CANDIDATES IN DREAM-LAND!:
A Presidential Stateroom
on the Titanic
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.February 2, 2007
During the early 1930s, France's celebrated movie director René Clair, produced a charmingly well-composed film, A Nous La Liberté. That film was parodied, this time omitting the touch of poetic elegance in René Clair's production, in the famous Charlie Chaplin's echo of René Clair, Chaplin's later, 1936 Modern Times.[1] The same theme was taken up, notably, on a third occasion, in a film from post-war Germany, titled, in rough translation: We Are Wonderful, in which the producers frankly disposed of both the self-inflicted artistic predicament of their plot, and, also, the drama's principal, picaresque character: by plunging both down the hollow shaft-way of what was called a "Pater Noster" elevator, which I recall from the Hamburg of my own timely recollections. The procession of these three pieces, thus, already showed us, an artistically downward motion in the picture of the history, the culture, and the fictions of that span of time.
Ah! But that was not, unfortunately, the end of the matter; now, the implied copyright for each among those three preceding instances appears to have been infringed, in a fourth case, creating thus an old prank played upon a younger audience: thus, we have today, in this fourth case, the embarrassing spectacle of a currently staged performance of today's roster of U.S. Presidential pre-candidates for the 2008 general election. The history of art-forms has moved, thus, from the motion-picture theaters to the grubby, existentialist fictions which occupy the current political street.
Nonetheless, the truth, which the field of political and other fiction excludes today, is, as the eruption of the new politics during the November mid-term election attests, preserved, vibrant, and waiting within the Classical tradition.
As I recall from an incident a bit less than a decade ago, I had visited a famous town not far from Germany's Switzerland border, where, suddenly, I had found myself walking near the actual house of the early-Sixteenth-Century, famous, real-life Dr. Faustus. In that instant, resonating within me still today, I had experienced strong images of Kit Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, and of the Mephistopheles of Goethe's Faust reciting the tale of the flea in Auerbach's famous Leipzig cellar.[2] At the moment of that encounter with an actually incarnate memory from history, my imagination had brought forth a resonant echo of both Beethoven's "Song of the Flea" and of bass Alexander Kipnis's voice singing Moussorgsky's truly Russian version. But, now, today, the recent, shocking manifestation of the parade of U.S. Presidential candidates for the 2008 nominations, reminds me mostly of Beethoven's depiction, not of the king, nor even President George W. Bush's current role as the flea, but of the recurring nightmare depicted by the spectacle of the present roster of U.S. Presidential pre-candidates, as beings cast in the likeness of those foolish courtiers depicted so vividly, coming up to scratch, in the Beethoven Lied.
Despite all, the Classical viewpoint has the final word to speak on the matter of the fictions of current political life. In politics, as on the theatrical stage, there is a distinct aroma of something nastily Bertolt Brechtian, like the "Alabama Song" from Mahagonny, in the current runway-like parade of not-so-skinny, but rather plump, putative U.S. Presidential pre-candidates. Their currently expressed appetites, as candidates, are, like "Condi" Rice's tastes, as broad as they are shallow, but the chosen roster, especially its featured Bio-Fools, would be a looming disaster for our nation, as for those candidates themselves.
In the cases of some among that parade of candidates, the moral fault lies less with their potentials as personalities, than their miscast impulse to play a consenting role in that farce displayed as their appearances in the mass media of the recent days. Some of them would be otherwise considered intelligent, even statesman-like, and even, perhaps, moral, despite the taint of Bio-Foolishness. Hopefully, therefore, some among them, at least, might be induced to abandon their presently tragic choice of ways. Otherwise, we witness thus, a farce which would be tragic, not so much for those present actors, as for the true victims, like you, among the credulous audience for the performance of that play.
* * *
If the U.S. Presidential candidates which were to be adopted by the respective Democratic and Republican Party's conventions, were selected from among what are the apparently leading prospective candidates, with their present platforms of today, you had now already arrived at a point which would be just in time to enter the sick-room where the prospective mourners are mustered to kiss the existence of our United States goodbye. If you follow those currently prospective candidates down the model runway which they have currently chosen for themselves, up to the present moment, you, personally, together with our nation, are doomed. Nothing illustrates this more simply, more vividly, more indelibly, than the number of currently leading "Bio-Fools" among those leading candidates, and, also, relevant others.
Hopefully this will change for the better over coming weeks and months. However, either what will be chosen, eventually, as the finally selected candidates of the two parties, will represent a radical change from the present postures of these present candidates, or it were time for you to weep for our republic, while you are still allowed to do so without being sent to torture and death-camps by a contemporary echo of the Gestapo.
The political scene, in the U.S.A., as in western and central Europe, is presently dominated by the following selections from the relevant, if only typical set of certain leading delusions.
- The delusion is, that the present world monetary-financial system is not already facing the immediate threat of an impending plunge into a planet-wide "new dark age" for all humanity. The delusion is, that an immediate, drastic reform of that already doomed system were not needed, but only, as Germany's Kanzlerin Angela Merkel has proposed, "small steps."
- The delusion is, that the present postures of the leading pre-candidates represent, in combined effect, anything better than a moral catastrophe, as much as an economic and strategic catastrophe: a catastrophe for our nation, and for the world generally.
- The delusion is, that we can ignore the need to launch a massive deployment of nuclear-fission power and a crash program of development of thermonuclear technologies. The delusion is, that such technologies represent a "politically unrealistic" perspective for the foreseeable future. That delusion is, for example, that both the human race and the irrationalist, neo-Malthusian perspective of a silly former Vice-President Al Gore, could successfully co-inhabit the same Solar System.
- The delusion among many influential Democrats, is that a return to the cultural paradigm of world leadership shown by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is not now the absolutely practical precondition for continuation of civilized life on this neck of the Solar System as a whole.
- The relatively widespread delusion affecting today's shaping of national policies, is, that we could safely overlook the historical fact that the existentialist's personally immoral delusion of today, is a contemporary reflection of that same moral sickness which was shared, in an earlier generation, among Nazi Martin Heidegger and his co-thinkers without Nazi Party-card credentials, such as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. That is the delusion which is shared with that stratum's allies among the still influential followers of the leading conspirators such as the late Brigadier John Rawlings Rees and Eric Trist of the London Tavistock Clinic's dupes on both sides of the Atlantic today. Theirs is the included lie which our contemporary Fabian followers of the very shallow Matthew Arnold, such as ultra-conspiratorial ACTA's Mrs. Lynne Cheney, teach to those they corrupt into becoming virtually "brainwashed zombies," the conspiratorial dogma taught to those poor wretches who insist that, "I don't believe in (the existence of) conspiracies."
Whereas, it is the way in which influential strata do, in fact, conspire, which exerts a very large influence on the way in which present decisions on policy affect the future of nations.
- Next to the worst of all, is the delusion widely expressed among the typical white-collar Baby-Boomers among leading, prospective Presidential candidates of today: "But, experience has shown us, repeatedly ...": the delusion of the middle-aged political figure admiring the reflection of his, or her own past parts, from a rearward glance over his, or her shoulder, into a wall-sized mirror. "Yet," we should ask ourselves: "Why should these worshippers of the hind-side of history think otherwise?" They are typical of an influential generation of certain types of ladies and gentlemen with a certain background which they are prone to admire, but who have little sense of responsibility—accountability—or even none, for the often cruel effect of their influences on the conditions of life of the actual future generations of the nation, and also of mankind, even upon the younger generations among the presently living, even, often, their own children and grandchildren.
- Worst of all, is a toleration for that proposal for a new Tower of Babel, which is expressed today as the policy of "globalization."
These may be considered, for all practical purposes, as the Seven Deadly Sins of these presently political times. The effects of these illusory conceptions are to be illustrated in ways such as the following.
For example, at the present moment: for as long as Vice-President Cheney remains in office, a globally disastrous war with Iran were virtually inevitable. The effect of such an attack on Iran, for which the "surge" into Iraq is chiefly an intended step of preparation, would be comparable in its effect to that of Adolf Hitler's staging the farce at the Polish border, the incident which was used by Hitler as the trigger to unleash World War II.
Among many of Cheney's presently self-certified opponents, the psycho-sexually impotent response to that looming prospect is that, "If that happens, we will then act to impeach Cheney." Cheney has already committed impeachable offenses of vast implications; impeach him today, or, tomorrow, he may be a Hitler-at-war, unleashed against Iran, and much, much more, besides. Then, our timid opponents of Cheney would explain: "Don't you see, it is now too dangerous to do anything about this!"
So, similarly, the Neville Chamberlains of the history of that time—particularly the one who gave umbrellas a bad name, that of Adolf Hitler, after the beginning of September 1939. Britain and France lurched impotently into war, until President Franklin Roosevelt intervened to rescue civilization.
More significant than that, is the fact, that as long as both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney head the Presidency, there is no possibility of avoiding a certain kind of worldwide warfare; similarly, something far worse than a mere general economic depression, is now in the making: a general physical-economic breakdown-crisis of the present world system. What do the stalwart presently prospective Presidential candidates say of this immediate set of prospects?
The threat of the Iran war is, probably, weeks away, unless Cheney is dumped in the interval available; the threat of a global breakdown-crisis of the world's present economic and monetary-financial systems, is perhaps as close as months, or, even as near as even weeks away.[3] What now do the prospective Presidential candidates say?
The support for "Bio-Fools" is sheer clinical mass-insanity, which will create a disastrous scale of increase of fuel costs, and also a globally mass-murderous scale of breakdown in the food supply. What do the prospective Presidential candidates say?
The principal determinant of the mean surface temperature of the planet Earth, is the combination of shifts in the Earth's orbital pathway, and the fluctuations in Solar radiation. The presently relatively short-term warming trend caused by fluctuations in the Sun's radiation, occurs within the longer-term trend, already afoot, into a new general ice-age. How long will the presently prevalent lunacy on the subject of global warming be tolerated by the political class?
Those prospective candidates, and relevant others, will admit the possibility of severe crisis somewhere down the way, but will add, "In the meantime ..." The meantime is usually some terrible mistake, even a global catastrophe like the current rash of "Bio-Foolishness," which might, nonetheless, win temporary political support from this or that particular, and, in fact, deluded constituency.
On this latter account, we might be reminded of an anecdote from this or that set of past, revolting times in the history of France. The standard "generic" version of this tale runs approximately as follows:
Leaders of sundry revolutionary groups are sipping refreshment and contrary opinions in a café whose view is open to the street. A howling mob rushes past outside. One of the figures at the table rises, saying: "That's my revolution; I must go out and lead it."
In July 1789, the British Foreign Office's fear of the proposed French constitution presented by Bailly and Lafayette, prompted that Foreign Office's so-called "secret committee" under Lord Shelburne's Jeremy Bentham, to employ unabashed London assets such as Benjamin Franklin's adversary and British asset Philippe Egalité, to arm, muster, and stage the July 14, 1789 siege of the Bastille, which was, in fact, an election-campaign stunt on behalf of another long-standing London asset of Lord Shelburne's circles, Jacques Necker. The ensuing French Revolution was dominated by a pack of the same Martinist freemasonry which had been the enemies of Franklin in France, and which created the Jacobin Terror and the personality, crafted by the truly Satanic Count Joseph de Maistre, of that vastly predatory dictator and emperor fondly imitated by Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte.
The passions of 1789-1815 France were real, but the energy of those passions was guided by British sheep-herders, in ruining continental Europe to such a degree, through the successive Jacobin Terror and Bonaparte's predatory rampages, that the imperial power of the London-centered Anglo-Dutch Liberal faction dominated continental Europe as a whole up and beyond the set of military and related events beginning with the assassination of France's President Sadi Carnot and the 1894-1895 launching of the series of London-directed Sino-Japan wars of the 1894-1945 interval. As in this case, what is often described as revolting leadership, were better described as disgusting misleadership. In such times, "vox populi" is often, thus, "pox populi."
The Qualifications of the President
Unlike the usual arrangements seen in Europe since that time, the U.S.A. has a Federal Constitution defined by the superior principle of law expressed by its Preamble. It is this Constitution, so defined by its Preamble, which provides for the American System of political-economy, rather than what history shows to have been the historically, relatively impotent parliamentary systems of western and central continental Europe. Our constitutional President was never intended by our founders to become a mere auxiliary functionary, as European heads of state usually are; the U.S. Presidency is very real, when it is well-served, and supported accordingly. Our primary concern on that account, is that we must select our Presidents with far greater care than the present crisis-spectacle suggests. This stricter requirement becomes historically crucial under each and every condition of threat of an existential crisis, as presently.
Since I have run for U.S. President more than several times, I am qualified to contrast myself, quite favorably, both emotionally and intellectually, with the morally disappointing showing of the current leading crop of self-propelled Presidential pre-candidates. The image of George W. Bush, wearing a "helicopter beanie" while tricycling fanatically within the Oval Office, should bring a blush to the cheeks of many among the current crop of "wannabes." I never ran for President out of personal ambition, but to fill a crucial vacuum; I ran, each time, in service of a leading mission which I knew to be: first, in the nation's profound interest, and, second, to be premised on critically required actions for which no other qualified and declared spokesman existed at that time.[4] In retrospect, looking back at the course of crucial trends and developments over the recent thirty years, I was never mistaken in my judgment on that point of fact.
The same point is illustrated by the commendable role of certain ex-Presidents, such as, formerly, Dwight Eisenhower, and, presently, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; on one or two accounts, the same selfless quality of function has been supplied by the recently deceased Gerald Ford and even George H.W. Bush, on at least one or two occasions.
It was typical of my candidacies, that I put myself on the line, often at a serious personal risk, as did President Ronald Reagan, in crafting and working for what President Reagan named "A Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)." I was sent to prison for no essential reason but that my leading adversaries on the subject of SDI considered me so capable that they debated, from the immediate aftermath of March 23, 1983, onward, whether it were more prudent to assassinate me, or to imprison and defame me. A few weeks later, John Train's salons signaled the relevant mustering of malice from the ranks of what were called, in OSS days, "the white-shoe boys" of our resident Anglophilia.
Those who would not do the same as I have done on that matter, or in comparable instances from 1976 through 2004, represent types of prospective candidates who are not actually qualified to run seriously for President of the U.S.A. under the kind and severity of onrushing conditions of crisis facing us today. A person who runs for President under the impulse of narcissistic personal ambition ("Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"), is automatically morally disqualified under any condition of serious national crisis: they have what are the morally wrong motives, and, therefore, the wrong agenda!
Indeed, a presently rising international "flap" respecting both China's earlier laser illumination of a strategically significant U.S. satellite, and the test-demonstration of destruction of one of its own, has brought the issues of my 1979-1983 proposal of what President Reagan named "SDI" back into full focus afresh today, as I shall illustrate my point by means of emphasis on those connections to the past and present alike.
For example, if awesome respect for the burden of past and future welfare of future generations, is not the motive for seeking the office of President of the U.S.A., it were grossly immoral to put oneself forward as a candidate for that office, especially in times of grave national and world crisis, such as the present moment. "Catching the brass ring" on the Presidential merry-go-round, is not a morally tolerable motive for seeking the Presidency. As reflection on the manner in which President Franklin Roosevelt came to his death, in service of all humanity, shows: it is the awesome responsibility of the U.S. Presidency, far more than any other species of head of state of the world, still today, which must be permitted to humble any mere personal ambition, especially at a time of globally existential crisis of all humanity, as in the present moment.
In my case, there have been several leading considerations which prompted me, on each occasion, to adopt my candidacy. Each time I stated that concern; each time, subsequent developments proved me correct in that estimate. Any would-be candidate now, should either measure himself or herself against the standard with which I had motivated my efforts, or be very much ashamed.
A U.S. War Against China—and Russia?
Outside the U.S.A. itself, the only credible objects still qualifying as major powers of the planet today, are Russia, China, and India. Each has made large concessions to the Anglo-Dutch Liberals' imperial scheme, the proposed new "Tower of Babel" called "globalization." However, unlike the nations of western and central Europe, individually, or combined, each of the "big-three Eurasian rivals" of U.S.A. participation in Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperial power, has deeply rooted organic, as much as optional commitments to the preservation of the essential features of national sovereignty. This makes each and all of the Eurasian "Big Three" the intended early target of destruction by the forces marshaled under the banner of the imperial Anglo-Dutch Liberalism which has dominated global trends since Bertrand Russell admirer Nikita Khrushchev blew up the proposed Paris summit meeting of Presidents Charles de Gaulle and Eisenhower with Khrushchev.[5]
The aspect of this problem which is most directly relevant to the actual strategic issues of the oncoming U.S. general election of November 2008, is the inherent conflict between the existential interests of our republic and that aspect of British culture which Bertrand Russell's long-ranging influence and policies represent, especially as this bears on U.S. relations with, on the one side, Europe, including Russia today, and on the other side, Asia in general, with emphasis on the keystones of Southwest Asia, China, and India, most notably. The essence of this strategic conflict is exactly the same, in principle, as the existential conflict over the fate of the post-World War II world between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The commonplace delusion respecting this continuing conflict, among even many of our leading political figures, is the failure to understand the characteristic features of our republic's traditionally British imperialist foe today.
Although Lord Shelburne greatly admired the work of his lackey Gibbon, the actual British Empire, in its sundry costumes, over the centuries, and still today, is not modeled on Imperial Rome or Byzantium, but on the medieval ultramontane system defined by the relationship between the slime-mold-like Venetian financier oligarchy and the crusading Norman chivalry. The one crucial change in that Venetian financier-oligarchical model since the Fifteenth-Century European Renaissance, is the introduction of the New-Venetian-Party model, sometimes called empiricism, of Paolo Sarpi and his followers. The Anglo-Dutch Liberal system is essentially ruled by an international, Venetian-like financier oligarchy, whose utopian goal of world-empire is what is promoted under the brand-name of "globalization" today.
The assumption of the Anglo-Dutch Liberals' imperialist financier cabal today, is that on condition that the U.S.A. is broken, and Russia, China, and India are crushed, there exists no other effective force of resistance to the establishment of a "permanent" world empire of the type which Shelburne and his lackey Jeremy Bentham sought in the closing decades of the Eighteenth Century.
The heart of this matter is located in the relatively immediate historical past of trans-Atlantic relations dating from the February 1763 Peace of Paris, the occasion on which the British East India Company of Lord Shelburne et al. emerged as a private, implicitly global empire bearing the Union Jack, and, later the British Empire proper and its outgrowth, the present-day British Commonwealth. The changes in British policy toward the English colonies in North America, the changes prompting a process which became the U.S. War of Independence and crafting of the U.S. Federal Constitution, created a new global situation, in which the conflict of the U.S.'s American System of political-economy, and associated American cultural values, have clashed, perpetually, to the present time, with the Anglo-Dutch Liberal form of intrinsically imperial monetary-financial system.
The greatest threat to this scheme by our republic's principal adversary of today, would be an arrangement of cooperation in defense of the principle of the sovereign nation-state, as should be configured among the keystone elements of the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India. This does not exclude continental Europe, but, by itself, continental western and central Europe are characteristically impotent as independent strategic factors on the world stage today, as those nations were, already, during the Franklin Roosevelt-led World War II fight against Hitler.
This similarity of today's strategic setting to that of the World War II fight against Hitler's regime, is rooted in the 1763-1783 alliance of the new U.S. republic with widely assorted forces of the League of Armed Neutrality, and other important continental European elements. In another, appropriate view, it is a geopolitical alliance of the U.S.A. with the leading forces of the Americas and of the Eurasian interests threatened by Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperialism. The common enemy to be defeated, is the ideology and institutions of what is called "globalization."
The importance of my presenting this case here, is that I know, with certainty, that none of the announced leading pre-candidates, so far, has an effective comprehension of this strategic issue, the issue on which the future existence of our republic now depends absolutely.
The most efficient way in which to enlist U.S. patriots into support of our republic's urgently required new strategic outlook, is, simply, to emphasize the need to return to the successful rescue of civilization as a whole by the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt. There is very little in that President Roosevelt's 1932 campaign and subsequent 1933-1945 effort which does not imply the kind of outlook and measures of economic recovery which are uniquely required to rescue our republic from its slide toward the verge of self-inflicted doom over the course of the recent thirty-five and more years. There is no other image of our republic's past policies which corresponds to our needed relations with the American republics to our south, Eurasia, and beyond, today.
The weapons we require for the defense of our republic today are chiefly diplomatic measures in the sense of John Quincy Adams' crafting of the system on which the best work of our U.S. Department of State was based up to the most recent times. The principal powers of continental Eurasia do not wish war. Russia, China, and India, notably would rejoice were we to dump everything which smelled of the Administration of President George W. Bush, and to offer global cooperation among perfectly sovereign nation-states as a return to the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt as expressed in modern terms. If none among these nations were our adversary, there is no power we must fear!
Were I President, that would be our policy, and we would succeed, with heartfelt blessings from our posterity on that account. While I am fortunate in my marginal advantage in health over most of my generation, the idea of my seeking two terms as President would seem to be a stretch of the imagination. If necessary, I would do the job, and that very well. Nonetheless, except some extraordinary emergency, for the next U.S. President, who could have the advantage of everything I might supply him, or her, what we need for the security of our republic's future is a candidate who becomes an efficient link to our future, a younger, if mature person, who could serve for two, or even three terms (if we decided to make that reform), and then serve effectively as a former President, as Eisenhower, Carter, and Clinton have done. We need a restored Presidency in the FDR tradition, whose reach of influence is the active adult lifetime of two generations to come, the working life-span of the young adults of today.
Once we have stated that we are returning, from several long decades of punishment in the wilderness, to the legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt on all crucial notions of national interest and policy, there are two specific subject-matters which must be brought to attention here. These are the recently resurgent implications of what President Reagan proposed as a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and the matter of the urgently needed adoption of absolutely new global economic policies covering a term of not less than two generations, fifty years to come.
The Return of the SDI
The policies associated with Mrs. Lynne Cheney's mascot, Dick, since his post as Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, have created a present situation in which China has, quite lawfully, shown its sense of urgent interest in laser and related policies previously associated with the SDI. The already referenced events, the earlier illumination of a U.S. spy-satellite by China, and the recent laser-assisted destruction, by China, of one of China's own satellites, has set the proverbial "cat among the pigeons." In fact, the SDI is back! It never actually left us, but was waiting to ambush history on an appropriate later occasion, now.
The point which must be emphasized, to be clear about those and related recent developments, is that strategy is never a matter of force as such. Rather, as Frederick the Great showed in his celebrated brilliancy in the battle at Leuthen, all principles of practice respecting human affairs pertain to the absolute distinction of the human mind from that of the higher apes and other lower forms of life. It is a strong assertion, but not a wrong one, to insist that military strategy must be conceived as an extension of the practice of diplomacy.
Thus, the clash of arms over the interval from the British 1894-1895 launching of Japan's 1894-1945 war against China (and also related other places), and the entire sweep of general warfare and related conflict over the 1892-1946 interval, from the assassination of France's President Sadi Carnot through the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, is an expression of Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier-directed imperial foreign policy. It were proper to regard such policies as the "true constitution" on which the Anglo-Dutch Liberal systems of government have been premised up to the most recent instance.
In these wars, it was not the conflict of real interest of the respective nations which prompted the warfare. World War I, for example, was orchestrated through the preparations made by Prince of Wales and later King Edward Albert, who played his silly nephews, Wilhelm II and Nicholas II, the foolish Austro-Hungarian idiot, and the revanchist faction of France against one another, spending a great deal of English and related blood to ensure the awful outcome. One of the great lies of history was made by a morally rotten U.S. President Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing, at Versailles, asserting that Germany, alone, bore the guilt for World War I. The war was the product of geopolitical forms of imperial gamesmanship orchestrated chiefly by the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier-oligarchy's almost instinctive sense of interests, interests which were, thus, also the true authors of both the Hitler dictatorship (and all of its consequences), as that legacy was represented with a certain ironical appropriateness by the two Princes of the Bilderberg cabal.
War has been largely a game, akin, thus, to play on a game-board, a sociological game, as one "which children might play." Then come changes in the rules made by men for others to obey. Then, also, come situations in which the attempt to play by accepted rules fails, because reality, expressed in some political or other way, refuses to accept that instruction.
Such is the history behind the SDI, as I devised such a proposed change in the rules of conflict during 1979-1983, and the relatively inevitable outbreak of reality of the SDI in the case of U.S.A. preparations for war against China, and other targets, today.
What has remained true since the February 1763 Peace of Paris, since the U.S. victory over Lord Palmerston's Confederacy puppet in 1865, and since the run-up to two World Wars by the British monarchy's Edward VII and his successors, is the Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperialist financier interests' concept of geopolitical interest, and, thus, of their included intent to ruin and subjugate the U.S.A. by subterfuge and corruption, if not conquest.
The series of imperial, geopolitical wars launched, over the 1894-1945 interval, by Edward Albert and his successors, led into the development of nuclear, and, then thermonuclear weapons. This changed the rules of war, irreversibly. Since non-nuclear conflicts among leading powers would lead to a point of frustration at which nuclear or even thermonuclear weapons would come into play, general warfare in the sense of developments leading into the motion of Franklin Roosevelt's death, must come, sooner or later, to the point of a virtual, or even actual doomsday scenario. Now, the effort to amplify the range of weapons technology, including wide exploitation of potential asymmetric-warfare means, has brought the world as a whole to the threshold of holocaust.
In this way, warfare, and its other political correlatives, has come under the impact of successive boundary conditions. Military action to contain a threat is still very much on the agenda. Courtesy of Mr. George Shultz's Paul Bremer, Iraq has fully demonstrated the folly of going beyond relative short-term, limited-objective actions of warfare, and also the folly of the current, close-in deployment of naval forces to create, thus, a rules-of-engagement sort of combustible nightmare in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf and that of Oman. There is no reason to continue or repeat the folly, the virtual disintegration of a nation, which Bremer's act of lunacy had unleashed.
However, nonetheless, push capable powers with instincts for sovereignty hard enough, and they will respond, sooner or later, to the lunatic policies expressed by the current Bush Administration's Dirty Dick Cheney. China's exploration of at least the fringes of something like the SDI, typifies the rather inevitable result.
We are presently faced with the use of so-called conventional military forces in a manner intended to reduce an entire region of the world into a firestorm-like state of asymmetric warfare. The efficiently implicit intent of such misuse of conventional military capabilities, is to decivilize a region of the world, as President Bush has succeeded in this enterprise in transforming a bad situation in Afghanistan into a presently hopeless one. Bush has similarly, spawned a threatened general proliferation of a kindred state of affairs through the entire region of Southwest Asia, and adjoining parts of Africa, down the Nile into Lake Victoria, where the heirs of Lord Kitchener have already succeeded in producing a horror spreading throughout the region of Central Africa. This is the threat banging at the gates of India and Central Asia, and against the southern and western flank of Russia. This is being signaled, even among some Democratic Party notables, as a rising threat against China.
This set of trends has also produced a collapse in the conventional military and economic potentials of the U.S.A., as also in other parts of the world. The U.S. military is already on the verge of destruction through the manner in which it has been misused by the present Bush Administration. The ruin of U.S. regular military ground forces and the like, which would be the consequence of Vice-President Cheney's latest rampages, would not be reparable in less than a generation, even under favorable conditions.
We are thus, presently, approaching a state of military affairs coincident with the most lunatic, Ockhamite-like science-fiction fantasies of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The prospect now emerging in the planning of our military affairs, is of a surface of the Earth reduced to a ruined state lower than bucolic idiocy, while space-based superweapon complexes control life on Earth's surface from above—something like the picture at the close of H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come.
Inherently, automatic systems are intrinsically fragile, especially when ingenious human minds are determined to outflank, by outwitting those systems. The development of a "space command" system of global management of the planet's affairs, is intrinsically vulnerable precisely because it is not human. The human mind, if qualified for such work, will always devise a method for outflanking any automatic super-system of defense and punishment. The relevant incidents involving China's experiments with countermeasures, are an echo of the feature of the SDI which terrified the off-the-shelf fanatics of the 1980s Heritage Foundation. As SDI illustrates this point, opponents of the utopian military dogmas associated with the recent U.S. and other trends, foster a situation in which the opponents of such utopian systems take human aim at what is inherently the most vulnerable feature of any quasi-automated space-command system: its control system.
Thus, the SDI has just announced the fact that it never went away; it has been waiting for the call to duty to sound, all along.
Remember, what I proposed during 1979-1983, what I presented to the Soviet government on behalf of the Reagan Administration's National Security Council, and what President Reagan proffered, publicly, to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, was not essentially a program for warfare, but for getting the world to shift away from imperialistic schemes of warfare, into cooperation for enhancing the realization of the separate and common interests of leading strategic powers of the planet. It was to create a setting, in which a workable military strategy would serve the separate and common interests of cooperating powers.
That would have worked. Relevant Soviet channels agreed with that; their expressed objection, in their negotiations through me, was that we, the U.S.A., were better at such economic-development programs than they were. Today, no leading Russian in his or her right mind could competently, honestly, and sanely deny that Andropov made the lalapalooza of all great historical blunders, in summarily rejecting the proffer made publicly, by me in February 1983, and restated by President Reagan, before the entire world, on March 23, 1983.
We should re-make President Reagan's proffer to Russia, China, India, and others, today. We must thus redefine the rules of engagement in terms which conform to the direction in which scientific and technological progress must proceed. The time for the SDI's realization has come again.
Meanwhile the World Moves On
Recently, in two now-historic, Internet conferences hosted from Berlin, I set forth, in summary, the concept of U.S.A. prospective cooperation with a system of Eurasian cooperation in development over the coming two generations of approximately fifty years. The pivots of that cooperation, radiating from a reindustrialized city of Berlin into Russia, China, India, and regions beside and between, would be based on recognition of two sets of crucially leading factors needed for continuing the existence of civilization itself during that coming period. This would require extensive development of a range of infrastructural developments needed, specifically, to support a highly energetic shift of economy into modes based on today's most advanced use of uranium, plutonium, thorium for high-energy-flux-density modes of nuclear-fission power used for such included purposes as mass-desalination of water, and superior sources and quantities of power, and the accelerated development of thermonuclear-fusion technologies and their relevance for transuranic outputs and isotope management.
We have reached, not a limit of resources, but a boundary condition respecting continued reliance on the implicitly obsolete, currently practiced economical modes of supply of essential mineral and other resources.
The technologies required for such an orientation depend upon capital-intensive investments in both the basic economic infrastructure needed to support such a policy, which, combined within investments in productive capacities, represent a cycle of physical-capital investments over a span of approximately a half-century: two generations.
This will require a sweeping reform of what is presently an inherently, hopelessly bankrupt present mode of monetary-financial-banking system: an FDR-style reform, and the related creation of sundry facilities, included mechanisms of long-term treaty-agreements, needed to generate the long-term credit on which a massive upgrading of the Eurasian continent and its neighbors requires.
We must not be reckless. Sound measures for enhancing the "environment" are needed, but lunacies such as Bio-Fools and fraudulent, pseudo-scientific allegations respecting "gases" as a factor in "global warming," must be banned in the interest of maintaining an environment fit for human habitation.
The policies introduced since the first inauguration of President Richard Nixon, and continued, more or less vigorously, by his successors, have ruined what had been the most powerful, most productive economy the world had ever known. Since Nixon, and most clearly since approximately the middle of the 1970s, the U.S. economy has been transformed from the envy of the world, into a disgusting trash-heap of lost farms, industries, and hopes of a future. Those downward trends unleashed in 1968, must be ended and reversed. To this end, we require relevant adoption of rebuilding programs for our sovereign nation-state economy, and cooperation, to parallel ends, with other regions of the world.
Such is our mission, a relatively unique mission of service in promotion of the interests of all humanity, which was embedded, as the purpose of those Europeans who came here to bring the best fruits of the culture of European civilization, to a new territory, at a needed distance from the oligarchical decadence which governed "Old Europe." That was our mission, and that is the nature of our obligation to the "old world." The time has come to make the world as a whole, at last, exclusively a territory inhabited by perfectly sovereign nation-states, each and all cooperating, as if under the Preamble of our Federal Constitution, in service of the common interests of all mankind.
[1] Chaplin's Modern Times also reflected, not only A Nous La Liberté, but also Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
[2] The same cellar where I had once dined merrily on the occasion of a memorable rehearsal of J.S. Bach's Jesu, meine Freude, earlier that same day. It was vividly resonating memories of that rehearsal which persuaded me, some years later, to propose that same Bach composition as the basis for a program of education which integrated Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, with J.S. Bach, in providing the platform-basis for a competent core program of higher education in that integrated approach to both science and Classical art which is now reflected in the content featured on the WLYM website.
[3] As I have explained repeatedly, our typical economic forecasters of today are about as systemically incompetent as the economists of LTCM's August-September 1998 crash. Virtually all generally known economist-forecasters of record today used methods derived from Cartesian modes of what the late Mrs. Joan Robinson said of the work of the pathetically incompetent Professor Milton Friedman, statistical post hoc ergo propter hoc methods. In real life, the best which can be done, as a matter of economic forecasting, is what I do, using dynamic methods congruent with the discoveries of Bernhard Riemann: we can, at best, forecast the proximity of a boundary-condition within a physical-economic process. At such a boundary, a phase-change in the process must occur, or the system will enter a collapse-phase of some specifiable form. Failing to recognize such a boundary-condition will create, among today's true believers in "Wall Street," a psychopathological spectacle worthy of the most anguished moments of cartoon-land's "Daffy Duck," or, perhaps, better said, President George W. Bush.
[4] Cf. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, Christian Demold trans. (New York: Random House, 1940), Chapter XXV, "The Poverty of Cincinnatus ..." It was on this account, as presented by Machiavelli, that the officers of the American Revolution composed the Cincinnatus Society whose Philadelphia meetings of the time coincided with, and overlapped the Constitutional Convention. That is the proper view of the qualifications and mission of a U.S. President, such as George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. That is the image of the Presidency held by Alexander Hamilton.
[5] It had been Bertrand Russell who had proposed the original plan, published in the October 1946 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, for a "preventive" nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, as a measure for establishing an Anglo-American-ruled system of "world government." Russell was continuing, thus, the intention which H.G. Wells had expressed in proposing "radium weapons," in 1913, and also the intention which Russell and Wells had come to share around Wells' 1928 The Open Conspiracy and, implicitly, also Wells' "Things to Come" project. On this account, the Soviet press under Josef Stalin had some very unpleasant, but appropriate things to say about the person of Mr. Bertrand Russell. This changed under Khrushchev, who sent four representatives to Russell's London meeting of World Parliamentarians for World Government—i.e., "globalization"—at which these representatives represented themselves publicly as assigned emissaries of Khrushchev, conveying Khrushchev's profoundly loving view of the person of Russell. Even taking the case of Adolf Hitler into account, Bertrand Russell was without reasonable objection from informed circles, the most evil individual person of the Twentieth Century. Hitler is dead, but the evil of Russell lives on still today. Adventurer Khrushchev's Paris fit was precalculated, as his insufferable assault against the person of President John F. Kennedy, at Vienna, attests, and as Khrushchev's true motives, and relations to Russell, in the matter of setting up and negotiating the 1962 missiles-crisis, attest. Fidel Castro's role in this matter is wildly misappreciated in the standard gossip on the subject of the run-up to the 1962 crisis.
