This article appeared in the October 2, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
How France's greatest military hero became a Prussian lieutenant-general
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
September 20, 1998
During the course of the recent efforts of former George Bush official Kenneth Starr to destroy the U.S. Presidency, not only this writer, but many prominent and influential press and other voices from inside the U.S.A. and Europe, have warned, that to continue to tolerate Starr's efforts is not merely disgusting; given the catastrophic circumstances of the present global, systemic crisis of the world's financial and monetary system, it would be the worst folly imaginable. Only the President of the U.S.A. is capable of pulling together a concert of nations adequate to establish that desperately needed new world financial and monetary system, upon which the continuation of civilized life on this planet might probably depend. In that sense, and other respects, too, Starr's perverted antics are a global threat to civilization.
This is a time of crisis, in which to re-examine the historic and present relations between the office of President of the U.S.A. and other nations of the world generally. The issues addressed in the following pages go to the core of the historical basis on which to situate the role which the world requires of U.S. President Clinton now, as a leading world figure. The author's references to himself, to the role of the United States, and to the exceptional place which the U.S.A. occupies in the history of modern nations, are colored to the purpose of putting the emphasis on the most urgent among the immediate, practical, strategic implications of topics presented in this report: the key role which the United States must now play, for the cause of civilization as a whole.
All of the great steps forward in human progress occur in the only possible way in which they could occur: great discoveries set into motion by paradoxes so devastating that the latter demolish much of leading, generally accepted opinion. No great power was ever destroyed by anything, as much as it was destroyed by the fatal persistence of its refusal, under such circumstances, to correct its own customary opinion. In such circumstances, only failing fools seek to build policy of practice by opportunistic, pragmatic appeals to what they wish to perceive as popular opinion. Only those shocks which compel the mind to see the follies of currently generally accepted official and popular opinion, have ever prompted such a power to turn back, to safety, from the brink of self-induced doom. Such is the nature of the case considered here.
There is one crucial aspect of early U.S. history upon which all subsequent understanding of the U.S.A.'s character depends, more than any other events since the founding of the republic. This is a characteristic of the U.S. and its history, which rises above the relatively transitory caprices and other aberrations of incumbent authorities and popular sentiment. It is that deeper, more durable aspect of the U.S. history, which is reflected in certain among the developments from the 1812 outbreak of the second war against the British monarchy, until the 1848 death of John Quincy Adams, developments whose radiating influence subsequently shook and changed the entire world for the better. Unfortunately, it is also a part of history which is seldom remembered today, and which is often, even then, insulted and otherwise abused, even among most leading political figures and professional historians.
What proved, ultimately, to be the specifically world-historic developments of that period, should be described for our purposes here, as situated between the War of 1812 against the British monarchy, and that invasion of Mexico by U.S. President Polk, which unleashed a mobilization leading into that insurrection known as the Confederate States of America, a mobilization which was organized by U.S. assets of Britain's Palmerston. What have subsequently shown themselves to have been the most important influences from this 1812-1848 period, influences on both future U.S. and world history, were actions set into motion in response to the disasters of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, actions taken during those first decades of the 1812-1848 period, when Henry Clay's "Warhawks" led the war against Britain, when John Quincy Adams came to be, successively, U.S. Secretary of State and President, and Sylvanus Thayer assumed his crucial role as Commandant at the U.S.'s West Point Military Academy.
To understand the crucial aspects of this period of U.S. history, and their subsequent impact on the world history of the past century and a half, we must recognize that, from the Congress of Vienna, until the aftermath of Palmerston's and Napoleon III's so-called "Crimean War" against Russia, every reigning government in Europe, from the Iberian peninsula to Russia, was the avowed enemy of the U.S.A. We had friends among even very influential persons in Germany, among the circles around the Marquis de Lafayette, and also elsewhere; but, from the Congress of Vienna until well after 1848, all of the reigning governments of Europe were openly aligned, or sympathetic with our avowed enemies. Constantly, during the entirety of this interval, it was with good reason, that our leading patriots always anticipated some fresh effort, chiefly from the British monarchy, but also from both Clement Prince Metternich's Holy Alliance and France, to eradicate from this planet both our republic and its influence as a model.
So, under these hostile conditions dominating most of the 1812-1848 interval, the caretakers of our republic developed, and continually reworked the war-plans which might be required for our republic's defense against such enemy operations launched, internally or from abroad, operations launched either separately, or jointly, from London, France, and those Metternich circles so flagrantly admired, in recent years, by U.S. agent of British influence Henry A. Kissinger.[1]
Our republic's continued existence was menaced, not only by powerful enemies in Europe, but, to make matters worse, long before Kissinger, during the 1812-1848 period, and later, the British monarchy had powerful assets operating against our republic from inside the U.S. itself. These subversive forces within our nation were typified by the treasonous, opium-trafficking, Hartford Convention cabal, Manhattan bankers in the following of Britain's Aaron Burr, and the South Carolina conspirators who came to form the nucleus of the Confederacy.[2] Thus, here at home, as abroad, it was an extremely dangerous time in our national history. It was a time when the close followers of Benjamin Franklin, such as Mathew Carey, President James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, General Winfield Scott, Henry C. Carey, and other leading patriots, repeatedly refreshed their understanding of a principle of strategy which is still essential for guiding our constitutional republic to safety today.
This was a perilous period, during which leaders of the U.S. grouped around Philadelphia's Mathew Carey,[3] John Quincy Adams, and, later, economist Henry C. Carey,[4] acted in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin, valuing highly what influential friends remained to us inside Europe, as key collaborators in our nation's struggle to escape from perilous isolation. Typical of those European friends from our time of need, were those circles which had continued that tradition of European support for the U.S. War of Independence and U.S. constitutional republic, from during the 1776-1789 interval, or even earlier.
Among such friends of U.S. independence, the most familiar to the memories of literate U.S. citizens today, is the case of the Marquis de Lafayette. The composers Wolfgang Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven were an integral part of this international movement. There is also the exemplary case of the Russian poet Pushkin. Less well known to present-day students of history, but crucial, were the German military and other circles centered around the friends of the historian, playwright, and poet, Friedrich Schiller. During the sweep of the 1763-1848 interval, these circles usually traced their friendship to the U.S. to admiration for Benjamin Franklin as a leader of that 1763-1789, international movement for freedom, of which the U.S. struggle itself was only a part.
After the death of Franklin, such folk often continued that friendship through associations with the networks of John Quincy Adams. Out of these friendships, came the U.S.'s invaluable support from within Germany, later, and from the Russia of Czar Alexander II, D.I. Mendeleyev, and Count Sergei Witte.[5]
It was that strategy and foreign policy of the U.S., the which was developed around the central figure of John Quincy Adams, which laid the foundations for that U.S. global influence and power which was established by the military victories of President Abraham Lincoln over both the Confederacy and the combined British, French, and Spanish invaders of Mexico. It was these experiences, dating from the most perilous early decades of Nineteenth-Century history, upon which crucial features of President Franklin Roosevelt's policies were later premised.[6] Without the lessons which some among our nation's leaders learned, and applied, from that legacy of 1812-1848, the United States would not have survived to arrive at this point at which we must now address the present global crisis, as we do here. Among the crucial examples of history-making from that period of our republic's relative isolation, is the case upon which we focus here, the ironical case of France's greatest war-time military leader, Lazare Carnot.
Out of the study of the wars which were ongoing in Europe during the interval 1789-1814, and of the decades immediately following those wars, these patriotic thinkers of the U.S. republic, came to a fresh, and richer understanding of the principle to which we have referred. This is most simply illustrated by Adams' role, as Secretary of State, in crafting what became known as the 1823 Monroe Doctrine.[7]
As Secretary Adams underlined this fact, the Monroe Doctrine was in explicit opposition to both of our leading foreign foes of that time: the rentier-financier power of the British monarchy, and the reactionary feudal interest represented by Clement Prince Metternich's Holy Alliance. It was the principle embodied in that doctrine, upon which President Franklin Roosevelt's policies for ridding the post-war world of British, French, Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese colonialism, were premised.[8] It is the same principle which is contained within my own design for establishing that urgently needed, "New Bretton Woods" agreement, which must replace the currently disintegrating, and bankrupt, global financial and monetary system.[9]
The core of the principle, is, that since Classical Greece, all of the greatest discoveries in the histories of physical science and art, and of the development of successful strategy for civilized society, are prompted by what had appeared, in each relevant historical instance, to be most devastating anomalies, paradoxes which each challenged profoundly some widespread body of pre-existing opinion. Such paradoxes challenge not only the ignorance upon which popular opinion is, too often, commonly founded, but also the ostensibly best-informed judgments of well-educated specialists from the relevant professions.[10] In periods of change, governments are overturned, great political parties may be either toppled from power, or disintegrate, as the U.S. policies of the errant Jefferson and Madison administrations virtually destroyed the leading U.S. political parties of that time.[11] On account of the recurring need for such sweeping, radical changes, during each time of great crisis, it is often said, sometimes without exaggeration, that the first thing a prudent commander does, when faced with a new major war, is to fire all the generals.[12]
We should have learned from the lessons of the early decades of the U.S. republic, that we would put civilization as a whole in jeopardy, if, in the midst of great crises, such as today's, we abandon our nation's leadership to those who, however otherwise well-intentioned, imagine that statecraft could be reduced to a set of mere recipes, old habits, so-called traditions and other precedents, popular opinion, or dogma. Today's devastating global financial and monetary crisis should remind us, that the world constantly changes, as it will change more rapidly today, during the rapid succession of ongoing phase-changes of these current weeks and months, than ever before.
To defend that unchanging principle of freedom, on which our republic was founded, requires frequent, radical changes in both general opinion, and in the choices of methods and procedures employed to realize our continuing higher purpose. We must match changed circumstances, with the discovery of relevant new principles of physical science, art, and other statecraft. The new principles are the discoveries without which anomalous new circumstances could not be mastered. John Quincy Adams' composition of the Monroe Doctrine, is typical of past such changes within the domain of U.S. statecraft.
To make clear what this quality of change implies, this report centers attention upon a crucial anomaly from the period of 1789-1823, during which Adams became U.S. Secretary of State. This is the case of a paradox, centered upon a single individual, France's Lazare Carnot, a case which has turned out to have been a crucial feature of the history of modern European civilization as a whole. The most ironical features of the case of Carnot, should focus our attention upon a key strategic political issue of the present, worst, global financial crisis in all modern history. On that account, we pivot the argument of this report upon an exemplary feature of the Carnot paradox.
Focus most sharply on a period beginning shortly after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, continuing until that death of France's greatest military hero, Lazare Carnot, which occurred in Magdeburg, Germany, in the same year that the United States issued John Quincy Adams' Monroe Doctrine, 1823. The pivotal feature of the anomaly upon which we focus, here, is that: in the course of a process bridging the interval from 1789 into 1823, one of France's greatest scientists, and, beyond doubt, its greatest military hero to date, Lazare Carnot, became, after 1814, a stipended Prussian Lieutenant-General.[13]
To put the case of Carnot in clearer historical perspective, compare the example of another great man, one who rose to become exemplary of the statesman who is, at the same time, a patriot and world-citizen in Friedrich Schiller's sense of those terms: France's President Charles de Gaulle.[14] This comparison of Carnot and de Gaulle, helps to sharpen focus on the most crucial political issue of policy-making in today's crisis-stricken world: the issue of the defense of the institution of the sovereign nation-state against the corrosive forces of so-called "globalization."
Where do the most fundamental, principled, vital interests of a civilized nation-state lie? What kinds of supranational agreements are tolerable under this rule, and which not? What principle should govern the patriotism of the individual citizen of a republic, especially among its leaders, especially in those extreme cases, such as Carnot's exile in Germany, or the deceptively apparent, merely alleged inconsistencies among de Gaulle's anti-NATO policy, his "Force de Frappe," and his perspective for "a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals." The cases of Carnot and de Gaulle are crucial for the future of civilization today, in the manner in which they assist in demolishing today's customary, dangerously foolish, and popularized definitions of the applicable rules of foreign policy.[15]
To restate the point of that comparison of Carnot and de Gaulle: the purpose of this report is to resolve a key problem posed by the present world crisis: the need for a clear political principle governing the establishment of a workable form of "New Bretton Woods" financial, monetary, and economic agreement. This, we shall emphasize in this report, is a principle consistent with John Quincy Adams' use of the notion of a "community of principle," in his drafting of the Monroe Doctrine.[16] It addresses the same paradoxes of interrelating national sovereignty and international institutions, posed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's intent to establish a post-World War II anti-colonialist order in world affairs.[17] Since such an order must be based solidly on not only the perfect sovereignty of all nation-states, but also what Adams identified as "a community of principle," we have an apparent paradox to solve. How, then, should we avoid what we shall show to be no more than a deceptively apparent conflict between the passion of the patriot and the conscience of the world-citizen?
Thus, to pose this question in its sharpest form possible, we begin our argument for the principle involved, with a summary of the case of Carnot: how patriot Carnot, like the patriot Marquis de Lafayette earlier, came to accept flag-officer rank in the service of a foreign power. In this location we sum up only the most relevant essentials of the case; crucial features of the case, and references to authorities, are documented in a forthcoming report.[18]
The case of Carnot
Beginning 1792, and continuing into 1794, the command of France's military defenses, was consigned to a Carnot already recognized, internationally, as among France's leading scientific and military intellects. He assumed that duty at a moment when prevailing opinion of both France's own and the enemies' authorities anticipated, as virtually inevitable, that the crushing defeat, and ensuing dismemberment of France, was about to be accomplished by an already invading horde of armies assembled from every power in Europe. During the period he held that command, Carnot organized an absolute, revolutionary turnabout in both the immediate military situation, and also in the art of warfare. These changes led to total victory by the French forces he directed. Typical of Carnot and his strategic thinking, were his preparations, during the same general period, for launching the liberation of Ireland from Britain's bloody tyranny.
In the same interval of 1792-1794 during which he held that command, he not only effected a revolution in the art of modern warfare itself, but accomplished this by also organizing that model of scientific-industrial revolution, the which became known world-wide, during and after the U.S. economic revolution of 1861-1876, as the American model of agro-industrial economy. During the same, 1792-1794, period, as a by-product of Carnot's leadership of France's defenses, the world's then leading scientific institution was established, the Ecole Polytechnique under Carnot's collaborators Monge and Legendre.
So, when there came a time, in mid-1794, when the terrorist Maximilien Robespierre lusted to guillotine Carnot, the legislature of France intervened, to block Robespierre's intent by an act declaring Carnot "The Author of Victory." Soon after that, the tyrants Robespierre and Saint-Just were removed from power, summarily, in the celebrated events of the Thermidor coup d'état.
Nonetheless, despite Carnot's recognized position as "The Author of Victory," and, despite Carnot's continuing, sundry great services to both his nation and mankind, his numerous great achievements were often performed under political superiors who were repelled both by simple resentment at the awesome superiority of his mind, and by outright, politically motivated hatred against him personally. These adversaries were typified by political superiors such as Robespierre, such rivals as the notorious Barras, and, later, the depraved would-be Caesar of the imperial Code Napoléon, Napoleon Bonaparte.
A similar irony followed Carnot into Germany. Although he was then a highly honored Lieutenant-General of the latter European power, he was targetted, as he had been in France, by powerful adversaries there. One should not be surprised by the fact, that these German adversaries represented the same soiled political interests against which Carnot had fought as a military leader of France. These were, most notably, those Prussian officials who, like Prussia's court philosopher of the brutish Carlsbad Decrees, G.W.F. Hegel, were either agents of the Holy Alliance's Clement Prince Metternich, or agents of the British influence polluting Prussia's court. Inevitably, those German adversaries of Carnot were also impassioned enemies of such leading Prussian reformers as Freiherr vom Stein and of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt.
Before Carnot went to exile in Germany, there had come a time, when the foolish Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte had been delivered his richly earned defeat and humiliation. That result came about by a means which is of specific relevance to the case of Carnot as considered in this present report.
This defeat of Napoleon, was set into motion through a strategic plan crafted by Prussia's reformers. This plan was based, in a crucial way, on historical studies of the struggles for the freedom of the Netherlands and the Thirty Years War, studies which had been conducted and published by the Humboldt brothers' friend, mentor, and collaborator, Friedrich Schiller.[19] This war plan, presented to, and adopted by Czar Alexander I for the 1812-1813 campaign, was continued into a second phase, which accomplished the relentless pursuit and crushing defeat of Napoleon's retreating forces. This plan was initiated by those who became Carnot's later sponsors in Germany, the reformers Hardenberg, Humboldt, et al.
Thus, there had come a time, after the defeat of Napoleon, when, once again, Carnot's briefly resumed leadership of the remaining military forces of France, confronted Britain and Metternich with what was, for them, a terrifying prospect, the prospect of continued war under Carnot's leadership of France's forces. This shocked France's adversaries into backing off from their renewed intention to dismember an already defeated France.
Although France was, once again, saved from dismemberment by Carnot's leadership, the Congress of Vienna's victory by the faction of those two tyrants, Britain's Castlereagh and practicing pimp Metternich,[20] led to such travesties as the shameful conduct of the restored French monarchy, its willful ruin of both Carnot and of France's great scientific institution, the Ecole Polytechnique.
This ruin of the Ecole was conducted by the Restoration monarchy's appointed authorities, the veritable "Biche and Mouche" of French science: Laplace and his protégé, the plagiarist Augustin Cauchy. Both the latter had been the bitter adversaries of the Leibnizian scientific methods responsible for the successes of France's Carnot, Monge, and Legendre, and, also, the successes of Germany's Carl F. Gauss.[21] It was these Leibnizian methods in science, which had been crucial contributions to France's victorious 1792-1794 war against the invaders, and which had established the Monge-Legendre Ecole Polytechnique as, by far, the world's leading scientific institution of that time.
So, while the Ecole Polytechnique's world leadership in science was being trashed by Laplace and Cauchy, Monge was sent to live out his remaining few years in virtual exile, to die, in 1818, in his native city, France's legendary Beaune. Carnot went into exile in Germany, where he continued his military career under new auspices, as a Prussian Lieutenant-General. There, in Magdeburg, Carnot lived, during the remainder of his life, under the patronage of Alexander von Humboldt and of that same circle of German leaders who had authored both the famous Hardenberg-Humboldt-vom Stein reforms of Prussia, and had authored, also, the successful design, and prompting of the 1812-1813 Russian campaign to lure, trap, and destroy Napoleon.[22]
After the ruin of France, by the cumulative deviltry of Robespierre's Jacobins, Barras, Napoleon, and the Bourbon Restoration, France, which had been, since the reign of King Louis XI, the world's leading, most advanced nation-state, degenerated, politically and scientifically, into the status of a second-rate, even sometimes third-rate power. From that ruined physical and moral condition, France has never fully recovered to the present day. The way in which the majority of France's establishment permitted and even aided the betrayal of its President Charles de Gaulle, as Carnot and the Ecole Polytechnique had been betrayed earlier, typifies the centuries-long prolongation of that ruined moral condition of the majority of France's still-reigning establishment--the polymorphous tangle of legitimists, Bonapartists, and existentialist leftists--which made possible, later, a Mephistophelean wretch such as recently deceased President (and British asset according to the model of Palmerston's Napoleon III) François Mitterrand.
Carnot's case is the center-piece of a much-broader process of related, anomalous developments from the 1789-1823 period. On this account, the case of Carnot must be compared to the case of another French scientist, the Ecole Polytechnique's Lejeune Dirichlet. Under Alexander von Humboldt's sponsorship, Dirichlet was brought from France, into Germany, and later appointed, under von Humboldt's continuing patronage, to become the successor of the great Carl F. Gauss at Göttingen University.[23]
We must include the role of both these exemplary émigrés, Carnot and Dirichlet, as part of a similar, post-Napoleon, migration of the influence of the work of Carnot and Monge into the U.S.A., as also into the Germany of U.S. diplomat and President John Quincy Adams' collaborators, the Germany of the Humboldt brothers and Friedrich List. We must give special emphasis to the use of the scientific and related work of Carnot and the Ecole Polytechnique, to reshape the military and economic policy of the U.S.A., as this influence of the circles of Carnot and Monge was featured in the tradition which Commandant Sylvanus Thayer established at the U.S. West Point Military Academy.[24] We must also stress the strategic significance of relationship of Carnot and Dirichlet to Alexander von Humboldt, in that collaboration between the U.S.A. and Germany which was conducted through Humboldt, a collaboration conducted chiefly, from the U.S. side, through an 1825 graduate of Thayer's West Point, Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson, and, later, a key advisor of President Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Dallas Bache.[25]
This attention to those and related, broader implications of the Carnot case, and to a broader strategic picture of relevant developments in the U.S.A. and Europe, during the 1789-1865 interval, leads us directly to uncovering that leading, crucial element of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries' history, which has been a decisive part of the shaping of a greater span of world history, up to the present day. These facts, and related considerations, are essential to any attempt to achieve competent grasp of the issues shaping the world-wide history of European civilization as a whole, still today. This is the set of issues which spans the centuries since the initial American preparations for the U.S. War of Independence, up to and including the present moment of crisis.
As we shall clarify and emphasize this in the following pages: to understand the strategic issues of that period of European history, we must situate that study by reference to a much earlier time, to the revolution in ideas which was begun in the Classical Greece of Solon, Aeschylus, and Plato. As we shall show the connection, in this EIR Special Feature, the real-life metaphors and other ironies of the Carnot case, lead, today, directly into a desperately needed new quality of strategic insight into the means by which our republic may master the challenge confronting it, in the present turning-point in world history.
What is modern European civilization?
We can not evade the necessity of restating here, if in no more than a summary, those relevant points, respecting the definition of modern European civilization, which EIR has reported on numerous earlier occasions. We state these points, on background, as briefly as possible.
The earlier, pre-Classical phases of development of Greece, were owed chiefly to a beneficial relationship with Egypt, a relationship which was developed in an alliance against the two common enemies of both Egypt and the Greeks, the maritime power of Tyre and the evils of ancient Mesopotamian culture. However, after we have given due praise to the qualified contributions of Egypt's culture, we could not understand the proper meaning of the term "European civilization," unless we emphasized the implications of a comparison of the so-called "archaic" plastic art of both Egypt and Greece, with the new, Classical principles of artistic composition seen in the work of such as Scopas and Praxiteles.[26] It is those implications which make Classical Greece the fountainhead of all European civilization, since that time, to the present day. Without that view of European civilization, no competent understanding of the history, or current crises, of Europe and the Americas were possible.
European civilization began in a transformation of the culture of those we call "the Greeks" today, a transformation pivotted around the revolutionary changes introduced by such celebrated Classical figures as Solon of Athens, the tragedians Sophocles and Aeschylus, and Plato. In short, European civilization begins with the Classical Greeks' replacement of mere representation and symbolic thinking, by the discovery of the functional meaning of "idea," as Plato's Socratic dialogues define the term "idea."
The same, Platonic notion of "idea," in opposition to the teachings of reductionists such as Aristotle or today's empiricists, is a crucial feature of Christianity. Plato's definition of "idea" supplies the scientific evidence in support of Genesis 1's definition of man and woman, as each made in the image of the Creator, a definition which allows no racial or other "ethnic" distinction among persons, their nature, and their human rights. The manifest capacity of the individual mind, as demonstrated, pervasively, throughout Plato's dialogues, the capacity to respond to devastating paradoxes with validatable forms of discovered new principles, is the quality which sets the human individual apart from and above the beasts, is the quality of "idea," as distinct from mere sense-perception, and from the pathetic practice of symbolic argument. This is the quality of history; there is no history but the history of ideas.
Obviously, their Egyptian predecessors, for example, produced many valid ideas, as did those who crafted the sophisticated, Vedic solar-sidereal astronomical calendars during the period circa 6,000 B.C., long before the maritime power of the ancient Dravidians brought elements of civilized life into southern Mesopotamia.[27] From the start of individual human life, the person's developable cognitive processes are given the power to turn paradoxes into validatable discoveries of principle. All successful cultures rely upon development of such cognitive powers of the human individual. The difference is, as Plato features the relevant ontological paradox in his Parmenides dialogue, it was the Classical Greece of Solon and his followers, which launched European civilization, by making the idea of generating ideas transparent.[28]
This Platonic view of the nature of the human individual, the individual cognitive processes as the generators of validatable discoveries of principle, as echoed in Plato's Timaeus dialogue, is the distinction of Christianity from all known earlier forms of religious belief, a view which has come to define the functional meaning of the term "European civilization."
On this account, the driving force within European civilization, since Greek times, and especially since the ministries of Christ and his apostles John and Paul, has assumed the political form of a struggle to eradicate those forms of political institutions which degrade a large part of the human population to the bestialized condition of dumbed-down, virtual human cattle. This effort to rid mankind of the brutish oligarchical legacy of ancient Mesopotamia, this hatred against "Babylon," in particular, became the characteristic political struggle against the rule of that "New Babylon" which the Christian apostles recognized as the Roman Empire, as also against the legacy of Byzantium and European feudalism. Out of the long struggle, including the influence of St. Augustine, Abelard of Paris, and Dante Alighieri, to bring the political and social relations of Europe under terms of reason consistent with the Christian notion of the human individual, there emerged the first modern nation-state, the France of King Louis XI, a figure sculpted by the radiating influence of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and the 1439-1440 sessions of the great ecumenical Council of Florence.[29]
The latter developments, the Council of Florence and the reconstruction of France under Louis XI, mark a clear functional notion of separation between medieval and modern forms of European civilization. The crucial difference is, the successful introduction of a form of nation-state, according to law, first introduced, as a qualitative change, by France's Louis XI, and best represented, to the present date, by the historically exceptional establishment of the U.S.A., in 1789, as the world's first true, sovereign nation-state republic. Although the U.S. model republic has been exceptional, we must recognize that to the degree all of European civilization has been obliged to respond to the combined challenges represented by the influences of the great Council of Florence, Louis XI's reconstruction of France, and the 1789 U.S. Constitution, no significant part of European civilization could exist today, except as it attempted to adapt to the implications of these three developments.
This crucial distinction between medieval and modern forms of European civilization, is indispensable for rational comprehension of the issues directly and implicitly posed by the referenced ironies of the Carnot case.
All known earlier forms of culture, as in Mesopotamia and Europe generally, had been types of society in which no less than a proverbial ninety to ninety-five percent of the total population lived as human cattle, virtually the English Seventeenth-Century Yahoos of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
These populations lived under various forms of oligarchical rule. A small class of oligarchs, festooned, like swollen queen ants, with retinues of lackeys, ruled over land and the great majority of people alike, in the manner consistent with the evil John Locke's notion of the slave, and Physiocrat François Quesnay's similarly evil, feudal conception of the French serf, as virtual property. Throughout the relevant, approximately six thousand years of Middle East and European history to date, since the establishment of the Dravidian maritime colony, known as Sumer, in lower Mesopotamia, three distinct types of oligarchy have been characteristic of both European and contiguous cultures. The three types of oligarchy are landed aristocracy, financier oligarchy, and bureaucratic oligarchies, the latter typified by an oligarchy composed as a social caste.
In all of these oligarchical forms, the notion of law was imperial, in the sense that the celebrated Professor von der Heydte defined this notion of imperial law.[30] Oligarchical societies are typified by the delegation of the power to make law to some agency, or individual person, such as an hereditary, or elected emperor. This power is denied to other parts of the society, including the individual members of those oligarchical strata which share the power to elect or overthrow such a sole law-giver. For example, the view too often expressed by representatives of the usurpatious Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, such as Kenneth "Porno" Starr, that "we are the law," is the claim of a right to usurp the kind of arbitrary law-making power otherwise claimed by the emperor of an oligarchical society.[31] Such tyrannical arrogance amounts to the claim, "We are the ruling oligarchy," that no other part of government, or the population generally, has any right to doubt the unimpeachable, arbitrary authority of such dictatorships. That is pure dictatorship, as the Nazis borrowed from both Karl Savigny's Romantic law, and the law-doctrines of Carl Schmitt to such effect.[32] Such arrogance, such usurpation, such Olympian's hubris, is the true face of the enemies of civilized society.
The alternative to that imperial form of rule, is the nation-state based upon the principle of universal reason. This principle of reason is to be understood from Plato's standpoint, as the fact, that if the cognitive powers of individuals are self-regulated by that same commitment to truth-seeking we associate with crucial experimental validation of some discovered principle, then the society's deliberation, in this way, should constitute the highest authority of law-making in the republic.[33] That notion of reason, so applied, is the only means by which governments may be established, the which are efficiently accountable to all of the people, governments which are committed always to the service of truth and justice, as Plato argues this. This notion of law supplies the only rational modern definition of the term "republic," and is the meaning of that term as related to the U.S. Federal Constitution of 1789, as also the Leibnizian 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence.[34]
Thus, the reconstruction of France undertaken by its King Louis XI, shifted the center of political power, from the oligarchies, to a popular intelligentsia, bringing feudal oligarchs and others into the processes of government, but eliminating the principal relics of the imperial system of law which had ruled Roman and medieval Europe up to that time. France under Louis XI was superior, in every crucial respect, to feudal society earlier; but, the differences went deeper than measurable degree of superiority. The difference, however only a slight improvement, in one sense, was absolute on principle. In response to this development in France, all oligarchical Europe "went ape."
This revolution by Louis XI was the beginning of the modern form of European nation-state. The revolution was not launched from France, but launched in France by Italy, which used the legacy of Joan of Arc to develop a network, built around Louis as heir to the throne, which would launch this revolutionary reform in politics, social policy, and economy. The impetus came from the authors of the great Council of Florence, from the Italian Golden Renaissance. For political reasons, including the legacies of the wicked Welf League and the power of Venice's financier-oligarchy, it was not then deemed feasible to organize Italy as the first of the modern form of unified nation-state. So, France, reconstructed as the greatest nation of Europe, was chosen to set the precedent, instead.
The relics of the brutish Thirteenth-Century Welf League, together with Venice's powerful financier oligarchy, moved to destroy both the influence of the Golden Renaissance (e.g., the great Council of Florence), and Louis XI's reforms. A war erupted within Europe, which has never ended, to the present day. On the one side, were the forces of the Golden Renaissance, gathered around reconstructed France; on the opposing side, were the relics of the reactionary Welf League and Venice. That war, which soon evolved into the Sixteenth-Century religious warfare sweeping Europe, was initially centered in the war of the League of Cambrai against Venice, a war which was nearly won by those forces led by France. But, a misguided Pope Julius II, and the Spanish monarchy, betrayed the League, and the Hell that Sixteenth-Century Europe became, leading into the slaughter in the Netherlands and the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War, was the result.[35]
These religious wars were not primarily religious wars. Rather, religious cults and factions were created, chiefly in, or through the influence of Venice and Padua, beginning the period immediately following the betrayal and defeat of the League of Cambrai. These cults, and the irrational and mass-homicidal conflicts they catalyzed, were manufactured, and used to serve a deeper, and darker purpose. For the European oligarchy led by Venice, as in the instance of the activity of Britain's Prince Philip, in launching a "pro-ecologist," synthetic, lunatic form of "world religion," today,[36] religious cults were merely a political commodity, crafted to lure the duped into actions designed to perpetuate the oligarchical system, and drown the Christian idea of man, as in the image of the Creator, with blood.[37] The issue underlying the religious and related wars of the post-League of Cambrai period, during the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries, was a war between the defenders of the modern sovereign nation-state, against the reactionary defenders of an oligarchical system which degraded approximately ninety-five percent of the world's population to dumbed-down virtual human cattle, to Yahoos.
That has always been the issue behind the efforts of Venice's financier oligarchy, of the British monarchy, and of Metternich's Holy Alliance, to destroy both the United States and what it represented.
Out of this mess created by Europe's oligarchical faction, it was partly to the credit of France's King Henry IV, partly to Cardinal Mazarin, to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and to others, that France, although savagely corrupted by its Henry II, by Cartesianism, the Fronde, the Enlightenment, and other mental and social diseases, remained the leading nation in Europe, in power, in science and technology, and so forth, until the effects of the disasters of 1789-1814. Until the outcome of 1789-1814, France remained the leader of modern European civilization. Leibniz's relationship to the work and legacy of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, expresses the positive connections. Carnot and the Ecole Polytechnique of Monge and Legendre express the positive connections.
Then, when France was largely ruined by the events of 1789-1814, the mantle of leadership of civilization fell to a combination of the patriots of the beleaguered United States, and an intellectually powerful minority within Germany. The relationship of Carnot to Germany, and of the achievements of the Monge-Legendre Ecole Polytechnique, to the U.S.A., and to the collaboration between the patriots in the U.S.A. and the faction of the Prussian reformers, in Germany, expresses the main stream of continuity of European civilization beyond the fall and degradation of what had been once Louis XI's reconstructed France.
What is exceptional about the history and existence of the United States, is that when the efforts to establish true republics in Europe, and elsewhere, failed to overcome the opposition by the oligarchical factions, it became the U.S.A. alone which carried the banner of republican freedom for all humanity. This was not an autochthonous development within the territory of the U.S.A. Rather, all of those European factions which worked for the cause of freedom, used their collaboration with Benjamin Franklin's and Abraham Lincoln's followers in the U.S.A., as the common rallying-point within all European civilization, around which to continue the struggle for universal liberation of mankind from the brutishness of oligarchical power. Thus, the U.S.A. came into existence through its essential characteristic as a European nation, as an integral part of the struggle within all of European civilization, against oligarchism, and for a conception of universal freedom consistent with the value of each person as made in the image of the Creator. It is as such a European nation, as an expression of European civilization, that the U.S. was established, that it has survived thus far, and that it might hope for continued survival beyond the present crisis.
Today, if the United States can recapture the role it represented under the guidance of a John Quincy Adams, an Abraham Lincoln, and a Henry Carey, the U.S. will act to bring together a concert among certain nations, which will not only ensure the continuity of civilization, but incorporate those benefits in a larger scheme, a community of principle in which the so-called developing economies of the world are sovereign partners. If we can muster that legacy from our past, we shall carry the process further, despite the terrible crisis gripping the world at this moment.
Stand back, to look at more than 2,500 years of European history. See the transitions, from Solon through Plato, and on to those who succeeded the Greeks in building up what became modern European civilization. Since Solon, the continuity of European civilization has been sustained. When one nation fell, other nations and institutions emerged, sooner or later, to assume the leading role.
Thus, when Athens had been crushed by the Persian oligarchy's ally, King Philip of Macedon, Plato's immediate successors in leadership of the Athens Academy, became key advisors to Philip's adversary, Alexander the Great. The Persian Empire was thus destroyed, and the Hellenistic culture whose positive influence was the Classical tradition expressed by the writings of Plato and work of the Academy, shaped all of the positive scientific and cultural developments within the eastern Mediterranean, through the time of Philo of Alexandria, through the time of Christ and the apostles.
Now, the time has come, to reach to a higher level. European civilization shall not vanish, but shall be realized as a crucial contribution to establishing a higher order of affairs among sovereign nations, a community of principle, as Adams understood this, and as Franklin Roosevelt yearned to bring it about, in which humanity as a whole participates.
They were all friends!
There are people who wildly misjudge the kinds of relationships which so many persons, from so many nations, shared with the organizer of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, or with Gottfried Leibniz, similarly, earlier. Those are the foolish observers who misjudge history as conducted through what such onlookers regard as spider-webs of occult conspiracies. There are misguided, or simply illiterate people, who would judge the superficially anomalous features of Carnot's reported relations to France and Germany, in such occult terms.
Consider the connections shared among all those sundry Americans, English, Irish, Scottish, French, and Germans, among statesmen, scientists, military professionals, poets, playwrights, Classical composers, and others, involved in this apparent conspiracy intersecting Franklin and Carnot, or Leibniz earlier.[38] The essential fact in all these cases, is much simpler than most historians and others seem to have imagined, scarcely occult.
In studying the connections among these traceable networks, there are essentially three facts to consider. First, no matter with what various nations and special careers they were more immediately associated, all such persons shared a certain special quality of intellectual life, and, as persons sharing such a quality of intellectual life, they were also all friends. Second, the common political and philosophical feature of these associations, is that the types of participants we have referenced here, were committed to the specifically Christian notion shared with the great Moses Mendelssohn, that all persons, regardless of apparent racial or other ethnic, or national distinctions, are of the same nature, cut from the same cloth, and endowed with the same kinds of potentials and inherent rights.[39] Third, all among these persons, were friends commonly engaged in the making of history, friends who, like Friedrich Schiller among them, recognized that there is no history but the history of ideas, especially the history of European civilization since Classical Greece.[40]
I know these connections intimately; it is a quality which I share with all of them, and it is the nature of the life which I lead. The important relations among such persons, are defined by the kinds of actions which are located specifically within the domain of ideas, not within the kinds of activity associated with competitive sports-play (especially of the escapist, spectator variety), nor the daily routines of personal and family life narrowly defined. The relations among the apparent conspirators of the Carnot case, are, especially, the kinds of mental actions associated with a passionately truthful commitment to correcting and improving ideas respecting both man's relationship to the universe, and the relations among the persons commonly engaged in acting upon the universe. Like the exemplary case of Friedrich Schiller, or Cotton Mather's and Benjamin Franklin's commitment "To Do Good," their strongest, usually overriding emotions, are not the passions associated with what one takes out of personal mortal existence, but what one's personal mortal existence might contribute to the past and future existence of a mankind which is made in the image of the Creator.
To understand such ostensible conspirators, forget the gossip of the all-too-typical, nose-picking academic, perhaps in the Book Review section of the Sunday New York Times. Read the correspondence of ostensible conspirators such as Leibniz, Schiller, et al., especially their exchanges on the subject of ideas. Schiller's writings in poetry and tragedy, on the subject of history, and in his personal correspondence, were the principal media through which his influence was spread among all those who made the Prussian reforms. The debunking of the corrupt subterfuges of Immanuel Kant, for example, was among the significant activities of Schiller in building up the network which came to dominate the reforms. This is the typical relationship among all such representatives of the far-flung conspiracies of Leibniz, Franklin, et al.
Most of the contact among such persons, is not directly personal communication. Consider, for example, the influence of Gottfried Leibniz's writings on the work of the Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn whom he never met, or the crucial contributions which Mendelssohn's influence made to the rise of German Classical culture. Examine the way in which the most crucial features of the work of Johann Sebastian Bach were communicated, especially among persons whom he never met. For example, nearly a quarter-century after his death in Leipzig, the manuscripts of his compositions prompted the musical revolution which Wolfgang Mozart made, beginning 1782-1783, in Vienna. Or, consider Robert Schumann's carrying a previously unknown manuscript of Franz Schubert, Schubert's Ninth Symphony, from a visit to Schubert's brother, in Vienna, to his friend, Felix Mendelssohn, who performed it for the first time in Leipzig. Consider the related fact, that many of the precious manuscripts of Bach were preserved by the aunts of Felix Mendelssohn, through whom young Felix came to know Bach's work. That is typical of the way of life I lead, and those among my predecessors, such as the conspirators whose activity intersected the life and work of Lazare Carnot.
Our political behavior follows that course, those habits; these are connections which span centuries. In this way, we know a great thinker we have never met, better than we know many members of our own family. We know their minds intimately, because we have relived the kind of acts of discovery through which they, far distant, or long deceased, have discovered important principles of physical science, history, or Classical art. These kinds of connections, through ideas, which we share so intimately with writers far distant or long dead, are typical of the actions through which we know all of the persons with which we share the kind of Classical-humanist concerns I have identified here.
Each of us interacting so, is concerned with what he, or she may contribute to civilization as a whole. He, or she, is inevitably concerned with the role which one's own nation and language-culture might contribute to that universal end. We are each essentially nation-builders, and therefore patriots. Nonetheless, for us, the true interest of each nation, is for it to do good for the cause of civilization as a whole.
Our common cause, which unites us, to a point in history much earlier than Abelard of Paris or Dante Alighieri, is the cause of civilization, the urgency of reforming society into forms congruent with the republican conception of each person as made in the image of the Creator, and in opposition to the intrinsic evil axiomatically embedded in all expressions of oligarchical culture and political forms. Our passion, therefore, is to establish and defend our nation as a better republic in that sense, and to do this for the still higher purpose of bringing all humanity under such community of principle among perfectly sovereign nation-state republics.
We are therefore engaged in a war against oligarchism, all committed to establishing and defending the anti-oligarchical principles of a true republic. This is so, not because we compacted to plot, but because it is in our nature to act so. It is the way we are obliged to live.
If, then, one of our nations is virtually destroyed, turned against what its nature must be, we must continue the fight for civilization as a whole, by whatever means are possible, while never abandoning our passion to rescue the nation which was temporarily lost to the cause. Through it all, all nations are precious to each and all among us. That is the way in which the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony acted, for example. That is the way in which Franklin conducted himself in England, and on the European continent. That is the Marquis de Lafayette in the United States. That is the Clausewitz inspired by Scharnhorst, sent to help out in Moscow, in 1812. Thus, in the end, Lazare Carnot in Magdeburg, will one day save France. That is what we must do today.
Near the close of World War II, an imperfect victory brought the world to the verge of a long-awaited opportunity.[41] Had Roosevelt lived to succeed in his commitment to eradicate the legacy of British, French, Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese colonialism, the power of the U.S. at that time, would have deployed to establish a just world order, establishing new characteristic features of economic relations among both the old and the new nation-states. The evil, so-called British "free trade" system would have been eradicated at last, and the standards of a Hamiltonian sort of economic relations of finance, monetary affairs, and trade among nations, would have been established instead. This would have been much more than a mere change in economic relations among states; it would have established a revolutionary new order in all aspects of relations among nation-states. It would have established what Secretary of State John Quincy Adams identified as "a community of principle" among nations. With Roosevelt's untimely death, that long-awaited opportunity came to be postponed for at least another fifty-odd years.
Now, we have come to the point of unprecedented global crisis, at which there exists no prospective escape to safety, except that that postponed change, to a "community of principle," were put quickly into effect.
This kind of "community," as referenced by Adams, is no utopia. It is a community of perfectly sovereign nation-states. The notion of such a community, is based upon the principle of the sovereign individual nation-state committed to the universal principle of scientific and cultural progress, as President Charles de Gaulle promulgated the notion of "a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals." It is a conception of such a community as based upon the principle that law and government must be subordinated to that principle of agape¯, of unrelenting commitment to the universality of cognizable truth and justice, which is set forth in Plato's Republic, in such locations as the Christian Apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13, and, pervasively, in the Gospel of John. It is a conception of the universal principle of law and justice, the which is defended with such emphasis in the public acts of that "Golden Soul," that exemplary "Philosopher King," Secretary of State, President, and conscience of the U.S. Congress, John Quincy Adams.
Today's lesson from Carnot
This brings us to the concluding argument. In this argument, we show the axiomatic, absolute difference between a community of principle, as Adams and Franklin Roosevelt, for example, foresaw it, and the kinds of ordering of affairs among the nations which have shaped international relations to the present time, most notably from the death of Franklin Roosevelt, until now. At the same time, we take into account the differences which may exist between the form of world-order represented by such a community of principle, and the relations internal to the individual nation-states of which that community is composed. We also consider a crucial, complementary question: how participation in a community of principle might change the characteristic internal features of any nation-state participating in that community. Finally, against the background defined by those three considerations, we shall focus upon the related, specific and crucial lesson to be learned from that Carnot-de Gaulle anomaly which has supplied the thematic feature of this report.
As if to remind us of the old saw, that "it is an ill wind that brings nobody good," in his May 10, 1982 keynote address to a London Chatham House conference, Henry A. Kissinger frankly confessed his sin; he even bragged about it.[42] He frankly confessed his adherence to the simple, disgusting kind of international relations axiomatic to oligarchism. He reported, that the British system, like Chatham House lackey Kissinger himself, is essentially "Hobbesian." He emphasized, that his own views are Hobbesian, and, like those traditional to the British monarchy, are antithetical to the patriotic "intellectual" tradition of the United States.[43] He expressed special hostility to President Franklin Roosevelt, and sneered at Roosevelt's rejection of the pro-colonialist, and pro-free-trade policies of war-time Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
What was presented as a substitute for morality, by Chatham House lackey Kissinger, is premised upon the doctrine of Venice's Paolo Sarpi, as typified by what is expressed in Hobbes' notorious Leviathan.[44] Neither "Old Hob" Hobbes, nor Sarpi invented the original form of the rule to which Kissinger confessed; it is a modern adaption of an ancient habit, a habit as old as Babylon, as old as sin itself. The element of novelty in the form this was re-introduced to modern civilization by Sarpi and Hobbes, is to be recognized as the new form which that ancient practice of evil has come to assume, in the Venice-led financier oligarchy's hateful reaction against the Fifteenth-Century emergence of the modern nation-state republic.
In today's U.S.A., in particular, this bestial principle of Hobbes, is often promoted under the pathetic rubrics of "geopolitics" and "balance of power," as the latter term is used with perhaps greater frequency by those of today's oligarchical lackeys, whose cases are typified by the well known Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. In the words of Hobbes, "balance of power," Kissinger's and Brzezinski's watchword for strategy, is "each in war against all." For Locke, the same axiomatic standpoint is expressed as the notion of "property." These are characteristically oligarchical notions, wholly alien to those axiomatic principles of freedom and reason which are characteristic of the sovereign nation-state republic.
The intractable opposition of the notion of "community of principle," to "balance of power," represents the essence of the difference between two kinds of systems, either of which, alternately, might otherwise incorporate the same set of individual member-nations. In Roosevelt's expressed preference for Stalin and Chiang Kai-Shek, as post-war partners, over Winston Churchill, the governing consideration was not the internal characteristics of the respective existing states of the Soviet Union, China, and the United Kingdom as such; the issue was: Which system of international relations will order the way in which virtually all nations of the world, however they might differ in crucial respects among themselves, adapt to choice of one of two mutually exclusive choices of systems of international relations? Stalin and Chiang Kai-Shek, representing the two largest nations among the war-time allies, were disposed to accept the set of international relations proposed by Roosevelt; the fault with the British was, that, as Roosevelt said, and as Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted, and Kissinger insisted later, the British monarchy and government were on the opposing side.
The point just made, is so crucial, and yet its implications are so little understood, even rarely known, that, at this point, we should clarify the concept involved by aid of the following illustration.
The most common of the known distinctions in ordering of physical processes, is the difference in ordering of the participating material, by, in one case, a characteristically anti-entropic living process, and, in the other case, a characteristically entropic ordering of any particular non-living one (on the ordinarily considered scale of events). This is the same type of consideration which confronts us respecting the way in which different orbits determine the characteristic differences in behavior among astronomical bodies, as Carl Gauss proved Johannes Kepler's principle conclusively, on this latter account. Or, what might be assumed otherwise to be a non-living molecule, behaves to different effect as a functionally integral part of a living process, than as, functionally, a feature of a non-living one.[45] In the same general sense, the relevant mathematical physicist must recognize that the trajectory of political and other cultural development of a nation, will vary according to the system of international relations in which that nation participates.
The principle we have just stated, is crucial for solving the apparent paradox typified by our earlier references here to the comparable cases of Carnot and de Gaulle. This is also the crucial principle underlying Adams' elaboration of what became the Monroe Doctrine. Two crucial points of virtually axiomatic importance, flow from these considerations.
First, on this account, consider the difference in choice of international systems, between what we now see disintegrating before us: between that failed international political, financial, monetary, and trade system, which has been built up during the recent thirty-odd years, and, the alternative. The present failed system, is to be contrasted with the invariably successful performance of an opposing community of principle, premised upon the American System of political-economy. This difference in effect, is ultimately absolute, not only as an international system in some general sense, but in the mutually exclusive form of the choice among Kepler-Leibniz-Gauss characteristics, which participation in a chosen international system imposes upon each nation thus placed within its grip.
Second, since the existence of societies depends absolutely upon the form, and relative performance of physical economy, it is only within the domain of the science of physical economy, that it is possible to compare different international and national systems in a measurable way. It is from the standpoint of the latter consideration, that the first consideration is made clear.
Any physical system, for example, is characterized by the form of action typical of the transition, not from one mere set of events to another, but, rather, from any given state of the system, to a successor state. The same is true of either a nation-state's, or a world economy. Among all physical systems, nation-state economies included, the most typical such distinctions, are those differences in order of such transitions, the which are, respectively, distinguished as either entropic, or anti-entropic modes of action. In the astrophysics of Kepler and Gauss, for example, it is the specific quality of non-constant rates of change in state of the system, as shown in minute (virtually infinitesimal) intervals of action, which defines the orbit as a whole. Those specific forms of change of state, in the relatively infinitesimal interval of action, are to be recognized, after the relevant work of Leibniz and Gauss, as the universal characteristic of that specific system. In an economy, the relevant change of state is expressed as a rate of increase, or decrease of relative anti-entropy, or entropy, as I have defined this notion, in physical-economic terms, in various locations.
It is those changes of state which are expressed as such virtually infinitesimal intervals of action, which define the characteristic of the system (e.g., economy).[46] The ordering of a succession of such relatively anti-entropic, or entropic changes in state, presents us with the functional characteristic of an economic process. This is applicable to the cases of physical-economies of each individual nation-state; it is also applicable, if on a different level, to an international system subsuming the participation of numerous such individual nation-state economies.
It is the characteristic ordering of changes of state within the interactions of a collection of nation-states subsumed by an international system, which is the focus of our attention here. Begin with the simplest form of the issues to be considered. On the one side, we have the parasitical, "free trade," or British system, as associated, as by the textbooks, with Adam Smith and other representatives of the British East India Company's Haileybury School tradition. On the opposing side, the so-called "protectionist," or "dirigistic" system, the American System. Those are the only two choices of general types of international systems worth being considered, in practice, today.[47]
Consider first, the case of the so-called "Adam Smith" system, and its universally characteristic, and inevitable failures as an economic system.
Why Alan Greenspan seems enraged
The Adam Smith system, so-called, is a proprietary, and dangerous, often fatal drug. It was derived from a generic method for looting nations and their populations, by compelling them to market their exports at the cheapest price. The predominant effect of this, is simply to drive the prices of those nations' exports far below the margins of operating profit at which productive capital improvements in the exporting nation's productive sectors can be provided.[48]
A widespread, celebrated debate over this issue, erupted around the close of the last century. Under the rubric of efforts to define the modern use for the term "imperialism," an intense debate erupted among economists. The issues of that debate have since been explored by many, including the documentary approach supplied, much later, by the published writings of the U.S.'s Herbert Feis. The most celebrated expressions of that debate, erupted, during the approach to World War I, chiefly within the international social-democracy.
Relative to all the other leading economists of the social-democracy participating in that debate, Rosa Luxemburg's view, as contrasted with the blunders of Karl Kautsky, V.I. Lenin, et al., most nearly correspond to the reality of the issue. From the standpoint of economics as such, the result of what is inherently, ultimately the fatal economic feature of imperialism as a system, is that which Rosa Luxemburg counterposed to the follies of Lenin's and the German Social-Democracy's mis-definitions of imperialism. The essential economic feature of imperialism is what Luxemburg defined as primitive accumulation.
As the U.S.A.'s Mathew Carey documented this, this was already typified by the practices of the British East India Company in the time of Adam Smith: forcing victim-nations to export at world-market prices below the actual net costs of continued production of the exported commodities.[49] As Luxemburg emphasized, as did Feis's studies later, the difference between the earlier phases of economic imperialism, as practiced by Smith's employer, the British East India Company, and way in which "imperialism" was defined at the close of the last century, was that under the conditions addressed by the debate within the international social-democracy's economists, the principal means for extracting the loot of primitive accumulation, was the so-called "metropolitan" nations' control of the marketing of international loans.
Relatively speaking, against her rivals, Rosa Luxemburg was technically correct. However, none of the participants in that or related discussions seemed to have grasped the underlying issue, the crucial issue of the present process of self-disintegration of today's "globalized" financial and monetary system. Look carefully, and critically, first, at what is said and practiced by those ideologues who defend the practices of today's self-doomed, global system.[50]
According to the more popular classroom babble on this subject, during approximately the recent forty years, the Adam Smith system operates upon the implicit (and, also, often stated) presumption, that economy is, at its best, "a zero-sum game." In other words, "profit" is defined under the "free trade" system, according to the implied presumption, that one man's flesh is another man's meal. That line of presumption, leads toward the opinion, that, barring one or another form of raw cannibalism, the ultimate source of "profit" could only be "natural resources," which are classed by solemn utterings of the sages from a modern parody of Swift's "Laputa," as either "renewable," or "non-renewable" resources. The overall presumption of such sages, is that, putting quibbles over defining the categories of "renewable" and "non-renewable" resources aside, human existence is, overall, entropic, a losing game.
This line, which can also be adduced from the gist of the politically connected Jeremy Rifkin's prattle, leads toward assumptions which are scarcely distinguishable from Adolf Hitler's prattle about Lebensraum, and toward political practices to match. In the end, Adam Smith, now, as then, was always a Malthusian, always a strong supporter of Malthus' and Jeremy Bentham's ideas about "welfare reform." The argument of the babblers, sooner or later, comes around to the expressed opinion of the sages, the expressed opinion of Adolf Hitler's stated goals of his Russia campaign: "The world's problem is, simply, that there are many too many people sitting at the dining table."
Underneath, the so-called "economics" dogmas of Adam Smith and other Malthusians, are no more than new names for an old game: oligarchism. Former chief editor of the London Times, and leading, longstanding, and perfervid Clinton-hater, Lord William Rees-Mogg, expressed this oligarchical tradition, in a fairly recent boosting of the "Third Wave" hoax of Alvin Toffler and U.S. House of Representatives' Speaker Newton Gingrich. Rees-Mogg prophesied that the economy of the future will be based on five percent of the total population, whose profession is eructating "information," perhaps from the Channel Islands, while the remaining ninety-five recent are left entirely uneducated, abandoned to the life of useless rutting Yahoos with no economic function at all, except, perhaps to consume odd bits of "information," which might be cast, perhaps as charity thrown into the kennel, in their direction.[51] The Benthamite essence of Malthusianism, is simply the old habits of oligarchism, and Hitler's Nazism, proposed as a "post-industrial" utopia.
Behind all that, the actual issue posed by the "free trade" and other Malthusian mythos, is, whether human existence (Nashville Agrarians and other Lotus Eaters aside) represents an entropic, or anti-entropic relationship to the planet as a whole.
The issue is, thus, the definition of human nature. The issue is, are we morally obliged to treat all human beings as men and women each made in the image of the Creator? Are we obliged, on that account, to create and maintain the conditions of education and practice under which the validated discoveries of physical (and related) principle contributed by earlier generations, are the point of departure for improving the demographic characteristics of individual and household life of all persons, and all nations, through methods inclusive of new steps forward in scientific and technological progress?
The combined archeological and historical evidence in support of the latter, anti-oligarchical principle, is overwhelming. Every culture which has behaved in a manner consistent with what U.S. Treasury Secretary Hamilton, for example, prescribed for the American System of political-economy, has prospered for as long as it practiced that policy of emphasis on fostering the benefits of scientific and technological progress. Every culture which has rejected that policy of progress, as the United States has done over the recent three decades, has been self-doomed by the resulting drift into a global "post-industrial" utopia, or the like. The human race has reached the time, that either we rid the world of the rabidly entropic, practically equivalent dogmas and practices of Malthusianism and monetarism, or the mental sickness called "Malthusianism" may very well rid the world of the human species; that is the rock-bottom fighting issue of the present age.
In recent decades, there has been greatly increased chatter in support of Malthusian and related cult-ideologies. Under the influence of that distracting rattle of cacophony, the ideological case for Malthusianism (e.g., "zero growth") has besotted many minds. However, if one contemplates the increasingly frantic shriek of hysteria in the public utterances of U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, for example, we must recognize, that although, in effect, the international economic system has been drifting into a Malthusian mode of negative economic growth for more than a quarter-century, and although the Malthusian dogma has been increasingly a factor in the composition of political institutions during this period, it is not Malthusian ideology as such which drives the world system, day by day, ever deeper into the muck of self-destruction. It is so-called "economic policy." Although the rise of neo-Malthusianism, since the 1961 launching of the World Wildlife Fund by Britain's Prince Philip, has been an increasing factor in destroying civilization, the principal correlative of destruction of the system, has been the rise of the type of monetarist fanaticism associated with Friedrich von Hayek's and Milton Friedman's Mont Pelerin Society.
The general observation to which such comparison of the respective influences of neo-Malthusian and monetarist ideologies should guide us, is that the principal, day-to-day driving force behind the presently ongoing, neo-Malthusian destruction of the world's economy, has been far less the result of explicit neo-Malthusianism, than the form of Malthusianism-in-effect inhering in monetarism. It has been the monetarist takeover, and day-to-day management of the world's financial and monetary systems, which has been the driving political force creating those neo-Malthusian effects we see in the presently spiralling collapse of the world's financial system. In short, it is the lust of usury, and the political corruption of the population generally with that lust, which has supplied the mass-based political constituencies driving the United States, Europe, and Japan (among others), hysterically, into the self-destruction of world civilization as a whole.
Typically, as an ever smaller portion of the U.S. population is employed in actually producing physical and related forms of wealth, as industry, agriculture, infrastructure, health-care, and education are looted to the verge of collapse, all to feed the bubble of financial speculation, an increasing portion of the population has come, more and more, to shun the fruits of industry. The motive for this shift away from the morality of productive values, has been chiefly, a growing, deeply corrupting preference for a usurious harvest from "my money!" The result of this shift away from sanity, to monetarist ideology, is that poor fellow who defends the destruction of U.S. agriculture, "because I need the money from my money-market investments, to eat." The similarly deranged investor, seems to prefer to die, rather than oppose Wall Street parasites' efforts to collapse the health-care system, to levels "at which I will earn enough money on my account to pay my medical bills." Such is the popular lunacy which has come to grip these times.
Soon, unless what Chairman Alan Greenspan defends is overturned, none of these fellows will have any "my money!" about which to concern themselves further; if the policies defended, so far, by Mr. Greenspan, are not overturned, suddenly, and drastically, in the appropriate way, on the day the bubble bursts, the financial system will soon disintegrate in a fashion reminiscent of Germany 1923. That is why Mr. Greenspan is often so hysterical; essentially, he is saying: (on the one side) that it is the system which is destroying itself (with its irrational exuberance), but (on the other side) we must defend that system at all costs. Poor Alan Greenspan: That is the sort of paradox which, if embraced, might evoke mighty, kaleidoscopic paroxysms in the facial expressions and speech of any true believer.
Thus, for related reasons, we must view Mr. Greenspan's evident displeasure, as but one more symptom of the wide spectrum of rage and lunacy which has erupted lately from those of the general population which have been driven mad by their unwillingness, so far, to face the relentless reality, that its most cherished monetarist fantasies are being blown apart, the reality, that there is nothing they can do to stop today's ongoing Götterdämmerung of their delusions. One is reminded, by the behavior of large chunks of the national parties, many leading political figures, and leading mass news media, today, for example, of hordes of Europe's Fourteenth-Century Flagellants, roving, in packs, from place to place, saying wild things which make no sense, and doing things which are even more disgusting, and destructive.
In the end, what must be said of Adam Smith and his system, is that beliefs which are, like his, axiomatically contrary to the essence of human nature, if carried to the limit, will often exhibit their natural--characteristic--inclination, by some extremely unnatural kinds of both facial, and even homicidal expressions, from among the true believers.
Carnot as economist
Having said what we have said here thus far, we have reached the point in this report, that the crucial issue remaining to be resolved here, is to pin-point the exact, readily cognizable mechanisms, by means of which an approach based on Adams' notion of community of principle, employs international relations as a means for prompting and accelerating the potential rate of anti-entropic changes in the state of the system of all participating national economies. In sum, the object is, to establish an international system of economic and cohering relations among sovereign nation-state republics, through which each sovereign finds it to be in its vital self-interest, as a nation, to accelerate its own contributions to increase of the anti-entropic state of the international system, this in anticipation of the benefits consequently received by itself. This is a relationship which could exist only in the case, that the basis for international relations is the promotion of increasingly anti-entropic changes of state within and among the member-states of the system.
The vital strategic issues of modern economy as such, are essentially three. First, how to defeat an oligarchical faction whose policies of practice are premised upon maintaining the relative power of the oligarchy and its associated lackeys, by reducing the rate of scientific, technological, and related progress to as near zero, or below, as is politically and strategically feasible. Second, how to establish a counter, anti-entropic policy of practice, as is typified by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's December 1791 Report to the U.S. Congress, On The Subject of Manufactures. Third, how to sustain those rates of anti-entropic phase-shifts in technology, the which are required to meet the requirements of the policies summarized in Hamilton's latter report.
The general comprehension of feasible solutions to the problems implied by this requirement, was provided by Gottfried Leibniz's development of the science of physical economy. The greatest single contribution to international economy after Leibniz, on this account, has been the relevant contribution, of what has become known as the machine-tool principle, by Lazare Carnot. Since this connection has been the central feature of the present writer's life's work, and related publications, it is sufficient, but necessary, to summarize that specific point here.
The characteristic quality of the human species, and of the individual person, is expressed in those changes of state of the human mind which occur solely as a result of cognition, as the Socratic method of Plato's dialogues typifies cognition. The changes in state of the human mind, generated through cognition so defined, are the distinction of human nature, its universal characteristic in the sense the term was defined by Leibniz, and was later crucially demonstrated for mathematical physics by that work of Carl Gauss which we have referenced, earlier, here. The most readily demonstrated expression of such characteristic changes in state, is the discovery of any new physical principle which is validated by means of crucial-experimental methods. That simplest type of case is most suitable for use in the classroom, for defining the meaning of the term cognition for the students. The characteristics of this expression of cognition, are the basis for understanding and applying the machine-tool principle.
Until the process of degeneration of the world's economies during the recent thirty-odd years, the importance of Carnot's influence on economy, could be far more readily demonstrated in practice, than today, by focussing upon the implications of the relationship between the teaching and research laboratories of the best universities. It was the standpoint which the graduate of such programs acquired from that form of scientific education, which was the driver of all great economic breakthroughs, in every part of the world, during the past two centuries, since Carnot introduced his machine-tool principle as a crucial logistical feature of the military operations under his direction during the 1792-1794 interval. The Ecole Polytechnique under Monge and Legendre, was the first large-scale demonstration of this principle of economy. The principle itself is elementary; we summarize the needed, corresponding argument, as we have made it many times earlier.
No discovery of scientific principle could ever occur by deduction. It can occur only by the Socratic method used for Plato's dialogues. Gottfried Leibniz composed two dialogues for the stated, specific purpose of demonstrating that connection. Such discoveries can occur only when prompted by demonstrating the existence of a devastating paradox in existing opinion, for which no deductive or kindred solution is possible. Once a discovery has been generated, a proof of its truthfulness as a principle must be demonstrated. In the case of physical principles, this proof must occur in the form of the especially rigorous, special type of experimental demonstration which may be termed either "crucial," or "unique."
That method of scientific work dates from Classical Greece, where, to the best of all available evidence, it was invented. Although Aristotle was an opponent of the method, all the leading figures of Plato's Athens Academy, through the work of Eratosthenes and beyond, relied upon it, as did Eratosthenes' correspondent, Archimedes. Although a revolutionary improvement in this method was introduced to modern Europe, to crucial effect, by the scientific writings of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the method was only superseded by a better one; its earlier achievements were simply incorporated into the new, improved form. Cusa's influence on Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Kepler, and others, laid the foundations for the subsequent scientific revolutions accomplished, chiefly, under the stimulus of Leibniz and Gauss. The fundamental and related scientific discoveries of Carnot and the Monge-Legendre Ecole Polytechnique, were an integral part of this process. For our purposes here, the relevant outcome of this was the development of the notions of multiply-connected manifolds, partly through what Riemann identified as his teacher Lejeune Dirichlet's Principle, chiefly through the successive breakthroughs of Gauss and Riemann in this matter.
It is Riemann's work which renders the nature of Carnot's machine-tool principle fully transparent. We shall describe the setting of Carnot's principle, and then return to Riemann, to show the practical connection to the process of transfer of anti-entropy to the economic processes of either a national economy or international system among sovereign nation-states.
In the only competent mode of instruction in science, the so-called Classical-humanist method, the student is never permitted to claim he, or she has mastered a physical principle, unless that student has relived both the perplexity of the prompting paradox, and the experience of replicating the act of validated discovery from that vantage-point. In the closing phase of that process, the student must design and conduct a crucial experiment which proves the physical principle whose discovery that student has just relived. This defines the mission of the competent university's program of pedagogical laboratory-work. The process can be relived by methods other than formal university-laboratory modes, but the principles to be satisfied by whatever method is employed, remain strictly the same. No student will be permitted to claim knowledge of a physical principle, unless those stipulated requirements are satisfied.
Enter, then, Carnot's machine-tool principle.
The construction of apparatus suited for the crucial-experimental testing of what is believed to be a valid discovery of a physical principle, results in a design of experimental means through which the ability to introduce a discovered new principle into production is established. In a successful case, the result of that is a new principle of machine-tool design, which may be efficiently incorporated, as a new physical principle, within the design of products and productive processes. The same method, enables the translation of proven principles of machine-tool design, into faithfully replicatable precision and performance of series and mass production. That is, in essence, the Carnot machine-tool principle.
There are other considerations, those of projective geometry generally, and, especially, the development of the application of Leibniz's principle of analysis situs to matters of the form of problems in projective geometry. Without regard for those additional niceties, our description of the machine-tool principle, above, is valid, but not yet sufficient. It suffices, however, to supply any intelligent and reasonably literate industrial operative, such as tool-and-die specialist, with a sense of how the machine-tool principle works within the economy at large. Every successful "crash program," such as the Germany-U.S. aerospace program, provides a prime practical example of Carnot's principle.
That said, back to Riemann.
For our immediate topic here, former Dirichlet student Riemann's most relevant discovery is that which he presented in his 1854 habilitation dissertation, under Carl Gauss.[52] Here, Riemann brought to a certain degree of completion, the process of freeing science from the burden of aprioristic, deductive forms of geometry. All notions of extension in geometry, excepting physical principles, were excluded, including those popular, naive notions of abstract space, time, and matter so popular with empiricists, positivists, and other varieties of reductionists. Instead, each validated physical principle became a "dimension" of an n-fold multiply-connected manifold. Each revolutionary discovery of a new physical principle, produced a new such manifold, with an empirically demonstrable physical characteristic differing in elementary degree from the characteristic of the superseded manifold. This Riemannian overview of scientific progress, is shown, empirically, to coincide with increase of the relative anti-entropy of the physical economy which efficiently incorporates the newly discovered physical principles. This Riemannian view of that matter supplies the basis for use of the term anti-entropy within the science and practice of physical economy.
Thus, situating Carnot's principle within the framework of a Riemannian overview, a process of machine-tool design which is driven by fundamental scientific progress, is the most typical mode in which anti-entropy is injected into national economies.
Look at the notion of designing an international order among sovereign nation-state republics from this standpoint.
In the science of physical economy, as distinct from what is widely taught, unfortunately, as "political economy," or "economics," today, economic value lies primarily in the transfer of anti-entropy, rather than being located primarily within the objects which are commonly viewed as the products themselves. In escaping from the misfortunes of the customary economics deliberations, into the sanity of physical economy, the location of the object of value, is shifted, away from the object as such, to the relationship between the production and consumption of objects, and, thus, to the change in state of the economic process, as the primary expression of value.
In a truly sane society, it would have been obvious, that a net gain, comparable to profit, in the physical state of the whole economy as a system, could occur only through those anti-entropic forms of increase in the productive powers of labor, the which bring the entire society to a higher state of demographic composition, and of greater power over nature, per capita and per square kilometer of the planet's surface. This can be achieved only through a positive (i.e., anti-entropic) change in the state of the system. It is there, in such anti-entropic changes in the state of the system, that all actual economic value lies. Other economic values have a conditional validity, conditional upon their relationship to the required changes in the state of the system as a whole.
This change in viewpoint, signifies a cohering change from presently practiced policy, respecting the economic relationship of the individual to the nation-state economy as a whole, and respecting the relationship among nations within the international ordering of economic affairs. In place of repetitive labor at the cheapest price, the priority is assigned to increase of productive powers of labor, through means indispensable to generating generalized scientific progress.
The resulting differences in practice, subsumed by such a correction of policy, are sweeping, and profound in implications, both for the individual nation, and relations among sovereign nation-states. The predatory system, which is expressed by "free trade," "globalization," "balance of power," "geopolitics," and so on, is replaced by a community of principle.
Carnot and global strategy
The experience of the U.S. with the European powers of the Nineteenth Century, like the experience of the developing nations of the 1946-1998 interval, or the experience of Russia and other nations under the predatory system which Thatcher, Mitterrand, Bush, et al. imposed, during 1989-1992, upon Germany and eastern Europe, should be taken as adequate demonstration of the point toward which we have been building from the outset of this report. Two principles are to be adduced.
On the one side, no globalized system must be tolerated; the principle of the perfectly sovereign nation-state republic must be considered as a discovered, natural principle of international law, which can not be violated except for purposes within the domain of what St. Augustine defined as "justified warfare." Without the role of the sovereign state, national economy could not function. There are previously well-known, well-defined limits to permissible reliance upon private enterprise, limits which can not be exceeded without unleashing the kind of chaos and ruin which the U.S. has suffered as a consequence of the radical changes in economic policy rammed through during the 1977-1981 interval.
On the other side, the impact of global ordering of the economic and associated relations among individual nations, is so powerful, that the corruption of that order, whether by malice or neglect, is a disaster for at least most of the world's nations, and, ultimately, if continued, for all among them.
Those two considerations taken together, the insightful patriot of his, or her nation, recognizes that the shaping of the ordering of relations among nations is an inseparable primary self-interest of the individual sovereign nation-state. The proper choice of nature of this connection is crucial. Adams' notion of a community of principle, and Franklin Roosevelt's prevented attempt to launch such, are a good starting-point for addressing this concern; but, not yet adequate.
We must recognize the degree to which the ordering of affairs among nations can determine the ordering of affairs within those nations, including our own U.S.A. From an increasingly rich, and often intimate experience of the situation with many nations, since overseas service more than a half-century ago, and, increasingly, in the course of my duties during the recent three decades, I know how worthy nation-states are corrupted by the ordering of international affairs imposed upon them. That experience affirms a view of history in the large, which informs us: "Yes, we must recognize and serve the principle of the perfectly sovereign nation-state; but, we must never be such foolishly conceited kinds of patriots, smugly `Claiming to mind our own business here,' as to imagine that we can be a good nation, even within our own borders, unless we attend efficiently to the matter of the way in which relations among nations are ordered."
A few points on this matter should now be sufficient to bring this report to conclusion.
To this effect, we must never tolerate any proposal to establish a form of international ordering which has the character of a "social contract" among actual or virtual adversary states. The very nature of a "social contract" is that, at best, it excludes consideration of the most essential thing: the need for a positive principle, a principle contrary to the notions of a contract. At worst, it becomes a club of the predators, as the IMF and other post-1945 supranational agencies had become, increasingly, especially since 1959. At their best, all such contracts could never be better than intrinsically entropic in their impact upon each nation, and, also, the world at large.
During this period, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between international diplomacy and organized crime of the Meyer Lansky variety. In both, striped pants were, for a time, traditional, perhaps only because of some recurring accident peculiar to members of the profession. In such a profession, everybody steals, everybody kills, everyone is corrupt, but the bosses negotiate among themselves to keep as much of a semblance of peace as might be considered "good for business." They agree, from time to time, to keep the homicide and other debaucheries down to a tolerable level--at least, most of the time. They always cheat, but they take that in stride: "live and let live," they say, "if you want to get along, learn to live with the system." That is not a good model for an international order among nations, but, admittedly, it was the model recently adopted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President François Mitterrand, and President George Bush. It is the system of Kissinger and Brzezinski, for example.
If we are to escape from the nightmares under which the world has lived under the overreaching power of its still-presently dominant, predatory, rentier, financial-oligarchical interest, then the Hobbesian nightmare of "balance of power," "geopolitics," and kindred obscenities, must be superseded by the affirmation of an actual common interest in a relevant positive principle. There is but one definition of common interest which suffices for this function: the common interest in fostering and sharing the relatively greatest rates of increase in anti-entropy. This may be read as merely an affirmation of the principles upon which the origins of the modern European idea of the sovereign nation-state were premised, just as the framers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and all European co-thinkers of that effort shared such a sense of universal values. We must do more than affirm those universal values; we must learn from often bitter experience, that it is also necessary to define the means by which such values are to be served.
Could Carnot have chosen to remain at duties within France, under the circumstances of the Bourbon Restoration? One might say, that the greatest conductor of this century, Wilhelm Furtwängler, stayed by his post during the Nazi time, risking his neck to protect German-Jewish musicians, when he might have fled to Switzerland, for example. Results attest, that, in his case, he made the right choice in staying at his post, as long as it was possible to do so. Morally, and otherwise, Carnot had no such option. France had been destroyed, chiefly by the order of international affairs imposed, by the Duke of Wellington's direction of the all-purpose French traitor Fouche, through the power of a concert of all the principal powers of Europe. Like numerous German-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, he acted in the place where he could, to foster that change in the international order, without which a ruined France could not be brought back to life. His only option was collaboration on the cause of freedom, in concert with those among his old friend Alexander von Humboldt's circles, those Prussian reformers who, themselves, were soon decimated by Metternich's fascist-like Carlsbad Decrees of 1819. Thus, in 1889, when another Carnot was President of France, Lazare Carnot's body was rallied by a massive Prussian guard of honor, to be returned to the tomb of France's acknowledged heroes. Perhaps, in the end, somewhere down the line of the future history of France, he will have succeeded in that purpose he served in Prussia during his last years.
Our purpose here should not be to deliver an apology for Carnot. I think he needs none, in any case. Our purpose here, is to adduce the implications of his case for history at large. The history of the world so far, is a world in which the greatest patriots of nations have too often been hounded into exile, or murdered, as Socrates was. Such circumstances should caution us, that one can not defend one's nation within the context of that nation, alone. One defends one's nation by fighting to impose upon the ordering among nations those principles, in the sense of Adams' community of principle, upon which the long-overdue, just ordering of international relations depends.
[1] Cf. Henry A. Kissinger, on Metternich's and Kissinger's own anti-U.S. passions, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1957), and on agent of British influence Kissinger's own anti-U.S. policies, see his bragging confession of this delivered to his "Chatham House" patrons, in a keynote address delivered on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the British foreign service: "Reflections on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy," (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, May 10, 1982).
[2] Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America, second edition, (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985).
[3] Mathew Carey, The Olive Branch, Or, An Attempt to Establish An Identity of Interest between Agriculture, Manufactures and Commerce, (Philadelphia: 1820). See also, Mathew Carey, "Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry" (1819).
[4] Henry C. Carey, the son of Philadelphia's Mathew Carey, became the world's leading economist with the publication of his 1840 three-volume Principles of Political Economy. He was, together with Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, a leader of the Whig Party, and of the founding of the Republican Party. It was Carey, together with Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson, Alexander Dallas Bache, who played a key part, as advisors to President Abraham Lincoln, in launching the 1861-1876 economic revolution which established the U.S.A. as a leading world power. Carey was also the key figure in introducing the industrial revolution to Meiji Restoration Japan, and played a key role, through 1879, in the launching of the post-1876 industrial revolution in Germany. The names of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, the German-American economist Friedrich List, and Henry C. Carey, represent the core of what Treasury Secretary Hamilton identified as the American System of political-economy.
[5] On the subject of the networks of friends of the American Revolution, such as Friedrich Schiller, see below.
[6] Proceedings of the Sept. 5-7, 1998 Schiller Institute/International Caucus of Labor Committees conference near Washington, D.C., panel entitled "What Really Is American Exceptionalism? From Benjamin Franklin and John Quincy Adams to Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon LaRouche."
[7] In an Aug. 20, 1823 note to U.S. minister to Britain Richard Rush, British Foreign Secretary George Canning proposed a joint announcement of an Anglo-American concert of action toward the Spanish-American countries. The British proposal is reproduced in John H. Powell, Richard Rush: Republican Diplomat (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), pp. 158-159. For an overview of John Quincy Adams' role in the Monroe Doctrine (the result embodied in President James Monroe's annual Message to Congress, Dec. 2, 1823), in opposition to the British proposal, see Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), pp. 363-408. For Adams' actions guiding President Monroe in the shaping of the Doctrine, see Memoirs of John Quincy Adams (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, Volume VI, 1874-77), in particular pp. 151-155, 177-181, 185-190, and 194-215.
[8] Compare Elliot Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946) with Henry A. Kissinger's anti-U.S.A. view, in Kissinger's May 10, 1982 Chatham House address (op. cit.).
[9] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Toward a New Bretton Woods," March 18, 1998 Washington, D.C. address, Executive Intelligence Review, March 27, 1998. "Behind the Bombing of the U.S. Embassies: What Will Happen, If . . . ?," Executive Intelligence Review, Aug. 28, 1998, passim.
[10] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.: "Russia Is Eurasia's Keystone Economy," Executive Intelligence Review, March 27, 1998; "An `American Century' Seen as a Modular Mathematical Orbit," Executive Intelligence Review, July 24, 1998; "Mathematics & Measurement: Science vs. Ideology," Executive Intelligence Review, Aug. 21, 1998.
[11] Mathew Carey, The Olive Branch, op. cit.
[12] On "firing the generals," see Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The Death-Agony of Olympus," Executive Intelligence Review, Sept. 18, 1998.
[13] The direct documentation that Carnot was given the rank of Lieutenant-General in the Prussian army was destroyed by the Allied bombardment of Magdeburg in spring 1945; however, there are a number of indications that this was the case. First, there is no existent evidence that he was not given this rank, although it was unofficial, due to the fight within the Prussian administration over Carnot's commission. In 1816, there was an exchange of letters between Carnot and Prussian Prime Minister Karl August von Hardenberg, about the conditions under which Carnot would go to Prussia. Carnot had three requests: that he would have the rank of Lieutenant-General; that he would retain his title of count; and that he could continue to use the Ordre du Lys he had received in France. In his response to Carnot's requests, Hardenberg did not deny any of these requests; Carnot then entered Prussia. There are also existing records that Carnot received a pension of 1,200 thaler, which is the usual pension for a Lieutenant-General of the Prussian Army.
In addition, when members of the royal family visited Magdeburg, Carnot was treated as the highest-ranking officer of Magdeburg, and was seated next to the prince. After his death, Carnot was buried in the St. John Church in Magdeburg, which was the military garrison's church, although he was himself a Catholic. In 1889, when Carnot's remains were transferred from Magdeburg to the Pantheon in Paris, he was interred there with the honors given to a full general.
[14] See "What Is, and to What End Do We Study Universal History?" in Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom Vol. II, (Washington, D.C.: Schiller Institute, 1988).
[15] It should not be overlooked, that de Gaulle's break from NATO was prompted by the French government's discovery of unimpeachable evidence, showing London-dominated NATO's links to the authorship of the attempted assassinations of the French President. This was part of a pattern unleashed by the "détente" agreements which Bertrand Russell, Russell's crony Khrushchev, and sections of the U.S. establishment (e.g., lackey Kissinger's oligarchical patron McGeorge Bundy) had negotiated by means of the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis. NATO had been created on the initiative of Britain, as the intended super-government to administer the four-power agreements which the triumphant World War II powers imposed upon Europe in the aftermath of Germany's surrender. As President Truman's firing of General Douglas MacArthur illustrates the point, by the time of the war in Korea, the UNO was already shadowing NATO's future role as an authority above the government of the U.S.A. Following the 1962 détente agreement, NATO's role was significantly modified, to serve as a supergovernment controlling the powers, including the U.S.A., which had created NATO. The assassinations of Italy's Mattei and of President John F. Kennedy, were among the consequences of that change. The repeated attempts at the assassination of President de Gaulle were of the same origin and character. The launching of the U.S. war in Indo-China, by such survivors of the Kennedy assassination as McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, reflected a continuation of the same post-1962 change in NATO's character. By 1967, the stay-behind network which had been founded in Italy, Gladio, had been taken over, from Europe, as part of the pattern of Paris 1968 and kindred operations against participating powers of the four-power Berlin authority, and others, during that period. During the 1970s, the so-called "Compass Plot," and the assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, were part of this same process. So, was the assassination of Dresdner Bank's Jürgen Ponto, and, much later, Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen. De Gaulle's Force de Frappe was a well-informed response to the implications of the changed role adopted by post-1962 NATO. So, was de Gaulle's "Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals."
[16] British Foreign Secretary Canning wrote in 1825 that he dreaded "a division of the world into Europe and America, republic and monarchy, a league of worn out governments on the one hand and youthful stirring nations with the U.S. at their head on the other"; quoted in Leslie Bethell, George Canning and the Independence of Latin America, 1970 lecture delivered in Canning House, London, printed in Madrid by Telleres Graficos de Ediciones Castilla. A somewhat candid British appraisal of the deadly contest between Canning and John Quincy Adams is in C.K. Webster, Britain and the Independence of Latin America: 1812-1830, published for the British Council (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 40-52.
Adams' rejection of the Anglo-American imperial policing, in favor of a community of principle among independent nations, was stated in a Nov. 7, 1823 cabinet meeting: "I remarked that the communications recently received from the Russian minister . . . afforded . . . [a] convenient opportunity for us to take our stand against the Holy Alliance, and at the same time to decline the overture of Great Britain. It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war," Memoirs, Vol. VI, pp. 178-179. Adams' unique role in moving President Monroe and his cabinet to rejection of the British proposal (see footnote 7) may be contrasted to the advice of former President Thomas Jefferson, to ally with Britain and acquire Cuba (see Jefferson to Monroe, Oct. 24, 1823, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 15 [Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United State, 1903-1904], pp. 477-480); and of former President James Madison (see Madison to Monroe, Oct. 30, 1823, and to Jefferson). Madison says the United States should have "the British power and navy combined with our own" (Nov. 1, 1823, in Letters and Writings of James Madison, Vol. III [Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1865], pp. 339-341).
[17] Elliot Roosevelt, op, cit.
[18] Where footnotes on the subject of Carnot himself are not supplied, the relevant researches on Carnot, and related matters of military policy, have been prepared by Andreas Ranke, or earlier investigations on Carnot as scientist and military figure, by Dino De Paoli. Ranke's summary of new evidence on the case of Carnot, from the standpoint of Prussia's military strategy, will be published in EIR at a later time, together with a summary of Dino De Paoli's in-depth study of the matter. Comments by France's Jacques Cheminade, will be among the other authorities taken chiefly into account.
[19] Friedrich Schiller, "The History of the Thirty Years' War in Germany," translated by Rev. A.J.W. Morrison; and "The History of the Revolt of the Netherlands," translated by Lieut. E.B. Eastwick, revised by Rev. A.J.W. Morrison, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1906) Vols. 6 and 7, respectively. It was Schiller's studies which formed the kernel of the war-plan devised by the Prussian reformers for the 1812 Russia campaign against Napoleon.
[20] As part of his orchestration of the Congress of Vienna, Metternich supervised the deployment of virtual regiments of countesses, peasant girls, and so on, to keep relevant foreign dignitaries entertained, away from the proceedings conducted by Metternich and Castlereagh. Metternich's pimping was conducted through the customary functions of the Austro-Hungarian Chancellor's secret police, who facilitated, witnessed, and reported on the entertainment provided. The documentation on the fact of the pimping, was uncovered by Rachel and Allen Douglas, for their book-length manuscript on The Roots of the Trust. The appreciation of the manner in which such things as pimping and assassinations were conducted by Austro-Hungarian Chancellors such as von Kaunitz and Metternich, was a by-product of the present author's investigations of the secret-police practices in the targetting of Wolfgang Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven.
[21] The pivotal issue which most commonly divides Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Lazare Carnot, Gaspard Monge, Carl Gauss, Lejeune Dirichlet, and Bernhard Riemann, et al., from the Aristoteleans, empiricists, and positivists, such as Newton, Leonhard Euler, Laplace, Cauchy, et al., is the latter's characteristic insistence on "linearity in the infinitesimally small." See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Mathematics & Measurement," op. cit.
[22] The war-plan, based on Schiller's studies, which was successfully presented to Czar Alexander I, required that the Russian forces not permit themselves to be engaged in decisive battle against Napoleon, until they had drawn him deep into Russia, e.g., Moscow. The study of the implementation of that plan, and of the discipline required, redounds much to the credit of those Prussian officers, including von Clausewitz, assigned to the Czar. The prepared mining of Moscow, to bring the city down around the ears of the forces of Napoleon's occupying Grand Army, was the crucial feature of the war-plan, as adduced from reading of Schiller's studies. The logistical situation thus presented to Napoleon's forces, was crucial in forcing Napoleon to depart Russia itself in a rout. It was the intervention with the Prussian commander Yorck, by von Clausewitz, which was crucial for launching the ensuing developments leading to Napoleon's fall from power.
[23] With the death of Gauss, in 1855, Dirichlet was appointed to succeed him. At the death of Dirichlet, in 1859, Gauss protégé and former Dirichlet student Bernhard Riemann succeeded Dirichlet. This network in German science provided, through the liaison to Alexander Dallas Bache, the continuation of the earlier U.S. connections to the scientific work of Carnot and the Monge-Legendre Ecole Polytechnique.
[24] See Graham and Pam Lowry, "The Mission of America's Military Nation-Builders: Global Development," EIR, May 2, 1997; Pam Lowry, "Sylvanus Thayer and the Republican Tradition of West Point," unpublished manuscript; Graham Lowry, "The West Point Military Philosophical Society," unpublished manuscript.
[25] See Anton Chaitkin, "Leibniz, Gauss, Shaped U.S. Science Successes," EIR, Feb. 9, 1996, especially pp. 38-44; Anton Chaitkin, "American Prometheus, Part 2, Philadelphia and Germany," in New Solidarity, Aug. 22, 1986.
[26] It is provocative, and fruitful, to reflect upon the fact, that the distinguishing principle of composition, which separates Classical Greek sculpture from that of the archaic tradition of Egypt and Greece, is a principle which is identical with Gottfried Leibniz's monadology, specifically Leibniz's emphasis on non-constant curvature in the infinitesimally small, and emphasis upon the related notion of universal characteristics. The argument to be made may be correlated with the demonstration of the Leibniz-Gauss-Riemann notion of such universal characteristics in Jonathan Tennenbaum and Bruce Director, "How Gauss Determined the Orbit of Ceres," Fidelio, Summer 1998. The Classical sculptor's capture of a moment in mid-motion, is already the same notion of universal characteristics associated with the referenced work of Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann on the intertwined topics of "analysis situs" and multiply-connected manifolds. Just as apprehension of the non-linear characteristic of a momentary interval of action, may define a corresponding, entire planetary, or other orbit, so the great Classical composer's capture of a moment of action in mid-motion, demands recognition of the essential character of the situation from which the idea of that moment of mid-motion has been abstracted. Thus, great Classical composers, and kindred sorts of poets, have reported, that their best compositions came to them as if in a single instant. That "flash" was the idea of the composition as a whole, its universal characteristic. The composition as we came to know it, was the elaboration of a composition consistent with the characteristic expressed by the flash. Related views of the work of Scopas and Praxiteles as such, have been textbook views in art appreciation for many decades; what I have been obliged to stress, is the equivalence of such ideas composed in stone to the role of the Socratic method in defining Platonic ideas generally.
[27] Although Herodotus already referenced the role of the Dravidians' maritime culture in founding their colonies in Yemen, Ethiopia, Canaan, and elsewhere, it was modern philology which has shown that Sumer was an offshoot of the Dravidian culture associated with Harappa. Philologists have shown, that the language of those Sumerians, who referred to themselves as "the black-headed people," was from the Dravidian language-group, not a Semitic language. With the fall of Sumer, the Semitic subjects of the region assimilated the cuneiform and other features of Sumerian culture to found the later series of cultures characteristic of Mesopotamia. This philological evidence is complemented in a crucial way, by the common idiosyncrasies of the leading religious cults of what Herodotus indicated to be Dravidian colonies, and the mother-phallic, Shakti-Siva cult of the pre-Aryan subcontinent. Notable, is that Vedic astronomy and culture, an Indo-European culture radiating from Central Asia, were based upon solar-sidereal astronomical calendars, in contrast to the lunar cults of Shakti, Ishtar, Athtar, et al.
[28] There is strong indication, in the writings of the great Sanskrit philologist Panini from the Fifth Century B.C., that he had such a conception of a principle underlying the elaboration of the structure of that language.
[29] Modern European civilization, is rooted in the work and influence of Dante Alighieri, who built up the means for elevating the popular languages of Europe into the civilized forms necessary for the establishment of sovereign nation-states. Dante's work is situated in the remains of Emperor Frederick II's resistance to the reactionary savagery of the Welf League and its alliance with Venice. The pivotal change, leading into the actual establishment of the sovereign European nation-state, was the work and influence of Nicholas of Cusa, later Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, beginning Cusa's Concordantia Catholica, the latter the successor work to Dante Alighieri's De Monarchia. It was Cusa, who, in the setting of the controversies within the Conciliar movement, read the implications of his own Concordantia Catholica as requiring the reunification of shattered Christianity around the Papacy. Out of this, Cusa emerged as a leading organizer of what became the great ecumenical Council of Florence, the latter the watershed of modern European civilization.
[30] Friedrich (Freiherr) von der Heydte's Die Geburtsstunde des souveränen Staates (Regensburg, Germany: Druck und Verlag Josef Habbel, 1952).
[31] The nearest precedent in English-speaking history, for the depraved conduct of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and his minions, is England's Lord Jeffreys, of "Bloody Assizes" notoriety. A related, earlier precedent, is the role of virtual pimp Thomas Cromwell, in persecuting Sir Thomas More.
[32] G.W.F. Hegel's crony, Karl F. Savigny, is the ancestor of that adaptation to Roman imperial law, known as "Romantic law," which set the precedent for the politicized practice of justice under the Nazi regime. The connections between Romantic Savigny's neo-Kantian irrationalism, and that of the Code Napoléon, are so flagrant that they have not escaped notice among relevant specialists. The referenced connection between Savigny's precedents and Nazi judicial practices, is the doctrines introduced by the author of the emergency laws used to bring Adolf Hitler to consolidation of his power, Germany's Carl Schmitt.
[33] Plato, The Republic, Book II, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963). The Loeb Classical Library translations include the Greek text on the facing page.
[34] The principle of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," in the Declaration of Independence, was included as explicit adoption of Gottfried Leibniz's denunciation of John Locke's slogan, "life, liberty, and property." See Phil Valenti, "The Anti-Newtonian Roots of the American Revolution" EIR, Dec. 1, 1995. The same Leibniz principle is the essence of the Preamble to the U.S. Federal Constitution.
[35] Pope Julius II briefly joined the League of Cambrai, against Venice, but, after being offered return of certain of the former Papal territories by the Venetians, betrayed the League, and allied with Venice. Shortly after that, Spain also betrayed the League, also joining with Venice against France, thus beginning those wars of the Sixteenth Century leading into the ruinous 1618-1648 Thirty Years War, and the consequent degeneration of Spain into a third-rate nation. These catastrophic betrayals of civilization, by Julius II and the Spanish monarchy, echoed that alliance of Venice with the Thirteenth-Century Welf League, against Emperor Frederick II, which had plunged all of European civilization into the "new dark age" of the mid-Fourteenth Century. Venice used the defeat of the League of Cambrai, to divide the former members of the League against one another, chiefly by Venice's orchestration of the religious wars of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.
[36] See the following EIR exposés: "Prince Philip to Set New `Satanist Covenant' in Assisi" (Sept. 5, 1986); "Prince Philip and the EPA Revive Paganism as `Ecology' (June 8, 1990); "Prince Philip Makes Genocide into a Religion" (May 19, 1995); "Martin Palmer: Prince Philip's Guru" (May 24, 1996); "Prince Philip's Assault on Religion" (Aug. 21, 1998).
[37] For example, Pietro Pomponazzi, the teacher of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, and a key intellectual influence in organizing the religious wars in Germany, was a professed mortalist (atheist). Similar were the circles of France's Henry II, which gave the world the mortalist Montaigne. The self-styled world-leader of Protestantism as a political cause, Venice's empiricist Paolo Sarpi, the patron of his lackey Galileo Galilei, and of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, was a frank atheist. Today, we encounter the same type of political commodity among those U.S. "fundamentalist" cults derived from the avowed "British Israelite" cult of Oliver Cromwell's time; these are to be recognized as today's leading U.S. backers of the fascist "Temple Mount" insurgency within Netanyahu's Israel. These represent another variety of politically motivated synthetic religion of the mortalist type. Typical, and relevant, to the latter effect, is the case of those circles of Britain's Lord William Rees-Mogg, who deny, vividly, man's "divine spark of reason," and insist upon, even brag, of the bestial, Yahoo-like depravity of the human individual.
[38] H. Graham Lowry, How the Nation Was Won, Vol. I (Wash., D.C.: EIR, 1987).
[39] Lessing's dramatic praise for Moses Mendelssohn, Nathan der Weise, is a relevant point of reference.
[40] For example, Friedrich Schiller, speaking as Jena Professor of History, on the subject of the history of European civilization. See "What Is, and to What End Do We Study Universal History?" op. cit.
Or, John Quincy Adams, on universal principles. Adams rallied the country around the universal principles of national sovereignty which the Monroe Doctrine was to embody. Adams said the American Revolution "became the history of the civilized world. . . . [The Declaration of Independence] was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government. It was the cornerstone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke, the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. . . . [The Americans] were a nation, asserting as of right, and maintaining by war, its own existence. A nation was born in a day. . . . It stands . . . a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light . . . a light of salvation and redemption to the oppressed." John Quincy Adams, An Address Delivered . . . on the Fourth of July, 1821 (Washington, D.C.: Davis and Force, 1821), pp. 21-22.
Or, Gottfried Leibniz, whose writing of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," in his "New Essays on Human Understanding," inspired the authors of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, against John Locke's pro-slavery dogma of "life, liberty, and property."
[41] Among the relevant imperfections of that victory was the virtual extermination of Magdeburg, by an Allied bombing with no military purpose (i.e., a war crime) near the end of the war. This action, part of the same pattern of practice by heathens in London as the deliberate fire-bombing of Dresden, not merely smashed, but obliterated all of the city of Magdeburg, but for a damaged cathedral. As a by-product of that war-crime, the military and other archives documenting Carnot's residence there were destroyed. The story of Carnot in exile had to be pieced together from other sources, including the archives of the Fouche of Prussia, Metternich tool and police chief, Wittgenstein.
[42] op. cit.
[43] For sake of precision, we have restricted reference to the term "British monarchy," to that established with the accession of William of Orange's selection, George I (Hannover), and his successors; although, anything unpleasant to be said truthfully of the latter, is probably also true, in principle, of William of Orange, too.
[44] The following facts must be borne in mind in this connection. The bloody purges which secured the succession of King James I to the English throne, including the assassination of Shakespeare's closest collaborator, playwright Christopher Marlowe, were a reflection of Paolo Sarpi's 1582 success in capturing the ruling position among Venice's financier-oligarchy. The Sarpi-linked Cecil family's orchestration of the Essex Affair, through its tools, Francis Bacon and Bacon's brother, were part of this process. It was Sarpi who made James I King of England, and the posthumous influence of Sarpi, operating behind the likes of Oliver Cromwell, which, speaking figuratively, spitted King Charles I with a lollard-spike. Later, it was the same Venice, this time through its instrument William of Orange, which both orchestrated Lord Jeffreys' Kenneth-Starr-like "Bloody Assizes," and then toppled England's King James II, before proceeding to butcher much of the population of Ireland. By the time of the accession of William of Orange's protégé, George I, to the newly created British throne, the patriotic faction of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the opponents of Venice's Orange and Marlborough, had been defeated. As a result of that defeat there, the struggle for England's soul was centered, thereafter, in the process leading to the U.S. War of Independence. This is the setting in which the Venice-style oligarchical doctrines of English empiricism, including those of Hobbes and John Locke, were fabricated. Sarpi was the author of this process. Bacon and Hobbes were both tools of Sarpi, and Locke represented the Venice faction of Sarpi's successors.
[45] Cf. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The Death-Agony of Olympus," Executive Intelligence Review, Sept. 18, 1998.
[46] See the sundry EIR reports, by this author, referenced above.
[47] For the purposes of the discussion immediately at hand at this point, in the case of the Soviet system, for example, the only relevant issue would be whether the Soviet system, at one time, or another, were oriented toward participation in an international system oriented to the American System, or the British system. Otherwise, respecting the economies of Africa, Asia, and Ibero-America, the only relevant question, at this immediate point in our argument, would be which of the two types of international system, "protectionist" or "free trade," was dominant in their international relations. Without being more specific here, the usual source of the plight of former colonies, has been, less frequently, the short-comings in the domestic economic policies of the nation, than the ruin of their economies by their participation in a "free trade" system, such as that of the British Commonwealth.
[48] This is the point at which the monetarist fanatic exclaims: "Eureka! The price is right!"
[49] op. cit.
[50] To Luxemburg's credit on this account, she was accurate and to the point in her published attack on Lenin's expressed views, and was also correct in her implied attack on Karl Marx's confessed disregard for the role of changes in the "technological composition of capitals" in determining the outcome of what Marx had identified as "extended reproduction." She was clear, to the degree of insisting that the central issue of economy is that principle of human cognition which has elevated mankind from the level of subsisting on a tide of raw flotsam cast up on the beaches of southern Africa.
[51] William Rees-Mogg, "It's the Elite Who Matter--In Future Britain Must Concentrate on Educating the Top 5%, on Whose Success We Shall All Depend," London Times, Jan. 5, 1995. "In some ways, Britain is better placed to compete in the information age than it was in the mass production age which is closing. . . .
"There are fascinating implications here for educational policy, and they are highly unfashionable. The 20th-century view has been that the economics of mass production required mass education, perceived as the universal provision of modern educational skills. The 21st century will require greater emphasis on the higher skills of the ablest students. . . . In international competition, perhaps 5% of the population will produce 80% of the national income, and the employment of the 95% will depend on the success of the few. . . . Britain has educated for Empire, has educated for factories, and now must educate for knowledge and communications."
[52] Bernhard Riemann, Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen, Bernhard Riemanns Gesammelte Mathematische Werke, H. Weber, ed. (New York: Dover Publications reprint edition, 1953).
