Saturday, October 28, 2017

The Authoritarian Personality (1950)

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State-Sanctioned Scapegoating ⇻

The Authoritarian Personality is a 1950 sociology book by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley, during and shortly after WW2.

The Authoritarian Personality "invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the 'F scale' (F for fascist)." The personality type Adorno et al. identified can be defined by nine traits that were believed to cluster together as the result of childhood experiences. These traits include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex.

Though strongly criticized for bias and methodology, the book was highly influential in American social sciences, particularly in the first decade after its publication: "No volume published since the war in the field of social psychology has had a greater impact on the direction of the actual empirical work being carried on in the universities today."
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Authoritarianism was measured by the F-scale. The "F" was short for "pre-fascist personality." Another major hypothesis of the book is that the authoritarian syndrome is predisposed to right-wing ideology and therefore receptive to fascist governments.
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The F scale targets an authoritarian, anti-democratic personality profile that makes a person susceptible to Fascist propaganda. The items were written in accordance to fascist propaganda materials as well as priory held TAT protocol data and interviews with ethnocentric participants.
  • Conventionalism: Adherence to conventional values.
  • Authoritarian Submission: Towards ingroup authority figures.
  • Authoritarian Aggression: Against people who violate conventional values.
  • Anti-Intraception: Opposition to subjectivity and imagination.
  • Superstition and Stereotypy: Belief in individual fate; thinking in rigid categories.
  • Power and Toughness: Concerned with submission and domination; assertion of strength.
  • Destructiveness and Cynicism: hostility against human nature.
  • Projectivity: Perception of the world as dangerous; tendency to project unconscious impulses.
  • Sex: Overly concerned with modern sexual practices. 
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The study employs both quantitative and qualitative components. The first part of the research resembles a survey type of research with structured questionnaires. Based on the scores on the questionnaires, a smaller number of participants was elected for clinical interviews and administration of the Thematic Apperception Test. Interviews were coded with the techniques of content analysis.
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A number of studies have examined the external criterion validity of F scale, with various demographic and political groups. Such groups included: German cosmetic factory workers (Cohn and Carsch, 1954); English fascists and communists, compared to 'politically neutral' soldiers (Coulter, 1953). Both studies found high scores (>5) in F-Scale.

However, the Coulter study also found the Communists scored higher in F-Scale than the politically neutral group. Eysenck (1954, ref. by Brown, p. 80) commented that Coulter's results indicate that the F-Scale actually measures general authoritarianism, rather than fascist tendencies in particular. (see Left-Wing Authoritarianism).

[Yet another tragic, disgusting, pointless US killing spree supports some of the conclusions of the book:] Eight dead in US spa shootings - BBC > .

"Officials say it is still too early to know whether the attack, in which six Asian women were killed, was racially motivated. The suspect may have been a patron and claimed to have a "sex addiction". Robert Aaron Long "apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.]

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Friday, October 27, 2017

Banned Books

23-9-9 The murky world of banned books - RobWords > .
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23-9-12 Brainwashing Of America's School Children | Climate Town > .
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>> Propaganda >>>
„Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen. “
“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” ― Heinrich Heine, 1823
The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (Deutsche Studentenschaft, DSt) to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others. The initial books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky, but came to include very many authors, including Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, writers in French and English, and effectively any book incompatible with Nazi ideology. In a campaign of cultural genocide, books were also burned en masse by the Nazis in occupied territories, such as in Poland.
On 6 May 1933, the Berlin chapter of the German Student Union made an organised attack on Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (roughly: Institute of Sex Research). It's assumed that Dora Richter, the first transgender woman known to have undergone sex reassignment surgery (by doctors at the institute), may have been killed during the attack.

The institute's library included around 20,000 unique works on intersexuality, homosexuality, and transgender topics. On 10 May 1933 >, the students publicly hauled the library to the Bebelplatz square at the State Opera, and burned them along with volumes from elsewhere. A total of over 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books were burned, thereby ushering in an era of uncompromising state censorship. In many other university towns, nationalist students marched in torch lit parades against the "un-German" spirit. The scripted rituals of this night called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged, banned books into the bonfires with a great joyous ceremony that included live music, singing, "fire oaths," and incantations. In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard Joseph Goebbels deliver an address: "No to decadence and moral corruption!" Goebbels enjoined the crowd. "Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner."

Mein Kampf (1925) ..
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BBC - Guy Burgess

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Guy Burgess and the Cambridge Spy Ring > .
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Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess (16 April 1911 – 30 August 1963) was a British diplomat and Soviet agent, a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring that operated from the mid-1930s to the early years of the Cold War era. His defection in 1951 to the Soviet Union, with his fellow spy Donald Maclean, led to a serious breach in Anglo-United States intelligence co-operation, and caused long-lasting disruption and demoralisation in Britain's foreign and diplomatic services.

Born into a wealthy middle-class family, Burgess was educated at Eton College, the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth and Trinity College, Cambridge. An assiduous networker, he embraced left-wing politics at Cambridge and joined the British Communist Party. 

Burgess was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1935, on the recommendation of the future double-agent Harold "Kim" Philby. Early in 1934 Arnold Deutsch, a longstanding Soviet secret agent, arrived in London under the cover of a research appointment at University College, London. Known as "Otto", his brief was to recruit the brightest students from Britain's top universities, who might in future occupy leading positions in British institutions. In June 1934 he recruited Philby, who had come to the Soviets' notice earlier that year in Vienna where he had been involved in demonstrations against the Dollfuss government. Philby recommended several of his Cambridge associates to Deutsch, including Maclean, by this time working in the Foreign Office. He also recommended Burgess, although with some reservations on account of the latter's erratic personality. Deutsch considered Burgess worth the risk, "an extremely well-educated fellow, with valuable social connections, and the inclinations of an adventurer". Burgess was given the codename "Mädchen", meaning "Girl", later changed to "Hicks". Burgess then persuaded Blunt that he could best fight fascism by working for the Soviets. A few years later another Apostle, John Cairncross, was recruited by Burgess and Blunt, to complete the spy ring often characterised as the "Cambridge Five".

After leaving Cambridge, Burgess worked for the BBC as a producer, briefly interrupted by a short period as a full-time MI6 intelligence officer, before joining the Foreign Office in 1944.

In July 1936, having twice previously applied unsuccessfully for posts at the BBC, Burgess was appointed as an assistant producer in the Corporation's Talks Department. Responsible for selecting and interviewing potential speakers for current affairs and cultural programmes, he drew on his extensive range of personal contacts and rarely met refusal. His relationships at the BBC were volatile; he quarrelled with management about his pay, while colleagues were irritated by his opportunism, his capacity for intrigue, and his slovenliness. One colleague, Gorley Putt, remembered him as "a snob and a slob ... It amazed me, much later in life, to learn that he had been irresistibly attractive to most people he met".
Old Broadcasting House, BBC's London HQ from 1932 (photographed in 2007)


Among those Burgess invited to broadcast were Anthony Blunt, several times, the well-connected writer-politician Harold Nicolson (a fruitful source of high-level gossip), the poet John Betjeman, and Harold (“Kim”) Philby's father, the Arabist and explorer St John Philby. 

Burgess also sought out Winston Churchill, then a powerful backbench opponent of the government's appeasement policy. On 1 October 1938, during the Munich crisis, Burgess, who had met Churchill socially, went to the latter's home at Chartwell to persuade him to reconsider his decision to withdraw from a projected talks series on Mediterranean countries. According to the account provided in Tom Driberg's biography, the conversation ranged over a series of issues, with Burgess urging the statesman to "offer his eloquence" to help resolve the current crisis. The meeting ended with the presentation to Burgess of a signed copy of Churchill's book Arms and the Covenant, but the broadcast did not take place.

Pursuing their main objective, the penetration of the British intelligence agencies, Burgess's controllers asked him to cultivate a friendship with the author David Footman, who they knew was an MI6 officer. Footman introduced Burgess to his superior, Valentine Vivian; as a result, over the following eighteen months Burgess carried out several small assignments for MI6 on an unpaid freelance basis. He was trusted sufficiently to be used as a back channel of communication between the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and his French counterpart Edouard Daladier, during the period leading to the 1938 Munich summit.

38-10-6 Frederick Wolff Ogilvie ⇒ BBC Chief 6 Oct 1938 - BrMo > .

At the BBC, Burgess thought his choices of speaker were being undermined by the BBC's subservience to the government – he attributed Churchill's non-appearance to this – and in November 1938, after another of his speakers was withdrawn at the request of the prime minister's office, he resigned. 

As well as making programmes for the public, the wartime BBC was involved in a range of top secret activity, working with closely with the intelligence agencies and military.

MI6 was by now convinced of his future utility, and he accepted a job with its new propaganda division, known as Section D. In common with the other members of the Cambridge Five, his entry to British intelligence was achieved without vetting; his social position and personal recommendation were considered sufficient.

In mid-January 1941 Burgess rejoined the BBC Talks Department, while continuing to carry out freelance intelligence work, both for MI6 and its domestic intelligence counterpart MI5, which he had joined in a supernumerary capacity in 1940. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the BBC required Burgess to select speakers who would depict Britain's new Soviet ally in a favourable light. He turned again to Blunt, and to his old Cambridge friend Jim Lees, and in 1942 arranged a broadcast by Ernst Henri, a Soviet agent masquerading as a journalist. No transcript of Henri's talk survives, but listeners remembered it as pure Soviet propaganda. In October 1941 Burgess took charge of the flagship political programme The Week in Westminster, which gave him almost unlimited access to Parliament. Information gleaned from regular wining, lunching and gossiping with MPs was invaluable to the Soviets, regardless of the content of the programmes that resulted. Burgess sought to maintain a political balance; his fellow Etonian Quintin Hogg, a future Conservative Lord Chancellor, was a regular broadcaster, as, from the opposite social and political spectrum, was Hector McNeil, a former journalist who became a Labour MP in 1941 and served as a parliamentary private secretary in the Churchill war ministry.

Burgess had lived in a Chester Square flat since 1935. From Easter 1941 he shared a house with Blunt and others at No. 5 Bentinck Street. 

Burgess's casual work for MI5 and MI6 deflected official suspicion as to his true loyalties, but he lived in constant fear of exposure, particularly as he had revealed the truth to Goronwy Rees, a young Fellow of All Souls College, when trying to recruit the latter in 1937. ... Always seeking ways of further penetrating the citadels of power, when in June 1944 Burgess was offered a job in the News Department of the Foreign Office, he accepted it. The BBC reluctantly assented to his release, stating that his departure would be "a serious loss".


BBC - Guy Burgess ..
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Bilateral Propaganda



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Blitz & Book Clubs

Book clubs and the Blitz: how WWII Britons kept calm and got reading:

"The restrictions at the beginning of the second world war affected all aspects of day-to-day life. But it was the blackout that topped most people’s list of grievances – above shortages of food and fuel, the evacuation, and lack of news and public services. Households were reprimanded and fined for showing chinks of light through windows, car lights were dimmed, and walking around, even along familiar streets, late at night became treacherous.

With the widespread limitations to free movement, the book trade was quick off the mark. Books were promoted by libraries and book clubs as the very thing to fight boredom and fill blacked-out evenings at home or in shelters with pleasure and forgetfulness. “Books may become more necessary than gas-masks,” the Book Society, Britain’s first celebrity book club, advised."
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The club was set up in 1929 and ran until the 1960s, shipping “carefully” selected books out to thousands of readers each month. It was modelled on the success of the American Book-of-the-Month club (which launched in 1926) and aimed to boost book sales at a time when buying books wasn’t common. It irritated some critics and booksellers who accused it of “dumbing down” and giving an unfair advantage to some books over others – but was hugely popular with readers.
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The Book Society guided readers through the confusion of appeasement and the run-up to the second world war with a marked increase in recommendations of political non-fiction examining contemporary geo-politics. The classic novel of appeasement was Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart (October 1938) in which a sense of malaise and inevitability of future war haunts the characters’ desperate actions.

When Britain finally declared war against Germany in September 1939, the Book Society judges were divided [between tension-relief and dismay].
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Publishers and booksellers faced huge challenges during the second world war, including paper shortages, problems in distribution, a vanishing workforce, and bomb damage to offices and warehouses. But there were more readers – and from a wider social class – at the end of it. Demand consistently outstripped supply as consumer expenditure on books more than doubled between 1938 and 1945.
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More topical non-fiction became a priority as the devastation of the Blitz kicked in. Winged Words: Our Airmen Speak for Themselves (1941) and Into Battle: Winston Churchill’s War Speeches (1941) were especially popular.

Historical fiction was consistently in demand. Half the club’s choices in 1941 were long novels with historical settings.
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The other fail-safes in the second world war were the classics. As books already in print became scarce, the Book Society reissued new editions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina."

 
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sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...

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