something to make Ben Watson chuckle...

If you saw a free publication piled up outside your local newspaper store bearing the title Children of Satan III: The Sexual Congress For Cultural Fascism, you'd pick it up, right? Especially if half the cover consisted of a Hieronymous Bosch painting of naked folk cavorting, one with a bunch of flowers stuffed up his rectum. Turns out to be a pamplet for the Presidential campaign of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jnr. Who I vaguely recall as a fringe right wing candidate from previous elections. Perusing the magazine, though, it's a lot loonier than that. Classic autodidact paranoid delirium, that somehow connects the "Beast-Man" Dick Chenry and his "pathetic puppet" George Bush (Cheney himself, though, merely "the snarling creature" on his wife Lynne Cheney's "leash"!) to a 20th Century-spanning Anglo-American "Synarchist" conspiracy that encompasses figures as diverse as Bertrand Russell, W.H. Auden, Time magazine founder Henry R. Luce, Arthur Koestler, CIA bigwig Allen Dulles, Aldous Huxley, the Fabian Society, and, most recently, Baroness Liz Symons. This Satanic conspiracy moved to subvert the achievements of Roosevelt (a godlike figure in this pamphlet, the third in a series apparently), by secretly rescuing elements of the Nazi power structure and bringing them to America. In the post-War period they then moved to degrade Western civilisation through permissiveness and "the morally and intellectually corrupting effects" of postmodernism.

Ah, but wait, here's where it gets really good. The subtitle of the pamphet, The Sexual Congress For Cultural Fascism, comes from an essay within on a postwar, early 1950s organisation called The Congress For Cultural Freedom, which I'd never heard of, and which LaRouche & Co claim was a CIA front. The essay starts like this:

"Theodor Adorno and Max Horkhemier were two of the earliest leaders of the Frankfurt School and were co-directors of that Authoritarian Personality project of the late 1940s, that wilfully engineered the Baby Boomer drug/rock/sex counterculture two decades later. These two were brought back to Germany in 1950, to reorganise and "de-Nazify" the postwar German education system and cultural institutions... In that assigned capacity, Adorno and Horkheimer were pivotal players in the overall project to wreck European and American culture.... destroying the last vestiges of European Classical Culture and replacing it with a culture of perversity, bestialization, and pessimism. This project was known, hypocritically, as the Congress For Cultural Freedom (CCF)."

Skip a section on Bertrand Russell, an honorary chairman of the CCF, that's really nutty and there's more on Adorno, in re. one of his specialist subjects, music:

"To bring about the total disintegration of postwar European and American society--which he argued, was the precondition for the defeat of the authoritarian impulse--Adorno insisted that all forms of beauty had to be purged. Instead, he argued for a steady cultural diet of "Top Forty" pop music and other degenerate forms of "mass culture", which, he argued, over time, would trigger various forms of mental breakdown, on a mass scale". These, the essay asserts, would take the form of depersonalisation, hebephrenia, catatonia, and necrophilia! "Adorno had written his Philosophy of Modern Music prescription for producing a society of necrophiliacs, through the perversion of music and culture..." The essay then attributes the emergence of the counter culture to the Frankfurt School, part of their malevolent plan to "transform American culture, step by step, toward an erotic, perverse matrix, associated with the present 'politically correct' tyranny of tolerance for dehumanizing drug abuse, sexual perversion, and the glorification of violence"

Don't know an awful lot about the Frankfurt School but seems like there's been a teensy bit of misreading and wrong-end-of-stick-getting going on here.