This article appears in the November 15, 2019 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
NOV. 9 TRIPLE ANNIVERSARY
Power is Not Force, But Principle: Why Beauty Strikes Fear in Evil
[Print version of this article]
“The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us . . .”
Something different has for weeks been stirring in the streets of America, and in the minds of the people. It goes entirely unreported in media, rendering nearly every polling service unreliable. It defies the surveillance agencies, as it did in East Germany in the months prior to the momentous events of 1989 which dissolved that mental prison-of-a-state, before its very helpless eyes. Throughout the world, signs of it can also be seen—Lebanon, Brazil, Argentina. Somewhere in London, or Venice, in the basement or penthouse of some agency, a surge of foaming rage erupts. “I’ve just figured it out. We’re being threatened with a mass outbreak of thinking!”
The triple anniversary commemorations held by the Schiller Institute in the United States on November 9, and over the weekend of November 9-11, addressed the need to elevate the American citizen’s sights above the clouds of mediocrity and mendacity into which various failing, but viciously-committed intelligence operations and Congressional Committees have sought to plunge them. Why might such celebrations, commemorations, and classes now have an indelible impact, where before they might not have?
For the first time in the last seventy-five years, that is, since after the end of World War II, the world has, particularly in the nations of Russia, China, India, and the United States, assembled an array of leadership whose potential combination could permit humanity to walk away from its own thermonuclear self-destruction. The bankruptcy, both financial and moral, in the trans-Atlantic sector, as bad as it undeniably is, is, however, as of nothing when compared to the cultural decay that has fatally infected all areas of “Western” academia and political life. It threatens to do the same to an unwilling but weak population throughout the states of the Americas and Europe.
But here, in this circumstance, a small dedicated “raggedy elite” can infect tens, even hundreds of millions, with the virus of “intellectual Beauty.” The aesthetic education of mankind, as discussed by Schiller, and then implemented in the educational reforms of Herbart, vom Stein, and von Humboldt is now the leading strategic concern profitably addressed. Schiller’s strategic studies, such as his History of the Thirty Years War, reintroduced not merely in universities, but in the streets of daily discourse, can replace geopolitics as the poisonous doctrine of choice now reigning among the once-competent diplomatic, intelligence, and even literary elites of the dying trans-Atlantic world.
To do this, “Committees of Correspondence” are being established throughout the United States devoted to assembling, in person or otherwise, self-selected citizens who recognize, not merely the crisis, but the opportunity to guide themselves and their nation to something better. These citizens’ assemblies will constitute a system of conferences that, in defiance of the various fake news sources of the day, seeks to comprehend current history by changing it. Lyndon LaRouche and his work in universal history provides the means by which current history is, particularly for an American audience, best comprehended. It is the actions that we take, once inspired, through which we can see our own powers of reason changing our destiny.
In welcoming participants to the Manhattan Schiller Institute event commemorating the 30th anniversary of the November 9, 1989 “miraculous” fall of the Berlin Wall, organizers informed some and reminded others, that during that great moment in history, the man who had forecast that very circumstance one year earlier in 1988-Lyndon LaRouche—had been imprisoned. In his introduction to the keynote speech delivered by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, moderator Dennis Speed said:
Thirty years ago today, Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. On Oct. 12, 1988, one year earlier, Lyndon LaRouche, the co-founder of the Schiller Institute and husband of Helga Zepp- LaRouche, gave a speech in Berlin at the Bristol Kempinski Hotel, and he said on that occasion, that the time had come for the reunification of Germany with Berlin as its capital. That speech was also broadcast on American television at that time, when Mr. LaRouche was running as a candidate for the United States Presidency.
Absolutely no one agreed with him. But that didn’t stop the Berlin Wall from coming down. That didn’t stop the reunification of Germany one year later. So the NSA did not know. The CIA did not know. The Pentagon did not know. No one in any political science department in any university in America knew. Henry Kissinger did not know. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, none of them knew. None of the recognized, acknowledged authorities knew. It was precisely because they were the accepted, acknowledged authorities, that they could not have known. It was only the unacknowledged authorities, in this case, Lyndon LaRouche, who articulated what was to be. He articulated the future, in the then-present; defied the axioms of all the authorities.
Now: The poet Percy Shelley said, “Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present. . . .
Re-asserting the Greek-based (and Sanskrit-based) Classical idea that legislators were poets, and that legislators have a responsibility to behold the future in the present, will be an astonishing affront to contemporary views of politics. There will be no other way, however, to respond to this time of crisis. LaRouche described his Presidential campaign thus:
I am here today, to report to you on the subject of U.S. policy for the prospects of reunification of Germany. What I present to you now, will be a featured topic in a half-hour U.S. television broadcast, nation-wide, prior to next month’s presidential election. I could think of no more appropriate place to unveil this new proposal, than here in Berlin. I am the third of the leading candidates for election as the next President of the United States. . . .
By profession, I am an economist in the tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Friedrich List in Germany, and of Alexander Hamilton and Mathew and Henry Carey in the United States. My political principles are those of Leibniz, List, and Hamilton, and are also consistent with those of Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Like the founders of my republic, I have an uncompromising belief in the principle of absolutely sovereign nation-states, and I am therefore opposed to all supranational authorities which might undermine the sovereignty of any nation. However, like Schiller, I believe that every person who aspires to become a beautiful soul, must be at the same time a true patriot of his own nation, and also a world-citizen.
For these reasons, during the past fifteen years I have become a specialist in my country’s foreign affairs.
And it is for precisely these reasons that Americans confronted with a Presidency that has announced its intention to roll back the “military-industrial complex” and collaborate with Russia, China, and India in various ways, must qualify themselves to advance “the better angels” of that Presidency, including against those devilish forces within it.
The 100 participants in the event, a highly diverse audience, performed as well as listened. Conversation ensued around the tables after the keynote speech by Zepp-LaRouche, which was followed by various musical and poetic offerings. Schiller poems, recited in both German and English, a Shakespeare monologue, and the music of Brahms, Schubert, Verdi, and von Weber were performed. The full text of Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote appears elsewhere in this issue.
