False Witness

The Sandwichman has submitted a comment to the Whittaker Chambers blog, maintained by his grandson, David Chambers.

David,

I have a question about Ralph de Toledano and his authorship of what would presumably be his last book, Cry Havoc!. Your tribute to him portrays him as an erudite intellectual with wide-ranging cultural tastes. You cite the recording of the Garcia-Lorca poem and connect it to your interest in Neruda, Brecht and Kurt Weill.

I have been investigating the proliferation of what can at best be described as a "conspiracy theory" focusing on the Institute for Social Research or Frankfurt School. It might be more accurate to describe it as a preposterous fabrication and calumny along the lines of the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The origin of this fabricated conspiracy theory would appear to be in Lyndon Larouche's paranoid cult in the early 1990s.

The confessed Oslo mass murderer, Anders Breivik plagiarized extensively from one version of the tale, published in 2004 by the Free Congress Foundation and edited by William S. Lind. Patrick J. Buchanan replicated the story in chapter four of his 2002 book The Death of the West, in which Buchanan acknowledges the editorial advice of his friend, Bill Lind. I have checked footnotes in Buchanan's book and found them to be bogus, indicating only a more sophisticated variety of intellectual dishonesty than Breivik's inept plagiarism.

I have been unable to locate a copy of Toledano's book at a nearby library but the promotional blurb from the publisher presents a lurid recapitulation of the Larouchite/Lind slander. So I am curious about what kind of documentation the book contains or if it is yet another raucous production of the vast, resonant right-wing echo chamber -- apparently even crediting the Frankfurt School with the rise of the Nazis. Here is an excerpt from the publishers' blurb:

Cry Havoc! is Ralph de Toledano's most ambitious work. Its modest length (254 pages) belies a volume jam-packed with information. One hardly knows where to begin. Anyone seriously absorbing it will end up with a heavily underlined book that connects the dots and timeline of the planned decline of Western Civilization.

Those dots lead ultimately to the Institute of Social Research planted in prestigious Frankfurt University in Germany in the Twenties. The "Frankfurt School," as it was called, was "dedicated to neo-Marxism — contributing to the corrupt miasma of Weimar Germany and the victory of Adolph Hitler's National Socialists."

Ultimately, the "school" moved to America where it was accepted by Columbia University in New York. This was accomplished by John Dewey, the educator credited (or blamed) by many with leading to the corruption of America's education system. Dewey, as Toledano notes, was in league with "a crypto-communist professorial cabal — and a conspiracy and a war so vast and so cunning that it went unnoticed."

A few — unfortunately very few others — have written about the Frankfurt school. Toledano takes one more step toward laying the conspiracy directly on the doorstep of the Comintern. As with Soviet funding of the Communist Party USA, it takes no great leap of imagination to surmise as much. Again, the question lies in "the smoking gun." Toledano makes the case that it is there in writings or words of V.I. Lenin and other original Bolsheviks.

Cry Havoc! traces the Frankfurt school plot to 1922 and to the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow and to Karl Radek — a power in the Politburo — and to other key players in the then-new Bolshevik revolution. Among them was Muenzenberg, who openly boasted, "We will take over the intellectuals. We will make America stink."