FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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How to spot a conspiracy fantasist

How to spot a conspiracy fantasist

Re: “Frankfurt School and the threat to Western civilisation”, Have Your Say, February 1.

Nigel Pike claims the goal of the Frankfurt School was/is nothing less than to destroy Western civilisation. That claim, along with others he made in the same letter, is impressive: In my 35 years of reading Nation letters I have never read comments as inane as these.
First, his opinion that the world’s ills are caused by the publishing of fake news by the mainstream media. Thousands of articles are published every day in the mass media, so it would surely be easy for Pike to give examples. Yet he offers not 
one shred of evidence and can only repeat the words of the pathological liar in the White House – hardly a convincing argument.
Second, to accuse the Frankfurt School of a conspiracy to promote fake reporting is absolutely astonishing. Again, Pike offers no evidence, preferring a world more surreal than ever dreamt up by Salvador Dali, to the sober though less glamorous reality – which is that no institution has the power to assert this kind of influence. 
Third, Pike caps his letter with an 87-year old statement by Frankfurt School co-founder Max Horkheimer: “The Revolution won’t happen with guns … We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.” 
Unfortunately he fails to interpret this statement by its historical context, and thus denies the fact that all theories evolve over the course of time and context. Or perhaps Mr Pike still believes in Aristotle’s worldview of unchanging and eternal truths?
(Equally old-fashioned is his horror at the idea that children be informed about sex and homosexuality.) 
As a Have Your Say conspiracy theorist, Pike is second only to JC Wilcox. The only difference is that Wilcox’s paranoid fantasies regarding all that is wrong with the world centre on Islam rather than the Frankfurt School.
Egon
 

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