Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 3, January 17, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Should One More American Soldier Die in the Middle East? It’s Time to Declare Victory and Get Out Now!

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 3, January 17, 2020

- I. Cultural Warfare

- The ‘Florestan Principle’ in Art by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1977)

- Open Letter to Germany’s Classical Music Lovers in the Year of Beethoven The Bounds of Decency Have Been Breached by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute

- II. Will Your Daughter Colonize Mars?

- THE ARTEMIS ASTRONAUTS Interview with Dr. Jessica Watkins, 2020 Astronaut Graduating Class

- Trigger for Australia Bushfires: Environmentalism, Not the Environment by Jeremy Beck

- III. Defeat the British Agenda

- REPORT FROM GERMANY The Perfect Storm (Book Review) by Andrea Andromidas

- A MOST TIMELY INTERVENTION Vladimir Putin Upsets the British Geopolitical Applecart by Robert Ingraham

- The Modern Synarchist Project: The Falun Gong by Charles Park, Mike Billington, and Stanley Ezrol

Bring the Troops Home

Send in the Tractors

Founder: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019)

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Co-Editors: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher, Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

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Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

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Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Rainer Apel

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Lima: Sara Madueño

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Washington, D.C.: William Jones

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EDITORIAL

Should One More American Soldier Die in the Middle East?

It’s Time to Declare Victory and Get Out Now!

Jan. 9—The majority of Americans agree with 2016 Presidential Candidate Donald Trump that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the worst mistake in American history—both among those who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and those who did not. They agree with him that nothing has been gained in these “forever wars,” these “no-win wars,” against which our greatest 20th Century General, Douglas MacArthur, warned us long ago.

The Afghan war has been going on for 19 years—America’s longest war. To what end? Recently released documents show that even top leaders in the Pentagon haven’t known what the objectives of that war were. And yet troops are fighting there today who weren’t yet born when it began. Make a list of all the reasons that have been given for staying in Afghanistan over the years. Did any of those things happen? And yet we fight on and on forever anyway.

Why Are We Still in Syria?

And what about Iraq? ISIS has been defeated—why are we staying? The recent nonbinding vote of the Iraqi parliament to ask that U.S. troops be removed, should be taken as the occasion to declare victory and finally part ways with the worst mistake in our history.

America is a country of vast unmet needs, especially in the “flyover country” between the East and West Coasts. Industry and agriculture were already in collapse before the 2009 crisis, and have not yet recovered from 2009. There is no one who doesn’t see the catastrophes of drug addiction, homelessness, and many others. No way can we afford to sacrifice the lives of our best young people and trillions of dollars in these forever wars.

President Trump knows all this—he campaigned and won on it. From the day he came down the escalator and declared his candidacy, if not before, he has fought the imperial forces, centered in the City of London and Wall Street, and now they are trying to trap him in the forever wars ignited by the Bushes, Barack Obama, and the British Foreign Office—and he continues to fight.

We have no stake here, and we have lost any influence we might have had in the disaster of the Iraq War and the Arab Spring uprisings. We should get out now. We should ask the Russians and the Chinese to join us in a campaign to ensure reconstruction and development of this war-ravaged area immediately. New long-term financing mechanisms are needed for that, a stable means of financing great projects. The private mercenary armies we have sponsored must be disarmed. These things should be on the agenda of the emergency summit between the U.S., Russia, and China called for by Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Get the shovels in the ground and start the tractors rolling!

It will free this President to fulfill his campaign promise to the American people—a national mission to explore the Moon and go to Mars, a national mission to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and decaying cities, a national mission to seize the future for and through our youth.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 3, January 17, 2020

Cover This Week

Only one year in the making, Egypt’s New Suez Canal opened on August 6, 2015.

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BRING THE TROOPS HOME

SEND IN THE TRACTORS

2 EDITORIAL

Should One More American Soldier Die in the Middle East? It’s Time to Declare Victory and Get Out Now!

I. CULTURAL WARFARE

4 The ‘Florestan Principle’

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

January 7, 1977

12 Open Letter to Germany’s Classical Music Lovers in the Year of Beethoven:

The Bounds of Decency Have Been Breached

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute

II. WILL YOUR DAUGHTER COLONIZE MARS?

18 THE ARTEMIS ASTRONAUTS

Interview with Dr. Jessica Watkins, 2020 Astronaut Graduating Class

20 Trigger for Australia Bushfires: Environmentalism, Not the Environment

by Jeremy Beck

III. DEFEAT THE BRITISH AGENDA

25 REPORT FROM GERMANY

The Perfect Storm

by Andrea Andromidas

29 A MOST TIMELY INTERVENTION

Vladimir Putin Upsets the British Geopolitical Applecart

by Robert Ingraham

34 The Modern Synarchist Project: The Falun Gong

by Charles Park, Mike Billington, and Stanley Ezrol

The Jan. 27, 1989 Jailing of Lyndon LaRouche

Defined an Era, Which Now Must End

Watch The LaRouche Case video

Watch the LaRouche Memorial video

Sign the Petition to Exonerate LaRouche

at lpac.co/exonerate

I. Cultural Warfare

January 1977

The ‘Florestan Principle’ in Art

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Painting by Michel (Mincho) Katzaroff

Ludwig van Beethoven

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Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the January 7, 1977 issue of the weekly newspaper New Solidarity.

Mr. LaRouche later changed his ideas about some of the material presented here, but the core of his argument remained the same. This work sparked a decades-long friendship and collaboration with the great violinist Norbert Brainin, first violin of the celebrated Amadeus Quartet, which began soon after Mr. Brainin received a copy of it while in New York City, and continued until Brainin’s death in 2005.

It is symptomatic of the most important issues affecting the general comprehension and enjoyment of all art that some misguided musical experts recommend the introduction of a “method-acting” element to performances of Florestan’s aria from Beethoven’s opera Fidelio. It is granted that disputes respecting performances of Beethoven’s works are not the most common correlatives of assault-and-battery cases coming before magistrates currently. Nonetheless, the point to be made must be stated in juxtaposition to key works of the greatest artists. For this purpose, Beethoven’s more important works are of extraordinary scientific relevance; the issue of Florestan’s aria has a special appropriateness for the kind of point being stressed foremost here, not overlooking the composer Robert Schumann’s fascination with that subject.

As we shall emphasize in due course here, great art has a demonstrated function for alleviating neurotic disturbances and stimulating the creative potentialities. Not accidentally: it is by stimulating the individual’s creative potentialities that neurotic impulses are most efficiently checked. A population which lacks enjoyment of great art, great music most emphatically, is not only culturally impaired in the ordinary sense of that term, but is deprived of a means for improvements in its qualities of moral judgment and creativity in general.

For purposes of analysis, music is the most efficient medium in which to situate the treatment of art generally. Music emerges and constantly reemerges from the prosodic qualities of the spoken language and is a medium for concentrated evocation of the affective correlatives of that language. The relationship of language to the individual’s consciousness-in-general, the individual’s conscious and preconscious notions of social identity, makes music the most social of the art forms. Within music generally, song and opera have the advantage of immediately subsuming drama and poetry. Song is the “Rosetta Stone” connecting speech to music in general. The current state of musical comprehension and taste constantly measures afresh the capacities of a people respecting drama and poetry. A culture which loses the impetus for fostering and enjoying great music cannot produce great drama or great poetry.

The choice of Beethoven’s music for analysis of points going to the fundamentals of art generally ought therefore to be obvious.

We note and disparage inclusively that nominally learned musical opinion which relegates Beethoven’s achievements as a composer to a bygone age. This sort of misguided opinion has two interconnected moments.

At the point represented by his late major compositions, notably the string quartets, Beethoven had not only made a revolution in counterpoint, he had expressed thus the discovery of a general principle of musical composition. This example contributed directly to the generation of great composers whose talents were formed during the first half of the 19th century. Schubert, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Liszt, Brahms, Wagner, Verdi typify the assortment of greater and lesser moons who radiated the sunlight of Beethoven’s genius. These figures, together with the continued reflections of Beethoven, produced the gifted Hugo Wolf, the self-aborted genius of Gustav Mahler from the second half of the 19th century. Then, during the 20th century, the capacity for composing music died, together with the death of poetry and the decay of drama. Although Beethoven’s immediate successors reflected both the direct influence of Beethoven and the favorable circumstances of the spirit of the age of their youth, the genius of Beethoven was not deliberately conceptualized beyond the point represented in particular by the musicologist Schenker. In general, musical theory has misapprehended the essential features of the late Beethoven, with the same included folly exhibited by incompetent learned opinion respecting René Descartes’ notion of universal perfection.

“It is by stimulating the individual’s creative potentialities that neurotic impulses are most efficiently checked.” Extraction of the Stone of Madness by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch or his workshop, 1501-1505.

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A Rigorous Scientific Basis for

Apprehending Great Music and Great Art

In sum, learned musical knowledge has both lost the spirit of creativity and has failed to develop the knowledge needed for formal analysis of the last great breakthrough in the methods of musical composition.

The formal aspect of this wretchedness has special included relevance in the treatment to follow, and also has the merit of establishing the rigorous scientific basis for apprehending the most essential feature of great music in particular and great art in general.

The musicologist fails to understand Beethoven’s method of composition because such musicologists have mistaken the apparent elements of tonality (“this chord!”) for the process of contrapuntal development. The blunder involved may be likened to mistaking the footprints of a man for the man himself. The musicologists overlook the primary facts, the succession of changes in manifest contrapuntal and related musical knowledge represented by Beethoven’s work. They fail to conceptualize the process of development as being itself the existent principle determining the changes. They want to find a procedure, where a principle for changing procedures is what ought to be adduced. This existent principle must be apprehended as the object-for-consciousness.

Beethoven, more than any other composer, made creativity-for-itself the subject of musical consciousness, creativity expressed in the medium of musical composition. This underlies the religious component of Beethoven’s musical genius and personality, Beethoven’s self-consciously Promethean identity as a musician.

At the same time, Beethoven’s development, as delimited by his late major works, represents a development of musical science. Like any breakthrough in knowledge, situated with respect to predecessors, it represents a point of departure for the subsequent, further development of knowledge. Beethoven represents the sum-total of musical scientific knowledge extant as of approximately 1830. Without mastering that knowledge, nothing representing a further general progress could be effected. More specifically, Beethoven’s supersession of Bach is usefully regarded as comparable to the supersession of Newton, Lagrange, and Gauss by Riemann and Cantor in physics. Beethoven shifts the concept of musical knowledge from the “Newtonian” to the relativistic. It is no mere heurism to say that Beethoven’s implicit contribution to musical knowledge is a doctrine of negentropic relativity.

This is to be emphasized. Even before the problem of negentropy began to be posed as a fundamental problem for physics, the great thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment recognized the creative principle of human thought as determining a “nonlinear” successive ordering of the coherent lawfulness of human behavior. The thrust of the development of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, typified by the succession of Marsilio Ficino, Descartes, and Hegel, is toward a rejection of the notion of linearity, in progress. An accumulation of progressive changes in knowledge and informed impulses for willful practice was regarded as defining a new set of general laws, which then became the point of reference for further innovations.

The physics analogy for this is as follows. Instead of imagining space-time as measuring displacements according to a fixed reference-scale, imagine that forward displacements of a space-time-matter continuum change the ostensibly linear scales employed for the preceding moment. Imagine that this change in the basis-measurement is of such a form that instead of measuring displacement of the developing continuum according to linear (scalar) magnitudes of increments of time, distance, mass-energy, and so forth, that the scale of measurement is a series of numbers determined by an exponential function. That is perhaps the best heuristic representation of the general idea for today’s ordinary informed consciousness. It also expresses precisely the consequence of Beethoven’s approach to composition in the late quartets and related works.

The late 19th and 20th century composers and musicologists were confronted by a sense of the impotence of contemporary composers relative to their predecessors of the early through middle 19th century, and confronted in fact by their lack of developed mental powers for comprehending what Beethoven had achieved. In desperation, they attempted to flee from the haunting comparison with Beethoven (in particular), by creating distance from Beethoven represented by irrational novelty. The exemplification of this degenerate reaction-formation in music is Arnold Schoenberg.

Hence, it was given to a Spike Jones, a popular band leader of the late 1930s and 1940s, to reveal the truth concerning Schoenberg et al. With their outrageous, shameless candor, John Cage and Spike Jones strip Arnold Schoenberg and Leonard Bernstein naked, and reveal the widespread inclination among contemporary musicians to become trolley-car conductors. Like the ruling eunuch-elite of decaying Byzantium, modern musicologists have cut themselves off from comparison to Beethoven, and distinguish themselves by such arbitrary differences.

The related significance of Beethoven’s important works for our present undertaking is that we need be distracted the least from our purpose by the obligation to account for this or that distracting defect in the composition considered. In this instance, we are viewing art in approximately the purest form it exists for current practice. It is more or less emphatically peculiar to Beethoven, that in examining criticisms of his work we are examining the critic’s internal tendencies in the best practical approximation of their juxtaposition to “pure” art.

Humanist Art

We have already touched upon the principal internal distinction of Beethoven’s work to this effect. Since the Renaissance, early centering around 15th century Florence, the essential subject of great art has been universal perfection. Up to about 1525, prior to the accession of Charles V to the throne of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, this was as characteristic of great painting, sculpture and architecture as great musical movements. Painting, sculpture, architecture were permeated with the same humanist impulse, usually expressed in the Renaissance form of utopianism variously seen in then-contemporary literature from Dante through Ficino and Machiavelli. Humanist art celebrates not the self-evident deed; humanist art deprecates the impulses of romanticism. Humanist art celebrates acts of creativity—the painting within the painting, the sculpture and architecture within the painting, and the self-portrait—as a medium for celebrating the process of creativity itself. It is the celebration of those creative mental powers which absolutely distinguish man from the lower beasts. It is in that sense, as the greatest literature, music and plastic art from the Renaissance directly attest, which permeates and characterizes the religious artistic works of the period and which characterizes the religious spirit of the Renaissance. It is the subordination of the development of the craftsmanship of creativity in Beethoven which places him as an epitome of artistry in general. Beethoven typifies the self-consciously Promethean expression of the informed creative impulses of universal perfection.

Painting by Willibrord Joseph Mähler, 1815

Ludwig van Beethoven

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This overview of Beethoven is not merely objective formal knowledge. It is not something this writer knows at a distance from himself, but is real knowledge. The writer owes the explicit grounding of his several, distinctive contributions to human knowledge to such figures as Karl Marx, Riemann, Cantor and their principal predecessors. He owes the reinforcement of his creative impulses themselves to Beethoven’s music more than any other identifiable influence. The persisting element of “surprise” in Beethoven’s work, isolated for concentrated, simpler treatment in his scherzi, is the characteristic feature of his development most powerfully experienced by his audience. This “driving quality” of Beethoven’s development in his compositions, and in the progress from one phase of his development to the next, represents the most desirable intellectual climate for creative work. On that account, this writer’s debt to Beethoven is enormous.

The essential feature of creative work is extended, unblocked concentration. The activities the mind must be screened from echoes of the banality to which one is exposed in daily life, and also from internal mental distractions. For this purpose, certain cathexes are most useful, to the point of becoming almost indispensable. The provocative features of great writers, or the provocation of one’s summoned mental powers in anger against a stupid writer, against mediocrity in general, are frequent, appropriate cathexes for rallying one’s concentration. The most efficient general sort of cathexis is a period of saturation with Beethoven’s music. Even hearing a bad performance, if it is not absolutely impossible, helps as it summons one to a defense of Beethoven against such a rendering. Beethoven’s quality is one of agreement with the creative life in one’s self. Saturation in Beethoven is a most appropriate process for summoning the most sustainable concentration for creative work.

This is not wanting in some works of other composers. (Whoever would deny that Mozart’s Requiem is essentially “late” Mozart has no musical integrity.) Other composers cannot, generally, be trusted by the creative person bent on getting to work. One’s own new reading of a Beethoven score, one’s hearing of a new performance of Beethoven by genuine musicians, touches upon an inexhaustible potential for discovering not merely what Beethoven might have intended, but what might be fruitful implications of the composition. Attentively heard with the “inner ear,” there is always something importantly new to be heard in a major Beethoven composition—hence the special excitement of hearing it once again.

Conscious experiments, involving other composers’ works, work-sessions with and without preparatory concentration upon music or some other creative audience-activity, correlated with experience of greater and lesser fruitfulness in this writer’s creative efforts, represents a significant experimental knowledge of the subject.

It is also a fact that the lack of similar disposition among encountered gifted persons correlates with a characteristic sour note in their internal mental discipline, a certain shallowness. A person who enjoys “rock” or prefers romantic “kitsch” is invariably a moral mediocrity under closer scrutiny. Romantic musical “kitsch” belongs to the department of the belly-laughs after the third or fourth beer, the second bottle of wine. Such moments occur in the life of the creative person, but they occur as “other moments.” The person who lacks the habit of great art, the habit of profound excitement in the experience and contemplation of great art, is a deprived, diminished person. Opposite to such deprivation and self-deprivation, knowledge of Beethoven’s work is the most powerful catalyst for one’s own creative development—yet, perhaps one must first evoke a compulsion to be creative to gain knowledge of Beethoven. Without the development of the inner mental faculty for hearing the content of the music, only the stultified senses are stimulated in a superficial way. Without creative insight, art ceases to be art, and is degraded into a mere matter of differences in the banalities of private taste.

Beethoven is the creative intellect’s preferred companion. Powerful, ebullient humor saturates his compositions. His music is a delightful prank against pompous philistinism, constantly a new discovery ostensibly intended to confound the apostles of “thoroughness.” If Beethoven was, in his daily personal life, sometimes embittered as well as contemptuously mocking against moral and intellectual banality, his surviving creative life is a joyful assault against the same imbecilities. His work is concentrated attention-span expressing that latter quality.

Beethoven is the perfect artist, insofar as one has yet existed.

It is on that account that the issue of the Florestan aria—the general issue reflected in the disputes surrounding that aria—is considered in that specific setting.

The Woman Question

The principal character of Beethoven’s Fidelio, Florestan’s wife, Leonore, reflects the healthy direction of Beethoven’s approach to the “woman question” in opposition to the reactionary impulses typified by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. This is underlined by the wretched, nakedly anti-Shelley theme of Mary Shelley’s famous “science fiction” novel, Frankenstein. The novel is a naked, Malthusian denunciation of the poet Shelley’s own Promethean impulses, reflecting the smug, almost Fabian banality which “feminist” Mary Shelley focuses in thinly veiled hatred against the essential feature of her husband’s character. Where Mary Shelley’s invidious feminism seeks cheap equality for women by degrading great men, Beethoven directly attacks the mediocrity imposed upon women. His Leonore is not the heroine of the opera, but the hero: the woman who is feminine, but also a Promethean fit to match herself against the men of her time. Fidelio is of the same type as Rosa Luxemburg.

This is also, without stretching analogies, the case of “Florestan” Robert Schumann and his Fidelio, Clara Wieck.

The creative man is perhaps the only person who can develop a competent initial insight into the “woman question.” Only the creative man can comprehend what men lose by the degradation of women to the condition of relative banality, to anti-intellectual creatures of “feeling.” A creative man, who desiring what the close companionship of a woman would aid him to fulfill in himself, finds instead a poor, babbling creature of sentiment and shallow varieties of informed opinion, a creature without depth, a creature—too much like a faithful dog—upon whom one can bestow one’s most precious inner achievements and see that attempted sharing pouring off an impervious mind. Poor Shelley! The Malthusian reaction settling about England like a sulfurous miasma, the French Revolution ebbed, and, so constrained in the external world as the negative reading of his “In Defence of Poetry” would portend, he turns to the face of his faithful wife. In such circumstances, he was almost as if doomed to die.

How can a woman encompass the most profound moments of a creative man’s life, unless she, too, is a creative personality? Unless she, too is creative, she can never be more than a sympathetic spectator for as much of his performance as she can understand—understand little better than she might project insight into the moods and performances of a pet dog or cat. Her mate’s achievements belong to a dimension of human experience which is alien to her. She can, in the one moment, admire the brutish achievements of one mate on the football field, and view the achievements of a creative-scientist mate in the same way! A Beethoven, seeking companionship from among the women of his time, lifts the cup to taste wine and encounters dishwater.

Situate the same Beethoven in the Vienna opera culture of his time—even Mozart’s operas, such as Così Fan Tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, the women of Don Giovanni. Everything he as a man despises concerning the condition of women is celebrated in those operas. That society not only molds women to become a cruel, bad joke on the men who assist in perpetrating the arrangement, but celebrates the result of this abysmal degradation in musical performances designed by the greatest composers. Music—sacred music—is composed to celebrate this awfulness.

How much Beethoven and Luxemburg would share ultimately identical contempt for our contemporary “feminists.” Feminists who rebuke men for the quality of “male intellectual aggressiveness,” feminists who make of the degradation of women into paranoid creatures of sentiment and “feeling” the purported moral advantages of the woman-species.

L.A. Opera

“For Beethoven, the woman must become the equal of the man.” Florestan and Leonore are reunited, in a production of Fidelio by L.A. Opera.

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No, for Beethoven, the woman must become the equal of the man. Foolish women will then mistake her for a man—thus foolishly insisting that no woman could achieve such a condition, and that women love men for the wrong reasons, for reasons which ought to be as much the peculiar achievement of women as men. Or foolish women must see in the “triangle” in Fidelio’s first act a portent of the lesbian cause.

The details of the plot of Fidelio are of little importance. They were of transient importance to Beethoven, as his critical judgment expressed in the revision underlines. Opera, as we shall emphasize shortly, is not dramatic narrative, but a montage of sequential circumstances which provide the settings for the essential business of the opera, which is music. Each song is an internal soliloquy of the character, and duets, trios, quartets, quintets, choruses a polyphony of soliloquies. The narrative halts, the character expresses the internal soliloquy on a subject situated in that circumstance, and the narrative moves as quickly as possible to the next soliloquies.

In the opera, the character steps forward—away from the “action”—as in a Shakespearean soliloquy. The opera’s primary subject is the montage of those soliloquies.

Hence, what Leonore does in the narrative aspect, the details of the situation are merely expedients for the expression of the outlooks of the inner selves as expressed by the music. The essential thing about the opera is Beethoven’s choice of the character of Leonore and of her relationship to Florestan in a common struggle against the brutish injustice of the aristocracy. The overall world-historical outlook is voluntarist; bold ingenious intervention can discover against all seeming contrary certainties some remedy. It is that creative, voluntarist conduct in a woman which is the essential subject of the opera.

The Dungeon Scene

In the revised version of the opera, the second act begins with an extended ironical orchestral prologue, which leads into Florestan’s aria. The scene is the dungeon of the Spanish prison, where Florestan lies near death. From the preceding act, one knows—and this confirmed—that the jailer and Leonore, disguised as the young man Fidelio, are approaching. Florestan’s assassination is imminent, according to the plans and instructions of the enemy who had him imprisoned so.

The soliloquy Beethoven gives to Florestan has the general function of introducing the inner Florestan, preparatory to his emergence as a second central figure of the opera in the developments to follow. Beethoven’s identification with Florestan is obvious; he projects enough of himself into Florestan to give depth of reality to what would otherwise be a thinly portrayed character in the script itself.

The issue of Beethoven’s oncoming impairment of hearing is perhaps relevant. Although Beethoven’s continuing to compose in part at his Broadwood piano is among the evidence against the common early dating of his absolute deafness, the impairment experienced even as early as the period of the revision of Fidelio was a real oppression to a gifted performer and composer who gained a kind of sardonic pleasure from conducting rehearsals of his own compositions. Not to hear from the outer world what the mind could hear from within; that is oppression enough to be regarded as like a dungeon in the experience of such a composer.

The soliloquy prescribed to be sung on behalf of this man near death begins with an exclamation of “God!” Up to this point, the figure of the prisoner has been stilled, in the half-darkened stage properly prescribed for the orchestral prologue. As the figure rises to exclaim his “God!” one properly imagines the lights to rise during that note, so that the audience is abruptly made aware of this personality, aroused from the setting provided by the orchestral meditation. The long soliloquy proceeds through three phases into a bravura, concluding reiteration of “Freedom!” Overall, the selection is preferred among the most confident of those baritones transformed into Wagnerian heroic tenors. A lyrical intensity in the lower register of the voice is required for the first portion; the concluding passages might have been intended as a showpiece for Helge Roswaenge.

What, then rules the proper performance of this aria? Are we to be guided by a realist’s regard for a credible performance? Must Florestan’s singing be that of a weakened man near death?

Illustration by Ange Louis Janet, 1860

A scene from Act 3 of Fidelio as performed at Paris’s Théàtre Lyrique in 1860.

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Absolutely not! It is not the narrative character, Florestan, who is singing. In what real-life situation do people proceed from moment-to-moment, everything pausing recurrently as each character takes time out to declaim a major operatic piece? This is soliloquy, in which the soul rises from the body it inhabits to sing according to the ideas occupying the soul, not the condition of the body. The song must reveal the character, not the narrative action.

The delivery by the tenor must reflect the psychological attitude correlating with the imprisonment, not the physical state of the prisoner. Beethoven’s music is clear on this point—what would you have, Marlon Brando mumbling and grimacing sotto voce as a quaint obbligato to the orchestral accompaniment? Yet, eminent musicians, who were better trained, have been known to propose compromises with the Marlon Brando school of mumbling on just this point.

This issue, while specialist to the point of perhaps appearing to border upon the precious, if viewed merely by itself, goes to the heart of the pervasive problem in contemporary artistic culture. It goes against the wretched schools of realism and neo-realism and their existentialist offspring, schools whose pervasive influence is in direct proportion to the inability of the United States (in particular) to produce a good play, write a respectable line of serious poetry, or compose sixteen good bars of music. The point is that a person who would propose a realist’s compromise approach to the performance of the Florestan aria has thereby rejected every principle upon which art and the creation of art absolutely depend.

One might say of the cinema and TV screen that, unfortunately, the medium has tended to become the message. The fact that singers can perform fellatio on a microphone before thousands of cheering spectators has apotheosized heartburn into a salable product. The fact that a camera can be employed by detectives specialized in divorce cases, and the fact that montage has been freed from the limitations of the regular stage, has caused the technicians of the screen to misconceive art as primarily the expression of their own technical prowess. New techniques have not become so much instruments to increase the power of artistic performances, but the techniques themselves have filled the vacuum left by the absence of artistic contributions.

The power of the camera and its associated modern accessory technologies is to transform even a miserable piece of literary wretchedness into an illusion of enormous credibility to the immediate sensibilities of audiences. The fault lies not with the illusion, but the purpose the power of artistic illusion is employed to serve.

The artist depends upon the instruments of illusion. People do not ordinarily reveal insights into themselves by means of great soliloquies in song. The fact that a stage character in an opera can do that is an illusion created by the composer and the training of the singer over decades. Yet, what the illusion accomplishes is no illusion, but the conveying of truth by this selected scientific ruse.

This is not to argue that drama must generally conform only to the idealization typified by great opera, Marlowe, Schiller, Shakespeare and so forth. Realism on stage and screen can be used to great and good artistic effect. By montage, by the arbitrary selection of moments in an imaginary narrative reality as a whole, the fantastic can be achieved, the presentation of important ideas in a way in which they would never be directly encountered in real life. The artist, in composing such a drama, selects what each might appear realistic occurrences, but by the selection and the ordering of selection determines an insight into the ordering of life.

What is despicable is the notion, whether explicitly argued or implicitly tolerated that art must not be didactic. Some lout screaming on stage, “The proletarians must arise,” is only a poor fool’s caricature of the didactic moment in art. He has given his characters mere slogans in the pathetic effort to cover up his own romantic’s lack of creative insight. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, Schiller, Goethe, Beethoven were preeminently political in the sense that art is inherently political. Verdi’s music filled the streets of Italian cities on more than one occasion. The artist does not declaim slogans; he uses art as a science, and, makes his case powerfully by presenting artistic insights as implicitly political informing of the practical will of his audiences.

The soliloquy in drama and opera exemplify the means by which such artistic insight is most efficiently conveyed. By bringing character out of himself, coming momentarily out of his role within the narrative, to express his consciousness privately to the audience, the artist uses the characters’ soliloquies to prompt the audience to make itself self-conscious of the drama. “What issues does this narrative reflect?” each soliloquy proposes in its own way. The audience must choose among the soliloquies, and so forth, rather than merely following the narrative.

The narrative itself may be trivial, and yet accomplish the function of great art. It is essentially merely a heurism, which aids the audience in creating a model of reference for situating its own judgment upon the insight represented by the soliloquy.

There are other devices. In place of the soliloquy, one character may speak privately to another in such a manner as to accomplish the functions of the soliloquy. The principles of dramatic art and poetry remain the same whatever ruses are employed to accomplish the purpose of introducing the artist’s fictionally oriented insights to the audience in a self-conscious way. To make the audience self-conscious of its choices of insight, to rise above blind attachment to existing opinions and prejudices, and to develop thus the capacity to understand current developments as they must be understood.

In a certain sense, some modern playwrights have appeared to fulfill such a formal requirement. This establishes them as persons of talent and artistic craftsmanship, but not necessarily as genuine artists. Art is not free to peddle any set of insights which factional interest must prefer. Art must tell the truth. The truth respecting man is always in the humanist form based on universalist commitments to scientific discovery and to the circumstances appropriate to fostering the individual’s power and commitment to rise above concern for individual greed and heteronomic sensual gratification to grasp the principle of universal perfection better than before. Without that humanist commitment, there is no art, without that commitment by the artist, such a passionate commitment, there is no motive for artistic creativity.

Without humanist truth, without the individual’s commitment to subordinate the individual’s particular greed and heteronomic sensuality to universal purpose of scientific and related progress in respect of the impulses of the informed practical will, there is only existentialist banality parading itself as art as long as we tolerate such travesties.

Thus, invidious contemporary want of artistic merit rises in resentment against Beethoven, against the expression of the Florestan aria as written, and demands that Beethoven be brought down, in all decency, into conformity with the dishwater banality of modern liberal sentiments. In a better age, Tennessee Williams would have been a great playwright, and not the stream of sordid untruths of a misapprehended psychoanalytical insight which has titillated the more self-respecting liberals. As for Tennessee Williams and other skilled contemporary craftsmen of various artistic professions, we wish them the best. However, while we have the great artistic productions from the past, we shall not and need not degrade ourselves to tolerate contemporary existentialist trash—whatever the potential talents of the professed artist involved. Meanwhile, let envious contemporary banality leave the great works of art alone.

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Open Letter to Germany’s Classical Music Lovers in the Year of Beethoven

The Bounds of Decency Have Been Breached

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Motivführung is a form of composition that, from a single musical idea, develops further themes, movements and ultimately the entire composition. It was elaborated and rigorously demonstrated in master classes by Norbert Brainin, the first violinist of the Amadeus Quartet. Shown: Norbert Brainin and Gunter Ludwig in Washington, D.C. on June 6, 1990.

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Jan. 13—The first thing one can say about the performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Darmstadt Theater, in a production of Paul-Georg Dittrich with a musical adaptation of the finale by Annette Schlünz, is: It’s god-awful! It couldn’t be worse. God-awful from a musical, artistic, philosophical and human standpoint. Of the long series of stupid, crude, repetitive Regietheater[fn_1] performances, that have been staged for over half a century(!)—limited at first to theater, but then also inflicted on the opera—this performance was the absolute low point.

In the summer of 1966, when Hans Neuenfels—then a 25-year-old dramatist at the Trier Theater—had a leaflet distributed to promote the “First Happening in Rheinland-Palatinate,” in which he even asked, “Why don’t you rape little girls?” he was expressing the convictions of the 1968 movement, as we have known it since at least Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Since then—for 53 years now!—various nudes, rock bands, schizophrenics, or actors in Nazi costumes have been copulating on stage, and have succeeded in distorting beyond recognition the plays and compositions of Classical poets and composers. This is definitely not originality.

A scene from the Darmstadt performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio.

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The Fidelio staging in Darmstadt presents a multimedia mixture of aesthetic vulgarity, Brechtian alienation effects, and the intrusion during the first part’s musical scenes of a screen filling the entire stage, on which photos and film clips are projected. They are supposed to illustrate the historical background of eight productions from 1805 until today. The overall impression is chaotic, and you begin to feel sorry for the singers who have to sing against this storm of clips, and for the heroine Leonore, who has to run around the stage the whole time like a headless chicken.

But the real monstrosity comes in the second part, when the Finale, the opera’s magnificent hymn to freedom, is literally chopped up in martial manner by the insertion of compositions in the New Music style of Annette Schlünz. In the program notes, Schlünz describes her insertions:

Little by little, a “chorus of hails” emerged, which becomes silent in part, or in which only individual voices or words remain. Sometimes I radicalize Beethoven’s instrumentation to reinforce his ideas or I repeat individual bars and then suddenly stop. I very much wanted to weave in external sounds and to color the music in some places. The trumpet fanfare, which is heard from the balcony of the State Theater before the performance begins, is something I take up and expand. It’s the signal that summons to a departure: Some instruments and musicians that drop out of the sound of the orchestra become, so to speak, rebellious, and bring in something new. The F major ensemble piece—a fantastic piece with a sacredness and coherence that I would never dare to approach—I leave untouched like a gem. The subsequent interlude with my music, in which different sounds, including the voices of eight vocalists, are sent throughout the room, completely breaks up Beethoven’s world of sound.

Annette Schlünz

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From the standpoint of the maltreated spectator, the noise that Schlünz inserted, during which the singers and instrumentalists trumpeted their deafening rubbish from the middle of the audience and from all sides, has nothing to do with music: It clearly crosses the line to bodily harm.

Just how emotionally damaged Schlünz is, becomes clear in the next sentences:

When listening, I often imagined that I was sitting at the controls of a mixer console and turned up the speed. And then I would just assume that Beethoven, when he composed, almost intended to go too far and fast. It’s really exulting! It reminds me of children who go crazy with excitement because they don’t know how to keep their emotions under control.

If there is anything crazy here, it is the pitiful state shown by Schlünz, in her emotional impotence to understand the sublime nature of the victory of the love between Leonore and Florestan. Moreover, she obviously cannot stand such greatness; her idea of wanting to speed up the music by adjusting a mixer console, represents the same uncontrollable freak-out that led the murderers of Ibykus[fn_2] to betray themselves after the choir of the Erinyes had called forth the higher power of poetry in the theater of Corinth. Small, base minds cannot stand great ideas nor sublime feelings.

The magnificent Finale of Fidelio, in which Beethoven celebrates the defeat of tyranny through the courage of conjugal love is an expression of the noblest humanity, where love, courage and the desire for freedom are expressed in music. In Leonore’s preceding aria, she sings: “I shall not waver, I am strengthened by my duty of marital love.” Beethoven chose as subject for the opera the idealization, in Schiller’s sense, of a historical event, namely the liberation of the hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, the French Republican, by his wife Adrienne. This reflects Beethoven’s own republican sentiments, which included at that time of feudal structures and Napoleonic campaigns, both personal courage and the desire for freedom.

Portrayal of Leonora in the Darmstadt performance of Fidelio.

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Such deeply human feelings, however, are no longer accessible to the disturbed emotionality of the representatives of the Frankfurt School and the liberal Zeitgeist. Stage director Paul-Georg Dittrich states most tellingly in his interview in the program notes, that the Finale seems to him “like a celebration where you don’t even know what is actually being celebrated.” While Dittrich and Schlünz may not know it, that in no way gives them the right to destroy ordinary people’s access to it by deconstructing Beethoven’s composition.

But precisely that was the intention from the very beginning of the diverse currents that formed the tradition in which Dittrich, Schlünz and the entire production in Darmstadt stand, in an amalgam of Theodor Adorno, the Eisler-Brecht School, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).

In a noteworthy touch of truthful reporting, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported on November 12, 2017, in an article titled, “The CIA and Culture: How to Steal the Big Words,” about the exhibition organized on the 50th anniversary of a scandal that erupted in 1967, when it was reported that the entire gigantic operation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA-funded operation as part of the Cold War effort. The FAZ added an admission about the whole thing that was tantamount to sensational for that daily:

The worrying point is that the secret service did not simply promote sinister reaction [i.e. the right wing], but it helped achieve the breakthrough of that same left-wing liberalism that still forms the mainstream standard of Western intellectuals.

The Fidelio production in Darmstadt is, so to speak, the terminal moraine of this process. It began with the change in U.S. post-war politics. After Roosevelt’s untimely death, under whose leadership the United States was allied with the Soviet Union in the fight against fascism in the Second World War, the intellectually much smaller Harry Truman quickly came under Churchill’s influence. The latter, in his notorious Fulton, Missouri speech on March 5, 1946, ushered in the Cold War. Thus the forerunners of those elements in the U.S. security apparatus, which Eisenhower later warned were the military-industrial complex and which are often called the “deep state” for short today, gained the upper hand. The Cold War thus proclaimed—demanded—that the deep emotions linking Americans and Russians together through the war experience, culminating in the meeting of the armies on the Elbe River in Torgau, be replaced by an anti-Russian sentiment. A new image of the enemy had to be built up and the population’s entire axiomatics of thought had to be changed accordingly. For the United States, this meant changing the basic beliefs that had contributed to the support for Roosevelt’s policies. For Europe, and especially Germany, the roots of European humanist culture, which constituted its cultural identity despite twelve years of a reign of terror, had to be destroyed and replaced by a construct—the deconstruction of Classical culture.

The Evil of the Congress for Cultural Freedom

The instrument that was created for this purpose was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a gigantic psychological warfare operation launched by secret service circles around Allen Dulles under the direction of Frank Wisner, then head of the Office for Political Coordination of the State Department. The CCF was later moved to the covert operations department. The operation officially lasted from 1950 to 1967, when the New York Times published on April 27, 2019 the news that the CCF was a CIA operation. That revelation became the biggest cultural scandal of the 20th century. The CCF operated in 35 countries and published 20 magazines, and the CIA controlled virtually every art exhibition and cultural event. At that time, there was virtually no writer, musician, painter, critic, or journalist in Europe who was not in some way connected to this project—some knowingly, some with no inkling.

The first Congress for Cultural Freedom convention, Berlin, 1950.

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The orientation of these cultural projects was essentially the same as that of the Frankfurt School, which was exiled to the United States during the National Socialist period and whose individual representatives were in the pay of the American secret services, such as Herbert Marcuse. In any case, the views of the Frankfurt School fit perfectly into the CCF’s program. Theodor Adorno, for example, defended the absurd and ignorant view that Friedrich Schiller’s idealism led directly to National Socialism, because he took a radical point of view. Therefore, Adorno claimed, beauty must be eradicated from art. In his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” written in 1949, his misanthropic view culminated in the much-quoted phrase: “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Here again, there was nothing new about the Fidelio performance in Darmstadt. In the program notes, George Steiner expresses the exactly the same opinion:

Is it possible that classical humanism itself contains a radical failure in its tendency towards abstraction and aesthetic judgment? Can it be that mass murder and that indifference to the atrocities that abetted Nazism are not enemies or negations of civilization, but rather their hideous but natural accomplice?

What is expressed here in very clear terms is the psychological warfare carried out by the CIA-steered CCF, which was intended to eradicate the roots of the humanist identity of the German population, in favor of an Anglo-American cultural value scale.

To restate the point concisely: There can be no greater contrast than that between the sublime image of man presented in humanism and Classical art, and the barbaric image of man of the National Socialists. The Classical image of man sees man as being good in principle, as the only creature endowed with reason, who is able, through aesthetic education, to develop the potential within himself to a harmonious whole, to a beautiful character, as Wilhelm von Humboldt expressed it. Classical works of art in poetry, the visual arts, and music celebrate this beautiful humanity, and inspire in turn the creative powers of the readers, viewers, and listeners.

In contrast, the National Socialists’ image of man, with its blood-and-soil ideology, is based on a racist, chauvinistic, and Social Darwinist conception of the superiority of the “Aryan” race. To claim that because both the classics and National Socialism occurred in Germany, there is an inner connection between these diametrically opposed ideas, is just as absurd as to assert that the United States Constitution directly gave rise to the interventionist wars of the Bush and Obama Administrations, or that Joan of Arc’s convictions were the basis for French colonial policy. That claim actually came from the CIA’s devil’s kitchen, which included such recipes as “necessary lies” and “staunch denial” since at least the time of the CCF. In the recent period, the world has again been treated to an ample taste of them in the ongoing coup against President Trump by British intelligence in cooperation with the “deep state.”

The question of how it was possible to go from the ideal of the German classics to the abyss of Nazi rule, is one of the most important questions there is. To answer it, one has to consider the entire history of ideas from the Romantics’ attack on the classics, and the dissolution of the classic form it began to spawn, to the beginning of cultural pessimism, which set in with the Conservative Revolution in response to the ideas of 1789 and the political restoration under the Congress of Vienna, down to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the youth movement prior to World War I, and finally to World War I and its consequences.

Inducing Cultural Pessimism

Inducing cultural pessimism was also the goal of various music projects of the CCF. In 1952, it held a month-long music festival in Paris titled: “Masterpieces of the 20th Century,” during which over 100 symphonies, concerts, operas, and ballets of more than seventy 20th century composers were performed. The Boston Symphony, which was to play a leading role in other CCF projects, opened the festival with a more-than-strange performance of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring). Others pieces were performed from the atonalists Arnold Schoenberg (one of Adorno’s teachers) and Alban Berg, as well as Paul Hindemith, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name but a few. Further conferences for the propagation of atonal and twelve-tone music followed in Prato and Rome, which were exclusively devoted to avant-garde music. At all of these well-funded events, it was taken for granted that everyone would pretend to enjoy ugly music.

CC/Jeremy J. Shapiro

Theodor Adorno

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The Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, which were also supported by the American military government and the CCF, performed Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Béla Bartók. Lecturers such as Adorno, Olivier Messiaen, and John Cage gave lectures on their music theory. In an official assessment of these courses, Ralph Burns, head of the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) Cultural Affairs Branch’s “Review of Activities,” wrote:

It was generally conceded that much of this music was worthless and had better been left unplayed. The over-emphasis on twelve-tone music was regretted. One critic described the concerts as the “triumph of Dilettantism.”

The issue here is not about stopping anyone from composing or listening to atonal or twelve-tone music, or other forms of avant-garde music. To each his own taste. The point is, that the idea of the equality of all tones of the tempered chromatic scale massively reduces the much higher degrees of freedom flowing from the polyphonic harmonic and countrapuntal composition, as it was developed from Bach to Hadyn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. It eliminates the ambiguity of the notes and the relationships between the keys, and the possibility of enharmonic confusion: “Motivführung” is a form of composition that, out of a single musical idea, develops further themes, movements, and ultimately the entire composition. This technique of composition, as elaborated and rigorously demonstrated in various master classes by Norbert Brainin, the first violinist of the Amadeus Quartet, was developed into greater complexity and perfection from Haydn’s “Russian” quartets Op. 33, to Mozart’s “Haydn” quartets, and then to Beethoven’s late quartets.

Given the heights that Classical composition had achieved with Beethoven, so-called modern music, if it throws these principles out the window—and there are undoubtedly good modern compositions—represents a decline comparable to reducing an anti-entropically developing universe of two trillion galaxies known so far, to a flat earth.

Classical Music Ennobles

Virtually all truly creative people, from Confucius to Albert Einstein, recognized and used the effects of good or Classical music to foster their own creative abilities and the aesthetic ennoblement of the population. Confucius rightly observed that the state of a country can be seen in the quality of its music. Immersion in the works of great Classical composers opens the deepest access to the creative faculties of the human soul and spirit. Where else, other than in Classical music, can one strengthen and deepen the passion needed to look beyond one’s own concerns and to address the great objects of humanity? Or where can one educate the sensibility needed to fulfill Schiller’s demand, as stated in his speech on universal history:

A noble longing must glow within us to add from our own resources our contribution to the rich legacy of truth, morality and freedom, which we have received from former ages, and must deliver richly increased to the ages to come; and to fasten to this imperishable chain, which winds through all the generations of men, our own fleeting existence.

It is precisely this emotionality of love, as expressed in the Finale of Fidelio, love for one’s spouse, love for humanity, and the idea of freedom in necessity, the idea of fulfilling one’s duty with passion, and thereby becoming free, that Schiller defines as the qualities of his ideal of the beautiful soul and of genius. It is the quintessence of the entire aesthetic method of the classics and of Friedrich Schiller in particular: “It is through beauty that one achieves freedom.”

This notion of freedom is what all the proponents of Regietheater, disharmonious music, and postmodern deconstruction attack, because it goes against their liberal concept of “freedoms,” rather than freedom.

Therefore, they dip unrestrainedly into the mothballed box of Brechtian alienation effects: interruptions, film clips, banners, cameras pointed to the audience, etc., so as to “shock” the viewers out of their habits of hearing and thinking. What came out of that in Darmstadt was a mixture of “Clockwork Orange” (recall the violence-ridden atrocity from Stanley Kubrick, accompanied by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), and the intellectual depth of pop star Helene Fischer. When Helene Fischer, in a red latex outfit and with orgiastic movements, belts out her song “Tell Me, Do You Feel That?” to an enthralled audience, it’s about as subtle as when the question, “Does it move you?” lights up the stage in large neon letters during the entire Finale of Fidelio. Obviously, the director Dittrich thinks the intellectually challenged audience needs to be awakened with a two-by-four. On top of that came the previously mentioned bombardment of deafening noise from the instrumentalists and chorus members scattered throughout the opera house.

The audience expressed its thanks for the din with a tormented mini-applause. If the goal of the staging was to summon the audience to political action in the present or to open contemporary music to a “broader audience” (Dittrich), one has to say in both cases: Mission failed. The well-known (to German speakers) “Hurz”-sketch by Hape Kerkeling describes quite aptly the reaction of most viewers, who have apparently grown accustomed for much too long to the outrageous demands of Regietheater and to the CCF’s cultural war, which is still ongoing.

Finally, a quote is in order from Alma Deutscher, who really can compose: “If the world is so ugly, why should we make it even uglier with ugly music?”

Before the example of Annette Schlünz is followed and other compositions of classical music are “raped,” in the spirit of Hans Neuenfels, this review should serve to launch a debate in the year of Beethoven on how to defend the classics against such assaults.

Celebrate This Year of Beethoven!

This Year of Beethoven, which will feature performances of many of the master’s compositions not only in Germany, but around the world, offers a wonderful opportunity for us to recall our better cultural tradition in Germany, to resist the moral decline of the past decades, and to find within ourselves, by consciously listening to Beethoven’s music, the inner strength to have our own creativity come alive.

The world is now in the midst of an epochal change, in which the era dominated by the Atlantic countries is clearly coming to an end, and the focus of development is shifting to Asia, where there are many nations and peoples who are very proud of their civilizations, and nourish their classical culture. Some of these civilizations are more than 5,000 years old. If Europe has anything to contribute to shaping in a humanistic spirit the new paradigm emerging in the world, then it is our lofty culture of the Renaissance and the Classics.

Many scientists, artists, and people appreciative of Germany all over the world have been wondering for some time now what is wrong with the Germans, that they have distanced themselves so much from being a people of poets and thinkers. If we let the Year of Beethoven be so ruined, then Germany will likely be written off for good as a cultured nation.

More discussion of this subject is needed and welcome.

hz.zepp@schiller-institut.de

[fn_1]. Regietheater, or “Directors Theater,” is a mode of performance of Classical drama and opera, whereby the director arbitrarily imposes modern (and usually degenerate) costumes and staging upon the production, thereby ripping the work out of its true historical context and ironies, and degrading the audience, the performers, and the composer himself. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]. See Friedrich Schiller’s poem, “Die Kraniche des Ibykus” (“The Cranes of Ibycus”). Full text available here. [back to text for fn_2]

II. Will Your Daughter Colonize Mars?

THE ARTEMIS ASTRONAUTS

Interview with Dr. Jessica Watkins, 2020 Astronaut Graduating Class

NASA/Robert Markowitz

Jessica Watkins, NASA Class of 2017 astronaut candidate.

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Kesha Rogers had the opportunity to interview Dr. Jessica Watkins, one of the newest astronauts selected by NASA to join the 2017 class of astronaut candidates, and whose class on January 10, 2019, became the first graduating class since the agency announced its Artemis Program. Watkins is a Colorado native. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Geological and Environmental Science from Stanford University, and a doctorate in Geology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She has worked at NASA’s Ames Research Center and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and was a science team collaborator for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission, the rover Curiosity.

EIR: First of all, congratulations! How does it feel today, being a part of the “Turtles,” the first class of astronauts to graduate in the Artemis program?

Watkins: I am one of the graduates of the class of 2017, “the Turtles,” and I’m super excited to be here today. It does mean a lot to,— to have reached the finish line, if you will, with my classmates. We’ve been on this journey together. We’ve gotten to know each other really well, and we’ve played off each other’s strengths. It was really a group effort for all of us to get here. So, it means a lot to me, doing this with them.

EIR: The first question I have for you is about your experience working on Curiosity, the Mars Rover. From your experience working on Curiosity, what do you see that we can learn from the Curiosity Rover, which will be applicable for astronauts going to the moon?

Watkins: There are a couple of things that I think are really important take-aways from working on the Curiosity Rover. The first, which was really striking to me while it was happening, and I understand it even more so now, is how applicable it is, the amount of work that is required, and the importance of having a really diverse, really effective team, and a large team in the case of the Curiosity Rover, as well as in human spaceflight, as we move forward looking toward the Moon.

On the Curiosity Rover, we had scientists and engineers working together every day to make decisions about where the rover was going to go and what science we were going to accomplish. That kind of interaction is really analogous to what we see, and what we’ll need moving forward to explore the Moon, that kind of interdisciplinary teamwork we experience here at NASA on a daily basis: I think it is what it’s going to take.

The second lesson that we learned, and I think we should take away from the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity Rover, and apply to the Moon mission, is that it’s important for us to have on the ground a rover type of capability prior to humans landing on the surface of the Moon. We have programs that have been recently funded to send rovers to the lunar surface, to provide more information, more data of higher resolution, particularly in the South Pole, where our landing sites will be, to help pave the way for humans once we start heading there in the near future.

Conor A Nixon@Shamrocketeer

Meet the Artemis generation astronauts: The seven men and five women in NASA’s 2017 class of spaceflight trainees, the largest in two decades. Below: Three of NASA’s newest astronaut candidates (left to right): Dr. Francisco Rubio, Dr. Jennifer Sidney-Gibbons, and Dr. Jessica Watkins.

NASA/Joel Kowsky

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EIR: What role do you see the space program playing in international cooperation? What role does the space program play in uniting the world?

Watkins: Absolutely, I think that’s one of my favorite things about a human space flight is the way that it brings people together. It really is something that is a part of human curiosity, it’s something that is innate in all of us—this notion and desire to explore the unknown and answer questions like, “Are we alone?” And, I think being able to leverage all of our resources as people and come together and recognize that some things are just bigger than each one of us—bigger than anything we can do on our own. I think certainly in the U.S. we recognize that in order to get to the Moon and to stay, as we want to, and are planning to, we have to leverage our international partners—they just bring things to the table that will lead us forward.

EIR: NASA Administrator Bridenstine announced that NASA will be putting out the next call for candidates for astronauts in the Spring. What message do you have for anyone inspired to take up that challenge?

Watkins: It’s super exciting to think about the next class coming in, and we definitely need more people on our team. We really look forward to meeting the people that will be coming in. To anyone that is interested in applying—I would say just go for it! When I was applying in 2015—when the applications our class were opened up—I definitely didn’t think I had a shot. So you never know. I would definitely put your name in the hat. It’ll be worth it.

Trigger for Australia Bushfires: Environmentalism, Not the Environment

by Jeremy Beck

AP/Glen Morey

Wildfires raging in Bairnsdale as of Dec. 30, 2019.

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This analysis of Australia’s devastating bush fires was released by the Australian Citizens Party on Nov. 20, 2019 and Jan. 8, 2020. Mr. Beck is the Victoria State Chairman and National Management Committee member of the Australian Citizens Party. The combined report has been edited and links have been added.

Similar firestorm disasters have been equally preventable. EIR published, on Nov. 15, 2019, the article, “As Half of the State Goes Dark—Green Insanity and Electricity Dereg Set California on Fire,” by Patrick Ruckert, and an earlier article, an Interview with the Nevada rancher Kris Stewart, on June 21, 2019, “What Is Causing Massive Wildfires in the U.S. West: The Environment—Or Environmentalism?”

Jan. 12—Numerous fire experts have warned for decades that increasing fuel loads would lead to catastrophic bushfires. They’re emphatic that “climate change” is not the issue at all. The real problem [they say] is green ideology, which opposes the necessary hazard reduction of fuel loads in national parks and which greatly inhibits landholders from clearing vegetation on their properties. Whilst Aboriginal tribes performed regular controlled burns for millennia, so-called environmentalists now demand vast areas of forest be locked up to preserve some “natural ecosystem” that never existed in the first place. In April 1770, Captain James Cook described Australia as a “continent of smoke,” but now environmental laws prevent necessary controlled burns and land clearing, setting the stage for mega-infernos on hot windy days.

The Volunteer Fire Fighters Association (VFFA) of New South Wales prominently displays on its website an article, “Green Ideology, Not Climate Change, Makes Bushfires Worse,” by Miranda Devine. Numerous articles on the VFFA website point to fire experts warning that [the level of] fuel loads pose the real danger and “it’s ridiculous to blame climate change.” Devine’s article reported on a 2003 federal parliamentary inquiry into bushfires, titled “A Nation Charred: Report on the Inquiry Into Bushfires,” which showed that a 4-fold increase in ground fuel leads to a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire. The mainstream media mostly ignores these firefighters and has instead focused on the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, which, as seen below, is a front for the Anglo-American financial oligarchy.

Roger Underwood, Chairman of Bushfire Front of Western Australia Inc., on March 10, 2019 wrote to then Environment Minister Melissa Price, following her comments that the recent Victorian bushfires were the “result of climate change.” Such misinformed comments from the minister could not go unchallenged. Underwood has 40 years’ experience in bushfire management in Australia and overseas. He was General Manager of the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) in Western Australia (WA). He wrote,

I implore you to withdraw your comments blaming the recent bushfires on climate change. They are unhelpful to Australian firefighters and disrespectful to Australian bushfire scientists and managers . . . the very people who are putting their lives on the line to protect the Australian environment and communities.

CC/Helitak430

Fire and Rescue personnel move in to protect properties from the Green Wattle Creek bushfire as it approaches South West Sydney on Dec. 6, 2019.

Bushfires in New South Wales and Victoria

NSW Rural Fire Service, Vic. County Fire Authority

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Bushfire Front Committee Members include Chris Back, Chief Executive Officer, Bush Fires Board of Western Australia (1995-97); Don Spriggins, who has over 40 years’ experience in bushfire management in WA and Victoria, and was a regional and district manager of the Lands and Forests Commission of WA; Dr Frank McKinnell, with over 40 years’ experience in bushfire research and management in WA; and Noel Ashcroft, with over 25 years’ experience in forest fire prevention and control in South West forests, WA. These veterans show conclusive evidence that prescribed burning and fuel reduction is a tried and proven method in forest and land management, and that blaming fires on climate change is pure nonsense.

Another prominent fire expert, David Packham, also has long warned of excessive fuel loads and that talk of climate change is “an absolute nonsense.” As a retired Senior Research Fellow at Monash University, Packham is one of Australia’s leading fire experts. He was co-developer of the aerial prescribed burning techniques that have been adopted throughout Australia and North America. In a June 2016 submission to the Victorian Parliament, Packham wrote:

Fire politics has replaced facts, science has been hijacked until it is really “politics by a different means” and leadership has been lost in a maze of legal actions and inquiries, contrived seminars and workshops, public relations craftsmanship and research discourse by press release.

Emergency Leaders for Climate Action

Why did twenty-two retired fire and emergency service chiefs blame “our ‘new normal’ of catastrophic weather risks” for intensifying the bushfire danger? Put simply, the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action is a project of the Climate Council. Headed by Tim Flannery, the Climate Council is a front for the financial oligarchy’s World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and its secretive 1001 Club of mega-rich donors. The following profiles of four Climate Councillors are noteworthy:

• Greg Bourne was CEO of WWF Australia (2004-10). Before that he was a senior oil executive at BP, serving as Regional President Australasia (1999-2003) and Regional President Latin America (1997-98). For two years Bourne was Special Advisor on Energy and Transport to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He was Chair of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (2012-16).

CC/Ninian Reid

A man attempts to defend his home at Lake Conjola, as fire consumes the house next door.

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• Lesley Hughes is a director for WWF Australia and a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, the WWF front group behind the disastrous Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

• Gerry Hueston recently retired as President of BP Australasia. He was Chairman and Board Member of the Australian Institute of Petroleum, and Board Member of the Business Council of Australia.

• Greg Mullins former Commissioner of Fire and Rescue NSW, and former President of Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities’ Council.

It’s not surprising that two senior former BP executives are Climate Councillors. Sir Eric Drake, former Chairman of BP, was a long-time 1001 Club member until his death in 1996. The British oil cartel has long intervened in environmental policy. Notably, John Loudon, who headed the Royal Dutch Shell Group, was a 1001 Club member and was WWF President (1976-81). The official 1001 Club membership list is confidential, but whistle blowers confirm that members are from the highest levels of the City of London banking establishment. We must not let this bankers’ “climate change” plot distract from the message of actual fire experts.

CC/Meganesia

Bushfire-charred Prospect Hill, in Sydney, Jan. 6, 2020.

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Failed Fire Management Policy Must End

Raging bushfires sweeping through Australia were entirely predictable, and the experts who forecast this crisis are in utter dismay that their warnings were ignored. Fuel loads are now about ten times greater than existed under Aboriginal management at the time of British colonisation, so what else did we expect? In recent decades “green” ideology has seen forests locked up, fire trails grown over, and fuel loads explode as controlled burns are prevented under spurious green rationales.

Fire expert David Packham has explained that a tenfold increase in fuel load means the fire will be 100 times more intense. It’s just basic physics and has nothing to do with whatever change the climate may be undergoing.

In an interview with Jane Marwick on 2GB radio last week, Volunteer Fire Fighters (VFFA) Vice President Brian Williams said:

It’s all preventable; this is the tragedy of it all. This fire has been building for the last 20 years. We’ve been burning, in New South Wales, less than one per cent of our bushfire-prone land for the last 20 years. So that means every year, the fuel loads just continue to build. And they continue to build until we get a disaster like this.

A lot of our areas that are now national parks, used to be forested country, and the sawmillers had a sustainable industry, and they used to manage the bush. They used to do a lot of the hazard-reduction burning to keep all the tracks open, because they valued timber. Timber was important. Now we’ve closed the forestry industry down—virtually—we’ve locked up the parks—we don’t let people into them, we’ve closed all the trails off. And our timber just gets burnt and wasted, and meanwhile overseas, they’re cutting down rainforests to supply Australia with timber. How crazy is that?

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Green Insanity Opposes

Controlled Burns

Last month Williams reported—also on 2GB radio—that most of the controlled burns are now arranged on a timeframe of between 12 and 25 years, which he said “is just crazy.” He said it was nonsense that climate change is reducing the window for controlled burns. “We can burn right through the winters now.” The problem is that they are forced to wait so long between burns that lately their fires have tended to burn too hot even on days when the maximum temperature is just 12° Celsius (53.6° Fahrenheit).

Recently retired group fire officer Fred Forrest, from the Mansfield Fire Brigade Group in the foothills of the Victorian Alps, confirmed that when he was young, they did controlled burns in the autumn of every year. The lack of controlled burns now is absolutely the issue, he insisted. Despite this, he’s confident that controlled burns can be done safely in the cooler months even with the additional fuel load that has built up in recent decades. “They are doing this, but they need to do much more and on a broader scale,” he said. In addition, Forrest remarked that decades ago, the timber industry, cattlemen and the forestry commission all collaborated to ensure good fire-reduction policy.

Typical of the “green” insanity is the Victorian Government’s decree last November to cease native timber logging by 2030 and immediately end logging of old-growth forests. Native timber provides a valuable product, but now the state government has killed an industry, and locked up forests which are almost guaranteed to go up in smoke in the next inferno.

State Government of Victoria

A firefighting helicopter water-bombs a wildfire in East Gippsland, Victoria on Dec. 31, 2019.

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Many of the large trees in Victoria are regrowth after the 1939 Black Friday bushfires, which burned approximately 575,000 hectares of reserved forest, and 780,000 hectares of forested Crown land. Following those fires, planned burning became an official fire management practice in Victoria. The proven method of hazard-reduction burning has ensured that we’ve not seen another Black Friday event. But the unwinding of this proven policy in recent decades has led to the current crisis.

Opponents of controlled burning have cited events where such burns have gotten out of control. This is as silly as proposing to ban aeroplanes because they crash sometimes. The evidence of the overall success of controlled burning is overwhelming. Fires with excessive fuel loads are impossible to extinguish, no matter how many water bombers and fire trucks are available.

Blaming the Fires on ‘Climate Change’

Isn’t Science

David Packham, in a November 12, 2019 interview with Sky News’s Andrew Bolt, explained this scientifically with reference to the Byram fire intensity index, which measures in megawatts (MW) the amount of heat energy emitted per metre of fire front. Today’s heavy fuel loads, he said, like those that fed the February 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria, can yield 70 MW per meter; but no technology known to man can extinguish a fire of more than 3 MW per meter.

Discussion of “climate change” as a contributing factor by some fire chiefs has frustrated many frontline firefighters, who consistently say climate change is irrelevant. In joining Tim Flannery’s Climate Council, former New South Wales fire chief Greg Mullins has upset many of his colleagues. VFFA president Mick Holton told The Australian last month that Mullins had “lost his way” in highlighting climate change above all other factors. “I found he was a great person to work for, and he’s a great fellow, but I think he’s lost his way. It is disappointing to me when he would have learned about fire science and isn’t discussing the fuel load issue.” Holton said Mullins’s main experience was in city and suburban fires.

Packham has consistently said, and scientifically proven, that blaming bushfires on climate change is “absolute nonsense.” Governments pushing this propaganda should take note of Packham’s stern warning in his 2015 submission to the Victorian Parliament:

The current land management policy and practice puts citizens in peril. Such acts with full knowledge of the consequences could fall within the definition of a crime against humanity, and when the next fire disaster occurs and perhaps thousands die in Victoria, those responsible should be referred to an International Court.

III. Defeat the British Agenda

REPORT FROM GERMANY

The Perfect Storm

by Andrea Andromidas

Der Perfekte Sturm (The Perfect Storm)

by Wolfgang Steiger and Simon Steinbrück

published December 2019 by Econ-Verlag, Berlin.

Jan. 3—Warnings abound of a possible new financial crash. On the first page of a book by Wolfgang Steiger, Secretary General of the Christian Democratic Union’s Economic Council, and Simon Steinbrück, a member of the Executive Board of the Economic Council and responsible there for international economic policy and European financial and monetary policy, the two authors compare the coming financial storm with the horrendous storm that raged off the east coast of the United States in the autumn of 1991. The rare concurrence of a hurricane, a cyclone and an arctic cold front produced a combination of circumstances that no computer simulation could have forecast nor comprehend, and therefore no corresponding corrective measures had been taken.

Noting this, the authors state: “Today, largely unnoticed, a political and economic dynamic is brewing that also has the makings of a catastrophe.”

Since the book was placed under the Christmas tree as a gift for all members of the European Economic Council for Christmas 2019, we may assume that a discussion of the rather harsh warning is desired. This is a fundamentally welcome development. The authors, on page 15, write: “Take a deep breath and press ahead—that can no longer be our motto. There are alternatives; we can still turn things around.”

Well, the reader might think, maybe a long-overdue solution awaits us here, which goes beyond the already well-known criticisms of the European Union (EU), such as complaints about permanent bailouts, constant breaches of the rules, criticism of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) money-flooding, the accumulation of mountains of debt, target balances, bad credit, shadow banks, and the like.

CC/World Travel & Tourism Council

Jeremy Rifkin, advisor to the European Union, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends.

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Only a meager 17 pages of the 250-page book are devoted to a “solution” to the crisis, and what is presented remains unclear and questionable. The proposals are at best partial solutions, with some good ideas here and there, but they are overall so contradictory that one suspects that either the authors do not understand the nature of the crisis at all, or worse, that their proposed solution will act as an accelerant for the financial and economic storm as it finally crashes into the wall. The chapter in which the “solution” is formulated, is titled, “Powerhouse Europe,” and, revealingly, it opens with a quote from Jeremy Rifkin: “If Europe does everything right, it can overtake the United States.” Rifkin? Excuse me? Rifkin’s science fiction as miracle tech? (See below for more.) On the next page, the provocation continues:

It [Europe] must now set the course in order to assume its creative role in the world structure. The change of personnel in the management offices of the European Commission, the European Council and the ECB offers the opportunity for a decisive change of course. Because what would Europe have to look like in order to continue to play a leading role economically and geopolitically in the coming decades?

GFDL 1.2/Johannes Maximilian

A Trabant 1.1, the final production model in 1990 (above). The Concorde’s final flight in 2003 (below).

CC/Arpingstone

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Change, of course, but in which direction? Leading role, but for what? The course defined by the Green New Deal had already been set long ago!

In addition to these suspicious statements, another is added towards the end of the book, where the farewell to industrial policy is clearly announced: “The past clearly shows that industrial policy efforts usually fail.” (p. 227) And in fact, not only the French Concorde supersonic passenger airliner is mentioned as an example, but also the Trabi (nickname for the Trabant, a cheaply made East German automobile with a less than stellar reputation), prefabricated buildings, industrial combines and of course, oh yes, the Chinese.

But before I summarize the suspicions that arise from everything in this book, I want to select, from the unfortunate mixture, two proposals with which one could actually design a well-thought-out strategy for the current crisis that would stop the impending storm.

First, there is one nice sentence: “Rather, a return to the strengths of the Wirtschaftswunder [Economic Miracle] is needed.” The “Economic Miracle” is the name given to the post-World War II policy that guided the enormous reconstruction of the German economy.

Also mentioned several times, is that a cornerstone of the German mindset is “never to separate action and liability” in economic activity. By this is meant that when you speculate and it goes wrong, you also have to take responsibility for the consequences.

In this context, the reader has to be very briefly, but clearly, reminded of two essential things which, although they are important historical facts, have almost disappeared in the course of the parrot-like citations of what has become known as the social market economy:

1. The international regulatory framework of the Economic Miracle.

2. The extremely industry-oriented policies of Ludwig Erhard.

Renate Patzek

Ludwig Erhard, Minister of Economic Affairs and later Chancellor of the German Federal Republic, in 1963.

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The Period of the Economic Miracle

The so-called Economic Miracle of the post-war period would never have occurred had it not been for the 1944 Bretton Woods System’s economic policy framework, which consisted of the following elements:

1. Restriction of capital movements

2. Fixed exchange rates

3. Regulation of the financial system.

All of this came about because those involved at that time had learned from the storms of the great depression of 1929-1933 and its aftermath, and wanted to prevent the financial market excesses of laissez-faire liberalism from happening again. German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard was a strong supporter of such regulation. Both the Glass-Steagall Act, introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, and the somewhat different measures in Europe, ensured that priority was given to real economic development and that everything financial was subordinated to it. Indeed, the unity of action and liability is only possible under such a regulation.

With the abolition of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and especially the UK’s so-called “Big Bang” deregulation plan in 1986 under the Thatcher government, this regulatory framework was torn down, thus setting the stage for new financial market excesses. The introduction of the Euro was just another step in this politically desired direction, which one might have known would sooner rather than later lead to the excesses of deregulated financial markets that are now being complained about.

U.S. National Archives

Post-war reconstruction of Germany is underway. The poster reads: “Emergency Program Berlin with the help of the Marshall Plan” (circa 1948).

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Ludwig Erhard’s ‘Social Market Economy’

Erhard addressed this very subject as early as 1943-44 in a memorandum written for Carl Goerdeler. He emphasized again and again the priority of “productive goods and services” over all financial measures. When during his time as Minister of Economic Affairs (1957-63), he noticed that all sorts of policies were being peddled under the rubric of the term soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy), he explained succinctly and clearly what he meant by it:

An economic policy can only be called social if it allows economic progress, higher productivity and increasing productivity, working to the benefit of consumers.[fn_1]

In January 1956, Erhard wrote the following in a letter to the German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer:

But beyond this partisan political point of view [it was about the campaign strategy for 1957—A.A.], there is no conceivable policy for a progressive economy that is dependent on the connection with the rest of the world, that could do without increasing productivity, production and consumption. Any effort not made in this direction would have to diminish our competitive strength and let us sink back into primitivity. But such a country would also lose its foreign and global political validity. From such a view, foreign policy and economic policy are closely interrelated and must seek initiatives that bear fruit for both. Finally, I have to point out that national income can only arise from the added value of goods and that it is consequently impossible to generate such income without increasing the consumption of a people accordingly. [fn_2]

Since higher productivity and increasing productivity are still the principles of a functioning industrial nation, and for these reasons remain a desired goal in the rest of the world, this quotation from Ludwig Erhard can only be understood retrospectively as a warning directed toward Germany and the entire European Union. With the organized steps back to a weather-dependent energy supply, based on energy-flux densities of the Middle Ages, we actually risk sinking back into a primitive state and the associated loss of global political weight and power.

Can it be that these fundamental principles have actually been completely forgotten? If so, the “Ludwig Erhard Compass,” which is mentioned in the book, may have been sunk in the Rhine or lost somewhere else; at least it will not be available when the time comes to turn the tiller.

But There Is Some Suspicion . . .

Some suspect that the situation is actually much worse than what is presented by the authors, and that the decision to push through the Green New Deal had long since been made, no matter what.

The pressure comes from the financial sector and precisely from those circles that are criticized in the book for their irresponsible breaches of the rules. Mark Carney, then head of the Bank of England, announced the new agenda, together with Greta Thunberg’s presentation at the United Nations in September 2019, and since then it has been repeated by many other figures in the financial world: We want a green financial system! The old financial system is at a dead end, the storm is looming, the abyss is near, we need a new bubble with which we can inflate the old bubbles again.

CC BY-SA 2.0/Aloxe

Weather-dependent energy systems turn an already failing economy into one even more unproductive. Shown here is an array of wind turbines in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

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Trillions in new funds are under discussion and the goal for such so-called investments has long been defined: the transformation of energy systems.

What is it that causes medium-sized German companies to accept this fraud? Supposedly, The Perfect Storm is a result of discussion with representatives of those industries that are represented in the Economic Council.

They are under the delusion that Germany could profit by supplying so called smart technologies to manage an already unproductive weather dependent energy system without realizing that by doing so they are simply making the system even more unproductive.

It is not surprising that there is growing talk of “miracle technology” that miraculously puts Europe into a leading role. As rationality dissipates, science fiction becomes an option. The financial sector has for some time now chosen the self-proclaimed visionary Rifkin, who seems to have turned the heads of especially the ladies in the EU with his song of smart wonder-technology and his aging charm.

We must hang on to the hope that this book can make some contribution to a “change of course,” although a decidedly different course from what the authors intend.

[fn_1]. Emphasis in the original. Wohlstand für Alle (Prosperity for All) by Ludwig Erhard. Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1957, chapter 7. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]. Adenauer—Rhöndorfer Ausgabe (Adenauer—Rhöndorfer Edition), edited by Hans-Peter Schwarz and Rudolf Morsey. Schöningh, Paderborn, 2019, p. 586. [back to text for fn_2]

A MOST TIMELY INTERVENTION

Vladimir Putin Upsets the British Geopolitical Applecart

by Robert Ingraham

Kremlin.ru

Russian President Vladimir Putin, at a CIS summit in St. Petersburg on December 20, 2019, reminded the U.S. and the Europeans of the common effort to defeat fascism 80 years ago.

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Jan. 12—In a speech to the Munich Security Conference on February 10, 2007, that has now become legendary, Russian President Vladimir Putin shocked his audience by exposing the efforts of the western powers to destroy and subjugate Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. That speech—blunt and uncompromising—earned Putin the eternal hatred of the British establishment and its anglophile underlings in the United States and other NATO member states.

Now, President Putin has done it again, and the howls emanating from London and pro-British circles elsewhere are evidence that he has once again hit at a flank that is both revelatory and indefensible. In choosing to attack in the way that he did, Putin has identified certain historical truths which threaten the entire, carefully constructed British narrative of 20th century history. He has also lobbed a hand grenade into the current efforts to isolate Russia and sabotage U.S.-Russian relations. Since the Obama administration’s 2014 coup in the Ukraine—a coup utilizing leftover Nazi elements from World War II—the demonization of Russia has continued apace. Now Putin has upset that applecart, reminding the United States, as well as Europeans of good will, of the common effort shared by all of these nations to defeat fascism 80 years ago.

President Putin chose, as the venue for his intervention, a summit of leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which met in Saint Petersburg on Friday, December 20, 2019, an environment far more congenial than his audience in Munich twelve years earlier. In addition to Putin himself, the summit was attended by Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, Armenia Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kyrgyzstan President Sooronbay Jeenbekov, Moldova President Igor Dodon, Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon, and Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov.

The subject matter of Putin’s address was a Resolution passed September 19, 2019 by the European Parliament, by a vote of 535 to 66, which places the blame for World War II jointly on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Resolution states that it was the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Treaty of Non-Aggression (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) which “allowed two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest to divide Europe into two zones of influence.”

This EU Resolution is the latest project of a group of institutions and agencies, all orbiting around the 2011-founded “Platform of European Memory and Conscience,” which seek to redefine World War II as a war against “totalitarianism,” not a war against fascism.

Vladimir Putin has called the charges contained in the EU Resolution, a “shameless lie,” and on December 20, he spent more than an hour reading from and commenting on previously secret historical documents, now only recently declassified and released by the Russian Federal Archive Agency. These include many official government documents from Poland, Germany and the Baltic States seized by the Red Army in 1944-1945. In doing so, the Russian President reconstructs from the original records what actually happened from 1933 to 1941. He states that those individuals who voted for the EU Resolution are “People who don’t know history. They can’t read or write.”

Bundesarchiv

German and Austrian border police dismantling a border barrier on March 15, 1938.

Bundesarchiv

The German Wehrmacht entering Czechoslovakia’s capital Brno on March 15, 1939.

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Putin Refutes British Revisionism

Most Americans who grew up from 1945 to 1975 were taught that the defining event which led to World War II was the Munich Pact of 1938, which allowed Hitler to dismember Czechoslovakia. Unbeknownst to many non-historians, during recent years a school of World War II historical revisionism has attempted to rewrite that history, largely at the expense of the Soviet Union. Almost all of these writings, particularly those of Viktor Suvorov (a former Soviet intelligence officer who defected to the United Kingdom), have now been discredited, but the intention was never to write legitimately about past events, but rather to spread new narratives to the historically illiterate, all intended to contribute to the now unceasing anti-Russian propaganda. The EU Resolution blaming Russian and German “totalitarianism” as equally responsible for the war is merely the latest offspring of such historical fabrications.

In his speech to the CIS conference, President Putin begins by referencing that anti-Russian EU Resolution. He states that the Resolution prompted him to learn the truth of the matter. He says:

Where is the truth after all? I decided to figure this out and asked my colleagues to check the archives. When I started reading them, I found something that I think would be interesting for all of us. . . .

Here is the first question. We talk about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact all the time. We repeat this after our European colleagues. This begs the question: was this the only document signed by one of the European countries, back then the Soviet Union, with Nazi Germany? It turns out that this is not at all the case. I will simply give a list of them, if I may.

• The Declaration on the Non-Use of Force between Germany and Poland. This is, in fact, the so-called Pilsudski-Hitler Pact signed in 1934. In essence, this is a non-aggression pact.

• The Anglo-German maritime agreement of 1935. Great Britain provided Hitler with an opportunity to have his own Navy, which was illegal for him or, in fact, reduced to a minimum following World War I.

• The joint Anglo-German declaration of Chamberlain and Hitler signed on September 30, 1938, which they agreed upon at Chamberlain’s initiative. . . .

• There is the Franco-German Declaration signed on December 6, 1938 in Paris by the foreign ministers of France and Germany, Bonnet and Ribbentrop.

• The treaty between the Republic of Lithuania and the German Reich signed on March 22, 1939 in Berlin by the foreign minister of Lithuania and Ribbentrop to the effect that the Klaipeda Territory will be reunited with the German Reich.

• The Non-Aggression Treaty between the German Reich and Latvia of June 7, 1939.

Thus, the Treaty between the Soviet Union and Germany was the last in a line of treaties signed by European countries that seemed to be interested in maintaining peace in Europe. Also, I want to note that the Soviet Union agreed to sign this document only after all other avenues had been exhausted and all proposals by the Soviet Union to create a unified security system, in fact, an anti-Nazi coalition in Europe, were rejected.

Bundesarchiv

Adolf Hitler and UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in Bad Godesberg, on September 22, 1938.

Bundesarchiv

The four signers of the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938, which allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. From left to right: UK Prime Minister Chamberlain; French Prime Minister Daladier, German Chancellor Hitler, Italian Prime Minister Mussolini, and Italian Foreign Minister Ciano.

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As to the events of 1938-1939, Putin notes the repeated acquiescence of Britain and France to German expansionism. He contrasts this to the efforts of the Soviet Union:

The Soviet Union was trying to the utmost to use every opportunity for establishing an anti-Hitler coalition, held talks with military representatives of France and Great Britain, thus attempting to prevent the outbreak of World War II, but it practically remained alone and isolated. [France and Britain] were trying to urge Hitler to direct his aggression eastward [as seen in the Munich Betrayal].

Putin also points to the culpability of Poland in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, when Poland acted as a partner of Germany, mobilizing three divisions and seizing the Czech region of Zaolzie—this at a time when the USSR was pressuring France to honor its defense alliance with Czechoslovakia. Putin also quoted directly from several Polish government documents, as well as a recording of a phone conversation between Germany’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the head of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Józef Beck, in January 1939, to show the depth of German-Polish cooperation during this period. He also read from a transcript of a conversation between Józef Beck and Adolf Hitler on January 5, 1939, where Beck supports Hitler’s plans to rid Germany of its Jewish residents.

Bundesarchiv

From left to right: German Ambassador to Poland, Hans-Adolf von Moltke; Poland’s General Inspector of the Armed Forces, Józef Piłsudski; Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels; and Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jozef Beck, in Warsaw, Poland on June 15, 1934.

Bundesarchiv

Soviet Union Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (l.) and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, in Berlin on November 14, 1940.

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Russia Declassifying Documents

President Putin also announced that Russia is now declassifying all government documents in its possession related to the events leading up to World War II, and that it is the only European nation to do so:

Western capitals are still keeping all this classified. We know nothing of their contents. But now we do not need to, because the facts show that there was collusion. The participants in it were not just Hitler, but also the then leaders of those countries. It was this that opened the road to the east for Hitler, it was this that became the cause of the outbreak of World War II.

Regarding the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement of 1939, Putin simply said:

The USSR, left alone, had to accept the reality created by the Western states with their own hands. The partition of Czechoslovakia was extremely cruel and cynical; in fact, it was robbery. It can be argued with all the grounds that it was the Munich collusion that served as the turning point in history, after which World War II became inevitable.

Reaction to Putin’s speech from the anti-Russian crowd has been shrill. On Twitter, U.S. Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher opined, “Dear President Putin, Hitler and Stalin colluded to start World War II. That is a fact. Poland was a victim of this horrible conflict.” To this the Russian Embassy responded, “Dear Ambassador, do you really think that you know about history any more than you do about diplomacy?”

Storm Over Asia

In his November 1999 feature-length film, Storm Over Asia, Lyndon LaRouche provides the historical background necessary to understand the current targeting of the Russian nation. In other words, LaRouche answers the question “Why?” and he reveals the motives of those who turned the 20th century into a Century of War.

As in Rudyard Kipling’s evocation of the imperial Great Game of the 19th century and the creation of British Geopolitics by Halford Mackinder and Alfred Thayer Mahan with Prince Albert Edward (the later King Edward VII) prior to World War I, British strategy has been obsessed with the destruction and subjugation of Russia. The obsession continued with the British and French designs to turn Nazi Germany’s war machine against the USSR, and it went into high gear after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, reaching a critical juncture with President Barack Obama’s sponsorship of the Nazi coup in Ukraine in 2014.

Since that event, the trans-Atlantic sewer press, together with the anglophile scum of the British and American establishments, centered around groups such as the Atlantic Council and the Henry Jackson Society, have escalated a demonic offensive to vilify Russia and to prevent at all costs a rapprochement between Russia and Donald Trump’s America.

EIRNS

In his 1999 film, Storm Over Asia, Lyndon LaRouche (above) warns of the drift into a global conflagration driven by anti-human British Empire geopolitical ideas imported into the U.S. by Bernard Lewis, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Henry Kissinger.

Left: ÊKai Mšrk; right: stockholm.usembassy.gov

Left: Henry Kissinger; right: Zbigniew Brzezinski

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President Putin, in his remarks to the CIS summit, made clear that he grasps the geopolitical nature of the past and present anti-Russian operations:

Both then and now, Russia is used to scare people. Be it Tsarist, Soviet or today’s—nothing has changed. It does not matter what kind of country Russia is—this rationale remains. We should also not confuse ideological terms—Bolshevik, Russian, whatever, our former common homeland, the Soviet Union. To achieve this, they will make a deal with anyone, including Nazi Germany; we can, in fact, see this.

It is clear—as seen in the September 2019 EU Resolution charging Russia with responsibility for the crimes actually committed by Britain and France—that voices of sanity are now a minority within Europe. In the United States, the problem is one of a powerful British faction within the establishment. More than 40 years ago, anti-Russian, British geopolitical thinking was brought into the White House by the likes of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the Bernard Lewis-inspired “Arc of Crisis” policy was unleashed, targeting both Russia and China through the creation and deployment of Wahhabi “Islamic” terrorism. Brzezinski later proclaimed his allegiance to British geopolitics with his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.

The actual history of U.S.-Russian relations,—as well as U.S.-China relations—particularly from the time of Abraham Lincoln through to Franklin Roosevelt, was, for the most part, one of friendship, defined by a shared antipathy to British geopolitical and colonial schemes. It is urgent that those congenial relations be revived today. We are not dealing simply with history. From the borders of China through all of Central Asia, into Southwest Asia, the Baltic States, Ukraine, and North Africa, the modern-day British Great Game continues to lunge ahead. Terrorist attacks, sanctions, regime change—these still define the strategic environment. Trump’s November 2016 promise of an end to this geopolitical madness has been stymied by the ongoing impeachment attacks against him. A monumental battle over strategic policy is taking place, and the future hangs in the balance.

At the CIS summit, Vladimir Putin declared, “We will continue to talk about the events, the facts of the Great Patriotic War, to unveil and publicize archive materials in their entirety.” Thus, he has signaled his intention to confront the lies. History—and the future—is changed through such interventions.

A video excerpt of President Putin’s speech to the CIS conference may be viewed here, and a video excerpt of his follow-up press conference is also available.

The Modern Synarchist Project:

The Falun Gong

by Charles Park, Mike Billington, and Stanley Ezrol

CC/ClearWisdom.net

Above: a rally of Falun Gong adherents in Washington, D.C. in 2003. Below: Falun Gong’s symbol.

CC BY-SA 3.0

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Jan. 13—America and Europe have been inundated over the past decade with advertisements for the Falun Gong, the virulently anti-China cult, promoting their newspaper the Epoch Times and their musical extravaganza, Shen Yun. Shen Yun, which regularly tours in more than 130 countries, features a program that merges Chinese music and dance with a portrayal of Chinese officials torturing and murdering members of Falun Gong, including the cutting out of organs of members of the cult. This is also the theme of Falun Gong-sponsored organizations and conferences. The Epoch Times newspaper, which fills each daily issue with wild fabrications about China and lies about President Trump’s views and policies toward China, is published in 21 languages—every major language in Europe and Asia, including Persian. This is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise.

Through both the Epoch Times and Shen Yun, Falun Gong attempts to portray itself as the voice for humanitarianism and freedom in China. The truth is far different. The sponsors and propagandists for Falun Gong include spokesmen of the Anglo-American establishment from both the left and right of the political spectrum. What binds this strange alliance together is a hatred for both President Trump’s efforts to improve U.S.-China relations and China’s efforts to forge a policy of global economic development through the Belt and Road Initiative. This attack on China is coming from the highest levels of the British imperial establishment.

Among the Falun Gong’s enthusiasts are:

• Mark Palmer, head of the Friends of Falun Gong. He has been a leading voice in the “social democratic” side of the operation, associated with Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy in the U.S.

• Michael J. Horowitz, a leading speaker at Falun Gong’s annual demonstrations in the U.S. Capital. He is the director of the Hudson Institute’s Project for International Religious Liberty.

• Stephen Gregory, publisher of Falun Gong’s newspaper, the Epoch Times. He is the former head of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago, the leading “Synarchist” institution in the United States (see below).

• Stephen Bannon, collaborator of Falun Gong and its video company, New Tang Dynasty. He is the inspiration for the recent creation of The Committee on the Present Danger: China.

• The National Endowment for Democracy, which funds Falun Gong. The NED is the government-funded regime-change institution that was created to “privatize” certain CIA operations after the revelations of the Church Committee.

CC/Solkim

Mark Palmer

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Mark Palmer

Mark Palmer, now deceased, was one of the first in the U.S. to go to bat for the Falun Gong. One of the earliest of the neocon warriors, Palmer was Ambassador to Hungary in the late 1980s, where he collaborated closely with George Soros (whose Foundation was later expelled from the country for overt subversion of the government). Palmer was a principal speechwriter for Henry Kissinger, Vice Chairman at Freedom House, and co-founder of the National Endowment for Democracy. Freedom House was founded in 1941. After the war, after FDR’s death, Freedom House played a pivotal role in reversing FDR’s intention to maintain cooperation with the Soviet Union, driving labor unions and “progressive” organizations into the anti-communist frenzy of the McCarthy era.

Palmer’s 2003 book, Breaking the Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025, in the words of the journal, Foreign Affairs, “challenges the prevailing scholarly wisdom about the potential for democratic change, arguing that uprisings are possible in even the most backward authoritarian states—if only the United States and its partners provided proper encouragement.” Palmer focuses especially on the Middle East “dictators” and China.

As head of the Friends of Falun Gong, Palmer spread lies of the same kind as those heard today to the effect that “China is locking up millions of Muslims and denying them the right to practice their religion,” which is a favorite cry of Falun Gong. Palmer told the John Bachelor radio show in 2003:

I mean, it’s important for people to understand that Jiang Zemin [then the President of China], in his persecution of Falun Gong has literally murdered something in the range of ten thousand women and young men. And over one hundred thousand have been in camps. Not just allowed to die, but who’ve been tortured to death, starved to death, I think in the range of ten thousand. . . . [Falun Gong is] the greatest single spiritual movement [!] in Asia today. There is nothing that begins to compare with it in courage and importance. . . . [China is] the most influential dictatorship in the world, [with] 60% of the whole population in the world that is unable to live in an environment of freedom. Among the dictators all over the world, China’s Jiang Zemin is the most notorious one.

Palmer personally organized a rally in front of the U.S. Congress in support of Falun Gong in July 2002, which became an annual affair. Six Members of Congress and 14 NGO leaders addressed the rally, while three Senators and eight members of the House sent representatives. The following day, a resolution co-sponsored by 100 Members of Congress passed by a 420-0 vote.

The Congress is equally mindless today, having passed a resolution supporting the Jacobin anarchists in Hong Kong, called the “Stand with Hong Kong Resolution,” in both Houses, with only one “No” vote between them; and the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019, demanding an end to the non-existent “arbitrary detention, torture, and harassment of these communities inside and outside China,” which passed with the same single vote against, that of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).

Michael J. Horowitz

Michael J. Horowitz is a senior fellow and director of the Project for International Religious Liberty at the Hudson Institute, a cold-war think tank that counts among its expert advisors the anti-China ideologue Michael Pillsbury. Vice President Pence chose the Hudson Institute as the location for a raging diatribe against China in October 2018, which the New York Times described with glee as the “Portent of a ‘New Cold War.’” Pillsbury, a collaborator of Henry Kissinger and, together with Palmer, an originator of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has had access to President Trump as an adviser on China policy.

In 2001, Horowitz promoted the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC), “run mainly by practitioners of Falun Gong,” according to the Washington Post, in an effort to break through internet firewalls in China. He mobilized a consortium of human rights groups, political figures, and media, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as neo-con Senators such as Sam Brownback, among others, finally succeeding in getting Congress to allocate $5 million to the group in 2009 and $30 million in 2010.

Horowitz spoke at several of the annual rallies at the U.S. Capitol, supporting Falun Gong. Among his words there were these:

Because the great issue for the twenty-first century—far more important than even Muslim terrorism—is the question of whether China will become a democratic country. . . . You are the pathfinders for democracy in China and therefore keepers of the hope for the world and for the 21st century.

Stephen Gregory

The most important of these Synarchist sponsors of Falun Gong is Stephen Gregory, the publisher of its newspaper, Epoch Times. Gregory is the former head of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago. Strauss was the valued protégé of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist for Adolf Hitler and the leading proponent of the concept of the “unitary executive,” a euphemism for dictatorship. Schmitt provided the “theory” behind Hitler’s “Enabling Act” in 1933—the declaration following the Reichstag Fire (set by the Nazis but blamed on “communists”) that Hitler would rule absolutely without interference from the Reichstag.

Leo Strauss, protégé of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, and professor of political science at the University of Chicago (1949-69).

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Although Strauss was Jewish, the Nazi anti-Semite Carl Schmitt helped his friend Strauss obtain a Rockefeller Foundation grant to come to the United States after a stop in the UK, and the two corresponded well into the era of Nazi genocide.

Strauss believed in the necessity of a totalitarian system run by “philosophers,” who rejected the existence of universal principles or natural law. To achieve an ideal society, he argued, the ruler must be willing to lie in order to deceive the foolish “populist” masses, using both religion and politics as a means of disseminating myths that keep the general population in clueless servitude.

The students of Leo Strauss compose a gallery of neocon fanatics who gave us perpetual warfare, which has imposed genocidal hell across Southwest Asia following the war on Iraq under George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and the Obama support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Arab Spring.” These “Straussians” include Paul Wolfowitz, Irving Kristol, Abram Shulsky, and others in the cabal around Dick Cheney who launched the war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, correctly described by President Trump as the greatest strategic mistake in American history.

Gregory, the foremost “Straussian” in the U.S., immediately took up the cause of the Falun Gong when it set up operations in the U.S. in 2000. Speaking at a rally in Chicago in 2001, while still heading the Leo Strauss Center, Gregory retailed the line there were “10,000 practitioners detained in Chinese labor camps.” Describing the mystical cult as a “spiritual movement,” Gregory now promotes Epoch Times as the alternative to the “fake news press” regularly attacked, with justification, by President Trump.

But his purpose is never hidden—it is to mobilize Trump’s base to support the disgusting ideological China-bashing, even by people within the Trump Administration, against Trump’s effort to establish close ties with China. These include Vice President Pence (whom Trump cannot fire), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, FBI chief Christopher Wray, Trade Director Peter Navarro, and others. Epoch Times also peddles the extreme conspiracy theories regarding the “deep state” from the likes of QAnon.

MSNBC, with the intention of equating the psychotic ravings of Falun Gong and Epoch Times with the policies of Donald Trump, issued a report in August 2019 correctly identifying the teachings of Falun Gong’s founder Li Hongzhi as promoting the idea that “sickness is a symptom of evil that can only be truly cured with meditation and devotion, and that aliens from undiscovered dimensions have invaded the minds and bodies of humans, bringing corruption and inventions such as computers and airplanes.” MSNBC noted that Li lives with many of his cult followers in a “400-acre compound in upstate New York” near Dragon Springs, which “houses temples, private schools and quarters where performers for the organization’s dance troupe, Shen Yun, live and rehearse.”

Rather than respond to these facts, Gregory simply asserted that Epoch Times is not controlled by Falun Gong, but is defending Trump against the “deep state” accusations about Russian collusion while telling the truth about the evil of China.

Gage Skidmore

Steve Bannon, former Chief White House Strategist (2017).

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Stephen Bannon

And then there is the ubiquitous Steve Bannon. Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs executive, Hollywood movie producer, and co-founder of the right-wing website Breitbart News, spent seven months in the Trump administration before being unceremoniously dumped. He then went on to help restore the moribund “Committee on the Present Danger,” with many of the original cabal of aging neocons who created the original anti-Soviet think tank to promote war against the “commies.” The new incarnation is called “Committee on the Present Danger: China.”

Bannon joined forces with the Falun Gong movie outfit, the New Tang Dynasty, to produce a film titled, Claws of the Red Dragon, which portrays a Chinese IT giant, openly modeled on Huawei, in an intricate plot to subvert America. In an interview with New Tang Dynasty, Bannon, who has many connections in Hong Kong, said: “If there is another Tiananmen in Hong Kong, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) will collapse.” He praises Falun Gong’s Epoch Times for its promotion of precisely such an upheaval in Hong Kong: “This is the power of the Epoch Times,” he said, “and I think that is why you are one of the rising and most influential voices in the United States and the world on issues related to China.”

To capture the Synarchist imperial pedigree of Steve Bannon, the EIR Special Report, End the McCarthyite Witch Hunt Against China and President Trump, included the following:

Bannon is also serving the British Empire at a level that would have earned him a title of nobility did he not want to pretend to be an American. He has served as one of five sponsors of DHI (Dignatis Humanae Institute—The Institute for Human Dignity), a City of London (financial center) influence group. The other four co-sponsors were Archduke Otto von Habsburg, successor to the throne of the defunct Habsburg Empire; His Royal Highness Charles of Bourbon-Two Sicilies and Duke of Castro, a leading figure in the anti-Renaissance wing of European nobility; Field Marshal the Lord Guthrie GCB (Knight of the Grand Cross), LVO (Lieutenant of the Victorian Order), OBE (Order of the British Empire); and Father Matthew Festing [Prince and Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta]. . . . It’s Chaplain, Father Michael Sneed, has been very active in bringing Anglicans, notably former Prime Minister Tony Blair, into the pro-Feudalist clique of the Catholic Church.

Bannon continues to lie about his influence on President Trump. As the attempted coup against Trump continues with an impeachment trial, in tandem with the threat of a global military confrontation over Iran (which, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has explained, can only be resolved by coordinated actions among Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping), Bannon is shamelessly campaigning to sabotage that indispensable great power alliance by flaunting the title of “Chief Strategist,” which Trump removed from him.

CC/Studio Incendo

Rioters attacking police lines in Hong Kong on November 18, 2019.

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On January 12, appearing on Fox News with the neo-con Maria Bartiromo, Bannon, contrary to everything Trump has said about his relationship with China and Xi Jinping, breathlessly boasted that Trump’s new trade deal with China is not for peace and prosperity, but is “economic warfare” against China, coupled with the uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which Bannon described as “Trump’s policy.” Bannon repeatedly referred to Trump, an outspoken opponent of the globalist British Empire and its never-ending wars, as “the Churchill” in this situation.

Digging Deeper: the Synarchist Agenda

The outlook which binds together this anti-China, anti-Trump left/right alliance is known as Synarchism. A term little known today, Synarchism was identified by American intelligence experts under the Franklin Roosevelt administration before and during World War II in Europe. It identified the merging of left and right ideologies to oppose sovereign nation states, in favor of a single European union of nations based on the Roman and Napoleonic imperial models.

The post-World War I Synarchist movement was launched by Count Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1922 in Vienna, under the title of the Pan European Union. While particularly targeting the “Bolshevist menace” after the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Synarchists opposed all nation states, insisting that only such a unified European state, under the control of financial and corporate interests, could counter the Soviet Union. It was this movement that became the core of the fascist movements in France (becoming the Vichy government), the German Nazi Party, and Mussolini’s Fascist party. We recommend the reader consult the article “Synarchism: The Fascist Roots of the Wolfowitz Cabal,” EIR, May 30, 2003 for a more in-depth treatment of this subject. Both Hitler and Mussolini were socialists before the creation of their fascist parties.

Lyndon LaRouche wrote in the Aug. 8, 2003 EIR, “A Short Definition of Synarchism”:

“Synarchism” is a name adopted during the Twentieth Century for an occult freemasonic sect, known as the Martinists, based on worship of the tradition of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. During the interval from the early 1920s through 1945, it was officially classed by U.S.A. and other nations’ intelligence services under the file name of “Synarchism: Nazi/Communist,” so defined because of its deploying simultaneously both ostensibly opposing pro-communist and extreme right-wing forces for encirclement of a targeted government. Twentieth-Century and later fascist movements, like most terrorist movements, are all Synarchist creations. . . .

Today’s manifestation of Synarchism has created the strange bedfellows of hard core right-wing cold-warriors and leftist dupes of the Hollywood and San Francisco variety joining together to support a British geopolitical agenda of overthrowing governments and attacking national sovereignty, all in the name of “democracy” and “human rights.” The primary target of this British imperial operation is China. The intention is to sabotage President Trump’s insistence that the United States must be friends with Russia and China, and to ensure that the geopolitical division of the world into hostile, irreconcilable blocs of East and West continues.

CC/longtrekhome

Falun Gong practitioners holding a group exercise event in Los Angeles.

CC/ClearWisdom.net

Li Hongzhi, founder of Falun Gong.

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The Cult Known as Falun Gong

Falun Gong pretends to be simply a movement of Tai-Chi practitioners, the ancient exercises practiced widely in China for centuries. Its founder, Li Hongzhi, started the organization in 1992 based on an anti-science mystical ideology that demanded belief in his magical powers, and by the end of the 1990s had a wide following.

In April 1999, exactly ten years after the 1989 occupation of Tiananmen Square by thousands of youth threatening a “regime change” collapse of government, Li Hongzhi deployed about 10,000 of his followers to occupy the area in front of Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the Communist Party of China, which is on one side of Tiananmen Square. After the 1989 events, George Soros was wisely declared persona non grata. After the 1999 Falun Gong event, the cult was banned, and Li fled to the United States.

As reported in the EIR report, End the McCarthyite Witch Hunt Against China and President Trump, Li Hongzhi’s psychotic “teachings,” contained in his Zhuan Fulan, claim that the only means for humankind to escape its sorry state at “one dimension, at a low plane of the universe,” is to accept the “true Way” of a super-human master. He rejects science as a pursuit, followed only “after people have pushed out the divine and abandoned moral codes.” Li asserts that human beings, because of their past transgressions, “were meant to be . . ., as divine beings see it, destroyed.” His role as a “divine being” is to show compassion for humans and try to reform them through “spiritual practice.”

EIRNS

LaRouche PAC rally at a Shen Yun performance in Houston, Texas on Dec. 29, 2019.

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The Zhuan Falun never addresses human creative capabilities. Following his practice, Li claims, might bring about dramatic changes in the “practitioner” including: “skin becoming soft and fair, with a rosy glow, and a lessening of wrinkles. . . . Older women will have their menstrual period return, since there is an essential energy involved in this blood that’s needed in mind-body practice.” Li describes his method: “You develop a falun at the position of your lower abdomen, and I personally bestow it during our classes.” The falun “draws in energy from the universe, transforms it for you, and delivers it to whatever parts of your body may need this energy for development.” He writes that this can provide the practitioner with “special powers” including levitation and the ability to “project energy” at will.

Defeating Synarchism

What we see here is a multifaceted, interconnected apparatus deployed from the highest levels of British and American oligarchical intelligence networks to control the foreign policies of the United States in the interests of the globalist imperial financier faction. For the oligarchy, the crime of President Trump is his passionate commitment against globalism and for the American System principle of defense of the Sovereign nation-state.

President Trump, at the United Nations on September 24, 2019, stated the following:

The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors and honor the differences that make each country special and unique.

The unstated fear of the British Empire-directed Synarchist operation, is that President Trump, in his defense of the right of every nation to defend the general welfare of its population and collaborate as equals with other nations for peace and prosperity, will adopt the policy defined as the “Four Powers Agreement” by Lyndon LaRouche—the U.S., China, Russia and India joining forces with other like-minded nations in the spirit of the Hamiltonian principles of the “American System,” and in the spirit of the New Silk Road imbedded in the Belt and Road Initiative of Xi Jinping. It is our task to equip the population to see behind the veil of Synarchist myths and master the principles required to secure the future for ourselves and our posterity.

Exposing and defeating the McCarthyite attacks on China and President Trump will clear the way for this “win-win” peace and development process to move forward.