THE 68ERS REVIEWED:
Under Their Skins
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
January 6, 2008
Any well-informed observer has now been adequately forewarned, that the intention for the 2008 Presidential campaign, by certain very powerful international financial interests, is the election of a man-on-a-white-horse, New York City's Mayor Bloomberg, to become what historians would describe with a shudder as the American Mussolini dictatorship (or, perhaps, even worse) of January 2009.
The intention of the super-wealthy financial parasites largely controlling the campaigns, is to play each candidate, such as Chicago's patsy Obama, against the others in ways intended to ensure that by early March 2008, the electoral potential of the presently leading candidates would have been sufficiently scrambled by the financial manipulators, that the road would have been cleared for the coming of a tyrant on a billionaire's personal, financial "white horse."
To understand how such a nightmarish threat as that could have come upon us, we must explore the evolution of a movement which came to be known as "the 68ers," from a white-collar generation spawned in the U.S.A., Europe, and relevant other locations during the interval 1945-1958.
The Dossier section of Germany's Sunday Welt am Sonntag, features a politically shallow-minded treatment of the subject of the events from Berlin and related events from four decades earlier. The importance of the leading element of this account, by author Richard Herzinger, is that it illustrates the commonplace way in which it completely misses the reality underlying the role of the "68ers," their deadly, Nazi-echoing, global strategic significance for the coming elections in the U.S.A. and elsewhere today.
I know the true story very well. I was there, on the ground, in the events of 1968. I had also been on the ground when the seeds of the "68er" phenomenon were planted, at the close of the war, in 1944-1946, and the years immediately following. It is a subject to which my adult life has been devoted from that time to the present moment.
In an evening meeting on New York City's Columbia University campus during June 1968, I presented my review of the lessons of the two successive massed student strikes which had occurred on that campus during the preceding months and weeks. Shortly after that, a summary of the report I had delivered at that meeting was published under the title of The New Left, Local Control, and Fascism. In that report, I compared the second of the two strikes on that campus with the way in which members of the Communist and Nazi parties had swapped chunks of their memberships back-and-forth during the weeks of the famous Berlin trolley-car strike of the period leading into the Nazi takeover of dictatorial powers through Hermann Göring's organization of the fire at the Reichstag building.
From Spring 1968 onward, what was emerging as the clearly defined majority of the so-called "New Left," in both the U.S.A. and elsewhere, was essentially the rise of a fascist movement, as the close examination of the second 1968 Columbia University student strike should have warned any close observer who was thinking seriously.
I knew very well what I was talking about back then, and I know it much, much more clearly, and in much greater detail, forty years later, today.
On August 15-16, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon acted as I had repeatedly warned as a likely development for about that time. He repudiated the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, which had been launched under the initiative of President Franklin Roosevelt, an action by President Roosevelt which had saved the world, for the time being, in 1944-1945.
As I warned orally, and in a widely circulated, featured pamphlet, published on August 31, 1971, this action by President Nixon opened the door for steps toward bringing a fascist world order down the road, unless the change in policy were reversed.
This was no sudden discovery on my part. During 1959-61, onward, I had repeatedly forecast, that if the monetarist U.S. economic policies of Arthur Burns et al., which had led into the deep, 1957 recession, were allowed to be continued into the later 1960s, this would lead to a threatened breakdown of the Bretton Woods monetary system. President John F. Kennedy became a pro-Franklin Roosevelt threat to those policies against which I warned during the late 1950s; but, his assassination, and the Gulf of Tonkin lies, led the U.S. economy, repeatedly, over the course of the 1960s, into the direction against which I had warned.
My continually repeated warning had been, that unless the policies responsible for the 1957 recession were corrected, we must expect a growing crisis during the second half of the 1960s, crises leading toward a threatened breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, to occur by approximately the end of the 1960s, or beginning of the 1970s.
It happened, exactly as I had forecast.
When the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system occurred, on August 15-16, 1971, I was the only publicly known economist, in the U.S.A. or Europe, who had forecast the likelihood of such a development.
The key figure for that 1971 action from among Nixon's advisors was George P. Shultz. Within two weeks of Nixon's actions, I warned that the result of the intention behind Nixon's action, was to prepare the way for a fascist takeover of the U.S. economy. In January 1972, Shultz was deployed to destroy the remains of the Bretton Woods system. The monetary policies under Nixon, as followed by the pro-fascist domestic economic changes introduced by Zbigniew Brzezinski's Trilateral Commission, during the Carter Administration, destroyed the foundations of the economic recovery which had been led by President Franklin Roosevelt, thus preparing the way for what has become the new world economic depression which broke out on, approximately, July 30, 2007.
I then, in September 1971, uttered a challenge to the leading economists who, then and now, had failed to foresee this development. Weeks later, a leading Keynesian economist, Professor Abba Lerner, a close associate of NYU Professor Sidney Hook, accepted this challenge. The great debate occurred at Queens College. Lerner responded to my charge that the policies he was defending were leading toward fascism in the same general way Adolf Hitler was brought to power in Germany. Lerner weakly burped his fatal reply, that if the German Social-Democrats had accepted the policies of Hjalmar Schacht, "Hitler would not have been necessary"! The assembled audience knew, with that admission by Lerner, the debate had closed.
Professor Sidney Hook threatened, that my defeat of Lerner in that debate meant that he and his associates would see to it that I would not be allowed on the stage of public policy-shaping again. Perhaps, you might suggest to my critics, still today, that I was just a lot smarter than the economists and political figures who have disagreed with me on these economic and political issues then, and those which still do so today.
1. The Hatching of the Egg
Now, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has stepped, almost goose-stepped, into his father's Nazi Party tradition of service under the Adolf Hitler regime; this time, it has been under the guidance of the same London-steered George Shultz, who, together with accomplices such as Felix Rohatyn, had installed the neo-Nazi murder machine of Chile's dictator Augusto Pinochet, and who had also been crucial in putting Schwarzenegger into the Governor's chair, with shameless overt London backing.
Now, that egg has hatched.
Despite that accumulated mass of that and much related evidence, the pages of the Sunday, January 6 edition of Germany's Welt am Sonntag remind us, how few are those who have learned to face the truth of the New Left upsurge, even after forty years of time for reflection. Now, many of that generation, and others, will learn, perhaps to their great sorrow, what have actually been their real motives against my earlier candidacies.
Since 1971, I have been hated, and also feared, by those influentials, both in the U.S.A., and in Europe, who, whether witting or not, are like Bank of England head Montagu Norman of the 1920s and early 1930s, that head of the Bank of England who had used Hjalmar Schacht as the tool to bring Hitler into power in Germany. The difference today, is that the name for the chosen instrument for bringing about fascist rule, is, as I have often warned, not Hjalmar Schacht, but George Shultz; and, the proposed fascist dictator is not named Adolf Hitler, but, for the present moment, at least, New York City Mayor Bloomberg.
The persistent refusal to see this threat coming since prior to August 1971, was never for want of abundant evidence. For many, such as rabid neo-malthusian and former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, it should have been sufficient to see themselves in a political mirror. Welt am Sonntag's failure to consider the actual origins and character of the majority of the so-called "68er" phenomenon is typical of the quality of unreality which most governments and their political parties bring to the shaping of policies and forecasts today.
How It began in June 1944
To understand what really happened at the Columbia campus, and other places during late Spring 1968, go back to the aftermath of June 1944.
To understand what is happening right now, it must be remembered that both Mussolini and Hitler were brought to power, by the British empire, as intended dictators. Mussolini had been the darling of Winston Churchill up to approximately the day Mussolini joined Hitler's forces in the 1940 conquest of France. England's King Edward VIII was dumped over (actually) the issue of his ties to Hitler's cause. The story of Neville Chamberlain's umbrella was a bit overplayed at the time of the 1938 Munich Pact with Hitler; but, without President Franklin Roosevelt's intervention, Britain would have capitulated to a deal with Hitler, as the pro-fascist government of France did, during the events of Spring-Summer 1940. Without President Roosevelt's role, the fascist tyranny would have ruled in the decades immediately following 1940.
Where, then, is the Franklin Roosevelt for today? Who are the fascists of today who, like former Pinochet associate Felix Rohatyn, are desperately determined that no semblance of a Franklin Roosevelt might intervene now?
Therefore, the key to the 68er phenomenon goes back, proximately, to the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, when the leading internationally-connected financier interests of London, New York, and kindred spots elsewhere, had been dedicated to both the Mussolini regime in Italy from the 1920s, and had been committed to putting the Adolf Hitler movement into a position of dictatorial power in Germany in the wake of Hermann Göring's organizing of the setting fire to the Reichstag, in February 1933. The British oligarchy's own attachment to the Hitler cause had continued late into the 1930s; and, even when Churchill's Britain had become an ally of Franklin Roosevelt's U.S.A., there was reluctance, even among Winston Churchill's circles, against winning the war against Hitler "too soon."[1]
So, the U.S. breakthrough on the Normandy front, produced a sense of both relief and worry among the British oligarchy. Their earlier attachment to President Franklin Roosevelt's war-time leadership role lessened, as they considered their fears of what a post-war Franklin Roosevelt administration would mean as a threat to the continued existence of the British empire, then, or as today. On this account, London's oligarchs could rely upon the sympathies of those same Manhattan-centered financier interests which had joined London in support for both Mussolini and Hitler earlier. The 1944 U.S. elections witnessed a sudden, and brutish right-wing turn here at home, not only among Republicans, but also Democrats typified by Senator Harry S Truman.
The key to understanding the outcome of this post-June 1944 turn in U.S. political trends, is to be traced chiefly to certain abrupt and radical changes in U.S. policy which erupted almost immediately following the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. The preparations for this abrupt shift in policy and perspective had already been in place from about 1938 on, trends set in motion about a dozen years earlier by, chiefly, what had been the circles of Aleister Crowley of Lucifer-cult notoriety, and were still the circles of H.G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell, all in concert with the psychological warfare section of British intelligence under the direction of Brigadier Dr. John Rawlings Rees.
In a certain sense, the British monarchy has been the real monarchy which its pageantry pretends to show it to be; but, in a deeper sense, its power, since George I, and, more so, since February 1763, has been that of a tool of a higher power. That higher power has been the actual British empire in mufti, the "Anglo-Dutch Liberal" tradition of the New Venice, financier faction of Paolo Sarpi.
London has been running an empire of this neo-Venetian type since, implicitly, the accession of William of Orange's crew took control under William's former protégé King George I. However, kings, queens, or forget-me-nots, the real imperial power resides in the reins of an intrinsically heteronomic rabble known as the Anglo-Dutch Liberal oligarchy, of which de facto British imperial agent George Shultz is a notable element, and for which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is a tragi-comic stooge. When the actual British empire of today is seen in that guise, there is a certain morsel of prophetic truth in that piece of fiction called The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was delivered to the British East India Company's chief thug, Lord Shelburne.
It is that financiers' empire in the tradition of Paolo Sarpi, and that empire's control over the British Foreign Office, since 1782 under Shelburne's thug Jeremy Bentham, not the British government otherwise, which has been continuously the chief long-term enemy of our United States since the February 1763 Peace of Paris. It is British agents within the U.S.A., in the tradition of Bentham agent Aaron Burr, or Burr's asset Andrew Jackson, or Martin van Buren, et al., who, like the Confederate uncle of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Ku Klux Klan fanatic Woodrow Wilson himself, or financier war-lords George Shultz and Felix Rohatyn now, have been the principal source of treasonous activity within our leading political ranks, since then, to the present day.
Now, back to the Baby-Boomers.
2. Where the Baby-Boomers Come In
From the beginning of the continuing war-time dialog between President Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, as the conflict over Pacific War policy between Churchill's U.S. sympathizers and General Douglas MacArthur shows, there was never any secret about the conflict on issues of strategy for the period of the continuing war, or, the post-war period. (Only H.G. Wellsian Wikipediaphile types could be so silly as to attempt to deny the evidence.)
The Baby Boomers are not a generation; they are a fraction of a biological generation, chiefly from among those born during the immediate post-war interval 1945-1958, who, like their representative, and former Vice-President Al Gore, express their breeding in neo-Malthusian forms of hostility to physical scientific progress in industry, agriculture, basic economic infrastructure, and Classical artistic culture generally. In the extreme, they were the "turn on, tune in, drop out" generation. They did not become this "naturally," "spontaneously." They were the products of a design, often recognized as "existentialism," based on such included elements as "information theory" and fads akin in spirit to those of the "Lost Generation" of post-World War I, 1920s and 1930s Europe.
The parameters of that new, Baby Boomer version of a "lost generation" are not fixed. For example, those of the same age-group who abandoned their earlier resistance to a "lost generation" paradigm, drifted into the quicksands of a kindred ideological orientation. The most significant feature of these decadent trends is a tendency to embrace "neo-Malthusian" fads. In a manner of speaking, "They went over to the other side, as some of my own former associates have done."
There is very little about this "Baby Boomer" trend which happened as mere coincidence.
The significance of the "1968" briefly described by Welt am Sonntag of January 6th lies not in the effects of the war in Vietnam itself, but, chiefly, in the rising number of members of the social class of the "Baby Boomer" generation reaching young adulthood in 1964-1968. The prompting of this social phenomenon is to be recognized in the cultural paradigm-shifts experienced by the households and in-group communities associated with the "middle class, white collar" culture described, from the 1950s, by sociological studies such as "White Collar" and "The Organization Man."
To understand how the middle to late 1960s happened, it is essential to place much less emphasis on the effects of the 1960s U.S. war in Indo-China, than on the terrifying experience of 1961-1963: the 1962 missiles-crisis most of all, the orchestrated ouster of Macmillan in Britain, the repeated, fascist assassination-attempts against President Charles de Gaulle, the "bum's rush" treatment administered, at London's direction, to Chancellor Adenauer, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
It is typical of the significance of those 1961-1964 developments, that shortly after the second mass-strike at Columbia University, Mark Rudd et al. planned to stage a hostile event against the memory of the murdered Robert Kennedy, an event which Tony Papert and I intervened to prevent. That section of the "68ers" was the real, "blue collar"-hating, fascist quality of social-ideological movement of that time.
Over the course of the 1970s, this proto-fascist current of the so-called "New Left," played an increasing role in shaping political change in Washington, D.C. They were the "anti-blue-collar" support for the breakup of the Bretton Woods (e.g., pro-industrial) system, and for the campaigns conducted by the Trilateral Commission, and for the "cultural-paradigm down-shift" in general.
Today, their most notable figure is the Prince of Wales' accomplice, former Vice-President Al Gore of "Global Warming" hoax notoriety. Without the specific kind of intellectual "degeneration" fostered in the ranks of the special social-class of the 1945-1958 "Baby Boomers" such as Al Gore, the presently onrushing threat of a fascist regime in the U.S.A. today would not have been possible.
Without the destruction of what the U.S.A. under Franklin Roosevelt had continued to represent, what is happening to the world at large today, would not have been possible. However the relevant British imperialists and their U.S. accomplices of the post-FDR decades might have foreseen the pathway of self-destruction through which the U.S.A. has put itself during the post-FDR decades, especially since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the evil which menaces the world today would not have been possible but for the roles President Truman and his British and American accomplices played in seeking to defend the continuation of the British empire, as each and all among them has done, against the kind of American Century which a surviving President Roosevelt would have carried into effect.
[1] The British betrayal of the German Generals' Revolt, expressed this British policy for the post-war world.
