From Volume 3, Issue Number 34 of EIR Online, Published Aug. 24, 2004

Latest From LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche wrote this Foreword for the about-to-be released Children of Satan book:

The Doom of the Would-Be Gods of Babylon

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. — August 14, 2004

Already, with the ugly impasse which erupted around the abortive U.S. Presidential election of November 7, 2000, there was the smell of an ominous sickness in not only the U.S.A., but a sickness of the U.S.A. as the capstone of a self-doomed world monetary-financial system. Now, nearly four years since that mis-election, the words I spoke shortly prior to the actual January 2001 inauguration of President George W. Bush, Jr. must seem prophetic to all whose memories are sufficiently lucid to remind them of my words.

Unless we mend our ways, unless our republic ceases doing what it has been mostly doing during the recent four years, we are indeed at the very edge of a chasm of ruin and despair such as has been unknown to today's globally extended European civilization since the great New Dark Age which wiped out half the parishes of Europe, and one-third of the level of its population, during the middle of the Fourteenth Century.

You, the citizen, are not faced with a choice between candidates; you are faced with a choice of plunging into doom under the incumbent administration, and the possibility that we might not merely survive, but might actually do well under the incumbent's prompt replacement. The choice of the current administration, is unthinkable for thinking men and women.

Especially in times of crisis, such as these, the task of a scientist-statesman, which I am, is not to dazzle with mystification, as our all-too-numerous, self-important academic asses are wont to do, but to educate the constituency and leaders of the nation, to show them their folly, to induce them to mend their sorry ways. It is to be the stern teacher, to make clear to those who must learn to survive, that which they now, urgently, need to know.

Therefore, my duty, formerly as a Presidential pre-candidate, and now as one working to bring a new Presidential administration into being, is to make clear to as many of our citizens as are prepared to listen to reason, to come to understand how we, the greatest nation yet to exist on this planet, could have brought about our own destruction, in the way we have done, during, especially, the recent forty years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the lunacy of the launching of the official U.S. war in Indo-China.

Many citizens, both of my generation and the generation presently occupying most leading positions in private and public life, recognize the folly of having entered that former war. The problem has been, that even they have rarely understood, exactly what it was, which we as a nation did to ourselves, to bring us into the gruesome mess of our nation and its international relations today.

So, I created the series of widely circulated reports, on the subject of "The Beast Men," "The Children of Satan," crafted and issued during the course of the 2004 Presidential primary campaigns.

How did we change, from being greatest producer-nation of the world, to becoming something like the decadent Roman Empire, a nation of "bread and circuses" subsisting on the cheap labor of foreign nations, especially the poorest, while destroying the great productive power we used to represent forty years ago?

Who caused us to do this to our nation, and to ourselves? How did it happen? Why, under the present administration, do we lurch from bad to worse, even, now, to the brink of a self-inflicted doom? What must we understand, if we are now to pull back from the brink, before it becomes already too late for all of our presently living generations today?

The greatest danger today, is that sheer stubbornness of people, which causes them to blame a few leaders for the mistaken opinions for which the people in general either voted, or did not bother to vote against. We are a democracy, for whatever that means in fact. We have the power to vote, unless that power is taken away from us, by computer-voting fraud, or other means, between now and the November election.

The way in which we use, or neglect that power decides our fate as a nation. The first step toward sanity and morality for our citizens today, is to blame themselves for the choices of policy which they have either made or tolerated. It was the votes, combined with the non-votes of the morally irresponsible professional underlings known as abstainers, which expressed, chiefly, those wrong ideas about policy which made possible the recent forty years' transformation of the world's greatest and wealthiest productive power into the tattered ruin we are today. Unless the people are willing to reconsider their habituated prejudices now, the chances for our nation's survival, even in the short term, are little or none. We have now come to the end of the road, to the edge of the chasm, where the road ends for all but our legendary lemmings.

So, I have chosen to "kick against the pricks," to tell the unpopular truths about the way in which the majority of public opinion, as more or less than lack of truly competent leaders, has led our nation into the present catastrophe. Unless the majority of our people are willing to change their political behavior on that account, there is little chance for a happy future for this nation. A nation in which so many people would tolerate the ideas of a New Gingrich for as long as ours did, could not be considered either moral, or entirely sane.

The following pages, which some should read again, and many for the first time, point the way to understanding what must be understood if we as a nation are to pull back from the brink toward which we are lurching, in time to save not only ourselves, but generations yet to come.

* * * * *

BOOK REVIEW

Lacey Baldwin Smith; Henry VIII: The Mask of Royalty; (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971, 328 pages, hardcover) (out of print); $17.95

Even a Bad Book Is Useful—Sometimes

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The sum of the parts, is sometimes worse than the whole. More than thirty years ago, a certain Professor Lacey Baldwin Smith wrote a book about the mind of England's lunatic King Henry VIIl; the author left out the part about history. The trouble was, Professor Smith obviously had overdosed on an intellectually fatal dose of empiricism. The result of this labor of his was not worth much except as an object-lesson which contemporary critics and politicians need very much, even, today, desperately, to learn.

That case typifies a common source of incompetence in the closely related fields of history and political and scientific intelligence.

For this present report of mine on the case of that book, you may blame one of my German physicians, who advised me: "Ausklinken," break my intense and sustained work-routine from time to time. So, from time to time. I pick up and read a book which is selected because it promises to be an entertaining, and, hopefully, enriching diversion from my customary work. So, on this account, I laid hands on Professor Baldwin's 1971 book. Now, "ausklinken" or no, I shall not rest from my work-a-day habits until I have unburdened myself of the relevant, important observation which my work-a-day clientele requires of me.

Like his Spanish predecessor, Tomas de Torquemada, England's Henry VIII was a beast-man, and deserving, on that account, of the special quality of admiration of the spiritual great-grandfather of Adolf Hitler, Count Joseph de Maistre, as also meriting the burning hatred of the Grand Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Henry was a monstrous fanatic in the same mold as such among our contemporary brutes as the incumbent U.S. Attorney-General Ashcroft, Vice-President Cheney, and President Dubya. Intellectually, of course, Henry VIII, although also a lunatic, was, as Professor Smith insisted, an intellectual giant among lunatics, when compared to the trivial talents of any among the latter three; but, as might be said comparable of man-eating tigers, as beast-man is a beast-man, even if he has but three claws, and two eye-teeth remaining, whatever his notable relevant intelligent quotient.

That author's failure, in composing that book as a whole, is a systemic fallacy of a type associated with what I have frequently identified as the "fishbowl syndrome." By "fishbowl syndrome," I mean the adoption of an implied set of implicitly self-evident definitions, axioms, and postulates, a set of assumptions which locates his opinions and actions outside the real universe in which the determining action of the process is actually located. He adopts implicitly, a set of axiomatic-like assumptions about his subject-area, and then seeks to pose explanations of developments within that "fishbowl," by excluding those actually determining features of Sixteenth-Century European history which he has systemically excluded from his study. His choice of area is comparable to discussing the behavior among species of fish without taking into account the existence of water.

First of all, Professor Smith ignores the crucial category of European civilization, which is to say the environment within which the interactions between Henry VIII and his times are situated. Second, he, in effect, attempts to refine his notion of the nature of Sixteenth-Century Europeans from the transactions involving Henry VIII, rather than the actions within immediately preceding and contemporary European civilization upon the person and social environment of Henry. Third, he leaves out the principal, efficient actors within the scene he describes, the Venetian party which was the continuing principal influence on the history of England since the time of the Norman Conquest; that is a portion of world history without which no competent assessment of the principal developments of Sixteenth-Century England were possible.

Thus, he misses the essential clue to the most notable of the specific traits of Henry's defective character, his role as an echo of the worst beast-man of the immediately preceding two generations of European history, the Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada. He misses the surge of religious warfare out of the effects of Torquemada's bestiality, a bestiality which was a model for the pandemic of religious warfare dominating all of Europe, including Henry VIII's and his successors' England, over the interval which some historians have classed as "a little new dark age," from 1511 until the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. It was a form of religious warfare epitomized in the role of certifiable, mass-murderous, religious lunatics, including the President, his Attorney-General, and his Vice-President, in the current U.S. Cheney-Bush administration (that is, to put the name of the ventriloquist, properly, before the name of his dummy).

Since the contrast between the democratic policies of Solon of Athens and those of Lycurgan Spartan slave-society, since the pre-Aristotelean science of Thales, the Pythagoreans, and Plato, until today, the characteristic feature of globally extended European civilization has been the resistance against forms of society, such as slavery, in which some people degrade other people to the condition of herded or hunted human cattle. Since the tragic doom of ancient Athens which launched an imperial Peloponnesian War, to the present day, the struggle to free people from the imposed conditions of herded or hunted cattle, has been a conflict between empires and constitutional republics premised on the natural-law principle of the supremacy of the general welfare.

To make the point clearer, state it in another way.

What Is Human?

The essential difference between man and beast, is that mankind is capable of willful increase of his species' potential relative population-density, an increase effected through the application of the discovery of pre-existing, but previously unknown, experimentally validated universal physical, or equivalent principles. Those changes, through which the potential relative population-density of our species is increased, have the effect of the upward evolution of the human species without aid of any change in biological specificity.

Through these hypothesis-driven upgradings of the specific power of the human individual and his species, man acts is a specifically human way upon the universe. It is those changes in the expressed specific quality of man in society, which constitute the elementary notion of a specifically human quality of action, as distinct from that of any lower species.

The history of society, and of human societies, is defined in an meaningful functional sense, by the way in which societies promote, or fail to promote such improvements in the potential relative population-density of the members of our species. In the history of European civilization, the most characteristic issue is the struggle of the human spirit to throw off the burden of arrangements under which some people subject a greater number of the people to the status of herded or hunted human cattle.

Typical of the modern argument in favor of such degradation of the majority of mankind, is the Physiocratic dogma of Dr. Francois Quesnay, a dogma which the plagiarist Adam Smith plundered for his own 1776 attack on the U.S. Declaration of Independence, in Smith's so-called The Wealth of Nations. Quesnay, like Adam Smith after him, and the pro-Satanist Bernard Mandeville before that Smith, insisted that the physical profit (gain) of the estate was the miraculous fruit of the landlord's patent claim on an aristocratic title, and that the farmers and the like who worked the estate were no different, in economic and social function, than a human form of cattle.

In the long sweep of European history, from the Peloponnesian War until the founding of the modern form of sovereign nation-state republic, during the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, the great majority of humanity was kept in the status of human cattle, to be herded or hunted as the Roman Empire, and the feudal system of Venice's partnership with the Norman chivalry characterized most of the history of all parts of Europe during the nearly half-millenium preceding the Renaissance. The struggle for the replacement of ultramontane social systems, such as the Roman empires and the Venetian-Norman ultramontane system, was the great struggle for humanity which led into the birth of the modern nation-state, as prescribed by those targets of Venetian usurer's hatred, Dante Alighieri in De Monarchia and, more perfectly, by Nicholas of Cusa in his Concordancia Catholica.

The sovereign nation-state, as pioneered in practice by France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII, is the typification of the liberation of the majority of mankind from the juridical and social-economic condition of mere human cattle. Evil, then as now, is typified by the yearning for some or another form of "globalization" as a replacement for the institution of the sovereign nation-state as best typified today, by the Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution of the U.S.A. Only that form of political society differentiates human beings with actual souls from what are functionally quasi-human beasts.

This is the key to understanding the history of England from approximately the accession of Henry VIII until the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. This is the key for understanding the unique genius of the creation of the U.S. republic up to the present day.

The self-inflicted downfall of the Venetian-Norman system, in the financial-economic collapse expressed as the Fourteenth-Century New Dark Age, weakened the power of the ultramontane form of imperial faction to the degree that the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance became possible. It was the development of European civilization, from the beginning of that Renaissance through that 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which launched a civilized set of relations among the nations and peoples of Europe, which has been the greatest known achievement, in all known history so far, in the improvement of the conditions of mankind on this planet. The essential feature of this revolution otherwise known as modern European civilization, is the systemic effort to elevate all persons to that practical condition of life above that of human cattle which is referenced by the usually misleading, trivializing, term of "individual equality."

That is key for any competent grasp of the role, and stark insanity of beast-man Henry VIII.

The rise of the power, from approximately 1480, of the beast-man Torquemada, as the Grand Inquisitor, corresponds to a resurgence of the ultramontane power of the Venetian-Norman-chivalric system, in a revived Venice's efforts to return Europe to feudal conditions of imperial organization. The sundry schisms, and related religious warfare, of that period, 1480-1648, were the weapon deployed by Venetian agents, such as Cardinal Pole, Thomas Cromwell, and Francesco Zorzi (the king's marriage-counsellor), to bring about the chaos intended to drown Renaissance Europe in its own blood.

The detailed transactions among Henry VIII and his contemporaries are merely a reflection of the principled characteristic of that 1480-1648 interval of globally extended European history: the struggle between the just-emerged modern sovereign nation-state, and the counterrevolutionary efforts of the Venice-orchestrated feudal faction seeking a return to the bestiality of the medieval ultramontane order.

The key figures of Professor Smith's account, are merely actors on the stage of a drama so composed.

Physical Geometry As Science

In modern physical geometry, as typified by the work of Bernard Riemann, no a-priori definitions, axioms, and postulates, or their like, are tolerated. Only experimentally validated hypotheses (universal physical principles, or their like) are allowed to define the determining parameters of action within the corresponding domain. In such a configuration, it is changes in the domain (e.g., change in Heracleitus and Plato's sense) which determine the characteristic form of action with a domain-in-transition, rather than a simply fixed domain.

The collision between Cusa's Concordantia Catholica and founding of modern experimental science, De Docta Ignorantia, on the one side, and the evil typifed by the influence of Venice's Cusa-hating Venetian marriage counsellor to Henry VIII, Francesco Zorzi, typifies the determining axiomatic features of both the entirety of the Sixteenth-Century histories of Spain and the Netherlands (among others), and the specific characteristics of the role of Henry VIII in his society of that time.

In contrast, Professor Lacey Smith's book is an all too typical attempt, among modern so-called historians and political doctrinaires, to locate history as percussive interactions of individuals on a flatland surface, outside the real universe.

As Kepler's uniquely original discovery of universal gravitation illustrates the relevant methodological issue of science: who moves what, and how?

It is only actions which change the physical geometry of the interactions within society, which allow us to situate competently the meaning of the role of interactions among persons in shaping the course of history of and among nations. It is the titanic struggles for change within cultures, within our universe, and the role of the individual as an actor of relevance to those universal features of the struggles, which are the permissible points of reference for the attempt to understand any part of human history, such as the imperilled U.S.A. today.

Henry VIII was thoroughly mad, and essentially an evil person, a beast-man in the same sense of the leading founder of modern fascism, Count Joseph de Maistre adored the beast-man Torquemada. To understand the history of Sixteenth-Century England from the accession of Spain's Charles I, through the accession of William of Orange, the actors must be situated on a stage in which the great civilizing forces of the Fifteenth-Century, Platonic Renaissance, and the pro-ultramontane Aristotelian-empiricist forces of unrepentant imperialism, were either moving the players on the chessboard, or, like Shakespeare and Kepler, working to change the design of the great game,

Professor Lacey Smith's vicious error, of concealing the Venetian factor, is the most important systemic feature of his book, the systemic error which vitiates his efforts at reaching conclusions and related inferences.

Professor Smith's folly is not unique. I have had to combat the same mechanistic blundering even among some notable cases of my own associates, the fact which makes the Professor's blunder notable, more than thirty years later.

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