It was 60 years ago this month, in February 1964, that the Beatles took America by storm.
Although the Fab Four by the beginning of 1964 were already a wild pop-culture phenomenon in their native U.K. and in Europe, having released two well-received albums and a slew of popular singles accompanied by extensive tours, their success in the states was delayed.
Struggles with Capitol Records, the U.S. counterpart of the Beatles’ label, EMI, resulted in their early music having a delayed release in America. When “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was finally put out in the United States in mid-December 1963, it was a smash hit that reached Number One in the U.S. charts by mid-January of 1964.
On the basis of the initial public interest in the new four-piece band that had already conquered Europe, the Beatles were given a shot at personally presenting themselves to the American public on CBS’ The Ed Sullivan Show. On February 9, they performed a set of their most popular hits on the program and made subsequent appearances on February 16 and February 23.
The rest, as they say, is history. The Ed Sullivan Show helped kick off Beatlemania, as America’s youth, which had still been mourning the death of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, was enthralled by the positive, youthful energy of the four twenty-somethings with long hair and a unique wardrobe. The Beatles did a tour of America later that year in which concerts were so packed with crowds of screaming fans that even the members of the band themselves couldn’t hear their own playing above the noise.
The Beatles’ success kicked off what came to be known as the British Invasion and then the Counterculture of the ‘60s, remembered now for its cacophonous combination of hippies, drugs, sexual promiscuity, normalization of pornography, Marxist politics, and other social movements and changes that resulted in the America of 1970 being virtually an entirely different world from that of 1960.
It’s appropriate that aspects of the Counterculture are referred to with the term “revolution” (such as the Sexual Revolution), for the entire movement was a revolution in every sense of the word. It was a Marxist revolution that pulled out all the stops, implementing the strategies cultural Marxists had developed and practiced elsewhere to achieve a socialist society in America.
After all, the Left knew they could not successfully instigate conquest from without or violent revolution from within as they had done in other countries in which communists had gained power. If Marxism was to come to America, it had to be through social engineering.
Thus, the Counterculture of the 1960s is an important episode in history that should be studied closely by those who wish to understand the workings of the Marxist globalist Deep State, how it exercises power, and how it has worked to destroy America.
One important detail that is so rarely articulated by historians and commentators (especially by those on the Left) is that the Counterculture was not a fight against the establishment, but a war by the establishment against the people — a war against the Christian faith, traditional morality, and nuclear family that the American people prized.
Of course, the popular (and erroneous) conception of the Counterculture is that it was a rebellion against “The Man,” a challenge from the “Little Guy” against big corporations and the Military-Industrial Complex.
Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, it was just the opposite. The Counterculture was the work of the wealthiest, most powerful interests in the nation. It transpired thanks to their handiwork. It’s obvious that this was the case. After all, the hippies weren’t getting their ideas and antagonism toward Christian America out of thin air.
It was the television networks, the movie studios, the record companies, the radio broadcasters, the book publishing houses, the newspapers, and the universities that were pushing the Marxist philosophies that the nation’s youth consumed with such gusto. Had it not been for these mediums, all of them million-dollar (billions, in today’s money) industries, the Counterculture would not have happened; it would have had no fuel to run on.
Ironically, the hippies were out on the streets protesting the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, when it was those same CEOs who had green-lighted the books and films and records that gave those hippies their marching orders.
The ‘60s Counterculture also teaches us the power of mass media; for by it, the Left was able to achieve in less than a decade what it had failed to do during two centuries prior.
In his book Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West, Pastor Kevin Swanson makes the case that the ideas behind the Counterculture were not new in the 1960s; they had been advanced by a long line of intellectuals for hundreds of years — men such as Karl Marx, John Dewey, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jeremy Bentham.
However, these men’s ideas took time to permeate into the public consciousness because their medium was writing at a time when many people were not literate, and their works were primarily being read by other intellectuals, not by the masses.
But by the 1960s, mass media was sophisticated and widespread enough to allow these ideas to reach the common man.
Swanson writes:
These celebrities are the cultural Nephilim, and they are leading today’s apostasy. They sell hundreds of millions of albums, and their music is piped into the brains of billions of people through iPods and iPhones. Certainly, the Nephilim did not have this level of control over the populace in the rural and urban areas in the 1840s when Karl Marx was writing his demon-inspired plays and poems. But now the machine is mass-producing the worldview of Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Nietzche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in bite-sized pieces for mass consumption.
… In the early 1900s, there was no pop-music machine and there were no superstars who controlled the hearts and minds of billions of people through music and the media. However, by the 1960s, the centralized network of radio and television stations was in place. The family farm was a thing of the past, and fathers had disappeared into large corporate systems. Mothers also were entering the work force, and already two generations had passed through John Dewey’s socialized public schools. It was a perfect storm.
Immediately, the dangerous ideas of the great philosophers from the 19th century surface everywhere in the “cool” music produced in the 1960s. As mentioned previously, Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger effectively captured Sartre’s alienation of man in the two most enduring rock songs of all time.
… As measured by album sales, The Beatles take their place at the top of the pyramid of the most influential musicians in history.… They were far and away the single most important worldwide influence in the last century.… This is far more mass appeal than Ralph Waldo Emerson attracted in his day.
Swanson also astutely notes that rock concerts, in which fawning audience members idolatrously crowd around and pay reverence to a pop star at center stage, are akin to a religious ritual — albeit a satanically inverted one. He quotes music correspondent William Burroughs, who wrote, “Rock stars may be compared to priests … [the concert] bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco … concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces.… For this magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.”
Trances, the evocation of spirits, magical energy: Is it any wonder that concerts are so often the site of hysterical screaming, fainting, drug use, promiscuous sex, and even violence?
So long as Americans, including many conservatives, continue to cling to the legacy of the Counterculture — a Marxist revolution and arguably the greatest psyop in U.S. history — the nation will continue its downward spiral.
The only hope for America lies in returning to the bedrock of its Christian faith.
