Criminalising Normality

An interview with Frederik Jansen, member of the Dutch parliament, discussing the Frankfurt School.

There is no other political party in the world which doubles up as an intellectual power-house as FVD does.  The party, its leaders and MPs, are deeply rooted in, and motivated by, by their intellectual interests.  The party also has a Renaissance Institute which organises lectures and courses on politics, philosophy and on issues of general cultural interest.  Member of the Lower House of the Dutch Parliament, Frederik Jansen, is working on a doctorate on the Frankfurt Scool, on which he recently gave a talk at the party offices in Amsterdam.  He was interviewed by the Renaissance Institute shortly beforehand and we are pleased to present that interview in English.

Do you believe that wokeism, the LGBT ideology, the cult of victimhood, and so on, are all legacies of the Frankfurt School?

They are. The origin of these ideas can be traced back to the thinking of a small group of German-Jewish academics from over a hundred years ago – the so-called Frankfurt School. They tried to solve the crisis of Marxism of the 1920s. How was it possible that the working class refused to exploit its revolutionary potential? Why did the ‘workers of the world’ face each other in the trenches, when they were supposed to be loyal to their class? What explained their lack of class consciousness?

The Frankfurt School's answer was nationalism, family structures, fine arts – in short, all aspects of ‘bourgeois life’ that perpetuated vertical loyalties which, according to the Frankfurt School, gave man a false consciousness. Only once all those structures were destroyed could people become aware of their true condition and the real communist world revolution could come about.

The members of the Frankfurter School started writing as early as the 1920s but the Second World War and the persecution of the Jews radicalized their thinking enormously. There was a shift in the focus of their work. They became obsessed with the concept of ​​‘the Democrat’ - the opposite of ‘the fascist’. In their early years, they mainly tried to revitalize Marxism and to motivate the working class but after the war they saw the working class more and more as a problem – as potentially fascist and anti-Semitic. The masses had shown themselves to be treacherous, intolerant and even murderous. Dissecting, ‘criticizing’ and defusing those phenomena became the focus of their post-war work. In the whole tradition of European civilisation they thought they discerned the increasing oppression of man and nature. Everything was rendered suspicious, everything became ‘potentially fascist’. Behold: the beginnings of today's obsession with minorities, oppression and the immediate labelling of dissenters as fascists.

There are also indications that the Frankfurter School philosophers collaborated with the American intelligence services, which in turn wanted to influence, or even undermine, European culture.

That is correct right. Three prominent Frankfurters, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, went to work for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA) during World War II. They wrote reports about the situation in Germany and drew up a very extensive ‘denazification programme’ – their idea what Germany should look like after the war. It is my firm belief that this ‘denazification thinking’ still forms the basis for our contemporary political, cultural, and economic ‘Zeitgeist’.

The aim of the Frankfurters, as mentioned, was to transform culture - and even human psychology - in such a way that there could never again, ‘nie wieder’, be a persecution of Jews. In their view, the nature and history of the European peoples led ineluctably to a social order of oppression, exclusion and exploitation. The European was thus essentially ‘fascist’ and would have an irrepressible urge to attack, dominate and humiliate all that was ‘weak’. They called it the ‘authoritarian personality’. It had to disappear, otherwise history would inevitably repeat itself.

And the CIA liked that plan?

Absolutely. Initially, their ideas were confined to obscure academic journals, but after 1945 they were given a unique opportunity which very few philosophers in world history have been given: they were able to put their ideas into practice through the American denazification programme. Atonal music and abstract art were promoted all over Europe. Left-wing faculties and universities were set up everywhere. Immigration was promoted everywhere and supranationalism – that is, the weakening of the nation state – was organised.

The Frankfurt School also politicised sexuality. How did that happen?

That path was forged with the student protests of 1968 and the hippie movement. In line with Freud, Herbert Marcuse in particular saw repressed sexuality as the cause of all kinds of disorders. But Freud said: if you try to liberate Eros, you break down exactly what you need to hold a society together. According to Freud, sublimation was therefore necessary: that is the culture-shaping force that, however, leads to vertical ‘bourgeois’ loyalties. As we’ve seen, the Frankfurters wanted to destroy it. This is why Marcuse writes in Eros and Civilization: the greatest danger (read: fascism) is in the normal situation of the ego. From the normal development of man arises susceptibility to fascism. The same applies to normal sexuality. That's why Marcuse wanted to free Eros. In his book One Dimensional Man he calls this desublimation.

But the question is: can you have a society based on critical theory, or should be not recognise that the fear of repeating the past is having a boomerang effect on us?  After all, the antifa movement has long shown itself to be violent and undemocratic, while the rights of other dissenting minorities (over Covid, for instance, or Russia) have come under increasingly violent attack, both categories of dissenters being attacked, as Thierry Baudet has been, and as the anti-EU and anti-Nato demonstrators in Prague recently were, as ‘enemies of the state’.