This article appeared in the April 2, 1999 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. See also Scott Thompson's article, "Brzezinski Testifies Against Himself"
Mad Brzezinski's chessboard
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
March 16, 1999
If you had thought Bozo the Clown is now just a memory from a Baby-Boomer's childhood, you obviously had not studied the March-April edition of the New York Council on Foreign Relations' organ, Foreign Affairs.
Remember Bozo as the fellow in the clown-suit standing on a platform above a large tank of water. He taunted you with the meanest, most provocative insults imaginable, daring you kiddies to throw baseballs at the target which, if hit solidly, would dump Bozo into the water--to your great satisfaction. That is pretty much the way in which many of today's saner strategists and historians, world-wide, look at Zbigniew "Tweedledum" Brzezinski, Henry "Tweedledee" Kissinger's one-time successor as U.S. National Security Advisor.
"Zbiggy," as he is called, is the deceptively goofy thug some Washington regulars of President Carter years used to refer to as "Woody Woodpecker." He was never of much use for winning wars; but, to the present day, he remains, like Kissinger, a person of those Hobbesian compulsions which dedicate him to provoking them. You doubt that? Read one of his most recent publications, The Grand Chessboard: Pure Hobbes! A real Bozo!
The trouble is, there are many Bozos more or less as nasty and loony as Zbiggy among Wall Street's hired "national security" roustabouts. If you had any doubt of that fact, read the current edition of Foreign Affairs. All of the leading items of that edition are, like The Grand Chessboard, devoted to veteran Harriman lackey Zbiggy's favorite lunacy, "geopolitics." The trouble is, that many of Wall Street's Democratic Party assets, like Brzezinski, Al Gore, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and other backers of "a nuclear globalizing of NATO," are, in practice, on the same "geopolitical" kick as the worst among the Bush league war-mongers on the Republican side.
This revival of geopolitics, as featured within the current Foreign Affairs, could start World War III. Conceded: this would not be the same kind of war as World War I and II. It would be much different, but, in the end, much worse: the kind of war no one would know how to bring to an end. It would evolve into a doomsday war, featuring included use of nuclear weapons, the kind of war which, minus the nuclear weapons, was customary until the Fifteenth-Century birth of the sovereign nation-state.
The kinds of wars Foreign Affairs geopoliticians would provoke, would be like the perpetual warfare of the time of the pre-nation-state Roman Empire, or, the Welf League wars which ended with the Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age, or, the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War organized by pro-globalist feudal imperial power against the institution of the modern sovereign nation-state. It would be the kind of war which brings a "new dark age" to whatever parts of the world it touches. That kind of World War III--the kind of warfare which has evolved out of the precedent of "Desert Storm," is what a considerable number among the world's most respected senior strategists, estimate, quite accurately, could become a "limited" nuclear war, killing perhaps "no more than" some tens of millions of people in the U.S.A., as in Russia and other places.
Such an escalation toward global conflict could start from the present likelihood of Israel's using its nuclear-weapons options, as part of the now onrushing escalation and counterZbigniew Brzezinski. Writes LaRouche: " `Zbiggy,' as he is called, is the deceptively goofy thug some Washington regulars of President Carter years used to refer to as `Woody Woodpecker.' He was never of much use for winning wars; but, to the present day, he remains, like Kissinger, a person of those Hobbesian compulsions which dedicate him to provoking them." escalation of its current Middle East escalation for warfare, wars directed against targets including Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Sudan. That Middle East war, currently being run by Britain's Blair government, with complicity of the currently dominant faction of the Washington Principals' Committee, could lead, by chain-reaction, toward a major "limited nuclear" exchange over much wider areas, a few years down the line after Israel's now-threatened next action.
The H.G. Wells-style scenario implied by Zbiggy's The Grand Chessboard, defines Central Asia as the likely cockpit from which the war could, and, according to the utopian madness of his "shape of things to come," should spread to wide areas of the world.
It is not only the calculated strategic scenarios which represent the danger of even nuclear escalations. There is a crucial added factor, beyond the calculations of the Principals' Committee's maddened utopians. That factor is the already defective, and rapidly self-deteriorating moral character of Israel's post-Rabin government, combined with the sundry circumstances and internal weaknesses of the present array of British, U.S.A., and continental European governments. Under conditions which such emotionally unstable political systems as those governments sense as unbearably prolonged, escalating economic crises and other stress, many among those governments, including that of the U.S.A., would probably react to the effect of a series of escalations toward spreading warfare. This would lead toward exactly the kind of exhibition of "flight forward" which would turn the Principals' Committee's utopian calculations into a nuclear-warfare toll adding into the tens of millions or more world-wide.
The world has already seen clear evidence which should have warned us of this danger. Study the way in which Al Gore led the Principals' Committee in foisting upon a President Clinton harried and diverted by an impeachment battle, the Principals' Committee's bombing of Sudan. That was followed by the Principals' Committee's foisting of the greater lunacy of the presently ongoing, escalating war against target Iraq. Compare these instances with the presently operational policies of the British and Israeli governments, together with the Principals' Committee, in pushing to extend their already-ongoing war in the Middle East, into a new, "imperial NATO" doctrine of deploying forces, including nuclear capabilities for actions against an ill-defined list of potential "rogue states," including "Caspian oil" wars in Central Asia.
This is a joint British, U.S.A., and Israeli operation, currently under overall direction of the present Blair government, without any significant preconsulting with other NATO members than the British Commonwealth and U.S.A.!
Look at the way in which the continuing after-effects of the British launching of "Desert Fox," were aggravated by Secretary Albright's loutish conduct at the Rambouillet conference on Kosovo. Her foolish diplomacy, set in the context of the Blair government's launching of the U.K.-U.S.A. war on Iraq, prevented a negotiable solution from being reached over the Kosovo issues.
Compare the pattern of behavior of the Principals' Committee, in pushing genocide in Black Africa, and the totally unjustified bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, with the demented conduct of Vice-President Al Gore and Secretary Albright during the recent APEC meeting sessions in Kuala Lumpur. Look at the consistently Gore-like, "bi-polar" rage factor, in the conduct of the Gore-dominated Principals' Committee. Look at the desperation of Gore's efforts to cover up his misuse of his political position in world affairs, to promote corrupt political and financial dealings on behalf of Gore's personal political interest. It is the toleration of this kind of behavior within the U.S. government, which is prompting strategic analysts to foresee a growing and fairly early danger of wars which merge and "nucleate" to the threshold of nuclear firestorms.
I believe that we could still prevent the limited nuclear and other wars which madmen such as Brzezinski are currently attempting to start. However, they will be avoided only if we begin to act now to prevent emotionally and intellectually weak, increasingly hysterical leading governments, including that of the U.S.A., from continuing their present tendencies toward increasingly irrational, "flight forward" reactions to the stress centered in the present, hyperinflationary global financial and monetary bubble.
Thus far, there is no justified cause for any of those ongoing, or threatened military actions which the U.S.A. and Britain are taking in the direction of something like "World War III." Nonetheless these actions are being taken; and, more and more, a current revival of lunatic litanies on the subject of "geopolitics" is being circulated as probable casus belli, as the current issue of Foreign Affairs typifies that specific expression of strategic madness.
What ought to be the obvious question is: Since there is no justification for planning warfare of this sort, why is the march of the British Commonwealth and U.S.A. toward such warfare presently ongoing at an accelerated rate? For anyone who understands the sheer hysteria gripping both the City of London and Wall Street, there is no mystery about the way in which either funds for the 2000 Presidential and Congressional campaigns are being steered from Wall Street, or in which the mass media of the U.S.A. and British Commonwealth are beating the drums for war.
In this report, I address three closely related issues. First, why are people like Brzezinski and the editors of Foreign Affairs so hell-bent on pushing the world toward even actual nuclear warfare? Second, for what cause are the supporters of Blair's present leadership acting? Third, what is the significance of war-monger Brzezinski's, and others' emphasis on the attempt to revive the same old "geopolitical" kookery used by King Edward VII's Fabian-led Round Table to set off World War I?
1. The flight-forward factor
So, now turn to focus upon the "flight-forward" factor.
Presently, all of sub-Saharan Africa is victim to a spreading Holocaust which has already exceeded six millions African victims. It is a Holocaust sponsored chiefly by a British-led combination of Commonwealth, Israeli, and U.S. factions operating in the Africa theater.
Similarly, since the British-planned provocation of the Spring 1982 "Malvinas War," most of Central and South America have been pushed toward the present edge of Africa-like Holocausts.
In a related way, western continental Europe, most notably, is dominated by a collection of governments which are not merely weak--greatly undermined in their authority by the ruinous actions imposed by the Thatcher-Mitterrand-Bush combination of 1989-1992--but politically shallow, each based upon very fragile political combinations. Look at Italy, whose political stability was destroyed, by a destabilization and looting operation run directly, with open shamelessness, from the private yacht of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. Read the report on the Thatcher-Mitterrand 1989-1991 destabilization of Germany issued by the Kohl government this past year.
Take note of the irony of the political situation in the U.S.A. today.
The evidence is, that President Clinton has achieved a level of personal popularity rivalling memories of President Franklin Roosevelt. The relevant irony of that personal popularity is, that it is in direct contrast to the unpopularity of the Democratic Party's leadership, and to the profound lack of popular enthusiasm for prospective Year 2000 Presidential candidate Al Gore.
The President's popularity is based, not upon what he has accomplished, but on such considerations as his expressed desire to develop partnerships with Russia and China. To the thinking citizens, these seem sensible impulses, which are nonetheless opposed by many Republicans and Democrats. Clinton's repeatedly frustrated attempts at a sane foreign policy--as in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the Middle East--show him to be an obvious outsider to "those other bums" in the Democratic and Republican parties' current establishments.
Overall, the first-hand evidence is that the President is liked by those voters who regard him as an "outsider," the only kind of political official a sensible citizen trusts these days. In effect, were President Clinton suddenly removed from office, the United States would, in that instant, lose the protective "mantle of Heaven." It would collapse quicker that you could pronounce "Ozymandias."
This deep, wide, and growing fear and contempt for establishment politics and politicians, is consistent with the general situation which has been building up in the U.S.A. and western Europe since the "political juice" went out of the U.S. Reagan Administration, beginning the 1985-1986 interval. As I noted above, in western Europe, the decisions made during late 1989 and 1991-1992, by the Thatcher, Mitterrand, and Bush governments, have created today's disastrous economic and political situation. For those reasons, as I have already noted, the nations of the so-called "Atlantic Alliance" are dominated presently by increasingly weak, and increasingly unstable governments and ruling political combinations; these are governments and parties from which the electorates are increasingly estranged.
Apart from some recent hopeful signs in Asia, the world as a whole is a terrible, and, truth be known, increasingly bankrupt mess. As we witness, since December, in the continued escalation of the British and U.S.A. bombing of Iraq, weak governments are prone to the kind of loss of nerve which the U.S. Principals' Committee has displayed in its current "flight forward" into a Middle East adventure.
The root of the political situation among these nations is the contrast between the increasing grip of defective ruling ideologies, and the real-life disasters these ideologies have brought upon the economies and great majority of the population of each nation.
Measured by real-economy standards, the net physical output, productivity, and consumption of the population of these nations, has been in overall net decline since the 1971-1972 launching of that present "floating exchange-rate monetary" system, which replaced the relatively successful previous Bretton Woods system. In the U.S., for example, no amount of the recent and current outpouring of deliberately faked governmental and Wall Street propaganda, could conceal the fact, that basic economic infrastructure is collapsing, that health-care, social-security, and other general welfare standards, are in the process of being gouged ever more savagely, our productive industries are an endangered species, and that our national food security--our farmers--is being wiped out.
With relatively few exceptions, presently, most among the leading circles are insane in the literal, mathematical-physical sense of the term; by the standard of cause and effect, they are passionately deluded, seized by an obsessive denial of a truth they refuse to face. They are true believers in pagan superstitions called by such misleading names as "democracy" and "free trade," or "globalization" and "ecologism."
Take the U.S. case first. Look at some of the more recent pattern of relevant developments.
Begin with the change in U.S. policy-direction before and after the 1994 U.S. Congressional elections. Before those elections, a leading theme of the Clinton Administration was protecting the health-care standards of the population as a whole. After the Republican victory, the weight was shifted, toward cutting health-care savagely, cuts with no basis in fact other than the intent to create superprofits for the speculators taking financial control over the market in health-care, finding ways to loot Social Security, similarly. In short, to tear down government, and loot the general population, all for the pleasure and profit of the international financial syndicates behind the global hedge-fund bubble.
Disaster struck in Spring and Summer 1996, as Vice-President Al Gore, flanked by the cousin of the notorious Roy M. Cohn, Dick Morris, led the charge to bully President Clinton into capitulating to then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, on the "welfare reform" issue. That change in the President's policy, doomed the Democratic Party to lose the fight in the 1996 U.S. Congressional elections. That, in turn, enabled Clinton's adversaries to set up what became the attempted parliamentary coup d'état, against the President and the Constitution, of 1998 and early 1999.
The overwhelming majority of the U.S. population were estranged, more and more, from both their governmental institutions and from the incumbent leadership of the Democratic and Republican national committees. That did not begin with the 1994 Congressional elections; the alienation of the voters from the parties and government, has been escalating since the imposition of the so-called "Phase I" and "Phase II" austerity policies of the months immediately following the August 1971 break-up of the post-war Bretton Woods system.
For the past twenty-eight years, the overwhelming majority of the U.S. citizenry--labor, farmers and other productive entrepreneurs, and scientifically trained professionals, among many others--have become habituated to expecting less and less of better, and more and more of worse, from both their government and the political parties' leaderships.
Overall, the trends in Europe are in the same, downward accelerating direction, especially since the policy-changes introduced under the combination of Thatcher, Mitterrand, and Bush, during the 1989-1992 interval. Recently, the Kohl government was defeated in the general election, because the "Red-Green" combination was considered as the "outsider." Not long after the new "Red-Green" government was installed, its popularity began dropping to levels as low as, or even below those of the just previously ousted Kohl government.
Not only are the populations more and more estranged from the ruling governments and leading political parties of Europe, as in the U.S.A. In every other respect, the policies of those governments are increasingly an absolute economic failure, both in Europe and in the U.S.A. Thus, the behavior of those once-impregnable Atlantic powers now appears to be, more and more, a parody of the great Persian host marching toward its doom on the plains outside Arbela.
This combination, of populations increasingly estranged from their governments and leading political parties, and successive governments, like leading political party hierarchies, showing themselves, more and more, to be bungling failures, pushes those parts of the world into a condition of increasing loss of the ability of governments to govern by any means but the modern equivalent of the mailed fist. The fist moves with increasing desperation. The death-penalty orgy in the U.S.A. merely reflects this accelerating loss of existing governments' fitness to govern.
Since the terminal phase of the presently ongoing, global financial collapse erupted into the open, during October 1997, the situation for these governments, under a continuation of their present policies, is becoming hopeless. Now, since mid-October 1998, when the IMF's Group of Seven chose to unleash the greatest hyperinflationary monetary and financial expansion in history, the doom of the entire global financial and monetary system is not far away. Thus, if and when we think of where things are going now, the image of Adolf Hitler in the bunker might come to mind.
In history, there are many cases of empires and other governments which have lost the moral authority to rule, but which nonetheless still retain the power of arbitrary rule, at least for the short term. The contrast, between an accelerating loss of moral authority, and their determination to retain power nonetheless, is the usual catalyst for wild orgies of political repression by the regimes in power, for the growing popularity of the revolutionary upheavals which those regimes provoke, and for the wars which condemn the "Ozymandiases" of real-life history to the doom they and their regimes have brought upon their nations and themselves.
It is this quality of "flight forward," which, as we saw at Kuala Lumpur, characterizes the political style of Vice-President Al Gore and his closest bed-fellows on the Principals' Committee. This unfitness to govern, typified by the "bi-polar"-like behavior of Gore, is a key factor in the growing war-danger now spreading around the world.
The Atlantic powers, in particular, have thus become a collection of ruling institutions which has each lost both the confidence of its populations, and the intellectual and moral fitness, and authority to continue to rule. Unless President Clinton can reassert his constitutional powers, bring globalization and "free trade" to a halt, and create a global alliance of sovereign nation-states under the kind of "New Bretton Woods" system which I have prescribed, the situation in western Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas is on the road to becoming hopeless during the near to medium term.
2. What are they defending?
The combined incompetencies of the present governments of the Atlantic powers have their principal origins in four exemplary, lunatic assumptions. Those implicitly fatal misassumptions, underlie each and all of the policies now pushing the world into the presently escalating strategic pattern of "flight-forward" follies:
1. Peace through military enforcement of a world government established and maintained by a London-dominated B-A-C (British-American-Commonwealth) coalition.
This means the establishment of a de facto "world government," ruled by the B-A-C Cabal, through the mustering of military means to enforce the undermining and eradication of any political institutions which might be capable of resisting such a modern parody (under the intentionally misleading names of "globalization" and "democracy") of an ancient imperial tyranny. This means the elimination of all sovereign nation-state economies, including the sovereignty of the U.S.A., through the overtly, explicitly treasonous doctrines of "globalization" and "free trade."
2. Regulating "dual-use technologies:" the use of modern types of scientific principles and related technologies is denied to nations which are outside the B-A-C bloc. This denial is based upon the absurd, and plainly immoral pretext, that these technologies might be used to develop means of warfare--"weapons of mass destruction," such as those with which Israel threatens its Arab neighbors today.
In fact, any technology which would enable a nation to maintain and improve the general welfare of its population, is a technology which falls under the heading of "dual-use technologies." In other words, the true motive of the bans on so-called "dual-use technologies," is, as then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger prescribed in his 1974 NSSM-200, to keep the nations so targetted in an imperially assigned status as "colonies" of the B-A-C bloc: to keep those nations' populations as "barefoot, poor, and as sterile" as possible.
3. The elimination of the principle of equity from international relations among and within states. This includes the repeal of the U.S. Federal Constitution, through repeal of its fundamental law, the "general welfare" principle set forth in the Preamble of that Constitution.
In every case, the imposition of so-called "IMF conditionalities" represents nothing other than intentional genocide--a genocide fully as "genocidal" in effect as Adolf Hitler's--aimed against much of the population of the targetted nations. These policies of "IMF conditionalities," have two actual motivations. One, since, as I noted, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's pro-genocidal NSSM-200 of 1974, and also since the Carter Administration's pro-genocidal "Global 2000" and "Global Futures," genocidal forms of "population control" measures have been integral features of the foreign policy and foreign economic policy of the U.S.A. and relevant other governments and supranational agencies.
We see the same genocidal policies applied in the U.S.A. and in western Europe, for example, in the forms of abrogation of earlier, long-established commitments to promote the general welfare. In the U.S.A., for example, the slogan "We must save Social Security," usually means looting Social Security for the benefit of Wall Street loan-sharks: in other words, bail out Wall Street by robbing the pensions of "the useless eaters." The same is behind cuts in health-care. The same is behind that form of stealing from farmers called "cutting agricultural subsidies." The same policy is behind present policies of "free trade" and "globalization" as pushed by Vice-President Al Gore, for example: loot U.S. citizens of their employment by exporting jobs to slave-labor markets in other nations, or into prison labor in the U.S.A. Indeed, in the U.S.A., most of the relevant trends in legislation constitute a suicide-pact in favor of types such as Al Gore's Wall Street Long Term Capital Management cronies.
By such sweeping violations of the fundamental law of the U.S. Federal Constitution, and also the U.S. Declaration of Independence before it, the government and leading political parties have cut themselves off, more and more, from the citizenry. Worse, they defend these measures in the name of "democracy," lacking even the honor of an honest tyrant in perpetrating such cruelties--chiefly for the sake of Wall Street--upon the population as a whole. As the economy is ruined, and as the hypocrisy of both government and leading political parties becomes increasingly shameless, those governments of the Atlantic powers make themselves the targets of widespread popular, deepening resentments and contempt.
Similar patterns are seen in the cases of the governments of western Europe--not excluding the present, increasingly hateable and contemptible government of the United Kingdom. Sooner or later, in one way or another, the people betrayed will eliminate such governments; if such tyrants pretend to be "democratic," or perhaps "democratic socialists," or "leftists," they are likely to be dumped more quickly on just the account of the plainly disgusting nature of such pretenses.
4. The misuse of the name of "democracy" to outlaw every standard of truth and justice from the practice of law within or among states.
On recent occasions, Vice-President Al Gore has insisted upon a monstrously perverted definition of the term "democracy." His argument has been that the exemplar of "democracy" is "billions of decisions" embedded within the actions of predators in unregulated financial "markets," such as those "decisions" represented by the raids on Malaysia by international predator George Soros. Similarly, Gore's definitions defend the looting of your pensions, health care, food supplies, and so on by similar predators' actions within financial "markets" as something to be upheld in the name of "democracy."
The misuse of `Democracy'
Gore's announcement, that much of his youth was devoted to shovelling manure, accounts for much of his expressed opinion. The reality of his practice shows that his claim to "democracy" rests upon notions of law peculiar to those models of tyrannical irrationalism which Plato exposes, in his Republic, in the behavior of the characters Thrasymachus and Glaucon. Gore's conception of the practice of law and statecraft dates from pre-modern, ancient and feudal history, from societies in which the meaning of law was defined as the arbitrary whim of an emperor, or the custom of the most barbaric pack of usurpatious overlords.
In short, by Gore's logic, the Emperor Nero could have made himself a Democrat by issuing a decree which stated that the word "democracy" should be used to mean whatever Nero chose it to mean on whatever occasion. There is no truthful definition of "justice" under Nero's law, and no truthful definition of "democracy" in Gore's usages.
However, Gore's perverted use of that term does have a precedent. A short explanation of that connection should be supplied here, as follows.
Gore's view of "democracy" and "free trade" is a copy of that supplied by Friedrich von Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society, a "radical right" group dedicated to the pro-satanic dogma of the notorious Bernard Mandeville [The Fable of the Bees]. According to Mandeville, everything deemed immoral, or even evil, must be tolerated, all according to Al Gore's insistence, that random interactions in the "market-place" of social practice, shape the result to far more beneficial effect than any willful choice of good over evil.
This doctrine of Mandeville and the Mont Pelerin Society, echoes the immediate predecessors of Adam Smith's dogma of "free trade," John Locke's empiricism and François Quesnay's esoteric, pro-feudalist doctrine of laissez-faire. The argument used by Locke, Mandeville, and Smith, is derived from the Ockhamite doctrine of Galileo Galilei, that all action in the universe can be reduced to inanimate interactions along straight-line distances. The latter includes both percussive interactions and action-at-a-distance, as Newton copied Galileo on this point.
Galileo's doctrine formed the esoteric core of the famous Cartesian manifold. That doctrine was applied to social relations by Galileo's personal student, Thomas Hobbes, and defined the social theory of John Locke.
Imagine! That a moral good appears in the universe only through inanimate forms of actions and reactions along straight lines? Imagine! That the manifest increase of man's willful power in the universe, an increase effected solely through scientific and related forms of discovery of principles, is claimed to be nothing more than random action among bumping and pulling actions? Gore's is a very wild, if dumb sort of esoteric delusion.
In short, when Gore says "democracy," he means anarchy in the same sense as the English lords imposed their anarchy (the Magna Carta) on England's King John. Put no restraints on the free movement of financial pirates; let the anarchy of the financial barons reign! Call that "democracy."
Since the Classical tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, and Plato's The Republic, all literate persons have recognized the danger of subjecting society to rule by some arbitrary ideology, such as the four, including "democracy," which I have just identified above. Sophocles' Antigone is among the most forcefully clear demonstrations of this principle. As the traditions of Solon and the great Classical tragedies should have made clear to any literate person, the greatest danger is not any of the ideologies involved in a nation's self-destructive impulses, as much as it is the very idea than any arbitrary religious or other ideology contrary to reason can be imposed upon society, without risking effects leading surely toward the self-imposed doom of that culture. Any policy which substitutes ideology for reason, as Antigone illustrates that point of law, leads nations and even entire civilizations to their doom.
Such is the root of the accelerating loss of the moral authority to govern, of the presently ruling institutions of the U.S.A., western Europe, and other nations. It is not the fact that such versions of "free trade," "democracy," "globalization," and "world government" are terribly bad. They are very foolish, and terribly bad in themselves; but the far greater danger is, as the Antigone tragedy underscores the point, that those ideologies might be awarded the authority of arbitrary law, as unchangeable trends in policy-shaping. The danger is that the name of "law" might be misused in service of some ideology, as Gore's cultish misuse of the terms "free trade," "ecology," "globalization," and "democracy" illustrates such folly.
In that latter case, the society seized by such a fatal delusion, has denied itself the right to terminate foolish policies at such time that evidence has freshly shown that they are foolish. The bad law reigns, hallowed, and protected from reason, by a cloak of ideology. The delusion is, that such notions of "ecologism," "world government," and "free trade," since they are established trends, represent either progress, or the results of the previous election, and, therefore, must be defended in the name of custom. That is what defines these kinds of arbitrary beliefs as a mass delusion. It is that delusion which threatens an early self-imposed end for the existence of western European civilization.
There lies the root of the lack of the dwindling moral authority to govern among those governments, both the B-A-C group of nations and continental western Europe, too.
What can the universe do to persuade such "true believers" that their delusions do not work? The history of fallen empires and failed cultures shows, that the answer to that question is elementary. The universe will react, as it has in the past, in the simplest way imaginable. The good news is that the universe will simply let such "true believers" eliminate themselves by the natural consequences of their own delusion. The bad news is, that, unfortunately, that also means the elimination of persons whose only crime was that they refused to break free of the grip of such governments and their chosen customs.
Such is the fate of governments and nations which refuse to give up their stubborn delusions, such as those to which Al Gore adheres today.
The principle of hypothesis
This brings the discussion back to a point which is a centerpiece of all my work in economics, philosophy, and politics: the Platonic principle of hypothesis. This is summarized in my Road to Recovery, for example. It is from the standpoint of this principle of hypothesis, that all of the issues emphasized here may be brought into the clearest, and most accurate representation, and with the least effort.
To understand both how a mass delusion works, and how it must be addressed for correction, I emphasize the method of hypothesis. For this purpose here, I use the notion "hypothesis" as Plato does. I speak of "hypothesis;" I also speak of a related, but higher-order conception, "higher hypothesis," as Plato does. I begin this explanation with a definition of "hypothesis."
The simplest form of hypothesis is illustrated by the case of a pre-"New Math" form of standard classroom geometry. In that classroom, the principle is, that all of the combined set of definitions, axioms, and postulates of such a geometry constitute a simple form of hypothesis. No proposition can be accepted in that geometry, unless it is fully consistent with that set of definitions, axioms, and postulates. Once you have adopted a certain set of definitions, axioms, and postulates, and if you have also used the rule of deductive logic as a substitute for measuring truthfulness, then every legitimate theorem of that geometry is already stated simply by noting those definitions, axioms, and postulates.
Once we understand how a simple, deductive hypothesis of that sort works, we can compare that with other forms of hypothesis, and thus come to understand the differences between simplistic classroom geometries, and real-world geometries.
It happens that such a classroom geometry is true only in the classroom, not in the real world. The geometry of the real world is of a more complex form. Real-world geometries, therefore, have different definitions, axioms, and postulates, than the simple-minded classroom varieties of deductive geometries, such as those of a Galileo, a René Descartes, or of the followers of such acolytes of Bertrand Russell as Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, for example. In other words, real-world geometries are representable only by different hypotheses than the simple hypothesis of ordinary classroom geometry.[1]
Think of different geometries as like maps belonging to different universes. Once it is demonstrated that Map A directs the traveller away from the goal which lies on Map B, continuing to follow Map A will result in moving a further distance from the stated goal than ever before. If the increasing discrepancy is recognized as either ensuring the doom of an important mission, or even the survival of the travellers, the sane among those pilgrims will recognize that Map A must be abandoned, and Map B used instead. Those who have an obsessive faith in Map A, despite all real-world evidence, have two choices: give up the obsessive faith, or become increasingly, ever more hysterically insane. Such is the nature of delusions; such is the view of mass delusions which requires our attention to the principle of hypothesis.
The relevant connections are identified in the following way.
The easiest way to understand how ideological delusions, such as "free trade," work, is to compare these delusions with any sort of classroom textbook geometry which does not work in the real world. For example, to look at this problem from the standpoint of mathematical physics, contrast the way in which an appropriate physical geometry maps an action in the real world, to the way a defective geometry fails to meet real-world standards. It is sufficient to compare the hypothesis associated with the delusory geometry, with the hypothesis for the relevant real-world geometry.
Instead of comparing the theorems of the two geometries, one by one, look at delusory and real-world geometries from the standpoint of their opposing hypotheses. Any one-by-one comparison of theorems is an inconclusive, as well as a tedious way to approach the matter. In the case of "free trade," "globalization," and so on, no U.S. policy based upon these ideologies will be consistent with reality; all policies based on these hypothetical definitions and axioms will be incompetent in fact, and lead to disasters in effect. It is not each policy which must be considered by itself; the flaw of all such policies is shown by examining the definitions, axioms, and postulates which shape each and all of that entire class of policies.
For example. All of the "free trade" and "globalization" policies which are responsible for the disastrous failure of present U.S. financial, monetary, and economic policies, are known as "monetarist" policies. In other words, they are based upon the arbitrary, false, but all-too-popular assumption, that relations of production and trade are determined with sufficient precision by projecting the expected results of a policy in term of market-prices. Any policy based on such a false assumption is, at its least worst, a defective policy which should be replaced by a competent one. When an error of that sort is adopted as a proposed principle, the error takes on the character of a delusion, even a virtual mass psychosis.
In the real world, successful functioning of economic processes was never determined functionally in terms of a system of purely market-prices--and never could be, even to the most distant future times. What happens, then, if a group of people adopt the delusion that "everything must be explained in terms of monetary theory (such as the zero-sum game lunacy of the late John von Neumann and his deranged followers)"? The effect, obviously, will be a situation in which such "true believers" in monetarist doctrines behave in a way so contrary to reality that we rightly term that belief a psychosis. Their working hypothesis is a "psychosis," in that sense and degree.
The case of the so-called Black-Scholes formula, for which Merton and Scholes gained a Nobel Prize in Economics, is an excellent illustration of belief which has performed the function of just such a psychosis. This formula has no correspondence to real-world economies, yet, until a catastrophe which struck New York's Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) organization in mid-September 1998, most of the leading bankers of the U.S.A. and western Europe behaved as if the formula described the statistically determined behavior of financial processes in the real world. All of them were collectively deluded; many, including Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, still are. The most crucial axiomatic assumption responsible for the delusion of Greenspan and others, was their blind, utterly irrational religious faith in the teachings of a certain John von Neumann, that economic processes are a "zero-sum game," in which losers and winners balance out, and, therefore, the market itself will not collapse if the game of financial speculation is played accordingly. During the events of August and September, it was proven most conclusively, and painfully, that believers in John von Neumann's teachings and the Black-Scholes formula in particular, were the victims of a mass delusion, a virtual psychosis.
The reaction to the LTCM crash by the governments and central bankers of the so-called G-7 nations was therefore of outstanding clinical-psychological significance. The reaction by Alan Greenspan et al., was to attempt to save the failed financial system by unleashing the most deadly hyperinflationary bubble in all history to date, with effects far more disastrous than had those governments and bankers done nothing at all.
That illustrates what we mean by using the term "psychosis" to describe the present state of mind of those governments and banking institutions. In this case, "psychosis" signifies a belief which is not only false to reality, but systemically so. It is a delusion so deeply entrenched in the victim that he would rather kill himself--or, sometimes, like Adolf Hitler, everyone else in reach--rather than accept the reality that the universe does not work in a way which fits their delusion.
There, in politics, you have political cases such as Adolf Hitler in the bunker. That is also today's British monarchy, which would rather plunge the entire world into an apocalypse, rather than accept the evidence that their political system--their hypothesis--is doomed.
Now, consider the real-life case, in which most citizens will, on the one hand, "repeat after me: we believe in `free trade.' " They don't really believe in "free trade" in the way Wall Street fanatics such as Alan Greenspan do; but, they do believe it is smart to be overheard saying, "I believe in free trade." Most of our ordinary citizens are like that; most of the things they say, are things they say only because they believe that saying such things is expected of them, by people who have the political power to enforce such policies.
However, unlike typical Wall Street lunatics, ordinary people believe that, "Come cold weather, we kittens need our mittens." The Wall Street warlocks insist: "You must give up your mittens for the sake of the economy, just as we shipped your job off to a slave-labor spot in Mexico." At the point that some popularized ideology, such as "free trade," begins to take away from the population things upon which life itself depends--such as Social Security, places of decently paid employment, and health care--all for the sake of Wall Street's "free trade" ideologies, a strain develops between the Wall Street ideology and the people.
About that time, sane people begin to suspect, more and more, that Wall Street's management ought to be removed from places of authority, and replaced by persons who are actually qualified to make an economy work for the general good of real living people and their posterity.
Not only is there that kind of political strain, but the economy ordered as the present one is, couldn't work, and never did. It may appear to work, as the British Empire seemed to work (to some deluded persons) during the Nineteenth Century; but the success of the United Kingdom economy depended absolutely on looting most of the rest of the world's area, either through colonies, or through swindles run under the cover of traffic in international financial loans.
Under the post-1971 form of U.S. economy, and recent trends in economic policy of western Europe, the per-capita physical-economic power of the economy erodes, even moves to the brink of collapse. At such points, the strains between the pressures of reality on the majority of the nations and their populations, and the ideology of the B-A-C "globalizers," grow into a condition in which the gap between the ideology and political reality becomes insufferable. Thus, the conflict between one hypothesis, such as the "free trade" delusion, and the hypothesis corresponding to reality, reaches a breaking-point.
It is in circumstances such as this, that the great wars, revolutions, and similar convulsions of history have erupted in the past, as they are erupting now. Always, then as now, those convulsions were the by-product of a delusion such as those I have identified here.
3. Geopolitics
The thing to keep in mind, if you chance to pick up a copy of the March-April 1999 edition of Foreign Affairs, is, that no sane and literate U.S. patriot ever believed in "geopolitics." The subject itself is a crude sort of esoteric nonsense, but a sort of nonsense adopted for a clearly intended purpose. It happened in the following way.
The facts I shall summarize are conclusively documented, and, in that sense, easily accessible to all decently-educated, sane persons. The general public, which is being cheated and looted by Gore and his cronies, does not know these facts; if it knew those facts, it would not allow itself to continue to be fooled, looted, and cheated in that way. That said, let us sum up the nature of the hoax called "geopolitics," as quickly as possible.
To the typical American visitor, late Nineteenth-Century England had become a nation of wild-eyed kooks. There was John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite Society; strange theosophical religions were dropping like overripe fruit from the British family trees; the landscape itself was dotty with queer blokes like Bernard Shaw and the Fabian Society, and a certain oddball who preferred to make a religion out of geography, a queer fellow by the name of Halford Mackinder. At that time, Britain had also spawned another queer fellow, known as the Prince of Wales. The perversions of those two intersected, creating the myth of "geopolitics."
At that time, the Prince of Wales, about to become King Edward VII, wanted a very large war for the purpose of destroying continental Europe's economies and peace; but, he did not dare to state his motive for this war openly. Pathetic Halford Mackinder's queer religious doctrine on the subject of certain alleged epiphenomena of political geography, was chosen to provide the diversionary cover-story for King Edward VII's orchestration of what became known as World War I.
Edward VII had already ruled the British Empire for most of the last four decades of the Nineteenth Century, before being crowned officially in 1902. His mother, Queen Victoria, a.k.a. "Mrs. Brown," had turned (increasingly) dotty about the time of the death of her husband, Prince Albert. During the subsequent decades, when Victoria was not being turned out briefly for public occasions, as had she been the stuffed corpse of Jeremy Bentham, the Lord Palmerston-trained Prince of Wales, functioned as the real center of monarchical power for the remaining decades until her death.
The crucial event leading to the adoption of the myth of geopolitics by King Edward VII's Empire, was the crushing defeat of British policies by President Abraham Lincoln's United States, during events of 1864-1865.
Defeated by Lincoln were not only the British puppet, the Confederacy, but also the alliance of Britain, Isabella II's Spain, and Napoleon III's France, the alliance which had put the butcher-Emperor Maximilian on the throne of Mexico. Instead of a divided and crushed U.S.A., as Palmerston's Britain had intended, the U.S. emerged in 1865 as the world's leading military power. During the interval 1861-1876, the U.S.A. had emerged as the most powerful and most technologically advanced national economy of the world, the model admired and copied by Japan, Germany, and Alexander II's Russia, among others.
Furthermore, as a result of the emergence of a number of nations committed to the U.S.'s American System model of technology-driven agro-industrial national political-economy, cooperation developed among states which had adopted this American model as the basis for both their own internal development, and also the basis for joint ventures of mutual benefit among other nations which had a similar, pro-American-model orientation. The pivotal feature of that system of cooperation, was the activation of the German-American economist Friedrich List's design for a Eurasian railway-based network, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. List's design was that which had been used by American patriots, such as John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln, to launch what became Lincoln's U.S. transcontinental development around an Atlantic to the Pacific transportation grid. The U.S. transcontinental rail system inspired imitation among the patriots of Japan, China, Russia, Germany, and others.
That U.S.-modelled Eurasian land-bridge policy implied a kind development of the land-area of Eurasia which would have led to the disintegration of the British-dominated colonial system, and the general adoption of the American System of political-economy, of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, the Careys, and Friedrich List, as the emerging world system of national political economies.
Edward VII and his assets were determined to end that threat to the British Empire's world-hegemony, by putting each of the partners in Eurasian cooperation at each other's throats, the British policy which caused World War I. The process leading to World War I began in France, during the 1890s, with the Dreyfus case and the ensuing emergence of Britain's factional allies to power in that country, through events such as Fashoda and the establishment of the Entente Cordiale under Edward VII. The Entente Cordiale, combined with British and French orchestration of the Balkan Wars of the pre-World War I period, created the London-Paris-Russia alliance which organized the launching of World War I. Meanwhile, the assassination of U.S. President William McKinley, resulted in the U.S.'s turn away from all of the U.S.'s traditional friends and allies in Eurasia, and the Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson committed to alliance with Britain's Entente Cordiale against Germany.
The truth of King Edward's plan for war could not be honestly stated openly by the leading political circles of Britain, France, and the U.S.A. An esoteric myth had to be created as an ideological pretext. That esoteric pretext was the neo-physiocratic myth of "geopolitics."
That same purpose lies behind the policies of such minions of Prime Minister Tony Blair's British Commonwealth as today's U.S. Principals' Committee majority and the contributors to Foreign Affairs quarterly. Nineteenth-Century Britain spoke more plainly than today's Principals' Committee. Old Britain called their motive "the Empire." Today's imperialists call it "globalization."
The issue which has always separated the self-interests of what became the United States and American patriots from the British monarchy, since the accession of King George I to the then newly-established throne of the United Kingdom, at the death of Queen Anne, has been two opposite, fundamentally irreconcilable conceptions of man and nature.
One, the British monarchy's view, is rooted in the Physiocratic perversion, as typified by the esoteric, pro-feudalist laissez-faire dogma of the notorious Dr. François Quesnay; that Physiocratic dogma typifies the origins of the lunatic way of thinking about geography which is called "geopolitics." The opposing view, that of Benjamin Franklin, and all American patriots today, is the Mosaic conception, of each man and woman as made in the image of the Creator, to exert dominion within the universe.
The fighting issue, from the present British monarchy's side, is the fact that a world based on the participation of every person in the benefits of scientific and technological progress, constitutes a world in which the British financier-oligarchy and its servile lackeys do not choose to live. That was the issue of the American Revolution; that was the issue of the U.S. Civil War. That was the British monarchy's motive in its unfortunately successful efforts to create World War I. That was the British motive for putting Adolf Hitler into power in Germany, in January 1933, thus orchestrating the war which destroyed any foreseeable future threat to British interests from continental western Europe. That is what the British monarchy's Blair government is doing, in concert with the pack of dangerous fools gathered around the pathetic Vice-President Al Gore's faction within the Principals' Committee. That is what the late Averell Harriman's war-mongering servile lackey, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is preaching to his protégé Secretary Madeleine Albright, et al., today.
For anti-science freak Al Gore and his co-non-thinkers, the issue is to stop all scientific and technological progress everywhere in this planet. (As the collapse of LTCM illustrates, the Black-Scholes notion of "information theory" is in direct opposition to both scientific and economic progress.) The development of the vast, undeveloped regions of Central Asia, using the strategy developed by List and others for the U.S. transcontinental railway system, means a profusion of scientific and technological progress throughout, and beyond the Eurasia land-mass.
The result must be the greatest outpouring of machine-tool and related production from the U.S.A., western Europe, and the former Soviet scientific-military-industrial complex, into the vast, growing markets for technology-driven increases in the per-capita productive powers of labor throughout South and East Asia, a growth extended into the Middle East, Africa, and a rebirth of the savagely looted nations of Central and South America.
The educational and related development of the whole population of these regions, means an uplifting of the mental state and well-being of the human individual. It means development of the individual in ways consistent with the notion of each and every man and woman made equally in the image of the Creator, qualified equally to participate in the fruits of reason leading to mankind's progressive dominion within the universe. This splendid result is precisely what the British monarchy will not tolerate. Their reaction is: "Better the apocalypse!" Their servile lackeys, the Tony Blairs and Al Gores of the world, are prepared to act in ways which might bring about just such an apocalypse, this time world-wide.
It is not the land-mass of Eurasia which offends madmen such as Brzezinski. What frightens them, is the fear that that land-mass might be developed in such ways that the world as a whole would find no room for the continued power of such a disgusting anachronism as the present British monarchy and its proposed "new, globalized Tower of Babel," its new version of the old Babylonian, Roman, Byzantine, and British empires. That has always been, and remains the purpose behind the babbling about "geopolitics."
It is past time to get all self-professed "geopoliticians" out of places of influence in our republic's policy-shaping.
[1] For the benefit of readers not familiar with this subject, the following advice will probably be sufficient here. There are three elementary types of geometries: those of, respectively, (a) zero-curvature, (b) constant curvature, and (c) non-constant, but regular curvature. From no later than the ancient civilized Greeks until Kepler, relatively competent, real-world, non-deductive, geometries were based upon the simple physical geometries of solar-astronomical calendars and oceanic astro-navigation. Kepler's discoveries introduced geometries of non-constant curvature, which became the basis for Leibniz's discovery of the calculus based upon Kepler's posing of this challenge. The successive work of Gauss and Riemann defined all competent mathematical physics after them, as conditional upon forms of hypergeometry known as expanding systems of multiply-connected manifolds. Geometries of zero-curvature, such as Descartes' model, or that formerly commonplace in secondary school classrooms, are properly used only to introduce the subject of geometry to novices; they have no consistency with actual physical systems. Notably, the definitions, axioms, and postulates of a classroom geometry, or the writings of a Descartes or Immanuel Kant, are all false, since they are based upon arbitrary, false intuitions about space, time, etc., intuitions which have no correspondence to the functional characteristics of the real universe.
