Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 7, February 14, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Implement Artemis Moon Mission Now: It Will Heal the Nation’s Wounds by Kesha Rogers

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 7, February 14, 2020

- I. Mankind’s Unfinished Business

- ENOUGH UGLINESS! Think Like Beethoven by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- SCHILLER INSTITUTE WEBCAST A Moment of Optimism for Humanity, As the Old System Collapses

- Nancy Pelosi Owes Her Job to Michael Bloomberg by Barbara Boyd

- RATHER THAN WAR Can the ‘Space Force’ Become the Platform for a ‘Second American Reconstruction’? by Dennis Speed

- Where Franklin Roosevelt Was Interrupted by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1998)

- II. Science Over Pestilence

- Locust Swarms Devour Nations: Time for Emergency Solutions! by Janet G. West

- Statement by the President of the International Schiller Institute China Deserves Praise and Cooperation in the Fight against the Coronavirus by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- REPORT FROM GERMANY Creativity and Optimism, Not Climate Mania by Alexander Hartmann

Total Support Now for the Moon-Mars Mission!

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

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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

Managing Editor: Stephanie Ezrol

Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

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

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

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

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

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EDITORIAL

Implement Artemis Moon Mission Now:

It Will Heal the Nation’s Wounds

by Kesha Rogers

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Donald J. Trump

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Feb. 8—Tuesday night, during his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump called for full funding of the Artemis program, his bold space vision to return to the Moon. This is the critical first step to the next level of economic development for the human species, including an interplanetary fusion economy and mankind’s colonization of Mars and the rest of the Solar System.

As was demonstrated by the Apollo Moon missions, the exploration of space is the most important and effective driver of science, technology, economic growth, and cultural optimism. The Apollo Program produced profound breakthroughs in medicine, engineering, manufacturing, and other fields too numerous to list, and expanded our understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe. For every $1 spent on the manned space mission, our economy gained $10 right here on Earth, because of the technological improvements that mission demanded.

Trump sees America’s return to space as critical to our future:

In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation. Now we must embrace the next frontier, America’s manifest destiny in the stars. I am asking Congress to fully fund the Artemis program to ensure that the next man and the first woman on the Moon will be American astronauts—using this as a launching pad to ensure that America is the first nation to plant its flag on Mars.

However, the Artemis program has been subject to concerted attacks in Congress. One such assault on the scientific future of our nation—and the world—is H.R. 5666, a bill sponsored by the chair of the House Subcommittee on Science and Aeronautics, Rep. Kendra Horn (D-OK). This bill cuts funding to Artemis, jeopardizing the progress it has already made, and the program as a whole. It explicitly states that Artemis should not develop the resources of the Moon. This outlook is wrong. The Moon’s surface is loaded with resources, including oxygen, water, metals, and a special resource unique to the Moon, helium-3. This special type of helium is very rare on the Earth, but present in relative abundance on our celestial neighbor. It is considered the best fuel for fusion, an inexhaustible and high-powered energy source that can literally power the entire Earth without waste, while transforming our relationship to natural resources.

Instead, H.R. 5666 argues, we should ignore the many benefits of developing lunar resources and infrastructure and instead go directly to Mars.

NASA

From NASA’s webpage on Artemis: “Humanity’s return to the Moon, with a sustainable architecture, the likes of which has never been built before.”

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In an exchange with LaRouche PAC leader Kesha Rogers, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine emphasized the significance of the 2024 date for landing on the Moon:

You [Kesha Rogers] mentioned 2024, and some people have said maybe that’s a partisan date. Remember what Kennedy said: “By the end of the decade.” He gave it a date. Why? Because that’s how you get results. Here’s the important thing: NASA doesn’t have a science problem or a technical problem. We can retire all the technical risk you can imagine: We’re an amazing agency with amazing engineers. We have a political problem! That’s why we are not at the Moon right now, that’s why we are not on Mars right now.

The “political problem” referred to by Bridenstine has been the result of a sustained attack on our nation’s manned space program, an attack that started long before Trump took office. The neo-Malthusian, zero-growth attitude, coupled with deadly pragmatism, has crippled our space program, robbing Americans of the optimism, scientific progress, and creative discovery uniquely associated with the exploration of space. This insanity is coupled with rabid and irrational hatred of President Trump generated by constant 24-hours-a-day propaganda portraying him as a monster. As a result, Congress is chipping away at Artemis, saying that if this President proposes producing a bountiful and optimistic future for you and your children, it must not happen because this President proposed it.

LaRouche PAC Will Fight for

Full Implementation of Artemis

LaRouche PAC is going to fight for full implementation of the Artemis program. It is the type of challenge and vision that can unite our population and fire the imaginations and creativity of our youth. It is a mission in which we fulfill and celebrate the nature of human beings, the gift to our species of creative thought, the ability to transform the universe—unlike the pessimism and decadence which has persisted in our society since the last great space exploration program was killed. It is the basis for cooperation with Russia, China, and India, in a grand mission to understand and develop the universe in which we all live, replacing the primitive and stupid idea of endless wars over resources and geopolitics.

Upon President Trump’s announcement of the Artemis Program, LaRouche PAC has taken its support for this very important initiative to the streets in a big way, to organize the American people in full support of this critical mission. We continue to circulate a petition and accompanying report under the headline “We Commit to the Moon-Mars Mission.” The report begins:

A 50-year, international crash program for lunar industrialization, the development of fusion-powered space flight, and Mars colonization will be the most important driver for the U.S. and global economies. President Trump’s plan to return to the Moon by 2024 is the correct first step; let’s see the full program through.

The great visionaries of our space program did not merely see the program as meeting short-term goals or deadlines, but as setting a standard for true economic and scientific progress for all of humankind. The achievement of a permanent lunar presence is the gateway to the development of a human economy in space.

Will you join us now, in the fight to implement this great adventure? Lifting our eyes to the stars will heal this nation’s present, destructive partisan wounds. Like President Kennedy’s challenge to the nation to go to the Moon, today’s Moon-Mars mission is a necessary challenge for achieving a future worthy of all human beings on planet Earth, and, soon, beyond.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 7, February 14, 2020

Cover This Week

NASA/James Blair

The 2017 Class of Astronauts participates in graduation ceremonies at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas on January 10, 2020. The astronauts are the first to graduate under the Artemis program, and are now eligible for assignments to the International Space Station, and Artemis missions to the Moon and Mars.

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TOTAL SUPPORT NOW FOR THE MOON-MARS MISSION!

2 EDITORIAL

Implement Artemis Moon Mission Now:

It Will Heal the Nation’s Wounds

by Kesha Rogers

I. MANKIND’S UNFINISHED BUSINESS

5 ENOUGH UGLINESS!

Think Like Beethoven

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

16 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

A Moment of Optimism for Humanity,

As the Old System Collapses

23 Nancy Pelosi Owes Her Job to Michael Bloomberg

by Barbara Boyd

25 RATHER THAN WAR

The Space Force: A Technological Platform for a ‘Second American Reconstruction’?

by Dennis Speed

29 Where Franklin Roosevelt Was Interrupted

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

June 16, 1998

II. SCIENCE OVER PESTILENCE

59 Locust Swarms Devour Nations: Time for Emergency Solutions!

by Janet G. West

65 Statement by the President of the International Schiller Institute

China Deserves Praise and Cooperation in the Fight against the Coronavirus

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

66 REPORT FROM GERMANY

Creativity and Optimism, Not Climate Mania

by Alexander Hartmann

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. Mankind’s Unfinished Business

ENOUGH UGLINESS!

Think Like Beethoven

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Ludwig van Beethoven, in a portrait by Willibrord Joseph Mähler, 1815.

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This is the edited transcript of Mrs. LaRouche’s presentation to a special Schiller Institute meeting in New York City on February 8, 2020. Dennis Speed introduced her, saying “humanity should try, for a change, to think like Beethoven.” He underscored that Lyndon LaRouche is best known as an economist and statesman and Presidential candidate, and that most people are unaware of his work in music. Speed read from an essay in the recently published volume of his writings, Think Like Beethoven, the essay, “What Is Music, Really? The Principle of Music Is Love.”

The essential thing is love. Music is love. The principle of music is love, mankind’s love of mankind. Of what mankind could be. And you want to do something that’s beautiful in terms of what mankind’s nature says. And if it isn’t beautiful, you don’t want to do it. You don’t want ugly things! And the characteristic of the 20th century was ugly music. From the beginning it’s ugly music. And the music has become uglier and uglier and uglier all the time. On every street, even in speaking. In writing. Also in smelling. . . .

That’s the problem. Mankind tends toward the wrong standards of truth. It starts with the conception that mankind is an animal, and mankind is not an animal. When you start with saying that mankind is an animal, that’s when all the trouble comes in. And the only way you can deal with music, really, is on the basis of love. The love of mankind and what mankind can do that is loving of mankind.

Because the future is: You’re all going to die. And what is the passion which corresponds, therefore, to mankind? Since everybody is going to die, what’s the meaning of human life? Is it a fact? Not exactly. It’s the creation of a more powerful capability of mankind by purging mankind of its own corruption. Extracting mankind into the freedom from corruption. And all practical measures to craft and improve the quality of art is crap, because they are not sincere. They don’t correspond to some principle of the matter.

And this is true: You see it in drama; you see it on the musical stage; you see it in performance of all kinds. The beauty is creativity, per se. It’s also the measure of what creativity is.

Speed closed his introduction saying,

This year being the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, let us do something that Beethoven would do, an indication of what he would do today is in his opera Fidelio. Exonerating Lyndon LaRouche would be the kind of action that would indicate that we had actually understood how Beethoven thought. We would be doing what Beethoven would have done; thus indicating that we understand how Beethoven thought.

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Trump in a news conference, the day after his acquittal by the Senate on bogus impeachment charges.

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Feb. 8—I will try to talk about the subject that Dennis just announced. Let me situate it in a specific context. During the last several days, we witnessed quite tumultuous events. The impeachment drive against President Trump was finally defeated. He was acquitted, and gave a rather jubilant press conference, a meeting, afterwards. It is a moment in which we all should reflect on that coup attempt, which started with British intelligence, members of the intelligence community of the United States, and the heads of intelligence of the Obama administration. If one were living in a different world, one might think, “Shouldn’t it be the case that leftists would oppose the CIA? Oppose the intelligence community? Shouldn’t it be that the liberals somehow would have a problem when there is a coup attempt against a sitting, elected President of the United States?”

Well, but we all found out that no such thing occurred. Neither the so-called left—if it still exists—or the left liberals had any problem with the fact that there was overwhelming evidence that the intelligence apparatus tried to make a coup by replacing the American Constitution, turning the American republic into a British parliamentary system, which was emphasized by Alan Dershowitz and others. So, why is that the case?

My presentation, which is about Beethoven and culture in general, will investigate why this is. Some of you will be surprised that this behavior of the left and left liberals in this entire process, is the result of a gigantic—and I really mean gigantic—brainwashing effort, which many people know very little about, or about how and why it works.

What has this to do with the Beethoven Year? We will have a full year of concerts around the world. In Germany alone, there will be more than 1,000 special concerts performing Beethoven’s music. When the first performances began, I had the good fortune of spending one entire day listening to an Austrian/Swiss/German TV program presenting many different Beethoven compositions. That is a luxury that you normally don’t have. However, if you do that, and you spend an entire day listening to many different compositions—piano concertos, symphonies, the Missa Solemnis, Fidelio, and many others—it has an incredible effect on you. Because you are being transformed, your mind and your emotions are moved into a completely different universe.

So, it occurred to me that this Beethoven Year is the perfect opportunity—it coincides with extremely important political and strategic decisions that have to happen. We have to overcome geopolitics. We have to avert the danger of the world plunging into another World War, sleepwalking, as happened with the First World War. The world needs Trump to move forward with what he set out to do in the 2016 campaign: improve the U.S. relationship with Russia, and with China. We face incredible dangers.

So, it occurred to me that we should use the Beethoven Year internationally to have many people participating in listening to Beethoven, in performing Beethoven—in order to develop the powerful emotional strength that is at the core of great Classical music, more from Beethoven than from anybody else. It has been clear to me for a very long time that we will succeed politically only if we combine our political efforts with a cultural renaissance of Classical music.

Why Classical Culture?

Schiller’s Aesthetical Letters, was his reaction to the failure and collapse of the French Revolution when the Jacobin Terror had taken over, and the hope of all the republican circles in Europe, that the French Revolution would replicate the American Revolution, was shattered. When that hope was shattered, Schiller said, “A great moment has found a little people.” The objective conditions for a change, to have an American-like Revolution were there, but the subjective moral condition was lacking.

Friedrich Schiller, in a posthumous portrait by Louis Ammy Blanc, 1861.

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In his Aesthetical Letters Schiller wrote in response that he believed that any improvement in politics could only come from the moral improvement, the ennoblement of the individual. I believe that is absolutely true. I have made that my own creed for the last half century. Only if individuals become better human beings, becoming more noble in their emotions, thinking about the nobility of all of humanity; only then can you move history forward. Schiller, in his Letters on Aesthetical Education, gave the answer, that it can only be through great Classical art that that can be accomplished.

Now, some people would argue, “No, what do we need Classical art for? We also have religion.” I’m not denying that in religion there is a command to improve. There are other people who argue, “But why do you need Classical music? I don’t know it; I don’t like it; it’s alien to me. Why don’t we just concentrate on astronomy, looking at the stars? That also has an ennobling effect.” I’m not denying either. I don’t think there is an exclusive separation among these three realms, Classical culture, religion, and astronomy. But it is great Classical art that does something very specific in fostering the creative faculties of the mind.

Schiller, and also Lyn during his entire life, proceeded from that assumption. As a matter of fact, all of Schiller’s works—his poems, his dramas—were all characterized and driven by the idea that the result must be the ennoblement of human beings. The quote you just heard from Dennis by Lyn expresses the essence of Lyn’s entire work quite well. Schiller, Confucius, and other similar great thinkers promoted the idea that aesthetical education brings forth that ennoblement.

If you immerse yourself in a great painting of Leonardo da Vinci, or Rembrandt, or listen to a Schubert song, or a beautifully performed American Spiritual, then you forget about your greed, you forget about your selfishness. While thinking in the creative composition you are engaging with, you become a little bit more like that yourself. The more you make that a habit, and the less you do selfish and greedy things in between, the more you become a better person.

Just in parentheses, I want to mention that Xi Jinping, the President of China, has frequently emphasized the need to have aesthetical education, especially of students, but also of all other age brackets of society. Because if people are educated aesthetically, they develop a more beautiful mind and a more beautiful soul. And that is the source of all great works.

CC/Jiuguang Wang

The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy, topped by Brunelleschi’s dome.

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There are many reports that Trump intends to issue an Executive Order that Federal buildings should no longer be modernist, but should be Classical. Hopefully he means Greek Classical and Renaissance Classical, and not what’s called Roman Classical, because these notions are sometimes not differentiated. But I think this is a very promising sign. First, Trump talks about the Dome in Florence, and now he is considering making buildings beautiful. So, he should continue on this road.

Beauty is intelligible. This is a very important point because it goes beyond opinion. People often say, “What my taste is, is my thing, and I have the right to find something beautiful, and you have a right to another opinion.” I want to offer a notion of beauty that is intelligible. It goes to the Italian use of the “golden mean” proportion in Renaissance paintings and buildings, but it is also a standard of composition.

It pertains to the famous debate between Schiller and Kant, in which Kant, in his Critique of Judgement, wrote that any arabesque that a painter throws against the wall is more beautiful than a piece of art in which you can recognize the intention of the artist. Schiller got very upset about that, and wrote many of his aesthetical writings to fully rebut this idea of Kant. He said there must be a notion borne out of reason, and of beauty. If the empirical performance and evidence conforms to that idea of reason, it is good, but not the other way around.

Let us go back to Beethoven. I recently wrote an Open Letter to defend the Classical performance of Beethoven works in which I vowed that I would initiate a campaign to end the acceptance of the performance of classically composed music as it is now being destroyed by the modernists, and to end the presentation of ugliness in music, which Lyn did not like, as Dennis presented it to you.

George Washington and General Lafayette at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777-78, in a painting by John Ward Dunsmore, 1907.

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Beethoven’s Opera Fidelio

I want to talk to you a little bit about Fidelio, because this is an opera which is very dear to my heart, and it was very dear to Lyn’s heart. The two of us really thought it was our opera, for reasons which I will come to in a second. First of all, concerning the narrative of Fidelio, it definitely is based on real historical events. More research needs to be done, and if some of you, our listeners and audience, feel compelled to join in that, you are welcome. We have certain hints. In the literature about the origins of the libretto of Beethoven’s Fidelio there are different views.

A very probable hypothesis is that it relates to the arrest and imprisonment of the Marquis de Lafayette who, as you know, was very much an ally of the American Revolution. And in that capacity, he drew the anger of the then British Prime Minister, William Pitt, who put pressure on the Austrian emperor to put Lafayette in jail, where he was imprisoned for several years in a dungeon. He was freed from prison by the efforts of many, including through the courageous intervention of his wife Adrienne, who joined him in his incarceration. An enormous international campaign ensued, involving many VIPs appealing to Emperor Franz, so that Lafayette finally was released. He was released in 1797, and only five months after that, the Frenchman Jean-Nicolas Bouilly published the libretto that Beethoven then used, called Leonore, or Conjugal Love.

public domain

Left: Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, as a Lieutenant General, in a portrait by Joseph-Désiré Court, 1791. Right: Marie Adrienne Françoise de Noailles, the wife of Lafayette.

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This is, as I said, very dear to my heart. When Lyn, who was innocent of any crime, was put in jail by the Bush Sr. Administration, I launched Operation Florestan. This was a situation in which Lyn was put in jail by a combination of the British and the Bush apparatus, and there was also clearly some collaboration with certain Soviet forces. So, when you read this article on Operation Florestan, understand that in 1989, the Berlin Wall had not yet fallen, and the situation was still extremely tense between the Soviet Union and the West, so, some of these things have to be seen in the context in which they were written. The setting of putting Lyn in jail innocently, deprived the American population of access to the most beautiful ideas probably ever written and thought in the history of the United States.

With Operation Florestan, for the next five years, we spoke with thousands and thousands of VIPs. We had probably a couple of thousand signatures from sitting parliamentarians all over the world, from generals, from chiefs of staff, from bishops, from cardinals, from writers, and other notables. We launched this campaign with the idea that Operation Florestan, being modelled on the Fidelio opera and the example of Lafayette,— that we would get Lyn out of jail. That was by no means certain. Lyn was given an extremely harsh sentence—the intention was that he would die in jail. So, we launched this campaign.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon LaRouche being escorted out of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia after sentencing to 15 years in prison, January 27, 1989.

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Now I want to talk a little bit about the narrative of the opera Fidelio to make clear why this is absolutely parallel to what happened to us. In the opera, Florestan is held as a political prisoner by Don Pizarro, the governor of the prison and a tyrant, who fears that Florestan might reveal some very compromising truth about him. Florestan’s wife, Leonore, disguises herself as a man, calling herself Fidelio. She gets herself hired by the warden of the prison, Rocco. Rocco’s daughter, Marzelline, falls in love with Fidelio—who she thinks is a man—despite the fact that she has a fiancé, Jaquino.

In the beginning of the opera, you hear this beautiful quartet, for which I ask our singers to get ready. This is still at the very beginning of the scene. The four characters—Leonore, Rocco, Jaquino, and Marzelline—are all singing. The beauty of this quartet is that they all sing about their hopes, their inspirations, and they are all different. But despite the fact that they are all very different, the harmonious composition is one of the most beautiful examples of the art of Beethoven. Now, let’s hear “Mir ist so wunderbar.”

LPAC-TV

The singers performing the “Mir ist so wunderbar” quartet from Fidelio, during Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Schiller Institute meeting. Left to right: Elliot Greenspan, Nancy Guice, John Sigerson, and Michelle Erin.

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(The live performance of the quartet at the meeting is available here.)

After this development in the beginning, Pizarro comes to the dungeon to look over the prisoners, because he has learned that the minister wants to come to inspect things. The minister is his political enemy. And he is afraid the minister will meet Florestan, who could reveal the secrets. So, he wants Florestan to be killed.

Pizarro tells Rocco to go to the dungeon and kill Florestan. Rocco does not want to do it, but eventually agrees to at least dig the grave, and then have the corpse of Florestan buried. Rocco takes Fidelio with him because it is heavy work, and he is a little bit old. So, Leonore and Rocco go into the dungeon. Leonore asks Rocco to allow the prisoners to see the light of day, because they are otherwise always in the dark. Then comes the most beautiful chorus, the Prisoners’ Chorus, which is very famous. If you don’t have it in your ear, you should go home and listen to the whole opera, which you should do in any case.

Florestan, meanwhile, who is struggling in the dark, and who has fever and is feeling horrible, has a beautiful vision that Leonore has come for him and he sees her as an angel. This again is one of the most beautiful arias you can imagine. Leonore/Fidelio asks Rocco to allow her to give this prisoner some bread and wine, and while doing that, recognizes her husband. So Pizarro arrives, and he is already moving with a dagger to kill Florestan. Leonore throws herself between her husband and Pizarro and says “First kill his wife!” She threatens Pizarro with a pistol. At that point, the trumpets sound to announce the arrival of the minister. The danger is over, and Florestan and Leonore embrace each other and then comes this unbelievable duet of joy, “O namenlose Freude!”

Leonora confronts Don Pizarro and saves her husband Florestan in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, in an engraving by M. Weber based on a painting of Eugene Klimsch.

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While we are hearing this now as an audio, I want you to focus on the absolute beauty of the emotions—the joy, the limitless joy, the nameless joy which unites Leonore and Florestan. It is that emotion which is love; and it is that emotion which is pure joy. The same joy which Beethoven celebrates also in the Ninth Symphony, especially in the last movement when he incorporates Schiller’s Ode to Joy and this becomes the chorus.

So, let’s now listen to the “O namenlose Freude!”

(The performance of the duet played at the meeting is available here.)

After that duet, the minister opens all the dungeons; the prisoners emerge and are free. The minister recognizes Florestan, his friend; then everybody joins in in the great finale, the beautiful chorus, the so-called Heil chorus in which they celebrate the love of mankind, the love between the two spouses, the absolute victory of freedom over tyranny, and that with a good plan, man can absolutely defeat all tyrants. This emotion, this idea that if you struggle for a good cause, you overcome all the difficulties, and that you arrive at a higher level of sublime feeling—this is expressed in this beautiful music. So, let’s hear the “Heil sei dem Tag, Heil sei der Stunde” chorus clip.

Well, this is only the beginning, and I really urge you to listen to a very good performance of the entire Fidelio. There is a very beautiful one with Christa Ludwig and probably many others, but I really think you should take the time to listen to the entire opera.

Regietheater

So, well, I had a very urgent need to go and see such an opera. It’s a very personal thing, because as you know, in a few days it will be one year since Lyn has passed away. And around the Christmas period, I just wanted really badly to see a performance of Fidelio. And contrary to my normal habit of looking at the reviews and critiques before I go, which I have not done for a long time, because they are all bad generally, I just went to a performance in the Staatstheater Darmstadt without checking it out beforehand. Maybe it was a shock, but I think it was a healthy shock, because it was so absolutely terrible that I felt compelled to write the Open Letter I mentioned earlier, which you may have read.

Regietheater, as you know, is this terrible thing which was developed in the 1960s and has been used ad nauseum a zillion times since, in which the director takes a Classical composition of Schiller or Shakespeare or some other Classical poet or dramatist, and projects onto it what he thinks is relevant, how it should be interpreted. Then you have soldiers, not dressed in historical costumes, but sitting on Harley Davidsons or being Nazi officers, just to project the personal opinion of the director, whatever it is. Normally they have at least one naked scene; they copulate on the stage. There were performances which were so ugly, actually pornographic. This has been going on for more than fifty years, so it’s not exactly original. But until recently, this kind of Regietheater was limited to the staging, the words, but they never really attacked the music.

So what happened in this performance was, not only did they apply all the terrible elements of Regietheater to the staging—having film clips, for example, while people were singing, so it was completely chaotic—but for the first time, they also changed the music. A modernist composer by the name of Annette Schlünz, who comes from the Eisler school tradition, changed Beethoven’s grand finale, of which you just heard two minutes of the beginning.

This goes to the idea of Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler that you also can have the Verfremdung [distancing] effect, which is the idea that you should no longer allow the audience to identify with the people on the stage and become elevated; but you have to interrupt this identification every five seconds by a sound or a movie clip or something which interrupts this process, which makes the performance absolutely unbearable.

So, this woman, Mrs. Schlünz, writes in the introduction to the program that she took this music of the final chorus, repeating a beat, then stopping suddenly, introducing alien sounds, having eight vocalists distributed in the audience who then all of a sudden get up, and if you are unhappy and one of these people stands behind you, you can have a heart attack. Then trumpets from the balconies. She described that she had the fantasy of sitting at the audio mixing console at the music studio, speeding up the music. When the actual joy in the chorus is expressed, according to her, it becomes like a jubilization machine; like children becoming completely hyper when they lose control of their emotions.

So, obviously, this woman is completely unable, emotionally, to comprehend the sublime notions that the music expressed, that we saw and heard with the nameless joy, or the love between the couple, or the joy of the victory over tyranny. All of this is alien to Mrs. Schlünz.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom

Now, where does this come from? Well, this comes all from a very sophisticated, extremely huge CIA operation called the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). This was an operation in the postwar period which broke up in a huge scandal in 1967.

Just recently, there was an exhibition on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of this CCF in Berlin. There was an article in the daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which the author, in a very rare moment of honesty, says,— the title of the article is “How One Steals the Big Words,” meaning freedom and so forth. He says: “The worrisome quintessence of what the CIA did is that it did not sponsor some sinister right-wing ideology, but it helped left liberalism become the hegemonic mainstream standard of intellectuals in the West today.” That is exactly what I referred to in the beginning. Why is it that the Left and the liberals are siding with the CIA against Trump, and not against the coup? That is the result of this process.

How did the CCF work? Remember that we are soon celebrating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, in which the United States and the Soviet Union fought together in the fight against Nazism. On the 26th of April in Thurgau near the Elbe, there will be a celebration of when the American and Soviet soldiers met for the first time. This was a very emotional event. For the Russians, this goes extremely deep, because they lost 27 million people in World War II.

They have absolutely not forgotten that, and they feel a tremendous sense of betrayal, after they allowed, for example, the German unification in 1989, that all the promises given to them were broken that NATO would never expand to the East, never to the borders of Russia. This is a whole other story, but going back to this unified fight of the Americans and the Soviet Union, this was the case when Franklin D. Roosevelt was still President, who had unfortunately a very untimely death at the end of the Second World War. When Harry S Truman came in, he was a much smaller man, and we all have heard what Lyn said when he was in India, and got the news, that the soldiers around him were asking “What do you think this signifies?” And Lyn said, I think we just lost a great man for a very little man.

Truman Presidential Library

President Harry Truman applauds British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946.

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It was little man Truman who succumbed to the influence of Churchill in the postwar period. The great alliance between the Americans and the Soviets was replaced. Churchill announced in his infamous Fulton, Missouri speech on March 5, 1946, practically what became the Cold War. That meant that in the United States, elements of what President Eisenhower would later call the military-industrial complex—which has turned in the meantime into what people mistakenly call the Deep State—is really the British subversion of the American intelligence services. They got more influence.

In order to change the positive alliance between the Americans and the Soviets into a Cold War, and therefore a geopolitical confrontation, they thought that they had to change the axioms of thinking in the American people, but also in the European people. They had to change that which had allowed Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was after all very much anti-Wall Street,— and they wanted to make sure that these values were absolutely replaced.

In the United States, it was the attack on the tradition and heritage of Roosevelt, and in Europe it was especially that they thought they had to really destroy the roots of the people in their European Classical tradition. The CCF, under the leadership of Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner, who at that time was the head of the Office of Policy Coordination in the State Department, led the effort. The CCF later was moved into the Department of Covert Operations, and then proceeded to set up cultural warfare in 35 countries. It set up 20 major cultural magazines; it controlled practically without exception all art exhibitions, concerts, who would become a famous painter, a famous author or musician. Many of the people who cooperated were unaware of what they were part of; but some of them absolutely were aware.

Freie Universität Berlin

Ernst Reuter, Mayor of West Berlin, welcomes the delegates to the 1950 Congress for Cultural Freedom, established to destroy Classical culture.

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The CCF was a continuation of the Frankfurt School, which the Second World War had moved into exile in the United States. It was taken over by the U.S. intelligence services. One was Herbert Marcuse, another was Theodor Adorno. In a 1949 essay, “Cultural Critique and Society,” Adorno wrote that after the atrocity of Auschwitz, no one could write any poems anymore. He also had the absolutely insane idea that German idealism, like that of Friedrich Schiller, leads automatically to radicalism and Nazism.

That is something I really want to make a point for people to think about. The image of man associated with the German Classical period, with the thinking of people like Lessing, Bach, Beethoven, Schiller, Humboldt, and many others, is the idea that man is principally good, man is limitlessly perfectible. The aesthetic education allows for all potentialities in the human being to develop into a beautiful soul, into a beautiful mind, into genius.

This idea of the potential of every human being to contribute through his or her self-perfection to the common good of humanity, is a very beautiful idea of man. And it has absolutely nothing to do with, and is the total opposite of Nazi ideology, which was a blood and soil ideology, the racist idea that the Aryan race is superior to the colored races. That is what you find today in some people who say that the emergence of China marks the first time there is a threat coming from a non-Caucasian race to the West. Here you have it; that is Nazi ideology. I don’t need to tell you who says these things.

Now, one component in understanding the work of the CCF is that at that time, the CIA started the idea that it is OK to lie. That if you have a national security reason or whatever you call it to be such a reason, this idea allows you to just say whatever you want, and to put into the world all lies possible as long as you have creditable deniability and you can pull your neck out of the situation later on. Remember, more recently, John Bolton said that it is completely legitimate to lie for such a reason.

How the Classical German culture, which was probably the most culturally advanced period in the history of mankind—and I will debate anyone who wants to pick a fight with me on this—ended up in the pit of the twelve years of National Socialism, is obviously one of the most important questions. How does a great culture plunge into the depths of horrible things? This is a question which Americans had to go through in some recent administrations as well.

How did the beautiful idea of the American Revolution turn into what was the policy of interventionist wars and everything else we know?

That transformation in Germany is a long story; a lot of things went into it. The Romantic movement started maybe innocently as a literature movement, became political and was taken over very quickly. The cultural pessimism which went with it; the destruction of the Classical forms through Romanticism; the actual cultural pessimism of people like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the different youth movements; the anti-technology youth movements before World War I. Then, World War I, which was a long-orchestrated, British-steered event. The Versailles Treaty, which was completely unjust and could not function for a peace order. The Great Depression of 1929 and the beginning of the 1930s, and then finally World War II, and the takeover by the Nazis. But this is a long, complex story, with many factors going into it. A lot of manipulations. And the role of the British can be traced in many of these aspects.

I will say this: To say that the argument of Adorno, that it was German idealism that led to the Nazi atrocity, is just one of these absolute lies.

The CCF proceeded to deliberately attack Classical music, Classical culture, Classical painting, Classical poetry. It had an enormous repertoire. For example, in 1952, it conducted a one-month-long music festival in Paris, which it called “Masterpieces of the 20th Century,” with more than 100 concerts, ballets, and operas, introducing all the modernist composers, atonal music, twelve-tone music, Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Claude Débussy, Benjamin Britten. Some of these are fully atonal, some are mixed forms, but it was all meant to destroy the idea of Classical composition.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche with Professor Norbert Brainin, first violinist of the Amadeus Quartet, in 1994.

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Motivführung

Why is this so absolutely bad? Because a chromatic scale in which all tones have an equal status, eliminates the possibility of the higher degrees of freedom, which you have if you have a polyphonic, harmonic contrapuntal composition, because it eliminates the possibility of ambiguity, of moving from one key into another, of creating and fully exhausting a musical idea. It completely eliminates the idea of Motivführung, discussed so many times by Norbert Brainin, the first violinist of the Amadeus Quartet, in long, long beautiful discussions with Lyndon LaRouche: namely, the idea that you have a musical idea—a poetical idea, put into music—and then, through thorough composition, you develop this, you exhaust the potential, and you come to a conclusion.

Now, that technique, which should be studied, has been described by Norbert Brainin in beautiful master classes he gave with the Schiller Institute, for example, in Slovakia. Lyn has written in the book Dennis showed you in the beginning, Think Like Beethoven, how Joseph Haydn’s music was developed further by Mozart in his Haydn Quartets, and reached the complexity of the late Beethoven quartets.

Lyn said that Beethoven’s achievement in counterpoint, has never been approximated by any composer to date. I absolutely agree. Lyn even said—and I know some people were upset when I mentioned this recently in a webcast—that Beethoven is the absolutely towering giant of all composers. People said, “What about Bach?” I’m not denying Bach. But I have a quote from Lyn in which he says, “Beethoven marks an Everest, which dwarfs even Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Schumann and Brahms to be foothills.” Now, I’m not deprecating these composers. I just want to say that Beethoven is in a completely different league of composition, by applying this method, really in the most advanced form.

Now, Lyn wrote over 100 pieces on music; in this book you find only some of them. In 1976, he wrote an article called, “Laughter, Music, and Creativity,” which for Lyn was pretty much the same thing. He said that twelve-tone and atonal music is a reactionary retreat led by dried-out 20th-century composers who cannot compose. He again makes the argument, that the degrees of freedom are completely eliminated.

One important point, in my view, in this whole thing, is what the harmonic contrapuntal, polyphonic form of composition allows: it creates stress; it creates dissonance. But then, in a lawful way, in an expandable, lawful way, these stress moments are resolved, and you have the sense of completion. In atonal and twelve-tone music you have a lot of stress, for sure, but it’s never resolved. The audience is left with a complete feeling of disarray. And, therefore, exactly what the purpose and beautiful function of great Classical music is—that it elevates the emotions, that it elevates the mind, makes mankind more noble—that is completely destroyed. The whole idea of aesthetical education is denied, it’s opposed, it is meant to be made extinct. That is why this is such a devastating attack on the idea that a moral improvement of the population can be accomplished.

What Lyn wrote in “What Is Music, Really?” which he gave as a talk on May 10, 2015, is that beauty is creativity per se, and the aim of creativity is to unleash the beauty of mankind. That was something that was well known by many people. It was known by Confucius, who said that if you look at the music of a country, you can say what kind of state that country is in—whether it’s disorganized, whether it’s functioning, or not.

CC

“Many times before he could continue working on his physical discoveries, Albert Einstein would play the violin, and put himself in that kind of a creative mindset.”

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Now, if you apply that Confucian principle to the United States, or much of Europe today, you can say these countries don’t function very well, because their music is, for the most part, pretty horrible. It was also what Albert Einstein, for example, celebrated. Many times before he could continue working on his physical discoveries, he would play the violin, and put himself in that kind of a creative mindset.

That is why we cannot allow the destruction of Beethoven. That is why we defend Classical music, and not allow people to desecrate the greatest music ever written. That is why I wrote this appeal, asking not only all the lovers of Classical music in Germany, but actually all over the world, that we declare this Year of Beethoven, to be the end of the tolerance for ugliness.

I’m not saying we should forbid the ugliness. Let them have their atonal concerts. Let them have three people in the audience, because normal people really don’t like that kind of music, but, let them have it. I’m not for banning it. I’m just saying they should not have the right to destroy the great compositions of the Classical composers, just because they cannot write any music themselves which is beautiful.

I also absolutely want to urge that the Beethoven Year must also be the year of the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche. If you read what Lyn writes about music, it should be astonishing to you to find somebody who’s a total politician, a statesman, an economist, a scientist, who also has such unbelievable knowledge of music.

I can remember one time, when Lyn was talking with Norbert Brainin for two days, when he visited us at our farm, that after these two days, Norbert Brainin said: “This man knows more about music than I do.” I absolutely agree with that. Because Lyn knew not only the inner meanings of all the works, the historical periods, but he also knew especially what it meant to “play between the notes,” to have a sense of the inner intention of the composers, and he could communicate that in the most beautiful way.

Exonerate Lyndon LaRouche!

The fact is that Lyn’s ideas are being denied to the American people, and to much of the world population, because of his unjust incarceration, because of the same apparatus which was behind the coup against Trump: I think that when President Trump said a few days ago, that one must guarantee that what happened to him, with Russiagate and with the coup attempt, must never happen again—well, there is one absolutely durable way this will never happen again, and that is the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche. Because, when that happens, it will become clear, that the idea of running the world as an empire based on the Anglo-American special relationship—which was put into place by British infiltration since Teddy Roosevelt, and which has been revived by many Presidents in the meantime—is the same apparatus that tried to destroy the Presidency of President Trump.

So, if my husband is exonerated, for the sake of the beauty of his ideas, then a durable freedom in the United States, with the United States returning to be a republic, will be absolutely possible.

So, let’s make this Year of Beethoven, the year of the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche.

SCHILLER INSTITUTE WEBCAST

A Moment of Optimism for Humanity, As the Old System Collapses

C-SPAN

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, rips up her copy of the speech, after President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on February 4, 2020.

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This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s February 5 weekly webcast, featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello. I’m Harley Schlanger with the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is February 5th, 2020.

We’ve been going through weeks of intense political activity and strategic developments. Let’s start with the State of the Union Address which was delivered last night by President Trump. Helga, what were your impressions from hearing the President speak?

Trump’s State of the Union Address

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: The State of the Union address by President Trump expressed an overwhelming optimism. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ripping up her copy of Trump’s speech, was more telling about the state of the Democratic Party than Trump’s speech.

Trump mentioned a couple of extremely important things: the Artemis [Moon mission], for which he wants to have full funding; that he wants to put a lot of emphasis in science education. Very good was the young black student, who wants to be an astronaut, who does not want to look up to the stars but look down at the Earth from there. There were some very strong elements in the speech. Consider that together with the expected acquittal today in the Senate—it’s too early to be sure, but I think one can assume it—that means that Trump will be freed from all the nasty maneuvers of Russiagate, Ukrainegate, and the impeachment process.

It’s now important that people, especially the American people, give him the support to address those things which absolutely need to be addressed now, because we are still in a strategically very difficult moment. We still have the financial crash pending, expressed, among other things, by the fact that the Federal Reserve has increased the repo credit from $80 billion some time ago to $120-$125 billion per day, and that underlines the urgency to really have a new financial architecture, before it is too late.

Call for a Great Nations Summit

On January 3, I proposed a summit among the Presidents of the United States, Russian and China, and I think the coronavirus crisis emphasizes that it would be extremely necessary that this summit also include India’s Prime Minister Modi. This summit should address the global questions, the need for a New Bretton Woods system, and to have all kinds of other problems be jointly gotten out of the way.

NASA

Artist’s concept of Boeing’s Space Launch System rocket and Lockheed Martin’s Orion spacecraft, prepared for launch to the Moon.

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The moment we are in right now is really an optimistic one. We can, and must, use this opportunity to move forward with the LaRouche program: the Four Laws—Glass-Steagall, a national bank, New Bretton Woods, and a crash program for fusion and international space cooperation—and mobilize full funding for Artemis from the Congress. That is the basis to move the world away from a very dangerous moment and get into safer waters. But it’s not yet done, so I think it’s just that the moment is ripe to really put in a new paradigm, to go back to the American System of economy, rather than being the dependency of the City of London and Wall Street. It’s a good moment, but momentum is extremely important to move this all forward.

Schlanger: You mentioned the freeing of Trump, which will likely come with the acquittal. I noticed he did mention the coming 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. This would be an ideal opportunity, wouldn’t it, for him to sit down with Putin as part of your proposal for a three-party summit. Given that the attack on him was initially started around Russia, this does give him that opening, doesn’t it?

Zepp-LaRouche: That’s a very good moment. Even so, that’s the end of April, still two months away, and in those two months a lot can happen. But I think if that is seriously put on the agenda as part of the April 26 anniversary of the meeting [of Soviet and U.S. troops] on the Elbe River, or at the latest on May 9 in Moscow, celebrating the end of World War II, I think this would be indeed something that everybody in the United States, and internationally, should support. Because we need to get out of this geopolitical confrontation, we need to stop making Russia and China the enemy. Because it should be clear that all the major problems of this world can be worked on and solved, only if the major powers work together.

I therefore call on people to absolutely have this idea in mind and support the idea that President Trump should accept Putin’s offer and go to these two meetings.

Coup Plotters Defeated in Senate Vote

—What Next?

Schlanger: Even with today’s vote in the Senate, Adam Schiff and others are still insisting that they are going to continue investigations, and maybe will even bring up new articles of impeachment. But on the other side, it does open the door to Senate investigations into where this came from, who’s behind it. Are you expecting that this will be followed up by Senate Republicans and also the Attorney General?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. Some of them have already said so, such as Senators Chuck Grassley and Rand Paul. Grassley and Ron Johnson have demanded that all the documents pertaining to the 2016 election campaign, and what the Democrats did at that point with Ukraine, should all be published and made available to the American people. Then you have the Barr-Durham investigation, which now should take on full speed.

The Democrats, if they still can think—which is questionable at this point—are well-advised to reflect on why they lost so much, and whether they wish to be wiped out completely as a party, should they continue. The absolute debacle of the Iowa caucus election really demonstrates that they don’t have their act together. The population is clearly fed up with Russiagate, with the impeachment process, with the Democrats who are obsessed in not addressing the issues of livelihood, jobs, and so forth—what the population really cares about. When Nancy Pelosi ripped up Trump’s speech, I had the memory of the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin who, when outmaneuvered as he was trying to get the daughter of the queen, ripped himself into two pieces. That is the image I have of Nancy Pelosi—Nancy Rumpelstiltskin Pelosi, one should call her from now on.

The Democrats have proven themselves absolutely incapable of reflecting on why they lost in 2016. In a certain sense, this is an example of the Erinyes working. They condoned everything the Bush administrations did against my husband—they stole the delegates in Arkansas which my husband had won, in a complete violation of any kind of practice. Right now is the moment to really escalate also the campaign for the exoneration of my husband, because as I said, and as we have discussed many times, Americans urgently need to read in depth the works of my husband, to study the proposals of physical economy, to really look at the broad scope of scientific method my husband developed, which is absolutely what is needed at this moment.

And that is why his exoneration is so crucial, because people have to have an unbiased view of the works of Lyndon LaRouche, in this critical moment.

UN/Rick Bajornas

Michael Bloomberg

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A Bloomberg in the Wings

The biggest danger right now is really that they will try after this Iowa debacle, to pull out Bloomberg, who is now gearing up; he’s doubling his spending as a billionaire trying to buy up the vote; he has just hired 2,000 more helpers for most of the states; it’s just something which is very dangerous.

Bloomberg, together with Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England, who has replaced Bloomberg as the UN’s Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, are the two people who are right now the biggest threat to the world economy. If they succeed in any way in imposing their green financing schemes, this will create absolute havoc. Green financing, circular economy—this is really dangerous. And the Democratic Party changed the rules so that Bloomberg can come in at a late point [during the primaries]. He’s the one who is supposed to pick up the pieces from where the Iowa caucuses left them.

So, while the moment is good and Trump is out of the box, it is not yet in any way the time to become complacent. The most crucial battle is going to take place now, and the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche is an absolute centerpiece to get the full-fledged new paradigm program realized, hopefully at one of these summits, either at the meeting on the Elbe or following that very soon, as quickly as possible.

Schlanger: The Democrats have not yet learned from the failure to defend Lyndon LaRouche. In fact they were part of the attack on him and have embraced the very green fascist policies he was warning about. The voter turnout in Iowa was a much lower than expected, because the Democratic Party is anti-growth, anti-science, and the jokes are, the facts are, that they couldn’t even count the number of votes in a gymnasium. How would anyone, therefore want to give them control over the world’s largest economy? The Iowa election proves you don’t need Putin to meddle, in order to screw up the Democratic Party!

CGTN

Leishenshan Hospital: Wuhan, China’s second emergency specialty hospital built in response to the coronavirus outbreak, under construction as of February 3, 2020. Construction was completed February 6, and admission of patients began February 8.

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Coronavirus and Racism Against China

Helga, I think we should turn now to what’s going on with China and this coronavirus outbreak, how serious it is, the reaction to it from around the world, and the absolutely insane opportunism of the anti-China McCarthyite mob, using this moment to attack China. What’s your assessment?

Zepp-LaRouche: For objective reasons, it has to be stated, that when the World Health Organization (WHO) Director General said that China has established a new standard of how to deal with such pandemics or epidemics, that is absolutely true. The Chinese government has demonstrated an unprecedented degree of efficiency. They quarantined 60 million people, two major cities; they have established an incredibly fast system to erect three hospitals of more 1,000 beds each, in Wuhan; and they have published the genome for other scientists in other countries to study, because of the urgency of a vaccine.

China has done a magnificent job, and it’s also important that the leading health organizations such as the WHO and also the World Association for Infectious Diseases and Immunological Disorders—WAIDID, as it’s called—have reported that there is no need to exaggerate measures; they advised against a travel ban—I think now twenty-two countries, nevertheless, have banned Chinese people from entering, or others who have been in China in the last two weeks. WAIDID has said that such practices are exaggerated and not advisable.

Gage Skidmore

Wilbur Ross, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, says the coronavirus now hitting China is good for the U.S.

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On the other side, along with WAIDID, the Chinese media and Chinese government spokesmen have expressed an understanding that other countries have to take measures to protect their own citizens. So, it’s one thing that President Trump has said that he wants to give support to China, but unfortunately you have such really unbelievable statements by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, for example, who said, that the coronavirus now hitting China is good for the United States, because it brings back jobs to the United States. It is unbelievable that he was not ashamed to say a thing like that!

Der Spiegel

Cover caption reads: “The Coronavirus: Made in China. When globalization becomes a mortal danger.”

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Then, you have a barrage of racism breaking out. Der Spiegel magazine in Germany outdid everybody by having a cover photo showing a supposedly Chinese person with a face mask, with goggles, with earphones, with a hoodie—looking like a monster. The headline is “Coronavirus Made in China.” There are many reports that Chinese people or even Asian-looking people are being stopped from entering restaurants or other facilities in the United States, for example. This is really bad—the anti-China, “yellow peril” hysteria being peddled by some people. People who say this should be blasted for their racism.

This is exactly the kind of thing expressed by the former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, Kiron Skinner, who warned that China constituted the first non-Caucasian threat to the United States. It’s really time to overcome this kind of racist bias. People should work together on such great challenges. This is one moment in which you need to put the common aims of mankind into focus. It’s the great divide, where the people who are racists reveal themselves. They should be disrespected and ostracized for their disgusting views.

Locust Plague in East Africa: A Moral Test

Schlanger: Speaking of racism as it’s related to disease, we have also the need for cooperation to deal with the plague of locusts that is hitting East Africa. Again, this is potentially very devastating. What’s your sense of potential for cooperation there? And what does it say about the effects of green policy that made these large volumes of insects possible?

Cc/Laika ac

A gigantic swarm of Desert Locusts in Madagascar in 2016.

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Zepp-LaRouche: This is the biggest locust threat in, I think, seventy years. The swarm is threatening to move from Kenya and Ethiopia into Sudan and Eritrea. It could increase 500 times between now and the summer. Every day, these locusts are consuming the equivalent amount of food necessary to nourish 2,000 people—even at this early stage. You can see that a large number of people are now threatened with death if this is not contained, and Africa has nowhere near the kind of robust measures or systems to conduct effective area spraying—they’ve done a little bit, but nowhere near the level needed.

This locust plague is something for which we should call on the international community to act. The United Nations has said $76 million is needed immediately to widen the spraying across East Africa—which is really absolutely peanuts—it’s about half of what Mike Bloomberg has spent since December on advertisements to promote his green fascist agenda; it gives you a sense of proportion.

We are therefore calling on the international community to step in and provide airplanes and spray of the type and in the amounts needed. This is a test case. Will the world community act and support a continent clearly on the verge of developing, or allow Africa to be set back quite a bit? It’s really a test of the morality of the rest of the world, how we react to this danger. This should be brought up; all the governments that have the means—the United States, the Europeans, Japan, India, Russia, China, and others—they should all work together to help the African continent defeat this danger and start a real industrialization program instead.

Potential Relative Population-Density

Schlanger: This goes back to one of the central points that your husband always made in terms of these fights, that what we’re dealing with, is the legacy of colonialism. You had the ugly specter of Prince Charles at Davos lecturing the world on how we have to deal with overpopulation and climate. You had George Soros there, doing something similar.

It’s important, Helga, when we talk about the LaRouche economic perspective, that people really understand the meaning of potential relative population-density, to get over this green fascism. Why don’t you just say a couple things about that, because it is one of the crucial points that you’ve always intervened with, in fighting against the depopulation policy.

Zepp-LaRouche: It’s very unfortunate that, for example, former German President Horst Köhler, who also used to be the head of the IMF, has recently come out with the need for a so-called “circular economy.” This is absolutely crazy. He calls for the de-carbonization of the world economy—the great transformation of the economy, and for a “circular economy”—meaning an economy that has no growth. It should be obvious that if you were to implement that in Germany, one of the countries with the best industrial potential in the world, a no-growth economy would guarantee that you would not be able to fight something like the coronavirus. You could not make breakthrough discoveries to fight new diseases, and you would leave the developing countries in whatever condition they are.

Such no-growth formulations are used by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the Director Emeritus of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who many years ago said that the so-called “carrying capacity” of the planet is only one billion people.

It is a fact, that if the world were to “exit” nuclear energy, which Germany stupidly has done (nobody in his right mind understands why Chancellor Angela Merkel ever did that; it was the biggest mistake in her entire time in office) and also stops using fossil fuels, and only goes with so-called alternative energy, such as solar and wind, then the energy-flux density available for use in what’s left of the economy will be sufficient for no more than one billion people.

BoE

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England.

CC/Christliches Medienmagazin

Horst Köhler, former President of Germany (2004-2010).

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Green Financing Is a Mass-Murderous Policy

So, when you hear people talking about “green financing,” or circular economy, you should be alarmed. What they really mean is “depopulation.” I know, from having been an opponent of this policy ever since the Club of Rome published its stupid lies about the limits to growth. Meadows and Forrester wrote their book on this in the early 1970s. The intention has always been to depopulate the world. They are ideologues; these are people who are in the tradition of Malthus, of the British East India Company. They have never really changed their outlook. These are people who believe the slave trade was okay, that the opium trade was okay. They’re the ones who presently could not care less about many people dying in Africa: Their outlook is, “Oh, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, this is a good thing. It helps to balance the planet.”

We have a real problem, in that people do not understand the connection between energy-flux density in the production process, and the potential relative population-density that can be maintained with a specific level of production. If you want to have the seven billion people alive today to have a decent life, you have to go to the fourth generation of nuclear energy production; you have to replace relatively unsafe nuclear plants with inherently safe nuclear plants, like the pebble-bed reactor, like the HTGR (high-temperature gas-cooled reactor), and also models based on the thorium fuel cycle. You have to join in a crash program for a fusion economy. Then, all of these problems can be managed.

Michael Bloomberg, Mark Carney and, unfortunately also Horst Köhler (who I had hoped would be a little bit better, but he has collapsed morally, really badly), all of these people are ideologues. They want to make money with green financing, but there is a much, much uglier and darker side to what they are proposing. They think that certain people should be protected, certain people who belong to the upper crust—the one percent of people who have the privileges of the “casino economy”—but that the large mass of the human population should be decimated, that the vast majority of people are “useless eaters” who should be gotten rid of.

Now, some people may think this sounds too harsh. But there is no need for Africa to be in this condition! People are freaked out about China developing Africa, but why did the West not industrialize Africa a long time ago? Why did the West not do what the Chinese are now doing, namely, to bring in infrastructure, industrial parks, energy, communications, thereby creating the infrastructure conditions for the continent to develop? Most European nations pursued colonial policies for hundreds of years. The IMF conditionalities were a continuation of that. The green financing is an effort to keep the industrial development of Africa, Latin America, and some Asian countries from occurring.

We are really looking at the end of a paradigm of oligarchism, colonialism, and imperialism—an ugly thing that must be urgently overcome. The optimism expressed by President Donald Trump in his State of the Union Address; the very important statements of Russian President Putin saying that Russia can play an important role in electrifying all of the African continent, to turn the lights on in Africa; and what China has promised in terms of overcoming poverty around the world, including Africa—that is the orientation with which the other major powers have to cooperate.

CGTN

Why did the West not do what the Chinese are now doing—developing Africa? Chinese firms are heavily involved in many construction projects across Africa. Shown: China’s Sinohydro Corp. is building Burundi’s biggest hydropower station, in Rumonge Province. Sixty Chinese personnel are working with 400 local Burundians, as of November 5, 2019.

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Those countries that want to stick with what is really a tradition of eugenics and genocide, should be outmaneuvered. A different agenda must now be put forward; it is a very serious matter.

The locust plague in Africa cannot be treated more lightly than the coronavirus epidemic. Even though it may not be same kind of threat, as far as spreading to other countries, addressing it is nevertheless a moral indicator of where the human species stands.

Schlanger: On the Schiller Institute website, you can find articles Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche has written on this topic over the years. I would urge people to not just read these, but to circulate them, and to join the Schiller Institute, and join our mobilization right now.

German Farmers Fighting for Survival

Helga, speaking of the mobilization, we had the opportunity to hear from a farmer who has been involved in the demonstrations in Germany, who spoke at the BüSo party conference over the weekend. Demonstrations are continuing in Europe, and now it looks as though we are beginning to pull together U.S. support for that. How does this fit in to the picture you’ve just described?

Zepp-LaRouche: The German farmers have been suffering for a very long time because the prices they get from the food chains, primarily, is maybe half of what they need. I think the different food chains have now lowered the milk price to EU9 cents per liter, when the dairy farmers need EU40 cents to break even—and that is not even a parity price.

These farmers in their flash-mob tractorcades—which they plan to continue—are fighting for their survival. The Yellow Vest movement in France and the protesting farmers in Germany are now beginning to reassess what they have to do. They are beginning to understand that they have to address the larger picture: For example, why would anybody wish to wipe out agriculture, to destroy that which is the basis for the nourishment of the entire population?

When some of our colleagues in the United States were briefing organizations there, like the Kansas Cattlemen’s Association, and others in North and South Dakota, Minnesota and Virginia, they discovered that those organizations did not know anything about the situation of the German farmers, or the situation in Europe in general. When they learned about it, they immediately said: “Look, we have to express our solidarity.” The U.S. farmers are facing a similar crisis. They sent messages of support.

Different social groupings in each country, but also groupings among different nations, must understand that this is a question that can be solved only at the highest level. There are no partial solutions. We need a new financial system, a credit system, a New Bretton Woods, according to the real intention of Franklin D. Roosevelt—which was much better than the Bretton Woods as it was implemented by people like Truman and Churchill after FDR’s death. Because Franklin D. Roosevelt was absolutely committed to providing massive credit for the industrialization of the developing countries. That is an additional component which needs to be added in such a New Bretton Woods agreement.

Be Optimistic—Join the Schiller Institute!

Once we decide to stop geopolitics, to stop thinking about profit for the few, but instead concern ourselves with the development of the whole human species, all the problems can be solved. We have Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin, and Modi—and once these four have formed an alliance, then others can join; there are many other useful and decent leaders who can bring their countries into this alliance. We need to have a completely different system, a system that is devoted to the common good, and not to the speculators. This will mean a national bank in every country and connecting these national banks in the form of a credit system. With that we can solve all problems. But we have to think big. If we each only look at our own interests, we will miss the opportunity that is right in front of us.

So, join the Schiller Institute! Because we are spearheading this fight internationally. We will present more programs on what has to be done. This is our expertise. We published a very important study, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge. There are already two volumes of that. We also published another, complementary study, Extending the New Silk Road to West Asia and Africa. These are the blueprints of how we can fix this world.

I can only appeal to you: Join the Schiller Institute! Let’s really end this sad period of history, in which some portions of the human species are condemned to poverty and backwardness. We have it in our hands to create a truly human world with a new paradigm of all nations, working together for the common good of all of us.

Schlanger: I’ll add one more thing. For those of you out there who are still pessimists—and I see it all the time with some of your responses on the YouTube page of the Schiller Institute website—all you have to do is look at this fight around Russiagate/Ukrainegate, and realize this is a fight that we won! It was Trump’s optimism, but it was also the fight of the Schiller Institute, going out to the public, bringing up the real battle, and as Helga was just saying, looking at the big strategic picture, rather than at your own misery—that’s how we get out of pessimism.

So, Helga, thanks for joining us. Anything else you want to add?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think it’s the time to become active: People should not sit on the fence. There are moments in history when you really can change things. These are the “star-hours of history.” Such moments don’t come every day, but I think the year 2020 is one of them. An old system is collapsing, and the potential exists to establish a new and better system. Be conscious of this great opportunity. Join us!

Schlanger: OK. We’ll see you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. Till next week.

Nancy Pelosi

Owes Her Job to Michael Bloomberg

by Barbara Boyd

Gage Skidmore

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives.

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Feb. 6—The House flipped to a Democratic Party majority in 2018 because Michael Bloomberg spent more than $112 million on a self-defined project to do exactly that, in preparation for his 2020 Presidential bid. As a result, Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House. LaRouche PAC is presently examining Bloomberg’s independent expenditures, which were otherwise covered right after the election, and then promptly buried. The narrative, which replaced the nasty reality of Bloomberg’s purchases, had the Democrats recruiting new “fresh, moderate faces” who had campaigned and won on issues such as healthcare, by going door to door. In reality, many of the “fresh, moderate faces” were also former CIA or other intelligence officers, or former military personnel from our nation’s forever wars, or in many cases, lawyers. Of course, Bloomberg prefers prosecutors.

The profile that emerges is one in which Bloomberg seemed to be singularly focused on reinventing the Democratic Leadership Council and Blue Dog Democrats, which had functioned as the central political institutions of British neo-liberalism prior to Donald Trump’s election. He also supported a smattering of candidates clearly running on identity issues, making this part of his mandatory “apology tour” to establish street cred in the identity politics-obsessed Democratic party.

According to the New York Times, Democrats won 21 of the 24 races that Bloomberg had targeted, including 12 that were considered toss-ups. He did so by setting up a political action committee (PAC), the Independence USA PAC, which then ran polling operations in targeted districts, produced a ton of digital advertising, and then massively bought television ad time. Late in the campaign, that PAC bought ads produced by production companies that he paid. This independent expenditure campaign made Bloomberg the largest Democratic donor in 2018, dwarfing both George Soros and Tom Steyer, both of whom had also spent heavily in the 2018 election. For each of the races Bloomberg targeted, he spent $1-$3 million in independent expenditure ad buys.

Typical of Bloomberg’s ads were those on behalf of Lizzie Fletcher in Texas’ 11th CD, which ridiculed her opponent John Culberson because of his devotion to space exploration. At the same time he supported Kendra Horn, who campaigned as an advocate for NASA and space exploration in her Oklahoma race. Horn is, right now, as the chair of House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, responsible for the shredding the Artemis Moon mission.

Michael Bloomberg’s 2018 Winners

Here are the 21 beneficiaries of Mini-Mike Mussolini’s 2018 largesse (and their districts); he spent millions on each race:

Jason Crow (CO-06), former Army Ranger, lawyer.

Mikie Sherill (NJ-11), former Navy aviator, prosecutor, London School of Economics.

Chrissey Houlahan (PA-06), Air Force veteran, education entrepreneur.

Elaine Luria (VA-02), twenty-year Navy combat veteran and commander.

Jennifer Wexton (VA-10), former prosecutor.

Lucy McBath (GA-06), veteran of Bloomberg’s gun control efforts and mother of a shooting victim.

Donna Shalala (FL-27), Clinton Administration HHS Secretary and establishment hack.

Lizzie Fletcher (TX-07), lawyer.

Colin Allred (TX-32), lawyer, former pro football linebacker.

Kendra Horn (OK-05), lawyer, former congressional staffer, “space advocate” who is presently cutting Artemis.

Sharice Davids (KS-03), LGBT Native American, lawyer, mixed martial arts professional.

Elissa Slotkin (MI-08), CIA; Obama NSC, Iraq; State Department; Defense Department.

Haley Stevens (MI-11), Chief of Staff to Bloomberg crony Steven Rattner, who headed Barack Obama’s auto task force.

Katie Hill (CA-25), former homeless advocate and goat herder. She has since resigned for sexual indiscretions with both male and female staffers; connections to Fred Newman cult being explored.

Harley Rouda (CA-48), a “John Kasich Republican,” realtor. He changed his registration to Democrat to assist in defeating Dana Rohrbacher because of Rohrbacher’s rational views of Russia.

Mike Levin (CA-49), lawyer, green energy nut.

Kim Schrier (WA-08), pediatrician and gun control advocate.

Steven Horsford (NV-04), black; held former Senator Joe Neal’s seat in Nevada Senate until he ran for Congress.

Angie Craig (MN-02), touted as the first lesbian mother ever elected to Congress; previously a journalist and communications director.

Dean Phillips (MN-03), Goldstar son, liquor distiller, gelato entrepreneur.

Lauren Underwood (IL-14), senior advisor to Obama HHS, youngest black woman ever elected to Congress.

RATHER THAN WAR

Can the ‘Space Force’ Become the Platform for a ‘Second American Reconstruction’?

by Dennis Speed

White House/Shealah Craighead

Charles McGee, a 100-year-old former Tuskegee Airman and World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War veteran, with his 13-year-old great-grandson, Iain Lanphier, both recognized by President Trump in his State of the Union Address.

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Feb. 10—If, on or around the April-May 75th commemoration of the anniversary of the end of World War II, a world summit conference occurs involving Presidents Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump (and perhaps others), is it possible that prior public discussion of joint development of capabilities for a Strategic Defense of the Earth, as well as returning mankind to the Moon and on to Mars, could encourage those leaders to begin a transition to a new era of civilization?

In Donald Trump’s January State of the Union Address, the promise of such a future was, not stated, but adumbrated in the President’s homage to the 100-year old World War II veteran, Tuskegee Airman Charles Edward McGee, and his 13-year-old great-grandson. While many have worried correctly that such a space force might be used by elements of the British-influenced “military industrial complex” merely to promote confrontation with China and Russia, leading to even more dangerous opportunities for strategic miscalculation and disaster, it were wise to consider how vigorous public interest in a revitalized, NASA-based civilian space program could also indirectly influence that new institution, and direct the United States away from war, not toward war.

The recognition of the Tuskegee Airmen in the course of Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, is of particular significance, in that it was explicitly connected to his reference to the creation of the Space Force as the newest branch of the American military. President Trump said:

In the gallery tonight, we have one of the Space Force’s youngest potential recruits: 13-year-old Iain Lanphier, an eighth grader from Arizona. Iain has always dreamed of going to space. He was first in his class and among the youngest at an aviation academy. He aspires to go to the Air Force Academy, and then, he has his eye on the Space Force. As Iain says, “Most people look up at space, I want to look down on the world.”

Sitting beside Iain tonight is his great hero. Charles McGee was born in Cleveland, Ohio, one century ago. Charles is one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen—the first black fighter pilots—and he also happens to be Iain’s great-grandfather. After more than 130 combat missions in World War II, he came back to a country still struggling for Civil Rights and went on to serve America in Korea and Vietnam. On December 7th, Charles celebrated his 100th birthday. A few weeks ago, I signed a bill promoting Charles McGee to Brigadier General. And earlier today, I pinned the stars on his shoulders in the Oval Office. General McGee: Our Nation salutes you.

From the pilgrims to our Founders, from the soldiers at Valley Forge to the marchers at Selma, and from President Lincoln to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans have always rejected limits on our children’s future.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Founding Vice-President of the Schiller Institute, Amelia Boynton Robinson, addressing a rally in Washington, D.C. on November 25, 1984.

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Look Back to Dr. King

President Trump’s recognition of the African-American military component of the U.S. population, certainly larger at this time than at any other time in history, should be placed in the context of the march organized 35 years ago by the Schiller Institute on the occasion of the very first Martin Luther King Holiday weekend, a time when no one else in the country so celebrated.

On January 15, 1985, Martin Luther King’s actual birthday, ten thousand persons organized by the Schiller Institute demonstrated in front of the Capitol on the D.C. mall. On that occasion, the primary sign displayed was “We Have a Dream—Feed Africa and Build the Beam.” This referred to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, a policy conceived and designed by Lyndon LaRouche, the founder of this magazine. LaRouche had, in his 1984 campaign, including through groundbreaking one-half hour television addresses, sought to educate the American population as to how the laser machine-tool capabilities that were to be developed for the SDI could be applied to all areas of American production, leading to the most innovative technological breakthroughs for American production since the invention of the assembly line itself.

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Further, LaRouche designed a longer television presentation, called The Power of Labor, and a had published a companion book, So You Wish To Learn All About Economics?, all as campaign supplements, which allowed specialists to get inside of his thinking on these matters.

The January 1985 Martin Luther King Demonstration’s “Feed Africa and Build the Beam” demand was a product of that LaRouche initiative. Not only was that not strange: it was exactly in keeping with the original intent of King’s 1963 March on Washington, called the March for Jobs and Freedom, which was supported most notably by the United Auto Workers of Detroit. That city, which had the highest living standard of any urban center in America in 1963, could support that standard as a result of the increasing skill levels of its workforce, and it was through gaining those skill levels that King thought, as did the Tuskegee Airmen, that equality could be achieved.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

On January 15, 1985, in Washington, D.C., the Schiller Institute holds a 10,000-person “March for the Inalienable Rights of Man,” honoring Dr. Martin Luther King.

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So, in 1985, chapters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. King’s organization, joined the Schiller Institute in that demonstration from different parts of the nation. Notably, Amelia Boynton Robinson of Tuskegee, Vice President of the Schiller Institute, and heroine of the Selma Voting Rights Campaign of 1965, brought 500 people to that event. Earlier, Robinson had in 1981 assisted the Fusion Energy Foundation in an unsuccessful attempt to have Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where Charles McGee had trained in 1942 as a pilot, establish a fusion research program in the Department of Engineering. That same year, The Industrialization of Africa book of the Fusion Energy Foundation was the basis of an all-day forum, including instructors and LaRouche organization members, held at the Institute and sponsored by the Tuskegee student body president and student council.

Tuskegee, A Powerful Force

Tuskegee has for 140 years been on the forefront of American scientific education, focusing on the development of a skilled labor force as the primary weapon in winning the struggle for human rights anywhere, including in America. The Institute was founded as an industrial school and at the same time as a rear-guard action to mitigate the lethal effects of the post-Civil War backlash against President Ulysses Grant’s temporary elimination of the Ku Klux Klan. It was created by Booker T. Washington in 1881, just after the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia, at which Washington himself had been educated. Hampton (now Hampton University) has been the source of many African-American mathematicians, engineers and scientists, as was recently documented and portrayed in the book and movie Hidden Figures.

President Trump’s elevation of Charles McGee to Brigadier General was a way of recognizing literally thousands of American servicemen, many of whom gave their lives for a principle that they preferred to exemplify, rather than simply espouse: the General Welfare, “for ourselves and our posterity.” Though they themselves would not enjoy the benefits, it was in fighting and dying, in a war against fascism, for a country whose future generations would absolve that nation itself of its earlier compromises, that their identity truly lay. The fact that McGee’s great-grandson bore witness to the promise of this future, and that McGee was there to witness that promise as spoken by the American Presidency, revealed the deeper truth underlying the entire ceremony.

NASA

Former Tuskegee Airman Charles McGee being honored at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., during a Black History Month program on February 5, 2020. He was recently promoted to Brigadier General by President Trump.

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Prior to and during World War II, there were 992 aviators trained at the Tuskegee, Alabama airfield, and the Tuskegee Institute. Four hundred fifty-two of the 992 were pilots who fought in North Africa, Sicily, and Europe, under the command of Colonel Benjamin O. Davis. They were referred to as “the black Red Tail angels.” Four squadrons, comprising the 332nd fighter group, were a single fighter unit in the 15th Air Force. Sixty-six of the Tuskegee airmen were killed in aerial combat. Another 32 were either forced down or shot down. According to Lt. Col. Charles W. Dryden, the Tuskegee Airman who hailed from the Bronx who was nicknamed “A Train”:

For every black pilot there were ten other civilian or military black men and women on ground support duty. . . . Many of these men and women remained in the military service during the post-World War II era and spearheaded the integration of the arm forces in the U.S. Air Force in 1949.

How did he and others get involved, despite segregation and the non-existence of apparent means of entry to such exclusionary military programs?

Dryden, in his autobiography, writes:

Tucked way in the back pages of the Bronx Home News one Saturday was an article that I happened to see. Just a few lines announcing that the United States Congress had passed a bill enabling the War Department to accept applications for aviation cadet training from “Negroes.” Of course the recruiting office was closed on Saturday. That was the longest weekend of my life, but finally it was Monday and I opened the recruiting office at 39 Whitehall Street.

Dryden had been trained through the Civilian Pilot Training (CPT) program at City College of New York and had his flying license at age 20.

As Tuskegee Airman pilot instructor Daniel “Chappie” James, later to become the first African-American four-star general, said:

My mother used to say: “Don’t stand there banging on the door to opportunity, then, when someone opens it, you say, ‘Wait a minute, I got to get my bags.’ You be prepared with your bags of knowledge, your patriotism, your honor, and when somebody opens the door, you charge in.”

This is the stuff of which Charles McGee, the Tuskegee Airmen, and the World War II generation were made. The same can be said for the present moment with respect to a combined civilian and military science research and engineering emphasis, utilizing such a proposal as the “higher platform” from which to address the reconstruction of America’s cities, and America’s workforce. When somebody opens the door to the future of mankind, you charge in. That is the door that today’s public discourse, on matters of space, a new economic platform, and an end to war, must open, to encourage the dialogue of America with its former World War II allies, free of ideology and fear.

June 16, 1998

Where Franklin Roosevelt Was Interrupted

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

What we present below is not the full 1998 article. For the full text, click here. Embedded links have been added.

The full article by Mr. LaRouche first appeared in EIR Vol. 25, No. 28, July 17, 1998, pages 16-43. The article as presented here, starts on page 23 of that original publication.

FDR Presidential Library

“Men and women shape history, but that usually occurs, chiefly, in their roles as participants within the dynamics of long waves of history, waves often spanning several generations, even centuries,” LaRouche writes. President Franklin Roosevelt understood this principle, and acted to shift the dynamic of history for the better.

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During the period of the two World Wars, 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, the U.S.A. had provided, overwhelmingly, the decisive margin for the combined military victory of the U.S.A., the U.K., France, and their allies,[fn_1] through a U.S. agro-industrial mobilization modelled on the 1861-1876 success of the program launched under President Abraham Lincoln.[fn_2] As we have already stated, this, Henry C. Carey’s 1861-1876 American model, was adopted, with great success, by Bismarck’s Germany (from 1877 onward), by Meiji Restoration Japan of the 1870s, and by the Russia of Alexander II, D.I. Mendeleyev, and Count Sergei Witte, and was the basis for the agro-industrial development program designed by China’s Sun Yat-sen.

Had the same war-time, Roosevelt program of 1939-1945, been adapted to the rapid, post-war, agro-industrial development of new nations freshly freed from the debilitating hand of British, French, etc. imperialism, the U.S. and its partners would have enjoyed a continuing, post-war economic growth. The policy-shaping institutions established under the first two decades of such a post-war conversion program, would have virtually ensured further, planetary growth and stability throughout the 1945-1998 interval.

As we have stressed repeatedly, in earlier reports on this matter, the most crucial, “post-Hamilton” feature of Lincoln’s “American System,” and its revivals during two World Wars of this century, lies in the development of the principle of machine-tool design, originally by France’s Lazare Carnot, and the continued implementation of this, during 1794-1814, by Carnot collaborator Gaspard Monge’s École Polytechnique. This work of Carnot and the École was, like the economics of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, directly a continuation of the development of the principles of physical economy, and physics in general, by Gottfried Leibniz. The link to Lincoln’s industrial revolution, was provided by the influence of the École Polytechnique in the 1814-1815 transmission of these principles of machine-tool-driven technological progress to the United States Military Academy under Commandant Sylvanus Thayer. It was the scientific and engineering tradition of Thayer’s West Point, as exemplified by the international role of Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson, Alexander Dallas Bache, which exemplifies the way in which the U.S. Army and Navy developed the foundations of the great U.S. economic triumph of 1861-1876. It was this model to which the military planners of Woodrow Wilson’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s incumbency turned, to provide the sinews of victory for two World Wars.

Lazare Carnot, and Alexander Hamilton, two great exponents of the American system of economics.

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Look at the immediate prospect for post-1945 development of the economies of the former British, Dutch, Portuguese, and French colonies from this vantage-point.

As stressed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton,[fn_3] there are two keys to the development of a poorly developed land-area into a prosperous economy. On the one side, there is basic economic infrastructure: public transportation, water management (both latter substantially public works), and energy supplies. The other side, is what Hamilton identified as “artificial labor:” the increase of the productive powers of labor (per capita, and per square kilometer) through investment in scientific and technological progress. Obviously, capital expenditures for these two categories of items increase the total cost, measured in physical units of production, per capita and per square kilometer; but, this is more than offset by gains in net productive powers of labor.

In the eyes of the competent historian of economy, Hamilton covers this adequately,[fn_4] but the ignorance among today’s policy-shapers, especially among followers of the Mont Pelerin Society and U.S. House Speaker “Newt” Gingrich, shows the need to emphasize a few crucial points. Begin with transportation.

The typical function of public works in transportation, is to decrease significantly the cost and delay of moving goods (and people) from one specific location on the map, to another. Savings in time of transport, the vastly greater economies of rail over highway transport for long distances, reduction in spoilage, and so on, are savings to the economy (per capita and per unit of total land-area) which more than offset the capital investment required to create, develop, and maintain efficient public transport. For example, the ability to get cheap, reliable transport to and from East Oshkosh, may determine whether East Oshkosh, and the people within it, are able to function with reasonable competitiveness. In other words, rearranging the landscape to facilitate productive and related human activity.[fn_5]

Similarly, water, in short, is life. The history of our national economy, over two hundred years to date, is that our agriculture, our forests, our climate, require constant increase of the intensity of both fresh-water management, and of water purification and desalination. The quality and quantity of managed water-supplies, directly supplied to agriculture and other human consumption, have the most direct bearing upon the fostering of life. Otherwise, public waterways are, by far, the cheapest form of mass transport, per ton, per unit price, of bulk freight. Only when slower delivery would increase substantially the inventory-cost of supplying high-priced goods to the economy, do rail, truck, and air transport represent required options.

That economic history also shows, that, chemically, and otherwise, the level of technology which can be achieved, is delimited by both the quantities of energy supplies, and also the energy-flux-density of the energy-supplies applied to productive and other processes. All other things considered, the quantity and energy-flux-density of energy-supplies determines the level of technology which can be realized, and, thus, has a direct effect upon the possibility for increasing the productive powers of labor. This reshaping of the energy-profile is, like the development of public transportation, a shaping of the physical-economic landscape in a mode which enhances man’s per-capita and per-square-kilometer power over nature as a whole.

The role of Hamilton’s “artificial labor,” is expressed, in effect, in terms of required increases in the capital-intensity of production. The reader must note, that capital-intensity is not to be measured in financial-accounting terms, but in physical-economic terms. The following rule of thumb applies.

FIGURE 1

Total Economy

The 2nd edition (1995) of Lyndon LaRouche, Jr.’s economic book, So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics? presented his physical economics flow chart. On pages 25 and 26 in the current article, written in 1998, and republished here, he added the pedagogical tools of T (total per-capital output of productive labor) and P’ (margin of physical-economic profit).

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Reconsider here, the leading points stressed in the present author’s introductory textbook in physical economy.[fn_6] Take the total per-capita output of productive labor (labor directly employed in agricultural and industrial products, or, in engineering and related services essential to the physical maintenance of productive capacity and product quality): “T” = “Total.” Compare the percentile of this total labor-output with the corrected ration of physical goods and related essential services required to maintain the labor-force at the existing level of skill and productivity (the British “classical” economists’ and Marx’s “Variable Capital,” or “V”). In a similar way, compare, as capital costs, the ration of total output required for basic economic infrastructure, plus the ration required as production and closely related capital (similarly, “C” = “Constant Capital”). The latter includes the required flow of goods in intermediate stages, as required to maintain current output.

Now, still referencing the present author’s textbook presentations, make the following rough calculation. Include “d,” as the general overhead expense of society, apart from V and C. Then, subtract d+V+C from T = P' (margin of physical-economic profit). Then, it is required: P'/(C+V) increases as the ratio C/V increases, and the physical-economic content of V, per capita, also increases. In part, the margin of gain of P'/(C+V) is the result of development of basic economic infrastructure; in the final analysis, all gain, including that from development of infrastructure, depends upon the impact of investment in scientific and technological progress. Thus, P'/(C+V) increases as a function of per-capita C, which increases as a function of C/V. In short, a true “anti-entropic” function, rooted in those uniquely human (cognitive = creative)[fn_7] processes of validated discovery of scientific and cultural principles by means of which scientific and technological progress are generated.

We must stress here, once again: The key to the large-scale, sustained successes of modern society in this venture, since the 1792-1794, revolutionary reforms of Lazare Carnot, lies within what is best fairly described as “the machine-tool design” sector. By “machine tool,” we signify the notion of a machine-tool principle as developed by Lazare Carnot. However, our emphasis is upon the fact that any perfected design of a proof-of-physical-principle experiment, is also a model for a machine-tool principle, a technology. It is through such machine-tool designs, that scientific discoveries are transmitted efficiently into production. It is that transmission which is the chief source of the high rates of physical-economic gain seen in the 1861-1876 U.S. industrial boom, in the copying of that American model so successfully by post-1876 Germany, the war-time mobilizations of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, and in the U.S. space program. Such a combination of high rates of forced-draft scientific and technological progress, mediated through the channels of an expanding machine-tool-design sector, is the key to the possibility of a general, sustained rate of physical-economic growth, per capita, in South, East, and Southeast Asia today (for example).

LoC

President Harry Truman and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill arriving in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, where Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College.

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In other words, had the Truman administration not swung over to Winston Churchill’s anti-American policies, the proper course of action for the post-World War II U.S.A., would have been to mobilize and expand the U.S. machine-tool-design sector as a whole, to supply the nations of Asia, Africa, and the Americas the high rates of development of infrastructure and technology needed to fulfill Roosevelt’s vision of a post-war “American Century.” Instead, we substantially collapsed the levels of production, rather than capitalizing the accumulated investment in war-production capacity as an active new industry for development of the world as a whole. Under circumstances proposed here, the U.S. war-debt would have been rolled over, and ultimately liquidated, thus, by using it as a source of credit for large-scale, global ventures.

Although today’s conditions are far from those of 1945-1963, some of the most relevant features of a global development approach remain either the same, or are similar. Still today, the admittedly withering machine-tool-design sector of the world economy is limited to a few nations. Most notably, these are a few industrialized nations led by the U.S.A., Germany, and Japan. The largest potential for expansion of this supply lies in the military-scientific complex of the former Soviet Union, if those resources could be harnessed for this purpose, especially supplementary contributions to the machine-tool requirements of China, India, and relevant other nations.

OWI/Alfred T. Palmer

At the close of World War II, under FDR’s leadership, the United States had achieved a level of physical productivity beyond all historical precedents. The shutting down of that potential, beginning with President Truman, has resulted in today’s profound economic crisis. Shown: Assembling B-25 bombers at North American Aviation in Kansas City, Kansas, October 1942.

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The lessons for today, may be summarized as follows. The functions which must be performed have three aspects:

1. In developing nations such as China and India, to supply these nations with sufficient machine-tool-design inputs to enable those nations to effect high rates of increase of productive powers of labor. Without that, adequate rates of capital formation (in social terms) could not be sustained.

2. As an included part of this requirement, to assist such nations in establishing adequate local machine-tool and machine-tool-design capabilities. These must be adequate to provide machine-tool and related services (locally) within the economy.

Within the leading machine-tool-design export nations, the division of labor allotted to machine-tool-design and related capabilities must be increased to levels corresponding to relevant obligations on accounts 1 and 2.

3. Not only must the quantity and ration of the machine-tool-design sectors be increased accordingly. The rate of scientific and technological progress within the combined economies must be accelerated, by task-oriented, “science-driver” methods, to provide the required degree of second-order increase of productive powers of labor.

On these accounts, the task-orientation which should have been adopted for the 1945-1956 interval, parallels the admittedly different specific set of requirements for today.

Not everything we did during the late 1940s and 1950s was wrong on these accounts; the limited successes, such as those of the space programs of the 1950s and 1960s, were precious demonstrations of what could have been accomplished, had these virtuous undertakings, and their specific passions, been carried to broader and further accomplishments. There was simply not enough of the good, or even merely passable efforts which were mobilized; the good done did not rise to the threshold of overcoming the increasing rates of attrition which the U.S. and other economies suffered from the middle to late 1960s, onward, especially after 1971.

On the subjects of basic economic infrastructure, required rates of capital-intensive investment in the entire economy, and so on: There is a widespread error of presumption respecting the causal interrelations between so-called “micro-economic” and “macro-economic” scales of economic activity.[fn_8] The worst of these presumptions, is the popular delusion of those “social Darwinists” who assume, that by eliminating “inefficient” firms, for example, the remaining firms will represent a prosperous economy. Such fellows overlook the fact, that the performance of a (world, or national) economy is its performance as a whole: this, in terms of nothing less than its entire population, its entire land-area, and so on. It is the relationship of the total population to the totality of (ultimately) the universe, and, more immediately, the land-area occupied by that population, which defines the success or failure of economies. The totality of the social-economic process represents an interdependent system.

To prepare the reader for the promised, explicit comparison of the eight periods, the following, several additional points of review must be provided, on background.

Economy is Uniquely Human

Above, we have stated, once again, the central principle upon which any competent study of economics depends absolutely. Recently, we had stated this afresh in our EIR report, “The Substance of Morality.” We have identified this as the principle of anti-entropy repeatedly, in the author’s introductory textbook, and numerous other published locations. Economy requires a persisting rate of growth in what some might regard it as convenient to label “the per-capita rate of profit,” a rate of physical-economic growth, per capita, which depends upon increasing both the relative physical-economic expenditures for members of households, and increased per-capita rates of expenditure for basic economic infrastructure and productive-capital investments: e.g., [P/(C+V)]1< [P/(C+V)]2 ; (C/V)1 < (C/V)2; |V|1 < |V|2 [fn_9]

The origin of such increases in the productive powers of labor, is society’s realization of validated discoveries of principle. As set forth in “The Substance of Morality,”[fn_10] these discoveries, both cultural and physical-scientific, are each typified by validated discoveries of physical principle. As stated in earlier locations,[fn_11] such validated discoveries of physical principle form a Riemannian series, n → n+1, in which the expansion of the series corresponds to the ordering of the increase of mankind’s power over nature, both per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth’s surface-area.[fn_12] The characteristic of man’s action upon nature, per capita, is enhanced in degree by each transition from n to n+1.

The indicated Riemannian series suggests a crucial point respecting sustainable preconditions for global economic development. View the economic implications of education and longevity, for all members of households, from the standpoint of this series.[fn_13]

The development of the realizable cognitive potential at level n, is in correspondence with the individual’s accumulation of the experience of the mental act of replication of each among the relevant historical series of acts of discovery. The economic function of the nurture of each young individual, within the family household and education otherwise, must be situated in terms of that Riemannian function. The same applies to the series m → m+1 of multiply-connected principles of a Classical-humanistic artistic nature, as compared with physical-scientific aggregation n → n+1. The quality of social and material circumstances in the family household and community, the quality and duration of education and related cultural activities, and the corresponding vitality of adult life, are prerequisites of the level of productive and related powers to be considered.

Thus, to develop and maintain a certain per-capita potential productivity within the labor-force, the total, per-capita household standard of living, must be maintained (and improved), as Leibniz already warned in his 1671 Society & Economy.[fn_14] This means, that to maintain a potential productivity of one employed member of the household, the average living standard of the entire household must represent that standard of living. This does not signify a fixed productivity. It requires a rising productivity, and, therefore, a standard of living reflecting increased constructive leisure and education, together with rising (physical) energy-density[fn_15] and (physical) capital-intensity, for virtually all members of the household.

USN/Jon Husman

What is it that sustains and increases the productive powers of labor on the planet? Intellectual development; the use of methods that promote creativity in the minds of citizens; increases in energy-flux-density: These are the things that determine actual value. Shown: A welder at work aboard the nuclear-powered supercarrier USS John C. Stennis.

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It does not mean education tailored to fixed individual skills,[fn_16] but, rather, a life-long process of continuing upgrading of knowledge and technological capabilities, for all of the population, during each span of more than three successive generations. Just as a successful form of modern agro-industrial society requires an increasingly high composition of science and machine-tool-design related employed, so the cultural characteristics of the entire population’s education and daily life, must reflect this technological-cultural composition of the total division of labor of the population.

The conditions of household life, and education, of the entire population, required for a growing productive power of labor of a population functioning on the basis of technologies equal to a 1963 standard for the entire U.S. labor-force (for example), are a convenient, rule-of-thumb basis for defining the real content of a household minimum wage for an average household of that period. Implicitly, the standard for education and cultural life should be the Humboldt standard, as otherwise represented by the early U.S.A.’s best New England schools and Alexander Dallas Bache’s model for Philadelphia Central High School.[fn_17] This also assumes, at a minimum, the standard for maintenance and improvement of public works implicit in the conscience of the war-time Franklin Roosevelt administration.

Take, as an example, the increasing poverty of average quality of university education, first under Truman, later under Eisenhower, and, later, under Johnson and Henry Kissinger’s Nixon.

One of the leading positive features of the post-1945 periods, 1945-1964, was typified by the combination of such war-time programs as ASTP and of the post-war education portion of the “GI Bill of Rights,” to expand the standard of public education. Generally, veterans studying under the provisions of the “GI Bill,” were emotionally and intellectually more mature, and better performers than the comparable pre-war campus populations had been. There were, unfortunately, three “down sides” to this change in standards for education: 1) the tendency for intellectual mediocrity among aging veterans rushing to get on with building a career to support the family life-style they were fixed on establishing—what Schiller derided as the education of the “Brotgelehrten”; 2) a generalized moral-intellectual sterility, fostered by the combined impact of Truman-era “McCarthyism” and so-called “security” conditions attached to higher-paying careers—it was better for your standing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not to offend the FBI by exhibiting a tendency to be an independent and original thinker; 3) the cluttering of education with a proliferation of “garbage courses,” the latter predominantly by-products of increasingly faddish influences of junk literature and “culture appreciation” courses, complementing the usually dubious influence of psychoanalysis and radical-positivist currents.

For the convenience of today’s reader, the degenerating trends in popular entertainments and typical conversational patterns observed from the Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge periods of U.S. moral decay, cast important light on the immediate experience (from the northeastern and Midwestern regions of the U.S.A.) of a child and adolescent from the U.S. 1920s and 1930s.[fn_18] From 1929, until Pearl Harbor 1941, the special effect contributed by the experience of the 1930s “Great Depression,” was the sense of most families that they were déclassé, their nostalgic attitudes colored by a blend of fact and fantasy about their social status in the “better times” before the “Big Crash.” There was a lot of Arthur Miller’s Willy Lohman,[fn_19] and, perhaps, also more than a bit of Japan’s Prime Minister Hashimoto, in most of the population from those 1930s. A vivid recollection from what we then still considered “the shoe city” of the manufacturing world, Lynn, Massachusetts of the late 1930s, is relevant.

Still, in mid-1930s Lynn, Massachusetts, the main street-railway lines and Boston and Maine Railway passenger terminal, with its urine-reeking waiting-room area, intersected at Central Square. The overhead railroad bridge was the short base of the triangular shaped square. Along one of the two longer adjacent sides of that triangle, lay the principal cafeteria, Huntt’s Restaurant. The cafeteria’s touch of modernity was a black glass facing. Against the glass, downcast men leaned quietly, but ostentatiously, methodically applying toothpicks to their mouths, suggesting the meal which most of those leaners had been unable to afford, that day, from the cafeteria within. For those men, it was a convenient place to lurk, in hope of “a hustle.”

Among most of the families whose children and adolescent offspring were maturing in the “Great Depression” years, the ugliest word in that period’s Nazi-like, Gleichschaltung dogma,[fn_20] was “be practical.” “Popular” served generally as a substitute for truthfulness. “Be practical,” signified doing nothing to suggest that one was an independent thinker in any serious sense of the term.

That was the bad side of the post-war 1940s and 1950s. Not all capitulated entirely to the corruption of “being popular” and “being practical.”

Take two cases from the popular ideology of the science classroom, the myth of Isaac Newton and the related dogma of Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Cauchy, et al., that the interval of action is linear in the infinitesimally small. The proof against these popular classroom dogmas is elementary, but, nonetheless, all but a handful refuse to risk their popularity among fellow-professionals, or others, by showing that elementary proof. Yet, within those limits, most of the serious scientists and engineers from the 1940-1972 interval, did some serious cognitive thinking on the subject of particular physical principles, or related matters. Most of those, however, avoided challenging the most fearsome of the popularized myths: the Isaac Newton myth, for example.

Take the case of Classical musical education and practice. Consider a few exemplary points. Begin with tuning.

An approximation of Classical musical tuning, centered upon C=256 and a scale otherwise nearly well-tempered, has been found in bells from ancient China, and was established in Classical Greece. In modern times, the influence of Florentine bel canto voice-training, combined with the functionally related development of polyphony by J.S. Bach, established the modern Classical tuning, at C=256, and A= (approximately) 430-432. It is known, that singing in voice-training modes other than Florentinebel canto, does not permit the best result. It is also known, especially among Classical singing artists, that an “elevated pitch,” of A=440 or higher, leads to an “early death” of the professional singing voice.

Yet, on the combined authorities of the Russian bandmasters participating in Clement Prince Metternich’s 1814 Congress of Vienna, and the later authority of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, the official “concert pitch” was set, by the English-speaking world, at A=440, or higher.

The principles of Classical polyphonic composition, from J.S. Bach through Johannes Brahms, are strictly defined, both by the relevant compositions themselves, and the best performances.[fn_21] Departure from Classical, to Romantic or “free-wheeling” readings of the score, produces a mish-mash of sensual effects, which, like Liszt’s notorious effort at use of Mozart’s K. 475 principle, falls apart in the performance.

As the career opportunities of the Classical professional musicians became scarcer, the urgency of propitiating the commercial side of the concert and recording industries, grew, and the critical sensibilities of leading and other musical performers grew more and more opportunistic. The result should call the reader’s attention to the discussion of justice, in Book II of Plato’s Republic.[fn_22] In proportion to the degree, these students and scientific or artistic professionals were serious thinkers, a relatively greater, if only partial emphasis was placed upon reenacting original discoveries of physical (or, artistic) principle, from case to case. However, with very rare exceptions, no efficient standard of truthfulness existed for the populations of the post-1945 period. Their ability to think cognitively, was shrunk, until, recently, among the strata born after 1939-1943, it virtually no longer exists.

Thus, from the mid-1960s onward, a standard of truthfulness virtually did not exist for the “Sixty-Eighters” and “Generation Xers.”

This trend has meant, that those cognitive qualities which set the human individual apart from the beasts, have virtually vanished from the active life of the population generally, and, thus, from the economic process. Public and university education has become, today, a ruse by means of which learning much “information,” is deployed successfully, to free the students from the act of actually knowing.

Public domain

Aerial view of Levittown, Pennsylvania, circa 1959, modelled after 1929 planned community of Levittown in Long Island, New York. The suburban escape from the city has condemned the average wage-earner to forfeit an increasing percentage of the hours of their lives commuting to work.

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In a related matter, bearing upon education and cultural development of family households.

To understand how the Truman-Eisenhower periods’ monetarist financier interests looted the post-war U.S. population of its unpaid labor, take the case of what happened to a post-war innovation known as the National Defense Highway System.

From the late 1940s, onward, especially beginning the Eisenhower years, the pre-existing major urban centers of the U.S. were encouraged to become the prey of parasitical real-estate and related financial speculators. Thus, beginning with Long Island’s Levittown experiment, the ordinary wage-earner was obliged to lose an increasing percentile of the hours of the living day in commuting. The heyday of this trend began when the National Defense Highway System was energetically “privatized.” Shopping centers dominating adjoining tracts of suburban residential development, increased the number of hours of the day consumed by commuting, while the traditional income-streams into the former industrial-residential cities dwindled. For this increased tax on his and her life, the victim of commuting received no compensating income.

How many hours are spent in commuting, from work to home, these days?

Add to this, the increase in the number of incomes a household requires today, not to reach the levels of real income of a comparable household from the late 1960s. Adding the commuting factors caused by a cancer of real-estate speculation, to the increased number of jobs required per household, we have the resulting destruction of the emotional and intellectual life of most of the children and adolescents of the household, all situated within a rising burden of commuting-related unpaid labor, relative to the pre-1945 period. The result of these combined factors, is a savage “dumbing down” of virtually all strata of the U.S. population.

U.S. Senate

Chief Senate Counsel representing the U.S. Army, Joseph Welch, being questioned on the Communist Party organization in the U.S. by Senator Joe McCarthy during the televised Senate Subcommittee on Investigations’ (Army-McCarthy) hearings, June 9, 1954.

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Truman versus MacArthur

Go back to the U.S. military training camps of 1940-1945. The first assembly of each crop of recruits on the Basic Training Center’s company street, brought together young men (chiefly) from virtually every niche of city and countryside throughout the nation. The challenge of the training and related programs, was to bring most of the new recruits up to no less than a common standard of literacy and relevant other skills. The common interest, and the general welfare, of the nation and its citizens, was the dominant trend in thought. For the greater part, this effort succeeded fairly well.

This leads us, more immediately and narrowly, to an interesting contrast in morale, between the veteran being discharged from service, at the close of the war, and what that retired veteran became, a few months later. Examining the same matter more deeply, we are led to the deepest issues of the Roosevelt versus Truman conflict: in other words, that Truman-MacArthur conflict which directly misshaped virtually all U.S. strategic thinking since 1951.

Throughout the span from “Boot Camp” to discharge from military service, the general tendency among the soldiers and sailors, was a tendency for an increase of personal and mutual self-confidence. With the reign of the Congress during President Truman’s first term, that personal and mutual self-confidence dwindled significantly. If only in approximation, a useful comparison can be made to German veterans returned to civilian life after the close of World War I, notably those “rootless ones” who were drawn, in large numbers, toward the Nazi Party, during the course of the 1920s. For most U.S. veterans of World War II, the mounting fear of return to the 1930s Great Depression, overlapping the rise of political witch-hunts, became, quickly, a tendency to withdraw from morality, into an attitude of “every man for himself.” Under Truman, the veteran sensed that there was no longer any clearly visible, common moral authority which could reliably compel even government itself to provide justice to the victimized individual. Thus, “Trumanism” revealed itself as “McCarthyism.” By 1948, Orwell’s 1984 was no longer prophetic: until the Army-McCarthy hearings, the hateful faces of “Animal Farm” specimens such as Roy M. Cohn and Senator Joseph “Tail Gunner Joe” McCarthy (“some pigs are more equal than others”) filled in for “Big Brother.”

The question which the war had posed, once again, to the citizen-soldier, was: “Are there values so urgent, that one must prefer to die, rather than allow those values to be betrayed?” “For what are you willing to die, if necessary?” “Are you willing to sacrifice your life for others in a just cause? Where is the breaking-point, at which you, unlike U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, will refuse to be a depraved accomplice, a refusal you make simply because you know you are morally obliged to stand up for truth and justice?” In today’s philosophy and social-studies classroom, where the common existentialist traditions of Nietzsche, the Nazi Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre prevail, such moral values of the now long past, war-time period, seem very strange to most. Today, one might kill or die, to express one’s existentialist self, rather than for a higher social purpose. In this transformation which has developed during 1945-1998, we witness the state of a contemporary culture, which, like the Biblical Belshazzar, has lost the moral fitness to survive.

Give this relative moral decadence of the post-MacArthur period a name; call it “the Adam Smith factor.” In place of the joy of participating in a common higher purpose, the all-too-typical representative of the Truman period accepted one’s self-degradation into becoming, at least relatively speaking, an utterly selfish opportunist, in that world of percussive interaction outlined by such Mephistophelean moralists as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Friedrich von Hayek’s Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham. Admittedly, some people were still willing to risk death, and make other sacrifices, for a common purpose; however, this was rarely done out of a moral commitment, but out of a kind of conformism which should have reminded us of Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels. To this day, most of the population of the U.S.A. has never fully recovered from the radiated impact of “Trumanism:” “keeping out of trouble with the authorities” usually outweighs any regard for truth and justice. “Let any ox be gored, as long as it is not my own.”

President Truman’s baiting and firing of General Douglas MacArthur cohered, in character and effects, with the broader spectrum of changes which the Truman administration imposed upon the returning World War II veteran. This is not a remote connection; the entirety of U.S. strategic, and domestic economic policy-shaping, since 1950-1951, has been cursed heavily with the implications of Truman’s folly in the MacArthur affair.

USN

Left to right: Vice Admiral A.D. Struble, General Douglas MacArthur and Major General Oliver P. Smith inspecting port facilities at Inchon, Korea on September 15, 1950.

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During World War II, and in his conduct of the early months of the war in Korea, General MacArthur’s performance ranks with that of the greatest commanders in all ancient through modern history: with Alexander at Arbela, Hannibal at Cannae, Frederick the Great at Leuthen, Lazare “Author of Victory” Carnot of 1792-1794, our William Tecumseh Sherman, Germany’s old Moltke in France, and Alfred Graf von Schlieffen. Despite his critics from within the U.S. news media, and also an Anglophile faction of the Navy Department, MacArthur, in World War II, won more war, over a greater area, more quickly, with relatively far fewer combat losses to both sides, than any military force engaged in Classical warfare, during modern history.[fn_23] The Inchon flanking operation was of the same caliber. Furthermore, nothing in military science justified Truman’s position, whereas every evidence demanded of reasonable professionals that MacArthur’s policy be followed. The subsequent 1960s war in Indo-China proved the case against Truman in full.

In its most immediate effects, Truman’s policy in sacking MacArthur, introduced the endless Korean War, not resolved to the present day, now nearly a half-century later. The result there has been a parody of Bolshevik military commissar Leon Trotsky’s untenable dealings with the German military, near the close of World War I: Trotsky’s vanity-stricken posturing, “neither peace nor war.” Truman’s Korea war continues to the present day, as an armistice which is not peace, and, yet, not exactly war. In the longer haul, in the present Japan crisis, the unresolved issue of reunification of Korea, has become a reawakened, deadly factor of potential strategic instability in the Asia situation as a whole.

Harry S Truman Library

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur greeting President Harry Truman, on Wake Island on October 15, 1950.

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In short, Truman’s antic firing of MacArthur unleashed a neo-feudalist revival of Eighteenth-Century “cabinet warfare,” as a new, determining factor in the conduct of U.S. strategic policy as a whole, world-wide. Truman shifted the U.S. military tradition, away from that of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman, to the neo-feudalist, “cabinet warfare” heritage of the dubious McClellan and the Confederate commanders directing the treasonous slaveholders’ insurrection. After MacArthur’s firing, the U.S. officer corps was in the process of being degraded into the assigned role of “assistant cookie-pushers” for a Kissinger-like Department of State. The sheer awfulness of that “cabinet-warfare” folly came to roost in the 1964-1975 U.S. War in Vietnam.

Consider the deeper, axiomatic implications of that change.

The U.S. military policy which developed under leaders such as John Quincy Adams and Sylvanus Thayer,[fn_24] had a deep root in Christian doctrine, specifically St. Augustine’s warnings on the issues of justified warfare.[fn_25] The particular significance of the corresponding U.S. doctrine, is located in the historically exceptional quality of the American Revolution and its Federal Constitution, an historical specificity which, still today, is unique in all of human history to date. It is from this standpoint, that President Truman’s terrible folly and ignorance of elementary principles of statecraft, in the MacArthur affair, shines forth in its relevant implications for all of U.S., and world history since.

As I have elaborated the case in earlier locations, the modern nation-state republic came into existence as a product of western Christianity’s doctrine respecting the nature of man. Christian principle required that all forms of oligarchism, including the one-worldist and other feudal institutions of western Europe, be uprooted and eradicated, in order to establish a form of perfectly sovereign republic governed by the principle that all men and women are made equally in the image of the Creator, and that the state has no legitimate function but to enhance the conditions and world-historical mission of individual life, accordingly. The state must never become, in any way, the property of a governing class of oligarchs, but a state whose will must be subordinated to the world-historical national interest of all members of the nation, and also humanity as a whole, as reason defines that interest.

Unfortunately, the victory of Venice in the war of the League of Cambrai, prevented true nation-states from existing in Europe, except in the degree that Europe was later influenced by reforms inspired by the establishment and development of the U.S. Federal republic.[fn_26]

This imposed a peculiar, historically specific, strategic mission upon our U.S.A. We must not make war for the purpose of imposing our system upon other nations, but we must never betray the principle represented by our Declaration of Independence, 1787-1789 Federal Union, and the great reforms instituted under the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln. We must never act to support, or condone the forceful imposition, upon the people of any other part of the world, of a political order contrary to the principles upon which our own Federal Union was established and defended by President Abraham Lincoln.

Otherwise, our military policy is essentially an Augustinian one. In brief, our strategy must be, to defend ourselves, while fostering a circumstance in which other nations should prefer to emulate our best example. In war, our strategy for peace, is the Christian principle of atonement.

The resulting policy is, that if we are faced with fighting a war we can not otherwise avoid, we must prepare to win that war, or to avoid a futile battle, if by retreat.[fn_27] We must use our capacity for military victory, when we have gained it, to induce adversaries to accept reasonable alternatives. We must never tolerate a degradation of our military forces into that semblance of feudalist mercenaries associated with the British and other conduct of Eighteenth-Century “cabinet warfare.” Ours is not a doctrine which seeks war, but rather one which prefers always to create the preconditions under which it were unlikely we were obliged to fight war. In his time, against an errant President Truman, General MacArthur was a bearer of that tradition.

In most U.S. and NATO quarters, as in the corrupt agreements tolerated in the recent Balkan wars, instead of that noble tradition which General MacArthur bore, strategic thinking has been degraded into a blending of immoral forms of diplomacy with a variety of British blood-sports. Send the football fans, as hooligans, to fight and kill, letting survivors live to kill another day; between matches, let the diplomats keep score. A time in which a Henry Kissinger, or an empty-headed babbler such as Samuel P. Huntington, is cited as a “strategic thinker,” is a time in which civilization as a whole has already gone to Hell.

The heritage of General MacArthur’s ouster became the legacy of President Dwight Eisenhower, the legacy of détente. Look at this outcome, which Eisenhower inherited from the Truman period, from the vantage-point of what had been intended as Franklin Roosevelt’s “American Century.”

Roosevelt was aiming for total strategic victory. His mission was to use the circumstances of the war and its ending, together with the U.S.’s relation to a post-war Soviet Union and China, to mold a world-order which would be both durable and in keeping with the global interests of the U.S.A. By using U.S. world-hegemony in machine-tool-design capability, to provide the U.S.S.R., China, and other states, a truly just world economic order, the economic principle of the American System would define the world-order within which all nations operated, and would define the global relations among those states in a new way.

There was nothing “leftist” or otherwise naive in Franklin Roosevelt’s design for dealing with a post-war Josef Stalin. Step back for a moment, and consider the relevant, deeper strategic lessons of all of the past thousand years or so of modern European history.

The emergence of a post-feudal form of perfectly sovereign nation-state, had been defined by Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa’s Concordantia Catholica (1431), a work which was itself an echo of the same principled theme underlying all of the leading writings of Dante Alighieri, with notable emphasis upon the latter’s De Monarchia (c. 1312). It was Cusa’s work which had led him to lead a break within the Conciliar movement, toward reestablishing the previously disorganized Papacy. These were the same considerations which had led Cusa, the founder of modern experimental physical science, to contribute a leading role in organizing what became the A.D. 1439-1440 sessions of the great ecumenical Council at Florence, the Council which is the watershed for both modern European civilization in general, and the historically exceptional mission inhering in the founding of the U.S. Federal Union in particular.

Venice: an epitome of the oligarchical principle. Shown is The Reception of the French Ambassador in Venice, by Canaletto (1745).

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A crucial problem intervened. The ruling oligarchy of Europe saw the emergence of a modern form of sovereign nation-state as a mortal threat to the continuation of the power of the ruling combination of landed aristocracy and financier oligarchy. The sly tactic of inducing the Vatican to corrupt itself in the false cause of maintaining a system of Papal states within Italy, in opposition to the unification of Italy as a sovereign nation-state, became—until the Twentieth Century!—a crucial flank in the efforts of the landed aristocracy to prevent the establishment of truly sovereign nation-states in Europe.[fn_28]

The immediate, post-Council of Florence provocation for this pro-feudalist obstructionism, had been the formation of the world’s first modern nation-state, by France under King Louis XI, a role which Louis had acquired, as Dauphin, with notable encouragement and assistance from the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance patriots of Italy. The defeat of France and the League of Cambrai, through the treachery of Pope Julius II and the King of Spain, did not succeed in destroying Louis XI’s France, but the defeat of Cambrai shelved the establishment of any truly modern form of nation-state in Europe, until the Nineteenth-Century approximations appeared, the latter based, chiefly, upon the world-wide impact of President Abraham Lincoln’s victories over the British Empire’s relevant, neo-feudalist puppet-states of that period, the Confederate States of America and Maximilian’s Nazi-like occupation and looting of Mexico.[fn_29]

From the end of the League of Cambrai, until the end of World War II, the dominant force within European civilization as a whole, was either Venice’s financier-oligarchy, or Venice-like financier oligarchies, such as those of the Netherlands and London, which had been built up as clones of Venice. With aid of its incitement of Catholic versus Protestant butchery, Venice set every state of Europe against one another, while otherwise setting Europe bloodily against itself in Spain’s wars against the Netherlands, and, subsequently, the notorious Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648. In this fashion, world power, and world trade, were under the domination of Venetian-style financier oligarchies, from the defeat of the League of Cambrai, until the developments of World War II. For a clearer view, summarize the world strategic situation over the period from the Napoleonic wars through silly Woodrow Wilson’s Versailles.

From 1789 onward, the common objectives of Britain and the Holy Roman Empire’s Fürstentum,[fn_30] were the destruction of both the United States of America and the influence of the United States’ Federal Union as a model, which both Britain and the continental landed aristocracy were desperate to ensure must not exist in any part of this planet: the personal and official policy of the British monarchy’s ultrareactionary Prince Philip, to the present day.

The Castlereagh-Metternich cabal’s policy was a virulently anti-American view which is shared, with shameless openness, to the present day, by a confessed agent of British influence—a virtual, British, enemy spy, and all-around scalawag, Henry A. Kissinger.[fn_31] Thus, from Pitt and Bentham through Palmerston, British Foreign Ministers and Prime Ministers, joined with the continental party of Habsburg chancellors von Kaunitz and Metternich, against the dreaded American influence. After Castlereagh, under Canning and Palmerston, Britain’s apparent affections for its Holy Alliance partners waned, becoming Palmerston’s and Giuseppe Mazzini’s outright hostility to Metternich. Let President Clinton be warned by the fall of Metternich, as Palmerston himself put the point famously before the British Parliament: Britain has no permanent allies, but only permanent interests.

Nonetheless, the anomalies of 1848-1849 taken into account, until World War II, the world was dominated by a combination of chiefly imperialist, continental European forces, forces whose actual power has come to be centered, increasingly, in the financier-oligarchies of Prince Philip’s Britain and the Nazi-SS veteran Prince Bernhard’s Netherlands.

This was already the circumstance faced by U.S. President George Washington’s administrations, the reality which prompted the President to warn the U.S.A. against any “entangling alliances” with European powers. Although the U.S.A. did develop Nineteenth-Century friends in Europe, such as the circles of Lafayette and Carnot in France, the followers of Friedrich Schiller among the Prussian reformers in Germany, and the Russia of Czar Alexander II and Count Sergei Witte, the hegemonic combination of ruling forces in Europe was implicitly those enemies of the United States who had inherited the foul victory from the defeat of the League of Cambrai.

This is the key to understanding the role of Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. This is key to understanding the implications of Truman’s strategic folly.

U.S. Signal Corps

Left to right: UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin Roosevelt, and Soviet Marshal Joseph Stalin confer at Yalta in February, 1945.

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By Spring 1945, the opportunity to exert a new world power, superseding entirely the kind of financier-oligarchical world-power hitherto exerted by Britain et al., lay within the reach of the U.S. President. Under Roosevelt’s post-war policy, the U.S.A. would be no empire; nonetheless, we were in a position to determine the shared, characteristic features of the global financial, monetary, and economic relations among sovereign nation-states. Under those historically specific circumstances, we in the U.S. had nothing to fear from the power of a Soviet Union or China, nor need we desire to establish imperial authority over their internal affairs. It was we, the U.S.A., who were now in a position to determine the global set of financial, monetary, and economic rules of the game, rules which would affect the relations among all states of this planet.

If only we had seized that wonderful opportunity.

From the founding of our sovereign republic, until World War II, world power had been divided between the minority force represented by the U.S. and its immediate, anti-British friends, on the one side, and a thicket of world-dominating financial-oligarchical powers and outrightly feudalist relics, on the opposing side. In that specific sense, world power, especially power over the world’s financial and monetary affairs, lay in the hands of imperial, rentier-financier forces which were the enemies of our republican constitutional principle. As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams said of our enemy, Canning’s Britain, there existed no community of principle between the U.S.A. and those forces which dominated the world from Europe.

Under those circumstances, the principles of practice governing well-informed U.S. strategy were necessarily, actively adversarial; we shared no community of principle with the leading concerts of the world’s powers. However, as Adams emphasized this future prospect for the Americas, when the time came, when we had the power to change this fundamentally, to establish an hegemonic ordering of international financial, monetary, and economic power, our strategic doctrine must change to conform to this changed order within world affairs.

At the close of the war, we held global financial, monetary, and economic hegemony. What we required of the world, was a rallying of states which would join with us to oppose the relics of British, Netherlands, French, and Portuguese imperialism, to provide to those liberated regions of the world the immediate advantages of a fair and just world economic order. Our duty, our self-interest, was to inaugurate that new, just world economic order, and to assume a leading role in defending that order as the common interest of a group of nations representing the vital interest of the overwhelming majority of the human race.

What had we to fear from anyone, then, or today, as long as we proceeded on that basis? This is what Truman, and other small-minded Hobbesians either never understood, or chose not to understand.

The SDI Example

In this light, consider as a most appropriate, exemplary case, my original design of what President Ronald Reagan named a “Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).”

The crucial feature of the President’s March 23, 1983 offer to the Soviet government, marks the SDI, publicly, to this day, as a product of my work, work focussed upon a private, exploratory back-channel discussion which I conducted, in U.S. interest, with Moscow’s representative, during the interval February 1982-February 1983. It was an exploratory effort, a further step in promoting a program which I had launched, in August 1979, as a feature of my 1980 campaign for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination. It was a campaign which I conducted publicly, from mid-February 1982 on, in the U.S.A., with high-ranking flag officers and other leading strategic circles in the U.S.A., France, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, past the close of 1985. Admittedly, there are state secrets involved, which I have not told,[fn_32] but, otherwise, all the essential features of my role in authorship of that SDI proposal were open, and openly acknowledged by some relevant agencies of the U.S. government, beyond the end of March 1983.

From the point of my first barely significant intervention into world affairs, beginning the mid-1960s, I adhered always to the attempt to revive the kind of U.S. relationship to the world at large which I had envisaged, while still serving in the China-Burma-India Theater, at the close of World War II. As early as the first months of 1947, for example, my zeal was focussed upon the importance of U.S. fostering of the development of nuclear-fission energy-sources as the obvious, best, and perhaps only key to the general improvement of the conditions of life of the entire population of India. From the mid-1960s onward, the same view was expressed as the proposal, that joint commitment, by the U.S.A. and Soviet Union, to rapid development of the technology of the developing sector, was the “way out” of the continuing strategic dilemma of that time.

Left to right: EIRNS/Stuart Lewis; CSIS; EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

“During the second half of the 1970s, I was in a great deal of official and covertly deployed troubles, which I suffered at the hands of such circles as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scrowcroft, and, of course, the same FBI which, according to its own official documents, worked with the leadership of the Communist Party USA, to promote my ‘elimination,’ as early as 1973.”

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During the second half of the 1970s, I was in a great deal of official and covertly deployed troubles, which I suffered at the hands of such circles as those of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and, of course, the same FBI which, according to its own official documents, worked with the leadership of the Communist Party U.S.A., to promote my “elimination,” as early as 1973. This occurred partly as a result of the role of my associates and me, in exposure of certain interesting background facts concerning developments of the late 1960s and early 1970s; initially, it occurred chiefly as a result of my too nearly successful 1974-1977 interventions on behalf of a “just new world economic order,” interventions in which I found myself intellectually allied, openly, with some governments of the Non-Aligned Nations group. It was my 1982-1985 role on behalf of what became known as the SDI, which persuaded certain international forces to conduct their 1982-1989 effort to have me eliminated finally and permanently from any further influence upon U.S. and world policies.

During this 1977-1982 period, I came to emphasize the significance of dual-use development of strategic ballistic missile defense based upon new physical principles (such as beam weapons), as the available strategic alternative. My point, from the second half of the 1970s onward, was, that on condition that both superpowers sought a common interest of our planet in the equitable development of all of the peoples and nations of the planet, that common interest could lead the world back to the kind of American Century goals which one should associate with the work of Franklin Roosevelt.

The key, was always to shift the frontier of economic technology forward, to what was, at each moment, the most advanced among the existing levels of machine-tool-design potentialities. Large-scale infrastructure programs, combined with the most advanced “science driver” programs of economic development, were the key. Those were my policies during the late 1960s, the middle 1970s, in my authorship of what became known as “SDI,” and in my proposals, beginning October 1988, for a post-Communist reconstruction. Those are my policies still today.

Consider the case of the public attacks upon me, and also Dr. Edward Teller, on the issues of “SDI,” by the subsequently deceased Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Daniel P. Graham, during the period from Summer 1982 until March 23, 1983. This involved an issue which Graham had earlier raised, while still head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), during the administration of President Gerald Ford. Graham was fanatically opposed to the role of science in defense systems; he insisted, that “off the shelf” technologies, presently reposing in the inventories of defense contractors, ought to be used, instead, even if that meant relying upon systems, typified by Graham’s “High Frontier” recipe, which had become hopelessly obsolete more than a decade earlier! The connection of Graham’s views to his association with that Mont Pelerin Society subsidiary known as the London-directed Heritage Foundation, was no coincidence. The Heritage Foundation dim-wits proceeded from their induced, crude, Anglophiliac ideology, to argue against government-funded science-driver programs. This was reflected in their gobbledygook propaganda arguing the allegedly principled distinctions between “fundamental” and “applied” research.

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

President Reagan addressing the nation on national security (SDI Speech), March 23, 1983.

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Soon after President Reagan had announced the “SDI,” Heritage Foundation ideologue Graham turned about, to profess himself a born-again advocate of the very strategic ballistic missile defense system for which he had attacked me and Dr. Teller so violently during the Summer and Autumn of 1982. During the Summer of 1983, an uneasy compromise was struck between the respective representatives of Graham and Teller; Graham prevailed with his emphasis upon obsolete conceptions of “kinetic weapons” technology. Consoling bits of money were passed around to Teller’s backers, to keep the troops quiet; I was pushed out of the way; and, despite President Reagan’s clear voice at Reykjavik, “SDI” was soon virtually dead as an ongoing strategic conception.

The crucial point to be stressed here, is the following.

Start with what has been my repeatedly stated principle: the power of mankind over nature, per capita and per square kilometer of the planet’s surface, is located entirely in the realization of scientific and technological progress as an effective increase of the productive powers of labor. In that sense, and in that degree, the origin of essential strategic power is precisely that. This is expressed either as the realization of such modes of increase of the productive powers of labor, or, from the Mont Pelerin Society and other opponents of progress, the suppression of such development.

We witness this principle at work in the rapid rise of the per-capita income and power of the France reconstituted by King Louis XI. We witness this in the impact of scientific and technological progress in Europe since Brunelleschi’s early Fifteenth Century. We witness this in the role of France’s Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The strategic principle of the science-driver effect, is shown, in the most brilliant fashion, under the leadership of Lazare Carnot, during 1792-1794. This is shown, again in the most brilliant fashion, in the explosive upsurge of the U.S. economy in its generalized machine-tool revolution, during 1861-1876.

Compare this with a relevant, telling observation made by a friend.[fn_33]

As the family of Empress Maria Theresa might agree, Prussia’s Frederick the Great was not a nice person; but he was, political follies such as Voltaire aside, a military genius. Alfred Graf von Schlieffen’s account of Frederick’s brilliant, double-flanking victory over the Austrians, at the Battle of Leuthen, illustrates the same military-strategic principle otherwise demonstrated by science-driver cases.

In brief, the principle of the flank, as documented by von Schlieffen’s Cannae,[fn_34] is not a principle of the sand-box as such; it is a principle of the mind. For example, if my enemy is operating on the basis of Riemannian set n, then I must outflank him by operating on the basis of Riemannian set n+1. Hannibal’s counteroffensive, from a seemingly hopeless, back-to-the-wall situation, to effect defeat of the relatively much superior Roman forces at Cannae, was not a matter of sand-box principles; Hannibal’s mind was superior to that of the self-misguided Roman commanders. Frederick was vastly outgunned at Leuthen, and confronted by what might pass for a perfect, Cannae-modelled flanking assault; but, the combined discipline of Frederick’s vastly outnumbered troops and the thick-headed formalism of the Austrian commander, enabled the mind of Frederick to outflank, and rout a vastly superior Austrian force, not once, but twice on the same day.

If one can confront a prospective adversary with the fact of the economic impact of realized scientific superiority, then, that adversary must either adapt to that principle, or accept defeat. There is a military parallel for this in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s continual hammering of his flanking operations all the way to and through Atlanta. It was, above all, the superiority of Sherman’s mind to that of the Confederate commanders, which is the crucial fact of that situation. The most relevant fact was the moral and scientific superiority of the Union forces over the pack of neo-feudalist degenerates dominating the Confederate command. Once Lincoln was able, after Gettysburg, to purge not only the dubious McClellan, but other liabilities, from the U.S. military command, the preparation for the delayed Union victory took shape. The Confederacy was not a “lost cause”; it was the cause of a pseudo-nation which, from its inception, had lacked the moral fitness to survive.

If one is in a position to assume the high ground, both culturally and technologically, and also globally, one will thus shape the direction of changes in political-economic practice among the nations so affected. It is not necessary, nor desirable, to attempt to dictate the internal affairs of individual nations; rather, let each nation shape its own internal development, through the natural process of its attempts to adapt successfully to the global environment within which it is located. Concentrate, therefore, on shaping that global environment.

In 1945, the difference was, that, prior to the close of World War I, the financier-oligarchical forces centered around Britain and the Netherlands controlled “the world market,” a position which the British had regained from the U.S.A., between 1873 and 1879, through the establishment of the British gold standard and the accompanying adoption of the treasonous U.S. Specie Resumption Act, that by a corrupted U.S. Congress. We see today, how the bandits running international financial and monetary institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, are able to effect the piratical looting of entire groups of nations, seemingly without any available recourse by the victimized nations themselves.

Conversely, we should be able to recognize, that without a new global financial and monetary system, modelled upon the pre-1959 Bretton Woods system, no recovery from the presently ongoing, global, financial, monetary, and economic collapse could be expected at any time during the decades immediately ahead: without that change, and very soon, the United States, and virtually every other nation of this planet, is hopelessly doomed to a decades-long passage through the virtual Hell of a prolonged “new dark age.” Control the rules of the international financial and monetary system, and subject that system to domination by the exigencies of realized scientific and technological progress, and the objectives of Franklin Roosevelt’s “American Century” image could be realized, even beginning today.

So, situate the Truman-MacArthur controversy with respect to the original, March 23, 1983 proffer of SDI.

From this latter vantage-point, the principal problems of 1949-1951 were, that the U.S.A., in its foolish excess of power-sharing with the British and other dubious allies, had surrendered the sovereignty of the U.S.A. to an increasing degree of meddling by supranational authority. Thus, the same U.S.A. which had assumed principal responsibility for the state of the world, had surrendered its ability to meet that responsibility, by denying itself access to means which might not be pleasing to the Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill devotees of a nuclear march toward world government. The farce of making the war in Korea a “United Nations war,” was the root of the problem.

Had MacArthur been allowed to pursue a sovereign U.S. solution to the challenge, there would have been no war with China; it was the weakness of the U.S., as demanded by the British-dominated UNO, and self-imposed by Truman, which lured, and virtually provoked China into the war. China did not cause the expansion of the war; it was the disgusting weakness displayed by Truman and the UNO command, which incited the attack from China. Had MacArthur been allowed to assert his clearly enunciated, and militarily obligatory set of rules of engagement at Korea’s northern border, there would have been no further war, and the world would have become, rapidly, a far better place than it has been since 1950, to the present date.

In matters bearing upon strategy, and vital national interest, globalization and national sovereignty are mutually exclusive notions. Without honoring in full a clear community of principle respecting the economically “protectionist” form of perfectly sovereign nation-state established under the U.S. Federal Constitution of 1787-1789, there exists no tolerable, durable basis for supranational condominiums. We should never have tolerated, for a single day, the agreements of that sort which have become increasingly popular since the establishment of that lunatic “floating exchange-rate monetary system” which has proven itself the present undoing of the world economy as a whole.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Today’s exotic financial instruments have their origin in the 1950s practices in the financing of automobile sales, as studied by LaRouche during the Eisenhower years.

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A Tour Through Mediocrity

There were many good ideas in circulation among Republicans, and others, during the Eisenhower administration. Veterans of that administration’s time, whom I came to know either as friends or friendly acquaintances during later years, were unquestionably moral, professionally capable, and valuable persons with whom to exchange ideas. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace,” was among the good things set into motion during that period. It was a far more comfortable period in which to live and work, than during the nightmare of the Truman years; but, nothing seemed to be able to break through that confining envelope of mediocrity which controlled the administration from its inception.

On this account, that administration’s economic policy was its worst side; the case of the temporary abortion of the Huntsville rocket program, typifies the way in which the administration’s mediocrity in economic matters spilled over into its strategic practice generally.

The fairest summation of the Eisenhower administration’s performance, overall, is that it was a post-MacArthur administration. There was no compelling commitment to anything reflecting the kind of “American Century” outlook of the early 1940s. There was no impulse to drive scientific and technological progress beyond immediately visible boundaries, no commitment to accelerate the ratio of the machine-tool-design element within the composition of U.S. employment and output. No Everests to climb, no frontiers to breach. There was nothing inspiring. Even the Eisenhower administration’s reluctant revival of the moribund U.S. rocket and space program, occurred only as a result of prodding by the insistent beeps of the Soviet Sputnik. The ill-fated Eisenhower consumer-credit expansion of the middle 1950s, brings the generalized, characteristic mediocrity of the period’s policy-making into the clearest focus.

The retail passenger-vehicle sales expansion, typified the folly of Eisenhower economics. The use of increasingly loose consumer credit to sustain an expansion of new car sales, involved sundry, high-binding and kindred accounting and marketing tricks. In summary, by late 1956, the unpaid balance on a predominantly mature thirty-six-month automobile loan, was in the vicinity of the point that the replacement of that same make and model, on a used-car lot, was less than the balance due on the original new-car loan. During the same period, the trend toward “value engineering” approaches to product cost-control, which were employed at the manufacturing end, assured that the useful life of the vehicle was probably less than the life-span suggested by the terms of the thirty-six-month new-car loan. A similar pattern pervaded the area of large-ticket home appliances, and so on.

The result of this combined folly of the administration and the automobile manufacturers, was the 1957-1958 recession, which broke out in February 1957. Although the rate of recession slowed in mid-1958, there was no genuine economic recovery until a candidate doomed by the price of the Eisenhower administration’s economic mediocrity, Richard M. Nixon, was pushed aside for the inauguration of President John Kennedy.

The strategic implications of the Eisenhower policy of economic mediocrity, are most usefully stated in terms comparable to those we have employed in discussing the Truman-MacArthur controversy.

Define the term “military technological attrition,” as signifying the combination of technological superiority of weapons and related systems with increased productive powers of labor in producing functionally equivalent, or superior systems. It is on precisely this point, that the Eisenhower administration fell down on its economic-strategic responsibilities. A peaceful world order, under established adversarial conditions, depended upon a margin of growing absolute superiority of the U.S.A. in terms of rates of technological attrition. The tempering of U.S. strategic growth, which was prompted by a combination of pro-monetarist economics mediocrity and quiet probing of Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Russell’s design for détente, should be viewed in this light.

Consider the Teller-Oppenheimer “thermonuclear bomb” controversy as casting some light on this matter. It is not necessary to go into great detail on that matter here. Two points are sufficient. On Oppenheimer’s side, he was tuned to the more radical version of Bertrand Russell’s tactics on the issues of nuclear-weapons policy; his leading points of difference with Teller, over H-bomb development, are located adequately in precisely that point. Teller, on the other hand, was correct in principle, in the degree that, respecting scientific and technological progress, one must always crash the strategic frontiers, whatever one’s strategic guesstimates might be otherwise. The specific kind of bitterness injected into the dispute at that time, was unnecessary; perhaps Dr. Teller should have been less reluctant to reference the sometimes complicated connections among himself, Eugene Wigner, and Bertrand Russell, and thus provide more clarity and less mud to the controversy of that time. It was on this same point, that the mid-1950s semi-mothballing of Huntsville’s rocket program, was typical of the military strategic side of the Eisenhower administration’s leaning toward strategic mediocrity.

Kennedy: A Few Golden Years

“New Frontier” was an apt choice of term.

President John Kennedy represented my own generation from World War II; he was slightly older than I, but not that much. After living through the bad Truman years, and the mediocrity of the Eisenhower years, my generation was entering the leading executive positions in government, professional, and corporate life. The change showed in the growing support for the Civil Rights movement. The change showed also, in the explosion of a pent-up passion for breaking out of mediocrity, for pioneering into new frontiers. For my generation, the memories of FDR were strong, still fresh and vigorous. That made the difference in the 1960 election-campaign, and during the President’s performance as an incumbent.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

President John Kennedy and French President Charles de Gaulle at the conclusion of their talks at the Élysée Palace in Paris, France on June 2, 1961.

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The special historic significance of the Kennedy period is most clearly shown in the coincidence of the strategic interventions among Kennedy, France’s Fifth Republic President Charles de Gaulle, and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer. These implications lingered, with a crucial, if somewhat attenuated impact, even after the death of Kennedy and ouster of Adenauer. Three of de Gaulle’s most crucial actions are to be emphasized: 1) de Gaulle’s push for a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” de Gaulle’s own efforts to pick up on Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to projected post-war dealings with Stalin’s Soviet Union; 2) de Gaulle’s open and sudden break with NATO, largely in response to a London-dominated NATO’s persisting efforts to conduct a coup d’état against the French state; and, 3) the Force de Frappe, de Gaulle’s response to the lunacy of the post-MacArthur legacy of strategic follies.

Overall, the sum and substance of the Kennedy period, is the slogan “New Frontier.” The thrust of the Kennedy Presidency, and the joint impact of Kennedy, de Gaulle, and Adenauer, was to break free of the sodden nightmares left over from the Truman and Eisenhower periods, to break out, to dare the limits, and reach beyond. This was a moment of anti-entropy, a short-lived interruption of that reign of entropy which has otherwise ruled the post-Franklin Roosevelt world until the present day.

Despite the 1962 Missile Crisis, the initiatives associated with Kennedy, de Gaulle, and Adenauer, during, and immediately following the Kennedy period, remain today a point of reference for relaunching the essential features of that brief, happier period of recent history.

The good times did not last for long, even if one included the 1964-1969 phase of the space program. While President Kennedy lived, pleasant, nostalgic echoes of the FDR years encouraged followers to follow; but, in the wake of the President’s assassination and the Warren Commission caper, few among those disposed to follow still possessed the passion to lead. The shock of the 1962 “Cuba Missiles Crisis,” followed, by the November 1963 assassination of the President, left mostly emotional rubble in the aftermath.

After the horrors of 1962-1963, a deep cultural pessimism gripped the youth entering university during the 1960s. President Johnson’s capitulation to McGeorge Bundy’s insistence on the war in Vietnam, put the political detonator on the explosive social charge. The notorious “cultural-paradigm shift,” the shift to the “rock-drug-sex counterculture” and to “post-industrial” utopianism, emerged as relatively hegemonic campus and post-campus phenomena of the 1964-1972 interval.

British Proconsul Kissinger

For what happened after the assassination of President Kennedy, two historic reference-points are perhaps the most appropriate. The first is the case of the ancient, Phrygian cult of Dionysus, the terrorist cult otherwise associated with the satanic worship of Gaea-Python and the Roman cult of Bacchus. The second, the post-World War I spread of a theosophical, existentialist youth-counterculture throughout Europe, as typified by the rise of Nazism, the influence of Georg Lukacs, and the rise of the satanic cult otherwise commonly referenced as the “Frankfurt School” of Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, et al.[fn_35]

CC BY-SA 3.0

Delegates to the Congress of Vienna, 1814-1815, in a contemporary engraving by Jean Godefroy after the painting by Jean-Baptist Isabey.

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The key to the rise of this counterculture, is twofold.

The modern roots of the rock-drug-sex and post-industrial countercultures, are traceable to two key events of post-Napoleonic Europe: the Congress of Vienna itself, and the fascistic Carlsbad decrees of 1819.[fn_36] The virtual banning of the influence of that Friedrich Schiller who had been the chief intellectual author of the reforms underlying Germany’s 1813-1814 Liberation Wars,[fn_37] defines the spirit of hatred erupting during the period in which a gifted Trier Johann Hugo Wyttenbach student, Karl Marx, born in 1818, was later recruited into virtually satanic cults, first at the University of Bonn, and, later, under the influence of the circles of the fascistic G.W.F. Hegel and Karl F. Savigny, at Berlin. The case of Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the key forerunners of Friedrich Nietzsche and Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, is another relevant case. Related is the case of the two Mazzini followers, Wagner and Bakunin, who came to play leading roles in establishing the cornerstones of both modern European satanism and Nazism within Machian late-Nineteenth-Century Vienna, Budapest, and the Bayreuth of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Richard “Parsifal” Wagner.

As we have already pointed to this, the right-left commonalities of these satanic cults are aptly represented by the perverse union between Hannah Arendt and Nazi existentialist Martin Heidegger, both in common with the satanic figures of Theodor Adorno and the de facto den mother of the “Frankfurt School,” Georg Lukacs.

The currents of Romanticism, Modernism, and post-Modernism spawned out of the post-Vienna-Congress, post-Carlsbad-decree cultural pessimism of the middle Nineteenth Century, gained an increasing influence in the organized intellectual life of European civilization on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Massachusetts and South Carolina branches of Palmerston protégé Giuseppe Mazzini’s “Young America” organization.[fn_38] The influence of Bertrand Russell, is a key element in the corruption of intellectual youth, such as Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, on both sides of the Atlantic. Under the conditions of the Truman and Eisenhower periods, these spores of existentialist pessimism found the culture-medium for which they might have been intended.

The qualified amorality which overtook the majority of U.S. citizens, for example, during the Truman and Eisenhower years, exploded into such forms as the rapid spread of the “rock-drug-sex counter-culture,” from 1964 through 1972. The continuation of the war in Indo-China was among the crucial factors in bringing about the emerging hegemony of an anti-science movement, “post-industrial” utopianism.

The fact that emergence of an organized youth-counterculture around “post-industrial” utopianism reflected the emergence of the forementioned types of psycho-social conditioning, should not be read as evidence that the emergence of the movement itself was in any sense “spontaneous,” or “natural.” Very little in modern history has been less natural, indeed more unnatural, than the self-styled nature cult which has grown up, “on behalf of the environment,” around the 1961 initiatives of Prince Philip’s and Prince Bernhard’s reactionary World Wildlife Fund. The members of the new youth-counterculture were virtually campus-laboratory guinea-pigs, whose behavior was induced and directed, from the top-down, from the outset. The environment preparing this operation was established as early as the 1920s, under British Brigadier Dr. John Rawlings Rees of the London Tavistock Clinic. The entire operation was dominated by relatively highly refined methods of mass-brainwashing, assisted by such networks as the Lewin centers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the network of Freudian and kindred brainwashing networks, such as “MK-Ultra,” spun out from under the direction of Julian Huxley at the UNO and the London Tavistock Clinic.

EIRNS

Early collaborators of LaRouche, seen here in the 1968 student strike at Columbia University in New York City, represented a counterpole to the destructive influence of “thinkers”such as Herbert Marcuse.

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During the most relevant years, during 1964-1972, I was directly involved in exposing and opposing this “brainwashing,” on the scene, with first hand, and often detailed knowledge of the agencies, including Kissinger sponsor McGeorge Bundy’s Ford Foundation, and many of the key personalities, such as Herbert Marcuse, playing the key day-to-day roles of Mephistopheles in corrupting their pathetic “Fausts” of the 1967-1969 Columbia University and other campus scenes. The Foundations and funding of the process leading from McGeorge Bundy’s and Herbert Marcuse’s interventions into the Columbia University situation, into the 1969 emergence of the offshoot known as the “Weatherman” terrorists, or the related case of the Jonathan Jackson Brigade, are exemplary. To this day, a check of Foundation grants and related connections is often still key to tracking the actual pedigrees and motives of most of the still operating, exotically “radical” operations built up with aid of coordinated mass-media puffery.

This youth-counterculture development of 1964-1972 did not occur in a political-economic vacuum. It overlapped two leading economic policy-developments of the same period: the 1966-1967 take-down of large parts of the forward, cutting edge of the U.S. space program, and the process leading into the August 1971 sinking of the U.S. dollar. It also overlapped, in a most significant degree, the rise of the Queen’s own Henry A. Kissinger to the position of virtually acting President of the United States.

The changes experienced during this 1964-1972/1976 interval, intersect the fact, that, excepting a few brief, extraordinary developments during the first Reagan administration, since the murder of President Kennedy, no President of the U.S.A., to the present date, has actually provided that quality of Presidential leadership for the United States we associate with even a Truman, an Eisenhower, or a Kennedy. Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, have been, usually, like the virtually anonymous Presidents we tend to view as the janitorial agency which locks up after the parliamentary government has gone home for the weekend; moreover, none of them seemed able to do anything to change this. As in Clinton’s case, even if he wished to act as a real President, a cabal of combined mass news media, right-wing Congressional “Robespierres,” and permanent governmental bureaucracy, has not allowed him to so do. There is no mere coincidence in this; the underlying reasons for the post-“Watergate” shift, from a Presidential to a Europe style of parliamentary government, are elementary, and historic.

Most citizens, and members of both judiciary and Congress, appear to have forgotten the time, before “Watergate,” when we ran our government differently. This is among the policy-matrix changes which has occurred since 1964-1976.

The emergence of “post-industrial” utopianism, as the hegemonic trend in policy-shaping, on all fronts, is the characteristic, dominant, if not exclusive, policy-shaping factor in the administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton-Gore. Blindly plummeting entropy is the dominant mood of politics in these times; the 1964-1972 interval, from the assassination of President Kennedy, until the establishment of the post-Bretton Woods “floating exchange-rate system,” marks the transition, away from all semblance of earlier patriotic standards of U.S. economic policy-shaping, into the lunacy of the junk-bond and derivatives age. With the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. Presidency degenerated rapidly, seemingly irreversibly. The continuing cause for this process of degeneration was the increasing hegemony of the cult of “post-industrial” utopianism. The sap was out of the tree, and the branches were dying.

Consider the political and economic revolution of 1964-1976 in light of its correlation with the “post-industrial utopian” form of cultural-paradigm shift.

When the U.S. Economy Stopped Growing

The assassination of President Kennedy marks the point of departure, from the time our nation was still committed to economic progress, until it began to move radically in a downward direction: changes in U.S. economic-policy began which were more damaging than even the worst of what had occurred under Truman and Eisenhower.

The first round of such radical shifts, downward, in U.S. economic thinking, came in two developments of the 1966-1967 interval: the State Department’s initial adoption of population-control policies directed against other nations, and the drastic, if partial shut-down of the space-program during those fiscal years. The “Great Society” hoax was a complement to this process of beginning to destroy the U.S. economy.

The second round of measures leading into the wrecking of the U.S. and world economy was developed during the interval 1967-1972, beginning with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1967 sinking of the British pound sterling, and concluding with the developments of 1971-1972, nullifying the Bretton Woods agreements, and launching that “floating-exchange-rate monetary system” which has led the U.S. and world economy, step by step, to the present global catastrophe.

Later, during the 1970s, it was argued, that for every penny spent on the space program, more than fifteen cents had been returned to the U.S. economy. The latter benefit occurred as a fruit of the spill-over, into the economy as a whole, of the scientific and technological progress radiating from the space program.[fn_39] This benefit was precisely what the Johnson administration cut out of the space program and closely related things during 1966-1967. Thousands of the best-qualified scientists and technicians were dumped from the payrolls, creating effects such as a virtual economic depression around Greater Boston’s Route 128 aerospace and related premises. It was said, in 1968-1969, that such throat-cutting acts of national economic suicide would benefit the economy by “bringing the space dollar back down to Earth” in such forms as the (predictable disappointment known as the) “Great Society” program. With only marginal exceptions thereafter, the economic-suicidal pattern of such cuts in high-tech research and development, not only persisted, but was generally accelerated, from 1966 onward to the present day.

NASA

The benefits of scientific and technological progress were lost when President Johnson reduced the space program to a shadow. Shown: The Saturn V rocket launching the Apollo 11 mission from the Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969.

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As a result, the net physical output of the U.S. economy per capita, has shrunk consistently, and disastrously, from the close of the 1966-1972 interval, to the present day. In fact, there has been no net physical-economic growth in the U.S. economy from that time, to the present day. “More jobs,” yes: but less net physical-economic income per household than when the average number of jobs per-capita of labor-force was fewer.[fn_40]

The tail-end of net U.S.A. post-war economic growth was reached about 1971-1972. What had kept some growth in place during the 1966-1972 interval, was largely to the credit of large-scale infrastructure-building programs set into place by (chiefly) the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and kept moving somewhat under Johnson. After 1971-1972, the amount spent on combined expansion, improvement, and maintenance of basic economic infrastructure, was spectacularly less, in effect, than the wear, tear, and depletion of pre-existing programs. The 1975 “Big Mac” collapse of infrastructure in New York City, is only an apt illustration of the general pattern during and since the 1970s.

Typical of the drastic changes in economic philosophy effected under President Richard Nixon, were the imposition of savage wage-cuts imposed, under the rubrics of “Phase I” and “Phase II,” following the President’s decision to sink the U.S. dollar, on August 15-16, 1971. The philosophy, if one may call it that, behind Nixon’s politically fatal follies in economic and monetary policy, is typified by the introduction of foolish Mont Pelerin Society fanatic Milton Friedman as cottage philosopher of the Nixon White House. There had been forewarnings of this under Truman, and in the influence of Arthur Burns over the Eisenhower administration, but Nixon had gone over the wall. The U.S. no longer had an economic policy consistent with our constitutional tradition; the effort to purge FDR’s memory from national economic and social policy was rampant. The arrival of a new editorial figure, Robert Bartley, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, typified a new crew in charge of the thinking of the nation’s financial centers, a Wall Street gone utterly mad.

Here lies the key to the political and moral decay of the U.S. Presidency during the past thirty years.

The exceptional character of the U.S. Federal republic, its historic specificity, centers around the differences in economic and closely related philosophy, which we have already referenced, between the U.S. and an oligarchy-dominated old Europe. The fact that we, in opposition to the evil doctrine of Adam Smith, were the only nation-state committed to such economic principles, required a national defense policy attuned to the continuing global implications of such conflicts in economic and related philosophy. The fact, that our economic system functions successfully only as a “dirigist” system, in which the state plays a specific, if limited, leading role in the national economy, requires qualities of our national executive which were neither desired nor tolerated among the oligarchy-dominated states of old Europe.

The sensible strata of U.S. citizens have always had what might appear to be an instinctive appreciation of these implications of our national historical specificity. All except such pathetic creatures as the “Nashville Agrarians,” recognized the importance of industrial development and matching progress in development of national and regional economic infrastructure. The sensible strata regarded such an orientation, together with national defense, as a crucial part of the job implicitly assigned to our Federal and other levels of government. “More and better” were integral standards of performance demanded of the performance of government, especially the Federal government and its Executive Branch.

The radical changes in economic policy which began during 1966-1968, and accelerated during the Kissinger era, 1970-1976, were an overturning of that traditional commitment to performance around which the role of our Federal government had been defined under all patriotic leaders of our nation since 1776-1789. By nullifying that commitment, the Federal government itself joined in destroying that foundation upon which our Executive Branch’s implicit authority to rule had depended up to that time. Like the Biblical Belshazzar, we had “lost the mandate of Heaven.” We shall not be able to restore the institution of the President until that error is corrected.

Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger’s role in setting up the oil-price hoax of the mid-1970s, his role in the lunatic Rambouillet monetary summit of 1975, and Kissinger’s emergency flight to Paris, shortly after Rambouillet, in the efforts to head off my influence among Arab and other states, were rumbles of what was to become the economically catastrophic Carter Period.

Carter as a Wall Street Puppet

On paper, the Carter administration was a hand-picked creation of David Rockefeller and Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission. The content of that administration was supplied by a group, headed by future Carter Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, future Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Miriam Camps. The details were worked out by the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), under the rubric of “Project for the 1980s.” There was nothing introduced under President Carter, or the early days of Vice-President (and Trilateral Commission veteran) George Bush, which was not spelled out in the 34 volumes of that report.

Not too much blame should be placed upon Carter himself. Prior to his election, apart from his sometime association with the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-submarine-development program, he had acquired none of even the rudimentary qualifications of a serious candidate for the President. No evidence shows that he ever actually understood the practical implications of the critical policies of his administration, even those which he appeared to advocate with some degree of personal passion attached. On balance, it would be fair to say that he was used by his handlers.

The one political quality which does stand out as Carter’s own inclination, is his leaning toward the prejudices of the Nashville Agrarians. The autobiographical piece published on behalf of his first campaign for the Presidency[fn_41] strongly suggests this variety of “country boy” leaning, as do many of his public utterances during the 1976-1980 interval of his original Presidential campaign and incumbency. That public relations caper, of searching for Carter’s ancestral home in England, was a cynical, raw, and obvious stunt by his handlers. Contrast Jimmy Carter with Huey Long’s actual economic recovery programs for Louisiana, and the differences are very clearly defined. Otherwise, be fair: do not search for the blame for the important developments under the Carter administration within Carter himself. The New York boys picked him and used him, and, when the time came, discreetly discarded him as another man who had been “used up.”

The Trilateral Commission under Vance, Brzezinski, et al., had one principal mission, under both Carter and Vice-President George Bush: destroy both the U.S. economy and our national sovereignty. They did both rather well.

1. The leading expression of the Carter administration’s persisting efforts to destroy the sovereignty of the U.S.A., is typified by the repeated babbling of Secretary G. William Miller, proposing to bring the U.S. Treasury and Dollar under the supranational authority of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).[fn_42]

2. The leading expression of the Carter administration’s attempts to destroy the U.S. Constitution and economy, was the package of drastic “deregulation” measures introduced to the area of transportation and other matters.[fn_43]

3. Carter’s actual destruction of the U.S. economy was launched in October 1979, with newly appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker’s program of “controlled disintegration of the economy.”[fn_44]

McKeesport Daily News

The remains of a blast furnace at a demolished steel plant in McKeesport, Pennsylvania.

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These rabidly destructive changes were carried forward in the following administration, led by Vice-President Bush’s connections to the Garn-St Germain, and related “junk bond” looting of the nation’s savings and loan institutions, and a bonanza to Wall Street parasites known as the “Kemp-Roth” bill. This combination of measures, introduced during the 1977-1982 interval, is what wrecked the U.S. economy internally. It was the addition of an added quality of changes in international financial and monetary, and “free trade” measures, introduced with the backing of a consortium led by Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, France’s “Francisque” Mitterrand, and President George Bush, which, unless suddenly and dramatically reversed, dooms the world economy as a whole.

Unless those measures, and the earlier establishment of a “floating-exchange-rate monetary system” are reversed, there is virtually no chance that the U.S. as we know it today, will live out the close of the century.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

President George H.W. Bush, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the White House Rose Garden, August 6, 1990.

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A Decade of Bush-League Strategy

Beginning 1986—perhaps 1985—President Ronald Reagan was becoming increasingly a figurehead within his own Presidency; from the last weeks of 1983 onward, the Reagan team was being systematically ousted from power; a cabal fairly described as “the Bush League,” including the ultra-ambitious James Baker III, was taking over. The last illness and death of Vice-President George Bush’s deadly rival, Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, virtually eliminated any checks upon the rampages of a gang nominally headed by the de facto head of the U.S. secret-intelligence community, Bush.

Bush’s most important base of operational power, was within the military side of the secret-intelligence community, typified by a vast army of mixed military and private elements, centered around a section of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff known, since Allen Dulles’ days, as “the focal point.”[fn_45] During the Reagan Presidency, Bush’s base was located under special secret authorities attached to a December 1981 facility, known as Executive Order 12333. Bush, in addition to being Vice-President, was operating out of his own corner in the National Security Council, as the head of the dirtiest operations run underneath the cover of 12333. “Iran-Contra,” including its extensive drug-running operations, including “crack,” into the U.S.A., was not run by the CIA; it was run by Vice-President George Bush.[fn_46]

It is not being implied that Bush is an evil genius. His biography presents us with the image of an indelibly mediocre mind, a personality whose position and influence is derived from his father’s and uncle’s power and influence, both key figures within the extended Averell Harriman clan.[fn_47] Mediocrities assigned to positions of power, are, like oversized schoolyard bullies, often the worst tyrants.

Bush’s significance is to be located in his position as a part of the hard-core Anglo-American, Anglophiliac gang, the source of his affinities to Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and, by derivation, to that scurrilous parody of Lord Palmerston’s Napoleon III, President François Mitterrand. It is President Bush’s dealings with, chiefly, Thatcher, Mitterrand, and Gorbachev, during the crucial period of 1989-1992, which laid the basis for the present, final stage of degeneration of the world economy.[fn_48]

My own role in the events of 1988-1990 is crucial.

During my February 1983 meeting with the relevant Soviet representative, I made the same point otherwise presented to other circles, in other locations. My argument was: If President Reagan offers your government the package we have been discussing, and if your government then insists on rejecting that offer, the Soviet economic system will disintegrate in about five years. The point was, that if the U.S.A. and Soviet governments, among others, were to cooperate in a crash program to develop ballistic missile defense based “on new physical principles,” and if those technologies were spun off into the Soviet and Third World economies, the resulting technology boom in the U.S.S.R. and related states, would save the world from collapsing into a general economic breakdown crisis. If the Soviets refused such an offer, the Soviet system was doomed to collapse before the so-called Western economies, in approximately five years.

EIRNS/Dean Andromidas

Lyndon LaRouche announcing the impending collapse of the Comecon system at a press conference in the Kempinski Hotel in Berlin, on October 22, 1988.

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On October 12, 1988, I delivered an address to a press conference in Berlin, in which I announced the impending collapse of the Comecon system, a process which would probably erupt first in Poland during 1989, and would probably lead to the reunification of Germany with Berlin as the designated future capital. A televised copy of this Berlin address was broadcast to a nationwide U.S. audience that same month. During November and December 1989, I worked with my wife and others, to elaborate a proposed program based upon my Berlin 1988 address, a proposal which coincided in crucial features with a speech prepared for November 1989 delivery by Deutsche Bank chief Alfred Herrhausen—an address never delivered, because Herrhausen was assassinated before it could be delivered.

The clearly feasible alternatives proposed by various circles, including my immediate collaborators, Herrhausen, and others, were never implemented. A cabal of madmen, led by Thatcher and Mitterrand, blocked such moves. Bush reached a compromise with Thatcher and Mitterrand, a compromise which led inevitably to the presently ongoing disintegration of what remains of the economy of Russia. It was this compromise which doomed the world economy to enter the present crisis.

Notably, the proposals of my immediate collaborators, first for a Europe-wide “Productive Triangle,” and then, beginning 1992, for a Eurasian “silk road” development based upon the same principles as the “Productive Triangle,” are an echo of the same “American Century” perspective which would have been carried into effect more than fifty years ago, but for the untimely death of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Relative to the life-spans of individuals, history unfolds over generations. It is world-historical personalities, who think and act on such long-term commitments to principle, who, alone, shape history’s outcome for the better. This is the lesson which the United States government will now learn very quickly, or one can pass off any U.S. election-campaign for the year 2000 as a sick joke.

[fn_1]. Without this role of the U.S.A., Britain and France would have been defeated in 1917, and Hitler would have triumphed in 1945. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]. On the Lincoln-Carey program of 1861-1876, see Anton Chaitkin, “The ‘Land-Bridge’: Henry Carey’s Global Development Program,” EIR,Vol. 24, No. 19, May 2, 1997, pp. 30-53. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3]. See Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report to the U.S. Congress, On the Subject of Manufacturers. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4]. ibid. [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5]. No “privatized” arrangement could meet this requirement. The responsibility for development of all of the land-area, and all of the population, of a nation, or region of the world, which must include benefits shared with both the best and worst investment-opportunities, is a responsibility of government. The presumption that “private entrepreneurship could do the job better,” is a delusion of people who do not think clearly. Often, privately owned public utilities and contractors make excellent contributions, but this in the form of contractors operating within regulated standards of performance. The benefit of “farming out” public utilities to private management, lies in freeing the capital which the state invests in initiating such projects, to be recycled in new state ventures. The use of governmental regulation, to ensure that the required performance of the utility is achieved, and a fair price paid to investors in public utilities, is the essential feature of the state-utility partnership. The essence of this division of labor, is that the government has a unique responsibility for developing and maintaining all of the area, and all of the population, in such a manner as to enhance the performance of all of the society, all its economy; whereas, the private utility, like other private operators, assumes only the responsibility for the operations and areas associated with its undertaking. Notably, the Carter administration’s elimination of effective public regulation of freight-rates and time-tables in railway, trucking, and air transport, wiped out economies of entire regions of the U.S.A., as if at a single blow. [back to text for fn_5]

[fn_6]. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics? 2nd ed. Executive Intelligence Review, Washington, D.C., 1996. [back to text for fn_6]

[fn_7]. The reader is reminded, that the cornerstone of the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, the empiricists, and positivists, is that actual creative mental action (i.e., actual cognition) does not exist. In other words, they deny that a knowable method exists, by use of which a mind might generate a new principle of nature, the latter which presents a validatable solution to an otherwise insoluble paradox. See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “The Substance of Morality,” EIR, Vol. 25, No. 26, June 26, 1998, pp. 22-43. [back to text for fn_7]

[fn_8]. The very terms, “macro-economic” and “micro-economic,” are faddish follies born of the illiteracy of most of the present generations of professional economists. [back to text for fn_8]

[fn_9]. Values of household income per capita of labor-force, are measured in terms of types and quantities of comparative qualities of entries in bills of consumption of both physical products and functionally

required services. Two successive arrays of the bills of consumption (per capita of labor-force) are then compared again, this time in terms of the percentile of the output of the labor-force required to replenish the indicated consumption. The desired case is one in which the superior household income (measured in both quantities and qualities) is cheaper, as a percentile of national per-capita output. In the latter case, the national-income content of superior unit of consumption, |V|2, should be less, as a percentile of national income, than inferior quality-quantity of consumption |V|1. In the history of the improvement of the standard of living of the middle- to lower-range family households of agricultural

and industrial operatives in the U.S.A., this pattern of correlation between technological progress and income-rises is modal. [back to text for fn_9]

[fn_10]. Op. cit., Note 7. [back to text for fn_10]

[fn_11]. See, for example, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., ``Leibniz from Riemann’s Standpoint,’’ Fidelio, Vol. V, No. 3, Fall 1996; LaRouche, “Riemann Refutes Euler,’’ EIR, Vo. 22, No. 44, Nov. 3, 1995, pp. 28-37; LaRouche, “Truthful, or Merely ‘Factual’?’’ EIR, Vol. 25, No. 2, Jan. 9, 1998, pp. 16-41. [back to text for fn_11]

[fn_12]12. As man explores space, the ratio of human action in space to the Earth’s surface-area remains a good yardstick for measuring the performance of the population of “earthlings.” [back to text for fn_12]

[fn_13]13. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “The Substance of Morality.” Op. cit., Note 7. [back to text for fn_13]

[fn_14]14. Gottfried Leibniz, Society & Economy, John Chambless, trans., Fidelio, Vol. I, No. 3, Fall 1992. [back to text for fn_14]

[fn_15]15. In all cases, increase of “energy density” tends to include increase of joules per capita, and always includes (secularly) increase of the cross-sectional joules per square centimeter cross-section of throughput (“energy-flux” density). See, the Fusion Energy Foundation’s table of typical “energy flux-densities” of energy-sources, by type. Thus, as fission energy is orders of magnitude cheaper than thermal sources, so fusion energy will be orders of magnitude cheaper than fission, whereas “matter/anti-matter” reactions, when developed, perhaps during the latter half of the Twenty-First Century, will be, perhaps, three orders of magnitude more effective than fusion. [back to text for fn_15]

[fn_16]16. E.g., Friedrich Schiller’s denunciation of educational programs designed for production of Brotgelehrten. Such degenerate practices in the name of education, are typified by the attempt to impose a “trade-school” curriculum, which limits education of students to the requirements of the plough to which they are to be harnessed for obedience. The same ruinous practice is typified by the self-brainwashed secondary or university student, who wishes to be burdened with no “information” which is not scheduled to “come up as my examination-question.” In generation, the dim-wits are those happy to enjoy an education based upon “information,” as opposed to a Classical-humanist form of education, which latter is indispensable for transmitting knowledge. [back to text for fn_16]

[fn_17]17. Anton Chaitkin, “Humboldt in America,” EIR, Vol. 25, No. 26, June 26, 1998, p. 25. [back to text for fn_17]

[fn_18]18. The writer’s youthful experiences, until 1940, were principally in his native New Hampshire, and the greater Boston, Massachusetts area. [back to text for fn_18]

[fn_19]19. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, Viking Press, New York, New York, 1949. [back to text for fn_19]

[fn_20]20. Under the influence of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels’ reign of terror, Gleichschaltung was the preferred term to identify the blindly ritual conformity of the German who wished to “stay out of trouble.” The widespread use of the interdependent injunctions “be popular” and “be practical,” or their successors under “McCarthyism” later, had approximately the same significance as Nazi Gleichschaltung or, for that matter, George Orwell’s fictional worlds of Animal Farm and 1984. [back to text for fn_20]

[fn_21]21. The pinnacle of polyphonic composition is, without doubt, the Fourth (E-minor) Symphony of Johannes Brahms. The root is chiefly Beethoven, including the crucial quotation from the Adagio Sostenuto of Beethoven’s Opus 106, and, deeply, Bach. In this, Brahms goes beyond Beethoven in counterpoint, but never departs from the relevant challenge presented by Beethoven. [back to text for fn_21]

[fn_22]22. Plato: The Republic, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963. The Loeb Classical Library translations include the Greek text on the facing page. [back to text for fn_22]

[fn_23]23. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not events of World War II, and should not be counted in keeping score on the actual Pacific war. MacArthur et al. had already won the war before those nuclear bombings occurred. These were, from a classical military standpoint, post-war attacks upon an already defeated nation and its people. [back to text for fn_23]

[fn_24]24. Reference is made to Adams’ policy-shaping as President Monroe’s Secretary of State, as in the instance of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, and to the developments associated with Commandant Thayer’s West Point Military Academy. [back to text for fn_24]

[fn_25]25. The “just war” doctrine of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) is developed in his reply to Faustus the Manichaean, his letter to Pope Boniface, his Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, his book On the Lord’s Words, and his book Eighty-Three Different Questions. St. Augustine’s concept of just war can be summarized as follows: 1) war should be conducted only as a last resort, since it were better to stay war with a word and to procure peace by peace than to slay men with the sword and to achieve peace by war; 2) however, the legitimate sovereign of a state has a natural right to conduct war to defend the common weal; 3) such a war requires a just cause in the form of some injury inflicted and the failure to make amends; and 4) in the event of a just cause, war to remain just must have a right intention and be waged mercifully, in the spirit of a peacemaker. [back to text for fn_25]

[fn_26]26. Exemplary of the error of those who might wish to quarrel with this account, witness the fact, that virtually every government in western Europe is of a parliamentary form derived from feudalism! Under those arrangements, there is a state, ostensibly represented by a permanent, unelected bureaucracy, and a so-called “government,” which can be overturned almost at whim, on the point of a parliamentary vote of confidence. What credulous observers mistake for “democracy,” is a long history of increase of the role of consent of an inferior agency, parliament, to exert influence over the sensibilities of a state which remains, more or less, beyond the effective control of elected government. The U.S. Federal Union, is the constitutional standard against which the distinction between dubious “parliamentary democracy” and true representative government must be measured. [back to text for fn_26]

[fn_27]27. For example, it was Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ doctrine, on the occasion of formulating the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, that since the U.S.A. lacked the power to defeat Britain militarily in South and Central America, we reserve our policy until such time as we had the power to expel the British (as well as the Holy Alliance powers) from the Hemisphere. The turning-point in that direction came under President Lincoln, who ordered the British-French-Spanish puppet-emperor, Maximilian Habsburg, expelled from Mexico. The treaties which President Ronald Reagan violated and betrayed, in condoning Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s corrupt assistance to the British in the case of the Malvinas War, were the reaffirmations of the Monroe Doctrine reaffirmed by President Franklin Roosevelt’s U.S.A. in the case of several solemn treaties, including the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro. [back to text for fn_27]

[fn_28]28. Until the first decade of the Twentieth Century, the Habsburg Emperor retained veto-power over the nomination of any Pope! This despite Pope Leo XIII! Under Habsburg oligarchical influences, the Catholics of Italy were prevented from assuming their natural leading role in the political life of Italy. It was this which provided Palmerston’s Mazzini the opportunity to make the anti-Christian, freemasonic party, the largest force for the unification of Italy. Hence, in contrast, the importance of the post-World War II Christian-Democracy of Italy. [back to text for fn_28]

[fn_29]29. The qualified exceptions to this were the efforts of France’s King Henry IV, and of Cardinal Mazarin and Jean-Baptiste Colbert. France, as the leading nation-state and economy in Europe, until 1789, was the principal target of its oligarchical enemies throughout the Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Through wars orchestrated by Venice’s financier-oligarchy, France was undermined and debilitated under a foolish Louis XIV, a subversion and waste which culminated in the successive nightmares of the Jacobin Terror and the Corsican bandit-king, Napoleon Bonaparte. After Napoleon, the glory of France departed, to the nadir reached during the post-Mitterrand period. [back to text for fn_29]

[fn_30]30. In the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), the council of princes of the Holy Roman Empire was reduced to a rump composed of a nominal Catholic Party from Italy, south Germany, and Austro-Hungary. As the assassination of many of the protégés of the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, including Wolfgang Mozart and his friends, attests, the real power behind the Habsburg throne was usually the Chancellor (Kanzler), who was the controller of the secret police (Geheimpolizei), and, sometimes, also, like Metternich, chief pimp of the realm. Thus, Wolfgang Mozart, like Ludwig van Beethoven, was personally close to the nominally reigning Habsburg family, whereas the office of the Chancellor was the enemy of both. [back to text for fn_30]

[fn_31]31. See Henry A. Kissinger, “Reflections on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy, Address in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of the Office of Foreign Secretary,” May 10, 1982, Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), London. Excerpts are published in EIR, Vol. 22, No. 38, Sept. 22, 1995, p. 33-35. See also, Kissinger’s book, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822, Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, 1957.

The career of Kissinger, a protégé of both British agent (and Nashville Tennessee “Fugitive”) William Yandell Elliott and Henry Stimson’s McGeorge Bundy, typifies the implicitly treasonous current in U.S. policy-shaping during the recent fifty years. President Theodore Roosevelt brought Morgan-Harriman lawyer Stimson into government as U.S. Attorney for New York, to tie prosecutorial power to the London-New York axis. Morgan was the official British Crown financial agent; the Harrimans’ railroad empire was British Crown-financed. Stimson led the Yale secret society, Skull and Bones—a typical sponsoring center for the British-U.S. “special relationship” and the Harriman, Bundy, and Bush families. Stimson protégé McGeorge Bundy emerged from the Stimson-Harriman power clique, which reoriented U.S. military strategy and structure along British lines after President Franklin’s death.

See Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Executive Intelligence Review, Washington, D.C., Chapters 4 and 7. [back to text for fn_31]

[fn_32]32. In respect to the back-channel itself, I was operating under national-security rules. Thus, those secret aspects of the back-channel discussion which were under national-security have never been revealed to unauthorized persons, by me, to the present date. Nor was there ever a good reason to do so; all the essential facts of the history of SDI were always fully visible in the public domain. [back to text for fn_32]

[fn_33]33. Andreas Ranke, “Schlieffen, Carnot, and the Theory of the Flank,” EIR, Vol. 25, No. 6, Feb. 6, 1998, pp. 62-70. [back to text for fn_33]

[fn_34]34. Gen. Fieldmarshal Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Cannae, Command and General Staff School Press, Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, 1931. [back to text for fn_34]

[fn_35]35. In treating the terrorist-linked and related radicals of the post-1963 “rock-drug-sex counterculture,” the Maxim Gorki paradigm must be referenced. Gorki, who used the satanic center of Alex Muenthe et al., at the Isle of Capri, for his training sessions, was the “mother” of the training of the hard-core agents of Feliks Dzherzhinsky’s Cheka (predecessor of the KGB). Hate-filled, homeless youth were developed as a hard core of agents, of exceptional ruthlessness and lack of human sensibilities. Like Georg Lukacs, or such of the latter’s “Frankfurt School” followers as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, the essence of the psychological conditioning of the Gorki, Lukacs types of leftist agent-types, was blind, irrational hatred of the “existing culture,” the “existing society.” The worst G.D.R. “Stasi” types, for example, fit into this profile, as do those hard-core eco-terrorists, of “criminal energy,” at the center of the murderous, large-scale guerrilla-warfare mayhem in 1970s and 1980s France and Germany. There is no essential difference between leftists of Bertolt Brecht’s “Jenny” type, and professed Nazis such as Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels, and Martin Heidegger. These types are essentially neither “left” nor “right,” but only and always satanic in the specific sense of the Phrygian cult of Dionysos, or the ancient Gaea-Python cult. [back to text for fn_35]

[fn_36]36. The murder of the popular writer August von Kotzebue by the radicalized student Karl Ludwig Sand was used by Prince Metternich as a convenient pretext to clamp down on the political ferment in Germany, for German reunification under a constitutional government. In 1819, Austria got the Deutscher Bund, the alliance of a whole array of feudal German mini-states, to adopt the Carlsbad decrees. These meant severe restrictions of the freedom of press, speech, association, etc., under the cover of “pursuing the demagogues” (Demagogenverfolgung). As this was a joint decision by the feudal princes, the victims could no longer escape prison or other punishment by fleeing across the border of their respective mini-states. Hundreds of courageous political leaders went to prison during those years, for nothing more than expressing their anti-feudal political convictions. Many escaped imprisonment by fleeing to Switzerland, France, and, notably, the United States. [back to text for fn_36]

[fn_37]37. Under the regime of the Carlsbad decrees, it became highly risky for journalists to quote certain works by Schiller or for theatrical directors to perform Schiller’s plays in an uncensored version. This concerned, especially, his drama Wilhelm Tell, but also Don Carlos and Kabale und Liebe, in which Schiller both attacked and ridiculed life and politics at the corrupt feudal courts. Interestingly, the same aspects of Schiller’s works, later fell victim to Goebbels’ censorship during the Nazi regime. [back to text for fn_37]

[fn_38]38. The New England “Transcendentalists” and the Charleston, South Carolina racists were both representatives of Mazzini’s “Young America” agents of Lord Palmerston. [back to text for fn_38]

[fn_39]39. In April 1976, Chase Econometrics released a study estimating that for every $1 spent in the U.S. space program, $14 was returned to the economy in new jobs, new factories, and increased productivity from new technologies. See Marsha Freeman, “Space Program Spending Paid for Itself Many Times Over,” EIR, Vol. 23, No. 9, Feb. 23, 1996, pp. 12-13. [back to text for fn_39]

[fn_40]40. The shrinking birth-rate among middle-income ranges of the U.S. population, is merely typical of the drastic cuts from the per-household standard of living since the middle 1960s. The explosion of irrational violence and loss of cognitive potentials among adolescent youth, victims of the collapse of the household standard of living, is also a reflection. [back to text for fn_40]

[fn_41]41. Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best? (Broadman Press, Nashville, Tennessee, 1975). [back to text for fn_41]

[fn_42]42. G. William Miller occupied the two top national financial policy positions during the Carter administration. On Dec. 28, 1977, President Carter appointed Miller chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; on July 19, 1979, Carter appointed him as Secretary of the Treasury, replacing W. Michael Blumenthal, and bringing in Paul Volcker as FRB head. During these years, the policy was to make the U.S. dollar, and economy, subservient to the IMF, by initiating domestic IMF “surveillance,” the use of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), and related means. In Spring 1979, while Miller was still Fed chairman, a secret memorandum on U.S. financial compliance with the IMF, was prepared for Treasury and State Department officials (see Lydia Schulman, “U.S. Sets Policy for Tokyo Summit: Treasury, State Propose IMF Surveillance Over U.S. Economy,” EIR, Vol. 6, No. 21, May 29-June 4, 1979), pp. 7-10. [back to text for fn_42]

[fn_43]43. President Jimmy Carter deregulated and helped ruin America’s once very efficient transportation grid. On October 24, 1978, July 1, 1980, and October 14, 1980, Carter signed the laws that deregulated the airline, trucking, and railroad industries, respectively. The initiative for these laws came from within the Carter administration and from the Heritage Foundation-wing of the Republican Party. In the case of airlines, direct flights and, in some cases, any flights at all, were eliminated from several American cities; while many industrial sites were eliminated from America’s rail freight grid. Both railroads and airlines became the plaything of leveraged buy-out speculators. See, for example, “Deregulation: The Road to Transport Chaos,” EIR, Vol. 6, No. 25, June 26-July 2, 1979, pp.16-25; and Richard Freeman, “A History of the Push for Deregulation,” EIR, March 29, 1996, pp. 47-49. [back to text for fn_43]

[fn_44]44. See Jonathan Tennenbaum’s two-part study, “Financial Crisis: The End-Phase of a 30-Year Disease,” EIR, Vol. 25, No. 22, May 22, 1998, pp. 16-41; and “The Global Financial Crisis Unfolds, 1944-98,” EIR, May 29, 1998, pp. 34-49. Volcker told a Leeds, U.K. audience in November 1978: “Controlled disintegration is a legitimate objective for the 1980s.” [back to text for fn_44]

[fn_45]45. Edward Spannaus, “The Focal Point System for Covert Action,” EIR,Vol. 22, No. 50, Dec. 15, 1995, p. 40. [back to text for fn_45]

[fn_46]46. “Would a President Bob Dole Prosecute Drug Super-Kingpin George Bush?” EIR Special Report, September 1996. [back to text for fn_46]

[fn_47]47. Tarpley and Chaitkin, op. cit., Note 31. [back to text for fn_47]

[fn_48]48. An EIR documentary Special Feature will be issued shortly on this matter, titled The Thatcher-Mitterrand Plot to Destroy Post-1989 Continental Europe (also to be published, simultaneously, in German, as a Special Report of Executive Intelligence Review Nachrichtenagentur, GmbH).

Briefly, during the last quarter of 1989, Britain’s Thatcher regime reacted with mouth-foaming frenzy against what it denounced as the imminent threat of a “Fourth Reich,” a reunified Germany assuming a powerful economic position as partner for the reconstruction of the shaky economies of eastern and south-eastern Europe. The initial impulse of both Britain and Mitterrand’s France, was to prevent the reunification of Germany at virtually all costs. The Bush administration policy, typified by the advice of Brent Scowcroft, was to reject the radical German-hating rantings of Thatcher and Mitterrand; a compromise was reached, under which Germany would be reunified, but the economies of the former Warsaw Pact nations virtually destroyed through a combination of measures including radical monetarist “reforms,” coupled with the elimination of any future independence for Germany’s economy, under the so-called “Maastricht” treaty. The Kohl government is now releasing important chunks of the heretofore secret diplomacy deployed to force Germany to submit to such conditions.

See also, Elisabeth Hellenbroich, “Exposed! The Anti-German Plot behind the Euro,” EIR, Vol. 25, No. 19, May 8, 1998, pp. 4-8; and Der Spiegel, April 27, 1998. [back to text for fn_48]

II. Science Over Pestilence

Locust Swarms Devour Nations: Time for Emergency Solutions!

by Janet G. West

FAO

Desert Locusts devouring crops in the Horn of Africa, January 30, 2020.

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Feb. 9—The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) sounded the alarm, issuing an unprecedented statement on Feb. 3, warning that the swarms of locusts already infesting several African countries in the Horn of Africa now threaten additional countries such as Uganda and southern Sudan, and are already extending to others such as Yemen, southern Pakistan and western India.

In its bulletin, “Appeal for rapid response and anticipatory action in the Greater Horn of Africa,” the FAO outlines that the countries most immediately affected are Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, with nearly 12 million people already experiencing “severe acute food insecurity” (households have minimally adequate food consumption, but are unable to afford some essential non-food expenditures without engaging in stress-coping strategies). If unchecked, the swarms threaten over 20 million additional people in the near term.

The FAO has called for a minimum of an initial funding of $70 million to support rapid control actions and take measures to prevent a deterioration in the food security situation and to protect livelihoods, and emphasized that long-term, sustained eradication efforts are required to avert catastrophe. This includes not only the means to destroy the swarms and end their propagation, but also massive support with food, since the locusts not only wipe out crops for people, but also for livestock.

The Scourge of the Desert Locust

Since Biblical times, the Desert Locust has been notorious—decimating crops and vegetation with huge swarms that can move almost 100 miles a day (150 km). In one day, a “small” swarm of one square kilometer can consume the equivalent amount of food for 35,000 people; a swarm in Kenya was recently measured covering an area of about 60 km by 40 km (about 927 square miles), and the swarm’s caloric intake will be the equivalent of food for millions of people (i.e., hundreds of tons of food). Like a gigantic juggernaut, a swarm consumes every edible plant it encounters. (Note that these figures ought to be in cubic measurements, rather than square, because the swarms can reach several tens of feet in depth.)

CC/Christiaan Kooyman

A Desert Locust (Schistocerca gregaria) laying eggs during the Desert Locust outbreak in Mauritania in 1994.

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The adult insect is about 6 centimeters long (3 to 4 inches), and weighs about 2 grams; each adult eats its weight-equivalent in food every day. Much is known about its life-cycle and the conditions under which it begins to swarm. Eggs that have been in the ground for perhaps 20 years can begin to hatch under the right conditions. The young locusts are flightless and are called “hoppers”; groups of hoppers are called “bands”; bands merge into “groups” and groups expand to “swarms,” and swarms soon become “plagues” that can number in the several tens of billions of insects.

Normally, the transition from young to adult takes about four weeks, but during optimal conditions, locusts develop much more rapidly—and then, they can fly. As the adults eat through and obliterate one area of food, they release pheromones that alert other adults to begin to fly and move on. Since they fly with the wind, they fly toward areas of low pressure—that is, rainy areas—and regions of lush vegetation.

Figure 1

NASA GSFC/Compton Tucker

The solitaria (grasshopper) and gregaria (swarming) phases of the Desert Locust.

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In 1921, a Russian entomologist, Boris Uvarov, made the discovery that a particular species of grasshopper could transform its appearance and behavior, depending on its population density, and turn into a locust. At low population density, the color of the insect is a greenish-brown, and the creatures avoid each other; this phase is called “solitarious”; when there is a dense population, they become bright yellow with black markings, increase in size and strength, and become attracted to each other—this is called the “gregarious” phase.

Researchers are still hypothesizing how and why this occurs; it has been observed to be reversible within a locust’s lifetime, which is usually three to five months. The transformation of a mere grasshopper into a hefty locust is so dramatic, they were thought to be two different species until this discovery. This will be discussed further below.

The recent crises in the Horn of Africa region have created a “perfect storm” for the formation of these swarms—floods from March to June 2018; the outbreak of Rift Valley Fever, June-September 2018; prolonged drought from about 2016 to 2018, and favorable rainfall for locust breeding from September to December 2019. Locust activity began in July 2019, and swarming began in December 2019. Unusual weather conditions in January created a rapid deterioration of the situation. These conditions, along with expected rains in March 2020 (and the beginning of the new planting season), will allow the locusts to continue to breed until June 2020, with the potential for a truly terrifying 500-fold increase in the number of locusts. Experts emphasize that this magnitude of swarms has not been seen for at least 25 years in Ethiopia and Somalia, and over 70 years in Kenya.

What is also deeply disturbing is the threat of these swarms moving into the Rift Valley (the breadbasket of the region) and the countries of Uganda and South Sudan—there is no existing response capacity in either country.

FAO

The map shows the extent of the Desert Locust infestation in the nations in the Horn of Africa, Yemen and other nations in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, and Pakistan across the Arabian Sea, as of January 2020.

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The Affected Countries—So Far

• Ethiopia—The FAO Bulletin reports: “Over 2,350 square kilometers of land has been affected so far in Ethiopia. Some cropping areas in Amhara and Tigray have already reported substantial crop losses, which is likely to have a direct impact on food security in the affected areas. As the locusts move, livelihoods and food security are at risk in the southern and southeastern areas of the country. While aerial control operations are taking place, additional support from FAO is required not only to control the Desert Locust outbreak, but also to support the livelihoods of the most vulnerable people in the affected areas.”

• Kenya—“In Kenya, dozens of Desert Locust swarms have arrived from Ethiopia and Somalia on a nearly daily basis since the end of December 2019. To date, about 70,000 hectares of land has already been infested. As they move into the center of the country, the pest outbreak poses a risk to agricultural livelihoods. Agropastoral communities in the north are particularly vulnerable as they are only just recovering from a prolonged drought. Aerial control operations began early, though the capacity of the country to respond to the rapid multiplication and formation of dense swarms requires FAO support for both control operations and livelihoods interventions.” (FAO)

• Somalia—As of Sunday, February 2, 2020, Somalia has declared a national emergency, underscoring its already fragile food supplies. Somalia’s Ministry of Agriculture warned that, “food sources for people and their livestock are at risk.” The FAO reported, “Desert Locust swarms bred in the north and have moved mainly to insecure areas in the central and southern parts of the country, invading livestock pasture and threatening the staple food crops in Somalia’s breadbasket, where severe food insecurity is recurrent. Up to 180,000 hectares require control interventions, including remote, insecure areas where control capacity is limited. FAO support is therefore urgently needed to back government efforts to survey, control and monitor the pest, and deliver time-sensitive livelihood and food security assistance to the most vulnerable.”

• Yemen—“Yemen is a key frontline country for Desert Locust because of its winter breeding areas along the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden coasts, the source of devastating plagues in the past,” FAO locust expert Keith Cressman told Reuters. Due to the prolonged civil war in Yemen, vital equipment such as four-wheel drive vehicles have been lost or destroyed; food and fuel prices have doubled; some 80% of the population depends on some kind of humanitarian assistance; and 14 million people are on the brink of starvation. Compounding the crisis is the outbreak of cholera—fresh water supplies and basic sanitation are scarce.

• Pakistan—As of February 1, 2020, Prime Minister Imran Khan declared a national emergency in response to the swarms of Desert Locusts in the eastern part of the country. Deutsche Welle reports, “National Food Security Minister Makhdoom Khusro Bakhtiar said the locust swarms were currently on the Pakistan-India border around Cholistan and were previously in Sindh and Balochistan, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported. ‘The locust attack is unprecedented and alarming,’ Bakhtiar told Pakistani lawmakers in a briefing on Friday. ‘Action has been taken against the insect over 0.3 million acres (121,400 hectares) and aerial spray was done on 20,000 hectares,’ he was quoted as saying by Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune. ‘District administrations, voluntary organizations, aviation division and armed forces are put into operation to combat the attack and save the crops,’ he added.”

Current Efforts Woefully Inadequate

Currently, spraying of pesticides is considered to be the only effective means of control, and is already going on, but to be effective, regions have to be sprayed at the right time and under the right conditions (wind and rain can affect the effectiveness), which requires adequate infrastructure and manpower. The most common insecticides used against locusts are fenitrothion, malathion, chlorpyrifos, and bendiocarb. It is well-known in these regions that the most effective spraying is with what is known as “Ultra-Low Volume” (ULV), in which an atomizer generates a mist with droplets in the ideal size range to cling to plants and locusts (about 3 micrometers in diameter). This type of spraying involves the pesticide pre-mixed with oil (rather than water) to decrease evaporation and to enhance its effectiveness.

“The wind is used to drift the spray over the target as overlapping swaths to buildup sufficient dose and toxicity to obtain a good result. ULV formulations required lower volumes of product and do not need to be mixed with water, which is often scarce in the desert,” says the FAO. “Once the aircraft has done aerial spraying, the locusts inhale the chemical and die within a short while. What goes to the ground is very minimal and in less than a week, it dries up. The chemicals are safe for the environment and humans.”

However, much of the spraying is apparently done on the ground by people using backpacks and other such equipment (hoses attached to trucks) to spray crops. In all of Kenya—about the size of Texas—there are only five planes deployed to spray. As reported in AP wires:

“It is challenging work, especially in remote areas where mobile phone signals are absent and ground crews cannot quickly communicate coordinates to flight teams. ‘The ground crews are in ‘the most woeful terrains,’ Marcus Dunn, a pilot and the director at Farmland Aviation, said Saturday. ‘If there is no network, then the fellow on a boda boda (motorcycle), he has to rush off now and go and get a network.’ ”

Cities, such as Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, have been spraying on a regular basis, and the locusts that have arrived there are considered to be “leftovers” from the main swarms to the east and south. In central Kenya, the chief agricultural officer of Isiolo County commented to AP News, “So far we have decimated around five swarms in Samburu and Isiolo (counties) but we keep on receiving more swarms every week.”

The FAO has been able to mobilize about $15.4 million of the $76 million requested, but this level of aid cannot address the magnitude of the disaster. The critical window of opportunity is now—between February and March, before the rains come. The FAO outlines the need for “large-scale aerial and ground pest control operations as well as surveillance, trajectory forecasting, and data collection efforts,” reporting that, “during the hopper stages, ground operations are cost-effective and will be prioritized. Once locusts reach adult stage, air control operations will be utilized.”

What Is To Be Done?

Although it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss mitigation efforts in depth, we can highlight some of the most promising areas. The proper approach is to mobilize resources as if for war, given the threat against millions of lives.

To begin with, we must address the decades of racist brainwashing of the advanced sector that these nations—or any nations—are “overpopulated.” Even well-meaning people may have the Darwinian-jerk reflex of reacting with, “Well, . . . isn’t it survival of the fittest? Aren’t there too many people already? This is just nature’s way of maintaining a balance,” and other such crap. We’re facing a crisis that potentially threatens the lives of some 32 million people—let’s mobilize our resources, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that has the logistics expertise and knows how to transport materiel. We, who defeated fascism, who were horrified at the atrocities of the Nazis—can we turn away from this necessity to act? It is time to jettison the sewage that is the cultural pessimism of the Greenies.

FAO

A camel caravan making its way through a Desert Locust swarm near Shilabo, Somali Ogaden, Ethiopia.

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The agenda for the war against the locust threat must include the application of advanced technologies such as drones, whose effectiveness has already been proven on a smaller scale in Pakistan, Mauritania, and a few other African nations, along with a strengthening of the overall infrastructure of the region. Drone technology is already being applied as part of the FAO’s global Desert Locust monitoring, early warning and preventive control in Africa and Asia program, in which locust survey teams equipped with drones seek out areas of green vegetation in the desert, search the areas for smaller locust infestations and treat them safely and effectively—before they develop into large swarms which do such enormous damage.

NASA (and other agencies’) satellites can also be used—although not yet able to distinguish swarms, they can detect changes in moisture in the soil; the female locusts lay their eggs in moist soil, so we could predict when and where swarms are most likely to occur, to allow preventive measures to be taken.

Advanced Technologies to be Developed

In the 1980s, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. spearheaded a campaign to eradicate locusts and other pests with the use of electro-magnetic pulse devices. In an article in EIR published in 1988, the science of using electromagnetic pulses which would be specifically “tuned” to affect only locusts, was discussed. These types of devices have proven feasible in research laboratories, but which went unfunded. Tests were performed on Lubber grasshoppers, chosen due to their similarity to their cousins, the Desert Locust. The wavelengths were approximately the size of the grasshoppers, which were treated to short bursts of electromagnetic radiation. It only took one-tenth of a second to kill the insects, and this sort of technology could be effective at a distance of up to three miles (EIR, Vol. 15, No. 16, April 15, 1988).

In 1989, a representative of EIR and the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC), William C. Jones, presented testimony before the U.S. Senate Sub-Committee on Appropriations (chaired by Sen. Inouye), regarding assistance to African nations (already devasted by the AIDS epidemic) to defeat the swarms of locusts at that time. In addition to recommending the use of Deeldran for spraying of the swarms with deployment of DC-7s, he also urged the immediate deployment of such electromagnetic devices to effectively eradicate locusts, and to save countless of human lives. These recommendations were not adopted.

Earlier, in 1985, the Fusion Energy Foundation in its publication, Fusion, presented the case for use of electromagnetic fields or emission of specific pheromones to attract insect pests to an area to be killed in an article titled, “Insects and the Battle of the Beams.” The author, Philip Callahan, based his fascinating research on his experience in World War II with radar, and how the pilots of the Luftwaffe were directed to their targets in London by a narrow radio beam; they didn’t navigate—they followed the beam until they hit another beam which intersected the “pathfinding” beam, and then released their bombs. A similar principle could be used to direct specific insects to their doom (Fusion, Vol. 7, No. 5, September-October 1985).

In 2013, at the University of Central Florida, a then assistant professor of biology, Hojun Song (now with Texas A&M University, Department of Entomology), conducted experiments based on his hypothesis of a “phase theory,” that the insect’s behavior and characteristics change according to local population density. According to the article, “Controlling Destructive Locusts by Manipulating their Genetics,” on Phys.org,

All locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. Locusts are a special type of grasshopper capable of altering their shape, color and behavior in response to a change in density, an ability known as locust phase polyphenism.

The article continues,

In the lab, Song has created two density scenarios—high and low—for several species of grasshoppers he has caught locally in Florida, as well as another species from Texas, and still another he plans to obtain from California. He also is conducting field studies in Mexico and South America on other species, because he cannot bring the insects into the United States.

“We have a generation of grasshoppers in the lab that reproduce,” he says. “From the beginning, when the eggs hatch, we divide the hatchlings into two groups. Each of the members of one group is in complete isolation—they cannot see or touch or smell each other—while we are rearing the second group in high density, 500 to 1,000 in a cage. They bump into each other, see each other, and smell each other.”

The researchers already have generated data for two Florida species and have found that they do, in fact, have the ability to change, although they are non-swarming when found in nature. “They are showing the traits in the lab,” he says. “They are shy when isolated, but attracted to each other in crowded conditions. They change color, and one species marches together.”

Other research during 2009 and 2013 revealed that although crowded conditions can initiate the change in the insect, serotonin would be the first neurotransmitter triggered, which plays a role in the transmorgrification of the grasshopper to locust. When solitary locusts were injected with serotonin, they became gregarious, even in conditions of being uncrowded, and in as little time as two hours. Further research must be carried out in this area, in which a locust-specific biological agent could be developed to shut down serotonin production, and curtail the ability to swarm.

Economic Justice

It is in these areas—the frontiers of science—that we may discover the means of mastery over our environment, such that locust plagues will become a thing of the past. What is required is a mobilization of resources, materiel, and manpower to rise to the challenge. Numerous nations must be involved in the effort for not only immediate humanitarian aid, but development of technology, agriculture and infrastructure throughout all of Africa, such that people can have modern sanitation, roads, electricity and the like, so that these problems are solved and the entire region can be stabilized politically. However, it is as much a moral question as a monetary one. The madness of the “Green Plague”—environmentalism—must stop if humanity is to survive.

Now, it is all the more urgent that world leaders heed the call of Helga Zepp-LaRouche for an immediate summit between President Trump, President Putin, President Xi Jinping, and if possible, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to deliberate and collaborate in resolving this and the many crises in the world today, and for the United States to enact LaRouche’s “Four Laws” for economic survival and science-driver development.

Statement by the President of the International Schiller Institute

China Deserves Praise and Cooperation in the Fight against the Coronavirus

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Feb. 7—The name of the German weekly magazine, Der Spiegel, means in English, “The Mirror.” And indeed what you see this week on the cover of the print version of Der Spiegel—a person with a gas mask, goggles, earphones and a red hoody—is the mirror image of the ugly face of the racism of its editors. The headline “Coronavirus Made in China” should actually be “The Ugly Face of the Racist Monster Spiegel.”

This piece of yellow trash journalism was so bad that the Chinese Embassy in Germany issued a formal complaint on its website. The notorious Jyllands-Posten of Denmark had an equally disgusting so-called cartoon putting the coronavirus on the Chinese flag. Various American so-called mainstream media use the abominable, racist term “The Yellow Peril.” What all of these portrayals demonstrate is the ugly reality of an obviously deep-seated racism under a very thin varnish of “Western values.”

The reality of the matter is, that the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has praised China repeatedly for its excellent handling of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) epidemic, noting that China has set a new standard of dealing with such problems. The Chinese government published a full genome-mapping of the new variants within days of the outbreak, making it easier for scientists in other countries to start working on possible vaccines. China has made significant breakthroughs in the biological sciences over the past 15-20 years. Other health officials have stated that the response of the Wuhan city government and the regional government in the dissemination of information has been “state of the art,” and that an extremely impressive quantity of new information has been made available in their daily updates, which began on Dec. 31.

To call any virus a “Chinese” virus is as silly as saying that it is someone’s fault if he catches the flu or gets sick. It can happen anywhere in the world and it can happen to any person on the planet. The lesson from the reactions to the outbreak of the coronavirus is that it shows who in the international community is capable of responding to dangers that threaten all of humanity, and it shows who is a troglodyte, and who is not.

If Europe and the U.S. want to be credible in talking about “human rights” and “Western values,” then they should join hands with China and cooperate in the fight to defeat this new coronavirus. The coronavirus, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths annually from the complications of influenza, show how urgent it is to make new breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding of living processes to overcome what are now life-threatening diseases. Europe and the U.S. should also cooperate with the most future-oriented vision on the international agenda, namely the extension of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) into Southwest Asia and Africa and the join in on the international cooperation in the Space Silk Road.

For sure we should reflect on the current relevance of the judgment of Gottfried Leibniz, who wrote:

In any case it seems that the situation of our present conditions, in light of the growing moral decadence, is such that it almost seems necessary that Chinese missionaries are sent to us, who could teach us the application and practices of natural theology. . . . I therefore believe, that if a wise man were elected, not to judge the beauty of goddesses, but the excellence of peoples, he would give the golden apple to the Chinese.

I think Leibniz was a lot wiser than, let’s say, Der Spiegel, Jyllands-Posten and The New York Times.

REPORT FROM GERMANY

Creativity and Optimism,

Not Climate Mania

by Alexander Hartmann

EIRNS/Dean Andromidas

Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressing the BüSo Party Congress in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on February 2, 2020.

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Feb. 8—At the February 2 opening of the 14th annual Federal Party Congress of the Civil Rights Movement Solidarity (BüSo) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, the BüSo choir welcomed 100 members and guests with a little-known musical setting of Friedrich Schiller’s famous Ode to Joy by Schiller’s friend Christian Gottfried Körner—the very first setting of this poem—and a sing-along performance of Beethoven’s canon Friendship also set the tone for the event.

In her keynote speech, the BüSo’s Federal President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, gave the participants a comprehensive overview of the world situation. She spoke about the crucial role of the BüSo as a catalyst for a paradigm shift, away from “green finance” and towards maintaining Germany as an industrial nation. She also included a strong emphasis on classical music and culture, especially this year, the year of Beethoven’s 250th birthday.

The Four Laws to save the economy proposed by Lyndon H. LaRouche are the basis for a far-reaching and long overdue restructuring of the global economy, she said. If the attempt to get President Donald Trump out of office fails, the way will be clear for a Trump summit with the heads of state of China and Russia, who will then discuss how the world can be brought out of its deep crisis. That means getting the world out of the trans-Atlantic monetarist malaise and geopolitics. She concluded by emphasizing that, above all, Agapē is needed at this time, as St. Paul says in his famous First Letter to the Corinthians.

EIRNS/Josef Stahleicher

Elke Fimmen

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Elke Fimmen, the first deputy federal chairwoman of the BüSo, then gave the formal report on the party’s activities in the past two years since the federal election in autumn of 2017, and used election posters and publications to show the core themes of these activities: German participation in China’s Belt & Road Initiative, the “New Silk Road”; the reconstruction of the Middle East and especially Syria; a peaceful world order for the 21st century via the creation of a new global security architecture; and the fight against artificially stoked climate hysteria. In this context, she referred to the evil role of the mass media, which does more harm by hiding the positive alternatives to prevailing politics than by spreading “fake news” about Trump, Russia, China or climate change.

EIRNS/Josef Stahleicher

A section of the audience at the BüSo Party Congress.

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That is why the BüSo has a special responsibility to inform the population about the actual situation and its background. The BüSo weekly “Zepp-LaRouche im Dialog” internet forums with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, which are now viewed by up to 20,000, and sometimes more, viewers, are particularly useful, but also publications such as the new BüSo brochure, “Stop the Climate Swindle of Wall Street and City of London!” in which the efforts of the financial world to get through the new, upcoming financial crash through the creation of a new “green” financial bubble are explained.

This campaign is aimed in particular at all those who are being driven by developments in public protests, such as the young participants in the “FridaysForFuture” demonstrations, the victims of the coal phase-out in the Lusatia region of central Europe, or the participants in the farmers’ demonstrations in recent months. Especially in times like these, when the crisis is driving people into the streets in large numbers, Lyndon LaRouche’s ideas are indispensable to steer the protests in a positive, optimistic direction and to prevent pessimism from spreading, which then can very easily turn into violence.

Election Campaigns

With this in mind, the BüSo has conducted a federal election campaign (2017) and state election campaigns in Hesse (2018) and Saxony (2019) during the past three years. To demonstrate this spirit of optimism, Fimmen showed the BüSo election spot from the Saxon state election campaign at the end of her presentation.

EIRNS/Dean Andromidas

Klaus Fimmen

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Subsequently, the second deputy federal chairman and BüSo treasurer Klaus Fimmen reported on the development of the party finances, whereby it became apparent that the party had achieved a growing influence in important questions despite limited resources, which is reflected in the greatly increased number of visits to the BüSo website and at the weekly internet forum of BüSo chairperson Helga Zepp-LaRouche. He cited important parts of the American Declaration of Independence and the Rütli Oath from Schiller’s play William Tell to remind people of their eternal rights and the ongoing mass strike process, which opens up completely new opportunities that must not be missed.

Then there was the vote for the party executive. Helga Zepp-LaRouche was re-elected as federal chair, as were Elke Fimmen as first deputy federal chairman and Klaus Fimmen as second deputy federal chairman. Stephan Ossenkopp was promoted to the executive federal board, and Michael Gründler and Christoph Mohs were newly elected to the federal board.

After completing these regular formalities, the focus was again on the political content, with a total of five presentations.

EIRNS/Josef Stahleicher

Jacques Cheminade

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The first of these guest speakers was the former French presidential candidate and chairman of the Solidarité et Progrès party, Jacques Cheminade. He emphasized that the challenge of our time is to act according to what we are committed—that is, to be optimistic against all opposition:

That means that we cannot be discouraged by the stupidity of some, because our enemies in the oligarchy know how to use discouragement as a weapon against us.

The basis for human reason, he quoted Lyndon LaRouche, was the ability of people to “make creative discoveries that advance their scientific knowledge and convert such scientific advances into technical advances.” Therefore “this time, our time, is no time for pessimism.” It is a shame that Europe is being overtaken by Asia, Cheminade said: “We don’t even understand China’s win-win conception because we are trapped in the cage of prejudice of a deductive system, while the Chinese are always looking for solutions outside of the system’s established rules, by advancing into the realm of creative thinking, as taught by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s America after World War II in its missions for productivity.”

EIRNS/Dean Andromidas

Bernhard Perschl

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Agriculture, Industry and Science

A panel discussion followed with speakers from agriculture, industry and science. Bernhard Perschl from Bavaria reported on the situation of the farmers and the reasons for their current wave of protests. In the past, the measures taken by politicians only affected individual sectors of agriculture, “but now the measures affect all farmers.” The measures are 90% green-ideological, but not technically justified; they reduce efficiency and endanger the economic viability of farms. He cited the manure regulation as an example: The period in which manure may be applied to the fields was severely restricted, and the farmers were therefore forced to store the manure that accumulated. But the construction of the manure storage facilities was not approved because the regulations issued for it could hardly be met.

Following Perschl’s presentation, Elke Fimmen read a greeting from American farmers to the German farmers, explaining their support for the ongoing protests and asking to establish and maintain contacts, exchange information and coordinate joint trans-Atlantic actions.

EIRNS/Dean Andromidas

Gerd Marks

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Gerd Marks, an industrial consultant with decades of experience in the paper and plastics industry, in mechanical engineering, automation and increasing efficiency, looked at the consequences of climate alarm for Germany as an industrial region.

The planned nuclear phase-out in 2022 and the coal phase-out planned for 2038 threaten a “transformation of gigantic, historical proportions,” Marks said. Above all, there is a danger from the “Big Five”: the Green New Deal, which he called a fiasco; the EU classifications that discriminate against major industrial sectors; “Green Finance,” a “ruinous strategy” that cuts off credit for industry; the volatile so-called “renewable” energies, which destabilize our electricity supply; and the so-called “circular economy,” more than just recycling, is a deficiency management system characterized by controlling and directing electricity consumption. The relocation of production away from Germany is already obvious. These policies promise to maintain prosperity, but then “prosperity” must be redefined, necessarily with a reduction in supply.

Marks contrasted this with the “right way into the future”: reconstruction of the physical economy, entry into modern, fourth generation nuclear energy. The world today needs “the space shuttle instead of the horse-drawn carriage,” he said, and demanded that Germany should leave the path that leads to a destructive economy of scarcity.

EIRNS/Dean Andromidas

Dr. Armin Azima

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Dr. Armin Azima, physicist from Hamburg, took up this topic and continued it. He cited estimates that the price of electricity would rise to 60 cents per kilowatt-hour in the course of the nuclear and coal phase-out. With current electricity consumption, this corresponds to EU360 billion, which is 10% of German economic output. Then there would be the rising costs of storage and higher network costs.

EIRNS/Dean Andromidas

Dr. Armin Azima projects rising electricity costs with phase-out of coal and nuclear.

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Nuclear fusion could offer a way out, but its development is currently hardly being promoted. In addition to government projects such as ITER and the Wendelstein reactor, there are a number of smaller, private approaches. As an example, he presented the concept of the FF-1 reactor from the U.S. company, LPPFusion, in which a hydrogen-boron fuel is converted into electrically charged helium nuclei with the help of a plasma focus in an aneutronic reaction.

EIRNS/Dean Andromidas

Harley Schlanger

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A Phase Change, U.S. President Trump Acquitted

Harley Schlanger, longtime spokesman for Lyndon LaRouche in the United States and much sought-after interviewee for several American radio programs, then reported on the latest developments in the United States. This served to answer a certain skepticism about Donald Trump which had emerged in the discussion earlier. He reported on the impeachment process against President Trump, emphasizing the irony that the same Democrats, who today want to use the warmonger John Bolton as a key witness against Trump, had vehemently rejected Bolton’s nomination to be Ambassador to the UN in 2005 because of his lies and unreliability.

Trump had expressed his fundamental support for the main points of LaRouche’s Four Laws in the election campaign: he had called for a return to the Glass-Steagall banking separation system, he wanted to greatly expand investments in the productive sector and in industry, and he committed himself decisively to expand NASA’s space program. But so far, not much has been done in this direction due to the resistance to these policies.

Now that the coup has failed, Trump will have a freer hand than before, but there is no guarantee that he will use it to enforce the right policies. Therefore, it is crucial that we promote the right policies in the United States to awaken the true legacy of the American system.

EIRNS/Dean Andromidas

The BüSo chorus, directed by Werner Hartmann.

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After their presentations, all speakers answered questions from the audience with great interest. Helga Zepp-LaRouche concluded the discussion with the assessment that it was clear that something had to change in our country, “and it is our job to achieve this.” The number of people who address it must grow dramatically. For this reason, activists should set up local groups of the BüSo in as many places as possible with regular meetings, in order to deal with these questions and to spread knowledge about them.