1969 – 2009

Forty Years of Helter Skelter Smelter

Timothy J. Cullen

REMNANT COLUMNIST, Argentina

Charles Manson

(March 18, 2009)

(Posted 09/07/09 www.RemnantNewspaper.com)  Forty years ago last month, two events occurred that exposed in Christendom a “generation gap” that might better have been described as an abysm. First, on August 9^th and 10^th, the so-called “Manson Family” committed demented multiple murders in Los Angeles; second, a week later on the other coast, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair—“An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music”—was held from Aug 15^th through the 18^th in an upstate New York dairy farm where approximately half a million young people—among them this writer—had assembled for an event that these many years later for some reason calls to mind the infamous Leni Riefenstahl Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will” in all its pagan emotionality.

It would be a very unperceptive person indeed who could not connect the two midsummer events as somehow connected, as forging a link in the chain of events that would drag formerly Christian communities down into a swamp of secular materialism, consumerism, sensationalism, subjectivism and sensuality, all of it sliding down the slippery slope into Satanism disguised as New Age “spirituality.” Forty years later, it is not too much of an exaggeration to claim that Western societies are circling the drain.

The Old Order was passing with the 60s: WWII heroes and later presidents Eisenhower and DeGaulle passed from the scene, the former passing away and the latter passing into political oblivion. Mankind landed on the moon and Teddy Kennedy and an unfortunate female passenger landed in Nantucket Sound, where Mary Jo Kopechne drowned. Muammar Kaddafi overthrew Libya’s king and remains in power to this day. The “Days of Rage” demonstrations by radicals known as the “Weathermen” caused a calling out of the National Guard in Chicago and the My Lai massacre took place in Viet Nam. And, of course, Paul VI’s “Novus Ordo” mass put a de facto end to Roman Catholicism as it had existed for nearly two millennia. All in all, it was not a very good year, and it brought to an end a difficult decade that was a watershed in the accelerating decline of the West.

One might say that “Helter Skelter,” the cacophonous Beatles song adopted by Charles Manson as the name for the apocalyptic race war he expected to take place in the West, could well have served as the theme song for the Sixties, the decade that saw created the conditions for the societal upheaval that would send the West into its downward spiral.

Most of us who “came of age” during the Sixties will remember with what rapidity the societal structure changed in the West. When the Sixties began, the nuclear family was still largely intact, few women had been pressured into the labor force so stay-at-home-moms were the norm, divorce was uncommon, out-of-wedlock births were uncommon, abortion was illegal, dress was mostly modest, education did not include “diversity” indoctrination, people of all ages attended church regularly, the Mass of All Time was still celebrated in all its splendor… In short, the West was “a place where even squares could have a ball,” in the words of the 1969 Merle Haggard country hit “Okie From Muskogee,” a song that epitomized the widening and deepening societal chasm that had opened.

Something had happened during the Sixties that changed Western societies more profoundly during a decade than had been the case for nearly the whole of the Twentieth Century that had gone before them. What was it? What were the key factors causing such societal turmoil?

This writer remembers well the seemingly spontaneous explosion of drug use and rebellion that swept Ivy League colleges in the summer of 1966, the year in which the Beatles declared that they were “more popular than Jesus,” and in which the “Church of Satan” was founded in San Francisco, site of the first “acid tests” that had so much to do with the rapid spread of LSD, legal in the US until October of that year. By year’s end, tweed jackets were giving way to fur vests, penny loafers to knee high boots, liberty prints to tie-dies… Revolution!

Revolution was in the air everywhere by 1969. The “counterculture” movement had captured a large segment of the college age population, and slowly but surely drew into its web the less affluent and educated young. But from where had the counterculture sprung?

A look at a Wikipedia entry on the so-called “Frankfurt School”—actually, the Institute for Social Research—might shed some light on the matter: “The Institute and various collaborators had a gigantic effect on (especially American) social science through their work The Authoritarian Personality, which conducted extensive empirical research, using sociological and psychoanalytic categories, in order to characterize the forces that led individuals to affiliate with or support fascist movements or parties. The study found the assertion of universals, or even truth, to be a hallmark of fascism. The Authoritarian Personality hypothesis which proceeded from this contributed greatly to the emergence of the counterculture.”[1]

The full entry merits reading, because the influence of this group of negative neo-Marxists upon Western culture has been and remains of an importance far outweighing its intellectual pretenses and conceits. The intellectual roots of the Frankfurt School can be traced back to Marx, Hegel and ultimately Kant: “Historical Materialism,” in other words; thus, anti-realism and by extension and default anti-Catholic. Universal truth, it taught, leads to authoritarianism; it leads inevitably to fascism. Beauty cannot be permitted to exist, because humankind’s condition can only be despair, or so taught those whose task was “to undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy through an ‘abolition of culture’ (Aufhebung der Kultur in Lukacs' German); and, second, to determine new cultural forms which would increase the alienation of the population, thus creating a ‘new barbarism’.”[2]

An exhaustive—indeed, even a thorough—critique of the convoluted, unclear and unhealthy thinking that makes up the Frankfurt School’s “philosophy” and “social science” (the word “science” should be taken under advisement and with more than one grain of salt) is beyond the scope of this essay; the reader is asked to take on faith that the writer has at least a basic knowledge of the subject. The Minnicino essay cited supra is well worth reading; the mind boggles when one considers that the maundering of these well-nigh demented “intellectuals” has been raised to the status of high scholarship and great thought, when it is obvious to anyone of religious faith and sound use of reason that one is reading no more or less than sesquipedalian nonsense that would make the Mad Hatter blush.

The European social engineers who were imported into US academic institutions and intelligence agencies during and after the Second World War made great use of radio for “entertainment” (especially pop music) and later television for persuasion—one might say “brainwashing”—campaigns, which came to fruition in the 1960s with the coming of age of the first “teevee generation,” the vanguard of the group now known as the “baby boomers;” this writer, born in 1946, belongs to this cohort.

By 1969, the danger was recognized by even so befuddled an observer as Pope Paul VI. Minnicino points out that: “The only critique [of Frankfurt School thinking and of Herbert Marcuse in particular] of any merit at the time, however, was one by Pope Paul VI, who in 1969 named Marcuse (an extraordinary step, as the Vatican usually refrains from formal denunciations of living individuals), along with Freud, for their justification of ‘disgusting and unbridled expressions of eroticism’; and called Marcuse's theory of liberation, ‘the theory which opens the way for license cloaked as liberty ... an aberration of instinct’.”[3]

A more recent essay dealing with the Frankfurt School stated that:

Their [the Frankfurt School] task, therefore, was as swiftly as possible to undermine the Judaeo-Christian legacy. To do this they called for the most negative destructive criticism possible of every sphere of life which would be designed to de-stabilize society and bring down what they saw as the ‘oppressive’ order. Their policies, they hoped, would spread like a virus—‘continuing the work of the Western Marxists by other means’ as one of their members noted. To further the advance of their ‘quiet’ cultural revolution – but giving us no ideas about their plans for the future – the School recommended (among other things):

1. The creation of racism offences.
2. Continual change to create confusion
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking
7. Emptying of churches
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits
10. Control and dumbing down of media
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family”[4]

The program has been carried out with great success, echoing the late (ordered hanged by Stalin) Marxist Willi Munzenberg’s arrogant declaration: “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.”[5]

Ruination of the Catholic Church, sexual libertinism and natural role confusion followed by perversion, destruction of the family, unbridled drug use, paganized popular culture, Marxist infiltration of higher education and bureaucracies… These ingredients were blended together to smelt the “Helter Skelter Society” that characterized the Sixties and that has become the societal norm for those born thereafter in a West in which the Catholic Church has been at least for the present stripped of its traditional role as defender of the core values of the West. The enemy within the walls has effectively neutered Holy Mother Church, whose Religious sons and daughters are now an endangered species and a curiosity to the new pagan hordes nursed on the poisoned milk of Marxist materialists with a worldview rooted in despair, envy and hopelessness. The West, Willi, is now so corrupt that it stinks, and there is no sign that the air is soon to clear.

The air in Spain is filling with the smoke of burning Catholic churches, according to recent reports.[6] How long before the winds of hatred blow the flames to the four points of the compass?

The satanic combination of spiritually and culturally nihilistic neo-Marxism with monopoly finance capital, underwritten by bought-and-paid-for governments threatens the West with near-complete societal—and more importantly, spiritual—collapse. The Novus Ordo “mainstream” Church has proven herself not up to the challenge presented by the implacable zealots of the Frankfurt School and its heirs, instead attempting again and again to appease those who will settle for nothing less than her annihilation.

Western society is headed for more than one helter skelter moments in the not-too-distant future, judging from the growing trend of ever-more-savage and soulless crimes reported on a daily basis. The end of the first decade of the twenty-first century after the birth of Our Lord holds far less promise than the end of the decade forty years ago. We must look to the future with foreboding but not with despair; we have the Faith, which the nihilists do not. The enemies of Christ may succeed in creating a Hell on Earth, but they cannot create the Paradise that awaits those who stay true to the Faith or to those fortunate enough to convert to it.

We must cling to our Traditional Catholic faith and turn our backs on all that smacks of modernism and its secular sequel as manifested by the satanic unreason of the Frankfurt School and its devotees. While Western society circles the drain, the Traditional Catholic community had best begin circling the wagons while preparing for what may become a necessary retreat to whatever catacombs we can create, wherever we can create them.

Helter skelter is derived from chaos and disorder. The expression also connotes panic. These are what the Frankfurt School has forged in their assault on the West. Forty more years of it…?

We of the West, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular, must recognize that it is past time to put our house in order.