THE FACTS BEHIND THE FRANKLIN CASE
We Are Gripped by
A Global Strategy Of Tension
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
September 2, 2004
Whenever the modern world has been gripped by the onrush of a threatened general collapse of the existing world monetary-financial system, as now, epidemic phenomena such as collapse of existing governments, revolutions, fascist regimes, and war happen. We are now living in a time of global crisis, comparable to what led into the 1931 collapse of the British gold-standard system, a time which unleashed the rise of the power of fascism with full force, a time which unleashed the war President Franklin Roosevelt was forced to fight during the course of 1939-1945.
Now, we have already entered the acute phase of a period of explosive, world-wide, economic and monetary-financial crisis like that which led the Trans-Atlantic financier cartel of that time to create the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements, and also the matching bond cartel which actually exerted a critical margin of control over the corporate assets, such as those of the famous Göring Werke, on both sides of the war during 1939-1945. That is the cartel which has managed to survive as a leading financial power in the world still today.
In the time of a crisis like this, the saner elements of, and around government act to attempt to prevent the kinds of panic which would-be warlords such as Vice-President Dick Cheney and their utopian cronies seek to exploit, as those would-be warlords seek to induce nations to destroy themselves. That is the significance of what has come to be known in the press recently as "the Franklin Case." So, the influential saner forces within certain national, or international institutions have acted to ensure that the press play up the way in which former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's son was caught red-handed in an intended murderous coup in Africa.
In the terminal phase of a monetary-financial crisis, such as the present one, we see, as in the specific case of Argentina today, powerful financier-cartel interests react with violence, seizing the last drop of blood from nations, deeds done in the financiers' desperate effort to save the creditors from bankruptcy. Such cartelized interests, seek to force existing elected governments to carry out such "fiscal austerity" programs of mass-murderous "triage" against the very citizens who had elected those governments. They use terrorism, organized on behalf of such cartel interests, to break the will of governments and their populations, and, in the end, overthrow those governments anyway, as they did in Germany during 1931-1933, however supinely complicit those governments might have become.
Such was the history of continental Europe, from the Soviet borders to Gibraltar during the 1922-1945 fascist takeovers of most of the nations of that continent. That is the underlying nature of the strategic threat to the existence of our republic, and other nations today.
Now, despite all the official outright lying from the Bush Administration and others, the U.S. economy is already plunging downward into an early state of financially driven physical collapse. This onrushing depression is hitting not only the U.S.A. The pathetically globalized world economy as a whole is in a far more dangerous economic crisis today, than during that 1929-1933 collapse of the U.S. economy by half, which occurred under the continuing fiscal austerity policies of President Herbert Hoover. We are in a time when wars, revolutions, and worse, are the effects to be recognized as the expected threats to civilization as a whole.
Now, with that thought in mind, face the ugly truth behind the name of "international terrorism" today. Face the truth about what poor President George W. Bush could not, and his putative controller, Vice-President Dick Cheney, would not tell you.
To understand what has now come to be popularly known, to somewhat misleading effect, as "the Franklin Case," this reported case can not be understood without taking into account the larger strategic picture of what we knew, back during the 1970s, as "a strategy of tension." That case, as reported in the press, is only a curious facet of a much wider, and even more deadly threat than the immediate threat of the setting off, rather immediately, of world-wide economic chaos through either a U.S.A., or Israeli, or joint U.S.-Israeli "preventive warfare" attack on Iran, Syria, or both.
Asymmetric Warfare
Now, think of the map of the world, to see the relevant effects.
Currently, the international press does report a spread of terrorist and related modes of attacks and related operations, throughout not only the region of the Caucasus and Central Asia which was the focus of my 1999 "Storm Over Asia" documentary. The targets also include France, Germany, Russia, and the Balkans in Europe, in addition to the existing governments of the Arab world, and others.
Focus on those parts of the world where such terrorism is rampant now: the so-called "Middle East," the Caucusus, Central Asia, Russia, western and central Europe. Cross-grid those presently targetted areas of terrorist operations which now provide the world as a whole with the majority of its most abundant and also the cheapest flows of petroleum and natural gas to the world as a whole. Chaos in the so-called "Middle East" and the current targetting, through the Caucasus, of Russia, suffice to point in the direction of $100 a barrel price for oil, and going up, up, up, beyond—far above the relatively fixed central price, of slightly more or less than $25 a barrel, at which the effect on the world's economy would be generally acceptable.
That is only one unavoidable conclusion to be drawn as the crucial implications of this pattern of threats. These threats do not come from a mythical entity of so-called "international terrorism." Clearheaded, literate people know that "terrorism" is an effect, a predicate, not a cause, not a subject in itself. What is called "terrorism," is the terrible real effect of actions which are usually set into motion these days by those powerful interests, working from behind the scenes, who deploy what the world's press and other sources, such as the Bush-Cheney administration, tell you is "international terrorism." That effect is not caused by itself; it is caused, chiefly, by those forces which either deploy it in the guise of covert operations, or who, as Bremer did in Iraq, bring it into being by their enraging foolish behavior.
Whose are those hands which have either provoked, or who actually control "terrorist" operations which are directed from behind the curtain of official and similar lies which protects the true authors of terrorism today? Take a case in point.
Those middle-aged folk who were not born just yesterday, will look back to relevant precedents for this kind of thing during the last century, beginning with the 1970s waves of terrorist and related acts which were classified then, variously, as "A Strategy of Tension," "The Compass Plot," and so on. Take the case of the murder of Italy's former Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
Who, actually, killed Moro? Some left-wing group? Not at all. The operation was conducted by an offshoot of that part of the Nazi apparatus under SS General Karl Wolff, which had been laundered back, by the U.S.'s Allen Dulles and his James J. Angleton, into a crucial position within the officially created "stay behind" guerrilla organization which was known as "Gladio." The incorporation of the Nazi apparatus merely typified by fascist Spain-based Otto "Scarface" Skorzeny, into the body of "experienced anti-Communist fighters," into the U.S.A. and NATO system, created the kernel of breeding-stock in Europe, in Mexico, and various parts of South America, which are a crucial part of the currently active threats to the U.S.A. itself today.
This is what many highly-placed circles in the U.S. government (and others) knew during the 1970s "Strategy of Tension," that is an integral, tell-tale element of the threat to our security today.
That is not speculation; that is massively documented fact, fact known to relevant circles of governments, including our own. I have known a crucial portion of those facts, partly from U.S. government and other qualified sources over decades, and therefore I also know that relevant circles know very well what I have just written above concerning those Nazi links.
Who is protecting us against this real threat from those actually behind the mere tools of terrorism today? It is certainly not the current Bush Administration, absolutely not Cheney and his neo-conservative "chickenhawks." It is the circles of Vice-President Cheney within the U.S. government now, and also within relevant circles in Israel, who are being used to promote this spread of international terrorism under the cover of Cheney's doctrine of creating, or, otherwise seeking pretexts for "preventive, nuclear-armed warfare," as he did, by aid of fraud, in getting us into the war in Iraq. Why is this wave of terrorism aimed now at such intended victims of "Chickenhawk" Cheney's doctrines as France, Germany, Russia, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia, North Korea, and China? Such Cheney goals of his "preventive nuclear warfare" doctrine, have already brought the world, in effect, to the brink of the generalized spread of a kind of warfare which civilization itself would lose.
Why would patriotic circles inside the U.S. government act, as in the implications of the public exposure of the Franklin case, in response to the strategic importance of those violations of our national security which are the deep truth behind the somewhat coincidental case of the neo-conservative Larry Franklin? In the opposing camp: why did the Republican National Convention feature apostate Democrat Zell "Strangelove" Miller in his performance of a replay of the theme, "protect our precious bodily fluids"?
Modern Asymmetric Warfare
Take four examples of the varieties of use of what are classified as strategic use of terrorist methods. Two from the 1980s experience, two from the experience of the Bush-Cheney administration.
- The 1964-1972 Indo-China War, in which the Soviet Union sidestepped China to assist Vietnam in developing an "asymmetric warfare" defense against invading U.S. forces.
- The retaliation, by the U.S. and British, organizing "asymmetric warfare," using figures such as Osama Bin Laden, against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a case whose effects are still reverberating under Bush 43 today, from the time of his father's tour as Vice-President.
- The "Strategy of Tension"-directed waves of terrorism in Europe during the 1970s and beyond.
- The inevitable "asymmetric warfare" reaction to the kind of U.S. occupation of Iraq under blundering U.S. pro-consul Paul Bremer and his present successors.
During the 1980s, I covered, extensively, the subject of the nature of such methods of "asymmetric warfare" under the classification of "irregular warfare," or the German synonym "Kleinkrieg," as defined by collaboration on this subject with the noted international law historian General von der Heydte.[1] Asymmetric warfare was then a cornerstone of Soviet strategy, and of China's. It was a practice honed by the British during and following World War II, and became the cornerstone of U.S. irregular warfare during the post-war period to date. Notably, in addition to my own knowledge of such expressions of modern irregular warfare, I have also dealt, especially since 1983, with the special counterintelligence problem of the continuing threat to Mexico and the U.S.A. from the Hitler Nazi Party-created Synarchist organization there, a presently still active, leading threat, one of the principal terrorist threats against the U.S.A. today.
It was the precalculable emergence of asymmetric warfare, a result of the fanatical stupidity of the current Bush Administration, which has made a farce of the so-called U.S. victory of that administration in Afghanistan, and worse in Iraq today. Afghanistan is a worse mess, and a vastly bigger center of the international narcotics traffic than it was before the war; meanwhile, the Taliban are on the road back in the direction of power against a poor government virtually penned in within the national capital. The entire enterprise by the U.S.A. there has been, in net effect, a colossal strategic failure. The U.S. continuing operation in Iraq is a foredoomed excursion in folly, repeating the tragic mistakes of both the French and U.S.A. in the significantly dissimilar circumstances of Indo-China, and France's follies in the attempt to suppress the struggle for independence in Algeria, where the situation was more comparable to the U.S. predicament in Iraq today.
It was precisely the lunatic folly of the U.S. adoption of the "military-industrial complex's" war in Indo-China, that prompted General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur to warn against any new U.S. land-war in Asia. It was the lesson of Indo-China which prompted those many veterans of that war, who went on to U.S. flag rank, to vow never to allow the U.S. to be sent to Hell in a war such as that in Indo-China again. Nonetheless, the same "military-industrial complex" which outgoing President Eisenhower warned against, and for whom Vice-President Cheney works, has sent us again into the endless trap of "asymmetric warfare" in Southwest Asia, and beyond. Thus, we send brave and other soldiers to fight in wars, for the sake of those whose own corrupt motives, or reckless folly, condemn those honest patriots, the men and women to fight and die in the kind of warfare which is the worst, and most useless nightmare of folly, as is ongoing in Afghanistan and Iraq today.
The function of the terrorist methods used by both sides in the continuing Israel-Palestine conflict, is to be understood as the same logic of "irregular warfare" which the Nazis faced repeatedly in Warsaw, and from the strategy of asymmetric warfare, based on Prussian studies of the work by Friedrich Schiller on the Netherlands and Thirty Years War, to devise the strategy used by the Russia of Alexander I to entrap and utterly destroy the Grande Armée which Napoleon used to invade Russia. That was the same strategy later employed by the Soviet forces, holding Leningrad and Moscow at a terrible price, while setting the trap for the Zhukhov counteroffensive which was concluded with the western reach of the Allied defeat of the Nazis.
The case of the "Strategy of Tension" used against targets France, Italy, and Germany, among others, during the 1970s and 1980s, has the special significance of bringing into clearer view, the fact that terrorism targetting those states was deployed chiefly from within the high-ranking covert-operations capabilities of the Western Alliance. I write of this as a veteran of the political-intelligence side of efforts to defend civilization in those and related cases in both Europe and the American hemisphere. The most deadly of all of the forms of terrorism, is the terrorism which a government deploys to manipulate the minds of its own people. That is what Cheney and his crew represent inside the U.S. government today. The presence of that element within our government now, makes wise heads in high ranks of power worry, whether a U.S. November election might even occur, even now.
Where Do We Go From Here?
What I have written here is not new, at least not in principle, among leading senior professional diplomats, military, and intelligence ranks of our unique national Presidential system or similarly qualified veterans of service to our Congress. We know this game. Under a new U.S. administration which might bring together the core of such capabilities lodged among those senior ranks, we of the U.S.A. have the intellectual resources required to ensure that that President is competently advised in all matters bearing upon such crucial strategic issues.
My purpose, acting from where I stand today, is to ensure that our government is pulled back from the Hell into which the utopian "military-industrial complex" policies of Cheney et al. are already plunging our already bankrupt nation. I am dedicated to bringing into being a truly willing concert of nations, consistent with the principles of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which will act in concert to defend one and all against the terror and wildfire of religious warfare, which policies such as Cheney's have stoked in Southwest Asia, the flames of asymmetric warfare reaching out now, in such forms as terrorism, toward engulfing the planet as a whole. Religious warfare does not end until it has burned itself out, and has burned out the nations, such as our own, which might fall into its flames.
Put aside the often meaningless, technically schizophrenic verbiage of President Bush, together with the malignant, lying babble of the beastly Cheney. Rip aside the veil of paranoia which conceals the truth about so-called "international terrorism." Face the governing reality of the leading global threat enveloping the world today.
To succeed in doing that, we must face the reality of the onrushing doom of that presently hopelessly bankrupt, floating-exchange-rate international monetary-financial system. We must rush, as President Franklin Roosevelt did in March 1933, to rescue national economies now universally rotted-out by the pestilence of so-called globalization, and bring together the nations prepared to fight to save the world system of sovereign nation-states from the grip of that financial cartel which created the world's Hitler nightmare of the past, and might do something even worse to the planet as a whole today.
Behind the tumult, of which the planet-wide insurgence of terrorist and like activity are only one very important expression, the principal issue under which all others are subsumed, is the eruption of a titanic conflict between the vital interests of the sovereign nation-state as an institution, and its principal enemy, those financier oligarchical interests which are presently committed to dissolving the body of the nation-state within the aqua-regia-like acid bath of combined free-trade and frankly sulfuric globalization. This content is presently most clearly exposed by the case of Argentina's conflict with a predatory Anne Krueger's IMF, and the conflict of the nation-states of Europe with the attempted enforcement of the Maastricht conditions, a conflict expressed most clearly by the presently spreading and rising Monday demonstrations against Hartz 4 in Germany.
The fact that the election of President Franklin Roosevelt as President of the United States enabled the U.S.A. to avert a threat of fascist takeover of the U.S.A., and the decisive role of the U.S.A. in bringing about the defeat of Nazi Germany's lunge for world empire, then, is the beacon of hope for the U.S.A., and also for the other endangered nations of the world, today. The gigantic battle between what the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt represents for today, and the same financier oligarchy which brought fascist tyranny to Europe, is the only vantage-point from which a clear view and understanding of the implications of the Franklin case can be understood effectively today.
[1] Professor Friedrich A. Frhr. von der Heydte, Modern Irregular Warfare, with Introduction by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1986). Originally, Der Moderne Kleinkrieg als weltpolitisches und militärisches Phänomen, 1972.
