A Place to Stand

    This article fits very nicely with the heading of this blog - Mencken's the way to keep power is to "frighten the populace with an endless series of scare stories, all of them false". It is an extensive listing of such frauds from

"70 BC Rome was still a Republic.....

Crassus seized upon the slave revolt led by Sparticus in order to strike terror into the hearts of Rome, whose garrison Sparticus had already defeated in battle. But Sparticus had no intention of marching on Rome itself, a move he knew to be suicidal. Sparticus and his band wanted nothing to do with the Roman empire and had planned from the start merely to loot enough money from their former owners in the Italian countryside to hire a mercenary fleet in which to sail to freedom.

Sailing away was the last thing Crassus wanted Sparticus to do. He needed a convenient enemy with which to terrorize Rome itself for his personal political gain. So Crassus bribed the mercenary fleet to sail without Sparticus, then positioned two Roman legions in such a way that Sparticus had no choice but to march on Rome.

Terrified of the impending arrival of the much-feared army of gladiators, Rome declared Crassus Praetor"

to, in the Clinton era

Meanwhile, back in Kosovo, stories about genocide and atrocities were flooding the media (in time to distract from the Sudanese embarrassments), just as lurid and sensational and as it turns out often just as fictional as most of William Randolph Hearst's stories of atrocities against the Cubans. 

   I assume the article was written before Blair's "Iraqi WMDs can hit us in 45 minutes" let alone Cameron's "we have to stop Al Quaeda in Mali" before they drive from Timbuktoo to London.

    A depressing lesson in the dishonesty of government and the willingness of people to believe them just one more time.
    This other article from The Truthseeker I take with less certainty but am willing to believe the Frankfurt School movement has played a part, possibly a significant part, in the intellectual promotion of political correctness and the culture of promoting failure across western countries. It was once said that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind" and in general I would rather have poets doing that job than academic philosophers. Of course given the option I would give the job to science fiction fans, but it is conceivable I am biased.

"Carl Grünberg, the Institute’s director from 1923-1929, was an avowed Marxist, although the Institute did not have any official party affiliations. But in 1930 Max Horkheimer assumed control and he believed that Marx’s theory should be the basis of the Institute’s research. When Hitler came to power, the Institut was closed and its members, by various routes, fled to the United States and migrated to major US universities—Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and California at Berkeley.

The School included among its members the 1960s guru of the New Left Herbert Marcuse (denounced by Pope Paul VI for his theory of liberation which ‘opens the way for licence cloaked as liberty’), Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, the popular writer Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and Jurgen Habermas - possibly the School’s most influential representative.

Basically, the Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief - or even the hope of belief - that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation that they considered necessary to provoke socialist revolution. Their task, therefore, was as swiftly as possible to undermine the Judaeo-Christian legacy. To do this they called for the most negative destructive criticism possible of every sphere of life which would be designed to de-stabilize society and bring down what they saw as the ‘oppressive’ order. Their policies, they hoped, would spread like a virus—‘continuing the work of the Western Marxists by other means’ as one of their members noted.

To further the advance of their ‘quiet’ cultural revolution - but giving us no ideas about their plans for the future - the School recommended (among other things):

1. The creation of racism offences.
2. Continual change to create confusion
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking
7. Emptying of churches
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits
10. Control and dumbing down of media
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family "

   AllAll in all I'm going to say http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/oldsite/index.asp is worth checking out. Most of it is wrong and there is an unpleasant trend of anti-Judaism but enough is both seriously informative and not reported by our MSM to be worth checking.