Defeating the Synarchists: The Unfinished Battle To End the Imperial Era

by Harley Schlanger

[Print version of this article]

Sept. 11—The following is an edited version of a presentation made to the weekly LaRouche Organization Manhattan Project meeting of August 31, 2024.

In a series of recent statements, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute and initiator of the International Peace Coalition, has emphasized that, with the escalation of the NATO war against Russia, there is an acute danger that the world will slide into, not just World War III—which we may already be in—but a nuclear World War III, which would bring an end to civilization on Earth. To understand how this has happened, and why so few Americans and Europeans seem to be aware of this, it is necessary to examine the fight waged over the last fifty-plus years by Lyndon LaRouche and the movement he created, against what is best described as a hybrid warfare conducted by a corporatist, synarchist oligarchy.

Unfortunately, there is a limited awareness of this danger. Many people know some aspects of the increasing danger, but dismiss the threat of nuclear war by saying, “Oh, it’ll never happen.” And like the ostrich burying its head in the sand, they will get hit from behind by something they can’t see, because they won’t look!

The most recent example of the danger of the likelihood of nuclear war is an article published in the New York Times on August 20 by David Sanger, under the headline “Biden Approves Secret Nuclear Weapons Strategy.” How secret is it? Well, Sanger found out about it, even though he reports that the classified documents have been seen by almost no one. Sanger reports that at least two officials in U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration have spoken about the new doctrine, which is described as an upgrade in nuclear preparedness to enable the U.S. to engage in, and win, a nuclear war simultaneously against Russia, China, and North Korea.

The idea behind this is that these three countries represent a new “Axis of Evil,” and the U.S. must be prepared to fight, and win, a nuclear war against them. That’s what Dr. Ted Postol, one of the leading experts on nuclear war, has said about the new security document.

The Kursk Escapade

Put Sanger’s report on nuclear strategy together with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “flight forward” Kursk incursion to get a sense of the extent of this danger. The Kursk escapade was not really Zelensky’s idea; rather, this is a desperate strike by NATO, to accelerate and expand the war against Russia. Desperate, because Ukraine is losing the war.

So what do they do? Do they try to negotiate to end the war, to salvage something of the country? No, because the intention from the outset was not about “freedom and democracy” for Ukraine, but to use Ukraine as a sledge hammer to weaken Russia.

If you really look at what they’re talking about with this new nuclear doctrine, while sending long-range nuclear-capable U.S. missiles to Germany, and British and U.S. missiles to Ukraine, the intent behind these decisions makes Dr. Strangelove look stable and reasonable. To understand fully what is occurring, you have to strip away the narratives and look at what the real battle is. It’s a battle between the trans-Atlantic nations which are run by corporate cartels—including the so-called military-industrial-financial complex (MIFC)—who are trying to protect their empire from an emerging new order of sovereign states which will not surrender their sovereignty to these corporate cartels. It is not a fight between supporters of freedom and democracy against authoritarians. The real authoritarians are sitting in the capitals of the Western world, and they are proponents of what was known to U.S. intelligence professionals in the 1920s and ’30s as “synarchism.”

Synarchism is a term that was used to describe what is actually fascism; that is, the merger of corporate interests with the state. And by merger, I mean the takeover of the state by corporate interests. Few people understand much about this. They operate under an axiomatic belief that it’s the “government” that’s bad; it is governments which are taking away our freedoms.

In reality, the government is an instrument, under the U.S Constitution, which must serve the general welfare, not private interests. But today, that instrument is in the hands of corporate fascists who are committed to a world in which no sovereign state can stand on its own. Sovereign states which act on behalf of their people are viewed as the “enemy,” and become the targets of the military of the U.S. and NATO, which maintain the unipolar order which is collapsing right in front of us.

To understand this, we must look at an arc of history, of slightly more than 50 years, which began with an event a little more than 53 years ago, on August 15, 1971. One could go back a little further, to the changes which were imposed after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on November 22, 1963, or to the period of the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, a process which was hailed by the neoliberal imperialists as the triumph of their “liberal-democratic order,” and which led to their proclamation that the U.S. was the “sole superpower.”

But I have chosen to start with the events of August 15, 1971, because this was the moment when Lyndon LaRouche emerged as an historical figure, because of his prescience as a forecaster, with his warning that the U.S. was in the hands of monetarists who were committed to the deindustrialization of the nation. He identified the “zero growth/Malthusian” policy as an attack on America’s physical economy, and emphasized that without an abrupt rejection of this ideology, the U.S., and the world, were facing a blow-out of the economy.

In the days leading up to August 15, that blow-out was underway.

Nixon ‘Pulls the Plug’

On that day, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced the beginning of the end of the Bretton Woods system, which had been established as the Second World War was winding down. It was a gold-reserve system, which provided an element of stability, and which over the next decades enabled an increase in trade.

As it went into a sharp downward spin toward the end of the ’60s, it was evident that something had to be done. While Nixon may have had his fingerprints on the plug as it was pulled, he was not the author of the policy.

He was being advised by some of the worst synarchist operatives in the United States. One was Arthur Burns, the former head of the Federal Reserve; another was George Shultz, who was quite well known as a leading figure in the Chile coup, which put the so-called “Chicago boys,” i.e., Friedmanites, in charge of the economy; and Paul Volcker.

LaRouche immediately released a condemnation of the decision. In an article published in New Solidarity, “Nixon Pulls the Plug,” LaRouche warned that the decision to break with the Bretton Woods system—even though there were problems with it, which LaRouche had been pointing out—would mean a fundamental shift in the world economy. He warned that it was a move toward a Schachtian economic policy.

Very few people, then or today, know who Hjalmar Schacht was. He was not only one of the point men for the corporate oligarchs in carrying out a shift in the world economy—in his case in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s—but he also became the economics minister for German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a controlled operative of British and New York corporate financiers, such as the head of the Bank of England, Sir Montagu Norman, the Rothschilds, the Rockefeller interests, and so on. These were operatives from the same networks that Shultz and Volcker worked for. Their approach neglected the real problem—that the economy could not afford guns and butter; that the spending on the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs required the printing of money to fund them, which was inflationary. Instead of advocating an end to the Vietnam War and investing in upgrading the physical economy of the U.S., the Schachtian approach was to impose brutal austerity.

In order to keep the spending going, they printed money, which fueled inflation. So, by a Schachtian solution, LaRouche meant the imposition of drastic austerity, with wage cuts, essentially a repeat of what Schacht had done in Germany in the Weimar period in the 1920s to bring down runaway inflation. Even more dangerous was what Schacht did in the ’30s, when he was appointed Hitler’s finance minister and his austerity regime included the slave labor policies to feed a military build-up, with Schacht as one of the authors of the concentration camp economy. LaRouche warned that if this embrace of Schachtian methods was not rejected, it would not only wreck the American physical economy, but it would provide the basis for permanent war in defense of a collapsing imperial looting system.

This was a central theme in a debate which took place on December 2, 1971, at Queens College, between LaRouche and Professor Abba Lerner, a “left-liberal” economist. Coming nearly four months after Nixon’s August 15 announcement, LaRouche attacked the decision, identifying it as an adoption of Schachtian policy. Lerner responded by arguing, if Germany had accepted Schacht’s policies, Hitler would not have been necessary.

This was a stunning acknowledgement that LaRouche was right about the Schachtian nature of Nixon’s decision! In addition to exposing Lerner’s “liberalism” as a fig leaf for fascist austerity, a decision was made by the proponents of Schacht that LaRouche must never be given such a forum for his ideas again.

The End of Bretton Woods

The final nail in the coffin of FDR’s Bretton Woods system was the adoption of a floating-exchange-rate system in 1973. That is, the move to a totally speculative system, in which the dollar was reduced to a form of funny money with nothing physical to back it up. This was the first big step toward “financialization,” a monetarist system, in which the concept of “wealth” became increasingly divorced from the physical economy.

In 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a deal with Saudi Arabia, in which oil sales would be made in dollars. This “petrodollar” agreement meant that the surpluses which flowed into OPEC countries for oil sales were deposited in the London-Wall Street banks of the MIFC. In addition to the petrodollars, the other back-up of dollars was the loot extracted from the colonies of the Global South, in a neo-colonial system backed by the U.S. military and certain of its NATO allies, many of which had been beneficiaries of the old colonial system. Overseeing the looting was the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

LaRouche Runs for President

It was at this point of transition that LaRouche announced his campaign for President in 1976, forming the U.S. Labor Party as an alternative to the two major parties, which were controlled by the MIFC. One of his initiatives as a candidate was a proposal to reorganize the financial system, which at that time was under the control of the IMF and the central banks, which were in turn controlled by private financial entities.

LaRouche announced his proposed reorganization in April 1975, in speeches in Bonn, Germany, and Milan, Italy. He wrote a paper to describe it called “How the International Development Bank Will Work.” He noted how the IMF system would go bankrupt, and how the Schachtian policy it was implementing was combined with a ruthless Malthusian policy, which simply said there are too many useless eaters who need to be eliminated. That was the beginning—or perhaps the middle phase—of the emergence of the so-called environmental movement as an anti-science, anti-technology operation. It was Schachtian and Malthusian.

In his International Development Bank (IDB) proposal, LaRouche argued that this IMF system should be replaced by a credit system similar to what had been implemented by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton at the beginning of the development of the United States. LaRouche’s idea was picked up all over the world. He had meetings in Baghdad, where the discussion became how to put together a fund to have joint beneficial investments for Palestine, Israel, and their Arab neighbors. He met with many other leaders; he travelled the world.

His IDB policy was circulated widely, and it caught the attention of Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, as U.S. Secretary of State, was working in tandem with one of the other evil figures backed by the synarchist oligarchs, the neoliberal war hawk Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski at the time was the co-founder and director of something called the Trilateral Commission. The founding members included Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker, both of whom became Federal Reserve chairmen. David Rockefeller, another co-founder, was one of the key backers of the Malthusian “liberal” project of Brzezinski.

The ‘Post-Industrial’ Agenda

In May 1975, there was a meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Kyoto, Japan. The topic was the transition to “post-industrial society.” Reference to this is not an example of a “conspiracy theory,” but evidence of how a group of powerful private individuals who controlled or influenced governments, who controlled financial flows, were planning to restructure the world economy—long before anyone had heard of Klaus Schwab—to restructure it as a post-industrial society; as a corporatist, fascist global empire. One of those involved in planning this transition referred to the project as “fascism with a democratic face.”

As the influence of LaRouche’s ideas was spreading, Kissinger used his office to intervene against him, pressuring officials not to meet with LaRouche, cancelling conferences and issuing threats if people didn’t comply with the order from Washington. This occurred repeatedly in 1975 and ’76. At the same time, there was motion among leading officials from nations in the Non-Aligned Movement which was running parallel to what LaRouche was proposing. Not coincidentally, some of the key people involved in that became associates of Lyndon LaRouche in the subsequent years, including people such as Indira Gandhi, and the foreign minister of Guyana, Fred Wills.

In August 1976, as this transition was underway, as the globalists were moving to consolidate this new fascist empire, there was a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement—its fifth summit—that took place in Colombo, Sri Lanka. At that meeting, there were discussions of the idea of a reorganization of the world financial system to deal with the growing problems of debt and underdevelopment, centered around rejection of the demands from the International Monetary Fund. Those involved in these discussions included Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India; Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Prime Minister of Pakistan; Fred Wills, the Foreign Minister of Guyana; and many others. The crackdown against this discussion provided a foretaste of the battle which is raging today, between nations mobilizing for their sovereign development, through institutions such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the global corporate forces willing to go to war to stop them.

An example of this is the ouster of Fred Wills as Foreign Minister by 1978. In 1976, at the Sri Lanka meeting, and again in September ’76 at the UN General Assembly meeting, Wills took the lead in opposing the corporate cartels. At the UN, he gave one of the more memorable speeches when he said: “The time has come for debt moratoria.” With this proclamation, he basically sealed his fate.

In July 1977, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was jailed in a coup, and two years later, he was executed. Henry Kissinger—although he later denied it—said to Bhutto, “I’ll make a horrible example of you” if you do not shut down your program to develop nuclear power. Bhutto went ahead with his program, and he paid for it with his life. And it wasn’t just Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was killed; his daughter Benazir Bhutto, who was twice elected Prime Minister, was assassinated in December 2007. And this pattern of bloody intervention has continued, with the most recent coup in April 2022, ousting Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was condemned by State Department official Donald Lu for his “aggressively neutral position,” for having traveled to meet with President Putin, and his refusal to support NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine. Keep in mind, Pakistan has been a target because if Pakistan and India were able to work together to overcome the legacy of division of the British Empire, and ally with China—as we’re beginning to see happen with Pakistan joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—the potential of an expansion of the BRICS to include Pakistan would be a major blow to the geopolitical intent of London to keep Eurasia divided as a new “Great Game.”

Indira Gandhi, who continued her father’s [Jawaharlal Nehru—ed.] commitment to the ideals of non-alignment, and met with Lyndon and Helga Zepp-LaRouche to discuss this, was assassinated on October 31, 1984. Behind this pattern of coups and assassinations is an International Assassination Bureau, run by a dangerous gang of thugs and killers protected by the “Permanent Bureaucracy,” a.k.a. the “Deep State,” burrowed inside the U.S. and UK governments and intelligence agencies.

LaRouche Takes on the Synarchists

With this background, let’s look at LaRouche’s view of this ongoing battle. Here is what he said in a video conference in Peru in February 2001, which shows how precise, and prescient, he was:

Over the period since 1971, of course, there’s been a transformation in the world economy, with the Nixon decision, and the following 1972 Azores decision, in which we established a floating-exchange-rate system. This, of course, was a disaster for the countries of South and Central America, in particular, and for other countries—the floating-exchange-rate system—which has caused the multiplication of the formerly existing debts, and an accumulation of debt. It’s been a disaster for most of these countries.

But we’ve come to the point now, in the recent period, particularly since the 1980s, in which the United States, more and more, relied upon exporting its work to cheap-labor markets abroad, and relying upon these sources, while shutting down U.S. manufacturing and things of that sort. So, therefore, the United States was operating recently, on a very large current account deficit, which, in one estimate I had, was running as high as a $600 billion-a-year rate.

This is precisely what he had forecast would occur in his 1971 analysis of what would result from taking down the Bretton Woods system. He continued in this presentation:

In 1965-1966, we underwent a change, and for the past 35 years, we’ve been going away from the kind of economy we had, as economic policy, from 1933 to 1965, into a new kind of highly deregulated, globalized trend. The globalization has taken off since 1989-1990, with the collapse of the Soviet power, and we’re now in the situation where we do not have the structure of national sovereignty, and other devices we had earlier, to help defend us against mass unemployment, and things of that sort.

As you are reading these words, keep in mind LaRouche was acting in real time in history. He was able to see the underlying dynamics of economics, of population growth, of education, of investment policy, and of the failure to put a stop to the kind of imperial policies of looting that by 2000 were beginning to turn against the nations of the West, which had been typical of the policy against the Global South.

In March 2002, LaRouche returned again to this topic in a piece titled “How ‘Democracy’ Became Diseased”:

The present codification of the term “democracy,” as signifying [H.G.] Wells’ utopian schemes, is echoed in the trend toward establishing an imperial form of what is termed, in technically precise, academic language, as universal fascism. That signifies: the dissolution of the existence of the sovereign nation-state in favor of a global imperial order, ruled through the mechanisms of military tyranny like those of the Roman legions which the Nazi Waffen-SS echoed. Typical is Samuel P. Huntington’s proposed parody of that Waffen-SS, his The Soldier and the State. This trend is typified by utopians such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Huntington, Henry A. Kissinger, and other associates and other co-thinkers of the late Nashville Agrarian, Harvard Professor of Government, William Yandell Elliott.

LaRouche is identifying the origin of what people today call the “Deep State.” Elliott was a British operative teaching at Harvard, coordinating the work of people like Samuel Huntington, who wrote The Clash of Civilizations, as well as Kissinger and Brzezinski, who argued that the United States should support so-called Islamic terrorist movements to bring down the government of the Soviet Union and later Russia.

Project Democracy

Here we turn our attention to something called Project Democracy. This is a typical Kissinger-Brzezinski-style operation, but they weren’t the authors. This came from these networks above—the neocon war hawk imperial managers of the military-industrial complex. It was part of the reorganization of the intelligence community consolidated by the adoption of Executive Order 12333, which was supposedly supplying guidelines for the intelligence community, but was actually a basis for Project Democracy, which became the primary operation to run covert operations, coups, and wars, to fulfill the intent of consolidating a new neo-colonial order.

The design of this consolidation can be seen when, in April 1982, the Argentines seized the Malvinas Islands from the British. The British objected to that, because the British thought these were British territories—they called them the Falklands. This led to a war in which the United States provided crucial support to the United Kingdom, through the efforts of Alexander Haig [then Secretary of State—ed.], who owed his position to his service to Henry Kissinger.

In June 1982, President Ronald Reagan, who outsourced this reorganization to his Vice President, George H.W. Bush, spoke before the British Parliament, presenting the outlines of what became known as Project Democracy. The reality is, this was a British policy, not an American policy, that was brought to the U.S. through the role of that British agent, Henry Kissinger. That Kissinger operated as a British agent is clear from his remarks at Chatham House, which is the center of British intelligence, on May 10, 1982. After boasting to his audience that he had sided with the British Crown in every postwar policy dispute with Washington, he said that in “my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department.” This was an admission that he subordinated American policy to the objectives defined by the British Foreign Office and the City of London.

In discussing that further, he acknowledged that he sided with Churchill against Franklin Roosevelt in terms of shaping the post–World War II order. He said this as a former American Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, brazenly admitting that he connived with the British Crown against his adopted country, the United States. He said, “Americans from Franklin Roosevelt onward believed that the United States, with its revolutionary heritage, was the natural ally of peoples struggling against colonialism.”

Now, who would be included among those Americans? Well, John F. Kennedy; even Dwight Eisenhower, for starters. There were many patriotic veterans of World War II who agreed with Roosevelt that the United States’ interest was to fight against colonialism and support the newly-emerging former colonial nations. Kissinger argued against that view, again siding with Churchill. Such Americans believed, he said, that “we could win the allegiance of these new nations by opposing and occasionally undermining our European allies in the areas of their colonial dominance. Churchill, of course, resisted these American pressures.”

That provides a clear picture of the background to the treason which undermined what Ronald Reagan was trying to do when he turned to Lyndon LaRouche to negotiate with the Soviets an end to the Kissingerian policy of Mutual and Assured Destruction (MAD), instead proposing détente with the Soviet Union through sharing technology and jointly developing a missile-defense system. Kissinger’s policy also provides a preview of the anti-Russian policy of extending NATO eastwards after the peaceful dissolution of the USSR in December 1991.

Coups, Regime Change, and Endless Wars

An offshoot of Project Democracy was the National Endowment for Democracy. It’s a quango—a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization—which was at the center of the Iran-Contra affair. Some of the leading figures involved in this are prominent neocons, including Carl Gershman, Elliot Abrams (who’s still around and still trying to horn his way into the Trump team), and Oliver North. This is the swamp which spawned operatives of the Project for a New American Century, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Victoria Nuland, and the Kagan family. This network has been involved in ongoing operations of hybrid warfare, coups, surveillance, and stifling free speech. The “Get LaRouche Taskforce” was part of this operation, with Henry Kissinger playing an important initiating role, deployed to eliminate LaRouche after Ronald Reagan brought him in to negotiate the Strategic Defense Initiative with the Soviet Union.

This is the network that has been responsible for every single war that the United States has been involved in over the last 30 years, wars such as two wars in Iraq, Yugoslavia (the bombing of Serbia), and the Afghan war—the permanent war which not only destroyed that country, but destroyed the credibility of the United States. This included the destruction of Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and now targets Russia, China, and Iran. These are the networks which are called the Deep State, but which should be properly known as the security state, the “secret government,” or the permanent bureaucracy. Or, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls it, the MICIMATT—the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex. Silicon Valley has become an integral part of this blob. It operates not to protect you from terrorism, nor to defend democracy, but to defend the billionaires and their imperial unipolar order, which is now collapsing.

Narrative Control

How can they succeed? How can a group so ruthless, corrupt, and immoral get away with this in a country that was built as an anti-colonial force based on the idea of scientific and technological progress? How can this gang of oligarchs get away with this?

They’ve learned from British experts in mind control how to rig the debate, to suppress the truth, to spread disinformation. A recent example of this is the arrest of Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram in France. Journalist Matt Taibbi dissects this latest attempt to stifle free speech in a column titled “France, What Happened to You, Man?” in which he provides a good example of how Europeans have surrendered whatever sovereignty they had. Remember, Charles de Gaulle insisted on French sovereignty; that’s why he wouldn’t submit to NATO, and set up his own independent nuclear force.

On August 30, Taibbi wrote:

Long before France’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, European leaders in general affected outrage at the U.S. spying, in some cases believably. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, after finding out Barack Obama’s administration directly targeted her phone in 2013, said “spying on friends is not acceptable.” Two years later, in 2015, WikiLeaks released a report called “Espionnage Élysée” showing the U.S. government spied on three different French presidents, forcing Obama to place a second apology call to French President François Hollande (the first was in 2013).

In comments on these scandals, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange added:

The United States has been conducting economic espionage against France for more than a decade. Not only has it spied on the French Finance Minister, it has ordered the interception of every French company contract or negotiation valued at more than $200 million … from BNP Paribas, AXA and Credit Agricole to Peugeot and Renault, Total and Orange, but it also affects the major French farming associations. $200 million is roughly 3,000 French jobs … The United States not only uses the results of this spying itself, but swaps these intercepts with the United Kingdom.

Taibbi concluded by saying that, with the Durov arrest, the French government is defending its right “to conduct exactly the electronic surveillance France howled about in the NSA/Snowden incidents…. The fate of Durov makes it clear that private carriers are no longer allowed … to allow free communication.”

This is what we’re facing: a world in which, in the name of content moderation, the establishment will suppress free speech with arrests, shutting down communications, and shutting down companies. This is done by a network that kills, that runs an international assassination bureau, which we at EIR have exposed. It runs coups, such as the Ukraine coup, such as the attempted “color revolutions” underway right now in Georgia and elsewhere. It issues killer sanctions, not caring how many children die because of its sanctions. It conducts regular and irregular warfare throughout the world. And it controls what’s covered in the press which gets to you.

But here’s the reality: Their world is collapsing. As LaRouche warned, they’re committed to fascism to defend their empire. But the problem is, their empire is in terrible shape. Ukraine is now going “to the last Ukrainian” to weaken Russia, under the auspices of the American-NATO policy. Israel is committing mass murder against Palestinians with the full complicity of that senile President, Joe Biden, and his would-be successor, Kamala Harris.

And now we see, courtesy of the New York Times, that they are preparing to carry out a three-front war, including with nuclear weapons, against Russia, China, and North Korea, a war which they arrogantly believe they can win. Most of the world has turned against them—and they can be defeated. More importantly, they cannot be allowed to win.