Cultural Warfare in the 20th Century: How Western Civilization Came Undone

 Matthew EHRET

Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review.

Which future wins out in the unfolding battle over humanity will be shaped by the decisions and discoveries we make (or fail to make) in the days ahead, Matthew Ehret writes.

In my last article “Guterres and the Great Reset: How Capitalism Became a Time Bomb”, I made the case that the time bomb justifying a Great Reset of civilization was set into motion over 50 years ago. In that location, we were introduced to a cast of characters surrounding the World Economic Forum and Trilateral Commission who played instrumental roles in bringing about a controlled disintegration of western civilization.

Despite the fact that this un-natural transformation occurred over the dead bodies of great statesmen of the 1960s, a question still lingers: HOW did the western nations… especially the United States, so deeply shaped by a love of freedom, wilfully relinquish its democratic institutions in favor of a new system of supranational governance and de-growth? How did the very people who were targeted for destruction not only let this happen but in some cases even aide and abet the perpetrators?

Epistemological Warfare in America

Here it helps to look to the writings of an imperial grand strategist who is too often championed as a defender of freedom: Aldous Huxley.

While Aldous’ brother Julian was reshaping the global paradigm by re-packaging eugenics under several new costumes post-1945, Aldous’ creative juices were driven entirely by his role as a cultural warrior.

Grand children of Thomas Huxley who was commissioned to re-organize the British Empire in the late 1850s, both grandchildren vigorously embraced the family business working closely with the elite Bloomsbury Group of Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes between 1914-1937.

Among these creative misanthropes, Lord Bertrand Russell (another celebrated pacifist) had gone far in outlining the sort of bone chilling ideal that Darwinian laws of evolution demanded be humanity’s destiny under a scientifically managed priesthood. In his 1930 Scientific Outlook, Russell stated:

“The scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researchers of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play…. All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called `co-operative,’ i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them.”

“Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world state and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous, and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific techniques and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements”.

Huxley would have Russell’s thesis firmly in mind when he began writing his Brave New World in 1931.

Aldous Goes to Work

Having set up his base of operations in Hollywood in 1937, Aldous lived out his days in the USA writing scripts for Hollywood, exploring psychotropic drugs and coordinating a new cultural movement that would soon overtake the youth growing up amidst the insanity of the Cold War.

In an infamous 1962 speech titled “The Ultimate Revolution”, Aldous Huxley outlined the principles of this new science of governance telling adoring fans amidst the wannabe alphas in the Berkeley auditorium:

“If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent. It’s exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion, an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them. Well, it seems to me that the nature of The Ultimate Revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques, which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably always will exist, to get people, actually, to love their servitude.”

Getting people to love their servitude would be made possible by an array of new techniques outlined in both Huxley’s fiction and non-fiction writings and put into motion by the hard work of CIA-funded laboratories working under secretive umbrella of Allan Dulles’ MK Ultra. Utilizing many techniques pioneered by Nazi psychiatrists in WWII, one of the primary objectives of MK Ultra was to deconstruct the human psyche using a mix of electroshock therapy, psychotropic drugs and other conditioning in order to reconstruct personalities from scratch by professional psychiatrists. As Naomi Klein demonstrated in her famous book The Shock Doctrine, the idea behind MK Ultra was always to extend these behavioral techniques to reprogramming entire groups, societies and nations.

Within Huxley’s Brave New World, psychotropic drugs (soma), cultural norms driven by pre-adolescent sensualism, constant Tinder-esque sexual escapades, the disintegration of family units and hyper-sensualized entertainment (dubbed “feelies”) did the job nicely. Huxley’s dystopia featured a society which had successfully evolved to become a total oligarchy with a scientific priesthood managing the test tube babies bio engineered to become alphas, betas, gammas or the lowly toilet cleaning epsilons reminiscent of the sub-human Morlocks described in H.G. Wells’ earlier Time Machine. In Huxley’s world, family units have long since disintegrated with the nation state and any belief in God.

In his 1958 Brave New World Revisited, Aldous decries the ultimate evil caused by faith in scientific and technological progress as an illusion which cannot provide an escape from the ultimate determining law of humanity: overpopulation. Citing creative breakthroughs in atomic power, space exploration and medicine, Huxley bemoans how each time humanity solves a problem that allows us to save more lives, the species replicates at faster rates bringing about the inevitable Malthusian problems of future wars for resources, diseases and the breeding of the inferior races.

Huxley writes:

“In this second half of the twentieth century we do nothing systematic about our breeding; but in our random and unregulated way we are not only over-populating our planet, we are also, it would seem, making sure that these greater numbers shall be of biologically poorer quality. In the bad old days children with considerable, or even with slight, hereditary defects rarely survived. Today, thanks to sanitation, modern pharmacology and the social conscience, most of the children born with hereditary defects reach maturity and multiply their kind.”

In another speech delivered to the University of California in 1961, Huxley elaborated on this bone chilling plan saying:

“There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel – by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

Huxley knew that if this sort of brainwashing were successfully induced, the ruling oligarchy could ensure that the hedonistic identities of those coming of age within this controlled environment would detach themselves from outdated concepts like nationalism, love of family, or religion, in order to create LSD-driven personal “micro-realities”. Honoring the past and sacrificing for the future became replaced with a new wisdom of “living in the now”.

Huxley was happy to discover that LSD-25 mixed with cannabis, hashish and mescaline was a perfect supplement for soma writing in his 1958 Revisited:

“In LSD-25 (lysergic acid diethylamide) the phar­macologists have recently created another aspect of soma – a perception-improver and vision-producer that is, physiologically speaking, almost costless. This ex­traordinary drug, which is effective in doses as small as fifty or even twenty-five millionths of a gram, has power (like peyote) to transport people into the other world. In the majority of cases, the other world to which LSD-25 gives access is heavenly; alternatively it may be purgatorial or even infernal. But, positive, or negative, the lysergic acid experience is felt by al­most everyone who undergoes it to be profoundly significant and enlightening. In any event, the fact that minds can be changed so radically at so little cost to the body is altogether astonishing.”

During his time in the United States coordinating this new countercultural insurgency, Aldous recruited a young professor of psychiatry named Timothy Leary to his cause. Describing his interaction with Huxley as the two planned this final revolution, Leary wrote in 1983:

“We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.”

The Creation of Organized Schizophrenia

How the counter-culture was formed in the bowels of such oligarchical psychiatric mental meatgrinders like London’s Tavistock Institute and was applied by psychiatric shock troops strategically placed across all schools, military, unions, corporate boards and government bureaucracies throughout the years is beyond the scope of this present article, although it was explored in a recent video by this author.

What must be kept in mind for our present purposes is that cultural warfare during this intense post WW2 period was full spectrum in nature- taking every major branch of human life into account and extracting all traces of creative reason, universality, Freedom, and Truth anywhere it could be found.

Whether it was in the fine arts and music or whether it was in scientific practice, new dualisms were imposed severing logical thinking from the “pollution” of subjective emotions. Where the arts became shaped increasingly by hedonism liberated from reason (with a “high” post-modern art for the elites and a “low” populist art for the dumb masses), the sciences became governed by the dogmatic faith in cold mathematical sterility governed by “statistics”, entropy, and blind fatalism.

Random paint splashes of CIA-funded artists like Jackson Pollock or the fuzzy squares of Mark Rothko became the new artistic ideal while scientists found themselves trained to think like computers modelling their minds of the methods of Bertrand Russell’s Principia, Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics and John von Neumann’s Information Theory. Bertrand Russell’s role coordinating the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom should not be lost on anyone.

With the severing of creativity from reason, the minds of those processed by this new cultural field was increasingly shaped by blind rules and axioms enforced by expert consensus rather than personal acts of discovery. Computer modelling thus found itself replacing acts of genuine human thought and within this sterile intellectual climate, a new cult of artificial intelligence began to find fertile soil to grow its perverse roots.

When mixed with heavy doses of imperial wars, assassinations, coups, and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, the parents of the baby boomers had no clue what evil they were dealing with as their children were absorbed into a new drug/sex-ridden cultural field that no one had ever experienced before. Schizophrenic chaos in the world bred schizophrenic chaos in the culture as increasingly large arrays of youth gave up on reality in order to “tune in, turn on and drop out”.

Throughout the 1960s, patriotic forces around the world rallied to revive the spirit of scientific and technological progress which these neo-Malthusians despised so much. President John F Kennedy attempted to amplify Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace along with large scale investments into Africa, Asia and Ibero America alongside leaders of the Pan African and Pan Arab world who were committed to ending colonialism and bringing their people into the 21st century.

After Kennedy’s murder, Charles de Gaulle worked with international co-thinkers like Quebec Premier Daniel Johnson, Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and German Chancellor Adenauer to bring about a coalition of progress which peaked in 1968 with Bobby Kennedy’s inevitable leadership of the United States.

Just as in the period of the late 19th century when a win-win system of international cooperation was threatening to replace the dying Hobbesian system of the British Empire, a dense string of coups, color revolutions and assassinations ensured the crushing of this dynamic as a new age of post-industrialism, Anglo-American imperialism and monetarism was unleashed onto an unsuspecting society.

The Club of Rome Takes the Stage

In this new post-1968 political climate, new scientific conferences were organized in an attempt to impose statistic modelling premised on systems analysis onto biological, economic and especially ecological systems. Extrapolating present trends into the future and disregarding the sorts of non-linear qualitative leaps caused by creative thought allowed this new breed of scientist to “predict” the inevitable crises caused by population growth and the diminishing returns on finite resources.

The iconic study for this new scientific movement was the Club of Rome-commission MIT report Limits to Growth that “predicted”, as Malthus had done two centuries earlier, the point of crisis when population pressures would outstrip nature’s bounty- giving technocrats managing humanity the tools needed to make the proper sacrifices in the present.

When figures like Mark Carney discuss the “greening of global finance” and placing monetary values upon the reduction of carbon footprints, this is the sick and unscientific foundation of their thinking. Where formerly, humanity valued economic growth via scientific and technological progress (and implicitly the support of increased numbers of people at higher standards of life), the new system of “values” promoted by these misanthropes demanded that profit be tied to the reduction of human activity on the earth.

Club of Rome co-founder Aurelio Peccei, who presented at the inaugural World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, stated: “The economy and the ecology are inextricably united…. A strategy of generating wealth and one of safeguarding this patrimony are opposed. Activities that generate wealth but destroy the natural patrimony even more, create negative value”.

Former President of the World Federation of Mental Health during the high point of MK Ultra, Margaret Mead (wife of MK Ultra controller Gregory Bateson) presided over one such 1975 conference on the environment and atmosphere sponsored by the Club of Rome (this club also being an early sponsor of the World Economic Forum in 1971). Echoing the spirit of Russell and Huxley earlier, Mead called for the creation of a new science of statistics premised on equating pollution to climate change that would become internally consistent and shape the behavior of humanity going into the 21st century. The focus was always population control. In her speech Mead said:

“The unparalleled increase in the human population and its demands for food, energy, and resources is clearly the most important destabilizing influences in the biosphere. We are facing a period when society must make decisions on a planetary scale.”

“What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility but at the same time as free as possible from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective warnings, warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane. [We must] draw from the necessary capacity for sacrifice. It is therefore a statement of major possibilities of danger, which may overtake humankind, on which it is important to concentrate attention”.

Rather than seeing science as a field for optimistic problem solving, this misanthropic cult of elitists demanded that science be redefined around a “new wisdom” of adapting to problems real or imagined. This cynical science of “problematique” (the science of problems) assumed that since all creative discovery caused population growth, the real enemy was found in the naïve optimists who believe it good to promote discoveries. Mead ridiculed those cultural optimists who rejected this cynical view of science saying:

“Those who react against prophets of doom, believing that there is not adequate scientific basis for their melancholy prophecies, [for they] tend to become in turn prophets of paradisiacal impossibilities, guaranteed utopias of technological bliss, or benign interventions on behalf of mankind that are none the less irrational just because they are couched as ‘rational.’ They express a kind of faith in the built-in human instinct for survival, or a faith in some magical technological panacea.”

Using more truthful language, Club of Rome co-founder Sir Alexander King stated in the preface of The First Global Revolution (1991):

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

Today’s world is being pulled by two opposing dynamics.

The prophets of doom who set the time bomb in place half a century ago giddily prepare their utopian Great Reset which demands vast bloodletting as an overpopulated humanity be sacrificed by a modern pagan scientific priesthood devoted to Gaia and computer models. On the other hand, the spirit of progress and open system thinking has come alive in the form of the multipolar alliance which premises its planning on an opposing set of assumptions about the nature of humanity, creative thought, value, economics, progress and natural law.

Which future wins out in this battle over humanity will be shaped by the decisions and discoveries we make (or fail to make) in the days ahead.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/10/09/cultural-warfare-in-the-20th-century-how-western-civilization-came-undone/