Hans Koschnick Poses A Question
Which the July Democrats
Must Also Answer
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
This release was issued on June 30 by the LaRouche in 2004 Presidential campaign committee.
The June 23rd edition of Germany's prominent conservative daily, Die Welt, featured a June 17th interview with a former Vice-President of that nation's Social-Democratic Party (SPD), Hans Koschnick, in which he delivered a challenge to his SPD which must also be taken very much to heart by the U.S. Democratic Party's coming July, Boston convention.
I explain the strategic implications of the relevant connection.
Koschnick, well-known as a former mayor of Bremen, warns, that his party should know that it is no longer relevant to consider whether or not the SPD will be in power during the immediate years ahead, but, rather, what future the Social-Democracy still has. Admittedly, the U.S. Democratic Party, which is not a socialist party, has much greater margin of electoral potential for the immediate future available to it to waste, than Germany's gravely wounded SPD of today. Nonetheless, the problems of the SPD should be seen by leading parties throughout western and central Europe, and also in the U.S.A., as a warning to them, that all those leading political parties of most of this world, which had retained positions of relatively great authority during the past several decades, are now gripped by onrushing existential crises which parallel, in greater or lesser degrees of calamity, those of Koschnick's SPD.
To understand the crises now actually gripping all U.S.A. and European parties today, we must focus upon the feature of European politics which had formerly situated the European Social-Democracy as among the durable kingpins of European politics, prior to, and after the wave of fascist takeovers during the 1922-1945 interval. To understand that particular crisis of European social-democracy now spreading across Europe, it is relevant to see today's crisis of those, and other leading parties, in the light of the fact today, that, from the outset, what emerged as the socialist political movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries was deeply divided, between two leading currents whose conflicts often dominated the same political party.
Over the recent decades, those leading political parties and governments had premised themselves, more and more, upon a fictional view of the world's economic and general strategic situation, a view which has had less and less correspondence to proceedings in the real world. As in the U.S.A., the conditions of life of the lower eighty percentiles of family households, and in more and more communities, have become worse and worse, while the parties have bragged more and more of the successes produced by those reforms which helped to bring conditions to the point of the remorselessly advancing state of worsening calamities of economic and general security today.
The fatal flaw which had inhabited those, and other types of parties from the outset, was the role of those unprincipled compromises by which parties had secured the broader base of support on which their political power in national life had lately depended, until now. As the illusions failed, so, the practical, real-life basis for that unprincipled consensus was taken away, as during the 1920s and 1930s, when the existing party-systems' base waned, and collapsed. An at least ominously similar process is under way now.
Meanwhile, all leading political parties of the world, socialist or not, whether or not they admit this reality, are presently thrown, like the SPD, into an existential crisis caused chiefly by their hysterical refusal to take into account the nature of the profound and sweeping changes in national and world affairs which have already been brought on by the worsening storms of monetary-financial, economic, and increasing war-danger. This is the danger which came to the surface during the period since the outbreak of the international monetary crises of 1997 and 1998.
The failed responses since then, of all relevant governments, including the government and leading political parties of the U.S.A., set the stage for the pattern of spreading and worsening global economic and strategic catastrophes which has unfurled itself like a pandemic, around more and more of the world, since the January 2001 inauguration of President George W. Bush, Jr. That Bush Administration did not cause the disease; the failure of Bush was the leading product of that global pandemic which had already been set into motion under the reign of that President's predecessors. It is not a U.S.A. epidemic. As the recent European Union elections reflect this, it is a global pandemic which has now put western and central Europe into its charnel house.
The expedient internal compromises which socialist and other major political parties of the world had cultivated during the pre-1997 period, could no longer be maintained under those conditions of accelerating strategic military and economic crises which have wracked the world since the close of 1996. The achievements of those parties, prior to 1997, have been exposed as a euphoric delusion. The rise and fall of the "Red-Green" coalition government of Chancellor Schröder, is but one among many cases of what had become such an unworkable, attempted political compromise with onrushing destiny, under what had been already an acceleration of rapidly changing conditions for the worse.
Under such a condition of systemic spread of global existential crisis, there is no more dangerous idiocy in politics, than to attempt to define politics in terms of the "left," "right," and "center" seating arrangements among, or within political parties. For any literate student of history, there are two leading currents of axiomatically distinct political thought among the political systems of modern, globally extended European civilization, neither of which are either "left," nor "right," nor "center." The only important, enduring, and axiomatic difference in modern European political culture, is between the Classical humanists and the sundry, opposing varieties of materialists. The implications of this are of fundamental importance for the class of problems to which the Koschnick interview refers. I explain this crucially important distinction as follows.
In Europe, one of the two mutually opposing currents whose intersection had effected the historical development of both the European continental social-democracy and the U.S. political-party system, was the same Classical humanist current which had been associated with the radiated 18th-Century influence of such as Leibniz, J.S. Bach, Abraham Kästner, Gotthold Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Schiller, and the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt.
The opposition to the Classical humanist current from within, notably, the socialist parties of continental Europe, was the same, self-styled "materialist" current to which most of the world's Communist parties adhered, at least on their principal official records.
What often bounded these two opposing socialist currents into a single, so-called "left-wing" party of variously meliorist or revolutionary disposition, was a commitment to unprincipled intra-party factional compromises, which afforded a party relatively short-term unity, under the common aims of retaining political power through unity of action, and, also, at least for some in the party, a means for temporarily defending the general welfare against the abuses commonly practiced by both the relics of Europe's feudal past, and the equally predatory interest of what 18th- and 19th-Century Anglo-Dutch Liberalism has defined as "free trade," to the present day.
In the case of the United States, we, with our uniquely principled Declaration of Independence and original Constitution, had adopted a different form of national economy than is found anywhere in Europe, still today. The constitutional model was known as "The American System of political-economy," the leading alternative to, and opponent of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system which dominates the political thinking of Europe today. However, from time to time, much of the influence of this U.S.A. model did spread back into Europe, especially in the wake of the war-time victory, led by President Abraham Lincoln, over the British asset known as the Confederacy. Following the triumphant 1876 demonstration of the superiority of the American System of political-economy,[1] over the inherently predatory Anglo-Dutch Liberal, monetarist system of so-called "free trade," some nations from around the world, including Bismarck's Germany, Russia, Japan, and others, radically revised national policies according to the model of the world's leading 19th-Century economists, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, and Henry C. Carey.
Thus, because of the moral and related advantages of the American System of political-economy, relative to the experience of Europe, no significant socialist movement comparable to those of Europe, developed until a period, during late in the 19th Century. Although labor movements, such as Terence Powderly's Knights of Labor, did emerge during the 1820-1876 interval, it was not until the influences such as the British gold standard and the corruption of the Specie Resumption Act, and, later, the Federal Reserve Act, were used to force upon large sectors of the U.S. population the misery caused by a London-modelled Wall Street savagery, that the 1877-1937 pattern of Europe-like, legendary social conflicts between capital and labor emerged in the United States. The result was often expressed with a savagery which echoed the state of affairs induced by Europe's Anglo-Dutch Liberal model of financier oligarchy.
Nonetheless, despite those historically determined differences between the United States and Europe, the conflict between the "Classical humanist" and "materialist" currents of socialist and other thought have developed somewhat in parallel, in both continents, that in notable forms and degrees. With the passing of the immediate post-war decades, the already exceptional, if potent influence of Classical humanist currents akin to Germany's 1920s and early 1930s Reichsbanner tradition, although revived under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's term in office, have more or less vanished among the European socialist movements during the later 1960s, as the older generation of the Classical humanist movements passed into retirement from leading positions in public life. The ranks of the Classical humanists were winnowed, partly by deaths, and more emphatically as the beastly subversion of the Congress for Cultural Freedom took hold. This issue, of "Classical humanist," versus "materialist" world-outlooks, within the SPD and other branches of European socialism, is the implied challenge of the reality in which I situate my reading of Hans Koschnick's published remarks.
My included personal qualifications for addressing this subject of European socialist parties as such, are exceptionally important today, both in respect to philosophical grounding of my role as one of the world's most successful economists, and other notable features of my personal experience of the past sixty years, including my practical experience with socialist parties and kindred associations outside the U.S.A.
1. How the Socialists Often Failed
It is relevant to my authority on the subject of Hans Koschnick's remarks to Die Welt, that I have had a notable association with socialist movements during two discrete intervals of my adult life. The first was during the interval 1948-1953, in my commitment to defeating the pro-fascist, pro-Churchillian upsurges which had been associated with President Truman's term in office, as these were infamously echoed by Roy M. Cohn's Senator Joseph McCarthy. The second interval occurred slightly more than a decade later, when I reacted against that renewed clear threat of fascist insurgency, this time the manifest threat posed by what President Dwight Eisenhower had denounced as "a military-industrial complex." That onslaught by that pro-Synarchist "complex" erupted most violently, in both Europe and the Americas, during the post-John F. Kennedy, 1964-1973 interval.
The first instance of my association with socialist politics, occurred as I returned from overseas duty to find a U.S.A. then under President Harry S Truman. It was no longer President Roosevelt's U.S.A. I was faced with the insolence of a reigning, post-Roosevelt, Wall Street establishment, which was now allied with significant elements of that same fascist enemy which we had declared our Franklin Roosevelt-led nation committed to fight. I found the fascism of what I later learned to recognize as the financier-controlled Synarchist International of the 1918-1945 interval, resurgent in even the United States itself.
By late 1948, the dwindling fractions of both socialists and pro-socialists were, for me, the only visibly significant political stratum with an active popular base which appeared ready to make an open rear-guard resistance to this new resurgence of synarchism which the right-wing, "preventive war" policies of Bertrand Russell and President Truman, et al. represented. So, after President Eisenhower had dealt with Senator Joe McCarthy and dumped the "preventive nuclear warfare" of Truman and the Committee on the Present Danger, the socialists of my U.S.A., were left with nothing truly important which they were actually willing to do; for me, they were simply too intellectually sterile and insufferably boring to continue to be worth my while.
At that point, I went happily back to work, thinking to assume what passes among us for a normal family life. However, that was not to last for long. A decade later, new developments mustered me back to the war against fascism once again.
In the aftermath of the 1962 missiles-crisis, the John J. McCloy-led, Warren Commission cover-up of the right-wing assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the launching of the lunatic official war in Indo-China, I saw the emerging anti-war youth ferment of that period as the only relevant spark-plug in sight, for resisting what I recognized, as an economist, as the post-Eisenhower rise of the preconditions for a serious attempt at introducing fascist (e.g., Schachtian) policies, and matching impulses toward new wars, into the world in general.
However, by 1971-1973, it had become clear to me then, even decades before the relevant FBI documents were released to me from the archives, that the socialist movements of that time were controlled largely by the U.S. Department of Justice's internal security apparatus, or by kindred spirits among leading law firms and think-tanks of the financier-oligarchical interest associated with the pro-synarchist Congress for Cultural Freedom. This signalled that self-certified socialist organizations had become less than useless as a rallying-point of U.S. internal resistance to the new fascist impulses expressed by the 1971-72 shift to a "floating-exchange rate" monetary order.
So, after the U.S. Justice Department's steering of its assets in the leadership of the CPUSA into a continuing, February 1973 and later effort to remove me physically from the ranks of the living, I knew that this reflected the fact that, within virtually all of the sundry socialist circles in the United States, the leadership had become the controlled assets of that FBI-steered operation. The nominally socialist movement of the U.S.A. was virtually dead. The degenerated socialist political currents of the U.S.A. had died a dishonorable death, and were no long capable, at least up to the present moment, of contributing a significantly useful role of leadership in the political life of the U.S.A.
My immediate duty was to the youth movement which I had developed over the 1965-1974 interval. The 1974-76 organizing of the U.S. Labor Party by me, as a new Whig association, was the first result. My 1976 campaign, on that ticket, was fought against the attempted revival of the "preventive nuclear war" organization, the revived Committee on the Present Danger. The intended revival was launched by a group around James R. Schlesinger et al., which deployed under the umbrella of Zbigniew Brzezinski's campaign to become the new U.S. National Security czar. These developments led to my subsequent role as a candidate for the Democratic Party's 1980 Presidential nomination, and my association with the Democratic Party ever since. It also led to my role in crafting what became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, and to my current campaign against current Nazi-like Vice-President Dick Cheney's continuing, now nearly fifteen-year-long commitment to perpetual, global "preventive nuclear warfare" today.
Thus, in both cases of my association with the U.S. socialist movement, 1948-1953 and 1964-1972, my impulse was to combat the aggressive introduction, into the post-FDR U.S.A., of Hjalmar Schachtian and other echoes of pre-1945 European fascism. It was a fascism which I later discovered, through my strategic intelligence investigations begun in 1983, to have been an influence which had been created and steered by those Synarchist International's financier circles, whose aims were expressed through such visible channels as Allen Dulles' negotiations with a core of the Nazi SS. My concern became centered on the fact that the same crew of financier oligarchs which had given us Hitler, were the enemies I must combat today. My view then, as now, is that when my republic, and much more, is in danger of the kinds of threats which arose during the post-Roosevelt 1940s, and in the contexts of the 1962 Missiles Crisis and Vietnam War, these are the kind of crises which demand that the individual citizen must pick up the guidon where he finds himself standing.
On the subject of the useful role contributed by socialist movements with which I associated myself on those two occasions, resistance to oppression, and fights for justice, are always in order. The important qualification, often overlooked by the usual run of socialist associations, is that those efforts should never have been conducted stupidly. A just cause is never a justification for being stupid about the crafting or avoidance of alliances and their objectives.
The failures of the socialist parties on that account, have not been accidental. The dominant role of various expressions of the materialist (e.g., empiricist) world-outlook in the philosophical world-outlook of those parties and related associations, has often blinded those parties to the requirements of the essential interests of mankind. Those movements have tended to choose failed substitutes for a Classical-humanist sense of purpose, substitutes found in utopian, populist qualities of concocted "social contracts"; or in the old German social-democracy's "objective theory of stages of history"; in the simplistic "class struggle" formulations, or a combination of these. Therefore, except as socialist organizations are sometimes influenced by Classical-humanist influences, their positive role has been limited to fighting against perceived social threats, rather than motivated by a Classical humanist policy: a Classical humanist commitment to building those principled communities of sovereign nation-states which are the only proven long-term alternative to the systemic evils under which civilization has continued to suffer until the present time.
When the socialists of the late 1940s protested the Truman Administration's sharp turn against the heritage of President Franklin Roosevelt, from the outset of Truman's inauguration as President, their instinctual impulse for defense of the general welfare—as nobly expressed by Clifford Odets' The Big Knife—was admirable; it was their home-baked, pro-"materialist," simplistically mechanistic recipes which were often deplorable. Once the fight was over, and the fighting instinct evaporated, the deplorable, populist, "class conflict" sophistries, took over. So, at appropriate moments in the course of time, I relieved myself of the alliance, to take myself back to my own independent policy of practice; but, I have never had reason to repudiate, or regret, what I did during those periods of my predominantly difficult association with those forces.
Similarly, in the mid-1960s, the opposition to the Indo-China war was sound, but the 1968ers' populist remedy, "post-industrial" utopianism, was to prove even more wicked, in global scope and duration, than the war they opposed at that time. As I warned the "single-issue" anti-war activists of that period, to resist the folly of the continuing of the Indo-China warfare, an appropriate political approach must be taken to those in the labor movement and elsewhere, who were misled into believing that the issue of that war was one of patriotism, rather than the war being a correlative of an attempted right-wing takeover of the U.S.A. by an Anglo-American financier faction, a faction whose pedigree was to be traced to their recurring association with both Hitler's rise to power, and the assimilation of key elements of the Nazi SS into the post-war "Atlantic Alliance." The socialist and related elements of the anti-war movement rejected my approach.
Worse, the dominant current within the anti-war youth was not typified by the Rev. Martin Luther King, but by those radical youth of that time, who were largely caught up in the "rock-drug-sex counterculture," who were steeped in the Luddite ideological tradition of "post-industrial" utopianism, and a matching hostility to the "blue collar" of modern agriculture and manufacturing.
It was the cultural-paradigm shift which the fusion of rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture and "post-industrial" utopianism typified, which has led the world into that presently ongoing world crisis which threatens, for the moment, to bring down Germany's SPD as many of the leading parties of Europe and the Americas have discredited themselves similarly, under the influence of the ongoing cultural paradigm-shift which has led the leading political parties of those nations toward ruin, over the course of the recent forty years.
The cultivated functional stupidity of the U.S. socialist organizations and their leaderships, was appalling; much of that stupidity was cultivated within and by those associations, by a widespread commitment to the same anti-Classical-humanist, "materialist" philosophical standpoint respecting the nature of man, shared by Thomas Huxley and Frederick Engels, a doctrine reflecting the correlated, empiricist methods of those associations. Let me choose to say, as stating the point with the greatest permissible forbearance, that the characteristic problem of the nominally socialist and pro-socialist political associations, was the thick-headed, often brutishly simplistic varieties of populist sophistry, typified by the madness of "single-issuism." These sophistries were characteristic of the opportunistic rhetoric and policy-shaping of not only those socialist and kindred associations, but the raw hedonism of the mass-base of the leading conservative electoral parties, too.
The hallmark of the appalling, widespread intellectual mediocrity of the socialist organizations of the U.S.A., over much longer than a century, has been the prevalence of the delusion that the mark of political purity was devotion to a militant "anti-intellectualism," This pathetic trait has been commonplace among existentialist atheists and "fundamentalist" fanatics, alike. Such beliefs, by atheists or believers alike, are a virtually religious form of bigotry approaching that of the notorious Grand Inquisitor.
The recent four decades of intellectual, and often moral decay among the socialist associations of Europe and the Americas, was the turn away from what had been the saving grace of many such associations, away from their grounding in the rudiments of betterment of conditions of life through national political commitment to the development of the basic economic infrastructure of nations as a whole; a turn toward "post-industrial" destruction of commitment to that Classically humanistic, scientific and technological progress upon which the positive moral outlooks of the socialists had depended.
Admittedly, the leading socialist political organizations of Europe are often a different proposition than the simplistic, "psychotomimetic" babbling that we encounter among the nominal socialists inside the U.S.A. today; but, as I have also pointed out some common features above, there are certain similarities, certain lessons to be adduced, by political parties on both sides of the Atlantic today, from a study of the evidence of the comparison of socialist currents in the U.S.A. with those in western and central Europe.
2. The Issue of The Human Soul
To sum up the essence of the working point here: the crucial issue implicitly reflected in Hans Koschnick's interview by Die Welt, is the conflict between Classical Humanism and materialism, which I summarized above. The issue of socialism is not the fraudulently alleged insistence that it is intrinsically subversive of constitutional republicanism in that way which right-wing demagogues often assert to be the case. Rather, the problem is, the dismal effects of the specific, populist kind of influence exerted by the anti-Classical humanist, "materialist" philosophical standpoint expressed by advocacy of Adam Smith's mystical, and actually fraudulent dogma of "free trade." This conflict is rooted, axiomatically, in the materialist's rejection of any physical-scientific basis, as distinct from any merely wishful, aprioristic, doctrinal tradition alone, for the existence of the immortal human soul.
That, for example, is the specific error of principle, which misled the SPD into electing, with fully conscious intent, to go for a while into a neo-Malthusian wilderness of official opposition, from about 1981-1982. No one who thought carefully about that turn of the SPD then, should have doubted that that decision, then, would come back to haunt the SPD, as it has jumped out to rudely confront Chancellor Schröder's leadership today. That problem suffered by the SPD today, is an object so large that it can not be overlooked even from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean: The root of that problem is the loss, or simply the lack of a specifically Classical humanist standpoint in the role of leadership.
The loss of a viable government in Germany, even the loss of a viable SPD, would be a serious blow to the U.S.A. Whereas, a failure of the U.S.A. to change its ways, very soon, would be a catastrophe for the world at large. Without a turn back toward a commitment to a Classical humanist approach, there is very little hope that civilization as we have taken it too much for granted, would continue in its present forms of practice of relative individual freedom.
As I have been persuaded of this throughout my adult life, and also some time earlier, Classical humanism, which dates its best known origins in European civilization from such figures as Solon of Athens, Thales, Heraclitus, Plato, and the pre-Aristotelean and pre-Euclidean Pythagoreans, is characterized by a scientific quality of certainty respecting a scientifically demonstrable quality of the individual member of the human species which is not found in any lower form of animal life. That quality is the power to discover an experimental proof of a type of universally efficient physical principle which is a kind of experimentally defined object which is not experienced directly as a phenomenon of sense-perception. That quality depends upon the rejection, at least in fact of practice, of the typically materialist standpoint of the modern empiricist.
This quality of the individual member of the human species, is mankind's only knowledge of the existence of an immortal quality of spiritual existence of the human being. This scientific notion of immortality of the individual human personality—a notion notably expressed by Moses' Genesis 1, by the Gospel of John and Epistles of Paul, and by Moses Mendelssohn's Phaedon—is the essential distinction of the Classical humanist from the reductionists, both in the times of Thales, Pythagoras, Solon, and Plato; and, today, a distinction from both the materialists and sundry varieties of religious lunatics such as the U.S. fundamentalist cults of both Princeton's Jonathan Edwards' time and today.
In the history of U.S. natural law, running through the notions of "to do good" by Cotton Mather and his heir Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin's adoption of Gottfried Leibniz's anti-Locke principle of "the pursuit of happiness," we meet the specifically U.S. natural-law expression of the Classical humanism of Europe upon which the creation of our own constitutional republic, and its specific tradition of the Classical humanism of Franklin and both Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and last public address, on reuniting the states as if they have never been separated, continues to depend to the present day.
Classical humanism signifies the immortality of the individual, through successive generations of a culture, as expressed through the transmission of those expressed qualities which distinguish the human individual from monkeys, worms, and goats. This transmission is merely typified, albeit in an essential way, by the discovery of those experimentally validated universal physical principles which are not themselves subjects of Charles Darwin's monkey-like pursuit of sense-certainty. This includes not only such discoveries of the universal physical principles which are known only as objects of the supra-sensory complex domain, but also those Classical artistic principles of social processes, such as Classical artistic composition, which radiate only from man, rather than the beasts.
In the body of the true natural law expressed uniquely by the modern form of sovereign nation-state, as by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the fundamental U.S. law presented in the Preamble of our Federal Constitution, the central expression of modern civilized society is the anti-Hobbesian principle of the general welfare: the moral obligation of sovereign nations to subordinate themselves to the intention to promote the general welfare of, and among, nations. Under such natural law, the notion of the dignity and rights of the human individual is associated with nothing but the distinction of the human individual from all lower forms of life; the notion of man and woman as made equally, unlike all other living species, in the willful image of the Creator of the universe, a species entrusted with responsibility for the nurture and development of that Creation.
This issue of principle was at the center of the founding of the U.S. republic, as in the incorporation of what I have already pointed to here, as Gottfried Leibniz's universal principle of natural law, "the pursuit of happiness," in the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence. This same principle of universal natural law is reflected in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution drafts of 1787-1789. That Preamble is an intention of universal natural law, the intention of Leibniz's "pursuit of happiness," to which every other feature of that Constitution, and of all Federal and common law, is properly subject for its interpretation for practice. That is the unique feature of the U.S. Constitution which has enabled it, despite all U.S. errors of practice since, to be the only national constitution to have survived over the course of the 1789-2004 interval to date. That is the notion of intention of U.S. constitutional law which enabled President Franklin Roosevelt to tip the balance in the way needed to save the world from the Synarchist International's lurch toward doom which still gripped the political processes of western and central Europe during the 1922-1945 interval.
Leibniz's notion of "the pursuit of happiness," which the evil Voltaire hated so bitterly, was the feature which the North American patriots led by Benjamin Franklin adopted from their reading of a belated publication of Leibniz's warning of the evils of John Locke's doctrine, in Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding. That is the key to solving the riddle implicitly posed by Koschnick's observations to Die Welt. This notion of "pursuit of happiness" is inseparable from the notion of the immortality of the human soul, as set forth in the body of Plato's dialogues taken as a whole, as by Moses Mendelssohn's powerfully influential key work of the German Classical Renaissance, his Phaedon.[2]
Mendelssohn, together with his friend Gotthold Lessing, was a principal, founding figure, together with Lessing's mentor, the great Eighteenth-Century mathematician Abraham Kästner, of the German Classical renaissance which exerted a great influence, significantly through one-time Benjamin Franklin host Kästner and his associates. The significance of this set of historical facts, is to be recognized in Kästner's avowed commitment to defend the great discoveries of two figures, Leibniz and J.S. Bach, against the evils of the Eighteenth-Century English and French empiricist "Enlightenment."
The most efficient way of showing the axiomatic difference between the Classical approach and the leading expression of modern anti-humanist materialism—the empiricism of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Euler, Lagrange, Kant, et al.—is the quarrel which is expressed by Leibniz-haters Voltaire, Euler, and Lagrange, against the discovery of the underlying principle of an infinitesimal calculus, the Leibniz-Bernoulli development of the concept of a catenary-cued universal physical principle of least action. The defense of this discovery was taken up by Germany's most influential teacher of mathematics, Kästner, as in Kästner's insistence on casting aside Euclidean and Cartesian geometries as used by the empiricists, in favor of a pre-Euclidean (i.e., anti-Euclidean) geometry. Kästner's principle was defended by his greatest student, Carl Gauss, in Gauss's 1799 Latin treatise The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, in which Gauss exposes the hoaxes of such empiricist ideologues as d'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange in their denial of the existence of an infinitesimal calculus, and, hence, the efficient physical existence of what the legacy of the relevant work on curvature, of Gauss through Riemann, defines as the Riemannian expression of the physical actuality of what is represented by the complex domain.
The theological significance of the attacks on the frauds of the empiricists, and their logical positivist successors, by Gauss, Riemann, et al., is, succinctly, that all experimentally validated discoveries of universal physical principle express universal physical principles which can be known through the cognitive creative processes of the individual human mind; but are also principles which are objects which can not be directly observed in their nature as objects, by human sense-perception alone. That is, in brief, the ontological significance of the complex domain in physical science, and also of Classical principles of artistic composition, such as those traced as such from Greece, as distinct from the reductionist, or arbitrarily fantastic, Archaic, Romantic, modernist, etc. modes.
To make the essential working-point clear, I must be painstakingly concrete, as follows.
As we are each and all born, we shall surely die. When we shall have died, will we have lived as men, or as beasts? Shall we have developed, cultivated, and transmitted an improvement of knowledge of those universal physical principles which Plato and his Pythagorean predecessors defined as "powers" to transform the conditions of the planet, and of human life, in ways of which no beast is capable by its nature? Have we taken up and perpetuated the great discoveries of principles by our forebears; have we added to the store of those powers and their proper use; have we secured these benefits, while we were alive and able, to the endless generations of mankind to come after us? Have we, like Jeanne d'Arc, and also the Reverend Martin Luther King, found in ourselves, in the image of Jesus Christ, the source of courage, when needed, to put all personal life and comfort in peril, that we might not betray the benefit which must be delivered to future generations?
Have we, as political leaders, appealed to that true fundamental self-interest of the person which is lodged within that notion of the uniquely specific immortality of the mortal person's individual human soul? This is not an assertion to be made as a bare appeal to merely the abstract name of that notion. It is a conception which must be expressed in the form and substance of those appropriate forms of action which contribute to the realization of that self-interest. Here lies the guiding role of Classical humanist method.
Real Politics For Today
That is real politics. That is the real statecraft of the true statesman, and of the political party which is worthy of being chosen to govern. There is nothing properly mysterious in any of this, and, therefore, there is no tolerable excuse for the bungling of governments and political parties which have lured us into the present systemic form of immediately threatened global catastrophe. There are known principles available to us on this account. The following are typical.
As I have stated in the immediately preceding paragraphs, this notion of knowable universal physical, and related artistic principles, as traced, in European civilization, chiefly from the Pythagoreans and Plato, provides the empirical basis for the notion of the individual human soul and its implicit immortality, as the notion so derivable is affirmed by such religious authorities as the Apostles John and Paul. Notable is Paul's I Corinthians 13, in which the same principle of agape presented from the mouth of Plato's Socrates, is placed above all other notions of universal law.
This immortality is expressed in ordinary practice by the transmission of great discoveries of universal principle of that quality, from one generation to its successors, as within the context of a classroom organized in keeping with Friedrich Schiller follower Wilhelm von Humbolt's design for Classical humanist education.
Accordingly, the central issue of constitutional principle of the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence, is the right of all persons to express their distinction from the mere beasts, by participation in the processes of transmitting and working to generate, and to apply the discoverable great principles of the universe. The denial of the right to practice that quality of activity, in education, and as an adult citizen, amounts to the degradation of the citizen to the condition of herded or hunted human cattle. The realization of participation in knowing, transmitting, and employing discovered universal principles of physical science and Classical artistic composition, is the pursuit of happiness; is the right, which denied, denies the victim his or her right to express humanity in an efficient way.
That is the same principle continued by the role of the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, as the authority which stands above, and judges all other law and related practice. There lies the crucial, specific element of exceptional great strength within the U.S. system. The American System of political-economy, as identified by Alexander Hamilton, Mathew Carey, Friedrich List, and the world's greatest economist of the mid-Nineteenth Century, Henry C. Carey, is an outgrowth of that constitutional principle rooted in Leibniz's argument for the right of pursuit of happiness.
This Classical humanist notion of the human species is directly opposed to such abominations as the existentialism of the Frankfurt School's Nazi existentialist philosopher and follower of the evil Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, with his notion of "thrownness." In modern European doctrine since the notorious, Venetian marriage counsellor of England's King Henry VIII, Francesco Zorzi (aka, Giorgi), and the neo-Aristotelean Venetian founder of empiricism, Paolo Sarpi, the chief enemy of Classical humanism in European civilization has been the outgrowth of the empiricism of Sarpi, and of such Sarpi followers as Galileo, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Descartes, John Locke, Antonio Conti, David Hume, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Euler, Lagrange, Jeremy Bentham, and the former Hume apologist Immanuel Kant of his Critiques. That outgrowth of that, empiricism and positivism, was that enemy of the founding of the U.S. Federal republic known as the so-called French and English Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Dutch Liberal "Enlightenment." The existentialism of the Congress for Cultural Freedom's "Frankfurt School" legacy is typical of the most morally and intellectually degenerate extreme of "Enlightenment" empiricism.
The persistent crisis of the modern socialist movement, since its origins within the 1789-1814 French Revolution, has been its empiricist legacy, its prevalent hostility to the principles of Classical humanism. However, as in my own case during 1948-53 and 1964-73, the worst political evils of, especially, modern European civilization often compel Classical humanists to make an honest commitment to common cause with socialists and others of a predominantly empiricist philosophical outlook. The most frequent premise for that occasional unity of action, is the urgency of defense of the general welfare against the rapacity of what is called the "reactionary" threat of financier oligarchical interest and the latter's political instruments. It is collaboration; it should not be considered a marriage.
President Franklin Roosevelt was not a socialist; he was a fully witting follower of his ancestor, New York banker, and political ally of Alexander Hamilton, Isaac Roosevelt. Yet, he was indeed the rightly adopted hero of, among others, most of that U.S. socialist movement which flourished under the inspiration of his leadership. He was an efficient promoter of that principle of the general welfare which is otherwise known in U.S. constitutional law as the explicitly Leibnizian principle of "the pursuit of happiness." The admiration of the best among the mass-based socialist movements of the time, of Franklin Roosevelt's Presidency, was for his explicit and efficiently expressed defense of the natural-law principle of the promotion and defense of the general welfare. It is that intersection of Franklin Roosevelt and his socialist supporters, to which I refer in addressing Hans Koschnick's remarks.
Russia, Today, For Example
Post-Soviet Russia today is not a Communist, nor otherwise a socialist society in the atheist or agnostic sense. It is a blend of Russian culture, including the heritage of the Russian church, with the experience of the Soviet system. As the point is aptly illustrated by a 1996 Moscow conference in which I played a key role, in concert with leading economic thinkers and others of Russia then, Russia is a specifically Eurasian nation in culture, a nation now committed to defending and rebuilding its way out of the 1990-2001 reign of Anglo-American carpetbaggers, to become a principal, if not exclusive keystone and bridge of the relations between Europe and the nations of Asia.
Despite those delusions of the Synarchist and related Bilderberger traditions, the great evil which was at the root of the two so-called "World Wars" of the Twentieth Century, was an expression of the effects of the neo-Venetian, Anglo-Dutch Liberal tradition, and its system of control over monetary and financial affairs of and among nations, control by those consortia of private financier-oligarchical interest which are identified today as "independent central banking systems." These latter types of systems, which seek to drive the rate of financial profiteering up to levels which collapse the rate of increase of physical output per capita, must lead lawfully to either more or less severe cyclical crises, or even general breakdown crises so severe that they threaten the onset of a generalized new dark age.
A study of the debt of the nations of Central and South America, since 1971-1982, shows that these nations have already overpaid every bit of net indebtedness they had actually incurred prior to the institution of an inherently rapacious "floating exchange-rate" monetary-financial system. Similarly, the change of the United States over the recent forty years, from the world's leading producer nation, to a "post-industrial" parasite on, especially, the poorer "cheap labor" markets of the world, should have warned us, already, that the merely nominal economic success of the U.S. economy since October 1987, has been merely one more great swindle of the poor by the more powerful. As the subjugated poorer parts of the world collapse under the burden so created—as Argentina illustrates that result most clearly—the predator collapses through the ruin of his prey.
The great insanity commonplace among the self-deluded, dominant political and related circles in the U.S.A. today, is their impulse to brag about the financial successes of the United States during the 1990s, without taking into account both the collapse of the basic economic infrastructure and productive capacity of the United States itself, and the degree to which U.S. apparent prosperity depends upon increased rates of looting of foreign resources which are reaching the limit of their ability to sustain the 1990s popular U.S. official delusions. The collapse of both the U.S.A. and of Central and South America, under the impact of NAFTA, illustrates the delusory character of the alleged successes of U.S. economic policy over the course of the 1990s.
The modern sovereign nation-state republic was first established as a form of practice of an existing government by Louis XI's France and then Henry VII's England. For the first time, the principle of natural law, that men and women must not be degraded to the condition of human cattle, was enthroned as the same principle of the general welfare incorporated in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution. This accomplishment was immediately the fruit of the Fifteenth-Century, Italy-centered Renaissance. Unfortunately, the medieval, ultramontane alliance of Venetian financier-oligarchy and Norman chivalry struck back, determined to exterminate the modern nation-state by combining the feudal social tradition with the weapons of religious warfare deployed over the period from 1511-1648, when a civilized form of life in Europe was established by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.
After 1648, the Venetian tradition, now wearing the robes of the Anglo-Dutch financier oligarchy, struck back again, through a series of wars which that oligarchy variously provoked and launched over the period leading into the establishment of the British Empire, as the empire of the British East India Company, by the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Thus, prior to modern times, and down to the present day, the cause for general warfare among the nations of globally extended European civilization, has been imperial efforts to establish one empire at the expense of another, or to crush the sovereign nation-state republic out of existence.
The modern weapons of policy by which imperial forces such as the Anglo-Dutch Liberals' imperial interest have sought to eradicate truly representative self-government from this planet, are two. First, to attempt to crush national sovereignty through introducing new forms of supranational government (e.g., "globalization," NAFTA). Second, as typified by the brutish project of the Congress for Cultural Freedom ("freedom" from sanity), is to uproot the form of striving for improvement of Classical human culture upon which the healthy existence of peaceful relations within and among sovereign peoples depends.
The first explicit statement of the latter, cultural policy, was supplied by Galileo Galilei's pupil, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, like Galileo's master, the founder of empiricism, Paolo Sarpi, and John Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Bertrand Russell's linguistics movement after him, demanded the eradication of those customs of Classical humanist artistic culture and use of language which are associated with the Classical concept of poetic irony.
Irony, so conceived, is fairly described as the characteristic expression, in any language's use, of a difference between a computer-language and human qualities of thought. The principle of Classical irony, which is characteristic of the intelligent, actually human use of the language of any people, relies upon the vast heritage of the collective cultural experience of a people, over many successive generations. Thus, we are able to introduce new ideas of principle into communication, by using words in a way which is formally ambiguous, but which, when taken into the context of the culture of that people, coins the expression of a new concept, by reading that ambiguity generated by the composer against the context of the cultural experience and knowledge of the literate users of that language.
Thus, were we to attempt to homogenize the language of the world, we would, in effect, degrade the people of the planet—lords, lackeys, and serfs alike—to the status of human cattle, incapable of expressing socially those ideas on which a people's willful participation in a human form of self-government depends absolutely. On this account, only the existence of the sovereign nation-state republic, constituted with this consideration in view, provides a people the means by which it gains and maintains efficient sovereignty in self-government.
The kinships and contrasts between central European and Russian culture are exemplary. Russian is a Eurasian culture by acquired nature. So, in that case, as in all of the significant cultural distinctions throughout Europe, a system of sovereign self-governments premised upon the embedded heritage of a language-culture, is indispensable for the existence of those qualities of actual self-government which elevate relations among people above the sorts of relations better suited to human cattle.
The comprehension of these distinctions is specific to those principles of Classical humanism typified by the shared intention of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schiller.
The issue is, contrary to the efforts to uproot Classical Humanism, the road to equality is not the rule of society by populist standards of the greatest relative ignorance in modes of communication, but, directly the opposite. True equality among people who are not being degraded into the status of human cattle, requires the practice of public deliberations in modes which reach toward the highest standards of Classical humanism.
In a time, when popular opinion has been degraded to the prevalence of dreadfully wrong opinion, only the rejection of continued reliance on a babble of popularized catch-phrases, can muster the majority of a people from the looming doom their currently fashionable choice of slogans and the like have nearly brought upon themselves today.
If, as some would insist, the kind of change I propose is impossible at this time; then, we would be surely at the present brink of a global descent into a new dark age, looking therefore hopefully, toward a better time, when the prevalent notions of today might have been weeded out of the human garden. If you dislike the presently looming near-term prospect of a plunge into a new dark age, the right and power to make the needed change in one's own opinion and behavior, away from populist mediocrity, toward an orientation toward a Classical humanist policy of survival, is at hand for nearly all persons.
If the SPD is to have a future, that is the only real option available to it. The same must be said for that U.S. Democratic Party now approaching its Boston, Massachusetts nominating convention. What you might find among the proverbial tea-leaves of that convention, would probably show you what Dickens' "Old Marley" tried to tell "Scrooge."
[1] The referenced event is the 1876 Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia, which showcased the industrial and scientific might of the United States.
[2] See: Moses Mendelssohn, Phédon, ou, entretiens sur l'immortalité de l'âme (1767), Paris: Editions Alcuin, 2000; Preface by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
