June 6, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 11

PRESS PASS: FAY Sober

Max Lerner: Aquarian Columnist

Would you accept the political judgement of a newspaper columnist who practices transcendental meditation and yoga, and advocates yin-yang? You may be doing just that, if you are among the millions of readers of the nationally syndicated columns of political analyst Max Lerner. Max Lerner is a longtime admirer and co-worker of Marilyn Ferguson, author and organizer of the kook cultists' "Aquarian Conspiracy." Lerner contributes to Ms. Ferguson's Brain/Mind Bulletin, the bi-weekly "research journal" of the Aquarians and precursor to Ferguson's new book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, the popularized version of the Stanford Research Institute's brainwashing manifesto, Changing Images. In the foreword Lerner penned to the Aquarian Conspiracy, he writes: We are in the midst of a knowledge revolution . . . discarding traditional models of the cosmos and ourselves . . . and reaching for new ones . . . spurred on by recent work on the brain hemispheres, on molecular biology, and biochemistry, on the genetic code, on primatology and ethnology, on biofeedback and altered states of consciousness, on medicine and psychotherapies, on archaeology and astronomy, on the evolutionary process, on the structure of language and the nature of meaning, on leadership and power, and on the governance of peoples and nations. . . . The reader will meet a number of key concepts on these pagesparadigms and paradigm shifts, entropy and syntropy, holism, holographs, the uncertainty principle, dissipative structures, punctuated evolution. This is not a "popularization" that reduces the essence of these concepts in any way. It is, rather, the humanizing of the research and discoveries that have heretofore been beyond the reach of all but the initiates. Through his position as an internationally syndicated columnist, Lerner creates political opinions for the uninitiated everyday on how they should think, act, and vote on issues and candidates. In a recent column he intoned

that "American national interest" demands that any candidate for the presidency of the United States regard Israel as "America's only remaining strategic asset," and appoint the "best bet" for Secretary of StateHenry Kissinger. The Education of Max Lerner Lerner is the liberal dean of political columnists. He is syndicated by the Los Angeles Times international syndicate, reaching 90 newspapers in major cities around the globe. He is also the author of numerous books, including his latest, Ted and the Kennedy Legend; a professor at the Graduate School of Human Behavior of the U.S. International University of San Diego; and a lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York City. The liberal Aquarian Lerner got his training in the 1920s at the Brookings Institution's School of Economics and Government. From there he served under Franklin D. Roosevelt on the New Deal National Emergency Council. He was made "consultant" to the Anglo-American Office of War Information psychological warfare bureau in 1942, and after the war became a columnist for the world-wide syndicate of the New York Post and Los Angeles Times, in 1949. Lerner was an intimate of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, and editor and writer for the Nation, New Republic, and Saturday Review magazines. He became a left-wing social democrat supporter of the Socialist International and its offshoot, the Labor Zionists, in the 1940s. His vision of a one-world "democratic collectivist" government resembles that of British Empire founder Cecil Rhodes, or today's London Economist writer and former British Ambassador to the United States, Peter Jay. Lerner wrote on "The Problems of American Life" in 1943: The sovereignty of the nation-state is a thing of the past. . . . The creation of an international armed force or the gradual denationalization of armies is the possible solution to the question of disarmament. . . . The nations of colored people should be placed in the trusteeship of democratic groups of their own colored race. In the 1950s the Ford Foundation funded Lerner as a scholar on European civilization, expanded his expertise, and in 1960 sent him to India and China. Today he is a close friend of Herman "Mega-death" Kahn and an

associate of Kahn's Hudson Institute, which advocates drastic depopulation of the Third World and a thermonuclear exchange between the superpowers. Lerner's early writings on America left-wing ideology posed the question how "the democratic majority is to be educated, formed, and set into motion." Apparently Lerner has discovered the answer in the Aquarian Conspiracy.