Remember Walther Rathenau
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
June 10, 2005
Today, the echo of the July 24, 1922 assassination of Germany's great industrialist Walther Rathenau once again reverberates in leading events of today's world history. Once again, today, as then, terror chills the will-power of prominent statesmen shuddering in fear of those malignant financial powers behind the scenes, powers which would once again arrange the assassination of any political or kindred leading figure who gets in the way of current plans to loot the pensions and other instruments of the general welfare of the peoples of the world, as the murder of Walther Rathenau and other veterans of the Rapallo negotiations was unleashed in waves following the April 10, 1922, so-called Rapallo Treaty adopted at Genoa, Italy.
Three months after Rathenau's assassination, Venice's British asset, "Young Turk" veteran and banker Count Volpi di Misurata, orchestrated Benito Mussolini's October 24, 1922 March on Rome. Thirteen months after that, the abortive Hitler Munich coup d'état was unleashed by then Mussolini copy-cat Adolf Hitler.
There was no mere coincidence among those connected incidents. The forces behind these events of 1922 were one and the same London- and Paris-dominated, oligarchical circles whose influence dominated Europe from the period of the Versailles Treaty-negotiations on. The world was then well on the way to the likelihood, if not yet the certainty, of what is known today as World War II. Once again, today, threats of the type which felled Rathenau and others are being delivered, or are messages being prepared to be sent soon to leading political figures around the world.
It was the failure of leading European circles to react with courage and competence to the threat from the Versailles Treaty-negotiations-based financier circles, implicated in the murder of Rathenau, which led directly into what later became known as fascism and World War II. Similar fates overtook the lives of many of the leading participants in Rapallo soon after, excepting Britain's Lloyd George. Similar negligence, today, to that which allowed the authors of that wave of deaths to continue, is to be found among relevant political figures. Such negligence now could lead rather quickly into something even far worse than what we once called "World War II."
We should have learned from history of such and kindred processes, that we rarely find among us leaders with both the wisdom and courage needed to prevent such awful turns in history. It is therefore urgent that, from time to time. well-meaning people in positions of important influence must discover in themselves the exceptional qualities of wisdom and courage not to evade the extraordinary risks which leaders must accept for the sake of present and future generations, the courage to look the Devil in the eye, and face him down. Such a time is now.
Admittedly, as in the case of the historical figure of Jeanne d'Arc, the risk true leaders incur, such as the authors of the U.S. war for independence, is great. Only those with a sense of purposeful immortality are likely to find the courage in themselves to lead bravely in such times.
Rathenau was neither the first nor the last German to be assassinated by forces similarly motivated. In Germany, the 1977 list included Bundesanwalt Siegfried Buback (April), Dresdner Bank's Jürgen Ponto (July), and head of the German employers' association, Hanns-Martin Schleyer (October). Directly parallel to the strategic implications of the assassination of Walther Rathenau is that of the Nov. 30, 1989 assassination of Deutsche Bank head Alfred Herrhausen. The entity for the authorship of all of these and comparable cases, from Rathenau through Herrhausen and Rohwedder, is the same, as will be clarified below.
It were not appropriate for me to now name the names of some current targets of such threats transmitted on behalf of certain powerful, behind-the-scenes financier interests in Europe and elsewhere. Threats reverberate already. Rather than identifying already known and probable targets of such ominously hinted warnings, another way in which we may address that clear and present danger, as I do here, were, on balance, more useful, and therefore more appropriate at this moment.
Here and now, as this issue of EIR goes to press, two weeks will have passed since the memorable weekend when a concert of Democratic and Republican Senators saved the U.S. Federal Constitution from the virtual coup d'état against the heart of that Constitution from the George W. Bush, Jr. White House. Look at the awful accumulation of continuing threats to the U.S.A. and other nations from the global monetary-financial breakdown-crisis already in progress around the world today. The ability of institutions such as the U.S. Senate, to continue to block the coup d'état mentality radiating from the Bush-Cheney Administration and its more rabid backers such as the circles of George Pratt Shultz, should be the leading issue on the agenda of the leading strategic intelligence specialists of the world today.
Then, as now, the source of threats of coups d'état, such as the fascist coups, including the Rathenau assassination, which led from the notorious financial-economic features of the Versailles Treaty, comes from the same international financier circles which each played their part in bringing fascist regimes to power in Europe, and unleashing what became known as World War II. These financier circles are the present outcome of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal current which was self-described as the Eighteenth-Century's "Venetian Party," because of its tracing of its characteristics of belief and practice from the Venetian oligarchical party of the followers of the founder of modern empiricism, Venice's Paolo Sarpi. Times have changed, of course, since the Eighteenth Century; today, the threat to civilization from the financier-oligarchical interest of the Venetian Party tradition, is potentially far worse, more dangerous than even that during the 1920s and 1930s.
Read the List
To put the present threat in perspective, read a relatively short list of some leading financial-economic crises confronting the U.S. government and population right now.
1. The most urgent threat at this moment, is the ongoing collapse of the U.S. automobile industry, probably immediately affecting, chain-reaction style, both the incomes and pensions of approximately a half-million people, or more, associated with employment in that industry. Entire states and cities of the U.S. would be thrown into collapse. That is not only a threat to the people and the communities in which they live; the collapse of the machine-tool capability which that industry represents would be a strategic threat to the U.S.A.; it would not exactly send the U.S. back to the Stone Age all by itself, but it would virtually finish the United States as a great power for decades or more to come.
So far, nothing is being done by the U.S. government to prevent an irreparable catastrophe which requires immediate action from the U.S. Congress if the worst effects were to be averted.
2. The clearly shown intention of the financier interests controlling that industry, is to dump the pension obligations of the automobile and associated industries upon the Federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. This coincides with what has already been done in the case of United Airlines, and what is therefore threatened in the case of Delta and American Airlines. This goes together with pathetic, mean-spirited, and much befuddled President George W. Bush, Jr.'s Social Security wing-ding, an outright swindle designed to let the Wall Street stock-brokers swindle most Americans out of the last pension fund soon to be still functioning, if the President's childishly nonsensical proposals of a sovereign U.S. default of U.S. bonds as mere "IOUs" were tolerated.
If influential people from around the world had not suspected that the President were clinically insane, his calling U.S. bonds "IOUs" of no intrinsic value, would have been sufficient to plunge the entire world monetary-financial system into a panic which would have set off an immediate total collapse.
The current proposals from the House of Representatives' Republicans on this set of pension issues would be mass-murderous in effect if allowed.
3. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan "Bubbles" Greenspan's sponsorship of the use of a form of gambler's side-bets as financial capital, so-called "financial derivatives," has created an explosive financial bubble, the so-called "hedge fund" bubble, which makes the 1998 LTCM bubble seem almost a minor incident by comparison. Major banks of the world, as in the U.S.A, and Germany, for example, which have implicated themselves in this hedge-fund bubble, are now threatened with a catastrophe beyond the powers of imagination of most ordinary citizens, or even most members of the U.S. Congress so far. Already, as much as between 20% and 40% of the hedge-fund accounts in question are either wiped out, or near that condition. The liability incurred by the banks associated with those hedge-fund ventures would stagger the imagination of most. The collapse of this hedge-fund bubble happens merely to have been triggered and accelerated by the outbreak of the General Motors crisis.
So far, nothing has been done to prepare the U.S. to manage this global crisis, a crisis which could bring down the entire world system.
4. This coincides with another product of Alan Greenspan's suspected bath-tub dreaming. His role in creating the Y2K bubble which crashed in 2000, was part of the same pattern, involving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which has created what is presently a monstrous, and imperilled real-estate mortgage-bubble. More and more leading news organs are currently reporting important facts about the evidence of the danger of a chain-reaction collapse within the so-called "mortgage industry" which is threatening to spread throughout that sector as a whole, from the most blatant follies launched under Alan Greenspan's "financial derivatives"-polluted reign at the Fed.
Yet, our political leaders are either very slow in coming onto the launch-pad on this deadly issue, or are mostly blocking it out of their minds as an ugly reality they, and most U.S. citizens, are not yet prepared even to think about.
5. In fact, a new real-estate swindle is being launched, this time from Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department, the base-closing swindle. What a nice, last-ditch sort of pork-barrel for Rumsfeld's and Cheney's contractor-friends that would be, if it could actually be brought off.
On top of this, we have rabid Vice-President Dick Cheney's snarling threats of pre-emptive nuclear wars and kindred enterprises, starting perhaps with North Korea, under the provisions of Conplan 8022. Conplan 8022 itself has implications which are fairly described as clinically insane on their own account, but the real danger is being overlooked. That brings our attention back to the implications of the July 1922 assassination of Walther Rathenau.
The genius of the U.S. Federal Constitution is there; whereas, our republic has endured some very bad governments, even some which have been frankly treasonous in certain of their implications, we have never lost our Constitutional system, as European governments have suffered coups d'état and dictatorships of one kind or another so often. The rise of the Senate, in defense of the Constitutional principle of advice and consent, to block the Bush White House's attempts to grab for dictatorial powers, was exemplified by the Senate's upholding that Constitutional safeguard against an attempted White House seizure of dictatorial powers, just as the Congress defeated a similar attempt earlier, under President Richard Nixon.
Since the first inauguration of George W. Bush, Jr., we have seen repeated instances, as in the cases of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, of Bush Administration efforts to adopt certain of the features remembered from the Adolf Hitler and kindred administrations in Europe. The way in which the incident of "9/11" was exploited by the Bush Administration, as under the Patriot Act proposals already whipped up before the "9/11" incident, and the way in which the Administration repeatedly used lies fabricated in concert with the Liberal-Imperialist Blair government of the United Kingdom, to foist a new Iraq war upon the world, with the horrid consequences of failure shown in the conduct of that continuing war today, are typical. The principal significance of the proposed use of mini-nukes for a pre-emptive attack on North Korea, is the global, including U.S., psychological effects of using a mini-nuke version of the unnecessary dumping of the only two then-existing prototypes of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dumped at a time when the preconditions for the surrender of the Emperor Hirohito's Japan were ripe for implementation, in the same way those conditions were the basis for Japan's surrender later.
The characteristic feature of the Nixon Administration mentality which veteran plotter Karl Rove has carried into the George W. Bush, Jr. White House today, is the same resort to arousing lunatics' passions which Rove's lunatic religious right employs to effects which remind modern historians of the fanaticism of the 1922-1945 interval of the history of continental Europe, and throwbacks to the lunatic spirit of religious warfare of the 1492-1648 interval. The policy of the Bush White House under Nixon veteran Rove, is that spirit of dictatorship typified by times of Europe's religious wars and fascist movements. That is the spirit of the current Bush-Cheney Administration and its policy-impulses.
Such are samples of the immediate situation threatening us today.
The Historical Connection
With the decadence and loss of power of the interests typified by Prince Metternich's Holy Alliance, the dominant imperial power on this planet was the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier interest centered in the City of London. If we view World War I as competent historians today should, as a second version of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal orchestration of the Seven Years War which was concluded at the February 1763 Treaty of Paris, we can better appreciate the way in which the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles provided the occasion for a grand-scale scheme by a multi-national concert of families-centered, private financier interest known as "The Synarchist International," which orchestrated events of the 1920s and 1930s to the effect of producing the forces controlled by Hitler's regime during the 1939-1945 interval. H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell were only typical of the kind of thinking which emerged among the architects of what that Synarchist International had intended for the post-World War II decades.
Russell's 1945-1946 intention to conduct a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union as a means for establishing what he identified as "world government" did not succeed then, because the Soviet Union was the first to develop a usable thermonuclear weapon, but the general thrust of Synarchist thinking has moved, through the phase of thermonuclear détente, in that kind of often groping direction, to take the form of a movement for "globalization" today.
The stubborn stupidity shown by people who ought to have known better, is often a stunning reality. The leader of this drive toward the sheer lunacy of what is called "globalization" today, is the product of a hatred against the existence of the sovereign nation-state which was radiated by Lord Shelburne's Eighteenth-Century British East India Company, by the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, and by the frankly self-described Liberal Imperialists of such Fabian Society creatures as Prime Minister Tony Blair today. The globalization of financier strata, especially since the time of the U.S. Nixon Administration and its 1971-1972 break-up of the Bretton Woods system, is typical of this long-term trend in internationalist financier circles such as the Synarchist International, which gave us the Hitler regime then, and which is the principal menace threatening nations today.
There is no need, nor usefulness in arguing for, or against so-called "conspiracy theories." Conspiracy is the most characteristic feature of human behavior en masse, and is likely to remain so for a long time yet to come. The practical matter is to defend that sovereignty of the U.S.A. and its people, as prescribed by the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution of 1789. As a genius known as France's Jean-Baptiste Colbert understood, in warning his errant monarch, Louis XIV, against joining with the remnant of the lunatic Fronde for entry into needless wars with the Liberal financier interests of that time, regime-change of other nations is not our proper business. Our method of success has never been nation-conquering, but nation-building methods, and never going to war except to make a defense against a clear threat to our republic's existence, as we did in World War II.
Today, there are foreign threats against us, chiefly from the drive toward "globalization" launched by a contemporary expression of those financier circles behind what was formerly known as the Synarchist International which steered the wave of assassinations and fascist threats of the 1922-1945 interval. We must defend ourselves against such threats, but we must approach that task in appropriate ways, relying more on winning and keeping friends than making unnecessary adversaries.
In the meantime, the greatest threat to our nation and its people, is typified by the list of immediate problems I have listed above. In some features, these threats are of a new quality, but these are nonetheless threats which can be overcome by the methods implicit in our Constitutional tradition, as President Franklin Roosevelt led us to being the world's greatest power at the close of the 1939-1945 war, after the depression bestowed upon us by the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations. These kinds of threats, now as under Franklin Roosevelt's leadership then, can be conquered by returning to that tradition of the American System of political-economy, as described by the greatest economists of the world during that time, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Mathew Carey, Friedrich List, and Henry C. Carey, the system in whose service Franklin Roosevelt followed in the footsteps of his ancestor, Alexander Hamilton ally Isaac Roosevelt.
What we must defend ourselves against, above all else, is the relics of the Synarchist International. against those whose perceived interests were served by the organizing of what became two world wars, and by the assassinations of such relevant German figures as Walther Rathenau, Jürgen Ponto, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, and Alfred Herrhausen. We need our European and other partners in the tradition they served today. We must lend those who serve that interest of their own nations our added strength, that they might survive and succeed. We must let it be understood by those who would destroy such figures, that they have us to reckon with in such matters.
In the meantime, for each and all of those challenges to our national economy which I have identified above, and more of the same general kind, there are solutions available to us. If we take the lead, other nations will follow us, and work in concert with us. At the moment, the hope of our nation's security lies principally with the special powers which the founders of our Constitution built into the Senate, as a key feature of our system of checks and balances. Let the Synarchists or their like today be warned, that in these concerns we are united, and in principled unity with our friends abroad. Let us unite around the pivot of the Constitutional role of that institution, to get us through the mess now descending upon us all.
