While psychiatry as a means of repressing political dissent was well-known for its use in the USSR, this also occurred in the West, and particularly in the USA. While the case of the poet Ezra Pound is comparatively well-known, not so recognised is that during the Kennedy era in particular there were efforts to silence critics through psychiatry.
Since the study on the Authoritarian Personality, social scientists have remained occupied with creating new approaches for the de-legitimizing of dissident opinions. Among the primary targets are those who have in recent years been termed conspiracists. The term is used to induce a Pavlovian behavioural reflex in nullifying dissident views on a range of subjects, additional to the use of words such as ‘racist’, ‘Fascist’, ‘sexist’, ‘homophobe’, ‘White supremacist’.
Recently a group of psychologists studying the allegedly contradictory nature of conspiracy beliefs were able to furnish mind-manipulators with a study that can be used to show that anything called ‘conspiracy theory’ can be relegated to the realm of mental imbalance. The paper was published as ‘Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories’.222 The abstract reads:
Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: A self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The present research shows that even mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated in endorsement. In Study 1 (n ¼ 137), the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered. In Study 2 (n ¼ 102), the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive. Hierarchical regression models showed that mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively associated because both are associated with the view that the authorities are engaged in a cover-up (Study 2). The monological nature of conspiracy belief appears to be driven not by conspiracy theories directly supporting one another but by broader beliefs supporting conspiracy theories in general.223
The conclusion is that conspiracy theorists have a generalized suspicion of all authority, and thereby believe that any event is the product of a conspiracy by authority. Several categories were used to score contradictory attitudes in regard to conspiracy. The subjects were chosen from 137 undergraduate psychology students. Five questions were asked regarding conspiratorial beliefs in Princess Diana’s death.224 The results ‘suggest that those who distrust the official story of Diana’s death do not tend to settle on a single conspiracist account as the only acceptable explanation; rather, they simultaneously endorse several contradictory accounts’.225
There are several factors to consider:
1) The small number of subjects drawn from the same background.
2) Whether the belief in contradictory theories is rather the willingness to accept several alternatives rather than being bound to a single explanation.
3) The tests appear to be of a ‘tick the boxes’ character, and do not seem to offer the subjects opportunity to explain their views.
4) The tests therefore seem to be nothing other than very limited statistical surveys from which a generalised theory is postulated in regard to conspiracism.
In is of interest that Wood, Douglas and Sutton draw on The Authoritarian Personality in creating a psychological profile of conspiracists that will accord with leftist assumptions on conspiracists as ‘Fascists’ and ‘anti-Semites’: ‘There are strong parallels between this conception of a monological belief system and Adorno et al’s (1950) work on prejudice and authoritarianism’.226 The purpose of the study can be discerned from this passage:
If Adorno’s explanation for contradictory antisemitic beliefs can indeed be applied to conspiracy theories, conspiracist beliefs might be most accurately viewed as not only monological but also ideological in nature. Just as an orthodox Marxist might interpret major world events as arising inevitably from the forces of history, a conspiracist would see the same events as carefully orchestrated steps in a plot for global domination. Conceptualizing conspiracism as a coherent ideology, rather than as a cluster of beliefs in individual theories, may be a fruitful approach in the future when examining its connection to ideologically relevant variables such as social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism.227
Conspiracism is identified as an inherently ‘right-wing authoritarian’ ideology. The authors, Wood, Douglas, and Sutton, thereby show themselves to be ideologically biased and agenda-driven; as were Adorno, et al. Moreover, in ascribing conspiracism to ‘right-wing ideology’ there seems to be ignorance as to the diversity of conspiracists.
How should one designate Dr. Carroll Quigley, other than as a liberal, Professor of History at Harvard and Georgetown University Foreign Service School, whose academic magnum opus, Tragedy & Hope, is often quoted by conspiracists? This includes several dozen pages describing an ‘international network’ of bankers whose aim is to bring about a centralised world political and financial control system.228 Despite the relatively few pages on this network in Quigley’s 1300 page tome, he regarded the role of this network in history, over the course of several generations, as not only pivotal, but also as laudable (apart from its ‘secrecy’).229
Wood, Douglas and Sutton begin their paper with the definition: ‘A conspiracy theory is defined as a proposed plot by powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some (usually sinister) goal’.230 Based on that definition, it would seem difficult to conclude anything other than that Quigley was describing conspiracy, insofar as it is:
1) ‘Secret’, which Quigley laments as being the primary cause of his disagreement with the ‘network’
2) Composed of powerful people and organisations
3) Aims to accomplish a world financial system under the control of international bankers.
The only question is whether ‘it’ should be considered ‘sinister’. However, Wood et al. state that ‘conspiracies’ are usually regarded as ‘sinister’, which presumably means that it is not an essential ingredient. Obviously, the word ‘sinister’ is subjective. Quigley regarded ‘it’ as being composed of highly cultured and intelligent men with good intentions for the world, although he seemed to have doubts towards the end of his life, when the lecture circuit had been denied to him, and his textbook Tragedy & Hope was inexplicably suppressed by his publisher.231
What should one make of the ‘warning’ to the American people by Dwight Eisenhower, during his ‘farewell speech’, in which he referred to the ‘military-industrial complex’, which became a favourite expression of the New Left? Eisenhower pointed out its wide ramifications, not only on economic and political but also on moral and cultural levels:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist….
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.232
Here are the primary elements for ‘conspiracy theory’ in Eisenhower’s address:
1) There is a threat that is ‘secret’, or at least not above board, otherwise Eisenhower would not see the need to make it a feature of his final words as president.
2) This threat involves a cabal: ‘the military-industrial complex’, and a technocratic ‘elite’.
3) The threat involves ‘the power of money’.
4) The threat is that of the accumulation of power by these elites.
Did not Karl Marx state that capitalism would internationalise, and that the internationalisation of the ‘modes of production’ would have what today is called a ‘globalising’ effect on society? Did not Marx also state that it is the forces of ‘social production’ that determine not only the economics, but also the culture, morals and religion of a society? Had Marx not seen this as a necessary part of the dialectical process towards Communism? Is it too wide of the mark therefore, even from a Marxian perspective, to state that there is a convergence of outlook between international capitalism and international socialism? But this is dismissed by conformist academia as a right-wing conspiracist ‘over-simplification’.
The explanation is indeed far more complex than ‘conspiracy theory’, and involves the Zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the age’ under which both capitalism and socialism emerged. I allude to this early in Revolution from Above, stating that there is nothing ‘new’ or ‘progressive’ about current trends, which have been seen many times before over millennia, during analogous epochs of civilisations in decay.233 Hence, when a budding academic such as Andrew Woods mockingly refers to ‘conspiracy theory’, he is himself projecting his own simplifications without understanding the historical contexts. Both the thesis and antithesis (capitalism and socialism) that emerged at the same time were born from the same Zeitgeist, as reflections of one another. A century ago the seminal philosopher of the Right, Oswald Spengler, who is quoted in Revolution from Above,234 but who is not likely to be taught by the present social sciences, wrote of this relationship between the two:
There is no proletarian, not even a communist, movement that has not operated in the interests of money, in the directions indicated by money, and for the time permitted by money — and that without the idealist amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.235
So far from attempting to explain social and historical complexities with the ‘oversimplification’ of ‘conspiracy theory’, the Right predicates such conspiracies as symptoms rather than causes, which can only prosper when society has reached a cycle of decay that allows money to dominate: plutocracy. Plato outlined a similar series of cycles in The Republic: Aristocracy, Timocracy (debasement of aristocratic values), Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny.236
The social pathogens that are being promoted by plutocracy and the Left are seen as ‘progress’. In presenting his critical analysis of ‘right-wing conspiracy theory’, Andrew Woods neglected to mention, in his ridicule of the notion that capitalist theorists might have their own dialectical outlook, that the source for this hypothesis is Zbigniew Brzezinski. One of the intelligentsia close to the oligarchy, particularly the Rockefeller dynasty, throughout his long career Brzezinski used a dialectical method in explaining the ‘progressive’ unfolding of history, where ‘Marxism represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision’.237
Certain conspiracy theorists misunderstood Brzezinski’s references to Marxism as indicating that he was a Marxist. This is a typical misunderstanding of how historical dialectics operates. The John Birch Society, for example, in its obituary for Brzezinski, writes:
While pointing out the evils of Communism as practiced in the Soviet Union, Brzezinski showed his fondness for Marxist ideology. In 1970 — seven years before becoming President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor — Brzezinski wrote Between Two Ages. The book laid out his plans for bringing about an incremental world government. Between Two Ages became the blueprint for the globalist Trilateral Commission, which was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller with Brzezinski becoming its first director.
In the book, Brzezinski — who had been, by this time, an American citizen for 12 years — wrote:
The social blinders that have made America unaware of its shortcomings have been ripped off, and the painful awareness of American society’s lingering inadequacy has been rendered more acute by the intensity and pace of change. In a word, America is undergoing a new revolution, whose distinguishing feature is that it simultaneously maximizes America’s potential as it unmasks its obsolescence.
Brzezinski’s disdain for America’s ‘lingering inadequacy’ and ‘obsolescence’ was matched by his high view of the “victory” and “action” of Marxism. He wrote:
That is why Marxism represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision. Marxism is simultaneously a victory of the external, active man over the inner, passive man and a victory of reason over belief: it stresses man’s capacity to shape his material destiny — finite and defined as man’s only reality — and it postulates the absolute capacity of man to truly understand his reality as a point of departure for his active endeavors to shape it. To a greater extent than any previous mode of political thinking, Marxism puts a premium on the systematic and rigorous examination of material reality and on guides to action derived from that examination.238
In Revolution from Above I quote more extensively from Brzezinski’s Between Two Ages, in hypothesising that there is a capitalist dialectic that operates in mirror image to that of Communist dialectic.239 My hypothesis is that the globalist intelligentsia, among whom Brzezinski was prominent, saw Marxism as a dialectical phase in globalisation, in a sense paralleling that of Karl Marx, who conversely saw capitalism as a phase in internationalisation, leading to world Communism. Marx saw Communism as the end of history in this dialectical process; globalist intellectual Francis Fukuyama saw liberal-capitalism as ‘the end of history’. To the rightist, and Spengler saw this a century ago, capitalism and Communism reflect the same spirit; the same Zeitgeist. It is this convergence of dialectic outlook that explains why arch-capitalists would support organisations and ideologies that are supposedly dedicated to the destruction of capitalism. This makes more sense than assuming that these capitalists are being hoodwinked and manipulated and that Marxists have taken over the funds of oligarchs through guile. It is more plausible that the oligarchy know exactly what they are promoting.
Woods’ attempt to trace ‘conspiracy theory origins’ with which to link Revolution from Above, and the ‘attack on The New School’, is inept. It is an ineptitude born of intellectual arrogance of the type that pervades the leftist intelligentsia:
Bolton’s attack on The New School contributes to a tradition of American conspiracy theorizing that has endured since the mid-twentieth century. Specifically, his work builds on enduring right-wing myths about the Fabian Society and the Frankfurt School. In 1964, the author and preacher John A. Stormer wrote the conspiracist classic None Dare Call It Treason to warn American citizens that communists had infiltrated churches, the education system, the media, the labor movement, and the medical establishment.
…. Building on Stormer’s allegations, Bolton explains that — in a classic twist of dialectical capitalism — Webb and Shaw secured generous funding from the Rothschild family to establish the London School of Economics in 1895. For the Fabian Society, universities functioned as ostensibly innocuous channels for transmitting collectivist propaganda. Following Webb and Shaw’s example, Dewey conspired to convert young American intellectuals to the pernicious doctrine of Fabian Socialism through The New School.240
The use of Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason, one of only two cited works in Woods’ endnotes, is odd. Woods does not identify the ‘enduring right-wing myths about the Fabian Society and the Frankfurt School’. It is sufficient to call something a ‘right-wing myth’ in order to have it dismissed. Woods alludes to Stormer having been a ‘preacher’ when he wrote None Dare Call It Conspiracy. This is incorrect. Stormer became prominent in the Baptist church and education after writing None Dare Call It Treason. However, calling Stormer a ‘preacher’ is enough to raise sneers and smirks among the leftist intelligentsia; to evoke an image of a snake-handling preacher speaking in tongues at a little church in the backwoods of Appalachia.
Of the many sources cited in Revolution from Above, and Woods concedes there are a plenitude, None Dare Call it Treason is not among them. Furthermore, while I had heard of Stormer’s book decades ago, it was not until reading Woods’ paper that I sought out this supposed source of my ideas. The thesis of Revolution from Above is not only different from Stormer’s, but in significant ways antithetical.
Stormer’s book is an example of the growing feeling during the Cold War that ‘Communists’ had ‘infiltrated’ the tax exempt foundations and were using the money in ways antithetical to the wishes of the oligarchs. It is on occasion pointed out that Henry Ford Jnr. resigned as a trustee from the Ford Foundation in December 1976 because he considered the recipients of Foundation largesse too left-wing. However, in this instance Ford Jnr. resigned because he thought the Foundation was over-extending its resources, and suggested cut-backs on the arts, that the staff was too large, that there was not enough support for initiative outside the Foundation programmes, and he regretted that the board was no longer a Ford family affair. When the Reece Congressional Committee on tax exempt foundations criticised the Ford Foundation in 1954 for funding leftist causes, Ford Jnr. stood firmly against Reece and the conservative critics. Nonetheless, the Foundation remained firmly in the hands of Establishment figures, such as John J. McCloy, including those at odds with Ford Jnr.241
The thesis of Revolution from Above, to the contrary, to quote Professor Quigley, is that ‘it must be recognized that the power of these energetic Left-wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but ultimately the power of the international financial coterie…’242 Quigley’s opinion that the leftists in the tax exempt foundations were subordinate to the oligarchs accords with the statements made by the Rockefeller Foundation, previously quoted, in regard to the agendas of the Social Science Research Council being set by the Foundation. These matters had previously been examined by the Reece Congressional Committee investigating the Foundations during 1954. The research director for the Congressional Committee, Norman Dodd, commented:
The broad study which called our attention to the activities of these organizations has revealed not only their support by Foundations but has disclosed a degree of cooperation between them which they have referred to as ‘an interlock’, thus indicating a concentration of influence and power. By this phrase they indicate they are bound by a common interest rather than a dependency upon a single source for capital funds. It is difficult to study their relationship without confirming this. Likewise, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that their common interest has led them to cooperate closely with one another and that this common interest lies in the planning and control of certain aspects of American life through a combination of the Federal Government and education.
This may explain why the Foundations have played such an active role in the promotion of the social sciences, why they have favored so strongly the employment of social scientists by the Federal Government and why they seem to have used their influence to transform education into an instrument for social change.243
Dodd saw the purpose of the social sciences being patronised by the Foundations as being that of ‘social control’ and ‘social engineering’.
…For these reasons, it has been difficult for us to dismiss the suspicion that, latent in the minds of many of the social scientists has lain the belief that, given sufficient authority and enough funds, human behavior can be controlled and that this control can be exercised without risk to either ethical principles or spiritual values and that therefore, the solution to all social problems should be entrusted to them. In spite of this dispute within his own ranks, the social scientist is gradually becoming dignified by the title ‘Social Engineer’. This title implies that the objective view point of the pure scientist is about to become obsolete in favor of techniques of control. It also suggests that our traditional concept of freedom as the function of natural and constitutional law has already been abandoned by the ‘social engineer’ and brings to mind our native fear of controls, however well intended.244
We are told with a blurb from the New School that Woods is working on a book showing the origins of conspiracy theories about Cultural Marxism. The character of Woods’ scholarship in researching this book is indicated by his article on the subject appearing in Commune, a quarterly journal in the mould of the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1960s New Left.245 Here Woods claims to have traced the origins of conspiracy theories about Cultural Marxism to Lyndon LaRouche. Woods states that LaRouche (who had been a leader of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party, before founding the U.S. Labor Party) first wrote about Cultural Marxism in 1974. Woods advances a conspiracy hypothesis of his own about the FBI’s COINTELPRO programme aimed at causing internal disruption in radical groups of both Left and Right, wondering whether LaRouche’s paranoia about enemy agents might have been fed by the FBI.246 When writing the Commune article, perhaps Woods had not yet found Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason, which had been published a decade earlier than the LaRouchean musings?
Woods in weaving his own version of conspiracy theory, contends that opposition to Cultural Marxism is responsible for the mass shootings by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in 1992, and by Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand in 2019, and that they are traceable to LaRouche. Woods explains:
Neither Breivik nor Tarrant obtained their irrational and erroneous opinions on Marxism from interwar Nazi propaganda. They absorbed these views from the long-established discourse on ‘Cultural Marxism’ within the American right, which has been perpetuated by figures such as the New Left apostate David Horowitz, conservative music critic Michael A. Walsh, and paleoconservative politician Pat Buchanan. Even if LaRouche’s EIR247 articles from the 1970s remain unread and unacknowledged, his specter haunts this discourse.248
Therefore, with the same rationale it can be stated that Woods and those at Commune are motivated by the spectres of the psychopathic Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Bela Kun, Robespierre, and stand on the shoulders of 100,000,000 victims of Communism.249 Whenever there is a Wahhabi terrorist act committed in the West, liberals are the first to object to the allegation of any causal relationship between Islam per se and terrorism. When it comes to the Right, however, are we supposed to believe that the ‘lone-wolf’ actions of the likes of Breivik and Tarrant are motivated by the doctrines of Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Ludovici, Pope Leo XIII, or the Vicomte de Bonald? There is a wide disconnect between Islamophobes such as Breivik and Tarrant, and the traditional Right, which has historically identified with the intransigence of Islam ‘against the modern world’.250
The Critical Theorist must resort to reductionist banalities and clichés about ‘conspiracy theories’ being the ‘lifeblood of contemporary fascism’, thereby discarding any need to explain the historiography of the Right. Instead it serves their agendas to only see Hitler and the KKK. Woods states that ‘historical conditions that generated them’ need to be investigated, but the Left never bothers to do so. In the climate of hysteria generated against the Right, banality suffices. The concluding sentence indicates that at work is a tactic to achieve support for the Left, if not also as a way to climb the greasy pole of academia for easy accolades, by focusing on an ‘extreme Right’ or ‘fascist’ boogeymen: ‘Fascism spreads whenever radical leftist politics is sabotaged, silenced, and suppressed. Whereas fascism constructs scapegoats, we must identify the true culprits. The fight against fascism is the first step in the fight for revolution’.251 To which it might be asked:
1) Where is radical leftist politics being ‘sabotaged’? What anti-left conspiracy is involved in this suppression? What leftist academics even of the most extreme type are removed from academia? When is any of the ‘antifa’ violent posturing condemned by the mainstream media? The leftist is psychologically obliged to maintain the myth of his role as the ‘revolutionary martyr’ even when he is an ensconced part of the System. A feeling of persecution paranoia must be maintained by projecting his own position onto the ‘Right’.
2) What is this ‘Fascist menace’ other than a scapegoat for the consequences of culture-pathogens such as multiculturalism and globalisation?
3) Is the purpose of this mythical ‘global Fascist conspiracy’ that is hyped by pundits, politicians and news media a diversion tactic to obscure the causes and purposes of social fracture; to delegitimise and demonise criticism of globalist agendas?
Far from the origins of the criticism of Cultural Marxism deriving from Stormer, LaRouche or the ‘Right’, we need to look elsewhere.
Most of the American Right during the Cold War were confused by Establishment anti-Sovietism. They saw Cultural Marxism as a conspiracy headquartered in Moscow, and its funding by oligarchic wealth was the result of Marxist infiltration of the Foundations. They saw the conflict being between Marxism and free enterprise, and many ‘American patriots’ have never transcended this flawed notion, grounded in the deification of free enterprise and individualism.
The Moscow-aligned Communists were the first to understand the character of Critical Theory or Cultural Marxism. Attempting to replace class struggle with the struggle for an orgasm, Wilhelm Reich252 was expelled from the German Communist Party. In 1932 Reich’s ‘sex-economics’ doctrine, after being endorsed by a Communist youth conference, was condemned by the party leadership as relegating politics ‘down to the level of the gutter’. The party announced in its periodical Roter Sport that Reich’s pamphlets were contrary to the party’s aims for youth education. Reich was accused by the party leadership of wanting to turn the party associations into ‘fornication organisations’. The party leaders said that ‘there were no orgasm disturbances among the proletariat, only among the bourgeoisie’. The party considered the doctrine as creating a generational conflict.253 In 1929 Reich visited the USSR but noted that already there was a reversal of the early Bolshevik anti-family policies.254 Arriving in the USA, he found liberalism more to his liking, ‘while “socialist” Russia witnessed reactionary, anti-sexual developments’.255 Such developments under Stalin were regarded by Trotsky as ‘the revolution betrayed’, and the reinvigoration of Russian family life and of traditional gender roles was particularly appalling.256
When decades later the influence of Cultural Marxism had reached sufficient critical mass to help spark New Left rioting from Chicago to Paris to Prague, so far from this being a Russian plot, Soviet commentators condemned Herbert Marcuse, whose name was being paraded through the streets along with Mao and Marx. Marcuse became the guru of the New Left. Like Wilhelm Reich, Marcuse’s theme was that capitalism represses the libido of the proletariat.257
Soviet journalist Yuri Zhukov258 wrote in Pravda of Marcuse’s ideas having infiltrated the youth to ‘sow confusion’ and divide them from the working class movement, whose vanguard was the Moscow-aligned Communist Party.259 Zhukov stated that Marcuse was being promoted by the Western press, ‘like a film star’. Marcuse was promulgating generational conflict instead of the fight against capitalism. He had repudiated the need for revolutionary organisation in favour of ‘spontaneous revolt’. Zhukov denounced Marcuse for contending that the proletariat has ceased to be revolutionary, and that the revolt must be assumed by others260 (the disaffected and fractured minorities of ‘identity politics’). Zhukov stated that ‘bourgeois ideologists’ ‘brought into play ultraleft anarchist ideas, often echoing those of Mao Tse-tung, in order to cause confusion and disorient ardent but politically inexperienced youths, divide them, and turn those who take the bait into a blind tool of provocations’.261 Zhukov regarded certain socialists in the German Federal Republic and in Italy as serving the same purposes. These various factions were ‘werewolves’ using the name of Marx to ‘decommunize Marxism’.262
Zhukov had excoriated Marcuse ten years earlier; six years prior to Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason, and sixteen years prior to LaRouche. Zhukov had in 1958 condemned Marcuse’s attack on Soviet society as an effort by Western intellectuals to ‘split the progressive forces and set them against one another’.263