The Frankfurt School and the conspiracy theory that won't die

The Frankfurt School and the conspiracy that won't die

Founded in 1923 to study society through heterodox Marxism, the Frankfurt School has spent a century at the center of academic criticism and of the most persistent conspiracy theories. An institute that Nancy Germany forced into exile in 1934, all the way to Columbia University, has been transformed in the internet's collective memory into the brain that designed the dismantling of the West. The paradox is uncomfortable: the civilization they supposedly wanted to destroy was the one that gave them refuge.

From enlightened critique to "cultural Marxism"

"Everything must be criticized; nothing must be built." With that summary of Critical Theory, Adorno, Marcuse and company are credited with fathering what is called "cultural Marxism." What began as a radical academic project would, according to this reading, have become the theoretical infrastructure behind May '68, catastrophist environmentalism and the depopulation agenda. The connections tighten when the Club of Rome's 1974 report, "Mankind at the Turning Point", is cited, with its blunt phrase: "The Earth has cancer and the cancer is man."

The Club of Rome, the KGB and the Rockefeller bill

Here the supposed plot forks. One strand points to funding from American philanthropy, with the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds as patrons of the scheme; another, no less conspiratorial, invokes the testimony of former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov to claim that cultural Marxism was a Soviet weapon. The most skeptical, meanwhile, point out that the Rothschilds had lost control of Wall Street after World War I, to Morgan and Rockefeller, and that a book with a foreword by Bin Laden's niece is hardly the best source.

The suspicion remains that no central committee was needed: postmodernity may have settled in on its own, through the exhaustion of the alternatives. But that no longer frightens anyone, nor does it sell books. Who prefers complexity when you can point the finger at a group of intellectuals exiled in New York?