Free The Devil's Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh Page A

(Laughter.) We will see that what we have to envisage is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.
    Marcuse, by reason of both his longevity and residence in the U.S., spoke directly to the counterculture of the late ’60s, and his words fell on fertile ground, sprouting like the dragon’s teeth sewn by Cadmus to create a race of super warriors, the Spartoi . They still dwell among us.
    Even more important, however, is the Frankfurt School’s literary role as antagonist to what we might characterize as heroic Judeo-Christian Western culture—which was formed from Greco-Roman civilization, the conservative impulse of the Thomistic Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (whose ultimate expression was the Constitution of the United States)—as well as Victorian and Edwardian high culture (perhaps the apogee of Western civilization). That civilization, in the classic literary fashion of the hero’s subconsciously pursuing his own destruction, gave birth to the resentful philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, the destructive First World War, the various socialist revolutions (some, such as Russia’s, successful and others, as in Bavaria’s, unsuccessful), the Cold War, and the short interregnum of “the End of History” before the long-dormant Muslim assault on the West resumed in earnest on September 11, 2001. Obviously, this list of world-historical events is not exhaustive, no more so than a plot synopsis can stand in for, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses or Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg ( The Magic Mountain ).
    It does, however, establish the framework for a discussion in which I seek to demonstrate that far from being a natural outgrowth of a strainof Western political philosophy that culminated in Marxism and, worse, in Marxism-Leninism, the cultural philosophy of the Frankfurt School was itself aberrational in that it was profoundly anti-religious as well as anti-human. While substituting its own rituals for religion and unleashing its murderous wrath on the notion of the individual, it masqueraded as a force both liberating and revolutionary, when in fact its genesis is as old as the Battle in Heaven.
    Consider the death toll alone. Yes, the European wars of religion—including the Thirty Years War between 1618 and 1648 and Cromwell’s invasion of Catholic Ireland in 1649—inflicted a horrible loss on the population, and we cannot underestimate the Great War’s toll on the cultural confidence of European civilization. Moreover, with German connivance, WWI opened Russia to Communist revolutionaries. But the twentieth-century wars unleashed by Marxism-Leninism took wartime slaughter to a new, mechanistic level, both domestically—Stalin’s forced starvation of Ukrainians, the Maoist revolution in China, the Stalinist purges, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the repressive society of North Korea, and the wholesale slaughter that followed the American collapse in Southeast Asia—and internationally, from World War II through Korea and Vietnam, Angola and Afghanistan. If Satan needs corpses, the Marxist-Leninists have been only too happy to provide them.
    Further, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, brought about by its own internal contradictions (as the Marxists might say) opened up the U.S.S.R.’s southern flank to the forces of Islamic extremism, itself in part a reaction to the Soviets’ ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan and poorly executed attempt to subvert Iran (after the fall of the Shah in 1979) via the Communist, pro-Soviet Tudeh Party. Osama bin Laden battled the Soviets in Afghanistan and wrongly concluded that he and his “holy warriors” had beaten the Red Army. In fact, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was more attributable to the Russians’ loss of cultural self-confidence brought on by the decadent, self-discrediting Marxism-Leninism of the Brezhnev era than it was owing to the losses inflicted by a