FBI Informant: Ray Bradbury's Sci-fi Written To Induce Communistic Mass Hysteria

v3rgEz writes: The FBI followed Ray Bradbury's career very closely, in part because an informant warned them that his writing was not enjoyable fantasy, but rather tantamount to psychological warfare. "The general aim of these science fiction writers is to frighten the people into a state of paralysis or psychological incompetence bordering on hysteria," the informant warned. "Which would make it very possible to conduct a Third World War in which the American people would believe could not be won since their morale had seriously been destroyed."

Comments

What?

[jbmartin6]

"Communistic mass hysteria"? Not clear what that means. It looks like they played with the idea that making people think about society made people more susceptible to Communism. Probably true in some cases.

Re:This kind of stuff is Exhibit #1

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Maybe the FBI were just reading too many actual Marxist manuals?

""religious illumination," says Benjamin, must be shown to "reside in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson." At the same time, new cultural forms must be found to increase the alienation of the population, in order for it to understand how truly alienated it is to live without socialism. "Do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones," said Benjamin.

The proper direction in painting, therefore, is that taken by the late Van Gogh, who began to paint objects in disintegration, with the equivalent of a hashish-smoker's eye that "loosens and entices things out of their familiar world." In music, "it is not suggested that one can compose better today" than Mozart or Beethoven, said Adorno, but one must compose atonally, for atonalism is sick, and "the sickness, dialectically, is at the same time the cure....The extraordinarily violent reaction protest which such music confronts in the present society ... appears nonetheless to suggest that the dialectical function of this music can already be felt ... negatively, as 'destruction.' "

The purpose of modern art, literature, and music must be to destroy the uplifting—therefore, bourgeois — potential of art, literature, and music, so that man, bereft of his connection to the divine, sees his only creative option to be political revolt. "To organize pessimism means nothing other than to expel the moral metaphor from politics and to discover in political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images." Thus, Benjamin collaborated with Brecht to work these theories into practical form, and their joint effort culminated in the Verfremdungseffekt ("estrangement effect"), Brecht's attempt to write his plays so as to make the audience leave the theatre demoralized and aimlessly angry."

Basically the long and the short of it was these these people were and apparently are trying to infect the arts and entertainment in order to get everyone bummed out enough to turn to communist revolution, by salting the depression with political statements. I'm not sure how bummed out you'd have to be to go that far but that didn't stop them trying. I mean why do you think that modern art is, sometimes literally, such a pile of shit?

Now just for clarity I don't agree with everything in that article, in particular his connecting art with religion - there may be a connection but it's far from as pervasive as he seems to think, however what I'm seeing happening in the arts and entertainment industries these days does appear to match the claims he's making.