November 4, 2012

THE ANCIENT ROOTS OF CHRONIC MODERN WAR . . .

On a Subject of Ancient Antiquity

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in EIR Vol. 39, No. 45, November 16, 2012, pp. 44-50.

Why have those attempts for a modern world-peace “in their times” failed, repeatedly, since the time of the 1890 ouster of Chancellor Bismarck? Such often appears to be the chronic riddle of warfare today. The question to be addressed here, invokes an echo of the legendary, but nonetheless actual destruction of Troy. Yet, on the same account, then, here, there, or now, the presently immediate threat of global thermonuclear warfare, has implications which now reach absolutely beyond all earlier precedents. For that latter, present threat, there is neither any apparent precedent presented up to this time, nor any systemic solution in sight—this far.

Warfare—as it is sometimes said “for its own sake,” has been often an unnecessary, lunatic, mass-disease, the expression of an outbreak of sheer, bestial insanity as was the U.S. folly in entering into the “land war in Asia” which President John F. Kennedy and General Douglas MacArthur strictly opposed—until President Kennedy’s assassination convinced the U.S. government otherwise. A similar folly is to be noted in cases such as, especially noted, in the history of ancient Greece, and the sequel of the launching of the Roman Empire. These morbid infections with war, often express the degradation which alternatively engenders, or is the consequence of the mass-insanity of such as the Crusades, the religious warfare prior to the Peace of Westphalia, and the present, British-led, mass-mania of an avowed, “post-Westphalian” Europe of the time of the New Venetian trends associated with that William of Orange who became the putative author of the neo-Roman, British empire of, still, the present day.

Nonetheless, I am justly confident that that which I shall have identified, in the following pages, will become sufficient to warrant a step toward solution for that apparent riddle itself.

That should have been obvious, as I shall show, below, since the experienced outcome of that 1763 Peace of Paris whose outstanding effect, was to establish William of Orange’s New Venetian party as the reincarnation of the Roman Empire, up through the present date. It is, contrary to all foolish opinion, that very same empire which presently dominates the planet, still today.

I explain.

What I have come to consider as the most useful of the relevant precedents to be referenced now, is implicit in the commonly misapprehended, Homeric Iliad’s account of the destruction of ancient Troy. That Homer was poetic, and therefore truthful, but he justly misled those fools who wished to believe their own evil dreams.

The specific usefulness of the example of Troy for our purposes here and now, lies in the coincidence between the site within which the remaining ruin of Troy has been designated by Heinrich Schliemann, et al., and through attention to the relevant social characteristics which coincide with the legacy of both those characteristics of the oligarchical system to be recognized in each successive predecessor, and also in the threatened present-day outcome of the ancient Roman empire.

I also include consideration of those social characteristics common among those cases embedded in the relatively major European oligarchical systems which are to be traced from the assembly of the Roman Empire through today, and also the more recently emergent quality of the present British-Saudi imperial systems. I mean by this, the systems which have provided the basis for the combined British-imperial and Saudi “9-11” system which had been deployed jointly by those imperialist parties for the relevant ritual mass killings which occurred both during 2001 and, presently, their mimic, the “9-11” of President Barack Obama’s implicitly treasonous role in the matter of the September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi.

The combined importance and authority of the dynamic of such a kind of background for our present mission here, has the following features.

There is something akin to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” in this riddle which I shall present here. After that is recognized, the solution might be unfolded.

The Cultural Artefact at Hand

When we might think about the matter more carefully than is common even among most known scholars this far, what persists is the importance of the Trojan War for insight into a science of history today. The key to relevant mysteries is to be located, essentially, in the style of the highly ironic, Homeric, Classical-poetic, poem itself. Ask: “Who is the villain?” And “Why?” The essential response to those questions, for today, is the evil embodied in the recent emergence of the Anglo-BAE-Saudi integration’s lividly characteristic expression of the present threat of a triggering of global thermonuclear warfare.

I intend to include my emphasis on the fact, of the present threat to all civilization represented by the integration of those British-Saudi-BAE systems expressed in both the original, 2001, “9-11” attack on the U.S.A., and the most recent, deliberately signalled, Anglo-Saudi attack on the U.S. diplomatic station in Benghazi, Libya. I emphasize, that that murderous development had been developed under the support provided by the implicitly treasonous, brutishly malevolent and chronically lying British tool, Barack Obama. There was the precisely crafted, and labored crafting of the attack which occurred, precisely, as an echo of September 11, 2001: exactly eleven years later, on September 11, 2012. That timing was controlled by President Barack Obama and by his incredibly lying and otherwise depraved accomplice, UNO Ambassador Susan Rice; but, they were only tools of the British empire of today.

Physical Science as Metaphor

What I emphasize here, in these pages, is the systemic character of the link of the Homeric portrayal of the fall of Troy, to the sequence of European-centered imperialist systems, as from the fall of ancient Rome, to the verge of that threatened doom of world civilization, the which is embedded in the actions of the British imperial role of the Saudi kingdom presently, as in the actions of “9-11,” then, as in 2001, and again, now. The essential feature of my treatment of that subject-matter here, brings forth a notion of the methods by means of which the present threat of a global thermonuclear holocaust might be averted during these presently immediate, as also future times.

The stark ironies of the Homeric poetry are crucial for us today, for precisely such purposes. These are needed, now, precisely because the presented account has been rendered by the role of that efficient physical principle of metaphor in the crafting of true Classical poetry. The ghost that seems to stalk.

The efficient representation of that ghostly, principled form of argument, which I employ for the needed insight here, is specific to the two, closely interrelated cases of what Nicholas of Cusa follower, Johannes Kepler, discovered, uniquely, as the principle of universal gravitation: “vicarious hypothesis,” and which is also expressed by the ontologically related principle of “metaphor.” These two, referenced principles reflect the fact that reliance on what is conventionally treated as “sense-certainty,” were better considered to be “sense-uncertainty.” This distinction is, precisely: the “location” of the strict meaning of those qualities of insight which supersede mere sense-perception as such. Sense-perceptions here, are of a quality of mere shadows cast upon our so-called sensorium by our efficient interaction along the lines of a reality, an irony which reaches beyond the simplistic reach of mere sense-perceptions as such.

The case presented on precisely this account, is the specific, if allegedly contentious definition of “mind” shared by both Wolfgang Köhler and Max Planck. They have recognized that truth exists for them only “outside” the reach of those mere shadows which are cast, in one case, as Kepler’s definition of “vicarious hypothesis,” and, in another, as the “metaphor” which is the actually essential principle of Classical musical composition, great Classical poetry and drama, and as the mental action which corresponds to the human experience of metaphor in its characteristic as both the Classical drama which is well-performed on stage, and the performance of Classical musical composition, as also the act of discovery of any truly valid notion of a universal physical principle.

The Douglas MacArthur Example

Consider three illustrative cases from the modern history spanned by the example of genius shown by General Douglas MacArthur, as in such relevant instances as his role in the fields of battle within World War I France, during “World War II,” and the spectacular instance of the Inchon landing. Include the fact that that scoundrel, President and British lackey, Harry S Truman, hated MacArthur as Truman also hated President Franklin Roosevelt: all of this as an extremely relevant fact in modern world history. Note that it has been the death of President Franklin Roosevelt and the subsequent assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, which typify forces within contemporary, post-World War II history, all of which choices have ruined our United States (by our republic’s own hand), that since the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, as the earlier British assassination of President Abraham Lincoln has ruined our United States, repeatedly, to the present date.

The MacArthur example should remind us of the leadership of George Washington and of Washington’s faithful genius, Alexander Hamilton (for as long as British agents such as the assassin and British agent Aaron Burr permitted Hamilton to live). The foolish sort of historians often accept and honor the criminals and the like who gained power through such means as murder and theft. The case of General MacArthur is crucially important, just because the facts of his most notable achievements in strategy lay essentially not in what some prefer to distinguish as the violent action, but in the wisdom through which the violence was minimized and the honorable and necessary victory best achieved.

The latter point is that which I emphasize as the essential fact to be considered here.

We use what is, in one view of the matter, merely sense-perception; but, we must understand that sense-perception is merely the language of the senses, whereas, it is the mind, in its own domain, that of metaphor, in which the efficient expression of truthful action—such as the actuality of efficient physical principles—does, and must reign.

I. Science & Classical Art: The Only Truth

To locate that single type of error in popular opinion, which misleads entire societies into self-inflected traps for their own destruction: It is sense-impression as such. That is the greatest of all the wicked errors commonly shared among mankind this far in known history. The indispensable distinction to be brought to bear on that account, is the distinction between discovered universal physical principles, as such, and the mere shadows which cast those shadows which are commonly known as sense-impressions. Hence, Johannes Kepler’s following Nicholas of Cusa’s De Docta Ignorantia in his unique discovery of the notion of “vicarious hypothesis,” and, implicitly, the related notion of “metaphor.” It is the drama, not the play, which is the essential content of the performance. It is a truly great Classical drama, or the actual work of a Johann Sebastian Bach, which is the music: the rest were merely a description of a set of sense-perceptions. (Such is the essential difference of Bach and Mozart, from a mere acrobat Franz Liszt, or a largely flatulent Richard Wagner.)

The misled scholar presumes, that the discovered universal physical principle is a mere derivative of sense-perception. Directly the opposite conclusion is the correct choice. It is efficient universal physical principles, rather than mere sense-impressions, which control the experienced processes of the universe. It is our assigned mission to discover that truth. Here lies the essential solution to the awesome duty which we must perform in solving the riddle of war.

Let us now proceed accordingly, as now follows.

A Matter of ‘Curiosity’

As mankind now progresses, by some, as somewhat encouraged by the achievements implicit in the deployment of “Curiosity” on Mars, the role of the human mind requires a certain quality of a new, and greater great leap upward and forward in the matter. In that outlook, within which mankind must view what may be identified as “our real selves,” I intend to proceed, acting with less and less dependency on the tendency to drift back into the brutishly barren intellectual domains of what had been regarded as “sense certainty.” That is to say, that we must be prompted to rely more and more on the actually efficient apprehension of our awareness of the role of mind itself, as the case of General Douglas MacArthur’s performances is to be distinguished from the relatively bestial habits of reliance on the mere means of expressed sense-certainty as such, as if in and for itself.

Thus, it was always the case, insofar as we are enabled to reach back into the experiences of earlier times, that the advancement of the human intellect should move into successively higher forms of human life, and must, so, come to depend less and less on mere sense-perception as such, and more and more on an impassioned awareness of the true reality of an experience which depends less and less on sense-perception in and of itself. We must become more and more a species which relies more on the efficient ideas associated, categorically, with such as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and such of Cusa’s followers as Johannes Kepler and Gottfried Leibniz, leading thus, onward from Bernhard Riemann, and into the consequent genius of Max Planck and Albert Einstein presently, and, hopefully, beyond that.

Hence, the necessity for my motivating the presentation of this present report here and now.

So, we proceed to the tasks of defending the existence of our human species from what might be regarded as the malicious effects of asteroids and comets which continue to besiege our very continued existence as a species, within our Solar system, as in smaller places.

Such concern impels us into a direct conflict with a “religious” sort of faith in sense-perception, as such. The term “evil,” becomes, thus, a hall-mark of the most grave, and the most prevalent of the crimes of “sense-certainty,” again, as such: The crime of failing to progress to a higher nature of species than mankind had been before this time. That means less dependency on crude, mere sense-certainties, than on the discoveries of efficient truths which must, in timely fashion, surpass anything we had been enabled to accomplish within this Solar system, and beyond, before this time. If our Sun is committed to destroy us, and, then, itself, that in a foreseeable range of future developments, we must supersede such problems, as “Curiosity” represents a relevant token of needed progress for the present moment of that Solar system.

Progress This Far

Therefore, any system of public and related education, which does not impel mankind in the consequently needed direction into states of human practice more advanced than the limits of our Solar system’s development this far, would be a moral failure of humanity as a whole.

It is precisely on that account, that we must address the present, British-Empire-led threat of early extinction of the human species.

Here, the name of “passion” assumes a very special kind of meaning: “the principle of necessary passion,” as that could not be competently defined without freeing the idea of society from the evil inherent in an expression of the passions of a “bare bodkin” of merely barren sense-certainty.

Any part of the human species which is enabled to reign under such influences, threatens to become the most deadly, and, therefore, the most evil of all criminalities, like that of the personality of a President Barack Obama who must be prevented from re-entering high office, sufficiently on that account alone. But, unfortunately, he might be regarded, for the moment, as among the worst, but certainly not the only such trespasser, on the terrain of human virtue.

Consider the case of the current obligations of the U.S.A.’s role in dealing with a generally accelerating present threat of human extinction promoted by the combined Anglo-Saudi, terrorist actions which have taken the direction illustrated by the cases of sheer horror known as the succession of Anglo-Saudi horrors of “Nine-Eleven-One” and “Nine-Eleven Two.” The proverbial “name of the game” which the criminal authors of those operations represent, is what is named “the oligarchical principle.”

II. The Gods & Their Slaves

The unique basis for the distinction of the human species from that of lower forms of life, such as herds of cattle, lies in the ability of some human beings to live in a state of mind corresponding to those unique powers of the human mind which are known to us only as those creative (i.e. noëtic) powers of the human will which are systemically absent from the character of lower forms of life. Those human beings who are conditioned to accept a lower form of mental life assigned to virtual, animal-like slaves, are herded by a reigning, predominantly human elite which customarily consigns other human beings into a role of brutish creatures lacking in the means to practice human creativity, brutalized human creatures who are herded into the brutalized state of mind which a ruling oligarchy imposes upon the “lower classes:” an oligarchy which is habituated to treat their fellow-humans of “lower classes” as, more or less, “brutalized” specimens subject to a “herded-like” role of virtually human cattle.

The relevant prototype of a society organized in those composed terms, is typified by the model of the Roman arena, or by Americans who, like the loutish lower classes of the Roman arena’s spectator-class, make the popular decisions for life or death of the arena’s victims, through the foolish “thumbs-down,” “thumbs up,” of the audiences of the arena, or the typical U.S. party-conventions in the tradition of U.S. President Andrew Jackson’s brutish political oligarchy.

The effect of such social arrangements among human populations, produces a conditioned quality of popular human intentions which converges, even in Europe and the Americas of today, on the “dull-wittedness” of the populations of slaves and serfs under a Roman imperial system, or the like.

One interesting manifestation of such distinctions within the range of human populations, is the slave-mentality-in-fact represented by the body of the so-called “environmentalists” bred in such particular locations as the Americas and Europe today.

There is a certain. rather interesting, and tell-tale example of the effects of so-called “environmentalism.” This is typically encountered in the popular forms of practice of economic forecasting, so-called: the prevalent standard of forecasting in the U.S.A. and Europe, in particular, is, essentially, the intrinsically incompetent practice of “statistical forecasting.” Essentially, “Wall Street” professionals, and many certified accountants otherwise, are, therefore, frequently, clinically insane systemically on this specific account.

The distinction of the human species, as a species, from the lower forms of animal life, is that the perpetuation of our human species depends upon the anti-entropic methods of resisting of decadence though innovations of a class which are systemically anti-entropic. The “environmentalist” is not only unfit to meet human standards of behavior; the human species would become extinct if persons of that disposition were in control. The systemically anti-human policies of population-reduction of the world, from seven billions persons to approximately one, the presently ongoing policy of practice by the incumbent Queen of England, is such a case.

Wall Street: Men or Beasts

The typical standard imposed upon those designated as “accountants” or “investment bankers,” and the like, is a truly bestial role, as contrasted with those persons who show a conscious awareness of the most essential distinction of man from beast.

That distinction lies, essentially, in the fact, that a person who acts professionally (for example) according to the prevalent standards of accountants or a comparable mental outlook on performance, lacks a functional apprehension of the essential distinction of man from beast. That means, that such persons who are victims of the custom of such professions, lack a responsiveness to the specific mental trait which distinguishes the human individual from all among the lower forms of life. The result is not that such unfortunates are not human: let us say, rather, that they are succumbing to be victims of “brain-washing.”

To summarize that point: the human individual mind has a definite distinction from all other known forms of life. The distinction is fairly described for purposes of identification, as being the ability to “see the future,” rather than being confined to the past and immediate present. Hence, for example, the typical Wall Street forecaster (or, his accountant), does not recognize the ability of the human mind to foresee principles which will predetermine mankind’s reach into foresight into a future state which could not be deduced from the past and present.

This superior capability of “insightful” forecasters and their like, is located, functionally speaking, in their apprehension of universal physical principles, as distinct from the disabled human mind’s reliance on what may be classed, for purposes of illustration, as statistical deduction.

It is precisely that sense of a principle of an emerging future, which supplies some persons the power to apprehend the future: because they experience the principle which determines the future, rather than being limited to deduction from past-into-present sensory or like experience. It is the sense of the future, which I have just identified here, which is also the only possible principle which could govern mankind’s acceptance of a true principle of conscience. It is here, precisely here, that the possibility of checking the chain-reaction of endless warfare can be found.