October 12, 2001

The World To Be Seen From Sunday

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This statement is being published in EIR for the first time. It was released by Lyndon LaRouche’s Presidential campaign committee, LaRouche in 2004, and published here.

As far back as Henry A. Kissinger’s reign as U.S. Secretary of State, during late 1974 and the beginning of 1975, the leadership of our association was studying a U.S. strategic option which bore the name of “breakaway ally” syndrome. In the case that that syndrome erupted into practice, Israel would apparently break free of its customary Anglo-American leash, to launch a mad-dog war against some neighboring Arab state, or states. Those in U.S. “breakaway ally” Israel who would launch such a “preemptive” war, would then say to the U.S., in effect: “We have started the war; now you are going to have to fight it!”

The danger of such a “breakaway ally” increased over the course of the 1980s. To prevent an Israeli attack on Iraq, the British monarchy, in 1990, enlisted U.S. President George Bush to conduct a war against Iraq, in such a way that the deadly, chain-reaction effects of an Israeli launching of a direct attack on Iraq might be avoided.

We see a similar situation at the moment. The present situation in Afghanistan is a result of such strange, deadly logic. Madmen like Richard Perle and his cronies, are pushing the U.S. to either go for destruction of Iraq, or risk an Israeli “breakaway ally” trigger for what could be a generalized war beyond the possibility of U.S. or European control. Hence, the conflicts within the current Bush administration over issues directly related to this.

With the state of increasing tension between the present U.S. Bush administration and the kill-crazed, present leadership of Israel’s military command, the world situation has reached the combustible state of affairs, in which something like the old 1970s “break-away ally syndrome” can not be considered as unlikely.

A sudden Israeli attack on Iraq, would fill the requirements for such a syndrome, today. However, there are presently other options to the same general effect. The issue is not Iraq itself; the issue is finding some targetable nation or nations as the bridge to provoking generalized warfare. Under the combined circumstances, of the presently accelerating greatest monetary and financial collapse in the history of mankind, the mass insanity reigning in desperate, leading financial circles, and the state of tension added by the recent terror-attacks on New York City and the U.S. capital, we have either reached, or even crossed the threshold at which previously impossible, speculative strategic scenarios become, suddenly, probable, if not yet inevitable ones.

What makes the Middle East cockpit so crucially important in world affairs today, is not the lunatic state of mind among an apparent majority of present Israelis. The crucial factor is what were better termed lack of mind, among a burgeoning mass of ostensibly English-speaking “Bible prophecy” lunatics, both in the U.S.A. and among the subjects of Queen Elizabeth II in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere.

I point to those tens of millions of half-witted, crazed Americans, such as the dupes of U.S. “Elmer Gantry” Pat Robertson, who see a world-wide, Middle East-centered holocaust as “God’s Will.”

However, it is a fact, that as a relative handful of Jewish settlers in the Middle East, are not the true source of the present danger, neither are a few tens of millions of half-witted “Bible thumpers.” The true source of the danger comes from those more numerous and powerful forces, who encourage such pathetic lunatics as those “Bible thumpers,” in playing with what may turn out to have been thermonuclear matches.

That larger problem is to be found among most of what today’s world, classes as those “Christian churches” which are outside looney-bins such as those of Pat Robertson. It is also to be found among all of those religious bodies and factions of such bodies, which have rallied against the ecumenical peace-mission of Pope John Paul II.

This is a subject which I addressed summarily during the second hour of my most recent radio interview with host Jack Stockwell. It is a subject to which I and my associates have devoted leading attention for now more than a quarter-century. Now, I turn to that subject once again, this time to point the finger of shame at many leading circles in what are nominally, at least, the Christian churches.

A New Pagan Pantheon

At first glance, the root of the broader problem in the churches generally, is typified by the influence of the irrationalist Immanuel Kant in mapping the pathway to the widespread infiltration of nominally Christian churches, by the existentialist doctrines of Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, and kindred pro-satanic influences.

The spread of “single-issuism” among sundry varieties of nominally Christian churches, by such as the followers of the pro-racist Nashville Agrarian cult, is a bellwether of the tidal-wave like spread of a modern neo-pagan cult of pantheism among the leading church organizations, and elsewhere today. Typical is the toleration of such explicitly evil circles of Kant followers as Nazi Professor Martin Heidegger, his crony Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Heidegger acolyte Jean-Paul Sartre, and other prophets of that form of neo-Nietzschean existentialist cultism, which dominates the philosophical dogma of the U.S. and other universities of today.

In today’s European culture generally, the leading contemporary expression of this pantheonic neo-paganism, is the copying, or other echoing of Kant’s doctrinal insistence that knowable truth does not exist. The spread of this doctrine was the principal vehicle for creating the pro-Nietzschean, neo-Romantic cult of Nazism in Germany, as that cult was the subject of the teaching of Nazi Professor Martin Heidegger, the spiritual father of France’s Jean-Paul Sartre. This has been the doctrine of existentialist Karl Jaspers, and of the circles of Arendt and Adorno in the U.S.A. The principal leaders of that movement relied upon the doctrine of Kant. Lately, during the recent quarter-century, the spread of this existentialist cult-belief has taken a radically positivism form, corrupting our U.S. public schools as well as leading universities. More and more, our public schools become a kind of allegedly democratic saturnalia, where reigning positivist maenads shriek: “There is no truth; there is only opinion.”

This denial of the existence of truth, permeates our presently corrupted U.S. Justice system. It also permeates our churches, of all nominal confessions. It is often expressed as the substitution, as mere opinion, of doctrinal “single issuism” as a replacement for actual Christianity. This phenomenon, as spread through those churches, is presently a leading contributing factor in the world’s slide toward not only generalized warfare, but also a threatened dark age for all humanity. Those who accept the existentialist denial of cognitively knowable truth, as distinct from merely deductive argument, must be recognized as plainly not Christians, whatever confession they may claim to represent.

Once that existentialist influence is spread into the leading religious bodies, a certain consequence is implicitly inevitable. I describe it.

Ancient pagan Rome addressed the problem of managing an empire composed of the subjects of numerous axiomatically incongruent forms of religious or religious-like belief. Religion was degraded to a kind of collection of carnival side-show exhibitions, all arrayed, as if in a circle, under a big tent called a “pantheon.” The function of the Roman Emperor was therefore rooted in his essential law-decreeing role as “Pontifex Maximus.” It was this organization of legally tolerated religious cults into a pantheon, under a Roman Pontifex Maximus, which was the essence of Roman law, and of the Roman Empire as a legal institution.

This was the characteristic of every known empire of the Middle East, and of a Greece corrupted to the point of virtual self-destruction under the Olympus and Apollo cults. The essential function of the pantheons, in all cases, was to establish and maintain rule over the subject peoples by playing the devotees of the cults against one another. If you accepted the emperor’s terms, including certain prescribed adjustments in your cult’s belief-system, you could be adopted as a legalized cult of the empire; so it was among the Jewish hierarchy of Judea, under the Emperor Tiberius’ son-in-law, Pontius Pilate.

In a pantheon, the legalized, purely arbitrary opinion of each cult is acknowledged as the doctrinal authority of the cult over its members, as this pantheonic doctrine of Roman law was used to accomplish the legalized murder of Jesus Christ. Thus, the cults are each and all arrayed in potential religious warfare among one another, as it may suit the imperial authority to pit them so, against one another, in some bloody arena. So it is with the evil and obviously deranged Zbigniew Brzezinski’s zeal for a “Clash of Civilizations” between Islam and the West.

That is the key to Israel’s assigned role in any “breakaway ally” scenario.

Such is the ancient imperial game of pantheonic religion being played again today. So, once again, the only efficient way in which to establish a world empire, is through reducing certified religious beliefs to the legal status of chartered entities of a pantheon. The essential result, is to base imperial military strategy on the playing against one another, of cultures and cults from inside and outside the existing imperial form of pantheon. Thus, the normal, often-repeated form of collapse of great empires into new dark ages, occurs as the lawful consequence of the attempts to manage a form of imperial role through the devices of a managed pantheon, as is being done today.

The influence of Kant’s denial of the existence of truth, is at the core of today’s global problem of this sort. The study of Kant’s argument and influences, as a model for such forms of existentialism as that of the Nazi Martin Heidegger, is also an efficient guide to study of the way in which a converging hostility to truthfulness springs, more or less inevitably, from empiricism in general, or the American pragmatism of William James and John Dewey in particular.

Ecumenicism

The world’s recognized leading voice against a degeneration of religion into a new pantheon, is Pope John Paul II. In everything I have observed him to say and do on this account, I have found nothing which is not fully consistent with my own ecumenical outlook as expressed over more than a quarter-century to date. So far, the hope of peace hangs chiefly on the thread of his frail body.

My long-standing philosophical arguments to this effect, provide a complementary, and much more broadly applicable expression of that same ecumenical approach to the current world situation. I summarized my view on the matter of religious belief, in the second half of the most recent radio interview with Jack Stockwell. Jack asked me to summarize those views there, because he and others are familiar with the great amount of practical, in addition to literary work I have done on this subject over decades.

To make it very short. I, like Plato’s Socrates, and like Moses Mendelssohn, believe in the efficient principle of cognitive truthfulness. I, like Mendelssohn, have my own belief, but I am also ecumenical. I believe that we must tell the truth about ourselves and our beliefs to others. If someone says, tell me, most simply, “How do you know Jesus Christ?” I reply, “I was there when the congregation assembled for the experience of J.S. Bach’s setting of the Passion according to Matthew.” I can then say, as I have said truthfully many times over past decades: “Trust me because I am truthful. Let us work today, united by devotion to the same cognitive principle of truthfulness which is typical of experimentally validated discovery of universal physical principle, to address the common problems and aims of all mankind.” Do what I do, as John Paul II does what he does.

The essential truth is that we are human, and must love one another as the members of that unique species made in the likeness of the Creator of this universe. There is no problem which is not obliged to be solved by application of the Socratic principle of cognitive truthfulness. Our lying mass media may disagree with me, but, in my life-long experience, really hide-bound liars usually do.

If you refuse that ecumenical approach, I think you will suffer the awful penalty you and your entire tribe will bring upon themselves, as fallen empires of the past have been doomed by their own like folly.