Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 44, Number 27, July 7, 2017

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 44, Number 27, July 7, 2017

- I. The Development of the World Land-Bridge

- WHAT BERLIN STILL DOESN’T UNDERSTAND: Our Future Lies with the New Silk Road, by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika! Lord, Bless Africa!

- THE ROOTS OF THE NEW SILK ROAD: Leibniz, Sun Yat Sen, The LaRouches, and Xi Jinping, by Michael Billington

- THE BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE: A New Trajectory for Mankind, by William Jones

- II. Manhattan Leads a Revolution

- Beautiful City, by Dean Andromidas (PART 2 of 3): Edgar Allan Poe and the Beautiful City

- REPORT FROM MANHATTAN: Sylvia Olden Lee and the Human Spirit

- Sylvia’s Mission, by Dennis Speed

- Symposium: ‘What Touches People Is When We Sing from Our Hearts and Our Souls’

- The Science of Music: Solution to Plato’s Paradox of ‘The One’ and ‘The Many’, by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

- III. Europe and the New Paradigm

- HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE REPORTS TO GERMAN CITIZENS: How Will Germany and Chancellor Merkel Emerge from the G-20 Summit?

- BRUSSELS CONFERENCE: Panel Seeks Alternatives to the Euro, Discusses ‘One Belt One Road’ Perspective, by Claudio Celani

The New Way Forward for Mankind

Editor-in-Chief and Founder:

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editorial Board: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. , Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert, Gerald Rose, Dennis Small, Jeffrey Steinberg, William Wertz

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Economics: John Hoefle, Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

Russia and Eastern Europe: Rachel Douglas

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

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Berlin: Rainer Apel

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 44, Number 27, July 7, 2017

Cover This Week

Metropolitan Museum of Art

“The Heart of the Andes,” painted in 1859 by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900).

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THE NEW WAY FORWARD FOR MANKIND

I. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORLD LAND-BRIDGE

3 WHAT BERLIN STILL DOES NOT UNDERSTAND

Our Future Lies with the New Silk Road

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

12 Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika! Lord, Bless Africa!

21 THE ROOTS OF THE NEW SILK ROAD

Leibniz, Sun Yat Sen, the LaRouches, and Xi Jinping

by Michael Billington

32 THE BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE

A New Trajectory for Mankind

by William Jones

II. MANHATTAN LEADS A REVOLUTION

40 Beautiful City, Part II

by Dean Andromidas

59 REPORT FROM MANHATTAN

Sylvia Olden Lee and the Human Spirit

by Dennis Speed

59 CONCERT PROGRAM

Tribute to Sylvia Olden Lee, Master Musician and Teacher

presented by the Foundation for the Revival of Classical Culture

64 SYMPOSIUM

‘What Touches People Is When We Sing from Our Hearts and Our Souls’

70 The Science of Music: Solution to Plato’s Paradox of ‘The One’ and ‘The Many’

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

III. EUROPE AND THE NEW PARADIGM

78 HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE REPORTS TO GERMAN CITIZENS

How Will Germany and Chancellor Merkel Emerge from the G-20 Summit?

80 BRUSSELS CONFERENCE

Panel Seeks Alternatives to the Euro, Discusses ‘One Belt One Road’ Perspective

by Claudio Celani

I. The Development of the World Land-Bridge

WHAT BERLIN STILL DOESN’T UNDERSTAND

Our Future Lies with

The New Silk Road

This was the address by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche to a June 24 Schiller Institute conference in Berlin.

LaRouche PAC

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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The optimistic note which was struck by the music we just heard [see page 12], is totally appropriate to the world situation. Perhaps that’s not readily understandable to you here in Germany, but I am very, very optimistic that the world finds itself on a good path. And that has everything to do with the New Silk Road.

The New Silk Road is growing at an unbelievably rapid pace, and it is in the process of developing into a new, just world economic order—even if you have neither heard much about it on Tagesschau, nor read anything at all about it in Bild-Zeitung or the FAZ. That does not mean it isn’t true.

I am totally happy to be able to begin with what’s perhaps the most important point: America, under President Trump—and this definitely goes against everything which you have been used to seeing in the German media about Trump—is now cooperating totally and fully with the Belt and Road Initiative.

I would simply point out that this is a little bit to our credit, because I know very precisely that in 2014, when the Belt and Road Initiative was already in process—President Xi Jinping had already declared the New Silk Road, then called “One Belt, One Road,” to be official Chinese policy in Kazakhstan in 2013—we clearly stated for the first time that this policy could only be successful if America and China, the two largest economies in the world, worked together on a global concept. At that time we published our report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, to which we then added a chapter saying specifically that the United States should cooperate with the New Silk Road. I can assure you that at that time no one believed that that would come to pass.

It seemed to be a totally far-fetched idea, but yet it has actually occurred, and thus there is more than a glimmer of hope that the world will again turn out all right.

America Joins the Silk Road

I will briefly review yesterday’s developments for you.

It was mentioned at the outset that Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi was in Washington in April to prepare for the May Belt and Road Forum in Beijing; consequently, Matt Pottinger, a high official from the State Department, went as an official delegate to the Beijing Summit—which was already a gigantic breakthrough; because you will recall that during the election campaign, Trump had spoken of trade war and said that China must be fought against. So there’s been a total turnaround. The same Yang Jiechi was just now in Washington, and met at length with Trump, to prepare for a new meeting between Xi Jinping and Trump on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hamburg. Trump declared afterwards that China and the United States would work together on the Belt and Road Initiative, and begin joint ventures in third countries.

Photo/China Daily

Premier Li Keqiang meets with U.S. delegation attending the ninth round of the China-U.S. CEO and Former Senior Officials’ Dialogue in Beijing.

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At the same time there was a whole array of high-level conferences—for example, the Ninth U.S.-China CEO and Former Senior Officials’ Dialogue in Beijing. There it was determined that within a year, a very large U.S.-China conference would be held either in the United States or China, where cooperation would be further developed. Then there was another large conference in San Francisco, also with CEOs, government officials, and infrastructure companies; there it was decided that there would be cooperation in building infrastructure in America, and also in third countries. And then there was a conference in Detroit, Michigan with 3,000 participants, including 600 Michigan entrepreneurs from medium-sized enterprises, at which the head of Alibaba, Jack Ma, stressed to the assembly: “If you miss China, you miss the future.”

That evaluation is totally correct, because what is on the agenda is not only economic cooperation, but a totally new paradigm of cooperation among the nations of this world. Even if that reality is not well received in Europe—at least not in Germany—that doesn’t mean that such relations between nations are not developing.

Since Xi Jinping declared this initiative as official Chinese policy in September 2013, this policy of “win-win cooperation”—whereby the Chinese economic model has, in effect, been put into practice in other countries—has developed with breathtaking speed. Let’s just recall once more what huge change has occurred there.

Dramatic Changes

In 1971, during the Cultural Revolution, I was in China for the first time; at that time the population was poor, unhappy, miserable. At the time of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 the median life expectancy was 35 years, and illiteracy was 80%. After the war against Japan and the civil war, the population found itself in a horrible situation, and during the Cultural Revolution there were many, many steps backward. But especially after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, which were very strongly oriented toward, among others, the German economist Friedrich List and the American economist Henry C. Carey, the situation decisively changed.

Thus today life expectancy in China is 76 years, illiteracy has almost disappeared—it is less than 4%—and especially over the last 30 years, China has carried out the greatest economic miracle in history, even more dramatic than the German economic miracle after the Second World War. Already the New Silk Road is approximately 20 times greater than the postwar Marshall Plan. Over the last 30 years China has freed about 800 million people from poverty, and there is a growing middle class, which lives very well and is very optimistic about what the future will bring. With the New Silk Road, China has put an offer on the table, for all nations who want to cooperate to be able to repeat this model of self-development in their own countries.

This is an unbelievable perspective. Originally the project was only for the reconstruction of the old Silk Road routes from China through East and West Asia to Europe. But by now there are six great infrastructure corridors—for example, the Eurasian Land-Bridge, the link from China to Europe. Trains travel on schedule daily on 39 routes—from Xi’an, Chengdu, Chonqing, Yiwu, and Lianyungang to Hamburg, Rotterdam, Madrid, Lyon, and Duisburg; and all this developed unbelievably fast.

Xinhua

Inaugurating freight rail service between Duisburg, Germany and Chengdu, China.

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Meanwhile there are more and more countries and organizations cooperating. At the Belt and Road Summit, which consolidated the whole initiative as a new world economic order in the middle of May, there were 29 heads of state, 110 countries with government representatives, and 1,200 economists, scientists, and experts on this topic. I myself had the great privilege of being invited to be there. It was the highest-level conference in which I could participate, and Xi Jinping’s speech, for example—which I would heartily propose that you yourself read or listen to—basically expressed a totally new Confucian model of relations between nations. After that Putin, Erdogan, UN Secretary General Guterres, and many others spoke. I spoke with several conference participants who all had the impression that they were participating in making history—that is, something entirely new was coming into being. The Belt and Road is not only about development corridors in Asia—such as China-Central Asia-Europe, China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Pakistan, and naturally a China-Bangladesh-India-Myanmar corridor—but now the New Silk Road has also extended to Latin America. Many countries are now saying that the future of Latin America lies in cooperation with the New Silk Road.

Xinhua

The Chinese financed and built the Ethiopia-Djibouti Railway.

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But perhaps the most inspirational change is the transformed mood in Africa. Because China is not only currently building more railroad lines there. The line from Djibouti to Addis Ababa has already been opened. In Kenya, a standard-gauge rail line from the port city of Mombasa to Nairobi, replacing the century-old colonial narrow-gauge line, has just been completed. There are also plans to connect Kenya with Uganda, and ultimately with Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other stretches of rail have been modernized, some in Nigeria, and all this, according to my information, has totally changed the mood among the Africans. For the first time, they see a country coming to them which is not only making beautiful speeches about democracy and human rights, but is actually establishing the preconditions for being able to overcome underdevelopment and poverty. Some of the African countries have the explicit goal of developing very soon, and finally overcoming the situation which has been with them since the colonial days.

Europe Is Responding

The spirit of the New Silk Road—people use that term—which makes possible mutually advantageous cooperation, has also seized Europe. For example, the Eastern and Central European countries, the Balkan states—Greece, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic—are all thrilled that the possibility of a new economic future is open to them. Even Italy: Prime Minister Gentiloni was at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, and clearly has the goal of having Italy and China cooperate on the development of Africa.

cc/Tobias Koch

Wolfgang Schäuble and Chancellor Angela Merkel in the German Bundestag, 2014.

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This is obviously because Italy, along with Greece, is the country which is convulsed the most by the refugee crisis. Italy now sees in China’s development and industrialization policy a way it can contribute to solving the problem in a humane way, and not the way the EU has previously proposed—with refugee camps lining the Mediterranean.

Emmanuel Macron, the new President of France, himself has a very, very positive attitude. For example, he sent former Prime Minister Raffarin to the Beijing Summit. Raffarin delivered a very, very positive speech there about cooperation between France and China in extending the initiative.

The same goes for Spain. Prime Minister Rajoy was also in Beijing, and there was just a large conference in Spain at which it was decided that Spain will not only be the terminus of the Eurasian Silk Road, but that Spain sees itself as the bridgehead toward Africa and Latin America. More deepwater ports, like Valencia and Barcelona, will be built. The same goes for Portugal. In Italy, noble competition has broken out between the North and the South, because Gentiloni admittedly brought back from China an agreement for the North—for instance, the expansion of the ports of Genoa and Trieste—yet the South has so far come up empty-handed. Thus a trade union movement has for good reason arisen in Sicily which is saying: No, we insist that Sicily’s deepwater ports—Augusta and others—be urgently included, because Sicily is actually the natural place for trade which comes through the Suez Canal for transit through to all of Europe.

In other words: There is a totally new dynamic underway, which was absolutely not captured by the barren words of Mrs. Zypries [German Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy] at the Summit in Beijing. Because everything Mrs. Zypries said merely meant: We insist that the rules be complied with; we insist that “European standards” be respected.

The fact is simply this: Win-win cooperation—the replacement of confrontation with cooperation—is the key to overcoming geopolitics. If all nations work together for their mutual interests and their mutual development, that’s the key for overcoming geopolitics. I would simply describe geopolitics as a fossil, which is not appropriate for mankind. The idea that there are national or group interests which must necessarily be pursued with war against the interests of another group, is an oligarchical idea, which is compatible with empires, but not with the natural condition of mankind. Unfortunately there are some people who have not understood this. But I am absolutely convinced that these people will become ever fewer, and that they will not ultimately prevail.

The spirit of the New Silk Road, which has now captured most nations in the world, is simply more optimistic, because it provides an approach for solving problems, and it would also be in the fundamental interests of Germany to cooperate with it fully. Admittedly Mrs. Merkel has given lip service when she says she supports it, but her statement is dry and barren. And our Finance Minister Schäuble gave a speech at the ceremony awarding him the Kissinger Prize where he said, If we let Russia and China fill the vacuum, or vacuums, now created by America, that would be the end of the “liberal world order.”

In one respect he’s right, because the liberal world order is not so desirable that one would want to preserve it at any price. And almost all the countries in the world are running like mad away from this liberal world order or the old system of globalization, which rests on neoliberal economic concepts and neoconservative military principles—of war for regime change, and economic policies which have led to the enlargement of the gap between the rich and the poor. There has been a revolt underway against this liberal world order for a considerable length of time.

LaRouche PAC

The Eurasian rail network plan, as first presented by LaRouche’s associates in 1992.

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The famous Brexit caught the Establishment flatfooted; Trump’s election was totally similar, because those who had so disdainfully been designated “deplorables” by Hillary Clinton, voted for Trump. Where there previously was industry, and a functional infrastructure, in the so-called “Rust-Belt” of America, it no longer exists; life expectancy is dropping in America. And if there is any one factor which describes the health or sickness of an economy, it is whether life expectancy is rising or dropping. And if life expectancy is dropping in the apparently richest and most advanced or economically strongest nation in the world, that is an indicator that something is totally and absolutely out of whack.

The rise of the rightwing movements in Europe—in France, Holland, other countries—is also attributable to this—but also to the fact that part of the population feels it’s no longer represented by its governments. That’s why in the second round of voting for the National Assembly in France, only 43 % of eligible voters cast their ballots—which was the lowest level of participation in such an election in French history. That doesn’t exactly signify that people feel represented; it has a totally different significance.

All these phenomena have been in process a long time, and what has been placed in question is the unipolar world that some people intended to erect with the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Growth of the Silk Road Concept

Our concept is totally different, and therefore we are using the fact that the Silk Road is in part “our baby.” I will not say that we are the only ones who thought that way, and I also have no intimation whether our proposals directly influenced Chinese policy or not. I only know that since 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, we have said: Now that the Iron Curtain or the Wall is gone, we can develop the region of Paris-Berlin-Vienna as an economic region with western technology.

Then the strategic situation developed thus: Margaret Thatcher launched her campaign against the Fourth Reich—thus against German reunification; Mitterrand demanded the giving-up of the deutschemark as a price for reunification; the United States under Bush senior saw in the enforcement of the euro an opportune method for locking Germany into the EU structure, and preventing, above all, Germany from conducting an independent policy toward Russia. All of that was achieved.

But then, when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, we simply expanded our program of the Paris-Berlin-Vienna Productive Triangle and said: Now is the time to link the European and Asian populations and industrial centers together with development corridors.

For us this was consciously conceived as the basis for a peaceful world order for the 21st Century. We then submitted this proposal to all governments throughout Eurasia.

The Chinese government took up this proposal and organized a major conference in Beijing in 1996, to which I was invited as a speaker. Even then, China had put the New Silk Road on the agenda as a long-term perspective for China. However, this development came to a halt with the Asian crisis in 1997, which was partly due to the speculations of George Soros, who had speculated the Eurasian currencies down by 80% within a week. Then in 1998 there was a Russian state bankruptcy, which further stalled this concept.

But during this time, we have held other conferences and seminars. If one reckons all this chronologically, we come up with hundreds of conferences and seminars on five continents—not just all of us here, but also from our colleagues in Australia and elsewhere. We have co-workers all over the world, who have represented the same program.

In this way, we have represented these ideas for two and a half decades, and the economic power of China has now created a material force behind it, which is to say that ideas have acquired a material effect.

But what was the reaction—unfortunately—in Europe? There was, admittedly, a promise not to bring the NATO troops to the borders of Russia, if Russia agreed that Germany would be reunited; this occurred in the intergovernmental talks between Gorbachov and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and was also reported by the then U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, Jack Matlock. This was a great achievement on the Russian side, especially considering that Russia and the Soviet Union had lost 27 million people in the Second World War, and the “Great Patriotic War” is still a great historical wound for the Russians. But Russia certainly was generous in agreeing to German reunification—after all, Germany was her opponent in the war. In Russia, one never understood why Germany had not felt more gratitude about this peaceful transition. Germany not only supported the war policy of Bush senior, Bush junior, and Obama, but now, when Hillary Clinton did not make it into the White House, Mrs. Merkel now styles herself as the leader of the free West, who must uphold this policy. From the Russian point of view, this has a very different perspective, of which we should really be aware.

Unfortunately, at the time the Soviet Union disbanded, the neocons, with Bush senior in Washington, were pursuing the old concept of the British empire to govern the world as a unipolar world. They have attempted to do this step by step—through color revolutions against the governments that did not want to surrender to this unipolar world, or through intervention wars as in the case of Iraq, Libya, or Syria. If all this had succeeded, Iran and similar governments would probably be gone.

The banking sector was also deregulated with the same policy, which led to an unbridled speculation that led the speculators to become richer, but many people in many parts of the world were becoming poorer—in Germany through Hartz-4 and other other mechanisms, and even more so in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal. In these countries, the economy has shrunk by a third, while the standard of living and health care has declined.

In the meantime, however, a revolt has developed against this unipolar policy of unbridled globalization, and if you just substitute the term “Anglo-American Empire” for globalization, you have an approximate idea of what has become of the EU as a regional satrapy of this policy, in order to enforce the interests of the banks and these financial interests.

Before and after his election, President Trump explained that he did not want any interventionist wars, that he wanted to return to the American System of economics of Alexander Hamilton, Henry C. Carey and Lincoln, that he wanted to reintroduce Glass-Steagall, and that he wanted to normalize the relationships with Russia and China. That is why he was elected, and he has been pursuing this policy for four or five months now. But this is also the reason why, from day one, the neoliberal establishment has displayed an unheard of, truly unprecedented enmity against Trump. Even in Germany you can pick this up, but what is currently developing in America is really a witch hunt, and the word witch hunt is actually still too mild.

To give an example: The whole campaign against Trump comes originally from Great Britain. British intelligence had already announced in 2015 that Russia would manipulate the election in America, and in the summer a year ago, Christopher Steele, a former MI-6 agent, produced that strange dossier. This dossier on the alleged perversions of Trump in Moscow was so outrageous that during the election campaign, it was not picked up by any major newspaper. After the election, the bosses of FBI, CIA and NSA—Clapper, Comey and Brennan—went to see Trump at the White House and introduced this dossier as “intelligence,” as something to be taken seriously, after which it was also broken in the media. Since then, every day the news is full of the assertion that Russia stole the election, and therefore a special investigator—the for�mer FBI chief Robert Mueller—should be appointed. Unfortunately for them, no one has been able to provide any proof. The whole assertion that Russia had manipulated the election and helped Trump to get elected was completely ridiculous.

wikipedia/Tony Webster

Decayed infrastructure: I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapse, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Then the tactics were changed somewhat and it was said that Trump had obstructed justice because he had supposedly told Comey in a two-party discussion that he wanted the investigation of National Security Adviser Flynn to be suspended soon. Several constitutional lawyers have now spoken out to say that this accusation is as outrageous as all the others, because it is among the rights of the President to pardon people. He could even instruct Comey to stop such investigations, because as President he has the right to make policy.

A tough internal power struggle has broken out, where Trump’s opponents are trying to remove him from the White House. The British daily The Spectator had published an article immediately after Trump’s election in January with the title, “Will Donald Trump Be Assassinated, Ousted in a Coup, or Just Impeached?” That is precisely the intention of this neoliberal or neoconservative opposition to Trump. These people will not give up until they are defeated.

The situation is completely on the brink, but if this development continues, there is also the absolute chance that the matter will find a positive end.

The Importance of Sino-U.S. Cooperation

I do not know who among you has been in America lately. While the United States undoubtedly still represents a very high economic standard for technology and production, it has completely neglected investment in infrastructure for decades. The streets have potholes into which you can disappear with a Fiat 500, and it would not even be noticed—you might notice, but no one else. There are practically no fast trains—just between Washington and Boston, but they only go 150-240 km/h.

China had already constructed over 20,000 km of high-speed railways by the end of last year, and by 2020, all major cities in China are to be connected to a high-speed rail system with speeds of up to 350 km/h; also urban and suburban railways are to be linked in such a way that, for example, in the Beijing-Hebei-Tianjin region—that is 130 million people—no one needs more than 20 minutes to travel to his workplace, as opposed to the four hours that Americans spend on average moving from home to work and back again.

In America, the infrastructure is generally in a catastrophic state, but it is in New York that it is now a dangerous crisis. In New York, the infrastructure is on average more than 100 years old, so it is no wonder that now, for example, there have been several accidents at Penn Station where trains have gone off the tracks, so that these tracks must be repaired as soon as possible, and two tunnels under the Hudson River connecting New Jersey with New York must be urgently closed and refurbished.

The problem is, however, that all existing traffic routes are already completely overloaded. If you now want to find replacement routes for almost a third of the 1.5 to 1.8 million people commuting every day to Manhattan, these routes are already carrying loads three times higher than what they were originally built for. The whole thing will now be acute on July 10 when the repairs mentioned are to begin, which will be a huge disaster because there is no plan for alternative routes.

In our first brochure of 2014, we presented an overall concept for how America, as part of the New Silk Road, can connect all major cities in the country by means of high-speed railways. New cities have to be built, because in America there are the population centers on the west coast and the east coast, but in between there are many states which are very little populated and really not developed, because the development of America, launched by Lincoln with the Transcontinental Railroad, came to a halt at some point. The head of the China Investment Corporation, Mr. Ding Xuedong, recently stated that America does not need a trillion dollars in infrastructure investment, but rather $8 trillion, which is probably a realistic idea.

We have made the proposal that China, which holds $1.4 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds that have no positive use, should invest in the construction of infrastructure through a National Bank or an Infrastructure Bank. China Investment Corporation has already opened a new office in New York, and at the aforementioned conference in San Francisco, the representative of the Chinese side declared: Is it not astonishing that a highly developed country like America is now using China’s aid to build infrastructure? And he continued: This is now the “new normal in our relation,” the new normalcy between the USA and China. The situation has completely changed because the enormous experience that China has accumulated over recent decades in the construction of highways, deep sea ports and other infrastructure can now be positively used in the relationship between the United States and China.

This also defines the situation for Europe in a completely new way. The German Ambassador in Beijing, Michael Clauss, gave a speech last week in Berlin, in which he said the New Silk Road was far too China-based, and that we would now have to develop our own thing.

But the train has already left the station! Why should we develop something separate, directed against China? This makes no sense at all and is actually only an old geopolitical idea. First and foremost, what is offered by the German and EU sides is merely so-called “appropriate technology,” and if one knows the evolution of this terminology, then one knows what this means: no technology, no development. That is why, in my opinion, this is an end-of-life model. We must therefore persuade Germany not to develop a model of its own, which has no chance at all, but it would be the most important if European nations would cooperate with Russia, China, India, Japan, and America to really build a new world.

The overcoming of geopolitics is the prerequisite for ensuring that we do not destroy ourselves as a species. We were on the way to the Third World War with Hillary Clinton and Obama, and the neocons are now also attempting, within the Republican Party, to lead Trump down such dangerous paths. At a time when the cooperation in Syria with the deconfliction agreements was going in a very good direction—each side kept the other informed and launched no one-sided military operations—the United States fired upon a Syrian fighter jet, which led to the immediate suspension of this agreement by Russia. Such disturbing maneuvers occur again and again.

Good contacts have told us why Trump allowed it. He is openly under such attack with all the special investigations and other such operations that are being run against him, that he has left the decisions for what happens in Afghanistan and Syria partly to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon has seized the opportunity for sabotage.

All this is still very, very dangerous, but I believe there is a more fundamental question as to whether we, as a human species, are able to save ourselves from our own extinction, that is, to take the step that wars in the age of nuclear weapons can no longer be a means of conflict resolution, and that at the same time we are going to have a form of government which corresponds to human dignity and human nature.

I would add that what is now developing with the New Silk Road has not only an economic side but also a cultural side. It is possible to promote the best traditions of culture from every nation and every culture, and then to engage in a dialogue such that ultimately all nations will get to know the best results of the other cultures. This is, in my view, the unconditional precondition for overcoming racism, prejudice and xenophobia, and building a community of humanity for a common future.

This is what Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasized. And this is also what Putin just said at his annual press conference, that we need a new paradigm, in which we base the relations of the nations on how they ought to look in 50 years.

You would never hear anything like that in Germany. But this is Putin, as he really is. In his speech in 2001 before the German Bundestag, Putin had already offered a relationship in which Germany would cooperate with Russia in order to open up the infinite riches and treasures Russia has to offer to the general benefit of all Eurasia.

His speech met with general refusal at the time;

at least, no one has responded to these positive

proposals.

But immediately following the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, the situation is entirely changed: the new Silk Road Initiative, the Eurasian Economic Union, the ASEAN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the 16+1 countries are all integrating more and more economically, and therefore there is the possibility that we may come to a completely new level of relations.

I think that we in Germany are predestined to play a positive role. For reasons that are sometimes difficult to understand, Germany is still very much respected in the world. Let us take the example of German culture. In my most recent journey through China, I was utterly astonished at how many Chinese people revere, admire and appreciate Schiller, Leibniz, Furtwängler, Brahms, and Schubert as representatives of German culture, and thus actually say: Why don’t the Germans do what we do, when we work to create a Confucian renaissance? The philosophy of Confucius is alive today in all the pores of Chinese society. Why don’t we Germans do the same with our fantastic classical culture?

This is exactly what the Schiller Institute had chosen as its mission from the outset, which is why music, poetry and culture always play an absolutely central role.

I think we are at a completely new stage of the story that is already underway. The fact that in Germany this development is still almost imperceptible does not mean that this is not the case. The majority of humanity is now moving in a completely different direction, and that is very, very good. If we now get over the last obstacles, we can finally concentrate as a human species on the things that are the common goals of mankind. China has already announced plans to overcome poverty by 2020.

When poverty is eliminated, we could turn to the other important subjects, e.g. crash programs for the development of treatment methods for previously incurable diseases. We could concentrate on the question of energy and raw materials security by the development of nuclear fusion, which also creates raw materials security because with the fusion torch we can break down all wastes into individual atoms, which are then made into new raw materials. We can begin to deal with the laws of the universe. By the fusion of deuterium and tritium and later of helium-3, which can be extracted on the moon, we will also have energy security.

With the Hubble Space Telescope, it has now been established that there are about two trillion galaxies in the universe. I have trouble imagining a galaxy right now, and when you’re dealing with two trillions... the Hubble telescope has delivered these wonderful images of nebulae and star formations, which we know very little about.

We live in a huge universe, but we have just begun to make a first leap to leave the Earth’s surface. People have been on the Moon, we have a space station. In the next year, China will send up the first radiotelescope with Chang’e 4 to the far side of the Moon, to see even better into space.

We are just in the embryonic phase of humanity’s development. And when we deal with space travel, it is also perfectly clear that we are not living in a terrestrial system, but are part of the universe. The laws that apply in the universe also have an immediate significance for our planet. They have, in a sense, a meaning that also corresponds to creativity. For the human mind can always make new inventions, which then lead to technological and scientific advances; the ability to carry out space research, space travel, means that there must be a correspondence between the creativity of man and the effect we have in the universe.

I also think one of the really great projects will be this: For the coexistence of the nations in this new paradigm, we will have not only economic relations that promote mutual interest, but we must also come up with a new charter of coexistence, such as the Charter of the United Nations. We should define principles for the new paradigm that make a peaceful coexistence of humanity possible forever. It must be established that the political and economic order must correspond with the laws of the physical universe; these principles must serve as a basis for the coexistence of the nations.

From this process a new renaissance will emerge. When we heard the very moving African hymn in a new compositional form, I realized that there are so many treasures in the world’s cultures—just as the Renaissance in the fifteenth century arose through the revival of the greatest traditions before—that something new can emerge in dialogue.

I think, then, that we are in the very, very fortunate position of living in a historical period in which an episode of war, poverty, misery, comes to an end, and that we are experiencing the beginning of a new era that we can shape. And I would like to invite you all to

participate.

Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika! Lord, Bless Africa!

July 3—The Schiller Institute’s June 24 conference in Berlin was blessed with the performance of a richly polyphonic setting—by Schiller Institute member Benjamin Lylloff—of the most famous hymn in Africa, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (Lord, Bless Africa). The video of this premiere performance of the setting, with Lylloff conducting, may be viewed here. Composed in 1897 by Enoch Mankayi Sontonga (ca.1873-1905), a school teacher near Johannesburg, it became a song of defiance against colonial rule across Africa. Today it is the national anthem of Tanzania in a Swahili translation. In South Africa, it is conjoined with the Afrikaans anthem, Die Stem van Suid Afrika (The Call of South Africa), to form the national anthem.

Lylloff drew his inspiration from the choral setting by Australian musician and musicologist, Karl Aloritias, who had also established the text in consultation with a researcher in South Africa whose parents had fought and died in the liberation struggle. The text—which begins in isiXhosa, then transitions to isiZulu and then to Sesotho—is provided here with an English translation, followed by the full score.

Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika

Maluphakanyisw’ uphondo lwayo

Yizwa imithandazo yethu

Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapho lwayo

Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika

Maluphakanyisw’ uphondo lwayo

Yizwa imithandazo yethu

Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapho lwayo

Woza Moya (woza, woza Moya)

Woza Moya (woza, woza Moya)

Woza Moya, oyingcwele

Usikelele thina lusapho lwayo

Morena boloka sechaba sa heso

O fedise dintwa la matshwenyeho

Morena boloka sechaba sa heso

O fedise dintwa la matshwenyeho

O se boloke, o se boloke

O se boloke, morena se boloke

Sechaba sa heso, sechaba sa Afrika

Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika

Lord, bless Africa

May her spirit rise high up

Hear thou our prayers

Lord bless us, Lord bless us

Lord, bless Africa

May her spirit rise high up

Hear thou our prayers

Lord bless us, your family.

Descend, O Spirit

Descend, O Spirit

Descend, O Holy Spirit

Lord bless us, your family.

Lord, save our nation

Stop wars and suffering.

Lord save our nation

Stop wars and suffering.

Lord, Protect our nation

Lord, save our nation

Protect the nation of Africa

Lord bless Africa.

Download the score (PDF, 8 pages, file size: 507 KB)

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THE ROOTS OF THE NEW SILK ROAD

Leibniz, Sun Yat Sen, The LaRouches, and Xi Jinping

The following article is adapted from a speech given by Michael Billington at the June 17 Schiller Institute Conference in Detroit. The presentation was titled, “Bringing the New Silk Road to Michigan.”

Mike Billington

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Helga Zepp-LaRouche has often referred to the two paradigms facing mankind today. In the West we face the largest financial bubble in history; the breakdown of basic infrastructure; a post-industrial collapse of industry, jobs, and wages; perpetual colonial-style warfare; and a societal decay characterized by the greatest drug epidemic in modern history. But, emerging from the East, we have what Helga describes very powerfully as the New Silk Road, a global boom in infrastructure-based development, which has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, generated an unprecedented increase in the productivity of labor, and given hope to nations and peoples who had nearly given up.

What I wish to do today, is to show:

• the historic connection between Europe and Asia in the development of the New Silk Road over several hundred years,

• the American System—the Hamiltonian system of our Founding Fathers, and

• the best aspects of America historically.

On the strategic side, currently, I want to show that most of the New Silk Road came together under China’s initiative but always in collaboration with Russia. This connection between China and Russia is crucial. If we can bring the United States into that alliance then we can end the British division of the world into East versus West: “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” as British imperialist Rudyard Kipling liked to say. Well, we think they can meet, and must meet, in order to bring about a truly human world for mankind.

The New Silk Road process, called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), was launched in 1996 at a conference in Beijing called the “International Symposium on Economic Development of the Regions along the New Euro-Asia Continental Bridge,” organized in part by Helga, whose speech at that conference was titled, “Building the Silk Road Land-Bridge: The Basis for the Mutual Security Interests of Asia and Europe.” China began building the rail links through their western provinces, but the process was stalled by the so-called Asian financial crisis in 1997-98, which was brought on by speculative looting by western hedge funds of the George Soros variety, and which Lyndon LaRouche identified as the first crack in the global financial system.

Therefore, in 2001 China and Russia formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), with four of the Central Asia nations: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. This was largely strategic, to deal with the terrorist and separatist dangers in the region, and the drug trafficking which fed it. This of course was 2001, the year of the attack on the United States by the Al-Qaida networks based in Afghanistan. The whole region was being infested with Saudi Wahhabi terrorist networks. The Chinese, the Russians, and the Central Asian nations came together to say, “We’ve got to stop this terrorism in our region, or there will never be any progress.”

Then there was the founding of the New Silk Road Economic Belt, and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road: the One Road One Belt initiative, launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. The following year, 2014, Russian President Putin put together the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU): This was Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan; Armenia and Kyrgyzstan joined later. These institutions, along with the ten Southeast Asian nations of ASEAN, are now all coming together. They have all jointly come to the conclusion that they must create a new paradigm for mankind, starting with their own Eurasian continent.

Of course the BRICS nations were a part of that. The BRICS institution was formed by Russia, China, and India linking up with South Africa and Brazil, the two largest countries in Africa and South America, respectively. This reflects Helga’s idea of extending the New Silk Road to the whole world, by bringing in South America and Africa. This led to our production in 2014 of the EIR Special Report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge.

That’s the paradigm Lyndon and Helga LaRouche represent, and what we have been fighting for.

Leibniz

I want to review the history of how this Silk Road idea came about. Helga’s presence in Beijing in 2006, and at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing this year, did not come out of nowhere. This has been at least a three hundred year process.

FIGURE 1

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I will start with Gottfried Leibniz. This slide shows Leibniz, with Peter the Great, and the great Manchu Emperor of China, Kangxi, in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Figure 1). Leibniz was the greatest scientist, philosopher, and statesman of Europe in that era. He collaborated directly with Peter the Great, helping Russia set up the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was in direct correspondence with the Jesuit missionaries in China, who were translating the works of Confucius, Mencius, and Zhu Xi, the leader of the Confucian Renaissance during the Song dynasty in the 12th Century.

FIGURE 2

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Zhu Xi (Figure 2) is not well known in the West, but he is very important—the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese know him well. It was Zhu Xi’s writings that Leibniz studied most intently. Leibniz wrote the Novissima Sinica,[fn_1] the “News from China,” which he spread all over Europe, to educate the European elite on the Confucian principles.

It was his view—which he stated openly—that if one encounters a culture which, like China, has developed a certain set of characteristics, one must conclude that this combination of factors proves that this culture has discovered, to a significant degree, the fundamental laws of the universe, and man’s role in that universe through his creative mind.

This is the list of factors he specified, in reporting on the 17th-Century culture of China:

• It was far, far bigger in population than Europe.

• It had much bigger cities, whose population was far more educated.

• It had a much higher level of literacy than in Europe.

• It had a higher standard of living than most of Europe.

The discovery of those laws, over long waves of history, Leibniz recognized, was the necessary condition required for the building of a flowering, functioning culture and society. That was his premise; he therefore read Confucius and Zhu Xi in order to discover how they had made those discoveries. Here is what Leibniz concluded on the relationship between the East and the West. The following citation is one of the most wonderful statements of history, and I consider this to be the beginning of the New Silk Road:

I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in China, which adorns the Orient as Europe does the opposite edge of the Earth. Perhaps Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that, as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life.

There is no more perfect description of the New Silk Road, the global Silk Road, the World Land-Bridge. The people in Eurasia as well as the people of the entire world are being brought together by the combination of these two great cultures.

I will also point out that Leibniz was the primary impulse that gave rise to the American System. The founding fathers were Leibnizian—Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, and others. Benjamin Franklin knew about Confucius. He talked about bringing Confucian ideas into America. I won’t go into that now. But they all aspired to exactly this kind of Leibnizian thought.

Sun Yat Sen

Let’s skip ahead about 150 years to Sun Yat Sen, known in China generally as Sun Zhongshan, which could be translated as “Chinese Mountain.” Sun was the architect of the 1911 revolution that ended the monarchy in China and created the Chinese Republic. What people in the United States generally do not know, except those who have been working with us, is that Sun Yat Sen was a diligent student of the American System. He had been educated in Hawaii in the 1890s by the Damon family, who were very knowledgeable about the Philadelphia school of Abraham Lincoln and Henry Carey, and also fully understood the ideas of Alexander Hamilton. Sun Yat Sen thoroughly mastered those ideas (Figure 3).

FIGURE 3

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Sun Yat Sen’s organizing for the revolution in China was based on a series of lectures he gave, called the “Three Principles of the People.” These Three Principles were based, as he said, on Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address talks about saving the republic as a nation “of the people, by the people and for the people.” That is, government of the people—a sovereign state, free of the colonial powers; by the people—a democratic republican form of government; and for the people—what Sun called the “People’s Livelihood,” or what we call the General Welfare in our Constitution, which is the idea that the country is predicated on the enhancement of the qualities of the population as a whole.

He was clearly a follower of Lincoln, and he also was an explicit follower of Hamilton. In his lectures, he discussed in great detail the role of Alexander Hamilton in promoting internal improvements, infrastructure, and in establishing a national bank which did not depend on private banks, but instead gave the government control over the banking system, directing credit into those things needed for the general welfare.

In addition, he understood something 99.99% of the American people do not know today: that Jefferson was not a great leader. Thomas Jefferson, although he helped liberate the colonies from the British, wanted to keep America as a British system, with slaves—to make sure we maintained slavery, and that we would remain an agricultural country, providing cotton to the mills in England, which is what the British wanted. This was an intense fight between the Hamiltonians from New York and the Jeffersonians from the South.

Sun Yat Sen knew all that. He taught the Chinese people the difference between Hamilton and Jefferson: the difference between the industrial banking system, to better the people, the livelihood of the people—as opposed to the Jeffersonian policy, to remain backward, using slave labor. That fight between Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism not only brought us into a Civil War, which was really a second revolution against the British—but it is still a fight today. There are still these two tendencies in the United States, which is why we now have to fight to restore Hamiltonian policy.

FIGURE 4

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FIGURE 5

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In 1919 Sun Yat Sen wrote a book called the International Development of China. This slide shows Sun Yat Sen’s map from that report (see Figure 4). Compare that to the map of the rail system now functioning in China (Figure 5). It took one hundred years, but China is now developing the policy that Sun laid out, calling on the whole world to join together, using railroads, canals, and basic infrastructure. China is extending those rail connections westward into Central Asia and Europe, northward to Russia, and southward into Southeast Asia, just as Sun called for in his 1919 proposal. It was an American System idea. The concept fought for by these Chinese Revolutionary republicans was based on this idea, which, unfortunately, we’ve almost forgotten in America. The plan is now being implemented, connecting every city with high speed rail and extending out to the whole world. What is happening today through Xi Jinping’s leadership, is based on the principles which we have lost, but which they are implementing.

FDR, Chiang Kai Shek, and Stalin

We will now jump ahead another fifty years or so into the time of Franklin Roosevelt. I won’t go into details, but we know how FDR saved our country from the British-induced Great Depression, and then from the fascists.

FIGURE 6

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This slide is a picture of Roosevelt with Stalin (Figure 6); Winston Churchill is also shown. Unfortunately he was always in the picture.

FIGURE 7

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This slide shows Roosevelt with Chiang Kai Shek (Figure 7), who was running China at the time. There was something of a functioning alliance between the nationalists under Chiang Kai Shek and the Communists under Mao during the war with Japan: a weak alliance, but an interesting story. The combination of Roosevelt, Chiang Kai Shek, and Stalin, representing the United States, Russia, and China, made it possible to defeat the Nazis in Europe and the militarists in Japan, and thus make possible the ultimate creation of a new, anti-imperial world economic order.

Unfortunately, Churchill is always there, and this is very important to understand, because Roosevelt went to war in alliance with the British very reluctantly. He knew the British had actually created the Nazis, had helped fund the Nazis, and that the British wanted Germany and Russia to destroy each other so the British could continue their control over weakened countries in Europe.

The British had also helped create the militarists in Japan. There were great leaders in Japan who had wanted to follow through on the Meiji Restoration, on the American System which had played a key role in the Meiji restoration, which had led to the creation of Japan as a great industrial power. Then the British went in and said to Japan, “You’re an island like us; you need raw materials; you don’t have them yourself, therefore you need to create a strong military so you can go out and take their raw materials.” And it worked, unfortunately. Certain great Japanese leaders were killed so that the British policy would be adopted.

Roosevelt told Churchill to his face: We are not fighting this war to save the British Empire. He went to Africa for these meetings. He went to Cairo and other places and saw what African countries and Mideast countries were like after hundreds of years of European colonialism, that they were worse off than they had been two hundred years before.

Roosevelt said, “We are going to use American system methods after the war, with our friends in Russia and China, to build nations in the image of what America had succeeded in doing to create this country.” He died, unfortunately, and was replaced by a very weak, British, Wall Street agent named Truman, who threw that approach out the window and gave the British, French, and Dutch access to U.S. military ships so they could go back and again take control of their colonies. As a result, we had almost forty years of horrible, unnecessary colonial wars, which could have been ended right then.

FIGURE 8

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LaRouche’s Intervention

Now we come to the era of LaRouche. In 1975 Lyndon LaRouche went to Iraq to meet with the Baath Party; he met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Europe, and he put together a plan called the International Development Bank (Figure 8). Many of you know China has created the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, putting billions of dollars into these development projects. The BRICS formed the New Development Bank, funded with tens of billions of dollars. Why? Was it to replace the IMF? Not really replace—but for over 40 years the IMF and World Bank have almost entirely stopped infrastructure building. All they do is load up countries with debt, claiming to help the poor farmers by giving them appropriate technology such as picks and shovels: Don’t expect infrastructure, that’s not appropriate for your level of development. This is the policy that had kept Africa in an absolutely destitute condition. The same was the case for Latin America, and much of Asia.

FIGURE 9

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LaRouche said, “That’s enough!” He initially focused on the Middle East, because he recognized the Middle East was the cockpit for potential wars between East and West, fighting over oil. In addition, the Israeli-Palestinian fight was set up to divide the countries of the region in order to facilitate the imperial policy of divide and conquer. A few years later, LaRouche propsed his Oasis Plan (Figure 9). He knew that in the Middle East, water is more valuable than oil. Water is the key. There is not enough water to develop the area. How do we solve the problem? We build canals; we have nuclear power plants, which can be used for desalination of sea water; we green the deserts. We use Israeli technology and skilled labor from the Palestinians and others, and transform the Middle East.

FIGURE 10

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But that didn’t happen. LaRouche’s policies were rejected in favor of perpetual warfare. 1974—this is a book put out by the Club of Rome (Figure 10), with a bunch of MIT computer manipulators, called The Limits to Growth. This is the old Malthusian saw. It says the world is running out of resources, there are too many people, we can’t grow enough food to feed the increasing population, and we have limited resources anyway. So we have to limit growth, we have to stop this American idea of constant progress and growth; they claimed that this idea could no longer work, because the Earth can’t hold that many people; we are going to run out of everything, which is the same refrain you hear today with the global warming fraud. Development is going to burn the world up so we have to stop development.

FIGURE 11

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LaRouche responded with a book called There Are No Limits to Growth (Figure 11). He made the point very clear: resources are defined by the human mind. They are not something that is “out there.” We are not animals. Animals are confined to the kind of things they eat from nature, as a species. They cannot see the future. They cannot think about changing the kind of life they live. Human beings are not animals. We define resources through our minds. Oil was not a resource before we had the internal combustion engine. It was just something that tended to ooze up and mess up agricultural land. But when we discovered how to use it, then suddenly it became a valuable resource. And the same is true today, as he pointed out in that book.

For example, today there is plenty of sea water, which is not even drinkable, but if we take the heavy hydrogen, deuterium, out of sea water, it will fuel a fusion reaction, provided we put our wits together and provide the resources needed to develop fusion power. And this example is not only limited to deuterium. Even better is helium-3 from the Moon, which is a better fuel for fusion, which could fuel mankind for thousands of years. Again, LaRouche is stepping up, saying: “End this division of the world, the anti-progress backwardness, lets build the world.”

FIGURE 12

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Birth of the World Land-Bridge

We did a series of studies in the 1980s: a full study of the industrialization of Africa (Figure 12), which, again, if you go back and look at the maps and charts, the Chinese are now doing what we proposed—not only the Chinese, but the process is being driven by China. New railroads in Kenya, and from the port of Djibouti to landlocked Ethiopia. Here is a wonderful slide (Figure 13) from our World Land-Bridge report, which shows Africa’s railroads as of a several years ago, when the only railroads went from the ports to the mines, because that was all the colonial powers were interested in—how we can get the raw materials out.

FIGURE 13

Left: existing railroads in Africa; right: proposed railroads in Africa. Picture credit: EIRNS/Fusion Energy Foundation, 1980.

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Next to that is the map for developing African rail today, being carried out mostly by China, where they are crisscrossing the continent—you will be able to get from one capital to every other capital by rail, in order to develop real nations, not keep them backwards so that they have no alternative but to sell their raw materials. China needs raw materials too, but they pay for them by at the same time building up the countries providing the raw materials, so these countries will have the means to develop, and not be kept backwards and drowning in debt.

FIGURE 14

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FIGURE 15

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Here we outlined the industrialization of India (Figure 14), from backwardness to industrial power. Later we produced The Integration of Ibero-America (Figure 15). Ibero-America has the same kind of problems. You can’t get from one country to another by rail, or in some cases by any overland means. China is now preparing to build a railroad from Peru to Brazil, a bi-oceanic railway connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic, as Abraham Lincoln did in the United States. In this case, Germany is also planning a bi-oceanic railway in South America. For the first time Ibero-America—and this is something we laid out in 1989—can be integrated through modern rail systems, which is an essential step if we are going to allow the countries of South America to become developed industrial nations.

Now we come to the 2006 Beijing conference discussed earlier. When the Soviet Union fell, Lyndon and Helga LaRouche declared: “Now we must end not just the Cold War, but even the chance of world war in the future, and we can do that through development. We are going to build the New Silk Road.”

Helga and Lyn coined that phrase, New Silk Road—it was their idea. We took it to the Europeans, but unfortunately the Europeans said forget it, we don’t want to make friends with Russia, we want to keep an enemy out there so we can expand NATO, and move it to the Russian border, as they have done now, bringing us to the brink of nuclear war. We went to Russia, but Russia was a wreck. They were being looted, destroyed—anything the new carpetbaggers could pick up and take out, they did, with Yeltsin as their useful puppet.

FIGURE 16

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But when we went to China, China said: “Absolutely, this is what we have to do.” So we co-organized, with the Chinese government, a huge conference in Beijing in 1996. Helga was a keynote speaker there, along with top government officials from China and other countries. We published this Special Report in 1997 (Figure 16), laying out the entire plan, focused on Eurasia, but as you see in the title, The ‘New Silk Road’—Locomotive for Worldwide Economic Development, we already had the idea that this had to be the core for building the entire world.

FIGURE 17

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When Xi Jinping made his announcement in 2013 of the Belt and Road Initiative, we put together a 370-page Special Report to extend the New Silk Road to the World Land-Bridge (Figure 17). It has now been translated into Chinese and Arabic, and is soon to be released in Korean. The idea is that this is the basis, the foundation upon which we can have a world which is not geopolitical, which is not a Darwinian dog-eat-dog world in which nations can gain only at the expense of other nations. Instead, we can have a world based on the achievement of the common aims of Mankind, transforming humanity into the adulthood of the human race, getting out of the childhood we are in now, behaving like kids throwing mud at each other, instead having a truly human population.

Cusa, Zhu Xi, and a New Renaissance

I’m going to do one more thing now, and that is to discuss the philosophical side of this. As I mentioned, Leibniz studied Zhu Xi, who lived in the 12th-Century, Song dynasty. Just as the European Renaissance used the ideas of Plato to develop the understanding of man as a creative being in the image of God—so Zhu Xi restored the Confucian tradition in China. He advanced it by adding a concept he called the universal principle. He said that the universe is governed by a single universal principle, called Li in Chinese. But he said that in addition to this universal principle, every created thing, including every person, had its own principle, which was different from the universal principle, but was the same concept—it was something you couldn’t see or touch; it was not material, but it was the principle that made the connection between the particular or singularity and the universal principle, the principle of the development of the universe as a whole, of coherent change taking place in the universe as a whole.

Now, Leibniz saw this and said: “that is the same as my idea of the monad.” Leibniz wrote a book called the Monadology, which develops the core of his philosophy. He said the same thing: What drives change and development in the world is the creative process that exists within the universe. Even before the emergence of life, before man, before the human mind, there is the process of creative change, the anti-entropic process which brought the universe forward. While all things are connected to the universal, reflecting this process of development, it is the human mind which participates in this universal creative process directly. Man alone is capable of changing his future, not being dependent on biological evolution, not Darwinian, but rather creative. We can change how we produce things; how we live; how we eat; how we travel; how we work together; how we go beyond the Earth into the Solar system.

FIGURE 18

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So, this was Leibniz’s view. Leibniz was a student of Nicholas of Cusa (Figure 18), who was the great mind who gave rise to the European Renaissance. Helga Zepp-LaRouche was greatly influenced by Cusa’s ideas and became, early in her life, an expert in Cusa’s work—how it brought about the Renaissance. She introduced his ideas to our organization. Cusa wrote a book called De Pace Fidei (On the Peace of Faith), which was a dialogue between a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Tartar, and others—basically all the major religions known to him. The point which he demonstrated through the dialogue was that all of these religions, which had more or less successfully sustained a functioning culture, must have made discoveries regarding the fundamental laws of the universe, just as Leibniz later recognized regarding the advanced nature of Chinese culture. Since there is only one Creation, Cusa argued, these discoveries must be reflected in common principles in and among these religions.

In Christianity, Cusa said, we have the Trinity. We have God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, which is the Trinity—it’s a One. But Cusa said there is another way to explain the Trinity. Rather than using Christian terms—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—one could say the Creator, the Created and the Act of Creation. He also posed other ways of expressing this notion of the Trinity. But, he said, this is not only the concept behind the Christian view of the Creation, but is also an expression of the fundamental laws of the universe. As in Leibniz’s Monadology, and as in the Universal Principle (Li) of Zhu Xi, everything that exists is part of the Creation and has a capacity to function within that Creation, with the human mind being the greatest of created things, due to its capacity to affect the universe as a whole directly—what Cusa called the fundamental relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm. It is through this principle of creativity—or love, agapē in Christianity, the higher kind of love, which is the love of mankind as a whole—that mankind aspires to attain to a level of the junzi, or the ideal person—the equivalent of what Schiller described as a Golden Soul.

FIGURE 19

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It is the last stage which captures the essence of the junzi, and, as we shall see, also of the Golden Soul. Confucius does not allow the bifurcation of the creative intellect and the emotions. Rather, they are one expressed in the ability of the human spirit to inspire the emotions, to find the true, higher sense of joy, in the experience of creativity itself—be it in making scientific discoveries, or in composing classical poetry or music, or in discovering for oneself such great truths of man and nature originally discovered by others. This elevation of one’s emotions, Confucius argues, makes it possible to follow the emotions, the heart’s desire, without fear of being drawn into selfish or debasing actions. Compare this to Friedrich Schiller (Figure 19), in his essay “Grace and Dignity”:

We call it a beautiful soul when the moral sentiment has assured itself of all the emotions of a person, ultimately to the degree that it may abandon the guidance of the will to the emotions, and never run the danger of being in contradiction with its own decisions. It is in such a beautiful soul that sensuousness and reason, duty and inclination, harmonize; and grace is its epiphany.

This is indeed the essence of the Confucian concept of Harmony.

Universal Renaissance

What is a renaissance? In history, renaissances have been the ability to go back into one’s own culture, especially in a period of crisis, to find what in history and culture has worked to inspire great art and science, which actually ennobled mankind, and captured the dignity of mankind, the power of mankind to advance society, rather than collapse into warfare and chaos, as we see today in the West. We had the great 14th-century to 17th-century European Renaissance. China had the Confucian Renaissance during the Song Dynasty, which is occurring again today.

FIGURE 20

*Committed, underway or completed

Map legend: existing rail lines are green, planned and proposed are red. Silk Road Economic Belt is beige.

LINKS 1 *Great Inter-Oceanic Canal, Nicaragua | 2 Bering Strait Tunnel | 3 Sakhalin Island-Mainland (Russia) Connection | 4 Sakhalin-Hokkaido Tunnel | 5 *Seikan Tunnel | 6 Japan-Korea Undersea Tunnel | 7 *Bohai Tunnel | 8 Strait of Malacca Bridge | 9 Sunda Strait Bridge | 10 Isthmus of Kra Canal | 11 *Bosporus Strait Rail Tunnel | 12 *Suez Canal Expansion | 13 Italy-Tunisia Link | 14 Strait of Gibraltar Tunnel | 15 *English Channel Tunnel | 16 *Scandinavian-Continental Links

CORRIDORS A *Peru-Brazil Transcontinental Railway | B Darien Gap Inter-American Railway | C Alaska-Canada-Lower 48 Rail Line | D The Bering Strait Connector | E Trans-Siberian Corridors | F *Silk Road Economic Belt | G *International North-South Transport Corridor | H *Cross Africa Rail Lines | I Australia Ring Railway | J *Maritime Silk Road | K *Northern Sea Route

Note: Geographical locations and corridors are shown schematically, with more than one railway combined as a single line in cases where major routes are parallel and in proximity. Maps within chapters of this report show greater detail.

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But today, just as the Land-Bridge must be a world Land-Bridge (Figure 20), a world Silk Road, so we are now beyond the point where we can have a Confucian Renaissance or a European Renaissance, or an Arab Renaissance. We have to have a global Renaissance. We have to bring the world together, not to unify their cultures—its precisely the beauty of the many unique cultures which gives each something to contribute—but each has to be contributing to a global Renaissance, a Renaissance which, for instance, inspires people in the West not only to rediscover the foundations of their own cultures, but to discover their own roots in Confucianism, or the Baghdad Caliphate, or the Indian Gupta culture. We have to inspire people to recognize that they are incomplete; they are not adults, unless they begin to use their mind to master not only their own culture, but also to master and collaborate with every great culture on Earth.

This is the opportunity. We are at a rare moment in history. It is very dangerous, we are still sitting on the brink of nuclear war. We’re still watching the coup attempt against our government which is happening precisely because this President wants to work with Russia and China rather than go to war. Yet it is the mission of our organization, this small organization working internationally, to pursue and to convey to every citizen that it can, that each of us must play a part in this tremendous moment, this window of opportunity for transforming mankind as a whole.

[fn_1]. The availability of an English-language translation of the preface to Novissima Sinica can be found here.

Click here for more information and to purchase The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge

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THE BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE

A New Trajectory for Mankind

by William Jones

A version of this article first appeared in the January-February 2017 edition of China International Studies, the journal of the China Institute of International Studies.

www.news.cn

China President Xi Jinping, after delivering his speech in Astana, Kazakhstan, Sept. 7 2013. Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev is on the right.

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June 30—When China’s President, Xi Jinping, announced the Silk Road Economic Belt project in September 2013, it took the world by surprise. But it didn’t come totally out of the blue. Anyone closely following events in the region would have known that there were a number of strands that had been coming together since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which converged in the concept so eloquently enunciated by President Xi in his speech at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University in September 2013. There, he presented his idea of the Silk Road Economic Belt, and then one month later, he announced the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union there was a great deal of discussion—and urgency—about the need to develop independent transportation grids connecting the newly independent, but landlocked, Central Asian countries to Asia and to Europe. Chinese scholars who were tasked with issues of economic and social development in China, were already considering the possibility of extending transportation infrastructure to the central and western regions of China, which had been left out of the rapid development occurring in the coastal regions. This grid could then branch out into Central and South Asia.

On September 12, 1990, the Northern Xinjiang Railway connected with the Tuxi Railway of the former USSR, marking the completion of the 11,000 kilometer New Euro-Asian Continental Bridge. Five years later, on September 8, 1995, railway experts from the seven countries concerned signed an agreement for opening the Alataw Pass-Druzhba international bridge.

Internationally this perspective was already being proposed by the political forces in Europe and the United States around economist Lyndon LaRouche. With German reunification after 1989, LaRouche and his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, proposed creating an integrated productive entity in the region formed by the triangle of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this “productive triangle” concept was expanded to encompass the land-locked Central Asian nations that had emerged from the Soviet Union. They and Russia would be integrated through the construction of several trunk lines of high-speed and other rail lines, which would stretch from Rotterdam to the Pacific Coast.

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The LaRouche-proposed industrial triangle in Europe.

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These ideas were proposed to Chinese scholars by the Schiller Institute toward the beginning of the 1990s. All of these various strands came together in May 1996, in a major symposium held in Beijing under the auspices of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, titled International Symposium on Economic Development of the Regions along the Euro-Asia Continental Bridge.

Speaking at the conference were leading Chinese scholars, including Professor Ma Hong, who had written a major book on the subject of Eurasian transportation; Academician Mikhail Titarenko of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia’s now-deceased premier expert on Chinese affairs and culture; and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President of the Schiller Institute. A major address was given by Song Jian, the Chinese Minister of Science and Technology.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche was a keynote speaker at the 1996 conference on development, in Beijing, China.

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It was clear at this early stage that the idea had already been gestating in Chinese scientific and political layers. With the financial blowout in 1997, in which China played the major role in preventing the Asian economies from going belly-up, and the subsequent 2008 crisis, which still looms over us, the land-bridge idea was put on the back burner, but was not entirely abandoned. And it was no doubt the unique circumstances of China’s internal and external developments during the first decade of this century, that convinced President Xi that this project had to be placed at the top of China’s foreign policy agenda.

First, it corresponded well with the overall economic situation. China had become the second largest economy in the world, and the technological advances it had made, particularly in a number of fields such as high-speed rail, had astonished the world. It also possessed the financial means of initiating a program of such a magnitude as the Belt and Road Initiative.

Second, that initiative was the ideal platform for a good-neighbor policy. The rise of China, the largest country in the region by far, had created some concerns among its smaller neighbors. But a China which showed itself willing to help them move forward on the road to progress, could not be seen as anything but an important benefactor.

And third, it converged nicely with China’s “Go West” policy. Developing China’s western regions thus became more than a social and moral imperative. With new rail connections established to Central Asia and further on to Europe, these western regions would become central to the development of this great project, with cities such as Chongqing, Chengdu, Xian, and Lanzhou now becoming major transit hubs for Belt and Road traffic.

hubei.gov

China's Three Gorges dam.

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More important, with the Belt and Road, China has reinvigorated the Silk Road spirit, the spirit that imbued the ancient Silk Road, with its highly consequential exchange of both goods and ideas. This was a period in which there was a tremendous exchange of goods—silk, spices, jade, and gold. But there was also a rich transmission of ideas and cultures, of art styles, and music. It was indeed one of the first attempts to create an international dialogue of cultures, a transmission of different philosophies and outlooks, each enriching the others in a glorious intellectual interplay.

Important centers of intellectual activity appeared along the Silk Road in such cities as Samarkand, Bukhara, and Alexandria. Developments in thought in Greece and Magna Graecia (Sicily), influenced by ancient Egypt, were also transmitted along the Silk Road. A true dialogue of cultures had begun, one that would provide the basis for the Great Renaissance of the 15th Century.

Another aspect of the Belt and Road agenda has to do with China’s growing role on the global stage. Given the tremendous turbulence characterizing the world picture in the last decade—the economic crisis in Europe and the United States, the continual deterioration of the conditions in the developing countries, and the spread of international terrorism, inflamed by the numerous military interventions by the United States and NATO into Middle Eastern and North African countries—the Belt and Road represents a beacon of hope in an otherwise uncertain world.

It has already created a sense of optimism, not only in Asia, but also in Africa and Latin America. The unprecedented success of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which has mobilized the majority of the world’s population behind it, has engendered a feeling that the world can now go forward, after many years of economic stagnation. The adherence of the BRICS group of nations to the Belt and Road perspective has largely brought the great majority of the world’s population behind the initiative.

A Dirigist Model

The enthusiasm for the Belt and Road has been enhanced by the fact that it was China which put forward the proposal. China remains one of the few developing countries that have succeeded, during the post-Cold War period, in moving in the direction of becoming a moderately prosperous nation. And such a development by the largest country in the world in population, demonstrated clearly for other developing nations that they too could move from poverty to prosperity. While countries such as Japan and South Korea had become Asian tigers in the period of the Cold War, they did so to a large extent with the assistance of the United States, and in a climate in which they were seen as bulwarks against communism.

Ironically, like China, they used a dirigist or Hamiltonian model for their development. As the United States did, after the American Revolution, under the economic direction of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, they understood that only with the government providing overall direction to the economy could their industries develop. Through a wise tax and credit policy, the government could ensure that the country’s immersion in the world market did not lead to it being reduced for all eternity to the level of a low-wage producer of goods for the more prosperous nations.

In China’s case this involved not only tight control over the unleashed forces of “the market,” but also a conscious attempt to leap-frog from the low-wage production that characterized China in the early days of reform and opening-up, to higher-value production—the conscious striving for cutting-edge technologies, including the determined development of an ambitious Chinese space program, which served as a science-driver for the Chinese economy.

Countries in Africa and Latin America gained valuable lessons from the Chinese experience, and were therefore very open to working with China in advancing their own prospects. Infrastructure investment, and an emphasis on developing science and technology, was proving to be the road to success. And China has made it a priority to utilize the success of its development model to benefit its neighbors, both near and far. Investment in infrastructure—in particular in transportation infrastructure—creates the network for the functioning of industrial production and flourishing trade relationships, increasing overall productivity through access to wider markets for both agriculture and industry, and quicker turnaround and less travel time for people and goods in the urban centers.

CCTV video

Mission commander Zhai Zhigang conducting a spacewalk outside China's Shenzhou VII spacecraft, 215 miles above the Earth, on Sept. 27, 2008.

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China is keen on promoting science and technology in the Belt and Road countries. By June 2016, China had signed memoranda of understanding for scientific and technological cooperation in the areas of space, energy, and ecology with fifty-six countries along the Belt and Road. In addition, China has also established thirty-eight science and technology centers in the form of industrial parks, joint laboratories, international technology transfer centers, and industrial cooperation and incubation centers. China also intends to bring 150,000 science and technology personnel from Belt and Road countries to China, within the next three to five years, for exchanges or training, and expects to receive more than five thousand young scientists during that same period.

The same approach is also used in the Chinese manned space program. China has opened up the program to cooperation with all countries. Similar to what the United States had done during the latter days of the Cold War, China is prepared to help other countries advance in the development of space technology. U.S.-Soviet cooperation in space during the Cold War helped to reduce tensions and the lack of trust between the two nations. Today, however, the U.S. Congress has placed restrictions on cooperation between NASA and the China National Space Authority in the vital area of manned space exploration. As a result, the Chinese space program is the only one that has put out a welcome mat for all nations, including the United States.

Overcoming a Cold War Mindset

The Belt and Road Initiative represents much more than simply a needed development program. It is a key element in a new model of governance in the world. The era in which politics was determined by a single power is really at an end. While the United States still remains militarily the most powerful country in the world, new nations have come forward and taken their places in the world arena, China being the most striking example. But Russia under Vladimir Putin has also fought its way back from the destruction of the post-Soviet malaise, the “shock therapy” imposed on it from the West, and the associated dismantling of key scientific and industrial structures. And despite its problems, India has become a key player in world politics.

Since the Cold War is at an end (except in the minds of some policy-wonks in Washington, who still view the world through the Cold War prism), there is no need for a “leader of the free world.” And creating a straw man, in the form of a resurgent Russia or a rising China, to justify such a need, will not succeed in mobilizing people against a non-existent threat.

The real threats that face the world today are international terrorism, the refugee crisis, increased poverty, and financial instability. To face these challenges, cooperation with Russia and China is absolutely essential. This was made clear by the Russian intervention in Syria, which has led to the near eradication of ISIS in that country.

After World War II, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt was determined that the world would no longer be ruled by means of conflict among nations. The creation of the United Nations was his attempt to bring all nations together in one body to find common ground and work out their differences, in order to prevent disputes from leading to war. The UN remains to this day a key tool for maintaining world peace and preventing the outbreak of another war between major powers. It has also been responsible for putting a damper on lesser conflicts through its extensive peace-keeping operations, to which China has become the greatest contributor.

Institutions that have been in operation a long time often have difficulty in changing the way they think and work. In that sense, China had to exert great efforts to gain recognition for the new status which it had effectively attained in the global arena through its economic development. While it did succeed in joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, it did so only after lengthy negotiations, and the country had to make major changes in its economic policy because of pressure from the United States and Japan in particular.

China also achieved Permanent Normal Trade Relations status with the United States at about the same time, but again, only after an uphill battle to overcome the resistance by many Republicans in the U.S. Congress to awarding China that status. Even then, Congress created the U.S.-China Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) as a watchdog to monitor Chinese adherence to trade agreements and China’s performance in areas such as human rights and religious freedom—as if China were some recalcitrant child who needed watching. To this day, the CECC remains an instrument of anti-China agitation within the U.S. Congress.

Achieving its legitimate voting rights in the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—rights corresponding to its growing role in the world economy—has also been a fight, with foot-dragging by the U.S. Senate, which has been unwilling to let China assume its legitimate role. Because of this innate bureaucratic conservatism in the international institutions, and the fact that all too many people in the Western political establishments, particularly in the United States, were still stuck in the Cold War paradigm, China’s initiation of the Belt and Road struck at the root of the problem by charting an independent course for world development and creating the institutions to implement that course.

Toward a New, Just World Economic Order

While China had the financial capability to initiate the Belt and Road with its own financial institutions—the China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank, and others—China’s initiative in establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in October 2014 represented a new direction for the world economy and a major boost for developing countries’ role in it.

By the beginning of this century, it was clear that the world financial structure—and the international financial institutions (IFIs) at its center—were in a state of total breakdown. Global world debt had soared, taking it far beyond any possibility for the world economy to pay it off. The iron-clad commitment of the IFIs to hold all debt as sacred has led to the imposition of massive austerity in the debtor countries, including the United States, where most of the fifty states are in a state of bankruptcy.

While such institutions as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank were originally tasked with investing in infrastructure, particularly in the developing sector, much of their funding has been side-tracked to other concerns, euphemistically mislabeled “poverty alleviation,” leaving several trillion dollars of infrastructure deficit in Asia alone.

But the creation of the AIIB was more than complementary to the lending of the other institutions. Its laser-like focus on infrastructure investment once again underlined the crucial role of infrastructure investment in alleviating poverty. While the $100 billion capital of the AIIB (it began with a commitment of $50 billion) was not a large amount compared to the need or to the funding capabilities of other international financial organizations, the example that it set, put the world on a different trajectory. Consequently, we soon saw a renewed interest in infrastructure investment by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

EIRNS

Indira Ghandi at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

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Here again there were major attempts to prevent countries from joining the AIIB. The Obama administration pressured countries, and individual firms, not to support the new China-initiated bank, stating that it was worried about a trend of constant accommodation of China. This pressure had little effect. When Great Britain, with whom the United States is mooted to have a special relationship, decided to join the AIIB in 2015, it was clear that this pressure was totally ineffective. It was also a clear signal that there was a keen awareness of the growing need for such an institution, and a clear support for the policy that China was pursuing in that respect. It was also a recognition that business as usual, within the confines of the traditional New York-London financial structures, was no longer an option.

Coordinacion de Material Grafico

Mexico President José López Portillo at a rally in support of nationalization of the banks, Sept. 3, 1982.

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In fact, there is a growing recognition throughout the world that the post-Bretton Woods structure is effectively at an end. The tremendous expansion of world debt, both corporate and private, including the debt incurred in the rarefied world of derivatives and over-the-counter trading, is calculated to be around two quadrillion dollars, that is, $2,000 trillion. World gross domestic product (GDP), on the other hand, is valued at around $70 trillion. Obviously, world production can never eradicate such a tremendous amount of debt. Only a thorough revamping of the international financial system, including massive write-offs of much of the mainly fictitious debt, would take us to a point at which the world economy could begin to generate the credit needed for rebuilding world infrastructure.

In addition, the needs of the developing sector have been totally disregarded in this post-Bretton Woods era. Without the recent intervention by China, countries in Africa would have plunged into chaos. A similar situation exists in Latin America where, in the 1960s and 1970s, countries like Argentina and Brazil appeared to be about to take off on the road to development. When Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in August 1971, effectively ending the Bretton Woods arrangement—creating major inflation and disrupting the terms of trade with these countries—many of them went from a condition of relative affluence into a condition of absolute penury.

Flailing of a Dying Order

In 1975, economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche called for the creation of an International Development Bank (IDB) as a means of financing major “great projects” in Third World countries, which would allow them to move onto a real development path. LaRouche’s IDB proposal received a positive response from leading figures in the developing world. It led to the call for creation of a New World Economic Order, which was raised by the developing countries at the UN General Assembly in 1976. But the United States and Britain, and their London-New York financial backers, were not prepared to listen. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in particular, made a direct intervention to use the power of the U.S. government to prevent any such “new world order” from taking shape.

Attempts were also made in the 1970s, again on the urging of LaRouche—who was working directly with Mexico’s President José López Portillo and India’s Indira Gandhi for the purpose—to create among Third World countries a debtors’ cartel which would be capable of negotiating with the major banks and the creditor nations from a position of relative strength. But the lack of solidarity on the part of some key developing nations made it impossible.

Left: Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (photo credit: Bundesarchiv), right: Former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (photo credit: CC/Roland Godefroy).

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In Europe in the late 1970s, there were also efforts by German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to bring together an East-West, North-South arrangement that could create the basis for a development policy in Africa and Asia. The combination of the free traders in the Reagan administration and Great Britain’s Margaret Thatcher prevented that from happening. Then a series of “terrorist” attacks and assassinations targeted the key figures in this policy, including Dresdner Bank chief Jürgen Ponto and German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer.

When the Asia financial crisis hit in 1997, the idea of creating an Asian Monetary Fund, independent from the IMF and its notorious conditionalities, was proposed by Japan’s Eisuke Sakakibara. Such a fund would be constituted at $100 billion, simply to support Asian currencies that had been under massive attack by foreign speculators such as George Soros’ Quantum Fund. Japan, as the major creditor of Thailand and of the other Southeast Asian countries hit by the speculation, had a clear interest in the plan. Opposition to this proposal by the IMF prevented it from ever getting off the ground, although the Chiang Mai Initiative, a network of bilateral swap arrangements set up by the ASEAN+3, which resulted from that discussion, remains intact to this day.

This crisis made it clear to everyone that another major financial blowout was highly probable, and that the Group of Seven (G7), which had previously served as the political steering committee of the world economy, was no longer sufficient to accomplish that task. Developing sector countries, and particularly China, had to be brought in, if any solutions were to be forthcoming. This led the Clinton Administration—which was also aware of the concerns of LaRouche on the matter—to bring together a broader group of nations, the G22 (later the G20) in Washington, to deal with the ongoing crisis.

The G20 would effectively take over the role played earlier by the G7 as the main body responsible for oversight of the world economy. The G20 has also begun to play a major role in coordinating the responses of nations to major crises and—as we have seen in the recent G20 Hangzhou Summit, chaired by China last year—in attempting to formulate a clear policy of world development, with poverty elimination at its core.

Righteousness Over Advantage

Many in the West portray the rise of China on the world stage as an attempt to usurp the role of the United States as world “hegemon.” Such views are ignorant of the reality. First, the role of the United States as the world leader, while always exaggerated, has lost much of its relevance.

Beginning with the first Iraq War, which plunged the Middle East into turmoil and chaos, the United States began to lose its credibility as an effective leader, with many countries feeling that U.S. actions since then have caused more harm than good. The world itself has changed in the last two decades.

The rise of China and the increasing demands of the developing sector to be allowed to fully develop their economies and to have a role in world politics, can no longer be suppressed. China’s response to its own rise has been far from that of becoming a regional bully, as some in the West try to portray it. Working diligently through regional and other international institutions, China has offered its assistance to provide the means for its neighbors to partake in its development drive. The Belt and Road Initiative provides the overall conceptual framework for bringing together the development programs of all the countries in the region.

The Belt and Road is much more than a framework of economic cooperation. It is an alternative philosophy for the interaction of nations, indeed, a new dialogue of cultures. While the Silk Road spirit imbues the spirit of the Belt and Road, it also contains an element that is characteristically Chinese and stems from Confucius, particularly Confucius’ saying, “The superior man is aware of righteousness, the inferior man is aware of advantage.” The Belt and Road Initiative, at the deepest level is, concerned with the question of righteousness in economic affairs, characterized by President Xi’s continual emphasis on its feature of win-win cooperation.

Wikipedia

Statue of Confucius in Houston, Texas.

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In this respect, the Belt and Road represents the kernel of what Helga Zepp-LaRouche characterizes as “the new paradigm” of international relations. The benefit accrues to all who partake, and all are invited to partake. While there has been a regional concentration in the formulation of the actual projects, the reverberations are universal. The railroad projects in Kenya and Ethiopia, and the envisioned bi-oceanic railroad in Latin America, have long broken the regional strictures of the original vision, expanding it to a world land-bridge. The enthusiastic reception of the Belt and Road by many of the European nations, as well as the recent consolidation of the Belt and Road in the perspective of the United Nations, have established it as the vision of what the world must achieve.

The old paradigm lingers on as an element of practical policy, particularly (but not only) in the United States, where we have also seen the keen desire of the American people for a change of paradigm. They will begin to realize how the Belt and Road infrastructure development model can also bring back the prosperity that the country once enjoyed under wise political leadership such as that of President Franklin Roosevelt.

If President Trump seeks a foolproof method for reviving the U.S. economy, he should take the lessons of China to heart, and accept the hand of cooperation and friendship that is offered by China, to extend the Belt and Road to the North American continent. That would launch cooperation among nations on infrastructure projects of mutual benefit. It would foster science and technology to develop new energy resources, especially nuclear fusion, to propel tomorrow’s growth. It would mean participating in a mutually beneficial dialogue of cultures, in which the greatest achievements of one culture can be exhibited and learned from by the other, enriching each with a new sense of beauty and respect.

In this way, while we will no doubt encounter more turbulence and setbacks as the Belt and Road moves forward, we can still expect that the alleged advantages of the zero-sum game will quickly pale before the tremendous prosperity engendered by the more righteous spirit of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The wise path for President Trump would be to bring the Belt and Road to the United States and work with China to bring development to the war-torn Middle East. If there were unity on the overarching goal in the Middle East, on the part of the outside powers—particularly among the United States, China, and Russia—it could provide a solid basis for achieving a lasting peace. It is only with a program of comprehensive economic development that any of these conflicts can ultimately be resolved. The Belt and Road represents that solution.

Steering this ship through the sometimes choppy waters will require skill, diplomacy, and a great deal of patience on the part of China and her collaborators. But the progress already achieved by the Belt and Road Initiative indicates that it will meet with success. On its success lies the greatest hope of mankind to eliminate poverty forever.

II. Manhattan Leads a Revolution

Beautiful City

Όμορϕη πόλη

by Dean Andromidas

PART II of Three Parts

Edgar Allan Poe and the Beautiful City

by Daniel Chester French in 1922

Statue of Edgar Allan Poe in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, Bronx, New York City.

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Feb. 2017—General Howe launched his attack on upper Manhattan from his headquarters atop the high point on the Bronx side of the Harlem River overlooking Manhattan’s Washington Heights. Known today as University Heights, it is now occupied by friendly forces and is the home of Bronx Community College. Having previously been the Bronx campus of New York University, an elite institution, it is endowed with grand and monumental buildings. On the highest point, where Howe situated his headquarters, is the Gould Library. An imposing edifice, designed by Stanford White, and built at the end of the 19th Century, it is reminiscent of the Pantheon in Rome. Forming a semicircle around this structure is a colonnade known as the American Hall of Fame, between whose columns are placed busts of many famous and deserving, and some less deserving Americans, among whom will be found a bust of Edgar Allan Poe executed by the sculptor Daniel Chester French, an artist we will encounter later on in this narrative.

Just north of this campus, can be found the small cottage which served as the home of America’s great poet. It is here where the young Virginia Poe lived her last days. Following the death of his beloved wife Virginia, Poe is said to have taken solemn and contemplative walks that led him to High Bridge, the viaduct that carried water to Manhattan from a channel that flowed past his home. High Bridge is still extant, and one can stand where Poe himself often stood contemplating a scene that must have been nothing less than a spectacular and beautiful panorama.

When the ancient Greeks set out to settle new colonies, the leader was the poet, for he would be the lawgiver. Not to formulate rules and statutes, but through the composition of the poems and music that would govern the souls of the new colony. While not a founder of New York City, Poe can rightfully be considered its most important poet, whose contributions help make New York the cultural capital of the United States. I can hear protests. Granted he is a Virginian, and the people of Baltimore claim him, and Philadelphia also has a hold on him—nonetheless, he spent the most important years of his life as a poet in New York City. This is in keeping with the fact that few of the great New Yorkers were actually born New Yorkers.

When we speak of Poe, we speak, above all, of the poet Poe, one of the most accomplished of the 19th Century. He had great influence on the poets of Europe, especially on modern Greek poets beginning with the generation of the 1880s, led by Kostis Palamas.

Kostis Palamas

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The best of Greek poets of this and even later generations pursued a sacred mission through poetry: the mission of educating the uneducated and impoverished citizenry of Greece, through transforming the language they spoke, Dimotiki, into a language capable of expressing profound ideas and expressions of beauty through the medium of poetry.

They fought against the tyranny of Katharevousa, the so called reformed Greek created by would-be scholars who claimed they were bringing the language closer to that of ancient Greece. All this was really nonsense—nonetheless, it became an official language in which not only state business was conducted, but new literary endeavors were to be written. Needless to say, only brotgelehrt professors and the aristocracy attempted to speak this language, and they imposed such a tyranny that, were someone to oppose it by writing poetry in the Dimotiki, it was considered a dangerous revolutionary act. This was the case up through the great Greek modern composer, Mikis Theodorakis, who set the works of these poets to music.

While Poe’s tales were translated into Greek as early as the 1870s, the translation of his poems came much later. Lamenting this fact Palamas wrote:

[Poe] had the good fortune of having been presented to us Greeks years ago first in the first issue of the journal published by the literary society “Parnassus.” Emanuel Roidis was the patron of the presentation which was diligent, valuable, worthy of its subject. But what is more, the Poe who became known to us at the time was the author of terror-inspiring but also mathematically precise short stories of great renown, but not the Pre-Raphalite, neoplatonic, ecstatic poems—the latter have remained at the exclusive disposal of new poets. From time to time they render him in their peddler’s magazines, via their language, or lack of one, via direct import or via the French route.[fn_1]

Needless to say both Roidis, and Palamas were always under attack from the establishment for their fight to develop the Dimotiki.

Among the next generation of Greek poets was the famous diplomat-poet George Seferis, who while Greek Consul in Albania in 1937, wrote a poem dedicated to Poe, entitled “Raven—In Memoriam Edgar Allan Poe.”

In 1970, while imprisoned by the Greek Junta in the Oropos concentration camp, Theodorakis set Seferis’ poem to music. This was part of the composer’s effort to educate the Greek population to understand the higher forms of classical music, at a time when the vast majority of Greeks had no exposure at all to classical music. Thus, Theodorakis set the poems of Greece’s best modern poets—many, like Palamas and Seferis, influenced by Poe—to music which itself was derived from Byzantine and traditional themes, transformed by classical principles into a poetic-musical composition that could touch the souls of the Greek people.

Theodorakis wrote in his Oropos Notebook:

The melody is found in its organic unity with the human sensitivity, so that it reflects the vibrations of the specific emotional weight it contains. . . .

In the beginning was the Word! This truth is applied faultlessly in all my works. Hence, one has but to take into consideration the poetic text each time in order to interpret my music. Moreover, from the beginning I intentionally stated that I place my pride in serving faithfully (primarily) modern Greek poetry. And this to such a degree that when one listens to a song, one cannot imagine the music with another text, nor the poem with a different music.[fn_2]

Poe fought a similar battle against two tyrannies: One was the subservience to British literary criticism, and the other was the tyranny of public opinion—both of which served to stifle American cultural progress.

Writing in his Marginalia in 1844, Poe decried the “disgusting spectacle of our subservience to British criticism” (pages 188-189):

We know the British bear us little but ill-will; we know that, in no case, do they utter unbiased opinions of American books; we know that in the few instances in which our writers have been treated with common decency in England, these writers have openly paid homage to English institutions, or have had lurking at the bottom of their hearts a secret principle at war with Democracy; we know all this and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland. Now if we must have nationality, let it be a nationality that will throw off this yoke.

As for “public opinion,” his critical essays are imbued with nothing less than scorn for its banality and stupidity. Poe held to a higher standard. In his preface to a volume of his poems, Poe wrote, “with me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not, they cannot at will be excited with an eye to paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.”

Poe may have been a patriot, a spy, and a fabled writer of stories and essays, but above all Poe was a poet whose poetic genius imbued with that genius everything else he did or might have done. His disdain for British critics was not simply a desire to create an “American,” or national, literary tradition. His pursuit was much higher,—it was nothing less than the creation of beauty and the sublime. That required educating the “taste” of American citizens to be able to understand beauty and the sublime.

In his essay, “The Poetic Principle,” Poe writes, “a poem deserves its title only in as much as it excites, by elevating the soul.”

Dividing the world of mind into its three most immediately obvious distinctions, we have the Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense. I place Taste in the middle, because it is just this position which, in the mind, it occupies. It holds intimate relations with either extreme; but from the Moral Sense is separated by so faint a difference that Aristotle has not hesitated to place some of its operations among the virtues themselves. Nevertheless, we find the offices of the trio marked with a sufficient distinction. Just as the Intellect concerns itself with Truth, so Taste informs us of the Beautiful while the Moral Sense is regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms:—waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity—her disproportion—her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious—in a word, to Beauty.

An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors, and sentiments amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments, a duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and colors, and sentiments, which greet him in common with all mankind—he, I say, has yet failed to prove his divine title. There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us—but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry,—or when by Music, the most entrancing of the Poetic moods—we find ourselves melted into tears—we weep then—not as the Abbaté Gravina supposes—through excess of pleasure, but through a certain, petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys, of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness— this struggle, on the part of souls fittingly constituted— has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic.

Developing this concept in a way that would be very much appreciated by the Greek composer Theodorakis, Poe continues extending the principle to as far as the Landscape Garden, but especially Music.

The Poetic Sentiment, of course, may develop itself in various modes—in Painting, in Sculpture, in Architecture, in the Dance—very especially in Music—and very peculiarly, and with a wide field, in the composition of the Landscape Garden. Our present theme, however, has regard only to its manifestation in words. And here let me speak briefly on the topic of rhythm. Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in its various modes of meter, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected—is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality. It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles—the creation of supernal Beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels. And thus there can be little doubt that in the union of Poetry with Music in its popular sense, we shall find the widest field for the Poetic development. The old Bards and Minnesingers had advantages which we do not possess—and Thomas Moore, singing his own songs, was, in the most legitimate manner, perfecting them as poems.

To recapitulate, then:—I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.

A few words, however, in explanation. That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful. In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement, of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the heart. I make Beauty, therefore—using the word as inclusive of the sublime—I make Beauty the province of the poem, simply because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring as directly as possible from their causes:—no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation in question is at least most readily attainable in the poem. It by no means follows, however, that the incitements of Passion, or the precepts of Duty, or even the lessons of Truth, may not be introduced into a poem, and with advantage; for they may subserve, incidentally, in various ways, the general purposes of the work:—but the true artist will always contrive to tone them down in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of the poem.

I have read this passage countless times and always discover something new, something more profound than before. The reader might want to reread this long passage, for it expresses the very essence of Poe and the mission he put before himself. It was for the cause of beauty and the “excitement of the soul,” that Poe the poet fought his life-and-death struggle. As General Greene would have said, he fought this struggle, “not as a representative of America but of the whole world.” In this very profound sense, Poe was nothing less than the Shelley of America.

1836 oil on canvas by Henry Inman

George Pope Morris

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The reader should reflect carefully on Poe’s discussion of Music and Poetry. One might ask what was the music Poe had made reference to. By the 1840s, Handel, Haydn, and even Mozart were well established in America, particularly their operas and religious music. But Beethoven, who I believe was not even as well-established in Europe as his predecessors, was first introduced into American by way of New York City. It was in 1841 that the New York Philharmonic was founded, and in their first concert they performed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—the first performance of a Beethoven symphony in the United States. In 1846, they held a benefit concert in an effort to raise funds for a new concert hall, where they performed, again for the first time in the United States, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This symphony became their standard work when a grand performance was called for.

Poe, who had already relocated to New York in 1846, attended the performance. At the time he shared the position of co-editor of the Broadway Journal with Henry C. Watson, who was a very well know music critic. The latter’s brother-in-law, George Loder, was the Philharmonic’s conductor, a man also well known to Poe.

On the question of music, Poe moved in a circle of composers, performers, and music critics. One of the most famous American song writers, George Pope Morris, was among them. In a review of the latter’s National Melodies of America, Poe wrote:

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, we think, one of the few. When we speak of song-writing we mean, of course, the composition of brief poems with an eye to their embodiment in melody. In this ultimate destination of the song proper, lies its essence, its genius, its spirit. It is the strict reference to music—the dependence upon modulated expression—which gives to this branch of letters a character altogether distinct and unique; which separates it in a very great measure, and in a manner not sufficiently considered, from the ordinary proprieties of literature; which allows it, and even demands for it, a vast latitude in its laws; and which absolutely insists upon that certain wild license and indefinitiveness which is recognized by every musician who is not a mere fiddler, as an important point in the philosophy of his science—as the soul of the sensations derivable from its practice—sensations which bewilder while they enthral, and which, perhaps, would not so enthral, if they did not so bewilder. . . .

The sentiments deducible from the conception of sweet sound, are, in themselves, exceedingly indefinite; those derivable from harmony and melody the most indefinite, and the least susceptible of analysis, of any with which the metaphysician has to deal. Give to music any undue decision, imbue it with any very determinate tone, and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal, and, as we sincerely believe, of its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its dream-like luxury; you dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic in which its whole nature is bound up; you exhaust it of its breath of fire. It then becomes a tangible and easily appreciable idea—a conception of the earth, earthly. It will not, indeed, lose all its power to please, but all which we consider the distinctiveness of that power.

Again in his “The Rationale of Verse,” Poe writes: “The perception of pleasure in the equality of sounds is the principle of Music.” As for “equality,” he writes, “Its idea embraces those of similarity, proportion, identity, repetition, and adaptation or fitness.” He continues:

Unpracticed ears can appreciate only simple equalities, such as are found in ballad airs. While comparing one simple sound with another they are too much occupied to be capable of comparing the equality subsisting between these two simple sounds taken conjointly, and two other similar simple sounds taken conjointly. Practiced ears, on the other hand, appreciate both equalities at the same instant, although it is absurd to suppose that both are heard at the same instant. One is heard and appreciated from itself, the other is heard by the memory, and the instant glides into and is confounded with the secondary appreciation. Highly cultivated musical taste in this manner enjoys not only these double equalities, all appreciated at once, but takes pleasurable cognizance, through memory, of equalities the members of which occur at intervals so great that the uncultivated taste loses them altogether. That this latter can properly estimate or decide on the merits of what is called scientific music is of course impossible. But scientific music has no claim to intrinsic excellence; it is fit for scientific ears alone. In its excess it is the triumph of the physique over the morale of music. The sentiment is overwhelmed by the sense. On the whole, the advocates of the simpler melody and harmony have infinitely the best of the argument, although there has been very little of real argument on the subject.

It is amazing how Poe’s idea of “indefinitiveness” has been interpreted by academics as meaning everything from the romanticism to symbolism, when in reality it can really only be understood through what Poe himself refers to as the “indefinitiveness” in music. That being what Furtwängler famously refers to as “performing between the notes.”

One of Poe’s good friends and a discussion partner on the question of Music was the New York City music critic George Washington Peck. Peck had moved from Boston when his journal, The Boston Musical Review folded after only four issues. In an article in that journal, Peck expresses the same analysis as Poe, but in more musical terms, in a discussion of musical expression of effect.

The musical expression, or melody, is the result of four parts, each more or less melodious in itself, moving together. To write such sentences, it would seem the composer must needs possess four minds, each inspired with the same thought, and each perceiving how the rest will express this common thought, and molding its own expression conformable; yet the idea conveyed by the combination is one,—a grand unfolding. We remark, by the way, that this is one of the finest instances of a musical sentence adapted to one of poetry we know of.

Thus far concerning the identity between Expression and Melody. We might now go into the construction of melody, and show how it is made up of phrases and rhythmical forms, which have certain laws of succession, like measure in poetry: but it is sufficient for the purpose of this article to observe, that whatever may be the sort of current the composer expresses himself in, it must be readily separable by the mind into regular forms, and must charm and hold it all the while by gratifying the sense of beauty. The ear must be attracted and the love of order pleased; there must be delicacy and sweetness as well as strength, or the imagination will not be impressed nor the heart touched. For it is the blessed office of the poetic part of our nature, of which all the arts are so many different manifestations, to lift the soul above itself, and transport it to a more glorious state of being,—“to a sense of its possible greatness.” It recoils from the sad and wearisome realities of life, and seeks to create a more excellent world of its own in a region where all is beautiful and all calm; where the heart has a natural language, and may dare to utter its grief or its gladness without restraint. Hence it is that the plane of every work of art, of whatsoever kind, must be, as it were, a tableland, without and above our actual every-day existence, blossoming with flowers, and breathing upon the senses a fresher air, while the imagination is revealing its discoveries in this more excellent world, or it will by its incongruity make them appear as things not to be believed. Hence the necessity of harmony of color in painting, of easy and natural versification in poetry, and of agreeable combination and succession in music.

But to return. Expression,—Melody, as we have defined it,—the stream of ideas flowing into the ear through beautiful forms, is in music the most essential quality, and bears to all other qualities the same relation that charity bears to the other virtues, since without it all is literally “as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.” Compositions may be ever so well adapted to particular effects, to the voice, to any instrument, or to the full orchestra: they may be ever so astonishing, or smooth, or intricate; so slow or fast, so easy, or so abundant in difficulties; if they do not express musical ideas in a clear intelligible consecution, they are nothing,—no more than displays of fireworks, where rockets shoot up and whirl round , now this way, now that, dazzling the eye and confusing the mind; and there is only change and motion without order or connexion. For all effects are but the accessories and servants of expression. All the voices of nature, all the qualities and varieties of all instruments that have been or are yet to be invented, are but the means which the immortal soul of man uses to convey its inward workings. One composer studies the piano, and his mind becomes so accustomed to its peculiar class of effects that he uses them involuntarily to convey his expressions. We say of such a one, that his music is strongly tinctured with the piano character. Yet his composition may be of the highest order, for the effects used may be in perfect accordance with and necessary to the full conveyance of the expressions. The piano works of Beethoven are examples; they not only abound in the most wonderful variety of effects, but in the most passionately imaginative expressions. They develop the resources of the instrument, as an instrument, and not as an end. . . .

The above excerpts represent only a small portion of what can be found in the four issues of Peck’s Boston Musical Review. It is amazing how Peck, not to mention his journal, have disappeared from popular history and now reside in dusty archives, only surfacing now and then in academic studies often tangential to Peck or even to music.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

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As Odysseus drew forth the spirit of Achilles in Hades, I will indulge my reader again with a quote from Peck’s Review.

In a sequel to the article from which the above is an excerpt. Peck writes:

For to say in brief what we hope hereafter to illustrate at large, Music is poetry addressing the imagination through the pure reason. It conveys no new knowledge, except of its own forms, to the understanding. Its sole beauty, considered apart from the beautiful effects in which it may be performed, is in the order and symmetry of its arrangement. A single tone, though never so pure and beautiful in itself, is not music till it is woven into a musical expression, into a form of sound which takes hold of the mind and carries it onward with an irresistible strength, analogous to that of a chain of mathematical reasoning, and at the same time operates directly on the imagination. The excellence of music does not consist in its ease or difficulty, or in the perfection or imperfection of its performance, but solely in quality and force of its expressions.

The above is an example of the quality of the rich discussion of music among the circle of which Poe was an integral member. Take, for instance, the above-cited George Pope Morris, who, in collaboration with Nathaniel Parker Willis, founded the New York Evening Mirror. Morris would later found the Home Journal, which later became today’s Town and County—which bears little resemblance to its origins. Both Willis and Morris were well known to Poe, and their Mirror published an “advance” copy of Poe’s “The Raven.”

In Poe’s day Morris was the most popular song-writer of his time, although now virtually unknown. Morris was a lyricist whose songs were set to music by among others, Henry Russell, Charles E. Horn, and the famous Stephen Foster. The first two were known to Poe, while Foster was of a later generation.

Henry Russell was an Anglo-Jewish composer and singer who spent several years in the United States, both performing and composing songs. He was a student of Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini. He put some thirty songs written by Morris to music. His most famous was “Woodsman Spare that Tree,” whose music bears a resemblance to Belini’s “Casta Diva.” This song was perhaps the most popular song of its day, yet there is only one recording of it on YouTube, and that by a not-bad English baritone and musicologist who is a member of the British Green Party, and considers it the first environmentalist song.

by Édouard Mane/Library of Congress

Illustration from a French translation of “The Raven.”

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George E. Horn was the son of a German composer and musician who emigrated to England, where he served as music tutor to the Royal Family, but is also known to be among the first to promote Bach in England, The son emigrated to the United States, and became a popular singer and composer who later became the director of Boston’s Handel and Hayden Society.

Long before Dvořák, and Horn in collaboration with Morris, delved into the songs of African-American slaves. This is an excerpt from his book National Melodies:

In the spring of 1837, my professional engagements induced me to visit the enterprising and hospitable city of Natchez on the Mississippi, where first I heard the melodies of the South, sung, danced and accompanied on the banjo and violin by the Negroes of the plantation; and in this section of the country alone, can they be heard with their own peculiar expression of joyousness and melancholy, unaffected by the amalgamation of what is termed science and taste, which, if too lavishly introduced, destroys all national music; feeling being its only requisite. Simple national feeling constitutes its sole charm.[fn_3]

These composers do not “measure up” to a Mozart or Beethoven—nonetheless their songs are beautiful, and express a truth of the spirit of the times.

It is not without a deeper significance that Poe chose to carry out his struggle in the city of New York. Poe earned a meager living by editing literary journals of his time, first at the Southern Literary Messenger and then in Philadelphia at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. But their owners were more interested in profits than art. Perhaps worse to Poe was their poor taste, and he longed to establish a journal of his own. The idea first came to him in Philadelphia where he proposed to call it The Penn, but found no backing. In 1844, five years before his death, he migrated to New York City, which was rapidly overtaking Philadelphia as the nation’s cultural capital. He secured a position as sub-editor of the Evening Mirror and then at the failing Broadway Journal, which he eventually bought out, but he was unable to rescue it from bankruptcy. Nonetheless, he sought to establish his journal, which he hoped to name The Stylus.

New York was every bit a battleground for Poe, where there was a thin line between literature and politics. The battle was fought in the magazines and as well as the salons. The two major literary magazines were entitled the American Whig Review and the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. The former trumpeted the views of the “Whig” party, and many of its readers and supporters would later form the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln; while the latter’s supporters were partisans of the Democrats, and many, although by no means all, would later support the Confederacy, including its editor John O’Sullivan. Poe’s works appeared in both journals.

“The Raven” first appeared in the American Whig Review.

Portrait by John Wesley Jarvis/New York State Historical Association

James Fenimore Cooper

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Poe and the Creation of the Beautiful City

With its great harbor and the opening of the Erie Canal, New York become the wealthiest of the young republic’s cities, and many of its wealthy citizens took a keen interest in patronizing the arts. James Fenimore Cooper formed his informal Bread and Cheese Club, which included the painter, inventor, author, and diplomat Washington Irving; painter and inventor Samuel Morse; and Hudson River school landscape painters Asher Durand and Thomas Cole. In 1825, Morse, Durand, Cole, and others created the National Academy of Design, “to promote the fine arts in America through instruction and exhibition.”

Poe was a celebrated guest at the some of the most sophisticated salons in the city, where he often recited his poems and conversed with the literati of the city, who in many cases were also among the rich and powerful, as well as the true artists like himself.

While his literary accomplishments flourished and reached the apex of his powers, his financial and business affairs always proved a failure. This may be attributed to his own character. He expresses this himself in a letter to James Russell Lowell: “I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things, to give any continuous effort to anything—to be consistent in anything. My life has been whim—impulse—passion—a longing for solitude—a scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future.”

But the more likely reason for his poverty was his frank and clear literary criticism, whose standard was nothing less than the preceding quote from his “Poetic Principle” suggests. Having, as Heine once said, an “accursed conscience” for the truth, he earned many enemies from among the many mediocrities that comprised the Literati of his time. He had nothing but scorn for the Transcendentalists, whose works he saw had little or nothing to do with poetry. Even the famous Longfellow, who wrote poetry from his desk at Harvard, where he was a professor, lost all of Poe’s respect.

As for the New York literati of his time, Poe wrote just such a book entitled The Literati of New York City, which cut to the quick on all the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Raven and Central Park

In Poe’s time, on what is now Manhattan’s West 84th Street, stood a modest but stately house on the 216-acre farm owned by the Brennan family. The homestead extended from what is now the west side of Central Park, to Riverside Park on the Hudson River. In the summers of 1843 and 1844, Poe and his family lived as quests in this house. Poe took contemplative walks about the woods that lay near the house, no doubt wandering into the territory of the future Central Park. But he also would spend hours sitting atop “Mount Tom,” the huge rock that can still be found in Riverside Park, where he looked down onto the beautiful Hudson Valley. It was in this environment where tradition has it that he wrote the final drafts of his immortal poem, “The Raven.”

The purpose of this anecdote is not to discuss the poetics of “The Raven,” but Poe’s powerful contribution to the poetics of landscape architecture, of which Central Park and Riverside Park are suburb examples. Do you ask, “what does Poe have to do with the topography of the beautiful city?” When one flies over Manhattan, the most distinctive feature is not the masses of stone, brick and concrete, reinforced by underlying steel, which reach high into the sky. It is rather the broad rectangular splash of greenery we know as Central Park. Snowy white in the Winter, brown with the emergence of greenery and blossoming flowers in the Spring, its rich greenness in the Summer and its riotous multicolors in Autumn have been a delight for New Yorkers for many decades.

Poe's House in Manhattan.

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We don’t have to go into some dusty archive to find evidence of Poe’s contribution. In 1847, Poe published “The Landscape Garden,” and later, in 1849, the last year of his life, he wrote “Landor’s Cottage.” In the former, Poe wrote of Mr. Ellison’s passion:

I mean the most liberal public or recognized conception of the idea involved in the phrase “poetic sentiment.” But Mr. Ellison imagined that the richest, and altogether the most natural and most suitable province, had been blindly neglected. No definition had spoken of the Landscape-Gardener, as of the poet; yet my friend could not fail to perceive that the creation of the Landscape-Garden offered to the true muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here was, indeed, the fairest field for the display of invention, or imagination, in the endless combining of forms of novel Beauty; the elements which should enter into combination being, at all times, and by a vast superiority, the most glorious which the earth could afford. In the multiform of the tree, and in the multicolor of the flower, he recognized the most direct and the most energetic efforts of Nature at physical loveliness. And in the direction or concentration of this effort, or, still more properly, in its adaption to the eyes which were to behold it upon earth, he perceived that he should be employing the best means—laboring to the greatest advantage—in the fulfillment of his destiny as Poet.

There may be an object in full keeping with the principle suggested—an object unattainable by the means ordinarily in possession of mankind, yet which, if attained, would lend a charm to the landscape-garden immeasurably surpassing that which a merely human interest could bestow. The true poet possessed of very unusual pecuniary resources, might possibly, while retaining the necessary idea of art or interest or culture, so imbue his designs at once with extent and novelty of Beauty, as to convey the sentiment of spiritual interference. It will be seen that, in bringing about such result, he secures all the advantages of interest or design, while relieving his work of all the harshness and technicality of Art. In the most rugged of wildernesses—in the most savage of the scenes of pure Nature—there is apparent the art of a Creator; yet is this art apparent only to reflection; in no respect has it the obvious force of a feeling. Now, if we imagine this sense of the Almighty Design to be harmonized in a measurable degree, if we suppose a landscape whose combined strangeness, vastness, definitiveness, and magnificence, shall inspire the idea of culture, or care, or superintendence, on the part of intelligences superior yet akin to humanity—then the sentiment of interest is preserved, while the Art is made to assume the air of an intermediate or secondary Nature—a Nature which is not God, nor an emanation of God, but which still is Nature, in the sense that it is the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God.

These were not two pieces written to earn the normal fee of four dollars a page, but they do, on the one hand, beautifully express mankind’s God-given mission of developing the cosmos. On the other, they were his intervention into the lively debate at the time on the future of the beautiful city of New York. In 1811, at the time when New York City did not extend north, even only to what is now 14th Street, city planners marked out the notorious “grid” pattern of streets and avenues that extended the full length and breadth of Manhattan, regardless of the topography of the ground. Its aim was purely to maximize the real estate potential of the island. Hills and dales were to be flattened, marshes drained, and the entire coastline to be turned over to the builders of docks and wharves.

While planners saw the grid as an efficient means to develop New York as a commercial center of the United States, real estate speculators such as John Jacob Astor, whose mission in life was to own all of Manhattan, took advantage of it for making high profits.

James Fenimore Cooper aptly described these speculators, “How loathsome is a state of society that reduces the feelings of neighborhood, religion, veneration for the past, hopes for the future, country, kindred, and friends, to the level of a speculation! The locusts of Egypt do not bring such a blight on a land, as the passage of a swarm of these restless, soulless, shiftless, and yet for ever shifting, creatures, who do not stay long enough in a place to love anything but themselves, and who invariably treat the best affections as they would deal with a bale of goods, or a drove of cattle on its way to the shambles. These are not the men who, by manly enterprise and bold conceptions, convert the wilderness into a garden, but reptiles that wander in their footsteps, swagger of their own exploits, come and go incessantly, and, like the rolling stone, gather no moss.”[fn_4]

It was in fact a fight to beat back the “gridders” that Poe was very much a part of. These two tales come out of his discussions with artists of the Hudson River school of landscape painters such as Thomas Cole and the latter’s protégé, Frederic Edwin Church, and landscape gardeners such as Andrew Jackson Downing. All shared with Poe a deep appreciation for beauty and the sublime.

A well-known landscape artist and one of the founders of the Hudson River School as well as the National Academy of Design, New Yorker Thomas Cole published his essay on “American Scenery” in 1836, writing:

Poetry and Painting sublime and purify thought, by grasping the past, the present, and the future—they give the mind a foretaste of its immortality, and thus prepare it for performing an exalted part amid the realities of life. And rural nature is full of the same quickening spirit—it is, in fact, the exhaustless mine from which the poet and the painter have brought such wondrous treasures—an unfailing fountain of intellectual enjoyment, where all may drink, and be awakened to a deeper feeling of the works of genius, and a keener perception of the beauty of our existence. For those whose days are all consumed in the low pursuits of avarice, or the gaudy frivolities of fashion, unobservant of nature’s loveliness, are unconscious of the harmony of creation—Heaven’s roof to them is but a painted ceiling hung with lamps; No more—that lights them to their purposes—They wander ‘loose about;’ they nothing see, themselves except, and creatures like themselves,

Short lived, short sighted.

What to them is the page of the poet where he describes or personifies the skies, the mountains, or the streams, if those objects themselves have never awakened observation or excited pleasure? What to them is the wild Salvator Rosa, or the aerial Claude Lorrain?

There is in the human mind an almost inseparable connection between the beautiful and the good, so that if we contemplate the one, the other seems present; and an excellent author has said, “it is difficult to look at any objects with pleasure—unless where it arises from brutal and tumultuous emotions—without feeling that disposition of mind which tends towards kindness and benevolence; and surely, whatever creates such a disposition, by increasing our pleasures and enjoyments, cannot be too much cultivated.”

Cole goes on to elucidate the beauty and the sublime of the American landscape, defending against those who claim there is no beauty in American scenery:

There are those who through ignorance or prejudice strive to maintain that American scenery possesses little that is interesting or truly beautiful—that it is rude without picturesqueness, and monotonous without sublimity—that being destitute of those vestiges of antiquity, whose associations so strongly affect the mind, it may not be compared with European scenery. But from whom do these opinions come? From those who have read of European scenery, of Grecian mountains, and Italian skies, and never troubled themselves to look at their own; and from those traveled ones whose eyes were never opened to the beauties of nature until they beheld foreign lands, and when those lands faded from the sight were again closed, and forever disdaining to destroy their trans-Atlantic impressions by the observation of the less fashionable and unfamed American scenery. Let such persons shut themselves up in their narrow shell of prejudice—I hope they are few,—and the community increasing in intelligence, will know better how to appreciate the treasures of their own country.

Metropolitan Museum of Art/Frederic Edwin Church

The Heart of the Andes

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Six years after the publication of Cole‘s essay, in 1843, Poe wrote the essay, “Morning on the Wissahiccon,” about a small brook that empties into the Schuylkill River just west of Philadelphia, where he also defends American scenery in much the same terms as Cole.

Poe was often the guest at the home of Cole’s Young protégé, Frederic Edwin Church. The latter was not only interested in American landscapes, but like Poe was deeply moved by Alexander Von Humboldt, whose Cosmos was published in 1845. Both Poe and Church read this work with great interest and no doubt discussed it. When Humboldt published his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America in 1852, Church took up Humboldt’s challenge to artists to portray the “Physiognomy” of the Andes.

Literally following in Humboldt’s footsteps, Church traveled to Ecuador, where he stayed at the very same house in Quito in which Humboldt had resided. Church’s artistic guide was Humbolt’s Cosmos, where the great scientist has a full chapter on landscape painting. He wrote: “Landscape painting, though not simply an imitative art . . . requires for its development a large number of various and direct impressions, which . . . must be fertilized by the powers of mind, in order to be given back to the senses of others as a free work of art. The grander style of heroic landscape painting is the combined result of a profound appreciation of nature, and of this inward process of mind.”

Church’s paintings of the Andes, in their rich colors and detail, became legendary. In 1853 Church had taken his “The Heart of the Andes,” which currently hangs in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, to Europe for Humboldt to view, but the latter died before he could see it.

by Gustav Blaeser

Alexander von Humboldt monument at Explorer's Gate on Central Park West and 77th Street, New York City.

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The question of the poetics of Poe’s “Landscape Garden” and of his friends, the landscape painters and architects, is inseparable from the impact of the tremendous popularity of Alexander Von Humboldt and the arrival in American of his great work, The Cosmos. The immense popularity of Humboldt at the time is almost hard to believe. On the centenary of his birth in 1869, which was ten years after his death, celebrations were held all over the United States, including in Boston, Pittsburgh—where the celebrations were presided over by President Ulysses S. Grant—Albany, Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Memphis, and San Francisco. In New York no less than 25,000 people gathered for an unveiling of a bust of the great scientist.

For Poe, Humboldt was indeed a kindred spirit, to say the least. The first two volumes of the Cosmos were published in 1845 and 1847 respectively, well within the lifetime of Poe. Harper’s Magazine of New York had already published a serialized version in 1845. Poe no doubt read this version, since the Broadway Journal, with Poe as editor and then as its owner, published an English translation of a German review of the Cosmos as well as notices and advertisements for the Harper’s reprint.

There can be little doubt that Poe’s “tale” of the Landscape Gardener went through several versions, and between 1845 and 1847 was profoundly informed by Humboldt’s Cosmos, as he depicts man, acting in the image of God, intervening on “nature” in the service of the creation of beauty and the sublime.

It is not hard to imagine the impact of the advent of the Cosmos on those discussions among the intellectuals, artists, and literati of New York, in the salons and lectures of literary, scientific, and philosophical circles in the city, especially those in which Poe, himself, participated.

Of course the “hardest evidence” of Poe’s intimate knowledge of the Cosmos, is the “Eureka” which was dedicated to Humboldt and written shortly before Poe’s death.

While this author found “Eureka” a difficult piece to follow, what is clear is that it is written from the standpoint of Poe’s own profound understanding of the poetic principle. In fact he calls it a “prose poem.” It was in fact based on a lecture he had delivered at the New York Society Library.

The significance of the work does not lie in its attempt to present the laws of the Universe, in which it does not succeed, but in its effort to present true scientific method. Through the literary device of a fictitious letter written in the next millennium, in the year 2848, Poe smashes the Aristoteleans, empiricists, and all forms of axioms, “self-evident truths,” and so called “laws.” As for Newton and his so called laws of gravity, Poe states that they were in fact simply “deduced” from the poet-scientist Kepler.

Newton deduced it from the laws of Kepler. Kepler admitted that these laws he guessed—these laws whose investigation disclosed to the greatest of British astronomers that principle, the bases of all (existing) physical principle, in going behind which we enter at once the nebulous kingdom of Metaphysics. Yes!—these vital laws Kepler guessed—that it is to say, he imagined them. Had he been asked to point out either the deductive or inductive route by which he attained them, his reply might have been–“I know nothing about routes—but I do know the machinery of the Universe. Here it is. I grasped it with my soul—I reached it through mere dint of intuition.”

. . .Yes, Kepler was essentially a theorist; but this title, now of so much sanctity, was in those ancient days, a designation of supreme contempt. It is only now that men begin to appreciate that divine old man—to sympathize with the prophetical and poetical rhapsody of his ever-memorable words. For my part” continues the unknown correspondent, “I glow with the sacred fire when I even think of them, and feel that I shall never grow weary of their repetition:—‘I care not whether my work be read now or by posterity. I can afford to wait a century for readers, when God himself has waited six thousand years for an observer. I triumph. I have stolen the golden secret of the Egyptians, I will indulge my sacred fury. [The last quotation is from Kepler.]’”

A view from Central Park.

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Poe and Central Park

Poe personally knew two of the key creators of Central Park, Andrew Jackson Downing and the latter’s protégé, Frederick Law Olmstead.

Of the same generation as Poe, Downing was among the most famous landscape designers of the period, whose work, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America, was first published in 1841 and dedicated to his good friend John Quincy Adams. Poe is said to have read this treatise, and without doubt knew Downing. Not surprisingly, Downing was also a poet. Thus it is safe to assume Poe’s two tales were in the service of promoting not only the art of landscape design, but also for the fight for a park.

Downing, like Poe, was a bitter opponent of the grid system, since it destroyed the natural topographic features of Manhattan, which had presented such potential for a city plan that would enhance the beauty of the emerging metropolis. Downing was among the first, along with William Cullen Bryant, to push for the creation of a broad park.

Downing, who died in 1852 at the young age of 37, only three years after Poe’s own death in 1849, did not live to see the establishment of the park. That task would be given to Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. Olmstead had a multifaceted career as a farmer, journalist, and landscape gardener. During the Civil War, he led what in effect was the medical corps. In the 1840s, Olmstead was the young editor of Putnam’s, the publisher of the American Whig Review where many of Poe’s works were published.

Not only were Poe and Olmstead acquainted through their work, but both attended the salon of Anne Lynch, later Madam Botta, who was herself a poetess. Every Saturday evening the leading and not-so-leading artistic and literary figures of the city and region gathered there. Poe often attended these stimulating evenings, and recited his poems, including the “Raven.”

Vaux, who would form a partnership with Olmstead, was an English architect who was brought to the United States by Downing, with whom he worked in partnership until the latter’s death.

While Downing is said to have made preliminary proposals for a park, the actual commissioning of the park occurred in 1857, well after the death of both Downing and Poe. Nonetheless, the creation of Central Park follows closely the principles both of Downing’s writings and Poe’s “Landscape Gardener.”

The beautiful landscape one sees across the more than 800 acres of today’s Central Park, is a totally artificial creation. The actual land upon which it was built was anything but picturesque. In fact, it was an area of poor soil, unfit for farming and home to several shanty towns. With work crews numbering in the thousands, Olmstead worked as if he were God creating the Garden of Eden. The land was cleared, and hundreds if not thousands of tons of topsoil were brought into the park. Hills and dales and even streams were created. The park’s two lakes were in fact reservoirs which formed part of Manhattan’s first water system, of which High Bridge was a part—which were reshaped to suit his design.

For Olmstead, trees, shrubs, flowers, soil, and rock were as colors of a painter’s palette. Olmstead laid out a path through the park in such a way that the walker encounters a series of picturesque scenes. He would create depth through the careful positioning of shrubs and trees.

Vaux designed the buildings and the bridges, which number thirty-six, each of a unique design.

While the firm Olmstead and Vaux would go on to design public parks across the United State, a few years after the completion of Central Park, their firm won the contract to create Riverside Park, also in Manhattan, and Fort Greene and Prospect Parks in Brooklyn, which would in fact preserve small but important patches of land made sacred by the battle of Long Island-New York City.

Like Poe’s “Domain of Arnheim,” Olmstead’s Central park was to be a living work of art, in three dimensions, where the citizens of a busy metropolis could seek healthful “recreation” through enjoying its sublime beauty. This was not to be a work of “art” preserved through spreading “keep off the grass” signs through the park. The park’s Sheep Meadow and grassy knolls were kept open for picnicking and other light recreational activity. Its principal purpose was to provide the citizen a place where he could recover from the hubbub of city life, through the rejuvenating properties of nature.

Nonetheless, Olmstead fought against public pressures, mostly from politicians, to place monuments and other constructions that would turn the park into something like a fair ground, which would destroy the beauty of the park and defeat its purpose. This was in keeping with the conception of the Beautiful and the Sublime, which was really at the heart of the highest level of the intellectual and artistic climate of that era.

Poe as Architect

In terms of the Beautiful City, perhaps now is the best time to discuss the question of architecture, particularly civic architecture That is to say the architecture of government buildings, universities and institutions.

This is not the place to go into all the architectural styles that can be seen in New York or any American city. Nonetheless there was a debate on Architecture. In fact there was, in first half of the 19th Century, a Greek revival movement. This was a very distinct debate between the Roman and the Greek, which are too often dumped into the catch-all of “Classical” architecture. The distinction between the Greek and Roman, as well as the Gothic, was clear in the minds of certain American artists and architects.

This issue became central to the debate on civic buildings, especially those of government, as well as institutions such schools and universities, and also monuments and monumental architecture. There are several fine examples of Greek revival and Gothic architecture in New York.

The most accessible example of Greek revival architecture is Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan.

cc/Hu Totya

Federal Hall in Manhattan, where Washington, as the first President of the Republic, was inaugurated in what was then the Nation’s first capital.

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George Washington statue in front of Federal Hall.

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I will not go into a treatise on architecture but I will turn once again to Poe for a principle. He wrote in a footnote:

The mind of man can imagine nothing which does not really exist; if it could, it would create not only ideally but substantially, as do the thoughts of God. It may be said, “We imagine a griffin, yet a griffin does not exist.” Not the griffin, certainly, but its component parts. It is no more than a collation of known limbs, features, qualities. Thus with all which claims to be new, which appears to be a creation of the intellect— all is re-soluble into the old. The wildest effort of the mind cannot stand the test of this analysis.

Imagination, fancy, fantasy and humor, have in common the elements combination and novelty. The imagination is the artist of the four. From novel arrangements of old forms which present themselves to it, it selects such only as are harmonious; the result, of course, is beauty itself—using the word in its most extended sense and as inclusive of the sublime. The pure imagination chooses, from either beauty or deformity, only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined; the compound, as a general rule, partaking in character of sublimity or beauty in the ratio of the respective sublimity or beauty of the things combined, which are themselves still to be considered as atomic—that is to say, as previous combinations. But, as often analogously happens in physical chemistry, so not unfrequently does it occur in this chemistry of the intellect, that the admixture of two elements will result in a something that shall have nothing of the quality of one of them—or even nothing of the qualities of either. The range of imagination is thus unlimited. Its materials extend throughout the universe. Even out of deformities it fabricates that beauty which is at once its sole object and its inevitable test. But, in general, the richness of the matters combined, the facility of discovering combinable novelties worth combining, and the absolute “chemical combination” of the completed mass, are the particulars to be regarded in our estimate of imagination. It is this thorough harmony of an imaginative work which so often causes it to be undervalued by the undiscriminating, through the character of obviousness which is superinduced. We are apt to find ourselves asking why it is that these combinations have never been imagined before.

Now, when this question does not occur, when the harmony of the combination is comparatively neglected, and when, in addition to the element of novelty, there is introduced the sub-element of unexpectedness—when, for example, matters are brought into combination which not only have never been combined, but whose combination strikes us as a difficulty happily overcome, the result then appertains to the fancy, and is, to the majority of mankind, more grateful than the purely harmonious one— although, absolutely, it is less beautiful (or grand) for the reason that it is less harmonious.

Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum.

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Carrying its errors into excess— for, however enticing, they are errors still, or nature lies— fancy is at length found infringing upon the province of fantasy. The votaries of this latter delight not only in novelty and unexpectedness of combination, but in the avoidance of proportion. The result is, therefore, abnormal, and, to a healthy mind, affords less of pleasure through its novelty than of pain through its incoherence. When, proceeding a step farther, however, fancy seeks not merely disproportionate but incongruous or antagonistic elements, the effect is rendered more pleasurable by its greater positiveness; there is a merry effort of truth to shake from her that which is no property of hers, and we laugh outright in recognizing humor. The four faculties in question seem to me all of their class; but when either fancy or humor is expressed to gain an end, is pointed at a purpose—whenever either becomes objective in place of subjective, then it becomes, also, pure wit or sarcasm, just as the purpose is benevolent or malevolent.[fn_5]

You say Poe is no architect, but have you read the Philosophy of Furniture, a short treatise on interior architecture and decoration, where he writes of the carpet of Arabesque designs being the soul of a room? Have you taken notice of his handling or architectural details in his tales?

Walking through New York City, one sees all the forms of architecture—classical, Gothic, Beaux Arts, both “modern” and “post-modern,” and the endless and fanciful styles in between them. It is clear that the above quote by Poe will give us the metric upon which to judge these forms separating the Beautiful and sublime from the fanciful, fantastic, and even the humorous as well as the deformed.

If we must refer to an architect, let it be the landscape painter and architect, the above-mentioned Cole, who wrote of the superiority of the Classical Greek over the degenerate pseudo-classicism of the Roman, and on the other hand the grandeur of the Gothic.

The architects and landscape architects, painters and literary figures all knew each other. One of course could find Poe himself among these figures.

If we look at the Greek Revival architecture, the best-known example in Manhattan is Federal Hall, built on the site of the original Federal Hall where Washington, as the first President of the Republic, was inaugurated in what was then the Nation’s first capital. It was erected in 1842, two years before Poe’s arrival in Manhattan.

The principle architect was Ithiel Town, who, at a time when architects were not much more than builders using pattern books to erect edifices, was one of the major promoters of Greek-revival architecture. He amassed a library of over 3,000 volumes of books on architecture. He was assisted by his protégé Alexander Jackson Davis, who is credited with designing the colonnaded front of the building which was modeled after the Parthenon. The third architect was John Frazee, who designed the rather impressive interior rotunda. The statue of George Washington was erected in 1882, and was executed by John Quincy Adams Ward, a very noted sculptor we will meet again in this narrative.

While the wrecking ball at the service of real estate speculators has wrought far more destruction on New York City’s architectural wonders than Allied bombers did in any German city, some other remarkable specimens of this Greek revival are still in existence if one looks carefully. For example, Town designed a remarkable-looking Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum, built in 1843. It includes a handsome facade of six Ionic columns supporting a Greek classical pediment. The building still stands, recently renovated, minus one of its wings. It stands literally up against the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It was saved from the wrecker’s ball only because the Cathedral itself was never fully completed.

CC/Dmadeo

Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island.

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Another remarkable example of this architecture is the Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island. This former sailors’ retirement home was commissioned by Richard Randall, Revolutionary War soldier, ship master, and privateer. In a will drafted by Alexander Hamilton, he had bequeathed a large fund to establish the retirement home which was to have been built near Washington Square Park, but for various reason was built on Staten Island instead.

Other, more modest buildings can be seen in Brooklyn, in the form of row-houses not far from the church where the Schiller Institute’s Chorus rehearsals are held.

While there seems to be no direct evidence of an acquaintance between Poe and Alexander Jackson Davis, the architect apparently crossed the former’s path from time to time. One of Davis’ most famous designs was the Gothic revival Lyndhurst Mansion, at Tarrytown, designed for Phillip Paulding, Revolutionary War officer and sometime Mayor of New York. Phillip’s brother was James K. Paulding, a literary figure in the Knickerbocker circle who was an early patron of Poe.

This brings us to the Gothic revival, which can be seen in an endless number of churches, but also universities, including City College. All these architects of the Poe generation were designing villas in the Gothic, Tudor, and Italian villa style. While none have survived the wrecker’s ball in Manhattan, they do survive in the scenic haunts of the Hudson River Valley, whose owners included Washington Irving, Samuel Morse, and many others.

As new waves of immigrants landed in New York, they bought with them new forms of architecture. One such immigrant was Alexander Saeltzer, who studied at the famous Bau Academy established in Berlin by the famous Karl Friedrich Schinkel. An expert in acoustics (his treatise can be downloaded from archive.org,) he designed the Academy of Music, with 4,500 seats, which was the largest opera house of its time. Completed in 1854 on 14th Street and Irving Place, it played host not only to famous opera companies and the New York Philharmonic, but also visiting Chinese acrobats.

The two buildings of this celebrated architect that can be seen today, are the Astor Library, now a public theater, and the Anshe Chesed Synagogue.

Poe prematurely died, most likely murdered, in 1849, an almost irreplaceable loss for the development of culture and art in America. At the same moment, a political struggle enveloped the nation that led the country into a bloody civil war. Indeed New York played a key role in that struggle. It was at Cooper Union that William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York Post, sponsored an election event for the young Abraham Lincoln, an event which is credited with lending decisive support for his winning the Republican nomination and then the Presidency.

While much can be said about Bryant, both positive and critical, he was nonetheless an accomplished poet for whose work Poe offered qualified praise. (See Poe’s “The Poetic Principle.”)

Those who believe Poe’s death was murder, look to his highly critical writings as having generated many enemies. Moreover, the political struggle that lead to the Civil War was already in full swing. It is therefore significant that at the time of his death, he was on a speaking tour to raise advance subscriptions for a literary magazine which would be entitled the Stylus. The founding of such a publication had been Poe’s life-long ambition. He had been given that opportunity by the 21 year-old Edwin Howard Norton Patterson, co-editor with his father, John B. Patterson, of the Spectator, a weekly published out of the small Mississippi river port of Oquawka, Illinois, but widely read throughout the region.

While Oquawka remains a small town, at the time it was one of the towns that provided strong support for Abraham Lincoln, who was good friends with the Phelps family. They, were founders of the town, along with the Pattersons.

It was Poe’s outspoken literary criticism that fired the ambition of the young Patterson, who had studied the classics, to found a magazine with Poe as its editor. Poe’s role in this effort was to collect five hundred to a thousand pre-subscribers for the publication. It was this mission that led Poe to begin what would become his last speaking tour. Poe’s intention was to tour the southern states for these subscriptions. His method was to organize speaking engagements to raise funds and solicit subscriptions. It is also interesting that the subject of these talks was “The Poetic Principle.” The first three, which were the last, were given twice in Richmond and once in Norfolk, where they were enthusiastically received. He was preparing one for Baltimore when he died.

End of Part II. Part III will follow in the next issue of EIR.

[fn_1]. Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale De Gato, editors, Translated Poe (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 37.

[fn_2]. George Giannaris, Mikis Theodorakis Music and Social Change (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1972), pp. 157-158.

[fn_3]. From the review, “George Edward Horn’s National Melodies,” appearing in the Southern Literary Messenger, Volume 5 Number 11, November 1839.

[fn_4]. James Fenimore Cooper, Gleanings in Europe: Switzerland, (Albany: State University of New York, 1983) page 88.

[fn_5]. Edgar Allan Poe, The Literati of New York City , (1846), pp. 197-98, see notes.

Click here for more information and to purchase The Civil War and the American System

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REPORT FROM MANHATTAN

Sylvia Olden Lee and the Human Spirit

July 3—Initial coverage follows, of the historic events which took place in New York City on June 29 and 30 in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Sylvia Olden Lee. It includes a brief synopsis by Dennis Speed of the significance of the events. That is followed by the full program of the concert which took place at Carnegie Hall on June 29. It concludes with a dialogue between Dennis Speed and bass-baritone Simon Estes, and a short tribute to Sylvia Olden Lee from mezzo-soprano Elvira Green, part of the symposium on June 30.

More extensive coverage as to the breakthrough nature of what took place over these two days will appear in the next issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Schiller Institute

The Sylvia Olden Lee Centennial Chorus.

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Sylvia’s Mission

by Dennis Speed

The “Tribute to Sylvia Olden Lee, Master Musician and Teacher,” held by the Foundation for the Revival of Classical Culture, the Harlem Opera Theater, and the Schiller Institute and its New York City Chorus, was more than merely successful. The concert approximated the requirement and standard for true Classical performance. Proper voice-placement, using the Verdi tuning of C=256, and the months-long training of the non-professional chorus with that tuning, helped significantly.

Schiller Institute

Left to right: Gregory Hopkins, tenor, Frank Mathis, baritone, Patrice P. Eaton, mezzo-soprano, Osceola Davis, soprano, Kevin Short, bass-baritone, and Everett Suttle, tenor, performing the sextet, Chi mi frena in tal momento? from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

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The “pedal point” that underlay the unity of effect of the concert as a whole, however, was that it demonstrated and therefore embodied the central emphasis of the instruction that Sylvia Lee had imparted to all of those that worked with her on the noble projection of the voice: “Pay attention to the Words”!! Lee used the terms “Words” and “Ideas” interchangeably. Whatever variation there may have been in the presentation of the multiform musical offerings—Spirituals, opera arias and ensemble pieces, German art songs, choral pieces, and even a solo Schubert piano impromptu—the idea-content, the thought-object of each composition’s presence on the program as a necessary facet of illustration of Lee’s musical mission, was paramount. In such an evening, that is the most that one can hope to accomplish, and it was.

Schiller Institute

Left to right: David Antony Lofton, piano, Simon Estes, bass-baritone, and Kevin Short, bass-baritone, after performing Verdi’s Il Grand’Inquisitor!—Nell’ispano suol mai l’eresia dominò, from Verdi’s Don Carlos.

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Extended coverage of the concert and the next day’s symposium will be featured in upcoming issues of Executive Intelligence Review. In this issue, we highlight the symposium contribution of the great bass-baritone Simon Estes, a fixture at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera, and on the world opera stage for decades. The remarks by Sylvia’s close friend and collaborator, Elvira Green, are included so that the reader may identify the central musician that performed at Carnegie Hall that evening: Sylvia Lee herself. It was her “immortal beloved” presence that rang throughout the hall, and in the hearts of all, including those who had never met her, nor heard of her, until most recently.

The approximately 2,000 people that participated in that evening will never again be the same.

Download program in PDF format (16 pages, 1.34 MB, includes program notes, short biographies.)

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SYMPOSIUM

‘What Touches People Is When

We Sing from Our Hearts and Our Souls’

The two-day tribute to Sylvia Olden Lee concluded with a symposium on "The Aesthetic Education of Humanity Through Music." The following dialogue—between bass-baritone Simon Estes and Dennis Speed, with a tribute from mezzo-soprano Elvira Green—was a part of the symposium. The event was held at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, on Friday, June 30, 2017.

Dennis Speed: We are now going to have a conversation. I may have had a Catholic upbringing, but I don’t consider myself the Grand Inquisitor. This is Simon Estes . . . [applause] I think everybody knows this man!

There are many things that come to mind, but I first would like you, sir, to tell us all about your deep familiarity, from the age of two, of Classical music—or not!

Simon Estes: Well I would start saying, I didn’t know anything about—really, that’s not quite true. I grew up in a little town in Iowa, called Centerville, and it was about 8,000 people there, and a lot of people came in from, really, many different countries, because of the coal mines. My father came from Virginia, but his father, my grandfather was slave. Sold for $500. I have pictures of him. My father came to Centerville—he was born in 1891; my mother was born 1910. They were nineteen years different, but they had a beautiful marriage, and I have three wonderful older sisters. I was the last, little scrawny child to come along.

But we had a musical home. Had my mother not been born in 1910, I believe she would have been one of the greatest singers at the Met, the Metropolitan Opera House. She had an incredible voice, incredible range. She could sing soprano, and she could sing mezzo, and she could sing alto, and when she was about eighty-nine years of age, she could sing a low D that I sing as a bass, and that’s absolutely true. [laughter]

God had given her this exceptional voice. In our home, we didn’t have Classical music, but my oldest sister had a great voice, too; she played piano, and she played a lot of Chopin and Grieg. So I did have a little introduction to Classical music, but I didn’t really know anything about it until I went to the University of Iowa. I graduated out of high school in 1956, and when I was in junior high school, the high school choral director asked the principal of the junior high school if I could come sing in the high school choir. And that was allowed, and I went over, and I sang first soprano, in the soprano section—until my senior year. [laughter] I played basketball and track, and football, all the sports.

What’s Opera?

When we went for rehearsal,— football practice starts before classes begin, because sports are more important than music [laughter], and so I went to football practice, and then we had a choral rehearsal, with Don Gunderson, who was the choir director at Centerville High School. So I went to sing something, “aarghh”—nothing really came out! And Don Gunderson, the choir director, sent me to a doctor, because I was eighteen years of age, and he assumed my voice was never going to change, and I didn’t know anything about singing, except just singing.

So I go to a family doctor, and he looked in my throat; all he did, he had to take his little wooden stick and looked in there. And he said, “Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your throat.” I didn’t think he even saw my vocal chords, but he said, “I have a feeling, your voice is changing.” And that’s what happened. When I sang first soprano, I could hit an octave higher than high C, that the sopranos sang. I’m not saying this to try and impress you, because God gave me the gift anyhow; but I could do that.

So I sang in the choir. Then I went to the University of Iowa in 1957. I went one year to a community college in Centerville in 1956, and then I transferred to the University of Iowa. I thought, “Well, I’ll be a doctor, and then I can’t sing any more.” So, I went pre-med, and a voice teacher came to the University of Iowa, and heard me singing. Had it not been for him—his name was Charles Kellis—I wouldn’t be sitting here today. I wanted to sing in the University choir, back in the mid to late 1950s, and I went to the choir director. I won’t mention his name—he’s deceased, but nonetheless, he was the head of the voice department and the main choral director. I said to him, “I’d like to sing in the University choir.” They had three hundred voices, and he said, “No, your voice isn’t good enough.” And I said,— I was very nai‹ve, incidentall, but I said, “You’re the head of the voice department; can I take voice lessons with you?” He said, “No, no! I wouldn’t waste my time with you. You don’t have any talent.” [laughter]

Schiller Institute/Jason Ross

Simon Estes at the June 30, 2017 symposium, which concluded the two-day tribute to Sylvia Olden Lee.

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So he said, “However, there’s a young voice teacher coming here, and maybe he will take you.” I said, “Well, OK,” because all I wanted to do was sing. And that was this man, Charles Kellis, who came out there in 1961. He heard me singing in a choral group called the Old Gold Singers, and he said, “You know, you have a voice to sing opera,” and having come from Centerville, Iowa, I said, “What’s opera”? [laughter]

This is all absolutely true. So he loaned me some recordings, those big thirty-three and a third [rpm records]—Cesare Siepi, who was a terrible Italian bass! [laughter] I say that to be facetious, because he was the greatest to me. I heard that recording, and he gave me a recording of Leontyne Price, Maria Callas, Jerome Hines, and a symphonic work, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, because he wanted me to hear this type of music. So I listened to them, and when I took them back to Mr. Kellis, I said, “I really like that stuff!” I just called it “stuff.” [laughter]

He started giving me voice lessons, and he said, “You know, you really can be an opera singer.” And at that time I didn’t—I changed my major four times, incidentally, at the University of Iowa. I always tell students, “do as I say, not as I did”; but he got me into music. I thank God that he sent this man out to Centerville, Iowa to discover me, because otherwise I wouldn’t have known anything about opera, or Classical music. And I’m sure most of you at my age— I’ll be eighty years of age in a few months [applause], but I had been really blessed. And I pray to God, and I thank God for the talent that he gave Bach and Brahms, and Beethoven, Schubert, and Verdi and Wagner, and Strauss, and Puccini, all of these great composers, that I didn’t even know existed in Centerville, Iowa. And I’ve had the humbling honor of having sung all of those works. I’ve sung one hundred two roles in opera; I’ve probably sung fifty-five orchestral works; I’ve done most of Bach’s works, and Haydn’s Creation, Haydn’s The Seasons—all because God gave talent to these great men. I think women would have had it, too, but unfortunately, the reality is they were men.

And of course, we all know, all the pieces that Bach wrote, at the end, he always said, “To the Glory of God.” And God is a giver of all talent, whether you are a singer, or Michael Jordan—he received those talents. Because—stop and think of those composers—because I’ve lived in Europe more than half my life. I lived in Europe since 1965, and two of my daughters were born in Switzerland, and one in the States. I went to the places where Bach played the organ in Eisenach and where Wagner wrote Tannhäuser, to experience—there’s something that you feel when you’re around these areas where these great people composed music.

Messengers of Peace and Love

The reason I say that talent really comes from God: Think of these composers that wrote symphonies at six and seven years of age. They had never gone to kindergarten; they never went to elementary school, let alone a conservatory or Juilliard; but God gave them the talent to write this music, and I think all of us, who can sing, and play this music, we are indeed blessed, because this period [applause]—thank you, cousin, because it all comes from God. I don’t think this period will ever be repeated again, going back to the Baroque period and the Romantic period and the Classical period; all of these great composers that we get to enjoy today as singers and as instrumentalists, we are very blessed and very fortunate.

So, because of Charles Kellis, who came to the University of Iowa, I sang one hundred two roles in opera; I’ve sung with one hundred fifteen different orchestras, all around the world—and that’s not to try to impress you—and eighty-four different opera houses. And all because of a little Greek man named Kiriakos, Charles Kellis, came to the University of Iowa. This teacher who said I had no talent, and I couldn’t even sing in a choir of three hundred voices.

After I had been singing, he retired and went to San Antonio and was teaching privately. I had been invited to sing with the orchestra in San Antonio, Texas. And I sang the “Fort auf das Meer” in The Flying Dutchman, and Wotan arias. After the performance, he came up to me and he said, “Well, Simon, I see you’ve done quite well for yourself.” [laughter] And he walked away, and some of my colleagues said, “Why don’t you wipe him out?” I said “No, it wasn’t necessary.” I said, “that took a lot of Mut, chutzpah, for him to come back and just say, ‘well, you’ve done quite well for yourself.’ ”

I do really feel very blessed. My mother and my father taught me humility, and my sisters and I want all of you to know, I’m not trying to tell you how to live your spiritual lives. But I love the Lord, and I know he gave this talent to me, and before I sing, I always pray and ask God that somebody’s heart will be touched in the audience, to love Him and to love one another.

I think we are really messengers of peace and love through music. When I work with students, there’s one thing,—I know how important vocal technique is—but I said, “Sing from your heart. That’s what touches people, when we sing from our hearts and our souls.” And I cannot tell all of you here, how blessed and humble I am, to think that I’ve had this honor of having sung with all of these great orchestras in the world, in America, going back to Eugene Ormandy, Erich Leinsdorf, Leonard Bernstein; and sung with people like Birgit Nilsson, Joan Sutherland, and Leontyne Price; the tenors—I’ve sung with all the great tenors. We forget about some of the other tenors like Carlo Bergonzi, and Nicolai Gedda, and these people; I sang with those guys in addition to the “three tenors”—what’re their names? [laughter]

But I’ve learned a lot, and sang with Birgit Nilsson, as Wotan and she did Brünnhilde; and I don’t want to tell you a compliment she gave me, because I don’t like to boast, and I was taught never to do that; but I was very touched by something that she said to me and Leontyne Price. I want to ask all of you a question, it’s not going to be a test, but just a question. Do you know who the first composer was? [After a pause, several people said, “God.”]

Well, God, yes, but in human form! We know that God came down here in the form of Jesus Christ, and said, “God be with you.” So let’s put it this way: Who was the first person that God gave talent to for music and to compose music? [Several: “King David.”]

King David! That’s right. “Little David, play on your harp, hallelu, hallelu.” When Saul was going crazy, who did he call upon? [Audience: “David.”] David. He played the lyre, the harp—that’s how long ago that music got started. And I think one of the earliest composers I sang was Monteverdi, his opera, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria [Ulysses’ Return to His Homeland]. But all through that, I’ve sung all these great composers, and so, I just want you to know that I thank God for this journey that He’s put me on. When we talked privately, you wanted me to mention a little bit about my life, so that’s enough about my life. What do you want to go to now?

Speed: Sure. But, Mr. Kellis was there last night.

Estes: He was there last night, ninety years of age! [applause] And he’s still doing well, because he’s married to a young lady, forty-five years younger than he is. [much laughter] She’s from Poland and has a beautiful voice. [laughter]

Speed: [joking] We’re going to TMI [too much information] now! [more laughter]

Speed: OK, but in passing, you said something about your grandfather, who was born in 1837, it was one hundred eighty years ago.

Estes: Yes, one hundred eighty years ago. I have pictures of my grandfather and grandmother. Slaves, sold for $500—yes.

The Power of Prayer

Speed: Obviously, knowing that, and having the career you had— But at the same time, there’s something else we should certainly touch upon, especially with this audience, which is the discrimination and racism that Sylvia, and you, and George Shirley, and others had to fight, to be able to get up and sing at all, in these places. And we know people like Bill Warfield just, you know, didn’t even try to deal with it.

Tell us something about how both of you confronted it—what that was, how you confronted it, and what you think about that issue today?

Michelle Rasmussen, Schiller Institute, Denmark: Were you rejected from the college choir because you were Black?

Estes: Yes. Just to be quite honest, yes. But, you know, my parents taught me at a young age to follow the philosophy of Jesus, Who was a man of love. And so, when I was in high school in Centerville, Iowa—now keep in mind, I was born in 1938—if I would come home, as an example I’ll give you, I would tell my mother that a white boy called me the “n-word” or he hit me; my mother said, “Well, now, son, you get down on your knees and you pray for that boy.” But when you’re seven or eight years of age, you think there’s something wrong with your mother’s mind! [laughter] And so you say, “Mother, but wait a minute, he called me the n-word, and he hit me.” My mother said, “You get down on your knees, and you pray for that boy.”

In 1971, when I started singing opera, I was living here in New York, and I called my mother, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, I was in tears. I said, “Mother, I’ve sung in Paris, in London, in Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg,”—I’d even sung in Australia, at that point—and I said, “they won’t let me sing in some of the opera houses in my own country.” And I was crying. And she said, “Well, son, get down on your knees,” [laughter] “and you pray.” And after that, I sang in Chicago, San Francisco, eventually at the Met, in Boston, and so on, and I sang in most of the opera houses, Seattle, Portland, Oregon—kind of all over. But there was—and I regret and say this with great sadness—there still is discrimination.

I remember the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, singing a Lieder recital. I had the TV on while I was getting dressed, and there was Walter Cronkite, of course, and he said “Martin Luther King has been shot.” And five minutes later—I’m sure you have seen this many times—he took his glasses off, “Martin Luther King is dead.”

I realized when I went out for my recital, I had to change it, because I didn’t feel like singing any jovial songs. And the people in Canada, they had a reception for me afterwards, and they said, “Why don’t you come and live in Canada, because we won’t discriminate against you.” And I said, “No, because I’m going to stay in my country and fight the battle to try to win equality.” I told them,—because at that time we had about ten million African American people—I said, “If they come to Canada you’ll have a problem, too. Not that we are intrinsically the problem, but there’s just a difference. So, I will not give up my citizenship, but I will stay and continue the struggle.”

Skinny Colored Kid from Centerville

And so the way I have endured discrimination has been without bitterness, without hate, but love can conquer everything. Love can do that. [applause] I’m not saying that Germany and Italy and France and Spain and Russia and Poland, all these places where I’ve sung, they’re perfect. But in Germany, when I first started my singing career, I sang Ramfis [the high priest] in [Verdi’s] Aida in 1965—April 19th, I will not forget that date. They would judge someone more on, as Martin Luther King said, the quality of their character, but [in this case we should say] the quality of the voice. Because they have makeup, they can make somebody look like ET if they want to today. [laughter] And I remember when I did the Ramfis in Berlin, I sang with Richard Cassilly; I’m sure you know Richard Cassilly. He was RadameŠs, and Gloria Davy, African American soprano, sang Aida; Ruth Hesse sang Amneris. They made me up—and this is really true—as white as snow [laughter]. And I remember I was sitting in the makeup chair and looked in the mirror, and I said, “If my mother could only see me now!” [laughter] But I went ahead and sang.

Can I tell you another little story? Mr. Kellis—he always called me “Simoné’‚’—his parents were both born in Greece, and of course he was a Greek and an American—he said, you need to go to an all-musical school. So he arranged an audition for me at Juilliard School of Music. Now, having come from Centerville, Iowa, I didn’t understand the magnitude of Juilliard School of Music. I look back on it now, and I realize it was a blessing; because I came up to New York, I’d never been on an airplane before—this was 1963, and I was more excited about seeing the tall buildings, than just this “Juilliard School of Music,” or whatever it was. So I sang the audition. Some of you remember the name Sergius Kagen; he was there, and I had a coaching with him. I finished my three songs—in fact I did King Philip’s aria from [Verdi’s] Don Carlo, and I did “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” and one of the Vier Ernste Gesä„nge song [by Brahms]s.

I finished singing, and they said, “Would you just wait outside the door, there?” That was up on 125th Street, the old Juilliard. And I went out, and I was just sniffing the halls—they smelled great to me. [laughter] No, they really did; it was fascinating! And I didn’t know, still, the importance of Juilliard. After about ten minutes they called me back in, and I go in—I was a little, skinny colored kid from Centerville, Iowa—and they said, “Well, you know, we want to give you a full scholarship to come to Juilliard.” And I said, “Oh, thanks.” [laughter] I didn’t really know . . .! And Mr. Kellis had told them my financial status, and they said, “And we’ll get you a Martha Baird Rockefeller Family grant.” I thought, some Rockefeller, dealing rocks,— I didn’t know . . . [laughter]

But I look back on that now, and it was a blessing that I was so nai‹ve, because I didn’t have enough—we say, “sense”— but I didn’t have enough knowledge to be nervous singing at the Juilliard School of Music. It was like singing in the colored Second Baptist Church in Centerville, Iowa; we got a group of people sitting there, and you just go out and sing! So I went and sang my pieces and left! So I tell that, because knowing what I know now, I would have been a nervous wreck, auditioning Juilliard.

The Universe Will Keep Us Singing

So the way I conquered the racial—not conquered—but the way I worked on the racial situation was through courage, determination, no bitterness. And I do believe in science and I do believe in facts, so when I would talk about it—and I would get a lot of interviews about it, in Europe as well as in the United States—I would just say, back in the middle-1960s when I started my career,— I remember when I was singing out in Salem, Washington, a recital, and they said, “Why aren’t you singing at the Met?” I said—and I don’t bring up this topic—but I said, “Well, there are sociological reasons.” And they kept pressing me, and so I said, “Well, how many singers of color, and especially males, do we have singing leading roles at the Metropolitan Opera?” “Well, you’re wrong, there’s uh, uh, there’s Leontyne Price . . .” and I said, “Yes.” “Uh, uh, Martina Arroyo.” “Yes, yes.” I said, “How many men?” “Well, there’s uh, uh. . .” and they didn’t remember George Shirley, but George was there.

So I explained, I said, “there is a problem there, but I would rather not go into it. This is a reception, after my recital, I don’t want,”—because, I’m sorry to say, they were all Caucasian—“I don’t want to mess up the reception.” So, my whole career, my life, I realized I had to be well prepared because I couldn’t be, as a human being, equal with a white colleague. I had to be better. Not that I was intrinsically, and I’m not any better, and I’ve never in my life, ever said that I was great, because I would never say that about myself. I just go out and try to do the job.

But I conquered it with prayer; I would pray. I listened to my mother and took her advice. And I grew up in a family that, economically speaking, we were poor. We didn’t have electricity in our house; when I was a little boy, we had coal oil lamps, and we didn’t have running water in my house—in Iowa it gets cold in the winter—until my sophomore year in high school. But we had faith, we had courage, we had compassion, and we had forgiveness. So that’s what has enabled me to overcome a lot of the racial discrimination.

And I always was very sad for Paul Robeson. I knew his son and I sang in a great concert once, honoring Paul Robeson. And Bill Warfield—I could almost cry right now—he never sang at the Met. And he should have sung there, but he didn’t get a chance.

So, I tell all of my young African American men, “don’t give up. You just can’t give up.” Just work hard, study hard, don’t become bitter, because then you damage your own heart, and that heart is the source of love and where blood comes, and that’s where we’re supposed to sing from, and play the piano from.

When I came to Juilliard—something else interesting, and I hope you won’t be upset with me (I’m thinking of the voice teacher, Carmela Altamura, there in the audience), I bought hardly any recordings of singers. I bought piano recordings of Rudolph Serkin, Rubinstein, Glenn Gould—pianists—and I would just sit and listen to the [Bach] Goldberg Variations that Gould played, that first recording! I would listen to it so much, I think I could have sung all of them! And Rubinstein. Once in a while he hit a wrong note, but you know what? Didn’t matter, because what did he do? He played from his heart. And that’s what touched the people.

And I bought symphonic,— I used to listen to the Mahler Fifth Symphony so many times, and especially the Adagio movement. I used to listen to Samuel Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings. This is where I learned my musicianship, from these great artists. And then, as my career,— Incidentally, Horowitz was almost my neighbor in New York, and I remember him. But I don’t know why it was, that I just listened to symphonic and piano music, and very few singers.

To answer your question about the racism, unfortunately, it does still exist, and I really hope and pray that the day will come, when the only “color” there will be, will be the way somebody colors their voice, or the way they make beautiful, colorful music and sounds with the piano and the violin!

I was so honored to have known Isaac Stern, because you know, at one point they were going to tear down Carnegie Hall—some of you who are in advanced years, like I am, will remember—and Isaac Stern came, and I sang in a concert, and we saved Carnegie Hall. I have a medal saying, “Help Save Carnegie Hall.”

We just have to keep on struggling, and I just hope the day will come when we don’t see color. I believe that God made us all of a different skin color, different shapes of our eyes, to test the character of us as human beings: Can we fail to love someone just because they don’t look the same way we do? I think He’s testing us. And those of us, if we want to win and get an A on the test, we are going to have to love one another. And we’re going to have to forgive! [applause]

Speed: What I’d like to do, and—Eve, are you here? Come down. And Gregory Hopkins, get up here, I need you up here. Simon, please stay here on the stage. And is Elvira here? Come up on the stage. Mr. Ray is here. And others? I don’t know who else is out there, and since I don’t know, forgive me because I’m just going with names I could call.

What I’d like to do,— let’s take up the discussion from last night, and as a whole, especially from what Simon has just raised. Not merely the issue of discrimination but the issue of creating a great culture in the United States, which African Americans have always been at the center of, actually. What would be needed? And thinking about Sylvia in that regard.

Schiller Institute/Jason Ross

Elvira Green participated in the symposium.

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Elvira Green: I think as long as we are conscious of who we are in this existence as musicians, as lovers of music, of people who are interested in feeling the love and comfort of the young voice as it is being saved, for a long singing career! That we pay attention, as Simon has said—may I say, Simon?

Estes: Of course!

Green: As Simon has said, we take what it is for which we live in this life, and infuse it in what we love in this life, which is music. That will then broaden the scope of who we are as the human person. It will broaden the desire of who we are as people who love music. We never, as I said yesterday, we should never reach the point that we no longer consider ourselves a student of the master’s work, a student of the work that Sylvia created through her touch of the master’s hand. And if we don’t pigeon-hole ourselves in anyplace, then the universe will allow us to enhance our knowledge as human beings, enhance our knowledge as musicians, and keep us singing—forever. That’s how I feel about this. [applause]

JANUARY 25, 1991

The Science of Music: Solution

To Plato’s Paradox of ‘The One’

And ‘The Many’

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

This article appears as the Foreword to the Schiller Institute’s Manual on the Rudiments of Tuning and Registration.

One of the more striking examples of the lunacy to which a modern positivist’s academic mentality may lead sometimes, is the occasional episode, during which a university instructor informs his class that science has been unable to show that life (such as that of university instructors) is possible. Lately, since the wider, post-World War II popularization of the Boltzmann dogma, as “information theory,” the positivist professor might concede that although the existence of life is contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is a remote chance, statistical possibility.

In that way, we forewarn our readers against such a positivist’s misinterpretation of some following observations on the subject of electromagnetic determinism, respecting the characteristic metrical features of musical science. Man, and life in general, existed long before positivists first appeared on this planet. Such fundamentally characteristic features of natural music as bel canto vocalization, and a well-tempered scale with middle C set at approximately 256 cycles, are biologically determined, and thus inherent truths of existence predating the first physicist or musicologist. The fact that something exists, is, statistically, necessary and sufficient proof of better than 100% certainty that the laws of the universe have brought about that existence in a necessary and sufficient way. The necessity of well-tempering, of bel canto, and of middle C set approximately at 256 cycles, was, in each respective instance, discovered centuries, or even, perhaps, millennia ago. These characteristic features of the “musical universe” are, like the existence of mankind, natural phenomena, not something whose existence requires academic midwifery.

The included task of science, is the search for truth, to bring the method by which human opinion is formed into conformity with the Creator’s laws. In that connection, we, as discoverers, depend upon what physical scientists often term “crucial experimental” evidence. The existence of mankind is such a crucial-experimental fact. It is not something to be proven possible; it has occurred. Rather, we must bring prevailing opinion-making into conformity with the proof, that the existence of mankind as a self-developing, and the dominant species of our Solar System, has been a necessary and sufficient result of the most fundamental lawfulness of universal nature.

Similarly, the crucial-experimental facts from which musical science is obliged to begin, are each and all facts of biologically determined vocal polyphony. Musical science begins with the subject of singing. Since the adult singing-voice species (soprano, mezzosoprano, tenor, etc.) are naturally, biologically determined, musical science starts here, focused upon what is demonstrated, by crucial experiment, to be well-tempered polyphony.

We can not begin with the phenomena of man-made musical instruments, since these are not natural phenomena.

The proofs of the natural principles of bel canto vocalization and voice-registration, are directly crucial-experimental reflections of the biology of the human species. Bel canto is demonstrated to be nothing but the human being’s most natural, relatively least-effort, most efficient method of speaking and singing, by virtue of the biologically determined characteristics of the healthy expression of the human genotype. This was proven experimentally by musicians no later than a half-millennium ago, and almost certainly much earlier than that.

The vocalization of classical (e.g., strophic) poetry, according to elementary bel canto principles of vocalization, is song. The participation of singers representing two or more of the biologically determined species of singing voices (soprano, tenor, etc.), is the essence of classical well-tempered polyphony.

It is determined, in a similar way, that each species of singing voice has, naturally, four potential registers, each with a distinct quality (“color”) of voice relative to each and all of the remaining three. It is also determined, that for each such species of singing voice, the places (on the scale) at which the transition from one register to an adjacent one must occur, is biologically determined, and that this place of “register shift” is fixed such that the place itself may not be shifted frequently without possibly irreversible damage to the singer’s voice.

Similarly, the extreme ranges of the voice, for each species, have certain approximate upper and lower limits, for most of the trained voices in the singing population; by exception, some trained adult singers may command extended ranges. Once we apply these natural, crucial-experimental facts to the canonical-polyphonic vocalization (bel canto) of any singable piece of classical poetry, we force upon the whole body of musical science the crucial-experimental proof, that the musical scale must be based upon the natural bel canto characteristics of healthy singing, upon Johann Sebastian Bach’s well-tempered polyphony, upon the naturally fixed characteristics of voice registration respecting each biologically determined species of singing voice, and upon a value of middle C of approximately 256 cycles.

After that, and no earlier, we consider the man-made musical instruments. As a practical matter, we delimit the span of our study to the development of instruments during the recent 500 years, approximately. Although stringed instruments (e.g., the lyre, woodwinds, and horns of one form or another), extend into very ancient history, we lose nothing on principle, if we limit our attention to the main lines of development of keyboard and classical orchestral chests of instrumental voices over a period beginning with the adulthoood of Leonardo da Vinci, and concluding, approximately, at the beginning of the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna. That “chest” of keyboard and orchestral instruments, which emerged as a standard over the period from J.S. Bach’s work at Leipzig up until the Congress of Vienna, is taken as our standard of reference for defining matters posed in respect to the strictly classical anti-romantic tradition associated factionally with such names as J.S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms.

These instruments, designed for a well-tempered scale pivoted upon C=256, were developed in imitation of those characteristics of the chest of bel canto voice-species which we have identified above. Thus, to the degree both composer and performer grasp, more or less successfully, the practical implications of these connections, everything (bearing on principles) which is to be said of the intent and characteristics of instrumental performance, is subsumed by natural voice principles.

Kepler and Music

Through the eyes of the mathematical physicist, what we have noted, as the natural characteristics of “musical space-time,” presents us an extremely significant challenge. In brief, the laws of a universe in which these natural characteristics might exist could not be the universe of Descartes, Newton, Kelvin, Helmholtz, Maxwell, or Boltzmann-Wiener. However, it could be a different kind of physical universe, that of Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa, Cusa’s follower Leonardo da Vinci, Cusa’s and da Vinci’s professed follower Johannes Kepler, Kepler’s professed follower Gottfried Leibniz, France’s Gaspard Monge, or such followers of Leibniz and Carl Gauss as Bernhard Riemann, Georg Cantor, and Eugenio Beltrami. The case of Kepler’s founding of the first comprehensive mathematical physics, is a very relevant illustration of the point.[fn_1]

Take Kepler’s World Harmony[fn_2] as point of reference. First, for the information of the person who has Alexander Pope’s “a little learning” concerning physical-science matters, we emphasize that Isaac Newton did not “discover universal gravitation.” Newton’s famous Gm_1m_2/r^2 is merely an algebraic manipulation of the algebraic formulas representing Kepler’s famous, universal three laws of motion.[fn_3] Newton discovered nothing; rather, by the algebraic oversimplification in Newton’s parody of Kepler’s laws of motion, Newton introduces an apparently insoluble mathematical paradox into physics, the so-called “three-body problem.”

The orchestral and keyboard instruments, designed for a well-tempered scale pivoted upon C=256, were developed in imitation of the characteristics of the bel canto voice-species. Pictured are moments in this history: (above) angels singing polyphonic music (detail from a 15th-century Flemish painting); (below) boy violinist (by the Dutch artist Frans Hals, early 17th century), and man playing the newly invented type of flute (by Antoine Watteau, French, 18th century).

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In Newton’s schema, for example, the orbits of the planets and their moons can be situated at any distance from the Sun one might choose for situating a planet. One merely has to choose a mass and orbital velocity whose associated centrifugal force neatly balances the centripetal force, the gravitational “pull.”

In Kepler’s universe, this is not permitted. The number of possible orbits and orbital velocities is precisely determined. No orbits between any two of these determined orbits is permitted. Kepler’s method permits the existence of no planetary orbit between those of Mercury and Venus, Venus and Earth, Earth and Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and so forth. Kepler requires one orbit between Mars and Jupiter, which Kepler assigns to “an exploded planet,” i.e., the asteroid belt. Similarly, Kepler’s universal laws of motion predetermine the relative orbital velocities of the planets in those determined orbits.

Although Kepler’s calculations require refinement, his conception of the ordering of the Solar System is the one which agrees with the evidence; whereas the physics of Descartes, Newton, Kelvin, et al., does not fit the evidence—most emphatically, the evidence of the uniqueness of the orbital positions, and of the relative harmonic values of the orbital velocities.

It is crucial, that the organization of the musical scale follows conceptually the arrangement shown by Kepler, in Kepler’s treatment of the musical harmonies of the solar orbits and their associated harmonic ratio-values of their orbital velocities. This means that the necessary and sufficient (i.e., scientific) determination of the musical scale is consistent with the physical universe of Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, et al., but not with the schema of mathematical imagination adopted by Descartes, Newton, Kelvin, et al.

The same argument applies to vocal polyphony in general, as also to vocally determined, natural registration, and exactly determined, natural singing-voice-species register-shift.

In the universe of Cusa, da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz, et al., the laws of the universe are coherent with a musical quality of harmonic ordering. We can show this more readily than otherwise, by studies of the existence of “register shifts” within the extended span of the complete electromagnetic-frequency scale, for a scale starting below the frequency of human-brain “alpha waves,” up through very energetic “gamma waves.”

We must go further, as physics, including biophysics, demands this. We must surpass a simply linear notion of continuous increase of frequency (from “2,” onwards), to the realm of “non-linear spectroscopy.” This latter, “non-linear spectroscopy,” assumes overwhelming importance as we focus upon the biophysical domain.

Obviously the production and hearing of music by the human species involves living biophysical processes in what proves to be the “non-linear spectroscopic” domain of generating and absorbing, discriminating efficiently musical tone-sequences. Thus, we locate the biophysics to be considered respecting a science of music.

Since the three cited, principal, natural feature of vocal polyphony—well-tempered scale, registration of singing-voice species, and determined register shift—require a Keplerian universe, excluding the Newtonian, the kind of physics to which a science of music must refer, must be along the Keplerian track leading through Leibniz and Riemann.

Kepler and Life

Another way of presenting what is ultimately the same point just made, is to say that Kepler’s mathematical physics was based explicitly, “axiomatically,” upon the evidence, that our universe is characterized as one in which life is the highest form of existence, and man is lawfully the highest form of life known.

To attempt to quell riotous protests of indignation from among some holders of doctoral degrees in physical science, we must interpolate here an identification of the following unpleasant truth respecting modern university (and secondary school) education. Only after we have cleared the air so, can Kepler be discussed rationally.

The 20th-century trend in U.S. education has been away from the rigorous standards of classical and scientific education preferred by 19th-century Harvard University, for example, toward a rote education of the poor quality which German speakers associate with the conventional word of contempt, Brotgelehrten. More and more, scientific education has aimed pragmatically, away from rigorous attention to scientific fundamentals, toward, and below the editorial standard of, say, Popular Science magazine.

In brief, even most contemporary university products with four-plus averages and terminal degrees, are primitively uneducated in a field which happens to be this writer’s specialty: a Socratic method of approach to axiomatics. This latter method is the most characteristic feature of the leading work contributed by the greatest scientific minds of the past 600 years, such as Cusa, da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz, et al.

What the Brotgelehrten among science students and graduates know, is virtually no geometry, but merely a variety of arithmetic-algebra based upon, and limited to a formalist deductive method. Such is the passively accepted classroom mathematics, at all levels of the pecking-order, today. What only a handful of such professionals do know, is that the scientific competence of a deductive mathematics is very much in doubt experimentally. The popular defense of the Brotgelehrten is to put out of sight and mind, any physical evidence, no matter how devastatingly true, which calls the “generally accepted,” deductive form of mathematics into question.

The evidence which proves Kepler’s mathematical physics competent and Newton’s opposing mathematics as crucially incompetent by comparison, is the kind of crucial evidence showing the outer limits of physical application of a merely deductive mathematical schema.

That brings us to our concluding points on the science of music, in this piece. There are three points to be made.

Despite the progress in interpretative performance of classical musical works by some postwar-period musicians, the principles of classical musical composition themselves have been virtually lost. The chief obvious reason for this general decay of musical education’s quality is the attempt of established musicologists to superimpose the Hegelian metaphysical schema, in which the romantic school is portrayed as the logical successor of the classical, and the twelve-tone modernist rubbish the logical successor of the romantic. The effort to adduce for the teaching of music a “principle” which coheres with such Hegelian mystical irrationalism, is the core of the musical-theoretical problem of today.

Continuing with the first of our three points here, there is a second aspect of the same problem to be noted here. The popularization of anti-scientific rubbish of Helmholtz’s (Sensations of Tone) and the popularized hoaxes of Helmholtz’s devotee Ellis, if believed, destroy utterly the ability of the music student to understand rationally the three natural characteristics of music we have identified above.

Summing up the first of our three concluding points, the 19th-century rise of the quasi-dionysiac dogma of romanticism, decreed through the mouth of proto-fascist positivist Professor Friedrich Karl Savigny, that an absolute separatism must be enforced, between natural sciences (Naturwissenschaft) and the arts (Geisteswissenschaft). Thus, did establishment support for Savigny’s doctrine of separatism lead both to the rise of Adolf Hitler and to the triumph of the irrationalist sundry dogmas of “art for art’s sake,” in music, poetry, and so forth.

Hence, the proper unification of science and art, as embodying, as an integral wholeness, these pervasively coherent qualities of individual mind setting man apart from, and superior to the beasts, is indispensable for the vigorous revival of music in our time. To this purpose, the current of scientific view of music exemplifed by Kepler and his successors, is indispensable.

The second of our three concluding points coheres with the first. Although musical history has proven conclusively, empirically, the three cited natural characteristics of vocal polyphony, questions of practical significance arise which music demands be examined from the standpoint of biophysics. We shall turn to that after identifying the third of our three concluding points.

Our third, cohering point is this. It is not sufficient, that musicological questions be settled from the vantage point of biophysics’ nonlinear spectroscopy, or from what might be termed a “simply musical” standpoint. The irrationalist myths of “absolute music” must not be left unchallenged. The human function of music, must be ultimately the basis on which musical activity is to be judged.

We subsume the three topics, as ultimately one, under the rubric Kepler and life.

The sovereignty of the creative processes of the individual human mind

Every genuinely new conception, as knowledge, which you, or any other person acquires, comes into existence in the individual human mind, in a way which can in no way be described by deductive methods, but rather in an entirely different way, in a way which solves the central paradox of Plato’s Parmenides dialogue. This is the true key to understanding, first, the human purpose of classical forms of music: This understanding shows us how the biophysics of vocal polyphony play their part in defining how much should be performed and composed.

The generation of a new idea, as a unified, indivisible conception, in the mind of an individual person, presents this following echo of the Parmenides paradox.

Many pieces, each individual, indivisible ideas, enter the mind, and are transformed from a many into a new, valid, combined but single and non-indivisible new conception. There is nothing of the new idea in any part of those many ideas which appear to have stimulated its generation. They are the Many; the new conception is the indivisible One. There is no deductive pathway leading from any or all of the Many, to this One. The transformation of the Many into this new One, is the work of the creative processes of the individual human mind.

By creative processes, we mean the same kind of mental processes which generate, transmit, and assimilate new, valid discoveries of fundamental principle in physical science. This occurs as a Many into One transformation, typifying so the required solution to the Parmenides paradox. Since this process is unique and indivisible, every individual mind engaged in generating concepts which are valid, and new to it, to this effect, is an axiomatically sovereign quality of individuality.

The case of physical science, the uplifting of man’s existence through scientific and technological progress, shows that the self-development of individual mental creative processes, to produce valid changes for the better in man’s comprehension of universal physical laws, puts such individual mental-creative processes in a special kind of direct, correspondence with the Will of the Creator.

A man and child explore nested models of the five "Platonic" solids. In constructive geometry, the Golden Section is the characteristic feature of generation of those polyhedra, and also determines harmonic orderings that express a characteristic of all living processes, and of negentropic processes.

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Thus, in valid scientific progress, the primary relationship to knowledge of the individual’s creative-mental processes, is to the Mind (Will) of the Creator, and only by derivation to objects in the universe.

Classical music, is the use of the natural characteristics of vocal polyphony, to replicate in music what the developed creative-mental powers of the individual human mind is able to accomplish otherwise in the “synthesis” of a valid discovery of improved, fundamental scientific principle.

This signifies, that in the process of generating a Many (mathematical-physics manifold) from a starting-point, and then developing the manifold to generate a One, establishes a single conception—the One—as the identity of the composition, rather than as a divisible aggregation of parts. This requires what may be described fairly as a “problem-solving” dynamic to the process of composition; this implies, in turn, that the problem and its solution are defined as problem and solution, respectively, by some notion of lawfulness.

Hence, the arbitrariness, irrationality intrinsic to the principle of artistic romanticism, shows romanticism to be on principle a dionysiac defiance against reason, and the twelve-tone system more radically so.

Notably, the principle of musical composition cannot be deductive (e.g., Aristotelian, neo-Aristotelian) in form. It cannot fit within a “universe” (a mathematical physics) according to Descartes, Newton, Kelvin, et al. This brings us to relevant work by Leonardo da Vinci and Kepler, successively.

The central feature of the work of Kepler was his elaboration of a principle central to the scientific accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci et al. had shown that all living processes were characterized as to form, and form of functional motion, by harmonic orderings congruent with the Golden Section. This work of da Vinci et al., had the following significances for the later work of Kepler, and for our topic here today.

First, as to constructive geometry (e.g., mathematics), the Golden Section is the characteristic feature of generation (determination) of those five “Platonic” regular solids (polyhedra) which are the limit of such constructability within visible physical space-time.

Second, as the convergence of Fibonacci’s series upon Golden Section harmonics illustrates, these latter harmonic orderings are not only characteristic of all living processes, but express a characteristic of negentropic processes.

Third, Kepler’s choice of this geometrical mathematics for his construction of an astrophysics (and of universal laws of motion) defines his universe (as an integral whole) as negentropic (e.g., directly opposite to the universe of Newton, Kelvin, et al.). Subsequent evidence (e.g., Gauss’s work on asteroid orbits) proved Kepler to have been right in his choice of a universal negentropic principle, and Newton’s physics, based mathematically and ontologically upon axiomatically entropic assumptions, to have been flatly in error.

Modern crucial-experimental evidence shows: 1) that all living processes are harmoniously ordered negentropically as indicated above; 2) that Kepler’s negentropically ordered physical space-time was proven as to astrophysics by Gauss’s work on asteroid orbits; 3) that in the very small, the quantum-domain of Schrödinger and de Broglie functions, physical space-time is negentropically “Keplerian.”

For reasons supplied in such published locations as In Defense of Common Sense,[fn_4] creative-mental processes are implicitly nonlinear negentropic processes. Consider the argument for each summarized very briefly.

Any consistent system of deductive argument, such as present-day conventional classroom mathematics, can be represented as an extensible form of deductive theorem-lattices. Such a lattice as generated from the starting-point of a set of unproven, arbitrary theorems, called axioms and postulates. All theorems are derived from that starting basis; no consistent theorem so derived contains any claim not originally implied by the original set of axioms and postulates.

A creative discovery in physical science is of the following type; at least, this is so, as long as we examine the matter from the standpoint of deductive method in general.

First, represent an existing physics (for example) by a choice of deductive mathematics, thus depicting that physics, in more or less close approximation, as a deductive theorem-lattice. Now, consider a single crucial experiment whose evidence refutes a consistent and necessary theorem of that theorem-lattice. All other practical considerations assumed taken into account, this single experiment demands a revolutionary overturn of that entire physics.

A fallacy in a single, consistent, and necessary theorem of a deductive system refutes fatally one or more features of the set of axioms and postulates underlying the entire lattice. The required correction of that proven margin of error in the deductive-axiomatic basis, requires a new axiomatic basis, to such effect that no theorem of the old theorem-lattice, e.g., A, is consistent with any theorem of the revised theorem-lattice B, and vice versa.

Thus, from the standpoint of deductive, or linear method (all deductive systems are linear, and vice versa), the two successive theorem-lattices are absolutely separated by a deductively unbridgeable logical gulf of formal (logical) inconsistency. Another name for this is mathematical discontinuity.

Nonetheless, the creative processes of the individual mind, in effecting the loop from A to B, bridge the discontinuity. Thus, we have as a representation of a creative-mental action (informing practice), a function linking successive theorem-lattices A, B, C, D . . . , which is a function of successive, nonlinear discontinuities in one and all possible deductive domains. That is a true nonlinear function, of a higher Cantorian order. Thus, we have emphasized non-linear.

The fact that the error-correcting aspect inherent in scientific progress directs revolutionary scientific practice (progress) of a society toward ever-higher per capita and per hectare reproductive processes, defines this creative function as a negentropic function, in the same sense, respecting our illustration, a Fibonacci series converges upon an harmonic ordering congruent with the Golden Section.

This is not merely the case for such creative thinking in physical science; it is the characteristic feature of creative activity in the medium of classical art.

We can illustrate this principle in classical musical composition in many ways. We can consider, for example, the famous Goethe’s misguided preferences for Reichardt, over settings of the same poems by Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert. Goethe failed to grasp the essential principle of musical creativity, even in so elementary a medium as the simple strophic song.

One of the most obvious illustrations of the point, is the treatment of J.S. Bach’s A Musical Offering by Wolfgang Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and others. Here is an excellent showing of what ought to be understood as the seamless union of scientific methods of musical composition and beauty. A proposition is presented, yet once again, for a yet-more-ingenious solution. The solution is bounded by strict classical rigor; the rigor pertains to the way in which a creative modification of the rules is permitted, on behalf of a solution.

Left to right: Franz Schubert (1797-1828), Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791), and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) each developed the proposition in Bach's Musical Offering, showing "the seamless union of scientific methods of musical composition and beauty."

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There are three most essential things which a classical musical composition must satisfy.

1) The medium must never depart from the domain of natural beauty. Beauty is life; ugliness is death. Life is rooted in those negentropic harmonic orderings which is congruent with the Golden Section. This has not changed since Plato.

2) Nothing can be art which is merely arbitrary whim, or which departs from the strict confines of natural beauty. Yet, the mere imitation of natural beauty is not art. Art is that which employs, and never departs from the medium of natural beauty, but which uses that uncorrupted medium as the domain of the same kind of strictly rigorous and valid creative-mental activity, applied to the medium of (in this case) vocal polyphony, which we associate otherwise with valid fundamental discoveries of principle in physical science.

3) The work of art, after meeting in a general way these first two requirements, must also master the challenge outlined in Plato’s Parmenides dialogue: The Many in the composition must be transformed into the continuous substance of the indivisible One.

Hark back to Nicolaus of Cusa’s work: the microcosm (Minimum) and the macrocosm (Maximum). We, through efficient development of that divine spark which is our individual potential for creative-mental acts, show ourselves, in working for the isochronically universal good, to be truly in the living image of our Creator. We participate so, in that which is greater than we are.

It is this quality of doing which marks us out, more than in any other way, as truly, perfectly sovereign individual reflections of our perfectly sovereign Creator. A true work of art brings Many into the perfect indivisibility of a sovereign Oneness, which latter is the indivisible Oneness of that work of art taken as a whole. Such a work of art thus reflects upon the direct form of relationship between the sovereign individuality of the creative intellect and that in whose likeness that sovereignty is cast. Unless a work of art achieves that specific sort of sovereignty itself, the other conditions also fulfilled, it is no true work of classical art.

The last quartets of Beethoven, beginning with the Opus 127, epitomize the opening into a new dimension of classical musical composition. Since then, the Opus 135, the best classical composers through Brahms, enriched the use of Beethoven’s heritage; but they budged music as a whole not an inch further ahead, to this day.

Once, by the aid of insights contributed to young musical masters by a science of music, there will be a more adequate assimilation of what the late quartets represent. Once the first truly sovereign musical composition reflecting the principle of those quartets has been heard, we shall know by that sign that the lesson has been mastered, and then music shall, at last, move ahead once more.

[fn_1]. See Carol White, “Johannes Kepler: Voyager in Space,” 21st Century Science & Technology, March-April 1988; Lyndon LaRouche, “Designing cities in the age of Mars colonization,” 21st Century Science & Technology, November-December 1988; and Will This Man Become President? by the Editors of Executive Intelligence Review, 1983, pp. 161ff.

[fn_2]. By Johannes Kepler:

1.Harmonices Mundi (1619)(The Harmonies of the World)(translated into English with an introduction and notes by E.J. Aiton, A.M. Duncan, J.V. Field. Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1997, Library of Congress;

2. Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Secret of the Universe) (1596);

3. New Astronomy, Based upon Causes, or Celestial Physics, Treated by Means of Commentaries on the Motions of the Star Mars of Tycho Brahe (1609);

4. On the Six-Cornered Snowflake, 1619;

5. Epitome astronomiae copernicanae 1620, (Epitome of Copernican Astronomy).

[fn_3] New Astronomy, Based upon Causes, or Celestial Physics, Treated by Means of Commentaries on the Motions of the Star Mars of Tycho Brahe (1609);

[fn_4]. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., In Defense of Common Sense, passim., Schiller Institute, Washington, D.C., 1989.

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HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE REPORTS TO GERMAN CITIZENS

III. Europe and the New Paradigm

How Will Germany and Chancellor Merkel Emerge from the G-20 Summit?

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

June 30—The upcoming July 7-8 G-20 Summit in Hamburg promises to be tense, and its results will be compared with the very extraordinary G-20 Summit in Hangzhou, China, last year, at which President Xi Jinping demonstrated his integrative power as a political leader in an extraordinary manner.

It will also be interesting to see how truthful the media accounts of the events will be, given that virtually the entire world, or at least a good representation of it, will be in Hamburg as guests, which will make it potentially more difficult to serve the public the usual media hoaxes.

President Donald Trump

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Even the critical reader or viewer, who is now accustomed to the usual “spins” in the Tagesthemen [“Topics of the Day,” ARD-TV program] or Heute-Journal [“Today’s Journal,” ZDF-TV program] will be amazed by the following account: White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders has just cited an investigation by the Media Research Center which found that the three American television networks ABC, CBS and NBC, in the five weeks following the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel, had given 13.5 times as much airtime in their evening news programs to negative or false reports about Russia and Trump, relative to all other subjects. From May to June they spent a total of 26 minutes reporting on tax reform, infrastructure, economy, jobs, and healthcare reform, compared to 353 minutes for attacks on Trump and false reports about Russia. Perhaps this should be kept in mind when Ms. Miosga, in the next Tagesthemen, talks about Trump or Putin in indignant tones, and with her eyebrows arched up to her hairline.

To the chagrin of its perpetrators, the entire “Russiagate” story about alleged Russian assistance to Trump in the election, has turned out to be a fabrication. Two editors and one reporter have now been fired by CNN for a false story linking a Trump associate with Russia. At the same time, a CNN producer was so inept as to confess on videotape that they had no evidence of Trump colluding with Russia, but were claiming that to be the case anyway, in hopes of jacking up the ratings for the network.

In the view of the Chinese publication Global Times, the animosity of the American elite against Trump has led to the media essentially reporting only those reports which show Trump in a bad light, but not reporting anything when Trump does something positive, such as creating jobs, getting investments in infrastructure, or improving relations with other nations—because the media have no interest in this.

Finally the New York Times also had to admit the falsehood of the constantly repeated claim that all 17 U.S. intelligence services confirmed the analysis that Russia hacked the Democratic Party’s e-mails and distributed them. As Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had to acknowledge to a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, this claim came from handpicked analysts from only four of these services, namely the CIA, NSA, FBI and Clapper’s own office. And as every expert knows, commented investigative reporter Robert Parry, the term “handpicked” already shows that the result of the analysis was preprogrammed, because hardened Russia-haters or Hillary Clinton supporters were involved in the case.

Thus, one might be curious about the way the German media are conducting themselves, relative to the rest of the world, in reporting on the G-20 Summit.

Chancellor Angela Merkel

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The advance indications for the Hamburg G-20 Summit are discordant, despite the planned performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in the Elbe Philharmonic Hall. Chancellor Merkel found it necessary to express her misgivings about Trump’s policies in a government statement to the Bundestag (German House of Representatives), and tried to unite the various EU representatives participating in the Summit to position themselves as “leaders of the free western world” against the coming invasion.

Tensions are also preprogrammed with respect to President Erdogan, who is being blocked from giving a speech to Turkish residents of Germany, ever since he has changed policy, and directed Turkish policy more toward Russia and China, and has injected himself into the confrontation between Qatar and Saudi Arabia on the side of Qatar. Naturally Saudi King Salman, who in regard to supporting terrorism sees only the grain of sand in his brother Qatar’s eye and not the beam in his own, is also participating in the Summit.

A constructive contribution is expected from President Xi, who is making state visits to Russia and Germany prior to the Summit, and will take the occasion to coordinate policy with Putin and to have policy exchanges with German Federal President Steinmeier and Chancellor Merkel.

The Summit will have an official agenda in which Ms. Merkel will try to make free trade and climate change the main subjects, and then at the last minute give at least the appearance that in regard to Africa, “fair trade” should now be on the agenda in place of the brutal conditions of free trade; at best a cosmetic correction, however. But the many bilateral meetings of leaders taking place on the sidelines of the Summit will be much more important. For example, the BRICS nations will hold an informal meeting before the Summit.

Above all, the signs for Hamburg look bad between the governments in Berlin and Washington. In Trump’s Cabinet, the advocates of keeping Trump’s electoral promise of a 20% border tax may come out on top. In the short term Ms. Merkel has sent her chief G-20 negotiator Lars-Hendrik Röller to Washington to look for possibilities of a policy reversal by Trump on his rejection of the Paris Climate Accord and on trade questions. The political climate was not likely to be improved by the announcement by German Economics Minister Zypries that the EU will “make many changes” if the United States introduces trade barriers to German and European companies. Thus it can’t be ruled out that the G-20 Summit could blow up.

Whether the systemic risk of the trans-Atlantic financial system, which has intensified since 2008 despite Janet Yellen’s claims to the contrary, comes out at the Hamburg meeting or only shortly afterwards, it is still only a question of a very short time before this crisis will demand fundamental reorganization. It will become clear that German Finance Minister Schäuble did the world a disservice by supporting the U.S. Treasury Secretary in his opposition to the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall bank separation.

The only way the Summit can be successful would be with an agenda headed by the introduction of a global Glass-Steagall Act, and then supplemented by a new credit system in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton, which would provide credit for investments in the real economy. Trump has already pledged several times that he intends to return to the policies of the American System of economy of Hamilton, Clay, Carey, and Lincoln. Germany also has a connection: The German economic miracle after World War II was due primarily to the policies of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau in exactly this tradition.

A trans-Atlantic system cleansed of excessive speculation would be much better able to collaborate in New Silk Road projects with the banks of the New Silk Road, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the New Development Bank, and the New Silk Road Fund.

President Vladimir Putin

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But it is to be feared that Chancellor Merkel is pursuing a completely shortsighted agenda, and she, and unfortunately all of us, must live with the consequences at least for a brief period.

It will be decisive for world history if at their first personal meeting, Trump and Putin come to a positive understanding, and thus creeate the preconditions for the success of what Presidenti Xi Jinping calls “cooperation for a future for mankind.” In any case, the Summit will make clear which political leaders offer the world constructive solutions, and which remain trapped in the categories of geopolitics and the Cold War.

BRUSSELS CONFERENCE

Panel Seeks Alternatives to the Euro, Discusses ‘One Belt One Road’ Perspective

by Claudio Celani

June 29—An three-hour international conference on “The Future of the EU; A New Model of Cooperation Among European Sovereign Nations,” was held June 28 at the European Parliament in Brussels. Host Marco Zanni, an independent member of the European Parliament from Italy, brought together international experts and politicians to discuss alternatives to the failed system of the European Union.

The panelists at the conference in Brussels, Belgium.

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The panelists were Alberto Bagnai from the University of Pescara; Liz Bilney, CEO of the British organization “Leave.EU”; Lega Nord (Italy) economist Claudio Borghi; Michele Geraci, head of the China Economic Policy Program at Nottingham University Business School and professor at Zhejiang University; and Giandomenico Majone from the European University Institute in Florence.

They engaged in a discussion of what Zanni described in his introduction as “different modalities of cooperation among European countries.” The panel presentations were concluded by an intervention by Matteo Salvini, head of the Lega Nord party. Before Salvini’s remarks, Harley Schlanger read a message of support to the conference sent by former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone (see box).

The main purpose of the event, Zanni said, was to “open a debate, and challenge the rhetoric according to which the EU is the only possible frame of cooperation among European countries. We do not believe in the TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) rhetoric, and we will show the European people that there are better modalities of cooperation. The EU is failing to offer prosperity, cooperation, or peace to the European people. So it is now time to think about alternatives.”

Professor Bagnai opened the panel by presenting an original model for assessing the economic effects of an exit from the Euro single-currency union on the Italian economy. Bagnai debunked fear-mongering scare scenarios offered by pro-Euro propaganda and even academicians, some of whom have gone so far as to forecast a 40% collapse of the Italian economy if Italy leaves the Euro—equal to collapse in World War II!

He presented two scenarios: the “base case,” in which Italy leaves the Euro but does not change its economic policy; alternatively, the case in which Italy leaves the Euro and implements counter-cyclical policies. Such policies, however, would be minimal: simply re-establishing public investments at the pre-crisis levels.

In the base case, it was shown that Italy’s output would drop immediately, but then recover in a few years. In the second scenario, output would start to rise immediately, and reach a four percent growth rate within two to four years. Bagnai demonstrated that there would be no hyperinflation.

The Euro is going to implode, Bagnai said. Therefore “it is a criminal act, not to study a phenomenon that will occur with certainty. The ’Fathers of Europe’ have built a hotel without emergency exits.

“There are two certainties on Europe,” Bagnai said: “1) It will end; and 2) Those who run it do not know what to do. This is tragic.

“We have such an incompetent leading class because of the media,” Bagnai continued. “The media are the biggest enemies of democracy.”

We must get rid of the Euro in order to regain “the freedom to implement economic policies, a freedom which is being denied to us,” Bagnai said with passion..

The next speaker, Lega Nord politician and economist Claudio Borghi, focused on the anomaly of the European Central bank, which is subject to no national control, while at the same time it still has absolute power over the destiny of nations which are members of the EU, by means of its decisions to cut emergency money to national banking sectors, as was done for instance to Greece, and has been threatened against Italy.

Take the case of the island of Elba, in Italy, where there is no maternity hospital, and pregnant mothers must take a ferry to give birth to a baby. To build that structure would cost 20 million euros, but they say there is no money. What would happen if the ECB, instead of printing 1.2 trillion of “quantitative easing” money, prints 20 million more? We would have a hospital on Elba.

Prof. Majone polemically addressed the fact that the European Union does not have a goal. “An ever closer union” is not a goal, but a process. Imagine Bismark or Cavour saying “we want an ever closer union” of the various states of Germany and Italy of that time. We would not have the nations of Germany and Italy today. And in the EU, there was disagreement on the goal from the beginning, so that a collective rational action is impossible. The solution, for Majone, is an integration of functions, and not of territories.

Liz Bilney, head of the British “Leave.EU” campaign organization, explained that a borderless Europe, working consistently on all aspects of politics, economy, and society, is not realistic, because of the principles of democracy and national identity: “We trust our own countries’ governments, because we recognize ourselves in them, or at least we should.”

[go to text after box]

Message from Roger Stone

I am sorry I could not be with you, as I had hoped to be. I fully share your concerns with the outrageous, unregulated speculative practices of the so-called Too-Big-to-Fail banks and the “shadow banking system,” and the protection of those practices by governments and Central Banks. The repeal of Glass-Steagall regulation in the United States in 1999 opened the door for scandalous speculation, which drew credit away from productive businesses and industries, and allowed for the creation of numerous debt bubbles, with banks carrying large volumes of non-performing loans. When these bubbles popped, it was the people that paid, through loss of jobs, businesses, home foreclosures, and useless and painful austerity measures, while the banks and financial institutions were given bailouts of taxpayer’s money, and now are allowed to conduct “bail-ins,” taking money away from their clients.

This process played a major part in the election of Donald Trump as President, who campaigned to put an end to these practices. His election victory was due to the rejection of the Bush machine in the Republican Party, and the Clinton machine in the Democratic Party, both of which had the support of Wall Street and the City of London, as many voters were fed up with the arrogance of those who used fancy economic models to steal the bread from their tables.

But the people behind these schemes and scams are now trying to remove Trump, in what is really an attempted coup, to prevent him from restoring real growth to the American economy, among other significant reforms he is proposing. It is my hope that President Trump will fulfill his campaign promise, to repeal the banker-and-derivative friendly Dodd Frank bill, and replace it with restoring Glass Steagall.

I commend you for your efforts to address this problem in the European Union, and wish you great success in presenting alternatives that will restore the functions of government to the people of their respective sovereign states, and take power away from those whose rapacious greed has led to poverty and war.

I look forward to being with you at some point in the future.

Roger Stone is a legendary political operative, who helped elect Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and was a key mover in the 2016 victory of Donald Trump. His book, The Making of the President, 2016, is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the Trump victory.

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Lega Nord head Matteo Salvini compared the European Union to the former Soviet Union, reading a prophetic statement issued in the European Parliament eleven years ago by former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. Among the current policies of the EU, Salvini blasted the sanctions against Russia, which is “our natural ally” in the fight against terrorism.

Salvini said it is indispensable for Italy to leave the Euro.

(The Lega Nord has recently scored major victories in local elections in a center-right alliance with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and the right-wing Fratelli d’Italia (FdI). Both the Lega and FdI are strongly in favor of a re-introduction of Glass-Steagall separation of investment and speculative financial banks, and have introduced draft bills to that purpose in Parliament.)

The ‘New Silk Road’

Professor Geraci, who has been living in China for the last ten years, presented a picture which “is not well perceived in Europe.” China’s fight against poverty is a fantastic success, he said. Per capita income in China has grown a hundred-fold in the last 40 years. China intervened powerfully with a dirigistic policy when it realized that manufacturing growth had been zero in 2015, and introduced its “Made in China 2025” plan. Immediately, production zoomed again. The Chinese government is regulating the process of internal migration with a yearly migration plan, choosing how many people, and of what categories, are allowed to migrate from the countryside to the cities.

As good as his picture of China’s development is, however, Geraci warned that by means of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) policy, China will be able to invade the West with exclusive high-tech products which China’s industry is already developing.

Claudio Celani

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Claudio Celani intervened at the onset of the question and answer section, introducing himself as vice-president of Movisol, which is the Italian section of the international LaRouche movement. He addressed Geraci’s presentation, rejecting the idea that China could be a threat, and insisting that the OBOR policy is a new paradigm and an opportunity for development. OBOR represents exactly those counter-cyclical policies which Professor. Bagnai had advocated in his presentation, Celani said. He reported that in 2011, the Chinese had proposed to the Italian government to help build infrastructure to make Sicily into “the Manhattan of the Mediterranean,” including ports, airports, and a connection to the Italian mainland through the Messina Bridge and high-speed railways.

Professor Geraci responded positively, thanking Celani for an intervention that allowed him to make a distinction between trade policies and investment policies. On trade policies, we must watch out, and be able to defend our products, he said. On what are called “green field,” or ground-up investments, “they are welcome, because they create jobs, develop infrastructure, and so on.” China is the only country in the world that can mobilize capital, manpower, raw materials, and knowledge all together, Geraci stressed. While Italy has discussed the two-km-long Messina Bridge to Sicily for over a century, it has not yet built it; “in Shanghai, where I live, they built a 32-km-long bridge over the sea.”

Garaci continued with another example: at the time of the serious earthquake in 2008, which caused a hundred thousand deaths, the area the earthquake struck was in the countryside, requiring a four-hour drive plus a mule-ride. “They picked up a project for two tunnels, and in three months they built the equivalent of the Mont Blanc tunnel, two times ten kilometers.” These are the sorts of projects we should support.

In discussions off the record, it became clear that some speakers had more fearful views of China, which are probably due to a incorrect understanding of economics. This shows that “populists” must be educated. The Brussels meeting was an important step in this process.