This article appeared in the November 19, 1999 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Will the U.S.A. keep its sovereignty?

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

October 30, 1999

How the modern nation-state came into existence
The origins of U.S. constitutional law
What is natural law?
Why bite-sized answers are often untruthful
Watch out for charlatans
What defines a national culture?
Taiwan: a case in point
The matter of culture
Listening with `the third ear'
Culture begins with the verb
Who is our adversary?
The fatal folly among us

The standard of "Who Is Qualified to Govern an Island?" was the theme of Miguel Cervantes' famous Don Quixote, in which Cervantes portrayed the pitiable, failed, real-life Sancho Panzas[1] of Spain then--or, with equal aptness, the folly too typical among populists of the U.S.A.'s post-World War II generations. This present report is written for those citizens who wish to be certain, that they themselves have met U.S. founder Benjamin Franklin's standard for voters who are qualified to select the new leaders of our presently imperilled U.S. republic.

The recent Gore-Bradley debate, in Dartmouth, New Hampshire, showed the world a U.S. audience bored into virtually sleeping in the aisles. That audience's bored reaction to such a badly staged, shoddy spectacle, should forewarn us, that the U.S. public is not yet dumbed-down to such a state of intellectual numbness, that our citizens will tolerate much longer, that duplicitous kind of so-called "bite-sized answers," which is better known as "spin."

The serious questions which most Presidential candidates and their campaign managers usually prefer to avoid, as at Dartmouth, include topics such as: the presently onrushing peril of world-wide financial collapse; how did government destroy what had been competent, pre-1975 health-care policy; how changes introduced to the classrooms and textbooks during the late 1960s and the 1970s, have ruined the educational system; and, the risk, that the presently continuing spread of wars, may lead us, once again, into an era of global economic crisis dominated by new dictatorships, an era of economic crisis, like the 1930s, in which we are carried to the brink of something like a world war, this time, perhaps, even a nuclear war.

During 1999, the world has reached the point, at which those latter, and related issues are becoming so urgent a part of day-to-day reality, that citizens here, as in many other nations, are repelled, more and more, by those politicians and news media which continue to insult the constituents' intelligence with bite-sized sophistries of the type purveyed at Dartmouth.

Emerging around us in the U.S. today, there is a limited, but rapidly accelerating appetite for serious answers. This ongoing shift in mood affects, most notably, the families of our farmers and industrial labor-force generally, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, senior citizens increasingly dependent upon health-care and social-security systems, and scientific and related professionals. Such are the early symptoms of a growing popular appetite, as during the early years of the Franklin Roosevelt Presidency and Kennedy Presidency, for a long-overdue return to the tradition of such great political confrontations of such election-campaigns from our nation's past, as the history-shaping Lincoln-Douglas debate.

Those candidates, at all levels of government office, and other representatives of constituencies, who will speak openly and frankly on the realities of this moment, must seize the fact of the present world and national crises, to reawaken in our public discourse that spirit associated with those earlier popular dialogues which made possible the founding of our sovereign republic and its Federal Constitution.

Think back to the writings of Thomas Paine, which won the people of the young United States to defend their new republic. Reread the Federalist Papers, which won the citizens to adopt the Federal Constitution of 1789. Read those writings of that first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, which established the domestic and foreign economic policies of the United States, the most successful model of national economy ever seen. Today, again, in these times of crisis, serious citizens demand, and deserve serious answers, not the evasive word-play of bite-size slogans. I, for one, am committed to supply serious answers to important questions. For this, I need--and your country needs--citizens who are willing to think seriously, once again, about sometimes frightening, but urgent personal, national, and global issues.

This report is an example of what any thoughtful voter, in this time of world crisis, should demand of each and every candidate for high office. In this case, I focus on the subject of one of today's most urgent questions, the policies of law which must shape our foreign policy.

1. How the modern nation-state came into existence

During an interval preceding the close of the recent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, President Bill Clinton warned against the prospect of Kosovo's emerging as a separatist state in the Balkans. A featured part of the President's argument to this effect, was his expressed, fully justified fear of the disastrous effects inhering in a continuing trend toward breakup of existing nations, into "micro-states."

Nonetheless, under the influence of the British monarchy, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has, in fact, fostered the early emergence of an ugly little tyranny in Kosovo, using concoctions, for this purpose, which she and Britain's Foreign Secretary Robin Cook foisted upon the NATO Rambouillet proceedings. Similarly, also under the direction of both Mr. Cook and Britain's and Australia's Queen Elizabeth II, and also with the complicity of Cook's familiar Albright, a travesty as bad as that in Kosovo today, has been foisted upon East Timor. This was done for the purpose of reestablishing a British-sponsored, de-facto recolonization of that former Portugal colony, and to seize and loot nearby mineral resources.

Thus, as President Clinton feared, in San Francisco, and for a short time after that, an inviable micro-state has emerged in Kosovo, a vicious, cruel little tyranny. Only NATO and other military, occupying forces, sitting on top of the fulminating tyranny there, have, so far at least, prevented that locality, and also its vicinity, from blowing up in ways which evoke memories of the worst periods during the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War.

Similarly, the emerging micro-state of East Timor, has no prospective viability as a national entity. It is a pitiable ghetto, with no decent future prospects under a continuation of these circumstances. If, admittedly, it has not been returned, formally, to its pitiable colonial status under Portugal's imperial rule, it exists only as an occupied political entity, under the cover of the weapons of occupation forces, chiefly the forces of British Queen Elizabeth II's Australia. Notably, that brutishly cruel Queen, supported by her U.S.A. and other military auxiliaries, is thus acting as an imperial overlord, using her royal pretense of virtually global imperial overlordship, to assume custody of that former property-title of the defunct Portuguese oligarchical imperium.

These contemptible results of experiments in "globalization-in-action," in Kosovo and East Timor, have not discouraged the followers of Prime Minister Tony Blair's imperial "new rule of law." The same, murderous hypocrites, now promise us more, similar efforts to fragment existing nations into pitiable collections of ruined micro-states.

The U.S. response to Blair, must be what President Clinton had promised, but failed to deliver, in the conclusion of the NATO bombing-attacks on Yugoslavia. The U.S.A. must honor our nation's traditional commitment to the principle of the sovereign nation, as Clinton had promised during the last weeks of that recent bombing of Yugoslavia. The U.S.A. must lead once again, as under the earlier Marshall Plan, to effect a peaceful reconciliation of peoples within viable sovereign states, a reconciliation effected through the shared benefits of general economic reconstruction.

Meanwhile, we must oppose and denounce the lunatic policies of those, such as Britain's grinning, Caligula-lookalike Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose use of such synonyms for "globalization" as "Third Way," represents an ongoing, post-modernist parody of the Romans' world imperialism.

That new imperialism, like the abominable personality of Blair himself, imitates that pagan-Rome model of "universal fascism," which had been intended by dictators such as Benito Mussolini and Mussolini's follower and ally Adolf Hitler, had these fascist dictators not been defeated in World War II. Compare the "body language" of any relevant, recent Blair address to the English Parliament, with film-clips of similar public performances by Mussolini and Hitler during the 1930s. That comparison of today's Blair with film-clips from Benito "Sawdust Caesar" Mussolini's 1930s addresses to the crowd from his customary balcony in Rome, or from Adolf Hitler's populist orations of the same decade, has not been overlooked by some notables of today's United Kingdom itself.

All varieties of Twentieth-Century fascism, including the fascistic practices of Prime Minister Tony Blair, are based axiomatically upon that same Romantic model. It was not merely ironical, that the tyrants Il Duce Mussolini and Der Führer Hitler exhibited their imperial intentions in their adoption of the ancient Roman legionnaire's ritual, stretched-arm salute. This is a connection which Hitler also expressed by his Romantic's admiration for that self-declared Caesar, the thieving tyrant, and self-proclaimed Pontifex Maximus Napoleon Bonaparte.

Meanwhile, whatever Prime Minister Blair's policy, the British monarchy's own foreign policy is in the tradition of Lord Palmerston's doctrine: it is a monarchy which has no permanent allies, but only its perceived, permanent, oligarchical, imperial interests. Thus, that monarchy's expressed policy toward China, is both the feigned desire for good relations with that nation, and also actions intended to carve up China once again, this time among Taiwan, Tibet, and who knows what else besides. Similarly, agents of British influence within our own nation, such as Her Majesty's "Christian Solidarity" agents in the U.S. Congress, echo Her Majesty's insistence on the sovereign independence of Taiwan.

These trend-lines pose the issue: What, under U.S. constitutional law, and therefore under proper U.S. foreign policy, is the case against the claim, by some misguided souls, to establish a carved-out nation-state in Tibet, or such regions as Kosovo, East Timor, Taiwan, a FARC-run narco-terrorist state within Colombia, a terrorist tyranny seated in Mexico's Federal state of Chiapas, or the Amazon region of Brazil? When must the claim to such a right to tear apart existing nations, be summarily rejected, as in these instances, as a prima facie violation of natural law? How must this argument against the present trend toward capricious fostering of novel micro-states, be contrasted with the valid claim of sovereignty under natural law, as that was made by the founders of the U.S.A., as in our 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence? How does this compare with the fundamental constitutional law of the U.S.A., the latter as expressed by the Preamble of the 1789 U.S. Federal Constitution?

The answer to these deadly issues of current U.S. policy-making, is not as simple-minded as most among today's younger generations of policy-shapers have lately demanded. In this matter, the result of insisting upon bite-sized simple-mindedness, could be even nuclear World War III, or even something far worse.

For example: which among today's U.S. citizens, recall the evidence, which showed that the U.S. citizens' repudiation of their actual or implied, earlier oath of fealty to Britain's King George III, was not treasonous violation of a proper oath? Which can recall the relevant argument of international law, to that effect, as in the U.S. Declaration of Independence? Which recall the principle on which President Abraham Lincoln's government defined those London-sponsored conspirators, who constituted the pro-slavery Confederate States of America, as, under true law, not honorable rebels, but merely a wretched, murderous pack of treasonous adventurers, virtually mere freebooting satraps of Lord Palmerston's Queen Victoria?

Or, in a related point of international law: Who recalls today that 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the precedent adopted by President Lincoln at the close of the Civil War, for the free readmission of those Federal states which had been lately claimed as the territory of the evil Confederacy? As Lincoln expressed the fact, thus, in his last public address prior to his assassination, the natural law cuts both ways, for the benefit of the just and the wrong-doer alike.

What is the basis in law for the existence, and formation of a modern form of sovereign nation-state? In their time, the important political leaders and legal thinkers of our republic, understood at least the gist of the answer to this question. We have fallen into a far less literate time, today, when both Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair and Secretary of State Albright are moving the U.S.A. into risk of a World War III, with their adventures in promoting new split-offs of micro-states in parts of the world. In this circumstance, I, as the best qualified among the current Presidential candidates, must assume leading responsibility for prompting a revival of what had become more or less forgotten knowledge on this important area of U.S. law and foreign policy.

Therefore, I must proceed now as did the crafters of our Federal Constitution before me. As they did, I turn your attention to the beginning of European civilization, to lessons which all of European civilization first learned from the experience of ancient Greece. In addition, that you might better understand the foundations of these principles of law, I must include your attention to one crucial, scientific matter of policy-shaping on which I, as the discoverer of what is known as the LaRouche-Riemann principle, am to be fairly viewed as the world's leading expert today. In total, the following topics must be considered in this report.

Therefore, ask: What is that notion of a sovereign nation-state republic which provided the basis in law for the emergence of the United States as a constitutional republic? How does that history compare with the general history of extended European civilization since the Greece of Homer, Solon, Plato, and Alexander the Great's dissolution of the predecessor of the Roman Empire, the neo-Babylonian Persian Empire? What is the axiomatic issue, which places the patriots of our republican U.S.A. on one side, and the oligarchical model of the Babylonian, Persian, Roman, Napoleonic, and British empires, on the opposite side, still today?

The origins of U.S. constitutional law

What is the fundamental foreign-policy and related interest of our republic; and, how is that interest expressed in our traditional constitutional law?

As a result of the already extensive and continuing destruction of the educational systems of both our public school systems and universities, we have entered a time, during which relatively few members of the population from ages less than seventy years, have retained much knowledge of our republic's traditions, or of the notion of natural law on which our republic is founded.

Since that so-called "cultural paradigm-shift," which gained hegemony among younger generations in Europe and the Americas, following the assassination of President John Kennedy, we have been dominated by a widespread and worsening degree of illiteracy, which, reflecting the depravity of our present educational system, prevails outside the ranks of our senior citizens today. This cultural paradigm-shift, is also expressed as an increasing incompetence, among the managements of our leading private enterprises, within large rations of the putatively learned professions, and within the law-making and other institutions of our government. This cultural decay is reflected not only by the rapid disappearance of competence from our educational institutions, but, also, by the spread of irrationality, and by the shrinking of the earlier capacity for concentration-span, among our citizens and their children generally.

On this and other crucial issues, we shall enter the year A.D. 2000, with our present educational institutions and systems presently a political and moral, as well as economic disaster. That illiterate condition of both our citizens generally, and most among our leading political figures, must be corrected, and that soon. That prevailing, habituated functional illiteracy of our present population, has become the greatest single menace to our national security, and internal threat to the general welfare and liberty of our posterity.

It is urgent that our citizens quickly acquire the essential elements of knowledge on a range of at least the most urgent policy issues of our time. The series of closely interrelated sub-topics now summarized in this report, highlight what every voting citizen of the new century should hold himself or herself obliged to know, about today's most crucial policies of law and foreign affairs.

Therefore, let us now proceed as follows.

It can not be emphasized too often today, that European civilization's principal source of the elementary principles of the law of sovereign nation-state republics, was a combination of the Classical Greek, republican heritage, with those doctrines, respecting the universal notion of the human individuality, which were promulgated by Jesus Christ and his Apostles, notably including the Epistles of the Apostle Paul.

On this foundation, including both the famous reform by Solon of Athens, and Plato's dialogues, a Christian-humanist notion of natural law was developed in Europe. It was on this foundation in natural law, that the Babylonian and Roman heritages of imperial and other barbaric law began to be superseded, by the Fifteenth-Century emergence of a new, Renaissance kind of government, the sovereign nation-state republic, which was introduced to King Louis XI's France by the true heirs of the martyred Joan of Arc. Our U.S. republic came into existence as a direct heir of those, anti-oligarchical, anti-Roman, Platonic principles of natural law, which were first affirmed as the law of established nations, in the founding of the first modern nation-state republics, during the late Fifteenth Century: France under Louis XI, and England under Henry VII.

The central principle upon which the authority, powers, and responsibilities of the sovereign nation-state republic were premised, was the notion of "general welfare," or "commonwealth." The cases of France's Louis XI and Henry VII's England, are exemplary, as were the anti-slavery policies of Spain's Queen Isabella I (the latter in sharp contrast to the mid-Nineteenth Century's wicked and foolish, pro-slave-trader Queen Isabella II). To wit:

The authority of the sovereign state lies solely in its indispensable role in promoting the general welfare of all persons, as Genesis 1 and the Christian apostolic mission define all persons, as made equally in the image of the Creator of the Universe, and thus equally subjects of the obligation to promote the welfare of both the living and their posterity. Only sovereign government has the means to promote the conditions of the general welfare respecting all of the people and all of the land-area, both for the living and future generations. Thus, to that end, not only are governments rightly constituted with this authority and responsibility, but the existence of such sovereign nation-state republics, has been efficiently demonstrated to be the morally required condition of mankind.

These principles can not be supplied by a mere democracy. Consider the horrible example of the infamous Democratic Party of ancient Athens; read a relevant passage from the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution: ". . . promote the General Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, . . ." Government must be held accountable not only to the opinion of the living, but for the consequences which present law and policy impose upon our posterity.

It is often the case, as attested by the past thirty years decline in our U.S. nation's physical economy, that what today's, pervasively ruinous opinion tends to bestow upon posterity, has been, and continues to be, chiefly, the calamitous mistakes of current majority opinion. During the course of the past two decades, the consequences of those mistakes have become, cumulatively, almost irreparable for the present majority of our population. We have reached the end of that rope; the last chance to correct those mistaken popular opinions of today, is now.

Government under law, must provide checks against that evil common to democracy, to protect our posterity from the consequences of foolish policies and practices, even those follies which are the fruit of an overwhelming majority of expressed public opinion. Ours must therefore be a republic governed by reason, not by caprices of passing popular whims, nor by the accidents of often-misconceived precedents in the merely positive law.

To combat the evils inhering in simple democracy, our founders sought to build effective checks and balances into the design of our constitutional government. Those founders, led by the venerable Benjamin Franklin, warned: We have given you a republic, if you can keep it. It was understood by those founders, that keeping that republic depended largely on the development and maintenance of the quality of educational system which would provide us a citizenry which is intellectually and morally qualified to govern itself, that according to reason, rather than the "bite-sized" whims of transient popular passions.

Thus, the Fifteenth-Century "Golden Renaissance" in Europe, established a new kind of society under a new notion of the nature of law and of government.

Until that Renaissance, from the emergence of the Roman Empire as a dominant force in the Mediterranean region, during the course of the Second and First centuries B.C., until the developments centered in, and following the great ecumenical Council of Florence, government had been dominated by the oligarchical model established in ancient Babylon, the model inherited, and perpetuated by pagan Rome. This legacy of Babylon, and of the pagan Rome justly called "the Whore of Babylon," has been the same notion of imperial law which, despite reformers such as Charlemagne, Abelard of Paris, the Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Spain's Alfonso Sabio, and Dante Alighieri, continued to rule, until the Fifteenth-Century's Classical-Greek-oriented Renaissance.

Until that Renaissance, the Romantic legacy of imperial law had been hegemonic throughout feudal Europe. It is also the standpoint of today's British monarchy still today, and is the view shared among the most impassioned and brutal advocates of world government, such as Britain's Duke of Edinburgh, Tony Blair, Madeleine Albright, and Vice-President Al Gore today.

During the last quarter of the Fifteenth Century, the echoes of that same Century's preceding Council of Florence, were to be seen in the emergence of a new conception of government and law, first under France's Louis XI and then England's Henry VII. These reforms were the first steps in establishing new notions of government and law. These were notions rooted in Christian principle, and harking back to the republican notions of Plato's Classical Greece.

Under the so-called "oligarchical model" of the empires of Babylon, the Achaemenids, and Rome, as proposed later, under the pro-slavery doctrine of England's John Locke, governments had been the private property of a ruling imperial oligarchy, whose law-making authority was often concentrated in the personality of a reigning emperor. Under feudalism, too, the emperor was the only person with the traditional authority to make law, that in a manner which feudalism modelled upon the Code of the Roman Emperor Diocletian.

The revolution in law and government, typified initially by Louis XI's revolution in France, has served as the precedent, in modern Europe, for the notion of the authority of government as residing, not within government as the property-right of a ruling oligarchy, but, rather, in the unique ability and responsibility of government to promote the general welfare, that for both all of the living and their posterity, throughout all of the territory over which that government ruled.

Government does not rule under divine right, as Thomas Hobbes proposed explicitly, and Locke, Mandeville, and Adam Smith demanded implicitly, as if it were an imperial god. Government must be subject to the natural law made apparent to us by the Creator of this universe: Government must rule according to the notion of reason presented by Plato's Socrates, not the arbitrary or customary policies of a Thrasymachus or Glaucon. Government can not rule justly as Romantic, neo-Kantian irrationalist Karl Savigny defended the use of changing custom, a Savigny who defined custom in a Roman-style form intended to promote the continuation of oligarchical rule. Nor can we allow that outgrowth of Thrasymachus' doctrine, that positivist's and existentialist's perversion of the law, which underlies the recurring, Twentieth-Century upsurges of fascism, as typified, most recently, by the mind-set of the U.K.'s Blair government.

Thus, with the Council of Florence and the emergence of the first modern nation-states among civilized people, the authority of reason displaced the arbitrary authority of oligarchical "reason of state." This outgrowth of the Fifteenth Century, was the principle of natural law, under which the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence established our sovereign nation-state.

This Renaissance revolution in government and law, was made in defiance of the tradition of Roman law, and in opposition to the two forms of oligarchy which have been the continuing chief pestilences in extended European civilization, to the present day. These pestilences are the presently almost extinct, feudalistic landed oligarchies, and, the presently hegemonic financier oligarchies, such as that which the present British monarchy represents as a kind of primus inter pares world-wide. There, in that most crucial point of conflict between powerful oligarchical castes and the republic, lies the essence of the issue of government and of law in the modern world at large, still today.
The power which all of the people and their posterity, jointly entrust to their sovereign governments, is subject to the condition, that the government fulfill the responsibilities inhering in that authority, the general welfare most notably. So said the authors of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence and of the Preamble of our 1789 Federal Constitution.
The duties of such government are to ensure care for those matters of the general welfare which no lesser agency, such as private interest, could rightly, securely, and competently undertake. The rule is, that the general welfare is not to be willfully exposed to the caprices often inhering in the conduct of private interests, e.g., not exposed to jeopardy by the hazards of "free trade" generally, or financial markets otherwise.
The duties, responsibilities, and authorities of sovereign government include: government's responsibility for approaching the future with efficient foresight, and with special attention to the consequences of present policy and practice in terms of the effects upon future generations of the nation and of humanity at large.
As then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams warned President James Monroe, successfully, in arguing against entry into a treaty with the British monarchy, the primary interest of each and all sovereign nation-states, is to govern itself in such a manner as to promote the growth and prosperity of a community of perfectly sovereign nation-states, to become the ruling power on this planet, a community of principle premised upon those same principles of natural law which the U.S.A. invoked, quoting the anti-Locke doctrine of Gottfried Leibniz, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," in its 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence.

It could never have been the rational intent of the U.S. republic, then, or now, to live indefinitely as an imperilled island of liberty amid seas of oligarchism reigning in most of this planet. Rather than secure our nation through a North American imperium, we must follow the only strategic course consistent with our nature as a sovereign nation-state republic: to desire the successful spread of republicanism among the nations of the world, at least among a dominant portion of those nations. That latter, continuing goal, is the foundation of our foreign policy: to avoid foreign conflicts as much as possible, while aiming for that more durable form of security which we might secure only through the spread of a community of sovereign nation-state republics.
Although the origin of the modern sovereign nation-state republic is a fruit of Christianity, the hideous spectacle of the European religious wars of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, from the butchery of the people in the so-called Peasant War in Germany, until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, shows the wisdom of the ecumenical principle which had been freshly affirmed earlier by such as leading modern thinkers as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and France's murdered King Henri IV.

As Cusa wrote in his dialogue, De pace fidei, and as Germany's Moses Mendelssohn defined the principles upon which Jewish emancipation was established under the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, and under other governments, in Eighteenth-Century Europe, the only durable form of sovereign nation-state, is a secular power self-governed by the principle of reason. This means "reason" as the Socrates of Plato's The Republic, for example, defines the principle of truthfulness and justice in accord with the use of the Greek term agape¯, as also in the Apostle Paul's I Corinthians 13. Thus, the only true form of a sovereign nation-state republic, is one defined in accord with this ecumenical principle of universal reason.

It has always been the intent of those who made possible the persistence of the republican cause, since Classical Greece, that power must repose in a sturdy, well-educated citizenry, men and women who are bound together by a common commitment to deliberate from the vantage-point, not of personal special interest, or special interest of some grouping, nor by such crude sophistry as "bite-sized sentences," but of reason.

The citizens of a true republic deliberate all matters as an honest jury should be required to do, not by personal prejudice, or perceived special interest, but as servants of reason, and as the defenders of the posterity of the whole nation. In the language of the best Christian theologians, the true citizen is one who dwells "in the simultaneity of eternity," or, as the historian, poet, philosopher, and dramatist Friedrich Schiller spoke, the true citizen is both a world-citizen and a patriot, who lives and acts with that higher personal identity, one's place in eternity, always in view, the personal identity to which the true citizen holds himself or herself accountable, in all matters of importance.

It was in accord with that ecumenical principle of reason, that the 1776 Declaration of Independence established the sovereignty of these United States as a true republic. That Declaration's choice of the language of Gottfried Leibniz ("life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"), which was adopted in explicit rejection of John Locke's pro-slavery dogma of "life, liberty, and property," identifies the essential law of the U.S.A., as the natural law as Leibniz et al. understood natural law.

2. What is natural law?

The term "natural law" has often been misused in ignorant or otherwise foolish ways. The proper use of the term, is that defined in a very strict manner, as the history of this idea is traced from Classical Greece, and through the efforts, starting from the model provided by Plato, to define man's relation to the universe, and to mankind itself. The cornerstone of natural law, is thus expressed by insight into the celebrated passage from Genesis 1: man and woman, each and all equally made in the image of the Creator of the universe, and endowed with that means, cognitive reason, to exert mankind's rule over, and responsibility for all other beings, including other living ones, in this universe.

This principle of natural law is so urgent for the continued survival of our republic, and of other nations, today, that no morally responsible citizen could object to allotting the concentration needed to understand the origins and nature of that principle, as I set that forth in the following portions of this policy statement.

An adequate definition of natural law, starts from that premise respecting the nature of man. This notion of man emerges as natural law, rather than merely some article of blind faith, the instant we challenge ourselves to show: Apart from the fact that we are taught to believe this, what proof do we have, that this is true? Thus, Apostolic Christianity, for example, was never defined on the basis of blind faith in taught dogma, but upon the authority of evidence supplied to reason, as reason is coherent not with mere formal, deductive logic, but, rather, with agape¯ of the Apostle Paul's Platonic Greek. Typical is the most celebrated Chapter 13 of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians.

If only in first approximation, the term "natural law" signifies a body of knowledge resting upon empirically validated discoveries of universal physical principles, proofs of a type which show that these principles are not merely provable empirically, but can be proven to be coherent with all other known physical principles. By proven, universal "physical principles," we signify principles governing the relationship of mankind to the universe as a whole, principles defined as they bear upon the increase of mankind's power, per capita, within and over the universe we inhabit. This notion was the starting-point for my original discovery of what became known as the LaRouche-Riemann Method.

In that sense, and to that degree of approximation, the use of the term "natural law" always implies the kind of certainty we associate with proven universal principles of physical science.

However, as the LaRouche-Riemann Method shows, the definition of natural law has a much broader, and more profound basis, broader and more profound than what shallow-minded teachers of physics and engineering, or ordinary statisticians, would have us believe. Although validated universal physical principles are the only rational basis for use of the term "physical science," it is false to claim that mathematical physics, to say nothing of such inferior mere techniques as statistical methods, are equal to natural law. We must look deeper, to challenge the validity of, and to constantly correct, those assumptions we adopt as standards of proof of a scientific principle.

Said as briefly as competence allows, the point is the following.

All of those discoveries of universal physical principles which we have cause to believe are truthful knowledge, are products of acts of discovery which have overturned, in a radical way, previously authoritative prevailing beliefs. These principles are discovered by a kind of mental activity found, appearing naturally, in even very young children, not only among exceptional prodigies such as a Wolfgang Mozart. These are the same principles represented in a more cultivated form, as expressed among individual adolescent and adult human minds; but, this kind of mental activity, known as cognition, is not found among the animals.

Animals, such as dogs and chimpanzees, can learn, but they are not capable of discovering any universal physical principle.

The non-deductive method of discovery of universal principles, is peculiar to human individuals. As we must emphasize repeatedly, against currently popular, foolish contrary views, it is known as cognition, as opposed to deductive methods, or other methods of mere learning. It is only through this non-deductive power of cognition, that a validatable universal physical principle can be discovered, or rediscovered, the latter as by a student in a competent school or university.

It is only through the discovery of these universal principles, that man's power in and over the universe can be increased per capita. The quality of the human individual mind which verifies Genesis 1's statement on the nature of man, is nothing other than that power of cognition, the which is lacking in the beasts. The application of that higher, non-deductive power of cognition, a power energized by the passion called agape¯, is the practical definition--the empirical definition--of the term reason.

The definition of natural law begins with recognition of this absolute distinction between what one has merely learned, and what one actually knows. Each among us knows, as an individual person, only what each has discovered by non-deductive methods of cognition. It is, thus, the close study of the nature and results of cognition, which supplies us the hard proof of the validity of the conception cited from Genesis 1. It is upon the foundation of this equation of reason to cognition, that the conception of natural law properly rests.

We are then able to show, that a) mankind is absolutely distinct from, and superior to all lower forms of life; b) that all persons, from all cultural backgrounds, skin colorations, nose-lengths, or whatever other such supposed distinctions you might choose, possess equally this potential power of cognition; c) that mankind's succession of discoveries of what prove to be universal physical principles, are the source of mankind's increase of the power of the human species, in and over the universe as a whole.

That is the first, most fundamental principle of natural law. Any contrary definition of "natural law" is, at its best, essentially a silly one.

The notion of the obligation of the state to ensure the promotion of the general welfare, that for all persons, and for posterity even more than the living, is the premise in natural law, upon which the notions of both the republic and the constitutional law of republics depend essentially. The ability of mankind to employ the process of discovery of validatable universal physical principles, for the increase of man's power in and over the universe, depends upon the ability of persons to cooperate in the manner prescribed by that cognitive nature of the relationships both between man and nature, and among persons.

This cooperation depends upon that development of the individual mental faculties which we associate with Classical art-forms in poetry, music, drama, and the plastic arts. The importance of Classical tragedy, such as that of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Lessing, and Schiller, or the compositions of Dante Alighieri and Miguel Cervantes, in enabling the statesman and others to understand the way in which those processes we call "history" are shaped, is an illustration of the role which Classical art-forms, as distinct from mere "entertainments," play, together with science, in defining the fuller scope of the meaning of the term "reason." President Abraham Lincoln's sometimes extended late-night instructions to his Cabinet, on the applicability of certain insights from Shakespeare, to the policy-making practice of that war-time period, are but an apt illustration of such connections. The essential role which the poetry and dramas of Friedrich Schiller played, in inspiring and guiding the Prussian Reformers to their crucial role in ending the imperial tryanny of Napoleon Bonaparte, has this distinctive importance for all statesmen of all nations today.

Here lies the crucial importance of Plato's writings, including his The Republic, for all functional notions of natural law of nations today. Essentially, the conflict between natural law, on the one side, and arbitrary and customary law, on the opposing side, is the conflict presented, there, between Socrates and his opponents, the characters Thrasymachus and Glaucon. The notions of truthfulness and justice, as these considerations are presented, there, by Plato's Socrates, have been the cornerstone of the republican notion of natural law, from that time to the present. This notion of law, is the standard on which the success of the U.S.A., at home, and its foreign relations, must rely.

It is necessary, that this notion of natural law is rendered complete, by means of the indicated, provable implications of the cited passages from Genesis 1.

3. Why bite-sized answers are often untruthful

This brings us to consider now a most pernicious corruption of contemporary statecraft, today's popular habit of lying by fallacy of composition. Fallacy of composition signifies: the customary, widely used, fraudulent practice of sophistry, whether through the deception inhering in the use of deductive syllogisms, or even cruder forms, to exclude relevant evidence from consideration in the matter at hand. The usual apology for that widespread practice of lying, is the claim that we must simplify the argument, to bring the discussion down to the level of popular opinion. Whether the fallacy of composition is an intentional fraud, or the result of blundering ignorance, the results are approximately the same. In corrupt courtrooms, in politics, and other matters: "Keep it simple!" is the most common origin of popular lies.

The use of so-called "dictionary definitions," is among the most vulgar of the frauds used to construct a fraudulent argument in law, or otherwise. The assertion of a "fact," without preceding adequate proof of the fact, is an increasingly commonplace fraud practiced, whether out of malicious motives toward the victims, or only foolishly, by sitting judges and magistrates in U.S. courts, or legislative proceedings, today. That is also the fraudulent character of most cases of insistence, by major news media, and others, who either demand "bite-sized answers," or who extract an intentionally misleading choice of "bite-sized" quotation, as the major news media's most commonplace method of willful misrepresentation (e.g., outright lying) of what was actually said by the speaker.

The broader problem is that central to both law and foreign policy. In these domains, "bite-sized answers" to questions are, with relatively rare exceptions, vicious misrepresentations of the matter considered. The most important application of such methods of sophistry, is the use of exclusionary assumptions, by means of which the all-important notions of cognition and man's cognitive relationship to both the universe and man in general, are replaced by stated or hidden, arbitrary, but popular presumptions which are false to reality.

During the past two decades, as current educational and cultural policies and practice have accelerated the spread of functional illiteracy, even in communication among trained members of professions, the so-called "bite-sized" question-and-answer routine, has assumed the authority and mindless passion of a variety of blind religious faith. That populist's know-nothing-like, growing obsession with "simple answers," when blended with the spread of "sensitivity training," has become a central feature of popular habits under which our population becomes ever more ignorant, ever less capable of knowing whether what they hear coming out of their own mouths is truthful, or even an outright lie.

As public opinion becomes increasingly ignorant in this way, even simple statements of fact or intent lose efficient correspondence to the actual knowledge or practice of the speaker.

As described in a useful little book, on the art of political lying, from earlier times, the assertion that "all my friends tell me," or that "the dictionary says," that "I know an insider who told me," that "leading authorities agree," that "what my textbook teaches," or, "I follow the news; I know what goes on!," and so on, are typical of the most popular forms of lying met in day-to-day conversation. General, today, are the intrinsically fraudulent reporting of "eye-witness evidence," or the depraved mass-media journalist's hot-camera question, for broadcast, "Tell me, Mrs. Jones, exactly how did you feel in the moments you watched the members of your family being slaughtered?" The fraud behind that reporter's pornographic question, is replacing "What do you know?" with "How do you feel?"

That a witness might honestly believe that he, or she had had a certain sense-experience, does not signify that the witness is qualified to judge that experience as to fact, on the mere premises of the experience itself. Foolish people often say, "Experience teaches us." To learn the truth, one must first acquire that cultivated state of mind, which enables one to judge one's own experience itself competently. "What is the truth, and how could we know that it is the truth?" is the ceaseless passion of the truthful citizen, one who has risen above the pathetic state of mind of Sancho Panza.

Indeed, the most common cause for the doom of cultures, has been the pathological way in which the members of that society allowed their prejudices to guide them in misjudging their experience. From Aeschylus and Sophocles, through Shakespeare and Schiller, the rational use of the term "tragedy" never means anything but the way in which some commonly accepted feature of popular and ruling opinion defines the relevant government or nation as one which had responded to its experience in a manner which defined that people as one, which had, for that moment, lost the moral fitness to survive. A "lack of the moral fitness to survive," is the only rational, literate use of the word "tragedy."

That is the only rational and literate meaning with which that word is to be applied, for example, to the self-inflicted peril confronting the United States and its voters today.

In this tragic state of affairs of today's U.S. population generally, even the simplest kinds of declarative sentences may often cease to refer to provable facts, but may often merely indicate the animal-like social attitudes, or "sensitive personal feelings"--akin to smiles, grunts, scowls, and so on--of the speaker. There is no exaggeration in this description. A look at the most elementary facts about the use of language, in matters of scientific discovery, or in Classical forms of poetry and drama, points to the nature of the grave danger which the cult of the "bite-sized answer" poses to the continued existence of our civilization.

In contrast to today's popular habits, Classical poetry, such as that of Shakespeare, Schiller, Keats, and Shelley, is the natural habitat of that quality of individual cognition which is otherwise named "human reason." Any serious attention to the evolutionary development of literate forms of language, shows that the use of language for the communication of important ideas, such as the ideas which control the practice of governments, derives the truthful meanings of statements, even simple words, from what appears as a special feature of Classical literary composition, a feature called "metaphor." Metaphor is the natural habitat of that which most essentially separates the man from the beast, the habitat of cognition.

Behind every important meaning of a word, or of a way of formulating a phrase or sentence, there lies a story, or a poem, such that, when a literate speaker of a language uses that word, or that kind of formulation, the speaker is referring the hearer to the hearer's memory of experiencing that story or poem (unless he, or she, the speaker, is merely babbling on, as Babylonian tradition often does). If the hearer does not know the relevant story, or poem, the speaker is properly obliged to share, or, at least, to reference that needed experience with the hearer. Such are the habits of those forms of communication which may be regarded as truthful and rational.

This, I am instructed, is most clearly emphasized in the literate use of the Chinese language. My lack of Chinese apart, I know this principle very well, respecting the literate use of the English language. The Chinese and European languages may differ, even in quality, but the natural principles of the human mind are the same among all speakers. In approximation, it is fair to say, that the definitions of individual words and phrases are supplied, not by simple line-entries of dictionaries, but, rather, in each case, by the relevant story, poem, Classical drama, or physical experiment. Each of those words, or turns of phrase are intended, by the speaker, to recall the relevant story or poem to the hearer, or cause it to be constructed in the mind of the hearer, as Classical poetry does, even if that is the first existence of that poem or story.

In science, the meanings of terms and turns of phrase are arranged in the same way. Any term in science, refers to an action (not a noun, but a verb) recalled as a validatable experience in a process of discovery. The function of mentioning that term, is to recall the memory of the experience of making that discovery, to the mind of the hearer. Ideas, whether in science or art, are not things--not nouns--but are processes of action, that to the following effect.

In science, the most important words are names assigned to memory of the act of discovery of some validated universal physical principle. To use the modern language of Gauss-Riemann hypergeometry: in physical science, the concept of the verb, as opposed to the mere noun, corresponds to a distinct quality of physical-space-time curvature, the characteristic form of action which defines the distinctive curvature of some such phase-space. Thus, the orbit of a planet, considered as the motive of the planet's manifest orbit, is a verb, not a noun. Similarly, the active relationship among the Sun and all of the orbits within the Solar System, is also a verb, not a noun. Such verbs are the motives of the adducible result.

The term "Classical," used in reference to art, has the same meaning as a reference to the experimental validation of a universal physical principle in science. Whether in Classical art, or competently practiced and taught science, cognitive discoveries of this kind are otherwise known as Ideas, as Plato's dialogues define the generation of Ideas. In Classical art, it is the metaphor, as in the Classical poem, which defines the idea which is the identity of the poem as a whole. The title of the poem is the mere name (noun) assigned to recall to mind the entire complex associated with the poem's verb. In Classical painting, for example, the way in which Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper appears to move with you, the eye of Christ following you everywhere, defines that painting as a verb, rather than as a noun-like object.

This distinction which I have just summarized, between literate emphasis on verb-ideas and illiterate's (e.g., nominalist's) preference for emphasis on noun-ideas, was emphasized by the great Sanskrit philologist Panini, approximately 2,500 years ago. It is the characteristic feature of pre-Roman, Classical Egyptian-Greek astrophysics, and of the method of those contemporaries of the pre-Roman age of Panini, Socrates and Plato.

That distinction can be heard today, between relatively illiterate forms of uttered (and also written) speech, common among New York Times readers and today's university graduates, which place the emphasis on enunciation of the noun, as contrasted with relatively literate forms of speech and writing, in which latter the voicing places the emphasis on the verbal action. Literate speech and writing punctuates and shapes the utterance of the statement to emphasize the multiply-connected character of the relationships among the elements of the statement, to the formulation of the idea expressed in respect to the verbal action upon which the statement as a whole is premised.

The deviations from such rules for literate oral and written speech, and the punctuation of such utterances, are an integral feature of the university-taught, New York Times-prescribed, and other common illiteracy of speech and writing in the U.S.A. today. For related reasons, a diminishing ration of the few educated writers and speakers today, even trained actors, can even recite poetry competently--in a manner which makes the metaphor clear to the hearer, let alone compose decent poetry. For reason of the same illiterate habits of speech among our younger adult generations, few professional teachers, on secondary or university levels, are as capable as earlier generations were, of communicating actual ideas in public situations.

In the case of science, the sharing of the cognitive experiences of discovering and proving the validity of such a universal principle is crucial. That, in science, as in Classical art, and in law, is the definition of individual human reason in that domain. In the domain of poetry, music, drama, sculpture, and painting, the meaning of the term Classical is essentially the same; the difference is, that in matters of Classical art, the name for scientific discovery of validated ideas is called "metaphor"--as Plato's Socrates defines metaphor, in terms of what is known as "Socratic dialogue."

Note, that Aristotle offers a contrary, non-cognitive, merely deductive, false definition of that term. Similarly, the neo-aristotelian neo-empiricist Immanuel Kant, excludes the existence of human cognition, and thus degrades the act of discovery of either a universal physical principle, or an artistic notion, to the piggish level of an arbitrary, irrational act, a purely arbitrary preference in "taste," or a so-called "self-evident" definition, axiom, or postulate. Similarly, Kant's follower G.W.F. Hegel, based his system upon degrading the use of the verb "to become," to serve as a mere noun.

For reasons which I shall make clearer in the following section of this report, a principled conception of the modern sovereign nation-state, requires a certain insight into the crucial role of metaphor in statecraft. To make the truthful meaning of words, phrases, and sentences clear enough for that purpose, the literate use of the term "metaphor" requires at least a brief explanation.

In all great Classical strophic poetry, the poet, typically, holds back the most crucial fact of his poem until the last strophe. The simple, shorter poems of the younger Johann Goethe, are among the best-crafted, relatively simplest modern examples of this technique of Classical artistic method. Without actually lying to the hearer, the initial strophes of such a Goethe poem lead the hearer toward a critical point in the unfolding of that poem, at which the addition of some fact or reference shocks the hearer into recognizing that, all through the earlier strophes, the hearer has misled himself, or herself, into overlooking something of importance. On reflection on the effect of any successful Classical poem, one must admit that the succession of those preceding strophes has prepared the hearer, both factually and emotionally, to cognize the paradox (the metaphor) posed by the concluding strophe.

Thus, every true metaphor is a kind of ontological paradox, an apparent contradiction in terms. The apparent contradiction was not an error; rather, what was in error was the state of mind of the hearer before hearing the paradox. It was an error for which no deductive solution existed. A higher principle must be discovered and validated; then, the contradiction is revealed to have been the result of a systemic error, an axiomatic fallacy of composition, an error in the previous opinion-shaping by the hearer. It was on this account that the poet Percy Shelley identified poets as the true legislators of mankind.

A similar experience occurs in the process leading to an original discoverer's, or a student's discovery of a validatable universal physical principle. Step by step, one follows what habit considers authoritative opinion, up to the point that some fact appears, a fact which discredits what the hearer had customarily believed up to that point. Stupidity is the quality shown by persons who reject out of hand evidence considered contrary to their customary opinions.

Since this principle of metaphor is so crucial for defining all principled notions of art, science, and law, let us introduce here the most stunning example of the modern discovery of a universal principle: the principle of least time.

Out of the work of Leonardo da Vinci on vision and light, and the successive work of Kepler, and Fermat after Leonardo, and, then, Huyghens, Leibniz, Roemer, and Jean Bernouilli, proved conclusively that a straight line is not the quickest distance between two points. Thus, Huyghens, as a matter of first approximation, showed that the quickest distance between two points, is not the straight-line distance, but rather a certain curved pathway, which Huyghens approximated as the curved path of a cycloid. Out of Leibniz's recognition that the curvature of least time involved higher orders of non-constant curvature, rather than the cycloid, the notion of least time was transformed into Leibniz's unique discovery of a more general notion of universal least action. The work of Fresnel, which proved Newton's notions to be absurd, established that principle beyond reasonable doubt.

Since then, competent forms of mathematical physics have rejected the linear assumptions of the ideologues Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, et al., and have based competent modern physical science on the Leibniz and Gauss-Riemann notions of a physical universe of a specific non-linear curvature.

Thus, the proof, that the illiterate's naive idea of a straight line as the quickest distance, is false, illustrates the way in which a metaphor (i.e., a contradictory array of evidence) leads to rejecting an old belief, and replacing it by a proven new principle. In art and science, the principle of metaphor always has that same general distinction from inferior, merely deductive methods.

So, in the Classical poem's closing strophe, an additional, ironical fact is introduced, an ironical contradiction in meaning, which forces the mind of the hearer to rethink the entire area of knowledge and experience which had been recalled to the hearer by the opening strophes of that poem. The solution to such a poetical paradox--such a metaphor--is not finding some symbolic, or other sort of consistency between the conflicting meanings, but to recognize a new principle, higher than any among the mutually conflicting meanings. In Classical poetry, this higher principle, discovered through cognition, rather than through deductive argument, has the same quality of significance as the quality which the greatest modern mathematician, Gauss, and his follower Riemann, attribute to the validatable discovery of a new universal physical principle, a principle then to be included within a multiply-connected domain.

The set of conflicting meanings posed in the case of the famous Third Act soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet, is among the most celebrated and efficient examples of this same principle of metaphor met in the simpler, early strophic poetry of Goethe, or of Heinrich Heine, Keats, Shelley, and so on. The Robert Schumann setting of anti-Romantic Heine's Dichterliebe, is an illustration of the principle of metaphor as used by Heine, and as set in music by Schumann. The concluding two Heine poems of that series, as set by Schumann, the concluding poem most emphatically, resolve the paradoxes of the preceding series, exposing to the hearer, in a most impassioned way, the folly of all of the Romantic school of artistic composition and performance. In a prose writing to the same effect, Heine explicitly analyzed and denounced the cultivation of Kantian, Faustian Romanticism, then popularized in early Nineteenth-Century Germany.

So, in physical science, the discovery of a fact which contradicts previously existing scientific belief, leads to the discovery of a validatable new universal physical principle. It is the relived experience of that process, beginning with that contradiction, leading through the validation of the discovered principle, which is the meaning of every later use of the term which refers to that principle. In other words, the unfolding process of discovery of any idea, such as a validated universal physical principle, is the meaning of the name given to that principle.

Recall the case of the referenced Hamlet soliloquy. Hamlet says, "To be," but then, also, "or, not to be? That is the question." There is the contradiction, using the term "contradiction" exactly as in a matter of discovery of a new universal physical principle. Which shall it be? It is sword-swinging swashbuckler Hamlet's fear of unaccustomed ways, which prompts Hamlet to announce he has chosen to follow his customary ways to his own willful doom; later in the play, the closing scene of the entire play affirms the calamity looming in the decision Hamlet expresses in the Third Act soliloquy.

Thus, at the close of the play, as the folly-stricken, dead Hamlet is to be carried from the stage, the irony of the Third Act soliloquy is replayed by the characters Fortinbras and Horatio. Horatio represents the voice of reason, which Hamlet had fatally rejected. Swashbuckling Fortinbras reincarnates that folly which is bent upon its own repetition, the same folly of opinion by means of which Hamlet had sent himself to his chosen doom:

Fortinbras: . . . For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune.
I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,
Which now, to claim, my vantage doth invite me.

Horatio: Of that, I shall have, also, cause to speak,
And from his mouth, whose voice will draw on more.
But let this same be presently performed,
Even while men's minds are wild, lest more mischance
On plots and errors happen.

How commonplace is something similar to Hamlet's fatal Romanticism, among the would-be "swashbuckling machos" of the U.S. Congress, and elsewhere, today. How little the results of their present folly will differ from the doom of Hamlet and his Denmark, unless we remove that imitation of Hamlet's folly from the practice of our government and its electorate today.

The audience, witnessing the play, and the inevitable doom inhering in the character Hamlet's refusal to choose an available alternative to self-doom, recognizes that the human will has the ability to avoid the kind of error which swashbuckling conservative and pessimist Hamlet chose. Thus, in that lesson learned, in that way, the audience, as Schiller emphasizes the principle of composition of Classical tragedy, leaves the theater better, more optimistic people--in real life--than they had entered it shortly before.

Thus, a good performance of a Classical tragedy has the same characteristic use of paradox/irony to provoke a discovery of a universalizable principle, as a successful discovery in physical science. Thus, the great Classical tragedies, such as those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Schiller, have the same function, in social relations, and in conceptions of principles of law, as validatable original discoveries of universal principle in the domain of physical science. Such is the function of all great Classical sculpture, painting, poetry, and musical composition.

In competent education, the student learns by reliving the experience of the great physical discoveries, the great art of the past. The student reads history in light of the insight into history provided by reliving the ideas associated with reliving of the experiences of scientific and Classical-artistic discoveries. It is this process of re-experiencing the acts of cognitive discovery of earlier generations, which transforms a school from a mere place of learning, into a place where actual knowledge is embedded in a living way, embedded within the cognitive processes of the individual student's mind.

The result of acquiring ancient and recent knowledge, alike, in this cognitive mode, is sometimes called a "cultivated mind," speaking thus of a mind in terms of cultivated fertile fields of farmland. It is a state of mind in which the meaning of every term or action mentioned recalls the relevant story, crucial experiment, play, poem, or other Classical work of art or folklore, to the mind of the person so educated.

Faced with the challenge of a new kind of experience, for which no known recipe exists in the mind of that former student, the student will draw upon the wealth of accumulated experience, experience of relived important metaphors from humanity's past experience, or from Great Classical art, to discover a new choice of attack on the problem, that in the same manner new solutions were successfully discovered, repeatedly, by those whose discoveries one has reexperienced from the past of those many predecessors.

Thus, did Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary discovery in artistic perspective, as shown in the Milan The Last Supper, lead his successors into the revolutionary discoveries in respect to universal, congruent principles of both light and electromagnetism, by Gilbert, Kepler, Fermat, Huyghens, Leibniz, Roemer, Bernouilli, Fresnel, Ampère, Gauss, Weber, and Riemann. The notion of a universal principle of least time, developed and proven in this way, is the central principle of modern science, a principle of physical science prompted by the production of great Classical art.

Like President Abraham Lincoln teaching Shakespeare to his Cabinet, every true statesman is a person who educates his constituents--and also others--in that Classical-humanist way I have just summarily described. The statesmen knows the history of the relevant ideas, and instills that knowledge in the constituent by the cognitive methods I have identified here. Then, the constituent may choose his or her own opinion on that matter from the standpoint of actually knowing the subject, rather than have accepted the proposed policy on the basis of blind faith in the stated claims of supposed experts. All leading statesmen, since Solon of Athens, in particular, or Confucius, have been teachers above all. Real leadership resides in a matured mind's serenity, from which that mind leads a people to knowledge respecting the problems to be solved, and the decisions to be made. Thus, the greatest poets and tragedians have been, in fact, among the world's greatest political leaders.

The true political leader does not appeal to public opinion; rather, he or she confronts the people with the dangers inhering in currently prevailing public opinion. He or she does this as a Classical poet introduces a crucial metaphor in the concluding strophe of a successful poem, or as a great tragedian inspires happiness in his audience by confronting that audience with proof of the folly of its habituated ways. It is those lessons, when they "stick," as it is said, which arouse an imperilled people to reach the greatness they require of themselves, to master the threats before them. True leaders, like true poets and tragedians, do just that.

Watch out for charlatans!

By way of contrast, the political figure who responds to every question with the sophist's bite-sized answer, or out of "sensitivity" to the personal feelings of the members of his audience, is a charlatan, whether he or she intends to be a charlatan, or not.

Yes, sometimes, a summary response to a question or challenge, is appropriate. In that case, what might be considered a "bite-sized" response is the best response. A short response, of one or a few sentences, may be the best response, but only if the assumptions associated in the minds of both the audience and responder are clear enough that a short answer does not represent a fallacy of composition in the mind of the audience. Thus, a good choice of short response strikes the consciousness of the hearer as the metaphor posed by the final strophe of a great Classical poem gives meaning to the prepared ground of the preceding strophes. However, when the assumptions expressed by the challenger already represent a fallacy of composition, or in which the audience must be educated as a precondition for delivery of a relevant response, a "bite-sized" response is neither a truthful, nor a morally acceptable response.

In general, what are fairly described as popular audiences, are burdened with crippling fallacies of composition, especially if the stated case references topics on which they represent strong preconvictions. The illiteracy of audiences respecting even subjects for which they have strong, preformed opinions, is far worse today than was the case a quarter-century ago. More to the point, is a crucial fact to which I shall return briefly in the conclusion of this report: that today's usually hidden axiomatic assumptions, are the actual cause for the fact, that the chief continuing source of the worst policies introduced during the recent quarter-century, is those popular assumptions which govern the way in which the majorities of populations select the policies which they prefer to support, or to tolerate, as distinct from the proper policies, which they tend to oppose, even deplore.

Most leaders in opinion today are charlatans, chiefly by virtue of fallacy of composition reigning in the minds of those whom they mislead. People who follow such charlatans find themselves fooled, and wonder why it is that most of each of the political figures they elect have fooled them by means of precisely such "bite-sized answers." However, burned yet once again, and yet once more again, in that way, the public generally continues to fool itself in that same way, like the man who married one pretty store-window dummy after another, always lured, but never satisfied with the result.

To avoid more of that same, resolve to get the story which defines the meaning of each statement. Do not rely on the mathematical formula copied from some book, either in books on physical-science topics, or those of social studies. Rely upon reliving the discovery of the principle involved in the task you propose to undertake. To avoid being, once again, the victim of yet another charlatan: Get the story, not the mere "bite-sized explanation." Effective generals, and other statesmen, and true citizens, too, learn how to relive history of the past, so that their greatest predecessors might prepare them, the living, to master the future.

4. What defines a national culture?

That view of the rational interdependence of Classical science and Classical art, defines the practice of natural law in a general way. To understand the successful design for a modern sovereign nation-state republic, apply the work, on the subject of national language, by Dante Alighieri and his follower Petrarch to what I have just summarily described.

The question is: Why should an area with certain borders be considered a nation? Why not different borders? Why was the avowed racist, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who sponsored the revival of the Ku Klux Klan from his White House, such a cruel blunderer, a Dr. Frankenstein-style butcher, in his carving-up, and sewing together of pieces of nations, which he perpetrated at Versailles?

Since the same physical science is equally appropriate for all nations, what differences in the deliberative processes of the people of one nation define the boundaries at which that nation's territory should end, and another's begin?

The simpler practical side to that problem, was addressed by President Clinton's warning against a continuing process of carving up existing nations into the futile existence of micro-states. The immediate issue is the fact, that no nation should be constituted which is incapable of caring for the general welfare in an efficient way. This was a crucial issue over territory, for example, in the quarrel which the Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts Bay colony had with the English monarchy, and a crucial issue of the quarrels between the American patriots and the British monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.

Taiwan: A case in point

Clearly, neither Kosovo nor East Timor today qualify as sovereign states; they are incapable of meeting the sovereign responsibilities of a modern nation-state republic committed to the general welfare. The case of Taiwan has special features, which are most instructive respecting the British-directed campaign for Taiwan sovereignty today.

In the case of Taiwan, the traditional sponsor of the notion of a Taiwan separate from China, was Japan. Modern Japan's past imperialist policy toward Taiwan was always the fruit of the British monarchy's influence, most notably from the period of Japan's launching of the first Sino-Japan war, in 1894-95, the Versailles Conference, and Britain's guiding its anti-U.S.A. ally Japan of that period toward the Second Sino-Japanese war. The latter refers to the period when Britain was virtually at war with the U.S.A., during the early 1920s "hot period" of Japan's alliance with London in the matter of naval-power quotas.

Indeed, the Japan attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, was the implementation of a war-plan against the U.S.A., which Japan had developed as its contribution to a planned, joint British-Japan naval attack upon the U.S.A., dating from the early 1920s. This latter was the plan, known to the U.S.A., since the early 1920s, to which U.S. General Billy Mitchell referred, in his argument against the anglophile current within the U.S. Navy, during his famous court-martial trial.

In Japan, there is today, again, a pro-British faction which takes the geopolitical view, that Taiwan must be either a territory, or a dependency of Japan. The latter faction, directed from London, and with complicity of London-steered circles within the U.S. intelligence community, cooked up, and promotes the current argument in favor of a sovereign Taiwan. These U.S. intelligence circles include the notorious "Lovestoneite," or so-called "AFL-CIA" international department of the AFL-CIO. Wall Street's and London's Lovestone, and his continuing cabal, are a product of the career of Lovestone, as a former Bukharin agent and Communist Party U.S.A. head, and protégé of the ILGWU's David Dubinsky, of sometime CIA Director Allen Dulles, and also of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover. The Jay Lovestone cabal is currently also lodged under the patronage of Carl Gershman, within the U.S.A.'s National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

During the period of the Kuomintang government in Taiwan, until the election of current President Lee, during the 1980s, both the Kuomintang and the government in Beijing maintained a one-China policy respecting Taiwan itself. In the view of the followers of Chiang Kai Shek, prior to the election of President Lee, as in the view of the leaders in Beijing, there was never a splitting of China between Taiwan and the mainland. The view of both capitals, Beijing and Taipei, was that this division represented only a state of continuing conflict between two factions within China as a single cultural whole, a conflict reflecting the Civil War ongoing within China during the 1930s and 1940s.

This was also the view of the U.S. State Department, up to the time certain overt agents of British influence, such as Congress members associated with British intelligence's Christian Solidarity front, have attempted to change U.S. policy radically on this account. This was also my view, and that of leading Kuomintang figures with whom my wife and I met during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The happy developments within China, since the conspicuous successes of the recent reforms, prompted the patriots on both sides of the Taiwan strait to look toward the natural reintegration of the two former warring territories around the common heritage of modern China's founder, Sun Yat Sen. When relics of the old opponent of the Emperor Hirohito, the warlord circles in Japan, sought to provoke an incident over Japan's claim to certain traditionally China fisherman's bases, in islands just northeast of Taiwan, a few years ago, the patriots of mainland China, Taiwan, and so-called "offshore Chinese" throughout Asia rallied as one, to defend the integrity of traditionally China off-shore territories as part of a single China.

In all of these and related matters, China is defined as a territory by the combined factors of considerations of ability to promote the general welfare (which an independent Tibet, for example, would be utterly incompetent to do), and the millennial history of the development of China's civilization and language-culture. The only significant effect of promoting separation among targetted regions of China, is to use foolish people in Asia to aid Albright crony Zbigniew Brzezinski's aim, of orchestrating a new conflict within the East and South Asia "chessboard," a conflict which bears the seeds of either a future general war, or the ushering in of a planetary New Dark Age.

Meanwhile, to anyone who knows the modern political and diplomatic history of the case, the campaign for the independence of Taiwan has obvious and unsavory antecedents, antecedents which render the present promotion of Taiwan's independence morally repulsive to bearers of a U.S.A. patriotic tradition.

The matter of culture

The answer to the more general problem posed by the question of national borders, lies within the domain defined by Classical art-forms. That I address now.

Although a common language is an important contribution to nationhood, it is not the most fundamental distinction. It is not merely the common language which defines the nation. Rather, the literate forms of languages associated with viable nations today, are in large part languages created by those nations, or, as Dante Alighieri's leading role in developing a literate modern Italian illustrates the principle, the nation is defined as Giuseppe Verdi's musical work was, chiefly by the literate, bel canto form of the spoken and sung language associated with its claims to a sovereign existence. It is the political-cultural characteristic of the nation, which produces the emergence of a common, literate form of language, underlying the continuing, progressive changes appropriate to that political culture.

It is the communication of ideas, using the term "ideas" in its specifically Platonic sense, which is the source of development of the national cultures of modern sovereign nation-states. This is located in that spoken and written literature, and so on, which communicates those ideas around which a people is rallied to establish, defend its national sovereignty. This is located in those aspects of art and folklore which have developed, as if by evolution, to establish and communicate those ideas upon which the notion of a natural political sovereignty of a nation depends.

Since ancient Greece, the Classical standpoint, as I have qualified the nature of that standpoint here, distinguishes all true knowledge as appearing in two functionally interrelated, but relatively distinct aspects: science and art. The first, physical science, pertains to man's relationship, as a species, to nature as a whole; the second, Classical art, pertains to the manner in which mankind's relationship to the universe as a whole is defined by man's relationship to man. These two branches of Classical knowledge are functionally interrelated, that by the way in which the ordering of man's relationship to mankind determines, and results in mankind's increase of power, per capita, within and over the universe as a whole.

That would be accepted by literate and rational persons as a fair representation of the case; but, it is not yet a truly adequate definition for the purpose of shaping the practical policies of the government of the U.S.A.

In a general way, until the disintegration of culture unleashed by U.S. President Nixon's monetary decision of August 1971, the Americas and the European continent, including the Soviet Union, had shared in common a general body of scientific and related technical knowledge. In general, the so-called developing nations had either shared, or aspired to share that scientific culture. The differences among those nations lay not in the idea of the authority of physical scientific progress, but in the way in which that scientific progress was administered, and either promoted or relatively suppressed.

The issues which define a validatable setting of borders of sovereign states, are essentially those of political culture. These differences in political culture are broadly defined as of two general classes, the one negative motives, the other positive.

On the negative side, the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence stated clearly, the compelling moral reasons our new nation must break free of the unjust British monarchy. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams affirmed the same principle, as in his crafting of what became adopted as the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. Adams stated that, the United States shares no common principle of government with the British monarchy, and, that, therefore, it was as much in its interest to keep the British influence out of the Americas as it was the degrading influence of Prince Metternich's Holy Alliance.

There exists no community of principle between sovereign nation-state republics, and states which are committed to oligarchical principles in general, or imperial (e.g., "world government") doctrines of law otherwise. Temporary military alliances, such as the most difficult alliance between the principled adversaries Roosevelt and Churchill, during World War II, are sometimes unavoidable, but no alliance or treaty is allowable which ignores the implications of a lack of community of principle. The vital, fundamental strategic interest of our republic, is to bring into being a community of republican principle among sovereign nation-states. That principled difference between imperial law and natural law, is sufficient and necessary grounds for a sovereign separation of states which each correspond to differences in the respective, distinct characteristics of national culture. However, to qualify as a viable nation-state under natural law, in any case, a prospective new state must meet the standard of its service to the general welfare.

The positive differences, as distinct from those negative ones, arise out of appreciation for the functional role of a specific political culture, including its existing or emerging common language-culture, as defining a means for efficient promotion of the general welfare. It is the principled features of this second class of differences, the positive differences, on which our attention is now focussed.

My argument here reflects, inclusively, the greater precision I have given to the treatment of this matter by my original--LaRouche-Riemann Method--discoveries in the branch of science called physical economy. Since I have been passionately committed to the establishment of true sovereignties within Africa and other so-called developing regions of the world, I have a much keener sense of the important implications of these matters than nearly all of my countrymen, including African-Americans today. The same is to be said of my treatment of other sections of the world at large. It is from my vantage-point, as both an advocate of sovereignty and my decades-long commitment, since the period of World War II, to a global principle of sovereign nation-state republics, that the definition of the sovereign nation-state republic can be most efficiently stated and argued.

It would follow, from what I have just summarized, that although the first condition for developing a sovereign nation-state republic, is a common political culture, the fact of the matter is, that all those language-cultures, among each of the leading nation-states of Europe and the Americas, are each fairly described as "historically synthetic," rather than "simply traditional," or "customary."

Just so, although Italian was originally a language distinct from Latin, despite the many exchanges of loan-words between the two over the centuries of domination by, first, ancient Rome, and then medieval Latin, literate modern Italian was a synthetic reconstruction of the ancient, non-Latin Italian. This reconstruction, which was intended to promote republican principles, was led by Dante and his followers. Hence, the literate form of Italian.

All of the modern nations of Europe and the Americas have been developed since the Fourteenth Century. These are each, such as Germany or Italy, more or less as much "cultural melting-pots" as our own U.S.A. In these cases, the U.S. perhaps most strikingly, it is the development of the nation which makes the culture, and produces the literate form of its language and art.

So, the impact of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, and the success of France's Louis XI, brought Henry VII to the throne of England, and unleashed that Italy-focussed, Erasmian development which produced such figures as Marlowe and Shakespeare, and produced the pre-1603 preparation of that King James Version of the Bible. That literature, developed during the Sixteenth Century, established modern English. Similarly, in the case of Germany, it was the late-Eighteenth-Century Greek Classical Renaissance, led by the anti-Enlightenment figures of Gotthold Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, which produced the Classical form of a modern German language, poetry, and drama, out of the mutilated speech left over from the ravages of the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War.

The differences between the uses of the so-called English language among the inhabitants of the U.S.A. and the United Kingdom, have prompted some wits to describe these nations as two peoples separated from one another by a common language. Although literate U.S. speech has its specific root in the same Sixteenth-Century, Italian-influenced development of English reflected in Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the King James Authorized Version, the development of the republican movement in North America, beginning with the pre-1689 development of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, defines a different principle in the development of the characteristics of English-language usages than has been the trend in England since the accessions of James I, the tyrant William of Orange, and George I.

As former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger stressed, in his May 10, 1982 keynote address at London's Chatham House, the traditional intellectual culture of the U.S.A., as expressed by President Franklin Roosevelt, is axiomatically at odds with the Hobbesian tradition, the latter as expressed by Roosevelt's war-time political adversary, Winston Churchill. The bearers of those respectively opposing traditions are, as Kissinger emphasized, functionally--in "mind-set," almost different species in respect to the characteristic behavior of the two political cultures.

Listening with the `third ear'

At this point, step aside for a few moments, to think, once again, about our experience with aspects of spoken and written language which can not be explained by aid of mere dictionaries and grammar-books. Reflect, in a clinical way, on the content of the following several paragraphs. Listen to much of the speech you hear about you these days; listen with what the late psychoanalyst Theodor Reik named "the third ear."

There are convergences among the usages within the two nations, of course. The anglophiles of the British East India Company's partners in the China opium-trade, and the followers of British Foreign Office head Jeremy Bentham's agent, Aaron Burr, on Wall Street, together with the southern slave-holder interest, have represented a pro-treasonous current in the U.S.A.'s life, down to the present day. As the influence of these anglophile currents waxed or waned over the centuries, the Englishman's and American's use of a nominally common language have tended to converge or diverge.

Despite such convergences and divergences, a patriot of the United States, when speaking with a more typical Londoner of any social class, knows that he is speaking with someone who thinks in a mental language which is foreign, in its axiomatic characteristics--its so-called "mind-set"--to the literate American patriot's intended use of the English language. The proverbial exception which proves the rule, is the style-book of Wall Street's New York Times, which, for any U.S. patriot, reflects the adaptation of a merely superficial literacy to a mind-set which is politically alien to that of any U.S. patriot such as Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, or U.S. space-pioneer Goddard.

The point is made clearer by noting that the mind-set an American patriot meets, in discussions with a literate patriot of Italy, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, and so on, is much closer to an American patriot's way of thinking, than with a typical representative of the English-speaking British Conservative or Labour currents. In the extreme, one would point to the typical British oligarchical fop, or a Tony Blair, whom one often senses as being virtually of a species alien to humanity itself.

My experience in dealing with persons from many nations of the world, often reminds me that the minds of people using different languages, such as U.S., German, Italian, and Mexican patriots, like the patriotic Scot in the Robert Burns tradition, are organized in kindred ways, and that a certain English-speaking Britons' pro-Hobbesian, pro-Lockeian mind-map has, as a matter of comparison, relatively little in common with a normal U.S. patriot's way of thinking. On the matter of the existence of that distinction, Henry Kissinger was right.

That feeling about that matter often touches me with a prescience of eeriness; perhaps, some among you, too. In my frequent participation in multi-lingual discussions, I am sometimes reminded, that, in all serious communication, in cases where ideas are the subject of such discussions, the spoken or written language as such fades into the background, drowned out by hearing--with one's "third ear"--the user of another language think. The mere words are put into their proper perspective, as the mere shadows of the mental processes in which the actual ideas are resident.

I should strengthen the argument for this crucial point by aid of the following illustration. In my customary practice, I have frequent occasion to participate in multi-language seminars and conferences, in various parts of this planet. Usually, I not only audit these proceedings, but play an active, even sometimes a leading role in them. For the kinds of serious discussions in which I participate on the usual such occasions, it is indispensable that I cut through the shrubbery of formal and impromptu translations, to be certain that I am grasping what the speakers are thinking, as distinct from the relatively superficial appearances of the translation I am hearing, either by a translator, or by a spokesman speaking in an English which is not his, or her native language.

For such, and kindred situations, what might be described as "the art" of hearing the other person's mind think, rather than hearing merely the words said, is essential to the efficient conduct of business of a scientific, artistic, diplomatic, or serious political nature. The method of achieving such insight, is identical to those cognitive processes indispensable to recognition of metaphor in encounter with various forms of plastic and non-plastic Classical art.

It is on that level, in that role of cognitive recognition, that the roots of national cultures are to be found. It is there, in that approach to the hearing of the mind of other person's thinking, that the enrichment and common pathologies of national cultures and their sub-cultures, are to be recognized.

To wit: In a related, much less human kind of experience, in observing today's television and radio professionals speak, one has the unpleasant realization that the television personalities appearing on the news-broadcast screen are not speaking English, but a pseudo-English better described as "teleprompterese." Looking into the eyes of the face on the television screen, one has the sense that there is no mind behind the voice one is hearing--or the sincerely staring eyes one is seeing, just what might be the soulless voice of an electromechanical talking robot. One might imagine a voice produced by a factory which manufactures special "techno" dummies, factory-produced "androids."

Such speakers are of the sort one might suspect are what are presently, widely deployed as those witless creatures called "facilitators." The ritual Sunday Morning TV "talking-head" performances, have come, more and more, to suggest that the personalities displayed there might be merely electronically synthesized, prescripted virtual personalities, rather than actual human beings, that they are something like the kiddies' animated cartoon-characters.

The same thing carries over into experience with the effects of recent decades' degeneration of the popular culture and sub-cultures of the U.S.A. In observing television broadcasts and kindred symptoms, one is forced to recognize, that from among persons under fifty years of age, we are often confronted by something converging on a kind of outrightly Orwellian newspeak, a way of speaking in what I have just identified as "teleprompterese." Another name for this television-screen-induced, Orwellian turn in popular speech-habits of younger generations, would be "informationspeak." One hears the words, but scanning the speaker's mind, one does not sense the presence of a human--cognitive--quality of thinking mind.

A fanciful observer might wonder: are today's schools training students to speak with, and even think like robots? Are we hearing, not human speech, but persons seeking to imitate some recent electronic model of synthetic speech, a virtual "vocoderese"? Is the next step, to have computers, called perhaps "Wieners" and "Von Neumanns," programmed to conduct the critical oral examinations of our universities' doctoral candidates? Are human beings themselves, next to be replaced by virtual images produced by what is called "benchmarking"?

Is that description of such experiences really so fanciful? Watching the performances of some of the real-life newscasters and other typically dehumanized personalities of today's television screen, a fanciful viewer might wonder: Will virtual ex-wives be allowed to collect alimony, and will virtual judges decree the awards--and will real people, have to pay actual alimony, as a result? In the changing patterns of real-life behavior, to be observed, with a growing sense of horror, over the recent thirty years or so, until now, such a process of dehumanizing of standard real-life behavior has, in fact, taken over much of the behavior of the post-World War II generations.

How does that linguistical horror-show bear upon the matter of defining a national culture? Look at the implications of the picture, which I painted in these several preceding paragraphs, through the mind's eye of the Classical artist. In that mind's eye, we find, rather quickly, the image of the positive way in which a national culture is to be defined.

Culture begins with the verb

What defines a nation is not its biological past, but, as the case of Dante Alighieri's work implies, the manner in which a people puts together, as a people, what it has learned both from its own past, and from what has been contributed by other peoples. Thus, the greatest achievements of all European nations reflect the development of each among those specific national cultures as a "melting-pot" culture.

The United States itself, is the continuing outgrowth of North America as a cultural melting-pot. Very few of the leading ideas on which the success of our national culture has depended, originated within the U.S.A. itself. The most important ideas, in science and in art, originated within Europe, both from the long sweep of the Classical Greek heritage of all extended European civilization, and, more immediately, from the impact of the Fifteenth-Century Golden Renaissance in generating those revolutions in science, political culture, and Classical forms of art we associate with names such as Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz, and Bach.

American names such as Winthrop, Mather, Logan, Hunter, Spotswood, Franklin, and Bache, typify those among our patriots who revolutionized our life and culture with knowledge of universal principles of science and Classical art directly imported into our general use from contemporary Europe. If we look at this same process of our development from the standpoint of those Europeans who made the most crucial contributions to our culture, we must recognize that those intellectual figures of Europe, promoted what became the cause of our sovereign republic, to become a model, an inspiration for transporting those achievements here, back to the Europe from which we had gained not only that knowledge, but also that political support for our republic, upon which our republic's very existence often depended.

In all of its best features, our U.S. national culture, has been the product of the way in which our nation's leading patriotic minds--our politicians, scientists, artists--put the pieces of imported and other cultures together, to form the republican tradition of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay, the Pennsylvania colony, and so on. Our national culture, based chiefly on pieces obtained from the best currents in Europe, was the fruit of our patriot's efforts to make this a place where we could build here the kind of republic which was not yet possible in oligarchy-ridden old Europe. This, as President Abraham Lincoln illustrates the rule, gave us the best of our national character, the character of a Benjamin Franklin, of Presidents such as Washington, Monroe, Quincy Adams, Lincoln, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley, and Franklin Roosevelt.

This also gave our republic its natural mission: to become an inspiration and friend of those efforts, in any part of the world, to build and maintain a sovereign nation-state republic constituted to serve the general welfare of both its own population and all humanity, too, as we must be properly dedicated to the general welfare of ourselves and humanity at large.

It is that mind-set, the conception of man and nature integral to that mind-set, which must shape the development of our national language-culture into the modes of expression suited to the mind-set living behind the mask of speech. It is that relationship between a republican mind-set and the evolution of a national language-culture to match, which inspires the most desirable definition of national boundaries.

5. Who is our adversary?

By definition, the true adversary of the United States, is any powerful agency which seeks to suppress the application of that lawful principle upon which the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution premised the very existence of our Federal Republic. The British monarchy of 1776-1863 (and beyond) has been a leading such adversary, as was Prince Metternich's Holy Alliance, and Napoleon Bonaparte's empire. The enmity of the U.K. against our republic and others, lies not merely in such particular monarchs as George III, Victoria, and Edward VII. The essential quality which makes the British monarchy of 1714-1999 the continuing adversary of all true republics, is the British conception of "rule of law," a conception wholly antithetical to the most vital interests of our own republic, then and now.

The folly of English law goes back a long way. It is readily dated from the Norman Conquest itself. Notable for today's discussion, is the case of those U.S. public fools, who trace their reading of what U.S. law ought to be, to such abominations as the Magna Carta. Similarly, foolish people trace U.S. law to the British notion of the Common Law. If any person had examined these matters of statecraft from the standpoint of Solon's constitutional reforms and his poem on the subject of those reforms, or had studied the dialogues of Plato on the subject of law, truthfulness, and justice, that person would recognize the current English tradition in law, as in direct opposition to the republican principle of Solon, and as, in its axiomatic features, a blend of the follies of the misguided Thrasymachus and Glaucon from Plato's The Republic.

King John of England came to the English throne as among the notable reformers of his time. As a reformer, John lies within a long line of predecessors, from Charlemagne through the Emperor Frederick II and the work of Dante Alighieri, in bringing about the emergence of nation-states committed to the general welfare. The Magna Carta was a work of evil, imposed by powerful feudal oligarchs, who were opposed to the encroachment of the general welfare upon the brutish prerogatives of the landed and financier oligarchies of that time. It was the doctrine of the Magna Carta which unleashed approximately a hundred years of madness upon much of the later British Isles and France: the madness of the Hundred Years War, the madness of the Wars of the Roses. Similarly, the same evil mind-set underlying the Magna Carta unleashed the madness of that Venice-directed Welf (Guelph) League, whose wars and predatory "Lombard bankers" loan-system, reduced the number of the parishes and population of Europe by one-half, plunging Fourteenth-Century Europe into the horror known as "The New Dark Age."

For anyone familiar with Plato's treatment of the subject of law, the argument for the "common law," is a swindle more or less as transparent as the principle of rule by arbitrary, predatory authority, as the latter is embodied in the Magna Carta.

In the Mediterranean region, and in extended European civilization generally, the struggle for freedom, truthfulness, and justice has always been a struggle against the legacy of "globalization" inherited from ancient Babylon, and from the "new Babylon" of imperial Rome. In this struggle, Europe has endured many set-backs from among concerts of oligarchical forces.

The set-backs to the initial launching of modern sovereign nation-states, began near the close of the Fifteenth Century and opening decades of the Sixteenth. The death of Spain's Isabella I, the death of France's Louis XI, and Venice's corruption of the emotionally disturbed personality of England's Henry VIII, Henry VII's heir, typify the pattern in that anti-Renaissance counter-offensive which the financier oligarchs of Venice were able to orchestrate, as religious and other ruinous, fratricidal wars, throughout Europe, following the betrayal and defeat of the anti-Venice League of Cambrai.

It was in that role of Venice, as the leader of the European oligarchical reaction throughout Europe, as expressed by the religious wars of the Sixteenth and early Seventeenth centuries, that the political and cultural heirs of the great Council of Florence seized upon the program of global transoceanic exploration of Nicholas of Cusa's circles, to the effect of choosing the Americas as the place of colonization from which to strike back, with flanking attacks, against the oligarchical enemies of civilization within Europe itself.

Isabella I's backing for Columbus' use of the map provided by Cusa's collaborator Toscanelli, marked the beginning of the process leading into the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence. From that time, onwards, the progress of science, republicanism, and development of Classical culture and modern literate forms of popular languages, proceeded, despite setbacks and obstacles. In this unfolding process of modern history, English-speaking North America became the chief rallying-point of a global struggle to establish the first true sovereign nation-state republic. Whatever the imperfections in our nurture of those our great national treasures, our 1776 Declaration of Independence and our 1789 Federal Constitution, these United States, so defined, have remained, in historical principle, the temple of liberty and beacon of hope for all mankind.

It is upon the benchmark of that historical place in space and time, that we define what we mean by a global community of principle, and that we also define the nature of our republic's mortal adversary, oligarchism. To secure the future existence of our republic, within our territory and outside it, we must not only return to the banner of Classical art and science, but must restore the function of that Classical republican tradition as the source of generation, and regeneration of a viable national culture for our posterity.

On that same account, we must extend our good wishes and cooperation to those other nations which aspire to do the same for themselves. On those premises, a true community of principle must be the guarantor of security for the republican cause throughout this world, and into nearby space beyond.

6. The fatal folly among us

The better moments of the Kennedy administration, and the role of the Civil Rights movement rallied around the Reverend Martin Luther King, typify the more notable, happy exceptions. Otherwise, from the untimely death of a truly great President--whatever his shortcomings, otherwise--Franklin Roosevelt, the overall trend in development of our national political culture, has been downhill.

The downhill trend was accelerated by the chain-reaction effects of the assassination of President Kennedy, the U.S. war in Indo-China, and the corrosive effects of the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture." The worst of the ostensibly irreversible downward trends, has been the cultural and related economic impacts of the panic of neo-liberalism, a "Southern Strategy"-oriented reversion to the economic and legal doctrines of the Confederacy, impacts which were unleashed by President Richard Nixon's fatal, August 1971 demolition of the successful, original Bretton Woods monetary system. Since then, especially since the wrecking of the pillars of our internal economy during the period 1977-1980, the U.S.A. has been sliding downhill, toward ruin, at a generally accelerating rate.

If one were to demand: "What individual decision is most responsible for this downturn?" the only answer which comes close to fitting that question, is a set of decisions adopted by Franklin Roosevelt's successor Harry S Truman, almost from the first moment Truman became President.

Three decisions made, officially, by Truman, during the first weeks as President, mark the changes which set the nation on a downward track, reversing the upward track which Roosevelt had predefined for the post-war world. The first, was the radical change from Roosevelt's intention for the formation of the United Nations Organization (UNO). The second was the decision to drop the only two nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal upon the defenseless civilian population of an already defeated Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The third was the Truman administration's decision to restore Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French colonial rule in Africa and Asia.

All three of these and related decisions represented a U.S. being turned back toward the Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge precedents, a return to the top-down political control of that London-directed gang of Wall Street bankers and law firms--like Stimson, the Harrimans, the Mellons, and the Morgans--from whose follies Franklin Roosevelt had rescued the Depression-wrecked U.S. economy of the early 1930s.

President Kennedy's short-lived effort to return the U.S., its economic and foreign policies, to the F.D.R. pathway upward, is a notable exception to the general moral decline of our post-Franklin Roosevelt political system. President Johnson's memory will be long honored for his decision in the matter of two Civil Rights laws. A few other good things were done by our Presidents, here and there; but, if we take into account the continuing, if waning, beneficial after-effects of what F.D.R. had set into motion while he was President, the intellectual and moral fiber of our nation has been eroding since almost the moment F.D.R. died.

That is a fair description of what has happened to our nation; but such a description is not enough for our needs today. The question is: More than a half-century has passed since Franklin Roosevelt died. There has been more than sufficient time to have learned the lessons of the many important mistakes in policy adopted since his death. Why, a half-century later, especially since Nixon's folly of August 1971, has every President and Congress acted, with brief and relatively rare exceptions, to the effect of introducing policies which were worse than those of their predecessors? What is wrong with the eligible voters of the U.S.A., that the net effect of most of their choices of leading political officials, has been to make everything, overall, constantly worse than before?

All the odds and ends which might be counted as isolable exceptions to that predominant pattern aside, the fact is, the spectacle of the U.S.A. over the course of the past half-century, especially the recent thirty years, fits the image of a Classical tragedy, as it might have been written by an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, a Shakespeare, or a Schiller, or perhaps a commedia composed, like Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes.

Truman's follies of 1946, mark a first turn downward; but, they have been shown to have been only the first of the downward steps which have dominated most of our policies of practice during most of the period since. That being the case, we must seek the source of the folly, not in the decision of any one person or interval of time, but rather in some persisting, tragic flaw in the behavior of the U.S. institutions, and of our citizens generally. We must identify the grave, potentially fatal, cultural flaw which has dominated our policy-shaping since the death of F.D.R., especially since Nixon's folly of August 1971.

To pinpoint the location of that tragic flaw, it is sufficient that we examine the question before us from the clinical standpoint of economy.

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, provides a suitable story for making our point. The plot to corrupt the character Dorian, shows us that each step downward, prepared Dorian to take the next step downward, and so on, until his doom was sealed. Since the first anti-Kennedy turn, downward, in U.S. science-driver policy, during the 1966-1967 interval, each downward step in policy-shaping has conditioned both the political system, and popular opinion into readiness to take a still steeper step downward in our economic policy. Think of U.S. public opinion as, thus, like Wilde's doomed, fictional Dorian Gray. It was not any specific decision which doomed Dorian. It was the way in which each of a series of decisions eroded Dorian's moral character, leading thus to a next downward choice of decision, which eroded his character yet more, which led him into the next, still deeper choice of downward choice.

The worst phase of our decay began, under Kennedy, with the assassinations of the leaders of the government of South Vietnam. That was the preparatory action for the next step downward, which could be unleashed by McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara et al., only once President Kennedy were dead. Thus, with the post-Kennedy launching of the full-scale U.S. regular military deployment for a war in Indo-China, a spiral of moral and economic decay seized control of our nation's policy-shaping. The first steps toward dismantling the science-driver capabilities of our economy were introduced in 1966-1967. During that 1966-1967 interval, the first large-scale dismantling of our economic science-driver, the space program, began. A decline in the rate of increase of U.S. per-capita physical productivity resulted, becoming the net collapse of physical output per-capita which has gripped the U.S. economy since the mid-1970s.

Instead of offering the beneficiaries of Civil Rights reforms the opportunity for a general improvement in the quality of employment, a Roman-style "bread and circuses" policy was launched, under the subterfuge of "The Great Society" side-show. The latter became the seed for the 1972 launching of types of proposed "welfare reforms" introduced under the label of "benign neglect," cheap-labor programs which substituted welfare recipients, dragooned by threats of loss of assistance, into creating non-union wages and working conditions in job-places presently occupied by members of organized labor. These steps taken in the name of wrestling with the U.S. Vietnam War budget, had the effect of preparing the way for those Nixon Administration economic-policy follies which set up the catastrophic decision of August 1971.

Since the catastrophic monetary reforms of 1971-1972, the U.S. economy has been sliding downhill, without any sign of recovery. As the present epidemic of "outsourcing," spurred on by the lunacy of NAFTA, typifies this, we have been ripping the gut out of U.S. economic national security ever since 1971. We are like a man who subsists by eating his own legs, but who insists, at the same time, that he typifies a successfully well-nourished, "robust" economy. Infrastructure has been in net physical contraction since 1971-1972. The most concentrated destruction of the economy was done under President Carter's administration, with the shattering effects of both savage measures of deregulation and Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's launching of what he himself had described as a "controlled disintegration of the economy." Later, under Reagan-Bush, Garn-St Germain and Kemp-Roth typified a philosophy which has shattered and looted our national economy since.

All of these decisions are to be correlated with what is often termed "the new liberalism" of the post-1971 Wall Street Journal: radical "free trade," "globalization," "benchmarking," and, most recently, "The Third Way." Think of the spread of that "new liberalism" as like some loathsome disease; think of that disease showing itself in the increase of the signs of corruption in the face on the portrait of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. Think of U.S. public opinion as like that picture of Dorian Gray; each immoral choice of change in economic policy, leads to an even worse next change in economic policy. So, our productive work-places were gutted, employment sent to slave-labor abroad, our education system destroyed, our health systems looted murderously by Wall Street's financial sharks, and, as Columbine shows, our youth more and more self-destroyed by the effects of what started as the "Frankfurt School"-inspired, "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" of the 1964-1972 interval.

How might that Dorian Gray, our citizenry, have avoided this self-induced, presently looming threat of doom? As long as Dorian continued to follow the trend of changes in his opinion, each next decision he would make would bring him nearer to doom. Only if he were willing to overturn what he had come to accept and defend as his accustomed way of making changes in his behavior, could he avoid the doom he was bringing upon himself.

Do not blame politicians, or circumstances for the horror, in domestic or foreign conditions, descending upon the U.S. today. Do not seek a culprit other than your neighbor and yourself. It is not bad policy-shapers who are responsible for what threatens you and our nation today. Your enemy lies within yourself, in the way you have permitted yourself to be habitually corrupted, to ever-deeper levels of corruption, into ever-shrinking pits of "bite-sized" intellectual mediocrity, by your obsession with televised and other forms of Roman "bread and circuses," by what you have come to regard as your obligation to learn to go along with what you consider currently generally accepted public opinion.

That, like Hamlet's, is your tragedy. To overcome what menaces you today, it is, above all, yourselves you must change. You must choose to change back into what the founders of our republic intended us to be. You must break with the imperial heritages of Babylon and Rome, which are the heritage of our natural, oligarchical enemy. You must turn back to those notions of natural law which I have summarized here, and to the perspective of building the kind of republican community of principle among sovereign nation-state republics, which I have outlined here. The choice--survival or a probable New Dark Age--lies within you.

In that change lies true law. In that change, lies the road back to our republic's sovereignty.

[1] Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Aguilar, 1991), is the best available Spanish-language edition of the early-Seventeenth-Century classic. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Adventures of Don Quixote, translated by J.N. Cohen (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1950), is a readily available English-language translation.

In Cervantes's masterpiece, Don Quixote convinces Sancho Panza to join him in his (mis)adventures, by promising him that he will eventually make him the governor of an island. By and by, a Duke and Duchess oblige, and grant Sancho Barataria Island (see Second Part, Chapter 42 and passim).