From Volume 3, Issue Number 50 of EIR Online, Published Dec. 14, 2004

This Week You Need To Know

TOWARD A SECOND TREATY OF WESTPHALIA

The Coming Eurasian World

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

November 29, 2004

First, let us speak of tragedy.

Let such caricatures of poor King Canute as President George W. Bush, Jr., howl their denials, while they can still be heard. Let him shriek in futile rage against those thunderous winds of chaos which were already hurling themselves against the increasingly bankrupt national financial systems of the world. That chaos, now excited to the greater turbulence caused by the desperate antics of such poor, enraged fools as he, now descends with its own, added, uncontrollable fury upon our hapless, present world monetary-financial system. So, now, just a few weeks following our modern Canute's recent claims of electoral victory, the oncoming waves of a great storm of global breakdown crisis are striking on the gates of the governments of the world, and are already pounding the hoaxster's illusion of Bush's economic recovery to shreds. The terminal breakdown-crisis of the 1971-2004 world monetary system is thus now fully under way.

In that Classical definition of tragedy which takes its origin from ancient Greece, but contrary to the incompetent, Romantic doctrines usually taught in university courses on the subject of drama, a tragedy does not represent a calamity whose primary cause is an error by the current leadership of a society. Rather, both the selection of, and the relevant failures by that leadership are determined by the systemic features of the culture and institutions within which both that selection of leadership, and the forces acting upon its behavior are operating. Such is the U.S. situation today.

Look at the folly of the Peloponnesian War, and learn. As Plato understood, and showed in his dialogues, this was not the mistake of a leader, but of the way in which the behavior of leadership, from Pericles through Thrasymachus, and the Sophists of the Democratic Party of Athens, was governed by the ruling moral degeneracy permeating the leading institutions of the population of Athens during that span of decades. So, it is with the tragic forces which have controlled the step-by-step descent of the U.S.A. and western and central Europe into self-inflicted doom over, especially, the recent four decades. The people whose institutions arranged the selection of the nation's leaders, prefer to blame the leaders, as Romantics do, for the ills of society; they evade the question: Why they did prefer not to choose, or to develop better ones?

So, in the current case of the Bush Administration, the origin of the present crisis is less a product of that Administration, than those U.S.A. institutional forces, including the Democratic Party as much as the Republican, which have shaped the selection and behavior of the leadership and policies and practices of both government and also private institutions during a more immediate period of four decades. Much of the blame for this dates from wrongheaded changes in direction of U.S. policy-making outlook already under way since the regrettable selection of Senator Harry S Truman as a Democratic Party Vice-Presidential candidate in the Summer of 1944.

In an existential crisis, such as the present world situation, which has those or similar attributes of a threatened general breakdown of the system, the danger comes chiefly from the leadership which fails to break with the pre-established policy-shaping trends, the failure to break in the way President Franklin Roosevelt did in his 1932 election-campaign, and in the turnabout in U.S. policy which he introduced beginning his first hours in the Administration. Like fabled King Canute, U.S. President George W. Bush, Jr., has more the character of a piece of noxious flotsam floating on the flood waters of doom, than the true cause of the crisis in which he plays the part of the official First Fool.

The great leader for a time of crisis is one whose selection breaks the rules, those rotten rules which are the relevant expression of the relevant, essential corruption. For that reason, society has tolerated only a relatively few truly great leaders for more than a short time. For example, as in the case of President Charles de Gaulle of France's Fifth Republic after 1963, the way in which bad governments recur or are maintained, is that the relevant leading institutions of society kill or otherwise eliminate capable leaders, even one such as de Gaulle who saved his nation in a time of existential crisis, when his rivals could not; but, who go against the whims of the representatives of the currently leading body of opinion, and are then, first undermined, and, later, ousted by aid of a corrupted majority of popular opinion. As Solon of Athens wrote, such expressions of popular opinion are the true root of Classical tragedy.

It is a virtual rule, that a corrupt popular opinion turns quickly against the leader who rescues that people from the consequences of its own popular follies. So, the French ingratitude to de Gaulle might remind one of a celebrated apostle of France's Nineteenth-Century decadence, who wrote insightfully of the beggar, who attacked savagely the first person who offered the beggar alms.

Traditionally fickle, so-called "democratic" popular opinion sometimes treats the wrong-doers of its nation almost as savagely as it might express ingratitude toward its heroes. In this present state of crisis, nothing that the Bush Administration might have thought were to be its triumphant schemes for the months ahead, will go as planned. Anyone who assumes that Bush's intentions will be carried out as planned, is as much a fool as the doomed Bush himself.

It is typical of that paragon of gutter hypocrisy, Bush, that he is mobilizing now for what he solemnly swore, repeatedly, during the recent televised campaign debates, that he would never do, "privatize Social Security." He is as evil and stupid as a Gila monster, as he moves to reward the poor dupes who voted for him, by sadistically increasing the proportionate tax burdens on those poor, and looting their small pensions, while gleefully cutting the taxes on his friends, the rich, especially the legendary "filthy rich" of such as Enron and Halliburton notoriety.

That folly of his Administration will generate countervailing consequences, probably even the fools' uncalculated ones, like those which soon embraced the five great fools of 1914, the German Kaiser, the Austrian Kaiser, the Russian Czar, and the chauvinism of the British and French populations. So, the spirit of the plagues of ancient Egypt is already descending upon its lawful prey, that modern gutter-Pharaoh's realm.

Nonetheless, in this stormy moment, nothing is settled, except the fact that the greatest monetary-financial crisis in modern history is already buffeting the world. In one way or another, this crisis is already threatening the Bush Administration with an early, self-inflicted doom. Meanwhile, what the actual outcome of this rising tumult might be, remains to be decided: by us, if we can find the will to do so.

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