Praise for The Devil’s Pleasure Palace
“Ranging over the centuries and across the continents, from high culture to war to American society today, Michael Walsh has written a dazzling, exhilarating, and thought-provoking book. Whether we end up liberating ourselves from The Devil’s Pleasure Palace or not, Walsh has made clear what’s at stake.”
—William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard
“In this learned and engaging book Michael Walsh takes us on a literary, philosophical, and pop-cultural odyssey of Western society, from the Greeks to the present. He reminds us that in the age-old war for the soul of the West between the bored and nihilistic creatures of affluence and leisure and the autonomous individual who honors his past and seeks transcendence in his religion, the bad guys are exhausted and now meeting their comeuppance. A delightfully depressing tour that ends at an unexpectedly optimistic destination.”
—Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
“There is poison in our bloodstream. Michael Walsh works to pump it out by bringing it to the light of day. The Devil’s Pleasure Palace shows us how we got here and how our souls and our culture are being suffocated. There is hope in knowing our history and wanting something better. This book equips that cause—one aimed toward heaven.”
—Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review
“The highly readable The Devil’s Pleasure Palace tells the story of a group of European intellectuals decamping to the United States from Germany during and after the war. It follows how they became influential university professors and how pretty much every single awful thing you see happening at the University of Missouri and Yale and every other cultural center came from these wicked men. . . . It is likely you have never or only vaguely heard about cultural Marxism. You may have never known that it was critical theory your professors ladled out to you, or how it poisoned you. But now you know, and Walsh would say your job is as simple as World War II: find ‘Berlin’ and destroy it. He calls all men of goodwill, conservatives of whatever stripe, to band together to defeat the cultural Marxists now commanding the heights and threatening us all . . . Michael A. Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace deserves a wide audience, especially among patriots. Reading it, you may even come to like opera; well, listen to some anyway.”
—Austin Ruse, Breitbart.com
“What Walsh has done here is no small accomplishment. He set out to write a book about the need for heroes, and created a work that is, in and of itself, a heroic act of truth telling.”
—Louis Markos, The Federalist
“The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is a challenging but unique and rewarding work powered by sustained flashes of brilliance. More importantly, it is a rallying cry for conservatives to reengage in the critical cultural battle which Walsh correctly calls the defining issue of our time. Its outcome will determine whether we who see ourselves as the conservators of the Western legacy—‘the primary engine of human moral, spiritual, social, scientific, and medical progress’—will ‘succumb to a relentless assault on its values’ or whether we will rally and crush the left’s ‘double agents, operating behind the lines of Western civilization.’”
—Mark Tapson, FrontPage Mag
“It is a dazzling book. It’s erudite, bold, entertaining, and important.”
—Jay Nordlinger, National Review
“If the past enemies of the West were wicked, the Frankfurt School and its ilk are Satanic in the precise sense of the word. Michael Walsh calls them by their right name: The new enemies of the West are Satan, in the precise way that we understand Satan as channeled by Milton and Goethe.”
—David P. Goldman, PJ Media and the Asia Times
“Michael Walsh asks in his book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: How might people react if the land promised by modern cultural Pied Pipers turned out to be a hell? How if, after accepting abortion, the loss of individuality, the destruction of tradition, and a near utter reliance on the state, the end point was not utopia but dystopia? Worse, what if those two places are actually the same thing?”
—Richard Fernandez, PJ Media and the Belmont Club
© 2015, 2017 by Michael Walsh
Preface © 2017 by Michael Walsh
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York, 10003.
First American edition published in 2015 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.
Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
First paperback edition published in 2017.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Walsh, Michael, 1949–
The devil’s pleasure palace: the cult of critical theory and the subversion of the West / by Michael Walsh.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59403-928-7 (ebook)
1. Critical theory — United States. 2. Nihilism (Philosophy) 3. United States — Civilization — 1945– I. Title.
HM480.W35 2015
149’.8—dc23
2015002549
For Ann Patricia Walsh, my mother,
who taught me to love words
Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
—Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
But I can’t listen to music often, it affects the nerves. One wants to say pleasant stupidities and stroke on the head the people who, living in this dirty hell, can create such beauty. And today it is impossible to stroke anyone on the head—they bite off your hand, and it is necessary to beat heads, beat them ruthlessly, although we, ideally, are against any sort of violence against people. Hmmm, the task is diabolically difficult.
—Vladimir Lenin, as recounted by Maxim Gorky in Days with Lenin
Only a humanity to which death has become as indifferent as its members, which has died to itself, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you . . . Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
—Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind
It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the “Day of Judgment.”
—Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
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