Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 35, August 28, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 35, August 28, 2020

- I. Real-Life Economics

- Asking the Wrong Question for 60 Years Stop Studying Flea Markets, Create Space Markets! by Benjamin Deniston

- Machine-Tool Design: The Brains of Profit by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1996)

- CubeSats: Preparing the Way Forward For Human Missions to the Moon by Kesha Rogers

- BOOK REVIEW Why Alexander Hamilton Is Important Today by Robert Ingraham

- II. The Coming End of Geopolitics

- ON EARTH AND IN SPACE Law of the Jungle or Law of Nations: Where is the World Heading? by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- The Case for Ending Mike Pompeo’s London-Run Grab for Power by Renee Sigerson

- Is the Belt and Road Initiative One of the Targets in Belarus Unrest? by Hussein Askary, Belt and Road Institute in Sweden

- III. Walther Rathenau: Behind the Curtain of History

- Einstein’s Friend, Walther Rathenau: The Agapic Personality in Politics and Diplomacy

The Machine Tool Principle

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

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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

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Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

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INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

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United States: Debra Freeman

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Berlin: Elke Fimmen

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 35, August 28, 2020

Cover This Week

Wikipedia Commons 3.0/SpaceX

A prototype of the SpaceX Falcon 1 first stage rocket, showing the Merlin engine, 2005.

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THE MACHINE TOOL PRINCIPLE

I. REAL-LIFE ECONOMICS

3 ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION FOR 60 YEARS

Stop Studying Flea Markets, Create Space Markets!

by Benjamin Deniston

7 Machine-Tool Design: The Brains of Profit

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

December 7, 1996

18 CubeSats: Preparing the Way Forward for Human Missions to the Moon

by Kesha Rogers

24 BOOK REVIEW

Why Alexander Hamilton Is Important Today

by Robert Ingraham

A review of Christian Parenti’s Radical Hamilton.

II. THE COMING END OF GEOPOLITICS

29 ON EARTH AND IN SPACE

Law of the Jungle or Law of Nations: Where is the World Heading?

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

31 The Case for Ending Mike Pompeo’s London-Run Grab for Power

by Renee Sigerson

44 Is the Belt and Road Initiative One of the Targets in Belarus Unrest?

by Hussein Askary

III. WALTHER RATHENAU:

BEHIND THE CURTAIN OF HISTORY

48 Einstein’s Friend, Walter Rathenau: the Agapic Personality in Politics and Diplomacy

by Judy Hodgkiss

PART ONE OF TWO PARTS.

I. Real-Life Economics

Asking the Wrong Question for 60 Years

Stop Studying Flea Markets,

Create Space Markets!

by Benjamin Deniston

Left: EIRNS/Stuart Lewis; right: Büso-TV/Stefan Tolksdorf

Left: Lyndon LaRouche’s webcast, “Solutions, Not Options,” Herndon, Virginia, July 21, 2011; right: Prof. Wilhelm Hankel, speaking at a “Four Professors” press conference in Berlin, July 7, 2010.

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Deniston’s article was first published on the LaRouche PAC site and is available there with animated graphics.

Aug. 19—A recent article by Whitney Clavin at the California Institute of Technology caught my attention.

The article, “Famous Economics Experiment Reproduced Thousands of Times,” and the study it’s based on, call attention to the highly problematic nature of popular discussions of economic theory in the United States today. Rather than endless discussion about supply and demand and free markets, it would be far more useful to study the vast global economic benefits of a Moon-Mars colonization program. To do this competently, the axiomatic problems of modern economic thought need to be highlighted, removed, and replaced.

The article in question opens:

In an open marketplace, such as a farmers’ market where produce and other goods like candles and flowers are exchanged for money, the ideal prices for both consumers and sellers will quickly emerge…. This phenomenon, which is related to the law of supply and demand, was demonstrated experimentally starting in the 1960s....

Now, nearly 60 years later, Caltech economists have analyzed data from 2,000 repetitions of these experiments, from researchers around the world, to demonstrate for the first time [this] is reproducible on large scales.

I could think of some far more productive and useful studies for these researchers to dedicate their time to. As Lyndon LaRouche spent most of his adult life emphasizing, discussions about economics are far too dominated by studies and speculations about markets and buying/selling behavior. Those studies have their place (I guess), but the far more interesting (and far more important) question is that which Mr. LaRouche tackled: What is the science of economic value and long-term growth?

From that standpoint, is there any relation between open market prices and true economic value?

This is an opportunity to highlight an August 2005 paper by Mr. LaRouche, “LaRouche Comments on Professor Hankel and Himself,” published in EIR, Sept. 2, 2005, where he addressed the issue of price in some depth. He wrote:

The effect of those indicated errors in the thinking of the usual economists and relevant others, is that the monetarist and related pricing theories commonly used heretofore, have nothing to do with what might be considered as an actual economic science, or even a merely sane method of management of governments and their associated economies. They have more the character of debates over doctrines among the factions within some pagan religious cult, a cult based upon superstitious belief in sympathetic magic, of doctrines crafted with the apparent intention of persuading the slave to accept his destiny, rather than representing any thoughtful attempt to demystify the paradoxes of national economy in the real world of today.

Economic reality lies in the physical outcome of the applied powers, i.e., discovered universal physical principles, employed on behalf of the physical expenditures required to produce that thus-increased physical outcome. The role of money, as an instrument of exchange and credit, must be efficiently subordinated to the real-economic, i.e., physical, objectives of national economic policy.

The ABCs of Physical Economic Science

Mr. LaRouche wrote about the “real-economic, i.e., physical, objectives” of economic policy more times than I can probably count, but his 1984 economics textbook, So, You Wish to Learn All About Economics? is always a good reference to go back to, with an emphasis—respecting the subject of this article—in Chapter 4, “The Definition of Economic Value.”

If you don’t own a copy, definitely pick one up for ten bucks. A Kindle version or a paperback is available here, or you can get an EPUB or Kindle version here.

A scientific definition of economic value requires treating the whole economy (national, regional, or international) as a unity, and studying it as a thermodynamic system which produces its own energy of the system requirements to maintain its operations (a closed thermodynamic system). For an economy studied in this way, the energy of the system isn’t energy, per se, it’s the physical goods needed to maintain the population and the productive process of the economy at a constant relative level of technology and living standards. Food, electricity, automobiles, clothing, machine tools, water infrastructure, roadways, and so on—these are both the products of the productive process, and the inputs required by the productive process (the energy of the system is identified as V + C + D in LaRouche’s analysis.) These basic categories and the process is described in Animation 1 on the LPAC website.

Only a limited section of the labor force is directly involved in the production of all the physical goods used by society, the productive operatives. Everything produced above the energy of the system requirements is net operating profit (Sʹ , which is the free energy available for investments to raise the economy to levels above the status quo maintained by the energy of the system.

This defines the most simplified version of the process that must be isolated before any scientific assessment of economic value can be made, the utilization of a portion of the energy of the economic system (produced in a prior economic cycle) by the productive operatives to produce the energy of the system, plus free energy, for the next economic cycle.

Individuals participating in open markets in rural or inner-city America might converge on a market price for oranges or opioids, but what does that tell you about the ability of the entire economy to sustain the population and grow?

Economic Value

For the economy (viewed in these thermodynamic terms) there is no steady state, the economy is always either moving in an entropic or negentropic direction—the notion of “sustainability” (the rebranding of “zero-growth”) is a dangerous myth.

Any economy that tries to maintain a fixed level of existence—a zero-growth policy—will be using up the relatively highest quality natural resources available, resulting in transitions to lower quality and/or less accessible, i.e., more expensive, deposits of those resources.

This means that the economy has to exert more effort to produce the same energy of the economic system requirements, just to maintain the economy at existing levels—greater portions of the energy of the system are consumed in the productive process, and a larger allotment of the productive labor force is required to produce the same level of output as the previous cycle (leaving less workers available for necessary overhead). Less and less of the total output is available for free energy investments, and, eventually, the energy of the system can no longer even be produced, forcing the economy into a collapse mode—the “sustainable” (zero growth) economy marches towards an entropic breakdown.

This zero-growth entropic process, leading to catastrophic population collapse, is illustrated in Animation 2 on the LPAC website.

To overcome the effects of the depletion of a given set of resources, the continued existence of any economy requires technological progress—resulting in increases of the productive powers of the labor force—and scientific revolutions—redefining mankind’s relation to the natural world and so-called natural resources. (Space program anyone?)

This is the only scientific basis to define economic value, and, thereby, the way to approach pricing from a scientific standpoint.

See Animation 3, “Technologically Progressive Economy in Negentropic Mode” on the LaRouche PAC website here.

For the productive operatives segment of the labor force to operate at a level of physical productivity sufficient to keep the economy in a negentropic mode, they must be able to afford both the capital goods (C) employing sufficient levels of technology and the consumer goods (V) required to sustain their households—including their household’s production of a new generation of productive operatives capable of utilizing current and future technologies (the disastrous nature of globalization and cheap labor policies become fully evident when economics is properly understood from this standpoint).[fn_1]

As Mr. LaRouche states in the above-cited 2005 paper,

The determination of price must be governed by first consideration to the conditions of life and work of the total national labor force, with its associated households, not only within respective nations, but, more and more, on a global scale. This determines the idea of the magnitude of private income as complemented by essential public and related services to households. This estimation of the total physical price of labor, so defined in terms of households, is compared with the product of the labor of those households: basic economic infrastructure, agriculture, manufacturing, and essential services, including those supplied by government.

This configuration must be described from the standpoint of several factors, including physical-capital formation, and rates of generation of and application of science-driven technological progress. The further refinement of the division among those assorted components, should be programmatic. Such a program has two leading, overlapping distinctions. Division of labor, within and among these categories, as defined according to the requirements of fulfilling an adopted national mission of a certain rate and direction of physical-economic increase of the productive powers of labor. The mission-orientation of national economic and related policy is not present to future, but future to present: a sane society creates the basis for a future which the present must overtake.

And, a bit earlier, in the same paper:

The development of these broad objectives is required for a dynamic approach in policy-shaping, to improving the physical productive powers of labor per capita and per square kilometer of territory. On this and related accounts, the best experience of the past shows that government can become informed to the degree that it can foresee general lines of forward development of technology, and can assemble the expert advice through which to assess the general rate at which such progress might be enabled to occur. The U.S. space-program, as it operated through the manned Moon-landing program, is a demonstration of the way in which science-driver “crash programs” have the effect of a “spill-over” into increased potential productivity of labor within the economy at large.

NASA

Astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt poses on the surface of the Moon beside the U.S. flag, as part of the Apollo 17 mission, December 11, 1972.

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The vast economic benefits of the Apollo Moon-landing space program have been demonstrated in both conventional economic analysis (e.g., “The Economic Impact of NASA R&D Spending,” Chase Econometrics, 1976) and from Mr. LaRouche’s standpoint (e.g., “How Defense and Space Programs Drive Economic Growth,” EIR Quarterly Economic Report, Fourth Quarter 1986; and, “Space: The Ultimate Money Frontier,” EIR, February 23, 1996).

The mission-oriented crash program to put mankind on the Moon drove the development of a vast array of technological breakthroughs, which were then made available for general manufacturing use throughout industries not related to the Apollo program. In terms of Mr. LaRouche’s approach, these new technologies were incorporated into the designs of new capital goods (C), increasing the productive powers of labor of the productive operatives who utilized the more advanced capital goods during the productive process.

Interestingly, while the aerospace/defense sector of the economy showed a 90% growth in new capital goods purchases under the Moon landing driver program, the non-aerospace/defense sectors grew more, at 130%.[fn_2] When done right, space missions can drive the entire economy to higher levels!

NASA/Johnson Space Center

Artist’s concept of humans on Mars.

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Back to the Moon, and On to Mars

President Trump’s revival of a manned mission to the Moon has the potential to become the most important crash program to drive the economy forward. In 2009, Mr. LaRouche began again to advocate for a global effort for the industrial development of the Moon and human missions to Mars, as the keystone program of a new global economic order led by the collaboration of sovereign nations, overtaking the control of the globalist financial system rooted in the City of London. That mission is still key today.

Market prices are what they are, but studies of such shouldn’t be called economics. The important issue is true physical economic value, defined by contributions to the negentropic growth that’s necessary for human survival. It is time for LaRouche’s science of economics to govern policy, otherwise the U.S. population will continue to pay the price for bad policies.

—Ben@LPAC-Organizers.com

[fn_1] Mr. LaRouche includes some discussion of this in his August 2005, “LaRouche Comments on Professor Hankel and Himself,” published in EIR, Sept. 2, 2005:

The advantages some Asian nations appear to have secured through globalization of “free trade,” involve setting the prices of their exports to the world market below the level of national export income required to relieve the economic oppression, which is often worsening presently, among those, or similarly situated other nations’ poor. This aggravation of poverty of the great mass of the poor, reflects the effects of the margin of price-advantage for export by these nations, on which those nations actually depend, presently, for a marginal factor which past economics convention has termed “primitive accumulation”: the augmentation of the relative income of the nation, through the looting of a relatively enormous part of its own, or other nations’ territory and population. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] Specifically comparing the decade of the 1950s to the decade of the 1960s, as discussed in “How Defense and Space Programs Drive Economic Growth,” EIR Quarterly Economic Report, Fourth Quarter 1986, page 65. [back to text for fn_2]

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DEC. 7, 1996

Machine-Tool Design:

The Brains of Profit

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in EIR, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 1, 1997, pp. 29-38.

Note to the reader: This article by Lyndon LaRouche, even though it was written in 1996, strikes to the core of vital issues of the real economy being debated now in the U.S. election—for instance on websites such as “American Compass” and “American Affairs.”

The importance of Lothar Komp’s accompanying report on the role of Germany’s machine-tool sector, is the clarity with which it illustrates a crucial point.[fn_1] The point is, that for any national economy taken as a unified whole, scientific and classical-artistic progress, combined, are the only source of sustainable profit, nothing else. The machine-tool sector illustrates the role of science in this. For the imperiled economy of the United States, and, of many other nations, today, the lesson told is a desperately urgent one, even if it appears to address only technological progress as such.

If we measure the net production and consumption of the U.S. national economy in physical terms, rather than by the misleading prices of the monetarists’ virtual reality, that economy shrank by approximately half during the past twenty-five years. That shrinking is reflected in such ways, as in the fact that more than two or three jobs per family household are required today, to come within viewing distance of the higher levels of real income, and productive output, for comparable households during the late 1960s. As measured per capita of labor-force, the U.S. economy has been shrinking by more than 2% per year, for each year since the August 1971 monetary crash. In the most recent years, since the October 1987 stock-market shock, the rate of collapse has accelerated, more or less world-wide, toward levels nearer to 5% per year, and soon much, much higher.

The decline of the machine-tool sector, in Germany, and among other formerly prosperous industrialized economies, demonstrates most clearly the reasons for the past quarter-century’s economic catastrophe of our planet.

The chief cause of this collapse, is that radical change in economic, monetary, financial, and trade policies, which was introduced over the 1966-1972 interval. That was a period of great change, away from a traditional agro-industrial economy, whose superiority over all pre-Fifteenth-Century forms of society, had been rooted in fostering investment in scientific and technological progress. Since the middle 1960s, the economic policy of the U.S. has been misshapen by an increasingly fanatical, cultish devotion to piece-by-piece looting and destruction of the pillars of earlier economic growth. We have passed from the earlier, long-standing rationality of a production-oriented society, to mimic the pre-feudal “Malthusianism” of that Code of Roman Emperor Diocletian, the which ensured the collapse of the Roman Empire, first in the slavery-ridden, Latin West, and, later, in Greek-speaking Byzantium. We have passed into the infantile fantasy-world of “post-industrial” utopianism, as, also, into the charismatic delusions of a deranged, globalist ideologue’s shibboleths of “free trade” and “floating exchange-rate.”

Under present continuation of those irrationalist, pro-Malthusian trends in belief and practice, the existing form of global society would go out of existence soon. The end now in sight, will not come gradually; its death will come with that abruptness by which long-earned ugliness suddenly overtook the fictional “Dorian Gray.” We have reached the fag-end of a thirty-year, hyperbolically accelerated process of moral, cultural, economic, and political decay.

Cincinnati/Milacron

Computer-controlled machining centers being built in a Cincinnati Milacron plant in Ohio. “Almost nobody in the U.S.A. knows anything important about production any more. Fifty years ago, even thirty years ago, as much as sixty percent of the U.S. labor-force was involved in agricultural or industrial production, or in some functional relationship to constructing, operating, or maintaining basic economic infrastructure.”

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Now, during the immediate short term, events will be dominated by an assortment of financial and monetary crises comparable to earthquakes. Monetary and financial crises at 3, 5, or 7 on the Richter Scale, are to be accepted as characteristic events of the present end-phase of the global system. We await the proverbial “Big One,” about 10 on the Richter Scale: the implosion of the derivatives bubble which vaporizes, within about 3-5 days, the existing financial institutions of virtually every nation on the planet.

Nothing can preserve the world economy, the world’s political system in its present form. As we speak, the world’s present economic system is dying of an incurable disease, in the adjoining room.

It is really of no practical importance to estimate the exact day or week the system dies: it is sinking fast, and will never recover. The only important question, is whether you are prepared to accept the fact that it is doomed, rather than go down with it. Either we have the wit to leave the world’s present economic “Titanic,” or we shall certainly sink with it.

Today, only fantasy-ridden dreamers make plans for the Democratic or Republican Presidential nomination for the year 2000; by the year 2000, possibly sooner, the good old U.S.A. itself, as we have known it up to now, will probably no longer exist: unless we abandon immediately every pro-monetarist, pro-Malthusian innovation in economic and monetary policy introduced during the past thirty years. Why worry about who will become the President of a nation which might no longer exist in its present form? Such is the short-term choice forced upon us. Swim for it, or sink: there is no available middle ground between the two options.

It is a good time to learn to swim. That is where Lothar Komp’s report on the 1945-1996 German economy comes in. The present Washington economic policies do not work, and could never be made to work; they have failed catastrophically since the first year, 1966, they began to be introduced as neo-Malthusian policies of the U.S. government, thirty years ago. It is past time we should have returned to those proven, earlier policies which had served us so well, until we began to abandon them, thirty years ago. Now, we should either remember what worked, or learn it quickly.

We must tell the good news about the pre-1966 economy to that next leading generation, now under thirty-five, most of whom have come to recognize that their parents’ generation has turned out to be the worst management of the economy since that Confederacy-minded Yankee, President, and virtual Nashville Agrarian Calvin Coolidge, pre-arranged the Great Depression of the 1930s. The up-coming generation of young adults may have been far more poorly educated in public schools and colleges than their parents’ “Baby Boomer” generation, but they are accurate in their contempt for today’s government and political parties, when they complain that they and their children have no future in the direction the world economy is plunging today. Showing that up-coming generation what used to work, before the follies of riotous 1968, is the best hope for the future of this nation, and the world.

China’s leaders of today have dumped “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” of 1966-1976, with results fairly described as a brilliant success; it is past time that the U.S.A. “Baby Boomers” did the same. The key to economic survival of the U.S.A., and civilization in general, is to get back, very quickly, what Lothar Komp’s facts present as typical of the time when national economies still enjoyed a general macro-economic profit: basing the economy on investment in the successful designing of ever-better machine-tools.

Do You Use a Personal Confuser?

Not overlooking the fact, that some economists command the personal competence of a seasoned clinician:[fn_2] every generally accepted doctrine of economics taught in any known university in any part of the world, is axiomatically worse than useless. On this account, there is little preference between the doctrines of the British Empire’s Haileybury school, and that recooking of David Quesnay and Haileybury’s Ricardo, which Karl Marx dished out of the British Museum’s reading room. The worst of the common classroom effluent, is the variety of “mathematical economics” derived from John von Neumann’s “systems analysis” hoax. The very worst economics, is that monetarist stuff suitable for dumping from the bilge of a personal computer. For each and all of the classroom economics dogmas, that of Marx included,[fn_3] the function which Komp reports for Germany’s machine-tool sector, does not exist: a function upon which all successful modern economies have depended absolutely.

The present writer has identified that problem of competence in many earlier locations, including extended treatments of the problem in 1996 editions of EIR. In the latter locations, he has identified the problem as the axiomatically implicit, linear presumption, that “commodities are produced by commodities.”[fn_4] As stressed in those locations, the axiomatic error of all such classroom doctrines and textbook theory is that they premise themselves upon a quality, “profit,” or “surplus value,” which is the sine qua non of their whole system; nonetheless, paradoxically, they describe a system which could never produce a net profit for any economy which is considered in its entirety!

The paradox is expressed in the following terms.

First: in fact, the ability to produce an array of products of a defined quality at a defined rate, depends upon two leading preconditions: 1) the development of such preconditions of production as physical-productive-capital, and of the infrastructure in which production and its product’s distribution is physically situated; and 2) the development of the households of the employed labor-force. These combined preconditions, express a notional equivalent to “energy of the system.” This “energy of the system” is expressed in respect to per capita of labor-force, per household from which the labor-force is drawn, and per unit of the relatively improved land-area in which immediate labor-force, production, and physical distribution are situated.

Second: for there to be a profit of such an economy as a whole, the produced output must more than replace the consumed energy of the system represented by combined physical costs and expenses of production, services, and “overhead.” The margin of gain may be regarded functionally as “free energy.” When technological attrition is taken into account, we have the following.

For profit to be sustained, the ratio of “free energy” to the “energy of the system” must not decline, although the relative quantity of “energy of the system” per capita, per household, and per unit-area, are each and all increasing individually, and in combined effect. Thus, the economic process is characterized by “negative entropy,” as that term was employed by biologists prior to publication of Norbert Wiener’s “information theory” hoax.[fn_5]

Worse (for the mathematical economists)! The development of modern society (e.g., European civilization since 1439-1440, until 1966), shows that such net increases of “negative entropy” are characteristic of modern European civilization as a whole, over more than five centuries. From the standpoint of animal ecology, the situation of the mathematical economists is devastating: the development of human potential relative population-density above a potential of several million individuals on a cultural level comparable to baboons, to the several hundred millions existing prior to the Fifteenth Century, shows that such “negative entropy” is the net characteristic of all human existence.[fn_6]

Whence the “free energy” which is characteristic of all successful human behavior? Where is the responsible agency? What is the sufficient and necessary reason, that humanity, and humanity alone, should exhibit such characteristics? For the answer to such questions, and for a competent economics, one must, as Bernhard Riemann insists, depart the realm of mathematics, for the higher domain of experimental physics.[fn_7] This brings us into the domain which Leibniz identified by the rubric “Analysis Situs.”

Analysis Situs: A Snapshot

Thus far, we have identified the external side of the matters which must be correlated, if one is to understand the nature of the policy-crisis which the present monetary-financial disaster represents. Now, we must look at the matter from the “inside.” The underlying issue here is locked up, inextricably, with the notion of “mind over matter,” the relationship of the functions of the individual human mind to mankind’s ability to achieve physical mastery over the preconditions of human life. In other words, we are obliged to detour for a few minutes, to focus upon those matters which all today’s generally accepted—which is to say, manifestly incompetent—economic doctrines prefer to leave unmentioned. This compels us to focus upon the practical implications of a branch of science much higher than mere mathematics, “Analysis Situs.”

The notion of “Analysis Situs” is made intelligible through no other means than the proper definition of the Greek term “hypothesis,” a term which can be competently defined for science in no other way than by Plato’s Socratic method.

To wit: If a series of plausible propositions, such as prospective theorems of a geometry, appear to suffer no mutual inconsistency, what are the hidden, underlying assumptions, shared in common by those propositions, which supply the apparent consistency? In reply to that specific question, the Socratic method of Plato’s dialogues yields a set of interactive definitions, axioms (including the axiom of deductive method), and postulates; that latter set is termed an hypothesis.

If, in turn, we produce a castrated parody of Aristotle, by application of nominalist William of Ockham’s “razor” by the Venetian Paolo Sarpi; and, if we add the obsession with sensuality which a eunuch might thus achieve, we have added to a barebones Euclidean geometry’s underlying hypothesis, the axiomatic presumptions which transform Euclid into a reductionist. We have, then, one of the assorted materialist, empiricist, logical-positivist derivatives of what was called “terminism” in Ockham’s time, and philosophical “nominalism” today. That Ockhamite mutilation, as typified by Venice’s Paolo Sarpi, and by Sarpi’s lackey, Galileo Galilei, produced the empiricism of Sarpi protégé Francis Bacon, of Galileo’s student, Thomas Hobbes, of Locke, Newton, Hume, and the fraudulent doctrine of analytical mathematical functions derived from the neo-Euclidean, nominalist notions of infinite series of the Euler-Lagrange tradition.[fn_8]

Thus, the delusion typical of Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, and their followers, was provided a devastating refutation by the 1854 habilitation dissertation of Carl Gauss protégé and Göttingen professor, Bernhard Riemann.[fn_9] Riemann’s dissertation returned mathematics and physics to the standpoint of the principles of Analysis Situs featured within that posthumously published writing by G. Leibniz known as the Monadology;[fn_10] Riemann accomplished this, by exposing and correcting the fundamental fallacy pervasively corrupting all formal geometry, “from Euclid through Legendre”: that the assumptions underlying the axioms of Euclid had been asserted without the required, rigorously Socratic consideration of their origins and implications.[fn_11]

For example, Leonhard Euler’s fraudulent, 1761 attack upon the Analysis Situs of Leibniz’s Monadology,[fn_12] was premised, throughout, by a dirty charlatan’s trick: a willful fallacy of tautology. Euler committed the fraud, of purporting to prove, that extension in space-time is perfectly continuous; this sleight-of-hand was accomplished, by means of constructions governed by a geometry whose existence presumed that conclusion axiomatically. On this argument, which first appears in Euler’s work from about 1741, from Sarpi and Galileo, through Hermite, Lindemann, Felix Klein, Bertrand Russell, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and their followers and other dupes today, the entirety of the distinctive features of the system of infinite series and theory of functions of the Euler-Lagrange faction depends axiomatically, absolutely.

It is the corruption of mathematical physics by that fraudulent presumption of perfect linearity, a presumption extended even into the remotest nooks and crannies of the microphysical domain, which is the source of the characteristic moral bankruptcy and related incompetencies of generally accepted classroom mathematics today. It is the same axiomatic presumptions of nominalist method, which render morally putrid every branch of generally accepted, taught classroom political science, social science, history, theology, musical theory, English prose style, and economics, among the university classrooms and barroom gossips of today.

Riemann’s correction, first presented in his 1854 habilitation dissertation, takes us directly inside Leibniz’s notion of Analysis Situs, thus freeing all honest and clearheaded scientists from further obligation to the Euler-Lagrange cult’s infinite series of linear mantras.

Drop the unsupported excesses, of presuming that extension in space and time are either boundless, or that such extension proceeds with perfect continuity. Then, extensions in space and time are but four among an open-ended series of geometric “dimensions” of the real-world physical-space-time manifold. Any discovered, independent principle of nature, insofar as it is supplied unique experimental validation, and as that validation is accomplished by aid of measuring extension, is a dimension of physical space-time, that in the same sense and degree one might accord a meaningful notion of “dimension” to independent senses of directedness in merely mathematical space-time.

Thus, each experimentally validated discovery of a natural physical principle, has added such a new “dimension” to man’s comprehension of a physical-space-time manifold. Thus, we must abandon the notion of a merely mathematical, and thus error-ridden geometry of Euclidean space-time, for a series of physical-space-time manifolds, in which the number of “dimensions” represented is in the process of transition from a manifold of “n dimensions,” to a higher-order manifold of “n+1 dimensions.” Not only does experimental physics show the necessary existence of each added dimension; experimental investigation also measures the difference in “physical-space-time curvature” expressed by comparison of the characteristics of action among the manifolds compared.

In physical economy, for example, the increases in productivity of labor effected through incorporation of some newly validated principle of nature as technology, represent the changes in characteristics of action within the manifold represented by the relevant physical economies as a whole.

Once we employ Riemann’s standpoint, for presenting the empirical evidence of scientific and technological progress in economies, we have three principal schemes. First, the fact that the validated discovery of a new principle of nature, is a relevant paradigm for a mental, metaphorical act of creative discovery within the sovereign precincts of the individual person’s cognitive processes.[fn_13] Second, we are supplied the means for representing technological progress in terms of the relative curvatures of a Riemannian series of physical-space-time manifolds. Third, we are able to measure the actual physical-economic progress corresponding to the Riemannian series of manifolds. In the application of Riemann’s method to the present writer’s own original discoveries,[fn_14] the third step, of measurement, is effected by correlating manifest increases in potential relative population-density of physical-economies with the “thermodynamic” requirement, that the ratio of “free energy” to “energy of the system” of the economic process as a whole, must not decline, despite the required, ongoing increase of the required rations of “energy of the system,” per capita of labor-force, per household, and per unit-area.

Two fundamental principles of Leibniz’s Analysis Situs are derivable from this lesson in the science of physical economy. First, the principle of Analysis Situs characteristic of all physical economy as such. Second, that law of the universe which is demonstrated conclusively by the experimental evidence of physical economy in general.

First, the series of physical-space-time manifolds represented by scientific progress expressed as technological progress, is twofoldly ordered. It is ordered by successively higher degrees of mathematically transfinite cardinality, of the form associated with the series (n+1)/n, and this correlates with an increase in the power of man in the universe: per capita of labor-force, per family household, and per unit-area. This is expressed as the “not-entropic” requirement cited above.

In this physical-economic series of manifolds, each manifold corresponds to an underlying hypothesis, in the same sense that Euclidean geometry is underlain by its own governing hypothesis.[fn_15] Thus, physical economy confronts us with an ordered series of hypotheses: a well-ordered lattice of hypotheses. This ordering has a validated physical-economic correlative. What, then, is the ordering-principle underlying such a lattice? We are back to the challenge of the devastating, ontological paradox posed by Plato in his Parmenides dialogue. The formal answer, in Plato’s terms of reference, is “higher hypothesis”: As any open-ended lattice of mutually agreeable theorems is underlain by an hypothesis, so a lattice of hypotheses is also governed by an underlying ordering principle, which we may term either “Higher Hypothesis,” or “Analysis Situs.”

In the case immediately at hand, successful physical economy, Analysis Situs corresponds to that not-entropic universal characteristic of action which satisfies the requirement that the potential relative population-density must increase, and that the ratio of “free energy” to “energy of the system” must not decline, despite the imperative increase of the “energy of the system” per capita of labor-force, per family household, and per unit-area.

Second, the fact that mankind’s increasingly effective domination of our universe occurs in this ordering of hypotheses, demonstrates the principle, that the universe is so “pre-designed” that it submits to mankind’s will, when that will conforms to the not-entropic ordering of hypotheses manifest for the general case of physical economy. The fundamental law of the universe, is thus proven to be “universal not-entropy,” in this sense of that latter term.

Here, we have summarized the intrinsic superiority of the principles of Analysis Situs to any mere mathematical precept. This accounts for the fact that the clinical insight of some notable economists stands in noble opposition to any generally accepted textbook of today’s university classroom. The point is better understood by comparative reference to the case of Classical musical thorough-composition. We conclude the discussion of Analysis Situs as such, with summary of the musical comparison, and thereafter resume direct attention to the implications of machine-tool design functions within successful modern economies.

From Bach Through Brahms

The rigorous bel canto domain of J.S. Bach’s well-tempered polyphony, laid the indispensable foundations for a revolution in musical composition introduced by Wolfgang Mozart during the early 1780s. The generic name for this improved method of Classical composition, is “motivic thorough-composition.”[fn_16] For convenience, we reference the notable, most-frequently quoted keyboard example of Mozart’s derivation of his discovery of the new method, his K. 475 Fantasy, and its implicitly embedded Lydian mode, the example most frequently referenced in the compositions of Beethoven and Brahms, for example. Exemplary is the case of Mozart’s own Ave Verum Corpus, as the relevant case was presented to a September 1996 conference by Mindy Pechenuk.[fn_17] This latter example serves to illustrate the musical role of the same Analysis Situs we have located within the setting of physical-economic processes.

EIRNS/Pietro Cicconi

The chorus of the Collegiate of San Bartolomeo, in Busseto, Italy, directed by Rev. Tarcisio Bolzoni, performs Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus,” Nov. 30, 1996. “This seemingly little piece of Mozart’s addresses faculties of the human mind far above the reach of any generally accepted form of classroom mathematics.”

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Like the opening germ of a great Classical tragedy, such as the ironical opening setting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a piece of musical thorough-composition begins with the ironies inserted into the musical universe by the explicit statement of a pair of intervals. This set of intervals, together with the shadowy, unsaid inversions it evokes in the musical intellect, constitutes an ambiguous modality, as the contrapuntally implicit Lydian mode within Mozart’s reading of Bach’s C-major/C-minor modality, typifies this. From the polyphonic unfolding of a selected pathway of contrapuntal development, the entire composition flourishes.

From this flows a succession of modalities out of the opening germ, ordered according to implied, often explicit increase of relative cardinality. The effect is akin to the most ruthlessly perfected Classical strophic poem, or the most ruthlessly thorough-composed Classical Greek, Shakespeare, or Schiller tragedy. A process of “unfolding musical development” ensues. This is expressed as new modalities, an ordered series of musical hypotheses, in fact.

This brings us, as in the case of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, to a closing quoted modality. In that case, this involves a two-fold irony: the addition of a second “Ave,” at the outset of the vocal parts, provides an explicit access from the initial “Ave,” to the Bach-Mozart, Lydian-implicated principle of Mozart’s K. 475 Fantasy. This is key to the contrapuntal implications of the piece’s concluding modality. The idea with which that concluding modality is associated liturgically, “the test of death,” coincides with perfect functionality to the musical implications which the composition supplies to the closing modality.[fn_18] Mozart’s true Classical musical genius, expressed at its highest level, in a most compact form.

This seemingly little piece of Mozart’s, addresses faculties of the human mind far above the reach of any generally accepted form of classroom mathematics. Indeed, all Classical forms of musical thorough-composition lie on a much higher level of the human intellect than any of today’s generally taught versions of higher mathematics! In one “little” Mozart composition, we are presented with a magnificently coherent array of successive hypotheses, arranged to such effect that the last hypothesis forces the mind to elevate itself to a specific choice of Higher Hypothesis, which then serves, musically, liturgically, and philosophically, as the indivisible Idea of the musical composition taken in its entirety. Additionally, like all functions of higher hypothesis, the mathematical representation of the manner in which both the idea of the composition and its competent performance are constructed, compels us to enter the domain of functions in which apparent time-reversal rules.

This illustrates the point, that music composed and refined to conform with the Classical principle of composition so typified, reflects the highest cognitive faculties of the human mind.[fn_19] It shows the indivisible nature of that cognitive power of creativity which, contrary to both the ponderously silly Immanuel Kant and to the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’ Romantics and modernists, commonly underlies science and Classical art: Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft. Indeed, the music of Bach, and of the principle of Classical composition which Mozart derived from Bach’s highest principled achievements, since it is composed upon a higher cognitive level of mental processes than mathematics, has shown itself to be a more or less indispensable habit in fostering relatively high rates of creative scientific achievement among scientific professionals: whereas Country & Western and Rock, tend to promote blockheaded formalism, or worse tendencies. More narrowly to the point: it is the comparison of the roles of Analysis Situs in the best developed strictly Classical art-forms and creative scientific productivity, which provides us a kind of “Rosetta Stone” for understanding the domain internal to the sovereign precincts of the individual person’s cognitive processes.

Notably, it is Classical art-forms derived from the tradition of Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato, which supplied Augustinian Christianity with the tools by means of which to launch the Fifteenth-Century ecumenical Renaissance and its original creation, the modern form of constitutional nation-state. It is that design of the state, derived from Classical art, not physical science, on which the effective economic development of physical scientific development depends absolutely.

Education and Economy

“Out-sourcing” is the increasingly popular form of national economic suicide practiced by those silly governments and foolish firms, which abandon customary sources of technology services and component parts, in favor of importing components “just in time” from foreign places where labor is cheaper, and less skilled. From the standpoint of industrial management, “out-sourcing” rivals the post-Brandt-Reform collapse of quality of German education, as the thing which is slaughtering the technological competitiveness of the quality of as much German industrial production as survives the general industrial démontage of Europe and North America during the recent two decades. The case of the departed [José Ignacio] López from Volkswagen is, in several respects, a complementary expression of the same disastrous trend toward “out-sourcing.”

The function of the German Mittelstand’s machine-tool design sector illustrates the point most clearly. The past economic history of U.S. manufacturing—as far back as Monitor-builder Ericsson, and earlier—illustrates the same point; the Germany case is more sharply focused; but, the case of the conflict between the policies of Edison and Henry Ford, against those of Wall Street’s General Motors, should be introduced to put the German case in its proper focus.

Under the influence of the Germany-educated, Gauss and Humboldt ally, and great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Dallas Bache, middle through late Nineteenth-Century science, agriculture, industry, and education, in the United States and Germany, were functionally closely interlinked in their development. In those days, Germany-linked Harvard University was a most eminently respectable, leading scientific institution. Exemplary of the Bache connection, are the interlinked cases of Bache-circle-sponsored Thomas Edison, Rathenau and Siemens in Germany, and the Edison-related case of industrialist Henry Ford. The United States, too, had a deeply embedded, Germany-like machine-tool-design tradition, until the heritage of Confederacy-linked Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Ku Klux Klanner Woodrow Wilson signalled the Twentieth-Century process of destroying the patriotic and scientific tradition of the United States from within.

Henry Ford conceived of his “Model T” as a household “capital good.” In rural areas, where it was well-intended for the challenge of deep-rutted muddy tracks sometimes used as if they were roads, it carried passengers, sawed wood, doubled as a tractor, and improved significantly, in vintage, from year to year, without significantly manifest concern for subtly sexual factors in seasonal styling. As General Motors emerged to challenge Ford’s emphasis on technology, it brought with it the brothel-like artistic sensibilities of Manhattan’s Seventh-Avenue Knock-Down industry and Hollywood’s sleazeball notions of Prohibition-Era “Class.”[fn_20] Ford had the industrialist wisdom, but Wall Street had its hand on the spigot of big cash, and eventually Wall Street’s accountant-errand boy, Robert McNamara, was installed as a kind of Gestapo figure at Ford.

Almost nobody in the U.S.A. knows anything important about production anymore. Fifty years ago, even thirty years ago, as much as sixty percent of the U.S. labor-force was involved in agricultural or industrial production, or in some functional relationship to constructing, operating, or maintaining basic economic infrastructure. Most products were designed with the intent that they might be repaired cheaply, easily, and effectively, and a large ration of citizens, and adolescents, too, could perform significant repairs on most of the products which came into their possession. We were a production-oriented culture, and our ideas about consumption were rooted in that quality of culture. In today’s U.S.A., that culture went down the tubes with the passing of the World War II generation from the leading positions of authority in the family, as in government, in education, and in management of leading firms. Largely as a result of that cultural change of the recent thirty years, our economy has gone down the drain, too, and at a presently accelerating rate.

GM

A General Motors Le Sabre, the most famous of GM’s parade of “dreamcars.” “As General Motors emerged to challenge Ford’s emphasis on technology, it brought with it the brothel-like artistic sensibilities of Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue Knock-Down industry and Hollywood’s sleazeball notions of Prohibition Era ‘Class.’ ”

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Now, more and more view production with that same immoral mind-set otherwise seen when today’s prospective heirs and Wall Street’s health-management fanatics join forces to extol the serenity of “death with dignity” to family members reaching or past retirement age.

Until about thirty years ago, when we went collectively mad, production used to be a pipeline, through which the benefits of technological progress flowed more or less continuously. For the production manager, who was concerned with products to be put on line as much as five to ten years hence, and with the phase-out of obsolete or worn-out plant and equipment a dozen or so years ahead, the “pipeline” was a process, filled with planning of future technological change in products and processes. The scope of any respectable firm’s planning function was seldom less than a generation’s span. Key to the technological change constantly in progress in any such large firm, was the role of the relatively small, high-technology firm which specialized in a range of machine-tool design and related specialties. The competitiveness of production, respecting quality of product and productivity, was derived from a relatively continuous process, generally hidden from the public—behind the scenes, so to speak, of technological improvements in product and processes.

View that “relatively continuous process ... behind the scenes, ... of technological improvements in product and processes,” from the vantage-point of the general physical-economic function identified here at several points earlier. That the ratio of “free energy” to “energy of the system” must not decline, despite a constant, required increase in “energy of the system,” per capita of labor-force, per family household, and per unit-area. It is the constant increase of productivity and product quality supplied to the productive process, chiefly through the machine-tool-design factor, which meets that requirement. The requirement is not satisfied by “getting cheaper parts from elsewhere”; it requires securing a cheapening of the effective cost by relying upon sources which have high rates of technology-driven improvements in productivity and product.

Very few of today’s “third-world” countries are reliable sources for this purpose. India could be; it has the relatively largest machine-tool component of its industry. The Philippines used to have such a potential, centered around the military bases at Clark Field and Subic Bay. Argentina used to have a very high potential, until we destroyed one of the world’s most productive economies there. At the same time, developing nations have very poor development of infrastructure, and poorly educated general labor forces; for highly skilled professionals in those nations, the relevant employment opportunities available to the most highly qualified, are chiefly the dwindling markets in Europe and North America. “Out-sourcing” from such “cheap-labor” markets, is the kind of policy no competent production executive would encourage; it is the Yuppies in the New York City financial center’s lunacy-mills, or useless “good old boys” of the mint-julep circuits, who delude themselves that “cheap” is intrinsically more profitable.

The secret of sustainable economic growth and profit, is high rates of high-density technological progress in every possible pore of the productive process. It is not how cheaply we might import from cheap-labor markets abroad; it is not simply a matter of whether we are exporting jobs our people need. It is the density of such technological progress in production, per capita, per family household, and per unit-area in one’s own national economy, which determines whether one’s national economy is growing, as ours used to do, until about thirty years ago, or, like our own today, collapsing into bankruptcy through the kinds of policies which have taken over the United States during the past thirty years, up through the present day.

Bundesbildstelle Bonn

Assembly of an electron accelerator at the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin. “The secret of sustainable economic growth and profit, is high rates of high-density technological progress in every possible pore of the productive process.”

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So, Lopez’s former reign at Volkswagen represents two relevant types of blunders commonplace in Europe and the United States today. The idea, that a firm such as VW might have an advantage in swiping inventions from a General Motors, for example, shows intrinsic economic incompetence in the management which condones such practice. It is the development of captive pipelines of continued inflow of front-line technological advances, as an integral part of the operational policy of the industrial firm, which is the well-established secret of successful, long-term industrial management.

The turn of Germany’s and U.S. firms to “out-sourcing,” instead of fostering domestic machine-tool-design resources, is a kindred show of managerial incompetence. Buying components from a market which has low-density machine-tool-design fertility, is such an obvious blunder, of buying into assured obsolescence, that the practice could be condoned only by boards of directors which lack both the mental ability to remember yesterday, and to foresee tomorrow.

The principle is: do not think of this as a matter of buying products; it is a matter of buying change. When you buy a product, are you also buying into the quality of change you will need for tomorrow? Are you buying into yesterday, or tomorrow? Production, and successful national economy, are both all about technological change. Therefore, the board of directors member, or operating executive, who does not understand that, should be fired with the same sense of urgency prompted by the detection of a chronic embezzler, pyromaniac, or axe-murderer in those positions.

Behind all this, is education, as Lothar Komp stresses the relevant point. The transmission of knowledge from the education and scientific-research institutions, into production, occurs chiefly in the conversion of validated experimental designs for proof of principle into the form of machine-tool designs by organizations such as the Mittelstand firms on which Komp focuses our attention.

This is the structure for technological progress: From Education, to Experimental-Scientific Discovery, to Machine-Tool Design, to Production Process and Basic Economic Infrastructure, to Product and its physical distribution. This structure is rooted in natural principles; but, the elaboration of such a structure into the realized institutional forms of modern nation-state economies, is a production of a political-economic revolution launched by the 1439-1440 sessions of the great ecumenical Council of Florence. The keynote of that effort, was the building up of France’s Dauphin, preparing him to become the Louis XI who established the first known nation-state in human existence: a society in which the intelligentsia drawn from the educated portion of a general citizenry emerged to challenge the reactionary authority of both the landed and financier oligarchies of feudal Europe.

The process of state-backed educational programs, to transform growing portions of the ordinary citizens into a national intelligentsia, while fostering high rates of infrastructure-building, and agricultural and industrial progress, is the germ, planted in Louis XI’s France, out of which the modern European nation-state economy developed, a revolutionary change in political society and economy, which, despite all evils perpetrated in the name of European civilization during this same period, had resulted, until thirty years ago, in the highest rate of progress in the human condition, in the planet as a whole, qualitatively greater than in all human existence earlier.

Without the appropriate quality of education, the kind of education which has been systematically destroyed during the past thirty years, the entire system of modern civilization must collapse into a “new dark age,” whatever other errors of policy might affect the economic process. Without the fostering of high rates of experimental-scientific research, the economy must collapse, whatever the quality of other aspects of economic policy-shaping. Without the link between science and production provided by the sector of the economy devoted to machine-tool design, a similar catastrophe becomes inevitable.

In the final analysis, all that we have said here, all that is stated and implied by Lothar Komp’s accompanying report, returns us to the point we have made in condemning generally accepted classroom economics doctrine for the “crime” of proposing, implicitly at least, either that it is commodities which produce commodities, or, worse, that it is financial capital which earns profit. The principle upon which the possibility of continued existence of civilization depends, is that principle of universal history, that continued human existence, and the further development of that human existence, depends absolutely upon valid changes produced by the not-entropic characteristics of the sovereign, creative-cognitive processes of the individual human mind. That is the principle one sees most plainly exposed in action, in the role of the German Mittelstand’s machine-tool-design sub-sector. That is the capacity to survive, which is being presently destroyed in the United States by the recent and present official policies of the U.S. government and financial community.

[fn_1] Lothar Komp, “The Crucial Role of the ‘Mittelstand’ in the Economy of Post-War Germany,” EIR Vol. 24, No. 1, January 1, 1997, pp. 39-43. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] E.g., John Kenneth Galbraith, Maurice Allais. In each of the more notable instances of such clinician’s competence, the specific quality of the expressed virtù is of a type located outside the realm of formal mathematical argument, as in the domain which Leibniz identified as “Analysis Situs.” [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3] In Capital, Marx confesses, that his system, contrary to the economics of G. Leibniz, Alexander Hamilton, et al., leaves out of account the role of technological progress. In short, all of today’s generally accepted classroom doctrines, make no functional distinction between an economy (and, presumably, economics textbooks), produced by apes, and the practice of a society of human beings. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4] “The Essential Role of ‘Time Reversal’ in Mathematical Economics,” EIR Vol. 23, No. 41, Oct. 11, 1996; “While Monetarism Dies,” EIR Vol. 23, No. 43, Oct. 25, 1996, pp. 10-19; and, “On the Subject of Evolution: The Descent to Bush from Man,” EIR, Nov. 15, 1996, pp. 16-27. [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5] Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1948. [back to text for fn_5]

[fn_6] See, “While Monetarism Dies,” op. cit., Figure 3, p. 18. [back to text for fn_6]

[fn_7] B. Riemann, “Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde Liegen” (habilitation dissertation), in Bernhard Riemann’s gesammelte mathematische Werke. Reprint, Dover Publications, New York, 1953, p. 286. [back to text for fn_7]

[fn_8] Note 4. [back to text for fn_8]

[fn_9] op cit. [back to text for fn_9]

[fn_10] G.W. Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, trans. by Paul and Anne Martin Schrecker, Macmillan, London, 1965. [back to text for fn_10]

[fn_11] op. cit., p. 272. [back to text for fn_11]

[fn_12] On Leonhard Euler’s 1761 “Letters to a German Princess,” see Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., The Science of Christian Economy, Executive Intelligence Review, Washington, D.C., 1992), pp. 407-419. See, also, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “Russia’s Relation to Universal History,” EIR, Vol. 23, No. 48, Nov. 29, 1996, Note 27, p. 20. [back to text for fn_12]

[fn_13] This, by itself repudiates absolutely the central assertions on which the systems of empiricism, materialism, Euler, Kant, Norbert Wiener, and John v. Neumann are premised. See, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “On the Subject of Metaphor,” Fidelio, Vol. 1, No. 3, Fall 1992. Scientific discovery, like great Classical forms of poetry, tragedy, music, and the painting of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael Sanzio, et al., is expressed in the literal form of the media employed as an anomaly, an anomaly which can not, in any way, be resolved by resort to symbolic or other methods of deduction. The function of the anomaly (metaphor) is to evoke the generation of a non-linear solution for the anomaly within the sovereign precincts of the hearer’s or viewer’s wholly internal cognitive processes of mind. This principle of metaphor is the basis for all competent modes of education: the student must never “learn” the solution for an anomaly; the student must be prompted to derive the rediscovery of the solution within the sovereign precincts of his or her own, entirely private cognitive processes. Students so trained, know; others, like trick-performing dogs, have merely “learned.” [back to text for fn_13]

[fn_14] Hence, “The LaRouche-Riemann Method.” [back to text for fn_14]

[fn_15] All systems, Isaac Newton’s included, are governed fully and thoroughly by an underlying hypothesis. See B. Riemann, op. cit., p. 525. [back to text for fn_15]

[fn_16] This method is limited to the Classical composers, as typified by Mozart, the later Joseph Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, et al., and never the Romantics such as Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner, et al. The Romantics, as in the case of Liszt’s keyboard sonata, sometimes attempt, unsuccessfully, to parody Mozart’s or Beethoven’s treatments of the K. 475 Fantasy, but have no actual comprehension of the method, since it is contrary to those principles of Nineteenth-Century Romanticism derived from the Critiques of I. Kant. [back to text for fn_16]

[fn_17] See, Mindy Pechenuk, “Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus,” Fidelio, Winter 1996. [back to text for fn_17]

[fn_18] Mindy Pechenuk, op. cit. [back to text for fn_18]

[fn_19] Romanticism, Modern, or Country & Western, or Rock correspond only to the bestial depths of soupy or satanic eroticism. [back to text for fn_19]

[fn_20] E.g., “Does the blonde model come with the car, like it says in your ad?” [back to text for fn_20]

CubeSats: Preparing the Way Forward

For Human Missions to the Moon

by Kesha Rogers

NASA/Aubrey Gemignani

President Donald Trump, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, signs Presidential Space Directive-1 on December 11, 2017, directing NASA to return humans to the Moon, and then pursue missions to Mars and beyond.

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Aug. 21—America is not going back to the Moon; we are going forward to the Moon, and we are going in a big way! Are you ready? For the first time in a very long time, our nation is being led by a vision of profound scientific progress, that is advancing at a remarkable pace. Even in the midst of all the obstacles, challenges, and imposed setbacks, we are persevering.

Did you ever imagine that after President Trump signed the Space Policy Directive 1 in December 2017, outlining a renewed mission for our nation to send American astronauts to the Moon, that we would have advanced so far in that direction so quickly? Space Policy Directive 1, which calls for human expansion across the Solar system, provides for a U.S.-led, integrated program, with private sector partners, for a human return to the Moon, followed by missions to Mars and beyond.

At the time of the signing, President Trump made the following statement, “It marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints—we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.”

We later learned that our mission is not simply to return American astronauts to the Moon, but to send the first woman and the next man under the newly named Artemis program—the lunar program named for the twin sister of Apollo—representing a new generation of space explorers, scientists and engineers, and many others, who will break through many barriers and make many creative leaps and scientific breakthroughs to fulfill such a bold mission.

In the course of a short period of time, we have made incredible gains toward achieving the goal of launching American astronauts forward to the Moon, with a commitment to establishing a permanent presence there, by developing the resources on the Moon that will prepare us for Mars and beyond.

In this report I am going to focus on a remarkable new revolution in space technology that has become known as the SmallSat or CubeSat revolution. These very small and innovative spacecraft are poised to play a role in NASA’s Artemis program, which will return humans to the Moon by 2024. According to Christopher Baker, the Small Spacecraft Technology program executive within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, “CubeSats also offer frequent, flexible, low-cost access to space, while the schedule from conception to launch of these diminutive spacecraft can be fast-paced…. They allow you to do things that previously would not have been possible with a large, monolithic spacecraft.”

To learn more about these fascinating missions, I took the opportunity to speak with Pamela Clark, Science Principal Investigator of the NASA Artemis 1 Lunar IceCube Mission, and Technical Advisor of the Cubesat Development Lab at JPL, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

I asked Dr. Clark to tell us more about the CubeSat missions and how they will prepare us to meet the goal of returning humans to the Moon and developing the resources for long-term presence and industrialization of the Moon.

LPAC-TV

Pamela Clark, Science Principal Investigator of NASA’s Artemis-1 Lunar IceCube Mission.

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Dr. Clark: Artemis 1 will deploy 13 6U CubeSats; the official launch date is 2021. NASA’s goal to have “boots on the Moon” in 2024 is actually driving that date. The reason that Lunar IceCube and the two other CubeSat lunar science missions—Lunar Flashlight and LunaH-Map—are important is that all of us are looking at distribution of water on the Moon, from a number of different standpoints.

We have many questions: Why is there water on the Moon, and what role did it play in the lunar formation or the Earth’s formation, or even the formation of the Solar system? What’s the source of water? Where does it get stored and how much is there really? Because we really don’t know. You have some tantalizing data from orbit. When it comes to water on the Moon, really as a function of depth, where is it? How well distributed, how heterogeneously distributed is it? What are the concentrations? How deep?

These three missions will provide three different types of information that will help us get measurements that will provide a better model for water distribution. This is very important from a resource extraction standpoint, an economically viable mining standpoint. Where it is, how economically viable is water as a resource to provide fuel, support human habitat, and a lot of different things.

CC/Morehead State University

Artist’s rendering of NASA’s Lunar IceCube orbiter. It will prospect for water and other volatiles using infrared spectrometry.

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Lunar IceCube will use its BIRCHES (Broadband Infra-Red Compact High-resolution Exploration Spectrometer)—a compact infrared spectrometer that fully captures the broad three-micron band associated with several water-related features (molecular, adsorbed, and bound water; ice; and the hydroxyl ion)—to map the distribution of these features as a function of time of day. It is evident that we have water in a variety of forms on the Moon, seen from orbit, and that we’re even seeing water down to about 30 degrees latitude, which is virtually the edge of the equatorial region. We do know there is a time-of-day impact: at local noon, morning or evening, we have different temperatures, illumination conditions, and shadowing on the Moon.

Of course the colder it is, the more likely we are to find ice on the surface. Adsorbed water that’s weakly held to the regolith and released as molecular water, depending on the temperature, is part of the exosphere on the Moon. Hydroxyl, the “OH” component of water (H_2O) behaves similarly and can be difficult to distinguish from molecular water. We also have water bound during formation, as in pyroclastics (explosively ejected volcanic rock).

Lunar IceCube will be covering the same swaths at different times of day during successive lunar cycles (28-day lunations). The longer we can stay up there (nominally three months), the more times of day we can observe for each swath. Because we know the Moon pretty well, we may be able to get indications of how different terrains on the Moon behave at the same times of day. Our viewing footprint will be [swaths] as small as 10 kilometers.

LunaH-Map, the Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, will provide repeated coverage of the South Pole from its polar orbit around the Moon. The closest point of its orbit to the Moon (its periapsis) is near the lunar South Pole. Its neutron spectrometer will measure any reduction of neutron flux induced by the presence of extra protons, implying ice, down to one meter below the surface, within several degrees latitude of the pole.

In a similar orbit, Lunar Flashlight has onboard laser sources, and receivers tuned to the same wavelengths as the lasers. The wavelengths used are known ice absorption bands and the immediately adjacent wavelengths. At the adjacent wavelength not associated with ice absorption, the laser light will be reflected and received onboard. If ice is present on the surface, light will be absorbed rather than reflected from the band associated with ice absorption when laser light strikes the surface. Thus the ratio of the two bands will change if surface ice is present. Permanently shadowed areas within a few degrees of the South Pole—the most likely candidates for surface ice—will be the target of Lunar Flashlight.

NASA

The Lunar Polar Hydrogen (LunaH) Mapper satellite is already providing continuous coverage of the Moon’s South Pole from its polar orbit, using neutron spectroscopy. Shown is a LunaH map constructed from different altitudes.

NASA

The Lunar Flashlight, a CubeSat lunar orbiter, will look for surface ice using lasers.

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Combined measurements from the three missions will give you a sense of what’s at the poles, buried water, surface ice, and what’s going on with various water features as a function of time of day, all leading into a model to help us understand where the water is on the Moon.

Once we get reconnaissance from orbit, then the next step will be to send landers and rovers that can actually go and get information on surface and subsurface water.

Another mission on the radar that has not been fully selected yet is Lunar Trailblazer, which will also have mid-infrared and thermal infrared detectors onboard. Trailblazer will collect that data from orbit as well, with resolutions of between 100 and 200 meters. Such data will provide similar measurements on the meters to tens-of-meters scale on the surface, to locate likely extraction sites.

The next fully selected mission on the books is a rover called VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover), which will be sent to an as-yet unselected landing spot, probably near the South Pole. It will expend effort trying to drill into the ground to extract ice. To identify a likely spot, it will utilize a neutron spectrometer and an infrared spectrometer to provide surface and subsurface “signatures” of ice. VIPER will test drilling technology for icy lunar regolith.

More systematic surface reconnaissance will be necessary to demonstrate highly probable or proven reserves, perhaps utilizing a little fleet of small rovers, armed with compact surface and subsurface ice detection instruments, that we can deploy from a larger lander across a likely target. It would be nice to have an infrared spectrometer providing surface volatile signatures, combined with two instruments providing complementary measurements on subsurface water down to one meter, namely a ground penetrating radar for measuring changes in dielectric constant associated with water/ice, and a neutron spectrometer measuring changes in neutron flux, implying subsurface water/ice.

You may measure water feature distribution on a larger scale from orbit, but we need to know how that water is distributed on a local scale, in order to support actual extraction. Is it all in one “hot spot”? Is it a meter below the surface? Is it evenly distributed? These are all the things you need to know to find out if it’s viable or not.

Rogers: So these missions will prepare us for living and working on the Moon in future lunar colonies.

Dr. Clark: Yes. Proving that we have ice that is extractable is going to be critical for deciding what kind of investment we’re going to need for Moon colonies, and where we’re going to put those Moon colonies. What kind of equipment will they need, to be able to extract the resources? What do they need to bring with them? All these questions tie into the timeframe we need to put something on the Moon that will be viable.

One of the greatest challenges we will see is that the Moon undergoes extremes in temperatures and for long periods of time. You have a 28-day cycle—14 days extremely hot and illuminated, and 14 days extremely cold and not illuminated. The Apollo missions solved the daytime operation problem: They successfully utilized solar panels to provide power, and very effective parabolic radiator reflectors to provide the cooling necessary to operate during the day [shadow shielding].

Nighttime survival—and in some cases nighttime operation—for the instrument packages deployed by the astronauts (ALSEPs, Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Packages) was provided by using radioisotope power systems, but those are expensive, have remained limited in availability, and add significant mass and volume. Thus, the biggest problem we’re going to have is finding a lower-resource way to keep small, low-cost payloads warm enough to operate on at least a limited duty cycle during lunar night.

NASA

The Apollo Lunar Passive Seismic Experiment, deployed at the Apollo 16 site, to detect lunar “moonquakes” and other information about the internal structure of the Moon.

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Because the Moon is such a thermally challenging target, and heat removal is a bigger problem for more compact systems such as CubeSats, NASA has already funded a number of thermal technology development efforts. One of my goals when I came to JPL was to get people interested in the thermal engineering problem. After two years at JPL, I got to know a thermal engineer who was very interested as well. We discussed ideas about a thermal component that would be far more efficient than anything flown before. We got people interested in investing internal funds at JPL.

As a result of that we are now looking at longer term, broader NASA investment in a generic reconfiguration of thermal package design that takes advantage of advances in several components, including far more efficient (25 times more efficient than previously flown) thermal switches to control (prevent or enable) heat flow; far more conforming multilayer insulation; and lower contact packaging systems.

The goal is to complete development for such generic, yet reconfigurable packaging within two to three years, by 2022 or 2023, to provide the reconnaissance necessary to support “boots on the Moon” in 2024. I’d like to see a network of instruments all over the lunar surface and in lunar orbit, to give us a three-dimensional understanding of the Moon.

Rogers: What is the challenge on the far side of the Moon—the side that never faces Earth?

Dr. Clark: The challenge with the far side is to have a communications network that reaches Earth. One of the reasons that the Chinese put a satellite at one of the LaGrange points was so they’d be able to communicate with their lander, which they have now landed on the far side, something that American aerospace folks have talked about for 50 years. There are some unique features on the far side you don’t have on the near side. That’s where you have evidence for the largest and oldest confirmed basin on the Moon. There are also proposals for missions or facilities that require radio quiet (no terrestrial communication system interference for frequencies of interest) on the far side of the Moon.

Rogers: How far along are we toward achieving the goal of human settlements on the Moon and toward building future habitats on Mars?

Dr. Clark: We’ve made much more progress with this administration than we have in a long time. If we continue on this trajectory, we will achieve the goal of a sustainable presence in cislunar space within years rather than decades—an infrastructure I believe is crucial to support sustainable exploration of Mars.

There is water on Mars, and potentially life has existed and may still exist in niches on Mars. Because of the resulting planetary protection issues [concerns about “contaminating” Mars with microorganisms from Earth], access to the surface and to resources such as water on Mars is more challenging.

NASA/Joel Kowsky

Former Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell, with the flight plan which first took humans around the Moon.

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One thing we can learn from sustainable cislunar presence that will be crucial for Mars exploration, is the optimal interface between humans and robotics and the ability for far more autonomy at the infrastructure level (communication, transportation). Because with Mars, we’ll have to have real autonomy for human safety reasons, if for no other reason. The fact that you need 10 or 20 minutes to communicate, means you have to solve programs in real time. The Moon is a few seconds away in comparison, and thus doable with an externally monitored or controlled system (ground control).

Being able to have completely autonomous operations will be critical. You practice that on the Moon. That is one of the most important things we can do. I would recommend doing it on the Moon, where we have a fallback position, rather than trying it on Mars for the first time. The Moon provides the space we need to fully explore that fail-safe environment—getting people back and forth, solving an emergency involving saving a life or keeping a system operational.

I would like to see us have some permanent bases on the Moon within a few years. You know how long it took us to get to the Moon under Apollo? Eight years. The one critical piece we’re missing now is the manufacturing sector we had during the Apollo program, because it has been systematically shredded by a number of administrations. This administration has recognized this for the first time in decades, and has at least been trying to bring it back.

We have to bring back critical infrastructure. Expanding transportation and communication infrastructure will be important for anywhere we go, including low Earth orbit and cislunar space. You probably know that there are many components needed for the national power, communication and transportation grid that we can’t make in this country any more. This is the most challenging problem we face as a nation.

One great attribute of NASA is its legacy of a team culture, where everyone gets to come to the table, everyone is seen as having an important skill set to share. Instrument builders, electrical engineers, theoretical modelers, program managers, lab technicians, even, as Jim Lovell indicated, cleaners. As he said when they asked him how does it feel to be a great hero? He said, “It’s really not about me, it’s about the thousands of people who made this possible, the guy that does the last check on the capsule, to the guy who cleans the floor of the control room.” I believe that the understanding of how critical that is, is what has made this country great.

I know we can do this. If we wanted to, we could have permanently established bases on the Moon and be flying out to Mars in less than ten years, no question. I have no doubt about that. Of course we want cooperation with our international partners as part of it. We’ll collaborate with anybody. Like we did, even during the Cold War, with the Russians.

Rogers: What will it take to inspire a new generation of youth?

Dr. Clark: I have spent part of my career as an educator. One of my students, a summer intern, said to me one day, “You’re so lucky because you have always had a vision of what you wanted to do and what contributions you could make, and what this country could be because you had the space program, because you had the Apollo program.” I thought to myself, “Wow, what a terrible loss! I have a student who never saw himself or herself as part of an inspiring vision!” I’ve thought about it a lot.

The reason I have a vision is because of the way I was raised: You give back more than you take. You are a unique child of God, no one else will ever be like you and you have to make a contribution, because you have a special gift that nobody else has. You have to find out what those gifts are, and then use them. Always think about giving more than you take.

So I thought, what could I do that caught my imagination? There are a lot of problems to be solved. I thought, space is the new frontier, demanding courage and a pioneering spirit. I said, whatever it takes, I’ll make it work somehow, get the right tools, whether the system rewards you or not, even when faced with major obstacles, such as women even becoming engineers when I started out. Whenever I talked about being part of the space program, my whole family ridiculed me. (When I succeeded, they came around!) A young lady wanting to become a space scientist or an astronaut or engineer was laughable to them, and to my peers.

Really good teachers can help you to overcome these obstacles; they can even change your life. My sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Edmund Vandall, a Native American who grew up in grinding poverty, changed my life and the lives of several other students I knew who didn’t “fit in.” He took us seriously. He treated us as real persons, as intelligent individuals. He challenged us all the time. We need more teachers like that, especially now, teachers who refuse to teach from a script. My sixth-grade teacher broke all the rules all the time, treating each of us according to what our needs were, and not according to the “presumptions” about sixth graders. He had a knack for that, as someone who had been knocked down and humiliated plenty when he was growing up, and what a difference it made for his students!

Get the prospectus and RSVP for the Schiller Institute Conference Sept. 5-6, 2020

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BOOK REVIEW

Why Alexander Hamilton

Is Important Today

by Robert Ingraham

Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder

by Christian Parenti

New York: Verso Books, August 2020

Hardbound, 304 pages, $16.17; ebook, $5.99

Aug. 20—As the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc with the global economy, and as many nations are brutally confronted with the reality of their own economic vulnerabilities, a welcome revival of serious economic discussion has begun to emerge within the United States. This is taking place within what are normally characterized as both the “left” and “right” of the political spectrum.

For 50 years a “neo-liberal” economic paradigm has been hegemonic in both the United States and internationally, an arrangement essentially neo-Keynesian in outlook and practice, but with significant chunks of the “Austrian School” thrown in. It is axiomatically a “monetarist” paradigm, and all economic policy has been subjugated to imperial banking and financial interests.

Under the imperatives of this post-1971 system we have witnessed the destruction of manufacturing, science and infrastructure in the United States and a descent into misery in many of the poorer nations throughout the world. Financial vultures have been picking the bones of defenseless countries for some time. To posit that the hegemony of this monetarist empire is about to vanish would be an exaggeration, but the crisis which has gripped the world since the 2008 financial meltdown, now augmented by the effects of the pandemic, has created a potential for a fundamental, even revolutionary, change in direction.

Among self-identified U.S. conservatives there is now serious debate, centering around an urgent necessity to rebuild America’s manufacturing base. This is causing an irreversible rupture with the neo-liberal economics that have dominated the Republican Party until very recently. The emergence of such a discussion is very evident in publications like American Compass and American Affairs, as well as other locations, and the debate is serious and already well advanced.

The question of rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure has also become a matter of serious bi-partisan concern, although Congressional Republicans and Democrats seem, as yet, too pre-occupied with partisan concerns to effectively join in taking action. At the same time, the present and future cascading impact of the Artemis program has provided a scientific and technological impetus not seen in at least two generations. The potential benefit from this is enormous, and an awareness of the implications of this revived space program is now spreading. Discussion of all of these developments is now rippling across the political spectrum.

Now, an intervention “from the left” has arrived, in the form of a new book, Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder, by Christian Parenti, a contributing editor to the The Nation magazine. The content and argument of that book is the subject here.

Hamilton, the Dirigist

On the one hand, nothing would please this reviewer more than to endorse Mr. Parenti’s effort as a valuable contribution,—and there are certainly praiseworthy and important portions of his book, but axiomatic prejudices and errors contaminate Parenti’s argument, and these must be discussed if Hamilton’s genius is to be made relevant to what must be done today.

Portrait by John Trumbull, 1806.

Alexander Hamilton’s Report on the Subject of Manufactures, published in 1791, is arguably his most important, and is also the one usually glossed over by historians and economists.

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To begin, we start with what is good about the book. Parenti’s primary subject in his offering is Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, a work which arguably is the most important that issued from Hamilton’s mind, and one, as Parenti points out, that is usually ignored or glossed over by those who have written about Hamilton.

Given the situation in the world right now, the author’s choice of this subject is extremely timely. In discussing the Report, Parenti supplies more than mere generalities. In one of the better insights of the book, Parenti clearly differentiates between Hamilton’s proposal for the use of “bounties” and “premiums” to foster rapid advances in science and manufacturing, versus the Mathew Carey/Tench Coxe rejection of that policy in favor of high protective tariffs. He also discusses the Carey/Coxe allegiance to Thomas Jefferson, including Carey’s strong support of southern slavery, as well as how the later Henry Clay economic approach flowed from the Carey/Coxe network.

This positive appraisal of Hamilton’s proposal for national bounties and premiums as a means to deliberately foster science, manufacturing and an increase in the nation’s productivity deserves a fuller treatment than what Parenti provides, but the mere fact that he raises the subject is both refreshing and important.

Along the same lines of Hamilton’s commitment to use government to foster human advancement, Parenti also touches on—all too briefly—Hamilton’s proposal toward the end of the Report to establish a national Board “for promoting Arts, Agriculture, Manufacturing and Commerce.” This Board, to be financed by the national government, would invest in the development of science and the recruitment of skilled labor. Parenti quotes Hamilton’s words from the Report which say that the Board would—

Induce the prosecution and introduction of useful discoveries, inventions and improvements by proportionate rewards, ... [and] Encourage by Premiums, both honorable and lucrative, the exertions of individuals, and classes, in relation to the several objects they are charged with promoting.

Radical Hamilton is also clear in making the irrefutable case that it was the South’s “Slave Power” grouping that bitterly fought against Hamilton’s policies, on the question of the National Bank, but even more fiercely against his proposals in the Report on Manufactures. The book is also very clear in showing that Hamilton consciously and publicly opposed the laissez-faire doctrines of Adam Smith, a topic frequently misrepresented, or even lied about, by some historians and neo-liberal free market economists today. Parenti demonstrates that the actual godfather of modern-day American proponents of laissez-faire was Thomas Jefferson, even providing a 1790 quote from Jefferson: “In political economy, I think Smith’s Wealth of Nations the best book extant.”

Adam Smith published his laissez-faire doctrines in The Wealth of Nations, in 1776.

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The ‘Misunderstood’ Hamilton

All of the above can be viewed as a useful contribution to the reassessment of economic fundamentals which is now underway. But as one proceeds through the book, a nagging feeling creeps in—that Parenti really doesn’t comprehend “what made Hamilton tick.”

Putting to one side Parenti’s egregious “guesses” about Hamilton’s sexuality, and related digs concerning his character, he persists in presenting Hamilton as a sort of calculating pragmatist. He insists that Hamilton’s economic initiatives were a “pragmatic” consequence of Hamilton’s war experiences and the economic crisis of 1782-1788, ignoring the earlier influences of William Livingston, Alexander McDougall, John Jay, and Hamilton’s upbringing on the islands of Nevis and St. Croix.

This picture of Hamilton as a pragmatist, as well as a clever and sly manipulator who used “loopholes” in the Constitution to get his way, resurfaces throughout the work. This is a serious error, and in failing to understand the motivation which inspired Hamilton’s life and work, leads Parenti into fatal problems as to the nature of Hamiltonian economics itself. What he tends to do is to focus on the form of Hamilton’s policies, rather than the intention behind those policies. Essentially, Parenti misunderstands his “Misunderstood” protagonist.

The real problem here is a failure to understand the American Revolution. Perhaps, Parenti should have first taken up the reading of John Jay’s Dec. 23, 1776 “Address of the Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York,” Gouverneur Morris’ 1778 “Observations on the American Revolution,” or William Livingston’s writings in the Independent Reflector. These were all individuals who were very close to Hamilton, and in these writings the shared mission of this group is very explicit.

The axiomatic issue of the American Revolution was a fight to free the inhabitants of the 13 American colonies from oligarchical rule, as that rule was manifest in the post-1763 policies of the British Empire. Facing the determination of the British ruling elite to impose their Jamaican slave-economy model on the colonies, the revolution was first and foremost a fight for the freedom to develop. Perhaps Mr. Parenti might agree with that statement, up to that point,—for he does spend a great deal of time stressing Hamilton’s commitment to a “developmental state”—but it is worth considering a little more deeply what is meant by the “right to develop.”

In Chapter 13 of Radical Hamilton, Parenti makes the assertion, “For Hamilton, the State is both the means and the ends.” No one would accuse Parenti of categorizing Hamilton as a modern-day devotee of Mao Zedong or Adolph Hitler, but the aroma of “serving the state, for the sake of the state” lingers in his analysis. For the actual Hamilton, the paramount issue was not developing the state simply for the sake of having a strong national state. Foremost was the issue of human productivity. This is where the unbridgeable gulf between the British Empire (and all of the Old-World oligarchical cultures) and the American Republic becomes self-evident, and it is an issue understood by very few modern-day historians.

What Hamilton recognized, and this is very explicit in a careful reading of his Report as well as in his later writings on the French Revolution, was the creative potential which exists within every human being. Human beings are not beasts of burden, as European oligarchical culture had defined them and used them for centuries. They possess the power to invent, to discover, and to socialize those discoveries.

Hamilton knew that the survival of the experiment of the American Republic must depend on nurturing and fostering those creative potentials within a free citizenry. Through science, invention, and technology the human condition, and human culture, could be improved and advanced to higher levels. This is not people serving the state, but the state providing the means whereby human productive power, civilization and happiness might advance. Thus the Constitution’s charge to promote the General Welfare for present and future generations.

Clockwise from top left: John Jay, William Livingston, and Gouverneur Morris, three individuals who were very close to Hamilton, and in whose writings the shared mission with Hamilton is explicit.

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It was this understanding of the “divine spark” which resides within every human being that made Hamilton such a determined foe of slavery. Critically, almost all of those close to Hamilton were of the same view: Gouverneur Morris, John Laurens, Rufus King, Alexander McDougall, John Jay, Lafayette, and even Washington himself abhorred slavery. Historians tend to erect a wall between Hamilton’s “moral opposition” to slavery and his economic policies, as if one had no connection to the other. In truth the American Revolution was the greatest anti-slavery revolution in history, and that intention was inseparable from Hamilton’s economic and banking initiatives.

The Critical Problem

It is in the conclusion of Radical Hamilton that the problems which are apparent throughout the work go completely off the rails. What Parenti does is to take his argument on behalf of “statist” centralized “Hamiltonian” economics and insist that this is the most effective approach to impose a “Green” economic agenda on the United States today. In the concluding chapter of the book, he states:

What does the Hamiltonian tradition have to say to the present and the climate crisis? The unprecedented challenge of climate change requires, at a minimum, that we euthanize the fossil-fuel industry and build out a vast clean-energy sector. This energy transformation, already underway but going too slowly, involves a simultaneous deindustrialization, putting an end to fossil-fuel use, and a green reindustrialization, building the new energy economy.

Mr. Parenti made similar comments in a recent August 12 interview with The Hill.

One might overlook these views as secondary to the rest of the contents of Radical Hamilton, except for the fact that Parenti’s opposition to the physical economic development of the human species is both public and long-standing. In the December 24, 2012 issue of The Nation, Parenti authored an article, “ ‘Limits to Growth’: A Book That Launched a Movement,” wherein he heaps fulsome praise on Jay Forrester and Dennis Meadows and endorses their contention that human progress must be curtailed. Similar praise is bestowed on the oligarchical Club of Rome and its founder Aurelio Peccei. Parenti says of Limits to Growth: “a scientifically rigorous and credible warning.”

So what we are left with is an author who proposes to use the credit and banking policies of Alexander Hamilton to usher in anti-growth economic policies that would have been anathema to Hamilton himself. In making this argument, Parenti unfortunately references, in several locations, the “creative destruction” gibberish of Joseph Schumpeter, going so far as to draw a parallel between the “destruction” of horse and buggy transportation and its replacement by railroads with his proposed “destruction” of coal-fired generating plants and their replacement with miles of low-energy solar panels.

Thus, Hamilton’s intention is turned on its head.

The Science of Economics

As Lyndon LaRouche spent a lifetime elaborating, all human economic and civilizational progress is a product of the creative potential which resides within the human mind. All mechanistic, input-output and monetarist notions of economics are nonsense. From the Paleolithic, through the Bronze Age and into modern times, discoveries, and inventions—including most importantly discoveries of principle, as to how the universe is ordered and operates—have been the basis for all upward human progress. The modern-day Anglo-Dutch model, descended from monetarist practices adopted in 17th and 18th century London and Amsterdam, is about money and rule by an oligarchy. Hamilton’s economics is about human advancement.

Parenti touches on this in his discussion of “bounties” and “premiums” and Hamilton’s sponsorship of science, but he fails to draw the correct conclusion. What he refuses to see is that human advancement,—even continued human survival—is dependent on continual revolutions in science, technology and industry,—revolutions which increase mankind’s power over nature, as well as the productivity (power) of both society as a whole and the individual citizen.

What Limits to Growth posits is just what its title says, that there is a Malthusian limit to human advancement: a limit to population growth, a limit to energy use per capita, a limit to vital resources, etc. This is the argument of today’s present-day eco-warriors. The problem with this is not only that Hamilton would utterly reject such claptrap; more urgently, any attempt to enforce such a no-growth policy world-wide would ensure a human holocaust. Humanity either progresses or it dies.

Modern-day Hamiltonian economics is best expressed in the 2014 Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche:

1. Immediate re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall law instituted by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, without modification....

2. A return to a system of top-down, and thoroughly defined, National Banking.

3. The purpose of the use of a Federal Credit-system, is to generate high-productivity trends in improvements of employment, with the accompanying intention, to increase the physical-economic productivity, and the standard of living of the persons and households of the United States....

4. Adopt a Fusion-Driver “Crash Program.” The essential distinction of man from all lower forms of life, hence, in practice, is that it presents the means for the perfection of the specifically affirmative aims and needs of human individual and social life....

Today, the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed not only the woeful state of public health capabilities world-wide, but the even greater need for advanced scientific breakthroughs, which will lead to a coronavirus vaccine, as well as the treatment and cure of other diseases. The Artemis program, the Perseverance mission to Mars and numerous space projects by other nations are also posing daunting challenges to our scientists, engineers, and our economic system. And they are beginning to reveal unanswered questions, as to the nature of our galaxy and the universe,—questions that demand attention and exploration. Fusion energy, starved for funding for decades, holds the promise of virtually limitless energy, more than enough to provide a standard of living higher than the most prosperous European nation to every inhabitant of the planet.

Crash programs in all of these areas should and must become the order of the day. That is the proper understanding of Hamilton’s proposal for Bounties and Premiums and the establishment of a Board to encourage “useful discoveries, inventions and improvements.”

There are no limits to growth! There is no limit to human creativity and advancement! Economics is a physical science, not an accountant’s playpen. What is required today is for serious people to study this matter with more honesty and depth. What is required is an economic system that is designed to foster increases in human productivity, leading to greater human happiness. That is the true intention of the Report on the Subject of Manufactures. And that is where real economics begins.

II. The Coming End of Geopolitics

ON EARTH AND IN SPACE

Law of the Jungle or Law of Nations:

Where is the World Heading?

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Aug. 22—We are now seeing a multitude of events which—seemingly independent of one another—together are creating the dynamics, the ambience, of a prewar period. The crucial question is whether the human species has the moral resources within itself to abandon its current path in international politics, before it inevitably leads to a new world war.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is clearly on the warpath, and certainly believes that the “will to power” will be sufficient to lure all other nations into a confrontation against Russia and China including, if need be, through the extraterritorial application of U.S. sanctions against Iran and all countries that do not give in to Pompeo’s projection of U.S. arbitrariness. It’s really quite astonishing: Last week the UN Security Council rejected a U.S. resolution to reinstate sanctions against Iran under a clause of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Russia and China voted against, France, Germany, Great Britain, and eight other states abstained. Only the USA and the Dominican Republic voted for it. The case was thus clear-cut.

But that did not prevent Pompeo from submitting a letter to the UN Security Council one week later, expressing his expectation that the sanctions against Iran, and all states that have trade relations of any kind with Iran, will automatically come into force again after 30 days, affecting primarily Russia and China, but also European and other states. The foreign ministries of Russia and China made it clear in their comments that Pompeo’s notions are absurd, in view of the fact that the JCPOA treaty was put into effect by UN Resolution 2231 and is therefore applicable international law, while the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from this treaty on May 8, 2018.

To invoke a treaty from which one has withdrawn, indeed expresses an alarming degree of delusion. The Foreign Ministers of France, Germany and Great Britain also indicated that they found Pompeo’s push to be incompatible with their own support for the JCPOA treaty. Pompeo’s argument that Iran failed to adhere to the agreed terms of the nuclear deal is also transparent, for the whole world knows that Iran only began to increase its reserves of enriched uranium in response to the American exit. Pompeo’s triumphant remarks in an interview on August 19 with Special Report correspondent Bret Baier, that Iran is no longer able to buy Russian air defense systems and Chinese tanks, makes it clear the real purpose is confrontation with Russia and China.

While President Trump has repeatedly emphasized and demonstrated that he actually wants to improve relations with Russia and work out a new nuclear disarmament agreement, Pompeo’s policy towards Iran is identical to that of Trump’s dismissed security advisor, John Bolton, about whom Trump had recently tweeted, “If I had listened to him, we would be in World War Six by now.” There are good reasons to believe that World War Six will not happen, because humanity would in all likelihood not survive the Third.

Trump’s Anti-War Intentions

Regarding Trump’s intended withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, which the Pentagon had repeatedly, skillfully obstructed, Trump had repeatedly complained that he was an “island of one” with regard to this intention—that is, that he was completely alone in this policy. He is President, but his policies have been largely undermined by ongoing coup attempts since before he assumed office in January 2017, and by the collusion of the secret service structures with the British secret service, from the time of the Bush and Obama administrations.

Anyone who heard the appalling speech at the Democratic National Convention by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell—who, according to his closest associates in 2003, knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction when he gave his infamous speech at the UN—would become uncomfortable recalling the policy of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against at the end of his term: endless wars of intervention, confrontation with Russia, and now the attempt to contain a rising China.

That this geopolitically motivated policy of confrontation is to be continued even into space, was made clear in the remarks of the new commander of the U.S. Space Command, Army General James Dickinson, who declared in an August 20 ceremony on the occasion of his installation:

To be clear, our objective is to deter a conflict from beginning in, or extending to space and to enable our nation to compete in space from a position of strength. However, should deterrence fail, our imperative is clear: we will win. To do so, we will require a space warfighting culture that permeates our entire command....

My pledge to you is that my focus as the commander will be on developing, nurturing, and embracing a space warfighting culture.

So an area in which the common goals of humanity—such as the development of outer space—could be realized, and in which a new era of cooperation of all nations could begin, is to be poisoned by the same Cold War mentality that is already poisoning international relations!

The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a department in the U.S. Department of Defense whose job it is to make technological innovations in the civil sector available to the U.S. military as quickly as possible, has just published a report, “State of the Space Industrial Base Report 2020,” in which the objective was clearly defined: The Moon and space travel in general belong to the domain of American dominance, and China in particular should be prevented from defining international rules for the presence of mankind in space.

The Space Portfolio Director at the DIU, Brigadier General Steven Butow, specified precisely what that means:

As space activities expand beyond geosynchronous orbit, the first nation to establish transportation infrastructure and logistics capabilities serving GEO (geosynchronous equatorial orbit) and cislunar space will have superior ability to exercise control of cislunar space and in particular the Lagrange points and the resources of the Moon.

The control of hydrogen and oxygen as fuel is the key to the commercial use of space, and that’s where the U.S. could use public-private partnerships to its advantage, Gen. Butow said.

The Interests of All Humanity

If history can teach us one thing, it is that only actual peace treaties that take into account the interests of all parties, such as the Peace of Westphalia, lead to peace, while treaties based on the geopolitical subjection of the enemy, such as for example the Versailles Treaty, lead to new wars. For example, if there is to be a lasting peace in Southwest Asia, then it must take into account the security interests of Iran as well as Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians. And this period of barbarism can be overcome only if all of this region’s major neighbors, such as Russia, China and India, and of course the USA and the European states, cooperate in the economic development of the countries that have been destroyed by senseless and endless wars that have cost millions of lives.

The idea of a “culture of space warfare” is just perverse. It is the projection of narrow-minded geopolitics—that caused two world wars and endless suffering in the 20th century—into space and into the future of humanity. What visionary minds like Hermann Oberth, Krafft Ehricke and Lyndon LaRouche saw as the “extraterrestrial imperative,” as the chance of transforming humanity to a higher level of culture—in which scientists and astronauts of all nations and cultures jointly explore and overcome the great unknown, the challenges of the universe—is subjected to the same depraved logic of profit that has brought the world to the brink of the abyss, where we stand today.

Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in reaction to the publication of the U.S. space doctrine, said that the clearly aggressive orientation of American space policy shows the intention to achieve total dominance in space, whereas peaceful exploration of space remains a priority for Russia, and an arms race in space must be prevented. The talks of the Russian-American space working group that began in Vienna on July 27 confirmed Russia’s readiness to discuss all topics of space activities in this bilateral format.

While negotiations and diplomatic initiatives are enormously important, what is existentially necessary is the grand vision of how humanity can move from the current state of barbarism into a new era of an inspiring renaissance of great ideas worthy of humanity. The idea of an international lunar village, an international city on Mars, and joint interstellar space travel throughout our galaxy, and at some point beyond our galaxy—this is not for small-minded people, but for the Mahatmas of history.

zepp-larouche@eir.de, Twitter: @ZeppLaRouche

The Case for Ending Mike Pompeo’s

London-Run Grab for Power

by Renee Sigerson

DoS

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, in a roundtable discussion hosted by the Henry Jackson Society in London, July 21, 2020.

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Aug. 23—The sharply escalating pattern of usurpation of Presidential authority by Anglo-Dutch political pawn Mike Pompeo requires urgent and uncompromising action. President Donald Trump must break out and draw upon his well-known ability to assert: “You’re fired,” quickly tossing Pompeo out of the cubby hole from which London’s intelligence apparatus guides the presumptive Secretary’s anti-China/anti-Russia provocations and war-game designs. As Trump knows, Pompeo never supported him during the election campaign, and he owes Pompeo nothing. Infamously, Pompeo denounced Trump during a 2016 Marco Rubio election rally in Kansas, siding with the craziest Democrats, and charging that Trump would be “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.”

Today, it is Pompeo, a distilled by-product of international globalists’ poisonous, decades-long subversion of the U.S. political process, who is daily usurping Presidential authority and “ignoring our Constitution.”

Beginning late summer 2019, and far more dangerously since January 2020, Pompeo shifted away from being a manipulator who would verbally agree with Trump’s policies but then slip around to make sure his initiatives fizzled. It was soon after Trump fired National Security Advisor John Bolton that Pompeo began, step by step, to continue Bolton’s London-sponsored skullduggery. Donning the cloak of a self-righteous, even “religious” warrior, driven by the identical objectives of constant showdown with Russia, China and Iran that controlled the Bush and Obama years, Pompeo went “hyper” promoting precisely the agenda Donald Trump rightly campaigned against for leading to “ridiculous endless wars.” That Pompeo played this “chameleon” role of pretending to be with Trump, while being positioned by outsiders to become the potential primary cause of a Trump downfall, reflected a game-plan shaped by what can be identified as an underlying moral insanity that controls Pompeo’s behavior.

The character of that deep moral insanity, which causes him (reminiscent of British stooge Barack Obama) to never care about the consequences of his actions and words, was publicly boasted of by Pompeo himself in April 2019, one year after moving from his position as head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to Secretary of State.

Speaking before a packed auditorium at Texas A&M University, which howled cheers and laughter as he spoke, Pompeo described how it felt to be serving in a high-level cabinet post. Giggling uncontrollably in step with audience roars of approval and applause, Pompeo confessed:

It’s a tough world out there … In terms of how you think about problem sets: when I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point: “You will not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do.” I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stealed [sic] stole … We had entire training courses … It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment….[fn_1]

Thereby he admitted, as the trained pet of the Anglo-Dutch/Anglo-American financially based oligarchy, that the foremost personality trait that qualifies a controlled asset for admission to the globalists’ inner sanctum of employment, is your readiness to view life as a game, in which no values or principles are permitted to be cherished as sacred!

Thus, it should be no surprise that it was then CIA director Mike Pompeo who in 2017 crushed the possibility of closing down “Russiagate”—the invented scandal claiming Trump was a puppet of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. In November, there was a potential to put an end to this hoax. William Binney, former Technical Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), had issued a forensic analysis of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server files reposted by WikiLeaks, as well as those published by “Guccifer 2.0,” showing they could not have been hacked by Russia. Donald Trump directed Pompeo to meet with Binney and get the real story. They met for one hour at CIA headquarters.

Pompeo heard what Binney had to say, and never acted on it. Had Binney’s conclusions been investigated and followed up by Congressional testimony and other avenues he proposed, the Russiagate conspiracy theory could have been shut down, Trump Derangement Syndrome could have been subdued, and our institutions of government would have been forced to pay attention to the true crises facing our nation and the world.

Those crises include the threat of war. Under the conditions of an already onrushing financial explosion which threatens to crush the world economy, continued toleration of Pompeo in the State Department could bring the United States and the world to military confrontation escalating into nuclear war in the short term. Several governments, referencing the effects of Pompeo’s insane behavior, have already warned that the danger of hot war now exists. Such warfare could spiral to nuclear confrontation even before the U.S. election. Former U.S. Ambassadors have stated publicly that the policies of sanctions, aggressive military maneuvers and threats of military deployment churned out daily and with abandon by the State Department against many nations, could erupt into hot war.[fn_2]

U.S. Navy/Ensign Samuel Hardgrove

The guided-missile destroyer USS Barry (DDG-52) conducting maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait, a potential scene for a global showdown, April 23, 2020.

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Informed citizens must join with President Trump to end this design of madmen. This is not a partisan matter. All the potential scenes of showdown—such as the South China Sea, the Taiwan Straits, and Central Europe—are conflict zones that were pre-rigged by the lies and chicanery of the pro-British Bush and Obama Administration years. Anti-Trump deranged fanatics, such as those around Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, agree with Pompeo’s broadsides against China, and differ only in complaining that U.S. aggression against Russia is not going far enough.

Trump has been under siege since he was elected because he was an “outsider,” who opposed the games of the most powerful financial globalists and dared to insist there was a pathway to organize a peaceful foreign policy. In his own way, the maverick Trump evokes the living legacy of what brought President Ronald Reagan to collaborate with economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, towards the goal of preventing nuclear war with the Soviet Union, based on the implications of the scientific design called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

Though a substantial portion of the American electorate recalls those Reagan years as a time of relative stability and cautious optimism, be advised: we will now show that for Mike Pompeo and his sidekick Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Ronald Reagan’s policies and aspirations—which challenged the encrusted power of the globalist system—have no meaning or value, and should, they believe, be stamped out from memory and history.

We document here the criminal mindset of Mike Pompeo and how he was fitted in to act as an asset of foreign-tied financial interests that have embedded their poisonous influence into U.S. corporate and political life over more than a century. We will review his matriculation at West Point Military Academy, and how that morphed into his association with the pro-Nazi Anglo-Dutch financial conglomerate Koch Industries. We will also show how Pompeo has been used by such London outposts as the Henry Jackson Society to increase the destructive force of the “Russiagate” plot, even though it has been irrefutably disproven as a London-contrived pack of lies. We will in total present the case that this morally twisted individual has no right to be in our government.

Pompeo is a failed personality, who once ousted will be barely remembered as less than a dent in world history. The purpose of providing this map of his degenerated mind and soul, is to strengthen the will of patriots among our citizenry and government institutions, to join President Trump in dumping him, and to thereby fling open the gateway towards reconstructing a legitimate process of deliberation and foreign policy within our Presidential system of Constitutional government.

The September 2019 Turning Point

What do we see when we watch Mike Pompeo? There stands an imperial “wind-up toy,” stiff as a board, flapping only the twitching muscles of his mouth without moving the rest of his anatomy. Such is the behavior of a well-trained puppet, whose aggressive insults and provocations hurled against much of the world, though primarily China and Russia (and often, Iran), advance no legitimate U.S. national interests, but rather please his controllers gathered around the London money-center.

When John Bolton was around (the man whom Trump denounced as trying to start “World War Six”), Pompeo played second fiddle to his ravings; according to “insider reports” in those months, Pompeo was painfully obsequious to Trump in public settings, and even publicly praised Trump’s declaration of friendship with Chinese President Xi Jinping.[fn_3] Beginning just weeks after Bolton’s dismissal, the situation began to change. Devious actions were maneuvered into place, to usurp Trump’s authority and to shift the functions of government into the hands of renegades including Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.

Many unusual things began to happen in September 2019, months before the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, extending to every branch of government.

The dismissal of Bolton (and of Ms. Kiron Skinner, a silly Hoover/Stanford infiltrator running the State Department Saturday morning seminars, who was helping Bolton spread overtly racist hatred against China) seemed to indicate that Trump was about to move faster in mid-2019 to secure trade agreements with China, and resolve dangerous hotspots through troop withdrawal. However, on August 23, a different agenda was suddenly thrust to the fore.

Emerging from the pit of secrecy, then Bank of England head Mark Carney spoke at a symposium at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming resort where a very select group of international bankers gather annually to plot their control over the world economy. Attacking the principle of national sovereignty, Carney called for the U.S. dollar to be replaced by a cyber-currency, completely managed by the “independent” central banks, beyond any control from sovereign governments. Carney justified this broadside against the United States, by complaining that the value of the dollar was undermining the success of central bank money printing aimed at bailing out the financial markets—ultimately an impossible task given their inherent bankruptcy.

CC/Policy Exchange

Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England, and oligarchical spokesman for the “Green Agenda.”

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Carney’s ravings were then seconded by the release of the private financial report circulated during the “cloak and dagger” Jackson Hole meeting. Authored by BlackRock, the largest hedge fund in the world (which means dirty money managers), the report called for central bankers to assert “regime change,” the new word for what used to be called coups d’état, or dictatorships, against every government, including the United States, on the planet.

The financial diktat from Carney was quickly supported by Michael Bloomberg, then a pop-up candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, as the two teamed up to promote the global, radical imposition of “Green Agenda” economics—policies that would slash economic productivity and reduce living standards (and the potential population level). While many features of their propaganda campaign were clownish,[fn_4] what must not be ignored is that the zombies of doom in the financial community had dropped their masks, and in fact admitted that they are completely committed to murderous policies of preventing physical economic development, worldwide, in order to keep their financial power.

CC/Tasnim News Agency

Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani, assassinated at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.

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Pompeo’s clique would play their part in the “regime change” design. Between September and January, Pompeo and Esper moved in to hornswoggle Trump into capitulating to disinformation and signing on to an attack on Iran which Trump had resisted for years. This pressure point became the January 3, 2020 assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. The evil form in which the assassination was motivated and executed shook the rafters worldwide, rivaling the pivotal acts of assassination and invasion that previously hurled mankind into World Wars I and II. Though global war did not erupt immediately, the shattering of trust between nations this act provoked, dangerously haunts all capitals of the world to this day.[fn_5]

If Pompeo had within him a scintilla of moral judgment, he would never have tricked Trump into this bloody “Soleimani” gimmick.

The West Point ‘Gang of Five’

Some have been deluded into believing that Pompeo is “very smart,” citing, for example, his having been at the top of his 1986 West Point graduating class. No grounds exist for accepting that assumption.

West Point was a formative experience that helped to cause Pompeo’s worst characteristics to come to dominate his personality and outlook. Born and raised in California, Pompeo arrived at West Point a fan of libertarian goddess Ayn Rand, a choice he states he made in rebellion against his fanatically liberal father. His sponsorship to enter the U.S. military academy came from Congressman Bob Dornan, known for his ties to the military-industrial complex and for his war-hawk proclivities. By graduation, Pompeo had abandoned his primary allegiance to Ayn Rand for a bent towards “End Times” faith to which he claims to remain loyal. In his references to “faith,” let alone his political conduct, one never finds a credible portrayal of Christian virtue, calling into question what he really considers religion to mean.

USMA

Mike Pompeo in a West Point photo.

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During his first day on campus, according to all accounts, Pompeo struck up a friendship with four other freshmen, who subsequently remained in unbroken contact with one another, and continue to closely coordinate their careers. These are: Defense Secretary Mark Esper; State Department official Ulrich Brechbuehl (whom Pompeo earlier brought with him into the CIA); State Department official Brian Bulatao (whom Pompeo also brought earlier into the CIA); and David Urban, generally identified as the coordinator of Trump’s election victory in Pennsylvania. According to many sources, it was David Urban (and possibly also Steve Bannon) who persuaded Trump to appoint four-term Kansas Congressman Pompeo as CIA head in 2017, despite Pompeo’s hostility to him during the campaign, and the widespread evidence that Pompeo’s financial backers came from Koch Industries, a money power-house in U.S. politics that Trump disliked.

The West Point clique around Pompeo, which this author dubs a “Gang of Five,” with all the connotations such a designation implies, draws a lot of attention and debate from the swarms of West Point graduates who hold positions throughout the U.S. military. Some have stated openly they were offended and alarmed by Pompeo’s publicly delivered insult to West Point’s motto blurted out at the Texas A&M event. As has been stated to journalists by Academy graduates, it is obvious that Pompeo has little respect for truth, and a mendacious tendency to invent intelligence. (Recently, his obsessive referrals to Russian meddling in the U.S. elections, directly counter to all evidence, as well as to President Trump’s own insistence that Russiagate was always “fake news,” also shows that his feigned loyalty to Donald Trump is now rapidly eroding.)

The key to grasping the problem Pompeo’s circle developed at the Academy comes into focus, however, if one compares their current behavior to the lessons that should have been brought to their attention at West Point, the leading training ground for the U.S. military, at that earlier juncture in history.

The “Gang of Five” all graduated in 1986, meaning they were all in preliminary military training during Ronald Reagan’s first term. This marks a precise time when nothing short of a revolution in military-strategic thinking was being fought out around the Reagan Administration. Central in that fight was statesman and maverick Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. The revolutionary change in thinking which LaRouche had forced to the level of a public policy debate centered around Reagan’s March 23, 1983 announcement of a new policy called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which designed a pathway for war avoidance in dialogue with the Soviet Union, as well as an entry point for advanced technological development of the U.S. and world economy.

Lyndon LaRouche

LaRouche’s role, with high-level security clearance, working with the administration circles loyal to President Reagan, in international discussions for that which became the SDI, was fiercely opposed by the corrupt forces of Vice-President George Bush, as well as in London and Wall Street. Through dozens of international conferences, national television appearances and on-the-ground organizing of the electorate, LaRouche’s movement was able to disseminate the substance of the LaRouche/Reagan collaboration to critical sections of the U.S. establishment and population.

Among the opponents to Reagan’s interest in LaRouche’s ideas were shadowy sections of the intelligence community and the military-industrial complex. The anti-LaRouche section of the U.S. military was grouped publicly around High Frontier, a pseudo-scientific alliance formed by General Danny Graham, a fanatic anti-Communist linked to the Moonies’ Unification Church. Protective of the power of the military-industrial interests steeped in government contracts, the Graham circuit ran a brainwashing operation in military circles claiming that the “new physical principles” LaRouche’s proposal would bring into being to stop nuclear war were impossible to develop.[fn_6]

The effect of this kind of propaganda upon military cadets can only be imagined: West Point originated for the purpose of creating an American peacetime Army Corps of Engineers responsible for building and/or maintaining rail, canals, water management, electrification, bridges and all systems associated with inter-connecting the distant components of the nation. Since the Cold War began after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, this legacy has been under nonstop political attack.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

LaRouche and Reagan at a Presidential candidates’ debate in New Hampshire in 1980; below, Dr. Edward Teller, at New York University in 1983.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

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Instead of studying the most important ideas relevant to revival of the American System of economics, the nation’s top-level military training has become dominated by a vapid, anti-scientific preoccupation with war games. In addition, as shown by personal accounts available to EIR, the cultural environment at West Point had degenerated way below the level for which it was known during the MacArthur and Eisenhower years. Messianic cults, such as that followed by Danny Graham, were allowed to function on campus, replacing a moral view that military deployment must always have a peace-keeping mission, with the delusion that God Almighty was the one preparing a wipeout of most of humanity.

These matters are relevant to the behavior today of Pompeo and his “Gang.” Observation shows that all five of these fellows are the product of an intense brainwashing operation—real victims of the counter-gang attack intended to never allow them to experience why Reagan would embrace LaRouche’s ideas. If you watch this circle, both as individuals and as a group, what is obvious is that they have no identification whatsoever with Ronald Reagan’s historic achievement as a President.

This contrasts fundamentally with Donald Trump, whose admiration for Reagan’s SDI program and moral attachment to Reagan were often cited by him in interviews he gave in the 1990s when he first entertained suggestions he should run for President. Trump of course is older than the “Five” victims of war game psychosis, and also came from a family that had direct personal interaction with Manhattan Project alumnus Dr. Edward Teller, Reagan’s science advisor who participated in developing the SDI, and knew of LaRouche’s role in first proposing how it could work.

That such matters are completely missing in the mindset of Pompeo’s mafia, is shown by their own behavior, as exemplified by the enthusiasm with which he and Esper leapt in support of the dangerous “militarization of space.” Reagan abhorred this perversion, while Dr. Teller portrayed his view of the matter in a memorable address delivered to scientists in 1986, in Erice, Italy, and then again later voicing the beautiful concept in post-Soviet Russia that the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact meant it was time for humanity to unite and develop “The Common Aims of Mankind.”

Pity to those for whom such profound ideas concerning the Good, do not exist.

Top left: DoD/Sgt. Nicole Mejia; top right: CC/ACG Consultants; bottom: DoS

Pompeo’s West Point “Gang of Five” clique (clockwise, from top left): Dr. Mark Esper, Secretary of Defense; David Urban; Mike Pompeo; Ulrich Brechbuhl, a State Department official; and Brian Bulatao, a State Department official.

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Pompeo and the Koch-topus

Pompeo graduated, and moved on to a military deployment (before the Fall of the Berlin Wall) fixing tanks on the border between East and West Germany. There are no references that he served in the reserves, nor did he ever, like Esper, deploy in Desert Storm or any other combat area. Usually high-ranking graduates from West Point are sought after by the military to adopt longer-term careers, but there appear to have been no compelling offers made to Pompeo.

Instead, Pompeo moved on to Harvard Law School and worked at a top law firm. When he ran for Congress in 2010, reports appeared in newspapers throughout the country, describing him as a Kansas Tea-Party redneck, who had deployed in Desert Storm. He never acted to correct those reports, and up until his confirmation hearings for CIA director and Secretary of State in 2017-18, there were 51 citations from members of the U.S. Congress referencing his service in Desert Storm, even though it never occurred. The mendacious Pompeo never corrected them.

Pompeo may well rank second to Barack Obama as the politician about whom the least has been known, and the most invented.

Gradually, as journalists have dug more and more into his background, pieces of the puzzle have begun to come together. Sometime after 1995, Pompeo showed up in Kansas, his mother’s birthplace, where he received a $90 million loan packaged by Koch Industries to set him up in business. He brought in T. Ulrich Brechbuehl and Brian Bulatao, and they founded an aerospace supply company which they named after the first head of West Point, Thayer. Pompeo also divorced his California-born wife, and married Susan Mostrous, the Emprise banker who was handling his accounts. According to The New Yorker magazine’s 2019 profile of Pompeo, as well as the left-wing video group “Now This News,” Thayer was a failed company: they had late deliveries, failed to pay vendors, and ran up debt.

Thayer Failing

Since it is rare for Charles Koch to stick with poor performers in business, the dynamic in his early relationship with Pompeo is unclear. In 2003, as Thayer was going under, Pompeo was given a new job, and in 2006 dropped out of Thayer, which was sold under a new name, to a successful group of businessmen. The new job, President of Sentry International, required Pompeo to work with a part owner that was Chinese government owned. Recently, Pompeo admitted in a speech to U.S. Governors that he even worked for a while out of Sentry’s Shanghai office. Yet, “Now This News” claims that in a questionnaire from the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pompeo claimed he had never conducted business with a company owned by a foreign government.

DoS

Pompeo with Sam Brownback, “Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom.”

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How he came into initial contact with Koch Industries is not known and may take some political shock effects to bring to the surface, since so much of Pompeo’s life has been disguised. Koch-generated contributions supported him heavily through four election campaigns, before he was tapped for the CIA. One has to scrutinize Koch, to grasp to what end they have operated. One clue as to why they may have picked up Pompeo as a project is provided by the overlay of his emergence with that of the daffy former Senator and Governor of Kansas Sam Brownback. Like Pompeo, Brownback is an “End Times” ideologue.

Since 2018, when Brownback was appointed by Trump to a bizarre position called “Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom,” a position Brownback invented in a bill he passed right before retiring from the U.S. Senate, Pompeo and he are known to coordinate. One can find them, for example, hopping around conferences in Washington, D.C., where Brownback will have assembled terrorists and anarchists he gathers from all over the world, claiming they are being persecuted for their faith, whom they will even inflict personally on Donald Trump with visits to the Oval Office. Brownback’s shenanigans on this matter are proven to be fraudulent when compared to serious interventions that have been undertaken by clergy and other patriots, who have worked with Russia and China to defend religious groups from ISIS and other murderous cults.[fn_7]

The Koch Brothers, Charles and the recently deceased David, have not been known for religious fervor. If they have any icons approximating religious faith, it is their loyalty to the fascist ideology behind the Austrian School of Economics. Fundamentally, they are opposed to the American System of Economics, and have poured billions of dollars since the late 1970s into U.S. university economics departments to influence the curricula and promotions of university personnel they handpick for agreeing with their ideology.

While they have never publicly been associated with attacks on Lyndon LaRouche, their funding and political preferences have been deployed through channels that directly aim to suppress LaRouche’s influence on economic policymaking, particularly in universities, as well as in Congress. Not because of religious sentiment, the Koch brothers seem however, to have liked to collect political assets that mix political agitation with “End Times” themes, presumably because the argument that the Lord wants to kill off the human species to reward the faithful, blinds the faithful to the Koch policies of accruing power to facilitate mass genocide.

How to Build an American Variety of Corporate Fascism

A three-generation spinoff of Anglo-Dutch financial interests embedded in oil and raw materials distribution, the Koch octopus in American industry and politics has exploded with sudden increases in financial wealth and political power twice in their existence. The first time was in the aftermath of President Nixon’s cancellation of the fixed exchange-rate monetary system named Bretton Woods. The second time was following the cancellation of the last, most critical bank regulation in American history, the law known as Glass-Steagall.

Unlike many other players in U.S. politics, the Koch system of influence has been developed over a period of more than 100 years. The association of Fred Koch, father of the current President of Koch Industries, with the John Birch Society and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is heavily documented. What until recently was less known, was the origin of Koch operations in Dutch financial assets, brought to the U.S. in the 1880s by Harry Koch, a personification of the Royal Dutch Shell mentality in wealthy Anglo-Dutch circles, who heavily supported the rise of the German Nazi Party. That legacy, whether cultural or enhanced by ongoing financial ties, continues to characterize the Koch System and its role in pumping up Pompeo’s career.

One person who has accurately discerned that there is a putrid odor emanating from Koch’s operations, both economically and politically, is none other than Donald Trump. The Kochs did not support Trump in the 2016 election, though they made several attempts to make amends with the President. On July 31, 2018, Trump tweeted:

The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade. I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas. They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made them richer. Their network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn. They want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed, I’m for America First & the American Worker—a puppet for no one. Two nice guys with bad ideas. Make America Great Again!

The best way Trump could live up to this insight would be to dump Pompeo who, in contrast to the President, owes them a lot. Recently David Koch died, and Charles, the long-term head of the firm, is also aging. The problem with Koch Industries is that it is a financial blob in the middle of the U.S. economy and political system, which will only go away if a real revival of American System economics, combined with a New Bretton Woods system, is brought into existence. As we illustrate here, the problem with Koch, which infects their business and political stooges whether they know it or not, is that their financial allies in London and Amsterdam are absolutely committed to destroying the real United States and turning it back into a colonial looting ground whose military they can deploy at will.

It is no accident that recently, the pro-fascist, beyond-Libertarian Koch apparatus has begun to coordinate with George Soros in designing a new era of think tanks that will merge the disorder of Black Lives Matter with schemes to crush China’s Belt and Road initiative, which is already advancing the industrialization of Africa and other impoverished areas of the world.

Brownback’s Entry

In 1996, when Bob Dole lost the Presidential race and retired from the U.S. Senate, the Koch Brothers moved in with big money and prepared media scandal attacks to grab Dole’s Senate seat. The person they stuck in that position was Kansas Agriculture Secretary Sam Brownback. The stunts enacted by Brownback in the Senate—like the creation of the Ambassador at large position—were laughable, but had an ominous intent.

In imitation of anti-Russia obsessive Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brownback would get up in the Senate and rail that Russia was threatening the now independent former Soviet Republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and that these must immediately be declared areas where the western NATO alliance had a right to militarily intervene. What was so blatant about Koch-man Brownback’s ravings is that the Anglo-Dutch financial circuit that operated through Koch Industries clearly were obsessed with controlling the raw materials in the former USSR, and were determined to prevent that part of the world from developing modern corridors of economic development, organized by sovereign governments.

It seemed incongruous at the time that a farm official from Kansas would be so impassioned on this subject—unless you knew who was paying for his career. Brownback twice sponsored a bill called the “Silk Road Strategy Act,” and didn’t back down until he managed to get it passed as an amendment to an appropriations authorization, stating in principle that this area of the world had to be brought under the Anglo-American/NATO umbrella of power.

What may surprise many today, is the reality that Koch Industries, with its current $100 billion annual revenues, and status as the second largest privately held corporate entity in the United States, was constructed over decades to fulfill exactly this goal: putting Central Asian energy resources under western control in opposition to Russia. How this relates to London and Amsterdam money center assets is unknown, because their operations, including foreign transactions, are entirely unknown—a matter pointed to by Donald Trump’s tweet.

Left: CC/Gavin Peters; right: Gage Skidmore

The Koch brothers, Charles (left) and David.

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Like Grandfather, Like Son

In the 1890s, Harry Koch, an immigrant to New York from a wealthy Dutch family of merchants and doctors, moved to western Texas to invest in railways and real estate. He created a regional newspaper, ran real estate investments, and traveled eight times to visit Europe. He would proudly tell the story of his attendance at one of Adolf Hitler’s mass rallies.

Harry despised Franklin Roosevelt and his policies under the New Deal. He was contemptuous of poor people and editorialized venom against trade unions. Curiously, his son Fred, an oil engineer, moved to the Soviet Union about this time, to market a valve he’d invented but which was boycotted by American oil producers. Fred lived in the USSR for several months, eerily crisscrossing exactly the same areas of the Caucasus region that 65 years later Sam Brownback would be yelling about in the U.S. Congress.

Josef Stalin was not happy about Fred’s activities, and Fred eventually packed up and returned to the U.S., proclaiming himself a fanatic anti-Communist. He immediately joined the John Birch Society (JBS), to help them build their membership. The JBS had extensive ties to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Fred himself must have aroused interest in the circles around J. Edgar Hoover for his experiences in Stalin’s USSR.

Fred took the revenues he got from his patent sales, and bought into a joint venture with J. Howard Marshall, who owned a Minnesota-based oil refinery in the town of Pine Bend. That partnership evolved over time to become the bedrock source of cash for the Koch business empire. When Fred died in 1967, control of the firm shifted to Charles Koch, with David at his side. For decades, they remained in business with Marshall, the only non-family member to hold the private shares in the Koch system. Marshall, the original seed of their wealth, was a renowned degenerate, and his profile is consistent with that of an organized crime asset of the FBI.

Koch began its operations as a “bottom feeder” in the oil industry, picking up scrap and low-grade operations like Canadian crude which the major producers didn’t want to touch, out of which they squeezed cash to redeploy. To maximize that cash flow, they became devoted to union busting and to illegally saving money on maintenance and safety. They were joyful when Nixon cancelled FDR’s “New Deal” offspring, the Bretton Woods System, and grabbed that as the opportunity to go all out for turning cash into expanding “bottom feeder,” low-maintenance operations.

To maximize their clout, in 1971 they carefully planned out a ruthless showdown with the chemical workers’ union in Minnesota, to break the work rules at Pine Bend. In a nine-month confrontation kept together by military-type tactics, they busted not only the local union, but provoked shakeouts throughout the region. Not accidentally their game—all in the spirit of the Austrian Economics creed that governments have no right to shape the economic direction of their nations—presaged the brutal union-busting operations the FBI would soon be conducting nationally through such thug operations as Brilab and Abscam, which put a lot of union leaders as well as Congressmen, in jail.

Charles and David, just like their father, were fanatic in support of Austrian School Economics. In 1977, Charles teamed up with Richard Fink, a post-graduate economics student originally from Rutgers University, to set up a system for financing university programs based on Austrian School apologists for the Nazis such as Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. During the Reagan years, Fink set up a program called the Mercator Institute at George Mason University, through which the Koch brothers have funneled huge amounts of money into influencing the hiring practices and curricula at universities throughout the U.S.

The promotion of this Austrian School ideology that economy is really the tricks by which money invents more money, by manipulating the transfer of goods which are required for human survival, is the enemy of the scientific approach to economics associated since Alexander Hamilton with the American System. It denies the requirement of human creativity and scientific discovery to provide the transformation and growth in physical output required to meet the needs of a growing human population. The Austrian School is just a re-jiggered version of the British Imperial ideology embodied in the British East India Company, which thrived on mass genocide directed against populations throughout the world.

If the Kochs like “End Timers,” it is precisely because the “Faithers” are the ones who view genocide as merely a step in the direction of God’s eventual rapture.

This is the context in which to view the pattern of events generated by Pompeo since January 2020.

The Final Act on the Stage

The assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, by a drone launched by U.S. forces into a diplomatic, non-combat setting at the Baghdad airport, marked a turning point. This was not just an assassination: it was an act designed to denigrate every standard of conduct between nations of the world. Pompeo and Esper had finally stepped over the bounds. No longer was the job of the Secretary of State defined as “Diplomacy.” Rather, terrorization, or what the Nazis called Schrecklichkeit was to be a norm, as Pompeo went beyond his Constitutionally defined powers, and began to cast more and more, the lurking image of “acting President.”

From that moment, Pompeo began to include surveillance and prosecution of naturalized U.S. citizens, but also of duly elected officials on the state level, including state governors, as targets of his raving anti-China/Russia/Iran hit list of policies.

Pompeo should have been nailed and fired all the way back in 2017, but Trump was under such unceasing attack, he probably didn’t recognize the role Pompeo was playing. Recall that in 2017 Trump told then CIA director Pompeo to get on top of the Russiagate hoax by meeting with former NSA technical director William Binney, who had been working with Lyndon LaRouche’s movement to set up public events and interviews wherever possible to get out his evidence that the supposed hack of Democratic computers leading into the 2016 election was a fraud.

Pompeo showed up for a scheduled one-hour meeting with Binney at CIA headquarters. Pompeo could have become a national hero by meeting Binney’s simple, single demand: set up interviews with the CIA and with Congressional committees so Binney could present his evidence that the DNC files released by WikiLeaks were not stolen by a hack, but rather were downloaded by someone physically in the DNC office, excluding the Russian government from the list of suspects.

Pompeo heard Binney’s argument, and simply grunted that he “believed the intelligence assessment,” a direct contradiction to President Trump’s own beliefs. Rather than advancing this powerful defense of Trump, Pompeo did nothing to alert others to the importance of NSA expert Binney’s work, nor did he recontact him to coordinate how to follow-up. Binney’s intrepid determination, and the nonstop support of the LaRouche movement, are bringing these rock-hard findings into the public discourse.

Even if he has convinced Trump of his “loyalty,” Pompeo has never “served the President.” Like Shakespeare’s character Iago—who convinces his General, Othello, that he’s his best friend, while he leads him to madness and death—Pompeo aims to sink Trump through insane behaviors which contradict Trump’s electoral mandate and personal convictions.

UK Government

Sir Kim Darroch, disgraced UK Ambassador to the U.S.

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John Bolton tried for months to persuade Trump to sign on to the assassination of Soleimani; Trump resisted firmly, leaning towards a completely different track. Following the firing of Bolton, Trump acted with Presidential authority, demanding that British Ambassador Sir Kim Darroch—the secret instigator behind the neo-conservative madness that Bolton typified—leave Washington, D.C. in disgrace. British newspapers admitted that Darroch had been conducting surveillance to pin down Trump’s closest circles of friends and personal advisors, to intersect them with whisperers who would work them over to get the President to adopt British imperial policies he opposed. Disappointed in Trump’s earlier decision not to launch a strike on Iran, Darroch wrote, hopefully, that “Just one more Iranian attack somewhere in the region could trigger yet another Trump U-turn. Moreover, the loss of a single American life would probably make a critical difference.”

What was the evidence that convinced Trump that Soleimani posed an immediate threat to American lives? The “intelligence” evidence that Pompeo and Esper apparently showed Trump to get him to sign on to the drone deployment into a diplomatic, non-combat setting to accomplish the murder, has never been released. It would be useful for some government or well-placed individual to demand that evidence be revealed, knowing Pompeo’s professed propensity to “lie, cheat and steal.”

Pompeo’s Moral Virus

Once the COVID-19 outbreak became a true pandemic—a calamity warned about decades before, but ignored because of budget and healthcare austerity measures dictated by the cancellation of the Bretton Woods stability system—Pompeo spiraled out of control. His behavior has become so debased that he is now a laughingstock in many parts of the world, with the noteworthy exception of London (where he is laughed at in a different way). However, he has also engineered more life-threatening actions, and is clearly being used to attempt a wrecking operation against Russian President Putin’s excellent call for a September summit meeting of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner in May, Pompeo admitted he viewed COVID-19 as an “opportunity” to line up world opinion against “a rising Beijing.” From the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, in fact, that was all he had in mind, being the first official to mouth the awful phrase “Chinese virus” in official statements. True to form, Pompeo played out the game, finally publicly accusing the Chinese Communist Party of deliberately allowing the spread of COVID-19, to build economic supremacy. All of the shabby evidence supporting this characterization, not surprisingly, came from British sources.

At some point earlier on, following public recognition that the disease was highly contagious, Pompeo asked Maryland Governor Larry Hogan that he be allowed to address the annual U.S. Governor’s Conference scheduled for February 8. Only days before that event, it was made public that Americans were trapped on cruise ships where the infection was spreading at a very rapid rate. Complex transportation and health issues were mounting at a rapid rate, and dramatic decisions needed to be made concerning how people would be safely transported for treatment.

Pompeo stood before the Governors, all of whose states were affected by this hourly-sharpening crisis, and said not one word about COVID-19. Only one subject was on his mind: terrorize the Governors that they were all becoming dupes of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Department was watching their every move!

Posturing that his 15-month stint as CIA director made him more qualified than mere Governors to judge China’s intentions, Pompeo warned that the U.S.-China Governors’ Collaboration Summit—where President Trump’s trade expansion strategy could be openly discussed by state leaders from both countries—was really nothing more than an espionage front for “foreign influence” run by the Chinese Communists. Flaunting his credentials, Pompeo condescendingly ignored that many of these Governors had interactions with Chinese state officials, academic representatives and immigrant communities going back in some cases for decades. Some of them probably knew more about China than Pompeo.

DoS/Ron Przysucha

Mike Pompeo with Maryland Governor Larry Hogan at the U.S. Governors’ annual meeting on February 8.

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Painting Falsity

The following required excerpts from his February 8 talk summarize, yet again, the Pompeo style for constructing a fake reality:

Last year, I received an invitation to an event that promised to be “an occasion for exclusive deal-making.” ... Deal-making sounds like it might have come from President Trump…. It was co-hosted by the Chinese Peoples’ Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. Sounds pretty harmless. I was lucky. I was familiar with that organization from my time as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency…. How many of you made the link between that group and Chinese Communist Party officials?... Indeed last year, a Chinese government backed think tank in Beijing produced a report that assessed 50 of America’s governors on their attitudes towards China. They labeled each of you “friend,” “hardline,” or “ambiguous.” I’ll let you decide where you think you belong. Someone in China already has…. Under Xi Jinping, China is moving [in the direction of] more repression, more unfair competition, more predatory economic practices; indeed a more aggressive military posture…. I would be surprised if more of you in the audience have not been lobbied by the Chinese Communist Party directly.

That suffices to provide the gist of the Mafia-like aroma of threats Pompeo blew in the Governors’ faces. None dared to speak out and question him, and the event received little press coverage. But the drumbeat—just like the concoctions about Saddam Hussein, Soleimani, and for that matter the “Russiagate” accusations that continue to legitimize the hallucinatory mindset of Trump Derangement Syndrome, contrary to all solid evidence—streams from Pompeo’s flapping lips, sometimes uttering “Chinese Communist Party,” other times doling out sanctions.

On July 21, Pompeo had his homecoming, arriving in London to glorify what he proclaimed “the U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship” as he tripped down the yellow-brick road to visit the Wizards of Oz headquartered at the Henry Jackson Society, which was founded by the ultimate inventors of the Russiagate scandals directed against President Trump, such as former British intelligence chief Sir Richard Dearlove. Pompeo salivated at the chance to prove to his ultimate masters that he hates China’s economic successes even more than they do.

Seeing these players in action, it is often difficult to calibrate why and how they wield so much dangerous power. They are shallow and worse than fools, but much more driven to control the world than those who desire the onset of better times.

The U.S. was founded to change the principled basis upon which influence and power in the world are organized. We are potentially weeks away from a series of international summit meetings that could overturn the reign of madness that has particularly dominated U.S. relations with Russia and China in recent decades. The patriots within the U.S. political system, including the population itself, must cease to be fearful of overgrown playground bullies like Pompeo, and the money interests which buy their way into politics. If we act, this country, in peaceful alliance with other nations worldwide could enter into an era of prosperity and well-being beyond most peoples’ imagination. Do we have the moral fitness and inner commitment to clean out the corridors of power from the likes of Pompeo and to work together to make that future come about?

—Renee Sigerson, reneesigerson@gmail.com

[fn_1] Pompeo’s Q&A session at Texas A&M can be viewed here. His opening remarks are available here. [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] See the open letter, “It’s Time to Rethink Our Russia Policy,” published August 5 in Politico Magazine, signed by 103 American foreign policy experts, including former ambassadors to Russia. A noteworthy response to the letter is that issued by Dr. Edward Lozansky, physicist, Russian émigré, and head of the American University in Moscow. His reply, “Urgent Call to Rethink U.S.-Russia Policy,” published August 13 in the Washington Times, showed what the signers should have added to their criticism. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3] Throughout 2018, including during Pompeo’s first official visit to Beijing, Pompeo expressed total support for President Trump’s working relationship with President Xi and for maintaining respect for China’s “One China” policy relating to Taiwan and Hong Kong. During that time, Bolton played the “war-monger,” and Bolton’s side-kick Kiron Skinner was running internal State Department seminars featuring anti-Xi Chinese immigrant Miles Yu, a victim of the Maoist period who has really made a career out of arousing distrust of China. Pompeo played Uriah Heep echoing Trump in this period, with the Washington Post and Washington Examiner later claiming—after Bolton and Skinner were removed—that Pompeo had come under Yu’s influence. Rather, this combination of players worked together to usurp Trump’s authority. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4] One can too easily forget how Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg joined in early September with “Child of Doom” Greta Thunberg to announce that from that time on, all capital investment they would allow would go into “Green” projects to shrink the world economy. Alarmed observers worldwide referred to Greta as the victim of psychological abuse. [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5] Schiller Institute founder and chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche responded to the atrocious and profoundly destabilizing attack by immediately calling for an emergency summit of the U.S., Russia, China and India, where the heads of state—all reasonable advocates of war avoidance—could assemble for an honest dialogue on how to restore trust and a perspective for avoiding war. Russian President Putin soon thereafter proposed a summit, but composed of the Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council. Zepp-LaRouche supports Putin’s effort. [back to text for fn_5]

[fn_6] Graham was also an ignoramus concerning science. In angry retort to both LaRouche and Reagan, Graham claimed it was impossible to develop high-powered laser systems that could penetrate nuclear warheads. Instead he demanded that the military only use known technologies to confront the threat of nuclear attack, which meant for him strictly kinetic designs, sending up rockets to stop rockets—not much better than giant slingshots. Stuck in his pro-British loyalties and faith obsessions, Graham was a hard-core Newtonian. [back to text for fn_6]

[fn_7] Truly religious people can be named who have acted, for example, to protect their religious brethren from being murdered by ISIS. In every case, such individuals have worked with many governments, including Russia and China, to achieve these results, and avoid portraying themselves as world defenders of all faiths. One cannot help but speculate that Brownback was mainly invented to blur the positive role some religious leaders are able to fulfill in crises, through conscientious dialogue, or in the case of Trump’s personal friend Franklin Graham, through a legacy of serious medical missionary work. [back to text for fn_7]

Is the Belt and Road Initiative

One of the Targets in Belarus Unrest?

by Hussein Askary, Belt and Road Institute in Sweden

CC/Homoatrox

A demonstration in Minsk against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, August 16, 2020.

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Aug. 20—It is a matter of fact (as will be described below) that Belarus has emerged as a key nodal point for the railway traffic between the European Union countries, especially in Northern Europe, and China, along the New Silk Road Corridor Number 3 (C in our map) of the Belt and Road Initiative’s (BRI) six land-based corridors. Chinese President Xi Jinping even called Belarus “the pearl” of the Belt and Road. With the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, this route became decisive for the shipment of medical preventive materials, medicines, and personal protection equipment (PPE), mostly produced in China, to Europe. In addition, China’s massive investments in Belarusian industrial parks and free trade zones are helping this country to regain, in a modern and efficient way, its Soviet-era industrial capacity, promoting the economic and social development of the Belarusian people.

Now Belarus is being hit with demonstrations and destabilizations by political forces that are calling for a sudden and consequently violent overthrow of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. A review of recent articles and commentaries that have appeared in Europe clearly reveals that some within the elite view this as an opportunity to wreck Belarus’s role in the BRI.

The Swedish think tank, Dagens Arena, which is connected to the ruling Social Democratic Party, published an opinion piece on the situation in Belarus, in which the author stated the following:

At the same time, Lukashenko has taken steps to become more independent of both Russia and the EU. Belarus is strategically located along the New Silk Road, China’s gigantic infrastructure project that will, among other things, connect China with the Baltic Sea. And China has no interest in democracy in Belarus. On the contrary. It is urgent for the EU to take the side of the people.

The leftist pro-Social Democratic Party daily Aftonbladet emphasized in an editorial on August 15 with the title, “It is Possible to Overturn the Bunker in Minsk,” in which the author emphasized, “We must not forget China either. Through China’s huge infrastructure project, the New Silk Road, Belarus finds itself in a particularly strategic position for the dictatorship in Beijing.”

The Swedish liberal daily Svenska Dagbladet has also made clear that the unrest in Belarus could be an opening against the Belt and Road and China. It states:

China has no problem with authoritarian dictatorships and has a fairly strong economic interest in Belarus. The countries have a military-technical cooperation and China has invested a lot in infrastructure in Belarus, which is a logistical hub in China’s Belt and Road project.

In a cynical piece in the Nikkei Asia Review titled, “Unrest Threatens China’s Belt and Road ‘Success Story’ in Belarus,” the author writes:

Belarus has emerged as a Belt and Road linchpin due to a combination of geography and politics. The former Soviet republic is located near the port cities of the Baltic states and serves as a major land transit route between Europe and Asia, making it a convenient gateway to Western markets for China.

Admitting that the cooperation between China and Belarus was a win-win success story, the author suggests that “the narrative of success is now under threat.” An expert is cited saying, “Any worsening of Belarus’ position on the international stage is clearly a threat for China’s plans to implement the Belt and Road Initiative.”

DoS/Ron Przysucha

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo meets with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk, February 1, 2020.

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Pompeo ‘Cares’ About the People

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo was on a tour of several Central European countries between August 11 and 15 , with the very open goal of dissuading them from cooperating with China and Russia. Speaking before the Czech Senate on August 12, Pompeo wasted no time in meddling in Belarusian affairs and lashing out at China, saying “We were very concerned it [the election] wasn’t held in a way that was free and fair.”

The benevolent Secretary of State further said: “We care about that. Because we care deeply about the Belarusian people.” Concerning China, he said: “And so when you see regimes like the Chinese Communist Party, they know that’s, in the end, going to crush them. They appreciate that it’s going to deny them freedom. We see what’s happening in Hong Kong to entrepreneurs. That’s the model that the Chinese Communist Party brings when they show up.”

Pompeo promised the countries in the region that if they were to abandon their cooperation with China and Russia, the U.S. would be “right there alongside with them.” But what these countries need is not somebody behind them breathing hot air on their necks, but investments. Concerning Belarus, the U.S. not only imposes sanctions, but even discourages foreign investment in the country, in spite of the fact that it lists all the merits of investing in the Great Stone Industrial Park (see below).

The Importance of Belarus for

East-West Trade

According to the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), Belarus is strategically located on the new Eurasian land bridge. Eight rail container routes on the China-Western Europe trade route pass through Belarus, enabling cargo to move much faster between China and Germany via Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland. The freight time has been reduced to 14 days thanks to effective clearing systems and cross-border transit facilities. In comparison, sea freight takes around three weeks longer, although the cost of sending freight by rail is about 60-70% higher per ton. As shippers have become more receptive to the expanding rail container routes, more than 3,000 Sino-European trains used Belarus’s rail network in 2017. That volume has, since then, increased dramatically, as new cities and ports in Western Europe and the Baltic Sea were opened as destinations for the trade route from China.

In July of this year, container traffic between China and Europe set a new record.

As reported by RailFreight, a specialized website:

The United Transport and Logistics Company—Eurasian Rail Alliance (UTLC ERA), a joint venture of Belarusian, Kazakh and Russian railways, carried 52,500 TEUs [20-foot-equivalent unit containers] across the broad-gauge railways. That is twice as much as the same figure last year and represents an absolute volume record in monthly Eurasian container traffic.... “We had more than 100 trains operating daily, and the total fleet managed by UTLC ERA already amounts to almost 7,000 railcars,” said the CEO of UTLC ERA, Alexey Grom.

BRIX

Belarus, circled in red, is a key nodal point for railway traffic between Europe and China, along the New Silk Road Corridor No. 3 (C on the map).

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The railway route starts in several cities and provinces in China, mainly Xi’an, Chongqing, Shilong and Chengdu, and terminates in several major European ports and logistics hubs like Duisburg, Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Liège. From there it feeds into the rest of Europe and Scandinavia, including several new lines to the Baltic sea, especially through Klaipeda, Lithuania, with direct connections to Swedish ports like Trelleborg.

In April, a new freight route from Xi’an to Trelleborg was established through the port of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.

However, all the routes pass through Belarus.

So, in what way is this efficient and smooth flow of essential goods between East and West supposed to be a threat to Europe and Sweden, as some politicians and journalists claim? Obviously, those who make such claims are not involved in providing goods and services to their societies, but merely have opinions about everything everyone else does.

Great Stone Industrial Park

Another milestone in China-Belarus cooperation which is helping the Belarusian people is the development of Great Stone Industrial Park. The park is 91.5 sq. kilometers in extent, with a special legal status conducive to doing business, with big incentives for foreign investors. The park is located 25 km from Minsk, and in close proximity to the international airport, railway lines, and the Berlin-Moscow transnational highway. It also has access to the Baltic Sea through the Port of Klaipeda in Lithuania.

In the park area, construction is planned for production and living areas, offices and shopping malls, financial services, and research centers. The emphasis in the park is on high-tech and competitive innovative production with high export potential. The technologies involved are fine chemicals, electronic information, bio-medicine, new materials, machinery manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, e-commerce and big data processing. Any company, regardless of country of capital origin, can become a resident of the industrial park. So far, 60-plus international companies, mostly Chinese, are registered in Great Stone Industrial Park, Huawei and ZTE being among the largest.

According to some estimates, in the coming years the park is expected to attract more than 200 high-tech enterprises with over 120,000 employees. Given the magnitude of the project, hundreds if not thousands of Belarusian companies would benefit from it as subcontractors, suppliers and logistics and transport managers. The Belarusian employees in these companies are highly skilled and enjoy greater benefits than workers elsewhere. For instance, the tax on income of employees is 9 percent, compared to 13 percent in the rest of the nation.

This project—combined with the development of Belarus as a key transit area for the trade between East and West along the Belt and Road—is a major contributor to the economic and social development of the people of Belarus, whose welfare Mr. Pompeo is allegedly worried about. This project has also helped Belarus open up to the rest of the world, which is a key element in economic and political reform.

Once again, when looking at the facts on the ground, turning the Belarus-China economic cooperation into a “threat” to Europe and the world is not only inaccurate and ill-informed, but bizarrely twisted.

CC/Aschroet

CC/Homoatrox, 2019

A milestone in China-Belarus cooperation is the development of the Great Stone Industrial Park, located near the Minsk airport.

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Will the Unrest Affect the Belt and Road?

According to the Chinese side, the latest developments will not affect the BRI or cooperation with China, since the joint projects are purely economic and there are no political strings attached. China seems to be committed to the long-term relationship with the people of Belarus, who should be the only ones to decide their own future.

On August 19, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian said:

China respects Belarusian people’s right to choose their own development path and their efforts in defending their country’s independence, sovereignty, security and economic development.

In an August 17 article, “Belarus Unrest ‘Won’t Shake BRI Cooperation’ With China,” the semi-official Chinese daily, Global Times, cited an employee of the China-Belarus Great Stone Industrial Park as saying:

Most of the Chinese companies in the park were not affected by the social unrest in Belarus, and the BRI projects in the country were unlikely to be impacted in the future.... According to statistics from China’s Ministry of Commerce released in August, there are 63 enterprises in the park, with investment surpassing $1 billion....

The industrial park counts for a lot for Belarus, as the country sees it as an industrial hub that can drive reform and its opening-up to the outside world, said Wang Yiwei, director of the International Affairs Institute at the Renmin University of China.

It is noteworthy that the opposition groups in Belarus have not taken up the cooperation with China as a factor in their dispute with the government. It is easy to understand that, since a great number of the people they want to attract to their side are highly skilled and well-educated workers employed in such enterprises.

One unfortunate phenomenon in Sweden and many Western countries is that in reporting, or rather opinionating, on developments related to the Belt and Road Initiative or China’s economic cooperation with other nations, seldom are any facts presented. There is a great deal of prejudice and political grandstanding involved in this kind of “journalism,” which does not really reflect reality. The Belt and Road Institute in Sweden, through examining many case studies, has found that to be prevalent. A better understanding of these matters can easily be achieved by looking objectively at the reality on the ground through information that can be obtained easily through publicly available sources.

III. Walther Rathenau: Behind the Curtain of History

Einstein’s Friend, Walther Rathenau:

The Agapic Personality in Politics and Diplomacy

PART ONE OF TWO PARTS

by Judy Hodgkiss

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in English on the Schiller Institute website in June 2012, and in German as a two-part series on June 27, 2012 in the German newspaper, Neue Solidarität.

Bundesarchiv/Bild

Walter Rathenau, August 1, 1921.

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June 2012—The following, excerpted from a two-part article in the German newspaper, Neue Solidarität, is intended as a case study into the unique personality type capable of calm, creative leadership, as demonstrated in the atmosphere of panic in 1920’s Weimar Germany, or, as will be needed, in the panic soon to come upon us, in the existential crisis of today.

ON JUNE 24, 2012 we commemorate the 90th anniversary of the assassination of the German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, a singular figure in the industrialization and the political leadership of the German nation at the beginning of the 20th Century. His was a personality perfectly suited for leadership in a time of crisis. A model for today.

We will speak here of Rathenau’s accomplishments in industry, politics and diplomacy. But we cannot merely recount Rathenau’s monumental list of achievements as an industrialist—he did not consider himself as primarily an industrialist. Neither can we merely list his achievements in politics and diplomacy—he did not consider himself as primarily a politician or a diplomat. He thought of himself foremost as a writer, a philosopher, a poet, an artist, and a musician.

Therefore, when he devised his various policies, his first consideration was never what others might consider to be “practical”; he saw his fight against the British Empire as primarily a cultural fight, a battle for the “soul” of the German nation.

Rathenau served as political advisor—officially and unofficially—to almost all of the turn-of-the-century German governments: from the pre-war reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his cabinet; through the war-time emergency governments and the chaotic coups and counter-coups of the demobilization; then in the post-war Weimar Republic, until his death in 1922.

He brought to the service of his country, in each of these cases, a personality uniquely distilled from, and expressive of, the best of the German classical tradition. Whether devising policy for the colonies in Africa, negotiating the Rapallo Treaty with the Russians, or building the various private industries and concerns of which he and his father were a part, he always described his actions as being guided by that “German spirit which has sung and thought for the world,” a spirit which was, after the war, threatened with obliteration by those “who are blinded by hate.”[fn_1]

Rathenau’s contemporary, the author, Emil Ludwig, marveled that “Walther Rathenau knew how to paint portraits, design a house, build turbines and factories, write poetry, draw up treaties, and play the Waldstein Sonata.”

Just as the image of Einstein and his violin comes to mind when we think of the agapic personality in science, we should, similarly, imagine Walther Rathenau at his piano, when we think of such a personality active in the fields of politics and statecraft.

Walter Rathenau

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In fact, we can imagine Einstein and Rathenau playing a sonata, together, at one of their several dinner parties which they held, alternately at one, then the other’s home in Berlin, between the years, 1917 to 1922. Or, another image would come to mind: the scene of Rathenau spending an evening at the large villa of his neighbor, a descendant of the Mendelssohn family. Robert Schumann’s piano quintet was played, with Rathenau at the piano; joined by the Klingler brothers, Fridolin on viola, the instrument he played in the Klingler Quartet, and Karl, formerly the viola player with Joseph Joachim’s quartet, 1906-7, played first violin, as he did in the quartet with Fridolin; on cello, was the banker, Robert Mendelssohn, great-great-grandson of Moses, distant cousin of Felix; and Robert’s brother, Franz, President of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce, played the second violin.[fn_2]

The Agapic Personality Squared

In fact, like Einstein, when Rathenau was in school, he contemplated music as a possible profession, as his mother wished; but felt compelled toward a profession in science and engineering, as his father insisted upon. And, perhaps, not coincidently, both fathers owned electro-technical businesses and hoped to see their sons succeed them at the company.

But Rathenau always asserted, as Einstein also understood, that scientific and technological progress was dependent not on the concerns of the “materially crass” world, but on the powers of the imagination, the same powers that are a necessary foundation for great art, literature and music. Rathenau wrote in a 1907 essay, called, “Unwritten Works”:

The intellect must lose itself sooner or later in the unessentially real; only the imagination can find the way which leads up to the essentially true. The materially enterprising world of today can carry on only if it turns from its crass admiration for the analytical intellect and bows to the ideal.[fn_3]

One of Rathenau’s first foreign policy missions, before the war, was to join a fact-finding tour of Germany’s African colonies for the Kaiser and Chancellor von Bülow. We might assume it obvious that Rathenau would promote large infrastructure projects for the continent (details of which we will explore later,) not only because of his personal background, but also in the context of the tradition of the nation-building policies of Germany’s former chancellor, Bismarck, and the influential German-American economist, Friedrich List. In fact, Rathenau’s father, Emil, had attended the very exhibition in America, the centennial celebration of 1876, which had originally inspired the railroad building programs that Bismarck carried out in Prussia.

But in Rathenau’s report for the fact-finding mission, he went even further, framing his proposals within a cultural context:

The evolution of Germany in the nineteenth century depended on the fact that the ideological and philosophical disposition of the German people, which had spent itself for centuries in metaphysical speculation, suddenly was recognized as having enormous real value, because it proved to be adequate to problems in science, technology, and organization. Thus we may hope that education for colonization will once more open to the German soul a field that corresponds to its earthly mission.[fn_4]

Einstein and Rathenau first met at a Berlin dinner party at the beginning of March 1917. On March 8, Einstein wrote to Rathenau, “I saw with astonishment and joy how extensive a meeting of minds there is between our outlooks on life.”

Einstein would write to his mother, Pauline, in 1918, “Rathenau is an eloquent and sparkling spirit.”[fn_5]

Royal Academy of Music

Left to right: Carlos Alfredo Piatti, Carl Reinecke, and Joseph Joachim at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, in May 1890.

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After Rathenau’s assassination, Einstein wrote a memorial to him for the Neue Rundschau, August 1922. He said:

My feelings for Rathenau were and are ones of joyful esteem and thanks for the hope and consolation he gave me during Europe’s presently bleak situation as well as for the unforgettable hours this visionary and warm human being granted me...A delightful mixture of sobriety and genuine Berlin humor made it a unique pleasure to listen to him when he chatted with friends at the table. It takes no talent to be an idealist when one lives in cloud-cuckoo-land; but he was an idealist, even though he lived on this earth, whose smells he knew better than almost anyone.[fn_6]

A Jew and a German Patriot

After the war, with the rise of anti-Semitism, and the increasingly violent atmosphere in Berlin, Rathenau had to fight with Einstein to convince him to remain in Germany. As part of that effort, Rathenau found himself in a contest with the Zionists for influence over Einstein. The Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, visiting from Britain, recalled in his memoirs:

This visit has remained vividly in my memory. It was a conversation with Walther Rathenau, whom I met at Einstein’s home one evening. In a gush of words he immediately launched an attack on Zionism... The quintessence of what he presented was: he was a Jew but felt like a German and devoted all his energy toward building up German industry and restoring Germany’s reputation in the world.[fn_7]

CC/Jochen Teufel, 2008

Walther Rathenau’s home at Königsallee 65, Berlin-Grunewald, built in 1910. Architects: Walther Rathenau and Johannes Kraaz.

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Although Rathenau had urged the full assimilation of Jews into German society, he was critical of those, like his and Einstein’s mutual friend, the Nobel-prize winning chemist, Fritz Haber, who converted to Christianity as a way to mollify his persecutors. Rathenau’s first book, Hear O Israel, was on the subject.[fn_8]

Rathenau was able to win over Einstein to the fight to “restore Germany’s reputation”: Einstein remained in Berlin, and also agreed to be Rathenau’s “goodwill ambassador,” making several trips to other countries, speaking before scientific associations and meeting with labor groups. He went to England and to Holland, and he planned a trip to Japan; but he hesitated to accept the invitation of his friend, Paul Langevin, to lecture in what he knew would be a semi-hostile environment, the Collège de France in Paris. He at first declined, then wrote to Langevin, March 1922:

Rathenau has told me that it is my duty to accept, and so I accept.[fn_9]

Left: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1931; right:

Above: Albert Einstein playing his violin, Lina. Below: In a photo by Lieselotte Orgel-Löhne, Rathenau’s loyal friend Karl Klingler (left), first violinist in the Klingler Quartet, shares a laugh with Max Planck, the eminent physicist and closest friend of Einstein, as they review musical scores. Like Rathenau, Planck was always ready with his piano, to accompany the violin of either Klingler or Einstein.

Courtesy of Charlotte von Conta

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Even after Rathenau’s death, Einstein still felt the power of Rathenau’s hand on his shoulder. When Einstein hesitated in joining the League of Nation’s Commission for International Intellectual Cooperation, Marie Curie wrote to him, July 7, 1922:

I think your friend Rathenau, who I believe was an honest man, would have encouraged you to at least try to bring about peaceful international intellectual collaboration.[fn_10]

Rathenau’s murder came as a terrible shock for Einstein. In 1935, Einstein’s biographer, William Hermanns, brought up the subject of the anti-Semitic gangs of Germany, in his interview with Einstein and his wife:

“Frau Einstein almost whispered, ‘It was this kind of youth that murdered Rathenau’.”

“ ‘I had so many talks with him about Germany and peace,’ said Einstein. ‘He was the first victim of Nazi propaganda’.”[fn_11]

Bundesarchiv Bild

Prince Bernhard Fürst von Bülow, Imperial Chancellor under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Rathenau served as his unofficial “Super Secretary of State” during the pre-war years.

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The Fatal Flaw in the Culture

Before the war, Rathenau never held an official government post, but he had functioned informally in a variety of capacities for the Kaiser and his Imperial Chancellor, the Prince von Bülow. Although this was a time of great enthusiasm and optimism on Rathenau’s part, he had intimations of the possible disastrous consequences of Germany’s adherence to its autocratic system. But he was blind-sided as to the depth of the problem that was inherent in the population’s slavish adulation of aristocratic titles or anyone decorated with military regalia.

As for Einstein, we see his view of the matter in his interview with Hermanns:

“[Germans] learned from their fathers to bow to any uniform, even a mailman’s. Look what Bismarck said: ‘The Germans lack civil courage.’”

When Rathenau moved back to his hometown, Berlin, in 1899, he bought a house in the fashionable Grunewald district, and began to associate with the city’s elite circles of artists, politicians, and members of the imperial court. He was introduced to the Kaiser, himself, in 1901. Rathenau described the experience in his essay, “The Kaiser,” published in 1919, after the Kaiser’s abdication and exile to Holland:

On the first occasion, I had to repeat before him a scientific lecture which I had already delivered before a larger audience, and which I thus had at my fingers’ ends. The Kaiser sat right in front of me so that I was able to observe him closely....

A friend asked me my impression of his bearings and conversation. I said, “He is an enchanter and a man marked by fate. A nature rent, yet not feeling the rent. He is on the road to disaster.”[fn_12]

Einstein expressed it more simply. He said to Hermanns:

It is interesting that the two advisors the Kaiser most trusted were Jews: Rathenau and [Albert] Ballin. I met the Kaiser once. He made the impression of a good man who rattled his sword to please others.

For Rathenau, it was the experience of the collapse of his beloved country into, first, the insanity of the euphoric war fever, beginning in 1913, followed by the depravities he witnessed during the chaos and confusion period of the demobilization, that finally forced upon him the harsh lesson: that the foolishness and weakness demonstrated by the Kaiser and others in the ruling class was actually a predictable function of the population’s own foolish attachment to the feudalist trappings of oligarchy, as a deeply embedded flaw in the culture itself.

In his 1918 appeal to U.S. President Wilson, Rathenau admits the problem, along with his fear that it might be too late for Germany to have a second chance.

Sent to President Wilson, via Colonel House, December 1918:

As a humble member of a people wounded to the heart, struggling simultaneously for its new-found freedom [the Kaiser had abdicated] and for its very existence, I appeal to you, the representative of the most progressive of all nations. Four years ago, we were apparently your equals; but only apparently, for in fact we lacked that element which gives a nation its real strength: internal freedom. Today we stand on the verge of annihilation: a fate which cannot be avoided if Germany is to be crippled as those who hate us wish. For this fact must be stated clearly and insistently, so that all may understand its terrible significance, all nations and their peoples, the present generation and those to come: what we are threatened with, what the policy of hate proposes, is our annihilation, the annihilation of the life of Germany, now and for evermore.[fn_13]

Observations by an American

One week after Rathenau’s assassination, the American journalist, John Finley, wrote a feature on him for the New York Times, titled, “Rathenau’s Vision of a New World.” Finley had interviewed Rathenau in Berlin a few months before the murder, and his appreciation of the statesman’s life is genuine and insightful. The following is the first section of his article:

It is significant of much, says Trevelyan, the English historian, that in the seventeenth century members of Parliament quoted from the Bible; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the classics; and in the twentieth century from nothing at all. Walther Rathenau, German Foreign Minister, assassinated a week ago, furnished a sharp contrast to his British contemporaries. In his first Parliamentary speech, a year ago this June, when taking his seat in the Cabinet, he quoted the opening and closing themes of a Beethoven fugue, referred to an apt incident in the story of the Holy Grail, invoked pertinent precepts of philosophy and drew upon the physical sciences for his metaphors.

This seemingly extempore and modestly brief speech, illuminated from his wide reading and study and out of his varied experience, was made in the middle of hostile heckling and baiting, in which Helfferich, who goaded him to the last day of his life, joined. It was the utterance of a thinker, who came, out of a sense of duty but fearlessly, near to what he called “a high-tension [i.e., AC current] political machine,” whose construction and operation he confessed he did not understand beyond “knowing vaguely its perils.”...

Rathenau was a thinker, but not brooding always in stooped and wondering inertia as Rodin has represented his “Penseur.” ... He had thought profoundly, and he had seen an anguish of the world which was vastly more awful than Rodin had pictured at the gates of Hell, upon which his “Penseur” was made, in its original placing, to look down. Rathenau had thought profoundly and broadly and he had written voluminously on science, art, esthetics, morals, one of his twenty books reaching a seventy-fifth edition. He had a “passion for theory,” whether as a scientist, philosopher or sociologist.

He was first, last and always a man who approached all problems from the point of view of the spiritual values involved. In this, he seemed the very antinome of Stinnes [steel industrialist and previous Foreign Minister], who approaches everything, it would appear, with a purely materialistic purpose. In the early years of the war, Rathenau was writing a book which began with the warning sentence that “this book treats of material things but treats of them for the sake of the spirit” and which ended with this conclusion: “We are not here for the sake of possessions, nor for the sake of power, nor for the sake of happiness: we are here that we may elucidate the divine elements in the human spirit.”

Rather surprising pronouncements, these, from the head of a tremendous [corporate] trust that embraced an empire with its horizontal combinations and latterly reached even into vertical co-operations; from one who was for a time the virtual dictator of the whole industrial and trade organization of Germany through his control of the raw material resources which he brought to the support of the armies in the field, fighting for an unholy end, as it seems to us. But these views permeate his whole philosophy of life and even his economic theory, for one of the high ends of economics he conceived to be to increase the flow of earthly goods to the “sacrificial places” where the “material is subtilized to become spiritual.”

Has any tariff conceived such a motive for the “flow of earthly goods”? And “subsidizing” the material we know, but “subtilizing” it into the spiritual? It is a strange terminology. And yet one reading his books and looking, as I did for an hour, into the face of their author, cannot doubt the sincerity of his moral purpose.[fn_14]

We will hear more from Mr. Finley later in this report. Now we will fill in more detail in Rathenau’s biography.

Public domain

Walter Rathenau, as painted by Edvard Munch, 1907.

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A Meteoric Rise to Power

The elite circles of Berlin who welcomed Rathenau into their homes and into their confidence, had been impressed in the previous decade by the growth and nature of Rathenau’s father’s electrical conglomerate, the AEG, the Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft. But the impression made on them by the son, was that of astonishment and awe. During the short segment of his career, from the time he moved back to Berlin in 1899, to when the Imperial Chancellor gave him his first semi-official assignment in the German Colonial Office in 1907, he went from being a complete unknown, to being categorized by the Berlin press as the “Super Secretary of State.”

In his autobiographical essay, “Apology,” Rathenau described his father’s modest beginnings in the Berlin of the 1870s:

The house ... was not situated in what was then the quiet west end of Berlin, called the Privy Councillors’ quarter, but in the Chausseestrasse, which was in the working-class North of the city. And behind the house, alongside the cemetery, lay the work-shop, surrounded by old trees—the little fitting-up room, the foundry, and the groaning brazier’s forge. Those were the engineering works of my father and his friend; and the masters and men of that famous race of old Berlin engineers were kind to the little Jewish boy who toddled about among them, and many a tool and piece of machinery they used to explain to him.[fn_15]

Rathenau studied physics and engineering at university; his dissertation topic was “Light Absorption by Metals.”

From the beginning, Rathenau insisted that he not be brought into his father’s business until he proved his capabilities on his own. Later, he would argue that this practice should be the general case for children of wealthy parents, enforced by a law requiring a 100% inheritance tax.

Rathenau developed a new process of electrolysis for the production of chlorine and alkalies, and convinced the AEG board to invest its capital to build an electro-chemical factory using his technique, in the small town of Bitterfield. Rathenau describes his amazing progress from there:

In 1899, after I had spent seven years in the little manufacturing town of Bitterfeld, the undertakings began to prosper. I decided to retire from industry in order to devote myself to literature. The AEG, however, invited me to join their board of directors and take over the department for constructing power stations. I undertook the work for three years, and built a number of stations—e.g., in Manchester, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires and Baku. I retained the directorship of the electro-chemical works, and became at the same time delegate of a great foreign electricity trust.... In 1902 I left the AEG in order to enter finance. I joined the management of one of our big banks, the Berliner Handelsgesellschaft, and reorganized a great part of its industrial undertakings. I gained an insight into German and foreign industry, and belonged at that time to nearly a hundred different concerns.

Africa

In 1907, Chancellor von Bülow selected Rathenau to accompany the Colonial Secretary, Dernburg, to do a fact-finding tour of the German colonies in Africa. The “Super Secretary of State” paid his own expenses, so that he could be as independent and truthful in his findings, as possible. He ended up, two years after his series of reports was issued, with the award of an Imperial Medal. But this was only after the controversy had been allowed to die down, and Dernburg had been demoted because of his resistance to some of Rathenau’s proposals.

Rathenau was harshly critical of what he found on his first tour, which was to the colony of East Africa; he was even more critical in his report on his second tour the next year, of the colony of South-West Africa.

His first report began with the assertion,

[The colony’s] most valuable product, its human population, is large but sparse; its population density is 12 to 15 times less than that of our own country. Population growth makes but slow progress, impeded as it is by endemic and epidemic disease.

Project Gutenberg

Germany’s pre-World War I African colonies.

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Rathenau advocated shifting out of “plantation agriculture,” to “native agriculture,” where “investment opportunities for large-scale German capital can, however, be found: investment in the colonies themselves would possibly be more profitable if mercantile, mining, and industrial developments were later to emerge.”

The notes in his African diary refer to “reflections on colonial psychosis.” He was more diplomatic in his official report:

It is worth noting the special interpretation on which the interested party bases his cultural task: he is called to train the Negro to work, and indeed this is clearly understood to be plantation work. The interpretation goes further—an argument which was put forward on an official occasion: just as the German child has to go to school, so too the black man has to undertake regular work in European enterprises.

These views, which former Governments [Bismarck] probably did not share, yet tolerated, have occasionally and sometimes continuously produced results reminiscent of kidnapping and serfdom.

He wrote up a 5-point proposal:

1. With regard to overall economic policy: shifting the emphasis in the direction of native agriculture.

2. With regard to the native question: different regulation of the power of Europeans to punish, and protection of the coloured man against maltreatment....

3. With regard to the agriculture of the country: an extensive afforestation programme; a search for new, and protection of existing sources of water....

4. With regard to the communications system: establishment of a railway-building programme....

5. With regard to the administration: reorganization of municipal finance; establishment of the colonial service as a career; an increase in the number of senior officers in administrative posts.[fn_16]

One (hostile) biographer, David Felix, ridicules Rathenau’s plan for railway construction, as a scheme, “costing 200 million marks for a colony with an annual trade of 24 million marks.”[fn_17]

But the Kaiser and the Reichstag thought otherwise. On the basis of Rathenau’s reports, the Reichstag voted in 1908 to build a total of 1,467 kilometers of new railways for the African colonies. This investment nearly matched the size of the Berlin-Baghdad railway project, begun in 1903, which would have extended 1,600 kilometers, total.

Photo by T.H. Voigt, 1902

Kaiser Wilhelm II, of whom Einstein once said, “I met the Kaiser once. He made the impression of a good man who rattled his sword to please others.”

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England

Before arriving in Africa, Rathenau stopped over in London, where he had meetings that were to arrange an international conference, needed to settle border disputes for African colonies. He wrote up a memorandum on the state of Britain for the Kaiser and von Bülow:

This pampered country has been doing bad business for years and lives, by our standards, beyond its means: new taxes are there the most disagreeable expense.... Doubtless England can strengthen its fleet, will strengthen it, and must strengthen it—but its present exorbitant position of superiority can not be maintained in the long run....

It is especially worth noticing that these anxieties, industrial and colonial, cause the nation to look across to Germany. Here is the competitor, the rival. It soon comes up in all conversations with informed Englishmen, sometimes as a compliment, sometimes as a reproach, sometimes ironically: you will outstrip us, you have outstripped us.... Add to this a third reason... From the outside one peers into the cauldron of nations that is the Continent, and becomes aware of a people, surrounded by stagnating nations, a people of restless activity and enormous powers of physical expansion. Eight hundred thousand new Germans every year!...

Thus all English discontent is substantiated and localized ... in the notion of Germany. And what appears among the educated as a motivated conviction is expressed among the people, among the youth, in the provinces, as prejudice, as hatred and wild fantasy to an extent that far exceeds the measure of our journalistic apperception.[fn_18]

Five years later, Rathenau wrote a study of a possible scenario of British pre-emptive war. He is apparently unable at this time to foresee that Britain were capable of inducing Germany to destroy itself. Here he thinks he can reason with the British. From the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, April 6, 1912, “England and Ourselves: A Philippic”:

[England] is under the impression she has been technically and industrially outstripped. Secondly, she feels obliged to intervene against every dominating continental power which emerges. Thirdly, her colonial structure would be shaken from within if supremacy at sea lost its value as a historic dogma. Fourthly, the armaments race is becoming too expensive and, given a constantly changing technology, success uncertain. The war which England would have to wage would thus be a preventive war....

England has, for two hundred years, been used to having all problems brought before her curial throne and to deciding them at leisure ... a policy of phantasy, adventure and desperation was alien to the Doge-like wisdom of this country.[fn_19]

The war fever building up in Germany in 1913 caught Rathenau by surprise. He launched a barrage of articles attempting to cool it down. From the Neue Freie Presse, March 23, 1913, on the anniversary of the War of Liberation, 1813:

But it is misleading to compare the taxes proposed by the Bundesrat with the national sacrifice of 1813. The finest thing about that period was not the sacrifice nor the victory, but the heart-searching that preceded them.... Money and armament alone will not avert our doom. Material forces only call up material forces in reply.[fn_20]

And, on the verge of war, July 31, 1914, in the Berliner Tageblatt:

The government has left us no doubt of the fact that Germany is intent on remaining loyal to her old ally. Without the protection of this loyalty Austria could not have ventured on the step she has taken.... Such a question as the participation of Austrian officials in investigating the Serbian plot is no reason for an international war![fn_21]

The war begins. A conflicted Rathenau writes to his friend, Fanny Künstler, authoress, in November:

Apart from this obvious pain, there is another, a duller pain, more mysterious, which benumbs everything within me. We must win, we must!... How different it was in 1870 with the ideal of unity before us! How different the demand for our very existence in 1813! A Serbian ultimatum and a mass of confused precipitate telegrams! Would that I had never seen behind the scenes of this stage![fn_22]

In spite of his misgivings, Rathenau volunteered within days of the outbreak of the war to head up a War Raw Materials Department to deal with the blockade set up by the Allies. That he was enormously successful, is testified to by an article in the London Times, October 11, 1915, that quotes American journalist, Raymond G. Swing, reporting from Berlin (America was still neutral at the time):

It is an interesting story, this miracle of industry, this inventiveness, this genius of organization. It is a story which explains the fall of Warsaw and the great Eastern offensives and the impregnable Western line. And when the Falkenhayns, the Hindenburgs and the Mackensens, are thought of as great German soldiers, one person must be set beside them, the German business-man, Dr. Walther Rathenau.[fn_23]

The Times then adds, plaintively: where is our English Rathenau?

But, even while Rathenau was busy accomplishing miracles on behalf of the war effort, he was writing to the German Democratic Party deputy, Conrad Haussmann:

Do you know, Herr Haussmann, what we are fighting for? I do not and I should be glad if you could tell me. What will come of it? We have no strategists and no statesmen.[fn_24]

Rathenau, the Author

No matter how world events were sweeping him along, before the war, during the war, or after, Rathenau poured out a continuous stream of poetry, essays, pamphlets and books, on a variety of topics, all of varying quality. Instead of attempting to critique any or all of it at this point, let’s look over the shoulder of our journalist friend, Mr. Finley, as he attempted to explain Rathenau’s economic theory to a contemporary American audience:

In the late Winter of 1921, when the German reparation delegation ... was in London I picked up one day at a bookshop, in an interval between the tense conferences in St. James’ Palace, a little volume entitled The New Society. It was by Walther Rathenau.

I read and re-read this treatise, which some anonymous editor had called a “landmark in the history of economic and social thought.” It did indeed seem like a primitive landmark, a cairn of chapters thrown together without design. But each stone had either historical significance or a prophetic import. This author, then stranger to me, began by asking if there is a sign by which we can know whether human society has been “completely socialized,” and answered immediately his own question: “It is when no one can have an income without working for it [i.e., no income from inheritance].” But is this the goal? No, it is only the sign. The final goal, the only full and final object of all endeavor upon earth is the “development of the human soul.”...

A few weeks later reaching Berlin on a Sunday and eager to meet the author of The New Society that I might ask him how he proposed to get that theory instituted here upon earth, I found that he was out of town.... But passing through Berlin again a few weeks later, I made another effort, this time successfully, to see this man whom I wanted to see above all other Germans. I was (as he says, every one in America is today, and as every one will be when society is completely socialized) determined to know the how and where and why of the thing. He welcomed me to his mother’s home, where amid signs of material but unostentatious comfort, we talked for an hour. It was the one bright hour of the drab and depressing hours that I spent in Berlin.

This little giant, with the patient eyes of a student lodged in features that belonged to no race, but were like those of a primitive man upon whom the marks of softness had not come, was a gracious but ineffusive man of affairs who seemed to have still the touch of youth upon him....We did not talk of reparations nor of the political change in America (whose “sky-scratching” towers he remembered admiringly.) Our conversation was all concerning his proposals for social salvation, for the bringing of “mind into labor.”...

This does not mean socialism. Dr. Rathenau was quick to say—that “hell of mechanical socialism.” “What I propose,” he said, “strikes dogmatic socialism to the very heart.” “Socialism leads from earth to earth; its centre is the distribution of earthly goods; its goal is simply the right to bread. Nor is it a cheap Utopianism with “unproved parrot phrases,” that he advocates, magically creating by technical improvements a “niggard Sunday out of the week-day existence.” “No,” he said, “no Soviet policy can go to the heart of the problem.” “It is a world order that I am urging, whose principle is an interchange of Labor, by which it is required, within certain fixed limits of application, that every employee engaged in mechanical work can claim to do a portion of his day’s work in intellectual employment and that every brain worker shall be obliged to devote a portion of his day to physical labor.”...

My questions and criticisms had to do with the practical operation of such an industrial system, the obvious losses through shifting and want of concentration and continuity. His answers were all concerned with the social benefit, whatever the incidental economic losses, with the abolition of hereditary idleness (of which we know little in this country), with respect for physical labor and appreciation of the fact that mental work is not mere chattering and that “thinking hurts.”...

Production would cease to be merely material and formal and would acquire spiritual value. As to the machinery for the realization of all this, he insisted, that it would inevitably come if the idea willed it. The thing was to get the mind possessed of the idea.... “Let the idea but take hold of the minds of the people, the means will be found.” I left his home that May day with a confident hope that if his idea could get into every factory and home, as his incandescent bulbs had, the new society would come.

More from Mr. Finley, later.

The ‘Gifts’

In the end, Rathenau believed that all of his extraordinary achievements, industrial, political, or diplomatic, were inspired by the “gifts” he had inherited, as a legacy from a “German soul,” a spirit, as he had described it in his Africa Report, that could guide human endeavor toward that which corresponds to “its earthly mission.” In his writings after the war, he described his dedication to preserving, what he called, that “German spirit which has sung and thought for the world,” and which was, at that moment, threatened with obliteration by those “who are blinded by hate.”[fn_25]

Rathenau frequently wrote of the obligation that had fallen on him for having received such “gifts,” from both the German culture, in particular, and from what he called, “nature,” in general. These were obligations that he often described as the driving force of his existence. He wrote to his friend, Lili Deutsch, in 1911:

This winter it has become clear to me as never before that a man’s life signifies nothing unless all his powers of mind and sense of responsibility are exerted to their utmost. There is something half-wrong in receiving gifts, even from Nature.

And, in another letter:

I must expend myself, not only on the things I love and dream of, but also on many others—things that make me hard and cold. I must do this, because men of my type are responsible for all that nature has given them to do and be; I have no right to live a life of imagination and contemplation without spiritual conflict and exertion. Nor must I ask the reason why. Nature has united in me heterogeneous elements; and she must answer for it.[fn_26]

In his 1913 book, The Mechanism of the Mind, Rathenau wrote of the general case, where an individual is called by “divine forces” to a life of creative activity:

Ambition has never produced anything in this world but sharp practice, petty expedients and mere casual successes.... But if we consider the truly great, the creators in thought and deed, we find that they were men who served a cause.... Display, immediate results, and reward meant nothing to them; they were willing to give up property, power, and life itself for the sake of their cause. Such devotion is transcendental, for it is disinterested and intuitive; the spiritual forces which release it are the result of imagination and vision. Of such a kind were and are the men who have given to the world their form. The passion that moves them is the same which inspires the artist, the scientist, the craftsman and the builder; it is the joy of creation. And they must have yet another emotion in an unusual measure, the consciousness of being called by the will of spiritual or divine forces to an activity which absorbs their whole being, demanding a ceaseless struggle against their own imperfections, incapable of delegation and endowed therefore with the dignity of a personal burden and necessity. This consciousness we call “responsibility,” meaning thereby that the spirit must render its account to God and man.[fn_27]

Rathenau was strict and disciplined about what was to be defined as a true “transcendental passion.” He condemned the fraudulent Tolstoy, for example, in The Apology:

Tolstoy’s mistake was that, instead of following the law which he divined in his own nature, he bowed to a theory which suppressed his creative spirit as artist and thinker, in order to give strength to the weak forces of his “enthusiasm.” ... But he who embraces the enthusiastic life, not from the beginning and from his own unconscious necessity, but strives for it consciously, or worse still, with a definite purpose—he does himself violence and sins against the light.

And, as we have seen, he condemned the misguided passion of Einstein’s Zionist friends. A few weeks before his murder, the Berlin Zionist leader, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Einstein came to visit him in Grunewald, in order to urge him to resign as Foreign Minister: Blumenfeld gave the reason that Rathenau was stirring up trouble not just for himself, but for all of Germany’s Jews; and Einstein, because he wanted to save the life of his friend.

Blumenfeld reported that Rathenau calmly argued his position. To Blumenfeld, he said, “I am [actually] breaking down the boundaries erected by anti-Semites to isolate the Jews”; and, to Einstein, “I am the right man for the position. I am fulfilling my duty for Germany.”[fn_28]

Into the Vortex

Rathenau’s self-assurance, as described above, astounded his friends; but that self-assurance was actually the result of a hard-won internal struggle. All during his career, Rathenau had his moments of doubts, times when he tried to resist the “divine force.” In an undated letter to Lili, he wrote:

I am in the grip of forces which ... determine my life. It seems to me as though I could do nothing of my own free will, as though I were led—gently, if I comply, roughly if I resist.[fn_29]

And resist, he did, when, before the war, he first received an offer of an official government position, which came to him, as a suggestion, through the wife of General (later President) Paul von Hindenburg.

Rathenau replied to Frau Hindenburg:

My industrial activities give me satisfaction, my literary activities are a necessity of life to me, but to add to these a third form of activity, the political, would exceed not only my strength, but also my inclination. And even if I were inclined to take to politics, you know, dear lady, that external circumstances would prevent it. Even though my ancestors and I myself have served our country to the best of our abilities, yet, as you know, I am a Jew, and as such a citizen of the second class. I could not become a higher Civil Servant, nor even, in time of peace, a sub-lieutenant. By changing my faith I could have escaped these disabilities, but by acting thus I should feel I had countenanced the breach of justice committed by those in power.[fn_30]

Wikimedia Commons

Walter Rathenau on a 1952 German postage stamp commemorating the 30th anniversary of his assassination.

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The 1914 cascade of declarations of war was to soon change his mind. Rathenau threw all considerations aside, immediately offering his services to create a War Raw Materials Department to ensure that Germany could survive the economic blockade established against her ports. Within days of the start of the war, he was named by the Minister of War, General Falkenhayn, to head such a department.

At the end of the war, Rathenau wrote a small book, An Deutschlands Jugend (To Germany’s Youth). Einstein was delighted, especially recommending the last chapter, “Charakter,” to his mother, Pauline, as “well worth the reading.”[fn_31] Einstein, at the time, was giving informal classes to a group of Eastern European Jewish emigres that were otherwise blocked from attendance at Berlin’s universities. Einstein would have encouraged Rathenau to apply himself in a similar direction; this was at the same time that Einstein was advising Rathenau to not accept any public office in a post-war government, and to keep a distance from the capital, where political violence was an everyday occurrence in the streets. He urged Rathenau, instead, to “guide the Germans from a desk with his brilliant mind.”[fn_32]

But over the next two years, Rathenau spent more time in the political fray, than at his desk in Grunewald, functioning as best he could as an unofficial advisor to a shifting array of post-Kaiser political parties, factions, and movements, as they carried out their coups and counter-coups. He was finally offered an official appointment in May 1921, as Reconstruction Minister, i.e., for reconstructing France, a post, which, technically, placed him in the senior position for dealing with the reparations issue. His ever-shrinking group of friends was horrified at the prospect. He wrote, apologetically, to Lili:

Do you really believe that I wanted to drag you into this vortex, when I scarce know myself whether I shall be able to stand it?[fn_33]

But the divine force had its grip on him. And we will not see him hesitate again, until January of 1922, when, in a decision that required much heart-searching, he accepted the even more publicly prominent position of Foreign Minister, making himself the ultimate target of all the dispossessed military and the right-wing corporate interests that the British and French could muster inside Germany.

His fellow diplomat, Count Kessler, described his condition:

When I entered his office in the Wilhelmstrasse for the first time after his appointment, and greeted him with the usual “Good-morning, how do you do?” he replied, pulling a pistol out of his trouser pocket: “This is how I do! Things have got to such a pitch that I cannot go about without this little instrument.”[fn_34]

To be continued.

[fn_1] “Open Letter to All Who Are Not Blinded by Hate,” December 1918, printed in Nach der Flut (After the Flood), as quoted in Rathenau: His Life and Work, Count Harry Kessler, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1930. (Original German version, 1928.) [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] I am assuming that this musical evening, mentioned briefly in Rathenau’s diary, would have had all the musicians playing their customary instruments. It is possible that Rathenau may have played in informal ensembles that included Joachim, himself—the diary entries do not begin until 1907, the year of Joachim’s death. Walther Rathenau: Industrialist, Banker, Intellectual, and Politician: Notes and Diaries, 1907-1922, Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ed., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985.

In 1917, in a memorial on the death of Robert Mendelssohn, his friend, the violin dealer, Arthur Hill, wrote: “The death of Robert Mendelssohn removes a fine amateur violoncellist.... I remember [him] calling upon us with Piatti and noted that his execution, for an amateur, when he played, was quite exceptional.” Mendelssohn’s teacher, Carlo Alfredo Piatti, a professional cellist, played with Felix Mendelssohn, Joseph Joachim, and Johannes Brahms. For more on the Felix Mendelssohn, Joseph Joachim story, see: David Shavin’s article, “Rebecca Dirichlet’s Development of the Complex Domain,” in EIR, Vol. 37, No. 23, June 11, 2010, pp. 30-62.

For the story of Einstein and his Violin, see Shawna Halevy’s article in EIR, Vol. 39, No. 9, May 11, 2012, pp. 58-66. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3] As quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4] Walther Rathenau, “Report on Journey to the E. African Colony,” 1907, in Notes and Diaries, Strandmann. [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5] Einstein to Rathenau, March 8, 1917; Einstein to Pauline, Oct. 8, 1918, In The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, 2004. The second letter is translated in Einstein in Berlin, Thomas Levenson, 2003. [back to text for fn_5]

[fn_6] “In Memoriam,” printed in Neue Rundschau, August 1922, as quoted in Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb, David E. Rowe and Robert J. Schulman, eds., Princeton University Press, 2007. [back to text for fn_6]

[fn_7] As quoted in The Einstein Dossiers: Science and Politics, Siegfried Grundmann, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2005. [back to text for fn_7]

[fn_8] Einstein much appreciated Rathenau’s writings on the subject. In a letter to Paul Mamroth, Einstein wrote: “The Judaism-Christianity issue must be answered variously.... Rathenau himself wrote unofficially on the issue again, just a few weeks ago in eminently witty and fine style.” From May 11, 1917, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 8: The Berlin Years: Correspondence, 1914-1918, No. 338. Robert Schulmann, et al., eds., Princeton University Press, 1999. [back to text for fn_8]

[fn_9] As quoted in Grundmann. [back to text for fn_9]

[fn_10] As quoted in Grundmann. [back to text for fn_10]

[fn_11] Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man, William Hermanns, 2011. [back to text for fn_11]

[fn_12] As quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_12]

[fn_13] As quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_13]

[fn_14] “Rathenau’s Vision of a New World,” John Finley, New York Times, July 2, 1922. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F05E3DB1039E133A25751C0A9619C946395D6CF or Search nytimes.com for “Rathenau’s Vision of a New World.” [back to text for fn_14]

[fn_15] As quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_15]

[fn_16] As quoted in Notes. [back to text for fn_16]

[fn_17] Walther Rathenau and the Weimar Republic, David Felix, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971. [back to text for fn_17]

[fn_18] Notes. [back to text for fn_18]

[fn_19] As quoted in Notes. [back to text for fn_19]

[fn_20] As quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_20]

[fn_21] As quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_21]

[fn_22] Rathenau to Fanny Künstler, November 1, 1914, as quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_22]

[fn_23] As quoted in Notes

[fn_24] As quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_24]

[fn_25] “Open Letter to All Who Are Not Blinded by Hate,” December 1918, printed in Nach der Flut, as quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_25]

[fn_26] Rathenau to Lili Deutsch, December 22, 1911; Rathenau to Lili Deutsch, date unknown, as quoted in Kessler. Rathenau’s most revealing statements are taken from his correspondence with his women friends, particularly Lili Deutsch, the wife of his business partner, Felix Deutsch, Chairman of AEG. Rathenau’s relationship with Lili was intense, but not adulterous; and, despite the sometimes-intimate tone of the letters, both correspondents wrote with an eye to future publication. In 1924, Lili turned the letters over to Count Harry Kessler for use in his account of Rathenau’s life, which, though hopelessly romanticized (with proto-fascist overtones, as his frequent references to Nietzsche reveal), yet has a particular usefulness, in that its English translation provides a wide selection of extensive quotes from Rathenau’s writings and correspondence, otherwise available only in the original German. [back to text for fn_26]

[fn_27] As quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_27]

[fn_28] Erlebte Judenfrage: ein Vierteljahrhundert deutscher Zionismus, by Kurt Blumenfeld, as quoted in Einstein in Berlin, Thomas Levenson. [back to text for fn_28]

[fn_29] Rathenau to Lili Deutsch, date unknown, as quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_29]

[fn_30] Rathenau to Frau Hindenburg, date unknown, as quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_30]

[fn_31] Einstein to Pauline, October 8, 1918, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 8. [back to text for fn_31]

[fn_32] “In Memoriam.” [back to text for fn_32]

[fn_33] Rathenau to Lili Deutsch, June 1921, as quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_33]

[fn_34]. Kessler. [back to text for fn_34]

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