LaRouche in 2004 For Immediate Release
LAROUCHE IN 2004 ANNOUNCES FIVE HALF-HOUR TV SPOTS
Dec. 24LaRouche in 2004, the campaign committee for Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, today announced that it has lined up five half-hour TV spots, for airing in Washington, D.C. and New England, prior to the D.C. and New Hampshire Democratic primaries.
Combined with the deployment of the LaRouche Youth Movement, the TV spots are geared to catalyzing a mass movement toward the polls for LaRouche, in the Jan. 13 D.C. primary, and the Jan. 27 New Hampshire primary. LaRouche, who has the second-largest base of reported contributions among the Democratic candidates, is planning a major breakout in the Washington, D.C. primary, in particular.
LaRouche's half-hour political advertisement is entitled "The Next President." It will air at the following times:
* Wednesday, Jan. 7, Fox TV, Washington, D.C., 6-6:30 pm.
* Saturday, Jan. 10, WRC-TV Channel 4 NBC, Washington, D.C., 7-7:30 pm.
* Saturday, Jan. 10, WMUR-TV, Manchester, N.H., 7:30-8 pm.
* Sunday, Jan. 11, WMUR-TV, Manchester, N.H., 2:30-3 pm.
* Tuesday, Jan. 20, WBZ-TV, Boston, Massachusetts, 7:30-8 pm.
Open Letter to the DNC and Presidential Candidates
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Dec. 24, 2003
There are five leading crises immediately facing the nation, and, therefore, the present leadership of the Democratic Party:
1. The world is sliding over the crumbling brink of a global breakdown of the present floating-exchange-rate monetary and financial system, a breakdown worse in its practical implications than that of 1928-33.
2. Since the January 2002 State of the Union Address, the United States has been plunging toward a spreading global pattern of asymmetric warfare, only typified by the deteriorating situation in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
3. As a result of the continued toleration of the policies of "preventive nuclear warfare" associated with Vice-President Cheney and the neo-conservatives, the foreign relations of the U.S. have deteriorated at a rate and in a way not seen in the memory of any of us. This state of affairs has undermined the capabilities of our nation to secure the kinds of cooperation demanded by the combination of presently accelerating world economic crisis and the worsening state of military and related affairs.
4. As a result of the continuing shift of the character of the U.S. economy and social structures, away from our former world leadership as a producer society, to our decadent state of internal affairs as a "post-industrial" consumer society, the political system of the U.S. been undermined by a worsening estrangement of the households of the lower 80 percentile of our family-income brackets from the thinking and ranks of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
5. The Democratic Party's bungling of the 2000 general election, and the 2002 mid-term election, especially the preceding and present Presidential campaign, threatens to plunge the nation into a protracted period of Republican, one-party rule, in fact. Under present domestic and world-crisis conditions, a continuation of that trend of the 1996 and 2000 campaigns through 2004, would, in point of fact, threaten the continued existence of our system of constitutional self-government.
There are also correlated problems to consider. The following are only typical.
The case of the currently leading position of the obviously politically fragile Gov. Howard Dean, would not have been possible unless the Democratic National Committee's handling of its approved list of Presidential candidates had not created the political vacuum into which the inherently unstable Dean candidacy was virtually sucked in.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party leadership's practice of even ordinary electoral mechanics loses the party campaign after campaign, on the state and local, as well as, in 2000, the national level. Whereas, the Florida Republican Party had done its homework in preparing for the processing of the write-in ballots for the 2000 election, the Democrats, with their negligence, flubbed the Florida campaign for, largely, that and kindred reasons. This is not to speak of the Gore-Lieberman campaign's failing to win the national Electoral College in the readily available Arkansas, which would have made the issue of the Florida tally irrelevant. The same negligence of elementary campaign mechanics showed up in the California recall campaign, and in the way in which the debates featuring approved candidates have tended to murder the party's constituents with sheer boredom.
Behind that set of issues and correlated considerations, there are two long-standing problems which have produced the result that only one Democratic President, Bill Clinton, has served two full terms since the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. Failure to understand the two problems which are responsible for that pattern of nearly six decades, would mean the early death of the Democratic Party's leading role in national politics. The common feature of both these counts, is that the party has moved, since 1944, to distance itself from the image of being FDR's party. Unless that trend is now reversed, the party is virtually finished as a leading force in national politics.
The first downturn came during the last months of World War II, between approximately August 1944 and the totally unjustified nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The second downturn began in full force during the middle to late 1960s, with the launching of the shift, away from our world-leading role as a producer nation, toward the present decadence of being a parasitical, post-industrial, consumer society, living on the product of cheap labor from the relatively poorest nations of the world. Thus, under the combined effects of these two trends, from the mid-1960s on, we had the decadence of the Republican Party leadership launched by President Nixon's "Southern Strategy," and the subsequent, echoing, "Southern Strategy"-like, "Suburban" orientation of the Democratic Party, as the latter was typified by influence of the now waning Democratic Leadership Council.
Examine those two factors of the downturn as follows.
Enter the 'Utopians'
The Democratic Party's present trouble came to the surface during the summer 1944 Democratic nominating convention, when a turn to the "right" came to the surface at precisely the point the events of June-July 1944 had sealed the impending early defeat of Adolf Hitler's forces. At this point, a factional quarrel erupted between the representatives of two opposing factions on the matter of military policy. On the one side, there were the military traditionalists, typified by Generals MacArthur and Eisenhower. On the other side were the followers of Britain's H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, the so-called "utopians," whose military goals were the establishment of an Anglo-American world government through the use of nuclear-weapons arsenals to terrify the world into submission. This utopian policy was otherwise known as "preventive nuclear war," as Russell elaborated that doctrine in the September 1946 edition of his The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. British scientist Lindemann's bestial policy of strategic bombing of civilian populations, as associated with Britain's "Bomber Harris" and the fire-bombing of Tokyo, were emblems of the same policies for which nuclear weapons were intended by the utopians.
Under President Harry S Truman, the Democratic Party was led into support of a utopian doctrine of "preventive nuclear war," which persisted until the combined effects of the Korean War and the Soviet priority in detonating a thermonuclear weapon, caused the U.S. to pull back from the preventive war doctrine. These developments led to the election of a leading opponent of the preventive nuclear doctrine, traditionalist President Dwight Eisenhower, for two terms. At the end of his terms, Eisenhower warned the nation against the threat to our society from "a military-industrial complex," meaning the utopians who had authored and pushed the "preventive nuclear war" doctrine during the middle through late 1940s. It was the fatal, utopian flaw embedded in the party by the Truman Administration policies of the 1940s, which undermined the party's ability to lead the Executive Branch for any significant period of time.
The Clinton Administration was, in that respect, an historical anomaly brought into being through crucial assistance from Ross Perot's attack on the incompetent economic policies expressed by the George H.W. Bush, Sr. Administration, which could not be repeated under a continuation of the same policy-shaping trends.
The election of President John F. Kennedy brought us a young President committed to restoring the legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt. But, then, President Kennedy was confronted by the utopian resurgence, with the Bay of Pigs, the 1962 Missile Crisis which sent many Americans to seek God in barrooms, and the assassination of the President himself. The President dead, the utopians, using Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, pushed ahead with the project for a supposedly "easy war" against North Vietnam.
The utopians were bluffing again, as Truman had bluffed his bungling, utopian way into the Korean war. As with China's response in the Korean War, the U.S. was mired in asymmetric warfare in Indo-China. China did not respond to the U.S. attack in Vietnam, but the Soviet government did, after its own choice of fashion, turning Southeast Asia into a quagmire for the U.S., as Cheneyacs have turned Afghanistan, and now Iraq, into a quagmire of asymmetric warfare for the U.S. forces, once again.
Meanwhile, between the Pugwash conferences of the 1950s and early 1960s, the principal powers of the world settled into an uneasy avoidance of the actual fighting of general thermonuclear warfare. The world had entered a demi-world, trapped between the outer limits of so-called traditional warfare and thermonuclear assured destruction. With the 1989-1991 collapse of Soviet power, circles including Republican Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, proposed an immediate return from a detente doctrine based upon a notion of Mutual and Assured (thermonuclear) Destruction (MAD), to a doctrine of world government through preventive nuclear warfare, conducted below what must have been presumed to be the level of general thermonuclear response.
The immediate problem here, as is typified by former Democrats who have since gone over to be Cheney's accomplices as neo-conservatives, is that the Democratic Party has an included component with its own deeply embedded commitment to support for utopian preventive nuclear warfare. This has had continuing support from among some of the party's leading figures. Thus, despite the sanity, personally, among many leading Democrats on these issues, the Democratic National Committee has refused to commit itself to that kind of effective political opposition to Cheney's war-making antics which would have been considered as divisive by some within the party's ranks. Thus, even Democratic pre-candidates who are personally opposed to Cheney's antics have appeared to have lost their nerve when given the opportunity, as candidates, to present hard evidence known to them on this matter of Cheney's frauds. Their silence has become their complicity, both in fact, and in the eyes of our disgusted traditional friends and allies among leading nations abroad.
Should the Forgotten Man Be Counted?
The 1920s policies of President Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon created the U.S. "crash" of 1929; the "fiscally conservative" policies of President Herbert Hoover and Mellon turned that financial collapse into the mortal agony of the 1929-1933 collapse of U.S. national income by approximately one-half. Had President Franklin Roosevelt not been elected to supersede Hoover, the U.S. would have been swept in the same direction which the Great Depression carried 1933-1934 Germany.
Roosevelt, a true descendant, biologically and politically, of Alexander Hamilton ally Isaac Roosevelt, drew upon that patriotic tradition to save the U.S. and our Constitutional form of government. He accomplished this by devotion to our Constitution's principle of natural law, devotion to the promotion of the general welfare. This meant leading attention to the plight of that often destitute citizen who had been robbed by the cruel follies of the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations. Roosevelt's campaign for election became his defense of "the forgotten man." That devotion to the "forgotten man" became the expressed soul of the victorious Democratic Party.
These and related actions led by him, built up the Democratic Party as a great force for good. The accomplishments of that party under his leadership were truly titanic. As we neared the close of our war against the fascist Synarchist International's predatory dictatorships of the 1922-1945 interval, a U.S. which had been wrecked by approximately half in the shoals of the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations, emerged, toward the close of the war, as the greatest productive power on this planet.
Today, behind the mask of inherently and monstrously fraudulent Federal Reserve System doctrines of "hedonic values," the effects of the recent 40 years' long march, away from our role as a great agro-industrial producer-nation, into the labyrinth of post-industrial utopianism, are to be seen in the deepening poverty of the lower 80% of our family-income brackets, as combined with the virtual national financial-monetary bankruptcy represented today by our tragic national current-accounts deficit and a plummeting value of the dollar under the current Bush Administration. Meanwhile, our Constitution is being gutted, since the inauguration of Attorney General John Ashcroft, by measures which stink of those abhorred trends we witnessed from the 1922 rise of Mussolini and Spain's Franco, through the end of Adolf Hitler.
Our economic welfare and our freedoms are in peril, chiefly because the leadership of the Democratic Party has lately failed, so far, to mobilize those measures of reform which we should have learned to apply from the lessons of the achievements of the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. The obvious lesson to be learned, is that the Democratic Party must return to the principled features of that FDR tradition today. We must, once again, rally the revival of the principles of representative government through a pivotal commitment to the defense of today's forgotten men and women.
The Lesson To Be Learned
It is now about 40 years, since Defense Secretary Robert McNamara succeeded in pushing the U.S. into the bottomless abyss of a protracted U.S. war in Indo-China. During the decades which have followed, our republic underwent a transformation, from the world's leading producer nation, and the world's richest nation, to the decadent, imminently bankrupt form of consumer society we have become today.
No single election, no one particular piece of legislation, has caused this 40-year-long downslide. Looking back over those years, we must recognize that the particular decisions and other actions which have pushed us along this downward course, were themselves the expression of a governing, long-term cultural-paradigm shift. We made our decisions, chiefly, as that harness, that cultural-paradigm shift, determined the way we made choices. It was not a succession of individual legislative and kindred decisions which generated the 40-year long-term trend; it was the influence of the long-term cultural-paradigm shift over decision-making, which generated the resulting trend. Over the recent four decades, this cultural-paradigm shift determined, more and more, that succession of steps which have brought us to the verge of ruin today.
This long-term sweep of that cultural-paradigm shift, has been the principal force of change in values which has shaped those long-term trends in personal values which have generated the steps toward the present ruin of our nation, step, by step, by step. The leadership of the party must not continue to evade that ominous fact. It has not been isolable issues; it has been a long-term trend, typified by the shift from traditional to utopian military doctrines, by a right-wing turn against the FDR legacy, and by indifference to the malicious effects of recent trends in national policy-making upon the conditions of life of what Roosevelt, in his time, described as "the forgotten man."
That is an example of the work of that Classical principle of tragedy which enables us to understand, and master the challenge of the rise and fall of great cultures and nations of the past and present. Wrong turns in cultural paradigms, such as Athens' launching of the Peloponnesian War, continued over a generation or more, reduce once-great powers to a ruin they bring upon themselves. If we understand that principle, and recognize the need to change in time, our nation can not only survive the presently ominous strategic and economic crises, but return toward prosperity and security, as Franklin Roosevelt led our nation in a similar time of despair.
It is time to change. Will you be able to recognize and adopt that change in time?
I have provided you the record of my present campaign for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination, as typified by the content of my campaign's website. This is my record in which you, as party members, should take some pride, a record which has stood the test of the years to date, and which affords the party a resource by aid of which a needed victory might be crafted.
I add this.
The time came, when I was drawn from other ways of personal life, into a political role in our society, by witnessing the successive events of the Bay of Pigs, the 1962 Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy and others during the 1963-68 years, the launching of the Indo-China War, and my foresight that the then-current trends toward economic-cultural change must ruin our nation, if continued over the longer term. I have, as it is said, "stuck to my guns," when most of the party was taking the wrong road, away from our character as a producer society, to the savagely deregulated, post-industrial ruin which we have become today. The issues I have addressed on this account, over these years, areobviously malicious misrepresentations of my policies and actions put asidematters of record. I have been right and foresighted when the majority of the party's leadership was mistaken on crucial issues of economic, social, and strategic policies. In particular, the record of the recent three years, since Nov. 7, 2000, is fulsome and clear.
It is characteristic of the history of cultures, that they often stray into habituated trends in policy-shaping which lead toward some awful crises. During much of those times, the well-advised individuals who recognize the danger are consigned to the role of a rejected minority. Then, the time comes when the need for change can be avoided no longer, as now. The importance of those who had proposed such change earlier is not merely that they had been right, when the majority was mistaken, but that the validity and tenacity with which their correct perception of trends was pursued, shows us persons who are proven to have efficiently understood the roots of the crisis when the majority had been wrong. It is not merely that they had been right, but that this quality of rightness represents a proven capability for leadership at the time urgent changes must be adopted.
The next President of the U.S. must be chosen, not to build a ruling dynasty, but for his or her dedication to an efficient, rather short-term mission, on which any success of our nation which might be desired to follow is made possible. That is my personal mission here and now.
KEYNOTE REMARKS TO THE LAROUCHE YOUTH MOVEMENT CADRE SCHOOL, MAINZ, GERMANY Dec. 27, 2003
Classical Drama and the Principle of Change
Well, I'm going to deal with something, or several things I've dealt with before on occasions; some of you have heard me, or followed my writings on these subjects. Today, I'm going to put some of the pieces together.
It's like when you take a couple of ingredients, and make nitroglycerin: suddenly, you have a new effect, not represented by the experience of any of the preceding components of that process.
We're going to take the subject of Classical drama and history, from a very specific standpoint. Because people do not understand literature, they do not understand the scientific, in the physical sense, significance of Classical drama. And many of the problems we have in discussions, in terms of "How do I understand this?" "How do I explain this?", all revolve around that question. There's a dichotomy in society, which is much older than the Baby Boomer generation. That is, the Baby Boomers did not invent evil, they simply added to its repertoire. A lot of it had been going on over a long period of time.
One of the most famous ones was developed actually out of things such as, from Aristotle on, but especially from the empiricist Enlightenment of the 18th Century, with the categorical division between what was called science and art. And this division between science and art, as it's taught in universities and so forth, and practiced today, is one of the great destructive forces which make human beings less than human. And let's put it together.
What we'll do is, we'll look at the question of Classical art, and look at the problem of how it relates to physical science, and why the two are the same thing, and why the division is wrong.
Now, we're going to take the case of Classical drama, first of all, the case of a play, which I have not yet heard, or seen, but which I have discussed with its producer, before its production. And the reason the discussion came, is a friend of ours, who's the producer of it, had a problem, of trying to understand what he was working with. He liked the play, thought it was great. He was reading relevant material by the author, reading the diaries of the author, and so forth, and trying to get inside, so to speak, the play, and inside the characters.
So, he asked me about it, and said, "Do I know Odets?" Yes, I say, I know Odets peripherally, because I was exposed to his dramas when they were broadcast on radio, back during the 1930s. He was a rather celebrated New York writer at that point, a playwright, who would appear frequently in his dramas performed on radio during the period of the 1930s, and so forth. But then he went to Hollywood, and had a career.
Now the play, which is called "The Big Knife," pertains to 1948. In this playin a sense it's autobiographical, in a very specific waybut in this play, a man who has come out of the '30s, with some degree of optimism, has gone through the end of the war, working in Hollywood, going along to get along. And then around 1948, he realizes that the society he's living in is going to hell. And that's the story, about the suicidethe man feels that his life is a waste of time, and he has to commit suicide, to make a display of his protest against the society going to hell.
Now, he asked me about it. I said, "Well, yes, I know all about that. I never saw the play, never read the play; I know something about Odets, I know who he was, and I can tell you what the play means. It's a true Classical drama, in the sense that Schiller wrote Classical drama, and that Shakespeare wrote nothing but Classical drama." And, to understand that, is one of the things I have to do at first with you today, right now.
I lived through this period. I have a lot of history in me. I lived through the 1920s, the end of it particularlyI was born in the 1920s, and was conscious, not adult, but conscious of what was going on around me, during that period, before the '29 crash. And I knew the neighbors and most people around me, were a bunch of bums. It was the Flapper Age, it was the ageit was the pleasure age, it was a pleasure-society tendency. Not as bad as today, not as bad as with the Baby Boomers, but very decadent, very corruptthe Flapper Age. The age of the Charleston. The age of Coolidge, and Mellon, Andrew Mellon, and Herbert Hoover.
So, I saw people suddenly go from, sort of, gleeful, complacent, self-confident degeneracy, decadence in the extreme, and suddenly: 1929. The market collapsed. The great illusion, about the infinitely exploding financial market, infinite riches forever, suddenly went down the tubes, and people turned gray, sad. Began jumping from skyscrapers. That's why they seal the windows on skyscrapers around the financial district these days. Otherwise, they would jump. And there's going to be a lot of jumping going on. People breaking the windows of skyscrapers so they can get out, and hit the sidewalk. "I want to hit the sidewalk."
So, then they turned gray, and Hoover did not cause the depression, but he did everything possible to make it worse. So that between 1928 and 1933, when Roosevelt was inaugurated, the total income of the United States had fallen by half. You had people just in absolute destitution, if this had continued. Roosevelt came in, with a program. He understood what he was doing. And he got the country moving. It was still gray-faced, and sad. It was not instant riches, not instant recovery, nor will there be under my Presidency. You've got a lot of things to build our way out of, as we did then. It's worse today than it was then. But worse, physically.
The Principle of 'Prescience'
But gradually, a certain amount of optimism developed. I can recall specific periods1934, 1936, 1938there were mood shifts all along the process. A little bit up, a little bit down. '37, a little more optimism. '38, a little more depression, more pessimism. '39, a little more optimism. And then during the course of the war, up to 1944, after the summer of 1944, a general increase in optimism in the U.S. population.
But then, the summer of 1944: Go back in history, to situate what we're talking about, in the case of Odets' play. Because many people didn't know these things, but they were affected by them. And the principle I'm addressing here, is the principle of what's called "prescience." That sometimes you don't know something, but you have a prescience of its existence, and you respond to that prescience. In other words, the prescience that you don't know what's going bad, you can't prove it, but you know it's happening. And you will respond to the fact that you know that is happening. You can smell it. You have a prescience of it. And populations respond to presciences, sometimes false, but often truepresciences of the way society is going, the direction it's going in. They will also respond to a sense of a change in direction, from better to worse. They may not be able to explain it, but they know it's occurred, and they are affected by it. And this, of course, is the key to the Odets play.
Because the people who Odets portrayed, in real lifenot just fiction, not just characters on a stage imagined by the authorthese are people who correspond to people in real life. And the characters on stage represent people in real life. Not necessarily by name. In some cases, yes. But they represent typical people, as represented from real life from that period of the United States.
They didn't know anything. They knew some things, but they didn't know what was going on.
But, here's what happened; here's what they didn't know.
They didn't know about synarchism, or very few did. They didn't know about Martinism. Their ideas about the French Revolution were idiotic, but they were popular ideas, and they were taught in schools, in textbooks, and generally accepted knowledge about the French Revolution. All wrong. You think back to the historical account. How did the French Revolution occur?
1763. The British had won a naval war, effectively, a maritime war with the French. The French submitted, in terms of a treaty of 1763, which gave up a lot of the French colonies' areas in North America, to the British. In the same period, India was taken over by the British East India Company. Not by Britain, but by the British East India Company. A company. And this occurred after the British had staged a war with the Dutch, before, and the Dutch system, the Dutch liberal system, had been assimilated into the liberal system of the British. In other words, they killed liberallythat's why they're called liberals. A liberal lack of conscience.
So, anyway, the British Empire was established, actually in fact, by virtue of the subjugation of India, by a company, the British East India Company, in the early 18th Century, and this was sealed by the Treaty of 1763. This was a turning point in modern history. It was not the beginning of modern history, but it's a crucial turning point, one of the several crucial turns.
At that point, the British East India Company, which was then led, politically, by a figure called Lord Shelburne, had a meeting with Adam Smith, who was one of his lackeys he'd picked up. He had other lackeys, many other lackeys. But Adam Smith was assigned by Shelburne, to go to France, and to develop an economic and other theory, to prevent the North American English-speaking colonies, from developing in ways that might lead to the formation of a republic in North America. That's number one.
Number two. In his work in France, he was supposed to assist in devising a plan for the destruction of France.
Now, the same thing was true of Gibbon. Gibbon, who was another character who was a protégé of Lord Shelburne. He assigned Gibbon to write this history of the Roman Empireto find out from study of the Roman Empire, to make a study, his famous three-volume study: Now that the British East India Company had established an empire, how could they keep it? What would prevent them from going the way of the Roman Empire? And Gibbon said, well, one thing you've got to do, you've got to eliminate Christianity. And they did: the Established Church. The best way to get rid of Christianity, is to form a church. Get people in, you call it Christianity, and you destroy Christianity, because you've created something artificial, to replace something that was real.
So anyway, this was the kind of process. So, in the process, in this period, Shelburne developed a freemasonic cult in France. It became active in the 1770s, and emerged, and became the key factor in the French Revolution. It was called the Martinists. It was a cult which was built up around Lyon, France. It included people like Cagliostro, and Mesmer, and so forth. And a figure around there, who emerged from it, Joseph de Maistre, who was extremely significant in this process.
Then you had the French Revolution. The French Revolution was organized in a financial crisis, which had been organized by the British, by a free-trade economic policy. One of the key figures in that had been Jacques Necker, who was an agent of Lord Shelburne personally. You had Philippe Egalité, who was an agent of Lord Shelburne, personally. Danton and Marat were both British agents, one French, the other Swiss. They had been brought to London, they were educated in London, under Jeremy Bentham. They worked for a secret committee of the British Foreign Office, set up under Bentham. The speeches of Danton and Marat, on the street and in the parliament of France, were written in London, under the direction of Bentham, and were read, and delivered in the parliament, and so forth, by Danton and Marat, as agents of British intelligence.
The Jacobins, the whole Jacobin Terror, was created in London, for destroying France. Also, Napoleon was created in London.
Now, Napoleon, of course, was a Jacobin. He was also a Corsican banditthat was his antecedentswho became one of the Robespierre brothers. He was a protégé of them. He was a Jacobin, was appointed to a position at Toulons, by this brother. He was then brought into Paris by the same interests, with his so-called whiff of grapeshot operation, later on.
So, in 1796, Napoleon was recruited to this Martinist cult, indirectly, and was given a model to follow, by de Maistre, which became Napoleon the tyrant, Napoleon the emperor. Napoleon was officially a "Beast-Man."
The Concept of the 'Beast-Man'
Now, then again, this becomes more interesting. Because where did the Beast-Man concept come from?
It came from the Spanish Inquisition. That is, when the British were studying, how to create a dictatorship in France, that would destroy France, and get continental Europe, all the nations, at each others' throats, for the sake of preserving the British Empire! The argument was, if you can get the nations of Europe to cut each others' throats, they will not be able to challenge the British Empire. And the French Revolution was one of the first steps, to doing that.
The French Revolution was unleashed on the 14th of July, [1789]. It was unleashed as a way of blocking any continued effort to introduce a French constitution, by Bailly and Lafayette, which would have saved France, and would have given the French monarchy, but in a new form, a constitutional form, and would have established the French monarchy as the first republic, albeit under a king, the first republic in Europe.
It didn't happen. Why didn't it happen? Because of, primarily, the French Revolution. The French Revolution's purpose was not to liberate France, but to destroy it, by helping it to destroy itself. And destroy the rest of Europe as well. That's what Napoleon did.
So anyway. So this goes back to this question of the Beast-Man. The Spanish Inquisition is the model. Now, the Spanish Inquisition comes from about 1480, when it took over Castile, and this, it had great influence on Isabella I, of Spain. And one of the first acts of Isabella, under the influence of the Inquisition, was the expulsion of the Jews, in 1492, from Spain, and similar kinds of acts.
This was the body which developed the idea of slavery. These were the guys who said that blacks are not human, they are animals. Therefore, Africans are good for nothing, but to become property, as slaves. And on the Iberian peninsula, in both Portugal and Spain, Portugal and Spain launched the African slave trade. They also, when they came into Mexico and Peru, they discovered they had a large population, so there they did not introduce slaves, as they did in many other parts; for example, Cuba. You look at any Cuban, the evidence of African slavery is all over the place genetically. It was done by the Spanish. Typical of Spanish slave trade.
But they did not introduce slavery into Mexico or Peru, which already had very large populations. The population of Mexico was probably 2 million people, at that point in time. So, in that case, they had to absorb a people. So they cut a rule. The rule was that the Indians are human, but not completely so. They are inherently irrational, like bad children. Therefore, you have to master them, and you have to have hidalgos from Spain master them.
So, what they did is, they set up a system, under which the governor, who was occupying the place in the name of the king, would appoint certain thieves, like Cheney's neo-cons, and they would make them the governor, or the proprietor, of a large land area, and the Mexicans would then be reduced to peons, virtual quasi-slaves, under the control of these people on the estates. And that's how Mexico was controlled, for several centuries, from the inside, by the Spanish system. Peru, they tried a similar kind of process.
So, these were evils.
Spain also, at the time that Europe was struggling to free itself from a reactionary force of Venice, the Spanish monarchy joined in starting religious wars against France. The Venetians went to London, and a guy called Zorzi, who was called Giorgi, Francisco Giorgi, in Londonwho was the sexual adviser to Henry VIII. So, this takeover of Henry VIII, by his sexual adviser, who was one of the key intelligence agents of Venice, sitting up thereand therefore Spain and England, which had been closely allied and tiedat that time suddenly went to war with each other. And France, and so forth. So, a whole series of wars were unleashed, which, from 1511 to 1648, there was a general period of religious and related kinds of warfare. It was hell throughout Europe.
The image of the Spanish war against the Netherlands, the image of the Thirty Years War, are characteristic of the bestiality unleashed by the Spanish monarchy, upon Europe.
This is what was described, in a sense, by Rabelais, in France, the effects of this kind of period. This is what is described by Cervantes, in portraying Philip II, effectively, as Don Quixote, the crazy knight-nut. And then, on the other hand, the typical Spanish peasant, Sancho Panza, who is the adoring, but critical follower and slave of this crazy old knight.
This is Spain. And by the time of the close of the Treaty of Westphalia, Spain, Hapsburg Spain, had been self-destroyed. And it was this model, of the Spanish reaction, which was used, in a sense, as the model for the beast-man of Joseph de Maistre. This was the model given to Napoleon. This is the model which became known as the synarchist model. This was the characteristic of Mussolini. This was specifically the characteristic of Adolf Hitler. The mass slaughter of the Jews, by Hitler, was a beast-man act; it had no political, economic purpose. There was no motive for it, in the sense of anything that's understandable, out of greed, out of hatred, and so forth. It was an act which was so monstrous, as to intimidate and terrify society, and it's still terrifying society today.
So, this was the situation.
So, who, in the 20th Century, began to put these beast-men into power, and when?
Well, it happened after World War I, which is not actually an unbeastly thing. If you go in France, for example, and look at these cemeteries, even remote areas, far from the battlefield, and look at the number of people who died, in France, as soldiers, during that period, you get an impact, a sense of impact, from looking at graveyards, of what that war was like. And I'm talking about cemeteries, not military cemeteries near the combat zones, but cemeteries far from the combat zones, where you see the graveyards in small towns, and you look at the dates. And you know what happened.
The Synarchist International
All right, so this was horrible. But then, after the war, the Synarchist International was activated. Now, who was the Synarchist International? The Synarchist International was a creation of what? It was a creation, essentially, of the British East India Company. Which had constituted this freemasonic cult, called the Martinists, as a model cult, to be used politically, to destroy efforts to create republics, which might be considered as rivals or threats to the power of the British, the newly formed empire of the British East India Company.
So, always, from the beginning, the origin of this was Venice, earlier. What? Venice was an imperial power, an imperial maritime power. But, in the declining years of the empire, of the second empire, the eastern empire, up to about 1000 AD, Venice began to emerge from a vassal status, between 800 AD and 1000 AD, Venice emerged more and more as an independent force. Its organization was a financier oligarchy, a mercantile financier oligarchy, and it began to get more and more power.
Now, the power of Venice was located largely in its alliance with a formation of a bunch of gangsters, called the Normans. Now these were the heathen, who were chased out of Saxony, by Charlemagne, and they went north into Jutland, and similar parts of that part of the world. And they became known as the Normans. They were used as pirates and slaughterers, gangsters, organized crime. And they were used, then, in the first operation, major one, in Normandy, to take over Normandy. That is, to take part of France, which was chopped up by two groups: the Cluniacs in the South, and the Norman invasion from the north. And this destroyed the France of Charlemagne.
So they created the state of Normandy as a peace agreement, and this formation settled itself in the area of what is today Belgium and Normandy France. They, then, later on, took over England, and converted the Saxons who were Christians, into non-Christians, or dead Christians, one of the two. And that's the birth of Norman England.
So the Normans then, as Normans, or as called Plantagenets, or called Anjou, were the major force allied with Venice, as a military force, which, among other things, conducted the crusades. The First Crusade, actually, was the Norman Conquest of England; that was the first crusade. Then you had others which were called crusades. All these were conducted by the Normans, as a fighting force. All were directed by Venice. Venice always made money on it.
The Fourth Crusade is typical. The Venetians decided to loot everything: When you walk around Venice today, you will find things that they stole during the period of the Fourth Crusade. They just stole things. They're like that. They're like those Las Vegas gangsters' mentality.
So, this had been the power. So, from the beginning, this kind of evil was always controlled by a certain kind of usurious financier interest, the same ones that created the New Dark Age in the 14th Century.
The British East India Company was modelled on the Venetians. It was a product of Venice, and modelled on the Venetians. It was trained by the Venetians. That is, Venetian banks moved north, took Dutch and British names, and they appear in London, or on the coast of the North Sea and Baltic, which is the old Hanseatic area, they appear under names of those countries. But they are actually members of families which were Venetian families. Sometimes which married into local populations. So you had a system of Venetian banking, that moved in, in this whole area, and took control. This became the Anglo-Dutch liberal system, out of which the Anglo-Dutch liberal system of parliamentary government occurred.
And Europe has never escaped from the pestilence of Anglo-Dutch liberal parliamentary government. That's why the United States has never had its Constitution overturned, since it was formed. But there's no country in Europe which has maintained a constitution, since that timeexcept the United States. And the British, of course, avoided that problem because they never had a constitution. They had the opinion of the ruling oligarchy.
So, the problem has always been bankers, of this type. It is the bankers who control the synarchists. It's the bankers who play the gangs against each other. The bankers will create two or three competing groups, all violence-prone, and set them to fighting each other, as a way of controlling society.
Just as Venezuela is nothing but a synarchist paradise of bankers. You have two major factions: one a left-wing thing around Chavez; a right-wing thing on his opposition. They're both synarchists; they're both controlled by the same set of bankers; and they're going to kill off the left and then bring in the right.
Just as in France, where they had the so-called "Left" stage the French Revolution (they were really fascists); staged the revolutionand then, brought in Napoleon as the so-called reaction, who went through the clean-up phase of what was really the model for modern fascism.
The same thing is now happening in Venezuela. The same thing is intended by Spain, today! Spain has never given up, culturally, its imperial idea. It still regards South and Central America as Spanish propertythe property of the Spanish monarchy. And they want it back! If you look at who owns some of the natural resources, and the power systems, of Brazil, Argentina, and so forth, it's by Spanish banks! Including the drug-pushing bank of the Bank of Bilbao, people like that. So, the Spanish interest, it has an imperial policynowtoward South and Central America. They want their property back! They want their monarchy back. The policy is called Hispanidad.
This is what we're dealing with. So, these things go on.
So, this group of bankers, going back to the end of the First World War, this group of bankers, which formed the Synarchist International, which included firms like Schlumberger, de Neuflize, Mallet, so fortha whole group of bankscreated fascism. Which is just a branch of synarchism. They created it in Italy, first. It came out of France. It was introduced out of France, on the theory of purgative violence, to Mussolini.
Who put Mussolini into power? A fellow called Volpi di Misurata. Who was Volpi di Misurata? He was a Venetian; he was also a British agent. When the British established the "Young Turk" movement, which they planted inside Turkey, in the Salonika area, Volpi di Misurata was one of the key figures operating. Also, the famous, or the infamous Parvus, was one of the agents involved. Jabotinsky was the writer of a publication called Jeune Turque, which was, again, that's the beginning of the so-called "Zionist fascism"Jabotinsky there.
Volpi di Misuratawho was not then called Volpi di Misurata; he was called Misurata laterbecame a key agent, a key controller for the Venetian banking interests. And it was he, who was the key figure who controlled Mussoliniwho created and controlled him, for a group of bankers. The same thing is true in all these cases.
Hitler Comes To Power
Now, come to the case of Hitler. Hitler came to power, because of a financial crisis, which came to a head in 1928; that is, Germany, in '28, you had crisis, the fall of the Mueller government, because the country became ungovernable. From that point on, until the fascist dictatorship, you never had a party-elected Chancellor of Germany. You had ministerial Chancellors: that is, the President of the republic would appoint a Chancellor, and the Chancellor would run the country, because you didn't have a party which could constitute itself as a government, in Germany.
So, Hitler was being developed by the Britishsame crowd, and others. Hitler was being developed to become the dictator of Germany. That was the intention. And they put him in. They put him in. They put him in by a series of maneuvers. And, by the summer of 1934, World War II was inevitable. Nothing existed on this planet, that could have stopped World War II, at that time. Nothing. It was inevitable.
But, then, the British didn't like it so much. They liked Hitler. The intention of the policy was, to take over Europe, which they almost did at Dunkirk. Once, having taken over Europe, to destroy the Soviet Union, quickly; and then, to take their alliesthe navies of Japan; of the British, which was supposed to go over to the Nazis; of Italy, of Spain, and Franceand these allied forces would then attack and destroy the United States. That was their plan.
That was their plan up until June 1940. What happened? There were American bankers behind this. But what happened? What happened is, led by people like Churchill, they went to Roosevelt, against Hitlerwhy? Because they didn't like fascism? Well, they loved fascism! They were the fascists. They didn't like continental European fascism! It was given to the Europeans to destroy themselves with; it was not given to the Europeans to take over English-speaking countries! So, what you had is, you had the same bankers of New Yorkincluding Harriman, and the grandfather of the present President of the United States, Prescott Bush. And Prescott Bush wrote the checkthe drawingwhich actually took the bankrupt Nazi Party, made it solvent, and put Hitler on the road to being appointed Chancellor. This was done by the top British bankers, at the same time.
What happened was, you had this incident at Dunkirk: Here you had the British Expeditionary Force, part of the French forces and Belgian forces, are sitting up there on the beaches at Dunkirk. The armored forces of the Wehrmacht were sitting there, ready to take them over. Hitler stopped the attack! Why? He stopped the attack, because he believed then, that people like Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Halifax and others, in England, who were Hitler's friends, would induce the British government, under those circumstancesas they did the French governmentto make an alliance with Hitler. As you had the Laval government and the Petain government, in France.
But, it didn't happen. Because Churchill decided that the [affecting a British accent] "British were not going to work under the direction of that Hitler fellow, you know. We made him, yes. But, he's not going to run us. We're English-speaking people. We are not going to destroy the English-speaking British Empire! And we're going to have to have these American fellows save our ass, so we can have our British Empah back!"
That was the policy! You'll see what I'm getting to.
So, these bastards, who had become patriots of the Anglo-American fight against Hitler, from 1940 on, in 1944, the summer of 1944, after the successful penetration of France by the Allied invasion force in June and July, then went over from being anti-Hitler, to saying, "Now that Hitler's dead, we can become Hitler."
Harry Truman and Preventive Nuclear Warfare
So, what they did, is they went first at the Democratic Party: They got Henry Wallace knocked out as Vice Presidential nominee, and put in a fascist pig, called Truman. Harry S Truman. The "S" is his middle name. There is no period after "S": What happened is, his mothera significant characterhis mother, when she was signing the birth certificate, wrote out, on the name of the baby, "Harry S"; why'd she write "S"? Because she thought she was going to pick a second name for the child. She couldn't make up her mind, so she just put in the "S," to go on record, and never got around to putting anything after the "S." So, actually, Harry Truman was a perfect S.
Anyway, we had a right turn in the United States, with the fascist pigs of the United States sideMellon, du Pont, Morgan, and so forththe ones who had backed Hitler in the first place, who had allied with people like Lord Halifax and Lord Beaverbrook, in this kind of operation, now went back. Having Hitler out of the way, now we're going to destroy the Soviet Union. We're going to go to war with the Soviet Union.
And, in the process, with the help of that great pacifist, Bertrand Russell, who designed the policy of world government through nuclear terror. It was called "preventive nuclear warfare," the doctrine of Bertrand Russell. This doctrine was the doctrine of the Anglo-American fascist right wing. That's what happened.
So then, you had this period, from 1945: the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were a direct reflection of Russell's policy of preventive nuclear war. There was no military reason, for dropping those bombs on Japan. None! Japan was already a defeated nation. It was done for one thing: to terrify the world, not to conquer Japan. And to terrify the world, by inaugurating and committing the United States to a policy of preventive nuclear warfare: the same policy that Cheney represents today. It was revived after the fall of the Soviet Union by Cheney and Co. And is the policy of the U.S. government, today, unless we get Cheney out.
So, there's the period. Now, go back to 1944-45-46, and those things, and look at the circumstances that which I experienced, which is what Odets reflects, in his play, "The Big Knife." Here you have optimism. Optimism that the post-war period was going to be a period of freeing people from colonial oppressions; independence of nations, which had been colonies. Yet, extending what we had accomplished in the United States, economically, to the world, to rebuild a shattered world. That was our understanding, as we approached the end of the war.
Suddenly, it stopped.
Then, you had the terror bombing: The reason for the fire-bombing of Hamburg, of Magdeburg, of Dresden, and so forththere was no reason for it, except terror. And, it was the same thing as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was part of the process of conditioning the world, to submit to the use of superweapons, by air power, in place of armies, to bring the world to submit to a world empire, world government, under the English-speaking peoples. That was the purpose.
So, we went through the period. So, suddenly we're in the period where this is what's happening. We don't know, exactly what's happening! Soldiers and others didn't know what was happeningbut we smelled it. And pretty soon, it began to become obvious.
And then you got into the post-war period, and I'd find people I'd served with, who used to be of one dispositionthey had changed! They suddenly said, "No, my wife is on me. Look, we've been away for five years of war. We've got to make up for lost time. We've got to get a house. My wife wants a house. We want children! She's five years older'You don't have children! We gotta make children! So, you go to work. You go to college. You study fast and hard. You get a good job. And, don't you do anything to lose that job! Because we are going to be secure! We are going to have the kind of life style I deserve!"
Guess where the Baby Boomers got it from? From their parents! "We're going to have the life-style we deserve." Why do you deserve it? "Well, because we feel we deserve it.' " "We wanna deserve it. We don't wanna work."
Anyway, that change came on. So, here I am, going through this experience, as many other people did. I probably had more insight than most do. But, others went through the same kinds of experience. Many people said, "Keep your nose clean. Shut up! Don't say anything that'll get you into trouble. Don't say anything that'll get your family into trouble. Don't say what you think! Say what you want to be overheard saying. Remember who might be listening." Be careful, because your neighbor may be an FBI agent." He often was.
This was the kind of condition. Here we are, in this period, where the Truman Administration is committed to general preventive nuclear warfare. That was the policy of the United States, from the time of the bombing of Hiroshima, and earlier, until about the time that Eisenhower became President. Under this policy, the United States bluffed. You see, the two bombs we dropped on Japan were not production weapons. They were experimental weapons: one uranium bomb, and one plutonium bomb. They were not in production. These were experimental weapons, taken out of the laboratory, as an experimental weapon.
We didn't have a stock of nuclear weapons. So, they had to get to work, to build a production line, for making nuclear weapons. Now that takes a little time, because there's a cycle in the production, if you're going to start from uranium. It's going to take a little time, before you're going to get a real arsenal, use more material for making weapons.
Now, you need delivery systems. And the Martin bomber, called the B-29, was not the perfect delivery system for this kind of process, because it couldn't attack the Soviet Union. That's a long distance. And these propeller-driven planes, at long distances, were not very useful for that purpose. Just look at the trouble they had getting the B-29s over to Japan, the logistical problems. So, it wasn't ready. So, they had to build a system.
But, in the meantime, the United States functioned under Truman on the presupposition, that we were going to continue to have a nuclear monopoly. And therefore, we could use the fact that we were going to get one, to act as if we had it. Now, they began bluffing the Soviet Union, and they began bluffing China. This bluffingthey counted that the Soviet Union and China would not dare to react. But, they did react; the Soviet Union reacted first. It sent the North Korean Army down through the peninsula, and the U.S. Army, with a few surviving Korean soldiers, was sitting on the Pusan perimeter, surrounded by North Korean forcesuntil MacArthur, who was not of their persuasion, that is, not of the Truman persuasion, flanked the situation at Inchon. And by an outflanking operation, recaptured the situation.
But, the war went on. We got rid of MacArthurthe war went on! So, the United States was stuck in a quagmire. The entry of Chinese forces in there, actually brought in asymmetric warfare, as the characteristic of the continuation of the Korean War. The Soviets did it though; they started it. So, the United States found itself dumped in a quagmire war: We still have troops at the DMZ line! To this day. We didn't win that war. We just stopped fighting. And you find the Cheneys and Co. want to get the war started again.
What happened was, about this time, it was reported that the Soviet Union had developed the first operational-quality thermonuclear weapon. It was experimental, but it had been developed. That meant, that you do not bluff, and do a nuclear bombing, of a nation with thermonuclear capabilities.
So, people went "back to the drawing board, buddy! We gotta re-tool this thing." The first thing, they said, "Okay, Truman does not run for re-election. He's finished. He's out." We run Eisenhower for President. Why? Because Eisenhower is a military figure, who is a traditionalist, like MacArthur, who will not go for this utopian, world-government-through-nuclear-weapons, nuclear war. So, that's why we had Eisenhower. We didn't even let the Democratic Party get near the Presidency for eight years! Because you couldn't trust the Democratic Party: It had more fascists in it, than the Republicans did!
So, when Eisenhower got in, the first thing he did was to get rid of Joe McCarthy, and what Joe McCarthy represented.
So, this was the period we lived through. And 1948 was a crucial point, where the fascist character of the Truman Administration became perfectly clear.
Classical Tragedy
This is what Odets is writing about. But, remember, we're looking at this from two standpoints: What I just told you, what the background is, what was going on. Then, look at it from the other standpoint, on stage: What are the average American persons seeing. They do not see what is really happening. They don't know what's happening. But, they see the effect of what's happening.
And then, you get the chief character, in the play, senses that by 1948it's over. The United States is gone. The optimism is gone. Horrible times are ahead. It's all gone bad.
So, the people involved do not know what's happening, but they have a prescience of what's happening. And what is their prescience? Their prescience is, of a change in direction of societya change from a culture which has been committed to an upward course, to a culture which is now committed to a downward course. They see it in their neighbors' behavior. They see it in the circumstances of life. They see it in everything. They have a prescience of a change in the course of history. And that's what we're dealing with. People do not respond [audio loss] change in the direction of history [audio loss].
This is the same way you have to look at all Classical dramaespecially take Shakespeare and Schiller. All Classical drama must be seen in that way, and no other way. That is, the first thing: All Classical drama, is historically specific. And there are two types of historical specificity in all kinds of drama. One, is actual events. For example, the historical plays of Shakespeare, the English historical plays, from Henry II through Richard III, are actual history. And they can turn to the content of that history, not just to the appearance of that history. Because, Sir Thomas More, whose adoptive father had done the research on this period, had written this program in a school that he established. Shakespeare had access to this work of Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare's writing of the English histories, was based on the actuality of the actual history, from carefully recorded knowledge.
So, all these dramas do not pertain to some "lesson to be learned" from history, about how to behave on your streetcar, or how to conduct your sex life. This is actual history, presented to audiences, in a way that audiences can understand history. Not as a connect-the-dots, kind of, "this event" and "that event" and "this date." But they can actually live through the experience of that history, and the passion that that experience involves; can see the turning point in a drama; can see, with passion, the failure of the people in the drama, to solve the problem, in that play.
So, we call this the principle of historic specificity: All Classical drama is based on this, or another form of the same principle.
The alternate to actual history, as a basis for Classical tragedy, is legend. For example, you have the plays of Shakespeare on Macbeth, Lear, and Hamlet: They are in a sense history, but not quite. They're based on legends which purport to be history. Now these legends are not really legends, but they are legends, which are embedded in the cultural outlook of the relevant cultures. That is, Hamlet is a Danish legend. Macbeth is an earlier English legend. Lear is an English legend. It is not a synthetic story. It is not a fiction story that somebody made up; it's based on the legend. These legends were transmitted through the culture. And they actually affected the mind of the members of the culture, in the same way that actual history would affect the minds of the population.
So, this is the case, in all truth. So, that everything that is done in Classical drama, refers to the actual history of the period which it addresses. You can not change the costume. You can not move a Classical drama from one historical position, to another; a different place, a different time, a different issue. You can not treat it as symbolic. You can not say, "This is like gang warfare." Or, what Orson Welles did, in the 1930s, with the Mercury Theatre: He had Julius Caesar performed on stage, by the Mercury Theatre, dressed up in Mussolini and Nazi type uniforms. That is not Julius Caesar. That is not the play. It's a different time, a different place, a differentand Shakespeare understood it as such. You do not have Caesar running around, saying "It's Greek to me," in a brown-shirt uniform. This is not the drama.
So, all history is Classical history; all Classical tragedy is historically specific. You can not move it in time and place from the actuality of what actually occurredeither as actual history, or as a legend, which has the effect on the mind of a population as if it were that people's history. Because, what you always address, you're addressing the mind of the population. But the important thing is never to fictionalize the process. No fiction is allowed.
You can not present a problem that didn't exist. You can not present an idea that didn't exist. You can not present an idea that did not exist at that time, that time and place. That's not allowed in Classical art. It must be real. There is no edifying fiction.
All right. So therefore, what this teaches you, is now you see a reciprocity, between the kind of problem which the Odets play typifies, and how you teach history. What you have to do, is teach history from the standpoint that I just described. You have to teach history, in terms of the emotional-intellectual experience of a population, in going through the kind of sequence of events, which actually occurred.
And what you do is, you take history, for the masses of the population, and you put it on stage, according to these rules: No fiction allowed. No free choice in fiction; insight is allowed, but not fiction. And, you do other tricks. For example, the very simple thing, the characteristic thing in Classical drama, the most characteristic feature of Classical drama, is the aside. That is, the actor is speaking to some character over there; he turns around, and he speaks to the audience. But the audience is not in the play! What's he saying? He's expressing a way of communicating an idea, an intent. But it has to be real.
For example, the soliloquies of Hamlet, are real. Who is Hamlet speaking to? He's speaking to no one but the audience. He's not speaking to the other actors, the other characters on the stage. So, you now are looking inside the mind, in a way which tries to understand what's going on, in terms of real society.
Thus, Classical drama teaches you to think about history, not as a collection of facts, connecting the dots, but as an emotional experience. Not history in general, but specific history. And you must have a sense of how one phase of human existence goes into another.
It's not history, when you take a section"I'm going to take this section of history, to specialize in." You are? Why don't you study something that you'll learn something? Why don't you study how cultures are connected, sequentially and otherwise, in terms of their experience?
In the Shadow of the Pyramids
Go back, for example: Greek culture was created in the shadow of the Pyramids of Giza. Not in Mesopotamia. The British always keep trying to find it. You know, the British archaeologists would go into the deserts of Iraq, and they were looking for the street address of Abraham's house. Typical Biblical archaeologists! And there are all these other materials around there, including cuneiform records, and they throw these things away!
I once tried to have a studyback in the 1950s, I'd done a lot of work on Mesopotamia, on archaeologists' study of economics. That is to say, how, because we had all these cuneiform records, can we not construct an image, from an accounting standpoint, of what the economic history of Mesopotamia was, from Sumer on? That seemed like a very good idea. So, I went to get a study done, of this type, and it couldn't work, because these crazy British Biblical archaeologists had taken all of these valuable cuneiform tablets, which had been carefully, meticulously collected records, which had somehow survived these [inaud.]. And here's all this materialit'd all been dumped in heaps, because they had no relevance to trying to find the street address of Abraham.
This is the kind of thing you get into.
But, history's connected. It's connected in ways, that one culture impacts on another. So you have a group of historically specific things.
Now, go back to Egypt. Egypt teaches you something, especially if you study constructive geometry, pre-Euclidean constructive geometry. It teaches you that the Babylonians didn't know what they were talking about. The Babylonians and the Mesopotamians were degenerate cultures.
Many people will say that you have to study Babylonian mathematics, to understand science. That's the worst thing you can do. Study Egyptian. Take the Great Pyramids at Giza. What are they? They are astronomical instruments. And they actually determinedthey're very sophisticated astronomy. And, when you look at the Great Pyramids of Giza, and study them as astronomical instruments, you understand exactly what the Pythagoreans meant by "spherics." That is spherics!
You've got this universe, you assume to be spherical, because you're looking out at it that way. You're looking through these various holes, and you're measuring angular differences in terms of movements. Do you know how far the star is? No, you don't. Do you know what the apparent angle is, between the star's movements? Yes, you know that. Do you know how some of these things coincide? Yeah, I know that. So, now we can measure something. But, you measure it, in angular measurement, not in straight-line distances. Not in a so-called Cartesian or Euclidean manifold.
But just take a big spherical volume; you're in the middle of it, somewhere. You normalize your observations, and you get this idea of the angular differences. And you look for patterns in this, to try to understand what's going on here. The Egyptians did that.
Then, you find that Thales, and so forth, and the Pythagoreans, say they got their knowledge from the Egyptians, and you find the Pyramids, which are astronomical instruments. You say, "Ah, yeah! When they say they used spherics, that's what they did. And these are the guys, that did it."
You go to the Mesopotamiansno spherics. They worshipped the Moon. That's why they're called lunatics.
Anyway, so, the continuity of history, and you start, say, from the inside of European history: European history and culture, starts with ancient Greece. As I say, it starts in the shadow of the Pyramids. Now, there's a continuity to European cultural history. But you have to go through the continuity, because their ideas are buried there, in the continuity, which are part of the culture today. To understand the culture today, you have to know what those things were; they have been transmitted to you. I used to tell people, "Look at Archimedes, for example; a few simple proofs of Archimedes. You can re-enact those proofs. You can know exactly how Archimedes mind worked, by doing the same thing he did. Re-enacting it." But, you're re-enacting it across a distance. But, you're re-enacting it, because the knowledge of his discovery of that, is transmitted to you, across thousands of years.
So, the history of culture, is embedded in existing culture, in various ways. So therefore, to understand mankind, you have to reach into the past, and understand it as a process. And great art, especially Classical drama, is the way we found is most efficient, to convey these ideas, as ideas, impassioned ideas, to people. To ordinary people. This was the function of the Classical tragedy, in Greece.
What did they have? They had this crazy stage. They have two guys come out with masks. And the audience is convinced, that these two guys with masks, coming on and off stage, are actually a whole crowd of people. And in the imagination, they are! And the audience develops passion, about what these characters are doing. The subject is what? Legends, like the Homeric legends, and other legends. The subject is history, some of it actual history. This is acted: History comes alive for an audience. Not history as a collection of facts, to be interpreted like connect-the-dotsbut history as a process. An impassioned process!
The Goldfish Bowl
Now, then you come down to the question of the goldfish bowl, which is key to understanding what this is all about. You have a bunch of fish in a goldfish bowlwater and everything. Now, you're carrying the goldfish bowl from here to here and here. And you're about to dump the goldfish down the toilet. Now, do the goldfish know what's going on?
People are usually living in a goldfish bowl. What's the goldfish bowl? They say, axiomatic assumptions, for example: Euclidean definitions, axioms, and postulates. These are the ingredients of a goldfish bowl. The mind of the person is enslaved to the boundaries of this goldfish bowl, of these so-called "self-evident principles." The mind assumes that nothing exists outside that goldfish bowl. Society then begins to attach great passion"That's wrong! You've violated that definition! You've violated that axiom! You violated that postulate!" "You're wrong! Oh! Oh! Terrible things will happen to you, if you do that!"
So, a great deal of passion. So, you actually have brainwashed the person, into believing there is nothing outside that goldfish bowl. There are only crazy people who would even suggest that anything exists outside that goldfish bowl. All the while, the goldfish bowl is being carried over here, to dump the fish into the toilet!
So therefore, what we're looking at, when we're looking at these changes, of the type that we see in the play by Odets, you're seeing a period of change, a change in direction of society. What you have to do, is you have to conceptualize the change, not what is happening as the experience within a fixed set of rules. In other words, the idiot will always try to explain things, in terms of assuming some fixed set of rules, comparable to a set of definitions, axioms, and postulates of a Euclidean geometry.
When you get into a crisis in society, which involves a change, a prescient perception of change, like a change I described in terms of this caseof during the war and after the warthat doesn't work any more. You now have to conceptualize the change, the change in direction. You have to adduce, what is the principle that governs this change in direction? So, now you're outside the goldfish bowl. You're now able to carry the bowl, and control its destiny. Because, you were not sucked into that destiny. You now are able to say, "How can we change our destiny, from being dumped down the toilet." Whereas the formalist, the Aristotelian will go to the toilet every time. Probably sit in the toilet bowl, waiting for somebody to flush.
So, that's the point.
What we come into now, we come into the questions of science, physical science. Because, what are these principles of change, what do they involve? They involve man's relationship to nature. Man's relationship, in the sense of society, as an organized process, in relationship to nature. You're dealing with, ultimately, the question of man's ability to survive. To grow, and to improve conditions of life, by changing our relationship to natureas by scientific progress, scientific discovery.
So therefore, in most of these cases, the change that's required, is to change the condition of social relations, as in a depression, where people are poor and hungry; to change the physical conditions. And the way we practice on the physical conditions, to change that in such a way, that we create a new condition, which gives us a change in a different direction than we're going in now. For example, right now: We are a very short distance away from a collapse of civilization. When it will happen is not certain, because they're pumping phony money into the system, as rapidly as possible, to try to keep the thing from collapsing; at least postponing it, until after the March primaries in the United States, hoping that they can hold onto power, political power; fearing that a crash now, would cause them to lose their political power, because they would lose their credibility.
But, apart from that, the crash is coming. And it's the biggest one that any of you have known, in more than a century. And I don't think most of you have lived that long.
Therefore, it's coming. Now therefore, what're you going to do? If you organize the planet, around a physical-economic recovery program, and get people to accept that program, you can now turn the direction of things from down, to up, psychologically. How do you convince people? You have to operate on the basis of the characteristic of the human mind. Not on the basis of that aspect of the mind, which knows definitions, axioms, and postulates; but, those aspects of the mind, which can understand changing definitions, axioms, and postulates. Or replacing them.
The Principle of the Complex Domain
This then, brings you back to the same thingto Gauss. The Gauss attack on Euler and Lagrange. Because, the principle of the complex domain, that is, the way of representing, to the conscious mind, the way we can control processes which are beyond our sense-perceptions, these processes which involve universal physical principles, we can not perceive; but, by understanding and solving the paradox, we can understand the principle, the unseen principle, which is causing the effect: like gravitation. Gravitation is typical, as defined by Kepler. This is real. You can't eat it; you can not smell it; you can not lick it. You shouldn't try. But, it has an effect. You can use your knowledge of that effect, to control a process.
All physical principles have that characteristic. In some way, you can use the knowledge of the principle, to control a process. It's invisible: You can't see it; you can't smell it; you can't taste it. But you can control the process. Therefore, what these principles involve is, what? Change! When you discover and apply a principle, you have introduced a change into the geometry of human action.
So therefore, the same thing is happening in Classical culture. You are presenting a paradox, as by way of a drama. A paradox, which involves a principle, reflected by a specific, actual historical situation. You now understand how that thing worked, how it should have worked; what was wrong. You now are determined: That mistake will never be made again.
It's the same thing as a scientific principle.
So, what our job is, in dealing with society, and the generation that you have to take over, in a sense, you have to free man from being a bunch of fish in a goldfish bowl, being carried to the toilet. You have to get control of these processes. To get control of these processes, which are social processes, you must understand the physical processes, which are the subject of control. You must understand the principles of physical science, and the principles of Classical art, as being one and the same thing; of one and the same type of thing.
Now, you have confidence. Now you have confidence that you can control the situation. And your generation has to do that. Because, we've been living with this dichotomy, this crazy culture, called empiricism, Aristotelianism, and so forth; existentialism; for too long. That is what has destroyed people. They have been in the goldfish bowl, carried to the toilet, again, and again, and again. These wars, where people are being carried to the toilet, in that way. They were so blind.
The First World War was created by idiots, under the manipulation of the greatest of all idiots, who was Edward VII, who died before the war actually broke out, but he planned it. Greatest piece of idiocy ever imagined! But, also, the German Kaiser was an idiot; the Austrian Kaiser was a greater idiot, a senile idiot; the Russia Czar was an idiot; France was a bunch of idiots. They went to a war, which accomplished nothing but the destruction of Europe. And it was not necessary, because nobody had their hands on the levers and the buttons, to control the thing, to say "Stop it! Don't do it!" Yes, you had people, who said, "stop it," like Jaures in France. He died. And nobody stopped it; and a lot of people died, and history went through Hell. Europe has not recovered yet, from the effect of that war.
It was stoppable. Why wasn't it stopped? What message should have stopped it? What were the cultural factors at that time, which prevented people from acting to stop it? Look, it was only these fools: this foolish Kaiser, this foolish Kaiser, these foolish French circles, this foolish Czar, this crazy bunch of British. A few handfuls of people! Mostly the breed of Queen Victoria, who was sort of like a queen termite, queen ant. Getting her pleasure on drugs, you know. Just a few people did that to the whole civilization! Apparently, a few decision-makers, made those decisions. If they'd made different decisions, the war wouldn't have happened.
Therefore, how do you control these kind of situations? So therefore, the key thing here, is to get the connection, to end this division, between so-called "physical science," which is taught in a reductionist way; and Romantic conceptions of history, as typified by Romantic readings of Classical drama.
Once you understand the principle of change, in Classical drama, as posed by Classical drama; a principle of change which appears to the audience, as a prescience, not as knowledge, but as a prescience. The audience does not see the solution. The audience has a prescience of its existence. A prescience of the change, and a prescience that the change has to be reversed.
And that's the same thing, as physical science. So, what we have to do, is unify the Classical art, as typified by Classical drama and its irony, and unify that with a Classical form of science, in which there are no arbitrary definitions, axioms, and postulates: for the purpose of finding out, how to recognize change, and how to willfully control it.
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