C.I.A. Subsidized Festival Trips: Hundreds of Students Were Sent to World Gatherings,” The New York Times, 21 February 1967, http://www.namebase.org/steinem.html

11. 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?, Osprey, 1994, http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html

12. Timothy Leary interview, High Times, February 1978.

13. “Biographical Memoir”’ (Washington: National Academy Press, 1987), Volume 56, p. 255.

14. “Biographical Memoir,” p. 258.

15. “Biographical Memoir,” p. 260.

16. Paul Lazarsfeld, ‘Biography’, http://www.answers.com/topic/paul-lazarsfeld

17. Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), pp. 19, 249.

18. Institute for Policy Studies, Beginning the Second Decade, 1963–1973.

19. Institute for Policy Studies, Beginning the Second Decade, ibid.

20. Sidney Blumenthal, “IPS – Left-Wing Thinkers,” Washington Post, 30 July, 1986. http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:X-SHxRkyN9YJ:www.tni.org/archives/media_ips-wp1986

21. Green Tracking Library, http://www.undueinfluence.com/index.html

22. ‘Timeline for the Young Social Democrats,” Young Social Democrats, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:A-JZk7 38J:www.youngpeoplessocialistleague.org/library/timeline.shtml

23. The International Union of Socialist Youth is the youth affiliate of the Socialist International, comprising social democratic and Labor parties throughout the world. The IUSY was founded in Germany in 1919 under the leadership of the German Bolshevik Karl Liebknacht, and became the Communist Youth International. The IUSY was reconstituted in 1946. ‘International Union of Socialist Youth, Statemaster Encyclopaedia, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:OaAnTsZAgKwJ:www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/International-Union-of-Socialist-Youth.

24. Political Research Associates, “League for Industrial Democracy,” Right Web, 10 January 1989, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:Cv7179ovYrgJ:www.rightweb.irc-online.org/articles/display/

25. Philip Agee Jr., “CIA Infiltration of Student Groups: The National Student Association Scandal,” Campus Watch, Fall 1991, pp. 12–13, http://www.cia-on-campus.org/nsa/nsa2.html

26. Ibid.

27. Angus Johnston, A Brief History of the NSA & USSA, US Student Association, http://www.usstudents.org/who-we-are/history

28. Left-liberal Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy.

29. Conservative Southern Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace.

30. James Kunen The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, (New York: Avon, 1970), “At the convention, Men from Business International Roundtables,” pp. 130–131.

31. A Communist Party front named after Afro-American scholar W. E. B. DuBois.

32. “Investigation of SDS 1969,” Committee on Internal Security, 91st Congress, 1st Session, Pt. 5, pp. 1654–1705 of hearings.

33. “Columbia University – Students for a Democratic Society – Unrest,” ABC Evening News, 19 September 1968, Vanderbilt Television News Archive, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:hQs-Ccu5i1IJ:tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/program.pl

34. An article in a leading British Leftist magazine puts the amount given by the Ford Foundation to SRU at $40,000. Mike Marqusee, “1968 The mysterious chemistry of social change,” Red Pepper, 6 April 2008, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:Qu0dvzQ7RuIJ:www.redpepper.org.uk/1968-The-Mysterious-Chemistry-

$40,000 is also the amount stated by Joel Geier, Associate Editor of the International Socialist Review, “1968: Year of Revolt,”  talk at the University of Illinois, Champaign, Il., March 26, 2008. Geier was a leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkley during the 1960s. International Socialist review, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:Tw1lGIjtOAgJ:links.org.au/node/335+

35. ‘Higher Education: Academic Reform’, Ford Foundation Annual Report 1968, http://www.fordfound.org/archihttp://www.fordfound.org/archives/item/1968/text/045ves/item/1968/text/045