From Bentham to Gingrich
What Is Fascism, Really?
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
March 27, 2001
Whatever else the early future might bring for Georgia's Newt Gingrich, he, and his infamous "Contract With America" will continue to typify the variety of fascist intention which currently dominates the radical, populist right-wing of the U.S. Republican Party.[1] This is not only a national issue of U.S. internal affairs; it is a strategic threat, both to the United States itself, and of global importance for humanity as a whole.
There could be no competent strategic assessment of the world situation today, which did not also recognize as the typical fascists of today, such phenomena as the present Chávez regime in Venezuela, the movement associated with the leadership of the EZLN insurgency in Mexico, the FARC insurgency in Colombia, forces associated with the Franco-British ideologue Teddy Goldsmith in Brazil,[2] and many others, all of which are currently either already seated, or in ascending motion within the Americas and elsewhere around the world.[3]
Each and all of the republics of the Americas must recognize the crucial strategic implications, for them, of the fact, as I shall show in this report, of that hatred of the existence of a sovereign United States republic, identified by its 1776 Declaration of Independence, by its successful struggle for that independence, and by the 1787-1789 Preamble of its Federal Constitution, which was the original choice of hate-object against which the passions of fascism have been directed, first in 1789-1814 France, and, within the U.S. itself, later, by the treasonous Confederate States of America, as echoed today by Gingrich's Contract With America, and in other nations, world-wide.
Put to one side, as worse than nonsense, those definitions of fascism met from among the diverse assortment of ragtag ideologues of the populist "left," some of whom are strictly definable, according to Hegel's theory of the state, as presenting "neo-Jacobin" styles themselves. For serious historians, "fascism" signifies essentially nothing different than what is typified by what Benito Mussolini defined that word to signify, and Hitler after him. It signifies, a reversal of all of the political accomplishments of modern European civilization, especially the principle of the modern sovereign nation-state, sending civilization in a backward direction. Fascism seeks to establish a world order mimicking the "globalized" system under the pagan city of Rome, of Byzantium, and echoing the "globalizing" impulses, such as the long-standing alliance of the imperial maritime power of Venice with the Plantagenets (Anjou), within European feudalism.
This intention was most plainly stated symbolically by Mussolini, by his reviving the battle-standard of the ancient Roman legions. This was the standard followed into battle by those whom Latin Rome designated as its predator class, the fighters, called populari, the same ranting, enraged, plebeian mob of feral human cattle, which ancient Rome deployed against its intended Christian and other victims, a populari whose myth-ridden, irrational opinion is notorious, in both the Colosseum and European history generally, as that vox populi otherwise translated into modern usage by the late Walter Lippmann, as "popular opinion."[4]
In essentials, fascism signifies a special form of expression of the attempt to turn back the tide of the modern sovereign nation-state, to a dictatorship, like that of the Caesars, and to the traditions of ancient pagan Rome. Fascism means an historically specific form which has erupted in modern times, erupting from within that larger tradition of philosophical thought in art, religion, politics, and law, which is known to historians as Romanticism. By Romanticism, qualified scholars signify the cultural and legal tradition of ancient pagan Rome, as the adoption of the specifically anti-Christian Code Napoléon typifies the positivist legal philosophy underlying fascist states, from the dictatorships of Jacobins Maximilien Robespierre and Napoleon, to the present day.
For Mussolini, the simple resurrection of the symbol of the Roman Standard, was a convenient choice. The Nazis adopted their stylized swastika as a deliberate choice of substitute for the fasces, as a Roman-legion-like standard, to perform exactly the same kind of mythic role played by the fasces symbol in Mussolini's hands. In the U.S.A., the Confederate flag continues to be a typical fascist symbol, sometimes used interchangeably with the swastika by today's relevant U.S. populist fanatics. The World Wildlife Fund, co-founded by former Nazi Party member Prince Bernhard and British's royal consort Prince Philip, is a leading modern expression of what is known among specialist scholars as "universal fascism," a movement complete with its substitution of the Panda symbol as the standard to fulfill the function which the fasces or swastika served under Mussolini and Hitler.[5]
There are many political movements and philosophies which are derived from the precedent of ancient pagan Rome. Those essentially Romantic movements and philosophies, such as Kantianism generally, inevitably contain important features also found among the fascists. However, that alone is not necessarily proof that they are fascists in any strict application of the term. Only silly people use "fascist" as an epithet for neighbors whose body odor they happen to dislike; the fascist legacy is a narrowly defined, historically specific phenomenon.
Fascism as a strictly defined type, is the legacy, among others, of Britain's Jeremy Bentham, Maximilien Robespierre, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Napoleon III. It has important features shared in common with existentialists, such as the Martin Heidegger who was formerly an active Nazi Party philosopher and practicing persecutor of Jewish professors, and with others who were not Nazis, such as Heidegger's disciple Jean-Paul Sartre, and his co-thinkers Theodor Adorno and the professedly neo-Kantian irrationalist Hannah Arendt, who became professed anti-Nazis in their later years. However, mere kinships put to one side, in strict usage, fascism as a political form of the idea of government, is defined by those leading fascist philosophers of the modern Romantic school of law, G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Karl Savigny, and Carl Schmitt, who defined fascism, in practice, as what we should recognize as the distinctive features common to Mussolini, Hitler, and Gingrich, among others.
For example, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia's radical positivist doctrine of "textualism," has the same qualifications as an explicitly, specifically fascist current in law-making, that Schmitt represented for the fascist dictatorship in Nazi Germany, and also for the current, Chávez dictatorship in Venezuela today.[6] Gingrich explicitly, publicly, and accurately, traced the origin of his fascist "Contract With America" insurgency to those British agents of Jeremy Bentham, et al., who led the Jacobin Terror, from the July 14, 1789 storming of the Bastille by the Duke of Orléans and Jacques Necker, through the 1794 guillotining of Maximilien Robespierre and Saint-Just.[7]
To make clear this historical specificity and its relevance, we must begin with reference to crucial events of the interval 1782-1815, between Lord Shelburne's becoming the Prime Minister of Britain, and the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. This period contains the most crucial facts, whose consideration exposes the terrible ignorance, and worse, of most of the so-called "leftist" and other standard ideological effusions of today on the subject of fascism. It is this set of facts which locates the point of historical specificity common to all of those forms of fascism which have appeared as actual or potential governments, in various nations, over the interval from July 14, 1789 to the present moment.
Fascism in Historical Fact
The setting for the first definitive emergence of fascism, in France under the Jacobin Terror, is to be located against the immediate background of developments which occurred between two famous treaties of Paris, which form the diplomatic book-ends of the 1763-1783 period of the struggle for American independence from the British monarchy. It was the growing popularity of the cause of American independence throughout influential circles of Europe over the interval 1763-1789, which drove our republic's enraged adversaries, in London and among the continental haters of Joseph II such as the conservative-revolutionary Chancellors von Kaunitz and Metternich, to launch the birth of a fascist reaction against that American revolution.
For discovering the immediate historical roots of fascism, the hatred of that young American republic by the notorious Lord Shelburne, of Barings Bank and the British East India Company, identifies the relevant anti-American Mephistopheles whose influence gave birth to fascism, in France, during the 1789-1814 period.
No later than the immediate aftermath of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Shelburne launched a concerted effort to crush both the economy of France and the English colonies in North America. His adoption of today's well-known Adam Smith as one of his lackeys, involved Smith's assignment to work on devising such a plan. When the cause of American independence had prevailed on the field of battle, Shelburne, as British Prime Minister, during 1782-1783, negotiated the provisional 1783 treaties of Paris with the United States and France. Shelburne acted so with the intent to bring about the self-destruction of each of those treaty-partners.
As an outcome of the "free trade" conditionalities introduced successfully to France under those Shelburne initiatives, France was soon bankrupted and subjected to the successive, fascist regimes of, first, Robespierre's Jacobins, and, then, the former protégé of the Robespierre family, the self-proclaimed new Roman-style Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte. As a result of the successive, combined impacts of British and Habsburg hatred of our republic,[8] combined with the impacts of the Jacobin Terror and Napoleon's reign, the U.S. was isolated, and its existence imperilled, over the entirety of the interval 1789-1863.
As a consequence of these and related developments, the foundations of modern fascism were first set into place, in France, beginning with the July 14, 1789 storming of the Bastille, a process which continued to unfold its development through the reign of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna. The original statement of a general plan for fascism, was written by ex-Jacobin "leftist" G.W.F. Hegel, as his fascist philosophy of the state and its laws. Although the neo-Kantian, Romantic school of law of Hegel's crony, Friedrich Karl Savigny, contains many of the rudiments of the fascist doctrine in general, it is Carl Schmitt who follows Hegel explicitly in defining the legal doctrine of all fascist states up to the present time. Newt Gingrich copied the argument of Hegel and Schmitt explicitly, thus defining himself as wittingly, and most specifically a fascist, in his public description of the historical base in revolutionary law for his "Contract With America."[9]
The bare historical facts of the 1782-1789 developments leading into the July 14, 1789 events are the following.
From the beginning, Lord Shelburne's policy for the destruction of the economies of both France and the English colonies of North America, had been premised upon exploiting, against France, the reactionary tradition within France shared among France's depraved Sun-King, Louis XIV, and other opponents of the influence of Cardinal Mazarin and Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Key assets of the Europe-wide network of salons organized by the Paris-based Venetian Abbé Antonio Conti, had included the reactionary Physiocrat Dr. François Quesnay, of laissez-faire notoriety, and his followers, such as that notorious French Minister A. Turgot from whom Adam Smith had plagiarized much of the essential content of his own Wealth of Nations.
It was Minister Turgot and another key asset of Shelburne's, the sometime French Finance Minister, the Swiss Jacques Necker, who typify key roles played in the post-1782 bankrupting of France, and in the events leading directly into the launching of the Jacobin Terror on July 14, 1789.[10] The storming of the Bastille on that date, was organized by Benjamin Franklin adversary Philippe Egalité, the Duke of Orleans, explicitly as part of an election-campaign to have the Necker who had done so much, as former finance minister, to bankrupt the King of France, appointed as the King's Prime Minister![11] As a result of this celebrated event, the King of France lost not only his throne but his head, and France gained the five years of the Jacobin Terror it suffered prior to the ironical decapitation of the chief terrorists Robespierre and Saint-Just.
These events, including the Terror overall, were directed explicitly from the British Foreign Office in London, directed personally by that Office's "secret committee" which was headed by Shelburne's most politically significant protégé, Jeremy Bentham.[12] Looking back from 1789-1794 to Benjamin Franklin's earlier associations and conflicts within French freemasonry, the pattern of such Jacobin and related agents of the British intelligence interest in France, was already in evidence even decades earlier than the events of 1789.
The storming of the Bastille was never a blow for the cause of human freedom; it is to be recognized, in retrospect, as not only a counterrevolution against the constitutional movement led by the Marquis de Lafayette and Jean-Sylvain Bailly,[13] but also the first modern fascist coup d'état.
To understand that counterrevolution, one must see it first, most immediately, as a counterrevolutionary blow, delivered by the rabidly anti-American elements of the European oligarchy, against the 1763-1789 struggle to establish the U.S. Federal republic. It was a blow intended to prevent France from following in what we would call, retrospectively, today, the footsteps of the U.S. Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, as the case of the "Tennis Court Oath"[14] underscores this fact.
However, to find the deeper roots of that British-directed anti-Americanism, the storming of the Bastille must be seen more broadly. In the latter respect, it was a blow, orchestrated chiefly by the British monarchy, against the existence of that modern sovereign form of nation-state which is based upon the same constitutional principle of the general welfare which set President Franklin Roosevelt apart from his political enemies, whom he named as "the American Tories." This nation-state premised upon the supreme principle of the general welfare, is a form of state, based upon a scientifically validated, universal principle of natural law, which had first appeared in practice during the course of the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-centered Renaissance, and from which all the subsequent significant achievements of modern European civilization have been derived.
Here, we shall examine the matter on the more immediate, first, of those two levels, and, later, the deeper historical implications.
All significant fascist movements since have been, first of all, essentially pro-oligarchical counterrevolutions against the institutions and intellectual forces of that modern sovereign form of nation-state which is based upon the principle of the general welfare, and, secondly, the opposing forces premised upon notions of society and law consistent with the cultural legacy of ancient pagan Rome. This was already, in Shelburne's time, the hateful view of the U.S. by British oligarchical circles.
The preoccupation of the British East India Company's Shelburne with his lackey Gibbon's account of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, reflected that oligarchy's own intention to build up a British Empire modelled, axiomatically, not only upon the cultural legacy of pagan Rome. It was intended to become a specific form of such an empire, modelled upon the way, including orchestration of religious warfare, in which the rentier-financier oligarchy of Venice had built up and maintained its hegemony as an imperial maritime power over a period from the Crusades until the decline of Venice's own power at the close of the Seventeenth Century.
With the Congress of Vienna, all of Europe came under the combined oppressive forces of the British monarchy and Metternich's Holy Alliance. Despite the growing conflict between London and Chancellor Metternich over subsequent decades, both rivals were always committed, through the close of the U.S. Civil War, to the thorough European re-colonization of the Americas, and to the planet-wide eradication of the principles of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence and 1789 Preamble of the Federal Constitution. Hence, the sponsorship of the Confederacy by Lord Palmerston, and the active sympathy for the slaveholder system expressed by Habsburg interests such as Austro-Hungarian Chancellors von Kaunitz and Prince Metternich and the pro-racist Spanish monarchy, from continental Europe.
The intention of those foes of the U.S. republic, was then, as their tradition maintains that intention still today, to eradicate what Henry A. Kissinger denounced as the "American intellectual tradition" of President Franklin Roosevelt et al. from this planet.[15]
If they could not destroy the existence of the United States, as they attempted this repeatedly until Lincoln's decisive victory over that British puppet, the Confederacy, they sought to destroy its soul, to integrate the soulless U.S.A., dominated by American Tories, to become a merely nominally independent satrapy of a British monarchy-dominated English-speaking union, a British Commonwealth. To that end, since its successful assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the British monarchy has acted as Kissinger has prescribed in his A World Restored, and his sycophantish May 10, 1982 Chatham House address, to uproot and eradicate the American intellectual tradition. Therein lies the setting for the introduction of fascist movements, such as Gingrich's Contract With America, into the government of the U.S.A.
Hegel was the first to define the fascist state in the way his follower Newt Gingrich has described the "Contract With America." It is the Hegelian form, echoed as to law by Carl Schmitt, which brought us the fascist movements which appeared throughout Europe during the interval between the two World Wars of the last century. It is fascism as defined by Hegel, which is erupting in Central and South America, and elsewhere, today. It is the Hegelian theory of the state, which corresponds to fascism as an historically specific phenomenon of modern society. For clarity, let us call it the Hegel-Schmitt-Gingrich doctrine in defense of the establishment of the fascist form of government.
It is the relationship, of not only the Marxist movements to Hegelian influences, but also all of those movements which were spawned by Jeremy Bentham's British Foreign Office-directed insurgencies in the Americas and in Europe, such as "Young America" and "Young Europe," which has been chiefly responsible for prompting the silly sophistries about fascism popularized in the modern university classrooms of the past century.
The most revealing feature of the popularized frauds manufactured by the leftists, is their fraudulent insistence, that fascism is something different from "bonapartism." There were compelling concerns which impelled the Twentieth Century's leftists to rationalize crucial, misguided features of their own policies, by pretending that Napoleon Bonaparte, "while perhaps a predator," was not a fascist. However, in most cases, the sophistries expressed by the leftist sects on this account, are usually as much a reflection of the leftists' pro-populist forms of illiteracy in history and epistemology, as any witting culpability. There are also others, in the British Foreign Office and elsewhere, of course, which have their own smirking, hypocritical reasons for relishing the spread of the deluded view of fascism which has become popularized among the public fools of the academic and other ideological left.
To understand fascism, one must view the enraptured Adolf Hitler adoring the entombed corpse of Napoleon in occupied Paris. One must view, thus, the metamorphosis of Jacobin Napoleon Bonaparte into that full-blown forerunner of his follower, Hitler. One must, in other words, see the Jacobins as former Jacobin and later Bonaparte fanatic Hegel did, and as Gingrich echoes Hegel's view of the French Revolution.
Look at the thus highly relevant, clinical case of Karl Marx's personal disorientation in this light.
How Karl Marx Became Confused
The failure of most of the political leadership of the Twentieth Century's socialist, and other labor organizations, to attain a competent grasp of the nature and significance of fascism, is partly the result of, and is, otherwise, typified by the fog of philosophical confusion which came to separate young Karl Marx from his father Heinrich. If one does not correct the popularized misunderstanding of Karl Marx and his continued, if somewhat waning world-wide intellectual influence today, one could not understand the dynamic underlying the putatively left-wing origins of many among today's fascist movements, such as those to be seen in the following of a former crony of New York banker John Train, Anglo-French Teddy Goldsmith, today.[16]
Marx's case should be treated not merely as a part of the problematic features of the Marxist legacy, but as a clinical case typifying a much more widespread folly, as encountered in not only the teaching of political science, but among the leading circles of today's governments, in addition to academic and other precincts generally.
For example, consider the case of the folly of the German social-democracy in its contributions to that ouster of Chancellor von Schleicher which made Hitler's appointment possible. The influence of Marx's misguided view of the American Revolution, for example, played a significant, direct and indirect role in fostering the disordered state of mind under which German trade-union leaders and others would walk blindly into a blunder of such awful consequences.
So, in my celebrated debate with leading Keynesian economist Professor Abba Lerner, at Queens College, in Autumn 1971, Lerner finally conceded that I was right in accusing him of pushing Schachtian policies for Brazil and elsewhere. After evading the issue, repeatedly, stubbornly, throughout most of the proceedings, Lerner offered, weakly, "If the Social-Democrats had supported Schacht, Hitler would not have been necessary"! Admittedly, Lerner, while a putative leftist, like his crony, former Communist and Professor Sidney Hook, was not a professing Marxist at that time, but yet much of the self-styled as "socialist" left of the U.S.A. at that time, gave more or less "critical support" to Lerner, against me.
This notable event merely typifies the numerous consequential instances in which Marx's or kindred blunders have exhibited their folly. Since it continues to be fashionable to regard Nazis and Marxists as the poles of "extreme right" and "extreme left," this widespread attempt to explain history in terms of the seating arrangements in the French national assembly of 1789-1794, requires that we contrast Marxist opposition to its fascist opponents, with the assumption that Marx's notions of political-economy are an axiomatic choice of useful guide to defining the systemic features of a fascist threat. Thus, the myth of Marx on this account, must be dispelled here.
The bare facts of the case of Marx are these.
Karl Marx was the son of attorney Heinrich Marx of Trier, Germany, who was himself an associate of the networks gathered under such auspices as the networks of German sympathizers of Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution. Young Marx himself was afforded the advantage of a Classical education, in a famous Trier Gymnasium then headed by the celebrated Johann Hugo Wyttenbach, the latter noted for his association with the Classical Greek tradition of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. However, when young Marx left Trier for the university at Bonn, and later the hotbed of Hegelians and so-called left-Hegelians at Berlin, he broke from the Classical tradition, and fell into those pits of post-Vienna Congress styles in German Romanticism which dominated the Young Europe organization of Lord Palmerston's famous asset Mazzini.[17]
This British Foreign Office-directed influence on Marx, continued as an active factor in his development and behavior, through his open break with the anti-Romantic Heinrich Heine, and through Marx's approximately decade-long London sponsorship and guidance of his further education, by British intelligence's Young Europe controller, British Museum-based Urquhart, and through Marx's public appointment, by Palmerston's Mazzini, to head the London-based "First International."[18]
Thus, the younger Marx was lured into such Romantic fashions of his post-Vienna Congress generation, as his basing of his economics on the false assumption that Quesnay and the gaggle of Jeremy Bentham-controlled economists, such as Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and others of the British East India Company's Haileybury School, were his own adopted forerunners as "scientific thinkers" in the domain of political-economy. In this respect, Marx was typical of most of the pro-socialist political currents of the labor movement of the middle through late Nineteenth Century and the Twentieth Century. In both political theory in general, and political-economy in particular, Marx's economics and related doctrine, are situated within the myth-ridden, cultish social theory of "capitalism" which Marx adopted from Smith, Ricardo, et al. of Jeremy Bentham's and the British East India Company's Haileybury School.[19]
To the degree there is relative validity in Marx's work, this appeared as his criticisms of British society and economy from within the bounds defined by its own arbitrary choice of axiomatic assumptions. For Marx, the "scientific socialist" movement expressed an "internal contradiction" specific to the prior existence of a perfected British model of "capitalism." What emerged as the core of his argument, came to be defined essentially within the framework of his adopted assumption, that the British system of political-economy, as defined by the British East India Company's Haileybury ideologues, was the highest form of political-economy and state yet to come into existence. That fatal fallacy of composition of the evidence which Marx was willing to consider, permeates all of his leading work, and accounts for its principal flaws.
As a critic of the British system, but only when his position is considered as one from ideologically inside that system, Marx's argument is a convincing one. However, when Marx's work is viewed outside the bounds of his fallacy of composition, viewed in the larger setting of the real world, and real history, outside the framework of his deluded estimation of the British "model," and outside the confines of the reductionist Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment, a recognition of the pervasive Romanticism and essential fallacy of composition, and related problematic features of Marx's thinking, comes immediately to the surface.
Typical of the evidence of the characteristic fallacy of Marx's work, is the foolishness of Marx's attacks upon leading American System economists Friedrich List and Henry C. Carey, both at the strongly expressed personal prompting of England's Frederick Engels. On these matters, Marx simply adopted British mythology a priori, as a mythos, and refused to consider the massive, relevant physical evidence to the contrary.
Indeed, without going here more deeply than necessary into Marx's personal philosophical development, it is sufficient to report here, that he showed a residue of the Classical education and influences which he brought from his youth in Trier, from his father's and Wyttenbach's legacy, but only as fragments scattered amid the edifice of that post-1806-1819 upsurge of the Romanticist philosophical reductionism, which dominated Marx's own and subsequent post-Vienna Congress generations.
Exemplary of the grossly fraudulent account of history on which the Marx-Engels doctrinal legacy depends, is the case of a letter from Engels to Franz Mehring, congratulating Mehring for discrediting "the Lessing legend" in Germany. When we consider the entire sweep of the Eighteenth Century, that of Germany most emphatically, the continuity of modern science and Classical artistic culture has its greatest debt to the defense of the heritage of Shakespeare, Leibniz, J.S. Bach, and so on, by a circle, pivotted upon the Leipzig of Leibniz, Göttingen University's Abraham Kästner, Gotthold Lessing, and upon Lessing's crucial collaboration with Moses Mendelssohn and friends of Mendelssohn representing the living J.S. Bach tradition from the Leipzig area. This is the core of the German Classical tradition and its art and science, without which there had never existed a Goethe, Schiller, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, nor Gauss and Riemann. Marx had been a wiser son had he admitted the fact of the existence of his nation's fathers.
For Marx, and for contemporary academia's version of an official Marx-Engels tradition today, modern European history sprang from the bowels of empiricist Paolo Sarpi and his followers of the English and French Enlightenment, to such effect that everything which happened to mankind, before or after Sarpi's rise to the position of lord of Venice, must be explained from the standpoint of the impact of the irrationalism and tendency toward bestiality embodied in the method of empiricism.
Similarly, Marx's systemic incompetence in matters of physical science, mathematics, and philosophy generally, echoes his typically Romantic adoption of the so-called British and French Eighteenth-Century, empiricist "Enlightenment" of Venice's Abbé Antonio Conti, as his leftist choice of intellectual ancestry in general. All of the systemic failures of synthetic construction in Marx's three-volume Capital, are to be traced chiefly to the impact of viewing the paradoxes and evils of the British definition of "capitalism" from the methodological standpoint of the anti-Leibniz and anti-Bach, Romantic Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment.
If the Marx of Capital had not existed, the British East India Company's Haileybury School would have been obliged to have invented someone to fill the role he played for them and, perhaps, at least in a significant degree, they did. By restricting the possibility of a seemingly rational alternative to the Adam Smith-Ricardo system, to the supposed alternative of the reductionist sophistry of the first five chapters of Volume I of Capital, the fact of the existence of what Hamilton, List, and Carey called the American System of political-economy, and of its actual predecessors, including, most notably, physical economist Gottfried Leibniz, was simply brushed to one side. What Marx, acting repeatedly upon Engels' instructions, repeatedly attempted to do, was to exclude consideration of the American System of political-economy, as outside the mythical academic "mainstream" of British financier-capitalism versus Marxian socialism.
At Berlin, young Marx admired the so-called "dialectical" method of that G.W.F. Hegel whose pro-fascist state philosophy Marx otherwise rejected. Similarly, although Hegel was deceased long before Marx reached Berlin, Hegel's factional ally, the neo-Kantian Romantic Savigny, headed the law department under which Marx studied. Like Hegel, Marx saw many among the fascist Jacobins of the 1789-1794 Terror, as his political forebears, in greater or lesser degree.
In brief, although Marx despised the fascist state philosophy of dirty old Hegel, he was attracted to the leftist follies and Romanticism of Hegel's earlier career as a Jacobin fellow-traveller. While Marx shared the German dislike for Napoleon Bonaparte well established during and following Napoleon's victory at Jena, and heartily despised the British fascist asset Napoleon III, Marx sought out a kinship of his own intellectual descent from among the ideologues of the Jacobin Terror itself.
Barring exceptional figures such as France's Jaurès, the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century emergence and evolution of the socialist movements of Europe and the Americas, have been dominated by the same general, philosophically reductionist mish-mash, of the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment Romanticism, which produced the leaders of the Jacobin Terror. Karl Marx did not create this mess, but, rather, is merely one of the most notable reflections, historically, of the impact of this pervasive problem.
The Deeper Problem of Law
The key to the leftist side of fascism, is to be discovered where Karl Marx lost that key, perhaps on his journey from Wyttenbach's Trier to the university at Bonn. The common sickness of the empiricists, Kantians, positivists, and existentialists, is twofold. First, they have no conception of man as apart from other living species, and, second, what amounts to the same thing, they each and all deny the existence of the ability to reach truthful knowledge concerning the universe through those specific qualities of mental processes known as cognition.
Sarpi's empiricism, as typified by the instruction in mathematics given to Thomas Hobbes by Sarpi's household lackey Galileo, denies the existence of any reality outside a kind of so-called Euclidean universe of sense-certainties and associated passions. In Kant's deviation from his long service as a German apostle of the British empiricism of David Hume, the crucial feature of all of his Critiques, including the Prolegomena, is the denial of the existence of a knowable faculty of cognition, by means of which validatable discoveries of universal physical principles might be made. On this account, the positivists and existentialists are even much worse. Karl Marx is essentially, axiomatically, an empiricist, in the specific sense of his association of what is called his "materialist" method and viewpoint with that of the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment. This is the case in practice, despite Marx's own efforts to situate the origin of his methodological views in the context of Classical Greek philosophy.
Since I have addressed this matter extensively, in many published locations, over decades, it is sufficient to summarize the point here. The practical expression of this issue in this location, on the subject of fascism, is: What are those proper lawful barriers against the kinds of practices which fascists are systemically inclined to conduct against nations and strata of their populations? This problem is not limited to the case of fascist governments and the movements which produce them, such as the Gingrich Contract With America movement; but fascism confronts us with a specific, exceptionally virulent quality of problem of law of this type. It is with those distinctions in view, that we should concentrate on this crucial point of law here.
As I have elaborated this point afresh in a recent edition of Executive Intelligence Review, the distinction of the human species from all other expressions of life, is that faculty of cognition, by means of which humanity is able to generate those empirically validatable discoveries of universal physical principle, by means of which the human species' per-capita power in and over the universe is willfully increased.[20] In science, this quality of cognition is science's reading of the celebrated Chapter 1 of Moses' Genesis. This is the inborn, innate, redeemable goodness of man, as a species naturally of the quality of the sublime.
This is the Classical humanist view, as typified by Plato's Socratic method for the Classical Greek heritage, and also the Christian humanist apprehension of Plato's work, which prompted directly the Fifteenth-Century birth of the first modern nation-state.
It follows directly from that consideration, that no state has the moral authority to govern, except as it is efficiently committed to promotion of the general welfare, or common good, of both its existing population and its posterity. No nation is a good nation, except as it is committed to promote the fulfillment of the principle of the general welfare of all nations and peoples.
This defines a form of state directly contrary not only to the cultural legacy of pagan Rome, but to all forms of society cohering with the principle of imperial law. I emphasize Professor von der Heydte's treatment of the fundamental distinction between the modern sovereign nation-state and its relationship to natural law, in opposition to those notions of the positive law characteristic of Babylon, the Delphi cult of the Pythian Apollo, Rome, and European feudalism.
Under the imperial code, such as that of the Romantic tradition, the authority to establish a "rule of law" governing many peoples, was restricted to a supreme pontiff (emperor), above nations and peoples.[21] Such a notion of "rule of law," is recognized by Romantics, such as Kant or Savigny, as either customary law or a form of purely positive law. By "purely positive law," one must include notions of law derived from the adoption of some a priori set of definitions, axioms, and postulates, such as those of the so-called Aristotelean system associated with the arbitrary, fraudulent synthesis of the system of Claudius Ptolemy. This is entirely opposite to the notion of what is called universal natural law, or the law of reason.
Natural law is a term which must be restricted by definition to empirically validated discoveries of universal physical principles. This applies not only to the knowable physical effects of non-living processes, but knowable physical effects of a principle of life, and of cognition itself. Such discoveries occur solely through that agency of Socratic reason, called cognition, which empiricism abhors and Kant asserts to be unknowable.
Hence, it follows that the individual person's potential for cognition, is the source of all good, and that the promotion of the fertility of those redeemable qualities of all individual personalities is the practice of the common good. That, for example, is the argument of principle set forth in the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, and in the Preamble of the 1789 U.S. Federal Constitution.
The core of the natural law is the Mosaic definition of the nature of man and woman as equally made in the image of the Creator of the universe, and as endowed with a specific quality unique among living species, of the quality of cognition which generates validatable discoveries of universal physical principle. Thus, in Christianity, as distinct from sundry gnostic forms of pseudo-Christian sects, the supreme moral law is not derived from any imperial authority, but is derived from reason, as I have described that principle of reason here, and as Pope John Paul II has recently affirmed that principle of reason, in contradiction of certain among his erring critics from within the Catholic Church. No law is universal, except as we are able to demonstrate, by reason, that it is universally true. Thus, the notion of natural law is conditional upon a Socratic form of principle of knowable truthfulness, called reason.
It is the characteristic of the empiricists, the Kantians, the positivists in particular, and fascists such as Hegel follower Gingrich, that there is no truth, but only mysterious, dialectical contradictions, as Kant and Hegel concur essentially on this point of their folly. This is but rewarmed empiricism, as can be found in Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Adam Smith, et al. They insist, on the authority of such dialectical contradictions, that there are certain things so mysterious that they can not be demonstrated as knowledge, but only believed on faith. Their authority comes not from reason, but from acceptance of some arbitrary, irrational authority, such as tradition, custom, or, as in the purely positive law, the dictate of one or more persons.
In the cases of fascist ideologues Hegel, Schmitt, and Gingrich, the purely positive authority is a specific act of arbitrary will, such as the arbitrary decree of the existence of some asserted principle, such as "shareholder value," as Justice Scalia applies an arbitrary act of irrational will to such effect in the application of what he terms his anti-historical, purely positivist principle of dictionary nominalism, "textualism."
Hegel adduced such a notion of the political will as the common feature expressed, inclusively, by the succession of Robespierre and Napoleon Bonaparte. A violent act of arbitrary will creates a state, by force. This state then secretes laws consistent with its seizure of power, as the Nazis did with the Carl Schmitt-premised Notverordnung, and as expressed by the march of the Mussolini mythos on Rome. This is in direct contrast to the American Revolution, which followed the natural law, as the Declaration of Independence describes this, in conducting its creation of a new, sovereign nation-state republic. Thus, the fascist state of Napoleon Bonaparte is seen by Hegel as the outcome of two successive acts of will, the first creating the Jacobin Terror and the second the act of sheer force of will establishing veteran Jacobin Napoleon as the Caesar of a new Romantic French empire.
So, Hitler's Prescott Bush-funded seizure of power of January 1933, relied on the mass base of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA); so, the second Hitler revolution took absolute power, by crushing the leadership of the SA, and the assassination of von Schleicher, in the events of Summer 1934. So, former Jacobin leftist Hegel, and subsequent Napoleon "groupie," and subsequent Metternich "groupie" Hegel, saw the state. So, Carl Schmitt saw the state and law, and so the "conservative revolution's" Gingrich decreed in his grasp for the seizure of power over the U.S. Congress.
The deepest principle at issue in these matters, is that if government does not recognize all persons as made equally in the image of the Creator, as cognition attests to that universal fact, then man were regarded as just another beast. Once man is put politically on the level of the beasts, as the World Wide Fund for Nature does, then man is subject to the same law we apply to beasts. Man will then act as a beast, kill as a beast, and be destroyed as a beast. Let us take heed, at the spectacle of the "Auschwitz" of slaughter of cows and lambs ongoing in Royal Consort Prince Philip's England. Are people, at least many of some people, the targets of some holocaust, next? Remember Hitler, and his passion for "eugenics"!
So, Chávez acted in Venezuela, so, Teddy Goldsmith's protégés intend to do in Brazil, and so on, and so on, around more and more places, such as Israel, in the world today. It rolls on, and on. When will it occur to you, that it is urgent that we bring this unfolding global nightmare to an end?
The Historic Issue Today
During its final exertion of imperial power in its own name, Venice launched over a century of religious warfare, 1511-1648, for the purpose of seeking to eradicate the great reforms of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, including the intended eradication of the sovereign form of nation-state based upon the principle of the general welfare. The intent was to uproot and eliminate forever those great reforms, based upon the principle of the general welfare, enacted under France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII.
Under the conditions existing in Europe, during and following the period of the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War, it became virtually impossible to revive the kinds of political reforms attempted by Louis XI and Henry VII earlier. Thus, the greatest minds of all Europe unified their efforts in support of bringing forth the first true modern nation-state republic from among the English colonies in North America. Such, and nothing else, is the American Exception.
Through London's orchestration of the French Revolution, and the success of the British monarchy and Metternich in the Congress of Vienna, the young U.S. republic was isolated, imperilled, and greatly corrupted, until President Lincoln's victory over London's Confederacy puppet, unleashed that 1861-1876 American agro-industrial revolution which revolutionized much of the world through the spreading influence of the conception of the American System of political-economy, of Hamilton, List, and Carey, as the clear alternative to the British system defined by the British East India Company's Haileybury cabal.
Although the U.S. became a political captive of London, under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge, the U.S. was still considered to contain within it a serious threat to the globalized imperial maritime power of the British monarchy. The British fear was that somehow U.S. policy might return to its pre-Theodore Roosevelt emphasis on finding partners in central Europe, Russia, and Asia, thus threatening to revive a U.S. in the Lincoln tradition as a threat to the continued existence of a British empire. London thought it might have prevented that danger by the terms of the Versailles Treaty; however, as the doom of the Versailles economic and financial system became clear, even early during the 1920s, London, as typified by long-standing British asset Volpi di Misurata in Italy, the Bank of England's Montagu Norman and Norman's Hjalmar Schacht, brought Mussolini and Hitler to power.
The premature death of President Franklin Roosevelt, enabled London to retain more or less effective control over the financial and political establishment in the U.S.A.
However, despite all else, the very existence of the American Exception as an historical fact, is still the greatest danger to continued world rule by the old European oligarchical order today. As Kissinger expressed this viewpoint in his May 10, 1982 Chatham House address, the continued existence of the "American intellectual tradition," is a threat which British lackey Kissinger is determined to uproot and crush in the U.S.A. and in the minds of the peoples of Central and South America. The significant sympathy for Argentina among traditionalist military and other circles, in the case of the outbreak of Britain's Malvinas War of 1982, was, for London, a reminder that the American intellectual tradition was neither dead nor entirely declawed.
So, as it acted against the American intellectual tradition's influence in orchestrating the Paris coup d'état of July 14, 1789, and as it acted to bring Mussolini and Hitler to power during the post-World War I periods of crisis, so, again, the threat of universal fascism is set afoot among the nations of the world today.
Think about it!
[1] Then-House Minority Leader Newt Gingrich announced his "Contract with the American People" on Sept. 27, 1994 on the steps of the Capitol. What became known as the "Contract With America" was intended for implementation within the first 100 days of a Republican majority Congress in 1994. See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Creativity in Science, School, and Song," New Federalist, Nov. 21, 1994; LaRouche, "Phil Gramm's `Conservative Revolution in America,' " and Michael J. Minnicino, "Why We Must Call Newt Gingrich `A Fascist,' " EIR, Feb. 17, 1995; Jeffrey Steinberg et al., "Newt Gingrich Looks into the Future," EIR, Jan. 12, 1996; and LaRouche, "Why Expose Gore's Record Now?" EIR, Dec. 18. 1998.
[2] Lyndon H. LaRouche, "Look At What Happened in Brazil," EIR Strategic Memorandum, Feb. 9, 2001, pp. 20-39.
[3] Notably, these movements in Central and South America correspond in pedigree to the British intelligence 1930s and World War II assignments given to the trio of Houston, Texas-based Jean de Menil (e.g., Venezuela, Cuba), Jacques Soustelle (Mexico), and Soustelle's senior Paul Rivet for Peru. All three of these synarchists, also defined by U.S. intelligence of that period as "Nazi-Communists," were pushed onto Charles de Gaulle's intelligence staff by war-time British intelligence. This network had very high-level roles in major international assassination organizations into the 1960s.
[4] Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1947 reprint from 1922).
[5] Lyndon H. LaRouche, "Look At What Happened in Brazil," op cit.
[6] On Scalia, see Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Scalia and the Intent of Law," EIR, Jan. 1, 2001. On the influence of Savigny and Schmitt in Venezuela, see box, page 44. See Prof. Friedrich Freiherr von der Heydte " `LaRouche Is Innocent, as Captain Dreyfus Was,' " EIR, Feb. 24, 1989, on radical positivist trends toward fascist dogmas of law in the U.S.A.
[7] On Jan. 20, 1995, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich delivered a call to arms before the Republican National Committee in Washington, D.C. in which he explicitly equated himself with Robespierre and Danton: "We need to understand that the scale of revolution that we need is so great and it is so dramatically different. . . . This is a real revolution. In real revolutions, the defeated faction doesn't tend to convert. It tends to go down fighting. . . . I mean, if you look at the Bourbons, in France, they didn't rush in and say, `Oh, please, can I join the revolution?' They remained Bourbons. In fact most of them learned nothing and forgot nothing, and 50 years later were still locked into a world that was dead. . . . I am a genuine revolutionary; they [the Democrats] are the genuine reactionaries; we are going to change their world and they will do anything to stop us, they will use any tool, there is no grotesquerie, no distortion, no dishonesty, too great for them to come after us. . . . The future of the human race for at least a century rests on our shoulders. If we fail . . . then Bosnia and Rwanda, Haiti and Somalia are the harbingers of a dark and bloody planet."
[8] For example, Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1957).
[9] By "revolutionary," we mean, in this case, the so-called "conservative revolution," as defined, for example, by Armin Mohler's The Conservative Revolution in Germany (Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland: 1918-1932 [Darmstadt, 1972]). The Republican far right's enthusiasm for "globalization" specifically defines them as universal fascists in the sense of Mohler's historical account.
[10] Necker, from Lausanne, Switzerland, is otherwise best known as the father of the notorious Madame de Staël. The mother of the latter creature had been putatively affianced to Shelburne lackey and historian Gibbon.
[11] Pierre Beaudry, "Jean-Sylvain Bailly: The French Revolution's Benjamin Franklin," EIR, Jan. 26, 2001.
[12] Cf. letter of Simón Bolívar, warning of the evil represented by Bentham's orchestration of the British-orchestrated revolutions in South America. In his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), Shelburne lackey utilitarian Bentham lays out the variety of British liberalism from which fascist movements and regimes have sprung repeatedly since.
[13] Cf. Beaudry, op cit.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Henry A. Kissinger, "Reflections of a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy, Address in Commemoration of Bicentenary of the Office of Foreign Secretary," May 10, 1982, Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), London. That office was established under the Rockingham government, of which Shelburne was a part, and whom he succeeded that same year. It was through this office that the Foreign Office's "secret committee," headed by Shelburne protégé Bentham, directed the Jacobin Terror in France.
[16] Shortly after the delivery of his May 10, 1982 Chatham House address, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger launched a campaign to have Lyndon LaRouche and his associates persecuted. After months of pleading for such action, Kissinger succeeded in gaining official authorization for a special foreign-intelligence operation, including international financial warfare, against LaRouche et al., from a January 1983 rump session of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This operation, conducted under provisions of E.O. 12333 and related modes, was immediately set into motion through the FBI and Department of Justice, enlisting many private interests as active members of teams including government officials. All of the legal and related harassment, including prosecutions, of LaRouche et al. over the 1983-1989 interval, and beyond, have their origin in that dirty operation under E.O. 12333 auspices. Notable private organizations included large segments of the leading television and print news media, and certain other private organizations, including the American Family Foundation and long-standing Teddy Goldsmith crony John Train. Earlier, during mid-March 1973, the FBI played a leading role, on behalf of Nixon Administration policy, in orchestrating much of the U.S. "left," including the Communist Party U.S.A., in street and other operations against LaRouche et al. These operations, which came to include the Socialist Workers Party and other left sects and sectlets, included the FBI's stated intention, as of November 1973, to foresee the personal "elimination" of LaRouche. The participation of these leftist groups reflected their own, then approximately decades-long degeneration into countercultural sects which serve as mindless leftish movements of a proto-fascist to outrightly fascist type, that in many parts of the Americas and beyond.
[17] Notably, the North American branch of Mazzini's "Young Europe," was known as "Young America," which from its bases of operation in the area of Concord, Massachusetts and Charleston, South Carolina, formed the core of what became the treasonous Palmerston asset known as the Confederate States of America.
[18] The comic-opera side of Marx's relationship to both Urquhart and Mazzini, was Marx's foolish diatribe against Palmerston, accusing the latter, in effect, of being a Russian agent! It happened that Urquhart, who had his own high-ranking career in the British foreign-intelligence service, had a certain rivalry with Palmerston. Urquhart used his influence as a controller of Marx's London career, to direct Marx into producing that howler.
[19] In varous recent publications, I have shown that the entirety of the currently popular, "free trade"-based forms of economic ideology, in the U.S.A. and Western Europe, for example, today, conform to the paganist religious assumption, that the universe is a statistical process controlled by a special bias supplied by what must be fairly described as "little green men operating from under the floorboards." Such is the role of crafted myths in mass manipulation of populations, in ancient and modern times alike. See my review, in my "The Science-Driver Principle in Economics: The Gravity of Economic Intentions" (EIR, March 30, 2001), of Kepler's exposure of the fraudulent assumptions underlying the astronomy of Claudius Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe. In that case, the myth is that the universe is so incomprehensible that we must limit our attempted understanding of it to at-the-blackboard sorts of mathematical schemes, such as the commonplace, Aristotelean "ivory tower" scheme used by Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Brahe, while ignoring the existence of knowable universal physical principles. The first five chapters of Marx's Capital, are based upon such a childish myth. The same use of popular myths as a substitute for sanity, is met in the religious "fundamentalist's" insistence that "God wrote the Bible so that a simple-minded idiot, like me, would have a perfect understanding of God's intention." Blind faith of the populist in the verities of self-evident sense-perception, is another expression of the delusion of that fundamentalist.
[20] Lyndon H. LaRouche, "The Science-Driver Principle in Economics: The Gravity of Economic Intentions," EIR, March 30, 2001.
[21] Friedrich Freiherr von der Heydte, Die Geburtsstunde des souveränen Staates (Regensburg, Germany: Druck und Verlag Josef Habbel, 1952).
