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This article appears in the August 8, 2008 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Why Gordon Grumbles:
The Empire Crumbles

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[PDF version of this article]

The LaRouche Political Action Committee released this statement on July 27, 2008.

The news from Scotland this weekend is that the British Empire is crumbling. Today, as in all of William Shakespeare's tragedies, Celtic or others, from the past, the current British Prime Minister, Labour's Gordon Brown, has no greater personal fault for all his present troubles, than that, as it now turns out: first, he was born at the wrong time; second, it was his luck to have been left with command at the point the former captain, Prime Minister Tony Blair, had abandoned the already doomed ship to the unfortunate Gordon's command.

It was poor Gordon's luck to find himself, thus, drowning politically at the fag end of the empire he was called to serve.

There is no conceivable way in which that presently disintegrating British Empire of today can come out of the present catastrophe alive. In that decaying empire's zeal to bring down the United States which President Franklin Roosevelt had led to victory over the plague of fascist regimes which Britain itself had launched upon the hapless post-World War I continent of Europe, it has now turned out, imperial Britain had doomed itself in the fashion of the man who destroyed his intended victim by lashing them both, villain and victim, to the anchor of a sinking British ship of fools.

One wonders: what will come out for the survivors of the sinking of this ship? The news from Scotland seems to suggest an outcome. Britain's Telegraph seems to have picked up, a bit wishfully, a trace of the relevant smell. A glance back to the situation at the outset of the Eighteenth Century, under Queen Anne, suggests what might possibly emerge from the rubble of that Anglo-Dutch Liberal tyranny which was imposed upon the British Isles under, chiefly, the long reach of Liberalism's true author, the Venetian scoundrel Paolo Sarpi. What was glued together of those British Isles under Sarpi's heirs, is now in the process of coming apart.

This does not suggest that the historical parts of the islands' past will return to status quo ante; rather, something which combines a reflection on the traditions of centuries past, will blend with the experience under the fallen empire's reign, to produce something new. First, however, the parts will seek to assert their independence, and, then, awakening as if to the weekend's morning after, as is customary in those isles, they think about putting old pieces together in a new way.

In the meantime, if we of the United States manage to shuck off the lunacy which reigns in U.S. governmental and economic circles today, we shall have to give serious thought to fixing the mess in the other English-speaking center of the trans-Atlantic world. What might be hoped would supersede the self-ruined Britain of today?

The Change

Since we are considering both sides of the Atlantic in this matter, we must proceed as follows in seeking a glimpse of the future.

What will be happening, on both sides of the Atlantic, during the coming month of August, will be a great popular revulsion against the arrogance of the regimes and ruling social strata on both sides of a bankrupt Atlantic society. Americans, in particular, will cease to grab their forelocks when the tyrants of financier imperialism ride by. It will be, in that respect, a truly revolting experience for those who are grasping desperately at the reins of financier tyranny today.

We should hope for, and work to ensure that we do not experience a new bloody Jacobin awfulness on that account. That hopeful prospect is not presently guaranteed in the least; but, it remains a possibility. The rule in such historical situations of this sort, is to provide a useful sort of leadership to pull matters together. Only fools will put the prospect of the onrushing great, perhaps terrible change, from their minds. It is to the extent that some among us think prudently about future alternatives, that the worst prospects can be avoided.

We patriots of North America must look forward to the emergence of a literate Britain of English, Welsh, and Scots, among other inhabitants, from the argot of the political culture under the present, Sarpian tyranny which has reigned for so many centuries since the death of Queen Anne, and since the Shakespeare whom the lackeys of Sarpi treated so badly. Americans and peoples of the British Isles will be brought together by memory of the affliction from which, as current Scottish developments suggest, they are in the process of being relieved.

I doubt, greatly, that those isles shall be assimilated into some trans-Atlantic political union. Putting the tag of "fag end" on the current Anglo-Dutch Liberal empire, signals the time for a global system of cooperation among what are, respectively, currently sovereign nation-states, which shall, we trust, find their differences enjoyable.

Presently, we must simply keep that prospect in mind, and act accordingly.

Empires come and go, but life must go on.

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