Littleton: it's Adorno's fault

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Sep 24 11:10:04 PDT 1999


At 1:44 PM -0400 9/24/99, Carl Remick wrote:
>I tried posting an article yesterday from Salon that is supposedly
>based on leaks from the official investigation of the Columbine High
>massacre. One key finding is that killers Eric Harris and Dylan
>Klebold apparently hated *everyone* and made no particular effort to
>target minorities, the devout, et al. The post seems to have
>vaporized in cyberspace, perhaps because of its length. Anyhow,
>here is the URL for anyone interested:
><http://www.salon1999.com/news/feature/1999/09/23/columbine/index.html
> >http://www.salon1999.com/news/feature/1999/09/23/columbine/index.html

Actually, Lyndon LaRouche, or more accurately an acolyte named "Jeffrey Steinberg," explains Littleton in the issue of The New Federalist I was reporting from the other day: it's pop culture after all. Lyndon gives that tired explanation a fresh kick though: the U.S. military's encouragement of video games was a crucial factor. "In the 1980s and 1990s, the military spent enormous amounts of money...in the computer industyr, to be able to develop training simulators to get people into a situation, that without even firing a gun, you can go through the experience of killing an object that looks humans, thousands, hundreds of thousands of times, until it becomes almost second nature." (That the Littleton killers used real guns, not remote-controlled smart bombs, would seem to undermine this thesis, but who's quibbling?) Further, the Marines Corps "recently" hired Id Software to develop a military version of Doom.

But that's not all. Columbine High School was a pioneer in "Death Education," a mandatory course in the school. Rather than the stated purpose of teaching kids that death was part of life, the real intent, says The New Federalist, was, as with video games, to desensitize: "issues that are fundamental philosophical and moral issues cease to exist, and everything is one succession of sensory experiences that all lead you to abandon that which is essentially human in yourself."

Further, Bertrand Russell, "the British royal family, the British oligarchy, [and] factions of Wall Street were all involved. Russell's guilt is that he was, as "Mr LaRouche has written...one of the most evil people of the 20th century." His crime was that he was "fully conscious of the goal of erasing that which is human among a majority of human beings, in order to enable the oligarchy to enjoy its power. Compounding this philosophical crime was the work of the Cybernetics crowd - von Neumann, Wiener, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson - who aimed to "disprove the idea that man was created in the living image of God."

But that's not all. Next influence in the creation of "the Littleton culture" was "one of the most insidious of the rock groups of the 1960s, the Grateful Dead" - all of whom were alums of Bateson's cybernetics experiments at the Palo Alto VA hospital. Working at their side was Stuart Brand, ex of the Stanford Research Institute, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, who became an early propagandist for the personal computer. But we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves; it was the sex, drugs, and rock & roll culture that destroyed the great classical music canon and led us down the road to barbarism.

Also guilty: The Frankfurt School. "Theodor Adorno was trained as a Classical musician in the 1920s in Germany, but was recruited to this project [of cultural and psychological warfare], in which the conscious objective was to destroy that which makes Western Civilization great, namely, the fundamental principles of Christianity, and he wrote and collaborated with others specifically on the idea that everything they did aimed to destroy Western Civilization.... And they said explicitly there could never be their kind of world-government revolution in the West until every aspect of Christianity had been destroyed...." Adorno, no friend of pop culture, nonetheless committed the earlier heresy of promoting Schonberg, "a postmodernist composer" who showed that human beings were irrational. Schonberg and Adorno turned people into murderers and necrophiliacs. Adorno's everywhere - music departments, Hollywood, everywhere.

So there you go, that's how the Littleton culture came to be.

Doug



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list