LaRouche Supports Russian Drive for Afghanistan Opium Eradication
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Editors' note: This article was sent by Lyndon LaRouche as a greeting and memorandum for the "International Forum on Drug Production in Afghanistan: A Challenge to the International Community," held in Moscow June 9-10. Officially endorsed by President Dmitri Medvedev, the conference was operated by the Russian Information Agency Novosti. The chairman of the organizing committee was Victor P. Ivanov, head of the Federal Narcotics Control Service, who is leading Russia's vigorous efforts to secure international cooperation against the plague of heroin flowing out of Afghanistan (see EIR, June 4, 2010).
June 1, 2010
To: Victor P. Ivanov
I am in full agreement with your stated intent for the specified, immediate measures to eradicate the opium production and trafficking within and from Afghanistan.
I wish to emphasize that such action is much more than a needed social reform; it is an urgently needed, relentless effort, to eliminate an existing, global evil, an evil which is both in itself, and in its broader, strategic implications, a crucial element among other factors of the highest priority, against a set of presently immediate threats to civilization generally.
I believe that we might recognize that the present phase of warfare in Afghanistan, is now the longest-lasting state of permanent warfare being fought within the world in modern times. The opium and related traffic expressed in that region of Asia and beyond, is an integral part of that manner in which that continuing warfare was originally launched, and in which it has been perpetuated since then, to the present date.
The importance of the recommended action proposed by Russia's government, should now be considered as a matter of great urgency among all civilized nations, those of continental Eurasia, most emphatically, but, also all leading nations of our planet.
Whereas, these foregoing prefatory remarks by me are appropriate for this momentary occasion, more profound considerations will be required for the longer term, as I have indicated in the following argument.
I propose that concerned governments must prepare to focus attention for the longer term, on crucially relevant, more ancient and broader, globally strategic aspects of a present world-wide threat to civilization as a whole, as presently expressed in the case of Afghanistan.
I present the still deeper, global implications of the case as follows.
During the months prior to his assassination, U.S. President John F. Kennedy had come to a solid agreement with U.S.A. General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur respecting the implications of a U.S.A./Indo-China conflict. The President and General MacArthur had agreed, that the U.S.A. should abhor any effort to conduct extended warfare within the continent of Asia; they, and those who shared this view, were able to block a Trans-Atlantic, Anglo-American oligarchical faction's impulse for such warfare for as long as President Kennedy lived, but not much longer.
The United States has never recovered, whether in physical economy, or in the morale of its citizens, from the effects of that long war of ten more years, then, a war through which the U.S.A. largely destroyed both its own economy and public morality as a result.
The inception of that war-policy which President Kennedy had opposed, had already been set into motion on the day following the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The sweeping change, from President Franklin Roosevelt's anti-imperialist policy, to the Churchill-directed, contrary policies of the U.S. under President Harry S Truman, was expressed as Truman's support for Churchill's defense of pre-war British, Dutch, and French imperialism, that against what had been the just-deceased Franklin Roosevelt's intention to eliminate all territorial imperialisms as soon as the war had been won.
The U.S. major warfare in Indo-China which was unleashed after the assassination of President Kennedy, became, in effect, the means employed for the British empire's revenge against the United States, revenge for what London hated as President Franklin Roosevelt's declared intention for the post-war period, his repeatedly stated commitment to bringing the existence of imperial systems such as the British quickly to an early end once the war had concluded.
Those facts must remind us, that the nations of continental Europe, including Russia, have had repeated experiences of a similarly ruinous type of what the British slyly term "foreign relations" among nations, still, to the present date, as I note that fact here in the following terms.
There had been the case of the long religious warfare in Europe during the A.D. 1492-1648 interval. There had been the so-called "Seven Years War," whose concluding 1763 Peace of Paris saw the newly hatched British Empire of Lord Shelburne as triumphant over nearly all of those nations of continental Europe. Later came Napoleon Bonaparte's imperial wars, which were, in effect, a new "Seven Years War," in their turn, wars which strengthened that British Empire immensely, as had been done in the Peace of Paris earlier, thus, once more at the expense of the nations of a duped continental Europe.
So, later, Germany's then-ousted Chancellor Bismarck had warned, insightfully, that the British monarchy's plans for what would become the general war in Europe and Asia of the 1895-1917 interval, would be "a new Seven Years War." Later, the great war of 1939-1945, had been launched with initial British backing of the Adolf Hitler regime. Virtually at the moment of the cessation of that war, Britain's Winston Churchill, and his admirer and accomplice President Harry S Truman joined an evil Bertrand Russell in launching what came to be called a 1946-1989 "Cold War"; that was, at that time, a more recent illustration of the same kind of strategic folly of "long wars" in the tradition of the "new Seven Years War" to which the ousted Chancellor Bismarck had referred. Today, the long warfare which is presently centered in the poppy fields of Afghanistan, has been another such case of the follies of the often half-witting powers of the post-World War II modern world.
The prolonged warfare in the so-called "Middle East" region under what would become the British imperial manipulations of the Sykes-Picot treaty organization, that from the close of the Nineteenth Century to the present day, includes the new round of Anglo-American schemes in Afghanistan. That presently continuing war is to be recognized as essentially a continuation of an even more ancient type of the similar folly of long, wasting wars, such as the cases of the process leading to the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, as, later, that of ancient Rome, that of ancient Byzantium, and that of the Ottoman Empire, or, later, those two "Great" wars, including that Anglo-Japanese pact, launched by the British Prince of Wales Albert Edward against not only China, Korea, and Russia, all part of the same process which continued as a long war throughout the Pacific region during the full sweep of the 1895-1945 interval. That included the British subversive operations launched against the post-1941-1945 United States through the assistance of Churchill's puppet, Wall Street's U.S. President Harry Truman.
It must be recalled presently, that the original plan for the December 7, 1941 Japan attack on the U.S. Pearl Harbor naval base, had been prepared by London and Japan during the naval-power negotiations of the early 1920s. The massive build-up of Japan's preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor since the time of that early 1920s negotiation, had been prepared throughout the entirety of the interval from that time, into December 1941.
It must be noted as relevant for the immediate global strategic situation at hand, that, in considering the present situation posed by Afghan opium production, there had been the following, unique feature in the history of the "new world war" of 1939-1945. The key to this part of world history, is that, whereas, the successful assassination of U.S. President William McKinley had brought pro-British puppet-Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Ku Klux Klan fanatic Woodrow Wilson into power, and Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover later, President Franklin Roosevelt's election brought the American patriotic opposition to British imperialism back into power in the U.S.A.
So, it happened, that, whereas, originally, the same British monarchy, as, earlier, under Prince Albert Edward (the later King Edward VII), who had been the principal architect of what came to be named "World War I," had created, built up, and steered the Hitler forces for the original intent of destroying both Germany and the Soviet Union in a long, mutually wasting war.
However, because of Franklin Roosevelt's role as President, a certain, crucial change in those British plans occurred when elements of a French pro-fascist government had struck a deal with the Hitler regime for a relatively weaker German military force's 1940 victory over relatively superior Anglo-French-Belgian power. This development meant that the British-Japan alliance was now severed by Winston Churchill's desperate appeal for rescue from U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A Japan which had been allied with both the British monarchy and also the Hitler regime up to that time, continued its long-prepared commitment to the destruction of the U.S. influence in the Pacific. Once Churchill had turned to the United States for the rescue of an essentially defeated United Kingdom, Japan now considered its earlier British ally against the U.S.A. as also its target of the intended war against the United States.
Today, in viewing matters since August 1945, an added, new kind of global strategic factor in the conduct of "long wasting wars," must be taken into account.
While the British imperial traditions of Lord Shelburne's British East India Company's long wars and drug-trafficking, persist to the present day, as an ingrained, oligarchical characteristic of that empire, the objective strategic pre-conditions for conduct of imperial warfare have undergone a profound change in quality; the apparent impossibility of conducting a successful form of full-scale imperial warfare, under the conditions defined by thermonuclear technologies, has become an essential reality.
Look back to the moment of the death of President Franklin Roosevelt; consider the evidence, now at hand, which should now warn us that what had been widely considered the economic and strategic elements of global certainties of strategic conflicts, since the Peloponnesian War, until this present moment, have been based on deeply embedded strategic assumptions which must be recognized now as having been absurd in certain crucial respects. The continuation of those heretofore popular presumptions of governments and their leading circles, could now be soon fatal for civilization in its entirety.
The character of the global drug wars now strategically centered in the poppy fields of Afghanistan, must be assessed in these terms of historical reference.
What's Wrong with Economics?
As was demonstrated later by U.S. State Department historian Herbert Feis, Rosa Luxemburg was the most notable figure of her lifetime, a figure who, in contrast to her British imperialist, or socialist contemporaries, presented a competent, physical-economic, rather than mistaken, financial insight into the nature of modern European imperialism.
The proximate root of the error of most putative economists and related scholars today, has been the influence of the irrationalist doctrine of the founder of modern European liberalism, Paolo Sarpi; but, Sarpi's dogma, that of modern British Liberalism, was merely a quirky substitute for the more ancient dogma usually identified with the Aristotelean legacy.
The essential point to be stressed for today's times, is that the essential role of physical economy, as definable in physical-scientific terms, has no correspondence to the system of money-values associated with such followers of modern Sarpean liberalism, as the British East India Company's Lord Shelburne, and Shelburne's flunky Adam Smith reflect the ideology of Sarpi and John Locke.
That is to emphasize, that the controlling physical factor in the rise or fall of modern economy, is the implicitly measurable rise, or the ultimate stagnation, or decline of the physical-productive powers of labor per capita and per square kilometer.
Since the long hegemony of the Delphi cult of Apollo in the rise of power of European, Mediterranean-based culture, through the lifetime of high priest Plutarch, the role of money-values in Mediterranean-centered civilization has been tied to the equivalent of prices associated with maritime trade, rather than any actual notion of a measurable physical value measured in a combination of per capita and per square kilometer terms.
So, the required modern estimate of real economy, which is to say, physical-scientific value in economy, must be tied to relative up-shifts in rates of net increase of potential relative population-density per capita, and per square kilometer. That latter measure is situated within the bounds of, on the one side, the depletion of richness of relative physical sources, and, on the other, the increase of productivity through, in effect, the application of physical-scientific progress as expressed in terms of relative energy-flux-density of sources of power employed for both production and the environment of basic economic infrastructure.
The subject of the modern economies associated with the leading influence of Mediterranean-centered European civilization since the beginning of Europe's Fifteenth-century Renaissance's influence, as shown by the followers of such founders of modern European science and economy as Filippo Brunelleschi and Nicholas of Cusa, is the most relevant choice of a long-term standard for modern European and trans-Atlantic economies. The best approach to understanding of the physical principles underlying a truly competent study of economy, today, is to be traced through the implications for economy of the work of Academician V.I. Vernadsky.
The presently notable requirement for the present "space age," is to resituate that subject of physical economy within the context of the present frontiers of space exploration, as by situating the future travel of human cosmonauts between Earth and Mars within the domain of cosmic radiation, rather than the fictive domain of apparently empty space, while viewing the legacy of Dmitri Mendeleyev's periodic table in terms of the relevant domain of cosmic-radiation singularities, rather than the mere particles of the rabidly reductionist, positivist ideologues of the like of the Bertrand Russell school of so-called "systems analysis."
Since the achievements of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's reform of his 1933-1945 years in office, the efficient management of economy as such is to be associated with the combination of Roosevelt's introduction of the Glass-Steagall law for banking, and the notion of the objective of a global fixed-exchange-rate for currencies among those of a system of sovereign nation-states.
Against that scientific background, Rosa Luxemburg's and Herbert Feis' treatments of the subject of imperialism, provide the reference-point to be employed, still today, as the key to remedies for the effects of modern European imperialism, especially the British variety which has dominated the world as a whole. But for short interventions, that imperialist outlook has been more or less dominant since that 1763 Peace of Paris which established Lord Shelburne's British East India Company as a world-empire in principle, as by the presently, implicitly doomed British imperial Inter-Alpha Group, up through the present moment these words are being written.
As the ever-worsening, presently wretched, and rapidly worsening condition of the population of the United Kingdom attests to this fact, no form of European imperialism was ever essentially a matter of national economy, but has been a by-product of a supra-national system of economy. That has been a system which is rooted in the power of a supra-national monetarist oligarchy such as that which has dominated Europe since that Venetian financier oligarchy of about A.D. 1000 which, among other things, launched the so-called "New Dark Age" of Europe's Fourteenth century. The world at large, most clearly the trans-Atlantic part, is, itself, presently plunging toward the depths of a threatened new dark age, but one which would then carry the remainder of the planet into a virtual sojourn in Hell as a result.
Present World History
The trans-Atlantic world is careening into a general disaster, which, if not reversed by appropriate, relatively immediate reforms, will quickly precipitate all nations and peoples of the planet into the darkest of all dark ages known in the presently recorded history of civilizations.
In fact, throughout the millennia of European history which have passed since the Peloponnesian War, the recurring threats of new forms of "dark ages" have been a recurring fact, sometimes in a limited part of the planet, sometimes, as now, threatening the nations and peoples of the planet as a whole.
In the known history of European civilization, especially since the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean littoral, the characteristic feature of society, a feature associated most consistently with the oligarchical outlook which has dominated most relevant cultures thus far, has been policies akin to those identified by the great dramatist Aeschylus, as this was exemplified by the surviving portion of his famous Prometheus trilogy. The crucial feature of that trilogy, is the emphasis on a reigning Olympian form of maritime oligarchy which banned the use of fire from the knowledge of the subjugated, enslaved classes.
The ironical fact of that notion of a "class society," is, most notably, that the essential distinction of man from ape is man's willful use of fire, or, as we say today, leaps in the relative energy-flux-density employed by mankind, per capita, and per square kilometer.
So, today, as under the mythical, or, perhaps not so mythical reign of the Olympian Zeus, the suppression of progress in increasingly energy-flux-dense applications of power, per capita and per square kilometer, especially in basic economic infrastructure such as increasing energy-flux-density of power, water-management, and transportation. This has been the essential precondition for the avoiding of prolonged ages of bestial conditions of most of humanity, and the precondition for the great breakdown-crises of civilizations, such as that which the British-dominated imperial world system has produced since the mid-1960s, the world system which is presently careening at accelerating speed into the maw of a presently onrushing threat of a new dark age for this planet as a whole.
As a matter of a case in point, consider the disastrous effects of that British-puppet Presidency of the U.S.A. under a Barack Obama now careening toward the very high probability of his early ouster by pressures from a massively abused and enraged general population of that nation. This spectacle must be considered against the backdrop of a present resurgence of a British imperial opium war against humanity, as exemplifed by the fact that a British puppet-President of the U.S.A., Obama, has demanded support for the British conduct of opium-trafficking from a British-controlled region of Afghanistan, without interference with that traffic by U.S. forces which he, Obama, compels to mire themselves in a futile "land war in Asia."
Consider opium wars launched by Lord Palmerston's protégés against China, an opium traffic which was launched by the British East India Company from the last decade of the Eighteenth Century to the present day. Today, the British Queen is, thus, the leading, official, imperial "drug pusher" in the world. Consider, for example, the effect of British drug-pushing on the nation and people of China during, and beyond the Nineteenth Century, still today. Consider the similar effects on people of other national cultures, as presently.
Consider three crucial, leading factors defining the effects of the setting of British imperialism in the world at large today.
First, the control of populations through various modes of stupefaction of the individual's and culture's cognitive potentials as such potentials are expressed in science and Classical cultural modes of progress of the conditions of mind and life of the population in general.
Second, the increase of the productive powers of labor through the vector of increasing physical-capital intensity of the basic economic infrastructure, such as supplies of water, power, and globalized modes of mass transport of people and produced product through advances in science and related technologies.
Third, the increase of those powers of the individual mind and general culture on which vigorous promotion of scientific and Classical cultural progress depends.
The most dramatic of the recent expressions of that kind of three-fold cultural warfare exerted by the insolence of ruling power over nations and their populations, is shown by President Obama's British-like attempted obliteration of the exploration of nearby Solar space.
The Role of 'Secret Economy'
The great failure of most notions of the practice of economy today, is to be located in the difference between those functions of individual and social forms of mental life of persons which are recognized as the customary subject of sense-perceptions, and those higher functions of physical science and Classical artistic composition, which, while also experimental in essential nature, lie beyond the domain of mere sense-perceptual experience as such.
However difficult it may be for many, still today, to understand the creative functions of the human mind from the notions of ordinary sensory experience, the stubborn fact is that the valid forms of fundamental discoveries of principles of composition in both physical science and Classical artistic composition, are the essential root of the functional distinction between the behaviors of man and beast. This is shown most dramatically by the persisting, terrible failures of the mathematical performances of the positivists in these domains, as contrasted with the Riemann methods of such modern physical chemists as Mendeleyev, Max Planck, William Draper Harkins, V.I. Vernadsky, and Albert Einstein, or the great Classical musical composers as from J.S. Bach through Johannes Brahms.
The practical problems so situated are most readily illustrated from the vantage-point of physical-performance measurements, by examining the role of basic economic infrastructure in determining the relative gains or failures in Trans-Atlantic cultures of recent centuries. The point is well illustrated by the essential role of creative ingenuity embodied in the development of national canal-and-river systems, such as that of Charlemagne, or, the successor system of transcontinental railway systems, which have been indispensable for increasing the per-capita productive powers of labor of entire cultures. The increase of the productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer, effected by such means, points to the promotion of human scientific and related forms of individual creativity in all matters in which human beings successfully distinguish themselves from the mere beasts.
At the same time, we have the contrasting effects of opium and related forms of addiction on the economic vitality of nations.
Inside the United States, as throughout Europe generally, the degeneration of the quality of power to think throughout populations of nations since, especially, the late 1960s, has been the most significant of the factors responsible for the collapse of the relative productive powers of labor since that turn coinciding with the U.S. war in Indo-China and the Soviet catastrophe in Afghanistan. The fact that these relative cultural disasters of recent decades have occurred, points to the importance of a high degree of popular morale fostered through the fostering of high rates of progress in those productive powers of labor associated with national cultures, and must be defended as an essential prerequisite for any recovery of this planet from the presently onrushing general disaster now threatening civilization throughout the planet considered as a whole.
The fact that we tolerate a drug culture, would tend to mark us as peoples who have lost, at least temporarily, a crucial part of that people's ability to survive as a culture.
It is necessary, but not sufficient to refuse to tolerate bad cultural influences such as those associated with an actual addiction to drugs which depress the cognitive and related moral powers of the human individual. Respectively sovereign nations must find common expression and common goals in humanity's future destiny for this planet as a whole and beyond.
It is the commitment to the adoption of such common aims of mankind as those, like President Franklin Roosevelt's to a planet freed of British and related imperialisms, which must bind in a common purpose among different sovereigns. The prospect of mankind's overcoming the barriers to human exploration of space, as a goal to be achieved within this present century, must be our goal for this period of world history.
It is those methods and goals which I have summarized in my "The Secret Economy,"[1] and away from the follies of Adam Smith and the like, which point us in such a direction.
