Political Theocracy Defined
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
April 18, 2001
The following topic is essential for any competent grasp of the leading strategic problems confronting both the U.S.A. and the world today. It will be studied, and assimilated accordingly, by all who wish to be competent in addressing the decisive issues of the immediate, present period of history.
The subject on which our attention is focussed in this report, is among the most important, and also the most politically sensitive of all leading issues which must be faced, that by a world presently in the grip of a global existential crisis beyond the imagination of most experiencing that very process at this presently onrushing moment. As it touches upon the matters of the privacy of personal religious professions, it is a hot issue; but, like the evils of the Spanish and related practice of both the nominally Catholic and Protestant Inquisitions, and like the Venice-orchestrated religious wars which rocked and ruined so much of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, it, like the pagan religion of Hitler's Nazis, is a matter of law and statecraft which, by its practice, loses its cloak of privileged immunity from obligatory public close scrutiny, and, if necessary, public, even official denunciation.
This subject is not only a very sensitive one, but may require a degree of intellectual effort beyond what is considered customary today. In this case, that habitual intellectual reluctance itself, is to be considered perhaps the most important of all the contributing factors in making the existential crisis confronting civilization as a whole at this instant.
What Is `Political Theocracy'?
The choice of the term, "theocracy," to describe such phenomena as that minestrone of Bush-allied gnostics, including the Christendom College set and pro-Temple Mount types, such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and the Bob Jones University gang, should be read as equivalent in meaning to an alternate, more descriptive choice of term: "political theocracy."
By "political theocracy," I mean an organic doctrine of law and related political practice, premised upon the ancient legacy of the Roman empires of both Rome and Byzantium, such as the Code of the Emperor Diocletian, and also the ancient Delphi cult of the Pythian Apollo, a legacy whose current expressions are best described in the relevant academic lexicon of the present-day world, as "universal fascism."
In the cases of Christendom College, with its Buckley family-linked streak of Escorial-cult Carlism and Falangism, or the Temple Mount and kindred, "fundamentalist" single-issue cults and alliances, political theocracy signifies a gnostic conception of supranational world law higher than, and thus opposed to both Papacy and national sovereignties. This is the mentality which Justice Department and related mass-media reports have imputed, implicitly, to be the characteristic feature of the case of St. Catherine of Siena's accused FBI official Hanssen.
Whatever becomes ultimately of the due-process outcome of the charges against Hanssen himself, the charge of "political theocracy" against the indicated minestrone of gnostics, sticks. Obviously, given the position of great influence exerted by this gnostic cabal, in not only the Bush camp, but its deep penetration of the institutions of the U.S. national-security apparatus in general, it represents perhaps the most deadly political threat, both internal and external, to the security of the U.S.A. today.
The core issue is the same as that I have addressed in the case of the nominally Catholic, but, actually, radically gnostic U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, himself a typical ideologue and member of Christendom College's gnostic orbit. On all of the fundamental issues of statecraft, law, and of theology, too, no competent judgment can be presented, until it has been developed from that Classical standpoint in natural law from which the U.S. 1776 Declaration and Independence and 1789 Preamble of the Federal Constitution were derived. Therefore, all competent definitions of phenomena such as gnosticism in general, or the gnostic theology of Christendom College's practice, must be rigorously grounded from that very same standpoint in natural law which Scalia has rejected as abhorrent to him.
The issue of "political theocracy" must be so defined, and in no contrary way.
The Standpoint in Natural Law
As I have emphasized, repeatedly, of late, from the standpoint of reference to the best standard of practice of physical science today, such as that of biogeochemist Vladimir I. Vernadsky, physical science signifies the evidence of the existence of efficient forms of universal physical principles, which are adducible from physical-experimental studies of what he terms "natural objects." He defines three distinct general categories of such natural objects: non-living processes, as contrasted in their expressed efficiency to the higher authority of living processes, and noetic processes, as contrasted in their expressed efficiency to living processes otherwise. Thus, he defines human nature as absolutely, distinctively superior to all other forms of existence within that universe.
Therefore, the body of law derived, by the most rigorous application of scientific method, from those phenomena which are uniquely characteristic of human existence in the universe, constitutes the scientific basis for defining what may be reasonably identified as "natural law."
There is no opposing method practiced in the name of physical science, for example, which has ever made, or could make a competent argument against the definition of natural law which I have just summarized. The empirically based discoveries of Vernadsky, are to be regarded as simply a consistent expression of, and contribution to the furtherance of that Classical scientific tradition, which the greatest Christian Apostles and theologians have traced immediately from such sources as the continuing work of Plato's Academy through the work of his follower Eratosthenes. However, as Vernadsky suspected, and I have shown, the more appropriate way in which to situate and conceptualize the relevant physical evidence and conclusions proffered by Vernadsky is the revolution in mathematical physics established by Gauss follower Bernhard Riemann.
By "natural law," we should understand one another to signify the nature of man, as expressed in terms of those among mankind's specific choices of actions which prove themselves to express our species' efficient ability to increase its power to existence within and over the universe. This experimental evidence shows, contrary to the empiricists and Kantians, for example, that the immortal processes of individual human cognitive action, which Vernadsky identifies as the noetic characteristics, are the only acceptable definition of both individual human nature, and of mankind's relationship to the universe as a whole. This standard, and this standard alone, defines man's nature, as in efficient relationship to the universe as a whole. Thus, only "natural law," so defined, enjoys any just claim to universal authority.
Thus, those institutions of mankind which are efficiently dedicated to the promotion of the general welfare of mankind, as mankind is so defined, and as the performance of society is so defined, is the highest temporal or spiritual authority governing the practice of law within all of human society. That is what is to be regarded as what may be justly termed the justifiable authority of lawful political, religious, and other institutions, and of constitutions crafted, like the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the 1789 Federal Constitution, in obedience to recognition of this principle of natural law.
In contrast, we have the cases of what is fairly described as "unnatural law." This includes today, and prominently, the avowed, "textualist," implicitly fascist misconception of law, as professed by Justice Scalia. The notion of "shareholder value," is such an implicitly fascist, and unnatural conception in law. This same, "unnatural" conception of law, is the basis for the gnostic sects of Christendom College and other cooperating, pro-Bush members of that tangle of political-theological minestrone which includes the aforenamed sects of Robertson, Falwell, Bob Jones University, and the "Elmer Gantry"-like, pro-racist, barking circles of Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Among the relevant historical precedents for such "unnatural law," are, as I have said above, the cases of ancient Roman law, which, as precedents, are consistent with the implications of the degenerate ancient Mesopotamian cultures, and with the Delphi cult of the Pythian Apollo. The typification of all relevant "unnatural law," such as Roman law and cultural tradition, is the satanic concept sometimes known as the law of "Pontifex Maximus" of both ancient Roman empires. Under this rule of Roman law, the head of state, such as Caesar, was the ultimate authority in matters of law, religious beliefs included. The Delphi cult's practices, including its myth-making "spin doctors," typify this same evil. This doctrine called in Latin, Pontifex Maximus, is the doctrine of imperial law, upon which is premised the division of society between rulers and their lackeys, on the one side, and the great mass of "human cattle," on the other side, and was the general ordering of society and its courts and laws.
This central feature of pagan Roman tradition is otherwise best identified today as the "political theocracy" exhibited as the common trait of that gnostic minestrone represented by today's Bush-league, slime-mold-like combination of the "single-issue"-oriented cults of Christendom College and its allies among the "Elmer-Gantry"-style, "Temple Mount" and kindred, Protestant "fundamentalists."
Although the members of what is called, fairly, that "Bush-league religious minestrone," differ among themselves as much as competing shop-keepers in a flea-market, there is a common theocratic principle, which unites them in common cause against all that is sane and decent in humanity. That principle is most efficiently identified as centered around the heritage of the Bogomil cult from which the modern doctrine of "free trade" was derived in Western Europe. It is the assertion of a doctrine of "free trade" as a universal religious principle, which defines the gnostic quality of political theocracy controlling the base of the Bush-league, in particular, today.
The Bogomil Cult
By the modern European, gnostic cult-dogma of "free trade," we signify chiefly the various outgrowths of the introduction of empiricism to modern Europe, initially, by the circles of the sometime lord of Venice, Paolo Sarpi, and his most notable ideological successor, Abbé Antonio Conti, and the Conti-organized, Europe-wide network of anti-Leibniz salons. The most notable satanic apostles of the empiricist doctrine of "free trade," are Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, and the utilitarian school of the British Foreign Office's Jeremy Bentham. We also mean to include, among the circles of Conti and Voltaire, the bestial Dr. François Quesnay and Minister Turgot, of "laizzez-faire" notoriety, from whom Adam Smith plagiarized the most crucial features of his own Wealth of Nations.
All things considered, it should not be surprising that Lord Shelburne's lackey Gibbon included a significant account of the Bogomils, otherwise called in English slang, "the buggers," in his account of the history of the Roman Empire. Much of what Gibbon reports on these "buggers," is true to fact in its bare essentials.
As part of their "special operations" of strategic defense of Byzantium against actual or potential threats from uncontrolled populations to the north, Byzantium imported a typically gnostic cult, known as the Manicheans, into the region of Thrace, as a kind of satellite marcher-lord and buffer, along that border of the empire. In a later time, as the infiltration of the Bulgars into this same region occurred, Byzantium, consistent with its custom, produced a modified version of the Manichean cult, a form of gnosticism, modelled upon the Manichean, but adapted to the Slavic cultural influences, a lunatic cult which became known as the Bogomils.
This Bogomil influence became a feature of the Bulgarian Empire, thus spreading across part of the southern Balkans, to the Adriatic coast. Later, when the migration of Carpathian Slavs occupied both sides of the river dividing Diocletian's western from eastern portion of the Roman Empire, the emergence of what are recognized as the pro-western Croats and the pro-Byzantine Serbs, checked and contained the Bulgarian influence, but the Bogomil influence continued in areas such as today's Kosovo, until the Bogomils converted en masse to Islam and the related alliance with the Ottoman Empire.
Inevitably, in the course of time, Venice cultivated the Bogomils in the area of Illyria, and promoted the cult as an agent of influence in northern Italy and southern France, where it also became known as the "Cathari" or Cathars. That portion of southern France recognized historically as Languedoc, featuring the area of the Pyrenees, along the Garonne, Tarn, and Rhône, and reaching up to the modern city of Geneva in Switzerland today.
This was the richest part of France during the relevant period of time, and, thus, a rival to the power of Venice's ally, the Plantagenets, of the early Thirteenth Century. Typically, in the immediate aftermath of Venice's direction of the Plantagenet 1202-1204 conquest of Byzantium, in the Fourth Crusade, Venice and its Plantagenet partners used the lurid reputation of the Bogomil cult, to launch a genocidal campaign against Languedoc, slaughtering Bogomils and many others alike, a Nazi-like slaughter of all together under the notorious slogan: slay them all, and let God sort them out.
It is important to stress what should be the obvious point. The fact that an agency as evil as Simon de Montfort and the Venice-directed Plantagenet agency he represented, slaughtered Bogomils, does not credit either the Plantagenet action as moral, nor the Bogomils among the victims as good, but simply demonstrates the pure hypocrisy and evil intrinsic to the introduction of the institution of the Inquisition as a combined practice of both church and state during a period which continued, in fact, from that period of the Thirteenth Century, until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War.
Nonetheless, the ideological influence of the Bogomils not only persisted, but increased, to the present day, when many of that legacy parade, as do our present-day's minestrone of Bush-league gnostics, still professing the core of the same Bogomil dogma associated today with the Mont Pelerin Society's adopted paragon, the pro-satanist Bernard Mandeville, which is also the "laissez-faire" cult otherwise parading under the banner of "free trade." There is no point of importance, on which any of the Bush-league gnostic cult-minestrone differs in essentials, from the essentially anti-Christian features of the Bogomil cult-doctrine.
Several features of the adherence to that pro-satanic (e.g., gnostic) cult-doctrine, are to be stressed in connection with the case of the Carlist, even outrightly pro-Falangist fanatics embedded, for example, within the Christendom College ingredient of that Bush-league's religious slime-mold. The first to be considered here, is the radically gnostic implications of any effort to elevate the doctrine of "laissez-faire" to a moral principle of not only national law, but also, much worse, of international law. The second, is the fact that the doctrine itself is not only purely irrational, and false as to fact, but represents, in the inevitable consequence of its practice, a result directly and absolutely contrary not only to the fundamental principle of our Federal Constitution's Preamble, but to the Mosaic conception of man and God, in general, and the fundamental principle of Christianity, in particular.
Thus, on these two accounts, even taking into account the exculpatory implications of President Bush's so conspicuously crippled mental powers, the common quality of the Bush-league's theocratic slime-mold base, is an anti-Christian, lunatic cult: in fact, a characteristically gnostic form of "political theocratic" dogma, a dogma placed by the "true believers" of that slime-mold collection, as moral authority higher than government, and also an implication inhering in their sundry varieties of curiously perverted religious beliefs.
The central feature of the religious dogma of the Bogomil cult, is their theory of "the elect," otherwise known as the "purified ones," or the "perfected ones." The mechanics of the doctrinal argument differs in no respect or degree of sheer lunacy from the arguments of John Locke, the Mont Pelerin Society's Bernard Mandeville, Quesnay, Adam Smith, or all among the utilitarians. The argument is, that there exist "little green men under the floor-boards (god)," who manipulate the statistical mechanics of the minutiae of kinematic social interactions among people motivated essentially by lusts such as petty greed, to the effect of producing a result which, because it is the result, is "the good." Thus, the rich and prosperous class is the rich and prosperous class, only because the "little green men" have arranged it thus. To interfere with that marvelous ingenuity of the "little green men," is what is morally reprehensible, the unwanted intervention of the human will, which must be prevented at all costs. When that dogma is adopted as a presumably universal moral authority, we have a corresponding form of the worst kind of heathen cult, of the type known, traditionally, as gnosticism.
When such a cult-belief is elevated to a place of authority above Paul's I Corinthians 13, for example, we have a characteristically evil, pro-satanic, gnostic cult of the type found in the Bush league's theological slime-mold.
Why Bush Is No Christian
President Bush has presented himself, so far, as the perfect Nietzschean superman, a depraved creature stupid enough, bestial enough, to be "beyond good and evil." He, as President, has acted, chiefly, in the same sort of flagrant defiance of the consequence of his own and his administration's action, which Hitler showed in his targetting of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Ariel Sharon-like operations against the Warsaw Ghetto. (Only a nation, such as Israel operating under the protection of European guilt—and that of President Bush's grandfather, Prescott—over its allowing the Nazi holocaust, only under the dictatorship of a Lazard Frères protégé such as Ariel Sharon, would commit Hitler-like crimes against humanity, against the Palestinians, and not be instantly crushed by international abhorrence for Sharon's Hitler-like atrocities.)
In short, the recent actions of the Bush Presidency have been characterized by a repeated disregard for the most obvious countervailing, economic and strategic consequences of unbelievably stupid Bush policies. The word is out, "How long will it be, before Secretary of State Powell resigns, in embittered frustration?" trying to serve such a stupid, foolish President?
To assess this sort of Nazi-like behavior by the Bush Administration, we must focus upon the affinities and connections between the legacy of the mother of Twentieth-Century fascism, the avowed satanist Friedrich Nietzsche, such followers of Nietzsche as Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, and Nietzsche's British Fabian admirers and followers, such as George Bernard Shaw and the H.G. Wells whose fascistic dogma is the foundation of the belief-structure of the circles of such products of Central European-aggravated, Twentieth-Century cultural and moral decadence, as Czechoslovakia's President Eduard Benes' Josef Korbel, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Korbel's daughter Madeleine Albright, and Korbel's protégé Condoleezza Rice. These cultural and moral degenerates, represent the explicitly pro-paganist complement to, and natural allies of the gnostic slime-mold of the Bush league's radical religious right.
Full circle to the fascist legacy of the Falange! The religious right represented by the slime-mold which features the Christendom College gathering of gnostic "political theocracy," is the Bush league's fascist mass-base for its attempted launching of a globally consolidated "universal fascist" world order.
The human essence of this matter, is that Christ was born and crucified to redeem all humanity, to the status of a creature made in the image of the Creator of the universe. Thus, for the Christian, in particular, the obligation of society, including political society, is to submit itself to the overriding obligation to promote the general welfare of humanity, at all costs, to foster the conditions of life consistent with that nature of the human individual which identifies the individual person as made in the image of the Creator. This is the principle of agape, as implicit in Plato's dialogues, and affirmed by Paul in I Corinthians 13.
Those who, in the name of their notions of a "political theocratic" sort of "ultramontane" principle, would, like Associate Justice Scalia, and all of the members and supporters of the Mont Pelerin Society, Heritage Foundation, and American Enterprise Institute, subject mankind to a division between overlords (shareholder interest) and virtual "human cattle," are the enemies of all Christianity, and are to be cast out from decent company accordingly.
In summary, the efforts to globalize the world, as the Thornburgh Doctrine did, for example, in service of an "ultramontane" theology of "free trade," are the enemies of Christianity, and of all humanity, in whatever costume, Ku Klux Klan or clerical robes, they may wish to attire themselves.
