This article appeared in the February 20, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
A CHANGE IN THE GLOBAL WEATHER
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
February 13, 1998
Do not blame what happened at the Wehrkunde conference on El Niño. The attacks by Europeans on the unfortunate outburst of U.S. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) echoed something far more devastating: a profound change, now ongoing, in the global patterns of political weather.
The brawls which erupted during the discussion periods of two successive international meetings held recently in Europe, are typical of numerous, increasing signs, that the world has reached the end of the era of Atlantic alliance between the British Empire and the United States, an era which began with the inauguration of that ideological spawn of the Confederacy, British asset Theodore Roosevelt,[1] at the Sept. 14, 1901 death by assassination of anti-British patriot, martyred U.S. President William McKinley.[2]
The century is now ending, during most of whose decades Teddy Roosevelt's Anglophile depravity reigned. This has been a Hollywood-centered depravity, typified by the film capital's racist Birth of a Nation, and the "White House's" occupation with that Romantic return to "Ante-Bellum" decadence associated with the common pro-Confederacy tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, and Ku Klux Klan revivalist Woodrow Wilson.[3] That disgraceful period of our national history, is leaving the scene, to join in Hell the lost power of other Henry A. Kissinger favorites, such as the evil, feudalist America-hater, Clement Prince Metternich's 1814-1848 Holy Alliance.[4]
The first of those recent, two international meetings was the Jan. 29-Feb. 3 sessions of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos.[5] The pattern was continued in the virtual brawls which erupted during the discussions of the subsequent, Feb. 7-8 Wehrkunde meeting in Munich, Germany (see report by Rainer Apel, below).
What lies underneath the patterns observed within those two meetings, is shown by a recent, post-October 1997 change, building up within the populations of both the U.S.A. and Europe, as among the leading political representatives of Islamic populations world-wide. The irrepressible popular outburst against the hateful British monarchy, in still-simmering popular reaction to the death, by vehicular homicide, of Princess Diana, is typical of an international mood-shift, which, as the death of Princess Diana showed, extends into the inside of the British Isles themselves.
There are two leading issues within this growing, and growling international ferment. The first, is the mid-October-to-mid-January breakout of the "East Asia" phase of a continuing, escalating, global, systemic financial crisis, a crisis readying itself for an early new round, more violent and extensive than that recent October-January interval. The second, is the success of the British monarchy, and Prime Minister Tony Blair, in duping U.S. President Bill Clinton into accepting Britain's demand for a new bombing assault on Iraq. As the connections are described in the previous, Feb. 13 edition of EIR, there is an obvious connection between the ongoing world monetary collapse, and Britain's push for President Clinton's politically suicidal folly in adopting the British monarchy's demand for a U.S. bombing attack on Iraq.[6]
In both of the two recent international meetings referenced above, the opening round of official presentations was a political sham. At Davos, the principal speakers pretended that the ongoing monetary crisis was an Asian affair, in the process of being brought under control. From the squabbling which ensued during the discussions, it was evident that most of the conference's participants did not share the views expressed in the opening presentations. The underlying character, permeating those discussions is most fairly described as "panic." At Munich's Wehrkunde conference, we witnessed a similar irony: while the snickering British delegation maintained a low profile, an open political fight erupted, chiefly between the politicals of the unusually large U.S. delegation, and the continental European spokesmen, as typified by the frank rejoinder of Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
These and other gathering storm-clouds, are matched by qualitative political changes which have been manifest within the U.S. and European populations since approximately early November of last year.
Taking all relevant, crucial political signs of change together, we have a pattern unlike anything which has appeared in world politics since the years following the Cuba Missiles-Crisis, 1963 conflux: Britain's Profumo scandal, the resulting, October resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and the November assassination of President John F. Kennedy, all leading into the disastrous first Harold Wilson government in London, and the culminating folly of McGeorge Bundy and looney Robert McNamara, in exploiting the death of President Kennedy, to force through modern parodies of Eighteenth-Century "cabinet-warfare" adventures, in Indo-China, follies which Kennedy had forbidden while he was still alive and able to do so.
Old revolutions, and new
The aftermath of 1962-1963, was what circles linked to the London Tavistock Institute defined as a "cultural paradigm-shift:" the sweeping, 1964-1972 combination of "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" and correlated epidemic of "post-industrial," utopian cults, which became politically hegemonic among the university-student ration of the "Baby Boomer" populations from that interval. What has emerged as a significant new trend, since the November-December 1997 interval, points in the direction of a "cultural revolution," just as significant as that of the post-1963 developments, but of different social composition, and in qualitatively different directions.
This time, as then, it is the incumbent generation currently occupying most of the higher-ranking positions of policy-shaping--in government, educational institutions, news and entertainment media, and finance--who, now, are as stubbornly out of step with the realities of today, as an earlier generation was, then, during the U.S. Presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Now, that is the experience bestowed on the generation which led in dumping Johnson and Nixon. "The King is dead; long live the King;" that is what will be said of today's reigning, official policy-shaping opinion, soon enough. The question is, "What, now, will be crowned the new King?"
There will be a revolution, some sort of revolution. It is already in progress, and can not be prevented. The question, as in a 1789 France torn by the social consequences of France's foolish submission to free-trade policy, is: "Which revolution, by whom, will prevail?" That is the question posed by the succession of brawls during the discussion periods at Davos earlier, and Wehrkunde now.
Then, and now, the key to circumstances which detonated the revolution then, and that erupting now, is simultaneous, fatally foolish combinations of strategic and economic policies. Compare, and also contrast, the changes of the 1960s and the circumstances of today's crisis.
Begin with the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis. The crisis was the result of the widespread influence of that British policy, for a posture of "preventive nuclear attack" upon the Soviet Union, which was the post-Franklin Roosevelt policy of Bertrand Russell, and also former Prime Minister Winston Churchill. This is the policy on whose behalf Churchill devotee President Harry Truman was induced, by London, to drop two nuclear bombs, for no necessary military reason, on Japan, in August 1945. This is the policy which Russell presented to the general public beginning September 1946, and the basis for the policy under continuing discussion between Russell and Soviet General Secretary N. Khrushchev, between 1955 and the negotiations of the period of the Missile Crisis itself.[7]
The relevant gist of the matter is this. Self-professed co-conspirators Russell and H.G. Wells,[8] were committed to eradicating the political nation-state system associated with scientific and industrial progress. Since war had been a stimulus to nations' fostering of scientific and technological progress, Wells, Russell, and British haters of the American System generally, saw the elimination of the institution of the nation-state as key to their neo-feudalist goals. During the period of World War I, Wells, then a chief of propaganda for his government, embraced chemist Frederick Soddy's presentation of the possibilities of both nuclear-fission weapons, and nuclear fission as a source of power. Russell adopted Wells' expressed views on nuclear fission, by proposing that the development of fission weapons would make war so terrible, that nations would give up their sovereignty to world government, in order to avoid wars in which such "weapons of mass destruction" might be employed. During the last three decades of his life, this approach to establishing world government, was always Russell's stated policy, as it was also the ideology of the Pugwash Conference which came into existence through convergence upon agreement, between Russell and Khrushchev, beginning 1955.
Russell's policies thus became the Pugwash policies associated with McGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger, from no later than Kissinger's London-arranged assignment to serve under Bundy's sponsorship, at a project on this subject undertaken at the New York Council on Foreign Relations.
Thus, the agreement on a process of "détente," which came out of the negotiations during and immediately following the 1962 Missile Crisis, became the 1963 launching-point for the introduction of a policy shift, away from the American patriotic tradition of nation-state and commitment to benefits of fostering investment in scientific and technological progress, into what became known under such rubrics as "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture," "post-industrial" utopianism generally, "information society," and neo-Malthusian "ecologism."
That change in economic policy was effected chiefly through a virtual mass-brainwashing of those university-student populations which would begin to assume the top-most positions of policy-shaping influence in government and private institutions from the mid-1980s on. The key to selling such an economic-cultural policy, was using the theme of "sexual freedom," as a lure away from the commitment to happiness, into preference for momentary experience of pleasure. This meant a shift away from physical standards of performance, and improvements of demographic characteristics of populations taken as functional wholes, into an emphasis upon existentialist notions of individual "psychological," i.e., ideological, gratification. Thus, during the course of the 1970s, the U.S.A., followed by western continental Europe, drifted away from emphasis upon physical-economic and demographic performance, to existentialists' notions of ideological gratification.
The point has been, that insofar as people are willing to accept sensationalist forms of entertainment, and other ideological gratifications, as a substitute for real physical-economic and demographic performance, they will not only tolerate, but embrace those policies which lead to dismemberment of national sovereignties, and sweeping destruction of the physical-economic productivity and standard of living of the population as a whole.
This has been the pattern of change, especially in North America and Europe, in policy-shaping assumptions, and in apparent popular values, since the 1962 Missiles Crisis. Although this 1962-1998 development has had historical exceptional features, the correlation between economic and political crisis is more the rule, than the exception throughout all known history. The present moment of crisis, the connection between the lunatic impulses for a bombing of Iraq, and the ongoing systemic collapse of the present world financial and monetary system, is nothing other than a new variant upon an old theme. Crises, including sudden, revolutionary reversals in cultural trends, are usually situated within such an interacting correlation between economic and social crisis.
The essential point to recognize, is, therefore, that despite the frantic ideologues, who attempt to delude themselves and others, that there has been net improvement in the U.S. economy since 1971, the reason we have a global systemic crisis today, is that the ideology-driven changes in culture, since the 1964-1972 cultural paradigm-shift, have been a net, catastrophic failure. As the Gospel reports Jesus Christ to have spoken, there are times when, if no other will say the truth, even the very stones will speak. All the public-relations double-talk, all the related "politically correct" ranting and raving, will not make this crisis go away. Propaganda can not defeat the crisis; the crisis will crush the propaganda, and, as has often been the case, those foolish, arrogant fools, who attempt to defeat reality with the rhetoric of a failed delusion.
At Davos, at Munich, and in the populations of Germany, France, Italy, the United States, and elsewhere, those who think that they can defeat the onrushing economic and political storms with the baling-wire of the Baby-Boomer era's ideology, are dooming themselves. Since approximately November 1997, an accelerating political polarization has been visible, a polarization, which in the U.S., is for, or against the ideologies of both the "New Democrats" and Newt Gingrich's "Third Wave" sort of neo-conservatism. Parallel trends are visible elsewhere.
For reasons which to such self-deluded persons must be inexplicable, the increasingly polarized populations, the nations, and even nature itself, are in a mental state of threatened insurrection against those who attempt, as did the foolish Emperor Nero, to impose upon reality the delusions of an already bankrupt regime, by mere institutional arrogance. Such leaders of the moment do nothing so much as doom themselves.
As the messenger reported to the Czar: "The conditions of the harvest, the military forces, and the morals of the nobility, are revolting."
"But, what of my ever faithful peasants?" the Czar replied, hopefully.
The messenger lowered his head, for a moment of great sadness, and, then, looking up, said, "Sire, they, too, are revolting."
As a strategic analyst sees it
In the language of schoolbook geometry, changes in cultural paradigms have effects analogous to revolutionary changes in a deductive geometry; the world suddenly operates on the basis of laws which are in contradiction to what was generally taken for granted, by successful people, axiomatically, on the basis of their prior experience. This is an analogy, but is more than merely an analogy.
Recently, increasingly, this fact is strongly impressed upon the present writer, in the case of nearly every development which merits public comment. The person who attempts to interpret current developments solely by resort to established axiomatic rules of analysis, will fail. The analysis offered by such latter sort of person will either be simply aimless verbiage, or would lead to the worst, most dangerous errors of policy-making judgment. Every important breaking development, around the world, during the recent weeks, and longer, has involved actual, or required axiomatic changes in behavior of leading institutions. Anyone who clings to what has become adopted as established criteria for analysis and policy-shaping, is intrinsically incompetent.
There is a branch of knowledge, derived chiefly by Plato's dialogues, which deals precisely with the kind of analytical problem present revolutionary trends imply. That is to say, the case in which the choice of a new set of axioms, to replace the old, is the essence of the developments and of the appropriate response to those developments.
During the recent several years, most emphatically, there has been an accelerating rate of increase of the instances in which attention to a change in axioms is the only useful consideration for purposes of analysis, or defining proposed policies. During the recent four months, especially since the end of November 1997, this factor of qualitative change has skyrocketted in its relevance.
Today, the most important task of a person such as the present writer, is to make clear to policy-shapers inside and outside government, and to the small layer of thinking citizens in general, how to look at their own now faulty habits of thinking, how to render comprehensible to themselves, the quality of axiomatic changes in ways of thinking, which must occur within the minds of those who bear the leading responsibility for guiding nations and their peoples away from the brink of a plunge of the entirety of this planet into a prolonged, "new dark age."
For example, the worst idiots, to use one of the kinder sobriquets applicable to the reality of the situation, are those who share views expressed in a two-page political advertisement appearing in the local voice of oligarchy for New Babylon, the Washington Post, on Wednesday morning, Feb. 10. This ad was headlined "A Time for American Leadership on Key Global Issues." Focussing upon the content of the advertisement, rather than the pompous title, the present writer suggested a more appropriate, much shorter name for the ad's authors: "The New Belshazzar's Feast Committee." The simplest reply to the ad would be: The moving finger has already written the relevant reply.
Here, in that committee's statement, one has a relevant, concise illustration of those who are so foolishly, so stubbornly, committed to the policies--the ideological poison--which have caused the crisis, that they propose to solve the crisis so produced by a more massive overdose of the same folly.
The crisis was caused by two factors: The superimposition, upon the policy-trends of the Truman and Eisenhower period, of the ideology established out of the cultural paradigm-shift imposed upon university-student populations of the 1964-1972 interval. In other words, we shifted from a monetary-parasite-ridden form of viable national commitment to investment in benefits of scientific and technological progress, the American tradition, by superimposing a "post-industrial" ideology upon the already flawed policies of the Eisenhower 1950s.
What is required, is to reverse that terrible mistake. 1) We must scrap the hopelessly bankrupt present, global monetary and financial systems, by returning to the kinds of international, protectionist arrangements underlying the Bretton Woods system of the 1950s. 2) One of the modifications which we must introduce to the 1950s model of monetary order, is to replace hopelessly bankrupt central banking systems, by new national-banking systems of a form derived from the successful proposals of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. 3) Since the concert of nations which must be assembled to establish the needed monetary reforms, must feature the populous nations of East and South Asia, as well as the U.S.A. and whatever European states will join with us, the new monetary system must function as what developing nations generally have called a "just new world economic order." 4) To recover from the present global crisis, requires that we ensure physical-economic margins of profitability. These require a rapid, and large-scale increase in per-capita physical-economic output. This requires the marshalling of credit of nations for large-scale infrastructural projects, the kinds of public investments designed to stimulate high rates of growth of private investment in benefits of scientific and technological progress.
Unless those four policies are adopted, there is no hope that civilization as we have known it, will outlive the present century. No reform, which does not reflect an axiomatic change in policy-making, in this specific direction, will do anything but make a terrible situation much worse.
During February and March of this year, we shall witness a continuation of a present pattern. Every so-called "reform" enacted in East and Southeast Asia will fail in the most miserable way. Every proposed reform will be worse than had nothing at all been done. The course recently adopted by the government of Japan, is the worst of them all: the members of the government have put their hands to the sword of political suicide, by adopting a policy worse than the hyperinflationary policy of 1921-1923 Weimar Germany, a policy which could virtually destroy Japan as a functioning nation, and that in short order. These reforms are disasters, deserving of no kinder term than "lunacy."
What will happen, as each of these recent "reforms" blows up: in Indonesia, in South Korea, in Japan, and elsewhere? What will the idiots of the IMF and kindred institutions propose, then, when the next explosion occurs, and the lunacy of their previous, recent policies becomes undeniable, perhaps during the second half of March?
The issue of analysis, is: When will these idiots make way for sanity, at last? What kind of revolutions shall we experience--very soon--unless the presently prevailing delusions, in Washington and elsewhere, are abandoned for the kinds of alternatives identified as just, here?
Do not be so occupied with attempting to interpret, perhaps to seem to explain away, what happened at convocations such as Davos or Munich, that you miss the essential common feature of these events. The world, as most of you took it for granted, until a very recent time, no longer exists. There is a new world out there, and you must quickly come to terms with the reality that represents.
[1] Filibusterer James D. Bulloch, T. R. Roosevelt's maternal uncle and the political mentor of "Teddy's" political education, had been the London-based head of the Confederacy's international secret intelligence service during 1861-1865, and a principal coordinator in London's military assistance to the Confederacy, against the United States. See Anton Chaitkin, Treason In America, 2nd ed. (New York: New Benjamin Franklin, 1985).
[2] McKinley served in President Lincoln's U.S. Army under Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes; he was the last U.S. President in the Lincoln tradition inherited by U.S. General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur.
[3] Sam Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer, later of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), played leading roles in the production and distribution of a film originally titled The Clansman, later renamed The Birth of A Nation, a pro-Ku Klux Klan propaganda-piece, whose celebrated sequel was Gone With the Wind. The financial success of The Clansman was largely the result of public praise for the film by Ku Klux Klan admirer Woodrow Wilson, who was the President of the U.S. at that time.
[4] Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1957), passim. Compare this with Henry A. Kissinger's 1982 anti-American address to a London public, "Reflections on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy" (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS], 1982).
[5] William Engdahl, "Backroom Brawls on Financial Crisis Mark Davos Meeting," EIR, Vol. 25, No. 7, Feb. 13, 1998. pp. 4-7.
[6] EIR Strategic Studies. EIR, Vol. 25, No. 7, Feb. 13, 1998, pp. 50-75.
[7] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "How Bertrand Russell Became an Evil Man," Fidelio, Vol. III. No. 3, Fall 1994, passim. See Bertrand Russell, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nos. 5-6, Sept. 1, 1946. Recently released documentation on the Missile Crisis itself underscores the curious relationship between Russell and Khrushchev.
[8] H.G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy: Blueprints for a World Revolution (London: Victor Gollancz, 1928). Russell publicly subscribed to Wells' proposal for this conspiracy, and adhered to that dedication for the rest of his life.
