n _The Equinox--the
Journal of Scientific Illuminism_, it is proposed that prostitutes
should be placed on the same level as soldiers who have served their
country and be honoured and pensioned by the State.[755] The community
of women was not an idea that originated with the Russian Bolsheviks,
but one that has run through all the revolutionary movements of the
past.

The attempt to pervert all conceptions of beauty in the sphere of art
serves to pave the way for moral perversion. In the _New York Herald_
two years ago there appeared a circular protesting against the so-called
Modernistic cult in art as "world-wide Bolshevist propaganda." The
circular went on to declare:

This aims to overthrow and destroy all existing social systems,
including that of the arts. This modernistic degenerate cult is simply
the Bolshevist philosophy applied in art. The triumph of Bolshevism
therefore means the destruction of the present aesthetic system, the
transportation of all aesthetic values, and the deification of ugliness.

The whole propaganda of the movement was said to be organized by "a
coterie of European art-dealers"--elsewhere described as German--who had
flooded the market with the works of artists who began as "a small group
of neurotic egomaniacs in Paris styling themselves worshippers of Satan,
the God of Ugliness." Some of these men were suffering from the "visual
derangement" of the insane, whilst "many of the pictures exhibited
another form of mania. The system of this is an incontrollable desire to
mutilate the human body." Sadism, as we know, played a prominent part in
both the French and Russian revolutions. The most important point in
all this is not that degenerates should be found to perpetrate these
abominations, but what the circular describes as the "Machiavellian
campaign organized for the unloading of these works. Editions de luxe
... were published and sold by the picture dealers; ...every crafty
device known to the picture trade was resorted to in order to discredit
and destroy the heretofore universally accepted standards of
aesthetics."[756]

This process of reversing all accepted standards may also be brought
about by subtler methods. We have already seen that occult practices may
lead to the obliteration of all sense of truth and of normal sexual
instincts. Under the influence of so-called occult science, which is, in
reality, simply powerful suggestion or self-hypnotism, all a man's
natural impu