In The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Kevin MacDonald spends a significant portion of the book analyzing The Frankfurt School, the radical, postmodernist ideology factory, comprised of jewish emigres from Europe, having reached the world’s safest enclave for worlwide jewish radicalism: New York City.
A cryptic merging of Marxism and Freudianism casuistry, the Frankfurt School sought to pathologize all-things-Christian and all-things-nationalistic. Every single sociological characteristic of WASP culture, for example, was pathologized, with anti-semitism found in every nook and cranny. Any form of ethnic group-identity (other than jewish ethnocentrism) was determined to be something in need of curative measures (or worse).
Writing in Foreign Affairs, William E. Scheuerman has a piece on “The Frankfurt School at War“, where we learn that American intelligence looked to conspicuously jewish marxist intellectuals for ‘insight’ into the Nazi mind:
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…
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…
Despite the vast political and cultural gap separating Donovan from Neumann and his team, the spymaster trusted the radicals with the vital security task of providing advice about the Nazis. In the words of John Herz, another young refugee assigned to Neumann’s office (and later a major figure in postwar international relations theory), “It was as though the left-Hegelian World Spirit had briefly descended on the Central European Department of the OSS.”
One Frankfurt member is disappointed that allied denazification didn’t go far enough:
In one of his reports, Kirchheimer presciently identified the legal difficulties that would ultimately face the United States when it came time to punish war criminals and expunge Germany of Nazi influence. Although he and his colleagues ultimately were disappointed by the Nuremberg trials and by what Herz later bitterly described as “the fiasco of denazification,” both of which they deemed insufficiently far-reaching…
I’m quite curious to know how far it was supposed to go.
The article does acknowledge, thankfully, just how propagandistic the Frankfurt School’s methods were:
Today, the Frankfurt School is widely associated with hostility to empiricism and even to science. On university campuses, its aficionados are typically found in literature and cultural studies departments, but not in economics, law, or political science. It is true that the most prominent Frankfurt School figures, the social philosopher Theodor Adorno and the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, had little patience for the sort of hardheaded research featured in the OSS reports…
The Frankfurt thinkers’ own ideological and political preferences sometimes got in the way of providing sound policy advice. And in Neumann’s case, those preferences led to an unfortunate interlude with Soviet agents.
Surprise, surprise. Neumann had an “unfortunate interlude” with Soviet communist agents. Whoops-e-daisy.
As MacDonald makes clear, to devastating effect, the Frankfurt School (like Franz Boas and Freud) utilized tropes of scientific language to forward what was, in essence, a thoroughly political agenda, one that sought to defuse any and all signs of European-based white racial consciousness.
