What brought around communism to most american campuses today was not the russian bolchevik version of the 40’s but rather the german frankfurt school version of communism. The people hitler kicked out of germany. They came to the usa and settled at columbia and berkley. Their critical theory was dominant at columbia university when I was there in the 70’s -80’s. It morphed into critical race theory at harvard in the 1990’s.
It was a frankfurt school critical theorist named Adorno—who performed the greatest blood libel in american history byo of a slight of hand in 1953—the year when stalin was gearing up to send jews to concentration camps (before he died) and julius and ethel rosenberg were executed for treason. (no one has been executed since—because the word has become meaningless.)
From the 20’s through the 40’s the nazis were considered to be a leftist party —while the communists were even further left. The difference between them as how much of the economy the government controlled. Nazis believed in contolling the “commanding heights” of the economy. They let big companies do their job while tightly controlling them. The communists believed in controlling the whole economy.
What adorno did in 1953 was call nazis a rightest party. So nazis were on the far right—which is bad and the communists were on the far left which is good. By doing this piece of left right jiu jitsu. Adorno tagged the republican part as being nazi light.
He was dead wrong. But it didn’t matter. All that needed to happen was that the NY Times pick up on his blood libel.
They did. And so did every other media outlet.
Excellent analysis.
You wouldn’t believe how many arguments I’ve had with leftists on Quora (in case you didn’t know the unofficial home of radical leftists) on Nazism being left.
I usually have to bring out the “big guns” as they will argue incessantly Nazism is far right and very similar to MAGA. Big guns being the fact Joesph Goebbels (German minister of propaganda and IMO the most intelligent of them) wrote several pieces explaining how Nazism was a new form of Socialism.
And yes I think the Frankfurt school theory has much merit. More than likely the NYT did (and does) have more than a few commies working inside.
On Harvard have you seen / read of their current President? She seems to be critical theory personified.