This article appears in the December 15, 2000 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

The U.S. Strategic Interest in Russia

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

December 1, 2000

British geography teacher Halford Mackinder was a charlatan, who would have served mankind better as a figment of the tortured imagination of an E.T.A. Hoffman, instead of becoming an awkward celebrity of British Lord Milner's Coefficients' circles. Mackinder's so-called geopolitics became part of the mass-homicidal delusion it showed itself to be in World War I. His continuing, hateful influence on U.S.-Russia relations, still today, is expressed by, among others, that pathetic offshoot of a Central European lackey-dom, Zbigniew "Woody Woodpecker" Brzezinski.

The actual strategic interest of the U.S.A., has never had anything in common with the homicidal fantasies of such acolytes of Harvard University's Professor William Yandell Elliott as Brzezinski and that perennial advisor, Henry A. "Iago" Kissinger.1 Contrary to the foolish followers of both Mackinder and Brzezinski, at the present time, U.S. cooperation with the role of a Russia best described as "Europe in Asia," is of the highest importance for the future of a republic, our own, which is now gravely imperilled by the presently onrushing, greatest financial collapse in the existence of this planet.

The primary fact of the immediate U.S. strategic situation today, is that we are in the grip of a folly which has been, in large part, of our own government's making, the global economic and other effects, of that pro-racist, so-called "Southern Strategy," which has taken control of our leading policy-shaping institutions, since that policy was launched around the 1966-1974 Presidential ambitions of the man who became Henry A. Kissinger's charge, Richard Nixon, and Zbigniew Brzezinski's charge, Jimmy Carter of 1976-1981.1 Here, in these arrangements, Mackinder's folly has found its current nesting-place.

Nixon's pro-racist electoral dogma, which spread widely during the 1970s, from George Bush's Republican National Committee of the early 1970s, into Brzezinski's Democratic Party, has been merged with takeover of our military and related policies by the utopian, Fabian, nuclear dogmas of the Coefficients' H.G. Wells and Wells' frequent accomplice Bertrand Russell, all now combined with a wild-eyed zest for so-called neo-liberal policies. That presently resulting mish-mash of policy-making impulses, imposed upon the leadership of both those parties, as aggravated by both pro-malthusian and "geopolitical" fantasies, has misled the U.S.A., and much of the world besides, into what has converged upon becoming an ultimately national-suicidal, global disorientation. This is the orientation which has led the U.S.A. both into the present global financial and economic crisis, and into the election-crisis which erupted late in the evening of this past Nov. 7th.

Soon, as of this moment of writing, the presently accelerating global financial collapse-process, will grip the world with a mass of aggregately unpayable, combined official, and previously unregistered financial obligations, totalling in the order of hundreds of trillions of U.S. dollar equivalent.

This financial crisis is a consequence of that increasingly dangerous imbalance in physical-economic accounts, which has been built into today's world economy, by the effects of that indicated hodge-podge of ideologies presently controlling the leadership of both major parties. The result of that hodge-podge is the presently looming global financial collapse, at which point, any effort to compel the timely honoring of that mass of currently outstanding financial obligations, would result in a chain-reaction collapse of the physical economy of the world. This collapse will threaten, at that point, to plunge the level of the world's population in the direction of levels existing during the so-called New Dark Age of the Fourteenth Century.

Under the conditions of that plunge, unless that presently customary set of U.S. policies were promptly and drastically overhauled, virtually all existing nations, including the United States, would wipe themselves from the current map of the world within a matter of decades, or much less. Fortunately, even at the present, late moment, there is still time to act, if we have the will to do so.

Excepting the kinds of natural catastrophes we have yet to discover how to control, there is neither an automatic, nor external factor of mechanical predestination in the history of the human species. It is our society's actions, or failures to act, which are the causes of all mankind's disasters but natural ones. The fate which has immediately befallen us, may have become inevitable after a certain point had been reached; but, nonetheless, like today, that kind of fate is always the result of voluntary choices, or failure to make such choices, decisions to which we, or our society, had committed ourselves earlier.1 The present crisis is a perfect example of that rule. More than three decades under the sway of the Southern Strategy have now passed. You have supped and sipped long enough, and now you shall pay.

Under these conditions, the possibility of even the mere continuation of forms of civilized life, depends upon two principal considerations. These require actions which are to be prepared for now, and then to be taken, promptly, in response to the breaking out of the presently onrushing, global financial collapse. First, responsible governments of nation-states, must then act promptly to put the bankrupt world financial system into government-directed, orderly bankruptcy reorganization. Second, the power of the sovereign nation-state to create credit, and to establish national banking, must be revived immediately, to the purpose of rapid expansion of useful forms of employment and hard-commodity trade within and among nations.

For a precedent for these actions, we should look back to the way in which President Franklin Roosevelt used his overturn of those relevant, bankrupt earlier choices of our nation's policies, those by such Twentieth-Century predecessors as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge, to bring the U.S., its Constitution intact, safely through the Depression of the 1930s and the great war of the 1939-1945 interval.

The world depression hitting both the U.S.A. and the world at large today, unless stopped, will soon become far more severe than could be imagined merely from examining the case of the 1929-1932 crisis. Such differences acknowledged, the precedent provided by Roosevelt's recovery measures is, nonetheless, as appropriate to the present crisis, as then. The same principles of U.S. constitutional law, notably the "general welfare clause" of our Constitution's Preamble, apply to the remedies required; the difference is, that the action today must be not only much prompter and more sweeping than it was under President Herbert Hoover, but the action taken must be deeper and broader in scope.

Under today's new world-wide, so-called "globalized" conditions, the needed U.S. economic recovery could not be accomplished, without proportionately large emphasis on certain forms of cooperation among most of the world's nation-states. Two principal strategic changes in the structure of the relations among nations, are required inclusions, if our reforms are to succeed in bringing about the intended general economic reanimation of a chiefly ruined world economy. It is those two principal changes in relations among states reasserting their sovereignty, which, as I shall define those changes here, define the U.S.A.'s appropriate view of the future relations to be sought with Russia.

In addition to those two classes of measures bearing upon U.S. relations with Russia, we must also take into account the crucial, unique role which the modern, post-Fourteenth-Century form of European civilization, has to contribute to any successful attempt to revive the world as a whole, that to those levels which the mere use of the term "economic recovery" ought to connote.

In summary of that argument to be developed here, limiting our attention here to the example of U.S.A. economic cooperation with Eurasia, the three topics just referenced, are identified as follows.

1. The specialization of those nations formerly characterized by high rates of technological development, in reorienting, and adapting their production and related goals, to the mission of uplifting the productive powers of labor in those parts of the world which had been recently classed as "developing."

This will include an indispensable, new quality of emphasis on the nature and goals of exploration of nearby Solar space, and, also, a new concentration on fundamental scientific breakthroughs, including a timely commitment to breaking free of the prison-yard-like bounds of molecular biology, to focus on the distinctive, principled, elementary characteristics of living processes as such.

2. A fundamental change in the conception of economy, which will be produced as a by-product of the development of large-scale development corridors across Eurasia. This will be one of the most profound qualitative shifts in the economic character of transportation in the known existence of mankind to date.

3. A clearer definition of the indispensable role which the experience of modern European civilization must contribute, to ensuring an otherwise unlikely success in the economic development of East and South Asia as a whole. The successful recovery of the U.S. economy from the effects of the presently onrushing world-wide financial collapse, will depend largely on U.S. cooperation in this Eurasian development, a development in which the role of Russia, as Russia in Asia, will be pivotal for the U.S.A., more or less as much as for western Europe, Korea, and Japan.

It is from the standpoint of the last, third point to be developed here, that the crucial importance of Russia for the security of the U.S.A. is brightly illumined.

The crux of these matters is the nature of the human individual and society, a nature which distinguishes our species from all others, a nature upon which all considerations of economy depend absolutely.

That said, we now proceed to the destinations so described.

1. Man: The Essence of Strategy

The common axiom of that set of nested topics on which we are to focus attention hereinafter, is the uniqueness of the voluntary role of the human individual in shaping history. This is a role intrinsic to the special nature of the human species, whose individual member is the only creature able to willfully increase its species' potential relative population-density as a whole.

This voluntary role of the individual, is not expressed as arbitrary action, but occurs in the same rigorous form as the discovery of a valid universal physical principle in science. This unique distinction of our species, is expressed solely through the perfectly sovereign cognitive processes of the individual human mind, the quality which distinguishes our species from all others. It is through the discovery of such universal principles, and of the technologies derived from them, that the human species has developed the capability unique to itself, of willfully increasing mankind's power to exist, as measurable in physical terms, per capita, and per square kilometer, of the cross-sectional area of our planet's biosphere.

Discoveries of universal physical principles, and of the technologies derived from them, are the immediate source of the ability of society to increase its power to exist, in and over nature. However, universal physical principles alone are not sufficient to bring about both their discovery and utilization. There is a second class of universal principles, typified by Classical principles of artistic composition, which are discovered by the same kinds of mental processes through which the discovery of physical principles occurs, and are indispensable for enabling human beings to cooperate in the way in which scientific and economic progress require. These principles of Classical artistic composition, include the valid essential discoveries in study of history, upon which effective statecraft depends.

It is through the discovery of such combined classes of universal principles, and only in that way, that mankind is enabled to increase its power to exist within and over the universe. Thus, the ability to mobilize society for such discoveries and their implementation, determines the relative power of societies. Such is the essence of the principle of control, and, thus, of strategy.

The greatest increase of that relative power, has been accomplished as the outcome of a unique, Classical form of political revolution, which occurred in Europe during the course of the Fifteenth Century, the invention of a unique, new quality of institution, known as the perfectly sovereign nation-state. This development has been entirely responsible, directly or indirectly, for all of the great increase, world-wide, in both the improvement of the demographic characteristics of humanity, and in the supportable level of population, an increase which has been unleashed by the revolutionary reforms which were centered in the so-called Golden Renaissance of Fifteenth-Century Italy.

The increase of the per-capita strategic potential of national cultures of globally extended modern European civilization, has been entirely the result of the factors responsible for the rise of modern European civilization to relative cultural hegemony globally since that Golden Renaissance.

It would be great mistake, to assume that such strategic capabilities are merely instruments of armed conflict among nations. The success of that Renaissance and its outgrowth, was, that, for the first time in known human existence, an entire society premised its notions of political self-interest on a notion of principle called variously the general welfare, or the common good. It is from the adoption of the general welfare, or common good, as the primary goal of society and its government, that the relatively greatest strategic power of a culture is generated as a by-product.

In all known cultures prior to that political and cultural revolution, society was characterized typically by what is sometimes called an oligarchical principle. In short, societies such as those of ancient Mesopotamia and pagan Rome, based themselves on the subjugation of the majority of the population to the status of human cattle, under conditions of life intended to provide for the power, comfort, and pleasure of a relatively small ruling oligarchy and that oligarchy's attached retinues of armed and other lackeys. European feudalism and its customary law, was exactly such an expression of the oligarchical principle.

Thus, the malignant Dr. François Quesnay followed the tradition of the bogomils in theology, when he, consistent with that oligarchical principle, defined the titled aristocratic landowner, the shareholder, as the creator of the value of the product of the estate, and those who worked under him, as, economically, merely cattle in human form. Physiocrat Quesnay, from whose dogma Adam Smith plagiarized much of the content of his Wealth of Nations, was an ideological defender of the same oligarchical principle defended by John Locke's notion of "Life, Liberty, and Property," on which the constitution of the Confederate States of America, that tract against the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, was premised.

By using the same principle which Smith had so plagiarized, Physiocrats such as Turgot and Mirabeau accomplished a great feat, by their acts in aid of the London-directed, rapid self-destruction of the most powerful nation in Europe at that time, their own nation, France. The degradation of that nation to a brutalized condition shown by the successive tyrannies of the London-directed Jacobin terrorists, Barras, and Bonaparte's Caesar-modelled empire, was, like the imperial form of the Eighteenth-Century British monarchy, typical of the great source of relative moral and other decadence which feudal and modern Europe has inherited from ancient Roman expression of the same oligarchical principle.1

What gave to modern European culture its relatively great per-capita power, was the revolutionary overturn, during the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, of the hithero virtually unchallenged authority of the customary oligarchical principle. This Renaissance, replaced oligarchist notions of law and other statecraft, by the constitutional obligation of the sovereign form of modern nation-state, to develop the entire population, as human by nature, and to foster the development and employment of the cognitive powers of the entire population.

Without fostering the general welfare, or common good, in that way, the relative bestiality imposed upon the majority of the population, not only brutalized the oligarchy and its lackeys, but created the effect of a very poor quality of per-capita performance by the society as a whole. This relationship between a ruling, lackeyed, parasitical oligarchy, and a brutalized general population, is the typical cause for the relentless, oligarchical cycles of rise and collapse which have repeatedly ground down the cultures of Asia over the known thousands of year to date.

The Present Collapse

Now, as we may observe, in such statistics as the past twenty-three years collapse of the share of the total U.S. national income gained by the lower eighty percent of our family-income brackets, the U.S.A. itself has drifted into a pattern of ongoing change in overall social, intellectual, and physical condition, which is reminiscent of the terminal phase of once-great empires of the past.

The trend-line of relative rate of progress of a society, is delimited by the relative size of that ration of the total population which is participating in the production and efficient utilization of fundamental scientific and technological, and related cultural progress.

The political paradox with which this fact confronts all oligarchies, is that a population which has been developed in its cognitive potential, knows itself to be the social and political equal of those who might wish to regard themselves as a ruling class or caste. Thus, for the oligarchy, the defense of its caste status, has required, as it does in the U.S.A. today, the relative brutalization of the mode of life and cultural development of most of the subject population at large.

The reason that the presently reigning oligarchical currents are pushing neo-malthusian policies, is not that they are innocently ignorant of the fact, that scientific and technological progress, is the only way in which to increase the productive powers of labor. The problem is, that they also know, that a people which is developed to the cultural level of which the frontiers of modern technological progress demand, will not continue to tolerate indefinitely the political and social conditions imposed upon obedient human cattle. By "obedient," these oligarchs mean cattle of the political type which go along to the barn, the pasture, or the slaughter-house more or less willingly, because such victims are duped into believing that they "must go along, to get along." Thus, today's oligarchy has adopted malthusian policies, as the price they must pay for reducing the mass of the subject population to the intellectual and moral condition which Jonathan Swift described as Yahoos.

The evil ancient Romans controlled their own plebeians and others, through a managed public opinion, a so-called vox populi, aided to this effect by bestial forms of mass entertainment. But, in the end, Rome was doomed by the effects of its apparent successes in control of its population by such methods. So, the oligarchical interests of the U.S. today promote chiefly those forms of mass entertainment which are the most brutalizing, to drive the population in general into depraved states of intellectual development in which they are more readily manipulated, and which, thus, drive the population into a moral and intellectual condition, in which the existing system as a whole teeters at the edge of doom.

As I have emphasized this point in slightly different terms of reference, above, if one examines the downward trend, since 1977, in the share of the total U.S. national income represented by the lower 80% of family-income brackets [Figure 1], we are confronted by a reflection of just such a process of willfully dumbing-down the quality of education, entertainment, other conditions of personal life, and employment of the population, into forms more and more approximating the condition of virtual human cattle.

When we compare such contrasting trends in the cultural conditions of life of societies, we should recognize the contrary kinds of strategic changes in national and global policy-making needed to build the world's way out of the present economic crisis. Then, our definition of other kinds of strategic interests, including strategic conflicts, falls into place.

The So-Called `Peasant Mentality'

Since the source of man's successes is that human creative will, the voluntary principle, by means of which valid fundamental discoveries of universal qualities of physical and other principle are made, we should not be surprised to learn, that the state of mind which believes in divine, mechanical, or simply statistical predestination, is often the source of the most grievous self-inflicted wounds the human species may bring upon itself.

Traditionally, this state of mind has been often identified as "the peasant mentality," because it often reflects the deadening effect of subjecting successive generations of people, to the conditions of life dictated by the Code of the Emperor Diocletian, such as the cattle-like conditions of life endured, over many successive generations, by the feudal serf. As the case of the relatively superior intellectual achievements of the modern, post-1930s form of U.S. family farm attests, the peasant problem was not a fruit of agricultural practices, but has been the outcome of brutalizing, virtual enserfing of the producer of such goods, as U.S. agricultural policy has been doing, since Jimmy Carter became the U.S. President in 1977.

"Do not think. Do as your fathers and grandfathers did before you. Your business is not to think, but to do as you are told, and to produce. Shut up, and bring in the money!" Or, a parent, or teacher might produce a similar, destructive effect on the mind of a child or adolescent: "Don't question; just learn! When you graduate, it will be time enough to begin to make up your own opinion about such matters."

From such induced superstitions, came the Luddites of Nineteenth-Century England, and the most fanatical among the malthusian ideologues of today. Such mental disorders may have been embedded in the conditioning, of successive generations of feudal serfs; the same type of effect is produced by "programmed learning," and other modes of drill-and-grill education, or by recreational and other use of drugs which dull the mind.1 Addictive forms of electronic games, intended for children, adolescents, and, increasingly, the training of military and police recruits, have kindred, or even worse effects.

Thus, one encounters psychopathologies such as "fundamentalist" predestination cults, and similar phenomena, most often among those brutalized strata of the population whose cultural background is of relatively the poorest quality, such as the more brutalized rural, and urban ghetto regions of the U.S.A. The basis for the wish to believe in such cults, is a conditioned lack of sense of moral responsibility for the consequences of the irrational quality of the ideas they are pushing. Such so-called "millenarians," for example, are thinking, and believing like brutalized serfs, like human cattle. Being degraded to the outlook of human cattle, the essential quality of humanity, the voluntary principle, is unknown to them. For such, God himself is a pathetic tyrant, a prisoner of those decrees he is thereby predestined to obey blindly! Hence, we have our "fundamentalist" predestination cults, and the deluded true believers in "free trade" with them.

Often, in such cases, there is also a correlated history of "bipolar" abuse of family members, and of others, with or without alcoholic syndromes to match. Such traits are often passed down, generation after generation, from parent to child, or among "recovering addicts." Similar impairment of the cognitive powers, is typical among children and youth abandoned most of their days to a feral life, a virtual "wolf boy," "on the street," and so on. The brutalization of the serf, typical of feudalism, and equally malicious, or the even worse practices of ancient Rome, ancient Sparta, Babylon, and so on, not only induce awful ignorance in those relegated to the status of human cattle, they induce certain cultural strains of brutishness, passed from parent to child, as well.

The victims of such beliefs and related impulses, lack a real sense of cognitive "free will," the will-power to change their own behavior, as reason should have prompted them to overturn willfully the axiomatic habits to which they had been previously conditioned. When confronted with a technology or conceptions which are alien to their acquired habits, they shun the change, on one pretext or another, simply because they react to any perceived insult to their preexisting prejudices, as either a frightening, or enraging provocation.

Today's urban populations of neo-malthusian fanatics, tend to reflect forms of conditioning to similar psychopathological effects. Hence, since pagan Rome, the most brutalized and culturally debased sectors of a population, tend to be the most fanatical believers in the unshakeable authority of what they perceive to be "popular opinion."

Such phenomena, as expressed in the form of the "peasant problem," may have been inculcated over earlier generations, as by subjection to serfdom, or they may be willfully induced in modern urbanized populations, that by methods which replicate the characteristics of rural deprivation within an urban setting, or by current, cognitively stultifying trends in secondary and higher education generally.

So, it is among the victims of such anti-cognitive conditioning, either by special circumstances of individual life, by cultural heritage, or by mass manipulation, which typify the attraction of so-called populist currents to mass-based fascist, or pro-fascist political movements, and the like. The adaptation by a government, or other leading institutions of influence, to a political mass base of that type, is a typical recipe for a great tragedy of an entire people. It is stubbornly clinging to trite prejudices and other so-called traditions, which is the most common source of the doom an ill-fated nation, or entire culture may have brought upon itself. The inducing of that pathological condition in a population, also represents a kind of strategy commonly employed by the oligarchy.

Adam Smith and the Little Green Men

Typical of the fruits of such mental disorders, are the "little green men under the floor-boards" dogmas of history and economics, which insist that "free trade," even if the actions practiced are immoral ones, must lead, statistically, to the best ultimate results. This belief also expresses the essence of the theology of so-called millenarian and other predestination cults.

The argument, as this is made, variously, by bogomil theology, by Bernard Mandeville, François Quesnay, Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, the utilitarians generally, and so on, is a fairy-tale doctrine, which argues, as Adam Smith does, and as Vice-President Al Gore has insisted most vociferously, and also brutally,1 that in the tiny statistical cracks among the percussive interactions in the very small, there are "little green men under the floorboards," working away. This, for empiricists and other believers, is a mysterious, god-like potency, perhaps the pagan god Pan, which ensures, as Mephistopheles lured Faust, as Mandeville taught, and as the drug-legalizers insist, that the worst "free" choice of action must contribute to the greatest ultimate good.

We encounter a predestination lunacy of a closely related type, among those modern Faustians called German Romantics, such as Immanuel Kant. We hear from such sources, much superstitious chatter about some magical potency called the "World Spirit," "The Spirit of the Age," Zeitgeist, or simply the mysterious force of mysteriously predetermined changes in custom.

Always, in irrational cults and kindred popularized beliefs, we encounter the same fatal error of the willing, cow-like victim of the oligarchical principle. All varieties of such cults express a principle which can be summed up in a single superstitious idiom: "It's in the cards!" says the witch, or, "In the stars!" says the astrologer. So, as I had said, in shanty-towns of religious fervor, this is typically expressed by lunatic faith in the existence of even the Creator's enslavement to a predetermined date for a future great Battle of Armageddon.

In politics, this same superstitious obsession, is often reflected darkly by allusion to the belief that a certain imminent change "will never happen, in your lifetime, or mine," as has been frequently heard in response to my now fully vindicated forecasts, until very recently.

Yet, the great global crisis which I had forewarned was systematically inevitable, as long as certain popularized choices were not changed, as I argued for this against virtually all official and related opinion, has just now happened. Now, the world as we know it, will now live or die, according to its voluntarist response, or lack of such response, to the implications of what had been my warning. In fact, changes which most putative experts insisted were never possible, will come pouring out, one after the other, during the continuing aftermath of the Nov. 7th U.S. Presidential-election disaster.

Thus, progress is neither predestined, nor a mere possibility, but an imperative presented to the individual, and common, voluntary will. This means the transformation of the daily practice of nations in a manner consistent with endless unfolding of scientific and technological progress. Other requirements also exist, but there exists no substitute for the benefits of changes rooted in scientific and technological progress.

The great source of danger to society, especially in times of existential crises, such as the present one, is therefore a stubborn resistance to those kinds of sweeping changes which are either represented by scientific and technological progress, or which cohere with them. It is the force of so-called "traditional society," the force of "popular opinion," which shows itself recurrently in history, as the chief cause of the self-inflicted doom or other grave disasters suffered by entire cultures. Malthusian and kindred policies today, are thus to be ranked as among the greatest present threats to the continued survival of civilization, perhaps even of mankind as a species.

We have reached the point at which the avoidance of a prolonged, planet-wide new dark age, depends, absolutely, on a great, forced-draft application of scientific and technological progress throughout nearly the entirety of this planet. Putting to one side, for a moment, the resistance we must expect from the world's financier oligarchy and its booted and other lackeys, the great obstacle to cultural survival of our planet, will be resistance from within the masses of the very populations which we must rescue from their present plight.

On that account, we must have great sensitivity to that latter problem, of irrational clinging to custom, as a crucial quality of strategic obstacle to survival of existing nations and their cultures. As Christianity teaches, winning support from the reluctant beneficiaries of our good will, to the measures on which their own survival depends, is one of the leading moral challenges, a true strategic challenge before us now.

Thus, once again, the nature of man is the essence of strategy, including our strategic perspective toward Russia today.

2. What Happened to Russia?

What happened to the Soviet Union? Some people might agree, that Russia went directly from Socialism to Jail, "without passing Go," and without collecting the legendary "$200." Because I had presented a very carefully considered forecast, which I reported to relevant official Soviet and U.S. channels, in the course of a back-channel action, back during February 1983, I can now address the question, "What happened to Russia?" with a special degree of relative authority.

In February 1983, I put my life-long reputation on the line, warning that, if the Soviet Union continued the policy which I was given assurance it preferred, that the Soviet economy would reach a point of collapse in "about five years." I later repeated that forecast publicly, in relevant EIR publications. In an October 12, 1988 Berlin press conference, broadcast shortly after that on U.S. network television, I forecast the relatively imminent collapse of the Soviet economic system, as about to occur, with the early reunification of Germany, and the probable commitment to reestablish Berlin as its capital, as a leading edge of the then onrushing economic crisis of the Soviet system as a whole. It happened, as I had forecast, in eastern Europe, in 1989.

That forecast was premised on economic considerations, but also ominously, Classically tragic cultural factors, which I had recognized in the Soviet leadership itself.

The House That Lenin Built

The great historical irony of it all, was that the very existence of the Soviet Union, in the first place, occurred solely because of a unique, explicitly voluntarist policy and role by V.I. Lenin. With the rest of the Communist Party leaders, but without Lenin's personal, explicitly voluntarist role, the Soviet Union would have never come into existence, and Adolf Hitler, or something like him, would probably never have been defeated. The details of that history has filled volumes; the case I make has been massively documented, and therefore need not be recapitulated in detail here. It is the significance of the voluntarist principle, which is the crucial point of current strategic importance bearing upon Russia's prospects for the 1980s, and, again, today.

The point is, that the action of Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov effectively doomed the Soviet system to the ensuing concluding acts of what thus became its tragic, briefly continued existence, in summarily rejecting the previously discussed policy which President Ronald Reagan proffered in his March 23, 1983 televised broadcast to the world. It was on the basis of the forewarning to me, that Andropov were likely to commit such a tragic blunder, that I, on that occasion in February 1983, informed both the Soviet channel and relevant U.S. officials, of my dour estimation of the medium- to long-term consequences of an expected Andropov rejection of the offer.

When the Soviet system had collapsed, under Gorbachev, over the interval 1989-1991, I was struck by the fact, then and later, that no account of what had actually happened to cause the fall of Soviet system, was visibly forthcoming from seasoned circles of veterans of that experience. The patient died of an undefined disease, but no autopsy was conducted, or, apparently, even desired, by the relevant prospective mourners.

In effect, in that manner, as I said, the resulting spectacle is fairly described as "The Soviet system went from Socialism to Jail, without passing Go."

The talented, but recklessly amoral and greedy young Russian opportunists, bought up, cheaply, in dozens-lots, by the U.S. Republican Party, and others, recruited largely from among the scions of the former Soviet Nomenklatura, plunged directly into the most lunatic version of contemporary financier capitalism, without any thought for either the consequences of their role, or what lesson might have been learned from the sinking of what had been widely regarded as the unsinkable Soviet Titanic. This is the unresolved issue of recent history, which not only haunts, but menaces the future of Russia, to the present day.

Take into account the fact, that the living residue of former Soviet society, includes some of the world's leading scientists and academicians, whose competence would be a credit to any nation today. After the devastating initial impact of Germany's Barbarosa of 1941, the Soviet defense policy echoed the success of Czar Alexander I and his Prussian military and other advisors, in luring and trapping a forerunner of Adolf Hitler, Bonaparte, and then falling upon the rear of the retreating invader's forces. The heroism and leadership shown in the crucial and terrible holding operations at Moscow and Leningrad, and the trap set at Stalingrad, are of exceptional note, especially considering the typically qualitative combat superiority of the trained Wehrmacht forces. It was not a lack of talent, relative intellectual competence, or of sense of mission, which undermined the Soviet system.

Such things considered, where lies the tragic flaw? Certainly, none of the usual slush pushed out as analysis of the causes of that collapse, from the so-called liberal press internationally, or leaders of U.S. or most west European political parties, are better than trashy fantasies on this account. The key lies in the notion of the voluntary principle. This is not a matter of armchair autopsy of past events. The future of Russia as a prospective partner, is the point of reference for what I report here.

The specific, unique role of V.I. Lenin, in the history of Russia, lies in the continuation of his break with the leadership of the entire European social-democracy, over the issue of voluntarism. This specific outlook, on this account, governed Lenin's essentially correct strategic perspective, respecting the outcome of Russia's entry, in concert with its British and French allies, into the folly of a needless war against Germany. After the strategically crucial assassination of Jaurès in France, circumstances situated Lenin's view as the available actual outcome.

In essentials, Lenin foresaw that neither the Czar, nor the leading candidates for the position of reformers, had the insight and the will to focus on a certain single, crucial strategic flank in the entirety of Russia's political situation under those war-time conditions. None was capable of executing a grand strategic flanking approach, of acting in what was generally considered as an unthinkable way, just as the Austrian commanders failed to anticipate the unthinkable flanking action employed by Frederick the Great, to rout the superior force of Austrians at Leuthen. Lenin's choice of strategic flanking action was elementary: pull a war-sick Russia, and its war-sick military veterans, out of the war at all costs.

No one else had the combined situation, guts, and insight to do that, as is illustrated by the way in which relevant Soviet leaders Bukharin and Trotsky both lost their nerve in the course of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations with Germany.

Among the most intriguing of the paradoxes I have met in military and related history, are the instances in which an able commander, even one representing physically or morally inferior forces, is able, as Hannibal obliterated the Romans at Cannae, to seize decisive flanking control of the field of action. An important study of the historical generality of this apparent anomaly, was examined under Germany's Chief of Staff von Schlieffen, a study associated with an operation which would have won the war immediately, if it had been carried out as prescribed, which would have defeated the combined British and French forces at near the outset of World War I. A similarly innovative application of the principle of the flank, was designed and implemented to bring about the British and French rout at Dunkirk in World War II. General MacArthur's leadership during World War II, repeatedly exhibited such qualities. Lenin's seizure of power in Russia, is clearly among the most brilliant of such anomalous strategic successes in modern history.

Thus, especially after the successful Soviet coup d'état, to the great powers arrayed against Soviet Russia, Lenin was the target to be eliminated, first and foremost, on all counts. What menaced those powers' chosen interests, was not Lenin's not exactly brilliant economic theory, nor any of the other "usual stuff" featured in Soviet and other officially approved studies of Marxism-Leninism. Two things were crucial: Lenin's sense of mission, and his reliance on the voluntary principle as the instrument through which to conduct a successful mission.

The danger which Lenin represented to the post-1917 British, French, and the Woodrow Wilson Administration, was Lenin's ability and proclivity to rely upon the creative force of the voluntary principle, as the instrument chosen to govern the shaping of the next action in his passionately adopted choice of mission. Thus, for the relevant Allies, Lenin was deadly, precisely because he was, for them, as for all pedants and kindred types, unpredictable, or, better said, incalculable in the minds of his principal adversaries, as all great commanders have used an action which was incalculable in the minds of opposing commanders, in designing and executing the truly spectacular flanking operations in known history.

All truly great scientists, and also great Classical artists, share an exceptional amount of that specific quality.

Lenin was not much as a scientist, but he had a certain quality of creative artistry in statecraft, a quality virtually lacking in the entirety of the rest of the world's socialist leadership, the entirety of his contemporaries among the Soviet leadership included. Trotsky later compared himself to Lenin, but Trotsky's reputation for brilliance, while not entirely undeserved, often owed as much or more to the intended impressions left by the display of his cultivated vanity, than capability for rigorous scientific thinking. The matter of Brest-Litovsk is typical of the weakness in Trotsky, especially in light of the way this matter came up in the aftermath of the vindication of Lenin's policy on the seizure of power itself. Trotsky's failure of nerve was not incidental; under the circumstances, it must be assessed as systemic.

It was on my understanding of this conflict over voluntarism within Soviet society, that I premised my 1983-1988 assessment of the coming breakdown of the Soviet system.

As I have already stressed, if we take into account the numerous truly creative and productive intellects from recent Soviet and Russian life, it is not the lack of potential creativity in the Russian population, which was the cause of the problem on which I was focussed during the 1970s and early 1980s. The fatal flaw lay in the systemic dimensions of the then existing Soviet society considered as a political-cultural whole, especially the leading circles of its political command. It was as if the heavy political-cultural hand of so-called "Soviet bureaucratic objectivity" were "Burking" the life out of Russia's political and economic creativity.

From that point of reference, in examining more closely the Soviet patterns from the 1970s, that the basis for my forecast became apparent to me. On the one side, the attritional processes of ultimately bottomless decay in the Soviet economic system, were not only knowable, but were becoming most conspicuous. The strategically problematic side of the matter, was the potentially fatal pathological emphasis on explicitly anti-voluntarist "objectivity" within the relevant Soviet leadership layers. That "objectivity," which was the chief cause of the system's attrition, made the outcome a predominantly predictable one. The strategic problem thus posed, took the following form.

Were there a replica of Lenin well-situated within the Soviet leadership of the 1960s and 1970s, had he not been shot by his colleagues, perhaps on charges of "voluntarist deviationism," the reaction to the evidence would have been a search for a crucial flanking-attack approach to the Soviet economic situation.

I, in fact, did present such a case to both my own government and the Soviet channels, in exploratory discussions of the proposal which became the SDI offer made by President Reagan on March 23, 1983. My approach was, blow the entire "détente" hoax of Bertrand Russell, John J. McCloy, Henry A. Kissinger, et al., out of the water, and approach both the lunacy of nuclear MADness and the oncoming Soviet economic breakdown from a fresh standpoint. That standpoint was a new approach, based on the factor of a global strategic, "science driver" policy, using the development and application of "new physical principles," rather than missile deployments, and related arms negotiations, to managing the relations between the U.S.A. and Soviet Union.

Contrary to the silly fellows in the Congress and elsewhere, who are pushing their Rube Goldberg parodies of ballistic missile defense currently, it would have worked, had a U.S.-Soviet agreement to this effect been adopted. In such a case, relevant leading circles among the U.S.A.'s NATO allies, and others, would have heartily joined in the effort. Numerous relevant circles inside the Soviet system, as in the U.S.A., western Europe, and so on, agreed with me personally on this point, although the Carter "Southern Strategy" Democrats, Henry A. Kissinger, and circles of Vice-President George Bush, et al., agreed with Soviet General Secretary Andropov and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in stiff opposition to me on this issue.

What Sank the System?

In other words, what sank the Soviet system, was not what it did, but what it failed to do. It was not so much a failure of the system as such, as the incompetence of the management, a kind of incompetence rather typical of, and becoming worse, among managements of corporations, and also leading political parties and candidacies, now in the process of going belly-up in the U.S.A. and elsewhere today. Perhaps a contributing reason for attempting to blame the economy for the errors actually made by its management, might be, like the mention of the rope in the house of the hanged, an awkward choice of topic among the managements and political leaders of today's economies of western Europe and the U.S.A. The Soviet system's management wrecked itself, and its economy, with its own "socialist objectivity," a suicidal inclination inhering in the popularly expressed aversion to the kind of voluntarism exemplified by the case of Lenin's coup of 1917.

That management failed to understand, that the only way to save Russia's economy, was to change its flawed character as an economy, not by shooting the Mont Pelerin Society's variety of neo-liberalism up its veins, as Gorbachev et al. sought to do, but by a heavy dose of Colbertism, of Alexander Hamilton, a heavy dose of voluntarism expressed in the form of a science-driver revision of the world economy's then prevailing orientation. That is where things really went wrong for them; failing to locate that as pin-pointing the cause of the system's collapse, contributed greatly to the state of confusion and tolerance of mismanagement which dominated most of the 1992-1999 interval.

In a certain sense, it was indeed Marxism that ultimately did Lenin's Soviet heritage in. The cause was not so much the flaws in Marx's economic theory as such, but the pathological streak of reductionism, inherited from the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment, inherited from the tendentious way Marx, and Engels more so, thought wrongly about history and the nature of man in general. It was the philosophical reductionism, by which Marx's philosophical disorientation had contributed so much, in his fostering the prevalent philosophical mediocrity of the international social-democracy. The intellectual mediocrity, the sheer pedantry of Plekhanov, Karl Kautsky, et al. was essentially at fault. This was the mediocrity over which Lenin broke with Plekhanov, which was the root of the problem. It might be said, therefore, that the Soviet system died of an overdose of social-democracy. It was Marx's and the social-democracy's prevalent, so-called "objective" misconception of the nature of man, which, thus, contributed so much to doing the Soviet system in.

Why the SDI Would Have Worked

The lessons to be learned from such considerations, are not specifically limited to the Soviet case. A general, universal principle of statecraft is involved. The Lenin case, as stated above, is but one more relevant illustration of that principle. The lesson is implicit in the universality of the voluntary principle itself.

Consider the question, that if we constitute society in such an organized form, that significant amounts of error are allowed, in the interest of promoting the development and exercise of creativity: Where, then, do the limits of tolerance of such error lie, and how do we manage the relationships so implicitly defined?

To summarize the answer to that in the simplest way possible, without introducing new kinds of error, it should be said, that as in the case of the error-stricken, virtually fatal policy-making of the U.S.A. today, where do we draw the line, beyond which a failure to muster a prompt correction of a potentially fatal mistake in policy, leads to the doom of the nation or culture?

That is a short summary of the point, but does not represent an apology for pragmatism in any sense. Human individuals are not brought to adolescence and maturity as if they were robotic computer systems without historical memory of their own creation and ancestry. The healthy development of the infant, child, and adolescent, is a socialized process of maturation, which is dominated by the reliving of the cognitive history of past generations, by the young of today.

The model form of desired development follows the same pathway as the use of the Classical humanist policy for education, instead of the doubtful qualities of combining textbook instruction with mechanically scored qualifying examinations. In principle, the student should re-experience the original act of discovery of each universal principle, in its place in history, and become familiar with the history of mankind and of ideas by general employment of that same approach. From a Classical-humanist approach, rather than those generally used in U.S. public and higher education today, a relatively superior quality of secondary and university graduate is achieved.

The adult who has benefitted from a Classical-humanist approach to knowledge of history of societies and ideas, relies upon a corresponding scientific method, rather than a pragmatic one, for judging stated and implied policies of practice for tomorrow and today. On this account, we must recognize that, of necessity, the adolescent and adult who has come to maturity through aid of the Classical-humanist method, will have, in general, a significant margin of moral and intellectual advantage over those who have come to maturity by a different route.

Thus, there is variation in the degree of ability of a government and its electorate, to make morally acceptable qualities of judgment in a timely way. However, the basis for such judgment is scientific, not pragmatic in quality.

The crux of the design-principle underlying the SDI, is to be found in the most elementary universal principle of a branch of physical science developed by Gottfried Leibniz, in work conducted during the interval 1671-1716: The Science of Physical Economy. It was my original discoveries in that field, which supplied the root-basis for the proposal.

The crux of the matter was my recognition that the "Achilles' heel" of the entire utopian strategic nuclear conception, as this had been originated by H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, was premised upon a wild error of axiomatic assumption pervading the life's work of Russell himself. Russell had presumed, in his 1945 plan for threatening a "preventive" nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and also later, that he, his lackey Leo Szilard, and Szilard's accomplices such as John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, and Bundy's apprentice Henry A. Kissinger, had devised a perfect system for using nuclear terror to establish a Roman-style, Anglo-American world empire, as Leo "Dr. Strangelove" Szilard had prescribed the kernel of this mechanism in his celebrated 1958 Pugwash address at Quebec.

That mortal error in Russell's thinking about nearly everything, including this matter, was his fanatical refusal to believe that physical science actually existed. Considering his frequent, if exaggerated claims to science, that was very inconsistent of him, but all of Russell's consistencies lay in his consistent adherence to sophistry, in the manner in which he crafted his systemic inconsistencies.

He was formally consistent in his fanatical adherence to the crudest sort of reductionism in matters of "ivory tower" mathematics and related forms of deductive constructs, as his role in the writing of the Principia Mathematica, and in shaping the life's work of his acolytes, as the case of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann attests. But, at the same time, he managed to delude himself, and his acolytes, into faith in those constructs, by consistently denying any principled sort of reality, such as the evidence of experimental physical science, which threatened to call his purely deductive constructs into doubt. There lay the built-in vulnerability of the Russell-Szilard design of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD), the basis for the entirety of what has become the post-1945 utopian doctrine of the errant currents within the U.S. national-security establishment. Therein lies the same axiomatic basis for the doom of the so-called "new economy" now ongoing in the U.S.A., and elsewhere, today.

Even more interesting, and more relevant for today, is the motive of the Anglo-American oligarchical establishment for falling prey to Russell's hoax. The continuing motive of the Venice-modelled Anglo-American financier-oligarchical establishment, especially since the defeat of the Confederacy, has been to rid the world of the Golden Renaissance-created, modern institution of the sovereign nation-state, and thus to ensure that the world of masses of virtual human cattle be herded or culled, as the pleasure of a ruling oligarchy might require, forever. The avowedly satanic co-conspirators Wells and Russell, had placed their palms upon Wells' The Open Conspiracy, and sworn their eternal fidelity to that intention.

The design put forward by Wells and Russell was clearly insane, morally and otherwise, but the worst evils which have ever come to rule over nations, such as the principal cultural features of ancient Rome, usually are.

Thus, the picaresque Wells and the decadent aristocrat Russell, like Cervantes' lusting Sancho Panza and looney old Don Quixote, had conceived their utopian's plan to conquer the mind of the world. So, like the foolish, real-life Sancho Panzas and Don Quixotes of Sixteenth-Century Hapsburg Spain, the ruling oligarchy of Wells' and Russells' time and place, had found their rantings useful. So, many ambitious lackeys and other fools of sundry higher and lower rank, such as John J. McCloy and Kissinger, out of their wish to be considered and rewarded as useful by that oligarchy, put themselves at the disposal of that utopian venture.

For me, the crux of the matter, whether against Russell and Kissinger, or relevant other types, was always the issue of contrasting views respecting the elementary principle of human nature. The core of that controversy, for me as for Russell, was, and will always remain just that.

Here lies the key to the design of SDI. I begin my explanation of that point with a rather crucial technical observation which must, nonetheless, be put on the record at this point.

What Russell's system demands, as the case of his Principia Mathematica illustrates this point, is the outlawing of the acknowledgment of the actual or possible existence of any universal physical principle, other than the arbitrary notions of space, time, and matter associated with "ivory tower" varieties of Euclidean geometry. That writing, from which intended collaborator Alfred North Whitehead disassociated himself, is to be understood as Russell attempting to play Voltaire to Carl Gauss' Leibniz. Most specifically, Russell's Principia is an attempted parody of Gauss' celebrated Disquisitiones Mathematicae. This connection was underlined by Russell himself, in his attacks, echoing Maxwell's, on the methods of physical geometry of Leibniz, Gauss, Weber, and Riemann, among others.

This sweeping and malicious incompetence in Russell's mathematical system, is his insistence that physical science is unnecessary, and perhaps even undesirable. For Russell, physical science, and its evidence, must never be permitted to intrude upon the higher, supreme authority of a radically logical-positivist form of utopian mathematics. Precisely there, lay the outflankable flaw in the utopian strategic system of Russell and his followers. Here lies the key to the technical principle of SDI.

In the Gauss-Riemann form of mathematics which is derived from the experimental physical science tradition of Plato, Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz, the discovery of a valid universal physical principle occurs as both an axiom of the entire mathematical-physical system, and a discontinuity in the previously defined fabric of mathematical physics prior to that discovery. This evolutionary characteristic of science, as recognized in Johannes Kepler's New Astronomy, defines, contrary to the random impressions of Russell's von Neumann, the only sane usage of the term non-linear. On this account, the effort to follow Heraclitus' famous ontological principle, that "nothing is constant but change," to thus define a correspondingly evolutionary form of mathematical physics, requires that deductive syllogisms, such as those of Russell's Principia, be superseded by the methods of what is named, alternatively, Analysis Situs, or geometry of position, as Bernhard Riemann argued for that same approach.

In such a Riemannian view of fundamental scientific progress, the acquisition of new valid universal physical principles, generates a relatively higher order of manageable physical domain, which is inherently capable of dominating the domain it supersedes, just as living processes, through the biosphere, dominate our planet as a whole, perhaps slowly, but increasingly. It followed from this principle of science, that any relevant system which could dominate characteristically, in a Riemannian sense, the technology of strategic ballistic missile barrages, represented a pathway to a successful method for significantly neutralizing the intended strategic goals of a general strategic ballistic missile assault. In the agreed diplomatic language of the so-called "superpowers," this aperture in the MAD system was loosely defined as "new physical principles."

Exactly how this applied to the situation during the 1980s, is not essential to the discussion of the point immediately at hand here. That was covered in materials published during that period, and my published reflections on that subject more recently. The point here, is the relationship of such an indicated science-driver policy for dealing with strategic ballistic missile threats, to the role of the same science-driver in changing fundamentally the increasingly perilous situation inside the Soviet economy in general. The point today, is the relevance of the same kind of thinking about science-driver policies and programs, for dealing not only with the economic crisis of Russia today, but that of the world in general.

The principle at issue, then as now, is fairly summed up as follows. The rate at which we can bring valid new discoveries of universal physical principles into being for general practice, has always been, and will forever be, the primary source of mankind's ability to increase the absolute productive powers of labor, to increase the power of the entire human species to survive and prosper in our universe. The great challenge implied in this principle, is the need to sustain the rate of such progress at levels in excess of the incurred "frictional" rates of attrition.

The most effective means yet known for realizing such improvements in the general welfare of mankind as a whole, is a strategy associated with the notion of "science-driver crash programs," such as the SDI was proposed to become. In the progressive development within today's globally extended European civilization, from Plato's Academy of Athens, through the best modern practice, the following description is a fair approximation of what experience with attempts at such a "science driver" policy, signifies for today's practice.

The building of such a program begins with a certain improvement, made according to the principle of a Classical-humanist mode of education, in the institutions of general and higher education. This means, from the top down, a virtually exclusive devotion to the combined, functionally inseparable matters of Classical subject-matters of physical science and artistic composition, and a design for building-up to the peak of such professional achievement through primary, secondary, and undergraduate programs implemented in consistency with the same Classical-humanist method famously proposed by Friedrich Schiller and his friend Wilhlem von Humboldt for Germany.

The general principle of education, is that the student shall be required to learn very little, but, instead, must re-experience the original acts of discovery of the great principles of science and Classical artistic composition, by reliving those acts of discovery in terms of the best possible approximation of the specific historical circumstances under which those original discoveries were made. The object, is to develop the moral character of the emerging future adult through the exercise of the cognitive potential of the pupil in this way. The intended result of such an educational program, is, that at its summit of achievement, it shall produce the future great statesmen of society, whatever other specialized professional competencies they may achieve. The included goal of such modes of education, is, as Schiller emphasized, to produce adult persons of the combined quality of patriotic citizens of their nation, and also world citizens of humanity.

This design for the kind of educational system a science-driver crash program demands, requires that great emphasis be placed upon both pedagogical experimentation bearing upon the principles so addressed historically, and also the research laboratories in which proof-of-principle, and derived exploration is being conducted.

By situating the shaping of the emerging economic policies of society in the exploration and perfection of new physical principles, as Riemann, for example, defines such principles, we turn the design of the relevant, fundamental proof-of-principle experiments, and their successes, into the technology driver for the machine-tool-grade section of the productive processes of the society in general. By mobilizing the society for very high rates of turnover in successive discoveries and their applications, in this way, the institutional mechanisms of a so-called "science-driver crash program" are set into motion.

In the economy considered as a whole, the greatest emphasis is placed on investment and employment in those categories of research and development and machine-tool-like production which reflect a high rate of turnover in technological revolutions applied to general practice. This requires that the flow of relevant expenditures and investments be channelled into the realization of the relatively highest possible rate of technological revolutionizing of the processes of production and distribution, and product design.

On condition that the adoption of such mechanisms and types of priorities, in a so-called "dirigist" mode, prevails, the rate of relative success of such a national or global mobilization, will depend crucially on the quality of certain special mission-objectives whose adoption puts a point on the spear of progress. Today, a mission-oriented space program, combined with drive toward breakthroughs respecting the principles of living processes and so-called microphysical frontiers, typifies the tip of the spear of progress suited for a global "science-driver crash program" for the world as a whole.

It is the future of the present world in crisis, seen from that standpoint of reference, which most efficiently situates the strategically crucial contribution a partnership with Russia signifies for the benefit of the world as a whole.

The potential of Russia for this kind of undertaking lies, at present, chiefly in the shrinking residue of what is left over today from Russia's and the Soviet system's scientific legacies from the past. Unless those potentialities are activated very soon, the possibility of producing the required new generation of Russia's scientists, which such a mission implies, will virtually vanish through presently ongoing, recently accelerating attrition of personnel and facilities.

This is not a problem limited to Russia as such. The rapacious destruction of the intellectual and related scientific capabilities of the populations of North America, western Europe, and elsewhere, over the recent thirty-odd years, since the 1966-1967 sharp curtailment of the Kennedy space program, has destroyed the greater part of the scientific and related potential of the world as a whole.

This is typified, and also greatly aggravated, by the monstrous destruction of the technological competence of managements and their industries, which had still existed a dozen years ago. The destruction of economy and technology caused by the cancerously growing influence of the cult of "information theory," has brought about, in and of itself, without considering other factors, a destruction of the potential productive powers of labor which future generations, if there are any available, will regard, in retrospect, as an unspeakable monstrosity. Without a reawakening and revitalization of that which has been destroyed through the effect of corrosive policies, during the recent thirty-odd years, the hopes for avoiding a plunge of the world into a new dark age are now in the process of vanishing.

Should recent neo-liberal and related policy-trends continue in force, humanity is, indeed, foredoomed to pay a great bill for what it has recently supped and sipped away.

The largely sleeping and wasting scientific and technological potential of Russia, is, thus, to be recognized as a crucial part of the potential to be reawakened and set into motion, if the world as a whole is to avert a slide into a probably prolonged new dark age.

Such are the lessons to be learned from the otherwise frustrating experience with the effort to implement what President Reagan named the SDI. Such are but some of the crucial benefits to be achieved through an appropriate view of what I shall now describe as "Russia in Asia."

3. A Twenty-Five Year Policy

The principal physical precondition for a global economic recovery, will be an initial emphasis upon a massive infusion of large-scale and other development of basic economic infrastructure. We must set into motion now, what shall become the greatest infrastructure-development program ever projected for this planet. Such infrastructural development, is typified by large-scale development of transportation systems, power generation and distribution, water management and sanitation, rehabilitation and increase of the numbers of urban centers, education, and of systems providing for general hygiene and health-care.

This leading role of development of basic economic infrastructure, will supply the stimulus for an increasing role of growth in private investments in agriculture and industry, like flesh grown upon the ribs provided by the new infrastructure.

The development of new such systems, and rehabilitation of the old, is broadly divided into two classifications, fairly named "main trunk" and "branch" systems. In respect to the hard infrastructure as such, we are speaking of development of installed improvements which run to approximately a twenty-five-year span of financing, at borrowing charges not in excess of 1-2% annual simple interest. Most of the financing for these programs will not come as private financial investments, although an increasing proportion of private participation is desirable; but, rather, through the use of lines of trade-credit generated from the authority inhering in sovereign nation-state governments.

Since the base-line for all other large-scale economic progress will be provided by the development of infrastructure, the recovery of this planet from its presently perilous physical-economic and political condition, must be approached as an investment program of an initial twenty-five-year span of infrastructure's development. To sort out the financial and other claims in bankruptcy proceedings, which will be forced upon us by the presently collapsing world financial system, will require a highly regulated, state-pivotted system of managed public credit, over a span of approximately a quarter century.

For the purposes of discussion here, we focus upon some typical features of such prospective development in Eurasia, especially continental Eurasia. For this purpose, focus upon the map of Eurasia in the following terms. To serve the interest of coherence, some brief restatement of points made above shall be included in this portion of the account.

The Map of Eurasian Development

Eurasia as a whole has the following most prominent features [Figure 2]. To the west, there is western continental Europe, whose central region, typified by the Paris, Vienna, Berlin triangle, has been, until about a decade ago, the most densely developed scientific and industrial potential of the world as a whole. Looking eastward toward the coastal areas of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the awesome and growing populations of China and India dominate the landscape. On the rim of East Asia, there are the modern economies of Japan and Korea. And there is populous, Southeast Asia, with its very high ratio of coastal maritime regions to its land mass. In between, in central and northern Asia, there are rich natural resources sitting in an area too poorly developed to realize much of that potential economically.

Go back to the U.S.A. of the early through middle to third quarter of the Nineteenth Century, where we see a vast, continental area, from the Atlantic to Pacific, welded into a single functioning nation by the consequences of the initial development of the continental railway system. Then, in the wake of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, observe the revolution which was made in the economic policy of Chancellor Bismarck's Germany and in the undertakings of the great Russian scientist Mendeleyev and the role of the great admirer of the Hamilton-Carey-List American System of political-economy, Count Sergei Witte. Observe the emergence of the Trans-Siberian Railway, designed economically and politically according to the model used for the transcontinental railway system in the U.S.A.

The combination of the victory of the U.S.A. over the British puppet, the Confederacy, established the U.S.A. as a leading world power, and also showed that U.S.A. to have emerged as leading the world in agricultural and industrial development, although not yet in science. The success of the return to the Franklin-Hamilton-Carey-List American System of political-economy, and that economy's superiority over the British liberal model, during the developments of 1861-1876 period, prompted many nations around the world to adopt the American System model for themselves. Such nations included Japan, Germany, and Russia, in addition to nations in Americas.

Thus, on this account alone, that U.S.A. which Shelburne, Bentham, and Palmerston had intended to destroy, had emerged as the leading nation-state in the world, and thus a powerful challenge to the hegemony gained by the British Empire during the preceding decades. This challenge became acute with the adoption of large-scale railway development projects, such as Russia's Trans-Siberian Railway, as copies of the lessons of the U.S. transcontinental railways.

Geopolitics was invented by the British monarchy of Edward VII's time, as a map of the intent to organize a great world war which had the aim of dividing Germany, Russia, and Japan, among others, into strategic adversaries. The 1901 assassination of U.S. President William McKinley, and the resulting inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt, transformed the government of the U.S.A. from a friend of Germany and Russia, into an ally of the British monarchy for what became the great war in Central Europe, World War I.

Decades ago, it became clear to me, that we must reverse that U.S. calamity of 1901. The U.S. must return to its natural strategic interests, as understood by the Careys, John Quincy Adams, Lincoln, et al., and once again move toward engaging Germany, Russia, Japan, and China, among others, as U.S. global partners in such undertakings as the integrated economic development of Eurasia as a whole. The difficulty in this undertaking was, not only that the U.S. was being dominated increasingly by the pro-racist Southern Strategy and neo-liberal fantasies of the Kissinger-Nixon and Brzezinski-Carter Presidencies, but that, plainly enough, the Soviet Union was a clear and capable strategic adversary.

Nonetheless, I took into account the great financial and economic collapse which must occur if the U.S. continued to follow those economic and related policies which had led into the Nixon monetary crisis of 1971, and had been continued with a certain ferocity by the Brzezinski-Carter government. I conducted myself accordingly. Now, that crisis which I foresaw has come, that for precisely the leading reasons I forecast it as inevitable unless the U.S. government adopted the certain changes in policy which I had specified.

So, once again, on October 12, 1988, I publicly forecast that a deep economic crisis within the Soviet system, would cause Poland, most probably, to move out of the Soviet-directed economic system, and that the likely result would be the reunification of Germany, with Berlin again its future capital, during the period immediately ahead. On that occasion, I outlined the policy which the U.S. government and such allies as Germany must follow, in respect to these oncoming early developments. What I proposed was correct, and events since have proven so; however, under the influence of Thatcher and Mitterrand, President George Bush adopted the wrong policy, which has led the world to the state of wreckage in which the world economy finds itself today.

Now, just slightly more than a dozen years after my prophetic forecast of October 1988, once again the issue of U.S.A. and western European cooperation with Russia, is posed in the harshest terms of currently breaking world reality. Once again, as under the influence of Lord Milner and Britain's King Edward VII, the would-be present-day toadies of Edward VII's geopolitical scheming, including Brzezinski, have raised the spectre of geopolitics, that for reason of the same evil motive as the earlier lackeys of Edward VII.

Today, we can not turn back the clock which has been unwinding for a century and more to French minister and historian Hanotaux, since Fashoda 1898. However, we are now faced with the occasion to grasp the old opportunity in a fresh way.

One asks the question: "Why should we hope to succeed, where France's Hanotaux failed?, or for that matter, the assassinated Jaurès after him?" The answer is, that the present world financial crisis is an event like no other in centuries before us. The question whether any part of civilization will long outlive the onrushing financial collapse, poses questions like nothing in recent centuries. The entire world system, which has continued to exist since more than a century ago, is now doomed. Either a viable form of new system is adopted to replace it, or the nations seated at the table will be eaten by the cook who is preparing the dishes.

What I am proposing, is the only chance available for those nations' survival. Does that mean that the nations are forced to adopt it? Not at all. Empires have felled themselves in analogous circumstances before; this one could repeat that ancient folly. That is the way history purges itself of cultures which lack the moral fitness to survive. We, this civilization, could meet the same kind of fate.

The Creator has endowed the human individual with cognitive powers akin to those of the Creator Himself. We are made in His image. Thus, we are given the power of choice; the choice of our culture's survival is, in chief, a voluntary one. Our task, as persons of some influence and knowledge, is to propose the solution to the crisis at hand, and to hope that our voluntary intervention to that effect is successful. Being human, that is what we must do, with or without assurances of success. At worst, we know it will be meaningful in some way, if we try. Since we are human, we would rather face eternity having acted as we should in our time, than being the practical fellow who chose to go to the devil himself, as a matter of "going along, to get along" with what passes for popular opinion. The worst that can be said, is that the circumstances of today, give us a far, far more persuasive argument for our cause than any of our predecessors from earlier times.

With those images held before our minds' eyes, today's global strategic objective for Eurasia may be described as follows.

From the Paris-Vienna-Berlin triangle in the west, to Japan and Korea in the Pacific east, the long-term character of trade relations in Eurasia, will be the flow of advanced technology from places in which the density of technology, as measured per capita and per square kilometer, is high, to places where the density of technology is relatively low.

Although this rule will apply universally, certain vectors in these downstream flows of technology are most notable for our consideration here.

Taking the development of Eurasia in the large, the emphasis will be on moving the center of gravity of the population in an inward direction, from the coastal regions. Through the improvements of basic economic infrastructure per square kilometer in such directions, as through emphasis on such goals as transportation, energy-density, large-scale water management, and building up the infrastructure of new and improved urban centers, the presently more backward or simply low-population-density portions of the interior of Asia undergo an increasing population and productivity density, converging on mastery and development of the present deserts and other regions of central and north Eurasia.

This is consistent with some existing policies of China, but carries thought in that direction further, to take into account the entirety of the upland and north and central regions of the Eurasia continent as a whole. This requires the largest-scale development of networks of main trunk and branch systems of transportation, power-generation and distribution, water management, and networks of urban development throughout the presently more sparsely populated regions of the continent as a whole.

A Brief Lesson From the Deep Past

Pause at this point, to take an important side-excursion, this time into a point as far distant as our planet's prehistoric past. There is a principle, a deep principle of economics and demography, to be made known by aid of that brief excursion into time.

The current estimates are, that man has lived on this planet for as long as two millions years. Crucial artefacts associated with some well-dated sites, show human existence of a cognitive type not found in the higher apes, as distant as a half-millions years or so ago, even in Europe. During that entire period, of millions of years, this planet's northern hemisphere has been subject to periods of glaciation lasting a time in the order of roughly 100,000 years. We are presently in the later part of an inter-glacial period which began about 20,000 years ago. During the most recent period of glaciation, the level of the oceans was between 300 and 400 feet lower than today.

From more recent parts of the long time before recorded history, the existence of leading known examples of human cultures, was dominated by transoceanic maritime cultures, of a type echoed by the phenomenon of the invasions of the Mediterranean by Peoples of the Sea four thousand and more years ago. Very ancient solar-astronomical calendars of initially astonishing sophistication, such as some dated to Central and North Asia, typify the relevant evidence on this account, and the echoes of such calendars in the astrophysics associated with the high point of the great pyramid-building in Egypt, are part of the relevant insight into developments rooted in pre-historic times.

As the glaciation melted, the spread of population into historic times, moved more and more inland, as we see such evidence from historic periods; but, the concentration of civilized habitation, tended to be limited to inroads provided by naturally favorable conditions, such as great rivers.

To cut the preliminaries short, as we see in the case of China today, it is the lack of adequate inland development of basic economic infrastructure, which cramps the total population still into coastal regions, and tends to make the interior more sparsely populated, and the latter areas, and its inhabitants, relatively poorer. For China, as for the interior of Asia as a whole, the use of modern technology for the economic conquest of the interior regions, is the great challenge before us, during the presently unfolding century. With emphasis upon the development of primary sources of generated power of increasing energy-flux density, this challenge is a conquerable one. The included result will be a qualitative change in the combined historic and prehistoric relationship of the human species to its available, underdeveloped great land areas of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and large tracts of Central and South America.

The means by which this goal can be attained in Eurasia, is the combination of increasing scale and energy-flux density of primary sources of usable energy, combined with an increasingly dense grid of main-trunk and branch corridors of transport and development. The result will be a dramatic, qualitative shift in the net-cost-advantage of long-range "rail" traffic over ocean freight. The successes, and failures to date, of the present abortive and decaying U.S. development of its continental railway system, teaches us what is, for many, a stunning lesson in the combined history and prehistory of mankind.

If we simply move freight over distance, from one distant point to another, there is no economic gain to society in the costs directly incurred by that transport. However, if the flow of freight over a development corridor, is efficiently interacting with production occurring along that route of travel, the net cost of operating the transport route may be substantially less than zero. Said most simply, in that case, the existence of that transport route increases the rate of net physical gain to society as a whole along every mile of that route. This is, in a sense, "found money," wealth which would not have come into existence unless that functioning route had been developed and set into operation.

If the density of activity along a long route, such as the main-trunk corridors across the Eurasian heartland, is raised to a sufficient level, the cost of freight by rail, from Seattle, Washington, in the U.S.A., across a route constructed across the Bering Strait, to Vladivostok and the Tumen development region of China, may become cheaper, in net cost, than a shipment of ocean freight to the same Asian destinations. The development of routes along the tundra region of north Siberia, a feasible longer-range project, poses the possibility of benefits in world transport, and also the opportunities for economic development of mineral resources, for example, not otherwise economical for exploitation and development.

If one examines the case which I have just so summarized, from the standpoint of the fundamental discoveries of the Nineteenth-Century physicist Bernhard Riemann, we recognize that the kind of use of development corridor-networks I have sketched here, opens the way to a fundamental shift in the characteristics of mankind's physical-economic relationship to the biosphere of this planet. The possibilities for South America and Australia, illustrate that the opportunities are of a general nature. We might say, that for economics, this represents an effect of a type roughly comparable to "breaking the sound barrier" in the world economy.

A Structural Reform in Employment

The challenge of reviving a sick world economy through a new quality of long-term investment in downstream flows of the most advanced technologies into areas of lower technology-density, signifies a radical shift away from the directions in composition of employment which have occurred within western Europe and the U.S.A. during the recent thirty-four years, since the savage, mid-1960s cut-backs in what had been the highly profitable, Kennedy space program.1

The early phases of what has become the now largely doomed fantasy called "information economy," or "new economy," came to the surface, among circles closely associated with the nuclear utopians H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, during the late 1930s and 1940s. The roots of this can be traced to such events as Russell's 1938 launching of his Unification of the Sciences project, as at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Margaret Mead-linked Cybernetics project of the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. The key figures of this hoax called "information society," were a pair of former acolytes of Russell, who shared the common distinction of having been kicked out of Göttingen university for incompetence by the great David Hilbert, MIT's Professor Norbert Wiener, the putative co-discoverer of "information theory," and the John von Neumann who is widely credited with authoring two of the greatest hoaxes popularized during the recent half-century, "systems analysis" and "artificial intelligence."

As I have identified this problem, above, athough depraved arch-aristocrat Russell was the originator of the utopian nuclear policy which bombed the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unnecessarily, for no actually military reason, Russell, like his fellow nuclear-weapons fanatic Wells, hated modern science and industrial society in about the same proportion that Russell sometimes avowed his pure hatred of the United States as such. As the later discredited thesis of his Principia Mathematica typifies his anti-technology views,1 Russell's continuing desire, was to find a way to run the world by abstract, ivory tower forms of mathematics, rather than the hands-dirty sort of science associated with engineering and the design, construction, and conduct of proof-of-principle experiments.

Two sometime acolytes of that satanic high priest, Russell, Wiener and von Neumann, were both fanatical adherents of that "ivory tower" view, radical positivist von Neumann more consistently, more fanatically than the gadget-conscious Wiener.1

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the folly of the views of that pair, and their duped followers, as plainly as the catastrophic failure of the utopian folly called "bench-marking," introduced, during the recent decade, in the attempt to eradicate the cost of employing engineers, by ivory-tower sorts of mathematical modelling. Thus, the richly deserved, onrushing collapse of the so-called "new economy" financial bubble, has implicitly the same consequence for "information theory," that the crash of the financial bubbles of the early Eighteenth-Century France and England had for the reputation of John Law. Like the ideas of Bertrand Russell, ideas that could never work, must, sooner or later, fail.

As it is said on such occasions, "Back to the drawing board!" Better said: return to the place where the wrong turn in the road occurred. The economic ideas which may be recalled from President Roosevelt's preparations for and leadership of World War II, which were also the ideas associated with President Kennedy's launch of the scientifically and economically successful "crash" space program, are back on the agenda once more.

This means that there must be a rapid shift in the composition of employment of, for example, the U.S. labor-force as a whole. The rations of farmers, industrial operatives, engineers, science-oriented professionals, and so on, must not only resume the nation's emphasis on physical output, as typified by the Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy years, but shift the technological composition of employment upward, in favor of the physical sciences and engineering, at the expense of the categories of employment associated with a veering toward "post-industrial society."

We must reorient economic and related policy to adapt to the required leading role of a "science-driver crash program" in effecting a sustainable global economic recovery under the present conditions of crisis.

This change in composition of employment, must absorb a decrease in the number of combined hours of work and commuting per adult member of the household, each week. Today's normalized image of the adult, returning home at last, exhausted, to plop before a mind-deadening television screen's performance, must become obsolete.

For example, do you remember the famous "suggestion box" found in every enlightened employer's employee areas? Do you recall how many hours an employee would often work, and the research he or she would conduct, on his or her own account, to compose a carefully crafted proposal? This was done during the same leisure portion of the week during which other personal activities of a creative or kindred quality often occurred.

We need that kind of family household and circumstances of life once again; we need the conditions of life of the labor-force on which the success of the U.S. reconstruction under Roosevelt, the war, and the post-war development could have occurred as they did. In tough times, like those immediately ahead, some of the accommodations provided may be relatively sparse, but the intellectual life of the general population must not be sparse. We need a thinking labor-force once again; we need a population oriented to something better, as a mission in life, than "just getting by." Conditions may be austere, as a result of the grave mistakes in policy our nation has committed, but the conditions must never be brutal.

The Role of State Credit

Many, perhaps most of you adult readers, have overheard, at least once, the strange and often lugubrious expression, "honest money." This recently revived, somewhat popularized delusion of today, is properly considered the kind of political relic of those by-gone, pre-Raphaelite, feudal times, whose memory was so tenderly and obsessively fondled by such arch-Romantic followers of Benito Mussolini as Ezra Pound and the father of the late, notorious, and savagely exotic James Jesus Angleton of the London-based office of war-time OSS, and, later, Allen Dulles' CIA.

This neo-feudalist notion of "honest money," springs from the same pathological root, as the notion that the existence of economy begins with a hoard of money as such, such as the hoard allegedly created and maintained by either stingy leprechauns, or misers with croaking voices, imagined as nursing their hoards in dirty dark hovels, where molds watch the negotiations from their ensconcement on the corners of stale crusts of bread. One might suspect that Angleton had meticulously listed each of those misers, by name, date of birth, and suspected family connections to Karl Marx, in his squinting, crabbed notations. He would have shaded his eyes in an expression of his habitual obsession with tight security, as wrote down each name, as was reported to him by his usually reliable informants, whether any of the creatures so listed had ever actually existed or not.

Such is the world in which believers in so-called "honest money" dwell. In a proper psychiatric appraisal, such beliefs are a form of delusion tantamount to mass insanity. Fortunately, the etiology and cure of such mental disorders is known, but delivery of the cure has been met with certain impediments, especially those erected from among the monetarist fellow-travellers of the Mont Pelerin Society. It is said, that the typical individual who believes in the competence of Professor Milton Friedman, would probably believe in almost anything, especially if it were insane, as is the notion of "honest money" itself.

Pedagogically useful academic entertainments aside, to come directly to the crucial point, money, by virtue of its nature, has virtually no intrinsic value at all. In modern civilized nations, as in sane ones generally, money is a form of debt, properly debt issued as currency by a sovereign government, and circulated for the intention of promoting trade and investment. In short, it is as the founders of the U.S. Constitutional republic expressed this intention, and as the first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, clarified the point with an enviable degree of precision and other excellence.

To the extent that such money, issued and circulated in such a fashion, is to be associated with some actual economic value, the location of the existence of that value is not to be found in the individual commodity, or transaction as such, but, rather in the economy considered as an essentially indivisible whole.

A perverted, but pedagogically useful expression of the significance of "economy as a whole," is to be found in the method of determining the current financial assessment of the monetary value of a "share," by the application of the notion of "financial leverage" to the estimation of "shareholder value." The lunacy of the monetarist outlook employed to define such notions of monetary "shareholder value," lies in the psychopathological form of misconception of the value of money itself.

The value of money lies in the value to society as a whole of the circulation of physical and related wealth which it facilitates. This value can be estimated fairly, if all money prices are removed from a study of the flow of physical and related activities through the economy taken as an indivisible unit. This notion of a non-monetary approximation of a unit of economic value in exchange, is derived by comparing the rate of physical output from production, to the total bill of materials and process-sheet requirements sufficient to maintain that rate of output.

In such pedagogical exercises in first approximations, the goal is to compare such rates of cost to output, with the rate of increase of output over costs so designated. A refined estimate to this effect, requires that all of the elements of incurred physical cost of a society's economy, be compared with the rates of changes effected in both the ratio of output to input, and also the estimated changes in potential relative population-density of that society, as measured in per-capita and per-square-kilometer terms.

The point is, that the value associated with the circulation of money for such purposes, as opposed to all circulation for financial and related speculation, should reflect both the current productivity of the economy, per capita and per square kilometer, and also the rate of growth of that productivity, both in absolute and relative terms.

Among those great fallacies, better described as lunacies, associated with fantastic belief in the existence of "honest money," is the errant believer's disregard for the indispensable role of development of basic economic infrastructure, and state-supplied services in making possible the economic development on which the production and circulation of goods depends. On this account, the attempt to impose "free trade" upon a modern economy, can only ruin that economy, as London's agent Jacques Necker, as apostle of "free trade" and also King Louis XVI's finance minister, bankrupted the most productive economy of Europe, France, sent France into Hell and that king on the journey to the guillotine.

On that account, the complementary delusions called "honest money" and "free trade," are to be regarded in their effects, as well-defined cases of mass psychosis.

In any sane modern society, the creation and regulation of money is a monopoly exerted by the government of a sovereign nation-state. As the Constitution of the U.S.A. prescribes, the creation of money is effected through the authorized issue of a form of government debt in the form of non-interest-bearing currency notes.

These notes are placed into circulation, not only to facilitate trade, as the Massachusetts Bay Colony created the highly successful issue of paper money for that specific purpose. The added function is to make possible high rates of new capital formation, by loaning issues of such notes through national-banking facilities, into the general banking sector, or as direct loans. The principal basis for the emission of currency for the purpose of creating medium- to long-term debt and capital improvements, is to mobilize otherwise wasted, or misused resources of manpower and so forth, for investments in undertakings which can not be repaid in full in a shorter lapse of time than medium- to long-term schedules. The wealth so created in the form of debt, is created against the "full faith and credit" of the government of the sovereign state.

All of these and related considerations strike us with paradoxical full force, as the present world financial collapse plunges into its terminal phase. Against the inevitable and indispensable write-off, or long-term freezing of currently unpayable financial claims, we must create enormous masses of trade and related credit in the form of state financial credit issued, chiefly, through the machinery of national-banking facilities and procedures. The object is to bring the world economy, as much as possible, and as rapidly as feasible, up to a level corresponding to physical-economic net breakeven of current output over costs.

The choice of mechanisms required for such radical changes will be forced upon governments, if those governments are not so insane as to refuse the measures which reality and the principle of the general welfare demands of them. Presently, virtually every central banking system of the world is desperately, hopelessly bankrupt. There is no possibility of a continuity of economy without the sovereign government's assuming its unshirkable authority and obligation under natural law, to take these bankrupt central banking systems into receivership for bankruptcy reorganization. The government-created facility for that purpose becomes, as if automatically, a national bank in the sense specified by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's celebrated report to the U.S. Congress on this subject-matter.

The rule must be, that the essential functions of government, banking, production, trade, and essential social and related services, must continue to function in an orderly way, and must also serve as the bridge for an accelerating rate of real economic growth, both in domestic and world hard-commodity categories of trade.

As the bankruptcy of today's leading central banking systems illustrates the point, the needed continuity of stable order in society could not be accomplished without invoking the powers peculiar to the government of a perfectly sovereign nation-state republic. On our willingness to accept that reality, depends our nations' ability to survive, and therefore, the ability of their economies also to grow.

4. Russia in Europe

Until the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance's creation of that revolutionary new institution, the sovereign nation-state, premised its authority upon the principle of the general welfare, the known existence of mankind was dominated by cycles of doom. In leading well-known cases, the cause for the recurring collapse of once-powerful cultures was chiefly the impact of the prevalent oligarchical principle, as typified by the systemically decadent cultures of ancient Mesopotamia and Rome. The persisting degradation of the majority of the subject population to the political, social, and economic status of human cattle, accompanied by the decadence inhering in the parasitical role of the ruling oligarchy and its lackey-dom, generated the physical trends, and correlated social and political effects which ensured the next downward plunge of the cycles of doom.

In this pattern, the remedy for an oligarchy which was threatened with collapse within the bounds of the territory it occupied, impelled it to seek a remedy in conquest. Hence, the associated patterns of imperial imperatives frequently associated with the phenomenon of oligarchical cultures. Sooner or later, as the expansion reached a lurking, inevitable outer limit of sustainable political expansion and control, the entropy inhering in the nature of oligarchical society closed in, creating the combination of internal and external forces through which the society was brought into either permanent collapse, or a cycle of collapse.

In modern times, when we have acquired the knowledge to understand the necessity underlying such cycles of doom, we are able to appreciate the unique implications, on this account, of that Fifteenth-Century Renaissance creation, the sovereign nation-state, based in natural law on the principle of the general welfare.

There are many considerations to be taken into account, in arriving at a defensible insight into a choice of reasons why this development should have appeared within the framework of a European civilization distinguished, most essentially, by its origins in the emergence of the Classical culture of ancient Greece. From study of the internal struggle on related issues within that European civilization itself, there are principally two cultural factors responsible for this historical distinction. That is to say, every other known culture, despite its notable contributions to cultural development of mankind, failed for lack of sufficiently strong net development of two conceptions unique to the combination of development of Classical Greek culture with the impact of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic monotheism. These two influences intersect and overlap in Plato's Timaeus dialogue, most specifically, and in the impact of Christianity, especially as expressed through the Gospel of John and Epistles of Paul, respecting the principle of agape[macron], and the notion of man and woman as each equally man in the image of the Creator of the universe. The common ground of that intersection, was the Classical Greek notion of the idea, as the term idea is usually associated with the work of Plato.

In short, the distinction lies in the conception of the essential nature of man. On this account, the advantage of Christianity over the generality of that Jewish population which Christ and his disciples represented at the time of the Crucifixion of Christ by Rome, was the Christian emphasis on the practice of the universality of human nature, rather than a religion of the Jewish population as such. Just so, the commitment of Islam to universality, shows the similarities and differences among the growth of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities as exhibited by the evidence from the whole span of the recent two millennia.

If we examine the approximately 1,400 years between the birth of Christ and the onset of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, we observe that, in the case of Christianity, there was no principle of law which did not implicitly require Christians to create a community of common principle among perfectly sovereign nation-states, as the only political order of society consistent with Christian principle. The struggle to free Europe from the corrupting vestiges of Roman imperial customs and law, was a long one; but, the notable fact is, that that struggle persisted, and it was a visibly resurging struggle, up to the period of the Council of Florence and the first pioneer forms of modern nation-state, under France's Louis XI and Henry VII's England.

The concept of agape[macron], as reflected in I Corinthians 13, is of special importance in this historical portrait. As Plato's dialogue on this matter, in the debate among Socrates, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon, makes clear, and as the same point in law is presented by Paul in that Epistle, agape[macron] represents the necessary intent of law, which supercedes any literal reading of given statute. The intent to which all literal law must be subordinated in authority, is the intent otherwise associated with the principle of the general welfare. In other words, the terms agape[macron], intent of law, and natural law all signify the same principle expressed in slightly different ways.

This notion, as expressed variously in those corresponding forms, is inseparable from the definition of the nature of man, as located in cognition, rather than sense-perception. The person who must enjoy the protection and other benefit of the intent of law, is regarded as a person, not in his biological existence as such, but in the personality which resides essentially in the individual's cognitive identity. Thus, in the intent of law, we afford protection to the body for the sake of the inalienable rights lodged within the person, a personality which is the mind in its cognitive functions, as, functionally, a perfectly sovereign cognitive process. It is that cognitive process which generates validatable discoveries of universal principle, either as original discoveries, or as re-enactments of original discoveries. It is through that process of cognition, and only that process, that mankind's power in and over the universe is supplied. Here, and here alone, lies the actuality of man made in the living image of the Creator. Yet, this process can not be seen by the powers of sense-perception, even though we can prove those discoveries, in irrefutable ways, to have been true such cognitive discoveries. It is there that the essential nature of the human individual lies; it is to that that the intent of law applies, and must be applied; otherwise, it is not acceptable as a principled expression of law, but only as a dubious pretense.

It was this Fifteenth-Century revolution in statecraft and law, which enabled globally extended modern European civilization to rise to its unequalled achievements per capita and per square kilometer. It is that achievement, and the means by which it is fostered, which is indispensable to prevent humanity as a whole from falling, perpetually, into those cycles of doom which have dominated human existence in all other forms of culture. It is, conversely, our toleration of the insurgency of the oligarchical principle, as expressed by the Southern Strategy, by "free trade," by malthusianism, by "globalization," by "de-regulation," which have plunged a decadent European culture, over the past thirty-five years, up to the threshold of a new cycle of doom.

On this account, a moral renaissance within globally extended modern European civilization as a whole, is demanded of us, that we might provide to our friends in East and South Asia, and elsewhere, the forms of cooperation which had given European culture its great, unprecedented global advantage, during, especially, the better parts of the recent three centuries.

Russia is an integral part of that globally extended modern European civilization. Its development, following the centuries of dark age imposed upon it from Asia, supplied a Russia throwing off the shackles of foreign tyranny, the imperative to defend itself in Asia, lest the repelled tyranny return again. For such sundry good and bad reasons, Russia became in fact Europe in Asia. It is in that role, in its trading and other relations within the territory of the peoples of Asia, that its leading part in the present new century will probably lie.

On that and related premises, the fundamental strategic interest of the United States, is to establish the kind of community of principle among sovereign nation-state republics which was defined by the great ecumenist Nicholas of Cusa's Concordantia Catholica, a policy which was affirmed by U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams' work in securing the adoption of the so-called Monroe Doctrine of 1823 for the Americas. The present crisis should have reminded us, that the time has come to seek to bring into being a true, global community of principle of that sort.

Respecting the cultures of Asia, it is not our proper intent to impose cultural standards upon them as cultures. However, in our practical efforts of cooperation made in search for a true community of principle among sovereign nation-states, we must not ignore the great gifts which modern European civilization has been given, the gifts by means of which to terminate those cycles of doom which had gripped humanity prior to Europe's Fifteenth Century, and grip most of this planet at the present time.

We must, at the same time, recognize, that Russia's role in the collaboration to which I have pointed, can not be that of a passive vehicle. Unless and until the leaders of Russia are able to arouse their population to a sense of the great mission lying before Russia in Asia at this time, Russia will be unable to mobilize its will for an effective such undertaking. On this account, the nations of the Americas and Europe must unite with Russia around a common sense of division of labor in a common global mission, to bring about a true global community of sovereign states, by means of cooperation in freeing all peoples from those material and related conditions of life, on which the long legacy of cycles of doom has been premised until now.