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Liberals Descend from Munzenberg's "Innocents' Club"

June 16, 2017

Willi-Muenzenberg-il-megafono-di-Stalin-l-uomo-che-invento-la-propaganda_h_partb.jpg

Willi Munzenberg, (1888-1940) ranks with Edward Bernays and
Josef Goebbels as one of the three great
masters of propaganda in the twentieth century.



 Münzenberg's techniques of propaganda and disinformation 
(fake news) prove that we live in a de facto Communist regime.




Why did Western governments tolerate this Communist subversion?  The answer is simple: they are subverted themselves.




Willi Münzenberg, inter alia German, French, Communist, founder of the Communist Youth Association, built up his "Münzenberg group" during the Weimar period with numerous daily and weekly newspapers, film corporations and book clubs, including Welt am Abend, Berlin am Morgen and Arbeiter-Illustrierte. Residing in Paris in 1933, he became the propaganda chief of the Comintern using the cover name: "International Aid Committee for the Victims of Fascism."


by Michael Newland
The Life and Influence of Willi Münzenberg



How did it come about that much of the British intelligensia,
for decades, was persuaded of the moral superiority of Communism, and of its inevitability as the future political system of the world? One man, virtually unknown and unnoticed, can claim the dubious distinction of being the prime mover.

quote-all-news-is-lies-and-all-propaganda-is-disguised-as-news-willi-munzenberg-76-17-16 (1).jpgWilli Münzenberg was born in 1888, the son of an alcoholic innkeeper in Thuringia, Germany, who killed himself cleaning a gun while drunk. Unlike most of the leading early German Communists, who were upper-middle class, he could claim to be a genuine proletarian.

During the First World War, Münzenberg was a young left-wing radical living in Switzerland. Talent-spotted by Trotsky, he soon became part of the Bolshevik circle around Lenin, as they waited their opportunity to return to a revolutionary Russia. It was to Münzenberg that Lenin turned as the famous sealed train left Zurich for Russia in 1917. "Six months from now we will either be in power or hanging from the gallows" he said.

Trotsky chose well in Münzenberg. Following the rise to power of the Bolsheviks, he pioneered most of the manipulative political techniques which are a feature of life in the West today. Ad hoc committees for endless causes, politicized arts festivals, mock trials, celebrity letterheads, disinformation stunts and protest marches all sprang from Münzenberg's sheer genius for propaganda.

double-lives-stalin-willi-munzenberg-seduction-intellectuals-stephen-koch-paperback-cover-art.jpgStephen Koch, in his book Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals, calls this "righteous politics." Political issues are turned into a quasi-religion, which brooks no debate - witness the 'no platform' antics of left-wing students who can tolerate no outlook besides their own.

During the 1920's and most of the 1930's Münzenberg played a leading role in the Comintern, Lenin's front for world-wide co-ordination of the left under Russian control. Under Münzenberg's direction, hundreds of groups, committees and publications cynically used and manipulated the devout radicals of the West.

Most of this army of workers in what Münzenberg called 'Innocents' Clubs' had no idea they were working for Stalin. They were led to believe that they were advancing the cause of a sort of socialist humanism. The descendents of the 'Innocents' Clubs' are still hard at work in our universities and colleges. Every year a new cohort of impressionable students join groups like the Anti-Nazi League believing them to be benign opponents of oppression, rather than the Trotskyite fronts they really are. The old tricks certainly are the best!

OTTO KATZ

Münzenberg's right-hand man, Otto Katz, established an Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood, placing the writer Dorothy Parker in charge as celebrity window-dressing. The novelist Thomas Mann was one of the few to detect a swindle, although it took him five years to grasp the realities. How familiar it all seems in a Britain in which extreme left-wing groups sport the names of duped and half-brained actors, sportsmen, etcetera as patrons!

Young_Dorothy_Parker.jpg(Left, Dorothy Parker)

Katz worked hard in Britain to establish the Left Book Club. It networked the Stalinist influence and promoted the left as the chic fashion of the time. The Club ran camps, conferences and propaganda tours of Russia. As in all the Western countries in which 'the Münzenberg men' extended their networks, the 'innocents' believed that they were working to oppose Hitler. In reality the purpose was the undermine the West and pave the way for Soviet control.

The Comintern were able to play upon the vanity of the elite for whom life could never reach their gilded expectations. The secret world offered a "wonderful restorative" - Koch's phrase again - with a particular appeal to the homosexual milieu of Bloomsbury which made up its centre. A connection to power is an aphrodisiac to people of this ilk. Thus the Cambridge spies Blunt, Burgess et al.

Burgess worked for the BBC for several years - helping other Soviet agents onto the airwaves. Appropriately, he lived out the war years in the house in Bentinck Street where Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire !

By 1935 Münzenberg had almost out-lived his usefulness to Stalin, and was lucky to escape from Moscow when he attended the last world congress of the Comintern in 1936. Stalin had no use for proletarians with attitude. The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 stripped away any illusions of Soviet anti-fascism and the notion of a popular front against Hitler.

Münzenberg lived precariously in Paris until the Nazi invasion of June 1940. He then fled southward and his strangled corpse was found in a wood near Grenoble in October. Almost certainly he had been murdered by a Soviet agent.

book9.jpgOtto Katz survived until 1952. He was arrested by the regime, on whose behalf he had been a devoted and obedient servant, and hanged after reading a prepared 'confession' at the show trials in Prague of that year. Knowing well what was in store, he offered his 'confession' the moment he was arrested. This was insufficient, and he was tortured for months while his final service to Communism, the 'confession' as an instrument of disinformation, was worked up.

Despite the formal collapse of Communism in 1989, the legacy of Stalin's strategy of destroying the West by propaganda has an increasing hold through the cult of 'political correctness.' The undermining of our society by the media has steadily intensified since then. Münzenberg's spectre hovers as vital as ever in contemporary life. At a time when Communism has little remaining formal influence, Münzenberg's techniques of propaganda and disinformation pervade our lives.

His legacy had far outlasted the formal cause it served, and now works for new masters. The opinion-formers who so misjudged Communism still claim legitimacy in dictating political ideals. Their track record is little considered. Marx wrote in 1857, "It is possible I've made a fool of myself, but that can always be remedied with a little bit of dialectics." The malady lingers on.

From May 16, 2014
-

Related -
Makow-
Liberals are Unwitting Shills for Communism and Satanism 
Liberals are Unwitting Shills for Communism and Satanism - See more at: https://www.henrymakow.com/liberals_are_shills_for_commun.html#sthash.zZFT7dtL.dpuf
--------   Betty Friedan - "Mommie was a Commie"







Scruples - the game of moral dillemas

Comments for "Liberals Descend from Munzenberg's "Innocents' Club""

Mariel said (May 18, 2014):

My mother's father and his family were a typical example of misguided but sincere liberals who were duped. He went to jail with Eugene Debs
in the Pullman strike, was a socialist member of the Montana legislature. He read the Bible, Marx, and Shakespeare while in jail, a man studying to be a Renaissance man, according to Nellie Bly, the journalist who interviewed the Debs group in prison. He was a great man whom we revere.

But look what happened to his family when he was injured at work in a train accident. No help from the socialists that I am aware of, to his widow and six children. No help from the railway company. No help from Welfare or Social Security. No help from the church. The family held together by all the older children working; Marty was permanently disabled in the Frye Hotel fire in Seattle, but Henry became a fire training captain.

The girls worked at menial slave jobs such as the "tube room" in the bowels of a department store. My mother was supported through college, their last hope of producing a Renaissance person in the family. The family was dispirited and lost their faith as well, when none of us excelled at changing the world.

Most people are waking to the fact that "all sides" are guilty in the game of thrones. Some of us have found faith in God as our only hope in a darkening world.


Dan said (May 17, 2014):

Years ago, my wife read above novel about an idealistic Russian student who worked for the Russian Revolution but who was shot by a soldier when new people took over after Lenin succeeded. We've been unable to find this book again. Have you read/heard of it? Maybe it's one of those disappeared books.

--

Does anyone know the name of this novel?


TT said (May 17, 2014):

I found this article so interesting, and what is strange is that there was an old man who lived near me and i would do his shopping for him before he died, and one day i asked who the people in the photos on his mantlepiece were, and he told me just so much and each time i came i would ask him more about it.

In brief he said the apostles those communist traitors from W W II, were promised so much but when Kim Philby got to Moscow expecting
a heroes welcome, he got very little and was shoved aside as he had fulfilled his purpose, he got a dingy flat in Moscow suburbs and as
much cheap gut rot vodka as he could drink.

The power was off for several hours each day and Kim Philby was miserable. He used to
write to old friends and beg a decent bottle of scotch and some cheese, some friends blanked him but some did send him stuff.

He realized early on he had been a fool and asked people like the old chap i knew to fix it for him to come home in exchange for all the names of other useful idiots, but Rothschild stopped it from happening. Apparently Billy Smart of
Billy Smarts circus fame offered to put up the money to have Philby killed, but it was deemed a bigger punishment to let them live.

John Cairncross the old chap said was from a poor background and envied the others who were from wealthy parentage, Cairncross was
teased for this and he grew very bitter, he claimed he did it all for the communist cause and not for money, but he had 60,000 in the
Moscow bank, but he could never touch it as he never went to Moscow as the English defectors did
The situation now is because of what these men did, helping communism to take root


Dan said (May 17, 2014):

Otto Katz left Hollywood ostensibly to glamorize Communist propaganda in Spain during the Civil War. it's now known in retrospect that he also 'set up' many of the Spanish left that collaborated with him, to be murdered by Soviet assassins. It turns out Katz was a Stalinist spy in the midst of the artsy Trotskyist scene, fingering his pals for the Party during the Stalinist purge.

George Orwell realized it when the Communists began bumping off their non-Stalinist compatriots as soon as the rebels had driven Franco's fascists out of the city for a while. (read 'Homage to Catalonia') . The disillusioning hypocrisy and treachery Orwell witnessed in Spain became grounding of his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty Four.

That Katz moved so easily into a position of influence in Hollywood during the early 30's explains a lot. Here's an informative interview with Jonathan Miles, author of The Nine Lives of Otto Katz on: his work in founding the Anti Nazi League in Hollywood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TUKI5D5B9k



Henry Makow received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 1982. He welcomes your comments at