by Greg Johnson
Some saw through this nonsense from the start, either under Yockey’s influence or based on their own perceptions of Real-politik. These included the insightful staff writers at the periodical Common Sense, Wilmot Robertson of Instauration, William Pierce, and the eccentric but sincere and determined James Madole of the National Renaissance Party.30
This, then, was Yockey’s new orientation in regard to the USSR and the USA during the Cold War:
The treason trials in Bohemia are neither the beginning nor the end of a historical process, they are merely an unmistakable turning point. Henceforth, all must perforce reorient their policy in view of the undeniable reshaping of the world-situation. The ostrich-policy is suicide. The talk of “defense against Bolshevism” belongs now to yesterday, as does the nonsense of talking of “the defense of Europe” at a period when every inch of European soil is dominated by the deadly enemies of Europe, those who seek its political-cultural-historical extinction at all costs.31
And further, those who sought the liberation and unity of Europe could play off the USA against the USSR; if they pursued a policy of Realpolitik as people such as Remer32 were themselves advocating:
Henceforth, the European elite can emerge more and more into affairs, and will force the Jewish-American leadership to render back, step by step, the custody of European Destiny to Europe, its best forces, its natural, organic leadership. If the Jewish-American leaders refuse, the new leaders of Europe will threaten them with the Russian bogey. By thus playing off Russia against the Jewish-American leadership, Europe can bring about its Liberation, possibly even before the Third World War.33
It was fatuous enough to ask Europe to fight for America, it was silly enough to ask it to “defend itself against Bolshevism” . . . Is there one European—just one—who would respond to this war-aim? But today, openly, without any possible disguise, this is the raison d’être of the coalition against Russia, for Russia has named its chief enemy, its sole enemy, and the sly peasant leadership of pan-Slavs in the Kremlin is not given to frivolity in its foreign policy.
[. . .]
We repeat our message to Europe: no European must ever fight except for sovereign Europe; no European must ever fight one enemy of Europe on behalf of another enemy.34
With the publication of The Enemy of Europe in Germany in 1953, primarily as a foreign policy manual for the Socialist Reich Party, Yockey talked openly of a “new Europe-Russia Symbiosis,” with the occupation of Europe by Russia not resulting in the Russification of Europe, but in the Westernization of Russia.35
Of course the world situation turned out radically different from what Yockey and others expected, with the implosion of the USSR and the emergence of a unipolar world under the US. However, Yockey correctly understood the cultural threat of the US to Western civilization, and this is why he continues to be relevant for analyzing the geopolitical situation.
The US ruling stratum is conscious of its anti-Western world revolutionary mission and deliberately promotes cultural degeneration as part of its agenda. To call the US the “leader of the West” or any other such term, is not only a misnomer, it is a travesty; the US is the anti-West par excellence, the Great Satan, as many Muslims refer to it.
That the Soviet bloc, with its spartan values, its martial and patriotic ethos, its “Socialist Realism” in the arts, was in ruins several decades after Yockey’s death, while the decadent USA emerged as the unchallenged superpower, attests to the tendency of nations—like individuals—to opt for the soft option, rather than face hard realities, despite the expectations of Yockey and also the staff of Common Sense, who closed up shop in the 1970s, convinced that it wouldn’t be long until the Soviets vaporized New York, thus the time for writing articles was past.36 The method used by the culture distorter is what Aldous Huxley describes as control by “pleasure,” an intoxicant that is rotting the soul of the entire world, with militant Islam as a vestige of resistance from a Fellaheen Civilization, and Great Russia the nearest remainder to an unsullied people that might yet break “the dictature of money.”
However, if we accept Spengler’s theory of the cyclic course of civilizations, one might reasonably expect a renascence of Russian authority and religiosity that will confront US hegemony and force Russia to face new realities and forge new alliances, especially given the scenarios for conflict that can easily arise vis-à-vis China and all Asia.37
However, for the moment, the US stands victorious, as the harbinger of cultural death throughout the world, spreading the “ethical syphilis of Hollywood,” the “spiritual leprosy of New York,” and the “Bolshevism of Washington,” which outlasted the “Bolshevism of Moscow.”
YOCKEY & HUXLEY ON “SOFT” TOTALITARIANISM
Understanding Yockey’s views of American “ethical syphilis” and “spiritual leprosy” is aided by a familiarity with Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World.38 Huxley was much more prescient than George Orwell and quite precisely described how “world controllers” would impose a global dictatorship not by force of arms, but by the slavery of “pleasure.” The ready availability of sex and drugs would be used to create a narcotized society where everyone is happy with his servile lot. Appraising Brave New World in 1958, Huxley described the regime as:
. . . The society described in Brave New World is a world-state, in which war has been eliminated and where the first aim of the rulers is at all costs to keep their subjects from making trouble. This they achieve by (among other methods) legalizing a degree of sexual freedom (made possible by the abolition of the family) that practically guarantees the Brave New Worlders against any form of destructive (or creative) emotional tension. In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.39
A drug called “Soma” maintains social conditioning. Huxley calls this drugged state “not a private vice” but “a political institution”:
It was the very essence of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. But this most precious of the subjects’ inalienable privileges was at the same time one of the most powerful instruments of rule in the dictator’s armory. The systematic drugging of the individuals for the benefit of the State . . . was a main plank in the policy of the World Controllers . . .40
In Brave New World, population control is enforced and non-reproductive sex, including mass orgies, or “orgy-porgys,” in which participants go into a frenzy induced by narcotics and repetitive rhythms.41 These orgies also serve as religious rites or “solidarity” events.
Yockey had a similar understanding of the workings of soft totalitarianism. In The Proclamation of London, he writes:
The degradation of the social life did not merely happen, it was planned, deliberately fostered and spread, and the systematic undermining of the entire life of the West continues today.
The instruments of this assault are the weapons of propaganda: press, radio, cinema, stage, education. These weapons are controlled at this moment in Europe almost entirely by the forces of Culture-disease and social degeneration.
The “chief fount” is Hollywood, which “spews forth an endless series of perverted films to debase and degenerate the youth of Europe” after having successfully destroyed the youth of America.42
Concomitantly “a vicious literature” promotes the “destruction of healthy individual instincts, of normal familial and sexual life, of disintegration of the social organism into a heap of wandering, colliding, grains of human sand”:
The message of Hollywood is the total significance of the isolated individual, stateless and rootless, outside of society and family, whose life is the pursuit of money and erotic pleasure. It is not the normal and healthy love of man and wife bound together by many children that Hollywood preaches, but a diseased erotic-for-its-own sake, the sexual love of two grains of human sand, superficial and impermanent. Before this highest of all Hollywood’s values everything else must stand aside: marriage, hon
our, duty, patriotism, sternness, dedication of self to a higher aim. This ghastly distortion of sexual life has created the erotomania that obsesses its millions of victims in America, and which has now been brought to the Mother-soil of Europe by the American invasion.43
Keep in mind that Yockey was writing this in 1948, not last month, or even a decade ago. We now look back on the era Yockey was describing with such misgivings and consider it a time of innocence and purity in comparison to our own. Who can deny that this process of “social degeneration” has accelerated beyond all ability to calculate?
Yockey also wrote of the rise of “feminism” at a time when we would now barely recognize any such thing as “feminism” in comparison to our own day:
Hollywood-feminism has created a woman who is no longer a woman but cannot be a man, and a man who is devirilized into an indeterminate thing. The name given to this process is “the setting free” of woman and it is done in the name of “happiness,” the magic word of the liberal-communist-democratic doctrine.44
Yockey died on the eve of the 1960s with its manufactured “cultural revolution.” Yet he surely would have regarded the counter-culture’s sexual liberation, feminism, and drug use not as a “revolution” against the US establishment, but merely as a phase of its pursuit of world domination through the destruction of traditional culture and morals.
THE CULTURAL COLD WAR
The origins and implementation of the strategy can now be historically traced with great precision. The seeds of the 1960s were planted as early as 1949, at the start of the Cold War, when Stalin gave the first indications that he was not going to continue the wartime alliance as a subordinate partner in a United Nations-based World State.
The CIA, with funding from the Rockefellers and the like, gathered a gaggle of old Trotskyites, Mensheviks, and other Leftists disaffected with Stalin’s uncouth Slavic “Bolshevism.” The result was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) under the direction of “lifelong Menshevik” Professor Sidney Hook (who would be awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan, for services to US hegemony), along with his old mentor John Dewey,45 and luminaries such as Bertrand Russell (who once advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR to insure “world peace”), Stephen Spender, and Arthur Koestler. “Counter-culture rebels” recruited in the 1960s by the US Establishment included Gloria Steinem46 and Timothy Leary.47
The founding conference of the CCF was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1949, as a provocation to a Soviet-sponsored peace conference at the Waldorf supported by a number of American literati. The CIA article on this states:
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sidney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the [pro-Soviet] Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist [should read anti-Stalinist] himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.48
Through the CCF, the CIA was able to control much of the cultural life of the West during the Cold War era, and subsidized influential magazines such as Encounter.49
When the CCF was shut down after the implosion of the Soviet bloc, other institutions were established, this time under private auspices, including in particular the Soros network50 and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the latter another collaboration between neo-Trotskyites,51 the US Government, and neo-conservatives. Both Soros and the NED work in tandem to create revolutions, much like the manipulated “youth revolts” of the 1960s, to install regimes favorably disposed to globalization and privatization, especially in the former Soviet bloc.
The cultural front remains pivotal to the expansion of American global hegemony, the spreading of cultural pathology being far more insidious and intrusive than bombs or even debt, as Yockey was among the first to warn, while much of the rest of the “Right,” including Rockwell’s American Nazis, aligned themselves with the US Establishment vis-à-vis the USSR and American hegemony.
While America sought to export its lethal “culture” in the form of jazz and Abstract Expressionism, to cite two primary examples, Stalin condemned “rootless cosmopolitanism” and was thus fully aware of the consequences of America’s cultural exports. Indeed “Abstract Expressionism” became the de facto “state art” of the American regime of the “culture distorters,” just as Socialist Realism was the de jure state art of the USSR.
Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically so-called “American” art movement. Jackson Pollock, the central figure, was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He had worked in the Federal Artist’s Project from 1938 to 1942, along with other Leftist artists, painting murals under Roosevelt’s New Deal regime, or what Yockey called the second “1933 Revolution.”52 Abstract Expressionism became the primary artistic strategy of the Cold War offensive against the Socialist Realism sponsored by the USSR from the time of Stalin. As in much else, Stalin reversed the original Bolshevik tendencies in the arts, which had been experimental and, as one would expect from Marxism, anti-traditional.53 On the other hand, Social Realism, which had been the popular American art form until the 1930s, was by the late 1940s being displaced as art critics and wealthy patrons began to promote the Abstract Expressionists.54
Many of the theorists, patrons, and practitioners of Abstract Expressionism were Trotskyites or other anti-Stalinist Leftists, who were to become the most ardent Cold Warriors. Modernist art during the Cold War became a factor in the USA’s world revolution. In 1947 the US State Department organized a modernist exhibition called “Advancing American Art” which was intended for Europe and Latin America, reaching as far as Prague.55
The two individuals who did most to promote Abstract Expressionism were art critic Clement Greenberg and wealthy artist and art historian Robert Motherwell56 who was vigorous in propagandizing on the subject. Greenberg was a New York Trotskyite and a long-time art critic for Partisan Review and The Nation. He had first come to the attention of the art world with his article in Partisan Review, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939,57 in which he stated that art was a propaganda medium and condemned the Socialist Realism of Stalinist Russia and the völkisch art of Hitler’s Germany.58
Greenberg was a particular enthusiast for Jackson Pollock, and in a 1955 essay “‘American Type’ Painting,”59 he lauded Abstract Expressionism and its proponents as the next stage of modernism. Greenberg considered that after World War II the US had become the guardian of “advanced art,” just as others were to regard America as the only genuine vehicle for a “world revolution” as a stage for world socialism, as opposed to the USSR.
Greenberg became a founding member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF)60 and was involved with “executive policymaking.”61 He continued his support for the CCF even after the 1966 exposé by the New York Times and Ramparts that the CCF and magazines such as Encounter had been sponsored by the CIA. Typical of a good Trotskyite, he continued to work for the US State Department and the US Department of Information.62
Another key institution in the service of culture distortion is the Rockefeller dynasty’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). John J. Whitney, formerly of the US Government’s Psychological Strategy Board, was a trustee of the Museum, and he supported Pollock and other modernists.63
Note the connection with psychological warfare. William Burden, who joined the museum as chairman of its Advisory Committee in 1940, worked with Nelson Rockefeller’s Latin American Department during the war. Burden had been president of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation which channeled funds to sundry fronts and lackeys; and in 1947 he was appointed chairman of the Committee on Museum Collections, and in 1956 as MoMA’s president.64 Other corporate trustees of MoMA were William Paley of CBS and Henry Luce
of Time-Life Inc., both of whom assisted the CIA.65 Joseph Reed, Gardner Cowles, Junkie Fleischmann, and Cass Canfield were all simultaneously trustees of MoMA and of the CIA’s Farfield Foundation. There were numerous other connections between the CIA and the museum, including that of Tom Braden, who had been executive secretary of the museum through 1947–1949 before joining the CIA.66
In 1952 MoMA launched its world revolution of Abstract Expressionism via the International Program which had a five year annual grant of $125,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, under the direction of Porter McCray, who had also worked with Nelson Rockefeller’s Latin American Department, and in 1950 as an attaché of the cultural section of the US Foreign Service.67 Russell Lynes, writing of this period, stated that MoMA now had the entire world to “proselytize” with what he called “the exportable religion” of Abstract Expressionism.68
* * *
Communism is gone, but the cultural Cold War continues, now packaged as the “liberation” of states deemed not suitably “democratic.” America has its own version of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” which US strategists call “constant conflict.” Major Ralph Peters, a prominent military strategist, formerly with the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, appears to have coined the term. Peters has written of this in an article by that name. Peters’ statements definitively show “culture distortion” to be a contrived strategy for global domination; he reminds us that the regime of the culture distorter now has at its disposal technology far more powerful and pervasive than the cinema and literature of Yockey’s time:
