A NOTRE DAME EVENT:
Don't Ask Obama
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
May 18, 2009
In these times, including the New York Times, the common failure of many highly publicized debates, is that none of the opposing parties, and few among the members of the audience, knew virtually anything worthwhile knowing about the purported subject of that May 17th occasion at Notre Dame University. It was clearly, a lack of knowledge of elementary morality which encouraged them to speak more freely, since they were unencumbered by that burden known as truth. What is actually important about President Barack Obama's appearance at Notre Dame University that day, was his certain, curious kind of innocence of what he had done. He showed no comprehension of the political issues of life-versus-death which he promised to compromise.
Compromise was what he had set upon the table for that occasion, and, indeed, the compromise, his innocence, called, by wiser men, his ignorance, was incarnate in himself. His appearance at that occasion may be therefore compared, figuratively, to the failure of the man in the crowd who got the pin of the hand grenade which he was carrying stuck in the belt of his trousers, and, quite accidentally...
But, then, he had walked on quickly, hearing the noise some seconds later; but, he never told his children, and never knew, himself, how many he had left to die when he had walked away, pausing to admire himself in his reflection in the pool he passed, on that weekend's day.
Compare President Obama's statements of May 17, with Adolf Hitler's decree of September 1, 1939, seventy years earlier, on "lives not worthy to be lived."
Clearly, a novice U.S. President might be excused, if not forgiven, for a certain number of sins of ignorance, or, perhaps, you might be of the opinion that, in this case, it goes the other way around. However that might be, from one case to another, I am neither attacking, nor praising President Barack Obama in this present instance; I am merely pointing to an object, a less than worthless opinion, which he had happened to have dropped, and left behind in passing, on his way to, and from, that place.
The fact is, clearly, President Obama's conduct suggests, that he, like the world's worst drug-pusher, George Soros, is apparently free of the burden of any knowledge of the moral implications of the abortion of a living human foetus. From his reported remarks at Notre Dame that day, he seems not to understand that the human foetus, is not "a thing;" it is not an animal; it is a human being, who, at virtually any stage of life, in, or out of the womb, has a specific, creative potential, that of a quality which does not exist in any other living species. Those who are not accustomed to actually thinking creatively, might have difficulty with that concept. Obviously, Obama did.
The problem with that Notre Dame debate is, that the argument of neither of those contending parties, as told, reported, by the New York Times or The Washington Post, has any affinity at all for that quality of inborn creativity, which actually distinguishes the human individual from the beasts. Morever, neither of them, or anyone like them, has shown the slightest intellectual grasp of what actual human creativity is. The evidence supplied by the habitually hollow sophistry prescribed by the example of The New York Times' style book, will serve, on this occasion, as illustration of my point (not to speak of my personal experience with the product of the Washington—ugh!Post).
No elaborate inference is required to demonstrate that President Obama lacks an efficient quality of actual knowledge of the potentialities inherent in the human foetus (and also unadulterated voters). He talked, but, as we have often seen with him of late, in respect to matters of principle, there is no credible evidence that he had an actual conception of the implications of what he was talking about. Often, we find, that some Harvard lawyers these days are trained to think like that, especially Harvard lawyers who have been close to Larry Summers; in his speaking as a lawyer on that occasion, he enjoyed what some might consider the exculpatory advantage of innocence of any actual knowledge of that subject, theology, on which was speaking. He might seek to claim innocence on the grounds of stupidity. For the President, in this matter, the mere form of the implied debate was everything, and the content, for him, was nothing.
Of such compositions by that President, as the Times and Post described that occasion's event at Notre Dame University, we must cry out, as Lord Byron might: what shall we say of such a poet and his press reviewers now?[1]
What Went Wrong With Religion?
In matters bearing on the policies of governments, let us not speak of religious denominations. Rather, let us look at the nature and history of the legacy of European governments since the time of the contemporaries of the Jesus of Nazareth who was born in the time of the reign of that Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar who had allied himself with the priests of Mithra cult. Jesus was murdered by crucifixion, under the specific authority conferred upon Pontius Pilate by the latter's virtual father-in-law, that monstrous habitué of the Isle of Capri, Tiberius. Such were the times of the similarly murdered Apostles Peter and Paul, and also the time of the most beloved Apostle John.
The bearers of that Christian heritage, shared a certain wisdom with the wise person, considered a great scholar of the Hebrew faith from that same time, Philo of Alexandria, Philo's attack on Aristotle, in defense of the Creator's power of creativity, went to the core of what became the heritage of European civilization, still today. It was men and women of that legacy who gave birth to what has become the constitutional order of the United States traced to the Winthrops and Mathers of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts today.
Put to one side those sundry contemporary interpretations of Christian doctrine which appeal more to the ignorance of the faithful than the wisdom of the Creator. Seek more solid ground for a judgment on a luminary figure such as our President. Look instead, at the verifiable legacy of the Christian faith and what it shares from its origins with the commitment of Philo of Alexandria. Our republic defined itself as Christian; therefore, look at the follies of the recent event at Notre Dame University in terms of what we know of the legacy which one might presume should be shared by those assembled, thus, at that university, or perhaps, a much better one, more like the Harvard of Increase Mather, today.
Then, ask and answer the question: What is the meaning of the immortality of the soul of the mortal human individual? What, therefore, are we killing when a child in the womb is killed by whim? Or, similarly, later? What is the difference of the death of the child, in the womb or later, and the death of the animal? You will not find the answer to that in Silicon Valley!
Therefore, instead of the tiresome labor of disputing scripture with sententious theological idiots, simply ask and answer the question, what is the creativity of the human individual which separates the death of the child from the death of a beast, or, on the contrary, of a soldier in war, or of the person who is murdered, in point of fact, by that withholding of the medical care which might have preserved that human life which President Obama's proposed policies now propose? Instead of splitting hairs over the words of scripture, answer that clear fact.
Do you know what human creativity means? I have seen no evidence that President Obama has even a glimmer of such precious knowledge; thus, what could he possibly know of the human soul, or, therefore, the killing of a living child in the womb? "What is Hecuba?" Certainly, his currently proposed health-care policies, which are explicitly echoes of the exact-same policy of genocide which Adolf Hitler dictated as the German law dated from September 1, 1939, have no agreement with what civilized societies call law.
The issue is not the death of the innocent itself; you errant creatures shall not be let off so easily! The Satanic quality of what President Obama's Behavioral psychologists present as their Hitler-echoing "health-care policy," lies not in the killing itself, but in the nature of the intention which the uttered doctrine of Peter Orszag and that faithless "Big Wheel," Ezekiel Emanuel typifies. There is an essential difference in moral principle, in death inflicted in combat, or by negligence, or if ordinary murder, and the willful extinguishing of the soul of the innocent person, either for reason of malice, or so-called economic convenience. There is a wide and deep moral gulf between the argument for the cause of death imposed by intent or by willful negligence, which President Obama defended at Notre Dame, and the death, even the murder of persons, for other causes.
Nor, is there an ordinary sort of punishment for such an act.
The essential nature of the crimes which Orszag and others have presented to President Obama as their wicked intention, must, of course, be confessed to be the fruit of their intention; but, the nature of the offense does not lie in the death itself, but in the evil of the Hitler-like intention which Orszag and his dupes and other accomplices represent as their intended design of the relevant form of proposed law. The evil lies in the legislator who permits such laws to be enacted. The essential evil lies in its true origin, in the intention of the perpetrator, not the act by the individual person, but the fault of the consensual law of that society.
The fault lies, essentially with those churches and the policies of the society which generates the general opinion which the individual act merely expresses. The root of the problem, and also the remedy, lies not in the individual member of society, but, rather the fault, to the extent it exists, lies on the shoulders of the leading molders of public opinions and law. It lies, for example, on those who promote that impoverishment of the people, as the current economic policies uttered by President Barack Obama prevent certain of the typical classes of remedies which might be available. Therein, similarly, in the economic and related dynamics of the general policy, including the general morality of the state, is wherein the remedy lies, a remedy beyond the means of control by the mere individual person as such.
It is the society, not the mere individual, who must be considered accountable.
For the sake of his own soul, that poor fellow, that poor heathen, President Obama must, especially, think about that.
'How Green Was His Valley?'
There are, chiefly, two aspects of the current policy of the Obama government which tend to demand that the President promote the increased misery of the generality of our nation and its citizens. First, he allows the great theft by what is called "Wall Street" and also its likeness around the world. To pay for this immorality of current policies of the most powerful governments generally, including Obama's own, the poor are intended to pay by Obama's adoption of policies which will increase their pain and misery and shorten their lives. Second, he supports a lying and bestial cult-belief, expressed as "cap and trade," which drives the economies which tolerate such a swindle into greatly increased economic ruin; this ruinous policy will kill our citizens, and those of other nations, in vast numbers. To support that fraudulent policy, the President is, so far, disposed to drive the greatest portion of our own and other populations into vastly increased suffering and death-rates.
Neither the U.S. Government, nor its officials, can consider themselves the faithful moral servants of the general welfare of our people, a general welfare which is mandatory under our fundamental law, if they promote, or even tolerate either those policies or their effects. The promotion, or even the toleration of such policies, is inherently immoral, and, under our Constitution, impeachable. Speaker Nancy Pelosi's complicity in the effort to bury the relevant idea of a "Pecora Commission" in the same political graveyard as the ill-fated hoax of "The Warren Commission," or "9-11," is typical of the principle involved.
The underlying systemic problem in the making of law which thus confronts us here, is that, whereas, the Constitutional law of the United States, as in both the Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution, was derived from the specific principles of dynamics introduced to modern society by Gottfried Leibniz, yet much of the flawed law practiced by our government and its lawmakers and courts since is based on the entirely contrary, scientifically incompetent doctrine and method typified by the teaching of the science-incompetent Rene Descartes, and such depraved followers of that Descartes as Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments—1759) and the British Foreign Office's Jeremy Bentham (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation—1781/1789).
Like Descartes' pseudo-scientific method, the British empiricist dogma, to the present day, as also that of the typical Wall Street ideologue, is premised on the depraved notion of the human individual as being merely an object engaged in statistical forms of kinematic interaction with other bumpable objects in otherwise empty space. It is a cardinal principle of the empiricist method derived from such precedents as the Ockhamite dogma of Paolo Sarpi and Rene Descartes, that there is no actual, knowable morality in society, other than bumps and grinds of the kinematic encounters among the mere particles of empty space (and also virtually empty heads) of Paolo Sarpi's system of government and Venetian finance. That Sarpian heritage is the doctrine of the empire of the British East India Company, and of British empiricism doctrine and notions of law against which our republic fought, since the February 1763 Peace of Paris, for independence from the evil which that British imperial system represented as depravity then, and its imperial murder and thievery of today.
The morality of any decent republic, and, therefore, its law, recognizes that the connection between the individual and the society is dynamic, not kinematic. It is the function of the state dedicated to those principles on which our republic was founded, in bloody opposition to British empiricist degradation, that the state is responsible for creating those preconditions of law through aid of which the moral objectives of the true republic are reached in effect. It is the way in which we compose the actualized constitution of our republic, which must create those conditions which are necessary, but beyond the control of the individual citizen, or even a large portion of that population.
It is, therefore, within the bounds of the necessary, constitutional commitment to the fostering of the scientific and related progress of the condition of present and future generations, and their individuals, that the practical realization of the necessary moral conditions of life of the individual and the larger body of society is attained and defended.
The distinction of man from beast, on which the sacredness of the life of the individual human foetus, or born person depends for its protection from the actions of its adversaries, lies in the society's devotion to the distinction of man from beast, which lies, uniquely, in not only the existence, but the promotion of what are those creative powers of the human individual mind which are the essential, and only distinction of man from beast among living human individuals.
Of such matters, President Barack Obama either knows nothing of his most essential moral responsibilities, or has chosen to ignore those responsibilities, for one reason or another.
Therefore, in numerous ways in his recent behavior in office, especially since his pilgrimage to worship objects in Buckingham Palace, he has acted with indifference to the violations of morality, and therefore constitutional principles of our law, which are, in particular, specific to the creation and progress of the existence of our republic. There lies the essential practical issue; there lies the issue of proper law and its practice,
In Defense of Creativity
When we speak of the human mind, we are referring to the "fire" which the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound had banned. "Fire," such as the presently indispensable reliance on the use of the power of high energy-flux-density. That means power on the level of the standard set by the nuclear-fission power, on which the continued existence of the present level of population of our planet now depends. No "alternative," low energy-flux-density alternatives exist, or ever will exist. The right of every society to its own use of the benefits of nuclear-fission, and also higher qualities when they become available, is as essential as the availability of a quality of health-care which President Obama's administration is presently, and passionately, determined to destroy.
The alternative to a pro-nuclear-power policy, would become genocide on the scale of billions of human deaths. The use of nuclear power, in and of itself, is not a moral issue, but the denial of its use is comparable to the genocide, and related effects, caused by the policies of Adolf Hitler, the willful cause of the needless death of billions of the people of this planet, soon. So, if President Obama's health-care policies could cause even billions of avoidable early deaths, what of it? His policies of "sun and wind" would tend to have the same effect.
Wind or killer pills, the fact remains, that the policies presently pushed foremost by the Obama administration up to this point, are policies respecting health care which are just as mass-murderous in the near term today as Adolf Hitler's were between September 1939 and May 1945.
Which brings us back to the event at Notre Dame.
[1] Should such debaters bring to our mind what Shakespeare's Doll Tearsheet, who was honest in her certain way, said of Ancient Pistol?
You a captain! you slave for what? For tearing a poor whore's ruff in a bawdy house? 'He's a captain!' hang him, rogue. He lives on mouldy stewed prunes and dried cakes. 'A captain!' God's light, these rogues will make the word as odious as the word 'occupy,' which was a wondrous good word before it fell into bad company; therefore, captains had need look to it.
