Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 45, Number 47, November 23, 2018

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Expect the Unexpected: A Smarter U.S. Population Readied for Post-Election Surprises in Foreign Economic Policy by Renee Sigerson

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 45, Number 47, November 23, 2018

- I. The Manhattan Project Moves the Universe

- Humanity Is at a Crossroads for a New Paradigm Zepp-LaRouche’s Message of the Future to Shape the Present by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- WITH HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE Discussion: Humanity at a Crossroads

- Aesthetic Education: Awakening the Mind of the Heart by Dennis Speed

- Tribute to Anthony Wentworth Morss by John Sigerson

- FROM THE CONCERT PROGRAM The Name of Freedom Is Beethoven

- FROM THE CONCERT PROGRAM Greetings from Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- Excerpts from Schiller Birthday Celebration Concert Program

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST Missed Opportunity in France, Huge Potential at G-20

- II. Physical Economy

- Schiller Institute’s Hussein Askary Speaks to Belt & Road Food Industry Conference by Marcia Merry Baker

- The Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on Global Food Security by Hussein Askary

- III. What Is To Be Done?

- Jesus Christ and Civilization by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (September 22, 2000)

- EDITORIAL LAROUCHE PAC STATEMENT Robert Mueller and His Ilk Are About to Commit a Massive Crime! Will You Let Them Get Away with It? by Barbara Boyd

After the Election:

The Fight for Physical Economy

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

Co-Editors: Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

Russia and Eastern Europe: Rachel Douglas

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Bogotá: Miriam Redondo

Berlin: Rainer Apel

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

United Nations, N.Y.C.: Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

ON THE WEB

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EDITORIAL

Expect the Unexpected: A Smarter U.S. Population Readied for Post-Election Surprises in Foreign Economic Policy

by Renee Sigerson

Nov. 20—It would be a mistake to think that the whirlwind endeavor carried out by President Donald Trump in 45 packed election rallies would somehow be forgotten as a passing event. As long-term political “educators” in the Lyndon LaRouche movement have noted, Trump’s relentless schedule of events, combined with his particular “personal style,” has triggered a definite sort of response within the population. Though many also ran to the polls to oppose him, bringing the electoral turnout to the highest level of participation for a mid-term election in over 100 years, the process of political engagement which swept this country in the last six months has triggered something very important, fresh, and different from anything the Liberal social engineers who view themselves as the opinion-shapers of America, would ever have desired.

The best way to capture the quality of this shift in American mindset is to note: a significant portion of the American public has suddenly become much smarter—in truth, more intelligent at this time—than they have been for many years. This shift—even more than the sub-categories of voters which will preoccupy the pollsters—will now help to determine the field of action the President has to operate in, as he approaches an important watershed in his Presidency: the scheduled sideline meetings in Argentina with Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi.

The Mission Before Us

The pollsters are already submerging themselves in statistical analyses aimed at belittling the effect of Trump’s hard-won achievement. In fact, at least one-half million Americans attended the President’s rallies. And, as unsophisticated as his style may seem to some, his proven “gift” is shown to be his ability to “make things personal.” Most of those people who spent hours and days in all kinds of discomfort to see and hear him in person, now know inside themselves that they have met him personally, and that he was talking “to them”—which is why they will never forget that day. And perhaps double the number of those who turned out and attended his events, were unable to attend, but think of themselves as “having been there.”

That sense is spreading out into the population, intensified by the fact that Trump’s majority in the Senate is growing to a higher level of at least 52, or maybe even 53—another kick in the jaw to the inventors of “Trump derangement syndrome.”

The mission of whoever heeds Lyndon LaRouche’s discoveries in this period, is to seize this newly created potential, and to prove that the same layers of the population which turned out to stand with Donald Trump at the election rallies, are ready to support him and back him, when he decides, as history requires, to announce cooperation with Putin and Xi, as well as with Prime Minister Modi of India, in reorganizing the monetary and financial relations between nations. As Lyndon LaRouche has argued for decades, it is only to the extent that humanity regains the benefits of the fixed exchange rate credit relations which allowed Europe to be rebuilt in twelve short years after World War II—principles of economic development which are based on scientific, physical economic standards— that today we can eliminate the economic disintegration now threatening our nation and other parts of the trans-Atlantic world with catastrophe.

Trump has kicked open the door for getting Americans to understand the real problems we are facing. Because of his personal commitment, and even his “style,” many more Americans right now consider themselves “political,” and part of the fight, than has been the case for a very long time.

It is because Americans are casting away the pacified identity of helpless victims who view the world through a dirty window-pane, impotently hoping “for the best”—an identity imposed by British Liberal cultural tricks and years of economic fraud; it is because they are being given the potential to be part of a system of positive change, that they have become “smarter.” Living with the President through the turmoils of British intelligence manipulation of the FBI and other U.S. agencies; witnessing the relentless attacks on him, and his willingness to fight on nonetheless, they have been inspired to seek answers to questions which only a few years ago they would never even have asked. Many of Trump’s most avid supporters are people who didn’t even vote, let alone try to follow the news, until he ran for office. Now they are becoming ready to educate and even lead others to take increasing responsibility.

This intervention of the President is giving us an increased chance of history-making victory. His post-election, rapid-fire action of calling Nancy Pelosi to pull together legislation from the Democratic-controlled House outlining infrastructure investments and healthcare changes, while saying he is ready to work with her for the benefit of the nation, showed true statesmanship. The opportunists in the Congress are to be found on both sides of the aisle; but the treasonous cells actively out to destroy him are coming from the City of London, not from dupes in Washington. This is the time to dig hard into the ranks of the Democratic Party to find the handful who will stand for non-partisan cooperation.

The moment has come for nationwide dissemination and discussion of Lyndon LaRouche’s discoveries in physical economy. The way to bring about unity and progress in the United States—leaving behind the insane divisiveness of Washington as a relic of a bad time—is to unleash widespread public debate and dialogue on the difference between physical economy versus monetary speculation. With his long background in real estate, Trump is often “too quick” to present financial and monetary policy questions in the habitual forms acceptable to Wall Street. On the other hand, he’s one of the only Presidents ever to criticize the snobbish indifference of the Federal Reserve, an institution that is long overdue for fundamental reform.

The moment has come for an educational explosion on behalf of LaRouche’s concepts of how physical economy and human cognitive development can bring under control the potentially “dangerous idiot” known as money. Those who now want to help the President clean up Washington, DC and create a safer, even truly beautiful world, should take to heart his call at every rally, “I need your help!” He needs the people of this nation to educate themselves and others in the scientific economic practices that will end the poisonous authority of the British Liberal “Dark Age” mentality. If we don’t recognize and seize the potential of this moment, we threaten to burn down our nation in killer fires which we can no longer afford to prevent, while we slip and drown in a mere five inches of icy snow—a dual calamity which actually happened last week because of our own folly. Trump’s Presidency, combined with the economic breakthroughs of America’s “paradigmatic patriot” Lyndon LaRouche, can end this threat and bring forth good times.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 45, Number 47, November 23, 2018

Cover This Week

First Nuclear Operating Co.

Davis-Bess Nuclear Power Station, Unit 1, Oak Harbor, Ohio.

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AFTER THE ELECTION:

THE FIGHT FOR PHYSICAL ECONOMY

2 EDITORIAL

Expect the Unexpected: A Smarter U.S. Population Readied for Post-Election Surprises in Foreign Economic Policy

by Renee Sigerson

I. THE MANHATTAN PROJECT MOVES THE UNIVERSE

5 Humanity Is at a Crossroads for a New Paradigm

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

11 WITH HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE

Discussion: Humanity Is at a Crossroads

22 SCHILLER BIRTHDAY CONCERT

Aesthetic Education: Awakening the Mind of the Heart

by Dennis Speed

27 Tribute to Anthony Wentworth Morss

by John Sigerson

28 FROM THE CONCERT PROGRAM

The Name of Freedom is Beethoven

30 Greetings from Helga Zepp-LaRouche

31 Program Excerpts

32 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Missed Opportunity in France, Huge Potential at G-20

II. PHYSICAL ECONOMY

39 Schiller Institute’s Hussein Askary Speaks to Belt & Road Food Industry Conference

by Marcia Merry Baker

41 The Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on Global Food Security

by Hussein Askary

III. WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

46 Jesus Christ and Civilization

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

September 22, 2000

73 EDITORIAL:

LaRouche PAC Statement

Robert Mueller and His Ilk Are About to Commit a Massive Crime! Will You Let Them Get Away with It?

by Barbara Boyd

I. The Manhattan Project Moves the Universe

Humanity Is at a Crossroads

For a New Paradigm

Zepp-LaRouche’s Message of the Future to Shape the Present

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

EIRNS

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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The following is an edited transcript of the presentation given by Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche to the Nov. 17, 2018 LaRouche PAC Manhattan meeting.

Let me state in the beginning that there is absolutely the potential, in a much quicker time than most people have any inkling, that we could experience very consciously the beginning of a new epoch of mankind—where we could put the danger of war behind us, where nations cooperate with each other according to a completely new set of international relations based on win-win cooperation, and where we devote all our resources—both our creativity as well as physical resources—to solving problems challenging us, such as solving poverty and advancing our sciences. I can see all of this beginning to happen fairly soon.

The relationships between and among President Trump, President Xi Jinping, and President Putin are absolutely key to achieving such a solution. In a year or less, or a few years, we could see a change from this present dark age we are now experiencing, especially in the West. Such a change could be as fundamental and groundbreaking as the Golden Italian Renaissance of the 15th century. I like to remind people that it was possible to overcome a dark age; to establish something which was the foundation for the next 600 years of European history. I think this is absolutely possible today.

I do not think I’m overly optimistic or caught in a utopian idea when I say that today it is now possible to realize the very goal which we set out to accomplish when we founded the Schiller Institute in 1984, namely, to establish a just new world economic order on this planet, and to accomplish this together with a renaissance of Classical culture—where each nation, each civilization, each culture will bring forth its best traditions and cooperate toward a new and higher renaissance for the entire human species. That was the goal of the Schiller Institute in 1984 and it still is. I think that is possibly about to happen.

However, I also want to state equally clearly that there is the danger that we again are sleepwalking into a world war, exactly as happened before, with World War I. The reason for this has a lot to do with the reasons why World War I happened and the present situation—while they have many differences and there are new factors, there are also some fundamental parallels. Foremost is what was put forth as the geopolitical theories of the British Empire before World War I, as expressed, for example, by Halford Mackinder.

I don’t want to go into the very complex pre-World War I history, but the parallel to today is nevertheless very visible, if you apply geopolitical thinking. Prior to World War I, it was the emergence of the trans-Siberian railway, the role of Russia, the possible expansion of the importance of Eurasia as compared to sea power. Today, it is very clearly the Belt and Road Initiative promoted by China, which has already inspired and drawn into cooperation more than 100 countries. Also, the emergence of Russia under the leadership of President Putin as a global power is a very important strategic factor.

How and why have we come to this point?

EIRNS/Rachel Douglas

Woman sells goods in a Russian street during the 1990s.

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When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the British, with their neo-con collaborators in the United States, decided that since communism was now defeated, it was time to establish a unipolar world, based on the British/U.S. “special relationship,” whereby the British would run the world according to their principles and likings. At that time, the “historian” Francis Fukuyama declared that this was the “End of History,” that from now on democracy would rule in all corners of the world, and there would be no more competing systems.

Triumphalism in the West

The so-called “shock therapy” was supposed to eliminate Russia as a strategic power, transforming it into a Third World raw materials exporting country. During the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, London and Wall Street imposed mass looting, and the industrial potential of Russia from 1991 to 1994 was reduced by 30 percent. This was a decade of genocide in Russia, of demographic collapse. At the same time, China was allowed to join the World Trade Organization (WTO), with the intention of gradually forcing China to not only fully adopt free trade, but also to accept “Western values,” such as “democracy,” and human rights, such that China would cease to be anything different than the West.

As for other nations not yet in line with the “End of History” paradigm, there was regime-change, color revolution, the Axis of Evil—all of which was supposed to get rid of problematic nationalists and patriots within those nations. The neo-liberal economic model was to be imposed on every nation, eliminating state-controlled systems or mercantilist tendencies. There was a push for deregulation of the financial markets. As a result, the gap between rich and poor widened. This went on for an extended period but eventually led to a global rebellion. As a result of this rebellion, we have seen the Brexit, we have seen the election of Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton, we saw the election of a new Italian government rejecting all of these values, and also many other European governments following in the same line.

China Chooses a Different Path

China has not behaved according to script. Instead, China discovered its own roots and adopted the policy of the New Silk Road, now commonly called the Belt and Road Initiative, which was, in cooperation with other countries of the BRICS and other Asian countries in particular, a reaction to the 1997 Asia crisis, which at the time my husband warned was not an Asian crisis, but the beginning of a global financial crisis which would simply come in different phases. In that 1997 crisis, it was very clear that the attacks on the Asian currencies by George Soros and others, eventually strengthened the idea that the so-called developing countries had to form a resistance; that they had to go with a different policy.

What China, especially Xi Jinping, then addressed was not only the terrible lack of development, especially in industry and infrastructure left by 500 years of colonialism, but also the failure of the Bretton Woods system to fulfill the aspirations of Franklin D. Roosevelt to end colonialism. Instead, they introduced this terrible injustice towards the developing sector. Once the World Bank and the IMF were in charge of giving loans to developing countries, they imposed conditionalities which enforced a “debt trap.” The conditionalities forbade the development of infrastructure, investment in social systems, and education.

They prevented the developing countries from ever making the jump to becoming industrial countries. If the IMF could not succeed, the rest of it was done by the evil ideology of the Club of Rome, insisting that we are living in a planet of limited resources, that you have to have only sustainable growth—basically population reduction and no development.

There was a tremendous policy vacuum.

Since Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, in a very short time—only five years!—economic development has exploded. In over 100 countries, the New Silk Road Spirit has given developing countries, for the first time, hope to overcome poverty, to become industrialized countries, and not only repeat what the industrialized countries had done in terms of development, but to leapfrog to the most advanced areas in science and technology, with the help of especially China, but also Russia, India, Japan.

For about four years of the BRI, the Western powers, the Western media, think-tanks, almost ignored the fact that this new system had emerged and was growing extremely rapidly. This denial of reality was incredible because here you had the largest infrastructure program ever undertaken in history. By now it has become about 20 times as big as the Marshall Plan, and it’s open-ended. The Western media just ignored all of this. There was no objective coverage; there were no documentaries, no features in the Western media.

But then, approximately one year ago, there was a sudden explosion of attacks on China. The think-tanks began accusing China of pursuing a “new colonialism,” luring countries of the developing sector into a “debt trap,” and other wild accusations. In those countries now participating in the Belt and Road Initiative, these accusations were completely ridiculed, and many leaders of the Third World—from Latin America, Asia, and Africa— have said that now, cooperating with China, they have for the first time the chance to develop, and they want to be treated as equal partners. They are no longer content to listen to the sermons of Westerners who talk big about democracy and human rights, but who bring in no development. So, this false propaganda against China did not fly in the developing countries.

The propagandists have managed, however, to confuse certain segments of the population in the United States and some European countries, because their people don’t really know what is going on. And if one is only permitted the Western media narrative, it is very difficult to find out.

Russia Targeted for War

Essentially the same thing happened concerning Russia.

There was a total demonization of Russia by inventing a completely fake narrative. The narrative started with the supposed “annexation” by Russia of Crimea. No event which happened prior to that date is ever mentioned. No mention is ever made that the West created and controlled the plundering of Russia in the 1990s, or that the reason there are oligarchs in Russia still to the present day is that they were supported by certain Western powers. This fake narrative also ignores a promise made to Mikhail Gorbachov, a promise to Russia at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and even before, at the time of the unification of Germany, that NATO would never expand to the borders of Russia. This is just totally forgotten.

CC/Aymayna Hyikary

Maidan rioters attack police in Kiev in 2014,in run-up to the coup in Ukraine.

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The Ukraine crisis was not triggered by Russia “annexing” Crimea, but, as [former German Chancellor] Helmut Schmidt once said, the Maastricht Treaty of the EU, which decided to turn the EU into an empire, according to [British diplomat] Robert Cooper at the time—namely, for NATO and the EU to add countries, moving forward to the East, until the Russian borders were reached, and as much to the East as possible.

All of this history has been erased from the memory, as well as the Nazi coup in Kiev. Also, that it was a referendum in Crimea—a free decision of the people of Crimea—which resulted in the joining with Russia. As Putin has said several times, if it would not have been Ukraine, they would have invented some other story.

On Nov. 14, the National Defense Strategy Commission, a congressionally mandated panel under the leadership of Eric Edelman, released its review of national defense strategy, Providing for the Common Defense, basically in the spirit of [the late Senator] John McCain. What does it say? I will read you a quote to give you a flavor of it. It says in the Executive Summary:

The security and well-being of the United States are at greater risk than at any time in decades. America’s military superiority—the hard-power backbone of its global influence and national security—has eroded to a dangerous degree. Rivals and adversaries are challenging the United States on many fronts and in many domains. America’s ability to defend its allies, its partners, and its own vital interests is increasingly in doubt. If the nation does not act promptly to remedy these circumstances, the consequences will be grave and lasting. . . .

Today, changes at home and abroad are diminishing U.S. military advantages and threatening vital U.S. interests. Authoritarian competitors—especially China and Russia—are seeking regional hegemony and the means to project power globally. . . .

These trends are undermining deterrence of U.S. adversaries and the confidence of American allies, thus increasing the likelihood of military conflict. The U.S. military could suffer unacceptably high casualties and loss of major capital assets in its next conflict. It might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia. The United States is particularly at risk of being overwhelmed should its military be forced to fight on two or more fronts simultaneously.

Now obviously, this is the view of the neo-cons; it’s the idea that the world will be divided into blocs forever, and that the idea of a multi-polar world is completely unacceptable. The neo-cons are clearly not giving up; nevertheless, they are in complete contradiction to what President Trump is continuously saying: namely, that he wants to improve the relations with Russia and China, and that to have good relations with these two countries is a good thing and not a bad thing.

elysee.fr/videos

French President Emmanuel Macron commemorates the end of World War I by calling for a new European army, and doing his best to keep Presidents Trump and Putin from drawing their nations together in peace for mutual economic development.

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European Follies

We also see President Macron of France calling for a European army outside of NATO. Macron attacked Trump and called for more independence from the dollar without actually saying how this might be accomplished. One day later, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire proclaimed the need for Europe to become “an empire like the United States, like China.” It is unbelievable that in these times people would have the nerve to attack the nation-state from the standpoint of empire, as if that would be a superior form of government.

In my view, Mr. Macron and his entire government are suffering from an excess of grandeur, given the desolate condition of the European Union. Macron’s popularity right now is dropping like a stone. Just today you had, all over France, huge demonstrations in which people were blocking the roads, bringing traffic to a complete standstill to protest against high fuel and gasoline prices, and against Macron’s severe austerity policy. So, this is a complete mass strike ferment in France, which can have all kinds of interesting implications in the near future.

At the same time, the EU is really disintegrating. The EU Commission and the EU are in a complete clash with the Italian government, which refuses to continue the orders of the EU to implement austerity to the detriment of their own population, saying they don’t want to repeat the mistakes made in Greece and Spain, and they just want to have an investment policy and growth instead.

In Germany, the grand coalition, so-called, of Mrs. Merkel is not so grand anymore. It’s a small coalition of only 40 percent. Merkel could be out very soon. Germany is in a real crisis, because one of the possible replacements for Merkel, is a CDU politician by the name of Friedrich Merz, who is a complete neo-con. He is a neo-liberal, he wants to have a coalition with the Greens. There is even talk of a Green chancellor.

Both options would mean the end of Germany as an industrialized nation, because what the Greens are calling for is the full decarbonization of the economy, based on the complete fraud that CO_2 emissions cause climate change and global warming. This policy means no coal, no fossil fuels, only so-called “alternative” energies. This would mean the complete collapse of the German economy, and given the role of the German economy in Europe, it would mean the collapse of all of Europe. Even worse, as John Schellnhuber, the former head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Consequences, admits, if you apply this decarbonization policy to the world economy, the population that can be sustained by the planet is exactly 1 billion. So, what should happen to the other 6 billion is naturally the big question.

Four Powers and the New Bretton Woods

I have painted this strategic situation in very broad strokes, but I have done it to argue that the proposal made by my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, that the only way for the world to get out of this present crisis and danger of a new sliding into war, is by having a Four-Power Agreement among the United States, Russia, China, and India. That agreement must not be exclusive, but an open coalition for more people and more countries to join.

The immediate step that must be taken by these four governments is to establish a New Bretton Woods credit system. We are right now not only in a crisis of Europe, including a European banking crisis, but we are sitting on the verge of a new financial crash. We have the possibility of a repeat of 2008, only on a much larger scale. There is a 40 percent increase of all the parameters which led to the 2008 crisis, but especially corporate debt is the ticking time bomb. The amount of speculative money which is floating around the world on a daily basis has also increased by several times, with $5 trillion every day being speculated—often in nanoseconds—around the globe. All the tools of the central banks have been used up; you cannot do endless quantitative easing. We are sitting on a volcano.

Normally, the setting for a discussion of a New Bretton Woods system would be the G-20, but given the fact that in the G-20 there are several countries which are absolutely stuck in the old geopolitical, neo-liberal paradigm, this initiative can only come out of discussions between Presidents Putin and Trump, Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping—in which they discuss a New Bretton Woods system which would incorporate a global Glass-Steagall approach. It would incorporate a national bank for each country. It would mean an international credit system to finance long-term international investments in projects of the Belt and Road Initiative.

This would obviously require that there must be a conscious decision to not regard the other countries as competitors or adversaries, but to work together on a win-win basis. For the United States, this would mean that, rather than increasing the military budget, which is already $700 billion and about ten times as big as that of Russia; that would instead mean working together to reconstruct the American economy. It should be obvious to everybody that with the catastrophic fires in California causing unprecedented damage, and simultaneously with much of the East Coast caught by winter storms without any preparation, the lack of infrastructure investment and the lack of water management over decades investing in such infrastructure should absolutely be America’s number one priority.

Map showing projected One Belt, One Road economic development corridors.

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At the beginning of 2018, China already had 22,000 km of fast train lines. By the end of this year, it will have completed the largest part of rail connections of fast trains between Beijing and Hong Kong, which will be 2,230 km. In two years, China wants to have all major cities connected through a fast train system. On the other side, the United States has not 1 km of train line faster than 250 kph, while the Chinese fast trains run at 350 kph. If the United States would cooperate with China to invest in a fast train system in the United States, rebuild the real economy, and then overcome the trade deficit by joint ventures in Latin America, Asia, and especially the development of Africa, we could have a completely different world in the near future.

From the Standpoint of the Future

What we are campaigning for is to develop a completely new set of international relations. In order to do that, we must look at the world from the standpoint of the future. How do we want the world to look one hundred years from now? If we avoid the present dangers, we will have commercially usable fusion energy. We will have, as a result of fusion and the fusion torch technology, limitless energy supplies. Through helium-3 as a fuel in the fusion process, we will have villages on the Moon; we will have industrialization of the Moon and joint missions to Mars and soon to other heavenly bodies.

We will have cooperation—as we saw, I think, just yesterday, with the very successful Roscosmos launching of the Soyuz FG carrier rocket with the MS-10 Progress spacecraft bringing supplies to the International Space Station; and as we saw today, when the Northrop Grumman unmanned Cygnus NG-10 resupply spacecraft was launched on the Antares rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility near Chincoteague, Virginia, to the ISS. This kind of cooperation in space is actually the model for the future relationship among nations.

Look at China, where Xi Jinping has put a tremendous emphasis on the aesthetical education of man, because his goal is to have beautiful minds and souls of the pupils and students, utilizing the tradition of Confucius and the 5,000-year history of China. See other countries, looking back to their own best traditions, as in Russia, as in Africa, as in other places around the world. If the West would also do this, were the Western countries to adopt the ideas of the Schiller Institute and the idea that an aesthetical education is needed for the ennoblement of their populations, we would indeed discover what beauty this universal history has produced already up to this point.

In the United States, as also in Germany, we are in dire need to counter the present collapse of our culture, the drug epidemics, the violence in the schools, the mass shootings, the despair-driven suicides, but especially the increase of violence and perversion in all expressions in our youth culture. We urgently need to look to the ideas of Confucius, of Schiller, and the great minds of all countries, to create a new ennoblement of our populations.

Since I am an optimist, I think the potential is absolutely there, and with President Trump, who has miraculously defied the onslaught of the British Empire coup attempt against him, I think we absolutely can mobilize in a way that will move civilization move into a new paradigm.

But, for that, I need your support. You need to work with us in the United States, and we have to have an absolute mobilization to reach this new paradigm, because mankind is at a crossroads as never before.

Thank you.

WITH HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE

Discussion: Humanity at a Crossroads

This is the edited transcript of the discussion session following Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s presentation to the Nov. 17, 2018 Manhattan Project meeting in New York City. Subheads have been added.

Question: I was going to ask you a question that I’ve been asked, “What does the U.S. have to offer a New Bretton Woods?” But at the end of your talk, you really captured my imagination about culture and what it ought to be like. So, I want to ask you, if you could, to paint for us an image of what culture should be like. Maybe it’s easier to imagine what it’s like to have high-speed rail, how that will change our lives: How should we envision the kinds of cultural relations to expect among people, in the kind of world we’re hoping to bring about?

Zepp-LaRouche: There is a tradition in China of emphasizing aesthetical education, which had been, among some thinkers, very much further inspired by Friedrich Schiller. I was just reading an article by one former dean of the Beijing University about aesthetical education. He said that he concluded that the source of all evil is greed, desire; that people who are driven by desire have wants—they want material things, they want objects—and that becomes more obsessive. And the more obsessive they become, the more they’re willing to step over rules to even become criminal and really become totally evil.

The only thing which really remedies that is beauty, is what he said. This is absolutely true. Once people start to discover the beauty in music, the beauty in Classical music, in poetry, in painting, and begin to discover the lawfulness of what it means to write a Classical composition, either in music, in drama, or in poetry. That captures their mind, and they are so overwhelmed by the beauty which appeals to the senses, but also, according to Friedrich Schiller, something which is a notion of reason. Schiller says, we do not need the sensuous experience of beauty to conclude that it’s beautiful, but beauty is a notion which reason defines, and if then something in the sensuous world coincides with that, it is a pleasure, but you don’t need the sensuous experience first: You know what beauty has to be.

And since beauty is both appealing to the senses and to reason, while we are exposed to it, it is having this aesthetical effect of improvement, it ennobles your emotions; you become, the more you engage in it, a better person and you develop the inner strength to reject the ugliness of the present culture.

Max Planck (left) presents Albert Einstein with the inaugural Max Planck medal for extraordinary achievements in theoretical physics, Berlin, 1929.

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My image of how the culture will be, is like that between the great scientific minds of the past, the relationship between Schiller and Humboldt, Schiller and Goethe, at least for 10 years when they did work on the aesthetical lawfulness of poetry, or between Einstein and Planck. If you look at the letters exchanged by these great minds, they are fighting for ideas, they are discussing the merit of universal principles. And a scientist, or a musician for that matter, or a poet, once they are really into their great art, this becomes so important to them, that they would never chase money on the stock market, they would never try to have as many Porsches as possible. And in a certain sense, you become transformed, and you become a completely different person.

So I think that the future of mankind, when we reach that point, which I think is eminently possible, will be among cultures, that kind of a relationship, like musicians of the world who would all be working in the same orchestra; or people working in the same chorus; that the relationship will be simply based on people relating to the most creative aspect of the other mind; that we will stop being naughty little children, kicking each other, and that we respect the creativity of the other person. This will be when human beings become truly human. I think we are tasting that already.

The Physical Force of Ideas

Question: I have a somewhat half-formed question about dynamics and history, in a sense about the process of the evolution of the human species, what you and Lyndon LaRouche have both discussed, as have Percy Shelley and Rosa Luxemburg. There are historical moments in which there is an unconscious process sweeping people along in a certain direction. These moments require the intervention of a very conscious type of a leadership with an insight, a foreshadowing of the future of where mankind needs to go.

Can talk about this, so we can think about it for the organizing, and think about the physical force of ideas and what kind of process and moment we’re living in right now? What is acting on people, in perhaps an unconscious way? At the same time, the necessity for a very conscious creative intervention that rejects and goes against everything that existed before.

Zepp-LaRouche: What we are now seeing in many parts of the world, in different ways, is a global mass strike process—a global rejection of the old paradigm, seen in the election results in the United States and in several European countries. We may have a fall of the May government on Monday or soon thereafter, and a complete change in France very quickly. This is a tremendous process of rejection of this old paradigm.

We have a completely different type of process in Africa. While there are still terrible problems—many people are trying to flee to Europe, risking drowning in the Mediterranean because of extreme problems of poverty and terrorism—at the same time, a completely different spirit is growing in power. Many leaders of Africa, having been reinforced and assured by China, are defining goals for their countries to be fully industrialized countries in a very short period of time, with a prosperous middle class and top-of-level science. Now, who would have thought that the so-called developing countries, all of a sudden, would say, “We do not want to be second-class nations, but we want to be in an international division of labor, where we will take certain leading scientific areas, and cooperate”?

We now have the potential for the whole world order to change. Most people never thought the Soviet Union would collapse. My husband, Lyndon LaRouche, in 1984 when his proposal for the SDI was rejected by the Soviet government at that time, said that if the Soviet Union continues like that, they will vanish in five years. And nobody—I remember this very well—nobody believed that this would happen. Many people in Russia, also, admit that even in Russia, nobody thought the Soviet Union would ever disintegrate.

Now, we’re talking about something completely different, that the present world system, which was leading, because of geopolitics, to two World Wars—and we’re not out of the danger zone of having a Third World War—if these crazy ideas like what I reported about the National Defense Strategy Commission report, that these ideas and the European army idea, if they prevail, we could have a Third World War.

But what people cannot imagine—but I think it’s eminently something for people to imagine and really understand that this is already happening—is that you could have a new world order, a new system where geopolitics does not exist anymore, where you do not have the kind of competition where you have a zero-sum game in which one wins and the other loses, but that you can actually establish a completely new set of relations among countries, based on sovereignty, on respect for the other social system. That you do not proselytize your idea or your values, but that you actually engage in a productive dialogue where you refer to the best tradition of the other country, and vice versa. Basically you define the relationship from the standpoint of the common aims of mankind: Most people really have no idea that this is a possibility. They have never thought that this is something to be desired.

Annihilation or a New Paradigm?

If mankind is to survive, this is a very serious challenge. Either we make that jump or we blow ourselves up. It is not an academic question; it is not something for the far distant future: Some military in the United States say a war with China is very likely to occur within the next 15 years. There was even a Rand Corporation study that said, it’s better to have the war now because now the casualties would be less than they would be 10 years from now—absolute craziness.

There is also the idea to increase tactical nuclear weapons, to have a “limited” nuclear war. I think that Ted Postol and other similar voices are right: Once you start to use nuclear weapons, it will go all the way. It is the very nature of nuclear war that once you start it, all weapons systems will be used.

We have to really look at this possibility of the annihilation of mankind, to then take from this possibility the absolute energy to say, “No! We want to have a new paradigm, a new phase in humanity.” And I can only say the reference to the 15th century and the Golden Renaissance was a total rejection of all the axioms which existed at the time of the 14th century, a century characterized by scholasticism, by witchcraft belief, by superstition, by the thinking of the Peripatetics.

The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster (Westphalia) by Gerard Terborch, 1648.

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All of that was rejected, then, in the Golden Renaissance. There was a rebirth of the study of Plato, whose writings were brought to Italy at that time on the initiative of Nicholas of Cusa by the Greek Orthodox delegation. Cusa himself said he would write a method of thinking which has never been thought by any man before: And he developed the idea of the “coincidence of opposites,” that you can think of the One as of a higher quality than the Many.

And I think this is a concept that absolutely can be applied to the present situation: That we can think of the One mankind being of a higher order than the Many, being many nations and many cultures, and that we can actually start to think in terms of solutions. If you make a new discovery in a field of science, or if you compose a Classical composition in music, or if you write a poem according to Classical criteria, your mind has to accomplish exactly the same thing: Because if you want to develop a poetical idea, a musical idea, and then apply the principles of thorough-composition by exhausting all the potentials which are lying in that idea, your mind has to do exactly that!

You have to form a concept on a higher level than simply prose. If you want to just write prose, you will never arrive at a poem. In the same way, if you want to make a Classical composition, you have to have that unity of the entire musical idea, at least in germ form, before you set the first note; or, you have to have the first musical idea, having involved all the potentials.

Thinking of this Oneness, thinking of the future, is exactly something you can train your mind to think. Classical music, Classical poetry are the best training for your mind and not stick to the axioms of contradictions, not to stick to the Aristotelian idea that A is either A or B, but that you can actually synthesize the higher quality, which means thinking the new conception.

And I think that that is absolutely something which has been applied to history many times before; I think it was essentially the quality of thinking leading to the Peace of Westphalia, and it is exactly the kind of thinking we need now, to overcome this terrible danger of a new confrontation between the United States, China, Russia, and possibly even the silly Europeans, at least the silly ideas of a European army, which I think is really an outgrowth of this idea of geopolitical confrontation.

So, given the fact that we are celebrating Schiller’s birthday, I can only advise people to read the Aesthetical Education of Man by Schiller, which develops exactly that idea that the future of thinking must belong to the artists, to the scientists, because these are the only people who think in terms of provable principles and not of opinion. And on that level, there is no limit to the generation of new ideas, and that is exactly the kind of thinking we need right now.

The Humbling Awesomeness of the Universe

Question: I appreciate your presentation. One of the things that struck me, when you were talking about the possibilities of a thermonuclear war—the insanity that man might even be capable of doing that, annihilating himself—you mentioned one of the projects could be to use the Moon as a stepping-off spot for exploration of the universe.

I had the fortune to be in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. It’s one of the four darkest spots in the world, and from that area, it appears that you’re right in the Milky Way. They have telescopes there, where you can see easily the rings of Saturn and you can see the Andromeda Galaxy! And I think that when you see that, you are humbled, you’re awed, you’re in mystery. You’re totally in connection with the Divine—to think that we are a little planet in the Milky Way with hundreds of millions of stars, as big as our Sun if not bigger—there’s a certain reverence there.

No country, whether China, or Russia, or Germany, has put people back on the Moon. When you can see the stars, like I’ve been able to see them, it creates a different energy, a different appreciation of life, a different value system. But in our big cities, at night, you never see the sky, you never get beyond more or less the fog of our reality here.

My question is—and I think it’s a good point—how do we get to the Moon, and set up installations there with other countries, and start exploring the universe, and start appreciating our position in the universe? Thank you.

Zepp-LaRouche: I think that this is indeed a very, very good point, because anybody who has looked at the Hubble Telescope pictures sent back from their exploration, this is unbelievable. I watched a movie a while ago, where you see all the different formations of the stars, the planets, which are manifold! They’ve discovered now that there are, to our present knowledge, two trillion galaxies. Now, you say, the Milky Way is already breathtaking, and for sure, it is. But the very idea that our galaxy is only one of two trillion, I mean, that really puts awe into you. And it really demonstrates the point that we, our knowledge as human beings, is really just at our very first baby step about how our universe works.

The good news is that especially Russia, China, and India, apart from the United States, also have very ambitious space programs. The Chinese space program, while it started relatively late, has really leapfrogged, and they have these Chang’e-4 and Chang’e-5 missions later this year going to the far side of the Moon. India also has a very ambitious unmanned space program. All of these countries definitely have the perspective of Mars missions. And the very successful cooperation between Roscosmos and NASA is showing the way. And I think to make the step between the United States and China, to abolish the legislation which forbids the cooperation, would be absolutely key.

If these four nations—the United States, Russia, China, and India—would put all their space research efforts together, and naturally they have already invited many other countries to participate in it; ESA also has a quite significant idea of a new village on the Moon—if you would put together and pool all of these efforts, I think we could really have the kind of absolute revolution in the productivity on the planet. Because, as was the case with the Apollo project, all the breakthroughs made in space had multiple benefits for the economy on Earth. Space medicine, space-related agriculture—everything would be revolutionized from a completely new economic platform, and that is exactly what we have been proposing to the presidents and leaders of these four countries.

I have written a letter to them, and we also have made a campaign that they must take this step of looking at the world from the future, to overcome this present situation.

And I think that, naturally, the first reaction in Russia is, “This is completely impossible; even if President Trump would agree at a summit, let’s say, with Xi Jinping to such an approach, or with Putin, he could come back home and the neo-cons and the neo-liberals and the war party in the Democratic Party, would immediately nix all of that.”

Naturally, that is a danger. But on the other hand, if these four leaders would basically take an approach which would be an effort to not only overcome the bilateral tensions among their countries, in other words, not just look at how to remedy the conflict between the United States and Russia, or the conflict between the United States and China, but to say that they will work together with the idea of uplifting the entire human population out of its present dangers of thermonuclear war, a new financial crash; that these leaders put together a proposition which addresses these dangers for all of humanity, like a New Bretton Woods system would do, they would outflank the opposition because it would cause so much excitement.

Just imagine if the four leaders, or even two leaders, and then maybe later another two, came out with such declarations and say, “We will work together to eliminate the danger of war; we will create a new financial architecture, a New Bretton Woods system which will launch the biggest development industrial program in history, if we work together.” This would shake the world! This would absolutely be feasible, and it would electrify the population, so that the war party in each country—each country has war parties, people who are orthodox military, or basically people who would not agree; it would outflank them! It would absolutely cause excitement and, whatever you called it—the “New Silk Road Spirit” or the “New Paradigm Spirit,” or even the “Buenos Aires Spirit”—would catch on, and it would transform the world.

Our task is to create an environment to support President Trump if he were to go ahead with such a four-power agreement. If he has backing from the American people for such an idea, the chance of it happening is that much more possible. Without broad-based popular support, it becomes more difficult.

I think we are on the verge of exactly accomplishing that. I agree with you: Lifting our eyes to the stars, to the vastness and beauty of the universe, is exactly what frees us from this idea that we are in a limited, in a closed system of a planet with limited resources. That is an oligarchical idea. Looking at the universe at large shows you that we are not in a closed system, but we are just a tiny, tiny blue planet in a huge universe we are just beginning to explore. And if we want to survive as a human species, then that is exactly what we have to do.

Go to China, See for Yourself!

Question: I read about your husband’s having had a couple of famous debates, at some point, which created a great stir. It seems like we’ve got to stir things up!

We need to have debates now and find someone that could really stand up to you, because you’re a strong woman and you have a strong argument. Thank you for hearing me out on this. It’s not that you need to be challenged, but our people are confused and not thinking clearly. We, as a people, need to see the challenge before us.

EIRNS/Alan Yue

Lyndon LaRouche (speaking) crushes economics professor Abba Lerner (seated right) in debate at Queens College, New York, December 1971.

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Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I’m open to debate anybody, so—bring it on! [laughs]

I would actually encourage you to pick out somebody, and let’s work on it. The policy, basically, has been to prevent exactly that, because after my husband successfully won the debate with Abba Lerner at Queens College, in December 1971, our opponents basically decided that they would never allow that to happen again, simply because we would out-discuss any of these opponents.

But I’m perfectly willing to do it, and you are absolutely right, that we need more debate. Tomorrow, there will be a concert, so hopefully there will be a lot of people being touched by the beauty of the Classical music, and as you know, we plan to build more conferences in the coming year, which you can find out about from the people there.

The idea is not to stop this mobilization with the G-20 and whatever happens with these summits, but that we want to really go, in the next several months, at the beginning of the year, into an absolutely, unprecedented outreach, into all pores of society—in the United States, in Europe and also in other countries—to exactly put this idea of a new paradigm on the table. Because, in a certain sense, there is a complete vacuum right now. You will have Trump probably being in a freer position, now that the Mueller investigation is really reaching a certain rock, but it will remain a big fight. With the campaigns we did with Kesha Rogers, with Ron Wieczorek, what we did in several Midwestern states, there is an absolute openness to discuss the ideas of my husband, of LaRouche economics.

I like your idea. I would like to have a debate. Nowadays, you can have actually an international debate among countries in a conference call, from Russia, from China; we could have a debate about that, where we would emphasize our outreach beyond what we’re doing right now. I absolutely agree with you, that we have to put our minds together.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche poses in front of a statue of Confucius.

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Pilgrimages to China, I had advertised already 20 years ago. I made a speech in Washington, I think in 2000 or so, where I said why Americans should go there, and I made a quite good, I must say, presentation, using a lot of documentation of the ancient Silk Road, the Taklamakan Desert, and tried to encourage people to go to China. When I was in China in 2014, I had the pleasure to be invited to visit parts of the ancient Silk Road, from Lanzhou to Dunhuang, and farther west toward the Taklamakan Desert. I actually saw how the railway was built from Lanzhou to Urumqi, which they built in half a year! And I saw how it was built simultaneously, at like 50 places, and a few months later, it was ready. I only saw a little of it—tiny excavations, which later became the tracks.

I can only encourage people: Go to China. It’s not such a big deal. I rode on the maglev test track in Emsland, Germany; this is now, unfortunately, no longer functioning. I also rode on the Chinese maglev from Pudong to Shanghai, from the airport to the city. It’s not such a big deal. I like the Chinese fast train systems much better. They’re faster, at this point—maglev may be in another generation much faster—but they’re so quiet! Anybody who travels on the Chinese fast train will be convinced that that’s the way to go.

So, if you have the possibility, go to China, and spread the word. Because anybody who either was in China, worked in China, is married to a Chinese, they all have a completely different view, and they would never fall for all the lies being spread about China. What China is doing is really the greatest strategic initiative on the planet right now—offering a way to overcome the geopolitical danger—and if more people knew that, it would help a lot.

But maybe we should work on building an international videoconference, and trying to involve as many networks, social media and so forth, and debate this idea! Like the Federalist Papers: “Can Mankind Govern Itself, or Are We Condemned to Continuously Destroying Each Other?” Maybe we should build such an international videoconference. I think that that would be a first step in the direction you are saying.

Educating the Emotions

Question: This question of joy, or this question of happiness, and how that is so connected with scientific progress and economic development. Because when you get a sense that you have a future, which is better than the present, there’s a quality of optimism, in which all kinds of crazy things that you get very obsessed with and that are very grinding and wearing, just totally evaporate.

And then I was reflecting on what occurred in the 1960s in the United States, where we had Kennedy’s commitment to land on the Moon: So, you had spectacular breakthroughs in science, you had the highest standard of living that we’ve had in the United States in many years.

Coupled with that, however, was the vicious onslaught of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. So that, instead of the natural explosion of development and goodness of people, you had instead, a population that was prepared to accept an unnatural entropy, where you reach a condition, as Helga mentioned earlier, which is the forest fires killing we don’t even know how many people; or a situation in New York City where it can take literally six hours to get from New Jersey to New York in a snowstorm—or sometimes, not even in a snowstorm—or if you’re on a subway that breaks down, or when the portal bridge breaks down, and the little man has to come out and hammer it back together after a boat goes through. These are things that it’s actually unbelievable that we’ve tolerated.

I think this quality of education of emotions, what I talked about at our [Nov. 10] Schiller celebration, where, to do the good, even if it’s against your “physical wellbeing” becomes your first impulse and first instinct, is not something that is remote. I think it’s very possible, and I think it’s a quality of a cultural Renaissance combined with the kinds of economic breakthroughs that we have to get.

The Schiller Institute NYC Chorus is just an extraordinary bunch of very, very different, individual people. And the thing that unifies them is their commitment to the music, and I realized at our rehearsal last night from a couple of conversations with members of the chorus, how completely impassioned they are, how personally they take their relationship to this great art, and that is another way, a Cusan way, of creating a kind of unity among people who find themselves diverse.

Example: California Is Disintegrating

Question: You’ve raised California a couple of times, Thursday on the webcast, and again today, so I feel compelled to address this question.

Let me give a quick sense to people who don’t know: In California we now have not “Skid Row,” but “Skid Blocks” all over Los Angeles. There’s a homeless epidemic, which then leads to a typhoid epidemic.

There’s a kind of breakdown there that’s hard to imagine when the state was the leading industrial and scientific state 50 years ago. Today, half the state’s children are in poverty; it’s got the second worst educational system in the country. It’s just been mangled and destroyed.

CC/Cyclonebiskit

Residents evacuating along the Pacific Coast Highway as the Woolsey Fire encroaches on Malibu, California, November 9, 2018.

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These massive fires are so big, and the smoke is so bad, that for the last week we’ve had a smoke red-alert condition in the Bay Area—300 miles away! The smoke has just barreled into the Bay Area. It’s now been 10 days straight—we can’t even send our field squads out. We were out in Livermore two days ago and a press van stopped and wanted to interview us, saying they wanted to know who is so dedicated to their cause that they would actually be out in this smoke, it’s so bad. [laughter]

In our 2007 video on “The Coming Financial Crisis,” we compared it to the Weimar hyperinflation and pointed to Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg as the key figures of a fascist policy in the United States. Schwarzenegger cut all the fire infrastructure, anything that was redundant, anything that you wouldn’t use except under severe, emergency circumstances; every decade, those were cut out of the budget—and they never came back. He was governor [from 2003] until 2010; the crisis hit in 2008, and this massive fire infrastructure was cut.

Your response has been that we’re closer to a breakthrough than ever before. My question to you is to ask you to elaborate on that: being so close to a breakthrough on a new paradigm, but so equally close to chaos and world war.

Western Civilization at a Breaking Point

Zepp-LaRouche: The key will be to discuss this idea about Western values. Because, in my remarks to the Nov. 10 New York Schiller birthday event [see EIR, Nov. 16], I mentioned that you have these mass shootings in the United States, you have already more than 300 this year! If this rate continues, it will be an increase over last year, which was 345 mass shootings in one year. And only the most spectacular ones are still getting coverage.

Germany has many problems but there is still a conscious approach [to forest-fire prevention]. The forests are being managed, dead wood is being cleared out, new colonies of trees are being planted. It’s more like a garden, it’s not just something you leave as it is.

Look at all of these aspects of today’s American society—the lack of infrastructure investment, the lack of forest management, the length of commuting time, the violence in the schools, the opium epidemic—anyone who puts all of this together and does not recognize that this is a collapsing society, is just not in their right mind. And I think a lot of people sense that.

I said, look at what China is doing: They put a ban on hip-hop music, because the lyrics present a degraded image of women and men. China is banning banal quiz shows, because they destroy creativity. I got a very upset answer from somebody who had listened to me, asking, “Are you proposing to get rid of the First Amendment?”

No, I’m not saying that. However, we must recognize that what is being peddled as “Western values,” is not the freedom of expression of your own opinion. But if you have an onslaught where everything goes in terms of culture, and the common good is kicked to the ground and completely neglected, then you must rebel against that. We need an uprising in which people demand the common good. That is the kind of broad discussion which we have to have, and I think that is exactly what we have to generate—”it’s in the air.”

Before the G.D.R. [East Germany] collapsed in 1989, it had probably been clear to the party leaders as early as the spring or summer of that year that the country was completely bankrupt, and they tried to hide it. Then you had this sudden trigger with the visas. Many, many people did not like the fact they could not travel outside the Comecon countries. Within weeks, you had the Monday demonstrations, going from a few hundred, to few thousand, and then to 100,000, and finally there were two million in the streets. That is the kind of process we need. We need a public expression from people who do not want this collapse any more.

Trump had a meeting with some executives from the entertainment industry after one of these shootings. We have to fuse all of these different things together: the people who are upset about losing their properties in California, people who are outraged about the incredible commuting time they’ve been force to endure—we somehow have to get all of these people together. We will be working to accomplish that unity in our organizing efforts in the first three months of the coming year. There will be a unique opportunity to fuse the rejection of these different evils, to lase them all into one effort—that will be key to get the United States into a different mode.

I’m absolutely convinced it can be done. Things come to a breaking point: I don’t think this can continue much longer. I directly addressed the German Industry Association complaints about the Chinese model of state control. If the West cannot take care of its own next generation, of its children and youth, there will be an organic disappearance of the Western system. We have to address the people who can see that and mobilize them.

I think we are closer to a breaking point than you can imagine. Look at the facts as they are. The European Union is in a centrifugal disconnect. I cannot say how quickly that will go, but the speed is accelerating. The financial crash is coming; the cultural collapse is coming. It’s much like, though it’s never the same, not exactly like 1989 in the G.D.R., but it’s the kind of process in which the tension becomes so great that you know a break is coming. It will be our intervention, providing leadership to this by fusing these different elements into one. I think it can be done.

The ‘Choral Effect’

Question: My question is about the choral effect, as we’re on the eve of the concert. Earlier in our rehearsals, Diane [Sare] and John [Sigerson] urged all members to read Schiller’s Song of the Bell and On the Sublime. If we did not develop in ourselves an understanding of what we were presenting, we would fail in our objective to communicate these ideas.

Last night, while we were rehearsing Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, John stopped us and pointed out, with an ironical smile, that the way we were singing at that moment would come across much more like the Nazi version of it. He told us a story about some of that history. Needless to say, we made that correction quite quickly and that was heard, and felt.

Now, for that choral effect, Thursday night—I live 12 miles from Midtown Manhattan, and it took me six and a half hours to get home. I won’t go through the details, but I’ll tell you that I took a bus, a taxi, a long walk, a train, another long walk, a train and then a long, long wait for a cab, before I finally got home. That took six and a half hours. I then slept probably, maybe, about four hours.

And the choral effect was this: It was a long, tough day. One of the things that helped me through this ordeal, was telling those around me, my coworkers, this story. One asked me, “Did you lose it?” And I said, “No. Because I sing.” And, exhausted as I was, I think everyone has experienced this before. That final rehearsal changed everything for me. These things are still amazing to me, how that happens—and it was a joy, even though I was exhausted.

During that Thursday night, the glimpse of chaos was very clear. People were losing it during that horror show of the transit collapse. I was in many different places, traveling through a gauntlet of breakdowns. In that type of circumstance, you really see the need for us to present these ideas to a desperate population, so that they don’t “lose it.” Which is what the guy said, “How did you not lose it?” Well, that wouldn’t have helped.

Zepp-LaRouche: The Choral Fantasy is one of my absolutely most favorite pieces, exactly because it has this idea of the beautiful soul you’re addressing:

Nehmt denn hin, ihr schönen Seelen,

froh die Gaben schöner Kunst. . . .

[Accept then, oh you beautiful spirits

Joyously of the gifts of art. . . .]

That’s exactly the emotion of love, speaking to the divine spark in the other soul, and transmitting this idea of the beauty of great art. So when you do this tomorrow, you should be joyful and happy, because that is exactly the kind of spirit of the new Renaissance. I think the Ode to Joy, the Choral Fantasy—these are the best expressions to know with your soul and with your mind of what this new age has to be, what this new paradigm of civilization can really mean for all of humanity.

From Where Does Our Power Come?

Question: In 1989 you were poised to see something in a way that very few people have ever been poised to see it: the sudden re-creation of a nation, in the case of Germany, even as your husband was in prison, in a situation where, at the time, of course, most of us thought he could very well die there, because of the way in which George Bush ’41, in particular, and others, had sought his demise.

EIRNS/Richard Magraw

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (light coat, with flag) joins the U.S. “Franklin Brigade” at the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

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But, at the same time, the day after the first breech in the Berlin Wall, Lyn, from prison, promoted or advanced the idea of what would be the Eurasian Land-Bridge: It was the seed crystal of what we’re talking about right now. Schiller has this idea that man is greater than his destiny.

And so, I wanted to know if you would say something further about your own, subjective, not merely experience, but the way in which you were able to deploy, using this idea which was completely new—yes, Lyn had referenced these things, and he’s doing this from prison—and at the same time, that we had the problem of that situation of Lyn, we had this capability and then we had to do something—you did—at that time.

I think what’s important for us to think about is, what are we, that we are able to get world leaders of nations [to act]. We don’t have a nation, we don’t have power, in that sense. Where does our power come from, and how was your own situation in that circumstance, how did you think of what you had to do, and then proceed?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, this was a process. If you remember the period of the SDI, we had many discussions with people from the Soviet Union, more than one year of backchannel discussions. Then the rejection coming from Moscow. The announcement of Reagan of the SDI. Lyn’s draft proposal for the relation of the superpowers, one year later. His prediction that the Soviet Union would collapse in five years. Then, he spoke at the Kempinski Bristol Hotel in Berlin in 1988, where he said the German unification will come soon and Berlin will be the capital of a unified Germany, and that Poland should be developed as a model for the transformation of the Comecon. Then Lyn was put in prison. And then all of this development happened.

Bundesarchiv

Erich Honecker (center, in dark suit), with Mikhail Gorbachov on his right, celebrate the 40th (and last) anniversary of the German Democratic Republic, October 7, 1989.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989.

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In my mind, there was never a doubt: We had followed the economic difficulties of the Comecon. In a certain sense, we were the only people, the absolutely only people, who were not surprised when the Wall came down. I’m saying that with full determination. [East German party head Erich] Honecker at the 40th anniversary of the G.D.R., its big military parade, said his famous rhyme, “Sozialismus in seinem Lauf halten weder Ochs noch Esel auf.” (“Socialism in its course will not be stopped by ox or ass.”) [In other words,] the Socialist G.D.R. would be there for 1,000 years. Two weeks later, he was out, and three weeks later the Wall came down.

So, it’s clear that Honecker was quite off, but so was the West. Despite the fact that the unification was the raison d’être of West Germany’s entire postwar statehood, so to speak—they did not believe it. They did not believe it. They published the documents about the 1989, I think it was in 1997, or several years later, much earlier than they normally do these things, admitting that despite the fact that German unity was the primary goal of West German politics, they had not prepared a contingency plan. They just assumed it would not happen.

Schiller Institute

The Paris-Berlin-Vienna Productive Triangle pamphlet.

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So, we had the Productive Triangle concept and one week later, about one week after the Wall had come down, I wrote the first leaflet. I think the headline of it was, “Continue, Beloved Germany.” “Geliebtes Deutschland, weiter so.” It contained the idea that this was the right process. I put in the idea of the development of Poland, and then, we went immediately to the borders, and we talked to all the people in the Eastern states. By January, we had the first pamphlet out, the Paris-Berlin-Vienna Productive Triangle.

In the next year, in 1990, our first trip I think was to Hungary and later to Poland. And this was a big deal. Don’t think that it was such a self-evident thing to travel to meet people in Poland and in Hungary, because while the Iron Curtain was there—and if you had no relatives, like in East Germany—Poland was really an Iron Curtain country, you had no connection. So, to go there, in an uncharted territory was quite something, because we did not know what to expect, we didn’t know what the reaction would be, but we went to all of these places, and proposed the Productive Triangle, including having this huge conference in the spring of 1990 in Berlin, with many, many people from all over Eastern Europe, Russia. The germ of the Eurasian Land-Bridge was laid there. And then, we proposed a conference.

The Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. We immediately extended the Productive Triangle into the Eurasian Land-Bridge and proposed a conference to all countries of Eurasia. It took several years before it actually happened, but I know this conference in 1996 was a result of our proposals, and only China accepted the idea.

So in a certain sense, you can say it took a long time, but, I really think that if you know that what you’re proposing is the right thing, because it corresponds to the laws of the universe, because it corresponds to what is the true character of humanity—well, once you know that an idea is an adequate idea, then you are confident. And that’s why I’m confident that there is the absolute potential that the new paradigm can be realized in the near future.

I don’t say that just to cheer you up, or make you happy, or console you over the terrible circumstances of the United States—that is not why I’m saying that. I really believe it is possible. I’m also saying it’s possible that the world could be blown up, but if I did not believe that the true nature of humanity is to overcome challenges on a higher level, that Leibniz’s idea that a great evil tends to cause a bigger good to emerge, if that were not the proof of the evolution of mankind, we would not have made the tremendous progress that we have. I think that that is the absolute message of the future which we can bring to change and shape the present.

So, I think our history proves that that principle is true.

Aesthetic Education:

Awakening the Mind of the Heart

by Dennis Speed

Painting by Ludovike Simanowiz

Friedrich Schiller

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Nov. 19—When the G-20 meeting opens in Buenos Aires on November 30, will Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fantasia for Piano, Orchestra and Chorus, Op. 80, be the piece chosen for the opening ceremony? It would be well recommended. That piece was the center of the Schiller Institute’s Friedrich Schiller Birthday Celebration Concert, held in New York City on Sunday, November 18.

The Fantasia, Beethoven’s earlier study for what he would later compose as the Ninth Symphony, also referred to as the “Choral” Symphony, would prompt a far different, far more productive political deliberation at that upcoming conference—involving Presidents Putin, Trump and Xi Jinping, among others—than was sadly witnessed at the Nov. 11 Paris Summit. In Paris, despite the gravity and importance of the occasion—the commemoration of the end of World War I, a conflict resulting in 40 million deaths and casualties, followed by another 50 million deaths in the ensuing Great Flu Epidemic of 1918-1920—the pre-pubescent snit of the erstwhile host, President Emmanuel “Micron” Macron, prevented any war-avoidance discussions from taking place.

Dennis Speed, speaking on behalf of the Schiller Institute at the beginning of the Schiller Birthday Celebration Concert, began:

Ludwig van Beethoven once made the statement: “If people understood my music better, there would be no war.” Confucius is sometimes quoted to the same effect. He stated, “When music and courtesy are better understood and appreciated, there will be no war.” One week ago today, an opportunity to commit humanity to a new vision of a world without war was lost. The gathering last week in Paris, on the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, bringing together 60 heads of state, failed to focus humanity on the common aims of mankind, as it might have. Friedrich Schiller’s famous comment regarding the French Revolution, that a great moment has found a little people, need not have been applicable to that occasion. [And] It need not be applicable to this moment, or any future moment in time. Man, as Schiller tells us, is greater than his destiny.

Speed also referred to a passage in The Federalist, No. 1, written by Alexander Hamilton. After the American Revolution successfully challenged and beat the British Empire, Hamilton wrote, in The Federalist, No. 1:

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

EIRNS/Sylvia Spaniolo

Schiller Institute NYC Chorus sings at the Friedrich Schiller Birthday Concert, St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City, Nov. 18, 2018.

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The New York Concert

Many comments received from the more than 400-person audience and the 160-strong orchestra and chorus indicate that the process of dialogue about the nature and function of great ideas in a time of crisis, conveyed through great drama and music, has taken a significant step forward among those continuously involved in this enterprise in recent months.

While political partisanship has made serious discussion in New York City very difficult, the highly diverse audience that assembled at St. Bartholomew’s Church to hear African-American Spirituals, Johannes Brahms’ “Dem dunkeln Schoss,” and the Beethoven Mass in C Major, op. 86 and Choral Fantasia, op. 80, were able collectively to listen to the results—as composed by Beethoven—of a 70-year dialogue involving J.S. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, about the nature and future of not only music, but the nature and future of mankind. It was this “musical masters in dialogue” principle, including Schiller as part of that dialogue, that was presented as the model for what might be recommended, if not replicated as the standard of discourse required in this most divisive time in our nation.

Left: Painting by Joseph Karl Steiler (1820)

Left: Ludwig van Beethoven; right: Johannes Brahms

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One observation, communicated by an audience member the following day, usefully characterized, not merely the recent concerts performed by the Schiller Institute New York City Chorus, but the three-year long succession of such performances given, more than fifteen in all, throughout the city:

One aspect of . . . something which has now become characteristic of these NY concerts . . . is, presenting in a manner that catches the audience off-guard. From the [June 2017 Schiller Chorus performance at the Foundation for the Revival of Classical Culture-sponsored] Carnegie Hall concert, begun with a singer singing her way slowly across the stage, to last night’s provocative opening presentation followed by the quiet entrance of the pianist who simply began playing, a variety of such surprises, sometimes leaving the audience wondering whether or not it should applaud, and rather preferring not to, have been well employed.

Readings from Friedrich Schiller’s works, recited by actor Dikran Tulaine, were interspersed with the musical selections throughout. The program began with Schiller, followed by Bach, then two Spirituals—each separated by the words of Schiller and William Shakespeare, then Brahms’ “Dem dunkeln Schoss der Heil’gen Erde,” and the Choral Fantasia, also preceded by a reading from Schiller. Following the intermission, the entire Beethoven Mass in C Major, prefaced by Schiller, was performed. As always, the Schiller Institute performed at the Verdi tuning of C = 256 cycles, the proper tuning for Classical composition, sometimes erroneously characterized as “lower” tuning.

Remembering Maestro Morss

Importantly, the concert was dedicated to the memory of Maestro Anthony Morss, who had worked with the Schiller Institute for thirty years, before his death in August of this year. Morss, who had served as the Music Director for the New York State Opera Company, the Verismo Opera, the Eastern Opera Theater of New York, the Lubo Opera Company of New Jersey and other companies, was one of the earliest proponents of returning to the Verdi tuning. In 1990 he conducted a concert performance of the Beethoven opera Fidelio at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, which definitively proved that the modern opera orchestra could accommodate the proper tuning.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Anthony Morss in 2014.

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Morss spoke at many Schiller Institute events, and in the 1990s was a vocal defender of the then-incarcerated Lyndon LaRouche, whose writings, particularly LaRouche’s musical writings, Morss closely read. Maestro Morss’ weekly presence at the Schiller Institute choral rehearsals was an essential component of giving the chorus the confidence that an amateur grouping could aspire to, and achieve, the highest standards of musical performance. Conductor John Sigerson’s tribute to Morss at the concert is presented below.

The performance of the Choral Fantasia was a first for the Schiller Institute in the United States. While associates of LaRouche had performed the piece in Detroit in December of 1979, a return to presentation of the piece, one of the best possible introductions to the Ninth Symphony, had only recently become possible. Beethoven himself conducted the piece in its premiere on December 22, 1808, at a fundraising concert that he had organized for himself. Other pieces first performed at the same concert were the Fourth Piano Concerto, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, and sections of the Mass in C Major. Beethoven saved the Fantasia for the concert’s end and improvised the entire piano opening to the piece on the spot. Its final words, “Only when Love and Power are wed / Does Man deserve God’s favor” resonated deeply with the audience, both then, and now.

Several attendees, in messages sent to the Schiller Institute the day after the concert, remarked on the “pin-drop quiet” concentration in the audience throughout the entire first part of the concert. One person commented:

EIRNS/Sylvia Spaniolo

My-Hoa Steger performs Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia.

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The highlights in the music were [the Spiritual,] “Anyhow,” and the Choral Fantasia . . . [Pianist My-Hoa Steger] “aced” it. The difference in the orchestra was clear. You could turn off the sound, and just watch them, and tell it was a great performance . . . The Bach [played by pianist Yuting Zhou] was very well done. The prelude contains the chromatic scale used in the 3-year-later Musical Offering. The fugue features the diminished 7th leap of the same King’s theme. The fugue subject is similar to Handel’s “And with his Stripes” and “Kyrie” from Mozart’s Requiem . . .

And this short message gives another window into the effect of the performance:

Even though we had to slip out between acts (my daughter and I came straight to the concert from a film shoot that ran long, and we very much needed to feed her!)—we all felt so uplifted by both the beautiful music and the uncanny timeliness of Schiller’s poetry.

It was also so moving to witness a volunteer chorus—to think that so much talent lies in so many people in this town, who one likely passes by on the street, in the subway, etc. without knowing. . . . It was astonishing. . . . Last evening’s beautiful show has shifted my perception in ways I am still very much processing.

EIRNS/Sylvia Spaniolo

John Sigerson conducts Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia.

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Bringing Schiller to Americans

Those that have followed the evolution of the Schiller Institute New York City Chorus since it was founded (following the death by strangulation of New Yorker Eric Garner in 2014), or have been part of the chorus’ growth from its first December 20, 2014 performance of excerpts of G.W.F. Handel’s Messiah, know that there are hundreds of people, almost all of them non-professionals, who have been involved in the subsequent performances. Some of the coordinators of the chorus, however, remarked that there seemed to be a greater depth of seriousness in the group than before.

In part, this may have been due to an insistence, beginning five weeks before the concert, that choral members must get to know the up-to-then unstudied Schiller. So, readings of Schiller’s poetry and a few of his prose pieces were organized. Additionally, some of New York’s many cultural organizations became excited to know that a Schiller celebration was occurring, and that the idea of promoting the generalized reading of Classical literature as a way of rejuvenating competent language-usage in general, was being advanced. The idea that an enthusiastic, voluntary return to literacy could be promoted through a fifteen-hundred-person citywide chorus, captured their imagination.

This approach seemed to provoke particularly “deep thinking” on the question of aesthetical education from younger persons in attendance.

One young student wrote:

(Zhi Hui) refers to “wisdom” in Chinese. But the two characters each have different meanings. is intelligence, while means wise. It’s easy to get . Everybody at my school has it. But not everyone has . It’s like a seed buried in one’s heart since we are born, and needs to be inspired and discovered, as we grow up. We call it (Hui Gen). means root, but it’s also reasonable to interpret it as seed, because they each have roots deep in each person’s mind, and they sprout when they feel like it. Some people have , some do not; some can bloom, some do not.

Actually, the word is a Buddhist word, but it has been adopted into Chinese language and has become an important part of us. To better interpret this word, one can read a small story about the difference between people with it and those without it. The story is in the “Succession of Sixth Patriarch.”

This thinking is reminiscent of considerations concerning the differences between thought and language, and the power of the ironic juxtaposition of thought to text, of notes to music, and the higher unity of poetry and music that was required for Beethoven, or any composer, to usefully add anything to the poetry of Schiller. Brahms’ “Dem dunkeln Schoss” uses eight lines taken from Schiller’s “Song of the Bell,” but in an apparently completely different way than they are used in the broader context of that poem, in order to commemorate the death of his great friend, Robert Schumann. In this way, Brahms demonstrates that, while no poem is ever able to actually be translated into another language, no great poem is ever limited to a single meaning.

EIRNS/Sylvia Spaniolo

My-Hoa Steger and John Sigerson, Director of the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus.

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It is also possible to take a section of a poem, find the music contained within it, and voice that music in the service of purposes not anticipated by the poet, but yet in full accordance with the substance of the Idea for which the poem’s words are but a shadow-echo.

The conceptual resonance of the chorus was notable in the complete Beethoven Mass in C Major, a piece infrequently performed, which is, however, an essential work for understanding his spiritual development. One listener remarked:

From a purely musical point of view I found the performance to be astounding. There are simply no words to describe the feelings that I had regarding Beethoven’s music. The interpretation was flawless, although a bit on the scholarly and spiritual/religious side. The last most likely being influenced by the spirituality of Schiller’s work.

Indeed.

As has happened before in the Schiller Institute Chorus performances of this piece, the last section, the Agnus Dei’s “Dona nobis pacem” brought together all that had been presented through the entirety of the program. Soloists Indira Mahajan, Linda Childs, Everett Suttle, and Costas Tsourakis received many compliments from the audience, many of whom have seen them perform at other of the Schiller concerts, or in other musical programs around the city.

EIRNS/Sylvia Spaniolo

Diane Sare and John Sigerson, co-directors of the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus.

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The conductors, John Sigerson and Diane Sare, have succeeded in creating a core ensemble of 70-80 singers, all of whom are increasingly clear that the mission of the chorus is to destroy the idea of “entertainment” as the primary focus of art. It is the re-creation of the intent of the composer, as conveyed through the medium of Chorus, which is the mission of the chorus. Re-creation of great ideas, whether in scientific or in artistic experiment, not entertainment, is the cultural backbone, the heartbeat, of social change in our time. Their participation in these artistic experiments qualifies the members of the chorus to “lift ev’ry voice” of deliberation on all things, including the immediate direction of this country as a force for good in history, to the world-historical stage, rather than petty gossip.

It is the aesthetical education of the population and its Presidential process that is the indispensable mission which the Schiller Institute has taken another important step forward in performing. That is not the pursuit of entertainment, but, rather, the pursuit of Happiness, as the Founders would have understood that principle.

Tribute to

Anthony Wentworth Morss

by John Sigerson

Our special thanks go out to the family of the late Anthony Wentworth Morss for helping to make this concert possible.

Tony Morss, who passed away on August 6 at age 87, worked with the Schiller Institute for almost three decades. In 1990 he pioneered a performance of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio at the Verdi tuning of C = 256 Hz, and was a tireless campaigner for returning to that standard. Following his retirement as director of Verismo Opera, he joined the bass section of our chorus, and was a source of joy and inspiration to all of us.

Tony was a beautiful soul, in exactly the way Schiller describes this in his essay “On Grace and Dignity.” Schiller writes there:

We call it a beautiful soul, when moral sentiment has assured itself of all emotions of a person ultimately to that degree, that it may abandon the guidance of the will to emotions, but never run the danger of being in contradiction with its own decisions. Hence, in a beautiful soul individual deeds are not properly moral, rather, the entire character is . . .

It is thus in a beautiful soul, that sensuousness and reason, duty and inclination harmonize, and grace is its epiphany. . . . All movements which issue from her grace become light, soft, and yet vigorous. Merry and free shall the eye gleam, and therein emotions glow. From the gentleness of the heart shall the heart receive a grace such as no pretense can feign. There shall be no tension seen in gestures, no coercion in willful movements, for the soul knows of none. The voice shall become music and move the heart with the pure flow of its modulations. Architectonic beauty may arouse pleasure, admiration, and amazement, but only grace can delight.

Truly, Tony Morss was such a delightful person, and the world is a better place for his having graced it.

FROM THE CONCERT PROGRAM

The Name of Freedom Is Beethoven

From the program of the Schiller Institute’s Friedrich Schiller Birthday Celebration Concert, held at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City on Sunday, November 18.

Ludwig van Beethoven

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What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

—Beethoven to Prince Lichnowsky, 1806

Speaking on her weekly webcast on November 8, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche proposed an optimistic, emerging possible course of action for contemporary world affairs, “of . . . where must mankind be 100 years from now”:

This could be a period where, if things go the right way, we will have a breakthrough in thermonuclear fusion, we will be able to use it commercially, and that way we will have energy security and raw materials security, because you can, through the fusion torch method, take all waste, separate it into isotopes, and create new raw materials. And by that time, we will already have the first step in the direction of villages on the Moon, international cooperation in space, and just humanity growing up and becoming an adult species, based on mankind’s nature as a creative species. [See EIR, Nov. 16, 2018, p. 31.]

We stand upon the threshold of not merely a new era for humanity. We are, as of the early twenty-first century, no longer earth-bound; we are “free to leave” the planet. Yet, in a larger sense, we are not merely free to leave—we are not free unless we leave. We are governed by what scientist Krafft Ehricke termed an “extra-terrestrial imperative” to do so. We now have knowledge, thanks to the successive Hubble Ultra Deep Field, Extreme Deep Field, and subsequent observations of the past decade, that beyond our own galaxy more than 200 billion-plus galaxies exist in the known universe. And in our own Milky Way galaxy, there are over 100 billion solar systems.

What mankind now chooses to do, for better or for worse, changes the universe itself.

Contrary to those that assert that mankind is a scourge upon the Earth, “just another species” whose time has come and gone, the actual mission for which the human race was created, is only now come within our physical capacity to explore. Schiller’s “An die Freude” (To Joy), famously set by Beethoven, tells us:

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!

Diese Kuss der ganzen Welt!

Brüder, über’m Sternenzelt

Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.

Be embraced, ye millions wonder!

Take this kiss throughout the world!

Brothers!—O’er the stars unfurl’d

Must reside a loving father.

Our joy, is to discover the meaning of human life, and the meaning of life for the universe as a whole. “To this account, every advance in physics and related knowledge, must impel us to re-examine the creative process’ role in the creative features of classical fine art, as at the same time we occupy our attention with the most profound and simplest of the crucial facts of physics qua physics,” said Lyndon LaRouche in his 1989 essay, “Beethoven as a Physical Scientist.”

Today’s program presents the audience with two of Beethoven’s works, the Mass in C Major, op. 86 composed in 1807, and the Fantasy in C Minor for Piano, Orchestra and Chorus, op. 80, the “Choral Fantasy,” composed in 1808. It was first performed in December of 1808, together with the premieres of Symphony No. 5, Symphony No. 6, the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, and the “Gloria” and “Sanctus” sections of the Mass in C Major on today’s program. Beethoven, it should be noted, improvised the entire piano fantasy section on that occasion.

Both the Choral Fantasy and the Mass in C are examples of the “musical masters in dialogue” practice which had come into existence with the work of J.S. Bach. Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and later Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, most notably, advanced music through a dialogue that spanned 150 years. This is especially audible in the “C Minor Series,” beginning with Bach’s A Musical Offering, after which all of the above mentioned composers wrote works commenting on Bach’s treatment of the so-called “royal theme” of that work. In the case of the Mass in C, the commission for this work came from the same Esterhazy family that had employed Beethoven’s one-time teacher and Mozart’s friend, Franz Joseph Haydn, for many years, during which Haydn was in the habit of composing a Mass per year. “May I just say that I will hand over the Mass to you with great trepidation, as Your Serene Highness is accustomed to having the inimitable masterworks of the great Haydn performed.” Beethoven intensely studied Hadyn’s work, as is evidenced in his sketch books. Beethoven premiered portions of the Mass in a concert on December 22, 1808, 210 years ago.

There are several notable, and clearly audible parallels between the choral theme of Choral Fantasy and the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, often referred to as “the Choral Symphony.” (Beethoven was the first major composer to include voices in a symphonic context.) Authorship of the words for the Choral Fantasy is disputed; poet Christopher Kuffner and Fidelio final librettist Georg Friedrich Treitschke are both cited. The sentiment of those words, however, echoes that of Schiller’s “To Joy”:

Großes, das ins Herz gedrungen,

blüht dann neu und schön empor.

Hat ein Geist sich aufgeschwungen,

hallt ihm stets ein Geisterchor.

Nehmt denn hin, ihr schönen Seelen,

froh die Gaben schöner Kunst:

Wenn sich Lieb und Kraft vermählen,

lohnt den Menschen Göttergunst.

Great ideas, having penetrated our heart,

Then blossom anew, more beautiful still;

Once a mind has vaulted upward,

A spirit-chorus always echoes him in song.

So, then, you beautiful souls, receive

Gladly the gifts of beautiful Art!

Only when Love and Power are wed,

Does Man deserve God’s favor.

“Thinking like Beethoven” means to accept the idea that the task of human creativity is to never demean or subordinate itself to actions or behavior that is not always in the service of the elevation of mankind to its true place in the universe—the contemplation of and celebration of the universal harmony. The name of Freedom is Beethoven, is Schiller, is Joy. It is in the pursuit of that Happiness that we seek to re-create for you these thoughts of Beethoven today.

FROM THE CONCERT PROGRAM

Greetings from Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Founder and Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute

From the program of the Schiller Institute’s Friedrich Schiller Birthday Celebration Concert, held at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City on Sunday, November 18.

Thank you for the opportunity to send you a short message on the occasion of the 259th birthday of Friedrich Schiller. Schiller was convinced that one of the most important questions of his time was the aesthetical education of Man, the idea of the moral improvement through the participation in and study of great Classical art.

Now, if that was an important question during the time of Friedrich Schiller, it is so much more important today, where the trans-Atlantic world of Western Europe and the United States are in a deep moral crisis, and profound cultural collapse.

Only last week, a U.S. Marine Corps Veteran killed 12 people and wounded many others in California, but this was not an isolated event. Already this year, there have been more than 300 mass shootings in the United States. There have also been 128,000 suicides of veterans returning from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Obviously, all of the mass shootings and suicides have not been committed by veterans, but are increasing overall, so that all of these things taken together indicate a tragic pattern of devastation.

It is convenient, and perhaps comfortable, to merely place the blame on guns and the NRA, but if you look at cases, like that in Florida where a 15-year-old strangled his mother, disposed of the body and then staged a robbery with two friends to cover for the crime, and was gleeful about his lying 911 call, or the case in Germany where you had a group of 10-year-old children molesting another 10-year-old in the presence of four teachers who didn’t even notice, one must admit that there is a very deep problem of having a depraved view of humanity.

Children in the West are bombarded by violence and pornography in their daily lives, and it is made worse by easy access to violent video games which glorify killing and destroy the normal human emotions of compassion and empathy toward other human beings. Most movies produced today have almost no plot, but are displays of absolute barbarism, made lower than barbarism because we have arrived here from a previously more elevated state.

By contrast, Chinese President Xi Jinping in a letter exchange with eight senior professors of the Academy of Fine Arts, wrote that aesthetical education as is crucial for the mental health of the youth, because it helps to develop “beautiful minds.” In China this tradition of “aesthetical education” goes all the way back to Confucius. It is interesting to consider that President Xi has stated his intent to work to eradicate poverty worldwide by 2050, and in China by 2020, while at the same time, in New York City, 114,000 public school students are homeless, and little is being done to remedy the situation.

One of Schiller’s most important contributions was his emphasis on the need for the aesthetical education. And in the famous “Aesthetical Letters” he laments the depraved condition of the population of his time, and he said, “Where should this change come from, when the leading institutions are degenerate, and the masses are in a barbaric condition?” His answer: “Through Classical art.”

Schiller was convinced that beauty is a necessary condition of Man, that without access to beauty, which gives him the key to the most inner movements of his soul, Man cannot fulfill his entire potential. This led him to place a heavy demand upon the artist. He said, before the artist can dare to move his audience, he must ennoble himself to the highest ideal of Mankind, and he only must talk about important, universal subjects which are able to uplift Man to the highest potential of his humanity.

It is my view that only if we reinstate a beautiful image of Man and celebrate this in the highest forms of Classical music, Classical poetry, beautiful painting, that we can get Mankind back its dignity. And therefore, at this joyful occasion of Schiller’s birthday, in a very tumultuous environment, and very tumultuous situation, the world is more in need of a Classical Renaissance than ever. So join the Schiller Institute, and the chorus, and let us create a better human civilization in the near future.

Excerpts from Schiller Birthday Celebration Concert Program

Reading from Schiller (All readings by Dikran Tulaine)

The artist is indeed the son of his time, but bad for him, if he is at the same time its pupil or even yet its favorite. . . . How does the artist preserve himself before the corruption of his time, which surrounds him from every side?. . . . He despises its judgment. He glances upwards towards his dignity and the law, not downwards towards Fortune and need. . . . (If you) give the world, upon which you act, the direction towards the good, so will the calm rhythm of time bring its development.

—Friedrich Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 9

Bach: Prelude and Fugue in A minor

Yuting Zhou, piano

Anyhow Arr. Evelyn LaRue Pittman

Schiller Institute NYC Chorus

Diane Sare, Director

Readings from Schiller and Shakespeare

Not marble, nor the guilded momuments Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.

—William Shakespeare, Sonnet #55

Humanity has lost its dignity, but art has saved it and preserved it in meaningful stone; the truth lives on in illusion, and from the copy, the original will be restored.

—Friedrich Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 9

Hold On! Arr. Eugene Thamon Simpson

Schiller Institute NYC Chorus

Diane Sare, Director

Reading from Schiller, Singer’s Farewell

Springtime wakes, the warming meadows spring To cheerful life, stirred youthfully to motion, The heavens ring, as choirs gaily sing, The airs perfumed by nectar’s fragrant potion, And young and old emerge, their souls rejoicing To feast with eye and ear and glad emotion. Springtime flees! To seeds shall blooms be turning, And all that’s come shall e’er be thence returning.

Brahms: Dem dunkeln Schoss

Schiller Institute NYC Chorus

John Sigerson, Director

Reading from Schiller

When grief gnaws at our heart, when melancholy poisons out solitary hours: when we are revolted by the world and its affairs: when a thousand troubles weigh upon our souls, and our sensibilities are about to be snuffed out underneath our professional burdens—then the theater takes us in and within its imaginary world we dream the real one away; we are given back to ourselves; our sensibilities are reawakened; salutary emotions agitate our slumbering nature, and set our heart pulsating with greater and vigor. Here, the unfortunate, seeing another’s grief, can cry out his own: the Jolly will be sober, and the secure will grow concerned. The delicate weakling becomes hardened into manhood, and here the first tender emotions are awakened within the barbarians breast. And then at last—O Nature! what a triumph for you!—Nature, so frequently trodden to the ground, so frequently risen from the ashes! when man at last, and all districts and regions and classes, with all his chains of fad and fashion castaway, and every bond of destiny rent asunder and then becomes his brother’s brother with a single all embracing sympathy, resolved once again into a single species, for getting himself and the world, and reapproaching his own heavenly origin. Each takes joy in others delights, which then, magnified in beauty and strength, are reflected back to him from 100 eyes, and now his bosom has room for a single sentiment, and this is: to be truly human.

—Friedrich Schiller,

Theater Considered as a Moral Institution

Beethoven: Choral Fantasia, Op. 80

My-Hoa Steger, piano

John Sigerson, Director Schiller Institute NYC Chorus and Orchestra

Reading from Schiller

Love alone . . . is a free emotion, for her pure source flows from the seat of freedom, from our divine nature.

Beethoven: Mass in C Major, Op 86

John Sigerson, Director Schiller Institute NYC Chorus and Orchestra

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Missed Opportunity in France, Huge Potential at G-20

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump (center) listening to French President Macron—instead of speaking with Russian President Putin as he had hoped—at the Elysée Palace in Paris, Nov. 11, 2018.

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This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s November 15, 2018 New Paradigm interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche by Harley Schlanger. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute, and I’d like to welcome you to this week’s webcast. It’s Nov. 15, 2018. As the dust is beginning to settle from the U.S. midterm elections, we’re seeing an extraordinary and fascinating picture opening up, one of both opportunity and danger.

I think we can start with what was a lost opportunity: The silly efforts of [French Prime Minister Emmanuel] Macron to put his ego ahead of anything else at the Armistice commemoration, the 100th anniversary of the Armistice ending World War I. Helga, this was an opportunity for Trump and Putin to speak to each other, and Macron just seemed to brush that off for his own purposes. What are the deeper implications of what happened in Paris on Nov. 11?

Paris: Another Lost Opportunity

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: It really shows what happens when vanity intervenes, because obviously, the commemoration of the end of World War I would have been a perfect opportunity. I think altogether 60 world leaders were present, providing the opportunity to reflect on why the First World War happened, how it happened, and why the world sleepwalked into a great tragedy that ruined the entire 20th century, because it led to World War II. So, it would have been a perfect opportunity to think about that, to speak about that, and to make real pledges that this should never, ever happen again to humanity.

That opportunity was lost. Even the beginning preparations for a summit between Trump and Putin were nixed by Macron, who all of a sudden asked Russia and the United States not to distract from the big celebration, and to basically not have their summit. So, there was only a very short discussion between Putin and Trump. It was very clear, as some Russian commentators, in my view correctly noted, that the event was all theatrics to create a stage for Macron to deliver his big speech.

If you look at the policies coming from Macron, who is falling in the polls like a stone, it is quite remarkable. Because he said that Europe should become more independent from the dollar, the euro basically should be strengthened and be less dependent on the dollar, but he also called for a European army, outside of NATO; and then, his Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire a day or so afterwards, said Europe should be an empire—naturally a peaceful empire, but an empire to match the other empires like the United States, and Russia, and China. Macron actually said a European army is necessary to defend against Russia, China and the United States!

German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

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So this is obviously quite something, and it reveals the backward, old paradigm thinking of these people, which was unfortunately then backed a day or so later by [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel in a speech to the European Parliament, also demanding, sometime in the future, a European army, and she contradicted herself a zillion times by saying it should be inside NATO or within the context of NATO, or as a supplement of NATO.

In any case, this idea that Europe must become an empire, or actually is an empire, this is not a new idea. This was already discussed by Robert Cooper who is still an active figure in the European Commission; he was the advisor to Lady Ashton when she was the foreign minister of the EU, and he already several years ago stated that the EU is the largest empire ever, and it will increase and add new members without limits. This is really megalomania.

CC/Raul Mee

UK Prime Minister Theresa May.

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If you look at the real condition of Europe, it’s an empire full of holes, like Swiss cheese. After [UK Prime Minister] Theresa May announced that she had a deal worked out on Brexit [Britain’s exit from the European Union] with the EU, her government began to fall apart. It might actually fall and then there would be new elections called. We have to see how this shapes out. But that’s not the only construction site so to speak, in the EU.

I think it’s really revealing, and this is really terrible! Empires were the reason for World War I—it was not nation-states, it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, the German Empire, and the British Empire. And especially now, if you build up Europe as an empire against Russia and China and the United States, this is exactly the kind of old thinking that must be overcome. And this is why I said that the most urgent question is to overcome geopolitical thinking, thinking in blocs, and that we must move very rapidly to a new paradigm, which starts with the one humanity and works for the common aims of mankind, and not that kind of backward-oriented thinking as expressed by Macron and Merkel.

Schlanger: It’s quite ironic, in the sense that in Macron’s attack on “nationalism,” to look at what he is putting forward as an alternative—empire! And as you pointed out, empires, especially the British Empire, have been the biggest cause for wars in the last two centuries.

Now, in talking about the collapse of Europe, you mentioned Brexit: But we’re seeing all these forces moving in different directions. Let’s take the case of Italy, where the EU has been trying to force Italy to adhere to policies which haven’t worked and won’t work, and there continues to be a reaction to that.

Italy Bucks the EU System

Zepp-LaRouche: The present Italian government, Finance Minister Giovanni Tria and Undersecretary of Economic Development Michele Geraci were very firm in saying that they will not capitulate to EU pressure, that the EU Commission’s idea that Italy should reduce its budget deficit to only 0.8% would be economic suicide. Even the Maastricht rules say that the budget deficit should not be more than 3%, so what the Italian government actually proposed was a 2.4% increase in the deficit. Italy is below the Maastricht criteria. Obviously, this is an obsession by the EU, which the Italians, correctly—absolutely correctly—reject.

When an interviewer from BBC asked Geraci why Italy was not behaving as the Greeks and Spanish and Irish, who did follow the EU austerity prescriptions, he said: Well, they were suffering, and Italy does not want to continue the mistakes and suffering of these countries, and this is why we need an investment program, and you need economic growth and not this kind of austerity.

There is a big debate now going on in the European Central Bank, the European Commission and other places, about what the EU should do. Because if they escalate the hard line against Italy, they may actually leave Italy with no other choice than to leave the euro, and possibly even to leave the European Union. On the other side, if the EU capitulates, and lets the Italians do as they propose, then naturally the EU iron fist is weakened and other countries in Europe may say, “OK, if the Italians can go for growth, so can we.”

So, the EU is really in a dilemma. Considering the situation with the Brexit, the British crisis, and the Italian-EU quarrel, the EU has no unity, and it has no solidarity either, so this is a very dramatic situation.

Schlanger: And you see Macron and Merkel sort of leaning on each other, the way two drunks do in order to stand up. What’s the situation in Germany? There’s a selection process under way for a new leader [of Chancellor Merkel’s] Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. There is all kinds of speculation about Merkel, and there’s an emergence of an extremely dangerous tendency around the Greens, of people who reject Merkel, suggesting that the CDU should align with the Greens. This is certainly not a good development, is it?

CC/Michael Lucan

Friedrich Merz

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Will Germany Get the Merz Treatment?

Zepp-LaRouche: No. Friedrich Merz, who has been out of politics for 15 years or so, working for all kinds of firms—recently for BlackRock as its European presidium spokesman—is the head of the Atlantic Bridge. In other words, he has a completely neo-con, neo-liberal profile. And he has not said anything which would cause you to think that he has any new ideas for the real economy.

In the past, he was against the Greens, but now he says, “Oh no, the Greens have changed, they’re now such a bourgeois party, they’re so liberal”; and he can imagine entering a coalition with the Greens if he were to be CDU chairman and possibly Chancellor. That would be a catastrophe, because Germany has already exited nuclear energy, and the Green policy is to also go out of coal, to go for the decarbonization for the world economy. Were Germany to rely on energy sources of such low energy-flux density as wind and solar, this highly industrialized country could not function. Already, energy prices have gone through the ceiling. And a CDU-Green coalition, with some Free Democratic Party participation possibly added—I mean, this is really terrible!

It goes completely against the interests of Germany. And the Greens are also on a rabid anti-Russia, anti-China profile. I have not heard from Merz himself as to what his policies are on Russia and China, or the New Silk Road, but this Green element is really a disaster.

The only good thing I can say is that many other countries in Europe are absolutely pursuing cooperation with China; they want to be part of the New Silk Road. And even some German states, like Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state, but also Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and also Bavaria, are absolutely for cooperation with the New Silk Road.

This remains a big fight. Much depends on the momentum for a new paradigm, and that is clearly left to the Schiller Institute to organize and escalate. At least in Germany, we are the only force really fighting for cooperation with the New Silk Road.

Schlanger: And while we have this dangerous attachment to imperial geopolitics coming from “Old Europe,” you might say, very promising diplomatic and economic initiatives continue to come forward from the East. There’s an ASEAN and East Asia Summit that just took place, and discussions between the U.S. and China appear to be back on track, after a bit of a detour. What can you tell us about these developments?

Promising Upcoming Summits

Zepp-LaRouche: You’re speaking about the ASEAN Summit in Singapore [Nov. 11] and East Asia Summit in Singapore [Nov. 14-15], and the upcoming APEC summit in Papua New Guinea [Nov.17-18]. Almost all of the leaders from Asia will be participating, and many are going from the Paris commemorations to these summits. There were many, many bilateral meetings on all Asian issues; the basic focus was to continue to work towards a multipolar world.

kremlin.ru

Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe meeting in Singapore, to discuss the Korean situation, territorial disputes between Russia and Japan, and a formal post-World War II peace treaty, Nov. 14, 2018.

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They made a new fair-trade agreement among all Asian countries, which is quite different from Obama’s Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). They agreed on a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea, according to which all conflicts will be solved through dialogue and diplomacy and not any other way, not any unilateral court suits or military options—so this is very good. And I think there were discussions, for example, between Putin and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, that they will resume their negotiations on a peace treaty between their two countries, which would be very, very important. The Korean situation was also a strong issue.

So, I think this is all moving in a quite different direction, and it just proves that the real dynamic is in Asia.

We are now less than two weeks or so away from the G-20 summit, scheduled for Nov. 30 to Dec. 1 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I think that the opportunity given by the twin summits of Trump and Xi Jinping, and Trump and Putin on the sidelines of this G-20 is a focus.

I do not expect the G-20 as such to come out with some grandiose plan, because there are many different elements in it, but I think the increased weight of the Asians within the G-20 should tend to make that institution a more important one. We from the Schiller Institute have said that the danger of a financial collapse is absolutely still present. The latest figures are that every day, $5 trillion worth of assets are floating around the globe, but only 2% pertain to physical economy; 98% are purely speculative and monetarist. Already in 1998, President Clinton had warned of these global financial streams, saying that this situation represents a mortal danger, and he had demanded a “new financial architecture” at that point, which was probably what triggered the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Since then the asset flows have grown to $5 trillion, and this is the Damocles sword which is hanging over us. So, a new financial architecture would really be the subject for the G-20. But we are pushing for at least the leaders of the United States, of Russia, of China, and India, and possibly Japan, that they should put a New Bretton Woods credit system on the agenda, because this would be actually the forum which could decide that.

A New Bretton Woods credit agreement would really remove the danger of a financial collapse, and it would provide the kind of cooperation among nations to actually address all the problems—the financial crash, the lack of development, poverty, reconstruction, refugee crisis—all of these things could be addressed. The Schiller Institute is in a mobilization, and I invite you, our viewers, to join us and help us to get this kind of discussion for a new kind of credit system on the agenda, before it is too late.

Schlanger: Well, I think an important step in that direction was the shift we saw coming from two of the President’s spokesmen on the negotiations with China: Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said at a conference that they’re very hopeful that the talks with China and the United States can get back on track. This is something that President Trump has talked about: the importance of his great chemistry with Xi Jinping.

Gage Skidmore

Senator Marco Rubio.

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But at the same time that this announcement came out, there was an escalation again from the neo-conservatives in the Congress, led by little Marco Rubio, the Senator from Florida and Wall Street. Rubio and others put out reports very similar to what we’re seeing from the European Union: that China is a danger, it’s a threat, a predator, and we have to be prepared to stop China. This is exactly what you’re talking about, Helga, when you’re talking about “sleepwalking into war,” isn’t it?

China Is Thriving on Innovation

Zepp-LaRouche: Oh, yes. I have said this in the past, but I’ll say it again: Nothing in the policy, and actually in the history of China, but especially the policy of the last 40 years, gives any credibility to the alleged aggressive nature of Chinese intentions—absolutely to the contrary. And that is why an increasing chorus of countries from Latin America, from Asia, from Europe, from Africa, praises the kind of win-win cooperation they have as a result of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. And this idea of Chinese aggression is just not true! It’s just a lie, which is peddled because some of these geopolitically thinking people want to keep to their privileges and they think that that requires keeping China down.

Now, if you want to have World War III, that may be possible, but nobody will survive such a war.

I want people to think about it: The United States has 325 million people. China presently has almost 1.4 billion people, and that was a subject at the recent China International Import Expo in Shanghai. China has presently already a relatively wealthy middle class of 300 million people, and wants to have 600 million middle-class people ten years from now. This is an enormous market, and obviously, it will not stop there, but the tendency will be to just make China an all-around prosperous country. That was the policy outlined by President Xi Jinping at the 19th National Congress of the CPC in October last year, that by 2050 China wants to be a fully developed, modern industrialized, democratic, harmonious, culturally progressive country, which means it will have long overcome poverty and will probably have 1.5 billion or more people, who will be in a middle class!

China is putting the emphasis on innovation and—as some people who have been working in China and know the situation have noted—it is just not true that China is copying Western technologies and that is what it depends on. China has already bypassed the West because of its focus on innovation in several fields, one of them, most obviously, is the fast train system, which is an excellent, excellent development, which is not matched by anything in the West. It is entirely Chinese engineered. I could add that China is the most advanced in fusion research, it has a very ambitious space program, and has an absolute focus on the excellence of its students.

The idea that you can suppress a country which has a 5,000-year history, which has been the leading force—at least until the 15th century, and then periodically also after that—and now is on this course, and it has the largest population. Maybe it’s going to be surpassed by India at some point, but it’s just an extremely large population—the idea that you can suppress such a country and stop it from developing, it’s just ludicrous, and really reflects the wrong thinking.

What China has offered is a great-power relationship of win-win cooperation among great nations. That is what it wants. As it has stated very many times, it is not China’s wish to bypass the United States as the dominant power. This is not the intention of China. China wants its sovereignty to be respected, and wants the principle of noninterference and acceptance of other countries’ social systems. Relating positively to China’s offers is a benefit for everybody!

This absolutely lying China-bashing, which has taken a new degree of aggressiveness with these reports coming from various study groups and commissions—you mentioned Rubio—is really just counterproductive, and it confuses the population, which all of a sudden thinks China is a big threat and it is not. I really want to emphasize this, that this China-bashing is really a lie! It’s a completely invented narrative, to cover for the geopolitical intentions of those who spread it.

Schlanger: Helga, speaking about win-win, making it a little controversial here, for a second, we have an opportunity to replace the partisan polarization in the United States—typified by people like Representatives Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters and others, who were saying that the midterms were all about impeaching the President—with the possibility of cooperation on national interests, particularly on infrastructure, credit policy. Are we moving in that potential direction in the United States, and if so, how do you see that unfolding?

The Democratic Party After the Midterms

Zepp-LaRouche: Following the midterms, it is very clear that the Democratic Party has two completely different tracks.

There is the absolutely hysterical Obama/Hillary Clinton tradition that is expressed by such people as Representatives Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff, which is pushed by Wall Street, by the Washington Post and the New York Times, all of whom are saying that the key task of the Democrats right now is to protect the Mueller investigation, the so-called Russiagate, to protect the FBI, to protect the Department of Justice. Russiagate has long been proven to be “British-gate,” to be the collusion between the Obama Administration, the intelligence heads, and the British government to make a coup against, first, the presidential candidate Trump and then the elected American President Trump.

That investigation is still ongoing, and one can only hope that President Trump sooner or later—better sooner—declassifies all the documents pertaining to Christopher Steele and all the Department of Justice officials and FBI and CIA officials who were in collusion with the British on this coup. And therefore, it is quite ludicrous for any Democrats to say that this is the most important.

Now, fortunately, our own reading is that even in the Democratic Party, there are many who don’t like Trump but are saying that they are sick and tired of the continuous bickering and scandal-mongering, and that they believe now is the time to focus on the real economy. Representing that second faction, Rep. Nancy Pelosi indicated, for example, that she would be willing to cooperate with Trump on a bipartisan level for infrastructure and other urgent questions. And naturally there is a big rebellion against her in the Democratic Party.

But I think the chances that reason will prevail, and that the Mueller operation is shut down and discredited as being part of this British coup, absolutely exist.

Roger Stone proven to have told the truth to the House Intelligence Committee.

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The online paper Daily Caller reported that Roger Stone’s lawyer—Stone being a key focus of the Mueller investigation—was able to prove that Stone was telling the truth before the House Intelligence Committee last year when he said that he did not speak to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, to get the information about the upcoming leaking of WikiLeaks of the Podesta emails, but that his source was Randy Credico, who had then subsequently denied that before a grand jury. Stone’s lawyer was able to get an old phone, which Stone stopped using after 2016, and the messages between Credico and Stone were reconstructed and it’s very clear that he was the source for Stone. So that should help Stone’s situation greatly.

Why the Schiller Institute?

Schlanger: Helga, to conclude, you founded the Schiller Institute in large part because your sense was that the only way to get out of the mud-slinging toxicity of this kind of politics, is to uplift the image of man, and to make this a central theme in any political activity or organizing activity. This was brought into the U.S. campaign by Kesha Rogers, with her discussion of the importance of developing the creative potential of every child. I think it’s important—given what we’re seeing with the opportunities now, the potential, but also the dangers—to just reiterate why you created the Schiller Institute.

Zepp-LaRouche: Let me just add something I should have said before, concerning the Democrats’ debate over whether to go in the direction of continuous hysterical attacks on Trump, or you engage in a bipartisan—or better—above-party cooperation? One urgent, urgent reason for choosing cooperation is the unprecedented fires in California, where it’s now very clear that the green policies of not allowing water management, not allowing investment in infrastructure, have created, since the time of Enron in the 1980s, the kinds of conditions that make these wildfires so dangerous.

U.S. Air Force/Sr. Master Sgt. Dennis W. Goff

Flames of the Simi Valley fire ravage Southern California.

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This is the moment in which the United States needs to go for reconstruction, and it can only be done together with Trump, and this bickering absolutely must stop! We cannot ignore this unfolding drama in which more than 50 people have died and many more are missing.

But in answer to your question, you know, the United States—and Europe, in a similar way even though the predicates may be different—is experiencing a deep, deep moral crisis. The violence, the mass shootings, the drug addiction epidemic, the suicides, the violence in the schools, which especially in Germany is becoming a huge, huge issue—all of this reflects that we have moved away from the best traditions in our cultures, when our cultures were great.

For the United States, this was for sure the spirit of the Founding Fathers, the period of Lincoln, and naturally then FDR and Kennedy to a certain extent. And in Europe, also, we have moved away from the great humanistic traditions of the Classical culture of the Italian Renaissance, the Andalusian Renaissance in Spain, the German Classics.

We have allowed the most degenerate kinds of cultures—everything is allowed, everything goes; the liberal idea that you can do whatever you want, there is no more binding morality, no more binding cultural values, but whatever you’re pleased to do, it’s fine—this, together with the perversion of pornography, the violence in entertainment, in movies, in video games. All this has had such a devastating impact on many generations that we need urgently to move back to the idea of Classical culture. We need to have beauty in our lives, we need to purify and ennoble our character and mind and soul through our own aesthetical education, which we can only get from great music: from Bach, from Beethoven, from Dvorak, from others, from great poetry, from beauty in all Classical forms of art.

This is the second most important focus of the Schiller Institute. We want to have a new world economic order which allows the economic development of every nation that exists on this planet, through the powerful dynamic of the New Silk Road.

But it has been my view from the beginning of the Schiller Institute in 1984, that none of this would work if not combined with a Renaissance of Classical culture. So, since the Schiller Institute is engaged in many such activities—concerts, poetry readings, and similar things—I want you to join the Schiller Institute, if you agree that we need a new paradigm in thinking. Contact us, become a member, and work with us, because now is the time to change history for the better. Objectively, the possibility exists, but again, it will be the subjective factor—are there enough people who get on board and get active? Contact us and work with us.

Schlanger: OK, Helga, I think that was pretty clear. See you again next week!

Zepp-LaRouche: OK, till next week!

II. Physical Economy

Schiller Institute’s Hussein Askary Speaks to Belt & Road

Food Industry Conference

by Marcia Merry Baker

Hussein Askary addresses the Belt and Road International Food Industry Conference.

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Nov. 16—On October 29, Hussein Askary, the Schiller Institute’s Coordinator for Southwest Asia, addressed the Belt and Road International Food Industry Conference, a high-level event in Beijing, China. The text of his presentation follows this article. The conference focused on the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and China’s development model for food security in China and globally. What stands out about the gathering is the confidence of the participants in deliberating on the actions needed to create a world without hunger, while enjoying of all the differing cultures along the Belt and Road country corridors, through food—by promoting their diverse cuisines, especially (of course) high-quality Chinese favorites. In this way, the “happiness index” will go up, said the Editor-in-Chief of China Food News.

The conference was sponsored by China Food News, the People’s Daily, and Global Times, and was supervised by the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Portal.

Senior Chinese government officials opened the main panel, led off by Liu Jian, the former Director of the State Council Office of Poverty Alleviation, who earlier had served as deputy Agriculture Minister. The second speaker was Sun Yuxi, a Member of the Public Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and former spokesman for the Ministry. Other speakers were Zhang Huarong, the Director of China Green Food Development Center; Dan Chengwei, General Manager of Global Times Network; and Huang Guosheng, Deputy Director of the China Children’s Center.

Hussein Askary’s presentation was titled, “The Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on Global Food Security.” A full transcript with his illustrations are given below. Askary began by citing the Schiller Institute’s 24 years of work in promoting global connectivity associated with the New Silk Road and the Eurasian-African Land-Bridge. He displayed copies of the two most recent Schiller Institute development reports, published in June 2018 and 2017: The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, Vol. II: A Shared Future for Humanity and Extending the New Silk Road to West Asia and Africa: A Vision of an Economic Renaissance, which Askary co-edited.

Askary expressed his and the Schiller Institute’s gratitude to President Xi Jinping for launching the BRI in 2013. “The BRI has already changed the world, ushering in a new set of international relations based on economic cooperation and mutual development, which will have great implications for food security in the world,” Askary stressed. He elaborated on what this means, looking ahead to a doubling of the world’s population by mid-century, and the task of raising up the level of nutrition for everyone.

Speakers at the Belt and Road International Food Industry Conference in Beijing.

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The Chinese record of achieving food self-sufficiency through deliberate interventions for agricultural advances, along with rural poverty reduction programs, presents a powerful model for world food security. In 1984, China became food self-sufficient, following on economic policies initiated in 1978. Then, since the 1980s, have come a succession of agricultural achievements, improvements in the diet, and the prospect of achieving the goal of complete eradication of rural poverty by 2020.

Askary spoke about this process of deliberate upgrading of the food supply, by showing a table of the improvement in the Chinese diet (by major food groups), from 1995 through 2010, and projected ahead to the goal for 2030. This table was originally presented by Chinese food expert Prof. Mei Fangquan, of the UN Global Food Security Committee, and the Agriculture Information Institute in China, in his presentation on “Universal Lessons of China’s Advancement in Agriculture,” which he delivered to a 2017 food and agriculture conference in New York, co-sponsored by the Schiller Institute. The July 7 event took place on the sidelines of the UN High Level Forum on “Agenda 2030” Sustainable Development Goals, focused on Goal No. 2, Eradicating Hunger by 2030. (Mei’s full presentation is in EIR, May 4, 2018).

China is actively working with international institutions to end hunger, and rural poverty, along with the general goal of poverty eradication as early as possible. In May this year in Beijing, China hosted the 2018 China Poverty Reduction International Forum. In June in Rome, China signed a joint statement on these goals, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Program, and other agencies. In September in Beijing, China hosted the seventh Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in which the goal of joint work to raise agricultural productivity in Africa was discussed. The continent of Africa today, with 1.2 billion people and vast agriculture potential, is still import-dependent for 40 percent of its grains. This dependence has been worsening over the past 30 years, but now the BRI era holds the promise of 100 percent food self-sufficiency for Africa in the near future.

The October BRI food conference in Beijing brought together business and trade association leaders in the food industry, and related logistics and social organizations, to confer on resources and further coordination among countries along the Belt and Road. The conference—regarded as “an international food summit”—was integrated into another conference held simultaneously in Beijing October 29-30, under the title, “The Belt and Road Global Chambers of Commerce and Associations,” GCCAC. The food summit received wide media coverage.

— marciabaker@larouchepub.com

The Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on Global Food Security

by Hussein Askary

FIGURE 1

Hussein Askary (left) presents the Schiller Institute’s two latest reports on the Belt and Road/New Silk Road to Shan Chengbiao, General Manager of Global Times Culture Communication Co., the main host of the conference.

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This is an edited transcript of a presentation by Hussein Askary, a member of the China-Sweden Business Council (CSBC) and the Southwest Asia Coordinator for the Schiller Institute, to the Belt and Road International Food Industry Conference in Beijing, China on Oct. 29, 2018.

Thank you very much. I’m honored to speak in this esteemed and wonderful forum, with this wonderful organization. I thank the sponsors for inviting me to speak in this very important conference. I would also like to thank all the wonderful young volunteers and assistants who have helped a lot.

My name is Hussein Askary. I’m a member of the China-Sweden Business Council that is dedicated to promoting economic, business relations between my second home country, Sweden—I’m Iraqi by birth—and China, for the common benefit of both Sweden and China, but also other countries in the world. The China-Sweden Business Council also contributed last month in launching the first Belt and Road association in Sweden, called the Belt and Road Executive Group for Sweden, the BRIX, to promote the importance of the BRI and the importance of Sweden participating in that project.

At the same time, I’ve been a member of an international think-tank called the Schiller Institute, and in the past 24 years since I joined this Schiller Institute, both the Institute and I have dedicated enormous time and energy to promoting the idea of rebuilding the Silk Road, a New Silk Road, to connect all nations with modern infrastructure projects: a just new world economic order.

We have produced many studies and reports. The two most recent are [Figure 1] The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, Vol. II: A Shared Future for Humanity, and Extending the New Silk Road to West Asia and Africa. They present our concept of global connectivity. We have been calling on nations, especially in the West, to go for this kind of new economic order in the world. Our call was finally answered by His Excellency President Xi Jinping in Kazakhstan in September 2013, when he announced the Silk Road Economic Belt. That was a very special day for both me personally and for the Schiller Institute, because we do believe that this opened a new era in international relations, a new era in the history of the world.

FIGURE 2

BRIX Sweden

The Belt and Road is changing the world in a positive direction, creating new relations among nations through economic cooperation and development.

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Belt & Road is Transforming the World

The Belt and Road is already changing the world into a positive direction, creating new types of relations between nations, through economic cooperation and economic development. [Figure 2] But without China’s amazing industrialization process in the last 30 years, this would not have been possible. And in that sense, China, also, has learned from the rest of the world in this process. Now it’s time for the world to also learn from China. As the great philosopher Confucius said: “He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” That should be the principle now.

FIGURE 3

Courtesy of Prof. Mei Fangquan

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The Belt and Road will transform living conditions in all countries it reaches and works in. This will lead to higher standards of living as has happened in China: You here in China have experienced this. The Belt and Road will have enormous impact on the production and consumption of food. [Figure 3] Professor Mei Fangquan, from the Agriculture Information Institute in China, and Chief Expert of the UN Global Food Security Committee, has studied the changes in food consumption in China going back to 1995, with projections into 2030. You can see a very special development in the middle of the chart, where protein production and consumption are listed. There is a dramatic increase there, especially in milk production, but not in the production of grains and vegetables.

This is not a luxury question. In the early years of a child’s growth, it is very important to have a protein- and calcium-rich diet. As children grow older, they don’t need as much. So you have to be careful about that. It’s very important for children in their early years to have this kind of diet.

Now, this chart also shows a projection into the future, with a comparison with Japan. Imagine this happening in most countries in the world, especially the underdeveloped countries of the world today. Imagine how much more land and how much technology and infrastructure will be necessary to meet the needs of people.

The world is, indeed—in spite of the Belt and Road—not devoid of challenges. As our earlier speaker mentioned, a report issued by the United Nations on world hunger levels shows places in the world where things are improving. However, there are still 800 million people in the world who cannot meet their needs for food. [Figure 4]

FIGURE 4

UN World Food Programme

2017 Hunger Map showing the prevalence and degree of undernourishment globally.

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The map shows the location of these countries. There are very big challenges. As the Belt and Road advances, we will have to think very seriously about the challenge we are undertaking. It took humankind 10,000 years from the invention of agriculture to increase the annual food production to 7 billion tons per year. That’s what it took, 10,000 years. The world’s population will double, most probably by 2050. This means that we will have to double what took 10,000 years—we have to double that production in 30 years. This is what is amazing and fascinating about the prospects for the Belt and Road. Such a feat can be achieved, even with today’s technology!

Four Scarcities: a Global Challenge

Now look at the countries located in this area. There are two kinds of problems: First you have scarcities. You have physical scarcity of water and you have economic scarcity of water, which I will discuss. But also, you have what China has correctly identified as three bottlenecks in these countries: the lack of capital, the lack of infrastructure, and the lack of skilled labor. Notice the location of these countries along this map. Now, let us look at the next map [Figure 5], an exaggerated map of the world’s dry areas. These are deserts, semi-arid areas, and arid areas (not complete desert), but these are all very dry regions.

FIGURE 5

EIR

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As you can see, this is not a national, a regional, nor even a continental problem—it’s a global challenge. It’s a transcontinental challenge, which requires the cooperation of many, many nations.

The Belt and Road promises to solve this problem. At the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, just last month, President Xi Jinping mentioned that controlling desertification will be one of the priorities of cooperation between China and Africa. And I have seen, myself—I have had personal contact with Chinese companies that have been very, very successful in this aspect. China’s contribution, even in this respect, will be very, very important.

FIGURE 6

NEPAD

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A friend of ours, Moussa Seck of Senegal, developed a project [Figure 6] that has now been adopted as an official strategy for the “New Partnership for Africa’s Development” (NEPAD) countries. His Excellency [Mr. Messan Amakoé Klutse, from Togo] mentioned there are many parts of this project being established or worked on in Africa. But you will need much, much more. As you see on the NEPAD document, showing the situation as it is today, only 4% of all arable land in Africa is irrigated! Africa has a potential of 300 million hectares of land to be irrigated; but only 13 million hectares are irrigated. Just imagine what could be done were adequate infrastructure in place, such as irrigation, transport and power. Without power you cannot do anything, even in agriculture. If we transform the current situation to where it should be by 2025, if this policy is successful, with the help of China with many other countries participating, we will be able to eliminate hunger in Africa by 2025. But it will require massive investments in infrastructure and education, and in scientific research.

FIGURE 7

World Food Prize

Dr. Yuan Longping (left) and Dr. Monty Jones.

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You may be familiar with these two gentlemen, Dr. Yuan Longping and Dr. Monty Jones. They shared the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2004 World Food Prize, the “Nobel Prize” for food production, for their independent research into new breeds of rice. [Figure 7] This is what it will take to eliminate hunger from the world.

We will need massive investments in infrastructure, as I said, and we will also need systems of education, new types of agricultural products, new types of managing agriculture, new types of handling agricultural products and so on and so forth. Look at the map in Figure 8. That area, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, is an optimal area for production of maize, corn. This area is as large as China itself. With availability of this type of infrastructure platform, the entire area will be transformed.

FIGURE 8

FAO

Map of Africa showing areas suitable for rainfed maize production.

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I could spend the whole afternoon telling you about all the wonderful projects being built, all the wonderful projects being planned, but I will stop here, because we don’t have time for that. I want to end by saying that from where I stand and look at the world, I see a great promise for the whole world. One very strong reason for my optimism is the Belt and Road Initiative and the miracle that China has achieved.

If you have any questions or inquiries, you can visit us at the China-Sweden Business Council desk on the second floor. I thank you very much, xièxiè.

CC/SkyPixels

The Katse Dam in Lesotho, one of many projects planned and built to bring a prosperous future to Africa.

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III. What Is To Be Done?

September 22, 2000

Jesus Christ and Civilization

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

I think my earlier reports have prepared you to be confronted now with what will be, for many, the most important, and also most shocking fact which most people, including most among my usual readers, have yet to face.

As I have repeatedly warned of late, events have already reached the point which I had warned would have arrived, unless certain prescribed changes were instituted. Despite my repeated warnings, of the need to reverse the policies which have created this risk, the refusal of governments and others to heed my warnings has now already brought the U.S.A. into the final phase of an already onrushing, global financial collapse. Worse, that onrushing, global financial collapse, threatens now to plunge global civilization into a threatened new dark age for all humanity.

In earlier reports, I had emphasized those more obvious, immediate issues which must be addressed, if even a temporary recovery of civilization is to occur. Now, presume, for a moment, although my proposals for a New Bretton Woods system become increasingly drastic as the financial crisis worsens, if those strenuous measures were to be adopted and implemented, even at this late date, and, that, therefore, most of the world would soon be on the way to recovery, as it had recovered from the combined effects of the Great Depression and the ensuing great war, under President Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership.

That presumed, now look at the deeper, essential, longer-range aspects of the problem. Consider the fact, that history, as we presently know it, has been dominated by cycles of collapse and, sometimes, at best, recovery. Therefore, how might we be assured, now, that even if we were to rescue humanity from the effects of the presently onrushing global financial and monetary collapse, by the measures which I have proposed, that our thus-revived civilization will not begin to slide back, a generation or two later, into a new round of collapse, a collapse perhaps even worse than that which menaces us at the present moment, a collapse to be suffered by your children or grandchildren?

The two issues so identified and distinguished, are linked to a third, overriding consideration. Is it possible, that even the mastering of the immediate financial crisis, requires that we must also act now to overcome the more distant threat of a new dark age? In other words, although I have shown how the world could recover from the presently onrushing global financial collapse, perhaps the world will not adopt that option I have given it. Is there, then, some deeper, longer-range sickness within the world’s presently leading institutions, which, as seems probable at this moment, would prevent the world from accepting such a workable, near-term recovery program?

Therefore, I present here the case for thus linking the two questions, the immediate crisis, and the times beyond. I present the two as if they were one, indivisible subject-matter. Once I shall have said that much, I shall leave it to your conscience, to estimate, whether or not even the bare, presently continued existence of our civilization, depends upon our solving that worrying, longer-term challenge. This would mean, that, at the least, we would adopt an efficiently conscious commitment to solving it, to a significant degree, over the course of a generation or more immediately ahead.

On that account, I situate today’s subject, by first restating, summarily, the general thesis I have just presented. I restate the problem I have just outlined, as follows.

To put the point bluntly: “What are the chances that most of humanity might escape the presently onrushing new dark age, even if the United States were to choose as its next President, a figure so thoroughly, morally and intellectually defective as either Vice-President Al Gore or Governor George W. Bush?”

“Jesus and the Disciples on the Road to Emmaus (detail),” by Peter Bruegel the Elder, 1571. Writes LaRouche: “Without the revolutionary change in religious belief, created by Christ, and spread by the Christian Apostles and the martyrs, the creation of the modern sovereign form of nation-state would not have been possible.”

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Do not misinterpret that question. I am not presuming any fearful potency, for either good or evil, in either of those two candidates as persons. They are essentially no more than puppets of a Wall Street “establishment,” which has selected such intellectually and morally crippled individuals to serve as the only leading candidates available, a perverse selection of such dummies chosen in accord with that establishment’s own peculiar intentions. The difficulty in finding any point of actually principled difference between the elements of such a Tweedledee and Tweedledum pairing, is, in itself, the most significant feature of each of the candidacies. It is their common qualities, or, better said, the lack thereof, which reflects Wall Street’s cupidity in selecting them as puppets for the occasion.

However, precisely for that reason, that each is virtually a less-than-nothing candidate, the offering informs us what kind of government that establishment intends to install this coming January 2001. This, in turn, tells us, implicitly, what kinds of policies and the like, either of the dummies were intended to follow as incumbents. Thus, the importance of both candidates, is that, especially under present conditions of accelerating world crisis, neither of those two brutish bunglers is capable of being a President in any meaningful sense consistent with the intent of our Constitution, even in the most unlikely case he were inspired, most miraculously, to attempt such a course of action.

The obviously implied intention of the financier oligarchy which has selected such candidates, is that in the circumstances of the presently onrushing global financial crisis, the United States, as defined by its Constitution, would follow the path dictated by the same Wall Street financier oligarchy which backed Adolf Hitler for Germany in 1933-1934, rather than the tradition of Presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt. Reading the history of 1932-1945 Germany, the question thus follows: which is the dumber dummy, either of the candidates, or any among those citizens who would vote for either of such candidates?

Were either such choice made, it were likely, even if not absolutely inevitable, that the United States would not survive the coming years in a recognizable form. Now is a time to remember, that the relevant institutions of Germany chose irrational and fanatical qualities of leadership philosophically akin to today’s Gore and Bush, at the close of January 1933; see what happened as a result of that choice.[fn_1] A similar, probably quicker disaster than that which struck 1933-34 Germany, could strike us now, unless many American citizens suddenly, drastically change their current ways. Could most of the rest of the world survive under the conditions implicit in a Gore or Bush Presidency? Many leading circles, from around the world, are discussing such contingencies today.

In other words, just as Germany’s power was revived, temporarily, under the Hitler regime, the effect of that temporary economic recovery, under fascist conditions, led Germany into a far worse crisis, that less than a generation after the London and New York bankers had first put Hitler into power.

Thus, as I have said, I leave it to your conscience to estimate, whether or not that planetary civilization’s survival is barely possible under present political trends in the U.S.A., even if such a solution has not appeared to be likely since Gore’s Presidential nomination was locked in, a few months ago, by Wall Street’s virtual mass-media decree. To assess the possibilities, consider, summarily, the highlights of the existence of European civilization over the approximately 2,500 years of its existence to date. Some key facts of that history stand out as relevant for the thinking citizen of the U.S. or other nations today; those historical facts are key, for unlocking the answer to the questions I have just restated.

Once again, in addressing this matter, as I do in the following pages here, the answers may be found only by defining both the questions, and the clues to their solutions, in an appropriate way. That key to all such knowledge, lies in the appropriate definition of the universal quality of human nature, as distinct from that of all other forms of life.

As such questions imply, this report is addressed not only to the people of the United States, but also to those of the Americas as a whole, of Europe generally, and as an integral, and eminently most practical, and urgent feature of that proposed, broader, global dialogue among cultures of which the honorable President of Iran has spoken publicly on several recent occasions.

In the end, the reader will acknowledge, that the pivotal point, which I develop at an appropriate location in the following pages, is, according to some choices of academic language, “strong stuff,” and perhaps beyond the easy comprehension of most living today. Nonetheless, I shall demonstrate two things here, urgent points for immediate policy-shaping practice among those qualified to be leaders in this time of crisis, supremely practical points which could be presented in no other way.

I proceed, therefore, step by step, to build up the case which must inform your practice now.

The most essential and original feature of Classical Greek culture, “is to be found in the record of the transformation of the conception of the nature of man, as traced from the Homeric epics through the writings and acts of Plato.”

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History According to Plato

Modern archeology substantiates Plato’s summary account of the earlier existence of mankind, prior to the rise of Classical Greece.[fn_2] Once we have applied to archeology, that principle which sets mankind apart from, and superior to all other living species, we can positively date and classify relevant ancient sites as human. The answer to the relevant question is: they can be recognized as human, on the condition that they are associated with artefacts which could be derived only from the effects of what we call today, the technologies generated by discoveries of universal physical principles. On that account, we can positively date human existence within the territory of Europe, to no later than several hundreds of thousands of years ago, and might suspect the discovery of evidence from a much earlier time, in parts of Africa which were presumably left free of the impact of those long periods of glaciation occupying much of the northern hemisphere.

This poses the question implicitly addressed by Plato: “To where, and why did so many of those cultures of earlier hundreds of thousands of years disappear, often almost without trace?”

To review those bare essentials of the matter which are most relevant to the subject at hand, the following.

Plato, referencing Egyptian sources, gave us two answers to that question. The first cause of the vanishing of entire cultures, has been the kinds of natural catastrophes which mankind has not yet become able to control. The second, is the collapse of entire populations. such as ancient Mesopotamian culture, as caused by a self-destructive feature embedded in that culture itself.[fn_3] On the latter account, most of the ancient cultures we have been able to identify, were those which plunged themselves into a prolonged dark age, a dark age brought about by a dominant, characteristic, internal feature of that culture itself. There have been, after all, morally inferior cultures, many of which brought about their own destruction for precisely that reason.

In Plato’s second of those class of disasters, that of culturally induced catastrophes, we have the repeated rise and fall of cultures in East and South Asia; we have Alexander’s felling of that Persian Empire rotten-ripe for its own destruction; and, we have the accelerating cultural and moral degeneration, and collapse of the Roman Empire from its own internal, systemic moral and intellectual rot, first in the west, and later in Byzantium. The question today, as posed by the patterns of change which have become characteristic of the last hundred years, since the ominous, 1901 assassination of U.S. President William McKinley, is, whether or not the existing form of globally extended European civilization is careening into a general collapse of the type which Plato located within this second class?

FIGURE 9

Growth of European Population, Population-Density, and Life-Expectancy at Birth, Estimated for 100,000 B.C.–A.D. 1975

Alone among all other species, man’s numerical increase is a function of increasing mastery over nature —increase of potential population-density—as reflected historically in the increase of actual population-density. In transforming his conditions of existence, man transforms himself. The transformation of the species itself is reflected in the increase of estimated life-expectancy over mankind’s historical span. Such changes are primarily located in, and have accelerated over, the last six-hundred years of man’s multi-thousand-year existence. Institutionalization of the conception of man as the living image of God the Creator during the Golden Renaissance, through the Renaissance creation of the sovereign nation-state, is the conceptual origin of the latter expansion of the potential which uniquely makes man what he is.

All charts are based on standard estimates compiled by existing schools of demography. None claim any more precision than the indicative; however, the scaling flattens out what might otherwise be locally, or even temporally, significant variation, reducing all thereby to the set of changes which is significant, independant of the quality of estimates and scaling of the graphs. Sources: For population and population-density, Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History; for life-expectancy, various studies in historical demography.

Note breaks and changes in scales.

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From all that we presently know, humanity has stumbled along on this planet in such a fashion, for hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years. This pattern prevailed throughout known history and pre-history combined, until a qualitative, revolutionary change for the better, a change which erupted at the beginning of mid-Fifteenth-Century Europe, during what has become known as the Golden Renaissance. (Figure 1.) Not only did that Fifteenth-Century Renaissance unleash an improvement in the conditions of human life, within its own region, which was qualitatively beyond anything shown by evidence of earlier times; the spread of the ideas associated with that Renaissance, assigned to all humanity equal right to access to those means to effect comparable advances in the conditions of life for the world as a whole.[fn_4]

This Golden Renaissance did not spring as if from the brow of the ancient Egyptian goddess whom the Greeks called Athena. It was the outgrowth of about 2,000 years of the history of European civilization, since Solon’s revolution in Athens, and of, in turn, at least several thousands of earlier years, as typified by accumulated knowledge associated with more than 2,000 years of what were probably preceding years of ebbs and flows of progress in ancient Egypt, that from a time even much earlier than the building of the great pyramids.

That review supplied, we turn to the core of the case presented in this report.

Taken as a whole, the recent 2,500 years of rise of that adopted child of Egypt, that the birth and development of the now globally extended European civilization, is to be understood in terms of the three greatest bench-marks of its entire history: the consolidation of the development of Classical Greek culture around the leading figure of Plato, the ministry and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and the Golden Renaissance. Without those three revolutionary steps forward, Europe and its civilization had neither come into existence, nor would have acquired the dominant significance in the planet which it has attained since the great, mid-Fifteenth-Century, ecumenical Council of Florence.

The essential qualities of change in the history of the world since that Fifteenth Century, have been dominated, increasingly, by a continuing conflict between the internal development of this Renaissance legacy, and those endemic moral disorders which have become characteristic of today’s globally extended form of European civilization. That is to say, that because of the superior power intrinsic to the cultural revolution launched by the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, the power of European civilization, either for good, or, all too often, for evil, emerged as the most characteristic feature of the combined cultural currents on this planet since. Hence, in that sense, and for that reason, modern history has been essentially, increasingly the history of a globally extended modern form of European civilization.

On account of the points just identified, there are certain things I must say here, not only because they are true, but because, for sundry factitiously misguided motives of other authorities, they were not likely to be published, until now, in this form, from any other living source, even from among those relevant authorities which would concur privately with my argument. In the course of reading the following pages, you should be able to recognize why certain other, relevant sources have been reluctant to address publicly certain crucial features of the report I present here and now.

The internal problems of modern Christianity, are among the sensitive issues which must be addressed here, even in spite of the grounds for reluctance on this subject from authorities other than myself.

Since the civilization presently gripped by a planetary existential crisis, has been, predominantly, a globally extended European civilization which is nominally, at least, Christian, there could be no competent examination of the present crisis which did not address and answer the immediately following question. Thus, that issue of Christianity itself can not be avoided by any strategic thinker who is both honest and competent.

For the reason just given, so, the fact of the present crisis, with its inhering threat of the planet’s collapse into a new dark age for all humanity, is to be seen, at least on the surface of things, as reflecting an included failure of organized Christianity in its present form. The recent Vatican report on the Third Letter of Fatima points to that problem, and, as you shall see in due course here, that report answers the question, at least implicitly, and, I believe appropriately, at least in significant degree, and is accurate as far as it goes.[fn_5] However, to avoid a deadly fallacy of composition in the assessment, a more adequate treatment of the present existential crisis of global civilization, must bring numerous other considerations, not taken into account explicitly by the Vatican report, into view, as I do at appropriate locations within the present report.

In addition to those three great bench-marks I have listed above, the most significant positive event in European history since the Golden Renaissance, was the initial 1776-1789 victory of the American Revolution over its principal adversary, the British Empire’s monarchy, a monarchy which has assumed a role in the world at large which it has modelled upon that of the financier-oligarchy power of the Venice of Pietro Pomponazzi and Paolo Sarpi, a Venice from whose much polluted canals it was originally spewed.[fn_6]

Since the tyrant William of Orange and the later accession of George I to the newly created British throne, the continuing conflict between the intellectual tradition of the American Revolution and our principal adversary, the British monarchy’s empire, has been the characteristic source of all of the principal internal disorders and foreign wars suffered by the United States since. Since 1789, this conflict between the American intellectual tradition and the British monarchy’s influence, has become the determining feature of all the principal developments within world history.

It is because of the moral and intellectual superiority of those features of European culture which are represented by all of the actual achievements of the American intellectual tradition, that the United States emerged, with President Lincoln’s victory over the British monarchy’s Confederacy puppet, as the world’s most powerful single nation.

From the beginning of the European colonization of the Americas, the most advanced thinkers in science, art, and philosophy, have been, with very rare exceptions, continental Europeans, and neither British nor Americans. However, because of the effects of the emergence of Anglo-Dutch financier-oligarchical power, at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, and such key subsequent developments as the London-directed Jacobin Terror of 1789-1794, the fascist tyranny of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Congress of Vienna, the patriotic forces within continental Europe have remained a minority, in the broader scope of the continent’s science and philosophy as a whole, as in politics. For that reason, from the beginning of the European colonization of the Americas, with such rare exceptions as Benjamin Franklin himself, the quality of intellectual leadership upon which the progress of the U.S. has depended, has been supplied from that specific, pro-Greek-Classical minority of great intellects of Europe, such as, most often, those of France, Germany, and Italy.

Indeed, I can report, from my advantage as a close observer of relevant persons and facts, that even today, when continental Europe has been reduced by Anglo-American decisions of 1989-1992 to a virtual satrapy of English-speaking oligarchical power, the leading intellectual circles of continental Europe, including those of today’s Russia, are, while exceptions even in their own nations, of a general intellectual quality superior to that found generally among even Americans of better moral and intellectual qualities. Ironically, the American political advantage, even among our typical boors, is the quality of strategic decisiveness exuded by, among others, Wall Street’s leading oligarchical circles. This North American sense of political potency respecting matters of the world at large, lies in the sense of possession of a relatively superior, globally overreaching political power, whereas Europeans repeatedly crushed by the combination of two World Wars and prolonged Anglo-American occupation, tend to see themselves, as no more than satraps of a reigning Anglo-American oligarchical power. Otherwise, morally, those Americans are, with rare exceptions, morally and intellectually inferior to the best leading circles of continental Europe.

That qualification taken into account, for most of the past nearly hundred-forty years, since President Lincoln’s great victory for civilization as a whole, the U.S. has been second in world power to no other single nation, but only, during some prolonged intervals, to the concert of forces led by the British Empire and its associated minions. Thus, in that sense and degree, the struggle within the U.S.A., to free the U.S. from the treasonous influence of the present British monarchy’s Eighteenth-Century so-called “Enlightenment” tradition,[fn_7] has been the great struggle for the soul of the U.S.A. This struggle has been, and is, still today, the most crucial strategic factor in the shaping of the history of the world during the past two centuries, since the fall of the first modern fascist tyranny, that of the Romantic figure Napoleon Bonaparte. We Americans are nearly all, after all, predominantly Europeans, including our so-called African-Americans, essentially representatives of globally extended modern European civilization. Whenever some among us attempt to deny that essential fact, lunacy, usually of a dangerous kind, breaks loose among us.

Nonetheless, despite the tendency among even most of the decent Americans, toward moral and intellectual crudities, more than the alternative, the American system itself, is the best political system of today’s world as a whole.

The term “American system” has no historically valid, literate meaning, other than preference for the ideas of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Mathew Carey, Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Friedrich List, Henry C. Carey, and President Abraham Lincoln, that over the opposing British system of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, et al. This American System of political economy, takes its origins on our continent from the founding and initial development of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that under the leadership of Winthrop and the Mathers.

That development, begun in pre-1688 Massachusetts, was continued under Benjamin Franklin, and through aid of Franklin’s supporters from among the followers of Gottfried Leibniz in Europe. Such is the anti-British monarchy, American system set forth in the opening three paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the Federal Constitution. It is the American intellectual tradition of such foes of the British monarchy as President Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Mathew Carey, Clay, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Franklin’s great-grandson Alexander Dallas Bache, Henry C. Carey, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. It is the American system whose legacy President Franklin Roosevelt worked to revive, as did the martyred President Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King, too. Such is the American intellectual tradition, as identified, if merely typified, and afflicted by the British monarchy’s self-professed and adopted agent of influence, Henry A. Kissinger.[fn_8]

That American System of political-economy, as I have brought its conceptual design up to date through my work in developing the science of physical economy, is the leading best expression of globally extended European civilization today. It is the conflict between that American system of political-economy, so best described, and the British monarchy’s presently world-dominating rentier-financier imperial system, which defines all of the most essential issues to be considered here. The chief irony is, that an oligarchical, Wall Street-dominated “establishment,” the oligarchical pack of rentier-financier hyenas presently exerting overlordship over the U.S. government, a pack represented typically more by the New York Times than the increasingly simply silly Wall Street Journal, has become an instrument of the British monarchy against the American system, and is today the bestial force chiefly responsible for corrupting the morals and culture of the U.S. population, and betraying our constitutional republic to the predatory dogmas of free trade and globalization.

Among educated adults of the world today, contrary views of the recent 2,500 years of world history are, at their least worst, childish fairy-tales designed to degrade academically misinformed public opinion to the same fantasy-ridden irrationality otherwise found in the credulities of the obviously illiterate. I explain all the immediately foregoing points, as follows. I proceed, next, to the matter of those three crucial revolutions which I underscored above.

The Elgin Marbles, from the Acropolis of Athens. The Classical Greek sculptors “captured their subjects in mid- motion, rather than as dead objects in ‘Euclidean’ space- time.”

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Plato and Christianity

As the great poet and historian Friedrich Schiller warned his students, and others, in his famous Jena lectures on the principles of history, no one can understand anything truly important about European history, until one first masters the fact, that European civilization came into existence in the development of what we now term Classical Greek culture.[fn_9] That culture has sundry essential elements, including, in addition to the greatest periods of Athens, developments within Ionia and pre-Roman southern Italy; but the most essential and original feature of that culture, is to be found in the record of the transformation of the conception of the nature of man, as traced from the Homeric epics through the writings and acts of Plato.

In reading from the Iliad through the Socratic dialogues and Laws of Plato, we trace two giant steps upward, leading into Classical Greece’s unique contribution to the origins and continued development of modern European civilization. First, there was man defined as the cattle-like plaything of, excepting Athena, the capriciously wicked gods of Olympus.[fn_10] Over a later span of time, as from the story of Ulysses, through Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, there is a great step upward, toward man as portrayed by the great Classical tragedies, in revolt against the tyranny of those oligarchical pagan gods. Finally, where Aeschylus’ Prometheus trilogy ends, there emerges the second great step upward, the new, Socratic definition of man as made in the image of the Creator (Composer) of the universe, in the writings of Plato, such as his Timaeus.

This emerging, latter notion of the true nature of man, is inseparable from the concept of the idea, as Plato, most notably, supplies the first known, rigorous definition of the idea of ideas. Here lies the key to showing the connection and qualitative difference between the presently known culture of ancient Egypt and that of the modern European civilization rooted in Classical Greece. This pin-points the first of the three revolutionary developments, beyond barbarism, upon which modern, globally extended European civilization, depends absolutely.

Admittedly, ideas, as Plato defines them, and I have refined that notion from the standpoint of Christianity, did not first come into being with Classical Greece. Rather, Plato’s Greece is the first location in known history, at which the idea of ideas in general is clearly defined. The difference is between the discovery of several or more experimentally validatable individual physical principles, and the discovery of the Platonic principle of universality underlying physical science in general. Plato’s Timaeus, Critias, and Laws, as to be read against the background of his earlier works, set the benchmarks for that notion of the idea of cognitive ideas in general.

Typical of this difference, is the appearance of Classical Greek notions of sculpture, as typified by the celebrated influence of Scopas and Praxiteles, and by the great Classical tragedies. A modern example, is the way in which Johann Sebastian Bach created that well-tempered system of polyphonic composition, upon which foundation the great compositions of Josef Haydn, Wolfgang Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Giuseppe Verdi, developed the great Classical polyphonic legacy, they each and all in explicit opposition to such Romantic followers of the silly Rameau as Liszt, Berlioz, Helmholtz, and Wagner.[fn_11] The contrast between the Classical representative of actual ideas, and the aura of death around the earlier Archaic art of Egypt and Greece, a contrast typified by Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael Sanzio, or Rembrandt’s famous portrayal of an insightful bust of Homer contemplating the soulless stare of Aristotle, illustrates the essential species of distinction between the two.[fn_12]

In fact, any valid idea is an experimentally demonstrable discovery of a universal principle, such as a universal physical principle, or, in the alternative, those universal principles of artistic composition which underlie all that is properly classed as Classical artistic work. Classical artistic composition is to be recognized as opposite in quality to such forms of irrationality run amok as Romanticism, Impressionism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, and most of what passes, according to Hollywood, for today’s popular, and usually bestialized forms of entertainment, the latter plainly echoes of the amusements proffered by that pagan Roman imperial arena in which Romans, by the “free choice” of popular opinion of their time, brought upon themselves the doom of their society. Thus, any valid discovery of a universal physical principle, is perfectly recognized as an idea, as distinct from mere sense-impressions or idle fantasy.

By idea of ideas in general, I mean, for example, as I have said, physical science, as distinguished from a collection of those respectively validatable individual discoveries which have yet to be integrated into the form of a validatable body of physical science in general.[fn_13] In other words, the point of the distinction is knowledge, or lack of knowledge of a conception of some principle of universal truthfulness, as Plato’s dialogues elaborated such a principle. We also include those similarly validated universal principles of Classical artistic composition, principles which meet the same Socratic standard of agapē echoed in Paul’s I Corinthians 13.

Admittedly, not only do we find traces of the notion of ideas as such, in the work of a contemporary of Classical Greece, the great Sanskrit philologist Panini. The notions of astronomical cycles embedded in the design of the great pyramids of Egypt, are examples of the kinds of ideas which represent, still today, the forerunners of modern science. A similar case is to be made for those Vedic Central-Asia calendars dated to not later than between 6,000 and 4,000 B.C. Perhaps there was an idea of ideas like that of Plato’s dialogues somewhere in the ancient mists of time; if so, we have no confirmation of such so far. Presently there is no rigorously defined, recognized evidence of earlier such notions from the known, pre-Classical cultures of the recent six thousand-odd years according to today’s official world history.[fn_14]

Rembrandt’s “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer” vividly illustrates the contrast between the Classical representative of actual ideas, portrayed by the blind Homer, and the aura of death shown in the soulless stare of Aristotle.

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By the idea of the idea, I mean the Classical Greek idea of human nature, as expressed best by Plato’s dialogues, or, better, the Christian version of this Classical-Greek conception, or that of Moses Mendelssohn, among others, later. I mean, also, the distinct principle of Classical composition of sculpture, painting, poetry, music, and drama, which modern civilization has derived from the Classical Greek origins. We should mean, implicitly, and most essentially, the idea of man as made in the living cognitive image of the Creator of the universe.[fn_15] It is that discovery of a rigorous, Socratic notion of the universal, non-Aristotelean principle of cognition, as traced to its origins in Classical Greece, which defines the notion of globally extended European civilization as a distinct idea. Herein, let us discover together the solution to the riddle which I have posed in the opening paragraphs of this report.

To trace the development of this notion of the idea, it were most convenient to focus upon the example of the argument provided by Plato in the work often identified as The Republic. For this purpose, the student should focus upon the dialogue, in that work, among the characters Socrates, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon. The issues posed are the central issues of modern society, including the most important issues encountered at the highest levels of government and religious controversy. The characteristic feature of that dialogue, and of all Plato’s dialogues otherwise, is the principle of the idea of the idea. The entirety of the development of Classical Greece, from the Homeric epics, to the Classical Greek culture known to Apostles such as John and Paul, is summed up in that example.

Another way of expressing the notion of the idea of ideas, is the notion of discoverable universal truthfulness respecting man and nature, as this issue is central to the central dispute referenced by Plato’s dialogue among Socrates, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon. This quality of truthfulness, so located in the argument of that Socrates, is the essential distinction between science and pseudo-science, and the opposition of a natural law rooted in truthfulness, to the depraved misconception of law adopted for practice by today’s doctrinaire, the notions of merely customary or purely positive law. The latter includes, notably, the evil work of such positivist acolytes of the evil Bertrand Russell as Norbert Wiener’s “information theory” and John von Neumann’s lifeless notions of “systems analysis” and “artificial intelligence.”

Three most characteristic, and also multiply-connected notions of Plato’s work as a whole, are to be recognized there. These are: the principle of truthfulness and justice; the supreme principle of law, identified by Paul’s use of Plato’s definition for the Greek term agapē; and, by the idea of all ideas, the idea of man. This defines man implicitly, as distinct from all other living beings, the efficiently human personality of the human individual, as created in the image of the efficient Mind of the Composer (Creator) of the universe.[fn_16]

I shall return to that specific point; but, first, I must qualify the connection between the first two of the successive revolutions just identified.

Alexander the Great had been guided to his inspired victories, by aid from those students of Plato who were adversaries of Alexander’s enemy, Aristotle. The assassination of Alexander spilled the seeds of self-destruction, like a soil poisoned by the blood from that murder, into the grand design which Alexander had represented. Although the Classical Greek culture of the pre-Roman, so-called Hellenistic period, was the most advanced culture in the Mediterranean region, until the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, it contained thus a fatal flaw. As the United States’ history illustrates the same paradox, the Classical legacy was the greatest legacy of its time, but, after the murder of Alexander, it harbored a parasite, an alien enemy within, an enemy akin in nature to our slave-holders and Wall Street gang. Hellenistic culture became thus vulnerable to its conquest by that intrinsically evil “New Babylon,” which became known, otherwise, as the Roman Empire.

Thus, beginning at about the time of the Roman murder of Archimedes and the later death of the greatest scientific mind of that time, Archimedes’ correspondent Eratosthenes, that creation of the Delphi cult of the Pythian Apollo known as Rome, emerged as an echo of both ancient Delphic Sparta and old Babylon, as the imperial New Babylon, sometimes known among Christians as “The Whore of Babylon.” That pagan Rome erupted, thus, to power throughout the Mediterranean more generally. For nearly two centuries, from the murder of Archimedes to the birth of Jesus Christ, the Classical legacy waned. Then, came the time when Christ and his Apostles transformed the Classical Greek heritage, that in the fashion the Apostle Paul addressed the matter of the “unknown God.”

For the Jews already in struggle against the tyranny of both Rome and Rome’s “Quisling-like” lackeys of the Jewish puppet-regime, the arrival of Christianity was a revolution, a redemption of human nature, as human nature is defined literally within the first chapter of the first book of Moses. As for Moses, the universality of man and woman is, that each is made in the image of the Creator, and empowered and mandated to exert dominion over all other things within the universe. That power is nothing other than the non-deductive faculty of cognition, the latter that anti-deductive power of Reason unique to the human individual, the power of reason hated by the Immanuel Kant of his Critiques. Cognition is the means by which mankind is able to discover and employ experimentally validatable, universal physical principles, thereby to increase man’s power in and over the universe.

This thus redeemed Mosaic notion of human nature, expressed as the mission of the Christian apostles to the gentiles, was the assigned great mission unique to the Apostles of Christ. That mission was dedication to the redemption of all mankind as such a special, cognitive creature, each individual made in the image of what Plato had defined as the knowable concept of the Composer of the universe.

No longer, as had been the case under the Jews of the time of Christ’s birth, was one people to be preferred absolutely over others; rather, each part of mankind is obliged to serve the welfare of all mankind, to serve the universality of all humanity as a species of creature made in the image of the Creator. It was this alternative to the evil inherent in Rome and in the flaws of the prevalent form of the Jewish outlook at that time; it was a Christianity whose ministry to all mankind, has, despite all else, thus far saved mankind from the doom otherwise inhering in the legacy of that “New Babylon” known as the Roman Empire.[fn_17]

“St. Paul Visiting St. Peter in Prison,” by Masaccio.

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The Mystery of Jesus Christ

Those referenced similarities in policy taken into account, how must today’s historians and strategists differentiate functionally between Plato’s Socrates and Christ? In what degree does the ministry and crucifixion of Christ prefigure, but differ from the figure of the Socrates who also died for the cause of truth, that at the evil hands of the probably treasonous Democratic Party of Athens? Why must I now insist, that the Christianity which adopts and preserves the legacy of Classical Greece, be recognized as a revolutionary, divine intervention, one distinct from the best previously contributed by Plato et al.?

On first approximation, it was the legacy of Christ and His Apostles, which kept the contributions of Plato alive, at a time when those contributions had otherwise remained where the Roman Empire had enslaved or buried most of them. It was the long struggle of Christianity, including that led by Augustine, against the Roman Empire and its legacy, which brought the work of Plato to serve as a central feature of the political revolution which was the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. Yet, although Plato’s method is not only reflected, most emphatically, in the Gospel of John and Epistles of Paul, but represents an indispensably integral feature of the appropriate method of Christianity and its theology over nearly two thousand years to date, there remains a certain crucial, functional difference between the two, and a related political consequence for the world as a whole.

In Christian doctrine, the crucial difference, as stressed among the earliest Church Fathers, and by the legacy of Augustine for the West, is embedded within a single phrase of the Christian Creed, “and of the Son.”[fn_18]

The crucial question is, “Why, if Jesus was born in the time of the reign of Augustus Caesar, did the Disciple John locate the existence of Christ from the beginning”? Here lies the relationship of the Crucifixion to the essence of Christianity. For Plato, this would be, admissibly, a concept not axiomatically alien to the method seen in his Timaeus, for example, but its origin and habitat is Christianity.

That, in turn, poses the question: What is the essential, necessary significance of the Crucifixion, which makes Christianity so powerful an idea of ideas? Therein lies the mystery of Christ. This is not a mystery in the sense of being inherently inexplicable to reason; it is a mystery in the sense it appears in the form of a profound ontological paradox, which can be made comprehensible only by mustering within oneself the relevant cognitive action of discovery. That mystery, so described, taken into account, what we must credit to Plato’s Classical Greek culture, is the source of the capacity, or, if you prefer, susceptibility, to solve the paradox posed by Moses’ definition of the nature of man.

There is no intrinsic incomprehensibility inhering in the mere fact of that mystery. As I shall stress, without this specific quality of Christianity, none of the positive developments leading into the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance had been possible. After we have taken all that we can adduce from Classical Greek culture, such as that of Plato, into account, that does not account for the Renaissance, for the birth of modern, globally extended European civilization. There is a special, efficiently superior universal principle embedded within what might seem otherwise the mere bare historical fact of Jesus Christ. It is a universal principle implied, as I have said, by a corresponding ontological paradox.

That paradox is crucial for actually knowing the characteristic feature of each and all of the three revolutionary developments upon which European civilization and its development depends. The mystery of Christ is the central, defining expression of that development. Consider that paradox in successive approximations.

In first approximation, the difference lies in the personal relationship of the Christ of the Crucifixion to the most destitute and otherwise most oppressed victims of Roman and other evil tyrannies. It has been the personal bond of that oppressed individual, even in death, to the personality of the crucified Christ, which has been the essential spark, the compelling passion, upon which all of the temporal achievements of globally extended European civilization have depended, and that absolutely, a civilization whose progress flowed, in such large degree, from the spilled blood of martyrs.

Painting of the Roman murder of Archimedes, by Penimo del Vaga (a pupil of Raphael). At about the time of that murder, “Rome emerged as an echo of both ancient Delphic Sparta and old Babylon, as the imperial New Babylon, sometimes known among Christians as ‘The Whore of Babylon.’ ”

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This points already toward a still deeper principle. The crucial conception, the idea of ideas, which makes that connection comprehensible, is the notion of the simultaneity of eternity. There lies the key to the challenge of that great metaphor, the historical mystery of Christ.

Unfortunately, such a statement, respecting the simultaneity of eternity, is heard by today’s superabundance of academically trained illiterates, as a very strange formulation. The fault which may be thus attributed, unjustly, to the expression, does not lie in the form of the statement, but in the blinding effect of today’s popularized forms of ignorance. Among the victims of their own lack of reason, we must include all those who profess themselves to be materialists, empiricists, Cartesians, Kantians, existentialists (such as the fascist admirers of Nietzsche and his follower Heidegger, and anarchoid leftists such as Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Heidegger’s follower Jean-Paul Sartre), and the modern positivists and structuralists. The idea which such illiterates profess they can not see with their senses, is a vision, but it is no mere fancy; it is, as I have said many times in what I have spoken and written on this subject, an elementary sort of experimentally demonstrable physical fact. This is the same quality of fact as any experimentally proven discovery of a universal physical principle.

It is the materialists, empiricists, and their like, who, directly contrary to their smug delusions, are living in a non-existent world of sheer lunatic fancy. This is precisely the idea which you—personally—must recognize, if you are to recognize the principle by means of which our presently imperilled civilization is to be rallied from the doom it is currently bringing down upon itself.

“Crucifixion” by Albrecht Dürer, 1508. “The crucial question is, ‘Why, if Jesus was born in the time of the reign of Augustus Caesar, did the Disciple John locate the existence of Christ from the beginning’? Here lies the relationship of the Crucifixion to the essence of Christianity.”

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No sleight of hand, no magical powers of prophecy, or the like, are involved in this vision. It is all clearly shown by the standpoint of a valid quality of physical science. The problem of society today, is that most people are terribly, sometimes terminally ignorant, precisely because they are of that superstitious breed suffering the bestializing delusion, that physical means sense-impressions. The task, therefore, is to show conclusively, that such people, including notable professors of physical science, are deluded on this specific point.

The point, is to put on record the evidence, that the mystery of Christ, as set forth in the opening of the Gospel of John, is not a matter of blind faith, but a fully comprehensible fact of Reason, and thus knowable to all, Christians or not, who do not remain hysterically resistant to the influence of Reason. The self-blinded victims of unreason, may be otherwise described as persons so passionately occupied by the bestial side of their sensual nature, that they refuse to detach themselves from the delusion, that the image seen in the distorted mirror of sense-impressions, is the same thing as the object which the mirror but imperfectly, and incompletely reflects.

In such a vision of Christ, there is no mumbo-jumbo, no blind faith. There is, however, the confusion which tends to erupt among the illiterates. Such problems of the illiterates, are the usual source of the disorders which have prompted many such persons to resort to unctuous utterances which may be deemed plausible only to the degree that the minds of teacher and pupil are more or less equally confused.

This, as I show, is a conception solidly rooted in the principles underlying physical science. It could not be otherwise.

Economy and Theology

It is no mere coincidence, that this notion of simultaneity of eternity, is the most interesting, important, and profitable idea in all physical science. (There, it appears most frequently reflected, today, in its reflection as the relativity of time.) I presented the groundwork for defining this paradox in locations published earlier, where I have emphasized the fact, that there are three distinct, but multiply-connected qualities of universal physical principles to be taken into account: non-living processes, living processes, and cognitive processes. Therefore, here, it is sufficient that I merely summarize those points elaborated in those earlier locations. That summary of those aspects helps me in focussing the reader’s attention on the crucial feature of the principal paradox, the mystery of Christ, as it provides the cornerstone for the entire subject of this report as a whole.

I summarize the physical-scientific basis for the argument, and thus so situate the core of the argument, respecting Christianity, itself in a provably knowable reality of experience.

As all my published writings and lecture-series on the Leibnizian science of physical economy, have emphasized, any competent notion of modern economy depends primarily, and absolutely on the notion, that the demonstrable increase of mankind’s gains in power in and over the universe, is the result of nothing other than society’s cooperation in applying experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principle. It is from those experimental proofs of thus-discovered universal physical principles, that the relevant technologies are generated as by-products, thus increasing the potential relative population-density of humanity, as measurable per capita and per square kilometer of surface-area.

In those writings and lectures, I have shown, that the generation of such discoveries of principle, can not occur through deductive methods, but only through the non-deductive processes of cognition, in contradiction of the Immanuel Kant, for example, who denied such knowable cognitive processes to exist. These discoveries occur at the prompting of what Plato’s method defines as ontological paradoxes of the sort which can not be overcome by deductive methods, but require methods associated with what Plato defines as a principle of higher hypothesis.

That is the same method to which Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa gave the title of docta ignorantia, the method adopted by Leonardo da Vinci from Cusa’s work, the method of Kepler, Leibniz, et al. It is by the sharing of the experience of original discovery, this by aid of sharing the experience of both such relevant ontological paradoxes and experimental validations, that such a discovery is established as knowledge for practice, as opposed to merely learned “information.” It is in the same way, and only this way, that any universal principle of physical science can be actually known.

These cognitive processes are of exactly the type illustrated by Plato’s dialogues. They also are of the same type underlying all successful efforts in Classical forms of artistic composition. The method of well-tempered counterpoint developed by J.S. Bach, as shown in his A Musical Offering and The Art of the Fugue, is an example of precisely this point. The opponents of Bach’s polyphonic method, in music, including Romanticists such as trivial Rameau and hoaxster Helmholtz, are typical of artistic (and, scientific) incompetence on this account. Thus, periods of history in which these Classical methods in science and artistic composition and performance predominate over so-called popular and other alternatives, are the great upward-moving periods in the entire sweep of globally extended European civilization since Classical Greece. It is periods in which cognitive literacy of this Classical form, in education, in scientific practice, and in artistic composition and performance, prevails, that the greatest relative progress in the human condition is obtained.

In contrast, it is during periods in which Classical forms of artistic composition cease to be popular, that societies tend to slide into their great cultural and moral catastrophes, as in the U.S.A. today.

Specifically, the mental activity responsible for the successful generation and sharing of a validatable, original discovery of universal physical principle, represents exactly the same quality of mental activity—cognitive activity—which is otherwise encountered in the Classical form of artistic composition and performance. The distinction between the two kinds of experience, is that the focus of physical science is man’s increased power in and over nature, per capita and per square kilometer, whereas Classical artistic composition addresses the means, of person to person, means rooted in cognition, by which cooperation in fostering and employing valid universal physical principles is made possible. As Shelley describes the unity of the two, in his A Defence of Poetry, it is a matter of periods in which there is an increase of the power of imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting—both—man and nature.

Look backwards, from Riemann’s 1854 habilitation dissertation, to Plato. Focus upon the notion of the kind of ontological paradox from whose prompting a cognitively generated, valid discovery of a universal physical principle flows. Contrast the type of case, in which a valid discovery flows from an isolated ontological paradox, to the alternate case, in which, as in Riemannian hypergeometry, all potentially well-defined new paradoxes are already implied, as cognitive potential, in knowledge of the manifold considered as a whole.[fn_19]

Take as an example of this, the relationship between Fresnel’s devastating experimental design for the demolition of Newton’s dogma on the propagation of light, and Wilhelm Weber’s experimental proof of the Ampère angular force, thus refuting the neo-Newtonian fallacies of Grassmann, Maxwell, et al. on this point. The latter two conceptions, Fresnel and Arago on light, and Ampère-Weber on electromagnetism, were not only integrated discoveries in both their origins and their outcome, but were discoveries generated, as in the intimate collaboration among Fresnel, Ampère, and Arago, from the starting-point of recognizing a pervasive, systemic fallacy in the totality of the empiricist dogma of Sarpi, Newton, Leonhard Euler, et al.[fn_20]

The characteristic of the most productive trends in modern European culture’s scientific and technological progress, is typified by the implications of Riemann’s habilitation dissertation. It is viewing the entire sweep of physical science as an implicitly unified, unfolding manifold, as Cusa and Leonardo did before Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, which moves scientific progress from the domain of seemingly haphazard solutions to isolated paradoxes, into a generalized, and more or less conceptually well-focussed onslaught on the frontier of existing science as a whole.

Those considerations, as just so summarized, lead us immediately to the central question posed by the notion of “simultaneity of eternity.” That, in turn, makes the concept of the mystery of Christ transparent to the individual processes of cognition.

There are three crucial, multiply-connected ideas to be considered in that specific context.

First, if the functional relationship between man and the universe is located within the domain of cognition, rather than that of simple sense-experience, what is the form and quality of the willful choice of action which defines man’s functional relationship to the universe?

Second, since such action is generated only within those sovereign cognitive processes of the mind of an individual, the which are impervious to observation by sense-perception, and since that individual is mortal, what is the relationship of that individual’s mortal existence to the universe in which the effects of such cognitive acts unfold?

Third, what, on both accounts, is the relationship of the existence of the cognitive activity of the mortal individual to the existence of all humanity within the universe as a whole? There, in summary, in that third observation, and in nothing less than that, lies the notion of the idea of the idea of human nature.

The first of those three ideas, points to a fundamental quality of distinction between the commonplace, vulgar notion of a universe, as a bare reflection of sense-experience, and the notion of that experience of the universe in terms of the specific qualities of action which demonstrably increase the potential relative population-density of mankind, or of a specific human culture.[fn_21] This identifies the first conceptual hurdle which the student must overcome, if he or she is to attain an efficient notion of the meaning of physical science and technology.

Consider the definition of characteristically human action, to be solely: that action by means of which mankind’s potential relative population-density is increased. Then, only those forms of cognition typified by valid discovery (and re-enactment of the act of such discovery, as by a student) of universal physical principles, correspond to such action. This can be represented, for example, by the image of a series of Riemannian manifolds (e.g., n, n+1, n+2, . . .) ordered accordingly. That image brings the action corresponding to the progressive ordering of that series of discoveries of principle, into conformity with what Riemann, following both Leibniz and Gauss, defined as the changes in characteristic curvature of physical space-time, as we proceed from one such manifold to the next.

By proceeding along that line of thought, we have freed science from the intellectually numbing grip of vulgar sense-certainty. Instead of the naive folly of attributing reality to the “ivory-tower”-like contemplation of sense-impressions, we now have, through the relevant modes of experiment, an immediate correlation between the cognitive action of the individual mind, and the effect of the action of the hand guided and controlled by the action of discovery by that mind. This relationship of the action of the cognitive state of mind to the change in effect induced by the action of the hand it controls, thus becomes the only definition of physical knowledge which we accept. This is Heraclitus’ “nothing is constant but change,” as that paradoxical ontological principle was clarified by Plato.

So, instead of inferring the action as congruent with an aprioristic kind of sense-certainty, or the so-called “Euclidean” physical space-time of the empiricist Galileo, et al., we define action in the cognitive terms I have just summarily described. Instead of the vulgar superstition of “action at a distance” (i.e., in “Euclidean” space-time), we adopt a Leibnizian notion of a principle of universal least action. This quality of action is, thus, the characteristic curvature of the kind of physical space-time associated with the action in which it occurs. The increase of potential relative population-density, provides a relevant standard of measure, the framework within which that “curvature” is to be defined.

The latter characteristic, is to be defined, in first approximation, in a Riemannian sense of the correlation between cognitive state of mind and the effective change—the change in pre-existing currents of change—induced by the hand it guides and controls.

Then, by measuring physical action so defined, in terms correlated with the notion of potential relative population-density, we have, in approximation, the image of the first of the three multiply-connected principles (ideas) listed above.[fn_22]

However, since such successful action by the human species, depends upon cooperation in sharing such ideas for practice of society, the physical relationship of the individual mind to the universe at large, is expressed immediately as I have indicated under the title of the second of the three principles listed shortly above. In this view, it is already clear that man acts efficiently upon the physical universe solely through the medium of those cognitively defined social relations, through which the transmission of such ideas occurs, through replication of their discovery. Thus, on this latter account, the role of Classical forms of artistic culture within the society, assumes a crucially determining character.

I emphasize a crucial point in this connection. I condemn to ridicule, the corrupted, actually degraded notion of art, as “merely entertainment,” as “merely fiction.” Of all compositions and performances of which it can be said, “This is primarily for your entertainment,” either the work performed, or the particular performance of it, or, at a minimum, the audience’s perception of it, is not an artistic experience. Classical forms of artistic composition, are the most appropriate means for the education of the soul, as Schiller’s tragedies, Wallenstein and Don Carlos, for example, elevate history from the level of more or less tendentious accounting-practice, mere apologetics or empty fantasy, to the mission of imbuing performers and audiences with a sense of the truth respecting the historical issue presented on the stage.

Does the performance of the Bach Passions of St. John and St. Matthew, for example, quicken in the participating congregation a truthful sense of participating in those moments in the life of Christ? Or, Wolfgang Mozart’s Requiem, in that Bach tradition, or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, also consciously crafted in the same Bach tradition as Mozart’s Requiem, but of which I have heard no truthful performance of the work as a whole to date. All true Classical art has the intended content, of composer and performer, of imparting to performer and audience an impassioned sense of truthfulness, a sense which can be effectively communicated in no other way than through the medium of Classical artistic composition. The best performance of the so-called Negro Spiritual, as Dvór@akak and Burleigh followed the thinking of Brahms respecting insight into the perfecting of folk-music, expresses the same universal principle of Classical art.

As the development of those forms of language oriented to cognitive communication, is as essential as reliving earlier accumulations of valid discoveries of physical principle, so even the existence of such a use of language itself, ties each of us presently living to the long process of emergence and development of such forms of language itself. However, to agree on the meaning of this ostensibly self-evident fact, we must first make clear to ourselves, what a healthy development of the use of a language represents.

Here, we must depart from the presently customary academic tendency, the tendency to equate spoken and written language with one-to-one correspondence with a purely deductive, more or less a behaviorist’s view of mathematics, with or without the included features of color, called emotions, added to the merely deductive forms of symbolic structures as such. As all successful forms of Classical artistic composition illustrate the relevant point most clearly, the essence of those forms of communication related to cognition is the principle of Classical metaphor. Relative to a formal classroom mathematics, the characteristic distinction of metaphor from a purely deductive form of language-use, is argument in the form of what Leibniz identified as Analysis Situs, this more or less as Riemann adopts a related notion of this.[fn_23]

In a relevant approximation, a metaphor is a stated gap, an apparent paradox, which can not be bridged by methods of deductive argument. It is, according to the standard modern English-language definition, by William Empson, the ultimate, relatively absolute form of literary irony.[fn_24] In all cases represented, as types, by Empson, the principle of Analysis Situs is either explicitly, or proximately present. Symbolism is the lowest form of irony, and tends to be the most often false and degrading. Metaphor is the perfect form of expression of irony, of Analysis Situs, and the most important, that on which the most profound arguments, such as the discovery of universal principles, must necessarily rely.

Thus, to the degree we are cognitively cultivated as children and adolescents, and at later ages, too, we each embody a corresponding mass of cognitive re-experiences, and also paradoxes, which we have thus acquired from preceding generations. Since the cognitive act of acquiring such combined knowledge and pre-knowledge, occurs within our perfectly sovereign mental processes, we each provide thus, potentially, a necessary link in the transmission of such knowledge from our predecessors to those who come after us. The actions of society, which are derived, as both potential and practice, from that thus-transmitted and -generated store of cognitive knowledge, are the means by which mankind acts upon the universe to the effect of increasing our species’ potential relative population-density. Since the individual cognitive action, on which this transmission depends absolutely, is, ontologically, the sovereign cognitive action of each individual, each individual so engaged, represents a permanent—i.e., immortal—link in that chain of human development, a link to be found, as appropriate, in either Heaven or Hell.

Therefore, look at the universe in a different way.

In first approximation, the skein of human existence as a whole—as past, present, and future, can be conceptualized as a permanent, ontological process of constant change, so defined in terms of a universal principle of efficient cognition. This can be conceived as if all eternity existed as but an instant. Yet, within that eternal instant, there is an ordering principle, the ordering of before and after, as cognitive action defines such a succession. Time and space, in the sense of “Euclidean” space-time, vanish, leaving only the residue of cognitive action, an ordering of before and after, within that internally, cognitively ordered simultaneity of eternity. Action is preserved, where time and space remain only relative.

Thus, we have the following crucial ontological paradox to solve. According to the Gospel of John, the Jesus Christ born slightly more than 2,000 years ago, existed with God the Father at the beginning of time, dwelling in that moment, called eternity, defined by creative cognition. This paradox points directly to the truth underlying the mystery of Christianity. That also defines the nature of Christianity, and, also exposes, in a more profound way than ever before, the actual nature of man.

Granted, we can not suppose that more than a few Christian believers so far ever conceived the arrangement in exactly the way I have described it here so far. Yet, for any Christian (that is, a person situated, essentially, in the implied, living, efficient connection between the mortal individual person and the living Christ crucified), precisely such an implicit, personal relationship, is essential. The image I have drawn in this way, is no fantasy. What I have described is the demonstrable physical reality of a universe so mapped according to cognition (e.g., Reason) as a supreme ordering principle. The scientific proof of that fact, is elementary; I have stated it on many earlier occasions.

Thus, on that account, we have the following additional paradox to consider, the paradox of creation in general.

When mankind acts according to a discovered universal physical principle, the universe obeys that cognitively-generated command. Mankind’s power in and over the universe is increased. It is thus as if the universe was predisposed to obey only such commands, as if by pre-design: as Plato argued, as if it were composed by its Composer. Scientific progress, when measured in terms of increase in potential relative population-density, from the standpoint of a science of physical economy, is “the great experiment,” upon which the claims of science to authority depend absolutely.

Thus, in such action, mankind expresses itself, through the fruit of individual cognition, as made in the image of the Creator of the universe.

What I have thus described, is an image of the real universe, to be contrasted to, and to supersede the infantile and childish presumptions which attribute reality primarily to sense-perception, and to hedonistic responses to the objects of sense-perception. Such is the essential distinction in quality of mind, between a morally matured representative of the human species, and the classes of such morally infantile types as those among which we find a Governor Bush or Vice-President Gore. However, while the cultivated mind of a scientist should be able to grasp the axiomatic distinction as I have just described it, he might not yet “feel” the distinction, until he had taken the matter one crucial step further.

It is a common folly among putatively well trained physical scientists, much more so today than among those born during the period spanning two World Wars, that they tend to go cognitively dead when leaving the experimental laboratory to assume a position before the blackboard. In the better cases, such a figure at the blackboard might say in response to a crucial sort of paradox, “I see the point you are making;” but, at the same time, the acknowledgment is essentially an academic formality, and does not represent an act of comprehension. It remains, more or less, an academic formality. He does not “feel” the fact he has recognized; he is, in that degree, without expression of cognitive passion.[fn_25]

At this juncture, it is essential to stress again a point made above. That, the effect of mankind’s relationship to the physical universe, may be measured in per-capita and per-square-kilometer values of potential relative population-density, but that the action by means of which this progress is motivated, and therefore accomplished, lies not within the domain of that observation, but only within the cognitive aspect of social relations. Here, only in that latter domain, one may “feel” the moral distinction in question. One might feel anger, for example, but not the quality of motivation (passion) associated with the cognitive willing of an action.

The experience of “feeling” that distinction, lies in the domain of Classical modes of artistic composition. Here, in this domain, we rise above the abstract individual thinker acting in terms of discovered universal physical principles; we leave the domain of mere shadow-figures, persons degraded by deductive logic into mere abstract objects, and enter the domain of real human beings. In the latter domain, we experience those passions through which cooperation in mastering the universe is motivated.

Thus, the Christian does not act because of the scientific idea of Christ, but because he or she loves Christ as Plato and the Apostle Paul define the quality of agapē, and as the great Brahms sought to impart a sense of that within his Four Serious Songs, especially the concluding part. For that, will heroes and martyrs die, as the image of Friedrich Schiller’s Jeanne d’Arc portrays this her passion in the closing moments of her life. It is in great Classical artistic composition, that such indispensable qualities of passion are rehearsed and strengthened.

It is precisely that same quality of passion which must be summoned from among our people, if we are to muster among us the will to free civilization from that awful curse presently descending upon the world.[fn_26] The lessons which were applied to bring the Golden Renaissance, including its birth of modern experimental science, into being, were not merely matters of formality; they were matters of great, and profound passion. Therefore, although only a few special persons are capable of rising to the cognitive quality of devotion which my foregoing outline describes, the lesson of Christianity over nearly 2,000 years, shows how the sense of a personal relationship to a living Christ crucified, supplied to European civilization that degree of admittedly unperfected passion for Reason, which has been proven essential to bring civilization to the levels reached by the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance and its actual progress in the human condition since.

In reality, the Christian so moved, is motivated by a sense of a living personal relationship to a living Christ. That this signifies that Christ lives today in the simultaneity of eternity, may be beyond the developed powers of that person’s comprehension; but, his or her passion respecting that relationship to the living Christ, is efficient, even if the Christian would stumble in any effort to explain that relationship. So, a person may insist, quite rightly and passionately, that he exists and is alive, even though the details of the scientific proof may be beyond his present powers of comprehension.

From that observation, we see in the ebbs and flows of the development of European civilization to date, how periods of moral complacency make our people morally and intellectually careless, as the aging Solon complained of his fellow-Athenians. Yet, we also see, that, sometimes, the threat or actuality of terrible tribulations awaken in people a willingness to risk much, even to the point of death, to defend civilization from the abyss, and even to add some worthy steps forward. The question is: Whence can they muster the passion required to act so, the passion—in German military science, the Entschlossenheit—needed to rescue themselves from the new dark age inhering in their present condition of great folly?

How often people say, “I see your point. You may be right; but, I have to go along with . . .” That is precisely the way in which the potential of the U.S.A. for a future as a nation is being destroyed by most of its citizens at this moment, such as those who argue, “Nonetheless, I have to be practical. I have to support Gore, even if that means holding my nose while doing so.” Those citizens, do not wish to be malicious, but they make themselves malicious in effect, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when they lack the passion to save their nation and themselves from the danger which is so clearly looming before us all. They lack that quality of passion, by means of which the greatest minds of Europe’s Fifteenth Century pulled a great Renaissance out of the rubble-heap left by the Fourteenth Century’s New Dark Age.

It is precisely in this current connection, that the New Testament image of Christ in Gethsemane, should be recalled to mind. For Christians, over nearly 2,000 years, the essence of their sense of personal connection to Christ is best summarized in the sections of the New Testament bearing upon the matter of Christ’s passion in Gethsemane. The core of this matter of the crucified Christ, is presented in the Gospel of John, in Chapter 12: 23-40, echoing Matthew Chapter 17: 21-23. Here, from his reading of these sections of the Gospels, Johann Sebastian Bach crafted those great services known as his Passions of St. John and St. Matthew.

Hear those Bach passions, as if they were heard in the mode Bach himself directed their performance. Sit among the congregation, in the church where Bach conducted. Hear the score as Bach intended it be performed, not as merely a spectator’s amusement, but as a great Socratic musical dialogue among the composer, the soloists, the chorus, and the responsive assembled congregation. Here, in this passion of Christ so re-enacted, is echoed that essential passion of Christianity, upon which all of the fundamental achievements of modern European civilization have depended for their effective motivation.

Performance of Bach’s St. John Passion by the Schiller Institute in Ampfing, Germany, 1998. “Here, in this passion of Christ so re- enacted, is echoed that essential passion of Christianity, upon which all of the fundamental achievements of modern European civilization have depended for their effective motivation.”

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With those Bach passions echoing in one’s mind, witness the Christians dying in Nero’s arena, under the descending thumb of Roman popular opinion. Here, so, sense the passion which has protected the idea of Christianity from the deadening fist of today’s doctrinaire pedantry and enthusiastic pulpit pornographers alike, and supplied to Christians that passion—again, Entschlossenheit—without which neither the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, that Renaissance’s launching of modern experimental science, nor all other benefits of modern European civilization, could have occurred.

In studying more closely the long waves and shorter intervals of moral and intellectual depravity, which have seized the U.S.A. during the sweep of the period since the assassination of McKinley, and, also the recent three decades slide into a moral and intellectual morass, we recognize that the greatest injury was done by the temptations of degraded forms of pleasure-seeking, especially popular entertainment of that sort.

The essential feature of such degradation, is best typified by examining the influence of the circles of such moral degenerates as Bertrand Russell and the circles of existentialists typified by the so-called “Frankfurt School” of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, et al., as from the same existentialist standpoint by Arendt’s intimate, that follower of satanic Nietzsche, the Nazi Martin Heidegger. These fellows focussed upon denying the notion of existence of truthfulness, and thus drove their duped victims into a flight into the immorality of amoral pragmatist reliance upon the passions associated with sense-certainty. Thus, has our promising modern European civilization once again slid into the depravity which is the legacy of pagan Rome. This, and what it typifies, is our enemy from within.

Just so, until about thirty-five years ago, Christian civilization was greatly corrupted from two principal sources. One, was the infantile and related moral and intellectual poverty of the people and their culture, generally speaking. The second, was the role of the wealthy oligarchical family circles, whose instinct was to degrade the people generally into the semblance of brutish human cattle, by aid of vulgar, bordello-like, and Roman-arena-like public sports-entertainments, and kindred forms of popular entertainment, as a way of ruling over them; to the latter purpose, like the pagan oligarchy of ancient Rome before them, they transformed those they would keep as human cattle into pleasure-ridden spectators of degraded entertainments, including great public spectacles like those of “Hollywood” and the sports spectacles today, and the pagan Roman arena earlier. It was chiefly the influence—including the financial, so-called charitable contributions—of the simony practiced by such wealthy oligarchically inclined rentier-financier families, which has been the chief instrument thrusting corruption, in such forms as modern existentialism, into the Christian churches. This phenomenon has been especially notable since the mid-1960s.

If the poor will not rally to support their own causes, the rich will cheaply buy the souls of the poor and oppressed.

During the recent three and a half decades, since the 1962 missiles crisis and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the moral level of the general population has been degraded to a level approximately as bad as that during the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War, and the notorious depravity which seized both the rulers and general population of Walpole’s England. It is the new wave of cultural depravity into which the post-Franklin Roosevelt U.S.A. has sunk, most dramatically since the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which has carried the U.S.A. over the line, from the earlier risk of simply a new Great Depression, into the present, culturally determined likelihood of imminent descent into a new dark age. The clearest symptom of the impact of the post-Kennedy countercultural revolution, is the depravity which has, to such a large degree, variously taken over churches, or simply depopulated the parish pews.

It is the loss of morally elevated, Classical-artistic qualities of passion, creating a vacuum filled by the depravities of pedantry and hedonism, which made the Twentieth Century a nightmare. It is the unleashing of a combination of radical positivism and outrightly satanic existentialism, like that of Adorno, Arendt, Heidegger, Heidegger’s clone Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sartre’s satanic clone Frantz Fanon, which typifies the pure evil which has dominated the process of internal decay of globally extended European civilization, and of the churches and synagogues within them, during the recent thirty-five years.

With the immediate aftermath of the death of a kind of Solon of that century, President Franklin Roosevelt, the citizens of the U.S.A. began to degenerate morally, rather rapidly, as Solon’s poem addresses the decadence of those people of Athens whom he had led in rescuing earlier. The pragmatism of the myths of “White Collar” and “The Organization Man” reflected the rotting out of the morals of the new suburbanites of the 1950s. This, in turn, fostered that eruption of moral indifferentism which characterized the post-Kennedy rock-drug-sex counterculture, leading to a satanic defense of arbitrary values and mere opinion against any threatened encroachment from truth. Without a passion for truth, nothing is likely to lure the doomed out of the damned Cities of the Plain. Even the most enthusiastic Christian hypocrites of this time are really no better; it is their bank accounts and pleasures which these corrupt hedonists of those churches wish God to heal, not their souls, not their civilization.

Thus, I have summarized the case in which the mystery of Christ is to be situated, and understood, not only among Christians, but within the setting of the great dialogue of cultures which the honorable President of Iran has described.

The Golden Renaissance

The Fifteenth-Century Renaissance was the birth of modern European civilization, and the expression of the noblest among the embattled forces which, ever since, have contested control over the field which has been that civilization. In modern European civilization since, we find nothing of crucial importance during the recent half-millennium, which is both good and novel, which is not derived from that Renaissance. Everything of significance which occurred within European civilization later, which was antagonistic to the fruits of that Renaissance’s Christian form of Classical Greek culture, has been a contribution to what is to be fairly described today, without exaggeration, as the Devil’s own work.

To grasp the circumstances under which this Fifteenth-Century renewal of Christianity in Europe occurred, we must look back to the time of the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II, and examine, in that light, the subsequent relative depravity into which European civilization was degraded through the Venice-directed, oligarchical Guelph League’s wars. The essential motive for those wars, was the perpetuation of the globalized form of the feudal system, against, initially, Frederick, but also, from the start, against the entirety of that upsurge of Europe traced from Alcuin and Charlemagne, through the period of the building of the great cathedrals in the Augustinian spirit displayed at Chartres.[fn_27]

During that period of more than a hundred years following the same period as the German defeat of the Mongol invasion, at Wahlstatt, in 1241, through the period of the Black Death pandemic in western Europe, the Guelph League’s depredations reduced the numbers of parishes and level of population by approximately one-half. The hundred-odd years between the launching of those Guelph League wars and the consequent mid-Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age, identify the barest essentials of the moral and physical self-degradation from which the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance uplifted Europe.

The policies of the Guelph League, were paralleled, later, by the methods deployed by Venice, from the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, to attempt to ruin the benefits of the Golden Renaissance.

The flood tide of that Renaissance was typified by Cosimo de Medici’s, George Gemmistos’ (Plethon’s), and Filippo Brunelleschi’s Florence, by the great ecumenical Council of Florence, by the influence of Nicholas of Cusa, and by the successive steps of actually establishing the modern form of sovereign nation-state, by France’s Louis XI and England’s Henry VII. The alliance of Leonardo’s friends in Italy and France, the discovery of America, and cooperation among Spain and England during the times of Spain’s Queen Isabella and England’s Henry VII, typified the beneficial new order coming into being as part of this Renaissance.

In the wake of the betrayal and defeat of the anti-Venice coalition, the League of Cambrai, and in Spain’s going over then to the side of the enemies of the Renaissance, Venice successfully created a great religious schism, put England and Spain at one another’s throats, established the corruption which was the reign of France’s Henry II, and drowned Europe in religious war for most of the interval of that new dark age, 1513-1648: from the consolidation of Venice’s victory over the League of Cambrai, until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. All this was a bloody warfare, orchestrated by Venice’s financier oligarchy, against both the Renaissance in general and the institution of the modern European form of sovereign nation-state in particular.

Thus, following the defeat of the League of Cambrai, the alliance among France, Spain, and England was not only ruined, but transformed into the warfare which dominated most of European history during a period dated from the beginning of the Sixteenth-Century religious wars through the 1714 conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession. Europe today bleeds still, from the chain-reaction reverberations of the treachery which enabled Venice’s defeat of the League of Cambrai.

There exists no tolerable excuse for the Guelph League, as there was none for the later launching of Europe’s religious wars of 1618-1648, and no tolerable excuse for the criminals who acted to prevent Wallenstein from reaching the peace-agreement which would have brought that unjustified war to a close. There is no tolerable excuse for the conduct of the adversaries of Frederick II, and no imaginable, actually Christian excuse for the conduct of Spain’s Philip II et al. in launching the Netherlands wars, or the criminal intervention of the Spanish house against Wallenstein’s effort to end the useless butchery. These wars of 1513-1648, belong to a period which has been rightly described as “a little dark age,” a period of Venice-orchestrated religious wars, echoing motives virtually identical to those of the Venice-directed Guelph League earlier.

In the instance of such follies as these, like the outcome of the recent, protracted U.S. War in Indo-China, there is crucial evidence embedded within the quality of the result itself, which attests conclusively to the depraved quality of the deed, and of the policy which brought about such an effect. In those referenced cases, the apology for the protracted war is perhaps an even greater crime, with effects continued even to the present day, than the protracted war itself. An evil war occurs, but apologies for that evil, like the version of “cabinet warfare” doctrine of Hobbesian perpetual warfare, which infects deranged and decadent, British-influenced U.S. military officers and others today, infects the future with yet more, perhaps even worse evil than it has either the past or the present. Over the course of known history to date, such apologies are most common among the doctrines which pre-shape and usher in a new dark age of humanity.

Under the continued policies of the Venice-directed Guelph League, over what had been more than a hundred years, European civilization had been not only gutted, but morally and demographically degraded by Guelph triumphs, thus reaching a depraved moral and physical condition of Europe, with physical conditions far worse than that which had existed at the start. For such actions, such as the policies which launched and, worse, perpetuated the 1618-1648 war, no apology is morally or theologically tolerable. Indeed, in the latter case, no solution was possible, but that adopted as the Treaty of Westphalia: to wipe the slate clean of the grievances and other follies raised and perpetrated from each of all sides. The same is to be said of the intrinsic moral depravity of the perverse collusion between that intrinsically depraved pair, Britain’s neo-Thatcherite Tony Blair and self-avowed H.G. Wells acolyte Secretary Albright, in launching and extending, to the present day, the so-called NATO war against Yugoslavia, or the, similarly, continued bombing of Iraq.

Fortunately, it had been against such a background, that, during the late Fourteenth Century, forces emerged in Europe, as in that plague-stricken Florence which had been formerly a bastion of the doomed Lombard bankers of the early Fourteenth Century, a new movement, exploiting the self-weakened condition of Venice and its accomplices, to launch what became the Golden Renaissance.

The Cathedral of Laon in France. The Venice-directed oligarchical Guelph League’s wars were aimed against “the entirety of that upsurge of Europe traced from Alcuin and Charlemagne, through the period of the building of the great cathedrals in the Augustinian spirit displayed at Chartres.”

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The crucial thread of continuity, from Dante Alighieri, through Petrarch, into the Golden Renaissance, is a key bench-mark for understanding what happened. Crucial, is the work of Dante in setting the cornerstones for both a Classical transformation of popular national languages and culture, and the establishment of a system of sovereign nation-state republics conceived in the same spirit as Dante’s efforts to elevate the popular language to a quality suited to the work of cognition.

It was the cultural shock, and the accompanying discrediting of the policies of the Guelph League, a discrediting produced by the New Dark Age, which created the opening into which the organizers of the Golden Renaissance deployed. Typical were the great teaching order, the Brothers of the Common Life (later suppressed by the pro-Venice, anti-Renaissance faction of the mid-Sixteenth Century), and the establishment of the great Greek Classical revival, at Padua, at the beginning of the Fifteenth Century. The latter was the Classical Greek revival which produced the leading intellectual forces of the Renaissance, as typified by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and his friends. The former, the Brothers of the Common Life of Thomas à Kempis, represent the teaching method which produced numbers of the greatest leaders of the Renaissance, as typified by figures in the range of Cusa and Erasmus of Rotterdam.

The essence of the Renaissance is typified by two works of the young Cusa, his Concordantia Catholica, upon which the conception of the modern sovereign form of nation-state depended, and his founding of modern European experimental science, his De Docta Ignorantia. These two publications, with the great ecumenical Council of Florence which Cusa did much to organize, situated amid them, typify that Renaissance as a whole. The former book, the Concordantia Catholica, supplied the argument upon which that century’s founding of the first two modern nation-states were premised. The second, De Docta Ignorantia, founded the modern experimental physical science of Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Carl Gauss, and Bernhard Riemann. It was the confluence of these two new institutions, the use of Classical Greek principles of artistic composition for creating the modern sovereign nation-state, and the fostering of science-driven progress in the productive powers of labor per capita and per square kilometer, which is the distinguishing essence of the revolutionary successes of globally extended modern European civilization.

It is, conversely, the abandoning of the functional interdependency of those two principles, under the corrosive influences of the unfortunate Vice-President Al Gore’s pro-paganist cults of globalization and “ecology,” which has done the most, during the recent several decades, to engender the spiral of the currently ongoing physical-economic collapse of Europe and the Americas.

The colonization of the Americas, the development of modern science by the successive work of Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Kepler, and the revolution in Classical artistic composition once led by Leonardo and his followers, typify this Renaissance, as do the successive political revolutions by France’s Louis XI and England’s Henry VII, in their establishing the pioneer forms of the modern sovereign nation-state.

The makers of the Renaissance had a passion for truth, and a passion for that knowledge needed to find the pathway to its realization. The public figures who led the Venice-led, Sixteenth-Century anti-Renaissance, recognized any public zeal for seeking truth, as a threat to the systems of their financier-oligarchy and its feudal-aristocratic sponsors and paymasters. These corrupt adversaries of the Renaissance, devised sophistries in the forms of mixed myth, outright lies, terrorist methods of tyranny, and deductive fallacies of composition—or, what is called today “spin”—to craft the political and religious doctrines by aid of which the devastating religious wars of the 1513-1648 dark-age interval were promoted.

Otherwise, that stated as a matter of identifying relevant historical connections, I have written so much, so often, on the topics of the Golden Renaissance during the recent thirty years, that I should not find myself obliged to outline the leading features of that history in detail, again, here. The preceding, and a few now added, most crucial highlights suffice.

The central institutional feature of the Golden Renaissance, is that it has been the greatest political revolution in the known existence of mankind, the introduction of the principle of the modern European form of sovereign nation-state.

This Renaissance, when considered as a model political revolution, considered in all of its characteristic features, is the third great revolutionary development in the entire history of globally extended European civilization. For the first time in all presently known human existence, the entirety of the population of a nation was raised from the status of virtual human cattle, to a political condition, which, in principle, if not always in practice, is consistent with the Christian principle, that all persons are made equally in the image of the Creator, and that the efficient promotion of the general welfare of each and all of those people, and their posterity, is the sole basis for the legitimacy of government. For that reason, the Renaissance notion of the perfectly sovereign nation-state, has been the dividing line between good and evil, both in and outside the churches, ever since.

Without the revolutionary change in religious belief, created by Christ, and spread by the Christian Apostles and the martyrs, the creation of the modern sovereign form of nation-state would not have been possible. It was the passion embedded in Christianity which moved, and was unleashed by the Golden Renaissance.

Three principal elements combined to account for the possibility of this Renaissance.

First, the old, collapsed order was discredited, as the system of “free trade” and “globalization” is soon to become an object of both hatred and contempt, world wide, very soon now.

Second, there existed a kernel of new leadership qualified to inspire a growing number of others in a renaissance premised upon the Christian heritage of the Greek Classic.

Third, the principal qualification of those leaders of the Renaissance, was a relevant passion for cognition, as preferred over the relative sterility of deductive method, as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa typifies those so affected and prepared, by cognitive labor, for their role.

It were sufficient for our purposes in this report, to focus discussion of the Renaissance itself upon those three elements.

To appreciate the roots of that Renaissance, we must take into account the continuing fact, that the curse of medieval and modern European civilization, to the present day, has been the legacy of the Roman Empire and its bestial doctrine of vox populi (e.g., “popular opinion,” “established customs,” “popular tastes,” “popular fashions,” “popular entertainment”). This is the evil of the pagan Latin-speaking legacy, as the case against it was documented by Augustine.

In the history of European feudalism, the specific form in which this Roman imperial legacy persisted, was, most notably, both the influence of the zero-population-growth practice prescribed by the Code of Diocletian, and the continued imposition of that Code by the Byzantine enemies of Alcuin and Charlemagne.[fn_28] Thus, despite liberators such as Charlemagne, and successors of Charlemagne such as the Emperor Frederick II, the feudal notion of “rule of law,” has remained, to this day, that decadent oligarchical perversion of the lately discredited U.S. Republican Representative Henry Hyde, or the brutish Magna Carta, the rule of feudal law, rule by globalization, by the legacy of imperial law, traced from old Babylon through the Code of the Emperor Diocletian. That notion of an axiomatically irrational system of “rule of law,” is the evil which we must act in concert to destroy, if the world is not to fall into a great new, planet-wide dark age, that of a duration of several decades or even much longer.

As typified by the life of Abelard of Paris, the political form of the great struggle to establish forms of society efficiently committed to the principle of man made in the image of the Creator, was concentrated in the issue of education of the young, especially the education of orphans and children from the families of the lower social estates, notably boys from the urban populations. If nations are to rule themselves according to natural law, rather than fall into the immoral corruption of mere custom (e.g., “tradition”) as such, where shall we find the rulers qualified to perform that function, and the general population to consent to and support such a political and social order? This is not possible in a nation such as the early English society depicted, allegorically, by Jonathan Swift: a nation of Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, such as the popular-entertainment-ruined U.S.A. is becoming today.

All of the great religious teaching orders, the Augustinians and others, like the Brothers of the Common Life, centered their work in this mission. In the most relevant cases, as Abelard’s battle against unreason typifies this issue, the crucial point in educational policy, was that the young should not bend in blind obedience to the instruction issued from the teacher, but should re-experience the discovery and validation of those demonstrably truthful ideas which converged most nearly upon universal principles. In brief, the issue was that of choosing between defending “What I have been taught to say,” and being qualified to state and defend ideas which one has discovered, and validated afresh, through acts of cognition, rather than learning.

Only one who has rejected such rule by mere learning, actually knows anything. This method for development of actual knowledge, truthful knowledge, is Socratic method; it is the method of docta ignorantia which Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Kepler, among others, adopted from the work of the intellectual founder of both the modern nation-state and experimental physical science, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. It is the method of the physical science upon which modern civilization’s avoidance of a new dark age depends without exception; it is the Socratic method upon which we depend absolutely for those Classical principles of artistic composition, without which effective cooperation in the discovery and application of universal physical principles were not possible.

It was the assembly of a cadre of such leaders, typified by the case of Nicholas of Cusa, their devotion to the Socratic method, and their passion for bringing into being a form of society consistent with the individual made in the living, cognitive image of the Creator, which made the achievements of the Renaissance possible. It was the condition of crisis produced by the preceding New Dark Age, which presented to that cadre the opportunity to undertake such a magnificent work. So, in times of greatest crisis for humanity, prayers may thus be answered: and prayers in the form of “God help me to do my duty,” may be decisive in mustering the will of the believer to bring about the answer to those prayers.

The Ecumenical Principle

On condition that the representatives of Christian civilization rid themselves of the corruption which I have summarily identified here so far, the Christian will, and must evangelize accordingly, otherwise he is not honest with himself or herself. If he is not honest with himself in such matters, why should anyone else trust his good intentions? Thus, the expression of a certain truthful quality of Socratic, cognitive, not deductive, passion for what he or she believes, on that account, may not guarantee the success of an attempted ecumenical dialogue, but these Socratic qualities are indispensable for even the mere possibility of success.

Nothing is more abominable in an attempted ecumenical dialogue, than that representatives of differing faiths pollute the attempt in such ways, as putting themselves through the degrading spectacle of purporting to negotiate a plea-bargain respecting their differences, from the vantage-point of mere “sensitivity to the feelings of one another.” Such immoral plea-bargaining, with disregard for essential issues of moral principle, was the cause for the failure of the recently attempted Camp David negotiations.

Nothing offends me more on this account, and justly so, than that most morally degraded of all moralists, the one whose expressed commitments are not to truth, but, rather, to affecting sensitivity toward the “feelings” of others and requiring that the other should do similarly, in return. “If you say that, you will hurt my feelings,” has no legitimate right to prompt me not to tell the truth as I know it, and am prepared to prove that my views on the point are truthful. To blame Chairman Arafat, that even publicly, for his failing to submit to the terms of a proposed plea bargain, may be lawyers’ standard current practice of positive law, but it is all the more immoral for just that reason.

If the parties approach one another with the expressed view, that there is no truth, but only differing opinions, differing values, you must walk away quickly from that conversation. Without a commitment to find an existing truth in a Socratic way, common to all, there can never be an honest agreement.

For example, there are many persons today, who tell us that they believe that man is merely another animal, and that every imaginable sort of lower species has the same rights which might be claimed for a human being. There are even well-known supporters of the candidacy of Vice-President Al Gore, who insist that man is about to be scrapped by “Silicon Valley,” in favor of a superior species, “thinking robots,” so typified by silicon brains as also, presumably, by silicone breasts. Toward such morally debased opinions, toleration is neither required, nor allowed.

So, a dialogue among cultures must draw the line, banning certain sorts of both outrightly lunatic and obviously disgusting beliefs from the agenda. For a successful dialogue, there must be a search for unanimity on some provable universal principle, a principle of the sort which is demonstrably embedded in the nature of mankind’s relationship to the universe in which we live. The nature of those latter principles should be clear from the relevant portions of the discussion within the preceding pages of this report. What we must agree upon, is a functional definition of the nature of man, as distinct from the lower living species, and of man as the only known species which is capable of increasing its power to exist, per capita and per square kilometer, in the universe.

As I have emphasized, a dialogue focussed upon the objective of that sort of definition, is axiomatically Socratic in form. For that reason, the functional characteristic of that dialogue is cognitive, rather than deductive or symbolic. It can not be deductive, since the implied purpose of the dialogue is to detect and eradicate axiomatic assumptions which both divide us and which are demonstrably false.

Those indispensable observations on moral principle stated, what should be the objectives of an ecumenical dialogue among cultures today?

The political purpose of an ecumenical dialogue among cultures, should be centrally defined as the attempt to reach a common definition of natural law. The function to be performed by adoption of such a definition, is to create a principled form of agreement on the subject of constituting a community of principle thus constituted among a group of perfectly sovereign nation-states.

The most essential point of agreement to be reached, as an objective of the dialogue, should be agreement to three points: a) a stated conception of a common conception of the nature of man, as I have elaborated that definition afresh in the earlier portions of the present report; b) the definition of the nature of the perfect sovereignty of a sovereign nation-state; and, c) the implications of the principle, that no government has legitimate authority under natural law, except as it is efficiently committed to promote the general welfare of its own population and its posterity as a whole, and to fostering the same principle in the relation among sovereign states so defined.

Apart from those crucial points of needed agreement, everything else of importance should be put on the table, so to speak, and that as frankly, as rigorously, and as passionately as possible, even if agreement on such matters is not reached presently, or envisaged for the immediately foreseeable future. By agreeing to disagree, in such a fashion, we strengthen our agreement in principle, because we have understood one another, and one’s relevant passions quite clearly. So, the great Moses Mendelssohn stated his adherence to the orthodox Mosaic heritage; so, it should be among Christian, Jew, Muslim, and others today.

[fn_1]. The attempt to explain the case of either Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler as evil master-minds, is not permitted by the relevant evidence. Think of them as in the tradition of Roman Emperors such as Caligula, Nero, and Caracalla, whose awful atrocities reflect not their strength of intellect, but rather the lack thereof. In revealing moments of crisis, both showed themselves for the wimps they really were. The threat they represented, partook more of the nature of a virus than an intellect. What makes a Governor Bush or a Vice-President Gore so serious a threat to the nation, is not the stuff within them, but rather what is fairly described as a certain lack of stuffing in either.

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[fn_2]. Plato, Timaeus. Critias relates to Socrates and friends, a story told him by his grandfather, who said that “the achievements of the city in the old days, now forgotten because of the passage of time and the destruction of human life, were great and marvelous.” The grandfather described an encounter between Solon, the ruler of Athens, and a very old priest. The priest tells Solon that the Greeks are but children, and do not possess “one old belief rooted in ancient tradition, nor any learning made hoary by age.” “You recall only one deluge on earth, even though there were many,” he tells the astonished Solon. “Moreover, you are ignorant of the fact that the best and finest breed of men once lived in your land and that you and your whole city derive from a small remnant of their seed. This you have forgotten because for many generations the survivors died leaving no written record.” The priest goes on to explain that “the present civilized order in our part of the world,” according to sacred texts, was established 8,000 years ago. But even 9,000 years ago, there existed a culture with many fine achievements, including trans-Atlantic navigation, which the priest describes. (Timaeus, translated by a team of LaRouche associates in The Campaigner, February 1980.)

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[fn_3]. During, and immediately following, my April 1975 visit to Iraq, reflecting on my 1950s studies of the archeology of that region, I commented on how far the region had fallen since the time of the celebrated Caliph Haroun al Rashid. Such are the saddening evidences of the rise and fall of civilizations past.

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[fn_4]. It was Nicholas of Cusa and his associates, who responded to the fall of Constantinople by organizing ecumenical voyages into the waters to the west and east of the Ottoman Empire. Since then, liars have perpetrated frauds in the effort to deny and conceal the documented evidence showing the means by which Christopher Columbus received the maps, and Cusa associate Toscanelli’s other technical assistance in navigation, and the support which led him to rediscovery of the Americas. The English colonization of North America, best typified in the onset by the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a product of the same, continued policy which had been launched earlier by Cusa and his circles.

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[fn_5]. The statement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith can be found at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000626_message-fatima_en.html. See also Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “Call Them the ‘Baby Doomers,’ ” EIR, July 21, 2000, p. 36, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, “Third Prophecy of Fatima: A Summons to Repentance,” EIR, July 21, 2000.

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[fn_6]. The mortalist Pomponazzi was a central figure of the launching of the Sixteenth-Century anti-Renaissance; it was those Venice circles which orchestrated Venice’s taking control of King Henry VIII. Venice’s Paolo Sarpi, the founder of modern empiricism and intellectual controller of Seventeenth-Century figures such as Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, both set into motion the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 and prepared the way for the consolidation of Venetian influence over the English and British monarchies, beginning the tyranny of William of Orange.

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[fn_7]. “Enlightenment” signifies, broadly speaking, the founding of empiricism by Venice’s Paolo Sarpi and Sarpi’s lackey, Galileo Galilei. However, the use of the term “Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment,” signifies the Europe-wide network created by Sarpi’s most influential successor, the Paris-based Venetian spymaster Abbot Antonio Conti. It was Conti’s Europe-wide network of anti-Leibniz salons, which created Voltaire, Quesnay, and all principal varieties of the so-called French and English Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century.

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[fn_8]. Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1957), and in his infamous Chatham House address of May 10, 1982: “Reflections on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy, Address in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of the Office of Foreign Secretary.”

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[fn_9]. Friedrich Schiller, “What Is, and To What End Do We Study, Universal History?” Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom, Vol. II (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1988).

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[fn_10]. The Greek name of Athena associates her with the founding of the original city of Athens, under Egyptian sponsorship. In the legacy of Classical Greece, she is associated with the principle of cognition, as distinct from both simple irrationalism and deduction. On a related matter, see Diodorus Siculus on the mythical real-life origins of the Olympus cult.

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[fn_11]. As distinct from, and opposed to the mechanistic, so-called equal-tempered system. Bach, as typified most efficiently by his crafting of his A Musical Offering, and in his The Art of the Fugue, followed Plato and Kepler, in defining the musical domain as what Gauss and Riemann later defined as a multiply-connected manifold. It is the ironies of juxtaposition of bel canto-trained singing voices, not a mathematical calculation in any ordinary sense, which locates the “orbital pathway” in which contrapuntal values of the sung tone lies. It is, as Wilhelm Furtwängler emphasized, “between the notes.” Today’s popular schoolbook doctrine on the subject of tuning, is to be viewed as typical of the witless quality of contemporary pedantry.

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[fn_12]. After, most notably, the relevant work of Leonardo da Vinci, the great Classical Renaissance paintings, such as those of Raphael Sanzio and Rembrandt, are premised upon the locating of events as reflecting, implicitly, a physical space-time which is most fairly described as Riemannian. In this way, the great Renaissance painters brought into painting the same way of representing ideas associated with that of the Classical Greek sculptors, such as Scopas and Praxiteles, who captured their subjects in mid-motion, rather than as dead objects in “Euclidean” space-time. This Rembrandt work is, for the sensitive modern viewer, among the boldest of successful examples of that method of portraying ideas.

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[fn_13]. The only valid form of a modern working definition of physical science, is that typified by Bernhard Riemann’s 1854 habilitation dissertation, a dissertation whose development is premised, as Riemann insists there, on the preceding development of the notion of multiply-connected manifolds, by Carl Gauss. Thus, science rejects simple sense-certainty and, therefore, also, “Euclidean” notions of physical space-time, as the standard for interpretation of the crucial phenomena underlying the discovery of validatable universal physical principles. Only experimental validation of a universal scheme, as anti-Euclidean physical geometry defines this, a universality itself composed solely of experimentally validated as universal physical principles, deserves the name of physical science.

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[fn_14]. The relevant standard of rigor is that exemplified by Bernhard Riemann’s 1854 habilitation dissertation, in which all formal-mathematical derivations of notion of universality, are outlawed, that in favor of a physical-experimental determination of the curvature of the entirety of the physical-space-time within which the relevant action is situated. All efforts known to me to show an earlier dating for the idea of ideas, rest, to my knowledge, on arguments which include demonstrably crude, aprioristic assumptions.

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[fn_15]. Cognitive, as the term is employed here, should be recognized as signifying the Mind of the Creator, as distinct from idols which purport to represent God in the image of the mere mortal body which the mind of the person inhabits. Thus, Classical sculpture and Renaissance painting, as contrasted with Archaic and Romantic styles, locates the image of the personality in the idea whose existence must be adduced by the mind of the viewer, the idea which lies ontologically within the mid-motion ironically represented.

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[fn_16]. i.e., as elaborated by Plato in his Timaeus dialogue, and as typified by Paul’s I Corinthians 13.

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[fn_17]. Admittedly, some enthusiasts have argued that Christ represented a “New Dispensation,” so argued from the dubious standpoint of Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries “Biblical archeology.” Despite such apologetics, which tend to be associated with gnostic varieties of pornographic and numerological sophistries derived from their readings of the Old Testament, Christianity’s redemption of the intent of Moses’ utterance, did represent a break from the dogma of a “chosen people,” a break without which such benefits as the Eighteenth-Century emancipation of the European Jews could not have occurred. Characteristic of, and often coinciding with such gnostic aberrations in theology, are all those varieties of pro-oligarchical apologetics, which locate morality almost hermetically in narrow matters of sexual behavior and family and community relations in the small, thus avoiding all the big issues of Christian morality, such as the evil inhering in the fostering of policies and arrangements which foster racial discrimination and other expressions of policies of oligarchical practice which treat some people as actually, or virtually human cattle. Typical are arguments to the effect: “Do not offend the rich and powerful,” sophistries typical of gnostics such as the Bogomil (Cathars) cult and its derived, pro-satanic, “free trade” dogma, that of John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and their followers of the Mont Pelerin Society cult today.

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[fn_18]. The adopted view on the antiquity of the Latin Filioque by the great ecumenical Council of Florence, was established by the work of the later Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who presented the proofs from Greek sources he collected in Byzantium. An account of this, “Nicolaus of Cusa and the Council of Florence,” was presented (in German) at Rome, to the 550th Anniversary of the Council of Florence, by Helga Zepp LaRouche on May 5, 1989. See Fidelio, Spring 1992, for the English-language translation of her address.

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[fn_19]. Bernhard Riemann, Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen (1854), Bernhard Riemanns Gesammelte Mathematische Werke, H. Weber, ed. (New York: Dover Publications reprint edition, 1953), pp. 272-287.

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[fn_20]. See Jonathan Tennenbaum, “How Fresnel and Ampère Launched a Scientific Revolution” and Jacques Cheminade, “The Ampère-Fresnel Revolution: ‘On Behalf of the Future,’ ” EIR, Aug. 27, 1999; Laurence Hecht et al., “The Significance of the 1845 Gauss-Weber Correspondence,” 21st Century Science & Technology, Fall 1996; Laurence Hecht, “Optical Theory in the 19th Century, and the Truth about Michelson-Morley-Miller,” 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1998.

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[fn_21]. This includes the qualifying notions of improvement of the demographic composition of the population, both as considered in terms of households, growth-rates per capita, life-expectancies, and so on.

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[fn_22]. Remember, that physical principles themselves are assorted among three sets of a multiply-connected, Riemannian-type manifold: principles adduced from non-living physical processes, physical principles peculiar to living processes, and physical principles peculiar to validatable cognitive processes as such.

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[fn_23]. e.g., Bernhard Riemann, Theorie der Abel’schen Functionen (1857), Werke, pp. 88-144.

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[fn_24]. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1961).

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[fn_25]. Among the most striking examples of this, is the commonplace evasion of the evidence which demonstrates that living processes represent the existence of a universal physical principle, of life, not to be derived from non-living processes. The evidence is conclusive; but, the passion needed to face the implications of that proof, excepting cases such as Pasteur and Vernadsky, has been usually lacking.

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[fn_26]. In German, this is called Entschlossenheit.

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[fn_27]. With Venice’s successful deployment of yet another crusade, the Fourth Crusade (A.D. 1202-1204), this time to establish the Latin kingdom, and the virtually simultaneous onset of the Mongol invasions of western Europe, the Republic of Venice emerged as the de facto dominant imperial power in the Mediterranean region, an imperial position it maintained until the close of the Seventeenth Century. During the course of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, Venice established a strong foothold at the court of Henry VIII, and, later, consolidated its grip on the English monarchy, through the agents of Paolo Sarpi. William of Orange typifies the takeover of both the Netherlands and the British Isles by Venetian rentier-financier interests during the interval 1688-1714, the process of takeover which concluded with the War of the Spanish Succession and the accession of George I to the newly established British monarchy of the United Kingdom.

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[fn_28]. Typical of that Byzantine corruption is the pro-oligarchical hoax known as “The Donation of Constantine.”

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EDITORIAL

LAROUCHE PAC STATEMENT

Robert Mueller and His Ilk Are About to Commit a Massive Crime! Will You Let Them Get Away with It?

by Barbara Boyd

Nov. 16—The news this morning is all about the pending indictment of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). Wittingly or unwittingly, the Justice Department revealed the existence of a sealed indictment of Assange in a pleading it filed in a related case in the Eastern District of Virginia. According to the DOJ, the pleading in which Assange’s indictment was revealed, is a mistake.

While others will talk about the horrendous Constitutional implications of an indictment for publishing truthful information—to wit, the 2016 emails of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and John Podesta—this threatened prosecution of Assange is truly catastrophic to the very survival of the First Amendment. Let us look at the larger context.

By indicting Assange, the United States seeks to shut him up about the biggest intelligence fraud yet conducted in human history: the fraudulent claim that the Russians hacked the DNC and Podesta, and handed Donald Trump the Presidency. As the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity have repeatedly demonstrated, “the evidence” that such a hack occurred, as recounted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his indictments of several Russian GRU officers, is extremely dubious at best, and more than likely entirely fabricated. The likelihood is that the Clinton and Podesta emails were leaked to WikiLeaks, and that Julian Assange and former British Ambassador Craig Murray know the name or names of the leakers, as they have said, publicly. The leakers were not Russian state actors.

Moreover, the people pushing for Assange’s prosecution are the actual criminals—John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper. Not only did they fabricate evidence against a major party Presidential candidate, and then seek to subvert his Presidency, but just this week, it was revealed that Brennan and Clapper collaborated to spy on Congress and their own agencies. They were seeking to isolate and destroy any dissent from their so-called “intelligence” briefings and assessments, often simply cribbed from what they were told to do by MI6.

Earlier, in 2017, Assange’s lawyers were in conversations with honest DOJ officials over a deal which would have revealed the names of the leakers and the security vulnerabilities which led to Assange receiving not just the Clinton/Podesta/DNC email trove but also the CIA and John Brennan’s own Marble Framework (Vault 7) hacking program—the one which allows the CIA to hack and intercept communications of foreign states and attribute that activity to a nation other than the United States.

That deal was shut down by James Comey, John Brennan, Senator Mark Warner and others who saw the entire Russia hoax evaporating and their own criminal culpability for precipitating an unlawful coup against an American President rising like a phoenix from the ashes. That is without reference to the monstrous crime against the human race, by Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Obama et al., in bringing tensions between the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and Russia, to the boiling point. This all was done on behalf of a British Empire, which views Donald Trump and his campaign for rational relationships among nation states—as opposed to submission to a globalist order—as a mortal threat to its existence.

Act Now to Stop This Crime!

The Assange indictment is just part of Robert Mueller’s scheme to fabricate evidence concerning the Clinton/Podesta email saga. He has otherwise pounded long-time Trump friend Roger Stone and Info Wars’ Jerome Corsi with the claim that somehow they were the link between WikiLeaks, Russia, and the Trump campaign. Mueller has threatened them with a bevy of process crimes—including making false statements and obstruction—unless they collaborate with him in supporting an outright lie. As the President tweeted on November 15th:

The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want.

Mueller is no stranger to the art of the Washington coverup. Former Senator Bob Graham and many others have documented his role in covering up the Saudi involvement in 9/11 and obstructing the Congressional investigation of the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. The question is whether we allow him to continue. It’s time to end the Mueller investigation and declassify all the documents pertaining to the British-directed intelligence operations against Donald Trump, run through the Obama White House, and commencing no later than the Spring of 2016. In that context, Julian Assange should be pardoned and immunized in order to tell us what he knows about this devil’s plot right now. This Republic will not endure if the coup is allowed to continue.

Sign our petition to declassify these documents now!