by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

July 31, 2000

At the close of July, it appears from reading the U.S. mass media, that there are only two leading U.S. Presidential candidates currently in sight for the November 2000 elections: the perennially unelectable Al Hitler, and current front-runner, the murderous Maledetto Busholini.

Put aside the possibility that the sheer horror of seeing those two as the only "mainstream" choices, may carry a Pat Buchanan or a Ralph Nader to the point of hanging the Electoral College's certifying the election of the next President. Put aside the obvious implication of the pre-designation of "technician" Dick Cheney as Bush's Vice-Presidential running-mate, that Bush's Wall Street backers foresee a catastrophic defeat of Gore as an assured certainty. How could this nation have come to the point, that the only visible "front-runners" for U.S. President are not merely emotional and intellectual cripples unsuited even to understand the crisis looming before them, but are hide-bound fascists in the strictest definition of those terms?

What is wrong with you, the citizens, that you could not rally behind actually qualified alternative candidates long before this stage of the matter was reached?

This characterization of Hitler-Gore as categorically a fascist, is not based merely upon the Democratic National Committee's racist initiatives in nullifying the 1965 Voting Rights Act, nor the goon-squad style exhibited once again at the Cleveland Platform ritual, nor is it based upon the way in which one poor Party lackey after another queued at the microphone, to deliver a pledge of mindless devotion to "our great leader" Hitler-Gore.

In the case of Gore, the use of the term "fascist" is required by the combined content and lack of content of the Gore-dictated Party Platform. Granted, the Democratic Party's Los Angeles convention is already modelled upon a Hitler-style Nuremberg rally; but, it is that Platform, and the way in which it was brought into being at that Cleveland affair, which has already shocked increasing numbers of Democratic Party veterans into facing the evidence, that in Gore's candidacy there are qualities common to such avowed modern neo-Caesars as the fascists Napoleon Bonaparte, Benito Mussolini, and Hitler.

Unfortunately, the term "fascist" has come to be misused for all sorts of silly purposes, either as generic for anti-communists, or for any person who criticizes the morals of the assassins of Israel's Prime Minister Rabin. The term, as defined by Mussolini, and as that meaning was copied and practiced by Adolf Hitler, is scientifically, historically precise. As the world should have learned from the way in which certain British and New York financier circles acted jointly to bring Hitler to power in Germany in January 1933, the indispensable first step toward effectively opposing fascist movements, is to define their specific qualities accurately. The current political trends inside the U.S. generally, and in Washington, D.C., in particular, are a time to use that term with the precision the presently looming dangers demand.

I turn now to summarize a strict historical and scientific definition of the phenomenon called fascism, as this developed, in the form of Bonapartism, out of the Jacobin Terror of 1789-1794 France. That done, I then compare the cases of the programs of fascists such as Gore and Bush, with their most relevant predecessors, the two Emperors Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler.

What Is Fascism, Historically?

Fascism is a specific form of modern development within globally extended European civilization. The context in which fascism emerged as a "bonapartist" form of modern political movement and system, is the millennia-long conflict between Christianity and the Greek Classical legacy, on the one side, and, the tradition of pagan Rome, especially imperial Rome, which has been continued for more than two thousand years as what is commonly called Romanticism.

As any literate person should recognize immediately, the key to understanding fascism is to recognize the essentials of the specific conflict between the Christian Classical tradition on the one side, and the Romantic legacy of pagan Rome, on the opposing side. The issue between these two opposing forces within European culture, the opposition of the Christian and Classical to the Romantic, is a fundamental, axiomatic difference respecting the functional definition of human nature.

The Christian principle is identified by the Mosaic principle set forth in the concluding verses of Genesis I, that mankind is set apart from and above all other living creatures by that quality of the human mind through which man is able to increase his species' power in and over the universe. As a matter of scientific fact, this distinguishing quality is the power of cognition; that is, the power to discover new validatable universal physical principles, and to evoke the same experience of discovery of true ideas in other persons. On this account, scientifically, man is made in the image of what Plato identified as the Composer of the universe; on that account, man must treat all other persons according to the recognition of that special quality universal to human nature.

In other words, government can have no lawful moral authority to rule, except as it uses its power as government, efficiently, to ensure the promotion of the general welfare of all persons, both the living and their posterity. Notably, on this account, the welfare-reform policies, and criminal-justice policies, of both Gore and Bush are virtually indistinguishable on principle. This is not accidental; both candidates, and accomplices like Al From, are devout adversaries of Christianity, the Declaration of Independence, and the fundamental law--the Preamble--of the Constitution on just these accounts. In fact, there is nothing in the views of those candidacies, on those matters, which differs in principle from the health and welfare and criminal-justice policies of a 1930s Adolf Hitler.

The tradition of pagan Rome, like that of ancient Sparta and the Delphic cult of the Pythian Apollo, rejects such definitions of human nature and human relations under government. In the Romantic tradition, man is degraded to a condition in which some mere beasts, like the ruling caste of Sparta and the Senate of ancient Rome, rule over human cattle. In the specific legacy of pagan Rome, the plebeians were a form of cattle controlled through a blend of mythologies and popular opinion. In turn, on a lower level, were the slaves and quasi-slaves. The image of Roman plebeians, cheering the slaughter of Christians by Nero's lions, and turning thumbs down on the human cattle, like contestants in the modern arena, called gladiators. This system of Romantic immorality was called vox populi (popular opinion) and the name for those induced to adopt such irrational opinions was populari, signifying, in Latin, "the predators."

The Romantic legacy was standardized afresh in the notorious Code of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, the Diocletian who also codified the separation of the Roman Empire into a Latin and Byzantine division. That form of Romanticism was prevalent under feudalism, until the revival of the Classical Greek form of cultural tradition, in Italy, during the great Renaissance of the Fifteenth Century. It was that Renaissance which produced the launching of the modern form of sovereign nation-state, the greatest single contribution to progress of humanity since ancient Greece and the mission of the Christian apostles. Since that Renaissance, the internal history of globally extended European civilization, has been a continued back-and-forth battle between the forces of the Christian Classical and the opposing Romantic currents of culture.

Fascism is a specific outgrowth of Romantic development, dating from the aftermath of the victory of the American Revolution over its mortal enemy, the British monarchy. It was in the specific circumstances created by London's (Foreign Office secret-intelligence chief Jeremy Bentham) directed, anti-American venture, the 1789-1794 Jacobin Terror and its immediate aftermath, that a specifically fascist insurgency erupted around the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte and the installation of pagan Romanticism in the form of the Code Napoléon. Like Mussolini and Hitler later, Napoleon looked to the pagan Rome of the Caesars for both his religious policy of crowning himself Pontifex Maximus (e.g., as an echo of a "Sun King") and establishing (temporarily) a form of empire, based upon systemic looting of subject peoples, intended to re-establish himself as the new Emperor Augustus. Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, as Mussolini, Hitler, and Gore's implicit intention, follow the Napoleonic precedent.

Notably, from the middle of the Eighteenth Century, a great Classical cultural revival, based on defense, against Romanticism, of the principles of Leibniz and Bach, was organized, more or less world-wide, around the figures of physicist Abraham Kästner, his student Gotthold Lessing, and Lessing's collaborator Moses Mendelssohn. This international Classical, anti-Romantic movement, formed the core of both the internal organization of the U.S. struggle for independence, and the broad support which the U.S. cause enjoyed throughout Europe.

It was the combination of the British-directed Jacobin Terror of 1789-1794, the consequent isolation of the U.S. from its former allies in Europe, and the post-1803-1806 triumph of Romanticism, in the wake of the Emperor Napoleon's establishing his imperial fascist tyranny, which prompted a wave of deep cultural pessimism, and thus the revival of the pagan legacy of Romanticism in art and science throughout Europe. Thus, no great musical composer has emerged in European civilization globally since the death of Johannes Brahms, and no poet who could match the Classical tradition of the young Goethe, Schiller, and Heine.

The distinction of fascism, which sets it apart from other expressions of Romanticism, is the use of a myth-intoxicated, murderous mob of plebeians, as substitutes for the more traditional institutions associated with Romantic forms of political rule over nations and peoples.

It was the breakdown of French society, as a result of the Jacobin Terror and its aftermath, which created the conditions under which a self-defined "modern Caesar," a fanatical Romantic, replaced temporarily those relatively more traditional ruling institutions of government and party; this made an Emperor Napoleon possible.

It was similar conditions, of the existing government's moral incapacity to rule, which made possible fascism under Mussolini. It was the refusal of the financier oligarchy then ruling the so-called Versailles powers, which decided to bring Hitler into power, as a way of preventing other forms of government from instituting the urgently needed reforms required by the follies of Versailles.

It is the unwillingness of the reigning Anglo-American financier-oligarchical powers of the Queen's own London, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, together with their queenly Wall Street partners, which has prompted them to promote the fascism typified by both the doomed Gore and his victor Bush, for the same reason that earlier fascist experiments and the like have appeared at other times and places during the recent period of now more than two centuries.

Hitler and The Jews

The popularized myth, still today, is that the central feature of Hitler's fascism was its persecution of the Jews. The fixation on the sheer horror of what happened to the Jews of Germany and eastern Europe, especially during the closing years of the war, has blinded many to the premises from which that specific part of the Nazi holocaust against peoples lawfully developed. This blindness could not persist but for a second holocaust, a holocaust of silence, including that by leading Zionist organizations, against the memory of those leading and other followers of Moses Mendelssohn who had contributed a part far exceeding their relative numbers, to the enrichment of the political, scientific, and artistic culture of Europe as a whole, especially Germany itself. When large blank slabs of concrete are used to obscure the memory of even many of those German and Yiddish Renaissance Jews who made crucial contributions to all European civilization, especially during the period since the collaboration of Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, the sensible person is stunned by the sheer horror of the behavior of those who insist upon acres of such blank slabs, instead of the real human beings who were an integral part of the great contributions of European civilization.

Why did Hitler murder those Jews? It is not difficult to find the relevant evidence in the writings of Conservative Revolution forerunners of the Nazis such as Nietzsche, and among the leading Nazis themselves. Why? How could the search for the answer to that awful question be overlooked. Given all of the great blessings which the circles of Moses Mendelssohn brought to Germany, how could any German or Austrian who loved Germany's greatest Classical works of science, art, and political justice, wish to eliminate Jews?

There is a readily available answer. The answer helps understand how Vice-President Al Gore became the fascist he has exposed himself as being today.

Go back to the time of Jesus Christ and his Apostles. Palestine was under the rule of the pagan Roman Empire, that the predecessor of modern fascism. The local arrangement there, as in Norway under Hitler's occupation, was to govern through a pack of the local equivalent of Quislings for that time. In the time of the persecution of Jesus Christ, the relevant Roman Emperor, then reigning from the Isle of Capri, was Tiberius; his son-in-law, Pontius Pilate, was the actual military ruler. In that region, there was a fermenting resistance movement against Roman rule among Jews, Greek-speaking Jews (Hebrew was a dead language at that time). This was not confined to what is recognized as modern Palestine, but included, most emphatically, the eastern Mediterranean littoral, in which the Greek and Hellenistic traditions of literacy were most strongly embedded.

It was not the Jews who killed Christ; it was the Roman Empire. Apart from the mob of Quislings involved in the judicial murder, the generality of the population was in a struggle for independence against the Roman imperial occupation and its Quislings. For the latter, Rome was the "New Babylon," or as the Apostle John describes it, "The Whore of Babylon."

Therefore, that history taken into account, what could a pack of Romantics, such as Adolf Hitler's crew, possibly have against the Jews? Josef Goebbels once summed up the explanation: Hitler's Germany could never forgive the Jews for having given birth to Christianity. Goebbels documented, that Hitler had promised, that once he had won the war in Europe, he would proceed to exterminate the Christians as he was doing to the Jews. How should we read what Goebbels reports as Hitler's policies? Read that philologist Nietzsche, who was, like his follower and Frankfurt School intimate Martin Heidegger, a principal architect of the Nazi myths. In the eyes of Nazism, the crime of the Jews was to have produced Jesus Christ!

Christianity was, and is the twofold enemy of the pagan Roman Empire and its Romantic legacy. It is the enemy of Romanticism, for reason of the importance of Classical Greek culture's contributions to science, art, and statecraft. It is the enemy of Romanticism, because it insists upon the universality of the Mosaic principle that men and women are made in the image of the Creator, and set apart from and above all other living beings and things, as given the power to willfully increase mankind's power in and over the universe. It is that Mosaic legacy, delivered from the lips of Jesus Christ, which implicitly defines Christianity, and, thereby, in defiance of John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich von Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society, implicitly defines the conditions of service to promotion of the general welfare, under which governments may lawfully rule.

Gore's Fascism

There should be no objection to identifying Gore as a fascist, on account of his policies concerning population and general welfare. His and "Dick" Morris' collaboration with "Newt" Gingrich, on "welfare reform," in 1996, and since, exposes the fascist essence of Gore's economic and related doctrines. His push for "globalization" is purely and simply a drive for "universal fascism," as Michael Ledeen and others have documented these connections by name. However, in what sense is Gore also a racist?

Frankly, I do not know what passes through Gore's thoughts when he is confronted by a person he identifies as African-American, for example. I would not insist that he is a co-thinker of President Woodrow Wilson's revived Ku Klux Klan, for example. I know that his economic, social, and criminal-justice policies, like those of the Bush-baby collation, are racist in practice. Watching his knee-jerk responses on such issues, one might say that he is a racist by instinct of practice, if not of the variety predominantly motivated by simple racial prejudices. The kindest we might say of him, is that his racism is of the same mint-julep variety as the Nashville Agrarians, such as Henry A. Kissinger's former mentor, Professor William Yandell Elliot; he does not object to the existence of African-Americans, as long as they do not threaten the utopian perfection of a Nashville Agrarian's sense of the way things ought to become.

In these and other matters, we must hold people responsible for that which they should have known to be truthful and just. No one has the right to hold to a so-called "sincere opinion," in disregard for those standards of truthfulness and justice which Plato presents in the famous dialogue among the characters Socrates, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon. On this account, one might wish to say, truthfully and justly, that Al Hitler, as I have described him here, is, in practice, the kind of fascist Plato presents in the mouth of his character Thrasymachus--even if it is a rather stupid sort of parody of Thrasymachus.

A plaque honoring Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) at the Jewish Middle School for Boys in Berlin. The memory of leading Jewish humanists such as Mendelssohn, has been subjected to a second holocaust, a holocaust of silence--including by leading Zionist organizations.

The Dachau concentration camp. Why did Hitler kill the Jews? Josef Goebbels summed it up: Hitler's Germany could never forgive the Jews for having given birth to Christianity.