I know that you are really into Beethoven. Does this mean that you are actually a Leninist? He went all squishy goofy soft over old Ludwig van.
I have a good friend (an economist even) who makes baroque instruments like viola di gambi by hand from scratch. Even sells them for a pretty penny. He claims that Beethoven was the beginning of the end of western civilization.
So there. Barkley Rosser (overquota again, darn it!) -----Original Message----- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Friday, September 24, 1999 2:33 PM Subject: Littleton: it's Adorno's fault
>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
>
>