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This article appears in the November 7, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. See also the companion article, "Henry Wallace Would Never Have Dropped the Bomb on Japan."
ON THE NON-NOMINATION OF 1944

The Geometry of the
Henry Wallace Nomination

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

October 18, 2003

The reason for the British-led campaign to prevent Henry A. Wallace's Summer 1944 Democratic Party nomination for a second term as President Franklin Roosevelt's Vice-President, was solely that Wallace was determined to continue the policies of a Franklin D. Roosevelt who was not expected to live out a fourth term as President. For that reason, and that reason alone, the Senator Harry S Truman whose views were acceptable to the British monarchy, was nominated to replace Wallace on that ticket.

On all crucial strategic issues, as President, from the beginning of his completion of President Roosevelt's term, through his own term, Harry S Truman lived up to the expectations of his British partners.

This British lobbying for the dumping of Wallace reflected the heart of the fundamental, historically determined differences between the U.S. Republic and British Empire which had continued despite the temporary 1940-1945 war-time alliance of the two states. The apparent complexities of the ironical Roosevelt-Churchill alliance and mutual-antipathy can be competently understood only as a topic in physical geometry, as I have defined the role of physical geometry in politics, in earlier locations.

Briefly, the mind-set of Churchill and his associates had a long history. It was a mind-set defined by what had been that nation's increasing tendency, since near the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, a tendency toward the empiricist world-outlook which we associate with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac Newton, et al. This has been an increasing trend in British culture and its radiated influence, from the early Seventeenth Century to today's typical classroom. That empiricist outlook belongs to a different universe than the mind of American patriots in the tradition of the followers of such as Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. The physical universe in which both the British empiricist and our leading patriots have dwelt is the same; but, the way the mind sees, and reacts to that physical universe is different. It is qualitatively different in certain crucial aspects. The two compared mind-sets represent intersecting, but axiomatically different physical geometries.

The British mind-set's geometry is essentially that of Aristotle and Euclid, as reflected in the cases of Descartes and the followers David Hume, Hume's follower Immanuel Kant, Lord Shelburne's propagandist Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and the radical empiricist Bertrand Russell. The founders of the U.S.A. were influenced by a contrary geometry, that of the followers of the pre-Euclidean constructive geometry of the Pythagoreans and Plato; this was the Classical tradition as imparted to the circles of Benjamin Franklin by, most immediately, the followers of Gottfried Leibniz on the European continent.

For example, the British mind-set is reflected in the Preamble of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, in John Locke's doctrine of "property"; the U.S. Declaration of Independence was based axiomatically on Leibniz's explicitly anti-Locke conception "the pursuit of happiness," as this is echoed as the principles of sovereignty, general welfare, and posterity in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution.

To put a fine political point on that explanation of the roots of the British hostility toward Henry Wallace's 1944 candidacy, the typical British empiricist joins Thomas Huxley and Frederick Engels, in denying any axiomatic principle defining the difference between man and ape; whereas, the American founders' tradition of Plato, Christianity, and Moses Mendelssohn, for example, emphasized an absolute, axiomatic quality of principled difference between the mind of man and the potential of the ape. We, when we are in our right mind, reject any policy of practice which degrades any class of human beings to the status of virtual human cattle; the reductionists, such as Hobbes, Locke, and the Physiocrat Quesnay, insist on forms of society which reduce the majority of human beings to the status of human cattle, in practice. Colonialism and imperialism are examples of the same class of practices of bestiality expressed by the followers of Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Quesnay, Adam Smith, Bentham, Kant, et al.

The importance of introducing this point of view to a description of the hatred against Henry Wallace by the British establishment of that time, is to lay to rest the nose-picking sorts of attempted explanations of that hostility to Wallace's candidacy. It was not any one or several points of Wallace's policy which prompted the British reaction. These points were of that significance only to the degree that they represented the traits of a species they considered alien to the kind of universe in which they were disposed to live.

Look at this story on two levels, each the story of the 1944 U.S. Democratic Party nominating convention. First, as a matter of description of the historical issues expressed in that conflict. Second, examine the same issues on a scientific level.

Britain's Wars Against the U.S.A.

During past centuries, the United Kingdom of Great Britain conducted a series of wars against the existence of our U.S.A. The first, were the so-called Indian wars organized by both French and British agencies. The second, was the American 1776-1783 War of Independence. The third, was the series of oppressions against the United States during the period preceding and accompanying the 1812-1815 War of 1812. The fourth, was the U.S. Civil War, with the associated conquest of Mexico by the combined forces of Britain, France, and Spain. This is the broad picture of the situation, but only a partial listing.

After President Lincoln's victory, a further attempt at destruction of the U.S.A. by military means was no longer feasible. With one special kind of exception, during the 1930s, Britain shifted its strategy to financial warfare and subversion. From the beginning of the Twentieth Century—from 1901, the time of the assassination of U.S. President McKinley on—the British policy was, usually, the intention to use British influence on the U.S. private financial institutions as the chief foothold for assimilating the U.S.A. into a kind of "commonwealth status" within a British system.

These wars, near-wars, and so forth, reflected a species-difference between our republic and the British Empire. On the surface, the nature of the species-difference between the relevant British and U.S. types, can be simply and fairly described as follows.

Despite changes in secondary features, the British system is, still today, a hereditary descendant of the Eighteenth-Century, Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of parliamentary government under the British East India Company's (and Barings Bank's) Lord Shelburne, and such notable Shelburne lackeys as Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and Jeremy Bentham. That Anglo-Dutch Liberal form of parliamentary government is shaped axiomatically as an agency of the power represented by a so-called independent central-banking system; the latter system is, in turn, an outgrowth of the form of de facto imperial maritime power which medieval Venice exerted over Europe and adjoining areas until the close of the Seventeenth Century.

The forced fusion of this Dutch and English form of merchant-banking power under William of Orange, and the establishment of the British monarchy on this basis with the 1714 accession of George I, established Barings and its British East India Company as the reigning force in the United Kingdom, a force self-described by its insiders and knowledgeable adversaries, alike, as "The Venetian Party." The term "Venetian Party" was essentially interchangeable with the philosophically empiricist "Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment."

For example. The long-standing opponent of such forms of pro-imperial financier-oligarchical power was the emergence of the modern form of sovereign nation-state. This form of state came into being during the course of the Italy-centered Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. The exemplary such states which emerged during that century were Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England. Shakespeare's English histories typify the long struggle of humanity against Venetian-Norman tyranny over Europe, through the overthrow of the Neronic tyrant Richard III. The judicial murder of Sir Thomas More by the Venetian interests represented by Cardinal Pole, Thomas Cromwell, and Henry VIII's Venetian marriage counselor Zorzi (a.k.a. Giorgi), typifies the English side of the long 1511-1648 struggle of Venice to drown Europe in the blood of religious and related warfare, rather than endure the continuation of the modern form of sovereign nation-state.

The axiomatic issue of all that Venice-led bloodshed, and of the wars of France's Louis XIV and of the Eighteenth Century, was the conflict between, on the one side, the principles of sovereignty, general welfare, and posterity—the principles introduced by the Renaissance—which define the modern sovereign nation-state as the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution did; and, on the opposing side, the claims of rentier-financier consorts to practice usury, and even deploy actual, or virtual chattel slavery ("debt-slavery") against even the nominally sovereign nation-state. That is the same issue posed against entire nations—including, soon, the U.S.A. itself—by the concert of financier interest which controls the present International Monetary Fund and World Bank systems.

Nonetheless, the United States came to the rescue of Britain and France in 1917. But for that U.S. military intervention, Germany would have defeated both France and Britain on the battlefields that year. The ominous power which the United States presented, as the crucial victor in World War I, provoked the formation of an anti-U.S. effort from Europe—an effort associated with an association known as the Synarchist International, the organization which produced the 1922-1945 wave of fascist movements and regimes in Europe, and in South and Central America.

This Synarchist International was the outgrowth of an organization organized by the British East India Company's Lord Shelburne during the 1763-1789 interval, the so-called Martinist freemasonic association which created the French Revolution, its Jacobin Terror, and its Napoleonic tyranny. This operation was launched under the direction of Shelburne, beginning approximately 1763, deploying Adam Smith and other agents with the explicitly stated intention of destroying both the economies of France and the English colonies in North America. It was a group of private financier interests, deployed under the impetus of Shelburne et al., which acted during the 1789-1815 period.

Later, during the later Nineteenth Century, this continuing Martinist association adopted modified trappings, becoming known then as Synarchism; and, around the time of the Versailles Treaty, as the Synarchist International.

So, by June 1940, with the tattered British expeditionary force expecting German armor to advance and capture them all at Dunkirk, British Prime Minister (and Minister of Defense) Winston Churchill appealed to President Franklin Roosevelt for closer cooperation to prevent the United Kingdom, and British naval forces, from joining Hitler's forces: for destruction, first, of the Soviet Union, and then the U.S.A. Adolf Hitler, waiting for his admirers in Britain to bring about a virtual alliance among the naval powers of Germany, Italy, France, and Britain, held back his tanks long enough for the British Expeditionary Force to escape. The new world war not only continued, but spread; but, Hitler's dream of conquering both the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. with help of Britain and France died around those events of June 1940.

The crowd around Churchill and other Transatlantic right-wing circles—within Britain, the U.S.A., and elsewhere—which had allied with Roosevelt until July-August 1944, had never given up those principles which made them adversaries of what the U.S. Constitution represented. With the allied breakthrough in Normandy in 1944, the affinities to Roosevelt of the Churchill and like-minded circles waned. Roosevelt was no longer needed; what the President represented now became, in their eyes, the new, most deadly adversary of Liberal financier-oligarchical power.

Was this duplicity on Churchill's side? Yes, and no.

There were many in the British Establishment prepared to join with Hitler for a fascist takeover of the world. However, some, like Churchill, were not prepared to accept the British Empire's submission to the status of a lackey of Hitler's regime based in continental Eurasia. The U.S.-British alliance, soon joined by the Soviet Union, ensured Hitler's pending defeat. When that defeat was nearly in hand, Roosevelt was no longer wanted by those pro-monetarist doctrinaires.

So, today, the attachment to British traditions impels conservatives and others in the U.K., to deplore the thought of coming under even the kind of U.S. imperial fascist domination which "beast-men" Cheney, Schwarzenegger, and their neo-conservative cronies typify.

Such was the logic of the British scheme for bringing about the dumping of Henry Wallace's candidacy at the Summer 1944 Democratic convention. The alignments of today are different, but the British leading circles' predominant rejection of submission to any other power than its own, remains.

The Physical Geometry of Politics

The human mind has two principal aspects. One aspect is of a type we share with the beasts, sense-perception. The other is the aspect which distinguishes us from the beasts, the power of discovery of experimentally validated universal physical principles. Typical of the human mind, is Johannes Kepler's unique achievement of the original discovery of universal gravitation. The understanding of the interaction between the two—sense-perception and universal physical principles not directly perceived—is, narrowly, the basis for a modern derivative of pre-Euclidean Greek Classical constructive geometry known as constructive geometry, or physical geometry.

Physical geometry is the appropriate way of defining the relationship of the individual mind to man's increasing mastery of the physical universe, as by technological progress. However, the way in which human minds interact to improve cooperation in managing the possibility of technological progress, also involves discoverable principles which are as essential to society's progress, as discovery of physical principles is for technological progress as ordinarily defined. Classical principles of artistic composition, as typified by Classical tragedy and Plato's dialogues, have been the appropriate basis for informing the design of principles of government and law since ancient Classical Greece. Classical artistic principles typify the kinds of principles of relevance to social progress, as distinguished from bare technological progress.

The combined accumulation of both kinds of sets of efficiently universal principles, defines a science of physical economy, in which the combined physical effects of both physical and Classical-artistic types of principles are the focus of attention.

No adequate insight into the way in which the political mind functions were possible, without examining more deeply the way in which sense-perception and discovered physical principles complement and oppose one another within the individual mind generally, and the popular mind most emphatically. The achievements and pathologies of mass behavior within and among nations can not be adequately understood without understanding the way in which the negative and positive features of sense-perception interact with the human will to action or passivity. The case of the 1944 candidacy of Henry Wallace can not be adequately understood without taking that deeper aspect of the matter into mind.

Our senses are functions internal to our biology; on this account, they do not show us the actual universe which lies, so to speak, outside our skins. They show us the impact of the universe upon those biological functions. Thus, it may be said that our senses show us only the shadows which reality casts upon our sense-perception, not the reality which casts the shadows. It is only through certain crucial inconsistencies, called ontological paradoxes, in our sense-experience, that we are provoked, and able to discover the unseen universal physical principles—as in Kepler's richly detailed elaboration of his discovery of gravity (as in his 1609 The New Astronomy)—which act to cause the paradoxes which our senses observe.

In mathematical-physics language, this relationship between sense-perception and unseen but efficient physical principle is represented by the view of the complex domain which Carl Gauss presented (as refutation of the empiricist method of Euler and Lagrange) in his 1799 The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. The fuller development of Gauss' work along that line, is accomplished by his student Bernhard Riemann in, most notably, Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation. On this account, the successive development of Kepler's proof of gravitation, as Leibniz's uniquely original discovery of both an actually infinitesimal calculus (contrary to that of Euler and Lagrange) and the universal physical principle of least action, laid the necessary stepping-stones to the work of Gauss, Abel, Dirichlet, Wilhelm Weber, Riemann, et al.

Therefore, for Classical science and art, truth is found only in the complex domain, rather than the shadow-world of sense-perception. The corollary implication is that, as for the empiricist Immanuel Kant and his existentialist followers such as Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, truth does not exist for those who regard the physical subject of the complex domain as unknowable.

Nonetheless, even if the existence of that domain, as so defined, were denied, the domain exists. The human mind will either fill up that domain with discovered principles, or may dump all sorts of refuse, even arbitrarily, into the space available. Typical refuse is the work of Thomas Hobbes, of John Locke, Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, Quesnay's laissez-faire, and Adam Smith's favored pick-pocket, the so-called "invisible hand."

The foremost significance of that view of a physically defined complex domain, is that physical science, so practiced, provides the simplest sort of conclusive proof that the human individual, as a species, is absolutely apart from, and above all other forms of life. It is by the discovery, application, and transmission of that class of discovered universal physical principles, that man has been enabled to reach above the several millions living individuals possible for higher apes, to produce a reported six billions living persons today. This power of willful increase of potential relative population-density as a species-characteristic of mankind, is the principle underlying a science of physical economy.

Man uses these discoveries to change nature, and to change his own behavior in a qualitatively efficient way. This requires not only the employment of technologies derived from discovery of physical principles; it also requires similar kinds of principles of social relations, principles which are most efficiently defined and studied by means of works of Classical artistic composition. The principles of sovereignty, general welfare (common good), and posterity embedded in the Preamble of our Federal Constitution are examples of this study of history and Classical art combined.

These three principles of republican statecraft have the quality of effect of universal physical principles. The defense of sovereignty, general welfare, and posterity define a set of rules of mass behavior, rules akin to universal physical principles, which will tend to promote the maintenance and improvement of the human condition, while promoting cooperation, rather than beastly conflict among nations.

Defining a Species of Difference

From the vantage-point which I have just presented, in summary, above, we may fairly describe the U.S. and British models as different species of society, as they were different species of animal life. I conclude with an explanation of that point and of its bearing on the case of Henry Wallace's nomination.

The essential principle of the "independent central banking system" has the directly opposite effect. The conflict is: Which shall be supreme, money expressed as usury, or human welfare? If the former, then the relationship of the state to its subjects is systemically predatory.

In all known cases of exceptions to the primary authority of the principle of the general welfare, the practiced form of government is implicitly imperial. Man is axiomatically beast to man, under which some are rulers and others are human cattle. To such wicked ends, societies adopt certain arbitrary rules as more or less "self-evident," as the definitions, axioms, and postulates of a school-book Euclidean geometry or an arithmetic are treated as "self-evidently" required practice. All such systems are therefore rightly known as utopian in the same general sense implied by the pathetic output of "Robinson Crusoe models" in teaching of some gambler's mini-max doctrine of "economics."

The very notion of an "independent central banking" system is, by virtue of the associated acquiescence by governments, a predatory variety of utopian model imposed upon governments and their subjects.

The array of utopian axiomatic assumptions built into the way in which the British system has functioned since 1714, is reflected as an integrated mind-set in the development of any of the relatively privileged British subjects, a mind-set reflected in the behavior of less fortunate ones as having the implicit lawful authority of ruling opinion. Thus, all who share faith in that particular sort of utopian dogma, upper and lower classes alike, imagine themselves to be paragons of right-thinking ways of a free people. They are habituated to living in that sort of ideological fish-bowl, and find its boundaries to be nothing other than natural ones. Analogous, but also different particular sets of opinions are found among inhabitants of the currently conventional American fish-bowl.

So, in the customary case, the individual member of a society associates his or her opinion with the whole effect of all of the principled sorts of rules which that culture, or sub-culture has currently adopted. He reacts, as if instinctively, to the whole effect of those rules, more than to any particular feature. It is the whole effect which evokes notions of "rightness" or "wrongness"; the particular feature is defended on grounds of the implied moral authority of the perceived rightness or wrongness of that mind-set considered a whole.

Thus, once the notion that "We are no longer dependent upon this fellow Roosevelt" had been introduced to the political equations of mid-1944, the already existent differences in post-war policy between the U.K. and U.S.A. came to the surface as particular points of perceived "wrongness" about the patriotic tradition expressed by President Roosevelt. That "wrongness" was then considered, thus, as "no longer something we had to tolerate for the time being." Wallace, therefore, had to go. Those who were in sympathy with the Mellon-Morgan-Dupont plot against the 1933-1934 Franklin Roosevelt, joined with their relevant leading British co-thinkers to bury Roosevelt and his tradition as rapidly as might be possible.

Perhaps no set of evidence makes this point more clearly, than the way in which U.S. General Draper and his co-thinkers hastened to cover up those lines of investigation of the financing of the Nazi war-machine, which would lead back to the Anglo-American accomplices of the Synarchist International plots of the 1920s and 1930s. That is the chief significance of the way in which the 2000 Presidential election was rigged, in both leading parties. The case of the Henry Wallace nomination of 1944 is still very much with us today.

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