SEDUCED FROM VICTORY
How the Lost Corpse
Subverts the American
Intellectual Tradition
by Stanley Ezrol
I believe, further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
—Benjamin Franklin, Sept. 17, 1787 (urging the unanimous endorsement of the draft Constitution of the United States)
Men at sometime, are Masters of their Fates.
The fault (deere Brutus) is not in our Starres,
But in our Selves, that we are underlings.—Cassius to Brutus, from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
Most of us know, or at least suspect, with good reason, that the nearly stillborn Bush II administration's bungling, yet brutal, attempt at "management" of the onrushing financial, economic, and strategic calamities of 2001, threatens to open this new century with even worse terror than that of the last, devastating, Century of War. The historical features of the last thirty-five years' "Southern Strategy," which imposed the Presidential "choice" between Al "Bore" Gore and "Boy George" Bush on the United States, are readily available,[1] and yet it remains for us, in this report, to explain why we allowed matters to come to this state of affairs. We must discover how we must develop the immunity to any future such pestilence. Just as many millions of us have been eager to gobble down the deadly, but imperceptible E. coli bacteria provided, at no extra cost, with our name-brand hamburgers, we have accepted an organized array of opinions regarding political-economic policy, philosophy, and theology, which are what Vladimir I. Vernadsky would call the "natural products" of an evil intention, an evil intention heretofore unknown to almost all of you, in its essential details.[2]
Our job in this report, is to focus the microscope on a particular variety of what President Franklin Roosevelt identified as the "American Tory" infection. We point to the avowedly "counter-revolutionary," Ku Klux Klan revivalist, pro-fascist, Confederate loyalists known as the Nashville Agrarians.
What you will discover is the extent to which well-known institutions and shapers of culture have, in fact, been, or been trained by, totally open, public, stubborn partisans of bloody treachery against the United States and its mission. These have included poets and novelists including Robert Penn Warren, historians including Ken Burns and Shelby Foote, political leaders including Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and educators including Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom, all among whom have been promoted as ostensibly benign, almost boring, "thinkers."
Through the microsopic inspection which we conduct in these pages, we will point out the characteristic features of the oligarchical system of ideas which our nation was founded to destroy, and the peculiar variety of this infection which is our main enemy today. Our intention is, that once this class of disease has been identified, you will come to understand how it has poisoned not only much of what you think, but, more important, the way many of you think. You will discover that this occurs, generally, through the mechanism of unconsciously accepted ideas about how the universe functions. These are mechanisms which control your opinion in spite of the popular delusion, that you must accept the opinions you swallow and repeat, because they, like your hamburgers, are made according to your habituated, acquired tastes.
The problem did not begin with the Year 2000 Presidential campaign. To explain how it came to this, we must look back approximately two centuries, with some understanding of the two and a half-millennia which led up to that point.
Our Republic was founded out of the great conflict between two great principles. The first, the Renaissance idea of the Nation-State[3] dedicated to the Common Good, or the General Welfare. The second, the anti-Renaissance, Medieval, or Feudal idea of the Empire composed of feuding warlords, in constant conflict over their property titles to land and to those serfs or slaves who work it, as well as to financial accounts.
The English colonization of America had been launched by friends and followers of the great ecumenical "Tudor Renaissance" leaders, Thomas More, William Shakespeare, William Gilbert, and Thomas Harriott, who sought to preserve the idea of a Nation from that Venetian-manipulated religious sectarian warfare, which had dominated Europe from 1511 on, and was to continue until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The immediate impulse for the establishment of an independent nation here, came from the 1688 through 1714 drive to expel the influence of our own intellectual forebear, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, from England, and to establish England as the "Brutish" Empire enforcer, modelled on ancient Rome, for the world's capital of financier power, Venice. This plunged Europe and its American colonies into a new Century of War, culminating in the unstable 1815 Congress of Vienna agreement between the Brutish, Habsburg,[4] and Russian Empires, which has been the basis for the bloody conflicts from 1848 to date.
Out of that conflict, Benjamin Franklin, in direct collaboration with Abraham Kästner, and with the circles of Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Lessing, and their allies amongst the champions of Leibniz's tradition throughout Europe, designed what became the United States, to be the cradle of the greatest advance in Civilization in the history of humankind. It worked. The age of combustion-powered technology and electricity, fostered here through the American System policies typified by high-tariff protectionism, technology-vectored internal improvements, and quality public education, has made possible a 150-year explosion of population and living standards, as well as the extension of our reach beyond our home planet Earth.
As you read about how the United States was seduced away from its tradition, apparently by a fairly small, multi-generational clique of traitors, fix in your mind, the image of the learned and proper Professor Rath of the 1930 German film, The Blue Angel, who taught his students from Shakespeare's Hamlet, but only so they could learn to pronounce "the English `th';" who was tempted, outwitted, and degraded to a miserable vaudeville "geek" by his own infatuation with the burlesque tramp, "Lola," portrayed by Marlene Dietrich. Which of the two, Lola or the Professor, was responsible for the calamity?
I. The American Tories and How They Grew
We start with the ideas that forced England's American Colonies to separate forever from the London regime. The Earl of Shaftesbury's 1688, so-called "Glorious Revolution," which placed the Dutch House of Orange on the English throne and launched the 25-year campaign to establish the "Brutish" Empire, included a plan to eliminate the American colonies' status as self-governing "Commonwealths."[5] Shaftesbury's "idea man" in this assault, was his philosopher of law, John Locke, who you were probably taught was a mentor of our own Founders. But, he wasn't. He was one of the creators of the British disaster, culminating in the coronation of the first George I, that made our revolution necessary. Locke's theories of political economy were promoted along with degenerate loon Sir Isaac Newton's mathematics, to replace the philosophy of our real forefather, Leibniz.[6]
By contrast with Leibniz's idea of "Happiness" in the joy of Creation, Locke's theory of government, expounded in his Two Treatises of Government, starts with the lie, that there was a predator versus predator "State of Nature" in which all men are servants and property-slaves; and, that this is the work of God, "made to last during His, not one another's pleasure." In this State, Locke claimed, any man has the right to forcibly seize back property taken by another, or kill a murderer, "as a lion or tiger," or even a thief who seizes property by force. Anyone whom one has the right to kill, Locke reasons further—in accord with the logic of the Roman assassin, Cassius, portrayed in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar—one has the right to enslave, "For, whenever he finds the hardship of his slavery outweigh the value of his life, it is in his power, by resisting the will of his master to draw on himself the death he desires."
From the State of Nature, Locke derives his own "God," now worshipped by those Yahoos who have arrayed themselves behind President George W. Bush. Locke's god is "Property," sometimes known as "shareholder value." "Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property," he explained. Of course, neither John Locke, nor Boy George and his Yahoos, ever found anything in a state of Nature, and certainly never produced any "labour," but, if you ask them to give back anything they claim as "Property" you'll likely find one of these "wild savage beasts" Locke says you can kill if he gets in your way, baring his fangs in front of you. Since, as you will realize upon considering how things that might be claimed as "property" are actually produced, Locke's theory means nothing, what the Lockeans really believe, and, as we will see, claim as a direct gift from God, is that anything they say is theirs, is; and that they can kill anyone they want to, to keep it—as Bush's family and friends are now doing with their price-gouging takeover of our public energy utilities, their theft of our formerly public health care system, and their "little wars" against nations struggling for sovereignty.
Locke's fable was used to justify the hideous system of absolute property rights in African slaves, removed "out of the State that Nature hath provided" through forcible relocation at the cost of millions who died in the kidnapping raids, the horrid trans-Atlantic shipments, and the other aspects of this removal from the State of Nature. Under Shaftesbury's patronage, Locke helped produce a draft for the Carolina Constitution, which established this principle of "law," which has been the most pernicious internal enemy of this Republic from that time until today.
These Yahoos, Locke then claims, conclude a contract, surrendering their rights of "equality, liberty, and executive power" to "government" for the "great and chief aim" of "preservation of their property." For Locke, as for "Boy George" Bush, who loves the Death Penalty, but just cares too much for "the people's money" to impose a "Death Tax," Property Rights are more important than Life:
[N]either the sergeant that could command a soldier to march up to the mouth of a cannon, or stand in a breach where he is almost sure to perish, can command that soldier to give him one penny of his money, nor the general that can condemn him to death for deserting his post, cannot yet with all his absolute power of life and death dispose of one farthing of that soldier's estate, or seize one jot of his goods; whom yet he can command anything and hang for the least disobedience.
Our Founding Fathers rejected Locke's government of, by, and for Property, when they struck the word "Property" from an early draft of the Declaration of Independence and replaced it with Leibniz's "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Our own General Welfare principle, in opposition to Locke's, "If you grab it, God wanted you to have it," recognizes the right of all citizens to that which is necessary for the continued productive life of themselves and their progeny. Yet, like malaria, Locke's idea keeps coming back. It is his claimed right to human "Property" and the breaking of the alleged "compact" to defend it, which is the sole cause cited in South Carolina's 1860 Declaration of Secession, and hence, defending the Slavery idea of human worthlessness, and the system of political economy that required it, was ostensibly the sole cause of the founding of the Confederate States of America and its Civil War against our Republic.
Today, that "Critter Company" which backed Richard M. Nixon's 1966-68 "Southern Strategy," claims that the Confederate "States' Rights" principle is a defense against tyrannical "Big Government" theft of your property. The one right denied the States by the Confederate Constitution was the right to outlaw Property in Slaves. The difference today, is that you have become the mere property of those who hold you and this nation to that form of bondage known as "shareholder value."
Like his Property theory of government, Locke's companion fraudulent theory of knowledge, expounded in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was also an attack on Leibniz. Along with the whole genus of oligarchical philosophers, Locke denies that man can come to know Universal Physical Principles. All man is capable of, he claims, are "simple ideas" derived only from "sensation and reflection." Locke claims that complex ideas are no more than the repetition, comparison, and conjunction of simple ideas, and that, "it is not in the power of the most exalted wit or enlarged understanding, by any quickness or variety of thought, to invent or frame one new simple idea in the mind." Locke denies the evidence of all human history, that man actually expands his understanding of the intentions of the Creator and His Creatures. He claims that man is totally incapable "to fashion in his understanding one simple idea, not received by his senses from external objects, or by reflection from the operations of his own mind about them."
He further claims, "This is the reason why it is not possible for any one to imagine any other qualities in bodies, however constituted, whereby they can be taken notice of, besides sounds, tastes, smells, visible and tangible qualities." He then rejects the idea of Man created in God's Image, saying, "God has given us no innate ideas of himself; . . . he has stamped no original characters on our minds," and divides the universe into two distinct types, "cogitative" beings, which are revealed to the senses, and "incogitative" beings. Thus, he rejects the obvious: That our "sense perceptions" are internal to our own minds, and may be triggered by "outside" processes, but are, at best, like Plato's shadows on the wall of a cave, partial and indirect evidence of those processes. In reality, man can verify his understanding of the "intentions" of the Creator, which are in no way revealed through the senses, only by demonstrating, through experiment, that he can make the Universe obey his wishes. That capacity is the source of "happiness" which our Nation was founded to un-Locke.
And, So, Locke Begat Jonathan Edwards
Locke's views were not immediately embraced in America. Our tradition is that of Apostle John's view of Christ, whose last, repeated, request to his apostles, was, "Feed my sheep." We understand this, as did our father, Benjamin Franklin, who wrote, "I believe in one God, creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his providence. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children."[7] Throughout his life, Franklin bubbled over with excitement at the prospect of devising and exhibiting experiments to test his hypotheses about how God had constituted the universe, and devised plans to use electricity and steam, dig canals, organize fire brigades, postal services, universities, philosophical societies, and, finally, our own Great Republic, all for the improvement of man's mastery over nature.
To attack Franklin's idea here in North America, and solidify the institution of absolute property rights in slaves, which was not generally accepted until well into the Eighteenth Century, Locke's sickness was spread by the so-called "Christian" forerunners of President Boy George Bush's Yahoo supporters, like our own racist Attorney General John Ashcroft, who would prefer to feed the Lord's sheep to the lions.
In the time of Benjamin Franklin, the great advocate of Locke's bestial notion of man was Jonathan Edwards, John Locke's student and a contemporary admirer of Locke's Scottish protégé, David Hume. Edwards became the guru of New England's "Great Awakening," and later President of what we now know as Princeton University. His grandson was to be Alexander Hamilton's assassin, the Tory traitor and schismatic intriguer, Aaron Burr.[8] From that time to the present, the Jonathan Edwards version of the Lockean model, is the persisting characteristic of our republic's "American Tory" enemy, as we shall see, time and time again, in the course of this report. Our traitors have always disguised their appeal in the hand-me-down old clothes of the Locke-Edwards-Burr tradition: the idea that mindless greed, ignorant of the world beyond its own desires, rather than what the "American" poet John Keats called "branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain," paves the way to prosperity.
What Edwards sold here, under the Christian slogan "Born Again," was the cult of Oligarchy, of Mesopotamian despotism, of Rome, the Whore of Babylon, and its Venetian and British successors. His view is the same as that of the Roman Empire and its Persian and Babylonian precursors. It is the view of that ancient Rome which called its people, "populi," which means "predators." According to this oligarchical—or Romantic—cult, the history of humanity is one of constant warfare amongst predators. The Creator, and the joy of Man in participating in Creation, is nowhere to be found. Like Hollywood's Godzilla, Edwards' God is merely the biggest and baddest predator, and his men are mean little predators whose only hope for "salvation," to be "born again," is to outwit Godzilla.
Since Edison had not yet invented the motion picture, Edwards' method was to terrorize audiences, including children, poorly educated laborers and others, under the sweltering hot tents of the "Great Awakening." In his written "sermon," "God's Sovereignty in the Salvation of Men," Edwards explained that God, like Godzilla, may, at whim, with no concern for right or wrong, do as he pleases to anyone:
God may save any of the children of men without prejudice to the honour of his majesty. God may deny salvation to any natural person without any injury to the honour of his righteousness. God may deny salvation to any unconverted person whatever without any prejudice to the honour of his goodness. God does actually exercise his sovereignty in men's salvation: In calling one people or nation and giving them the means of grace, and leaving others without them. In calling some to salvation, who have been very heinously wicked, and leaving others, who have been moral and religious persons.
He then goes on to claim that God has granted European Americans special privileges over Africans, Native Americans, and even Jews, whom God now has abandoned to the devil, and, by implication, to whatever evil designs men have for them as well:
The savages, who live in the remote parts of this continent, and are under the grossest heathenish darkness, as well as the inhabitants of Africa, are naturally in exactly similar circumstances towards God with us in this land. They are no more alienated or estranged from God in their natures than we; and God has no more to charge them with. And yet what a vast difference has God made between us and them! In this he has exercised his sovereignty. He did this of old, when he chose but one people, to make them his covenant people, and to give them the means of grace, and left all others, and gave them over to heathenish darkness and the tyranny of the devil, to perish from generation to generation for many hundreds of years. God showed his sovereignty, when Christ came, in rejecting the Jews, and calling the Gentiles. God rejected that nation who were the children of Abraham according to the flesh, and had been his peculiar people for so many ages, and who alone possessed the one true God, and chose idolatrous heathen before them, and called them to be his people. When the Messiah came, who was born of their nation, and whom they so much expected, he rejected them.
In his most famous rant, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," he laid down the fear:
We find it easy to tread on and crush a worm that we see crawling on the earth; so it is easy for us to cut or singe a slender thread that any thing hangs by: thus easy is it for God, when he pleases, to cast his enemies down to hell. What are we, that we should think to stand before him, at whose rebuke the earth trembles, and before whom the rocks are thrown down? Yea, God is a great deal more angry with great numbers that are now on earth: yea, doubtless, with many that are now in this congregation, who it may be are at ease, than he is with many of those who are now in the flames of hell. It is plain and manifest, that whatever pains a natural man takes in religion, whatever prayers he makes, till he believes in Christ, God is under no manner of obligation to keep him a moment from eternal destruction. So that, thus it is that natural men are held in the hand of God, over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it . . . neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold them up one moment; the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up. In short, they have no refuge, nothing to take hold of; all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted, unobliged forbearance of an incensed God. . . . He will crush you under his feet without mercy; he will crush out your blood, and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his garments, so as to stain all his raiment. He will not only hate you, but he will have you in the utmost contempt: no place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as the mire of the streets.
Finally, Edwards concluded his pitch, no doubt with the huckstering tones of a modern day "One Time Only" department store sale advertisement:
But this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be. Oh that you would consider it, whether you be young or old! There is reason to think, that there are many in this congregation now hearing this discourse, that will actually be the subjects of this very misery to all eternity. And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of mercy wide open, and stands in calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners; a day wherein many are flocking to him, and pressing into the kingdom of God. Many are daily coming from the east, west, north and south; many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in, are now in a happy state, with their hearts filled with love to him who has loved them, and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and rejoicing in hope of the glory of God. How awful is it to be left behind at such a day! To see so many others feasting, while you are pining and perishing! To see so many rejoicing and singing for joy of heart, while you have cause to mourn for sorrow of heart, and howl for vexation of spirit! How can you rest one moment in such a condition? Are not your souls as precious as the souls of the people at Suffield, where they are flocking from day to day to Christ?. . . Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom: Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.
The Battle To Revive Leibniz
The birth of the United States, in 1776, was the culmination of a trans-Atlantic battle for the revival of Leibniz against the Brutish Lockean loan-shark forces. The founding of this Republic was the cutting edge of a movement which also included the development of the great German Classical period in drama, poetry, music, mathematics, and physics. In France, its representatives were the scientific and military geniuses of the École Polytechnique, which helped build our own West Point, and Germany's Göttingen. In Britain itself, this movement sparked a post-Congress of Vienna insurgency including the pro-Franklin poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and the anti-Newtonian circle of mathematicians led by Charles Babbage. The essential idea, and playful good humor, of this movement is captured in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," with its famous concluding "slogan" on Truth and Beauty.[9]
The Romantic opposition to this Renaissance, as it affected the United States, was led by Locke's successor David Hume, the Scottish mentor of the German Romantic, Immanuel Kant. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume claims to prove that Truth is never Beauty, and Beauty is never Truth. Following the usual procedure of those who place their faith in mere deductive logic, he first claims that what he intends to "prove" by deduction is true: that there is a distinction between "reason" or "truth" on the one hand, and "sentiment" or "taste" on the other. "The harmony of verse, the tenderness of passion, the brilliancy of wit, must give immediate pleasure. No man reasons concerning another's beauty," he claims, without offering any reason why he should be trusted on this. He then endeavors to determine to which realm Morality belongs. He proposes to do this by applying the experimental method of Sir Francis Bacon, claiming—as if Benjamin Franklin, the greatest English-speaking figure of his century, did not exist—"Men are now cured of their passion for hypotheses and systems in natural philosophy, and will hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience. It is full time they should attempt a like reformation in all moral disquisitions; and reject every system of ethics, however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation."
Hume concludes that argument, by foreshadowing both the argument of his disciple Adam Smith (The Theory of the Moral Sentiments), and the Pragmatism of William James, claiming Morality is merely a matter of utility:
Thus, the rules of equity or justice depend entirely on the particular state and condition in which men are placed, and owe their origin and existence to that utility, which results to the public from their strict and regular observance. Reverse, in any considerable circumstance, the condition of men: Produce extreme abundance or extreme necessity: Implant in the human breast perfect moderation and humanity, or perfect rapaciousness and malice: By rendering justice totally useless, you thereby totally destroy its essence and suspend its obligation upon mankind.
Finally, he concludes, "morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary." In this, of course, he is in agreement with the Romantic Vox Populi, or the Twentieth-Century "Public Opinion," which LaRouche rightly calls, "Vox Pox."
Thus Locke, Edwards, Aaron Burr, and the influence of Hume typify a characteristic feature of that variety of Romantic pathology which the American Tory represents down to the present day.
We, in what is called the American Intellectual Tradition, are passionate about science and passionate about the welfare of our brethren and our posterity. For us, the love for Truth, for Beauty, for our fellow man, and for God are one and the same thing.
Our republic's enemies from within all agree, that there is a strict, uncrossable divide between ideas and "matter," between reason and emotion, and that one realm must not influence the other. Whether these American Tories claim to be devout Christians or otherwise religious, atheists, or Satanists (or any combination thereof), they all agree that God's ways, whether they claim to like them or not, are completely unknowable to man, and therefore indistinguishable from Satan's, or that of any other irrational Godzilla-like force. Man must obey only his own irrational will, or one which proves more powerful. Some fanatics may claim the most powerful Will is God, some make a case for Satan, some for Nature, but they tend to switch back and forth between these views, and be just as immoral whichever "side" they choose for the moment.
The Scottish school tended to downplay the Edwards-style "Godzilla" image, in favor of what Lyndon LaRouche has called the "Little Green Men" under the floorboards, who act invisibly toward the same effect. They all follow the tradition of that post-Elizabethan protégé of the Venetian "guru" Paolo Sarpi, Sir Francis Bacon, the corrupt prosecutor and embezzler who, most of us were taught, was the inventor of the modern scientific experimental method, despite his failure to have ever produced a valid experimental result. "Truth" is cut and dried, and totally divorced from morality. Genius may be good or evil, just like in the comic books. In his Novum Organum, Bacon went so far as to call the opposing Platonic and Christian view, "evil":
The corruption of philosophy by the mixing of it up with superstition and theology, is of a much wider extent, and is most injurious to it both as a whole and in parts. For the human understanding is no less exposed to the impressions of fancy than to those of vulgar notions. The disputatious and sophistic school entraps the understanding, whilst the fanciful, bombastic, and, as it were, poetical school, rather flatters it. There is a clear example of this among the Greeks, expecially in Pythagoras, but it is more dangerous and refined in Plato and his school. This evil is found also in some branches of other systems of philosophy, where it introduces abstracted forms, final and first causes. Yet some of the moderns who have indulged this, follow [it] with such consummate inconsiderateness, that they have endeavored to build a system of natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, the Book of Job, and other parts of Scripture . . . not only fantastical philosophy, but heretical religion spring from the absurd mixture of matters divine and human. It is therefore most wise soberly to render unto faith the things that are faith's.
What we have identified—Baconism, Romanticism, whatever you call it—is, in fact, Gnosticism. It is the same as the ancient Cult of the Oracle at Delphi which formed the basis of Spartan and later Roman culture; or the so-called "Mystery Religions," the Bogomil cult, or Rosicrucian Freemasonry. That is, man is incapable of knowing anything through his own powers of reason, but must depend on some mysterious authority, which is passed from generation to generation through a cult priesthood, to which "truth" is revealed through visions, signs, and so on, which only the priesthood may interpret for the rest of us. This is the religion of Oligarchism, of Mafias, of Inquisitions.
It is the religion of the Bible preacher who says you must believe every word of the Bible, but then sermonizes for an hour on the interpretation of the meaning of each word which Little Green Men have whispered in his ear. If you want to know something, you gotta get in with the people what know. You play your cards right and don't cross the wrong people, and we might just let you on the inside. You should recognize this, also, as the axiomatic view which underlies the "guru"-riddled cult of the "Information Society."
Bacon's identification of cognition as "evil" is the dirty secret of the Romantics. Despite all of their talk about "Liberty," they—including the Twentieth-Century "anti-Authoritarian Personality" crowd of the Frankfurt School irrationalists Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt—identify as the enemy they are dedicated to exterminate, the idea that truth in any form actually exists to be known. As for Bacon, for Adorno and Arendt, there is only arbitrary opinion.
The Traitor Cuts a Romantic Figure
This Romantic plague infested America, even during the Revolution. Edwards' grandson, Aaron Burr, founded the Bank of Manhattan in 1799, which has now developed into what we know as Chase Manhattan Bank. From that base, he was elected the second Vice President of the Republic, and, while serving in that office, assassinated the father of the American System of political-economy, the Alexander Hamilton who had acted to prevent the treasonous Burr from being chosen President by the Electoral College. There followed some period of disgrace surrounding the assassination of Hamilton and his own trial for Treason, in an intrigue involving the raising of private filibustering forces in the Southwest. Burr went on to found the New York Democratic Party. In this he collaborated with Jeremy Bentham, the chief Lieutenant of Britain's Lord Shelburne in the British attempt to re-group after the 1781 surrender at Yorktown.
The following quote of Burr's opinion from Bentham's The Principles of Morals and Legislation provides us insight into Bentham agent Burr's role as a Romantic opponent of Jefferson and of the American Revolution:
The pursuit of happiness is a natural right. Here we have a sly allusion to our celebrated Declaration of Independence; a paper which our author examined once paragraph by paragraph, with an acuteness and vigour, which were never exceeded. Take one example—We declare that certain rights [!] are inalienable, among which [rights!] are life; liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! But if they are inalienable, how comes it that our legislators may deprive us of them? How can they exercise the right of confining us—of hindering our pursuit of happiness, of taking away our property, or of putting us to death, unless we give it to them? And how can we give them a right, which we ourselves have not? In other words, how are we to alienate what is inalienable? The pursuit of happiness is certainly a natural inclination; but can we call it a natural right? That depends upon the mode of pursuit. The assassin pursues his happiness by assassination. Has he the right to do so? If he has not, why declare it? What tendency in that declaration is there, to make men happier or wiser?. . .
I shall finish with a general observation. The language of error is always obscure, feeble, and changeable. A great abundance of words only serves to hide the poverty and falsity of ideas. The more the terms are varied, the more easy it is to lead people astray. The language of truth is uniform and simple: the same ideas, the same terms. All these refer to pleasures and to pains. We avoid all that may hide or intercept that familiar notion. From such or such an act, results such or such an impression of pain or pleasure. Do not trust to me; trust to experience; and above all, to your own. Between two opposite modes of action, would you know to which the preference is due? Calculate the effects, in good and ill, and decide for that which promises the greatest amount of happiness.
Bentham promoted himself as being anti-Locke, by opposing Locke's hoax "Compact," but, as you see, he had a view of man as bad as Locke's, or, perhaps a worse: man as a mere calculating machine, totally devoid of any real cognitive ability. In this, he merely plagiarized the Venetian Giammaria Ortes, whose work, in addition to his essay "Calculation of the Pleasures and Pains of Human Life," had been the (not original) source for Adam Smith's anti-American theory of Economics, and Thomas Malthus' overpopulation theory. Again we see the characteristic of Romanticism: the terror of human cognition. Poke a rabid environmentalist, obsessed with population control, and you will discover their fear that human beings might actually solve the problems they claim are insoluble, thereby eliminating the excuse they've used to justify the state of stupefaction they've chosen to live in.
II. Emerson and the De-Flowering of New England
So, the enemies of Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin de-flowered New England. The battle lines were drawn. The union of Kant and Hume bore fruit in New England, in the soil made fertile by Jonathan Edwards' crap, in the person of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his so-called Transcendentalist School. Emerson grew up in the period of the "Hartford Convention," a group of wealthy war-time traitors to the U.S.A., which threatened to bring about New England's 1814 secession from the young United States. Emerson, like Kant, was an admirer of the Swedish Newtonian scientist turned mystic cult founder, Emanuel Swedenborg. This queer fellow, Emerson, became the paradigm for the American Tory enemy of real cognitive work, whose Twentieth Century Nashville Agrarian and Bohemian varieties will become our main subject. Like our Twentieth Century expatriate "poets," Emerson's affections were in Europe, primarily in England and Scotland, and his life was punctuated by pilgrimages to his spiritual masters in Britain and on the continent, typified by Thomas Carlyle; Jeremy Bentham's protégé and editor, John Stuart Mill; and the apostle of the anti-Renaissance "pre-Raphaelite" movement, John Ruskin.
Emerson's mission, like that of today's Bush-league "Critter Company," was to mask Gnostic degeneracy with an American flavor. So, he promoted his infection as the coming age of "The American Scholar." In his 1837 address of that title to the Cambridge, Massachusetts, Phi Beta Kappa Society, he appealed to American Patriotism, announcing:
Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?
This flourish, with its vague reference to real scientific discovery, is typical of Emerson, and, perhaps you will recognize the stock from which grew our more modern scientasters like Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, or Carl Sagan. This sprinkling of his work with the artificial essence of science, was a way of weaning Americans away from the real article, as we knew it in Dr. Franklin. Though claiming to be the high priest of American Philosophy, Emerson bragged, as a student, "I can't multiply seven by twelve with security." In the "American Scholar," he said, "science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts." The secret of Emerson's abiding appeal is plain old laziness of the brain. He uses the scent of scientific language to argue, in effect, that real work isn't necessary, we can chatter all we like because anything we feel is Truth, is:
That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity, these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed. After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to be computed. The soul's advances are not made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight line; but rather by ascension of state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis,—from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain total character, that does not advance the elect individual first over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of discovered inferiority, but by every throe of growth the man expands there where he works, passing, at each pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house.
In this he apes the Leibnizian scientific method, from Nicholas of Cusa's work on the quadrature of the circle, through Leibniz, Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann, who rigorously developed a geometrical method based on the lawful process of generation of successions of incommensurable "geometries." Contradicting his own claims about the inadequacies of arithmetic measure, Emerson has learned and taught precisely zero about how Nature really works. The real scientists know that nature follows no single precise arithmetic law, but they can multiply seven by twelve. In fact, before the development of electronic computers, Kepler, Gauss, and others were notorious for their painstaking arithmetic calculations, and precise physical measurements, to produce the real science which they have bequeathed to us.[10]
Four years after his "American Scholar" address, Emerson promoted his cult of "I know what I know," hostility to real cognitive work, in "The Over-Soul":
We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, "How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?" We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone indicate the greatness of that man's perception,—"It is no proof of a man's understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false, this is the mark and character of intelligence."
He then, like our modern Hollywood ding-bat spiritualists, attempts to paint this cult of stupidity with the aura of "Revelation":
We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these communications, the power to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception.
Emerson doesn't write about splattering your blood, the way Jonathan Edwards did, but he's just as dangerous for your mind. He proceeds to anticipate the ideas later presented by his famous protégé, William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience. Emerson wrote as follows:
A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been "blasted with excess of light." The trances of Socrates, the "union" of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment has, in innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the "revival" of the Calvinistic churches; the experiences of the Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.
Is it surprising that this New England abolitionist, Emerson, called his longtime correspondent, "Prince" Achille Murat, the spawn of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Metternich deployed to Florida after Napoleon's defeat to agitate for what was to become the Confederacy, "an ardent lover of truth, a type of heroic manners and sweet-tempered ability?" He praised the anti-slavery terrorist, John Brown, in almost the same way.
While patriotic Americans—John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Henry Carey, and Abraham Lincoln—fought for Franklin-style "internal improvements," tariff protection for domestic industrial development, and the withering away of the horrid slave system, the Confederacy bubbled up out of our Southern cauldron, fuelled by an alliance between Emerson's New England and the lords of Dixieland. The latter was an alliance in the slave, sugar, and opium trades. Emerson and his circle laid the groundwork for the rot that would virtually disarm the United States morally, as well as militarily, and that would open the fortress gates to the post-Civil War, romantic's cultural revival of the notion of the Confederacy as a Lost Cause.
The Transcendentalist periodicals, The Dial, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harpers, allied with the British Blackwood to spread Emerson's fake American cult of hostility to cognition. This is what Franklin's admirers John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley fought against, in England and from exile in Italy, and what Edgar Allan Poe fought against through the Southern Literary Messenger and other venues, here in the United States. No American's education is complete unless he understands this war against the Transcendentalist Romantics through, amongst other things, reading Poe's stories: such as, "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.," "How to Write a Blackwood Article," "A Predicament," "X-ing a Paragrab," "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," "Eureka," or "Mellonta Tauta"; or his famous plea to Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he praised as the most talented of the Transcendentalists in his review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, to leave "The Old Manse" (the Emerson family seat) and start writing with "visible ink."
And so, it came to War, beginning really, not in 1861, but with "Bleeding Kansas" in the 1850s. Despite Lincoln's heroic efforts to, somehow, maneuver a peace between enemies smoldering with blood fever, he took the oath of office and assumed the Presidency of a nation already, in reality, at War. Although Emerson, too old to be expected to serve in the military, remained a vocal supporter of the Union, his disciples leaned toward the views of Aaron Burr's anti-War Democrats, as typified by General George McClellan, who, after Lincoln cashiered him for his refusal to lead a serious threat to the Confederacy, confirmed Lincoln's judgment by running for President against Lincoln as a Democrat on a platform of surrender to the inferior Confederate forces. A sampling of Emerson's youthful protégés gives an idea of the Transcendentalist contribution to the cause.
The Swedenborgian William James—who went on to found the Harvard University Psychology department, and its tradition as a dispensary of psychotropic drugs, and the philosophy he called "Pragmatism"—failed to enlist.
James' lifelong friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—who went on to be appointed to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt—enlisted, but resigned his commission in support of McClellan's 1864 surrender campaign, explaining to his father, the famous Poetaster, who excelled his son in patriotism, that he thought Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had "politicized" the war, thus relieving him of any responsibility to fight further. In the Twentieth Century, he served as a sort of "uncle" to some of H.G. Wells' New Republic collaborators.
The Swedenborgian William Dean Howells, was named by the Transcendentalist clique at the outset of the War to inherit the editorship of The Atlantic, from which position he was to serve as the patron of two generations of writers. They, therefore, arranged to have him appointed Assistant Consul to Venice to avoid danger.
The Lost Cause: The Dead That Walk and Talk
After the military defeat of the Confederacy, the battlefront shifted to financial and cultural warfare. The alliance among New England and New York financial interests and Southern drug-running and slave-trading interests, promoted a pro-Confederate counteroffensive, which has been more dangerous than the shooting war itself.
Within days of the close of the War, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Despite this, the program of "internal improvements," notably railroad building and the development of the Agricultural and Mining schools, launched by Lincoln and his economic adviser, the world's greatest economist of that time, Henry C. Carey, continued. As a result, by the time of the famous 1876 Exposition, the United States was clearly the dominant industrial, and economic force in the world, and had developed the base from which much of the world would be "electrified" in the course of the succeeding half-century. In the same period, an American current of Classical musical composition, based on the "Negro" Spiritual, was fostered here, by the work of such artists as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the later help of Antonin Dvorák.
The American Tory opposition to these developments was fierce. The events of the next thirty-six years, including the assassination of Republican President James Garfield in 1881, and ending with the assassination of Republican President William McKinley in 1901, delivered the White House to a pro-Confederate, Wall Street, British Empire fanatic, Theodore Roosevelt. This had its effect, much as has the recent period since the assassination of President Kennedy, through the Vietnam War, and the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and other Civil Rights leaders. Then, two generations of War, and the assassination of three Presidents in 36 years, left many Americans vulnerable to the idea that not the hard, but joyful work of discovery, but rather, the raw, unthinking lust for wealth and power, was the surest means of Progress.
Increasingly, the American System of Economics, based on Leibniz and Franklin, was replaced, even within the slain Lincoln's Republican Party, with the Lockean ideas of "Property," rapacious profiteering, or today's "shareholder values." This, like the replacement of Leibnizian science with empiricist claptrap, was done under the authority of Herbert Spencer's and Charles Darwin's "Survival of the Fittest" hoax. Emerson's "Kindergarten" was instrumental in the cultural degradation which opened the door for Roosevelt's coup, and they played a prominent role in his Junta and its aftermath. Theodore Roosevelt himself, was one of William James' psychology students. John Hay, one of the Transcendentalist-backed "western" writers, who shared a Washington residence with James' intimate, Henry Adams, was Roosevelt's Secretary of State, and in 1902, James' lifelong friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was appointed by Roosevelt to the Supreme Court.
Now, focus on the cultural aspects of this post-Civil War campaign for the Lost Cause.
In Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, Confederate Generals and Scottish Rite Freemasons, Albert Pike and Nathan Bedford Forrest, along with other "Templars of Tennessee," founded the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan's founders and defenders describe it as a secret fraternal organization, modelled on ancient cult practices, intended simply as a way for idled former Confederate soldiers to amuse themselves, which developed into a force of vigilantes, or "regulators" dedicated to terrorizing freed slaves who didn't know their place, and any whites who might defend them. Their costumes, symbols, ranks, and precepts were an infantile mimicry of an ancient mystical warrior cult. This wonder of imbecility, with its Grand Dragons, Wizards, Giants, Cyclops, Magi, Monk, Exchequer, Turk, Scribe, Sentinel, Ensign, Centaurs, Yahoos, and Ghouls, who organized themselves to lord it over the Realms and Dominions comprising the Invisible Empire, became a major terrorist force throughout the nation.[11] The incongruity between the Klan's own self-description and their bloody work, reminds one of Shakespeare's Hamlet's famous quip, "No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest; no offence i' the world."
Founder Albert Pike was the Sovereign Grand Commander, and intellectual—as well as gastronomical—giant of the Scottish Rite order. He became the principal author of the Scottish Rite "Bible," Morals and Dogma,[12] and is now honored with a bust and crypt in the nether regions of the order's Mother Temple in Washington, D.C., as well as a prominent statue provided for by an Act of the United States Congress, in the Capital's Judiciary Square. Pike identified Masonry's roots in the same occult traditions (Rosicrucianism, Zoroastrism, Theosophy) as Emerson's Swedenborgianism. The fundamental idea being that there are no knowable ideas, only mysteries which some people have been given the key to and others haven't. God likes some and doesn't like others, and that's all there is to it, and we know who we are, and we know who you are.
In this climate of terror against Lincoln's legacy, Emerson's "Kindergarten" rose to dominate cultural life in America. His literary disciples, led by William Dean Howells, who returned from Venice once the war was safely over, promoted sectional literature, and the literature of soap opera-like personal feelings. Industrial and economic progress were often portrayed in this literature, to appeal to American taste, but with the heart and brain removed. Ambition, lust, and greed, rather than passion for Truth and Beauty, were what made the world go round. The paradigm of this movement was the Transcendentalists' Country and Western "superstar," Mark Twain.[13] Meanwhile, the immensely wealthy, lazy, and virtually unemployable Swedenborgian draft dodger, William James, launched an attack on the very idea of Truth through his promotion of what many today believe is the American Intellectual (or anti-Intellectual) Tradition, the philosophy he called "Pragmatism."
James, like his mentor Emerson, was an intimate of the British political and cultural elite. After the assassination of Lincoln, accomplished by Confederate spies with connections to the British and the Habsburgs, Emerson's circle set out to do what Lincoln had declared couldn't be done, namely, to "fool all of the people all of the time." James became an unofficial member of the British elite "Cambridge Apostles," participating in groups including the "Scratch 8," and the "Metaphysical Society," led by the Apostles.
Personally, James and his lifelong "soulmate," Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., were directed by Sir Frederick Pollock, a leader of British Freemasonry, who, during the First World War, was to head the Royal Colonial Institute Lodge, with special responsibility for maintaining Masonic influence in the colonies—including the United States. Pollock owed his title to his Grandfather, who had sat as a judge, who violated British neutrality during the Civil War by ordering the release of the British-built warship, the Alabama, to the Confederate Navy.
As the founding head of Harvard's Psychology Department, James became the father of American psychology, and also, in concert with John Dewey and others, one of the molders of Twentieth-Century American educational policy. The period in which he came to dominate American psychology and philosophy, was the period in which, with the assassination of McKinley, the Lincoln current in the Republican Party was murdered and replaced with the British Empire chauvinism of Theodore Roosevelt. With such a precedent, no one has a right to be surprised by the more recent case of Harvard LSD guru, Dr. Timothy Leary. For James, Emerson's mere talk against cognition wasn't adequate; he used drugs and promoted a cult of drug-induced insanity to chemically castrate the brain. I quote from his most famous work, based on lectures delivered in Edinburgh, Scotland, The Varieties of Religious Experience:
Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental balance, psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by which it has been called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities which, when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an individual, make it more probable that he will make his mark and affect his age, than if his temperament were less neurotic. . . .
He then offers his prescription:
The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.
Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication. . . .
Some years later, James published Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, dedicated to Emerson's friend and Jeremy Bentham's editor, John Stuart Mill, in which Harvard dope-freak William James smeared Leibniz, without mustering an argument, saying, "Leibniz's feeble grasp at reality is too obvious to need comment from me." Those of you who think that "Pragmatic" means practical, hard-headed, getting the job done, American, or something like that, remember, it is the philosophy not of a man, but of his dope:
[T]he days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts.
[W]e ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other's being right. If you follow the pragmatic method. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value. Theories become instruments, not answers. Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully aroused and militant.
Now truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.
The reason why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for `to be true' means only to perform this marriage-function.
Old fashioned theism was bad enough, with its notion of God as an exalted monad . . . but, so long as it held strongly by the argument from design, it had kept some touch with concrete realities. Since, however, Darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the `scientific,' theism has lost that foothold;
. . . as I have enough trouble in life already without adding the trouble of carrying these intellectual inconsistencies, I personally just give up the Absolute. I just take my moral holidays. . . .
James' agnosticism may appear to differ radically from Jonathan Edwards' Thunder of Doom, but, he claims, modern science has doomed Man just as surely as Edwards' Godzilla. In Varieties of Religious Experience, he wrote:
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion.
In tandem with Pragamatism, a school of explicit support for the Lost Cause—featuring praise of the Confederacy and the Pike/Forrest Ku Klux Klan—arose, featuring Southern historians, including one of Edwards' successors as President of Princeton University, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who was himself a protégé of one of James' Metaphysical Society "brothers," the longtime editor of the London Economist, Sir Walter Bagehot.
III. Twentieth-Century Romanticism
As Pragmatism rose in the United States, Classical Culture was also under attack in Europe. The Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the installation of Louis Napoleon at the head of the French Second Empire, typified the developments leading to the bloody "geopolitical" wars of the Twentieth Century. The German, "God is Dead" school, epitomized by the mad philosopher of the irrational will, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the lust and rage-driven Mazzinian bomber Richard Wagner, was on the rise. In Britain, Emerson's friend John Ruskin and his pro-Venetian school spawned a movement in the arts, especially painting, known as pre-Raphaelism, which explicitly pressed for a return to pre-Renaissance, feudal culture and political organization. Various cults and secret orders, claiming to be modelled on pagan mysticism, were formed, or re-invigorated, including Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry's "Order of the Golden Dawn." Each of these was but a re-packaging of Jonathan Edwards' idea of the specially privileged, whether called "Elect," "Adepts," "Ascended Masters," "Magi," or "Little Green Men." These cults became the inspiration for a dizzying assortment of schools of literature, music, dance, philosophy, and psychology. What "conspiracy theorists" see as secret plots and disguised intentions is actually much more insidious. Much as occurred with the succeeding "counterculture" of the last third of the Twentieth Century, the Euro-American "intellectual" elite was largely, and quite openly, mired in the extended social relations of this shifting pattern of cult associations. The essential features of "Little Green Men" irrationalism remained as the basis for the whole she-bang, as individual alliances shifted between various of these "theological" cults and the new political "-isms"—socialism, communism, Fascism, Nazism.
H.G. Wells, a protégé of Charles Darwin's boss, Thomas Henry Huxley, blended the ideas of "God"-caused, "Nature"-caused, "Technology"-caused, and "Geopolitical"-caused Doom, into a unified notion of ultimate "Godzilla" terror, for which the only solution was global tyranny. Wells' early political success in the United States was his control of the policies of the Klan cheerleader made President, Woodrow Wilson.[14] In fact, Huxley was the patriarch of a British-centered grouping, identified as the New Dark Ages Conspiracy,[15] which formed an Anglo-American alliance for Doom with the Emerson Kindergarten and the Lost Cause afficionados here. Leading figures included Wells, Huxley's grandchildren, Julian and Aldous, whom Huxley hired Wells to train, and Lord Bertrand Russell, the latter the most infamous of the "Cambridge Apostles."
Enter the Nashville Agrarians
The quintessential product of this rancid stew was "The Great Beast," Aleister Crowley, a leader of Rosicrucian Freemasonry and darling of the "Quatuor Coronati" Masonic branch of British Intelligence, whose career encompassed five decades of activity in Britain, the European Continent, and North America.
The fashionable pornographers of the "Gay Nineties" through the "Roaring Twenties"—such heroes of today's "counterculture" as D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, the Virginia novelist James Branch Cabell, and the leading promoter of Friedrich Nietszche, H.L. Mencken, were all in Crowley's orbit. Beyond his immediate following, the chic Brits, and the American forerunners of the "Beat" and "Hippie" eras—who, much like Emerson, preferred the seedy nightlife of Paris and the Caribbean to their hometowns in places like Missouri or Idaho—all knew Crowley or his cult. They all had friends who had visited his "Abbey of Thelema," to join in the "sex magic," the animal sacrifices and blood-drinking, and the opium and heroin use, which would, eventually, cost Crowley his respectability, but would build the legacy which his admirers among today's establishment entertainment figures, including Mick Jagger and Sir Paul McCartney, have emulated. This wider circle included Ernest Hemingway; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Edmund Wilson of Princeton University and The New Republic; John Peale Bishop of Princeton, who went from being a Beat poet in the twenties to war-time propagandist for Co-ordinator for Inter-American Affairs Nelson Rockefeller; William Butler Yeats' one-time house-boy, Ezra Pound, who became a propagandist for Mussolini, but remains a darling of both the supposedly patriotic neo-Conservatives as well as the doped-up counterculture; T.S. Eliot; Gertrude Stein; Sylvia Beach; and Isadora Duncan.
Out of this mess, arose the monstrosity which is at the core of this story, the Twentieth-Century heirs of the Ku Klux Klan, the Nashville Agrarians, who have come to dominate much of the nation's politics, culture, and theology. Before continuing, review the characteristic features of this illness:
- Godzilla theology: The denial that Man is in the Image of God or deserving of anything other than death and damnation, and the belief that all knowledge and authority come from secret sources (Godzillas and Little Green Men).
- Opposition to the Renaissance Nation-State and support for Empire, especially the Brutish. Hatred for the actual cultural achievements of European Civilization, and affection for its legacy of hideous "Feudal" and other oppressions.
- Denial of any connection between Reason and Sentiment, Science and Emotion, Truth and Beauty. This includes the claim that precise, logical, mathematical determinism is the only "science," and that the only alternative mode of cognition is wild irrationalism.
- Hatred of real cognitive work, the belief that drug-induced or similar states of wild irrationalism are the source of "creativity," and that belief in the cognitive capabilities of man is an "evil" to be eradicated.
- Opposition to technological progress, "internal improvements," high protective tariffs, and freedom. Support for "free trade" and slavery.
Enter the Nashville Agrarians, from which such spawn as former U.S. Secretary of State (Sir) Henry A. Kissinger were bred.
The Agrarians have taken this American Tory disease and wrapped it with a down-home "American" country package, in which it's been marketed massively for seventy years under a variety of trade-styles.
Then, there was also that revival of the Ku Klux Klan which was to carry both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter into the White House.
It started in 1915, the same year that Hollywood gave birth to evil twins: the modern movie industry and the born-again Ku Klux Klan. The second Klan was launched by Hollywood's first full-length feature motion picture, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. The film, now revered as a great "classic," features then-President Wilson's praise of the Klan in its opening frames. He promoted the film and the Klan by sponsoring showings at the White House, the Supreme Court, and for the assembled Government and Diplomatic grandees of our Capital.[16] That same year, in Nashville, Tennessee, a seemingly random group of Vanderbilt students and faculty began meetings and discussions on philosophy and poetry in the home of a Rosicrucian mystic of an allegedly Jewish Masonic family, Sidney Mttron Hirsch.
Vanderbilt itself, had just gone through a tumultuous ten-year process of takeover by Wall Street money, in part coordinated by the involvement of then-President Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Fuller, and Britain's financial mogul in America, J. Pierpont Morgan. From then, until now, Vanderbilt has been one of the leading recipients of Wall Street Foundation money—Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, the works. The stated purpose of this seizure of Vanderbilt from its former Southern Methodist affiliation, was to turn it into the Southern center of John Dewey, "Pragmatic"-style teacher training and culture generally.[17] Vanderbilt's histories do not explain why this "conversion" to New England-born Pragmatism should have included the appointment, in 1917, of Walter L. Fleming, one of the nation's leading KKK partisans, as Dean, but, perhaps, you're beginning to get the idea.
The Nashville-based core of the Hirsch circle was drawn from, and had the financial and other backing of the leading families and business interests of Nashville, including the Cheek-Nichols family which owned Maxwell House Coffee. They were to found a literary magazine in 1922, called the Fugitive, and a political movement in 1930, the "Nashville Agrarians." The early meetings, at which Hirsch reclined on a chaise, propped up by feathery pillows, surrounded by his acolytes, perfected the circle as practitioners of Nietzschean or Rosicrucian "Little Green Man" occultism. This is how Fugitive Donald Davidson described the Hirsch salons:
[We] fell silent and became listeners when—as always happened—Sidney Hirsch picked out some words—most likely a proper name like Odysseus or Hamlet or Parsifal, or some common word like foot or fugitive—and then, turning from dictionary to dictionary in various languages, proceeded to unroll a chain of veiled meanings that could be understood only through the system of etymologies to which he had the key. This, he assured us, was the wisdom of the ages—a palimpsest underlying all great poetry, all great art, all religion, in all eras, in all lands. All true poets possessed this wisdom intuitively, he told us, solemnly, repeatedly. Furthermore he proved it later on, when we began to forsake philosophy for poetry, by pointing out that some image that had crept into our verses, no matter what we intended it to mean, revealed exactly the kind of mystic symbolism he had traced from the Ramayana to Homer to Sophocles to Dante to Shakespeare to William Blake.[18]
Most histories of the Fugitives/Agrarians tend to dismiss Hirsch's influence as unimportant, but his training and early leadership was the basis for everything the Fugitives and their disciples were to become. The Fugitives later developed Hirsch's "Little Green Men" method into the dominant school of English Literature, the so-called, "New Criticism." It was Hirsch who, in 1922—after a seven-year association interrupted by the War—proposed and pushed through the idea of starting a poetry magazine, and named it the Fugitive. John Crowe Ransom, who went on to become the acknowledged founder of what is fairly dubbed "The New Crittercism," and is otherwise called the leader of the group, introduced his 1930 work, God Without Thunder, with an adoring note to his mentor, "S.M.H.," and reports that Hirsch was the source of a proposal he made in the American Review, in 1933, to build a new capital city in the heartland of the country.
Forty years after the salon first met, the Rockefeller Foundation financed a "Fugitives Reunion," at Vanderbilt University. The presiding figure at this event was Fugitive's "editor in absentia," William Yandell Elliott, who as head of Harvard University's Government Department, launched the foreign policy careers of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, the mentors of two generations of Democratic and Republican policy "gurus," notably including our last Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her virtual foster sister, current National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
At the reunion, Elliott—who had been an intimate of London's literary elite, was then serving on Dwight Eisenhower's National Security Council, and had spent years, in conjunction with his favorite, Kissinger, hosting world leaders at Harvard's International Summer Seminars—said, "Sidney had this dominating, almost mesmeric habit of addressing people in the Socratic manner. . . . The insights that he had about the struggle of myths and systems, and the nature of the struggle of the people who became the epic exemplars, was superior in its political insight to any figure I've known." In unpublished tape-recorded remarks to that gathering, Elliott reports having escorted Hirsch from his home to the Vanderbilt campus.
Eyewitnesses report that in that period, Hirsch's home, which Elliott visited, featured occult artifacts, a life-size nude portrait of himself, and a human pelvis hanging from the ceiling, which Hirsch would caress as he engaged in conversation.
So, who was Sidney Mttron Hirsch? He was a product of the fin de siècle witches' brew described in the last section. His family were wealthy Nashville merchants, but he led a Bohemian existence. After a career as a Navy boxer he worked as a model for a sculptor named Chase, with whom he roamed the degenerate seas. He is said to have posed for August Rodin (who had a brush with Aleister Crowley) and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and to have met William James' favorite student, Gertrude Stein, and Lorado Taft (a Chicago sculptor and art historian, with whom life-long homosexual Stark Young, of whom you'll learn more, had a flirtation as well). In 1913, with support from the Nashville Art Association and the Board of Trade, he produced The Fire Regained, a Dionysian pageant on the subject of "Lesbian Love"—complete with hundreds of sheep, doves, dancers in diaphanous costume, and the governor's wife, Lucy McMillan, playing the Goddess Athena.
Hirsch's "kids" were remarkably successful. Of the handful at the core of what we now know as the Fugitive/Agrarian group, John Crowe Ransom, William Yandell Elliott, Bill Frierson, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks became Rhodes Scholars; Andrew Nelson Lytle studied at Oxford; Stark Young was a lifelong intimate of top British cultural warrior Julian Huxley (whose primary foray into United States politics was as a founding faculty member of Rice University in Houston, Texas, under the patronage of Captain James Baker, grandfather of Boy George Bush's lead attorney, the third of that line), and a leader of British spymaster H.G. Wells' New Republic group.
Allen Tate became an intimate of the above-mentioned Crowleyite literati, in Greenwich Village, New York, Paris, and other Bohemian outposts, who were patronized by the British establishment, and of Gertrude Stein. In the Twenties, Tate frequently published in Wells' The New Republic, and The Nation, The Saturday Review of Literature, and the literary pages of many other journals. In the Thirties, he served as editor of the horsey Hound and Horn.
The story behind the British promotion of the Fugitives, however, originated prior to their meeting with Hirsch, and, really, prior to their births. The Nashville-centered core of the group, and their out-of-town cousins, were part of a leading clique composed of the second- and third-generation descendants of the "Tennessee Templars," who had founded the Ku Klux Klan. Ransom was the great-nephew of James R. Crowe, a leader of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in Tennessee, and one of the inner circle of Masons, with Albert Pike and Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had founded the Klan. Crowe was cited by Fleming as a key source for his "insider" history of the KKK. Ransom's mother, Ella, had fond memories of evenings spent by the fireside with the other Crowe women, sewing sheets together for Klan rallies. Stark Young's father and Cleanth Brooks' grandfather fought in Forrest's "Critter Company," during the Civil War. William Yandell Elliott's grandfather was an ostensibly anti-slavery Republican, who reportedly provoked an incident after the War, resulting in the deaths of eight freedmen. He, nonetheless, belonged to the same Masonic Lodge in Murfreesboro, Tennessee as James D. Richardson, who, as a Congressman in 1898, caused Federal land in the nation's capital to be set aside for the monument to Klan founder Pike. Young, Lytle, Frank Lawrence Owsley, Ransom, and Elliott all claimed connections to the McGehee family—one of the wealthiest and largest slave-holding families in the South, which claimed descent from the British Stuart royalty. Robert Penn Warren's father worked as a clerk for the McGehee retail chain in Kentucky.
So, to summarize, the Fugitives were, by family and social connections, Anglophile, pro-Confederate, "White Sheet" babies, who were given an intensive indoctrination in "Little Green Men" theology by Hirsch, who, apart from the support given his efforts by Nashville's leading commercial, cultural, and political institutions, appears to have been the village loon.
The Fugitive was launched in 1922, sandwiched in time between the installation of Mussolini's Fascist government in Italy, and Adolf Hitler's rise to prominence in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The electorate had replaced the Klan's Woodrow Wilson with a pro-Industrial Republican, Warren Gamaliel Harding. Under Harding's leadership, the Anglophile Klan revival which had led the U.S.A. into World War I was threatened with being side-lined. At the time, Elliott and Bill Frierson were at Oxford doing their Rhodes Scholarship studies. Elliott was listed on the masthead as "Editor in Absentia." He, in fact, promoted the Nashville Fugitives, arranged publication deals, and so on, amongst the British literary elite. At Oxford, he worked through a late-night drinking and discussion circle including the mystic poet and estranged Lodge brother of Aleister Crowley, William Butler Yeats, and long-time Fugitive intimate, Robert Graves. Graves is known today for his adoring history of the Roman Empire, I Claudius and his promotion of the cult of the White Goddess. Thus, the Fugitives became leading figures in the "modernist" literary establishment of the Twenties, with a definite aroma of what we would recognize today as "Bohemian," "Beat," "counterculture," and definitely "weird."
They were to become something different. In 1923, Harding died mysteriously from food poisoning. He was the fourth President to die suddenly in office in sixty years. The other three had been gunned down by assassins. He was succeeded by Wall Street's Calvin Coolidge, whose policies were to create what we know, unjustly, as the "Hoover Depression." The change in the Fugitives was prompted when, as some viewed this matter, Satan decided to promote what he advertised as a fight between Jesus and Science, in Dayton, Tennessee. It was planned in Richmond, Virginia, in 1925, in the home of occultist, pornographic novelist James Branch Cabell, at a meeting between his friend, the Baltimore curmudgeon journalist H.L. Mencken, known as the leading popularizer in the United States of Nietzsche, and the Nietzschean atheist attorney, Clarence Darrow. A fourth, unseen, presence in the room would have been the mutual friend and collaborator of Cabell and Mencken, "The Great Beast," Aleister Crowley. Crowley and Mencken had collaborated in spreading "pro-German" propaganda in the United States prior to America joining the British side in the First World War. Whether their propaganda, painting the Germans as the Nietzschean super-race about to crush the American weaklings, helped turn the tide for Britain or Germany, is not the subject of our story here. Mencken had introduced Crowley to Cabell, who, in his medieval "Sorcerers and Dragons"-type sex fantasy novels, expressed ideas he shared with Crowley through the mouth of his fictional hero, Juergen, who often repeated the following slogans:
Do that which pleases you. For all men that live have but a little while to live and none knows his fate thereafter. So that a man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his body: and yet the body of man is capable of much curious pleasure.
and,
I'll drink anything once.
To this day, Crowley's followers use excerpts of Cabell's novels as scripts for their black magic rituals. Cabell was, himself, an heir of one of the most respected Freemasonic families of the "Old South." His relations include the notorious "Randolphs of Roanoke," whose most notorious figure—the drug-addicted John Randolph—is, today, a hero of the Buckleyite conservative movement; as well as Air Force General and Deputy Director of the CIA, George Cabell, and the recent Kissingerian intelligence agents and diplomats, David and Evangeline Bruce. The Bruces, of course, like the McGehees and MacGregors, trace their lineage to Robert the Bruce—the forebear of the Stuart line of Scottish and English royalty. Thus Cabell, himself a "Green Men" occultist, was a cousin to his sometime collaborators and sometime competitors amongst the Fugitives.
What Cabell, Mencken, Darrow, and the unseen Crowley agreed to, was to launch a court fight, to be argued by Darrow and publicized by Mencken, against the Tennessee laws banning the teaching of Darwinism. This was to become the celebrated "Scopes Monkey Trial," in which the Satanists of medievalist Cabell's Richmond parlor, undertook to represent the forces of Huxley's Darwinism, which they called "modern science," against the Bible-thumping "Christians" represented by former Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan. By doing this, they turned David Hume's hermetic division between science and morality into a popular fighting issue. To the extent you, or anyone you meet today, believes that religion, morality, or aesthetics are matters of irrational taste, while science comes only from cold experience: Hume, and Satan's plot, planned in Richmond and executed in Dayton, deserve at least some of the thanks.
The Fugitives were offended by the treatment given the South by Mencken and others in and around this trial. They were particularly upset at Mencken's essay about the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart," in which he alleged that Southern Whites were genetically inferior to the "Mulattoes," because, he argued, the Whites were largely Celtic, whereas the "Mulattoes," were enriched with the Norman (out of which came the Venetian-allied English Plantagenet Kings) genes of the plantation owners. There followed several years of feverish correspondence amongst the Fugitives and their friends, out of which arose a project to re-launch Confederate culture. It seems that Mencken's prodding of the White Sheet baby poets had about the same effect as his war-time "defense" of Germany.
The Night Writers Take a Stand
The result of the Night Writers' fevered response was a series of hotly promoted books and articles published by 1931. These included biographies of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Stonewall Jackson by Allen Tate; Andrew Nelson Lytle's fawning biography of the Klan's First Imperial Wizard: Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company; and John Crowe Ransom's call for a Godzilla theology takeover of all existing religions, in God Without Thunder. The flagship of the Night Writers' fleet was I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners.[19] This literary assault, published, debated, and promoted in the period of descent into economic depression following the 1929 stock market crash, and leading into the installation of the Hitler Nazi regime in Germany and the initiation of last Century's second Global War, was the articulation of the main outlines of what was to triumph as the Conservative Revolution, which culminated in Boy George's year 2000 Black Sheet coup.
As you will see, this involved the open takeover of American culture by the Godzilla theology of Rome and kindred Empire cultures, clothed as good ole' Southern Americanism. You may be shocked, or amused, to learn that this Southern tribe are the kissin' cousins of the ecology freak counterculture, which organized the Gorey mess in the Democratic Party to lose to Bush.
Tate coordinated the production of I'll Take My Stand from Paris, financed by a Guggenheim fellowship arranged by a curious individual then known as Ford Madox Ford, in whose apartment he stayed while working on his biography of Stonewall Jackson, which he sub-titled "The Good Soldier," after one of Ford's novels. Thursday afternoons, he called at the Salon of William James' favorite student, Gertrude Stein, and her "wife," the hashish-baking Alice B. Toklas. Although Stein and Toklas became heroes to the Beat and hippie generations, they were no liberated couple. According to Tate, Stein would sit in the front room with the men, including such dissolute expatriates as Ernest Hemingway, John Peale Bishop, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to discuss matters literary and philosophic, while Toklas served the ladies her famous chocolate cake in the rear. With this provenance, it should be no surprise that I'll Take My Stand was dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan's authorized historian, Walter L. Fleming.
To understand the Agrarian variety of American Tory treason, first read from the joint statement of the I'll Take My Stand twelve, drafted by White Sheet baby, John Crowe Ransom, which, but for the word "Southern," and, perhaps, one or two others, could be from any "environmentalist" tract of the 1970s or later. Note the "Little Green Men" rejection of the idea that man has "power over nature," which Ransom claims is "something mysterious," and the strange idea that, as long as they have some slave to do it for them, "labor" is good in itself, and, therefore, the less efficient the better:
All tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way . . . Agrarian versus Industrial.
The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical; it has enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome.
The philosophy of applied science is generally quite sure that the saving of labor is a pure gain. . . . This is to assume that labor is an evil, that only the end of labor or the material product is a good.
The true Sovietists or Communists . . . are the Industrialists themselves. They would have the government set up an economic super-organization, which in turn would become the government. We therefore look upon the Communist menace as a menace indeed, but not as a Red one; because it is simply according to the blind drift of our industrial development to expect in America at last much the same economic system as that imposed by violence upon Russia in 1917.
We receive the illusion of having power over nature, and lose the sense of nature as something mysterious and contingent.
It is strange, of course, that a majority of men anywhere could ever as with one mind become enamored of industrialism: a system that has so little regard for individual wants. There is evidently a kind of thinking that rejoices in setting up a social objective which has no relation to the individual. Men are prepared to sacrifice their private dignity and happiness to an abstract social ideal, and without asking whether the social ideal produces the welfare of any individual man whatsoever. But this is absurd. The responsibility of men is for their own welfare and that of their neighbors; not for the hypothetical welfare of some fabulous creature called society. . . .
Next, Ransom's essay, "Reconstructed But Unregenerate," elaborates further the connection between "environmentalism" and the oligarchy's "Little Green Men" cult. Note the slavish admiration for England, and the appeal to intellectual sloth which abhors the "infinite series" of progress in favor of the mind-dead siren call of "tradition." To this dopey, lazy brain, even slavery is preferable to an American-style life of creativity:
The nearest of the European cultures which we could examine is that of England; and this is of course the right one in the case. . . . England was actually the model employed by the South. . . . And there is in the South even today an Anglophile sentiment quite anomalous in the American scene.
England differs from America doubtless in several respects, but most notably in the fact that England did her pioneering an indefinite number of centuries ago, did it well enough, and has been living pretty tranquilly on her establishment ever since. . . . Their descendants have had the good sense to consider that this establishment was good enough for them. They have elected to live . . . in accordance with the tradition which they inherited, and they have consequently enjoyed a leisure, a security, and an intellectual freedom that were never the portion of pioneers.
In most societies man has adapted himself to environment with plenty of intelligence to secure easily his material necessities from the graceful bounty of nature. And then, ordinarily, he concludes a truce with nature. . . . But the latter-day societies have been seized—none quite so violently as our American one—with the strange idea that the human destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to wage an unrelenting war on nature.
This is simply to say that Progress never defines its ultimate objective, but thrusts its victims at once into an infinite series. Our vast industrial machine . . . is like a Prussianized state which is organized strictly for war and can never consent to peace. . . .
Then, Ransom pronounces his "feed the people to the lions" opposition to loving God's "other children":
Along with the gospel of Progress goes the gospel of Service. . . .
The feminine form is likewise hallowed among us under the name of Service . . . service means the function of Eve, it means the seducing of laggard men into fresh struggles with nature . . . it busies itself with the heathen Chinese, with the Roman Catholic Mexican, with the "lower" classes in our own society. Its motive is missionary. Its watchwords are such as Protestantism, Individualism, Democracy, and the point of its appeal is a discontent, generally labeled "divine."
Slavery was a feature monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice; Industrialism is an insidious spirit, full of false promises and generally fatal to establishments. The attitude that needs artificial respiration is the attitude of resistance on the part of the natives to the salesmen of industrialism. It will be fiercest and most effective if industrialism is represented to the Southern people as—what it undoubtedly is for the most part—a foreign invasion of Southern soil, which is capable of doing more devastation than was wrought when Sherman marched to the sea.
"The Irrepressible Conflict" by Frank Lawrence Owsley, who, in effect, succeeded Fleming in Vanderbilt's chair of Lynchin' and Cross Burnin', is a bloody assault against the freed slaves, but what's worse is his open recognition of his heritage, from Rome to Locke, which leads to the sentiment that it's better to be a lump of manure rotting on "the soil," than to have to think. He starts with a justification for the Klan's terrorism after the Civil War:
There was no generosity. For ten years the South, already ruined by the loss of nearly $2,000,000,000 invested in slaves, with its lands worthless, its cattle and stock gone, its houses burned, was turned over to the three millions of former slaves, some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations from cannibalism. These half-savage blacks were armed. Their passions were roused against their former masters by savage political leaders like Thaddeus Stevens, who advocated the confiscation of all Southern lands for the benefit of the negroes, and the extermination, if need be, of the Southern white population; and like Charles Sumner, whose chief regret had been that his skin was not black.
Not only were the blacks armed; they were upheld and incited by garrisons of Northern soldiers, by Freedman's Bureau officials, and by Northern ministers of the gospel, and at length they were given the ballot while their former masters were disarmed and, to a large extent, disfranchised [sic]. For ten years ex-slaves, led by carpetbaggers and scalawags, continued the pillages of war, combing the South for anything left by the invading armies, levying taxes, selling empires of plantations under the auction hammer, dragooning the Southern population, and visiting upon them the ultimate humiliations.
. . .The rising generations read Northern literature. . . . Northern textbooks were used in Southern schools; Northern histories, despite the frantic protests of local patriotic organizations, were almost universally taught . . . , books that were built around the Northern legend. . . .
The real cause of conflict, Owlsey explains was:
[T]he North was commercial and industrial, and the South was agrarian. . . . All else, good and bad, revolved around this ideal—the old and accepted manner of life for which Egypt, Greece, Rome, England, and France had stood. History and literature, profane and sacred, twined their tendrils about the cottage and the villa, not the factory. Each word, name, sound, had grown from the soil and had behind it sweet memory, stirring adventure, and ofttimes stark tragedy.
. . . it was the Romans of the early republic, before land speculators and corn laws had driven men from the soil to the city slums, who appealed most powerfully to the South. These Romans were brave, sometimes crude, but open and without guile—unlike the Greeks. They reeked of the soil, of the plow and the spade; they had wrestled with virgin soil and forests. . . .The industrial North demanded a high tariff. . . . It was an exploitative principle, originated at the expense of the South and for the benefit of the North. . . . The industrial North demanded internal improvements—roads, railroads, canals—at national expense to furnish the transportation for its goods to Southern and Western markets. . . . The South objected to internal improvements at national expense because it had less need of transportation. . . . The North favored a government-controlled bank. . . .
Slavery had been practically forced upon the country by England—over the protest of colonial assemblies. . . . However, when the Revolution came and the Southern colonies gained their independence, they did not free the negroes. . . . Negroes had come into the Southern Colonies in such numbers that people feared for the integrity of the white race. For the negroes were cannibals and barbarians, and therefore dangerous. No white man who had any contact with slavery was willing to free the slaves and allow them to dwell among the whites. Slaves were a peril, at least a risk, but free blacks were considered a menace too great to be hazarded. . . .
These [economic and social rights] were not the only interests which the state-rights doctrine was expected to protect from an overbearing and unsympathetic national government. Perhaps the greatest vested interest was "personal liberty," the old Anglo-Saxon principles expressed in the Magna Carta, bill of rights, habeas corpus act, supported in the American Revolution, and engrafted finally in every state constitution. . . . Jefferson had called the "inalienable rights of man" and Locke and Rousseau had called the "natural rights"—right of life, liberty, property. . . .
Since the Confederate Constitution unequivocally supported the right to slave ownership, and granted its States no rights to overrule that "personal liberty," Owsley, and all supporters of the Confederate model of "States Rights" and "personal liberty," place themselves in the peculiar position of asserting that "Liberty" requires the right to slave ownership. Unfortunately, this is not a dead idea. Southern Partisan magazine, the well-respected organ of Buckleyite Conservatism, whose pages have been graced with adoring interviews by notables including Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Senator Jesse Helms, Senator John East, Senator Phil Gramm, and former Virginia Republican Party Chairman Patrick McSweeney, re-published this genocidal essay in 1991 as part of its Sixtieth Anniversary homage to I'll Take My Stand.
Two of the essays directly attacked Universal Public Education, saying that there was no point in providing real education for anyone but a small elite, and certainly not for negroes. John Gould Fletcher of Arkansas, who claimed that growing up in the former home of Albert Pike inspired him to his career as an imagist poet, a British Fabian Socialist, and an ardent booster of Benito Mussolini,[20] and who later founded the Arkansas Folklore Society and drowned himself, presented his case against universal education, and in favor of the Southern, "Private Academy" system, which is the idea behind today's "school vouchers," movement, and many of our "home schoolers":
. . . what is the good of sending an unspoiled country boy or girl to a city high school and still later to a college, if after some seven years' sophisticated flirting with knowledge he or she has to return and unwillingly take up ploughing and washing dishes again?
. . . a considerable proportion of our population are negroes. Although there is no doubt that the negro could, if he wished, pass easily through the high school and college mill (such a task does not require any profound knowledge. . .), yet under the present social and economic conditions under which he has to live it is simply a waste of money and effort to send him there. . . .
The inferior, whether in life or in education, should exist only for the sake of the superior. . . . We can pick out the most promising and enterprising pupils who appear in our high schools annually and set them apart, as actual students taught by real teachers, to form an intellectual elite. . . . We can also support . . . such institutions for training the negro as Tuskegee and the Hampton Institute, which are adapted to the capacity of that race and produce far healthier and happpier specimens of it than all the institutions for "higher learning" that we can give them.
Robert Penn Warren, who was to become the most famous and "successful" of the Night Writers—First Poet Laureate of the United States, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, author of two Hollywood movies, co-author of the ubiquitous textbook, Understanding Poetry, and so forth—wrote "The Briar Patch," which despite attacking equal education for "the negro," was controversial amongst the Agrarians, for being a bit more genteel than Cousin Owsley's attack on the supposed flesh-eating cannibals:
[After Reconstruction], [t]he negro was as little equipped to establish himself, as he would have been to live again, with spear and breech-clout, in the Sudan or Bantu country. The necessities of life had always found their way to his back or skillet without the least thought on his part. . . . He did not know how to make a living. . . . Always in the past he had been told when to work and what to do. . . .
For what is the negro to be educated?
Booker T. Washington realized the immediate need of his race; he realized that the masses of negroes . . . had to live by the production of their hands, and that little was to be gained by only attempting to create a small group of intellectual aristocrats in the race.
In the past the Southern negro has always been a creature of the small town and farm. That is where he still chiefly belongs, by temperament and capacity. . . .[21]
Allen Tate's "Remarks on the Southern Religion" reflect his agreement with Ransom's attacks on Christianity, and, something which is often the subject of his letters to friends: his plain old preference for stupidity over "intellectual agility," like the fellow with the Stars and Bars on his pick-up, or the teenie-bopper at the mall, who, in the words of the old Tareyton ad, would rather fight than change their minds. Some years later, he, like his friend, the Missouri-born defector to Britain, T.S. Eliot, became a pro-Feudalist Catholic.
. . . since the Christian myth is a vegetation rite, varying only in some details from countless other vegetation myths, there is no reason to prefer Christ to Adonis.
. . . the old South . . . was a feudal society without a feudal religion.
The South could remain simple-minded because it had no use for the intellectual agility required to define its position. Its position was self-sufficient and self-evident; it was European where the New England position was self-conscious and colonial. The Southern mind was simple, not top-heavy with learning it had no need of. . . .
We are very near an answer to our question—How may the Southerner take hold of his Tradition? The answer is, by violence. For this answer is inevitable. He cannot fall back upon his religion. . . . Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots. . . .
Andrew Nelson Lytle, who went on to be the long-term editor of the Sewanee Review—one of the nation's leading literary magazines, published by the Episcopal Church's flagship Southern university, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee—as well as a founder of the traditionalist Anglican Society for the Book of Common Prayer, contributed, "The Hind Tit," where he, like cousin Owsley, says he'd really just rather be a stinkin' goat than a "progressive farmer":
Since 1865 an agrarian Union has been changed into an industrial empire bent on conquest of the earth's goods and ports to sell them in. This means warfare, a struggle over markets, leading, in the end, to actual military conflict between nations . . . men, run mad by their inventions, supplanting themselves with inanimate objects. . . .
. . . the Republican government and the Russian Soviet Council pursue identical policies toward the farmer . . . Russian Soviet is the more admirable. It frankly proposes to make of its farmers a race of helots.
. . . prophets do not come from cities. . . . They have always come from the wilderness, stinking of goats and running with lice. . . . The progressive-farmer ideal is a contradiction in terms. A stalk of cotton grows. It does not progress . . . as soon as a farmer begins to keep books, he'll go broke shore as hell.
Industrialism gives an electric refrigerator, bottled milk, and dairy butter. Industrialism saves time, but what is to be done with this time? The milkmaid can't go to the movies. . . . In the moderate circumstances of this family . . . she will be exiled to the town to clerk all day. If the income of the family can afford it, she remains idle, and therefore miserable. . . . It is true that labor-evicting machines will give a greater crop yield. . . . It means overproduction and its twin, price deflation. It [the South, I suppose—SE] is our own, and if we have to spit in the water-bucket to keep it our own, we had better do it.
The manifesto's conclusion was by the best-known Agrarian at the time, the homosexual drama critic Stark Young. He was also the Agrarian most closely allied with the Wells-Huxley-Lord Bertrand Russell, "New Dark Ages" crowd. He had been a special friend of Julian Huxley, since 1912, and was to remain so until Huxley's death. He made it clear in his letters that he was similarly devoted to Huxley's brother, Aldous, the mescaline and LSD fiend, who was, he wrote, "closer far in sentiment to Julian than anybody knows." As such, Young was involved in the circles including Colonel Edward House and Sidney Mezes, who ran Woodrow Wilson's policies during World War I and at the Versailles peace negotiations. Huxley, as we said, had been brought to Houston, Texas before the War by House's friend, Captain James Baker, grandfather of George W. Bush's lawyer, The Third, to found Rice University. Young was a leading figure in the Wells circle operations in the post-War United States, including The New Republic and the New School for Social Research. He was particularly close to the Communist Party financier, Dororthy Elmhirst Straight, who also paid to bring many "Frankfurt School," and related academics to the United States, under New School and other auspices. In Not in Memoriam, but in Defense, in case anyone doubted that when Cousins Lytle, Owsley, and Ransom talked about the intrinsic appeal of Labor, they meant watching, not doing, he acknowledged that the aristocratic slave system was the stuff the Agrarians' dreams were made of:
There was a Southern civilization whose course was halted with those conventions of 1867 by which the negro suffrage in the South—not in the North—was planned, and the pillaging began. At the outset we must make it clear that in talking of Southern characteristics we are talking largely of a certain life in the old South, a life founded on land and the ownership of slaves.
The aristocratic implied with us a certain long responsibility for others; a habit of domination; a certain arbitrariness; certain ideas of personal honor, with varying degrees of ethics, amore propre [sic], and the fantastic. And it implied the possession of no little leisure. Whether that was a good system or not is debatable. I myself think it . . . better than a society of bankers and bankers' clerks, department-store communities, manufacturers and their henchmen and their semi-slaves, and miserable little middle-class cities. . . . Good system or not, from this Southern conception of aristocracy certain ideas arose, about which this book to a fair extent, has been written.
The Jungian psychologist Lyle Lanier also contributed an article. Another Fugitive psychiatrist, Merrill Moore, did not contribute. I mention this because Carl Jung was responsible for building a "Little Green Men" theory of psychology and psychoanalysis. He claimed that an individual's personality was based on his heritage—his racial or cultural background—what he publicly called "archetypes" or "the collective unconscious," and privately referred to as communications from gods and spirits. He claimed that the "Little Green Men" told him that everyone's heritage included belonging to polygamous matriarchical societies, and that everyone had a spiritual responsibility to screw around as much as possible. He became a regular at the Swiss sex-magic resort at Ascona, also frequented by many of Crowley's followers. As such, he was the family analyst of later CIA director Allen Dulles and the mistress and assistant, Mary Bancroft, whom he provided Dulles, despite Jung's known affection for Nazism. So, there was a special affinity between the Jungian and the Agrarian movements.
Next we report on Andrew Nelson Lytle's homage to the Klan's first Imperial Wizard, Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company, released in tandem with I'll Take My Stand. In 1996, Southern Partisan compared it to Homer's epics, and the Southern League has engaged in at least three fights over the last five years, in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, to build or preserve monuments or schools honoring Lytle's mass-murdering hero. In Critter Company Lytle presented the myth, now promoted especially by "Carlist" Catholic reactionaries and their "Southern Strategy" friends, that the United States was founded, not as the bastion of the Renaissance idea of the Nation-State, but rather, of the anti-Renaissance Feudalist revival:
The Forrests had been on the move for a good many years. They were a part of that vast restlessness which had spread over Europe after the breakdown of medieval life, and which, because it could not be contained entirely by the rigid discipline of nationalism, continued by overflowing into the Americas. Here, in the newly occupied continent of North America, the Europeans set about to appease their nostalgia for feudalism.
He concluded of the Ku Klux Klan that, "It was the last brilliant example in Western Culture of what Feudalism could do."[22]
Lest any of you didn't notice, Nashville Agrarianism has no more to do with agriculture than Emerson's Romantic ravings had to do with science. Andrew Nelson Lytle, the one Agrarian who came from a farm family, and lived on farms much of his life, was so ignorant of what agricultural production really involved that he said that horses, unlike tractors, don't cost anything to produce or maintain. Tate's wife Caroline Gordon explained, "Allen feels toward Nature as I do towards mathematics—respectful indifference. He walks about the garden hailing each tomato and melon with amazement—and never sees any connection between planting seeds and eating fruit."[23] As you will see, Gordon may have not realized which Mellons Tate was hailing.
Snuff All Modern Religions
Now, we come to John Crowe Ransom's call for the destruction of Platonic Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and all kindred religious currents, in God Without Thunder. Our Southern Partisans still reprint and brag about I'll Take My Stand and Critter Company, but they don't say much about God Without Thunder. In it, Ransom explains the roots of the American Intellectual Tradition in Plato and the Platonic Christians, and demands that this tradition be wiped off the face of the earth by destroying all modern religions from within, with Godzilla cults like the Nazis' beloved "Thunder God" fables. Here he openly presents the Anti-Christ lies and myths which are the axioms which, unawares, poison the thinking, not only of the Yahoo "Fundamentalist," "Traditionalist," and "environmentalist" fanatics who are most obviously affected, but of many of your friends and neighbors. If you've ever wondered what the study of Philosophy has to do with you, you're about to find out. Ransom's systematic attack on our tradition, starting with Plato's "ideas," his support for a "Mother Goddess" rather than the Christian Trinity, his hatred of the "Filioque" clause, over which the followers of Emperor Constantine forced the Eastern Church to leave the Western, and his fake promotion of Humean kookery as science, are all issues which, with some thought, can be understood by you. After all, Ransom's work was popularized by the Night Writers, and has formed the basis for the "Religious Right" movement which has now put someone dumb enough to please Allen Tate into the White House. If this tribe, which has professionally cultivated utter stupidity for four generations, can understand the monumental ideas in the history of human development well enough to hate them, surely you can understood them well enough to begin to love them.
Ransom opens with "A Letter to S.M.H.," Sidney Mttron Hirsch, whom most of the Agrarians' boosters would rather you thought the Agrarians had, by then, dismissed as a crank. In it, he says that he writes "to explain to the Western world of America, as if in simple untechnical monosyllables, the function of the myths in human civilization." In his first section, "The Dynasty of Heaven Changes," he presents the oft-told lie that there is a difference between his preferred God, the "Godzilla" of the Old Testament, and the cognitive, benevolent, and, therefore, he says, phony "God" of the New Testament, whose "image" man has inherited.
. . .The doctrine which is now becoming so antiquated with us is that of the stern and inscrutable God of Israel, the God of the Old Testament. The new doctrine which is replacing it is the doctrine of an amiable and understandable God. We wanted a God who wouldn't hurt us; who would let us understand him; who would agree to scrap all the wicked thunderbolts in his armament. And this is just the God that has developed popularly out of the Christ of the New Testament: the embodiment mostly of the principle of social benevolence and of physical welfare. . . . It is the religion proposed by the scientific party. . . . The new religion represents God as a Great Man with all the uncertainties left out: a Great Man whose ways are scientific and knowable and whose intention is amiable and constant . . . he is the modern scientist glorified and apotheosized. . . . And when God has once been conceived as a scientist, he is also conceived as one whose processes likewise aim at human good.
He expressed the wishful thought that "The Roman Church" had "held on to its medievalism," and never accepted this "New" God. The "Old Testament God," was so frightening, Ransom claimed, "Not even his prophet Moses could bear to look upon his face." In support of this whopper, he quotes scripture:
And when Jehovah saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush. . . . And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.
In making this claim, Ransom, who was the son and grandson of Methodist ministers, and himself a Bible class teacher, ignores the famous account in Deuteronomy, where it is reported that God, some decades later, talked to Moses "face to face, as if to a friend." This is quite an important idea to Philo and other Platonic Hebrew theologians, and an important link to Platonic Christianity. This idea of a God who appears to young (only eighty years old at the time) Moses, and to most others, in a cloud or a pillar of smoke, but later "face to face," is consistent with Paul's description in the famous Epistle to the Corinthians. Of course, Ransom well knew that the Hebrews' Jehovah, was not the God of Thunder. Ransom's God wasn't ours, it was Hitler's: the Roman Jupiter, or the Norse Wotan or Odin. He liked the "Fundamentalists,"[24] because, like William James, and the cash-loving Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, they believed in what was "worth believing in," not what was True:
My own view is that all first-class religionists are Fundamentalists, and that it is the Fundamentalists, properly speaking, who constitute the Church. . . . In effect the Fundamentalist does not any longer distinguish myth and fact. But why should he, if the myth is worth believing in?
Speaking of "the affair of Dayton, Tennessee," which his master Satan had arranged, Ransom says:
Fundamentalism occupied itself there with defending a myth. . . . They were confronted with a cruel pair of alternatives: whether to admit exceptions to a body of doctrines which they had loyally adopted. . . ; or to continue holding to them . . . at the cost of public ridicule, and even on pain of establishing in their own minds a painful contradiction between the natural and the supernatural.
Having established his preference for lies which have what James called, "cash value," over Truth, Ransom proceeds in Chapter Six, "Satan as Science," to turn Christianity upside down with the idea that Satan, also known as Lucifer, is the same figure as the Greek God Prometheus, who, according to Aeschylus, brought the fruits of science and technology (not merely fire) to Man.
Prometheus was the Demigod or Man-God whom the Greeks represented as endeavoring to alienate mankind from Zeus the malevolent despot. . . . He is to be understood as offering the blessings of science. . . . But Prometheus comes down to us in a rather different role from that of Lucifer: his reputation is better.
The "Man-God Christ" of the Platonic Christians, he says, is really Satan, Lucifer, or Prometheus. The story of the Garden of Eden, teaches, he claims:
In the victory of science they found the first sin, the cause, prototype, and essence of all specific and actual human sins. Therefore in this myth we have the story of the perilous step man had taken towards his later civilization when he introduced agriculture and ate of flesh . . . here lay the origin of the strife between the animal species, when man began to enforce the fact of his superiority by militance and aggression.
It is evident that Israel since then has followed Lot's and David's example rather than Abraham's. That race seems committed almost beyond all others to cities and industrialism, and to the scorn of nature and the pastoral and agrarian life. It does not seem to have been altogether a happy choice.
He concludes this section with evidence that he knows his enemy:
Christ as the Logos, is the Patron of Science; the Reason which governs the universe. . . . The Logos is the Platonic Idea, for the Platonists of the Christian era had substituted the one word for the other.
In Part Two, "The New God's Limits," he directly attacks "Americanism" as the fruit of this "sin," saying, "Science as a cult is something of an Americanism." He starts with praise of the Nazi forerunners, Kant and Schopenhauer, to which he counterposes a nasty attack on that loving student of Benjamin Franklin, our own Percy Bysshe Shelley.[25] He quotes Prometheus Unbound, in which Shelley metaphorically identifies Benjamin Franklin as Prometheus:
Shelley was the prophet of the new God, who anticipated the religious attitude of our leaders of today. . . . He undertook, in his drama, to unbind Prometheus, the spirit of science, from his rock. . . .
He then quotes Shelley's unmistakable identification of Prometheus with Franklin:
The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep Gives up her stars. . . .
And then twists the knife in the memory of our dear Shelley, who drowned under suspicious circumstances before his thirtieth birthday:
This is the very language of the moderns talking about the triumphs of their science; but it is terribly juvenile. As a matter of fact, Shelley was young, and it was not in him to grow much older.
In concluding his attack on American science, this Anglophile, Ransom, does something very strange. Apparently unable to find an American to represent what he chooses to attack as "Americanism," he quotes his own collaborator, the absurdist Humean determinist and British Fabian Global Empire fanatic, Lord Bertrand Russell, making the claim, "Physical science is thus approaching the stage when it will be complete. . . . Given the laws governing the motion of electrons and protons, the rest is merely geography. . . ." Russell's absurdism is the fraudulent basis for all "ecology"-freak attacks on science. Like him, they start, whether they know it or not, or admit it or not, with the entirely disproven assumption that no new science is possible. Only were we all so stupid and heartless as to make that falsehood true, would the world be doomed by each "last" invention, as they claim.
In Part Three, "Ghosts: Including the Holy," Ransom continues his attack on his fake stand-in for "science," by borrowing from Emerson's know-nothing generalizations on the concept of the Transcendental. "Pure mathematics is at the base of the sciences," he asserts, in agreement with his Lord Russell, but in disagreement with the actual American Tradition of science. He continues, "But there are some defects in pure mathematics. . . . Though all things seem numerable and measurable, this is not quite true. We must to that extent fail to possess the world as a precisely known system of objects. The defects of mathematical technique come to light when we examine the mathematical infinites. . . . The failure of the decimal system to express the quantity 1/3 stands for all the notorious failures of our sciences to embody the concrete objects of our sensible experience."
Here, of course, Ransom proves the utter Emersonian worthlessness of his own railing against science, and that of all ecologists who join him in this absurdity. In fact, from Archimedes, to Cusa, to Leonardo, to Kepler, to Gauss and Riemann, it is mastering this idea of the incommensurability of the "infinites," which is the starting point of science. Only one lamely stuck in the belief, now disproven for 2,500 years, that the universe follows some single mathematic formula, could take this as proof against science. As Riemann so eloquently pointed out in his 1854 habilitation paper, made famous by Lyndon LaRouche's frequent citation over the last thirty years, physics is not mathematics, but the study of nature's intentions. Mathematics may be used to construct a map, not the landscape being mapped. Despite Ransom's claim, the fact that no map can precisely portray the Earth's terrain, doesn't mean that it's impossible to figure out how to get around. Asking for directions in our rural South, however, can sometimes go far toward making you think he's right.
So, Ransom goes back to the Little Green Men theory, which he had learned so well from Hirsch:
Each demon stood for the secret, or ineffable, or transcendental individuality of some individual and private person. Socrates had his demon, which presided over his mind and told him the strange things he must say. . . . A demon is the embodiment of variety and freedom who resists determination . . . a demon is a devil.. . .
And slanders Plato for his contribution to the idea that the Universe is produced by intention:
The fiction is the representation of this infinite system by a fabulous being: a Logos, a Word, a Principle, a Law, a Cause, a Whole, a Universal, a Platonic Idea—or God himself, construed as the aggregate and energizing unity of all the masses. . . . The Platonic Idea was a grand specimen of the ghost Logos.
He then presents his version of the "Mother Goddess" theology which should be very familiar to students of, or adherents of, the ecology craze. It is very close, in fact, to the views later expressed by Club of Rome fanatic, and one of Al Gore's mentors, Elizabeth Dodson Gray.[26] Notice that he seems to divide male and female as Hume did Truth and Beauty. (He, nonetheless, married a woman. Many of his friends did not.)
God is the Father, the masculine, cosmic, and rational Creator. But the material is the Mother, who is feminine, anarchical, and irrational. It is a significant fact, and it has proved rather detestable to Occidental theologians with their special interest in the Logos aspect, that the Holy Ghost for the Old Testament authors, and for Christ himself speaking his native Aramaic, was of the feminine gender. But this was the right gender for defending the demonic and irrational aspect of his being.
And attacks Christianity for rejecting Godzilla:
But the New Testament authors very nearly lost the Pneuma, or the Holy Ghost, out of their excessive devotion to the Logos as personified in Christ. . . .
And that was the very beginning of Occidentalism: the substitution of Logos the Demigod for the Pneuma, the Holy Ghost the Tetragram, the God of Israel . . . so Christ now rules over the Occident instead of God. The Orthodox or Eastern Church, nearest to the source of our religion, which was an Oriental source, has consistently declined to represent Christ the Logos as coordinate with the Holy Ghost. In rejecting the famous Filioque clause of the Western canon, this Church has maintained that the Holy Ghost proceeds from God the Father (that is, the God of Israel) but not from God the Son: an admirable doctrine rightly entitled to the name of Orthodoxy.
Perhaps the most critical moment in our history . . . was . . . the moment when the Roman Church sanctioned the doctrine of Filioque. In that moment Occidentalism emerged as a definitive historical polity which was to glorify the rational principle and deny the irrational principle. . . . Western empire has developed out of that choice, and Western science, and Western business.
To be filled with the Holy Ghost, as all the preachers in the early chapters of the Acts were supposed to be, was to possess magic and to be able to work wonders. . . . Then Saul of Tarsus enters the story, and the book becomes mainly a chronicle of his doings. . . .
Ransom is, of course, right about Filioque. Man shares in Creation with God, and, therefore shares with God the understanding and mastery over Nature, which Ransom correctly identifies as the object of his hatred, and it is that idea which his followers are fighting to drive from all religions, in whatever way they can. In his epilogue, "By Way of a Program," Ransom issues the call which the fanatic "Religious Right" follows today, whether or not they've ever heard of or read Ransom:
They [the priests] have in effect come to this arrangement with the naturalists: "If you will leave us the name and honor of our Gods, we will surrender to you their powers and see that you are not interfered with in your naturalism and your secularism." . . . For Christ is the spirit of the scientific and ethical secularism of the West.
A new religion being totally impracticable as a thing to propose, the only recommendation that it is in my power to make is this one: We had better work within the religious institutions that we have, and do what we can to recover the excellences of the ancient faith. The churches must be turned from their false Gods toward their old true Gods—whenever, and however, and so far as this proves to be practicable.
But why should one not dispose of this vexing problem by saying, ever so simply: Let the West go into the Greek communion. . . .
The West will scarcely do what I might ask in this matter. . . . The only local example of a church of this faith with which I have any actual acquaintance is situated in a Wyoming mining town: I cannot pronounce the names of its members. . . . The thought of joining them is, in brief, abhorrent.
Or why not advise the Western world to enter the Synagogue, . . . and find the God of Israel in his greatest purity? Once more, and with all respect, the word suggests itself: abhorrent. For better for worse, a man is a member of his own race, or his own tribe. . . .
I will mention another possibility. Why should not the Western world go Roman? . . . My Western world does not want to do anything of the kind. The history of the Western world is a history of political separation from the Roman church, which is now definitely a rejected polity. . . .
And next: Why not bid the West go Anglican, or Episcopal? I am now getting much nearer home. . . . I am an Anglophile, and I wish my country might be more so. But I am not so Anglophile as I am American. And I find myself sometimes, as I find my neighbor more frequently, abhorring Anglicanism and Episcopacy. . . .
Therefore, he issues the following call:
With whatever religious institution a modern man may be connected, let him try to turn it back towards orthodoxy.
Let him insist on a virile and concrete God, and accept no Principle as a substitute.
Let him restore to God the thunder.
Let him resist the usurpation of the Godhead by the soft modern version of the Christ, and try to keep the Christ for what he professed to be: the Demigod who came to do honor to the God.[27]
In this, Ransom was in total agreement with the program of Nazi psychoanalyst Carl Jung. This is from Jung's 1910 letter to his mentor and rival, Sigmund Freud, in which he explains how his intentions differ from those of his teacher:
I think we must give [psychoanalysis] time to infiltrate into people from many centers, to revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity for the one purpose of making the cult and the sacred myth what they once were—a drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness of an animal. That was the beauty and purpose of classical religion.[28]
Agrarians on Tour
The Night Writer assault of 1930 through '31 launched a five-year campaign of frenzied promotion, during which the Agrarians were a central part of the cultural opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and the agitation for appeasing Hitler and Mussolini. Roosevelt was engaged in a campaign to revive Lincoln's age of technological progress, which had been slowed and reversed by the preceding sixty-five years of assassinations, shooting war, and cultural war. His plan to destroy Wall Street's "economic Royalists" included the invasion of the old Confederacy with such projects as the Tennessee Valley Authority, to forever destroy the Southern bastion of Feudalism. A key parallel to Roosevelt on this point, was Louisiana's pro-Lincoln, pro-industrial Senator and Governor, Huey Long,[29] who was subjected to a campaign of vilification which the Agrarians continued for at least fifty years after his 1935 assassination. It was against this Roosevelt revival of the American Tradition, that our American Tory plague, with backing from their Brutish and European cousins, launched the Agrarian counterattack.
That counterattack against Roosevelt included a series of highly publicized debates, involving various champions on either side, led by White Sheet baby Ransom for the Agrarians and his friend, Stringfellow Barr, for the opposition. Barr was a University of Virginia professor and sometime editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review (which was and remained an outlet for the Agrarians and their friends), who was to go on to an illustrious career as the side-kick to one of Bertrand Russell's top American operatives, Robert M. Hutchins. As such, he launched Hutchins' "Great Books" education program at St. Johns College of Annapolis, served as long-time President of the Foundation for World Government, and as a fellow for Hutchins' Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.
Writing from his Paris base of operations, Allen Tate had assured his Fugitive collaborator Donald Davidson that Barr was "solidly on our side,"[30] and proposed him as one of I'll Take My Stand's authors. Instead, he ended up playing Gore Vidal to Ransom's William F. Buckley in this pre-television, staged version, of Firing Line.
The controversy was kicked off by Barr's essay, "Shall Slavery Come South," in the October 1930 Virginia Quarterly. Barr doesn't name the Agrarians, but rather criticizes, in a gentlemanly way, those traditionalists who opposed industrialization of the South. Aside from asserting that industrialization was unstoppable, this essay would have fit right in with I'll Take My Stand. He, in fact, repeated the Agrarian claim of the superiority of the slave system to the industrial, which has more recently graced the pages of the Agrarian Revivalists' Southern Partisan magazine under the byline of Marxist economist Eugene Genovese.
"I suspect that if the Old South had a soul, that soul consisted in a mature sense of social responsibility," Barr wrote. "The plantation master could not afford to let a thousand dollar slave starve. The factory master can let his slave starve. The doctrine of legal equality has been the rationalization of a capitalistic society living on a hire and fire economic basis, a profitable but irresponsible basis." An interesting argument, but did Barr, who I am assured by close mutual acquaintances had some considerable intelligence, not know that, in fact, on occasion, plantation masters did kill their slaves? He proposed that the "traditionalists" accept industrialization, but temper it with the good old plantation owners' paternalism, "For nobody knows better than the Southern traditionalist that, despite the American myth of equality and independence, the strong will always rule the weak and should do so with justice and mercy."[31]
Lest there be any wishful belief that Barr had some sort of American-style industrialization in mind, the same issue of Virginia Quarterly ran an article by Lord Bertrand Russell, which clarified the issue.
In "Thirty Years From Now," Lord Russell contrasted British industry and the British labor movement to the American, in order to illustrate that "industry" can be just as "traditional," just as racist, and just as mind-dead, as the Agrarians might have wished, writing, "in Great Britain, it is common to find industrial workers whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers were also industrial workers in the same industries and the same localities. Think of the Lancashire proverb, `Three generations from clogs to clogs.' " "Restriction of immigration, I am convinced," he explained, "will be an immense gain to American radicalism. Comparison with the British labor movement strengthens this conviction. The foreign-born population of Great Britain is negligible; the Labor Party derives its strength from men and women whose ancestors have lived in the country from time immemorial. If America continues to restrict immigration it seems probable that within thirty years almost all the foreign elements except the negroes will have been thoroughly assimilated."[32]
The following issue of Virginia Quarterly Review continued to build the tension. Although the issue featured a full-page ad for I'll Take My Stand on the inside cover, billed as "The Revolt of the Young South Against Machine Civilization," $3.00, available through the Virginia Quarterly Book Service, it carried a less than favorable review by H.L. Mencken's associate, Gerald W. Johnson. Johnson was, amongst other things, a New Republic contributor and the author of a children's book, The British Empire, which says that the United States separated from the Empire "for no really good reason."[33] He further stirred the pot of controversey, which Mencken had stocked with his "Sahara of the Bozart," some half-decade before, asking, "Are they unaware of pellagra and hookworm, two flowers of Southern agrarianism? Have they never been told that the obscenities and depravities of the most degenerate hold of a cotton-mill town are but pale reflections of the lurid obscenities and depravities of Southern backwoods communities?"[34]
Again, lest you wonder what sort of modern times the University of Virginia's quarterly championed in opposition to the Night Writers, the same issue carried an article, "Boundaries of Utopia," by the prophet of the drugged society, Lord Russell's colleague Aldous Huxley.
The stage was set for the genteel Ransom-Barr exhibition match. It occurred on Nov. 14, 1930 at the University of Virginia, under the sponsorship of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The playwright, Sherwood Anderson, a close friend of Agrarian Stark Young, served as moderator. In his introduction to the audience that filled a 3,500 seat auditorium, he applauded Agrarianism. The following year, Anderson would support Communist Presidential candidate William Z. Foster against Roosevelt. Seated on the podium were the Governor of Virginia, the president of the University, perennial Socialist Presidential Candidate Norman Thomas, and various literary figures, including, of course, Aleister Crowley's friends, James Branch Cabell and H.L. Mencken.
This debate, and the others that followed it, were widely covered media events that turned the Agrarians into national celebrities. H.L. Mencken continued his promotional sparring with them for many years. T.S. Eliot initiated his practice, which lasted a number of years, of heaping praise on the Agrarians, with a favorable review of I'll Take My Stand in his journal, The Criterion. Tate's friend, Edmund Wilson, after visiting the Tate non-producing farm, Benfolly, wrote a satirical sketch, "Tennessee Agrarians," for The New Republic.[35] The Italy-America Society, run by Fascist ex-Finance Minister, the Venetian Count Volpi, paid Stark Young $5,500-plus expenses to do a lecture series, which he described as "my mission to Italy." Young wrote, after meeting Mussolini, that he was "very warm, and very intelligent." His three-part series for The New Republic, "Notes on Fascism in Italy Today," countered Mussolini's bad press here. For this, he was inducted into the Order of the Crown of Italy, and dubbed, "Commander of the Crown of Italy," which in no way diminished his association with Julian Huxley, Lord Bertrand Russell, or British spymaster, H.G. Wells.[36]
Building the New British Empire
Over the next several years, the Agrarians collaborated with an assortment of Fascists, pro-Feudal British Catholics, and the odd Satanist and Communist, in efforts to undermine the Constitutional authority of the United States and assure that it would pose no serious threat to European Fascism and Nazism. It was in this period that H.G. Wells, in his book and movie, Things to Come, promoted the Brutish strategy for a thirty years war, beginning in 1939, to wipe out all industrialization. That Wells strategy required the prevention of effective U.S. participation in the War, and this is what the Agrarians attempted to ensure by building a rearguard offensive here to weaken Roosevelt's re-industrialization policies, and to organize sympathy for Fascism. The European-American movement which the Agrarians led, was dedicated to Ransom's Godzilla-theocracy conquest of the planet.
This now seventy-year-old, Agrarian-led alliance was the intellectual progenitor and shaper of all of the essential features of today's "Religious Right" Boy George Yahoo enemies of the United States and all nations. The main features are:
- An alliance of assorted "Godzilla" cults, operating, as John Crowe Ransom demanded, within otherwise respectable religious denominations.
- The belief that man's scientific capabilities are an aggression against animals and nature, and that man should stick to those qualities he shares with animals.
- The revival of theories premised upon Feudal notions of economics and property rights, theories looking back to the traditions of Rome, Venice, Habsburg, and like Empires.
- Unqualified support for Spain's Franco as, somehow, the re-birth of the beloved Spanish Hapsburg Inquisition; strong sympathy for Hitler and Mussolini; and the related drive toward a "new world order" featuring such qualities recognized today as "Globalization" control over trade relations, internal national political practices of all nations reviving the most brutally arbitrary concoctions of the Roman imperial tradition as "world rule of law," and so on.
Allen Tate took the lead in forging these odd alliances, with the help of William Yandell Elliott's drinking friends, and Ford Madox Ford. Ford was introduced to Tate by Tate's on-and-off-again first wife, Ford's secretary, Caroline Gordon, during Ford's mid-1920s New York stay.
Though little known today, Ford was a major figure in British literature, as a poet and novelist, but, more importantly as a promoter of others' work. A brief report on his background and activities should help develop a good flavor for the sort of disease-breeding intellectual swamp in which the Agrarian monster thrived. He was an odd fish: a multiply-divorced Catholic, at home amongst all varieties of oligarchical disease. He originated as Ford Madox Hueffer, in the same species of occultism, that stinking gap between Victorian Britain and Nietzschean Germany, as did Aleister Crowley and Sidney Mttron Hirsch.
Hueffer's father, Francis, had edited two magazines in Germany: The New Quarterly, devoted to promoting Schopenhauer, and Musical World, which promoted Richard Wagner. He got into some trouble in Germany in connection with Wagner, and so moved to London, where he toiled the rest of his life as music critic for the Times. There he married the daughter of pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, who was himself the nephew of pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rosetti. So, young Ford Hueffer's life was dominated by the pro-Medieval "products" of Emerson's collaborator, John Ruskin.
He became a fixture in the "Bloomsbury" literary circles and the British Fabian Society. This circle included Ezra Pound, the one-time house boy to Crowley's estranged lodge brother, William Butler Yeats, who is now famous as a propagandist for Mussolini and darling of the Beat/Hippie set; William James' brother, the novelist, Henry; H.G. Wells, whom Ford supported in his attempt to take over the Fabian Society; James Joyce, the one-time dependent of Jungian cultist Edith Rockefeller McCormick; and Crowley's disciple, the pornographic novelist, D.H. Lawrence, whom Ford "discovered."
His executive role in these latter circles was institutionalized, in 1908, with the editorship of the English Review. In the Twenties, he became a sort of patron, tour guide, and host to the whole American émigré set in London and Paris, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and, of course, Allen Tate. He also had contacts with, and introduced Tate to, a strange group of anti-Renaissance Catholics, known as the "Distributists," the heroes of today's Catholic enemies of John Paul II, including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; this group's plan was to reorganize the economy under medieval craft guilds. The two notable figures were Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, who became Agrarian collaborators.
In 1924, an international group of financiers, led by Crowley's one-time host and Yeats' patron, John Quinn of New York, appointed Ford to run their Paris-based, English-language journal, transatlantic review (sic). In this period, Ford's friends included Nina Hamnet of Crowley's Silver Star (A:A) Lodge, who provided housing for himself and his various mistresses. Others were Mary Butts and Cecil Maitland, who interned at Crowley's "Abbey of Thelema" in Sicily; and the author of the stories on which the play and movie Cabaret were based, Christopher Isherwood, who would later become the "spouse" of W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, the Hollywood pal of Aldous Huxley, and a "Gay" rights pioneer.[37]
In the mid-Thirties, the Agrarian/Distributist collaboration centered on an openly pro-Fascist journal, American Review co-edited by Tate and Seward Collins, a Princeton heir, one-time leftist "Secular Humanist" associate of Paul Elmer Moore and that drug-pushing, sex-psychologist Havelock Ellis, who turned Fascist in association with the Distributists.
The period culminated in 1936 with the coordinated publication of the Agrarians' second joint manifesto, Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence, which included essays by the Night Writers as well as Belloc and other Distributists, and William Yandell Elliott's The Need for Constitutional Reform. The latter was summarized and promoted in Who Owns America by Davidson. Who Owns America was co-edited by Tate and Herbert Agar. Agar, who began his collaboration with the Agrarians' fascist American Review based on Tate's invitation to join in making "a Conservative Revolution,"[38] had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1933, and went on, during the Second World War, to found Freedom House, and serve in the Office of War Information propaganda unit. Freedom House remains to this day, a major "quango" (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization) organ of British Empire "Project Democracy" policy in the United States and around the world.
Although Collins and Tate had, prior to 1933, engaged in a rather sterile public war of wits, they joined forces in response to Roosevelt's launching of the New Deal. One of the "ideas" that cemented the relationship, was Collins' recommendation to Tate, that he read The American Heresy by Distributist Christopher Hollis.[39] The idea of the book, similar to Cousin Lytle's "nostalgia for Feudalism" theory of America, which is one that keeps popping up in different ways, is that America was never intended to be a nation, but, rather, a loose federation of independent states, and that the "heresy," introduced by the Whig and Republican parties, and consolidated by Lincoln's Civil War Victory, was to turn the United States into a Nation with high tariffs and industrial progress, which "smashed the Jeffersonian State."
Most of the Agrarian histories attempt to explain the Night Writers' open embrace of Fascism as a result of their ignorance of the ideology which was using them. This, however, just isn't so. In Tate's correspondence negotiating the deal, he pledged the Agrarians to "full support" for European reactionary movements, foreseeing, "Great reactionary changes will mark the next half-century." The deal was sealed during a weekend retreat at the Lytle family farm, Cornsilk, in Alabama, during which Collins talked mostly of his association with the Distributists, including his appreciation for Belloc's anti-semitic work The Jews. Writing of the meeting to Nelson Rockefeller's future publicist, John Peale Bishop, Tate said, "Collins has worked himself into a great froth over the Jews. Let us not discourage him." In the preface to the 1937 edition of that book, prepared during the period of his collaboration with the Agrarians, Belloc praised the Nazi government, writing, "There is no doubt that the Nazi attack [on the Jews] was sincere. Now there are two criticisms to be made of this attitude [of the Nazis]. The first is that the attack made upon the Jews in Germany is neither thorough nor final. The second is that you will not achieve a victory until you have some moral consecration for it. A murder may have some lasting political result if you can ensure the continuance of its effect by the continued prosperity of the murderer, and there is a grave and glaring injustice in the Nazi policy against the Jews." This injustice, Belloc explained, was merely that the Nazis had broken the German Lockean "contract" to permit the Jews full citizenship. The remedy he proposed was a new "contract" which would "legalize" the removal of all citizenship rights from Jews, not only in Germany, but in all non-Jewish nations.[40]
In the first issue, Collins described the Review as a forum for "Revolutionary Conservatives," and promised a "sympathetic exposition" of "Fascist economics." Tate told Collins, "It is the only magazine I've ever read every word of which I was able to agree with." Tate himself wrote in the Review, "I belong to the white race, therefore I intend to support white rule. Lynching is a symptom of weak, inefficient rule; but you can't destroy lynching by fiat or social agitation; lynching will disappear when the white race is satisfied that its supremacy will not be questioned in social crises." Collins, in an article titled, "The Revival of Monarchy," welcomed Hitler as a "monarchical" anti-Communist. He called Mussolini, "the most constructive statesman of our age."[41]
Most Agrarian historians lie that the Night Writers broke with Collins after he made headlines nationally with an interview given to Grace Lumpkin. In fact, only Agar stopped publishing in the American Review as a result, and even he wrote to Tate of Collins, "I think he means well, has lots of good ideas, and is at heart a sweet fellow." Tate and the others kvetched about the bad publicity, but they kept publishing in the magazine until it closed at the end of 1937 and continued cordial relations with Collins. According to the catalogue of Yale's collection of Collins' papers, Cleanth Brooks kept in touch through at least 1939 and John Crowe Ransom through 1945. Here are excerpts from the Lumpkin interview:
Lumpkin: Are you [a fascist]?
Collins: Yes, I am a fascist. I admire Hitler and Mussolini very much. I do not agree with everything they do, but. . . .
Lumpkin: Do you agree with Hitler's persecution of the Jews?
Collins: It is not persecution. The Jews make trouble.
Lumpkin: . . .You wish to do away with all progress?
Collins: Yes.
Lumpkin: And do you wish to have a king and nobles, counts, dukes, etc., in America?
Collins: Yes, exactly!
Lumpkin: You wish to live as people did then?
Collins: Yes, do away with the automobile and go back to the horse.
Lumpkin: You wish to do without conveniences?
Collins: Yes.
Lumpkin: Without bathtubs?
Collins: I never use a bathtub.
Lumpkin: You don't bathe?
Collins: I use a shower. I could rig up a shower.[42]
In addition to re-statements of the old Agrarian themes, Who Owns America embraced Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as allies who must be appeased. The Distributist whom Belloc identified as Spanish Fascist Francisco Franco's leading publicist, Douglas Jerrold, wrote:
The claims, made or implied, of Japan, Italy, Germany, and Poland, to overseas possessions or economic privileges represent only the first proposals for readjustment which the world will have to adopt. . . .
Italy in particular is already on the way to freeing herself from dependence on foreign coal and one of the main aims behind her Abyssinian venture is to free herself from her dependence on American and Egyptian cotton.[43]
This collaboration paved the way for the short-lived "Alliance of Agrarian and Distributist Groups," which was revived after the War as Buckleyite Conservatism.
William Yandell Elliott's book, The Need for Constitutional Reform, written at the point when an urgent mobilization to defeat the British Empire's Fascism was required, rather continued his own life's project, also the intent of his 1932 book, The New British Empire: the destruction of the United States and its re-absorption into the British Empire. This, of course, is the project notoriously continued to this day by Elliott's "Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee" protégés, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.[44] In place of our Constitutional government by the people, Elliott proposed that the United States be broken down into ten or twelve regional blocs, and governed, as is Britain, by a "permanent civil service," rather than by elected officials. He proposed:
A Treasury and a Department of State without permanent civil service secretaries are incredible survivals of the days when amateur administration was possible. An adequate bureaucracy is essential to the functioning of any modern state. At the head of the whole civil service there should be an officer like the British Permanent Secretary for the Treasury, or some other suitable official, probably with us the Director of the Budget. All appointments and promotions should be cleared through him. To each department should be added an advisory committee representative of all the great interests with which it comes into normal contact. . . . A General Economic Advisory Council should be formed from among selected members of these advisers and those of the Federal Reserve System. . . .[45]
Of course, by "amateur," Elliott means "elected," and "great interests" are what in Elliott's beloved Britain are called "Nobility." He went on to play a major role in the re-inventing of the Executive branch of the United States Government after the War. In a continuation of the Cleveland through Wilson Administration "Civil Service" reforms, Elliott and his collaborators have established a host of extra-Constitutional "councils"—National Security, Economic Advisory, Economic Security, Domestic Policy, etc.—which function, just as Elliott proposed, to bring our "nobility" and their lackeys into the government, without benefit of election. This process is illustrated by the service of Elliott's protégé, Kissinger, as, essentially, the unelected Permanent Secretary of the Nixon-Ford Administration. As such, he played a major role in replacing Nixon with Ford without election, through first, hiring the staff that required "plumbing," and then urging Nixon to create the rogue "plumbers' unit" to deal with them. At the termination of Kissinger's reign, the new President, Jimmy Critter, appointed Kissinger's alter ego, Brzezinski as National Security Adviser.
IV. The War and Beyond
Most historians of the Agrarians claim that after 1936, the group returned to "littachah" and dropped their "Agrarian" concerns, but this is a blatant lie. Each of the core members we deal with here, Democrats and Republicans, Pulitzer Prize winners, those who remained in Tennessee and those who re-located to Yale or Harvard, participated in Agrarian organizing against the Constitution of the United States, through Agrarian events and publications, until their deaths. Each of the Agrarians then living, collaborated with the Buckley-supported, openly pro-Ku Klux Klan and anti-American Southern Partisan magazine, which launched a re-birth of the movement in 1979. In 1980, the most "liberal," of them, they say, Robert Penn Warren, wrote "Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back," for The New Yorker on the occasion of the U.S. Congress' and Jimmy Critter's posthumous "exoneration" of the traitor. In it, he maintained the old Agrarian message of 1931: Davis' courageous, statesman-like resistance against the tyrant Lincoln. In 1981, they staged a highly publicized 50th anniversary celebration for I'll Take My Stand at Vanderbilt. In 1985, they publicly celebrated the assassination of Huey Long with help from Louisiana State University, which Long had built, and the Public Broadcasting System. Agrarian disciples continue to publish Southern Partisan, Southern Patriot, Modern Age, Chronicles, and books like Charles Adams' The Case for Southern Secession, with support from Cabinet members and Senators.
After the American Review period, the Night Writers continued to operate in two, related directions, which characterize their activity up till today. First, they vigorously organized for a new Global Empire under the control of Britain, in collaboration with the Wells/Russell British-American-Canadian, foreign policy, intelligence, propaganda, and psychological warfare services, official and unofficial. Secondly, they took over a commanding position in the English-language literary establishment, and a powerful position in historical—especially American History—studies. It is notably typical of this intellectual and moral corruption, that Tate's derivative and partially plagiarized biographies had already won the praise of noted historians Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager.[46] Through both prongs of this offensive, the Agrarians achieved total, direct, intellectual mastery of the post-War Conservative movement in the United States—as typified by the Buckley interests and the later "Religious Right," and their Global anti-Industrialism has been integrated into the so-called "left-liberal" establishment constellation of forces and issues.
As we shall now see, the intention of the Fugitives' "littererah work," the "New Crittercism," was precisely the same as the Godzilla and Little Green Men theology of I'll Take My Stand and God Without Thunder.
The New Critters' Invisible Empire
Before explaining what the "New Crittercism" is, I will paint a brief, partial picture of the extent of the Night Writers' control and influence over our literary and cultural establishment. Those of you with even a superficial relationship to "culture," will recognize some of the names of individuals, institutions, and publications we report on here. But many of you who read this have not read a poem since your school days and have never read a literary critique. What then, you might ask, does a school of literary criticism and its control over cultural institutions have to do with you?
Think of this, as you read on. Most of you watch television, both the so-called news and also the estrangement. Most of you have seen movies. Most read newspapers and magazines. Most of you, and most of your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have studied in schools. You may think you've avoided the problems of schools by "home-schooling," or "charter schools," but isn't this anti-Public Education movement largely led by the "Religious Right," and won't it, in the absence of massive reinvigoration of Public Education, result in something like the old Southern Academy system, with some shadow of real education for Godzilla's friends, and nothing much for the outcasts? Isn't it true that many of the people involved in producing television, movies, magazines, newspapers, and books have attended college? Isn't it true that in order to graduate, and especially to get advanced degrees, they had to at least pretend to think in a way acceptable to their faculties? Do you ever discuss television programs, professional sports events, news stories, or other items produced by these people with your friends? Has the way you think been affected by this?
Think: Is there a special way of viewing the world, a special set of rules about discussing the world, which seems to be acceptable in these "educated" circles? Are there other, formerly accepted, and fully rational ways of thinking, such as those once considered, which are not generally considered "acceptable" today?
Most of you have, at one point or another, been involved, or know someone who's been involved, in a "news-making event," even if only on a local level. Did the news media reports agree with the way you would have reported it? I was struck by the strange ways of the news media through my first direct experience, confirmed by many since, in high school.
I submitted a letter to our local suburban newspaper in about 1966, on the subject of Black Power, which was then being promoted. I wished to make an appeal for the brotherhood of man, as being more important than the formal arguments being made on either side. My letter began something like, "Under the provisions of the Declaration of Independence, Blacks have an absolute right to separate from the rest of this nation." I went on to say that a greater good could be served by forgoing that right. That letter won a $10 weekly prize, but when it appeared in print, the opening read, "Some people believe that the Declaration of Independence. . . ." What I had stated as scientific Truth was turned into a mere Humean statement of "opinion," and not even the opinion of the author, but that of "some people." Isn't that the way of the news media? "Some people say . . . , but others believe. . . ."
Even on the most practical, non-political issues—local zoning issues, for instance—you probably know someone who has made an absolutely solid case before a local council, only to have it reported as "Jack Spratt claimed that . . . , but Councilman Splatt said that, in his opinion. . . ." A close relation of mine tells me that he learned at "Marriage Encounter" sessions never to claim that anything is true. "Always speak of your own feelings, they tell us. Never say, `You insulted me,' say, `I felt insulted by what you said.' No one can argue over your feelings." Have you never heard anyone say, in response to an absolutely solid case, "That's just your opinion. I have mine." Or "Whatevvaah"?
To give you an idea of the plumbing network through which the influence of the New Critters was delivered, I present a brief sketch of their spread through all areas of our cultural life. In 1935 Commander of the Crown of Italy Stark Young's movie, So Red the Rose, about his family's loss of their plantations and slaves, premiered simultaneously in each of the eleven former Confederate state capitals, and was introduced by a national radio broadcast from the Governor of Virginia attending the Richmond screening. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren were named co-editors of the Southern Review, based at Louisiana State University in the state's capital, Baton Rouge. Ford Madox Ford attended the celebrations releasing the first issue, and psychedelic superstar Aldous Huxley contributed an article.
Within several months, Huey Long was killed by the Louisiana social set Warren and Brooks had joined. He was shot by Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, the son of Brooks family physician, Dr. Carl Adam Weiss. The shooting seriously injured Long. The medical treatment that followed killed him. Three weeks earlier, the assassin had treated Cleanth Brooks' foster brother in Brooks' home. Fifty years later, Robert Penn Warren commissioned current Public Broadcasting System superstar, Ken Burns, to produce a film celebrating the assassination, as part of the Agrarians' entertainment for Southern Review's jubilee anniversary party. According to statements by Mrs. Hodding Carter II[47] and others interviewed on that film, the entire Baton Rouge and Louisiana upper crust had been openly clamoring for Long's assassination. She reports that when the shooting was announced, she started shouting, "Where's Hoddin'? Where's Hoddin'?" because she, like each of her friends, thought that her husband might have been the shooter. The aging Warren creaked out, venemously, that Long was a "Mussolini," apparently hoping that no one remembered how fond he and his friends had been of Il Duce at the time.
After the Southern Review was closed during the War, the Critter influence spread like the metastasization of a cancer. Warren and Brooks' joint effort Understanding Poetry, became the leading "Poetry 101" textbook used in America. Brooks finished out his career at the elite Yale University, as, amongst other things, the leading interpreter of novelist William Faulkner's drunken ramblings. He also was appointed for a term as U.S. Cultural Attaché, under James Branch Cabell's cousins, the Bruces, in our London Embassy.
Warren also taught, for a time, at the prestigious Yale Drama School, which continues to serve as one of Hollywood's main training centers, having produced "stars" including Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, and Glenn Close. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, had two Hollywood movies made from his novels (most notoriously, his attack on the murdered Huey Long, All the King's Men, which won three Oscars), and he was named the first "Poet Laureate of the United States." In 1981, Democratic Gov. John Y. Brown of Kentucky arranged to fly Warren in his personal jet to the I'll Take My Stand Fiftieth Anniversary celebrations in Nashville.
The Critters' influence was also spread by protégés who may not have fully embraced the Agrarian cause. PBS "superstar" Ken Burns' fame stems largely from his Civil War series. Warren was so delighted with Burns' work on the fifth assassination of Huey Long (the second, third, and fourth being the book, play, and movie versions of Warren's All the King's Men),[48] that he suggested Burns collaborate with Agrarian historian Shelby Foote on a like-spirited treatment of the Civil War. Though, at first glance, the series may appear to be informative and "balanced," think about it. Does it actually present the truth about the War, "testing," as Lincoln said, "whether this Nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated can long endure?" Or is this Truth buried under interminable soap-opera spinning of the personal stories of people whose life's meaning is, thereby, cheapened by Burns? In the film Foote declared his mystic reverence for the sword of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and in Memphis he publicly opposed a campaign initiated by Lyndon LaRouche to remove Ku Klux Klan founder Albert Pike's statue from Federal land in Washington, D.C.
The assistant at Southern Review, Albert Erskine, became a leading book editor, whose authors included Stark Young's "discovery," Nobel Prize-winning novelist, William Faulkner.[49] Another of Warren's students, noted "bluesiologist" William R. Ferris of the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, was named director of the National Endowment for the Humanities by President Clinton in 1997. One of Davidson's and Brooks' students, Melvin E. Bradford, of whom you will learn more soon, was rejected for the same post during the Reagan Administration. For a time, Agrarian collaborator Dixon Wecter held the coveted and influential—due to the massive publishing industry surrounding it—post of keeper of the secret Mark Twain papers.
Ransom left Vanderbilt University in 1937, for a chair endowed for him at Kenyon College in Ohio by the Mellon family-allied Carnegie Foundation. His going-away party in Nashville was sponsored jointly by Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Saturday Review of Literature, and Poetry, MC'ed by Ford Madox Ford, and attended by much of the Nation's literati. Those who didn't attend, like T.S. Eliot, sent greetings and best wishes. At Kenyon, Ransom established the Kenyon Review and the Kenyon School of English summer session, which, along with his publishing, established him as the leading figure of "The New Criticism." His "honors" included the Bollingen Prize in poetry, which I have more to say about, and a term as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. Two students, who were to become well-known poets on their own, Randall Jarrell of Nashville, and Robert Lowell of the Boston Lowells, nick-named Caligula or Caliban after his manners and grooming, accompanied Ransom to Kenyon. Lowell had been treated by Fugitive psychiatrist Merrill Moore, then at Harvard, who consulted with Ford Madox Ford, and convinced the family to accept consignment to the Fugitives as a course of treatment.
Tate and Lytle each served terms as editor of the Episcopal Church's prestigious Sewanee Review. The traditionalist Episcopal Society for the Book of Common Prayer was founded at Lytle's Monteagle, Tennessee farm, by a committee including not only Lytle, but Brooks and Brooks' friend, the notorious homosexual dope fiend, W.H. Auden. Tate became, at least amongst the literati, one of the best-known poets and critics in America. His friend, T.S. Eliot, praised him as the best poet working in America. He had a variety of academic assignments, most notably at the University of Minnesota, and Godzilla's own Princeton University, where he converted to Catholicism under the sponsorship of medievalist Jacques Maritain, another of Robert Hutchins' friends. The Princeton appointment had been arranged by his life-long friend, and friend of the other Night Writers, Scribner's famed book editor, Maxwell Perkins. He had been close to The New Republic's legendary literary editor, Edmund Wilson, and his successor Malcolm Cowley, a Stalinist, who later edited the popular Viking "Portable" paperback "classic" series. Hart Crane, the mystic, homosexual poet, financially supported by financier Otto Kahn, who killed himself at the age of thirty-two, was another close friend. Tate was also a regular panelist in the 1940s on the CBS Radio program, "Invitation to Learning," along with the Mellon financial agent and friend of Stark Young, Huntington Cairns, Stringfellow Barr, and another life-long friend, the poet, editor, playwright, and critic Mark Van Doren. Van Doren was to be, amongst other things, the teacher of Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as well as the more "mainstream" critic and educator, Lionel Trilling.
After the War, Tate arranged for the Bollingen Foundation—an institution established by financier Paul Mellon specifically to promote the work of psychiatrist Carl Jung in the United States—to offer an annual poetry prize in conjunction with the Library of Congress. The Foundation, incidentally, was named after the Swiss town in which Jung had built his "Tower" getaway from his wife, in which he carried on his adulterous affairs. The prize was first presented in 1949 to Ezra Pound, then resident at St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital in Washington, D.C., for the Pisan Cantos he had written while in United States Army custody, awaiting trial for treason. This travesty was organized by Tate, his friend Archibald MacLeish, the war-time Librarian of Congress, the other Night Writers, and their friends like W.H. Auden. As a result of the controversy surrounding this first award, the Library of Congress withdrew official support, but Bollingen continued the prize, eventually bestowing it on a number of the Night Writers.
In the Fifties, Tate and Cairns, who were both then regulars at Ezra Pound's literary salon at St. Elizabeth's, served on the board of Confluence, a culture magazine edited by Dr. Henry Kissinger at Harvard, under the patronage of William Yandell Elliott. In addition to entertaining his literary friends with goodies like champagne and caviar provided by Cairns, Pound was, at the time, the leader of a Ku Klux Klan "cell," whose leaflets he wrote and whose activity he directed.[50] Cairns' other accomplishments include editing Bollingen's English translations of all of Plato's dialogues.
The Night Writers and their Southern colleagues, including William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Ellen Glasgow, and James Dickey, came to form an important bloc in the professional association for "English" teachers, the Modern Language Association (MLA), and haunt, to this day, its Southern caucus, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA). From 1975 through '77, second generation Agrarian M.E. Bradford was the President of SAMLA. The upcoming, Winter 2001, issue of SAMLA's South Atlantic Review, includes articles on Robert Penn Warren, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, and Ford Madox Ford's co-author Joseph Conrad. The MLA has been in the forefront of setting New York Times style-book type standards, based on Bentham's "uniform and simple" diktat for publishing in the United States.
Recently, both a graduate of the Tennessee school system and an official of the Tennessee Historical Society have complained to me that the state's Civil War History curricula, libraries, museums, and so forth are still dominated by the Agrarians' "damned cult of Nathan Bedford Forrest."
What Is `The New Crittercism'?
Thus, the Night Writers' "New Crittercism" came to dominate American literary training, as well as the outlook of our broadcast and film industry. I remind you, again, to think, as you read this, how that has corrupted your own thinking, and that of your fellow citizens. You should not be surprised to learn that the intention of the Night Writers' school is to use literature and art to destroy human cognitive thinking and replace it with "appetite," which, Ransom explained, in the tradition of Hume, is what we humans share with animals.
To do this, they observed, in their "art," the strict division between Truth and Beauty specified by Hume. On the one hand, they maintained the view that literature and other art, like their fake science, was based on a collection of meaningless rules, rather than on the intention to inspire real thinking. This was totally logical, as follows:
They were able to determine what the rules of good literature were, because these were the rules observed by the good writers. They first, of course, had to determine who the good writers were, by observing which writers followed the good rules.
In discussing these rules, they used terms like "literary merit" and "handsome diction." It's never clear what those things mean, except that they must have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual meaning, moral sense, historical truthfulness, or anything else about a literary work. They also accepted Bentham's injunction that language must be uniform and simple. They hated puns and real metaphor—anything that forced creative thought from the reader. They also hated passion, with a passion. Thus, the Critters who had mobilized after Ezra Pound's indictment for treason, to prove that he was insane and could not be tried, then rallied to have him honored with the first Bollingen Prize in Poetry. Tate defended the Pisan Cantos authored by the poet he insisted was nuts, saying they aren't "about anything. But they are distinguished verse." In his collection of essays, The World's Body, Ransom explains how poetry is to be used as a weapon against science, in favor of "our animal life":
We have elected to know the world through science, but science is only the cognitive department of our animal life, and by it we know the world only as a scheme of abstract conveniences. What we cannot know constitutionally as scientists is the world which is made up of whole and indefeasible objects, and this is the world which poetry recovers for us.[51]
The aesthetic moment appears as a curious moment of suspension:
between the Platonism in us, which is militant, always sciencing and devouring, and a starved inhibited aspiration toward innocence which, if it could only be free, would like to respect and know the object as it might of its own accord reveal itself.
Science gratifies a rational practical impulse and exhibits the minimum of perception. Art gratifies a perceptual impulse and exhibits the minimum of reason.[52]
In a 1926 letter to Tate, he bluntly expressed his preference for the minds of "beasts":
Biologically man is peculiar in that he must record and use his successive experiences; the beasts are not under this necessity; with them the experience is an end in itself, and takes care of itself.[53]
As we saw in his vile dig at Shelley, Ransom hated poets who weren't animals like him. His most famous critical essay, "Shakespeare at Sonnets," was so puerile that even Warren and Brooks hesitated before publishing it in the Southern Review. To just present the flavor of this down-home Rhodes Scholar's tantrum against one of the greatest human minds ever produced, I quote his attack on Shakespeare's Sonnet CVII (Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul/Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.):
The world-soul is a technical concept, I suppose, in the sense that it was of use to Paracelsus and to other theosophists. It indicates a very fine image for some metaphysical poet who will handle it technically: for Donne or another university poet. It is not fit for amateurs. The question is whether Shakespeare's theological touch here is not amateurish; elsewhere it sometimes is, as in Hamlet's famous soliloquy beginning, "To be or not to be."
Also, from "Shakespeare at Sonnets," is an example of the kind of mindless literary rule the Critters insisted on, when it suited them:
If the English sonnet exhibits the rhyme-scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, it imposes upon the poet the following requirement: that he write three co-ordinate quatrains and then a couplet which will relate to the series collectively.
Upon concluding that Shakespeare breaks the rule, rather than throw out the rule, the damned Critter, who, despite all of his titles, never wrote a poem anyone would ever read except to make a grade, called Shakespeare a "careless workman." Following Hume and Locke, Ransom refuses to allow an idea which is independent of a direct sense image. For instance, he takes this fragment from Shakespeare's Sonnet LXXIII:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Ransom understands the idea evoked by Shakespeare, but hates him for stretching the brain with a complex metaphor, writing, "[H]e will not quite risk the power of a single figure but compounds the figures."[54]
So much for what the Critters say about their method. In their own literary work, the method of the Night Writers is to drown you in sensation. Their books are full of smells, sounds, and images. Even when they seem to deal with the workings of the mind, it is not cognition they deal with, but, rather, the experience of a parade of internal sensations. Donald Davidson's complaint to Tate, about Tate's most famous poem, "The Ode to the Confederate Dead," made the case in part with his question, "But Allen, where, are the dead?" Television and Hollywood-type cinema use the same method. The idea is to turn you into an impotent spectator of the world, but, more importantly, of your own mind. Although our movies, like our nation's most recent Presidential election campaign, are filled with lust and gore, they do, as the Critters insist they must, lack passion. In fact, this indifference to violence, perversion, and degradation, seems to be the intention of these productions.
Think, for instance, of the wildly popular television "comedy," Seinfeld, which almost made a religion of merciless indifference. If they get you, you sit, a spectator at the Gorey massacres of the Colosseum, who has witnessed not only the slaughter of Pagans, Christians, and beasts at the whim of a long succession of degenerate Emperors, but has remained immobile in your seat through the centuries, as the arena itself has rotted and decayed around you.
The Night Writers of the Visible Empire
As the "literarah careers" of the Critters took off in the late Thirties, the World War, which the Agrarians had done so much to promote, approached. Elliott and other collaborators became increasingly involved in the Wells-Russell-Huxley efforts to guarantee that the war would wreck industrial civilization, and leave nothing but a global feudalism run by the British. As the foreign and domestic atrocities of the Fascists accelerated, the Night Writers' attempts to promote open sympathy for the cause became increasingly difficult. Once Hitler's invasion of Poland plunged all of Europe into War, they directed their efforts to sabotaging the American war effort from within, while claiming to support it. Their own correspondence during the War is lacking in any passion for the fate of their nation or any other, but focusses, rather, on their literary careers, with some mention of how they might take advantage of the War for advancement.
In 1940, key Agrarians and their friends joined with "left"-leaning One World Government types, in support of Wells' "Open Conspiracy" to use the War to create the "New British Empire." The University of Chicago's President, Bertrand Russell's operative, and decades-long editor of Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Robert Maynard Hutchins, organized a call published as The City of Man: A Declaration of World Democracy by a group loosely called the "Committee on Europe." Its Executive Committee included William Yandell Elliott and the co-editor of Who Owns America, Herbert Agar. Amongst the others were:
- Frank Aydelotte, President of Swarthmore, longtime Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, and associate of longtime Washington Post editor, Felix Morley.
- G.A. Borgese, Italian "anti-Fascist" refugee brought to the University of Chicago by Hutchins, and the son-in-law of Thomas Mann, husband of Elisabeth Mann-Borgese, who became a leader in both the United Nations and the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" cult. All three were friends of KKKatie Meyer Graham, late chairman and publisher of the Washington Post.
- Thomas Mann, the German refugee novelist, whose American career was sponsored by Agnes Meyer of the Lazard Frères, Washington Post family. He was particularly close to Theodore Adorno, who is famous for pioneering work, leading to post-War "popular" music, in the use of sound to destroy mental functioning. He was also the father-in-law of W.H. Auden. His son, Klaus, had an affair with Christopher Isherwood, and his brother Heinrich wrote the novel on which The Blue Angel was based.
- Van Wyck Brooks, a top New England literary figure, among other things a biographer of Mark Twain.
- Christian Gauss, longtime literature professor and Dean of Princeton, who taught Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and recruited Tate to teach there.
- Alvin Johnson, a leader with Agrarian Stark Young of Wells' New Republic/New School for Social Research crowd.
- Lewis Mumford, a follower of the Distributists and one of the founders of Twentieth-Century looney environmentalism.
The book is a naked call for crushing all Nations under the foot of one Godzilla Empire. This is what is now known as "Globalization," as pursued by "Project Democracy" and its confederates. Herbert Agar's Freedom House and Elisabeth Mann-Borgese's Club of Rome and United Nations, are now in the forefront of this drive to establish a World Authority to destroy sovereign nations. The Agrarians' collaborator Julian Huxley was also a top UN official—the first director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).[55] The City of Man was only one of many documents following the general plan of Wells' Open Conspiracy, but since you now know many of the participants, and know their role in collaboration with Hitler and Mussolini, in support of a return to Feudalism, I use that evidence here to demonstrate what the intention of "Globalization" is.
One myth which is destroyed by taking these historical facts into account, is the idea that "Big Government" is an enemy of individual freedom. These apostles of absolute Global Dictatorship, who intend to control every aspect of life—family, church, education, technology, economy—are using that myth to destroy the strength of Nations. They insist that they are doing so, because, as they tell you, apparently trusting that you're too stupid to get the point or too frightened to do anything about it, a properly constituted community of Nations—of the people, by the people, for the people—is the one thing that protects you from them:
England, where modern man first rose to his dignity, still holds out in tragic valor—a bastion in flames. But not even her survival in heroic self-defense would be adequate, without outside help, to the task of reshaping a world; and the alternative of defeat has been ominously intimated by her Premier himself—"until," he said, "in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old."
To this expiation by tyranny, now already an accomplished fact over a large expanse of the world, we oppose the ancient dream of man, which we deem imperishable. In an era of Apocalypse we call for a Millennium. Universal peace can be founded only on the unity of man under one law and one government. . . . Therefore the City of Man must be much more than a League of Nations or a coalescence of continents. It must be the Nation of Man embodied in the Universal State, the State of States.
But it remains for all men of good will to make the interval of preparation as short as possible, until the day comes when the heresy of nationalism is conquered and the absurd architecture of the present world is finally dismantled. Then, above the teeming, manifold life of free communities rising from the natural conditions of each one's soil and work, there will be a Universal Parliament, representing people, not states—a fundamental body of law prevailing throughout the planet in all those matters that involve interregional interests; an elected president, the President of Mankind—no crowned emperor, no hereditary king—embodying for a limited term the common authority and the common law; and a federal force ready to strike at anarchy and felony.
If that sounds almost good to you, the Committee now proceeds to set the hook:
But the fundamental principle is that the democratic concept of freedom can never include the freedom to destroy democracy and freedom. . . .
In an interpretation suited to the modernist or post-modernist mind, the spirit which Christ called the Holy Ghost. In its ultimate sacredness He set a limit to all tolerance and charity. "Wherefore I say unto you, all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men."
. . .This common creed already exists; towards its luminous center all higher minds already point. . . . It teaches that a divine intention governs the universe—be it called God or Deity or the Holy Ghost or the Absolute or Logos or even Evolution. The direction of this intention is from matter to life and from life to spirit, from chaos to order, from blind strife and random impulse to conscience and moral law, from darkness to light.
It teaches that in the universe we know the human species is the spearhead of the divine intention. . . . It teaches that man's growth or progress or evolution is not backward, toward the savagery of the superman or the gleam of the beast of prey, but forward, toward the radiance of the angel. It teaches that if the divine intention is to be fulfilled, the pursuit of the good, under the inspiration of faith, hope, and charity, must imply resistance to evil, with battle when necessary. . . .
The factory, in whose self-contained despotism Fascism found an early blueprint of world-wide regimentation, must be no longer the penitentiary of the outcast, the Bastille of the proletariat. . . . The youth of the nations, enlisted for a limited term, should learn in federal factories, in public works, on communal farms, the skill of production in patience rather than the craft of destruction in terror. . . .
They close with an appeal to "Americanism," but the Committee's "Americanism" is no more American than is Bertrand Russell's "science" which Ransom had tried to pass as such, no more than Emerson's re-touched Kantianism. Is it anything but yoking America to pull the Empire's chariot of doom?
. . .There must be a New Testament of Americanism, which will voice the commandments that have arisen from this age of denial and ruin, from America's desertion of the League of Nations to the cataclysm of 1940.
Union was proposed by the British Government to France, later than at the eleventh hour. But the offer, futile in the death-agony of republican France, remains a mere ideal milestone on the slow path of man toward the consciousness that the era of the nations is over and that unity will be achieved in the spirit of Evil if the spirit of Good is not good enough. . . .
Here—more precious than all the gold in Kentucky—the treasure of English culture is guarded, as Hellenism was preserved in Rome; and along with it the treasure and essence of all human cultures. . . . For here, and almost nowhere else, is man granted the right and duty of being Christian and human.
Ask yourself what they mean when they say, "know what limits are set," or "pruning the tree of freedom." Their heirs claim to revere family, community, education, and Church, but do they intend that any institution shall escape enslavement to their Global Theocracy?
The primary groups of family, educational association, neighborhood, and church—each of them with its specific attributes and all of them with their combined contributions to the general purpose—must be restored in new forms with new life. This is tantamount to stating that a constitutional reform of democracy cannot be founded but on the spirit of a new religion . . . [regarding] the relations between the community as a whole and the separate churches. [We require] definite tenets embodying the universal religion of Democracy, which shall underlie each and all of them. For virtually all of them have meddled in the anarchy of the nations and bowed to the powers that be. . . . Therefore the hour has struck when we must know what limits are set by the religion of freedom, which is democracy, to the freedom of worship, and of what God we talk when we repeat, from the Gettysburg Address, that "this nation," and with this nation the world, "must have a new birth of freedom under God."
The pruning of this tree of freedom will not make it less fruitful. The organization of learning, with colleges and universities at the top of its structure, has built and builds the preparatory ground where democratic aristocracies are trained for leadership. But no aristocracy or leadership can subsist without a firm footing in inflexible principles and unshakable values. A reorientation of education and a supervision of its aims should be undertaken from this angle.
Wilson's "program of the world's peace" cannot be enforced . . . with judges but no sheriffs. . . . Therefore, that program, the only possible program as we see it . . . is a universal law first promulgated to all humanity, entrusted to the good will of those groups and communities that are progressively disposed to adopt it, then enforced on the rebels, finally to become the common peace and freedom of all the peoples of the earth.[56]
So, you see, this Wellsian crew dropped the openly "pro-Confederate" flavor of Agrarianism, but retained the hatred of Nation-States, of cognition, of science, of industrialism, of real religion and of public education, and the love of the British Empire, of Godzilla Religion, of environmentalism, and of "aristocracies" which, otherwise, characterize the type. They fly the flag, "Democracy," over their hideous plan for "inflexible," "unshakable" control of all "principles" and all "values." When they speak of "peace," you should think of H.G. Wells' "Gas of Peace," which was used in Things to Come, to obliterate all opposition to his New Empire.
The War, thanks to the fallen Roosevelt and his Generals, ended decades short of H.G. Wells' hoped-for thirty years, and failed to entirely wipe out Nations. Nonetheless, the Committee and their collaborators pressed ahead with their crusade. Borgese, and Dr. Richard P. McKeon of Hutchins' University of Chicago, founded the "Committee to Frame a World Constitution" in 1946. Other members in 1947 were Mortimer J. Adler, who had moved from Hutchins' side to Harvard; Wilburg G. Katz, University of Chicago Law School; James M. Landis, Harvard Law; Charles H. McIlwain, Harvard and Union Theological Seminary; Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Board; Albert Leon Guerard, Stanford University; Erich Kahler, New School for Social Research; Stringfellow Barr, then President of St. John's; and Harold A. Innis, University of Toronto. As we mentioned before, Barr was to serve later as President of the Foundation for World Government, and as a fellow for Hutchins' Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Borgese went on to her UN and Club of Rome career, and Thomas Mann went to Hollywood, where he relived old days and ways with Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and others of our cast resident there, where they were occasionally joined by Robert Penn Warren and other relevant visitors.
Thus, the whole "liberal," "World Federalist" phenomenon, including the not necessarily "liberal" Globalization, is a slight variation on the theme, "pro-Confederate Agrarianism."
Cleanth Brooks and the Confederate Yankee
After the Second World War, the Critters, beyond their strictly "literarah" work, got involved in three related and overlapping sorts of political activity. As we've indicated, the purest strain of the Agrarian/Distributist infection produced the epidemic of the post-War "Conservative Revolution." Another strain was the "World Federalist" and Globalizing current we've described. The third was the closely related involvement of, especially, Elliott's Agrarian protégés, in the "Eastern Establishment" reorganization of the U.S. Government strategic and international policy.
First, examine the spread of the virus in its pure form. Cleanth Brooks left Louisiana State University for New Haven, Connecticut's Yale University. That is where Brooks, a life-long Democrat, who supported William Jefferson Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign, made the contacts which were to shape the Conservative movement of the past half-century as a revival, expansion, and continuation of the Agrarian/Distributist/Fascist alliance of the Thirties. He met William F. Buckley, Senior and Junior, there, and all of the Buckley brothers and sisters. The initial Buckley family contact was through William F.'s younger brother, F. Reid, who was to live much of his life in Spain as a Carlist sympathizer, and Willmoore Kendall, who had taught with Brooks at LSU and then moved to Yale at the same time as Brooks, and whose career included psychological warfare assignments for the military and the CIA, for which he called on Brooks and Warren as consultants.
This association merged Buckley family oil-money, intelligence community, apostate Communist, and anti-Renaissance Catholic contacts, most notably the so-called "Carlist" partisans of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy and the allied Habsburg Imperial revivalists, with the Nashville Agrarians, to produce what we now know as the Gingrichites, the Religious Right, and so on.
The first major job Buckley recruited these and others of the Agrarian tribe to was support for the "McCarthyite" witch-hunts of the early fifties. This "pruning of the tree of freedom," along with the hedonism of the Huxley-inspired Beat and later hippie movements, and the shocks of the Kennedy and other assassinations and the Vietnam War, softened Americans to retreat, during the last thirty-five years, from the high point of Roosevelt's war leadership, into the anti-cognitive sloth of the "rock-sex-drug, back-to-nature" counterculture and the "Southern Strategy." Buckley's first major organization, the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, now known as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, was founded for that purpose in 1953, and he hired Agrarians to be its "idea" men. To this day, its publications and programs are dominated by the Night Writers, and from this base they have become the key "intellectual" leaders of post-War American Conservatism.
The leader of this next Agrarian generation was Richard M. Weaver of Weaverville, North Carolina, a son of "dirt poor" North Carolina gentry. He was a socialist, of some sort, at the University of Kentucky, when I'll Take My Stand was published. He was so taken with it that he enrolled in a fellowship program under John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt. After Vanderbilt, he got his doctorate from Louisiana State University with Brooks and Warren. His thesis was later published as The Southern Tradition at Bay (STAB). Since his ideas stray little from those of the elder Night Writers, I provide only this quote from STAB, which demonstrates agreement with Master Ransom's and Carl Jung's Godzilla counter-revolution against religion:
[T]he Southerner wanted the older religiousness of dreams and drunkenness—something akin to the rituals of the Medieval Church, and to the Eleusinian mysteries of the ancients.
From Vanderbilt, he went to lecture at Hutchins' University of Chicago, where he published Ideas Have Consequences. This book impressed an East Lansing, Michigan bookstore owner, who described himself later as a "Conservative Bohemian," named Russell Kirk. Kirk, the scion of a Mecosta, Michigan spiritualist family, invited Weaver to speak in East Lansing, which began a life-long association between the two. These two, along with Kendall, and some others, quickly took over the "intellectual" work for Buckley's operations, and related "Conservative" institutions. Later, second-generation Agrarian Melvin E. Bradford was moved into top-level positions in the same apparat. In the sixties, Kendall, Bradford, and an ardent Monarchist and Carlist, Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, were all together at the University of Dallas. UD had been founded by Buckley's crowd, in 1956, as a center for Godzilla Catholicism, which worked closely with the "Protestant" Fundamentalist center, the Dallas Theological Seminary. Wilhelmsen told me that it, and its Cistercian Abbey, have served as part of the Buckley apparat, and also a home away from home for the Archduke and would-be Holy Roman Emperor Otto von Habsburg, who, despite his missing crown, does control immense wealth and power. In 1968, Buckley's Intercollegiate Studies Institute sponsored a "Southern Literary Festival" there, which featured a re-union of the remaining Agrarians, including Ransom, whose God Without Thunder program was the same as the University's mission. Today, the University of Dallas' web-site, which seems to offer courses of study such as "how to be a Habsburg vassal," "reviving the Crusades," and "crushing the nation," declares, on its "Rome Campus" page, above an homoerotic photograph of an obelisk and two cupolas, "We are all of us still, in a sense, as T.S. Eliot has said, citizens of the Roman Empire" (www.udallas.edu/rome/Romapage.html).
Kirk founded the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's journal, Modern Age, and Weaver, Kendall, Bradford, and Wilhelmsen also contributed to it. Kendall and Kirk had leading positions at Buckley's flagship National Review, and the others contributed to it. Kirk also held positions with the Heritage Foundation, and was the founding president of the Rockford Institute and founding editor of its journal, Chronicles. Heritage, of course, is one of the most powerful Conservative "think-tanks" in the nation, deserving of much greater notoriety than what it earned by hosting the "orientation" of Newt Gingrich's famous Headless Hordes of the Congressional class of '94.
In 1979, Kirk, Bradford, Wilhelmsen, Andrew Nelson Lytle, F. Reid Buckley, Kirk's protégé Thomas Fleming, and others, largely associated with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, founded the Southern Partisan, which functions, to this day, as a rallying point for the revival of the Confederacy and the legacy of the Nashville Agrarians. As we said, alongside the glowing interviews given by "respectable" conservatives, including current Attorney General John Ashcroft, and "moderate" Night Writers like Cleanth Brooks, it has praised Lytle's Critter Company as literature on a par with Homer, and re-printed Frank Lawrence Owsley's blood-curdling defense of slavery and lynching from I'll Take My Stand. Other figures associated with this journal of treason include:
Sam Francis of the Heritage Foundation and Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Former aide to Senator John East (also a friend of Southern Partisan) of North Carolina.
Murray Rothbard of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Mont Pelerin Society, and the National Taxpayers Union.
Llewellyn Rockwell of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Patrick J. Buchanan, columnist, TV personality, and sometime Presidential candidate.
Eugene Genovese, Marxist academic who supports the idea that slavery is better than capitalism.
Charles Adams of the National Taxpayers Union, author of The Case for Southern Secession, a recent, dumbed-down entry of the American Heresy genre.
The Mont Pelerin Society is the most powerful promoter in the world today of the Free Market Voodoo Economics cult of Greed of the "Southern Strategy," which you now recognize as John Locke's government of, by, and for Property, having produced, amongst other things, notorious University of Chicago ding-bat, Milton Friedman. It is closely associated with the memory of founder Friedrich von Hayek, whose famous work, The Road to Serfdom, was published by Hutchins' University of Chicago. The Ludwig von Mises Institute, named for von Hayek's "Austrian School" disciple, and the National Taxpayers Union, better renamed the "Tax Dodgers," are closely related. Boy George's "I'm gonna cut your taxes so you can pay Big Daddy's energy companies," is the sort of thing they're responsible for. Somehow their Lockean slogans, "privatization," "deregulation," and "shareholder value," have become so powerful that even in the face of massive, genocidal failure, as in the California energy price-gouging and KKKatie Graham's shut down of D.C. General Hospital, opponents of these "property first" policies dare not attack the whole murderous idea, but meekly speak of "problems" with deregulation here or privatization there, and the need to avoid these "problems" while proceeding full-steam ahead with the program.
Fleming has now left Southern Partisan to succeed Kirk as both President of the Rockford Institute and editor of Chronicles. He is also on the board of the Southern League and edits its journal, Southern Patriot. The Southern League is agitating for a new Confederacy, the maintenance of the Stars and Bars, and the construction of Nathan Bedford Forrest and other pro-Confederate monuments throughout the South. Under Fleming, both the League and Rockford have forged alliances with "indigenous" and "separatist" enemies of nations around the world.[57]
Wilhelmsen was one of the founders of another Godzilla Catholic institution, Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia, which has served as a Washington, D.C.-area bastion for Distributist type enemies of Pope John Paul II and his concerns. Its student lounge is named "Chester-Belloc" after the Agrarians' collaborators, Nazi sympathizers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Not surprisingly, Buckley's Carlist, sometime CIA brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, is also involved in that one.
One of the leading book publishers for this movement is Henry Regnery. Regnery Publishing was founded at the close of World War II, under the patronage of Robert Maynard Hutchins by Henry Regnery and former Washington Post editor, Felix Morley.
These recent generations of dumbed-down Night Writers have few new "ideas," but I'll briefly mention one of Bradford's contributions to Modern Age, "On Remembering Who We Are."[58] I read it in the early Eighties, having been somewhat astonished and amused by my first encounter with Southern Partisan among the Washington, D.C. Buckleyites. Bradford wasn't just whistling "Dixie," but had an elaborate philosophical argument against nations like ours, and in favor of Empires like Rome. It was published at about the time President Reagan nominated him to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. In it, he attacks the United States Constitution because it is a creation of "principles derived from a definition of men . . . as vessels of reason," and makes a case for what he calls "natural" republics. The examples of "natural" republics he cites are Rome, and the Serenissima Republic of Venice, for a thousand years the loan shark capital of the world. That is the Venice infamous for the secret execution orders of the Council of Ten, the Bravo's stiletto, and the corpses silently slid into the ooze of its Romantic sewage-stinking canals, whose government Verdi identified in the opera I Due Foscari, with the slogan, silencio, myster. His list includes the United Brotherhood of the Netherlands, and the Nazis' beloved Thule. These republics he praised for being composed of "men and women who are of one heritage, one blood, and one religion," who tolerate outsiders as subjects, not citizens, just as Belloc had proposed "Christian" nations should treat Jews.
So, the Gingrichite Conservative Revolution which gave us Yahoo hero Boy George and his Black Sheet coup is nothing but the continuation—with little change, because that's the way they likes it—of the ideas of the old, bestial, Nazi-sympathizing Agrarian/Distributist alliance.
Covering National Security
While those Critters who continued to openly identify with their gurus served the Empire faction from the leadership of the forces of "Conservative Revolution," William Yandell Elliott's protégés and others operated to the same effect from within what is sometimes called the "Eastern Liberal Establishment," while nonetheless maintaining relations with their White Sheeted comrades. For the more than half-century since the end of the Second World War, the main issue confronting us is whether Franklin Roosevelt's plan to replace "Economic Royalism" and "Eighteenth-Century" British Empire methods, with an American-led community of equal, sovereign Nation-States, would succeed. The Critters were determined that it should fail.
William Yandell Elliott's role in creating Dr. Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski at Harvard University, today's premier training institution of America's Establishment elite, is only the leading example of this. As you read this section, keep in mind Elliott's heartfelt appreciation for the "wisdom" he imbibed from Rosicrucian kook, Sidney Mttron Hirsch. When you see or hear Elliott's intellectual grand-children and grand-nephews such as Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, imagine Hirsch's "epic examplars," the Little Green Men, pulling the strings of their minds, as you watch their mouths move and hear the words come out. Suddenly you will understand why the world they talk about seems to have nothing to do with the one we live in. Perhaps, you will start figuring out how to free our Universe, the only real one, from the reign of such unearthly creatures as these monsters.
Kissinger was Elliott's leading protégé, assistant, and right-hand man from 1946 until Elliott left Harvard in 1963. His duties included assisting Elliott in preparing Harvard's standard textbook, Western Political Heritage. This became the main "source" book for training each Harvard freshman in Hirsch's "Epic Examplars" view of History. Following dozens of excerpts selected out of 25 centuries of philosophy and political science, the text concludes with a somewhat moderated call by, apparently, the greatest of them all, William Yandell Elliott, for a Global Godzilla Empire. The dimension added to this call, after the War, by the whole Wells-Russell crew, including Elliott, was that the danger of Nuclear War made global control of industry (which these Yahoos always wanted anyway) an urgent necessity.
Kissinger's work with the Rockefeller Foundation, "Caliban" Lowell's cousin, Harvard's McGeorge Bundy, John J. McCloy, and others in establishing the "Mutually Assured Destruction" doctrine and its corollaries, is fairly well known, as is his work, for Elliott, on the Harvard Summer School International Seminars, which brought him into contact with leading figures from around the world. What is less widely known, is that throughout this period, Kissinger was trying to fit in as a good ole' Critter.
In the early Fifties, Elliott arranged for Kissinger to edit a "culture" magazine, Confluence, which published the works of the Night Writers and their circle. His co-editors, Allen Tate and Huntington Cairns, were both then regulars at Fascist propagandist Ezra Pound's salon at St. Elizabeth's political asylum for the "addled discreetly put away." As director of the Summer Seminars, Sir Henry worked with Critter Andrew Nelson Lytle, who chaired its Humanities division in 1954, and again with Tate during the Summer of 1959. I have not discovered whether Kissinger, who served in that period as Elliott's aide-de-camp, accompanied his mentor to the Rockefeller-funded "Fugitives Reunion at Vanderbilt," in 1956, but in tape-recorded remarks to that gathering, Elliott said he brought the Fugitives to Harvard on a number of occasions for poetry events. Presumably the editor of Confluence would have been involved.
Just as Elliott acknowledged his spiritual debt to his master, Hirsch, Dr. (now, "Sir") Henry Kissinger, dedicated his 1957 book, A World Restored to "Professor William Y. Elliott, to whom I owe more, both intellectually and humanly, than I can ever repay." Kissinger's debt to the Empire's Night Writers was, otherwise, acknowledged in his famous May 10, 1982 statement to the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, where, as part of the organizing for "Project Democracy," he declared his loyalty to the Empire, and his treachery against the American Intellectual Tradition as follows:
Many American leaders condemned Churchill as needlessly obsessed with power politics, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too colonialist . . . , and too little interested in building the fundamentally new international order towards which American idealism has always tended. The dispute was resolved according to American preferences—in my view, to the detriment of postwar security.
Fortunately, Britain had a decisive influence over America's rapid awakening to maturity in the years following.
In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department.[59]
The following year, Night Writer Robert Penn Warren was one of three Rhodes Scholars specially honored at Oxford's eightieth anniversary celebration of the Scholarships. Queen Elizabeth II made a point of engaging him in private discussion, by-passing other notables in attendance, including then-Governor of Arkansas, William Jefferson Clinton.
Making Us the Enemy
One most pernicious effect of the Night Writer disease, is that "Americanism," as they and we understand it—a passion for strong Nation-States dedicated to the Common Good, through fostering Man's role in the image of God—has been made into the "enemy image" for the United States intelligence and foreign policy establishments. Seeking out and destroying this "enemy" is the mission of "Project Democracy," established in 1982 to fund a network of "quangos," including arms of both the Democratic and Republican parties, the trade union movement, and the Chamber of Commerce, with the openly declared intention of interfering in politics in ways the official CIA was then prohibited from doing. The replacement of elected popular leaders in a dozen or more "developing" nations with Elliott-style international "permanent" bureaucrats, under the banner of Global "Democracy," is this outfit's stock-in-trade.
Although there is probably more that we don't know about it than what we do, the Critters, "liberal" and "conservative," have been incorporated into these "intelligence" operations.
Allen Tate, who was friendly, during the War, with Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, wrote to Lytle, stating that he wanted to get a job in Intelligence, and met with the forerunner of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. MacLeish's duties, reportedly, involved various "information" assignments beyond mere librarian duty. Prior to his "Librarian" job, he had been a close friend and travelling companion of War-time Fascist agent Ezra Pound, and had collaborated with Pound, later CIA top official James Jesus Angleton, and later National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, in producing a Yale literary magazine, Furioso. Afterwards, he was an Assistant Secretary of State, who cooperated with Night Writer soul-mate Julian Huxley in setting up UNESCO, and also participated in various "Intelligence"-linked cultural activities. He was involved, for instance, in John Train's Paris Review in the fifties. Train was from a top Wall Street family, the brother of the Republican Club of Rome kook Russell Train, but he set up Paris Review as a sort of successor to Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review, to promote the works of Aldous Huxley and other counterculture heroes from Paris.
Thirty years later, Train was to host a series of "salons" which brought together news media types with State and Federal prosecutors, the Anti-Defamation League, and others, with the intention to railroad Lyndon LaRouche to prison and destroy his organization. In 1983, Elliott's protégé Henry Kissinger and Center for Strategic and International Studies Director David Abshire, arranged for President Reagan's Foreign Intelligence Advisery Board (PFIAB), to officially declare Lyndon LaRouche a foreign security threat, which "legitimized" his illegal prosecution and imprisonment under Reagan's Executive Order 12333. The support for Kissinger's demand came from notable sources including Washington Post publisher Katharine Meyer Graham's attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, and Freedom House. All of the principal Justice Department and related operations against LaRouche and his associates, from that time to the present, have been the fruit of that January 1983 action, at the instigation of Edward Bennett Williams, on behalf of Kissinger.
Although we don't know that Tate ever officially joined OSS, we do know that he met a young woman, Eleanor Phelps Clark, who was employed there, first at the French, and later the Italian desk. Tate introduced Clark to Robert Penn Warren, and they married some years later. Although Clark's official duties at OSS were behind desks, immediately before the War she had been a leader in Leon Trotsky's Fourth International, who had served on Trotsky's staff in Mexico at the time of his assassination. Warren himself had visited Italy twice in the years immediately before the War. The reasons given for these visits do not explain why he remained there dangerously past the October 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland. In 1964, Warren wrote an apparently autobiographical novel, Flood, about a Nashville and Ivy League writer hired by an "ex-OSS" man.[60]
In 1952, Tate travelled, along with Stark Young's discovery, William Faulkner, then a Nobel Prize-winning drunk, on an international tour for an acknowledged CIA "proprietary," the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Robert Penn Warren had been invited to accompany them, but did not. The CCF had been founded at a major conference in Berlin in 1950, under the sponsorship of Katharine Graham's friend at the CIA, Frank Wisner, and Pragmatist John Dewey's "reformed" Bukharinite Communist protégé, Sidney Hook. Its stated purpose was to attract people in "the arts" away from Communism toward whatever it was.
The honorary sponsors of the Berlin conference included Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Allen Tate's sponsor in the Catholic Church, Jacques Maritain. The participants included Buckley associate James Burnham, Night Writer colleague Tennessee Williams, and later long-term head of the AFL-CIO's International Division, Irving Brown.[61] Brown's "International Division" remains, to this day, one of the major "quango" spy fronts. It is, amongst other things, the largest single recipient of money from "Project Democracy," which was established in 1982, pursuant to Ronald Reagan's pledge to the British Parliament the previous year, to replace activities like CCF, which the CIA was no longer permitted to fund.[62] The later Agrarian-allied operation, Christendom College, was established on land purchased from Brown's "George Meany Center" in Front Royal, Virginia, and featured CIA personnel, including Buckley's brother-in-law Brent Bozell and former Deputy Director Vernon Walters.
In 1962, the forces of what was to become known as the "Southern Strategy," initiated several institutions to formulate policy, and shape the ideas behind policymaking. These included two closely related, largely Catholic and Southern think-tanks in Washington, D.C., the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the American Enterprise Institute. After their respective periods of government disservice, both of Elliott's protégés, Jimmy Critter's National Security Adviser, Brzezinski, and the Nixon-Ford National Security Adviser, Secretary of State, and, in effect, Prime Minister, Kissinger, joined CSIS, with which they remain associated to this day. It was under the auspices of CSIS and the "Military Reform Caucus" of the Congress, that Atlanta's Conservative Revolutionary, Newt Gingrich, and the Harvard- and Vanderbilt-trained Mother Earth cultist, sometime Congressman and Senator from Grand Ole' Nashville, later Vice-President of the United States, Al Gore, joined with various Democrats and Republicans, including the first Bush's National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, to formulate the post-Cold War Imperial military policy later implemented in Panama, Iraq, Bosnia, and elsewhere, by Colin Powell and others.
Think of Jonathan Edwards' myth of nations cursed or blessed by God, and Elliott's and Agar's "pruning of the tree of freedom," as I present you my personal recollection of one-time Undersecretary of Defense Robert Komer explaining the policy at an early '80s CSIS seminar, as one of "horses and rabbits."
The United States and allied industrial powers were to be the "horses" who would ride above the battle and rain down destruction with no risk to themselves, while their less fortunate "allies" from lesser-developed nations were the rabbits—fighting and dying on the ground. In the same period, in the basement of the State Department, I heard Brzezinski explain to a crowd of hundreds, including Afghan freedom fighter "rabbits," assembled under the auspices of "Project Democracy," that the United States must back them sufficiently to keep them in the field fighting, but not so that they might win.
I also recall one of many meetings I had on Capitol Hill with Dr. Victor Fediay, an advisor to Southern Partisan Senator Jesse Helms and other Night Writer-allied institutions, in which Fediay exclaimed, "We have these Mujahideen [Muslim freedom fighters] ready to bleed and die for us. I don't understand why we don't use them more!"
Otherwise, Gingrich and Gore collaborated in two of the nuttiest operations around. Both of them were outgrowths of the Wellsian "futurology" movement, and both are deeply tied to the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" cult of Elisabeth Mann-Borgese and others. These were the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future and the World Futures Society. These institutions were crawling with Little Green Men—New Age spiritualism, psychedelic drug promotion, "human potential" fads, and Pentagon-related Rand Corporation-type prediction and analysis operations. They claimed, essentially, to have invented the future. Of course, in one sense, they did believe they had invented the future; but, they overlook the name of the institutions which had invented them. What came out was not their invention and it was not, and never will be, the future.
What they did, in concert with the curious Alvin Toffler, was to take the Night Writers' dream and our nightmare, that creative thought was forever banned, and make that the fundamental assumption about the future. Having done that, they created computerized algorithms and so on, which proved, based on the programmed-in assumption that no new idea would ever occur, that the future was a disaster, and that the only hope we have is to kill everyone. Of course they don't, necessarily, in all cases, say "kill everyone"; they, more often, speak of "limits." Limit growth, limit consumption of energy, water, food. Limit production of everything. They even claimed, sometimes, that some people would be permitted to live.
Jimmy Critter's energy adviser, Dennis Hayes, for instance, produced a pamphlet, using their "Systems Analysis" methods, to prove that people could cut energy consumption in half without reducing their living standards, through measures like eating fifty pounds of kelp (seaweed) instead of getting the same protein content from one pound of meat.
A New Birth of Freedom
So, here we are. Our news and entertainment media, educational institutions, and the political factions they promote, including our Foreign Policy and Intelligence establishments, almost universally accept some package of varieties of the Agrarian program—hatred of cognition and science, hatred of sovereign Nation-States dedicated to the General Welfare, embrace of globalism, the suppression of science and technology, and other manifestations of human cognition, in favor of animal-like existence, and pleasure in drugged or kindred states of wild irrationalism. By tolerating, and in many cases embracing, this, our citizens have permitted the Year 2000 "Project Democracy"-style Gorey mess and Black Sheet coup to install our own brain-dead Hitler in the White House.
It may take some more thinking, some re-reading, some reflection on your own experiences, maybe even some checking on your own into the history I've reported here, but if I've done my job, you now have the vaccine. All human beings have been endowed with the capacity for real creativity. What you now know is that some people, fortunately a rather small, biologically and intellectually in-bred, multi-generational clique of degenerates, don't like that. Furthermore, you know that they have, to a large extent, controlled the various ways in which we are taught to think, largely by controlling the fundamental, unconscious beliefs, which are the basis for our judgments. To do this, they permit certain things to be published, released as movies, taught in schools, and so on, and others not to be. They can get awfully nasty—lynchings, assassinations, frame-ups, firings, slanders, and so on, with those who don't know their place. But that's not much of a threat anymore, because Boy George, KKKatie Graham, and the other Wall Street, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Vanderbilt, and Sewanee Critters have no plan now, in any case, but the Global "pruning of the tree of Freedom" and that will cost not only freedom, but most of our lives.
You may protest, "Nobody tells me how to think," and that is partly true. For the most part, nobody does. They don't have to. Most of us, unfortunately, most of the time, just think the way Lola wants us to, as if it were "natchal." Now you have been told, and should know, that it is not natural. You now know that that scent from Lola's corpse is putrefaction, not perfume, so why not re-bury the Lost Corpse for good, and have fun figuring out how to revitalize this planet, building on that "American Intellectual Tradition," which Henry Kissinger stated, in London, on May 10, 1982, that he has attempted to destroy, but which has been the source of all of our republics' true victories, to date?
[1] "Southern Strategy: Assault on the American Republic," EIR, Jan. 1, 2001.
[2] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., The Economics of the Noösphere (Washington, D.C.: EIR News Service, 2001); , "V.I. Vernadsky and the Transformation of the Biosphere," EIR, July 27, 2001.
[3] Helga Zepp-LaRouche's Address to the Schiller Institute conference, at Bad Schwalbach, Germany, on May 6, 2001, which has been published as "Nicolaus of Cusa, Towering Genius of the Renaissance," Fidelio, Summer 2001; and "Honoring Nicolaus of Cusa: A Dialogue of Cultures," EIR, July 6, 2001.
[4] In referring to the two branches of the nearly 1,000-year-old Habsburg dynasty, I use "Habsburg" for the German/Austrian branch, and "Hapsburg" for the Spanish branch, starting with Carlos V, descended from Emperor Maximilian I's son Philip the Handsome and Fernando and Isabella's daughter, Juana the Mad.
[5] For a detailed treatment of this process, see H. Graham Lowry, How the Nation Was Won: America's Untold Story (Washington, D.C.: EIR News Service, 1988).
[6] Although it has been argued that the founding of the United States involved a political movement without an associated cultural Renaissance, the United States was the cutting edge of the great Leibnizian revolutions in politics, music, mathematics, and physics of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. This story remains to be told in full, but study Philip Valenti and Anton Chaitkin, "The Anti-Newtonian Roots of the American Revolution," EIR, Dec. 1, 1995; and two articles in Fidelio, Summer 1999: David Shavin, "Philosophical Vignettes from the Life of Moses Mendelssohn," p. 29, and Steven P. Meyer, "Moses Mendelssohn and the Bach Tradition," p. 46.
[7] Benjamin Franklin, "Letter to Ezra Stiles," March 9, 1790, from A Benjamin Franklin Reader, edited by Nathan G. Goodman, (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1971), p. 244. In the same letter, Franklin said of his views on the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, "I do not dogmatize," which well captures his view, the American Tradition, regarding all sectarian questions of religious doctrine.
[8] Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America: From Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman (Washington, D.C.: EIR News Service, 1998).
[9] One of the mind-deadening legacies of the Romantic school of poetry and the "New Critter" school we report on here, is the mood of wistfully earnest sincerity with which poetry is nearly always mis-recited and thought to have been composed. Try reading Keats' "Ode" with the sense of ironical good cheer which is the hallmark of all Classical composition.
[10] Bruce Director and Jonathan Tennenbaum, "How Gauss Determined the Orbit of Ceres," Fidelio, Summer 1998.
[11] J.C. Lester and D.L. Wilson, Ku Klux Klan: Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment, with Introduction and Notes by Walter L. Fleming (New York: The Neale Publishing Co., 1905).
[12] Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Prepared for the Supreme Council of the Thirty-Third Degree for the Southern Jurisdiction of the United States, and Published by Its Authority (Charleston, S.C.: 1871).
[13] Stephanie Ezrol and Stanley Ezrol, "Was Mark Twain a Satanic Pedophile?" New Federalist, Jan. 12, 1990. That article focusses on Twain's later, darkly Satanic, writings, but even his less blood-curdling children's books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, are fully in the tradition of Emerson's hostility to Classical culture and real cognition. His "lovable" child heroes explicitly endorse Satan as their ally, amongst other things, in their flight from their studies.
[14] Stuart Rosenblatt, "Southern Strategy 1: Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Party's Legacy of Shame," New Federalist, April 23, 2001.
[15] Carol White, The New Dark Ages Conspiracy (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Co., 1980). Also see, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The Wells of Doom," EIR, Dec. 19, 1997.
[16] Mark Calney, "D.W. Griffith's `The Birth of a Nation,' Hollywood, and the KKK," EIR, April 2, 1993.
[17] Stanley Ezrol, "Vanderbilt University and the Night Writers of the Ku Klux Klan," New Federalist, Oct. 7, 1996.
[18] Thomas Daniel Young, Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), p. 92.
[19] I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930).
[20] After he wrote in support of Mussolini in The Freeman, the New York Times invited Fletcher to do a feature in praise of the dictator. The result was, "The Downfall of Civilization: Mechanical Industrialism and the Progressive Enslavement of Men's Souls," by John Gould Fletcher, The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 13, 1924, p. 6. After what today would be recognized as a radical ecologist rant, he wrote, "And we must also in an attempt to build life and living culture up from the foundation of the working class, realise that at each step it is the money power and the mechanical power that we have to fight.
"Certain attempts are being made in this direction—perhaps most notably in Italy—but . . . the modern form of Caesarism . . . is but the first step in freeing the human spirit from the hydra-tentacles of mechanical barbarism."
[21] There has been a debate, carried out in good faith, regarding Booker T. Washington's educational policies. Regardless of Washington's actual intentions, which appear to have been just, it is clear that the Agrarians wished to use his name and reputation in order to promote their own views on education.
[22] Andrew Nelson Lytle, Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1931).
[23] Thomas A. Underwood, Allen Tate: Orphan of the South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 119.
[24] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.'s "The Bestiality of the Fundies," EIR, Nov. 10, 2000, provides some depth on the question of "Fundamentalism" today.
[25] Here we have an example of the importance of following ideas, not words. Shelley, in his "Defence of Poetry" and elsewhere, identifies Lucifer and Satan with Prometheus. Nonetheless, it is clear that Shelley passionately holds to the idea of Man's participation in the work of Creation, which Ransom hates.
[26] Elizabeth Dodson Gray, Why the Green Nigger? Green Paradise Lost (Wellesley, Mass.: Roundtable Press, 1981).
[27] John Crowe Ransom, God Without Thunder, An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1930).
[28] Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 65. Noll is quoting from The Freud/Jung Letters, edited by William Mcguire and translated by Ralph Manhaim and R.F.C. Hull (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), p. 294.
[29] Brian Lantz, "Huey Long's Challenge to the Establishment," EIR, Nov. 27, 1992.
[30] The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson & Allen Tate, edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1974), p. 242.
[31] Stringfellow Barr, "Shall Slavery Come South," Virginia Quarterly Review (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia), Vol. 6, No. 4, October 1930, pp. 481-494.
[32] Bertrand Russell, "Thirty Years From Now," Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 6, No. 4, October 1930, pp. 575-585.
[33] Gerald W. Johnson, The British Empire (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1969), p. 16.
[34] Gerald W. Johnson, "The South Faces Itself," Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 1931, p. 157.
[35] Underwood, op. cit., pp. 169-170.
[36] Stark Young: A Life in the Arts, Letters, 1900-1962, edited by John Pilkington (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), pp. 352-369.
[37] Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford, A Dual Life (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1996).
[38] Underwood, op. cit., p. 201.
[39] Christopher Hollis, The American Heresy (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1930).
[40] Hilaire Belloc, The Jews (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., third edition, 1937; first edition, 1922), pp. xl-xli.
[41] This account of the Collins/Agrarian collaboration on American Review is drawn from op. cit., Underwood, pp. 202-210. I am grateful to Underwood for illuminating more of this story, which is otherwise largely obscured in the Agrarian histories, and for citing some of the contents of American Review, which is not readily available in many otherwise well-stocked libraries.
[42] Underwood, op. cit., pp. 240-244.
[43] Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence, edited by Allen Tate and Herbert Agar (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1936), pp. 201-202.
[44] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Tweedle-Dum Goofs Again," and Stanley Ezrol, "William Yandell Elliott," EIR, Dec. 5, 1997, p. 20 and p. 30, respectively.
[45] William Yandell Elliott, The Need for Constitutional Reform: A Program for National Security (Whittlesey House, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1935), pp. 202-203.
[46] Underwood, op. cit., p. 149.
[47] She was the wife of the later Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper editor, who had been Brooks' roommate at Tulane University, and mother of the Carter State Department spokesman and current PBS talking head.
[48] Being himself a cultist of the risen Lost Corpse, it seems Warren went to his own grave still haunted by an obsessive urge to repeatedly assassinate the dead Huey Long.
[49] Stanley Ezrol, "William Faulkner: The `Great American Novelist,' with Pure British Aroma," EIR, Nov. 14, 1997, p. 64.
[50] E. Fuller Torrey, "Crazy Like a Fox," The Washingtonian, January 1993, pp. 55-58.
[51] John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938), pp. x-xi.
[52] Quoted in Young, op. cit., p. 312.
[53] Young, op. cit., p. 175.
[54] To aide in enjoying Shakespeare's amusement at Ransom's rantin', the author has written a short, unpublished play, The Marriage of Parmenides, presenting a direct confrontation between Ransom and Shakespeare, in the presence of Spain's most "American" Queen, Isabella.
[55] I don't mean by pointing this out, that the United Nations always was, or even now is, an instrument of the British Empire. Franklin Roosevelt intended that it would serve a useful purpose as a permanent international forum, and it has, often, been a useful venue for the Non-Aligned nations and other anti-Colonial forces. But the British always intended it to be an arm of their Global Empire.
[56] Herbert Agar, Frank Aydelotte, G.A. Borgese, Hermann Broch, Van Wyck Brooks, Ada L. Comstock, William Yandell Elliott, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Christian Gauss, Oscar Jaszi, Alvin Johnson, Hans Kohn, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford, William Allan Neilson, Reinhold Niebuhr, Gaetano Salvemini, The City of Man: A Declaration of World Democracy (New York: Viking Press; Toronto: The MacMillan Co., 1941).
[57] See Mark Burdman, "Her Majesty's Separatists Meet: Lord Byron Foundation Brings Its `Greater Serbia' Cause to the U.S."; Edward Spannaus, "Confederate Fleming Pushes Breakup of U.S."; and Umberto Pascali, "Lord Byronists Foment `Clash of Civilizations' to Protect the Empire," EIR Feb. 28, 1997.
[58] M.E. Bradford, "On Remembering Who We Are: A Political Credo," Modern Age, Spring 1982, pp. 144-152.
[59] Henry A. Kissinger, "Reflections on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy, Address in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of the Office of Foreign Secretary," May 10, 1982, Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), London. Text provided by Dr. Kissinger's office at CSIS.
[60] Joseph Blotner, Robert Penn Warren, A Biography (New York: Random House, 1997), passim.
[61] Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1974), pp. 363-364. Michael Warner, "Origins of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, 1949-50," in CIA: Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 38, No. 5 (a version sanitized for the public is available from the CIA's World Wide Web Page, www.odci.gov).
[62] EIR Special Report, "Project Democracy: The `Parallel Government' Behind the Iran-Contra Affair," April 1987.
