Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 46, Number 18, May 10, 2019

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Your President Needs You Now —Not Three Weeks from Now

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 46, Number 18, May 10, 2019

- I. Man Creates Anew

- LAROUCHE PAC CLASS Can a Single Individual Change History And Bring about a New Renaissance? by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- Keats’ Great Odes and the Sublime by Daniel Leach

- LAROUCHE 2012 WEBCAST No to the Green Policy: Revive Our Credit System

- INTERVIEW: LARRY BELL European Solar and Wind Countries Are ‘Ostriches in the Coal Mine’

- II. The Fight Intensifies

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST Be Optimistic! Trump-Putin Phone Call Advances the New Paradigm

- Sri Lanka Terror Attack Targets Belt and Road by Dean Andromidas

- EDITORIAL Former NSA Technical Director William Binney Must Testify Before Congress To Expose the Big Lie— That Russia Hacked the DNC E-Mails by William F. Wertz

LaRouche Defines the Earth’s Next 50 Years

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, 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

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

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

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EDITORIAL

Your President Needs You Now

—Not Three Weeks from Now

May 2—They mock it mercilessly, as they mock everything that is potentially good—but Tuesday’s White House infrastructure meeting between President Trump and a dozen Congressional Democrats strikes close to the root of the question of why Donald Trump is in the White House today, and also the question of the late Lyndon H. LaRouche’s legacy, and the use to be made of LaRouche’s ideas in the acute crisis of today.

As many of you probably know, the same group is to meet again in the White House in about three weeks, to hear President Trump’s proposal for how to fund a (very inadequate) ten-year, $2 trillion infrastructure package. The President said, “I’ll lead on this. I’d like to do something. It may not be typically Republican.” He dismissed the previous White House plan, based on public-private partnerships (PPPs), saying, “That bill was so stupid. It was a Gary [Cohn] bill,” referring to his previous top economic advisor, from Goldman Sachs. PPP means “you get sued,” said the President.

Of course, our role is not to take bets around the water cooler on what the President may propose, but rather to go flat out immediately to encourage and support him to propose what is urgently needed.

Now the principle of credit was not quite at the very center of LaRouche’s scientific discoveries, but it was never far from his thoughts. In a December 7, 2012 webcast, “No to the Green Policy: Revive Our Credit System,” LaRouche began by insisting again that Glass-Steagall must be restored to protect the needed, honest part of the banking system. But he went on to specify:

However, . . . Glass-Steagall is indispensable, but it does not contain a cure. It contains a preventive of gambling, and it is necessary. But here’s where the problem comes in: We’re going to be operating, not on the basis of the present system. That is, if the United States is going to survive: if the U.S. economy is not going to disintegrate entirely, what’s going to have to happen, relatively immediately, now, is the installation of a credit system as the basis of actually creating the growth of the U.S. economy. That is, an inflation-free form of growth, or hyperinflation-free form of growth, as the matter is now.

Later on he clarified:

Credit does not lie in letting money sit in a bank; it must do something. It must change its character; it must be more efficient; or it must be more enriching. It means technological progress; it means higher rates of energy-flux density, which is an essential part of this. People are more skilled; they do a job which is a more skilled job; they produce more value with the same amount of nominal labor. That’s the system. We must generate growth. We must increase the productive power of labor. We must advance technology—absolutely. We must increase the energy-flux density flowing through the entire system.

So all the myths which Republicans and Democrats alike believe in, with a kind of religious fervor, or, shall we say, Satanic passion, are wrong. The generation of credit, as real credit, occurs only by the increase of the productive powers of labor, as measured in physical terms. This means physical terms in the sense that people doing the same thing do it more efficiently, or do it at a higher technology.

This is the principle of Federal credit, and that principle precedes and absolutely governs the forms of the institutions through which that Federal credit is issued, which are accurately summarized, for U.S. history, in LaRouche PAC’s January 2019 statement, “The Way Forward,” which says:

Hamilton did it through the National Bank. Abraham Lincoln did it with his Greenback policy. Franklin Roosevelt did it through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. So why not return to the best practice of both parties in finding a principled way to fund desperately needed infrastructure?

Upgrading U.S. infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers’ current rating of “D+” to its “A” level will indeed increase the productivity of all labor—but how do we achieve the qualitative revolutions which LaRouche indicates above? One great leap will involve bringing the huge Chinese high-speed rail industry to invest in this country to begin to revolutionize ground transport. Follow that up with magnetic-levitation rail, also now being pioneered by China.

But let’s recall that LaRouche eventually rejected the term “infrastructure” entirely, in favor of the much more general concept of “economic platforms” forming the basis of an entire stage of human economic-scientific-cultural development, as for example the prehistoric maritime culture, which based itself on knowledge of the relationship between the long-cycle solar calendar and the entire celestial sphere, as Ben Deniston has reported.

This view forces us to unify (what should be) the short cycle of disaster relief from the Midwest flooding, with the middle-term cycle of disaster prevention, and the longer cycle of bringing the Belt and Road and its Eurasian Land-Bridge throughout the Western Hemisphere, from Alaska south to Tierra del Fuego, and equally West to East across the hemisphere.

The Road to the Stars

But at the same time, that concept introduces an even grander consideration—that of Solar system exploration and colonization. Now man can no longer be seen as strictly an earthbound species. We are in transition from a terrestrial “platform” to a Solar system platform. The race to land on the Moon within five years, and then to colonize the Moon and begin to explore Mars, has already forever changed our perspective even on Earth. And our apparently-earthly “infrastructure” plans undertaken today, will be penetrated and conditioned by the space Odyssey. All labor, of whatever form, will become more productive because of across-the-board scientific and technological breakthroughs spinning off from the space effort.

This was the Kennedy economic miracle: his de Gaulle-style indicative planning or industrial policy, and his infrastructure initiatives were all revolutionized by the Apollo Lunar program, as ours are being revolutionized now by our space program and the cooperative international crash space program of the immediate future.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 46, Number 18, May 10, 2019

Cover This Week

EIRNS

A performance by the Schiller Institute Chorus of Sonora, Mexico.

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LAROUCHE DEFINES THE EARTH’S NEXT 50 YEARS

2 EDITORIAL

Your President Needs You Now—Not Three Weeks from Now

I. MAN CREATES ANEW

5 LAROUCHE PAC CLASS

Can a Single Individual Change History and Bring about a New Renaissance?

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

14 Keats’ Great Odes and the Sublime

by Daniel Leach

27 LAROUCHE 2012 WEBCAST

No to the Green Policy: Revive Our Credit System

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

December 7, 2012

34 INTERVIEW: LARRY BELL

The European Solar and Wind Countries Are ‘Ostriches in the Coal Mine’

II. THE FIGHT INTENSIFIES

41 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Be Optimistic! Trump-Putin Phone Call Advances the New Paradigm

48 Sri Lanka Terror Attacks Target Belt and Road

by Dean Andromidas

53 EDITORIAL

Former NSA Technical Director William Binney Must Testify Before Congress To Expose the Big Lie—That Russia Hacked the DNC E-Mails

by William F. Wertz

Correction: In the May 3, 2019 issue of EIR, the photo caption on page 52 should read: “Rev. Wade Watts, Executive Director of the Oklahoma State NAACP, addressing a Schiller Institute New Bretton Woods Conference in Andover, Massachusetts on January 31, 1988. Seated behind Mr. Watts is Frederick Wills, Foreign Affairs Minister of Guyana (1975-1978).”

The Jan. 27, 1989 Jailing of Lyndon LaRouche

Defined an Era, Which Now Must End

Sign the Petition to Exonerate LaRouche at lpac.co/exonerate

I. Man Creates Anew

LAROUCHE PAC CLASS

Can a Single Individual Change History And Bring about a New Renaissance?

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

PART 2 OF 2

Part 1 of this class, conducted April 27, 2019, was published in the May 3, 2019 issue of EIR.

In 1986, as a result of Lyn’s influence in the United States, we had an election breakthrough in the primaries in Illinois, where colleagues of Lyn’s won the primaries for the number two and number three places in the Democratic Party. That, together with the SDI, with the idea to overcome the desired under-development in the developing countries was clearly what triggered a letter already in 1982 by the British to the United States Department of State on the prosecution of my husband.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

LaRouche Democrats Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild on March 21, 1986.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Raid on LaRouche offices in Leesburg, Virginia on October 6, 1986.

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In October 1986, the infamous raids occurred on our offices and homes. 400 FBI agents with armored vehicles, clearly designed that we would not survive this. But because we mobilized internationally, we called up the White House, the White House intervened and the worst was prevented. But this was the absolute turning point, because up to that point, we had only organized positive things—development programs. We wanted to create three private universities because we worked with about 100 professors and these professors were ready and wanted to create private universities with Lyn’s theoretical ideas. There was going to be a university in the United States, one in Germany, and one in Peru.

Naturally, all of these positive developments and activities were completely interrupted, as we had to defend ourselves against the illegal prosecutions; the Boston trial, the Alexandria trial, then the jailing of Lyndon LaRouche and his colleagues following 1989. So, for us, the situation completely changed. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark has called this prosecution of Lyndon LaRouche the worst atrocity in the history of law in the United States; and said this was not only aimed against Lyn, and therefore a person, but it was intended to eradicate all the beautiful ideas which came from Lyn and the movement he had created.

LaRouche in Berlin

Before Lyn was put in jail, he did two additional important things. In October 1988, we went to Berlin, and he forecast at that time that the Soviet Union, and the Comecon [Soviet bloc], would soon collapse; that was one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And in a speech at the Kempinski Hotel in Berlin, he said that given the economic difficulties in the Comecon, in one year, or very soon, there would be German unification with Berlin as its capital, and that the unified Germany should start to develop the Comecon countries with Western technologies. He proposed concretely the economic development of Poland, as a model.[fn_1]

EIRNS/Dean Andromidas

Nobody believed it when LaRouche said the Soviet Union would soon collapse. Helga and Lyndon LaRouche at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on October 11, 1988. Below: LaRouche’s concept of the Productive Triangle.

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Nobody believed Lyn when he said that the Soviet Union would collapse; but it did. When the Wall came down, Lyn was already in jail. We were the only ones who had had any idea that this would happen. We developed a concrete plan for economic development, during the many discussions I had with Lyn on the telephone, and after we were not even able to speak directly, and only through tape for half a year. Lyn developed the idea of the Productive Triangle, which I was very happy to help to put together and present as a proposal to overcome the under-development of the East European countries after the Iron Curtain had come down. In 1991, this proposal was extended to become the Eurasian Land-Bridge, by connecting the population and industrial centers of Europe with those of Asia through development corridors.

LaRouche Runs for President, From Jail

In 1992, Lyn did another absolutely incredible thing, namely, he ran a Presidential campaign from prison. He did that with the help of James Bevel, a close collaborator of Martin Luther King. That campaign helped to maintain the organization while we were working with dogged determination to get Lyn out of jail. We collected hundreds and thousands of VIP signatures appealing to the U.S. President to release Lyn; which only occurred after Bill Clinton was elected—and in 1994, Lyn was released from prison. During his incarceration, Lyn wrote his famous prison writings. I can only advise you to look at them, because he wrote them without books, without a library, without an internet, without Googling—without any such devices. These books contain the most profound ideas about the universe, about scientific method, and about Classical art; and anyone who wants to see the genius of Lyndon LaRouche should look at these prison writings.[fn_2]

EIRNS/Rachel Douglas

LaRouche at the State Duma in Moscow on June 6, 1995.

EIRNS/Michael Vitt

Lyndon (center) and Helga LaRouche at a press conference in Moscow on June 28, 2001.

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After Lyn came out of prison in 1994, we accelerated the same campaign. We went to Russia. Lyn went several times to Moscow; he tried to get the Clinton administration onto a different course, despite the fact that you had the Boris Yeltsin years, which was a terrible period for Russia. With the help of Yevgeny Primakov, he tried to remedy that. We continued with our economic development plans.

In 1996, I went to Beijing, because finally there was a response to our proposal to conduct a conference on the Eurasian Land-Bridge. At that time, China had the idea that the Eurasian Land-Bridge would be the long-term development perspective for China until the year 2010. That did not happen, because, as Lyn predicted in the summer of 1997, the global financial crisis broke out. I just happened to have been in China that fall, in September, and I communicated Lyn’s prognosis to many of the leading think tanks in Beijing; and they all took note of the fact that Lyn had predicted the crisis of 1997.

Schiller Institute/Jonathan Tennenbaum

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (center) visits a farm in Hebei Province, China in May 1996.

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When it finally did break out, we got many phone calls into our offices. Many people said, “Oh, Mr. LaRouche is a prophet. How did he know there would be a crisis?” which then was called the Asia crisis. “If we had listened to Lyndon LaRouche, we would have saved a lot of money.” Now Lyn was emphatic that this was not an Asian crisis, but that this was the beginning of a global financial crisis which would not stop until its causes were first remedied. It continued in the form of the Russian state bankruptcy, and the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund crisis one year later—and many of the consequences are still being felt.

The New Silk Road

We continued this throughout the 1990s, the 2000s, and therefore, we were extremely happy, when, finally, in 2013, Xi Jinping announced the New Silk Road as official Chinese policy in a speech in Kazakhstan. I’m not saying that what Xi Jinping is doing, and what China is doing is the exact fulfillment of what Lyndon LaRouche and our organization have done for the last 50 years: But it is a provable fact that the idea of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, of a New Silk Road, was promoted by Lyn first, that we had hundreds of conferences on five continents around the world, hundreds of seminars and conferences, and, as I said, we have affected many, many thousands of people who agree with us that this is the right policy.

I think there is a great affinity in Chinese history, so that they would come out with the same ideas. Because of the 2,500 years of Confucian tradition in China, they have this idea of a harmonious development of all nations, and naturally, because of the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, returning to what de facto is the American System of economy, China had incredible success, and is now offering that Chinese model to other countries to overcome their underdevelopment.

I can only assure you that Lyn’s influence on the world was not just through his writings, which we are going to publish as soon as we can. This will be a big, big job, because Lyn was the most prolific writer you can imagine. He has written not only hundreds and hundreds of books, articles, memorandums, presentations, and unpublished memorandums, so that the collected works of Lyndon LaRouche will impress the world. Probably the last time you had something like that, would be Leibniz. But it was not just the writings, the many speeches, the videos, the half-hour TV programs from his Presidential campaigns, but he directly affected the lives of hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands and maybe more individuals, who all said that “Lyndon LaRouche changed my life,” because it was getting in touch with the profound body of his ideas which completely reversed the way they thought about themselves their nation, the world, and the future.

What Lyn said in the short video we saw just now, was that there are only two nations which right now will make a difference in terms of the outcome of world history: the United States and China. And it is absolutely important that the United States does not fight this new paradigm, but joins it. Cui Tiankai, China’s Ambassador to the United States just two days ago made another offer, saying that the world needs the industrial potential of the United States to build the Belt and Road Initiative, and that the United States should not miss out on this great potential.

The genie is out of the bottle: There is practically now, with the New Silk Road, the practical realization of Lyn’s long fight. I can only touch upon some of the most elementary aspects of how Lyn has shaped the last 50 years, and that Lyn’s ideas must—and I’m sure they will—also shape the next 50 years.

NASA

American Astronaut David Wolf attaches a camera to the International Space Station with help from Canadarm2 on an EVA in October 2002.

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LaRouche’s Vision of Earth’s Next 50 Years

One glimpse of that was this Woman on Mars video, which Lyn broadcast on March 3, 1988, where he showed how the future must be space colonization. He wrote at that time, that “On Day One” of his Presidency—this was part of his 1988 Presidential campaign—“I will declare a national emergency and initiate the largest economic recovery program in history. In the first two years . . . I will issue $2 trillion in low-cost federal loans for infrastructure development. I will create 5 million new industrial jobs,” basically outlining different aspects of the FDR recovery program. And then he said, “I will pick up where the old Apollo program was left off in the 1960s, and launch a program for Mars colonization.”[fn_3]

This program is now echoed by the recently announced Moon-Mars program of President Trump.[fn_4]

In 2005, Lyn wrote a beautiful book called Earth’s Next Fifty Years.[fn_5] He describes that in the next 50 years there must be a completely new set of international relations, which are based on the Vladimir Vernadsky conception that the noösphere increasingly will replace the biosphere, meaning that the number and quality of discoveries by human creativity, of new scientific and technological principles, and of creation of new great forms of Classical art, achieve the result that the increase of the part dominating the universe which has to do with human creativity, which Vernadsky called the “noösphere,” will have an increasing relevance over the biosphere. And that this will increasingly shape the relations among creative individuals relating to each other.

If you take the long arc of universal history and evolution of life on Earth, as it was developed by Krafft Ehricke and by Vernadsky, briefly, life developed out of the oceans with the help of photosynthesis, leading to higher forms of organisms with higher forms of energy flux-density in their systems, eventually leading to the evolution of man; man, first settling along the rivers and oceans; then, with the help of infrastructure conquering the interiors of all the continents for human habitation; and essentially you can say that “the New Silk Road becoming the World Land-Bridge” is actually the completion of that phase of human evolution and development. And clearly, the development of infrastructure in nearby space, the building of villages on the Moon, as a starting point for interstellar flights, for the colonization of Mars and other such endeavors, will be the next phase of the evolution of human civilization.

EHT

First-ever picture of a supermassive black hole candidate’s environment. The center of galaxy Messier 87, as imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in April 2017.

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Discovery of Black Hole Confirms Einstein

Now, this is absolutely exciting. Just two weeks ago, astronomers were able to obtain for the first time an image of the immediate environment of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of the center of the galaxy M87, 55 million light years away. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than our Sun. The EHT was a project to unite and integrate an array of eight ground-based radio telescopes.

By having such a global network of radio telescopes, they were able to make photographs or images of this black hole region, a cosmic object of such an unimaginably large mass, contracted to an extremely small volume. The effect of it, is an extremely strong bending of space-time, and the environmental matter heats up very strongly so that, basically it starts to glow. This effect was predicted by Albert Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity, but at the end of his life, even he doubted that such black holes existed. But now they are proven to be there, and they are probably at the center of the two trillion galaxies which the Hubble Telescope has discovered so far.

If the existence of black holes having such a large mass does not impress you, I don’t know what will. And also the fact that we know of the existence of 2 trillion galaxies.

The beauty of this is not only that Einstein’s theory was proven in this way, but it required the linking of eight telescopes in eight different places: In Hawaii, Chile, Antarctica, Mexico, Arizona, and Spain. The technique used was something called “very long baseline interferometry” which, with the help of the rotation of the Earth, was able to create a virtual telescope of the size of the Earth. And the technique used is so precise that you could actually read a newspaper in New York, from a coffee plate in Berlin.

The beauty of the observation is, that it would not have been possible to do that with one nation alone. To have such knowledge of how our universe works, we need the kind of international cooperation that Lyn described in the book, Earth’s Next Fifty Years, the kind of Vernadsky cooperation, where one creative human being relates to another creative human being, disregarding any kind of national, or for sure, geopolitical so-called “interest.”

Discovering the existence of and imaging of this black hole is a milestone in our understanding of the fundamental dynamics of the galaxies in the universe. Exactly as Lyn had already talked about it in the beginning of the 1950s, such a discovery challenges all pre-existing knowledge and redefines every assumption that mankind has had to this point. One of the participating scientists from the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, Mr. Anton Zensus, has remarked that in the future, researchers will talk about the time before and after this discovery, because it represents a watershed regarding human knowledge of the laws of the universe.

The Difference Between Man and Beast

I mention that for two reasons: First of all, Lyn has pointed to the qualitative jump in human knowledge caused by creative discoveries, and therefore the EHT project pertains to that ontological character of human discovery having an effect in the real, physical universe. It is a vision of the future of how the human species can collaborate. And just as a last idea, consider what this discovery does to the ridiculous assumption of the Club of Rome about “limited resources on the planet,” and the even sillier ideas of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Let us now listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche [via video]:

Lyndon LaRouche: The way to deal with this problem—again, we have to come back and start playing again. Have fun! The remedy for every crisis, every emotional crisis: Have fun! Don’t get ugly; have fun! This difference between man and beast; it’s the basis of all civilized life. What’s the difference between a human being and an animal? Some people think there’s no difference. There was even a cartoon I saw in the Washington Post today, of George Bush, President George Bush, saying that he didn’t think that the contamination of stem-cells with mouse stem-cells was going to create a problem. And they have him, as President, standing there speaking, as President, with mouse-ears sticking out! I mean, this is typical of the problem! [laughter]

What’s the difference between man and animal? There is a difference. It’s a difference we can demonstrate. It’s a difference we call cognition. Only a human being can make an original, valid discovery of a universal physical principle. No animal can do it. Only a human being. Only a human being can cause another human being to replicate exactly that experience of discovery. No animal can do it. That’s why animals have fixed cultures. Because they’re incapable of developing a culture; they can not discover universal physical principles by means of which they increase their species’ power to exist in the universe. Only human beings can do that.

Now, if your relationship to other human beings is cognitive—in other words, instead of reading a book, or having your hind-end plugged into electric wires to the Internet, or something like that—if you are educated, by re-experiencing, as much as possible, the great discoveries actually made by the greatest minds before you, for thousands of years past, and if the memory of that act of discovery is living again today in your mind, you are human. You’re human in a functional sense, because when you look at the eyes of some other person, what you see is not the physical image of this human body; what you see is the function of that mind, that behind those eyes, on the other side of the room, there is a cognitive being, who is capable of incorporating and generating great fundamental discoveries of universal physical principle.

If you say, as Kant did, or as Locke did, or as Adam Smith did, as the empiricists and positivists do, as the stem-cell-embryo freaks do; if you say that man is only another animal, that there is no process of cognition, there’s no power of discovery of Classical artistic principles—it’s all just a matter of opinion—if you say that, you’re nothing but an animal. Not because you were born to be an animal, but because you’re thinking like an animal; you’re behaving like an animal, not a human being. You’re incapable of loving other human beings, as human beings. I think the record of marriage these days attests to the degeneration of morality on that count. People say, “Why’d you get a divorce?” “I got tired. It wasn’t exciting any more. I wanted a new experience.” “Uh, not fashionable. I changed the type I like. I saw a new movie star.” And this is what people do these days! They have become bestialized, who do not see that all beauty, all human beauty, lies in this quality of mind.

Isn’t it the most wonderful thing in the world, from the standpoint of understanding history, to re-experience, in your own mind, the actual act of discovery, of a great principle made by a great thinker from the past? Suddenly, that person is alive! They never died. Because an actual moment of creative thought, which they had, you have replicated in your own mind. They live inside you. When you act, if you act well, you change the outcome of their lives. When you take a discovery by a great scientist, say a hundred years ago, and that has been neglected, or has not been properly developed, and you, then, understand it, and then you apply it, to improve the condition of life: You have changed previous history, as well as the present, just as you will intend to change the future.

Look, we’re all going to die! So, what do you live for? Do you live like an animal, to go out with a whimper? Or, do you live like a human being, knowing that you are doing something, you are developing, in yourself, something which will be transmitted to future generations, to make humanity better in the future? You no longer are a little person, living in a little neighborhood, with a little mind, with little ambitions and little interests; you’ve suddenly become a very big person, because you have the minds of some of the greatest people in history before you, live in you! And your replication of exactly their act of discovery. You do things with pride! They’ll say, “He was right! This was a great discovery. We’ve to use it for mankind’s benefit.” You say, “I’ve got to do something to make the future better, for those who come after us. Then, I can die with a smile on my face. Because I’ve lived well. I’ve lived at peace with the greatest people of the past. Or, at least, some of them. And I can live at peace, with joy, in the people in the future. I will live forever, in this process.” That’s what it is to be human.

And when you think like that, and look at other people like that, you don’t have a problem. You may have problems, but that’s fun! Because, if problems force you to attack and solve problems, whether as an individual, or in concert with others, that is fun. It’s what the puppy does, when the happy puppy is playing. The worst thing you can do to a puppy is not play with it. They get angry. It gets bored. The worst thing you can do to a horse, is not play with it, not work with it. It gets bored; it’s unhappy. It may get sick and die on you. It has no purpose in life.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

“Do you live like a human being, knowing that you are doing something, you are developing in yourself, something which will be transmitted to future generations, to make humanity better?” Shown here, a youth improves his cognitive powers studying geometric construction at a Schiller Institute summer camp .

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Human beings have a different kind of play. It’s that kind of play, called cognition, in respect to past and present, which makes an absolute moral difference; which defines the individual person, as a creature made in the image of the Creator. When you think in those terms, then you think, accordingly.

Now, how do we get out of this mess? I’ve defined implicitly, what the problem is: The problem is, we are gripped by a system, a doomed system, a self-doomed system. This system, this financial-monetary system, with its legal trappings, such as [Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia, with its popular trappings, such as popular opinion, with its lack of sense of what humanity is, a lack of moral principle—there is no moral principle. If you don’t have a sense of what humanity is, as I’ve described it, you have no morality. It’s all mechanical—there’s no morality in it. Morality involves passion. And moral passion, is love for human beings. It’s love for those creative people, who went before you. It’s love for those who are coming afterward. To do nothing shameful in the eyes of those, who came before you—even if you disagree with them. [applause] And, to do nothing, which is not beneficial to the society that comes afterward.

And Plato called this agapē. The Apostle Paul referred to this repeatedly, as in I Corinthians 13 as agapē! Don’t get involved, like crazy Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, with these dos and don’ts single-issues. Forget the single issues! Don’t worry about a list of dos and don’ts. Paul says the same thing: This is fraud! Concentrate on agapē, which is the essence of all morality. And, when you have agapē, you don’t need any other code, except good judgment. Agapē, essentially, knowing what a human being is; knowing what humanity is; knowing what cognition is; and loving what you have received as benefits from the past—cognitively. And loving the future, by giving to the future, that which the future, as human, needs.

And, if you always act according to that, you may fail in your understanding of what you need to do, but your intentions are always clear and moral. And that’s what we lack, essentially.

So, that’s the problem I face: I live in a society, in which my generation was de-generate; became my de-generation. And, my degeneration taught their children to degenerate still further. And, now the thing is collapsing. And people are saying, “You gotta fix the system. You can’t change the system. You gotta fix it. Don’t talk about changing the system! Why don’t you come up with some suggestion that will make the system work.” Like, you know: Find a way to make strychnine enjoyable. That’s the problem.

What it comes down to: We have a shortage of leaders. And, this problem of leadership has two aspects to it. One aspect is, people who are qualified to be leaders. What person is qualified to be a leader? A person, who is, essentially, from what I’ve said here, a person of agapē. A person who has passion, who has love for humanity; who wants to do good for future humanity; to honor the noble contributions of people from the past. And to give something better to the future. Those people are leaders. People who will not sell out the principle of agapē for the sake of opinion, or personal advantage. [applause]

I’ve only indicated the surface, the highlights, of what has been done to the American people in particular over the recent period.

FDR Library

After World War II, most of the people LaRouche had known in service, who had shared Roosevelt’s view and his, that colonialism must end, had sold out to Trumanism. Shown here is Harry S Truman, with a dying FDR on his right, and Henry Wallace on his left, in November 1944.

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LaRouche Dedicates His Life to Ending Colonialism

When I came out of military service at the end of the war, while President Roosevelt’s life was still in living memory of many of us who served abroad, we shared the opinion—most of us, even some boys from the South—we shared the opinion, that (as I would express it more articulately than most of them would at that time, but they shared it), that we had just come through a Second World War, which we were about to win. That was sure, at that point. For those of us who had served in Asia, and saw the conditions of life in Asia—the oppression under colonialism of people in Asia—the question posed was: You can not expect to go through two world wars, and fight them, with what these have meant, and ignore the great injustice to the great masses of Asia, and not expect to have a Third World War, come haunt you sometime soon, down the pike.

We shared that view. We said: As Americans, it is our job. I didn’t know what Roosevelt’s policies were, at the time; I had a smell of them, but these were my policies, and the policies, I think, most of the people who were in service with me at the time shared. We have to ensure that this ends! That colonialism, and all its trappings, ends! We have the power. We will come out of this war as the victors. We will have power in our hands. We can tell the world: This system of colonialism is finished! And these new nations are going to have the right—and with our assistance—to develop in the way we would want to develop. The way they choose, but with the same right.

Within about 18 months of that time, probably 95 percent of the people I knew in service, who had shared that view with me, were on the other side: a gift of Trumanism. These were the people of my generation, the returning World War II veterans. Most of them sold out, and were totally corrupt. I saw it. It stunk. I hated it. I saw my friends being self-destroyed. To see someone destroyed, is bad: But, to see a person self-destroyed, is the most horrible thing.

These people became opportunists. They told their children, especially those in suburbia, “Be careful. Be careful! The neighbors are watching.” And the children became shallow-minded hypocrites, who would get, on the one hand, from education—those who had better education—would get a sense of, certain values were good, and certain were bad. Certain things were fair; certain things were unfair. These kinds of positive values would occur. But they were very shallow. They didn’t have a deep sense of morality. They didn’t have a sense of putting your life on the line, if necessary, for a principle. You don’t put your life on the line because you want to die. You put your life on the line, because it’s so important to you to defend and uphold a principle, that you will not hesitate to risk your life to defend that principle.

The children of the World War II generation, caught in the rock-drug-sex counterculture.

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And, that’s what these little kiddos didn’t get. And, when they got hit, as others did, with the 1962 missile crisis, and then, with the assassination of John Kennedy, most of the generation, of the children of my generation, went crazy. It was called the rock-drug-sex counterculture.

You know what happened: the ’68er phenomenon, as it occurred in the United States, as it occurred in Europe. These things happened. And, I found myself, more and more as we got into the middle ’60s, standing alone. There was nobody there to lead; not really lead. People called themselves leaders, but they were all fake. And, I found myself standing alone. And, I just said to myself, “I’ve got to do something. I must do something.” So I did it Some people in this room know, or have some experience with what I did. . . .

That’s the situation.

And, therefore, it comes to the point, as now, that sometimes upon us, falls a responsibility of leadership. That happens to all of us, in some way or another, or many of us. Every physician will face that, because every sick person is a different person, with a different disease, no matter what their diagnosis is. And, the physician has to face the responsibility of dealing with that problem. A great teacher, teaching a class of students, faces the same thing, about saving these young minds; a responsibility for saving them, under these conditions, today. It’s a great, awesome responsibility.

For some of us, the responsibility of the same singular variety, comes in a different way—each in a different way. But to all of us, one thing is in common: When destiny has given you a vocation, and you have a mission, especially when you’re the only one to play a key part in realizing that mission, you better accept it, and do it.

Thank you. [applause][fn_6]

[End video.]

[fn_1]. Lyndon LaRouche, “United States Policy on the Reunification of Germany,” a speech delivered in Berlin on October 12, 1998. For a full transcript, see https://archive.schillerinstitute.com/lar_related/LaR_Kempinski.html [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]. Lyndon LaRouche wrote three books during his five-year imprisonment, In Defense of Common Sense, Project A, and The Science of Christian Economy, all of which were published under the latter title, by the Schiller Institute, Washington, D.C., 1991. https://www.amazon.com/Science-Christian-Economy-prison-writings/dp/1717725244 [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3]. Lyndon LaRouche, “The Woman on Mars. How a 40-Year Mission to Colonize Mars Would Transform the United States,” 1987. https://larouchepac.com/20170321/woman-mars [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4]. White House Fact Sheet, “President Donald J. Trump is Boldly Putting Americans Back on the Moon,” March 26, 2019. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-boldly-putting-americans-back-moon/ [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5]. Lyndon LaRouche, Earth’s Next 50 Years, Lyndon LaRouche PAC, Leesburg, Virginia, 2005. https://www.amazon.com/Earths-Fifty-Years-Lyndon-Larouche/dp/B000BR4JTU [back to text for fn_5]

[fn_6]. Lyndon LaRouche, “You Have Nothing to Fear So Much as Denial Itself.” For the full transcription of the speech, see EIR Vol. 28, No. 35, September 14, 2001. Pp. 16-29. https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2001/eirv28n35-20010914/eirv28n35-20010914_016-you_have_nothing_to_fear_so_much-lar.pdf [back to text for fn_6]

Keats’ Great Odes and the Sublime

by Daniel Leach

First published in December 2009 by the Schiller Institute here.

William Hilton

John Keats (1795-1821)

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When John Keats died in Rome on Feb. 23, 1821, at the age of 25, the world lost one of the greatest poetic geniuses it had ever known, and although much of what would undoubtedly have been his greatest work was unfinished, and as much scattered about in, or only hinted at in his letters, his published works contain some of the greatest treasures in the history of art and the pinnacle of Classical poetry in the English language—his “Great Odes.”

These works have continued to inspire every generation since his death, despite numerous changes, mostly for the worse, in popular tastes, attesting to their grounding in universal principles of the human spirit. Although volumes have been written about them individually, they have been poorly understood, precisely for that reason. For they were the product of one single outburst of creativity in the space of a few weeks in the Spring of 1819, and are the unfolding of a single poetic idea, like the planets which congealed from the revolving disc thrown off by that primeval Sun. It will be the purpose of this article to explore this idea, for it lies at the center of the most profound question facing mankind, particularly in times of crisis: Man’s mortality, and the conflict with his immortal identity, which Friedrich Schiller called the Sublime.

Before looking at the poems themselves, it is crucial, in order to fully comprehend the intent governing their creation as a whole, to know that Keats was part of a revolutionary youth movement, which consciously understood itself to be championing the view of Man and his relationship to nature, God, and his fellow men, that was embodied in the American Revolution, and in deadly conflict with the opposite, oligarchical view, as represented by the reactionary forces arrayed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

This movement included Keats, as well as Percy Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and the essayist William Hazlitt, among others. The political atmosphere in which they worked was a brutal, repressive one, reminiscent of the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s, directed against anyone espousing “republican” sympathies, which Keats most emphatically did with his first widely circulated poem, “Written On the Day Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison.” Hunt had been imprisoned for insulting the Prince Regent and, as one of the boldest of the circle of reformers who operated a philosophical-poetic-political magazine, The Examiner, his work had become a national cause célèbre. To openly announce one’s sympathy with him, as Keats did, was a declaration of war against the monarchy, and all it stood for. To portray Keats as merely a sensitive, misunderstood aesthete, is, on the part of most academic scholars, deliberately misleading, and obscures the deeper meaning of his great achievements—from which comes the passion which drives his relentless quest to awaken in others an awareness of their own higher, spiritual nature.

The prejudices of the Romantic Era, in which the notion of the separation of Naturwissenschaft and Geistenwissenschaft—on the one hand, the natural sciences, the domain of Reason, deductive, axiomatic systems, and precise, intelligible, mathematical language; and on the other, the Arts, the domain of “feeling” and arbitrary and subjective personal experience, on the other—continue to distort our perception of Keats’ poetry to this day. Keats, as is apparent in his letters, had no such idea about his own work, and was, in fact, striving for a unified concept of the human psyche that comprehended man’s heart and mind, and his relationship to all of mankind, past, present, and future.

For All Mankind To See that Beauty

This fundamentally moral question was at the center of the political debate that raged in the salons and across the pages of the leading literary journals of the day. A man’s politics were determined by his views and tastes in art, poetry, and music; in whether he gloried in the formal, lifeless, impersonal art and institutions of Rome, or the free and open spirit of discovery of Classical Greece; in whether he upheld the endlessly cynical sophistry of the Augustan poetry of Alexander Pope and John Dryden, or the passionate republicanism of William Shakespeare and John Milton; whether he adopted the view of John Locke, Edmund Burke and the French empiricists, that man is capable only of knowing what his senses tell him and is therefore essentially an animal and naturally selfish and evil, or that of Gottfried Leibniz, and Friedrich Schiller, that man is essentially of a spiritual nature, partaking of the same quality of creativity as that universal principle Christians call God, and therefore, essentially good.

What is remarkable about this period in England, is the openness of this debate and the transparency of its political ramifications. The French Revolution had demonstrated the bloody consequences of unleashing the rule of the mob, uneducated and acting only on its “natural” instincts and animal-like passions. Yet the reactionary institutions of the monarchy, the landed and financial oligarchy, and the State Church, had reacted by branding any attempt at reform as “revolutionist,” and therefore, threatening the very existence of society. In fact, both sides of the debate were controlled—not only had British agents precipitated the Reign of Terror in France,[fn_1] and the reaction to it, but the underlying philosophical premises of both sides were the same, namely that man is a beast, and must either accept rule by the stronger, or by divine right, or overthrow this rule on behalf of the supposed right of unrestricted “freedom” to pursue his selfish, animal-like interest.

Friedrich Schiller

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That the latter course will ultimately end in an even more brutal and repressive dictatorship, is, of course, the secret of this whole game, and the issue that republicans of this circle knew they must somehow address. It is the issue which Schiller addressed in his Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man:

True is it, the repute of opinion is fallen, caprice is unmasked, and, although still armed with power, yet it obtains no more dignity; man is aroused from his long indolence and self-deception, and with an emphatic majority he demands the restoration of his inalienable rights. But he doth not merely demand them, on that side and this side he rises up, to take by force, what in his opinion is wrongfully denied him. The edifice of the natural state rocks, its worn out foundations give way, and a physical possibility seems given, to place the law upon the throne, to honor man finally as an end in himself and to make true freedom the basis of political union. Vain hope! The moral possibility is wanting; and the generous moment finds an unresponsive people.

How Keats decided to confront this problem is, although not explicitly stated, very similar to Schiller. Unlike Shelley, who waged a fierce and overtly political polemic in his prose writings and his poems, Keats, like Schiller, felt that only by working on the inner being, the emotions, could the artist produce that desire for the Good, that longing for all men to see the potential beauty residing in their own souls which is the essence of true and durable political freedom. This ineffable principle, which the Bible calls “agapē,” or love, and the American Constitution invokes as the concern for the General Welfare of present and future generations, cannot be inculcated as a doctrine, or merely demanded as a social duty, as Kant asserted, for unless it is embedded in the individual’s emotional identity, becoming, so to speak, “instinctive,” the lower, selfish, animal-like emotions can always be provoked, particularly in times of great crisis and stress.

The Personal and the Philosophical

Before turning to the question of how Keats approached this issue in the odes themselves, it is indispensable to briefly consider the personal factors in his life, which shaped not only his overall philosophical outlook, but also his emotional relationship to the mission that was his poetic art.

Creative discoveries which change the direction of mankind’s knowledge, therefore advancing his power in the universe, never occur solely as the sum of various influences, in a deterministic way, but are spurred by an intention, a gripping passion in an individual human soul, which, although it embodies the sum total of all the ideas from all of the generations of mankind which combined to produce it, nevertheless can make an absolutely unique contribution of potentially infinite consequence for the universe as a whole. So, although Keats was clearly thinking along these lines from his earliest forays into poetic composition,[fn_2] it was not until the events of 1818-1819 in his personal life, that he made the decision to dedicate himself fully to his mission, despite the consequences for himself. The result was the odes.

Besides the longing for immortality, the sense of dwelling in the timeless realm of beauty, that, for Keats, was embodied in Classical Greek sculpture, and the philosophy of Plato that so enraptured him, the other thing about which Keats was passionate was Love—that direct and intimate connection to, and sympathy with, another human being, which was, for him, a sacred thing. Also sacred to him was his relationship to his brothers. Yet his sense of the fleeting nature of these physical connections was impressed upon his soul early and quite violently, for his father died in an accident when he was a child; his mother died of tuberculosis when he was in his teens; and then, in the Winter of 1818, after his brother George had emigrated to America, his other brother, Tom, also died of tuberculosis, virtually in his arms.

Joseph Severn

Tom Keats

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Keats struggled mightily with feelings of despair and victimization that would have crushed lesser souls, but much as did Beethoven in his “Heiligenstadt Testiment,” in which he committed himself to continue his creative life despite the devastating knowledge of his impending, total deafness, out of pure agapic love of mankind, Keats found a reserve of moral strength which is the very essence of the sublime quality expressed later in the odes. This struggle can be seen in an untitled sonnet composed around this time, known simply as, “When I Have Fears.”

When I Have Fears

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in charactery

Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain,

When I behold upon the night’s starr’d face

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows with the magic hand of chance,

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

That I may never live to see thee more,

Never have relish in the faerie power

Of unreflecting Love—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone and think,

’Til Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

In this poem, we see, as if in germ form, what would later unfold in full bloom in his great odes: the struggle with mortal concerns of fame, worldly notions of accomplishment, and the anxious, insistent drive to create and possess ideas almost as objects, expressed in the first four lines; and the reverent sense of mystery in being the vehicle for the unseen principles of which the visual images we see are merely the “symbols,” expressed in the second quatrain. Here are the elements of that creative tension, that restive striving towards something eternal, which we can never fully know in mortal life, but only see a reflection of, in the paradoxes of our experience, which Keats later focused upon and drove over the threshold of the sublime. And here we see that characteristic emotional connection, at once intensely personal, and yet universal, which carries us, as it were, over with him.

The “turn” of this sonnet, beginning with, “And when I feel,” could be addressed to one “fair creature of an hour” or, for that matter, all creatures, all human beings. The agonizing sense of the fleeting nature of any human relationship, yet the passion associated with the idea of “unreflecting love,” an unquestioning, unconditional, pure and ideal kind of love, creates a melancholy, yet strangely uplifting effect on us. When Keats then “stands upon the shore of the wide world alone,” he, and we with him, can see the now seemingly petty concerns of “love” and “fame,” thought of in their mundane sense, indeed sink into nothingness. It is as if the very process of confronting mortality, yet relishing even the fleeting reflection of the immortal in the visible world, creates the emotional energy to break through to a higher state of true spiritual freedom. Schiller discusses just this phenomenon in his essay, “On the Sublime”:[fn_3]

The feeling of the sublime is a mixed feeling. It is a combination of woefulness, which expresses itself in its highest degree as a shudder, and of joyfulness, which can rise up to enrapture, and, although it is not properly pleasure, is yet widely preferred to every pleasure by fine souls. This union of two contradictory sentiments in a single feeling proves our moral independence in an irrefutable manner. For as it is absolutely impossible for the same object to stand in two opposite relations to us, so does it follow therefrom, that we ourselves stand in two different relations to the object, so that consequently two opposite natures must be united in us, which are interested in the conception of the same in completely opposite ways. We therefore experience through the feeling of the sublime, that the state of our mind does not necessarily conform to the state of the senses, that the laws of nature are not necessarily also those of ours, and that we have in us an independent principle, which is independent of all sensuous emotions.

After his brother Tom died in November 1818, Keats went into a period of depression, self-doubt, and lassitude, in which he abandoned his great, unfinished epic poem, “Hyperion,” and wrote almost nothing. After several fits and starts and a few completed poems, Keats had an epiphany which produced one of the greatest creative outpourings in literary history. By what thought process this came about, is largely a mystery, but the results themselves are the footprints of this thought-object, which we can reconstruct in our own minds by working through the odes as an ordered process.

Although there has been a great amount of debate in academic circles as to the chronological order in which they were written, it is a largely irrelevant, if not downright silly matter, for when taken in their natural, conceptual order, they present an unfolding idea, much like the movements of a musical composition, which is evident from their content alone. From Keats’ letters, we do know, at least, that the “Ode to Psyche” was the first one he wrote, and that he wrote it in the spring of 1819. In it he clearly announces his dedication to a sacred mission:

Ode to Psyche

O goddess! Hear these tuneless numbers, wrung

By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,

And pardon that thy secrets should be sung

Even into thine own soft-conched ear:

Surely I dreamt today, or did I see

The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?

I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly,

And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,

Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side

In deepest grass, beneath the whisp’ring roof

Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran

A brooklet, scarce espied:

’Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,

Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,

They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;

Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;

Their lips touch’d not, but had not bade adieu,

As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,

And ready still past kisses to outnumber

At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:

The winged boy I knew;

But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?

His Psyche true!

O latest born and loveliest vision far

Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!

Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-region’d star,

Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;

Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,

Nor altar heap’d with flowers;

Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan

Upon the midnight hours;

No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet

From chain-swung censer teeming;

No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat

Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,

Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,

When holy were the haunted forest boughs,

Holy the air, the water, and the fire;

Yet even in these days so far retir’d

From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,

Fluttering among the faint Olympians,

I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.

So let me be thy choir, and make a moan

Upon the midnight hours;

Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet

From swinged censer teeming;

Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat

Of pale-mouth’d prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new-grown with pleasant pain,

Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:

Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d trees

Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;

And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,

The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull’d to sleep;

And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

With the wreath’d trellis of a working brain,

With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,

Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

To let the warm Love in!

Keats had read that the goddess Psyche was added to the Greek Pantheon at a much later time than the ancient gods who had been worshipped from the time before Homer. Since she was a beautiful mortal who was made immortal, incurring the wrath and jealousy of Hera, the wife of Zeus, and undergoing all manner of persecution, but ultimately overcoming it, and since she did represent the human soul, with its roots in mortality, but its destiny in immortality, she was an irresistible poetic subject for Keats. Although he is often criticized for an excessive sentimentality, for using such phrases as “fainting with surprise,” it is precisely the passion with which Keats approaches this ideal object, and his reaction to his own discovery, that is the essence of the matter he is placing before us.

After first establishing the setting and the “poetic device” of the poem—and accidental discovery of Cupid and Psyche asleep in an embrace which is at once full of warm, human passion, yet somehow in suspension, unrealized—Keats quickly gets to his real subject; his own mind and its reaction to this discovery. In his letters, Keats spoke of a concept he called “the greeting of the spirit,”[fn_4] with its object, as the real subject of poetry—the active participation of the human mind with the objects of the senses as the true substance of experience.

Keats here, after creating a powerful sense of longing for this beautiful image of a goddess who never received the reverence and devotion of the old gods, then announces this “greeting of the spirit” with the line, “I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d,” the real “turn” of this poem. He then repeats the refrain from the second stanza, “no lute, no pipe, . . .” etc., now offering himself as the priest who will inspire the religious devotion to Psyche, and it is as if a flood of creativity is unleashed by this act.

What follows is one of the most lyrical and literally “flowery,” yet profound descriptions of the creative process in all of poetry. He strikes a perfect balance between the untamed natural beauty of the physical world and the creations of the human mind; between the apparent, static perfection of nature, and the beauty which we, with the power of the imagination, can add, like a “gardener . . . breeding flowers.”

He concludes with the double image of creating this beautiful world as an act of love for Psyche, but also his own heart, like a torch inviting the “warm Love in”—in complete openness to new experience, new passion, and new creative growth and development. So we have here a union of intellect, imagination and heart, which leaves us open to a process of endless change and growth, yet expressed with such grace and simplicity that we hardly notice the profound discovery which Keats is reporting, and the mission he is announcing, which would unfold in his subsequent odes.

Joseph Severn

George Keats

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The Creative Tension

Keats now had the “thought object” before his mind’s eye which he knew he had to somehow make palpable in the mind of his audience: the greatness and beauty of the individual, creative soul as it struggles through the paradoxes of its mortal existence to find its true, immortal identity. This was for Keats, as it was for Schiller, the highest calling of Art, to induce the awareness of this greatness sleeping within, and the tension, and even conflict, between it and all that is sensual, accidental or temporal. This is what Schiller called the Sublime. In one of his letters, Keats used quasi-religious poetic metaphor to express the same idea:

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is “a vale of tears” from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven—What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please “The vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say “soul-making”—Soul as distinguished from an intelligence. There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception—they know and see and they are pure, in short, they are God—how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystian religion—or rather it is a system of spirit-creation—This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years—These three Materials are the intelligence—the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or mind) and the world or elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to posses the sense of Identity.

—Letter to George Keats, February 1818

This creative tension between the ideal, the eternal, the One, and the concrete, particular reality of sensual experience, was to be the very “fuel” which Keats used to bridge the chasm and achieve, in the later odes, a whole new poetic level, a higher “power.” But first, he knew he had to deal with the human foibles that block the emotions to the kind of passion required to make that journey. He did so, from two different standpoints in “Ode on Indolence,” and “Ode on Melancholy.” Whether he actually wrote these later, after “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” is really immaterial, as their thought content clearly precedes, psychologically the latter two, even if written later to elucidate that thought process, in hindsight. So, we shall consider them first.

Ode on Indolence

“They toil not, neither do they spin”

I

One morn before me were three figures seen,

With bowed necks, and joined hands, side-faced:

And one behind the other stepp’d serene,

In placid sandals, and in white robes graced;

They pass’d, like figures on a marble urn,

When shifted round to see the other side;

They came again; as when the urn once more

Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;

And they were strange to me, as may betide

With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.

II

How is it, Shadows! that I knew ye not?

How came ye muffled in so hush a mask?

Was it a silent deep-disguised plot

To steal away, and leave without a task

My idle days? Ripe was the drowsy hour;

The blissful cloud of Summer-indolence

Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;

Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower:

O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense

Unhaunted quite of all but—nothingness?

III

A third time pass’d they by, and, passing, turn’d

Each one the face a moment whiles to me;

Then faded, and to follow them I burn’d

And ach’d for wings because I knew the three;

The first was a fair Maid, and Love her name;

The second was Ambition, pale of cheek,

And ever watchful with fatigued eye;

The last, whom I love more, the more of blame

Is heap’d upon her, maiden most unmeek,—

I knew to be my demon Poesy.

IV

They faded, and forsooth! I wanted wings:

O folly! What is love! and where is it?

And for that poor Ambition! it springs

From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit;

For Poesy!—no,—she has not a joy,—

At least for me,—so sweet as drowsy noons,

And evenings steep’d in honied indolence;

O, for an age so shelter’d from annoy,

That I may never know how change the moons,

Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

V

And once more came they by;—alas! wherefore?

My sleep had been embroider’d with dim dreams;

My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er

With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams:

The morn was clouded, but no shower fell,

Tho’ in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;

The open casement press’d a new-leav’d vine,

Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay;

O shadows! ’twas a time to bid farewell!

Upon your skirts had fallen no tears of mine.

VI

So, ye three Ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise

My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;

For I would not be dieted with praise,

A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce!

Fade softly from my eyes, and be once more

In masque-like figures on the dreamy urn;

Farewell! I yet have visions for the night,

And for the day faint visions there is store;

Vanish, ye Phantoms! from my idle spright,

Into the clouds, and never more return!

Keats had often spoken of his “bouts of indolence,” not as an ordinary sort of laziness, but as an almost transcendental sort of passivity, and openness to pure experience, unmediated by conventional thought. He sometimes felt that, in these moments, his apprehension of essential ideas was so pure, so beyond the world of commonplace reasoning, that any attempt to confine it to a deductive system, such as language, was almost a sacrilege. And, as we saw in “When I Have Fears,” Keats was highly self-critical and wary of his own intentions regarding fame and love, so he here personifies them and sets them in conflict with this pure and ideal state of mind, which he playfully chooses to call “indolence.”

The paradox of this poem is already contained in the inscription beneath the title; it is from Matthew, 6:28, and refers to Jesus admonishing his disciples not to be unduly attached to the concerns of everyday life: “Consider the lilies of the field. . . .” It is not that we can completely ignore those things which are the necessary consequence of our mortal nature, but if our sense of identity is located in them, we can never fully identify with our true, divine nature—“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be, also.”

Here, Keats is haunted by three ghostly shapes representing Love, Ambition, and, ironically, “Poesy,” which he portrays as attempting to seduce him out of his blissful indolence, where “Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower,” and it is here that most lovers of Keats’ poetry begin to experience a tension which attends the paradox he is confronting us with. For how could he consider “poesy”—Poetry—his divine calling, a demon which tempts and threatens somehow to corrupt him, along with love and ambition? Is Keats merely, as some suggest, having a self-indulgent fit of existential desire for nothingness, or psychological death, or escape from reality? Or is he seeking something higher?

The answer to these questions lies, in a sense, outside of the elements of the paradox, as all true metaphors do. In stanzas IV and V, Keats draws out and allows the full weight of the two sides of the paradox to be fully felt. He clearly rejects love and ambition, considered as attachments to mortal things, in phrases such as “man’s little heart’s fever-fit” and “the voice of busy common-sense,” contrasting them to a timeless or eternal state, “shelter’d from annoy,” where one may “never know how change the moons.” But still, what of Poesy? Why reject her, too? Perhaps he is somehow, in utterly rejecting all “normal,” conventional motives, defining, or at least intimating a higher notion of this calling.

Look at what he does in stanza V; they tempt him once more, but something has changed—a serenity which is at once passive and receptive, yet full of a potential creative energy, ready to unleash new beauty from the union of itself with Nature, yet hung in suspension, not ready or needing to, yet. There is something completely free in this passage, that is the shadow or footprint of a process that Keats struggled through in real life. He did, in fact, reject fame and risked a life of poverty to follow his creative genius, and he rejected the allure of a commonplace sort of relationship with Fanny Brawne,[fn_5] in order to pursue his mission unhindered. This courage to locate his identity solely in his creative self, enables him to then confidently predict that he has, from within himself, “visions for the night, And for the day faint visions there is store.”

There is a distinct feeling of freedom, even triumph, in this last stanza, confirming for us that Keats had, indeed, made a psychological break from his own demons and could now, with a new-found courage, go to the next level and challenge himself, and us, to go there with him. The ultimate irony of “Indolence” is, of course, that Keats neither became indolent, nor abandoned Poetry, as a “literal” reading might suggest, but plunged into the thorniest and most difficult of paradoxes with openness and honesty, relying only on the certainty of this idea which is a definite, yet undefined “thought object,” arising out of the process he just underwent. This he did in the “Ode on Melancholy.”

Ode on Melancholy

I

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf’s bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d

By nightshade, ruby grape of Prosperpine;

Make not your rosary of yew-berries;

Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

II

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

III

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to Poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia, 1614.

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Here, Keats turns from addressing himself and asking us to witness the result, as in “Psyche” and “Indolence,” to directly address you, the reader. He seems to be saying, yes, the human condition is fraught with an inescapable melancholy; a consciousness of some unattainable perfection of which all experience falls short, the inevitable passing of every state of temporal happiness, pains, disappointments, and, of course, the ultimate “bummer,” death—yet, don’t try to suppress the full import of this excruciating paradox of human existence, don’t try to escape it—embrace it! This, of course, goes against every instinct of particularly today’s Baby Boomer-dominated culture, which avoids this issue as an axiomatic matter of principle; “Don’t go there!” But Keats knows we must go there if we are going to discover anything.

What Keats does in the second stanza is something that must be simply experienced with the heart and spirit. Let the full weight of melancholy contained in these images of briefly glorious, yet passing beauty sink in. Then feel the full import of including even one’s own beloved—another human being—in this sad progression. Keats says again, no, don’t run from it—savor it! Is there not something richly satisfying in that, despite the knowledge, as he makes clear in the first four lines of stanza III, that it too will pass? Is there not something divine and transcendental in the overall effect of this? Ah, that is the point; without explicitly stating it, we are made to feel the beauty of the human soul, as a bridge, if you will, to a higher idea, a higher power. All of the other images, however beautiful, were of nature, but this is, after all, a human being—human hands and human eyes and behind them, a soul. The concluding image suggests being somehow suspended in a state which is at once triumphant, and also strangely passive, as if in the sway of a higher power.

We are now ready to really appreciate the truly remarkable breakthrough represented by Keats’ greatest odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

Ode to a Nightingale

I

My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,—

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

In some melodious plot

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

II

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade into the forest dim:

III

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs,

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

IV

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

Already with thee! tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;

But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

V

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and pastoral eglantine;

Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;

And mid-May’s eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

VI

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a sod.

VII

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

VIII

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

One is struck immediately in the first stanza by the contrast between the almost pitiable state in which he describes himself, and the utter freedom and happiness of the nightingale. There seems to be an almost unbridgeable gap between them, for the nightingale is off in “some melodious plot . . .,” which the poet cannot see, but only imagine from the sound which reaches him. By means of this image, in ten lines, Keats has powerfully conveyed the paradox of our existence—that higher state of unconditional joy and connectedness which the senses can only hint at, never actually capturing—and with an emotional intensity that drives us onward to try to discover an idea which resolves this tension.

In the second stanza, we have a description of a state of unbridled and unalloyed happiness which seems to be the answer to the dilemma posed in “Melancholy,” of pleasure always passing into pain and lost almost as soon as it is felt, but which he now imagines can be attained if only he could “drink and leave the world unseen . . .,” and through some magical incantation, join the nightingale in this paradise beyond the senses.

The third stanza is one of the most agonizing descriptions of the human condition in all of poetry; especially considering the pain and loss which Keats had suffered, it is all the more compelling, even pathetic. How, then, can we bridge this gap? How can we attain, in this life, some measure of real meaning and happiness if every pleasure, like the sand slipping through our fingers, is continually passing, human attachments are all ultimately broken by death, and even love seems to be inconstant or is betrayed? Keats here does something truly amazing, and discovering just how he accomplishes it, not only goes right to the heart of the breakthrough that he had made, but enables us, borne along with him by the magic of his poetry, to make the same breakthrough. With the line, “Away, away, for I will fly to thee,” Keats simply rejects the painful and paradoxical world of the senses, and, although it may seem at this point like and artificial device to almost naively entrust one’s soul to the “viewless wings of Poesy” to transport it, it is what he does next that convinces the mind and heart that something of genuine substance is occurring.

A Force Acting Throughout History

After rejecting any sort of artificial escape through mere intoxication, “Bacchus and his pards,” and then referring to the way in which the intellect, alone, only “perplexes and retards” this flight of the spirit, Keats simply asserts that this power to connect with the eternal is already there inside of us, and he is now aware that he is “already with thee,” and has been transported into a realm where, even if the eternal is still infinitely distant and otherworldly, it nevertheless transforms his power of vision. Like Carl Gauss’ complex domain, an unseen, universal principle is shaping the visible domain. The passage starting with “But here there is no light,” through to the end of the following stanza, is one of the most powerful examples of an almost clairvoyant poetic vision ever written. Keats makes clear that he is not actually seeing any of the things he describes, nor is he smelling or hearing anything, but rather apprehending, with a newfound power of poetic imagination, the objects of the visible domain, connecting somehow with their very essence. Gone is all of the pain and turmoil of the first three stanzas, and nothing could express the resulting of inner peace and fullness of life better than “the murmurous haunt of flies on Summer eves.”

This is why we sense an innate truthfulness in what might otherwise seem morbid or just weird in his then referring to death in such a beautiful, even longing, way. For if we can, in fact, live with this eternal quality inside of us, if it is indeed our identity, death is nothing to fear, but is only the ultimate union of the soul with its true self. Keats here has not brought about this awareness of the existence of the soul by a rational argument, not by resort to dogma or belief, but by making us feel it, poetically. But he also makes clear that even if one were to die while in communication with this spirit, there is still something about the nightingale’s song that is beyond us, and seemingly unattainable. If not for these last two lines, the poem might have been ended here, if a lesser poet had written it, but there is still something more to discover, something more Keats wants to say, and it is precisely in this that his sublime intention becomes clear.

He seems to suddenly realize that this spirit is much bigger than merely him and the nightingale, but is a force acting throughout human history, and that he is connected, through it, to every other human being, who ever heard it. The imagination then opens wide to the implications of the hypothesis, beginning with “Perhaps . . .”; every longing for something great or noble, seemingly lost or unattainable, every great endeavor of the human spirit was inspired by this voice. And its “magical” power can even appear to show the way when all hope seems to be lost. In this short space, Keats has universalized the idea and connected it to all of humanity, past, present and future, so that the union with the nightingale, which eludes him even in the spiritual death so beautifully portrayed in the preceding stanza, is now located in a higher concept, the “Simultaneity of Eternity,” that timeless realm in which all human beings, through the power to communicate ideas across centuries, even after physical death, are indeed connected. Although it is here glimpsed but briefly and then fades, leaving him, and us, wondering whether it was “a vision or a waking dream. . . .” We are now prepared, emotionally, to deal with it directly, as the ruling idea of Keats’ immortal “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Ode on a Grecian Urn

I

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

II

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

III

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs, for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,

For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

IV

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its folk this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

V

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

---------------------------------------------

One thing that is often overlooked about this poem, which emerges when considering its basic argument, in the light of what has been discussed in the previous odes, is the principle of inversion; here, the entire poetic device being an inversion of the “Nightingale.” Whereas in the “Nightingale,” the ineffable principle being alluded to was heard, but unseen, here, it is seen, but unheard.

Again, Keats, as in the “Nightingale,” uses the paradoxes of the senses to induce the mind to conceptualize a principle completely outside the world of the senses, yet which exists with, and works through, those sensual objects, in the same way that we experience a Classically composed musical work; the overall idea of the piece can never be contained in one note or succession of notes, yet could never be arrived at except through experiencing the paradoxes, the ironies, generated among them, as the piece develops. This is the unity of the One with the Many discussed by Plato, Nicholas of Cusa, and Leibniz, and rigorously proven to exist as the “Complex Domain” by Carl Gauss.

In the “Nightingale,” Keats cuts to the chase immediately. After describing the object he is placing before our imagination, and stating that this “bride of quietness” is going to say something to us which can’t be captured in words, representing the crux of the paradox upon which the whole poem is based, he simply and beautifully states, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,” thus lifting us into the realm of the imagination, it seems, effortlessly.

And whereas we feel a sharpening of melancholy at the thought of the loss of beauty and pleasure that is inescapably bound up with mortality, as in the “Ode on Indolence” and the “Ode on Melancholy,” or the agonizing pathos of the third stanza of the “Ode to a Nightingale,” we are here presented with the inversion of that paradox; for the figures on the urn are forever frozen in the moment of the highest pleasure and happiness, just before its actual attainment, beyond change, beyond death. The “bold lover” cannot actually ever get what he seeks, actually experience the sensual pleasure he desires, but its object can never fade or die. This forces the mind to free itself from the senses and identify with the eternal.

There is something so compelling in this image of eternal love, happiness, even of the eternally fresh, creative outpourings of music from an eternally young heart, that we are tempted to want to exist in this idyllic universe with them until, in the last three lines of stanza III, we are suddenly reminded of our mortal identity and that an unbridgeable gap separates us from this world “far above,” and which leaves us vainly striving after it with a “burning forehead and a parching tongue.” Are we, therefore, stuck back in the same condition as at the end of “Nightingale”? Is this ineffable principle forever glimpsed only fleetingly, forever escaping us as in a dream?

Consider carefully what Keats does next. In stanza IV, we are suddenly reminded that this is, after all, a religious ceremony, a sacrifice, and that these are depictions of what were once real people. Keats then does something which causes great consternation, when considered in logical or deductive terms, but which resonates on the deeper level of metaphorical truth in a necessary way, and which is the crux of not only this entire poem, but also the entirety of the process Keats embarked on with the announcement of his “mission” in the “Ode to Psyche.”

To Continue To Live Through Us

By personifying a “little town” which isn’t even depicted on the urn, but exists entirely in our imagination, and causing us to feel the sense of loss of the physical presence of these human beings, we are at once enabled to conceptualize both the melancholy fact that they are physically dead, lost forever, but yet exist somewhere, as if they might come back, and since we have already experienced such a powerful and vital effect from them, even as frozen images on the urn, we really have an implicit idea, which is both intellectual, and felt deeply, emotionally, that they exist in a timeless, yet ever-beautiful and creative place, which can speak to us, even over thousands of years!

The emotion evoked is agapē—love, not just for people, but for the idea of humanity, and the image of the little town takes us entirely out of the sensual world into the world of the imagination in the highest expression of true metaphor.

When Keats expresses his wonder and joy at this profound discovery being communicated by means of a cold, dead object, and proclaims his famous dictum, “Beauty is truth, truth Beauty,” we know that it is true, and feel that it is beautiful. But could that statement mean anything to us if merely uttered alone, without having gone through the process of discovery which this poem represents? And could this poem mean half as much to us if we had not gone through the journey with Keats from his indistinct proclamation of an intention in “Ode to Psyche,” through the soul-searching and restless drive to discover the immortal in ourselves which characterizes the other three odes?

So, we contemplate the One, the entire process which unfolded in these poems with wonder and amazement, not only at the profundity of it, but the passion which gripped Keats as he poured forth this beauty, all in a few weeks in that Spring of 1819, at age 24. Are we not uplifted and spiritually empowered to comprehend and act upon the boldest and most universal ideas concerning mankind? It is not necessary for the poet to prod us to any particular action, or to moralize upon any particular defect in ourselves or society when we are moved on this level, for we will feel and know “instinctively” that it is what contributes to, or detracts from, this idea of humanity, which constitutes good or evil.

Emotionally blocked, academic pundits and “touchy-feely” Romantics will never be able to understand Keats for just this reason. True republican political organizing is on this level—the issue of what it truly means to be human, your place, therefore, in the Simultaneity of Eternity, which connects you to all humanity, past, present, and future, and your mission in the moment of history in which you find yourself. That is why nothing could be more beautiful than for Keats to not only speak to us, but continue to live through us, energizing and inspiring our ongoing fight for a more beautiful humanity.

This is the Sublime.

[fn_1]. For a fuller discussion of this, see Pierre Beaudry, “Why France Did Not Have an American Revolution,” EIR, Vol. 29, No. 2, Jan. 18, 2002. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]. Keats’ first published poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” exemplifies this connection between the individual creative discovery and the universe as a whole. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3]. Before Schiller wrote “On the Sublime,” which it is doubtful Keats ever read, the most influential writings on the subject, at least in the modern period, were by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Although it is useful to compare the methodological approaches of Schiller, on the one hand, and Kant and Burke on the other, it is important to note that both Burke and Kant start from the assumption, largely based on John Locke, that man can only know what simple sense perception tells him, and then only base judgements on this information according to whether it produces pleasure or pain. William Hazlitt, a contemporary and friend of Keats, thoroughly demolished this view in his commentaries on Madame De Stael’s “The Poetry and Philosophy of Germany,” in the section on Kant. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4]. Robert Gittings, Letters of John Keats (Oxford University Press, 1970), Letter to George Keats, Feb. 14-May 3, 1819. [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5]. Keats, even before his final illness, had a complicated, and much theorized about, relationship with Fanny Brawne. Although obviously captivated by her physical charms, and enjoying a certain intellectual rapport with her, he nevertheless regarded marriage, or any constant domestic arrangement, as a hindrance to his ability to write, and several times banished himself from her presence for this reason. [back to text for fn_5]

LAROUCHE 2012 WEBCAST

No to the Green Policy:

Revive Our Credit System

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Glass-Steagall is the first step required to prevent the U.S. from going bankrupt, LaRouche said. But that must be followed immediately by the creation of a credit system to fuel the growth of the U.S. economy.

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Here is the edited transcript of Lyndon LaRouche’s opening presentation to the LaRouche PAC webcast of December 7, 2012, originally published in the December 21, 2012 issue of EIR.

What I’m going to say today will cause a certain amount of difficulty in the audience, unless we pay close attention to some concepts which are not commonly recognized, which are actually crucial in this particular situation.

Now, the principal subject we’re launching at this event today, is, we are taking the preconditions which are required to prevent the United States from going bankrupt. First of all is Glass-Steagall. But Glass-Steagall alone, by itself, cannot do anything miraculous in terms of changing things. But it is necessary to protect the banking system—that is the honest banking system—and prevent that from being corrupted by the kind of speculation which is being done now, for example, in terms of everything that the Federal government is doing which is wrong. Unless those things are changed, we are in trouble.

Glass-Steagall is the actually indispensable action without which the United States’ economy is not going to survive. And by not surviving, I mean something relatively immediate. The whole system is now going into the breaking-point of hectic irrationality, in which everything becomes chaotic. And this is the bailout point which corresponds to what happened to Germany in October, approximately, of 1923, where everything went bankrupt. That’s where we are.

However, as I say, Glass-Steagall is indispensable, but it does not contain a cure. It contains a preventive of gambling, and it is necessary. But here’s where the problem comes in: We’re going to be operating, not on the basis of the present system. That is, if the United States is going to survive; if the U.S. economy is not going to disintegrate entirely, what’s going to have to happen, relatively immediately, now, is the installation of a credit system as the basis of actually creating the potential growth of the U.S. economy. That is, an inflation-free form of growth, or hyperinflation-free form of growth, as the matter is now.

Most people don’t understand that, because they think that money placed in a bank, or a denomination of money placed in a bank or some other kind of institution—represents credit, the basis for credit. It does not. A credit system is based on the growth of per capita wealth, per person in society, or household, per society. And that’s very poorly understood, because the assumption that’s made by all the people who are incompetent, ever since they were swallowed by whatever happened years ago, decades ago, is they assume that money deposited in a bank, or attributed to be deposited in a bank, represents value. It does not.

Money is a very tricky thing, money as such, because it has no intrinsic means of defending itself against hyperinflation, or other kinds of problems. So only a certain credit system is the key to this process.

What Is a ‘Credit System’?

Now, what happens is this. We have now three categories we’re considering. First of all, Glass-Steagall; that is an absolute. Glass-Steagall must be imposed as the original Glass-Steagall form. The Franklin Roosevelt Glass-Steagall is what must be done. Anything different than that should get somebody shot, because things are getting that bad these days.

The credit system: What do we mean by a credit system? That the Federal government organizes a system under which credit is uttered, and the anticipation is that there is a time factor, that if we assign a certain value to something as credit, we must assume that by the time that credit has been collected, or realized, that there will be growth in the value of the product, and growth in the value of the credit itself.

This can be interpreted in various ways—it can mean that things become cheaper, and therefore you have a gain, which is margin for profit, because things became cheaper, through productivity, for example, that kind of method. But otherwise, there is no other source of value in terms of money as such, merely as circulated, as is being done now with this hyperinflationary process which is going on now, which is about to destroy the United States. That cannot be tolerated.

So therefore, the value lies in what? It lies in physical values per capita. Now, this also includes the increase of the value of work, the value of production. Because what happens is as we become more efficient, we tend to go into higher technologies, these are more productive. And therefore, we have a difference between the point that the credit was issued first, and the time that it’s matured when the pay-off has to come.

The assumption is, that an increase in productivity can take place in two ways—either in terms of the actual productivity, or the combination of an increase in productivity and also a decrease in the relative cost of the same item. We become more efficient; we can produce the same thing more cheaply. That’s another source. But the point is, the key to the whole system, is that you must realize that there must be an increase in the physical productive powers of labor, as expressed in terms of net production. That that must occur, and that’s the basis of the credit system. That’s where the question of the determination of value lies.

U.S. Navy/Specialist 3rd Class Jared King

The key to a sound economy, LaRouche stated, is that there must be an increase in the physical productive powers of labor, as expressed in terms of net production. Shown: a worker uses a cutting torch to fabricate a bracket.

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Increases in Power Density Per Capita

Now, if you want a stable system, you’ve got to have growth—physical growth—or improvement in efficiency of physical growth. So therefore, what you have is, by advancing credit, as if you were loaning money, this money must increase in value. Well, the money doesn’t actually increase in value; the cost of the product decreases in value, in terms of relative value. And that’s the basis of credit.

Credit does not lie in letting money sit in a bank; it must do something. It must change its character; it must be more efficient, or it must be more enriching. It means technological progress; it means higher rates of energy-flux density, which is an essential part of this. People are more skilled; they do a job which is a more skilled job; they produce more value with the same amount of nominal labor. That’s the system. We must generate growth. We must increase the productive power of labor. We must advance technology—absolutely. We must increase the energy-flux density flowing through the entire system.

All the myths which Republicans and Democrats alike believe in, with a kind of religious, or, shall we say, Satanic passion, are wrong. The generation of credit, as real credit, occurs only by the increase of the productive power of labor, as measured in physical terms. This means physical terms in the sense that people doing the same thing, do it more efficiently, or do it at higher technology.

For example, increase of energy-flux density, in terms of higher density of power per capita. All these factors can lead to the creation of credit potential, on which real credit is based.

So, the basic reform, first of all, is that. The generation of credit is associated with the credit system, not with the simple Glass-Steagall system as such. Therefore, the Glass-Steagall system’s function is to give us a fixed reference point from which to make the comparisons on which growth is determined. And that is something which is not understood, except by a rare few individuals on both sides of the Atlantic. And that’s what the problem is.

Therefore, the credit system as such: What does that mean? It means that the Federal government organizes transactions in society, such that the credit is being generated. In other words, if you are increasing productivity by new technologies, you’re increasing the value of production; you’re increasing the value of labor. And it’s that growth in value associated with improvements in employment.

For example, when we employ people for doing nothing—which is what we tend to do these days, if we employ people at all—we’re not really increasing credit, we’re increasing hyperinflation, as is the case today. But the typical Republican of these times believes that money sitting in the bank, or sitting in someone’s account—sitting there—is just sitting there, waiting to “grow.” And what they find out is, they end up with inflation, but not an increase in actual value. And there’s no real increase in credit.

Early Credit Systems

Let’s take the case of—a nice, hard one: Let’s go back to the middle of the period of the settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Then we had a system of credit which was set up in that colony, that you would make a commitment to complete something, which would be an increase in technology. Then you would find that that improvement in technology had increased the value of the outgoing credit which had been established. So, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, during this heyday of its growth, was actually the fastest-growing “nation” in the world, in terms of technology and in terms of its economic measurement. And only after the Massachusetts Bay Colony was crushed by the British interests, then it went back into a poorer condition.

The same thing was started in Pennsylvania, after Massachusetts had been pretty much crushed. And in Pennsylvania, with the influence of Benjamin Franklin, a number of things were done, based on the concept of paper credit, paper money, because the paper money represented credit, but the credit did not lie in the money as such; it lay in the fact of the improvement in the productive powers of labor, either through just the improvement of skill as such, the improvement of working on the basis of a productive product, as opposed to a useless product; and so forth.

It was actually a physical value in all cases: to increase the productivity of labor, relative to an earlier point in time, and some averaging of the whole process, of the productive circulation process, was to do that.

We’re now in a hyperinflationary system, and it’s about to crash. We’re about to have the highest rate of inflation the United States has probably ever been through. And the problem is that people, including the Republican Party leaders, who are supposed to be hard-boiled, rational people—they’re actually nuts! Their conception of the way the money system works is absolutely looney! The only thing that’s more looney is the Democrats. Which means we do have a few improvements to make in our product.

I mentioned these things so far: I emphasized credit, the credit system, and the credit system has been the basis for every successful period of growth of the United States, from its beginning—from before its beginning, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in its heyday. So, credit is the difference between the productivity of labor per capita now, and what it will be in the improvement over some point in time. So, it’s the ratio of the improvement in potential, of physical potential, represented by advances in technology, or improvement in the rate of technology per capita of the population. And that’s the basis.

Sources: Parsons Company, North American Water and Power Alliance Conceptual Study, Dec. 7, 1964; Hal Cooper; Manuel Frías Alcaraz; EIR.

Under the reestablished national credit system, credit from the Federal government will flow into great projects, such as North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), which will create millions of new productive jobs.

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NAWAPA and the ‘Make-Everything’ Industry

We have another aspect of this thing. The credit system as such works in terms of the money system; but the money system only works when it’s treated as a credit system—then it works. But now we have—knowing that we get nothing out of Glass-Steagall in terms of gain—we don’t get anything out of that as such, except to the degree we generate more credit, the realization of more credit. But in the case of the United States, we are so bankrupt, as the result of what has happened, particularly since 2007, but actually earlier—much earlier. But the worst period now has been since 2007, when the take-off occurred, leading into 2008, which led to the bailout money.

Since 2007-2008, the United States has been on the road to an increasing rate of bankruptcy. And the result of that is a corresponding, increasing rate of hyperinflation.

We have a lot of labor we can’t employ right now, under present conditions. The banking system does not have the capital to bring this labor, or the production, into being, as such. So, therefore, we have to find some projects which we’re going to give credit to, from the Federal government. New Federal credit is going to be supplied to these projects.

These projects will employ some millions, actually, of people. One will be the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA). NAWAPA is essential, not only because it does generate a lot of true value and growth; it changes the character of the water system of the United States; it improves the productive power of labor in every way you can imagine. And we’re talking about 6 million jobs, right off the bat. They may not be too efficient at first. We have a few old hands who are now near retirement, or are into retirement actually, who are capable of organizing labor for this purpose, in order to get the thing rolling, to get this process of growth rolling. So, the NAWAPA, that’s a big one.

Then we also have another category. You know what happened some years ago? We shut down the auto industry, essentially, inside the United States. At that point, I was in the middle of this process, on policy. It was obvious to me—and we were boosting that at the time—Ford and some of the other industries were aware of this thing. What we had to do was go to what we did in World War II.

In World War II, the automobile industry, as it became known, was the make-everything industry. Airplanes, submarines, torpedoes—anything you wanted to mention—was made by the automobile industry. The greatest amount of working-space for this kind of production was under the heading of the auto industry. So, the auto industry, during this period of World War II, was the make-everything industry, and it became that as part of the build-up for fighting the war.

Insanity of the U.S. Economy

At the end of the war, we had this great potential, but we had a terrible President—Harry Truman—and this creep destroyed pretty much everything. He got so disgusting, that the citizens of the United States became disgusted with him, and they decided to dump him. So, we had a better, we had a real President [Dwight Eisenhower] then, after getting rid of this bum.

There was a lot there, but the auto industry of the 1950s also became insane—totally insane. I was an expert sitting in the middle of this, and forecasting where this thing was going to go. And I had an early date in that period, in which I said it was going to collapse. And it did: The auto industry, and several other industries, went into a sudden collapse, exactly on the day I forecast it would happen.

Well, it was easy for me to forecast, because this involved a lot of contracts, and therefore if you know that something’s going to crash, and you have the number of contracts, and the location of the contracts which are subject to this crash, then you can do a pretty good job of forecasting. But I specialize in the future; it’s more interesting than the present or past. Sometimes it’s worse, but sometimes it’s a better experience.

So, therefore, the development of the machine-tool driver: What we lack is an expansion of the general category of a machine-tool driver. And with that, as a supplement to, or complement to what NAWAPA will do as a project, means that we can immediately move into—and I say immediately move into—an end to this chaos, and this insanity of the U.S. economy now. We can move into a gradual but accelerating rate of recovery of the U.S. physical economy.

Therefore, we can generate the credit on the basis of that recovery. That credit will enable us to rebuild the U.S. economy. But we have to earn our way, by physical increments of real value. And that’s the solution we need, definitely.

We have a real problem in agriculture. We have deliberately, intentionally, destroyed much of U.S. agriculture. On one part, this destruction of the U.S. economy, its agricultural sector, is a failure to respond to challenges in certain parts of the country. On the other part, it’s actually a deliberate process of mass murder of the population.

Let me explain.

CC/Leonhard Lenz

Fridays for Future march in Berlin on January 25, 2019. The policy of the British Empire and its “green” shocktroops is population reduction worldwide of billions of people.

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The Queen’s Green Genocide

The mass murder of the U.S. population which is now in progress, is a product of the British Empire, and it’s a product of the Queen, herself. Because the Queen herself has adopted, as her responsibility—or her culpability, I guess, better said—in which she’s saying “We’ve got to reduce the population of the planet; we’ve got to increase the death-rates of people; we’ve got to reduce the world’s population from an estimated 7 billion people now, rapidly to slightly more than 1 billion.” And that’s the genocide program. The “green” program is a genocide program! The green program means, “Don’t do anything that’s going to increase productivity!”

Now this is a sure recipe for one of two things: either hyperinflation, or mass murder—one of the two. And that’s the policy of Obama. Mass murder and hyperinflation—both. And that’s going to become evident in a few weeks—if not next week. But in this immediate period, going into the next year, next calendar year, we’re headed for this kind of crisis: a hyperinflationary crisis.

People are denying it, from the press circles and so forth, the usual gossip circles, but everyone at the same time knows it.

We’re also headed for the threat of a thermonuclear war. And everyone who’s in the military department, and really knows what’s going on in that department, among nations, knows we’re headed for a thermonuclear war, unless we change our policies. And the combination of the green policy—which is a mass-murder policy—together with this threat of thermonuclear war, which is now coming down upon us, means a general threat to the human species as a whole. I’m talking, as the Queen is talking, about a sudden, rapid reduction of the world’s population.

And mass murder is now occurring; it has accelerated greatly under Obama already. The policies of Obama are actually policies of mass murder against the population: the canceling of health care, the elimination of whole categories of health care, and the acceleration of the death rate, by withholding medical facilities, withholding technology, withholding all kinds of defense against health problems.

So, that’s where we are now.

NASA/JPL

The danger to Earth from asteroids and comets is a challenge that can be met by mankind’s increasing mastery of the Solar System and beyond. Here, an artist’s concept of NASA’s Dawn satellite in orbit around the giant asteroid Vesta.

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Mars, and the Defense of Earth

We have also something else to consider. It’s a very practical problem, which only a few people are paying attention to much now. And that is Mars.

Now, Mars is very important in this process, despite what some people don’t know. The Solar System of which we’re a part, is not a fixed system in a fixed position, doing the same-old, same-old, same-old, same-old from year to year to year.

The Solar System itself has a limit to its calculated existence. Within two billion years, the Sun will go away—that’s the general estimate of the trend right now. And when the Sun goes away, the brightness is going to go out of the universe, for people. So, therefore, we have to have a long-term consideration of what is happening.

Asteroids and comets, are becoming an increasing menace to the continued existence of mankind, on Earth and elsewhere, within the range, say, from the Mars orbit down to the Venus orbit. This had been worked on for some time by some geniuses of the past, who understood the need to organize a defense of humanity on Earth in particular, against these kinds of dangers, these kinds of threats.

And therefore, it’s important for us, for this, and related reasons, that we look at the Mars project as we’ve defined it, as a defense of Earth project. That is, we are limited in our capability at present, even to locate the asteroid which may kill you in the morning. That’s the situation.

We can do things about this, but it means a technological acceleration in that direction. And therefore, we have to say that mankind is no longer limited, as a matter of policy, to Earth itself. Because in order to defend Earth from mass killings—which are on the agenda—we don’t know when they’re going to hit in each case, because of the known objects out there, only a small fraction are actually known to us, identifiable to us, today—it’s a tiny fraction. Therefore, we have a major effort to build up a system of detection and defense for mankind, operating within the range of the Mars orbit, and down to the Venus orbit, where all these most significant kinds of things are there. (Comets are a little bit different problem.)

We’ve reached the point that mankind must move from a limitation on living on Earth, to beginning to take over places like Mars.

Now, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is an example of something in that direction. Curiosity itself is not a solution to this problem, but it’s a necessary step in the process of trying to deal with it. So, therefore, we’re now going to have to think about integrating Man into the functions of the Solar System, at least in the region between the Mars orbit and the Venus orbit. Because that’s the area we’ve got to solve.

It’s Increases in Energy-Flux Density, Stupid!

All of these processes come together in one thing: Mankind is now about to depart from the limitations on Earth habitation. Mankind is going into the Moon, to develop tunnels under the Moon’s surface—the preparations for the mass attack on the mission to Mars. Once we do that—once, say, a generation from now, with a hyper-density of energy-flux density—then we will be able to do that within, say, a week—a week between Moon and Mars landing. Once that is reached, mankind will have a more personally important direct role, in terms of this process.

In the meantime, our job is to prepare the way for that process, and do as much as we can, now, to detect the threats to Earth, threats to mankind on Earth, in order to stave off the worst threats we face to now.

So that’s the nature of our real task. We have a real task, and this tiddlywink kind of thing about, “We’re going to fix that with this, with that scheme or other,” forget it! It’s nonsense! Mankind’s increase of the productive powers of labor, in terms of improved technology, increased energy-flux density! Everything about mankind’s survival means energy-flux density increases. Without that, no luck, no survival.

Increasing Man’s Intelligence

Mankind has to change its policy: Dump the Green policy, which is presently the greatest single threat to humanity; that’s a killer! And we have to understand that it is the increase of man’s intelligence, which means also scientific intelligence, the ability to create, the ability to generate higher energy-flux densities per capita and per square kilometer of territory—these are the standards on which credit is generated. It’s to increase the population of the planet: Increase it! Stop this killing people: Increase it! Because we need more work done. We need, also, increases of the energy-flux density of the work being done. These are absolute necessities for us.

And the crap that’s been shoved into us, all this green crap, has just got to end. We have a population of the planet, and we need every damned individual on this planet: We need ’em! They have a purpose in existing, because they can become more productive, and as they become more productive, then their children become more productive, and so forth; mankind’s ability to cope with these problems increases.

There is no such thing as overpopulation. There’s under-mentation, and that’s what the problem is.

These are the considerations. You have to stop thinking of money as something of fixed value. You walk in with this money: “I got my money! My money! My money!” Right? “This is my money! I’m going to spend it the way I want to! You don’t get any of my money!” That kind of thing. The Andrew Jackson kind of nonsense.

The point is, we need every human being. We need them to live longer and better. We need them to become more creative. We need to have their children better educated, and developed. We need an increase of the potential productivity of the human force, per capita and per square kilometer, and those are the missions that we must fulfill.

There are many things we don’t know yet, but these things we do know: The increase of productivity of labor per capita, with an increasing population, is an absolute necessity, which has to be coupled with the fact that mankind is no longer going to be content to sit on Earth and gossip about the neighbors.

At this point, mankind is going to take an active role in taking over the Mars orbit. We are going to be inhabiting it with all kinds of instruments and so forth, that we put there. We’re going to learn how to control these asteroids that threaten us. We have a very poor track on it now. We’re going to learn how to use planets as communications devices, in this process.

These are the things that we must do. And every step we take in this matter increases the productive powers of labor, makes people smarter, makes them more capable, gives them greater incentive, makes them happier. And that’s what we must do.

And all these solutions-which-are-not-solutions—they’re actually threats. The Green problem is not a solution to anything. It’s a threat to humanity! Green people are a threat to humanity.

Have fun!

INTERVIEW: LARRY BELL

European Solar and Wind Countries Are ‘Ostriches in the Coal Mine’

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

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This is the edited transcript of an interview with Larry Bell, Professor of Space Architecture at the University of Houston. He was interviewed by Paul Gallagher on April 26, 2019.

EIR: Dr. Bell, you recently wrote a review of a book called Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex, by Rupert Darwall, which deals with what’s going on in Europe. We know there’s a kind of “children’s crusade,” of demonstrations led by 11-year-olds and 15-year-olds, and not only in the streets but speaking to parliaments, to the British House of Commons—children accusing their parents and grandparents of having denied them any future at all, and ruined the planet and given them only twelve years left to live before the planet becomes uninhabitable; and demanding the “decarbonization” of the economy, demanding green power only—solar and wind only—no eating meat. . . .

On the basis of this book which you have written about, what’s been the result in the countries in Europe that have made this big shift to wind and solar power.

Three Fallacies of the ‘Climate Crisis’

Prof. Larry Bell: I think there’s at least three major issues here. . . . One has to do with the whole premise that we have a crisis, a climate crisis. And really, looking at the data, and looking at the absolute refusal of the “climate establishment” to discuss or debate the issue, on the grounds that it’s settled, which is not true,—

Another layer of this has to do with what they call renewable energy or “clean energy”—which really boils down to wind and solar, because the climate establishment won’t claim hydropower or nuclear; what’s surprising is they’ll claim biomass as a clean energy source! But the notion that you can populate the surface of the world with just windmills and sunbeams and think you’re going to provide reliable or adequate energy, is absolutely preposterous.

The third level is really looking at it from an economic standpoint. In terms of those countries that have really bought into it for various reasons—I don’t know if they’re canaries in the coal mine or ostriches in the coal mine, but they’re pretty conspicuous.

Pixabay/Soundfrau

A wind turbine array in Germany.

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The Result of Going Green in Europe

You look at Germany, for example—and this is really taking some data out of Rupert Darwell’s book Green Tyranny. I recently attended a talk of his, and I found a lot more information in it. Germany shut down its lignite [coal]-burning plants following unification. Of course they needed power, so they installed a gigantic amount of solar and wind capacity, more solar capacity than any other nation in the world. Combined with wind, they claim they have provided over 37% of their generating capacity. Now, when you talk about “generating capacity,” those are wiggle-words. The generating capacity isn’t necessarily what you get at all, nor when you want it. It’s typically intermittent.

And so, they hyped this up—they typically do, there’s huge lobbies behind this—“Well, we’re going to get 400,000 jobs,” and so on. What came out of it was:

• 40 million of their households saw huge electricity [cost] increases. Over a 9-year period between 2006 and 2015 they saw a 50% increase in their electricity cost.

• All of business and industry saw a 25% increase.

• Who it really hurts, are the people in the low-income brackets. It’s an extremely painful tax, and it comes in the form of the cost of consumption of electricity. And it also comes in the form of subsidizations paid to these so-called “green” utility companies whether we use their electricity or not.

• What are the impacts in terms of having reliable energy? Wind and solar are obviously intermittent. In the United States we have an ancient power grid. And if you put this intermittent power on it, you put these grids—the three major grids—at risk and great, great hazard.

In Germany, up until 2008, they had never had a grid failure, an interruption of their grid. In 2012, four years later, there were 1,000 brownout events in Germany. One year later there were 2,500 brownouts, which means that power was interrupted. Maybe they can get by with it, maybe the hospitals have generators, but what they’re doing is destabilizing the grid.

• Look at the Danes. They had the highest capacity of wind production in the world in 2014. The Danes pay four times more for electricity than we do in the U.S. They paid 44 cents per kilowatt hour, in 2014. In Germany, which is second highest, they’re paying 33 cents per kilowatt hour. So, the costs are enormous.

EIR: We pay on the order of 11, 12 cents in the United States?

Prof. Bell: Yes. These are non-trivial events. . . .

Pixabay/Fauke Reither

Wind turbines in northern Germany.

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More Dirty Little Green Secrets

And other dirty little secrets. What they call the “claimed generating capacities.” With wind, you might get 10-15% of that, because wind’s very intermittent. So in order to balance this out on the grid, you have to have an equal amount of spinning reserve power that’s immediately available to kick in when the wind isn’t blowing or clouds cover the Sun. This is just to keep the grid balanced.

And what is that reserve? By and large, it’s coal and natural gas. So, now you’ve got an amount equal to claimed capacity, of spinning reserve. And it’s used in the most inefficient way possible. In order to balance out the grid, you crank up the turbine; you stop the turbine; you crank it up. . . . You’re really using fossil energy, but in the least efficient way possible.

EIR: Many people hear a statistic that 10 or 11% of the power in the United States is already coming from wind and solar. And many people tend to think that means that we’re getting 10% of our energy already from wind and solar. You’ve recently shown that this is simply not true.

GEOSOL

A solar energy plant in Leipzig, Germany.

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Prof. Bell: It’s much worse than that. I was preparing for an article, and I thought I knew how much of our energy came from wind and solar. I thought, “I’ll check this; it should be pretty simple to check.” So I contacted the Energy Information Administration with a simple question: “How much energy do we get, in the United States, from wind and solar?” And the stock answer was, “We get 11% of our electricity”—our electricity, mind you—“from renewable sources.” “But I didn’t ask you that. I asked you how much energy (measured in BTUs) we get. I didn’t ask you how much electricity.”

So, I peeled back layers of the onion. We have four sectors of energy: One is the electricity sector; another has to do with transportation; another has to do with residential [heating and cooling]; another has to do with business and industry.

It breaks down like this: 11% of the electricity we get comes from renewables; 27% of the 11% comes from wind and solar. And I’m winging this now, but I think I’m pretty close to right: Something close to 40% of our energy—actually 37%, goes into the electricity sector. Of that, 11% comes from renewables; but only 27% of those renewables are wind and solar; so, 27% of 11% of 37% of our energy is what we get from wind and solar power.

It ain’t very much. It’s about 2%. And then you look at the other energy sectors, and you ask, “How much wind and solar goes into the transportation sector?” Well damn near nothing. As you know, that’s natural gas and liquid gas. “How much goes into the residential sector?” Damn little. “How much goes into the industrial sector?” Damn little; that’s mostly coal and natural gas.

But there’s another dirty little secret. When you look at the life-cycle costs of wind and solar—and you can check this in the European experience—the life cycle of a wind turbine on shore is about 14 years. So you’ve got this incredible investment in all this infrastructure, all this steel that went into building these turbines—a 14-year life cycle. It’s worse offshore, because of the sea-water corrosion. And somehow, they’re sending these children out saying Bambi’s going to be saved if we cover the surface of the planet with sushi machines for birds. It’s illiterate.

But the level of misinformation and disinformation—to me, is absolutely egregious. This is so easy to check. No, the ocean rise has not accelerated in the last 100 years. It’s still seven inches a century, just like it was before. There’s been subsidence and some other events. No, extreme weather has not become more frequent. You just see it more because it makes good drama on television, and everyone’s got cell phones, so they can photograph themselves in a windstorm.

Would an Honest Scientist Say,

‘I Don’t Want to Debate’?

EIR: In terms of what is changing: I got an invitation to an event of the CO_2 Coalition in Washington on May 1. What they said they were going to discuss, was that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen slightly over recent decades, but that the effect has been expansion of biomass, of crops and plant life generally, even encroaching on deserts in certain areas.

Prof. Bell: I’m affiliated with them, and I have great respect for that group of people. They’re absolutely right. It’s not theoretical, you can see it on satellite images. There’s been accelerated greening in a lot of areas—carbon dioxide, after all, is plant food. It helps plants retain water. And it’s particularly helpful for desert plants because they don’t lose as much water and so on. Absolutely, it has that benefit.

This demonization of carbon dioxide is silly. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] has admitted they can’t predict climate; the models really validate that, because the models have never comported with observations.

Will Happer, one of the founders of the CO_2 Coalition, is now with the Trump White House, and he’s been a strong proponent of having an open discussion, debate on this. Will’s a Professor Emeritus at Princeton and an excellent guy, and he’s trying to get a discussion going to review. Let’s look at the science. Before we spend $100 trillion or whatever it is, let’s look at the science. . . . [box: CO[2] Coalition Intervenes in Washington]

EIR: You support the idea of President Trump that’s been associated with Dr. Happer’s name, to form a national climate science panel, to examine all this evidence?

Prof. Bell: Absolutely! And I would submit that any honest scientist, who’s really responsible and honest, would welcome it—rather than saying, “The science is settled.” How many times has “settled science” been contested successfully? What honest, competent scientist would say, “I don’t want to debate; you guys are making a lot of noise about unfair and untrue science”? Here’s an opportunity to set “you guys” right. Why don’t they set us right?

It ought to be a piece of cake to debate with us. We’ll just take things that they’ve said, and say, “Well, can you support this data? Can you support the so-called 97% climate consensus? Let’s really look at that.”

Is there one real scientist in this whole country who said, “Yeah, that was a really good poll. That really met our standards of polling in science.” One organization, one scientist who claims that they would support that? What that poll really was? And how they arrived at that? And whether the poll suggested that there was anything to be alarmed about? Did it really say that 97% of scientists are alarmed that the climate’s on fire, and the oceans are rising? No. No. But since it’s repeated so often . . .

That would be a simple thing to look at. Let’s just look at the poll. How did that originate? What organization would really defend that as a scientific poll? It’s a simple thing.

Have the oceans risen, has it accelerated over the past 100 years or more? Let’s look at that; it’s a simple thing. Have there been more extreme weather conditions over the past century? That’s an easy thing to check.

How good have the climate models been, in actually predicting it? The IPCC actually acknowledged, themselves, that the climate can’t be predicted. They said they couldn’t. And how do you arrive at climate sensitivity? And why don’t you mention the fact that carbon dioxide increases—has a reverse logarithmic effect; in other words, each molecule has half the absorption effect [of reflected sunlight] of the previous one. They don’t stack up and get worse. That’s a simple thing to explain to the public, that it’s not linear, it’s reverse logarithmic—200 parts per million [ppm] is not twice the impact of 100 ppm, and 800 ppm isn’t the double of 400 ppm.

And to me the egregious thing is, even when they know better, reputable science organizations won’t stand up and say, “You misquoted what we said. You exaggerated what we said.” Instead they complacently sit back and let the media terrify the public, that polar bears are dying—and actually they’ve probably never done better, probably—that icebergs are melting. Antarctica is gaining ice mass now, not losing it. The Arctic goes though cycles, everybody knows that—the North Atlantic Oscillation—and so forth. So why won’t they simply come up and say, “We never said the Earth was going to end!”

If I sound like I’m agitated, I am offended by disreputable representations of alarmism that have no basis in fact, and pollute young people’s minds, terrify people, and use polar bears as poster children for how your SUV is killing the climate.

Anti-Human Eugenics is Now Anti-Human Ecology

EIR: A British “climate scientist” named Kevin Anderson who has been travelling around with Greta Thunberg, the child star of the “children’s crusade” in Europe, says that the population that the Earth can support is really only 500 million people. Lyndon LaRouche’s EIR published a Special Report in 2015 titled, Global Warming is Population Control, Not Science. It focused on the British Royal Family, and on the idea that the “ecology” movement, so-called, actually emerged from a retooling of the eugenics movement after World War II—where eugenics, the “culling of the human herd,” was turned into ecology, becoming the reason why the human herd had to be culled.

Right: James Rea

Left: Paul Ehrlich; right: Greta Thunberg

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Prof. Bell: Well, this goes back to Thomas Malthus, full circle in Europe again, where the Earth can’t be sustained because we’re going to run out of energy and resources and so on. And it goes back to Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb: Population Control, or Race to Oblivion? and others, where the “solution” is, we’re going to have to cut back population. . . .

When countries start to become prosperous, they start having fewer children. You look at agriculture when it took so many people just to support a farm. Then machines came along, and there was suddenly no longer a need for twenty people. So if you’re really concerned about population, raise people out of poverty! And you raise people out of poverty, in large part, through energy! And also, not a bad idea to have some of that carbon dioxide around so you can grow some plants to feed those farting cows that you’re so worried about, to provide milk for these kids.

The DDT ban! How many million people have died because of the bad science surrounding DDT? A village in Africa can get money from the World Bank to build a windmill; but they can’t develop their own coal. So they cook with animal dung. And they don’t have DDT. And they’re dying of lung disease, and the ones that are most vulnerable are the elderly and the children. So we’ll give them mosquito nets. It’s just egregious! In the name of saving the climate. And they commandeer these words, like “ecology.” Nice words, of course. Now it’s “global warming”; now it’s “climate change,” and “carbon-neutral.”

And rational, conservative people are now talking about a carbon tax. Why would you have a regressive tax on energy that’s most impactful on the people who are most impacted by price increases? Everything requires energy.

What Should U.S. Energy Policy Be?

EIR: What should United States energy policy be, in your view?

Prof. Bell: First things first. Let’s get the “climate” thing, let’s open that up, and let’s have a real scientific discussion, and separate it from energy—or at least define what relationship it has, if any, to energy. When talking about energy, commandeering terms like “climate pollution,”— carbon dioxide now is a pollutant; plant food is a pollutant, somehow. No, a pollutant is things that you can remove from coal and other sources—the particulates, the stuff that you really don’t want, the sulfur dioxide, the smoke, the particles, stuff that volcanos erupt. What does that do? It causes cooling, but I wouldn’t put a lot of soot into the environment for the sake of cooling the planet. We talk about clean coal. Clean coal isn’t scrubbing carbon dioxide, it’s cleaning stuff that all of us want to have scrubbed. And it’s easily done with scrubbers, and we’re doing it. . . .

Let me say one other thing. I know Lyndon LaRouche, and there’s been a lot of interest in fusion. . . . Very broadly, of course we need to look at new energy sources. And with regard to space, I don’t believe we’re ever going to go to the Moon or Mars without nuclear power, for the same reason we can’t do without it on Earth. We can’t live on sunbeams; we can’t develop mining operations and whatever else we’re going to do on the Moon or Mars without nuclear power. So we need to do that.

Maybe space can be a test bed for some of this, since certainly we’re going to need it. Whether it’s thorium reactors, or—we haven’t invested in new energy technology now for, what, half a century, practically? I’m not an expert on fusion. Jack Schmidt’s a good friend of mine [astronaut Harrison Schmidt—ed.], and I know he’s really passionate about it, Helium-3. I look at fusion as something that’s always ten years off. Nevertheless, we should look at these things.

CO_2 Coalition Intervenes in Washington

Gage Skidmore

Dr. Will Happer

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Princeton physicist Dr. Will Happer, one of the founders of the CO_2 Coalition of scientists, was reportedly scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump in the White House May 1, while the Coalition presented a forum in Washington—enlightening though sparsely attended—on the benefits of rising atmospheric levels of CO_2 for global food security. Dr. Happer, who did not speak at the forum, was to discuss Trump’s idea of a Presidential panel on climate science, according to a report in the Daily Caller May 1 and another in the Washington Examiner May 2. Dr. Happer is on the staff of the National Security Council.

No confirmation of the Trump/Happer meeting came from either the White House or Dr. Happer, although the Examiner reported that “Friends of Happer, and some advising the formation of the group, say they expect an announcement soon from the panel on its direction and structure.”

In the Visitors’ Center meeting rooms under the Capitol, Dr. Jacob Rossiter and Dr. Craig Idso of the Coalition presented exhaustive evidence that the small rise in CO_2 atmospheric concentrations in the industrial age has provided extraordinary benefits for the biosphere—specifically, for the growth of plants of every kind from trees to cereals to legumes.

Dr. Idso gave the main presentation; Dr. Rossiter testified on the subject April 30 to the House Government Oversight Subcommittee on Science and Environment. Activists from the neo-medieval children’s crusade called the Sunrise Movement had been gathered to shout down Rossiter’s testimony, and he was able to give it only after Capitol Police cleared them from the chamber.

Most provocative were Idso’s charts and maps demonstrating that the 1982-2011 trend of increasing gross primary production (GPP) and water use efficiency (WUE) of biomass—including the contribution to these increases of a higher total leaf area index—were in fact global trends affecting even the world’s great deserts. The largest percentage increases in GPP and WUE have actually taken place on the great African/Eurasian desert, the only exception being a northern section of the Gobi Desert in northern and northeastern China and southern Mongolia, where both have declined. Gross primary production of biomass has declined in the central African Sahel despite slightly increased water use efficiency—this is the area to be transformed by the Transaqua Project.

Since the development and publication of these fundamental measures by Dr. Sylvan H. Wittner in 1982, some 10,000 experiments, in both indoor and outdoor environments, have been conducted to test the role of increasing CO_2 concentration in this global trend—and it appeared Dr. Idso might have the data from all of them! These experiments show that more CO_2—that is, concentrations testing up to 650 ppm, compared to current conditions of 400 ppm, causes higher plant productivity, increased nutrient acquisition (including from fertilizers), and increased crop yields per unit of irrigation water applied.

This has been shown for cereals, roots and tubers, legumes, leafy vegetables, beans, and fruit bushes, vines, and trees. In addition, the rise already measured since the start of the industrial age, from approximately 330 ppm to 400 ppm, has seen increased tree size all over the world, in addition to the counter-desertification effects noted above.

When EIR raised the proposed Presidential climate science panel at the forum, the much understated Dr. Idso strongly and “absolutely” supported it. “That’s how science works,” he said. “Make hypotheses, test time. Find out whose are more correct.”

The pamphlet, “What Rising CO_2 Means for Global Food Security,” is available from https://CO2coalition.org

[back to text]

Buy 'Global Warming' Scare Is Population Reduction, Not Science from the LaRouche Publications Store

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II. The Fight Intensifies

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Be Optimistic! Trump-Putin Phone Call Advances the New Paradigm

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s New Paradigm Webcast of May 5, 2019. A video of this webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger with the Schiller Institute. Welcome to this week’s webcast with our founder and President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. This week there have been, as we have every week, a number of very significant developments. We see a growing momentum toward the possibility of a Four Power agreement—an hour-and-a-half discussion between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. And I think, Helga, that’s the place for us to start—the significance of this coming after the release of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the fact that the President is now talking again with Vladimir Putin. What’s your reading on this?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I think this is really good news, because, as you said, on the initiative of President Donald Trump, the two Presidents talked for 90 minutes on the phone, and they covered a far, wide range of strategic issues, which I think anybody who is interested in world peace should be very happy about; contrary to such strange people as Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is upset about it. Think about it: The heads of the two largest nuclear powers in the world are talking again about strategic issues. That should make everybody happy, because it’s very important for the strategic stability and the possible solution of all relevant conflicts.

They talked for the first time since the cancellation of the Nov. 30, 2018 summit, when they were supposed to meet in Buenos Aires; because of the whole hysteria of Russiagate, this was then downgraded to then just an informal, short discussion.

So they had now a long talk, discussing economic issues, trade relations, investments; but also strategic, security-related issues. They reportedly discussed North Korea, Venezuela, Ukraine, and also the fact that the charge of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 campaign is now over. Trump, afterwards wrote several tweets in which he said, to have good relations with Russia and China is a good thing and not a bad thing; great potential for future relations.

And I think this is really, very, very important, because, you can say, about two years of Trump’s Presidency, or a little bit more already, was lost because of this absolutely incredible Mueller investigation. It is now becoming more and more clear that this was collusion with British intelligence on the part of the heads of intelligence of the Obama Administration, and naturally, this was with the knowledge of Obama and Hillary Clinton. It is now very difficult to say that it was not.

So I think this is a real breakthrough.

On Venezuela, Trump and Putin agreed that it’s entirely up to the Venezuelan people to settle their internal affairs; I think this is very good. It was also reported that President Trump has expressed increasing doubt about the intelligence he was given about the situation in Venezuela. They discussed Ukraine in the context of the new President there, Volodymyr Zelensky, that this means that now, absolutely, the Minsk agreement must be gotten to some success. Also, extremely important, they discussed nuclear disarmament, even the possibility of including China in a tri-party strategic agreement on nuclear disarmament.

I think this is really a very, very important development, and good news for the whole world, because it’s a real blowback against those people who had tried to go for confrontation with Russia, up to the point of turning a new Cold War into a hot war. So, I think these are really good developments.

kremlin.ru

The damage to world peace and economic development has been enormous because President Trump is being prevented from working with Russian President Putin—through the phony Russiagate investigation. They are shown here at their last summit in Helsinki, Finland on July 16, 2018.

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Schlanger: It brings back into focus what happened at Helsinki. Speaking of lost time, when President Trump and President Putin met in Helsinki, on July 16, 2018, one of the things they discussed was disarmament, the nuclear arms agreements. Trump, brought this up again after this call the other day, asking “Why are we spending trillions of dollars on arms and wars when we have other needs?”

The other thing I think is significant, is Trump, once again, literally joking with Putin about the fraud about what he called the “hoax” of Russiagate. Remember, after that Helsinki discussion, what the media focussed on was Trump saying he trusts Putin more than he does the U.S. intelligence community.

Back and Forth Over China

In that context, Helga, we have this continuing back and forth over China. Is this a clash of civilizations, or is it something that’s worthwhile? How do you think the Trump-Putin discussion will affect U.S. coverage, or U.S. and Western thinking, about the Belt and Road Initiative?

Zepp-LaRouche: On the one side, next week or in the coming week is supposed to be the next round of U.S.-China trade negotiations. [Vice Premier] Liu He is supposed to come to Washington, and if it comes to an agreement, then there is also the chance that President Xi Jinping may actually come to the White House to sign the agreement, because this is what Trump had indicated earlier. So hopefully, this is on a good track.

But one has to also see that there is this hardcore Bush-league, neo-con establishment, sitting in the United States, and they’re not giving up at all. As a matter of fact, they’re trying to really portray China as the long-term enemy, the adversary, and there is a new expression of this really racist view—I mean, it’s really racism!

DoS

Dr. Kiron Skinner, Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State.

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The State Department Policy Planning staff is a very important institution in the State Department and historically. It’s there as a permanent bureaucracy; it’s almost more important than whoever is the Secretary of State, who is Mike Pompeo at this point, who has also proven to be not so loyal to Trump as he initially pretended. Pompeo was, together with National Security Adviser John Bolton, in a lot of the confrontation policies against North Korea, Venezuela, Iran.

The State Department Policy Planning Director is a woman—actually an Afro-American woman, which makes it all the more incredible—whose name is Kiron Skinner. She put out the story that the United States is involved in a real, long-term clash of civilizations with China because, supposedly, according to her worldview, China is the first great power the United States has ever confronted which is “not Caucasian.”

Can you imagine that? She’s not precisely “Caucasian” herself, but she says, China is a completely different civilization, completely different ideology, and even the Soviet Union, despite the fact that they were Marxist and communist, they were still somehow belonging to the family of Western nations, because after all Karl Marx was counted in Western philosophy, and so forth. I mean, this is really unbelievable. And she said, the Soviet Union could be confronted on the basis of human rights violations and so forth, but this will not be possible with China.

Naturally, she is quite right, because China has an impeccable human rights record, because they lifted 800 million people out of poverty, and if there’s any violation of human rights, then it is poverty, because if you are poor, then you can only either afford housing, or food, or health services, but not all of these combined. So, therefore, poverty is a human rights violation!

Geopolitical Racism or World Harmony?

Now, China has, in the 40 years of reform and opening-up, changed from a really, very, very poor developing country, into what you can say is really becoming now more and more the engine of the world economy. It has created a strong, well-to-do middle class, of now 300 million, which is supposed to double in 5 to 10 years to become 600 million people—which for U.S. and European exporting nations is a tremendous market, among other things; that’s not the only value, but it is one. So to say that China cannot be challenged on human rights, is in one sense, very true, because they do a lot for solving of any poverty or whatever problems.

Naturally, that’s not what she means; she means that the Chinese tradition is a completely different one, but that shows that she’s as ignorant as Samuel Huntington, who obviously is one of her mentors. In his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, from 1996, twenty or more years ago, Samuel Huntington claimed that there will be an increasing clash between Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism.

If you read this book—I tortured myself to do that at the time—you realize that this guy had absolutely no knowledge about any of the philosophies he discussed. And so does this Kiron Skinner prove herself to be completely ignorant, because you can absolutely make the case that China is really grounded very deeply in the Confucian tradition, and I have proven, and I will prove this more in the future, that the Confucian tradition, and the humanist tradition in the West are extremely closely related, and they have a great affinity. The aesthetic education of Confucius and of Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt, are absolutely based on the same principle of the need for the ennoblement of the individual as the precondition for the harmonious development of the state.

And just to contrast this really terrible stuff which she pronounces there, Xi Jinping on his side, has called for a dialogue of civilizations on the possibility of their development in harmony in diversity, and as people may remember, I have always emphasized that this is one of the core ideas of Nicholas of Cusa, who also talks about unity in diversity all the time, that there is a common interest to the entire civilization of the human species.

So you can really see the two worldviews, that of confrontation, the geopolitical racist conception on the one side, and the idea of having a harmonious development, which is creating the basis for world peace. So people should draw their own conclusions of who has the interest of civilization in mind and who does not.

Schlanger: I would encourage our viewers to go to the Schiller Institute website archives, where you will find many writings of Helga Zepp-LaRouche on the aesthetical education of man and the common agreement between the Confucian tradition and that of Western humanism.

Attraction of the BRI for Europe

This fight is obviously expanding. We have developments from Italy and elsewhere, following the Second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which took place over April 25-27 in Beijing. There was a lot of harmony and dialogue at that event, but we also see now, even in Germany, as you pointed out from a Handelsblatt researcher, a very significant article essentially saying that Germany must be involved in the Silk Road. How is this developing in Germany? There’s also an oppositional side, along the lines of what this Skinner wrote.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, but I think the growing attractiveness of a new paradigm of cooperation in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative is becoming more expressed and more dynamic. For example The Bavarian state government commissioned the Munich Institute for Economic Research, the Ifo Institute, to make a study on the Silk Road interest for Germany, and for Bavaria in particular. Ifo came to the conclusion that the economic advantages for Germany to cooperate with the New Silk Road are really very big, but that Bavaria and Germany—Bavaria, in particular—must urgently upgrade and modernize its own infrastructure, because the non-investment in infrastructure in Germany over a long time carries the danger of it being completely sidelined.

I think this is a very useful study, and it coincides also with the fact that Bavaria will have a second big New Silk Road conference in Nuremberg this year, and it is one of the German states which is extensively cooperating already, and many delegations are going back and forth. So I think that that is on a good track.

This Handelsblatt article you mentioned, by the director of the Handelsblatt Research Center, Dr. Jörg Lichter, basically says, yeah, sure, Germany should stick with the EU connectivity plan, but it should also cooperate with China. And then he points to the many, many connections which have been established between a half-dozen or more Chinese cities with the equivalent number of German cities—Hamburg with both the Maritime Silk Road connection, but also the overland route, the Eurasian connection; and then, Duisburg, being the largest inland port in Europe, but also many other routes; Wilhelmshaven is the only deep water port of Germany. So, it’s really growing, and there is especially from the Mittelstand, the middle-level industry, an increasing interest for cooperation. So I think this is all on a very good track.

You mentioned the Skinner type of crazy side. One woman, Nadine Godehardt, from the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik—German Institute for International and Security Affairs—just repeats this old line about a “geopolitical threat,” and so forth.

But while it is still aiming to poison the well and scare people off, I’m actually quite optimistic that reason will prevail in all of these points.

kremlin.ru

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

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Schlanger: I think a good example of that is what happened in Malaysia, where the BRI was being attacked. After Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the Prime Minister, attended the Belt and Road Forum, he said the Chinese were more than willing to make some compromises and changes in agreement, and he pointed out that this is the future for Asia. So, this idea that the Chinese are “imposing” their will with an imperial, aggressive policy, has been disproven by one of the very cases that were being cited by its enemies.

Infrastructure on the Agenda

On the infrastructure question: A very significant development in the United States, which cuts through some of the insanity in the Democratic Party concerning the Mueller report, was an April 30 meeting between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and President Trump on infrastructure. This could be promising, couldn’t it?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. I think that the Democratic Party is split more and more between the really radical, crazy wing, which wants to have impeachment, even as there is no basis for it and there never was. Even Bernie Sanders said an impeachment drive is just going to drive voters away. Pelosi and Schumer, together with a number of other leading Democrats, met with Trump on infrastructure.

Now, Trump said there is an urgent need to have a $1-2 trillion infrastructure program over the next 10 years, and it will not be easy but very difficult, to secure the financing. Now, I think that this needs to be supported, but I think it needs to be upgraded. The American Society of Civil Engineers has said the actual infrastructure demand in the United States is more than $4.5 trillion, and a Chinese corporation involved in infrastructure investments has said it’s $8 trillion. According to our own estimates, it comes to more like $20 trillion, because it’s not just a question of repairing existing infrastructure, but what would be desirable for the United States is a complete overhaul and modernization of the infrastructure.

Because of the return to better relations between Trump and Putin, the chances of accomplishing this are actually growing. We need a Four Power agreement, a New Bretton Woods system to overcome the danger of a new financial crash, which is looming. And then have a really modern infrastructure plan for the entire North American continent, by connecting, for example, all U.S. cities with high-speed trains, with maglev trains, to completely innovate the inter-urban traffic through so-called “slow maglev” trains.

The financing of that could come, not from conventional means, but through a combination of what my husband, Lyndon LaRouche had outlined already many years ago, the Four Laws legislation: First Glass-Steagall banking separation; then a national bank in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton; then an international credit institution, a New Bretton Woods system for international financing of long-term projects; and increasing the productivity of the economy through a crash program for fusion, for international space cooperation—to take all this as one package.

Now, even if you do that, it speaks a lot for Chinese investment in this U.S. infrastructure modernization. Given that the Chinese hold $1.3 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds in their foreign exchange reserves, it would be quite easy and helpful if they would invest this money, through an infrastructure bank in the United States, and cooperate in the building of such infrastructure.

That, in turn, could mean then that the Chinese offer to the United States to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, in Latin America, in Asia, in the urgent building up of Africa, would really create a situation in which all countries of this world would be engaged in the creation of a completely new paradigm of cooperation, and the crazy geopolitical fantasies of such people as Kiron Skinner would be put ad acta of history for good.

So I think we want to have the debate, especially among the population. We need to have a discussion of how to get the kind of funding necessary to reconstruct the United States economy. The flooding catastrophe in the Midwest, where President Trump promised he would help the governors of the affected states, is just the context in which such a debate can and must occur.

Brits Behind Russiagate and LaRouche Prosecution

Schlanger: You mentioned a split in the Democratic Party. It’s very interesting that the people who are continuing to push for impeachment, are the same ones who oppose Trump’s outreach to Russia and China, which is the whole basis, the whole point of Russiagate from the beginning. But they’re also supporters of this radical, anti-growth policy, the so-called Green New Deal. An agreement with China on trade and then extending it into infrastructure would be the best way to counter that.

Now, on the craziness that’s coming out around people like Rep. Jerry Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who continue to beat the drums on “collusion,” “obstruction” and so on, there are some new developments: A Fox News interview on May 3 with George Papadopoulos, in which he went aggressively against the British role, while Rep. Devin Nunes, Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, says he wants to find out what the CIA, FBI and others knew about one of the key people in the Papadopoulos case, an FBI/CIA/MI6 informant, Joseph Mifsud.

This investigation into the British side brings us back to the importance of the exoneration campaign for your husband that we at the Schiller Institute, with our friends and allies, are waging. I’d like you to discuss the critical intersection of what we’re doing with the exoneration fight, and getting to the truth, to the bottom of what was behind Russiagate.

Zepp-LaRouche: As we have stressed several times, the apparatus which went for the prosecution of my husband and his colleagues in the 1980s, is exactly the same kind of war party that is behind the Russiagate campaign against President Trump. This must all come out! It is coming out. You mentioned that Papadopoulos was on Fox TV on the Hannity program, where he discussed the role of British intelligence and other Western intelligence services in this whole affair. And he made a joke which is very close to what we had said last week—namely, that if President Trump goes on this state visit to Great Britain, he should bring up with Theresa May and the Queen what was the role of the British? I mean, maybe he shouldn’t go at all, but if he goes, he should have great fun.

Anyway, I think the British side is really the most important one to focus on, because it is also at the bottom of what led to the prosecution of my husband. In a big book we wrote about this, which people can easily access, called Railroad! U.S.A. v. Lyndon LaRouche, et al., among the many documents published there or since is a letter from British intelligence, I think dating back to 1982, demanding that something should be done about Lyndon LaRouche.

My husband wrote an article on Feb. 15, 2000, published in the March 10, 2000 issue of EIR, which I think anybody who wants to get to the bottom of this should read. It is titled, “U.S.A. vs. Lyndon LaRouche: ‘He’s a Bad Guy, But We Can’t Say Why’.” He describes extensively the FBI/CIA intelligence operations against him.

Why They Went After LaRouche

As the real reasons, he mentions five. One was his collaboration with President Reagan on the Strategic Defense Initiative, because this would have upset the entire geopolitical situation of the postwar period, because he proposed a way to overcome nuclear weapons through new weapons based on new physical principles which would have made nuclear weapons obsolete, which President Reagan did make official American policy on March 23, 1983. This caused a huge freakout on the side of the Bush leaguers in the United States, but also Soviet government elements associated with Nikolai Ogarkov absolutely hit the roof.

Coordinación de Material Gráfico

Working to establish a new financial architecture, Lyndon LaRouche collaborated with President of Mexico José López Portillo, who launched a national food-sufficiency policy and called for the construction of 20 nuclear plants in Mexico. He is shown here rallying support at the Zócalo on September 3, 1982 for his nationalization of the banks.

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My husband also repeatedly made very important steps to get a new financial system, the most effective being his collaboration in 1982 with President José López Portillo of Mexico.

Then he was also working with heads of governments of the developing sector to get long-term development projects to overcome their underdevelopment, whereas the policy of the British Empire and the establishment was precisely to prevent that from happening, through such institutions as the Trilateral Commission; the Council on Foreign Relations’ “1980s Project,” with its “controlled disintegration” of the world economy; and earlier the Club of Rome introducing the fraud of zero growth and so-called limits to resources.

These are really the fundaments of why you had an underdevelopment of the developing sector, and of the proposals my husband, myself, and our organization have worked on for almost 50 years. It is a question of the future of the United States.

Exonerate LaRouche, Be Optimistic!

So the exoneration of my husband, who was condemned and prosecuted because of his ideas, is extremely important. People must study these ideas if the United States is to come out of this present crisis.

I would really urge you: Read his writings, help us in the exoneration campaign, sign and circulate the petition, build up the pressure that he be exonerated and take his rightful place in history in the United States and the world.

Schlanger: Helga, when you mention the Railroad! book, which was the story of the persecution of your husband, it reminds me that the only railroad that really works in the United States right now is that run by the shadow government operation against their opponents. If we can root out these British networks embedded in U.S. institutions, we can begin to establish new railroads based on new physical principles, and that would be the object of what Mr. LaRouche had been fighting for his whole life.

I think, if people want to do something on the exoneration—and you should!—go to the Schiller Institute website. There’s a petition there: Read it, read the supporting documents with it, and circulate it. Be active. That’s the only way we’re going to win this fight.

Helga, is there anything else you want to bring up today?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think people should be optimistic. I think the biggest enemy of the human species, sometimes, is the pessimism of too many individuals and the doubt that you can actually move history in a better direction. But I think the role of the individual in history, especially in conjunctures like the one we have now, is really big. If you have a plan, and an idea, and if the time for that idea has come, and you have the courage to move on it, you can actually change the course of history completely.

My husband has done that, and we have now the noble task to complete his vision and his work. So I’m asking you to join us in this endeavor.

Schlanger: OK! And we’ll see you next week, then.

Zepp-LaRouche: Till next week.

Sri Lanka Terror Attack

Targets Belt and Road

by Dean Andromidas

April 27—On Easter Sunday, ten suicide bombers attacked three luxury hotels and three Christian churches in Sri Lanka, killing more than 250 people and wounding 500 others, in the worst terror attack in South Asia since the horrific Mumbai, India attacks in 2008, when ten members of the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba Islamic terror group killed 174 and wounded three hundred. The Easter attack was one some security experts suggested would have taken years to organize, but is being attributed to a little known Islamic extremist Sri Lanka-based group called the National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ), under the direction of the Islamic State terror group.

The intensity of the attacks has left everyone asking the difficult questions: “Why?” And “How could such an attack occur?” But now ask the question: “Cui bono—who benefits?” That will steer you towards the British Empire, the enemy of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s great global economic development policy.

Sri Lanka is one of China’s main Belt and Road partners, and has become major hub for all of South Asia on the New Maritime Silk Road, for which it has earned it the hatred of the British-led anti-Chinese forces. Sri Lanka has been a major target of the British “debt trap” propaganda. Now this terror attack all but kills the country’s tourist industry, which is its third largest foreign exchange earner. The expected loss of tourist revenue could create serious problems in making debt payments. This report will demonstrate why Sri Lanka is being targeted for major destabilization because of its participation in the Belt and Road Initiative.

Why Target Sri Lanka?

The British and their stooges have been targeting Sri Lanka for months for its cooperation in the BRI, with claims that it is now caught in the clutches of China’s “debt trap,” and is being turned into nothing less than a vassal state. This is, of course, absurd. Such a view is expressed in the claim that China now wants to turn the Hambantota Port on Sri Lanka’s southeast coast into a naval base. The reality is quite different.

First, the military question. The 99-year leasing of Hambantota Port to the Chinese state-owned and Hong Kong-based China Merchants Port Holdings, for $1.12 billion, is a commercial deal and does not resemble the 19th century 99-year lease of Hong Kong to the British Empire. Sri Lanka retains full sovereignty and has made clear it is fully responsible for security. Nor has China asked for basing facilities for its naval fleet. The fact is that Sri Lanka maintains a strict non-aligned policy and has no reason to alter it. All three of its major ports are open as ports of call to almost any nation’s naval ships.

Last month alone, an Indian Naval Ship, the INS Cora Divh, came to the Trincomalee Port on a goodwill visit. The same week, the Russian navy’s frigate Admiral Gorshkov and Japan’s JS Asagiri (DD-151) destroyer were moored in the Colombo harbor. Last month Sri Lanka held a joint naval exercise with Australia called Indo-Pacific Endeavor 2019, during which two Australian naval ships visited Colombo and two other ports.

CC/Deneth17

China financed the development of Hambantota Port, Sri Lanka, which is able to accommodate the largest container ships.

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As for Hambantota, the crazed geopoliticians make claims that the Chinese want to make this into a submarine base. Yet only this month, U.S. warships were hosted in the port for the week-long, joint U.S.-Sri Lanka naval exercise known as Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT), which began on April 20 and was “focused on building inter-operability and strengthening relationships” between the armed forces of the two countries. This exercise has been held every year for the last 25 years. While no Chinese submarine or warship was present, the guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance, expeditionary fast transport ship USNS Millinocket and a U.S. Navy submarine-hunting P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft were all made welcome by the port services of the China Merchant ports!

Sri Lanka Is a South Asia Hub on Maritime Silk Road

The British are always trying to claim that Sri Lanka is caught between the big competitors in the region, India and China. There is an element of truth to this within certain political circles in all three countries, but economic necessity demands that all three countries establish—and they are establishing—a cooperative and win-win policy among themselves.

Sri Lanka serves as a key trans-shipment hub for cargoes from all over the world travelling to and from South Asia, most especially India; that is why China made loans to the country to build the Hambantota Port, which is capable of accommodating the largest of the world’s container ships.

While oil tankers and bulk carriers always travel to a single destination, the huge container ships of such companies as China’s COSCO, France’s CMA CGM, and Denmark’s Maersk make multiple ports of call. The largest of their ships stop almost exclusively at trans-shipment ports such as Singapore, Piraeus and Rotterdam. Sri Lanka’s Colombo Port and Hambantota Port are trans-shipment ports and China has chosen these ports as their hubs for South Asia. Most of India’s ports, including Mumbai and Kolkata, do not have the depth to accommodate the deep drafts of the huge container ships.

This arrangement of having Sri Lanka as the transfer hub serves India well, especially since India Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” economic policy aims at expanding exports of manufactured goods, which will require an efficient logistical system. Indian exporters will want to be able to put containers on those large and fast ships. Therefore Sri Lanka is a key link in the Maritime Silk Road.

Sri Lanka’s internal consensus on China policy is shown by the fact that Chinese development of Hambantota Port was commissioned under the previous President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. The 99-year lease was arranged with China after it was found—by current Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe of the United National Party—that the port was losing money.

CC/Adbar

Terminal Building of the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport in 2013.

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There has also been much talk about the Chinese-financed-and-built Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport (MRIA), located 18 kilometers north of Hambantota Port, having become a “white elephant,” that is, useless and unwanted but difficult to dispose of. Although it was conceived as part of a government plan to develop the region around the port for industry and tourism, no air carriers currently use it. Nonetheless, the Sri Lankan government is in negotiations with the Airports Authority of India (AAI) to enter into a joint venture with Sri Lanka’s civil aviation department to operate the $201 million airport. The plan now is to create an air cargo hub that could function in parallel with the Hambantota Port.

While some crazed geopoliticians claim the Indians want the airport in order to observe possible Chinese military activities in the nearby port, the reality is that China is planning to work with Sri Lanka to implement its “port-park-city” model, where an industrial park and a city will come in after the initial development of the port. Therefore the now unused airport will no doubt have a bright future.

Already in 2017, the “Sri Lanka-China Logistics and Industrial Zone Office” was inaugurated within the Ruhunu Economic Development Area, which lies alongside Hambantota. The 50 square kilometer industrial zone is integral to the Hambantota Free Trade Zone.

Sri Lanka has two other deepwater ports. Colombo Port is on the west coast, where the Chinese are involved in the $1.4 billion Colombo Port City development plan. India has an interest in investing in the trans-shipment terminal of this port, since about 80% of the cargo handled there is meant for India. The other deepwater port is Trincomalee Port on the northeast coast.

Trincomalee, one of the largest natural deepwater ports in the world, was the British Empire’s Far East Fleet’s naval base before independence. It is less developed because of the long state of war with the Tamil Tigers, and because it does not lie along the historic trade routes between South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

It is now being developed, and the Indians have expressed an interest in investing over $200 million. It is ideally located for servicing India’s east coast. Also of interest is that Trincomalee Port would be close to a proposed bridge that would directly link Sri Lanka with India across a submerged natural land bridge, the ancient Adams Bridge. A 23 km railway and road bridge would connect India’s Pamban Island—which already has a rail connection to the continent—with Sri Lanka’s Mannar Island, which is connected to Sri Lanka with a bridge as well. Although not yet on the agenda, in 2015 the government of India revived the project and is drafting a feasibility study. It is expect to cost $3.6 billion.

The Adams Bridge would be a South Asian logistics game-changer. It is part of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of interconnecting all the countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

http://powermin.gov.lk

The Norocholai Power Station is the largest in Sri Lanka.

CC/Adam Jones

Construction work underway in 2014 on the war-ruined Jaffna Railway Station.

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More than Just Ports

In addition to the Hambantota Port, the Chinese are involved in several rather productive projects including the $1.35 billion Norocholai Coal Power Plant project. Other projects include building 40,000 houses in Jaffna, the contract for which was won by China Railway Beijing Engineering Group Co., Ltd. Jaffna is the major city in the north which suffered extensive damage during Sri Lanka’s 26-year struggle against the Tamil Tiger separatists. The Chinese plan large investments in the country’s plantation industry and are already negotiating an investment of $30-40 million.

India is also investing in Sri Lanka, especially in the ethnic Tamil north where the population shares the language and culture of the people of Tamil Nadu in India, across the strait separating the countries. India is constructing 50,000 houses at a cost of $270 million across Northern Province, which was ravaged by the war. It has restored the Jaffna-Colombo railway link and upgraded the Kankesanthurai harbor and the Palaly airfield. In addition, India provides rehabilitation assistance to small businesses, has set up an industrial estate in Jaffna, and has constructed and equipped hospitals, clinics, and water supply projects.

Creating Chaos and Confusion

A narrative of chaos and confusion is being created over the huge Easter Sunday terror attacks in Sri Lanka. But it is a fact that this is one of the largest terror operations to hit South Asia, way out of proportion to the capabilities of the two-bit Islamic extremist organization on the island nation. What is not being discussed in the media is who stands to benefit from such attacks? While the narrative of yet another Islamic State terrorist operation is unfolding, it would be a fatal mistake to ignore the British Empire’s interest in this attack. After all, South Asia had been the heart of the Empire for more than 200 years.

UN/Cia Pak

Maithripala Sirisena, President of Sri Lanka.

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The attack occurred while Sri Lanka was undergoing a serious political crisis. For nearly a year, President Maithripala Sirisena has been completely at odds with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who also serves as defense minister. The men come from different parties. The President is from the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the Prime Minister from the United National Party (UNP). These two parties are in a national unity government, with the UNP holding more seats in the Parliament. Only a few months ago, there was a constitutional crisis when the President tried to oust the Prime Minister and appoint former President Mahinda Rajapaksa from the Sri Lanka Freedom Party.

The crisis was resolved when the ouster was ruled unconstitutional. While Wickremesinghe was reinstated, the national unity government became all but dysfunctional with Wickremesinghe, who is both prime minister and defense minister, not being invited to the National Security Council meetings.

South Asia has always been a mosaic of ethnicities and religions, which the British manipulated to pit one against the other and thereby control their far-flung Empire. They’re still at it. In the case of Sri Lanka, they have pitted the Tamil Hindus against the majority Sinhalese Buddhists. Sri Lanka suffered a 25-year war with the terrorist Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, LTTE), a ruthless terror group that operated an insurgency inside the country while maintaining an organized crime network with a broad international reach. It openly operated front organizations in Great Britain, enjoying the patronage of leading British parliamentarians. The Tamil Tigers were finally crushed in 2009, leaving the north of the country in tatters.

Now the British are trying to do the same with the Muslim minority that numbers less than 10% of the population and has lived peaceably with its neighbors. At least one of the bombers was said to have been radicalized while in Australia and Great Britain.

President Maithripala Sirisena told a press conference:

We do not believe these attacks were carried out by a group of people who were confined to this country. There was an international network without which these attacks could not have succeeded.

In a report on the Easter bombings, China’s Global Times compared the situation to the one in Xinjiang province in China’s far northwest, where terrorist separatists among the Uyghur Muslim minority, supported by those backing the Islamic State, have been carrying out terrorist attacks. As usual, Western No-Good Organizations (NGOs) and governments claim China is committing war crimes against the Uyghurs. About this, Global Times wrote:

Xinjiang has been cooked to be a hot topic in the West, which now should understand how important the security issue is to safeguarding people’s safety and economic development. China has invested a huge amount of manpower and material resources into Xinjiang to combat terrorism. Those efforts are absolutely necessary. . . . No deadly attack like the coordinated bombings in Sri Lanka has been allowed to happen [in Xinjiang] in recent years. . . . Regardless how much pressure is put on China, Xinjiang will stick to its own path.

If today the British hand wears a Muslim glove, tomorrow it might find a Sinhalese one and once again try to throw Sri Lanka into a nightmare of communal violence. Or, the British might choose a provocation in India or in another country on the Belt and Road. The security services must deal with the glove but they must never forget the hand.

Buy The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, Vol. II from the Schiller Institute

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EDITORIAL

Former NSA Technical Director William Binney

Must Testify Before Congress

To Expose the Big Lie—

That Russia Hacked the DNC E-Mails

by William F. Wertz

May 3—On October 24, 2017, at the request of President Donald Trump, the then CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, met for one hour at CIA headquarters with former National Security Agency (NSA) Technical Director William Binney, who had co-authored an analysis published by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, challenging the official, British intelligence-promoted assessment that Russia was behind the theft of data from Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers. That so-called official Intelligence Community Assessment was made by the same Obama-era intelligence officials now exposed for having falsely accused President Trump of collusion with Russia, and for having used that allegation, now proven false, in an attempt to overthrow the President of the United States of America.

DoS/Ron Przysucha

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

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This Big Lie, thanks in large part to Mike Pompeo, nevertheless continues to stand in the way of President Trump’s acting on his often-expressed intention to establish good relations with Russia, and by extension with China, and continues to contribute to a threat to world peace, including through the promotion of the same regime-change policies against which President Trump campaigned for office.

In the meeting, which was also attended by two other CIA officials, CIA Director Pompeo said, according to Binney, that President Trump had told him that if he “want[ed] to know the facts, he should talk to me.” Binney reports that at the end of the meeting, Pompeo asked whether Binney would be willing to meet with NSA and FBI officials to discuss his analysis. Binney readily agreed, and Pompeo said he would contact him when he had scheduled the meetings.

Left to right: White House/Pete Souza; cc/Rich Girard; LBJ Library/Jay Godwin

Left to right: Obama’s former Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan; Former FBI Director James Comey; Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper.

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Yet soon after the meeting, the CIA issued a statement through spokesman Dean Boyd, which stated, “The Director stands by and has always stood by the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment entitled, ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections’,” an assessment organized by John Brennan, James Comey, and James Clapper to deflect attention away from the activities of British intelligence in the 2016 elections, and to prevent President Trump from establishing a good relationship with Russia, by falsely claiming Russian interference in the U.S. elections.

No meetings were ever scheduled for Binney with the FBI or the NSA. Binney was never interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. He has not been asked to testify before relevant committees in the House of Representatives or the Senate. Even Fox News, which has interviewed Binney at least ten times since September 2016, has inexplicably not seen fit to re-interview him on this matter.

As President Trump has repeatedly pointed out, the DNC servers were never examined by the FBI or by Mueller. Therefore, the “official” assessment of lying, leaking James Comey, of drone-assassin and Senate Intelligence Committee-spying John Brennan, and of lying mass-surveiller James Clapper, which is repeated in the Mueller report, was devoid of any forensic evidence. Relevant witnesses were never interviewed. The crime scene was never cordoned off.

And most important, Mike Pompeo, who was requested by the President of the United States to listen to Bill Binney, refused to take the steps necessary to blow this entire Big Lie out of the water.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo must explain to the American people, and most importantly to President Trump, why he capitulated to the politically motivated, forensics-free assessment of Russian interference in the U.S. elections provided by the British Intelligence tools—lying John Brennan, James Comey and James Clapper—rather than seek the truth from William Binney, as President Trump had asked him to do.

Why did Pompeo not set up the promised follow-up meetings for Bill Binney with the NSA and FBI?

Why did he accept the assessment of those who have worked for British Intelligence in an attempt to carry out a coup d’état against the duly elected President of the United States?

If it were not for this lie, then Michael Flynn, an opponent of President Obama’s British-inspired regime-change policies, and not regime-change advocate John Bolton, would now be President Trump’s National Security Adviser.