Frankfurt ideology sought to soften the totalitarian tendencies inherent in Marxism by combining it with Freudianism(or something like Karl Marx as Ron Jeremy). Supposedly, Stalinist repression rhymed with sexual repression, therefore true socialism would not only have to liberate labor from capital but liberate the libido from sexual repression — it could be some Frankfurters were merely justifying their portnoic lust for shikses. Granted, the Frankfurters were confused on how to come about this. They largely opposed the capitalist ‘commodification’ of culture and its mindless hedonism. In their own way, they had a puritanical intellectual streak, favoring stuff like unlistenable modernist music.
But given their anti-dogma stance in opposition to Stalinism, there was no single theory within the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’, which made for a lively debate among its stalwart figures. That sense of Radical Dissent is what drew many to its influence. It was seen as radicalism that allowed for debate, in contrast to the Old Left that parroted the Moscow Line.
The Frankfurt school addressed the problem of how the revolution was to be accomplished now that the workers had not thrown off their chains as Karl Marx had predicted they would do. The Frankfurt Schoolâs solution was a âmarch through the institutions.â
Frankfurters didn’t really care much about the working class. As Marxists, there was the usual lip service, but they were primarily occupied with the reformation of the bourgeois outlook. In other words, they were fashioning a Marxism for the bourgeoisie. They favored a neo-Marxism that wouldn’t destroy the bourgeoisie but reshape the class into a theoretical commitment to radicalism. Any school of thought that describes PRACTICE as ‘praxis’ favors theory over practice.
Frankfurters realized that a communist system would do away with the kind of freedoms and right that they valued and enjoyed, those found in liberal bourgeois societies. They believe in the revolutionary spirit but didn’t want to be engulfed by revolution and its new tyranny. Thus, their focus, which was highly intellectual, was on the educated middle class. Just like Christianity gave up trying to change the world(in favor of the Salt of the Earth) and became the religion of the ruling classes, Frankfurters sought to make their brand of Marxism fashionable to the educated classes and the elites.
This wasn’t to ultimately bring forth a Proletarian Revolution but to make their brand of radicalism palatable to the educated class, sort of what David Brooks described in his notion of the ‘bobo’ or bourgeois-bohemians. The so-called ‘long march through the institutions’ would mean the elites would imbibe aspects of ‘Marxism’ or ‘radicalism’, implying no necessity for a Workers Revolution. Why would such be necessary when the elites themselves were turned ‘radical’? Thus, Frankfurters had no real desire to see the US become a Proletarian State. They catered to the educated and the elites to make ‘radical’ ideas fashionable in elite circles.
It’s like the Early Christians. Initially, they targeted the lower classes and hoped they would join in the anti-Roman revolution. But later they targeted the Roman elites, and once the Empire turned Christian, the faith and power became one and the same(and the poor masses didn’t matter much any more as Christianity had become the official cult of the ruling elites). Christianity began as a religion of the ruled but ended as a religion of the rulers.
If anything, the Frankfurt School had a softening impact on the American Left. During the Great Depression, not just Jews but many WASPS turned to the Left, idealized the Soviet Union, and many feared that liberal democracy was doomed and the future of the US would either be communist or fascist. In post-war America, Frankfurt School offered the possibility of the continuance of the capitalist system with all the bourgeois amenities but with a kind of watered down Marxism-Freudianism as the official religion of the elites. The Frankfurters were too much in love with bourgeois liberties and rights to ever drive society toward a communist future.
I suspect the cultural Marxists were accepted by Columbia University because they were on the cutting edge of left-wing, not Jewish, thinking. It was a left-wing movement whose members happened to be largely Jewish.
Some say that the most influential figures in American academia were of the French School of Structuralists followed by Deconstructionists. Some say Michel Foucault was a key figure. May Day giving way to Gay Day may owe more to figures like Foucault.
But then, even before that, the two towering French figures were Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Camille Paglia often went batshit about the French and how they destroyed the academia. Harold Bloom also decried the influence of the French on US academia. Frankfurt School’s influence has been greatly exaggerated, especially as there was no single school.
It’s true that Jewish Influence has been very great in post-war America, and many on the Right lazily and confusedly lump all of this influence into this thing called ‘Frankfurt School’. It makes it sound as if the US academia was taken over by a hotdog stand.
The Enlightenment secularized morality while at the same time unleashing moral demands on society. But science called into question the validity or reality of moral motives. Scientists couldnât weigh morality, measure it, calculate its strength, or judge its presence.
It depends on what is meant by ‘morality’. To religious folks, it’s about sacred laws handed down from God. Religious folks often say morality isn’t possible without God because mankind without God will make up its own rules whereas belief in God reinforces the notion that morality isn’t arbitrary(by the whims of man) but sanctified from above. The problem with the religious argument is that religious morality depends on one’s conception of god or gods. Aztec gods demanded human sacrifice. Old Testament God smites entire populations. He also command the Israelites to wipe out entire tribes. New Testament says Jesus is the only path to ‘salvation’ and those who reject Him, no matter how decent they may be, will forever burn in hell. (Some loving religion)
But morality need not be holy to have validity. We know from experience and reflection what makes for a good society. Also, one mustn’t confuse science with philosophy. True, morality has no place in hard sciences that are all about facts and data. If atoms could be split and create an atomic explosion, that’s science. Science is simply about understanding the laws of nature. In contrast, philosophy is about using reason and reflection to arrive at a better society. Science is about splitting atoms. Philosophy is about pondering the benefits and dangers of technology resulting from atomic science. Thus, philosophy is a form of morality but one grounded in reason and thought than on faith and spirit.
Granted, one could argue that there has always been a philosophical angle to religion as well, i.e. in the progress of religions — which, far from remaining static, changed over the ages — , prophets and theologians used a combination of reason and emotions to arrive at what they deemed to be decent and humane and then projected those values onto the Heaven. In other words, even though religious texts say God handed morality to the humans, what really happened was the reverse, i.e. humans realized through reason and experience that some values were better than others and then projected them to the Heavens, making belief God commanded them.
Morality seemed to vary according to class, race, gender, religion, national interest, and stage of societal and political development, and according to who had the upper handââmight makes right.â
The Enlightenment made a distinction between cultural norms and universal ideals. Every society had its baggage of customs and convictions that largely went unexamined. Such was embraced, practiced, and perpetuated because it was just part of the social and cultural fabric, and no one bothered to question them or ponder any other possibility.
Enlightenment was about breaking free of those cultural chains and thinking freely, and this outlook didn’t begin with the French philosophes but with the Ancient Greeks, like when Socrates raised questions about gods and customs as arbiters of what is good.
For example, Japanese prior to modernization believed their main purpose was to serve the master without question. But with the spread of Enlightenment principles, modern Japan allows each individual to receive education and think freely of what is good, what is right. Instead of blind adherence to tradition or blind obedience to authority, there is the ideal of the free individual thinking according to his freedom and conscience.
True Enlightenment rises above differences in class, race, national interest, and etc. For instance, even a patriot who loves his country would have to admit that his country did wrong when it destroyed another country based on lies. Even someone who loves his family will have to admit his son is deserving of punishment if he committed a crime.
Before the Enlightenment, societies did hot have the notion of transforming society and achieving social perfection. So the problem did not arise.
There was radicals schools of Enlightenment that strove for utopia, but others were drawn to the Enlightenment precisely because it had a less vaunted worldview than religious orders did. The French Rev0lution is remembered as radical Enlightenment that tried to do too much and ended in bloodbath, but the English and American enlightenments are remembered as moderate, cautious, and sober. The Founding Fathers adopted Enlightenment principles but were also cautious men who rejected dreams of utopia. They believe in progress and reform but in an evolutionary process. (The American Civil War was less the result of Enlightenment radicalism than religious fanaticism of the Abolitionists.)
Long before the Enlightenment, the Christian West believed in transforming humanity. Christians wiped out paganism in the North. Muslims spread their faith like wildfire and destroyed all paganism in their path. For a long spell, Catholics and Protestants couldn’t tolerate one another. Catholics wanted Europe to be all Catholic, and Protestants sought to destroy Catholicism. Christians and Muslims fought innumerable battles over which side would get to transform all of humanity: Christian or Islam.
So, it’s not true that morality prior to the Enlightenment was rather humdrum and occupied only with ‘doing what’s right’. Religious orders were, in their own way, trying to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Thirty Years War was a bloody affair, and so were the Crusades and the Muslim conquests.
But even without religious fanaticism, empires sought to transform the world. The Romans kept fighting and fighting to conquer more land to create a world in their own imperial image.
But with moral demands being placed on society, how could post-Enlightenment morality be expressed?
The answer is by denunciation of existing society and institutions. Morality was expressed by denouncing existing society for its immorality. The liberal reforms all relied on denunciationâslavery, racism, colonialism, exploitation, discrimination, class-based privileges, child labor, restricted franchise, the list goes on. The way society moved forward was not through affirmation of its successes but denunciation of its faults. Over time a denunciatory mind-set emerged. It affected the ways literature, history, politics, anthropology, law, and sociology were taught, and in our days brands math and science as âtools of white supremacy.â
But current Wokeness defines itself as Anti-Enlightenment. Roberts critiques the Enlightenment as a vector to Anti-White ideology, but the ‘woke’ and others condemn the Enlightenment as the West’s pseudo-moral rationale to conquer the world. For most of Enlightenment history, imperialism was seen as a good thing for spreading the more advanced ideals and values of the West to the backward peoples of the world. British Liberals were bigger supporters of the Empire than the British conservatives in the 19th century. What we now call ‘racism’ was once favored by progressives as a properly scientific understanding of humanity based on the theories of Darwin. Also, Enlightenment took pride in using Western influence to end various injustices, such as widow-burning in India. After all, the slave trade began long before the Enlightenment, but it was Enlightenment principles that finally led the West to reject it and then abolish it globally. Child labor existed since ancient times, but it was the most Enlightenment parts of the West that first did away with it.
The real contradiction in progressivism is its denunciation of Western domination/supremacism, all the while relying on Western hegemony to spread its favored values. For instance, the very progs who denounce Western imperialism are supportive of Western hegemony’s spread of globohomo to the ‘less evolved’ parts of the world. Even as the Western progs denounce ‘cultural imperialism’ and the past history of slavery in the Americas, the only reason why nonwhites believe slavery is an evil is because the West spread the idea that it is so. When blacks denounce slavery, they are not relying on traditional African wisdom but parroting Western Enlightenment ideas about slavery. For most of history, few cultures believed slavery to be evil. Some believed it to be wrong or unpleasant, but the idea of slavery as an evil is an Enlightenment idea spread by the West via hegemony and imperialism. The West often used imperialist force to end slavery in many parts of the world. Indeed, what’s amusing about the nonwhite progressives is that most of the ideas they invoke to denounce the West were put in their minds through Western hegemony. Take non-white women who bitch about the West. Their ‘feminism’ came from the West. If not for Western influence, they would still be living under the thumb of their own men.
Traditionally, Enlightenment affirmed the successes as well as denouncing the failures of the West. The French Republic emphasized the successes of the Revolution than its disasters. Bolshevik Russia emphasized the successes of communism than its crimes. The US favored its triumphs than its tragedies. Even its tragedies such as Slavery was spun to justify the American Experiment. Walt Whitman took pride that America was the first civilization that fought a war to end slavery. Lincoln was a symbol of America’s progress and commitment to put away its wrongs.
For most of its history, British progressives took pride in empire and its benefits to mankind. And when the empire ended, the Brits took pride in being decent enough to know when to call it quits.
The movie GANDHI by Richard Attenborough makes Gandhi out to be a hero but also shows the Brits as capable of realizing when the empire has come to an end.
The Jews were not responsible for this. Cultural Marxism fit in with it, but the process would have rolled along strongly without Cultural Marxism.
Cultural Marxism wasn’t mainly responsible for the cult of White Guilt. That was more the ploy of Hyman Roth Tribalism that sought to gain power in the West. Jewish climbers, heavily into psychology of whiteness, knew which buttons to push.
When it comes to the strategy of Jewish Power, there’s more to learn from the Leo-Straussian School than from the Frankfurt School. Hyman Roth was a Straussian, not a Frankfurter. Also, there was no danger of Jewish radicals in the academia turning the US into a communist-socialist state. The real threat came from Jewish capitalists. Whites had more to fear from Cultural Friedmanism.
People think the Frankfurt School is responsible for spreading of vice and degeneracy. But think of the Jewish Sassoon dynasty that sold tons of opium to the Chinese. Did they act that way because they time-traveled to post WWII NY and read the Frankfurters?
Las Vegas and spread of gambling, with full endorsement of Christians in the GOP, wasn’t a Frankfurt agenda.
Likewise, the worst features of Weimar Germany owed to degeneracy spread by Jewish capitalists than by Jewish communists.
The real problem isn’t the Enlightenment but the lingering Christian ethos of the West. Enlightenment is seen as anti-religious, but it carried on with the cult of self-righteousness intrinsic to Christianity. The worst contribution of Christianity to humanity was sanctimony, this ‘holier than thou’ attitude that made Christians the most insufferable bunch of pricks in the world.
Judaism and Islam have their own nastiness and problems, but they aren’t sanctimonious but hardier in morality. Judaism’s main figures are prophets and warriors. Same with Islam. In contrast, Christianity is centered on a figure of love and sacrifice, goo-goo sainthood. It says the Son of God(who Himself is God) sacrificed Himself for humanity, and that humanity should seek to emulate Him in the way of the saints. This alone makes for sanctimonious crap. But it gets worse. Any civilization that lives by the word of Jesus is doomed. “Turn the other cheek” and all that. So, Christian civilizations fought, conquered, and plundered like the rest. But because of Jesus’ teachings, this could only lead to feelings of guilt in the Christian heart. The West, a civilization defined most by Christianity, used its material might to conquer the world and kick everyone’s butt. It led to moral schizophrenia. A civilization based on sainthood but gaining power with warriors and merchants.
Enlightenment weakened religion, but the Christian sanctimony and self-righteousness remained as part of Western DNA. Robespierre was emotionally no different from the kind of puritans who burned witches. The new religion of Holocaustianity is all about elevating Jews as the new messiahs and begging forgiveness for all eternity. BLM is about white secularites sobbing like Christians of old and washing stinky Negro feet as atonement. Even though most of these people are non-Christian or even anti-Christian, their emotions are wrapped up in quasi-Christian sanctimony.
Thus, the problem is less the Enlightenment than its failure to stamp out Christian sanctimony.
It’s like Bolshevism did away with the Old Order in Russia but was, in many ways, a continuance of a deeply embedded authoritarian system. And Mao in China did away with the old order but was himself an emperor worshipped as a god by his minions. It goes to show ideas can change but habits remain the same.
The way to do away with the cult of ‘White Guilt’ is to finally root out Christian sanctimony, and its holier-than-thou self-righteous crap.
Another problem is the lack of agency in white morality. If indeed whites genuinely and sincerely feel sorry for past misdeeds and want to make amends, that would be one thing. But what passes for current white morality is totally dependent on what-Jews-want.
For instance, if white morality is truly sorry about racial discrimination in the past, whites should be condemning Apartheid Israel. But the very whites in the GOP who say MLK was a great man and there was no excuse for Jim Crow laws are now totally supporting Jewish takeover of West Bank and total destruction of Gaza.
The very whites who hail the Warsaw Uprising and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as heroic acts denounce what happened on 10/7 without any context and use it as pretext to justify any number of Zionist war crimes. If they were consistent, they would call 10/7 the Gaza Uprising. But Jews control white minds. Jews and Poles rising up against Nazi Germans were heroic, but how dare Gazans rise up against Zionist tyranny?
In other words, White Guilt isn’t even genuine guilt borne of reflection and conscience but merely the product of Jewish pushing of buttons in the cucked white mind. When Christianity was antisemitic, at the very least it was free of Jewish manipulation. But once Christianity accepted a morally and spiritually inferior position vis-a-vis Judaism and Jews after WWII, it has turned into a religion of Appeasement of Zion.
At any rate, the reason why whites are so easily manipulated thus is because of the lingering influence of Christian sanctimony. Whether it’s arch-religious Evangelicals or arch-secular progs, both groups are easily manipulated by Jews into getting on their knees in atonement. Evangelicals say redemption is possible only by serving the Chosen Race against subhuman Palestinians, and Progs believe redemption is only possible by celebrating homos, washing black feet, and purging ‘white identity’ from white souls.
That said, the growing pro-Palestinian movement is a healthy indication on both the Right and the Left that a mindset independent of Jewish manipulation is beginning to take shape.
For most of US history, there was a nice balance of the right and the left, the triumphalists and the tragedists. This made for pride and confidence but also for reflection and reform.
But Jewish ascendancy meant Jews put their thumb on the scale in favor of the Left. But what’s truly perverse is that Jews didn’t do so in a sincere commitment to leftist principles but in service to tribal opportunism. After all, the very Liberal Jews who denounced white ‘racism’ were always pressuring whites to support Jewish racial supremacy in Israel/Palestine. The very Jewish Liberals who denounced the US role in Vietnam were later egging the US on to destroy any nation standing in the way of Zionist supremacy in the Middle East. The very liberal Jews who denounced greedy capitalist of white privilege were supporting the Jewish oligarchs in Russia of the 90s and then hostile to Putin for favoring the Russian masses over the globalist oligarchs. The very Jewish Liberals who endlessly ragged on about McCarthyism later pushed the Russia collusion hoax and anti-Russian hysteria and blacklisting(and censorship). The very Jewish Liberals who howled about nazi-this and nazi-that were more than happy to support Nazi elements in Ukraine. The very Jewish Liberals who claimed to stand for secularism and tolerance were more than willing to work with arch-religious Evangelicals and Muslim Jihadis to do the bidding of the tribal-supremacist state of Israel. In other words, most of Jewish Liberalism was a fraud. This is all more Leo-Straussian School than Frankfurt School.
But there is also the Bill Buckely the Cuckley School of brownnosing, which is however also the school of Jared Taylor, Charles Murray, Steve Sailer, and etc. On the JQ, they are no different from Lindsey the pansy Graham. Maybe THAT SCHOOL should be called out and put to rest.
