30 October, 2009

Review of Thomas Wheatland’s The Frankfurt School in Exile, Part II: The Critique of Mass Culture

Posted by Socrates in Frankfurt School, Kevin MacDonald, Socrates at 2:37 pm | Permanent Link

by Dr. Kevin MacDonald.

“One of Wheatland’s strengths is his rich documentation of the strong connections between the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School. Both groups were predominantly Jewish (the first generation Frankfurt School exclusively so), and both were associated with the anti-Stalinist left. However, they had somewhat different theoretical perspectives and overlapping associations. It is common among intellectual historians (e.g., Eric P. Kaufmann) to view the New York Intellectuals as the most important group advocating cosmopolitan racial ideology in the post-World War II era.”

[Article].


  • 3 Responses to “Review of Thomas Wheatland’s The Frankfurt School in Exile, Part II: The Critique of Mass Culture”

    1. Adam Says:

      From the article:

      But of course realistic ideas about natural human penchants and limitations have never been a strong suit of the intellectual left, dedicated as they are to the proposition that people can be shaped into virtually anything.

      […]

      Control of the media is critical. If there were strong media messages advocating White identity and the legitimacy of White interests, things would turn around rather dramatically and rather quickly. This is because the psychological power behind a movement of ethnic defense is far greater than the motivation that can be mustered for a multi-racial, multi-ethnic communist revolution.

      Yet the last sentence cannot be true, or the Jews wouldn’t have been able to succeed in reversing the ethnic defenses mounted by whites.

      Also, one wonders, if the tendency to ethnic self-defense is supposed to be “natural” and so strong, why does it need the support of the mass media? Whatever strength it has is self-evidently insufficient to help it to victory over the forces of assimilation and multiculturalism.

      But it seems to me that it is really impossible to get anywhere looking at this problem as though it existed in a vacuum with only two antagonists. There are definite reasons for why things transpired as they did, and the racial conflict between whites and Jews doesn’t provide an explanation for all of it. Independent developments within the technological system, which were willingly accepted by whites under the guise of “progress”, also played a large role. The economic relations that whites in America and Europe had established with the non-white world have begun to bear poisonous fruit. The political rights that were granted to non-whites as a consequence of the expansion of the technological system — including the Jews, who were liberated from their ghettos at the start of the Industrial Revolution — inevitably led to their social mixing with whites, and even their interbreeding with whites, mixing at the genetic level. Throughout history, East or West, this has always been the case with empire.

      Rather than seeing the racial conflict between whites and Jews as the only (or even the primary) force involved, or even seeing this conflict as taking place within the environment of the technological system, with it existing as a kind of passive backdrop, it would probably be most accurate and best of all to conceptualize this conflict itself as an expression of the development of the global technological system.

      If there is one central message from the post-World War II world, ethnicity and race matter. As Jerry Z. Muller has shown, there has been a strong trend toward ethnically based nations over the last 150 years, not only in the territorial adjustments in Europe following World War II, but around the world.

      Race and ethnicity matter, but so do technical considerations. Despite occasional retrenchments in concession to ethnic feelings, there is in the modern world a definite and powerful trend against nationalism and in favor of internationalism. First, this proceeds from the very obvious fact that nations MUST aggregate themselves into economic alliances if they are to do battle on equal terms with their rivals, who have also so organized themselves. To refuse to do this once your enemy has done it is simply suicide; it is to agree to lose, since larger economic units will have more capital and resources with which to dominate smaller ones. But second, in a world where the technical tasks at hand require global action, only global organizations operating under global agreements can succeed. Whether the task involved is global pollution abatement, the fight against diseases, population reduction, or conservation of a resource such as the oceans or endangered species such as whales or dolphins, only a global approach can stand a chance of success; for it does no good for only one or a few nations to tackle these problems, if whatever steps they take can be nullified by actions taken by other nations who are yet outside of their control. This necessarily leads to a proliferation of international organizations such as the WHO, UN, IMF, NATO and the EU, and agreements such as NAFTA and GATT. The expansion of the global technological system, is therefore relentless and totalitarian in effect, and aggressively takes a role in destroying cultures, nations, and races.

    2. Howdy Doody Says:

      The Great War of August 1914, and social Upheavel it left in wake along with Movies is IMO much bigger than most can understand today. Believe it.

    3. Howdy Doody Says:

      In other words that planned war and its murder our best young men “WW 1” was the sledge hammer that has led us to this day.