PRESS RELEASE
July 2002 (EIRNS)—Yarin, the top political magazine in Turkey, covered Lyndon LaRouche for the second month running on the front page of its July issue. LaRouche's first interview with Yarin, in June 2002, sold out, and was rushed into a second printing. It was also picked up by the Turkish dailies, and posted on their websites. The essay by LaRouche, written by request from the editors of Yarin, appears below.
Political Traditions and
Their Struggles in America:
An Historical Reading of Current Events
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
June 26, 2002
The world is presently gripped by an onrushing economic collapse of the existing, but bankrupt, present monetary-financial system. We must compare the present U.S. situation to 1931-1932, during the deep plunge of the U.S. into the so-called "Hoover Depression." In all modern history, any crisis of similar type has led to far spread social crises, and, often, periods of especially savage warfare.
The exact dates can not be forecast, but, as long as the present world monetary-fiinancial system is maintained, we will remain floundering helplessly in the grip by one of the worst periods of financial crisis in modern world history. We can escape from this crisis only if the needed reforms in the monetary-financial system are made soon, and quickly; otherwise a world-wide collapse, far worse than during the 1930s, would become inevitable: probably, with wars and revolutions to match such catastrophic failures of existing institutions.
There are two important differences between U.S. crises of 1931-32 and now. First, excepting my own 2004 Presidential candidacy, there is no Franklin Delano Roosevelt in sight. Second, over the 1971-2002 nterval, the U.S. and European economies today, have been wrecked to a far greater [degree] over the past three decades than during the 1920s.
Nonetheless, the situation is not hopeless. For those who know the history of the U.S., sometimes a crisis such as the present one, or that of 1929-1932, brings forth, with seeming suddenness, the new U.S. leadership which was waiting to be brought to power as replacement for the opposing, failed current one. So, Franklin Roosevelt succeeded Hoover. To understand that possibiility, one must understand certain of those features of U.S. history and institutions which are unique among today's nations.
Why the U.S. Is Exceptional
The past and present internal political character and conflicts of the U.S.A. become intelligible, only when that nation's history is situated in the exceptional place it now occupies within the entirety of modern European civilization.. The lack of knowledge of that connection, is, in my experience, the most common reason for errors in judgment of the U.S. and its policies, even among leading circles in Europe which ought to know better.
The history of a globally extended, modern European culture, was begun in the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance's struggle to free Europe from the grip of the imperial maritime power of Venice's financier oligarchy. That Renaissance was characterized by the combination of: the introduction of a new conception of the sovereign nation-state, and the founding of modern experimental science. A new conception of law was introduced, the notion that government's lawful authority to rule, is conditional upon its efficient devotion to the principle of promoting the general welfare of all of the people and their posterity. France under Louis XI and England under Henry VII, were the first modern nation-states established under those principles.
However, Venice struck back, beginning approximately 1511-13 A.D., unleashing an orgy of religious and related warfare, which plunged Europe as a whole into what some notable historians have identified as a "little new dark age." This ruin continued until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia brought those religious wars to an end. During that "little dark age," leaders in Europe looked to the possibility of building up true republics, based upon the principle of the general welfare, in the Americas. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, led by the Winthrops and Mathers, proved to be the most notable among such colonies emerging out of that 1511-1648 interval.
With the rapid decline of the imperial maritime power of Venice, during the late Seventeenth Century, a new attempt at a Venetian style in rentier-financier form of imperial maritime rule was attempted, this time under the influence of the Dutch and English India companies. The 1688-1689 coup d'etat in England, by William of Orange, led to the consolidation, under King George I, of the British East India Company as the true ruler of Britain. Britain, as self-conceived successor to both the ancient Roman Empire, and medieval Venice, went on to become the leading imperial maritme power of the world as a whole, until the rise of the U.S. to preeminent world power under Franklin Roosevelt.
Thus, by the death of George I's predecessor, England's Queen Anne, the hope of establishing republics based upon the general-welfare principle, became focussed upon the English colonies in North America. It was hoped, by those European leaders in the Classical tradition, that the establishment of a model republic in the Americas would encourage imitations within Europe.
During the first decades of the Eighteenth Century, two principal contending political factions emerged in these North American colonies, the one, which became known as the "American Tories," was based on the political phhilosophy of John Locke; the other was represented by the American patriots gathered around the rising figure of international celebrity, Benjamin Franklin. The patriots' opposition to Locke was expressed in the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence's emphasis on "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," a Declaration organized around the anti-Locke ideas of Gottfried Leibniz.
Once France had been defeated by the British monarchy, in 1763, that monarchy turned, as expected, to crush the English-speaking North American colonies. This unleashed the international campaign of Benjamin Franklin, leading to the Declaration of Independence, and the mobilization among leading circles throughout Europe to the cause of American independence. The more or less open break between American patriots and American Tories, of 1763-1789, has been the persisting source of all principled policy conflicts among leading U.S. circles, to the present day.
For example, I am a product of the same American intellectual tradition of Benjamiin Franklin which produced Presidents Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, whereas all my leading political adversaries, such as former [missing?] Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezisnki, are representatives of a Franklin Roosevelt-hating, avowedly American Tory tradition.
For example, George Washington entered the office of President as an effective leader, but during a time the moment the U.S. was imperilled by the aftermath of the French Revolution. President Adams was a good man, but wth weaknesses which ruined both his Presidency and his political party. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had been excellent leaders as long as they were under the direction of Benjamin Franklin, but both were disasters as President. Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln, like Franklin Roosevelt, saved the U.S. at moments of the constitutional republic's greatest peril, but Jackson, van Buren, Pierce, and Buchanan were not only American Tories, but more or less treasonous. The 1901 assassination of President William McKinley brought to power the American Tories Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge. American patriot Franklin Roosevelt saved not only the U.S.A., but also the world, from the global disaster which would have occurred, had he not become President.
Despite the untimely death of Franklin Roosevelt, many of his reforms continued to lead the Americas, Europe, and Japan, to a successful post-war economic reconstruction over the 1945-1964 interval. However, the American Tory faction, with its Venice-like dreams of being a world maritime-airpower empire, was tearing up Franklin Roosevelt's heritage from the moment he died, as rapidly as they dared.
The U.S. Utopians
The retirement of President Dwight Eisenhower, removed the last President with the position as a military figure needed to resist effectively what Eisenhower described as the "military-industrial complex." After the waves of assassinations, including that of President Kennedy, palace coups d'etat, and the effects of the 1962 nuclear-missiles crisis, the post-1964 U.S. began to be changed rapidly, from a nationalist producer economy, to an imperial consumer society. The 1971 collapse of the original Bretton Woods system, and the wild-eyed deregulation campaigns launched under Presidential advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, represent three decades of self-destruction of the economies of the Americas, Europe, Japan, and others.
It is the change from a produer society, to a utopian form of "post-indistrial," consumer society, launched during the late 1960s, and the 1971 wrecking of the original Bretton Woods monetary system, which led directly to the world monetary, financial, and economic disasters which have erupted nearly thirty years later.
Since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, there have been two crucial changes in the character of leading U.S. governing institutions. The first, was the dropping of the U.S.'s existing nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the second, was the collapse of Soviet power, over the interval 1989-1991.
As Bertrand Russell, the author of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, stated publicly, in September 1946, the role of nuclear weapons must be to threaten the Soviet Union with a "preventive" nuclear attack, for the purpose of forcing the replacement of the institution of the nation-state, including that of the U.S.A., by the form of world government which Russell and H.G. Wells had proposed in Wells' 1928 The Open Conspiracy. With the 1989-1991 collapse of Soviet power, the followers of the policies which had been set forth by world-government utopians Wells, Russell, et al., prepared to shed the Anglo-Americans' continental NATO and other allies, to tear down all remaining institutions of national sovereignty, world-wide, to establish a Roman-style world empire of the English-speaking powers.
These shifts, away from previous U.S. policy- trends, were accomplished by the emergence of a more radically extreme, explicitly fascist form of the tradition of Locke. This is a form of fascism which found its roots in the treasonous Confederacy, a form of Confederate tradition expressed by such explicit heirs of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan as the Nashville Agrarians of Harvard University Professor William Yandell Elliot. Elliot launched the careers of such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, Henry A. Kissinger, and manny other controllers of Presidents and major party leaders in the U.S. These circles and the "think tanks" associated with them, are the core of today's leading pro-fascist ideologues. They represent what Kissinger crony Michael Ledeen has identifed as "universal fascism," a fascism consistent with the memory of the Nazi international Waffen-SS.
One of the leading European historians of law of our time, the late Professor Friedrich Freiherr von der Heydte, speaking in January 1989, warned that the combination of the tradition of John Locke with contemporary radical positivist doctrines, was impelling the U.S. to a worse form of fascism than Nazi Germany under the legacies of Savigny and Carl Schmitt. Typical of such fascist tendencies in the U.S. today, is the case of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. As Professor von der Heydte understood, from his combined expertise in law, history, and military science, the new fascist trend which had emerged within the U.S. had both social and military facets.
The clearest expression of that trend among certain leading American Tory circles today, is the military-utopian current of policy-making influences typfied by the policies of such Harvard-trained lackeys of the Tory financier circles as Henry A. Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel P. Huntington, and their British Arab Bureau mentor Bernard Lewis. However, Kissinger, et al., are a younger generation. It was the circles of Wells and Russell, assembled inside the U.S. around Russell's role as 1938 co-founder of the Russell-Hutchins "Unification of the Sciences" project which led the war-time and immediate post-war build-up, of a utopian military policy for the nuclear-weapons age. Russell proteges such as Professor Norbert Weiner and John von Neumann typify the cult of systems analysis which was put forward during the 1940s and later, as replacement for the modern tradition such as Lazare Carnot, Gerhard Scharnhorst, and our own Douglas MacArthur.
The Soldier and the State of Professor Yandell Elliot's student Samuel P. Huntington, is, still today, the standard doctrine of the mlitary utopians. It expresses the intent to remodel the U.S. military along the lines of both the Roman imperial legions and the Nazi international Waffen-SS, as a band of senseless killers deployed to terrify each and all parts of the world into submission, even for the purpose of exterminating outlawed nationalities.
The traditional modern military policy, had been that the purpose of war is to establish the preconditions for negotiation of a durable peace, and to bring that about by the greatest possible economy in the wealth and lives of the combating forces. Typical of that tradition is Lazare Carnot's doctrine of strategic defense, which prompted Carnot to warn the Emperor Napoleon against the invasion of Russia, the same notion of strategic defense used by the Prussian collaborators of Czar Alexander I, to bring about the defeat of Napoleon.
The contrary, universal fascist, military dogma of Huntington et al., is based on increasing the kill-ratio to the maximum.
The utopians' military doctrine is merely a reflection of an even uglier social doctrine.
Under the malthusian dogmas adopted by the U.S. Nixon and Carter goverrnments, the argument was to the following net effect. Since the English-speaking union of oligarchical financier power has the power of property-right over the world at large, the raw materials of Americas, Africa, Eurasia, and Australia, such as Gulf oil, are the Lockean natural property-right the concert of English-speaking powers. Therefore, those powers have the right, under shareholder value, to protect those natural resources: 1.) From direct exploitation by inhabitants of those nations; 2.) From use of improved technologies by the populations of Africa and elsewhere; 3.) From the natural effects of the failure to shorten the life-expectancies and populations of relevant areas. In short, these neo-malthusian dogmas are policies of the practice of genocide on the pretext of "shareholder value."
The political character of these utopians, is typified by the 1974 National Security Studies Memorandum-200 of then National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The policy expressed there was not Kissinger's own concoction, but, rather, his articulation of the already existing, leading policy of an Anglo-American utopian current echoing policies of both nuclear-terror advocate Bertrand Russell [and?] H. G. Wells' 1928 policy-planning book, The Open Conspiracy. The same policy was expressed under Brzezinski's direction as the outgoing Carter Administration's Global 2000 and Global Futures. Both Kissinger's NSSM-200 and Brzezinski's concoctions, are radically positivist, Lockean forms of fascist dogma, in the sense referenced by Professor von der Heydte.
The core of the argument behind these fascist neo- malthusian dogmas, is the Locke doctrine, sometimes described as the legal doctrine of "shareholder value," under which property right authorizes doing whatever the property-holder chooses, with whatever or whoever happens to appear on that property. The defense of chattel slavery had been upheld by the Preamble of the treasonous Confederate Constitution's adoption of Locke's doctrine of "shareholder value." The neo-Cathar, Physiocratic doctrine of Physiocrat Dr. Quesnay, and the kindred "free trade" doctrine of the Brtish East India Company's Adam Smith, assets[?] the same notion of property right as superior to human rights.
The Empire Which Will Die At Birth
There is no possibility that such a world empire could be consolidated. Whereas the Roman Empire was consolidated at the moment of its relatively greatest power, the present utopian attempt to establish a new Roman empire of the English-speaking powers, is in a state of economic wreckage at the moment of its attempt to be born. Not only is the world economy dominated politically by the U.S. in a state of imminent collapse, it would be a delusion to imagine that a war-mobilization, like that of 1930s Germany or the U.S.A. could occur under the existing economic condtions and philosophies of the world's present governents.
The danger is not that the intended empire could be established; the danger is that the inevitably failed attempt to establish such an empire, would plunge the planet into a state of chaos, thus threatening a planet-wide new dark age.
In principle, the solution would be to return to the kinds of global monetary and economic policies which were prevalent during the 1945-1965 interval of post-war reconstruction of the Americas, Europe, and Japan. What is needed for that purpose is an emergency meeting of some of the world's leading nations, to agree to certain temporary measures of stability, in preparation for the establishment of a new, global fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, under which measures of economic reconstruction like those associated with memory of France's Jean Monnet are set into motion.
At the present moment, it appears that nearly every government and leading political party of the world is not only incompetent, but intellectually bankrupt. I am neither surprised by this fact, nor does this make me pessimistic. The reason for the political incompetence of most leading governments and political parties, such as my own U.S.A. and its Democratic as well as Republican Party, is that the present policy-axioms of these insitutions have become unworkable; any government or political party which tries to make policy within the framework of what are currently the world's generally accepted monetary, financial, and economic policies, is incapable of providing any policies which have even a semblance of competence for dealing with the increasing accumulation of domestic and foreign crises facing each nation of the world today.
However, at the moment it becomes apparent that the economic-policy models coming out of recent U.S. governments are hopelessly bankrupt, a world grown increasingly tired of such clearly incompetent Washington, D.C. leadership, will tend to respond to a breakdown of the present world monetary-financial system with a certain new-born quality of insolence toward such Washington regimes. A similar insolence will appear inside the U.S. population and its political processes.
Generally, in known history, the most rapid eruption of long-overdue changes in policy come only under the mpact of the utter incompetence of the exsting system to cope with a crisis of its own making. Unfortunately, such happy changes are not inevitable, but, at least, they are possible. We are at the brink of such a time for rapid and global change at this present time.