This article appears in the April 6, 2018 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

The Fraud of ‘Western Democracy’: Who are the Real Authoritarians?

by Robert Ingraham

[Print version of this article]

March 31—During the last fifteen consecutive months we have witnessed an ongoing, continual, escalating effort on the part of the British establishment and its friends in the United States to prevent President Donald Trump from pursuing a path of normalizing relations with Russia and China—to find means, despite the difficulties and disagreements, to move the world away from super-power confrontation and to explore avenues of peaceful cooperation.

The entirety of the so-called “Russiagate” affair and all of the hoopla surrounding Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s efforts to “pin something” on Donald Trump must be correctly viewed within this framework, and not simplistically—and incorrectly—as a product of “partisan politics.” Similarly, the latest unhinged efforts by the unstable Theresa May to use the alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal to agitate for an escalated crusade against Russia, fall within the same oligarchical playbook.

At the time of Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency, Lyndon LaRouche insisted that Trump’s unexpected victory must be understood as part of a growing international revolt against the policies of the trans-Atlantic power structure, not simply as a result of a domestic U.S. political phenomenon.

As we have seen in the results of the recent Italian elections—as well as in the receptivity of many European nations to China’s Belt and Road Initiative—this revolt against the financial, economic and foreign policies of the European Union and the Anglo-American establishment is continuing to spread and is gaining momentum. Circles around the British Crown are now so desperate that the British Prime Minister herself has taken the public lead in this latest anti-Russia screed. The fact that the charges now being leveled against Russia are such transparent falsehoods that many nations are refusing to go along with them, is a clear indication of just how desperate the British are. All of their post-1989 plans for a global New World Order of trans-Atlantic hegemony are crumbling.

The New Clash of Civilizations

As the pressures against Donald Trump mount, all stops are being pulled out in trans-Atlantic establishment media to inundate the populations of Europe and the United States with a political analysis which goes something like this:

“We are now facing a period of crisis, the worst since the end of the cold war and perhaps even the most dangerous since the end of World War II. The world is now dividing between ‘free’ and ‘non-free’ states. On the one side are the ‘Western Democracies,’—sometimes called ‘liberal democracies’—those nations committed to human rights, liberal economics, and personal freedom. These nations—particularly Great Britain and the United States—bear a responsibility to defend ‘freedom and democracy.’ Opposed are the growing forces of totalitarianism—closed nations that are aggressive, anti-democratic, and corrupt, and which routinely restrict freedom and violate human rights. These nations are now challenging the benevolent post-World War II hegemony of the Western Democracies, and for the sake of all humanity they must be opposed.”

Empiricists and nominalists like to gives names to things, because with a name, a whole gestalt of emotions, prejudices and subsumed predicates can be summoned forth by the mere mention of a particular name or phrase—emotional prejudices which are “built into” the name—thus predisposing the reader or listener to think in a certain way whenever the name is mentioned. The name that has been attached to this fabricated totalitarian threat is the “New Authoritarianism.”

The New Authoritarianism is now being discussed everywhere. In establishment media as divergent as Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the Economist, the Financial Times, the website of Chatham House (the Royal Institute for International Affairs), the Atlantic, Freedom House, the Weekly Standard, the American Spectator, The New Yorker—and many more—major pieces have been published warning of the new totalitarian threat. Usually, the term used is the New Authoritarianism, sometimes it is Modern Authoritarianism, and in regard to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a new epithet has been created called Market Authoritarianism.

Many world leaders are named in such articles as authoritarian and/or totalitarian, including Kim Jong-un of North Korea, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. However, the bulk of attention in all of these writings is given over to discussion of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. They are the primary targets. They are the aggressive totalitarian threats to the West. One of the most insane examples of the propaganda now being spewed out is an article which appeared March 14 in the London Telegraph. Written by Allister Heath—the editor of the Sunday Telegraph—the article, “We need a new world alliance to take on totalitarian capitalists in Russia and China,” says the following:

We must take the lead in building a new global military and economic alliance of like-minded countries committed to the promotion of capitalism and liberal democracy. NATO is no longer enough. . . . The new network should be based on mutual self-interest and respectful of national sovereignty; it would be open to all liberal democracies that practice capitalism, and that respect human rights, intellectual property and privacy. It should be a values alliance, governed by a treaty guaranteeing military self-help and seeking the freest possible trade in goods and services. America would be a member, as would Canada, India, Israel, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, France . . . and many others. Such an alliance would be the biggest shift in geopolitics since the creation of the UN. It would dramatically shift the global balance of power, and allow the liberal democracies finally to fight back. It would endow the world with the sorts of robust institutions that are required to contain Russia and China. . . .

In the years following the break-up of the Soviet Union, a proposal was advanced that the world was now entering a new era, one in which the geopolitical rivalry of the Cold War would be replaced by a “Clash of Civilizations.” This term was first used in 1990 by the British-American operative Bernard Lewis. It was then popularized by Samuel Huntington in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1992, and then again in his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations. Many people who have heard the term believe it refers to the alleged threat posed to world by radical Islam, and certainly Huntington’s thesis, and the way it was elaborated by others, was used to justify the western invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the primary argument of Huntington’s work was not about Islam at all.

He begins by defining the core values of the Western World, which he identifies with human rights, liberal democracy, and the capitalist free market economy. He then states that these values are now threatened by non-western nations which have different values, Islam being only one of those threats. He makes a point of discussing China’s Confucian culture as an example of a nation which holds different values and one which might emerge as a strategic threat. This narrative that “western values” are under siege by foreign nations and cultures is precisely the basis for the present discussion of the “new authoritarianism” and the demonizing of China and Russia.

Oligarchical Values

One of the greatest difficulties in refuting the arguments arising from the Clash of Civilizations thesis is that many well educated individuals accept—uncritically—the axiomatic view that European and American culture is based on “human rights, liberal democracy, and the capitalist free market economy.” This view is not only hegemonic among American elites; it is believed by many prominent people from China, Japan, the Islamic world, and elsewhere, particularly those who were educated at American and British universities.

But it is not true.

In reality, the American Revolution was waged against what the London Telegraph and other sewer press today proclaim as Western Values, and Americans are being asked today to buy into a British-created-and-directed confrontation with Russia and China in direct opposition to the founding principles of their own nation.

In 1763, with the Treaty of Paris—which ended the Seven Years War between Britain and France—the British Empire emerged victorious as the hegemonic power throughout the planet, a position it would maintain well into the 20th Century. This was the same Empire that was the leading slave-trading power in the world, the leading narcotics trafficker, and the very Empire which, in India, Africa and elsewhere, killed far, far more people than Adolph Hitler—all done out in the open.

Incredibly, it is the philosophical outlook and the political practices of that murderous empire which form the basis of what is today proclaimed as “Western Values.”

While the British Empire was murdering tens of millions, it was also developing new forms of oligarchical rule. This became known as “British Liberalism.” Britain was a liberal empire, one which embraced Whig principles of free trade and parliamentary rule. As is evident in Jeremy Bentham’s Hedonistic (felicific) Calculus, and the dictum of Adam Smith to “pursue pleasure and avoid pain,” it was also an empire which encouraged even the most degenerate forms of “human freedom.”

These are not “Western Values”—they are the values of the militarily victorious British Empire, the values of the propagandists for the British East India Company. Through the writings of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Parson Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, and others, an oligarchical version of the human identity and human culture was created and vomited forth. The empiricism of these “thinkers” was axiomatically contrary to the true historical tradition in European culture, one which goes back to Pythagoras and Plato, and to the concept of hypothesis and the human creative identity. The British victors of 1763 sought to overthrow 2,000 years of Western philosophical tradition and replace it with an extreme heteronomic notion of human identity, one grounded in individual greed, bestial appetites, pleasure-seeking, and continued oligarchical rule.

Cusa’s Commonwealth

In 1433, at the time of the great Council of Florence, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, writing in Book II of his Concordantia Catholica, states,

Since Natural Law is based on reason, all law by nature is rooted in the reason of man.

and later in Book III of the same work, he says:

There is in the people a divine seed by virtue of their common equal birth and the equal natural rights of all men, so that all authority—which comes from God as does man himself—is recognized as divine when it arises from the common consent of all the subjects . . . This is that divinely ordained marital state of spiritual union based on a lasting harmony by which a commonwealth is guided in the fullness of peace toward eternal bliss.

Twelve years after the conclusion of the Council of Florence, in 1461, Louis XI ascended the throne of France, and proceeded to establish the first modern sovereign nation-state, based on Cusa’s Commonwealth principle.[fn_1] Louis proceeded to build ports, roads, schools, printing houses, industry, and infrastructure. He provided support for the cities, created a national currency, and broke the power of the feudal baronies. These are Louis’ own words, taken from his book Le Rosier des Guerres (The Rosebush of Wars):

Considering that the characteristic of Kings and Princes and their Knights, is that their estate and vocation is to defend the common good, both ecclesiastic and secular, and to uphold justice and peace among their subjects, and to do good, they will have good in this world and in the other, and out of doing evil will only come grief; and one must count one day on leaving this world to go and give an account of one’s undertakings and receive one’s reward. And to expose their lives for others, of which among all other estates of the world is most to be praised and honored. And because the common good which concerns many, which is the public matter of the Realm, is more praiseworthy than the particular, by which the common good is often frustrated; we have gladly put in writing the deeds of princes and of their knights and all the good tenets that served their cause. . . .

The usage of the term Commonwealth has been corrupted and mis-defined over time, but the original concept of Cusa—and the idea put into practice by Louis XI—is that of the Common Good or Greater Good, a principle fully coherent with the American revolutionary idea of the General Welfare. This is not merely a “political” policy; it stems from a recognition of the divine creative potential which exists within each human individual. It is defined by the concept of Man and of Natural Law given by Cusa in the above-cited work.

This is the outlook on the human identity and human society which, in European society, goes back to the Socratic Dialogues of Plato and the Promethean view of Man, the Fire-Bringer found in Aeschylus. This heritage is the only truthful, lawful basis on which to begin a discussion of Western Values. Anything else is utterly fraudulent.

The American Identity

It is time for thinking Americans to begin to seriously consider what has been lost in our own culture. Some of that knowledge, that heritage, is still there, buried as a memory in the consciousness of millions of citizens. But the pride which men and women of previous generations took in their sense of identity—pride in being an American—is increasingly ebbing away. For many born after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, and John and Robert Kennedy, the concept of a distinct, positive American identity is non-existent. It is past time to correct this.

The creation of America was a victory for all humanity, which brought into physical existence a nation and a national culture based on Cusa’s Commonwealth principle—a nation with a noble view of the human individual and one which is Constitutionally bound to the principle of upward human progress.

Years ago, the term “melting pot” was used to describe the process whereby immigrant families were assimilated, over several generations, into a higher culture, one based on universal principles, superior to the oligarchical cultures from which they had fled. America represented an ideal—a potential—of what human society could become, and it was that vision of America which Martin Luther King devoted his life to rescuing.[fn_2]

This notion of a distinct American identity is not an academic exercise. If we are to successfully resist the efforts of the British Crown to drag us into a global confrontation with Russia and China, it is of critical importance that we begin with a full comprehension of the deep philosophical and moral gulf which separates the history of the United States from that of the British Empire. Only then will American citizens be able to resist the lies in the news media and the barrage of propaganda now being thrown against us.

Oligarchic Principles

It is suggested here that readers of this article from China, Japan, India, Russia, and elsewhere reflect for a moment on the history of their own cultures. There are periods from the history of every nation—sometimes lasting centuries—that many people would like to forget, periods of decline, retrogression, and oligarchical rule. Yet the values which ruled society during those “bad eras” do not represent the true character of those nations, nor their people. Such is the case with the era of British Liberalism.

With the 1601-1609 creation of the Dutch Empire, an Amsterdam-based laboratory was established for the purpose of creating a new empirical “science,” one which would justify the outlook and practices of a global oligarchical empire. Many of today’s speculative financial practices were invented there; the beginning of the concept of “parliamentary democracy” is another product of that era.

René Descartes, Hugo Grotius, and others postulated a new radical materialism and an empirical approach. They abolished the concept of the Greater Good, as well as the agapic notion of human creativity. They reduced the human identity to the Hobbesian concept of a war of “each against all,” and they postulated a social system based on permanent competition among heteronomic individuals, motivated entirely by appetites, passions, and greed.

In the 1660s, a pair of brothers—Johann and Pieter de la Court—became leading advisors to the Dutch government, authoring many works. In Political Balance they write, “Descartes and Hobbes show the way to the theory that should occupy mankind, as he was and not as the old-fashioned professors chose to see him.” In the Political Discourses, they say, “The natural state is the Hobbesian unrestrained state of nature; the best state exists where the unreasonable passions are most restrained. That is the democratic republic.”

For the mouthpieces of the Dutch Empire, democracy is thus defined as a state of animalistic competition among antagonistic human individuals, each governed by his or her own passions and desires, and only restrained by the “rule of law.” This is what the oligarchy calls a Republic.

After the Dutch invasion of England in 1688, this anti-human outlook was imported into London. At the same time, between 1688 and 1698 all of the financial and maritime practices of Amsterdam were grafted onto London, with the creation of the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange and the newly rechartered East India Company.

Then, over roughly the next 100 years, a series of writers, including John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith and others, would refine the philosophical axioms for the new Empire. Today, it is the plagiarist and Dutch agent John Locke who is lionized as the primary influence in the development of modern western “democratic values,” when, in reality, he was a spokesman for the murderous policies of the new British Empire.

Two of Locke’s most famous works are his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (of notorious tabula rasa fame) and The Two Treatises of Government. In the former, he attempts to overthrow the entirety of the positive thread in the history of Western Culture from Plato through Cusa. He rejects entirely the reality of human creativity and posits an extreme materialism based on sense-perception. Locke simply denies everything that is truthful about the Human Mind. In the Two Treatises, cribbing from a variety of oligarchical scribblers who preceded him, Locke puts forward a bizarre reinterpretation of the Book of Genesis, stating:

At the beginning of mankind’s existence, the Law man was under, was rather for APPROPRIATING. God Commanded, and his wants forced him to LABOUR. That was his PROPERTY which could not be taken from him where-ever he had fixed it. And hence subduing or cultivating the Earth, and having Dominion, we see are joined together. The one gave Title to the other. So that God, by commanding to subdue, gave Authority so far to Appropriate . . . [which] necessarily introduces Private Possessions.

This is Locke’s Social Contract theory: “We are all beasts; we are all governed by Hobbesian passions; we simply have to find a means to live together, without killing one another.”

Locke was also the first British proponent of extreme monetarism, wherein the power of money becomes the defining governing principle in society, enforced by the “rule of law.” It is this subjugation of society to a system governed by monetary value and individual greed, as posed by Locke, and subsequently developed much further by Adam Smith and others, which forms the basis for what the London Telegraph and others today call the Western Value of “liberal economics.’

Constitutional Presidential Government

The good of man cannot consist in the mere pleasures of sense; because when any one of those objects which you love is absent, or cannot be come at, you are certainly miserable; and if the faculty be impaired, though the object be present, you cannot enjoy it . . .

I have showed you what it [“the good”] is not. It is not sensual but rational and moral good. It is doing all the good we can to others, by acts of humanity, friendship, generosity, and benevolence; this is that constant and durable good, which will afford contentment and satisfaction always alike, without variation, and diminution.

Benjamin Franklin, Dialogue between Philocles and Horatio, Concerning
Virtue and Pleasure (1730)

The issue of government is not one of form, but of essence. As the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States proclaims its intention, a new government is being established “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Unlike the hedonistic outlook of the British aristocracy, the United States of America was created with an intention, one identical in nature to Cusa’s concept of the Commonwealth. It is grounded in the principle of the Greater Good, and it is defined by a commitment to the General Welfare and the Posterity of the nation.

This also provokes an examination of economic and financial policy. London now accuses China of “Market Authoritarianism,” because of the direct role of the Chinese government in the Belt and Road Initiative and the deployment of the banking system to build infrastructure, rail lines and other magnificent projects. Yet, the Chinese approach is completely Hamiltonian! Read Alexander Hamilton’s Report on a National Bank and his Report on the Subject of Manufactures. Hamilton created the concept of National Public Credit as a vital feature of the anti-oligarchical Constitutional American Republic. To deploy Credit and other financial means to deliberately advance the nation, to uplift the people and to create a better future—this is an American policy. It is directly the opposite of British imperial “liberal economics,” but it is fully coherent with what China is doing today.

America is also a Presidential nation. Unlike most of the European nations, America has never been ruled by a parliamentary system. In truth, what Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations proclaim as “western democracy” is a chimera. Parliamentary systems—all of them—are oligarchical systems—weak, ineffectual, easily manipulated and overthrown, while the real power lies outside of the government in the financial elite and their fondi, who impose their own degenerate policies and culture on the rest of us.

“Liberal Democracy,” as defined by Samuel Huntington, Allister Heath, and others is nothing less than a dictatorship of the financial elite. Their banking, trade and cultural axioms of policy are sacrosanct, and their continued rule is taken for granted, while Parliamentary “democracy” is maintained as pure Kabuki Theater—stylized ritual meant to entertain and distract. This has been the great tragic fate of modern-day Europe, where, despite many heroic and brilliant individuals, oligarchical rule has never been broken.

All of the British-centered tripe about “liberal Parliamentary democracy” goes back to the 1688 British Declaration of Rights, written by Lord John Somers. In reality, that Parliamentary “democracy” was precisely the system which was put in place with the creation of the Bank of England and the East India Company, in order to create a system of government which would be subservient to the power and practices of Empire then being imported from Amsterdam.

In the summer of 1787, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris crafted the American Presidential system, the which was then put into practice during the eight-year George Washington Presidency. Again—take note!—the key is in the intention, not simply the form. Morris and Hamilton recognized that their intended Presidency would establish a means whereby the principles of the Constitution’s Preamble—as well as those from the Declaration of Independence—would be “made flesh,” that is, personified in the Office of the Presidency. The American Presidency is a principle, not simply an elected office; it is the responsibility of the President to personify the Republic’s mission and to honor and further the nation’s commitment to the Greater Good.

Ask yourself: Isn’t this precisely what we are witnessing today in the thinking and the actions of President Putin of Russia and President Xi of China? Are their actions not governed by an unshakable moral drive to uplift and advance the conditions of their own people? Is this not coherent with the same principle of the General Welfare as defined in our own Constitution?[fn_3] Yes, there are cultural and political differences between America, China and Russia, but it is precisely the possibility that these “Three Presidents”—Putin, Trump, and Xi—might succeed in the creation of a global system based on peace, cooperation, and economic development, which is driving the British nuts.

Hence, all three Presidents are labeled “authoritarian” by the trans-Atlantic media. The truth is that they simply will no longer abide by the financial and policy dictates of London and Wall Street.

Who Are the Real Authoritarians?

After World War II, a great deal of noise was made about the concept of the Authoritarian Personality. Theodore Adorno wrote a book of the same name. Hannah Arendt and many others pontificated on the subject. Little known today, is that many of their collective polemics were aimed at destroying the memory and the policies of Franklin Roosevelt in the right-wing turn under Harry Truman.

Essentially what Arendt—the mistress of the Nazi Martin Heidegger—and others said, is that if you try to assert that you know the Truth about anything, you are an authoritarian personality, perhaps even a Hitler in the making. There is no truth. There is only opinion.

It should go without saying that Plato would not agree with this. Nor would Kepler, Cusa, Leibniz, Einstein or Lyndon LaRouche. The true history of Western Civilization is made up of individuals such as these, those whose lives were and are committed to discovering truthful principles about the universe and the human identity. But for Arendt and her ilk, they are all authoritarian personalities.

This is the kernel of the fraud about “Western Values.” Beginning with operations such as the Princeton Radio Project and the post-World War II founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a new liberal culture of irrational “personal freedom” was proposed in which truth is outlawed. Only opinion is allowed. This is not a “Western Value”; it is an attempt to destroy the actual Western cultural tradition going back to Plato, to destroy the actual human identity of lawful—and truthful—creativity.

Where does that leave us? With a society based on cultural relativism in which anything is allowed. Today, there are many—particularly among today’s dumbed-down youth—who are adamant that legalized drug use and addiction are a legitimate component of a society committed to “human freedom.” Welcome to Jeremy Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus. Actually, what now exists in the trans-Atlantic world is a crushing culture of conformity, albeit one in which a delicatessen of exotic dishes is permitted. This is all the product of decades of practice at manipulating public opinion by the financial elites.

London’s “Western Values” of liberal democracy, liberal economics and personal freedom have nothing to do with the principles which created and built Western Civilization. Neither are they the basis for the American Republic. What London proclaims as Western Values is what Mozart condemned to the pit in Don Giovanni.

If we are to survive and to move forward, our orientation must be to work with President Xi and President Putin to build a better world, including a more hopeful, optimistic world for the children now being born into it. Breakthroughs in science, great physical economic projects which transform the world and uplift the people, and a mission to explore and colonize our Solar system are the necessary future for all of mankind Russia and China are our natural, lawful partners in that great project.

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