In the mid-1990s, a series of exposés featured on the London Independent and elsewhere brought a dark secret to light. Many were startled by the revelation that the entire evolution of 20th century modern art was directed in large measure by the CIA! This not only included the direct financing of abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, whose works now regularly sell for over $100 million apiece, but also powerful literary magazines like Salon and Encounter, interpretive dance schools, and the remarkably ugly a-tonal music of Arnold Schoenberg.
The instrument selected to re-shape western cultural tastes in the wake of World War II came to be known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Founded in 1950 with funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation, the CCF was designed to 1) promote the de-Nazification of Germany and 2) fight the cultural war against the communist world that had just recently been organized by Sir Winston Churchill. The logic of the Cultural Cold War asserted that since communism and fascism relied on “realist/rigid iconography” to advance itself, the “free world” on the other side of the Iron Curtain would rely on abstract, emotional “freedom.” Where communism was based on the sacrifice of the individual for the “good” of the whole, this Cold War democracy asserted that the needs of the whole were separate from the arbitrary freedom of the individual to “do whatever feels good”. The degree to which the new modernism offended order and logic was proportional to the degree to which it defended “democracy and liberal capitalism”.
It is noteworthy that the CCF had as one of its Honorary Chairman Lord Bertrand Russell who had just a few years earlier called for the pre-emptive nuking of the Soviet Union in order to achieve a one world government. Russell’s active work subverting the arts should not be seen apart from his imperial political views, or his efforts to impose a system of shackles upon the minds of scientists who would forever be rendered creatively sterile due to a belief that fixed mathematics governed the universe as outlined in his Principia Mathematica [1]. Zeus cannot after all tolerate knowledge of fire (science), the freedom to use it (politics) or the instincts to use it well (culture). It is only by thinking in terms of those three interconnected aspects of the human condition, that one can understand the 20th century or history more generally. Describing his view of culture Russell wrote in the 1951 Impact of Science on Society:
I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education.’ Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.
Adorno, whose theories on music are still considered a gold standard in modern academia and who also ironically created the foundation for the “top 40 hits” as part of the creation of a culture for the masses detached from an “elite culture” for the oligarchy and its managers, described his ideal of the “new music” in the following terms:
What radical music perceives is the un-transfigured suffering of man…. The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks…. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.
Since Adorno exemplified the oligarchical belief in the inevitable decay (entropy) of all existence and the associated belief that the arts should MIRROR that reality, Adorno wrote in his Philosophy of Modern Music that ultimately “necrophilia is the last perversity of style.”
It is no wonder that the ultimate enemy of an oligarchy is found in the optimistic belief that moral reason exists within the essence of all human nature as a unique species made in the image of a Good and loving Creator. What types of art reflect that divine sense of humankind? What types of systems of political philosophy express it? Is a system of hereditary power equal to a system that posits that “all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights”? Is it true that Bach’s Jesu Meine Freud or Mozart’s Requiem should be treated as somehow equal to the “sophisticated” atonal music of the 20th century? Should a painting by Rembrandt or Da Vinci be treated as equal to the ink splatterings of Pollock or the blurry squares of Rothko? What happens to the powers of judging right from wrong, and truth from lies in a society which embraces an art which is animated by love and beauty vs an art animated by pessimistic ugliness? Which type of society would be easier to manipulate?
A Return to the Universal in Art: Schiller as Antidote to the CCF
The German poet Friedrich Schiller, who was shaped by the global republican movement that spread in the wake of the American Revolution asked in his Aesthetical Letters (1794) “how is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age that besets him on all sides? By disdaining its opinion.” If the masses are debased to believe that poison is their drug, then how could a true artist cater to their desires, no matter how popular? To do this requires an extremely advanced moral disposition since both money and fame must be sacrificed in order to challenge a society to become better. Schiller said that for one to be committed to truth and its corollary Freedom in the highest pursuit of Beauty, an artist had to find a way to balance existing in space and time, but always strive to transcend their temporal society’s limitations in a constant search for the eternal. In his ninth letter Schiller wrote:
The Artist, it is true, is the son of his age; but pity for him if he is its pupil, or even its favorite! Let some beneficent Divinity snatch him when a suckling from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time that he may ripen to his full stature beneath a distant Grecian sky. And having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not, however, to delight it by his presence; but terrible, like the son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The matter of his works he will take from the present; but their Form he will derive from a nobler time, nay from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his nature. Here from the pure aether of his spiritual essence, flows down the Fountain of Beauty, uncontaminated by the pollutions of ages and generations, which roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath it.
Schiller’s thoughts were not written in an ivory tower, but were driven by his leading efforts as a playwright, poet and founder of a field of research known as the Science of Universal History. Although his life was short, he not only left an incredible opus that inspired some of the most noble works of music such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Verdi’s operas, he also directly shaped a network of other artists, scientists and statesmen through the Weimar Renaissance such as both Humboldt brothers and Wolfgang Goethe to name a few.
The need to cure society of its tendency to fall under the sway of either extreme of abstract intellectual matters devoid of emotional growth on the one side and emotional chaos detached uninformed from reason on the other was the basis of Schiller’s own self-development and his guiding light in the creation of a culture capable of attaining true political freedom [2].
It is this spirit that the perverted “end of history” zombies of the CCF wanted to destroy through their manipulation of global affairs leading into World War I, their humiliation of Germany under the Versailles Treaty and their financing of Adolph Hitler through Wall Street and the City of London’s Bank of International Settlements. The fact that these same forces who created the world wars and fascist monsters of the 20th century were also given the authority to offer the “cure” in the form of the CCF de-nazification of Germany and new “democratic” culture of abstract art, modernist music and existential philosophy is akin to allowing the murderer give the eulogy at his victims’ funeral.
Now that China’s Belt and Road Initiative is leading a new paradigm of win-win cooperation we are witnessing an inspired re-awakening of popularity in classical artistic standards in music, art, and even architecture. The choice is once again being placed in front of all citizens: Do we wish to continue to swim in the pigsty of cultural decadence and pessimism unleashed by the CCF, or do we want to embrace a future more becoming of a species made in the Creator’s image?
Footnote
[1] Luckily for the world, Einstein’s close friend Kurt Gödel inspired by his studies of Gottfried Leibniz, put an end to this endeavor in 1931 by demonstrating that Russell’s belief in a closed mathematical system was impossible as all systems are intrinsically open and thus susceptible to constant perfectibility. Unluckily for Gödel, Russell never forgave him and made sure that the remaining years of his life were hellish with Gödel finally meeting a tragic end in 1977 convinced that Bertrand Russell and international secret societies were trying to destroy Leibniz and were also trying to poison him.
Originally published by The Rising Tide Foundation
Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation. He is a writer for the Strategic Culture Foundation.