June 16, 1998

Where Franklin Roosevelt Was Interrupted

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

What we present below is not the full 1998 article. For the full text, click here. Embedded links have been added.

The full article by Mr. LaRouche first appeared in EIR Vol. 25, No. 28, July 17, 1998, pages 16-43. The article as presented here, starts on page 23 of that original publication.

During the period of the two World Wars, 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, the U.S.A. had provided, overwhelmingly, the decisive margin for the combined military victory of the U.S.A., the U.K., France, and their allies,[fn_1] through a U.S. agro-industrial mobilization modelled on the 1861-1876 success of the program launched under President Abraham Lincoln.[fn_2] As we have already stated, this, Henry C. Carey’s 1861-1876 American model, was adopted, with great success, by Bismarck’s Germany (from 1877 onward), by Meiji Restoration Japan of the 1870s, and by the Russia of Alexander II, D.I. Mendeleyev, and Count Sergei Witte, and was the basis for the agro-industrial development program designed by China’s Sun Yat-sen.

Had the same war-time, Roosevelt program of 1939-1945, been adapted to the rapid, post-war, agro-industrial development of new nations freshly freed from the debilitating hand of British, French, etc. imperialism, the U.S. and its partners would have enjoyed a continuing, post-war economic growth. The policy-shaping institutions established under the first two decades of such a post-war conversion program, would have virtually ensured further, planetary growth and stability throughout the 1945-1998 interval.

As we have stressed repeatedly, in earlier reports on this matter, the most crucial, “post-Hamilton” feature of Lincoln’s “American System,” and its revivals during two World Wars of this century, lies in the development of the principle of machine-tool design, originally by France’s Lazare Carnot, and the continued implementation of this, during 1794-1814, by Carnot collaborator Gaspard Monge’s École Polytechnique. This work of Carnot and the École was, like the economics of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, directly a continuation of the development of the principles of physical economy, and physics in general, by Gottfried Leibniz. The link to Lincoln’s industrial revolution, was provided by the influence of the École Polytechnique in the 1814-1815 transmission of these principles of machine-tool-driven technological progress to the United States Military Academy under Commandant Sylvanus Thayer. It was the scientific and engineering tradition of Thayer’s West Point, as exemplified by the international role of Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson, Alexander Dallas Bache, which exemplifies the way in which the U.S. Army and Navy developed the foundations of the great U.S. economic triumph of 1861-1876. It was this model to which the military planners of Woodrow Wilson’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s incumbency turned, to provide the sinews of victory for two World Wars.

Look at the immediate prospect for post-1945 development of the economies of the former British, Dutch, Portuguese, and French colonies from this vantage-point.

As stressed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton,[fn_3] there are two keys to the development of a poorly developed land-area into a prosperous economy. On the one side, there is basic economic infrastructure: public transportation, water management (both latter substantially public works), and energy supplies. The other side, is what Hamilton identified as “artificial labor:” the increase of the productive powers of labor (per capita, and per square kilometer) through investment in scientific and technological progress. Obviously, capital expenditures for these two categories of items increase the total cost, measured in physical units of production, per capita and per square kilometer; but, this is more than offset by gains in net productive powers of labor.

In the eyes of the competent historian of economy, Hamilton covers this adequately,[fn_4] but the ignorance among today’s policy-shapers, especially among followers of the Mont Pelerin Society and U.S. House Speaker “Newt” Gingrich, shows the need to emphasize a few crucial points. Begin with transportation.

The typical function of public works in transportation, is to decrease significantly the cost and delay of moving goods (and people) from one specific location on the map, to another. Savings in time of transport, the vastly greater economies of rail over highway transport for long distances, reduction in spoilage, and so on, are savings to the economy (per capita and per unit of total land-area) which more than offset the capital investment required to create, develop, and maintain efficient public transport. For example, the ability to get cheap, reliable transport to and from East Oshkosh, may determine whether East Oshkosh, and the people within it, are able to function with reasonable competitiveness. In other words, rearranging the landscape to facilitate productive and related human activity.[fn_5]

Similarly, water, in short, is life. The history of our national economy, over two hundred years to date, is that our agriculture, our forests, our climate, require constant increase of the intensity of both fresh-water management, and of water purification and desalination. The quality and quantity of managed water-supplies, directly supplied to agriculture and other human consumption, have the most direct bearing upon the fostering of life. Otherwise, public waterways are, by far, the cheapest form of mass transport, per ton, per unit price, of bulk freight. Only when slower delivery would increase substantially the inventory-cost of supplying high-priced goods to the economy, do rail, truck, and air transport represent required options.

That economic history also shows, that, chemically, and otherwise, the level of technology which can be achieved, is delimited by both the quantities of energy supplies, and also the energy-flux-density of the energy-supplies applied to productive and other processes. All other things considered, the quantity and energy-flux-density of energy-supplies determines the level of technology which can be realized, and, thus, has a direct effect upon the possibility for increasing the productive powers of labor. This reshaping of the energy-profile is, like the development of public transportation, a shaping of the physical-economic landscape in a mode which enhances man’s per-capita and per-square-kilometer power over nature as a whole.

The role of Hamilton’s “artificial labor,” is expressed, in effect, in terms of required increases in the capital-intensity of production. The reader must note, that capital-intensity is not to be measured in financial-accounting terms, but in physical-economic terms. The following rule of thumb applies.

Reconsider here, the leading points stressed in the present author’s introductory textbook in physical economy.[fn_6] Take the total per-capita output of productive labor (labor directly employed in agricultural and industrial products, or, in engineering and related services essential to the physical maintenance of productive capacity and product quality): “T” = “Total.” Compare the percentile of this total labor-output with the corrected ration of physical goods and related essential services required to maintain the labor-force at the existing level of skill and productivity (the British “classical” economists’ and Marx’s “Variable Capital,” or “V”). In a similar way, compare, as capital costs, the ration of total output required for basic economic infrastructure, plus the ration required as production and closely related capital (similarly, “C” = “Constant Capital”). The latter includes the required flow of goods in intermediate stages, as required to maintain current output.

Now, still referencing the present author’s textbook presentations, make the following rough calculation. Include “d,” as the general overhead expense of society, apart from V and C. Then, subtract d+V+C from T = P' (margin of physical-economic profit). Then, it is required: P'/(C+V) increases as the ratio C/V increases, and the physical-economic content of V, per capita, also increases. In part, the margin of gain of P'/(C+V) is the result of development of basic economic infrastructure; in the final analysis, all gain, including that from development of infrastructure, depends upon the impact of investment in scientific and technological progress. Thus, P'/(C+V) increases as a function of per-capita C, which increases as a function of C/V. In short, a true “anti-entropic” function, rooted in those uniquely human (cognitive = creative)[fn_7] processes of validated discovery of scientific and cultural principles by means of which scientific and technological progress are generated.

We must stress here, once again: The key to the large-scale, sustained successes of modern society in this venture, since the 1792-1794, revolutionary reforms of Lazare Carnot, lies within what is best fairly described as “the machine-tool design” sector. By “machine tool,” we signify the notion of a machine-tool principle as developed by Lazare Carnot. However, our emphasis is upon the fact that any perfected design of a proof-of-physical-principle experiment, is also a model for a machine-tool principle, a technology. It is through such machine-tool designs, that scientific discoveries are transmitted efficiently into production. It is that transmission which is the chief source of the high rates of physical-economic gain seen in the 1861-1876 U.S. industrial boom, in the copying of that American model so successfully by post-1876 Germany, the war-time mobilizations of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, and in the U.S. space program. Such a combination of high rates of forced-draft scientific and technological progress, mediated through the channels of an expanding machine-tool-design sector, is the key to the possibility of a general, sustained rate of physical-economic growth, per capita, in South, East, and Southeast Asia today (for example).

In other words, had the Truman administration not swung over to Winston Churchill’s anti-American policies, the proper course of action for the post-World War II U.S.A., would have been to mobilize and expand the U.S. machine-tool-design sector as a whole, to supply the nations of Asia, Africa, and the Americas the high rates of development of infrastructure and technology needed to fulfill Roosevelt’s vision of a post-war “American Century.” Instead, we substantially collapsed the levels of production, rather than capitalizing the accumulated investment in war-production capacity as an active new industry for development of the world as a whole. Under circumstances proposed here, the U.S. war-debt would have been rolled over, and ultimately liquidated, thus, by using it as a source of credit for large-scale, global ventures.

Although today’s conditions are far from those of 1945-1963, some of the most relevant features of a global development approach remain either the same, or are similar. Still today, the admittedly withering machine-tool-design sector of the world economy is limited to a few nations. Most notably, these are a few industrialized nations led by the U.S.A., Germany, and Japan. The largest potential for expansion of this supply lies in the military-scientific complex of the former Soviet Union, if those resources could be harnessed for this purpose, especially supplementary contributions to the machine-tool requirements of China, India, and relevant other nations.

The lessons for today, may be summarized as follows. The functions which must be performed have three aspects:

1. In developing nations such as China and India, to supply these nations with sufficient machine-tool-design inputs to enable those nations to effect high rates of increase of productive powers of labor. Without that, adequate rates of capital formation (in social terms) could not be sustained.

2. As an included part of this requirement, to assist such nations in establishing adequate local machine-tool and machine-tool-design capabilities. These must be adequate to provide machine-tool and related services (locally) within the economy.

Within the leading machine-tool-design export nations, the division of labor allotted to machine-tool-design and related capabilities must be increased to levels corresponding to relevant obligations on accounts 1 and 2.

3. Not only must the quantity and ration of the machine-tool-design sectors be increased accordingly. The rate of scientific and technological progress within the combined economies must be accelerated, by task-oriented, “science-driver” methods, to provide the required degree of second-order increase of productive powers of labor.

On these accounts, the task-orientation which should have been adopted for the 1945-1956 interval, parallels the admittedly different specific set of requirements for today.

Not everything we did during the late 1940s and 1950s was wrong on these accounts; the limited successes, such as those of the space programs of the 1950s and 1960s, were precious demonstrations of what could have been accomplished, had these virtuous undertakings, and their specific passions, been carried to broader and further accomplishments. There was simply not enough of the good, or even merely passable efforts which were mobilized; the good done did not rise to the threshold of overcoming the increasing rates of attrition which the U.S. and other economies suffered from the middle to late 1960s, onward, especially after 1971.

On the subjects of basic economic infrastructure, required rates of capital-intensive investment in the entire economy, and so on: There is a widespread error of presumption respecting the causal interrelations between so-called “micro-economic” and “macro-economic” scales of economic activity.[fn_8] The worst of these presumptions, is the popular delusion of those “social Darwinists” who assume, that by eliminating “inefficient” firms, for example, the remaining firms will represent a prosperous economy. Such fellows overlook the fact, that the performance of a (world, or national) economy is its performance as a whole: this, in terms of nothing less than its entire population, its entire land-area, and so on. It is the relationship of the total population to the totality of (ultimately) the universe, and, more immediately, the land-area occupied by that population, which defines the success or failure of economies. The totality of the social-economic process represents an interdependent system.

To prepare the reader for the promised, explicit comparison of the eight periods, the following, several additional points of review must be provided, on background.

Economy is Uniquely Human

Above, we have stated, once again, the central principle upon which any competent study of economics depends absolutely. Recently, we had stated this afresh in our EIR report, “The Substance of Morality.” We have identified this as the principle of anti-entropy repeatedly, in the author’s introductory textbook, and numerous other published locations. Economy requires a persisting rate of growth in what some might regard it as convenient to label “the per-capita rate of profit,” a rate of physical-economic growth, per capita, which depends upon increasing both the relative physical-economic expenditures for members of households, and increased per-capita rates of expenditure for basic economic infrastructure and productive-capital investments: e.g., [P/(C+V)]₁< [P/(C+V)]₂ ; (C/V)₁ < (C/V)₂; |V|₁ < |V|₂ [fn_9]

The origin of such increases in the productive powers of labor, is society’s realization of validated discoveries of principle. As set forth in “The Substance of Morality,”[fn_10] these discoveries, both cultural and physical-scientific, are each typified by validated discoveries of physical principle. As stated in earlier locations,[fn_11] such validated discoveries of physical principle form a Riemannian series, n → n+1, in which the expansion of the series corresponds to the ordering of the increase of mankind’s power over nature, both per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth’s surface-area.[fn_12] The characteristic of man’s action upon nature, per capita, is enhanced in degree by each transition from n to n+1.

The indicated Riemannian series suggests a crucial point respecting sustainable preconditions for global economic development. View the economic implications of education and longevity, for all members of households, from the standpoint of this series.[fn_13]

The development of the realizable cognitive potential at level n, is in correspondence with the individual’s accumulation of the experience of the mental act of replication of each among the relevant historical series of acts of discovery. The economic function of the nurture of each young individual, within the family household and education otherwise, must be situated in terms of that Riemannian function. The same applies to the series m → m+1 of multiply-connected principles of a Classical-humanistic artistic nature, as compared with physical-scientific aggregation n → n+1. The quality of social and material circumstances in the family household and community, the quality and duration of education and related cultural activities, and the corresponding vitality of adult life, are prerequisites of the level of productive and related powers to be considered.

Thus, to develop and maintain a certain per-capita potential productivity within the labor-force, the total, per-capita household standard of living, must be maintained (and improved), as Leibniz already warned in his 1671 Society & Economy.[fn_14] This means, that to maintain a potential productivity of one employed member of the household, the average living standard of the entire household must represent that standard of living. This does not signify a fixed productivity. It requires a rising productivity, and, therefore, a standard of living reflecting increased constructive leisure and education, together with rising (physical) energy-density[fn_15] and (physical) capital-intensity, for virtually all members of the household.

It does not mean education tailored to fixed individual skills,[fn_16] but, rather, a life-long process of continuing upgrading of knowledge and technological capabilities, for all of the population, during each span of more than three successive generations. Just as a successful form of modern agro-industrial society requires an increasingly high composition of science and machine-tool-design related employed, so the cultural characteristics of the entire population’s education and daily life, must reflect this technological-cultural composition of the total division of labor of the population.

The conditions of household life, and education, of the entire population, required for a growing productive power of labor of a population functioning on the basis of technologies equal to a 1963 standard for the entire U.S. labor-force (for example), are a convenient, rule-of-thumb basis for defining the real content of a household minimum wage for an average household of that period. Implicitly, the standard for education and cultural life should be the Humboldt standard, as otherwise represented by the early U.S.A.’s best New England schools and Alexander Dallas Bache’s model for Philadelphia Central High School.[fn_17] This also assumes, at a minimum, the standard for maintenance and improvement of public works implicit in the conscience of the war-time Franklin Roosevelt administration.

Take, as an example, the increasing poverty of average quality of university education, first under Truman, later under Eisenhower, and, later, under Johnson and Henry Kissinger’s Nixon.

One of the leading positive features of the post-1945 periods, 1945-1964, was typified by the combination of such war-time programs as ASTP and of the post-war education portion of the “GI Bill of Rights,” to expand the standard of public education. Generally, veterans studying under the provisions of the “GI Bill,” were emotionally and intellectually more mature, and better performers than the comparable pre-war campus populations had been. There were, unfortunately, three “down sides” to this change in standards for education: 1) the tendency for intellectual mediocrity among aging veterans rushing to get on with building a career to support the family life-style they were fixed on establishing—what Schiller derided as the education of the “Brotgelehrten”; 2) a generalized moral-intellectual sterility, fostered by the combined impact of Truman-era “McCarthyism” and so-called “security” conditions attached to higher-paying careers—it was better for your standing with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not to offend the FBI by exhibiting a tendency to be an independent and original thinker; 3) the cluttering of education with a proliferation of “garbage courses,” the latter predominantly by-products of increasingly faddish influences of junk literature and “culture appreciation” courses, complementing the usually dubious influence of psychoanalysis and radical-positivist currents.

For the convenience of today’s reader, the degenerating trends in popular entertainments and typical conversational patterns observed from the Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge periods of U.S. moral decay, cast important light on the immediate experience (from the northeastern and Midwestern regions of the U.S.A.) of a child and adolescent from the U.S. 1920s and 1930s.[fn_18] From 1929, until Pearl Harbor 1941, the special effect contributed by the experience of the 1930s “Great Depression,” was the sense of most families that they were déclassé, their nostalgic attitudes colored by a blend of fact and fantasy about their social status in the “better times” before the “Big Crash.” There was a lot of Arthur Miller’s Willy Lohman,[fn_19] and, perhaps, also more than a bit of Japan’s Prime Minister Hashimoto, in most of the population from those 1930s. A vivid recollection from what we then still considered “the shoe city” of the manufacturing world, Lynn, Massachusetts of the late 1930s, is relevant.

Still, in mid-1930s Lynn, Massachusetts, the main street-railway lines and Boston and Maine Railway passenger terminal, with its urine-reeking waiting-room area, intersected at Central Square. The overhead railroad bridge was the short base of the triangular shaped square. Along one of the two longer adjacent sides of that triangle, lay the principal cafeteria, Huntt’s Restaurant. The cafeteria’s touch of modernity was a black glass facing. Against the glass, downcast men leaned quietly, but ostentatiously, methodically applying toothpicks to their mouths, suggesting the meal which most of those leaners had been unable to afford, that day, from the cafeteria within. For those men, it was a convenient place to lurk, in hope of “a hustle.”

Among most of the families whose children and adolescent offspring were maturing in the “Great Depression” years, the ugliest word in that period’s Nazi-like, Gleichschaltung dogma,[fn_20] was “be practical.” “Popular” served generally as a substitute for truthfulness. “Be practical,” signified doing nothing to suggest that one was an independent thinker in any serious sense of the term.

That was the bad side of the post-war 1940s and 1950s. Not all capitulated entirely to the corruption of “being popular” and “being practical.”

Take two cases from the popular ideology of the science classroom, the myth of Isaac Newton and the related dogma of Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Cauchy, et al., that the interval of action is linear in the infinitesimally small. The proof against these popular classroom dogmas is elementary, but, nonetheless, all but a handful refuse to risk their popularity among fellow-professionals, or others, by showing that elementary proof. Yet, within those limits, most of the serious scientists and engineers from the 1940-1972 interval, did some serious cognitive thinking on the subject of particular physical principles, or related matters. Most of those, however, avoided challenging the most fearsome of the popularized myths: the Isaac Newton myth, for example.

Take the case of Classical musical education and practice. Consider a few exemplary points. Begin with tuning.

An approximation of Classical musical tuning, centered upon C=256 and a scale otherwise nearly well-tempered, has been found in bells from ancient China, and was established in Classical Greece. In modern times, the influence of Florentine bel canto voice-training, combined with the functionally related development of polyphony by J.S. Bach, established the modern Classical tuning, at C=256, and A= (approximately) 430-432. It is known, that singing in voice-training modes other than Florentinebel canto, does not permit the best result. It is also known, especially among Classical singing artists, that an “elevated pitch,” of A=440 or higher, leads to an “early death” of the professional singing voice.

Yet, on the combined authorities of the Russian bandmasters participating in Clement Prince Metternich’s 1814 Congress of Vienna, and the later authority of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, the official “concert pitch” was set, by the English-speaking world, at A=440, or higher.

The principles of Classical polyphonic composition, from J.S. Bach through Johannes Brahms, are strictly defined, both by the relevant compositions themselves, and the best performances.[fn_21] Departure from Classical, to Romantic or “free-wheeling” readings of the score, produces a mish-mash of sensual effects, which, like Liszt’s notorious effort at use of Mozart’s K. 475 principle, falls apart in the performance.

As the career opportunities of the Classical professional musicians became scarcer, the urgency of propitiating the commercial side of the concert and recording industries, grew, and the critical sensibilities of leading and other musical performers grew more and more opportunistic. The result should call the reader’s attention to the discussion of justice, in Book II of Plato’s Republic.[fn_22] In proportion to the degree, these students and scientific or artistic professionals were serious thinkers, a relatively greater, if only partial emphasis was placed upon reenacting original discoveries of physical (or, artistic) principle, from case to case. However, with very rare exceptions, no efficient standard of truthfulness existed for the populations of the post-1945 period. Their ability to think cognitively, was shrunk, until, recently, among the strata born after 1939-1943, it virtually no longer exists.

Thus, from the mid-1960s onward, a standard of truthfulness virtually did not exist for the “Sixty-Eighters” and “Generation Xers.”

This trend has meant, that those cognitive qualities which set the human individual apart from the beasts, have virtually vanished from the active life of the population generally, and, thus, from the economic process. Public and university education has become, today, a ruse by means of which learning much “information,” is deployed successfully, to free the students from the act of actually knowing.

In a related matter, bearing upon education and cultural development of family households.

To understand how the Truman-Eisenhower periods’ monetarist financier interests looted the post-war U.S. population of its unpaid labor, take the case of what happened to a post-war innovation known as the National Defense Highway System.

From the late 1940s, onward, especially beginning the Eisenhower years, the pre-existing major urban centers of the U.S. were encouraged to become the prey of parasitical real-estate and related financial speculators. Thus, beginning with Long Island’s Levittown experiment, the ordinary wage-earner was obliged to lose an increasing percentile of the hours of the living day in commuting. The heyday of this trend began when the National Defense Highway System was energetically “privatized.” Shopping centers dominating adjoining tracts of suburban residential development, increased the number of hours of the day consumed by commuting, while the traditional income-streams into the former industrial-residential cities dwindled. For this increased tax on his and her life, the victim of commuting received no compensating income.

How many hours are spent in commuting, from work to home, these days?

Add to this, the increase in the number of incomes a household requires today, not to reach the levels of real income of a comparable household from the late 1960s. Adding the commuting factors caused by a cancer of real-estate speculation, to the increased number of jobs required per household, we have the resulting destruction of the emotional and intellectual life of most of the children and adolescents of the household, all situated within a rising burden of commuting-related unpaid labor, relative to the pre-1945 period. The result of these combined factors, is a savage “dumbing down” of virtually all strata of the U.S. population.

Truman versus MacArthur

Go back to the U.S. military training camps of 1940-1945. The first assembly of each crop of recruits on the Basic Training Center’s company street, brought together young men (chiefly) from virtually every niche of city and countryside throughout the nation. The challenge of the training and related programs, was to bring most of the new recruits up to no less than a common standard of literacy and relevant other skills. The common interest, and the general welfare, of the nation and its citizens, was the dominant trend in thought. For the greater part, this effort succeeded fairly well.

This leads us, more immediately and narrowly, to an interesting contrast in morale, between the veteran being discharged from service, at the close of the war, and what that retired veteran became, a few months later. Examining the same matter more deeply, we are led to the deepest issues of the Roosevelt versus Truman conflict: in other words, that Truman-MacArthur conflict which directly misshaped virtually all U.S. strategic thinking since 1951.

Throughout the span from “Boot Camp” to discharge from military service, the general tendency among the soldiers and sailors, was a tendency for an increase of personal and mutual self-confidence. With the reign of the Congress during President Truman’s first term, that personal and mutual self-confidence dwindled significantly. If only in approximation, a useful comparison can be made to German veterans returned to civilian life after the close of World War I, notably those “rootless ones” who were drawn, in large numbers, toward the Nazi Party, during the course of the 1920s. For most U.S. veterans of World War II, the mounting fear of return to the 1930s Great Depression, overlapping the rise of political witch-hunts, became, quickly, a tendency to withdraw from morality, into an attitude of “every man for himself.” Under Truman, the veteran sensed that there was no longer any clearly visible, common moral authority which could reliably compel even government itself to provide justice to the victimized individual. Thus, “Trumanism” revealed itself as “McCarthyism.” By 1948, Orwell’s 1984 was no longer prophetic: until the Army-McCarthy hearings, the hateful faces of “Animal Farm” specimens such as Roy M. Cohn and Senator Joseph “Tail Gunner Joe” McCarthy (“some pigs are more equal than others”) filled in for “Big Brother.”

The question which the war had posed, once again, to the citizen-soldier, was: “Are there values so urgent, that one must prefer to die, rather than allow those values to be betrayed?” “For what are you willing to die, if necessary?” “Are you willing to sacrifice your life for others in a just cause? Where is the breaking-point, at which you, unlike U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, will refuse to be a depraved accomplice, a refusal you make simply because you know you are morally obliged to stand up for truth and justice?” In today’s philosophy and social-studies classroom, where the common existentialist traditions of Nietzsche, the Nazi Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre prevail, such moral values of the now long past, war-time period, seem very strange to most. Today, one might kill or die, to express one’s existentialist self, rather than for a higher social purpose. In this transformation which has developed during 1945-1998, we witness the state of a contemporary culture, which, like the Biblical Belshazzar, has lost the moral fitness to survive.

Give this relative moral decadence of the post-MacArthur period a name; call it “the Adam Smith factor.” In place of the joy of participating in a common higher purpose, the all-too-typical representative of the Truman period accepted one’s self-degradation into becoming, at least relatively speaking, an utterly selfish opportunist, in that world of percussive interaction outlined by such Mephistophelean moralists as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Friedrich von Hayek’s Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham. Admittedly, some people were still willing to risk death, and make other sacrifices, for a common purpose; however, this was rarely done out of a moral commitment, but out of a kind of conformism which should have reminded us of Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels. To this day, most of the population of the U.S.A. has never fully recovered from the radiated impact of “Trumanism:” “keeping out of trouble with the authorities” usually outweighs any regard for truth and justice. “Let any ox be gored, as long as it is not my own.”

President Truman’s baiting and firing of General Douglas MacArthur cohered, in character and effects, with the broader spectrum of changes which the Truman administration imposed upon the returning World War II veteran. This is not a remote connection; the entirety of U.S. strategic, and domestic economic policy-shaping, since 1950-1951, has been cursed heavily with the implications of Truman’s folly in the MacArthur affair.

During World War II, and in his conduct of the early months of the war in Korea, General MacArthur’s performance ranks with that of the greatest commanders in all ancient through modern history: with Alexander at Arbela, Hannibal at Cannae, Frederick the Great at Leuthen, Lazare “Author of Victory” Carnot of 1792-1794, our William Tecumseh Sherman, Germany’s old Moltke in France, and Alfred Graf von Schlieffen. Despite his critics from within the U.S. news media, and also an Anglophile faction of the Navy Department, MacArthur, in World War II, won more war, over a greater area, more quickly, with relatively far fewer combat losses to both sides, than any military force engaged in Classical warfare, during modern history.[fn_23] The Inchon flanking operation was of the same caliber. Furthermore, nothing in military science justified Truman’s position, whereas every evidence demanded of reasonable professionals that MacArthur’s policy be followed. The subsequent 1960s war in Indo-China proved the case against Truman in full.

In its most immediate effects, Truman’s policy in sacking MacArthur, introduced the endless Korean War, not resolved to the present day, now nearly a half-century later. The result there has been a parody of Bolshevik military commissar Leon Trotsky’s untenable dealings with the German military, near the close of World War I: Trotsky’s vanity-stricken posturing, “neither peace nor war.” Truman’s Korea war continues to the present day, as an armistice which is not peace, and, yet, not exactly war. In the longer haul, in the present Japan crisis, the unresolved issue of reunification of Korea, has become a reawakened, deadly factor of potential strategic instability in the Asia situation as a whole.

In short, Truman’s antic firing of MacArthur unleashed a neo-feudalist revival of Eighteenth-Century “cabinet warfare,” as a new, determining factor in the conduct of U.S. strategic policy as a whole, world-wide. Truman shifted the U.S. military tradition, away from that of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman, to the neo-feudalist, “cabinet warfare” heritage of the dubious McClellan and the Confederate commanders directing the treasonous slaveholders’ insurrection. After MacArthur’s firing, the U.S. officer corps was in the process of being degraded into the assigned role of “assistant cookie-pushers” for a Kissinger-like Department of State. The sheer awfulness of that “cabinet-warfare” folly came to roost in the 1964-1975 U.S. War in Vietnam.

Consider the deeper, axiomatic implications of that change.

The U.S. military policy which developed under leaders such as John Quincy Adams and Sylvanus Thayer,[fn_24] had a deep root in Christian doctrine, specifically St. Augustine’s warnings on the issues of justified warfare.[fn_25] The particular significance of the corresponding U.S. doctrine, is located in the historically exceptional quality of the American Revolution and its Federal Constitution, an historical specificity which, still today, is unique in all of human history to date. It is from this standpoint, that President Truman’s terrible folly and ignorance of elementary principles of statecraft, in the MacArthur affair, shines forth in its relevant implications for all of U.S., and world history since.

As I have elaborated the case in earlier locations, the modern nation-state republic came into existence as a product of western Christianity’s doctrine respecting the nature of man. Christian principle required that all forms of oligarchism, including the one-worldist and other feudal institutions of western Europe, be uprooted and eradicated, in order to establish a form of perfectly sovereign republic governed by the principle that all men and women are made equally in the image of the Creator, and that the state has no legitimate function but to enhance the conditions and world-historical mission of individual life, accordingly. The state must never become, in any way, the property of a governing class of oligarchs, but a state whose will must be subordinated to the world-historical national interest of all members of the nation, and also humanity as a whole, as reason defines that interest.

Unfortunately, the victory of Venice in the war of the League of Cambrai, prevented true nation-states from existing in Europe, except in the degree that Europe was later influenced by reforms inspired by the establishment and development of the U.S. Federal republic.[fn_26]

This imposed a peculiar, historically specific, strategic mission upon our U.S.A. We must not make war for the purpose of imposing our system upon other nations, but we must never betray the principle represented by our Declaration of Independence, 1787-1789 Federal Union, and the great reforms instituted under the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln. We must never act to support, or condone the forceful imposition, upon the people of any other part of the world, of a political order contrary to the principles upon which our own Federal Union was established and defended by President Abraham Lincoln.

Otherwise, our military policy is essentially an Augustinian one. In brief, our strategy must be, to defend ourselves, while fostering a circumstance in which other nations should prefer to emulate our best example. In war, our strategy for peace, is the Christian principle of atonement.

The resulting policy is, that if we are faced with fighting a war we can not otherwise avoid, we must prepare to win that war, or to avoid a futile battle, if by retreat.[fn_27] We must use our capacity for military victory, when we have gained it, to induce adversaries to accept reasonable alternatives. We must never tolerate a degradation of our military forces into that semblance of feudalist mercenaries associated with the British and other conduct of Eighteenth-Century “cabinet warfare.” Ours is not a doctrine which seeks war, but rather one which prefers always to create the preconditions under which it were unlikely we were obliged to fight war. In his time, against an errant President Truman, General MacArthur was a bearer of that tradition.

In most U.S. and NATO quarters, as in the corrupt agreements tolerated in the recent Balkan wars, instead of that noble tradition which General MacArthur bore, strategic thinking has been degraded into a blending of immoral forms of diplomacy with a variety of British blood-sports. Send the football fans, as hooligans, to fight and kill, letting survivors live to kill another day; between matches, let the diplomats keep score. A time in which a Henry Kissinger, or an empty-headed babbler such as Samuel P. Huntington, is cited as a “strategic thinker,” is a time in which civilization as a whole has already gone to Hell.

The heritage of General MacArthur’s ouster became the legacy of President Dwight Eisenhower, the legacy of détente. Look at this outcome, which Eisenhower inherited from the Truman period, from the vantage-point of what had been intended as Franklin Roosevelt’s “American Century.”

Roosevelt was aiming for total strategic victory. His mission was to use the circumstances of the war and its ending, together with the U.S.’s relation to a post-war Soviet Union and China, to mold a world-order which would be both durable and in keeping with the global interests of the U.S.A. By using U.S. world-hegemony in machine-tool-design capability, to provide the U.S.S.R., China, and other states, a truly just world economic order, the economic principle of the American System would define the world-order within which all nations operated, and would define the global relations among those states in a new way.

There was nothing “leftist” or otherwise naive in Franklin Roosevelt’s design for dealing with a post-war Josef Stalin. Step back for a moment, and consider the relevant, deeper strategic lessons of all of the past thousand years or so of modern European history.

The emergence of a post-feudal form of perfectly sovereign nation-state, had been defined by Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa’s Concordantia Catholica (1431), a work which was itself an echo of the same principled theme underlying all of the leading writings of Dante Alighieri, with notable emphasis upon the latter’s De Monarchia (c. 1312). It was Cusa’s work which had led him to lead a break within the Conciliar movement, toward reestablishing the previously disorganized Papacy. These were the same considerations which had led Cusa, the founder of modern experimental physical science, to contribute a leading role in organizing what became the A.D. 1439-1440 sessions of the great ecumenical Council at Florence, the Council which is the watershed for both modern European civilization in general, and the historically exceptional mission inhering in the founding of the U.S. Federal Union in particular.

A crucial problem intervened. The ruling oligarchy of Europe saw the emergence of a modern form of sovereign nation-state as a mortal threat to the continuation of the power of the ruling combination of landed aristocracy and financier oligarchy. The sly tactic of inducing the Vatican to corrupt itself in the false cause of maintaining a system of Papal states within Italy, in opposition to the unification of Italy as a sovereign nation-state, became—until the Twentieth Century!—a crucial flank in the efforts of the landed aristocracy to prevent the establishment of truly sovereign nation-states in Europe.[fn_28]

The immediate, post-Council of Florence provocation for this pro-feudalist obstructionism, had been the formation of the world’s first modern nation-state, by France under King Louis XI, a role which Louis had acquired, as Dauphin, with notable encouragement and assistance from the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance patriots of Italy. The defeat of France and the League of Cambrai, through the treachery of Pope Julius II and the King of Spain, did not succeed in destroying Louis XI’s France, but the defeat of Cambrai shelved the establishment of any truly modern form of nation-state in Europe, until the Nineteenth-Century approximations appeared, the latter based, chiefly, upon the world-wide impact of President Abraham Lincoln’s victories over the British Empire’s relevant, neo-feudalist puppet-states of that period, the Confederate States of America and Maximilian’s Nazi-like occupation and looting of Mexico.[fn_29]

From the end of the League of Cambrai, until the end of World War II, the dominant force within European civilization as a whole, was either Venice’s financier-oligarchy, or Venice-like financier oligarchies, such as those of the Netherlands and London, which had been built up as clones of Venice. With aid of its incitement of Catholic versus Protestant butchery, Venice set every state of Europe against one another, while otherwise setting Europe bloodily against itself in Spain’s wars against the Netherlands, and, subsequently, the notorious Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648. In this fashion, world power, and world trade, were under the domination of Venetian-style financier oligarchies, from the defeat of the League of Cambrai, until the developments of World War II. For a clearer view, summarize the world strategic situation over the period from the Napoleonic wars through silly Woodrow Wilson’s Versailles.

From 1789 onward, the common objectives of Britain and the Holy Roman Empire’s Fürstentum,[fn_30] were the destruction of both the United States of America and the influence of the United States’ Federal Union as a model, which both Britain and the continental landed aristocracy were desperate to ensure must not exist in any part of this planet: the personal and official policy of the British monarchy’s ultrareactionary Prince Philip, to the present day.

The Castlereagh-Metternich cabal’s policy was a virulently anti-American view which is shared, with shameless openness, to the present day, by a confessed agent of British influence—a virtual, British, enemy spy, and all-around scalawag, Henry A. Kissinger.[fn_31] Thus, from Pitt and Bentham through Palmerston, British Foreign Ministers and Prime Ministers, joined with the continental party of Habsburg chancellors von Kaunitz and Metternich, against the dreaded American influence. After Castlereagh, under Canning and Palmerston, Britain’s apparent affections for its Holy Alliance partners waned, becoming Palmerston’s and Giuseppe Mazzini’s outright hostility to Metternich. Let President Clinton be warned by the fall of Metternich, as Palmerston himself put the point famously before the British Parliament: Britain has no permanent allies, but only permanent interests.

Nonetheless, the anomalies of 1848-1849 taken into account, until World War II, the world was dominated by a combination of chiefly imperialist, continental European forces, forces whose actual power has come to be centered, increasingly, in the financier-oligarchies of Prince Philip’s Britain and the Nazi-SS veteran Prince Bernhard’s Netherlands.

This was already the circumstance faced by U.S. President George Washington’s administrations, the reality which prompted the President to warn the U.S.A. against any “entangling alliances” with European powers. Although the U.S.A. did develop Nineteenth-Century friends in Europe, such as the circles of Lafayette and Carnot in France, the followers of Friedrich Schiller among the Prussian reformers in Germany, and the Russia of Czar Alexander II and Count Sergei Witte, the hegemonic combination of ruling forces in Europe was implicitly those enemies of the United States who had inherited the foul victory from the defeat of the League of Cambrai.

This is the key to understanding the role of Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. This is key to understanding the implications of Truman’s strategic folly.

By Spring 1945, the opportunity to exert a new world power, superseding entirely the kind of financier-oligarchical world-power hitherto exerted by Britain et al., lay within the reach of the U.S. President. Under Roosevelt’s post-war policy, the U.S.A. would be no empire; nonetheless, we were in a position to determine the shared, characteristic features of the global financial, monetary, and economic relations among sovereign nation-states. Under those historically specific circumstances, we in the U.S. had nothing to fear from the power of a Soviet Union or China, nor need we desire to establish imperial authority over their internal affairs. It was we, the U.S.A., who were now in a position to determine the global set of financial, monetary, and economic rules of the game, rules which would affect the relations among all states of this planet.

If only we had seized that wonderful opportunity.

From the founding of our sovereign republic, until World War II, world power had been divided between the minority force represented by the U.S. and its immediate, anti-British friends, on the one side, and a thicket of world-dominating financial-oligarchical powers and outrightly feudalist relics, on the opposing side. In that specific sense, world power, especially power over the world’s financial and monetary affairs, lay in the hands of imperial, rentier-financier forces which were the enemies of our republican constitutional principle. As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams said of our enemy, Canning’s Britain, there existed no community of principle between the U.S.A. and those forces which dominated the world from Europe.

Under those circumstances, the principles of practice governing well-informed U.S. strategy were necessarily, actively adversarial; we shared no community of principle with the leading concerts of the world’s powers. However, as Adams emphasized this future prospect for the Americas, when the time came, when we had the power to change this fundamentally, to establish an hegemonic ordering of international financial, monetary, and economic power, our strategic doctrine must change to conform to this changed order within world affairs.

At the close of the war, we held global financial, monetary, and economic hegemony. What we required of the world, was a rallying of states which would join with us to oppose the relics of British, Netherlands, French, and Portuguese imperialism, to provide to those liberated regions of the world the immediate advantages of a fair and just world economic order. Our duty, our self-interest, was to inaugurate that new, just world economic order, and to assume a leading role in defending that order as the common interest of a group of nations representing the vital interest of the overwhelming majority of the human race.

What had we to fear from anyone, then, or today, as long as we proceeded on that basis? This is what Truman, and other small-minded Hobbesians either never understood, or chose not to understand.

The SDI Example

In this light, consider as a most appropriate, exemplary case, my original design of what President Ronald Reagan named a “Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).”

The crucial feature of the President’s March 23, 1983 offer to the Soviet government, marks the SDI, publicly, to this day, as a product of my work, work focussed upon a private, exploratory back-channel discussion which I conducted, in U.S. interest, with Moscow’s representative, during the interval February 1982-February 1983. It was an exploratory effort, a further step in promoting a program which I had launched, in August 1979, as a feature of my 1980 campaign for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination. It was a campaign which I conducted publicly, from mid-February 1982 on, in the U.S.A., with high-ranking flag officers and other leading strategic circles in the U.S.A., France, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, past the close of 1985. Admittedly, there are state secrets involved, which I have not told,[fn_32] but, otherwise, all the essential features of my role in authorship of that SDI proposal were open, and openly acknowledged by some relevant agencies of the U.S. government, beyond the end of March 1983.

From the point of my first barely significant intervention into world affairs, beginning the mid-1960s, I adhered always to the attempt to revive the kind of U.S. relationship to the world at large which I had envisaged, while still serving in the China-Burma-India Theater, at the close of World War II. As early as the first months of 1947, for example, my zeal was focussed upon the importance of U.S. fostering of the development of nuclear-fission energy-sources as the obvious, best, and perhaps only key to the general improvement of the conditions of life of the entire population of India. From the mid-1960s onward, the same view was expressed as the proposal, that joint commitment, by the U.S.A. and Soviet Union, to rapid development of the technology of the developing sector, was the “way out” of the continuing strategic dilemma of that time.

During the second half of the 1970s, I was in a great deal of official and covertly deployed troubles, which I suffered at the hands of such circles as those of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and National Security Advisors Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and, of course, the same FBI which, according to its own official documents, worked with the leadership of the Communist Party U.S.A., to promote my “elimination,” as early as 1973. This occurred partly as a result of the role of my associates and me, in exposure of certain interesting background facts concerning developments of the late 1960s and early 1970s; initially, it occurred chiefly as a result of my too nearly successful 1974-1977 interventions on behalf of a “just new world economic order,” interventions in which I found myself intellectually allied, openly, with some governments of the Non-Aligned Nations group. It was my 1982-1985 role on behalf of what became known as the SDI, which persuaded certain international forces to conduct their 1982-1989 effort to have me eliminated finally and permanently from any further influence upon U.S. and world policies.

During this 1977-1982 period, I came to emphasize the significance of dual-use development of strategic ballistic missile defense based upon new physical principles (such as beam weapons), as the available strategic alternative. My point, from the second half of the 1970s onward, was, that on condition that both superpowers sought a common interest of our planet in the equitable development of all of the peoples and nations of the planet, that common interest could lead the world back to the kind of American Century goals which one should associate with the work of Franklin Roosevelt.

The key, was always to shift the frontier of economic technology forward, to what was, at each moment, the most advanced among the existing levels of machine-tool-design potentialities. Large-scale infrastructure programs, combined with the most advanced “science driver” programs of economic development, were the key. Those were my policies during the late 1960s, the middle 1970s, in my authorship of what became known as “SDI,” and in my proposals, beginning October 1988, for a post-Communist reconstruction. Those are my policies still today.

Consider the case of the public attacks upon me, and also Dr. Edward Teller, on the issues of “SDI,” by the subsequently deceased Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Daniel P. Graham, during the period from Summer 1982 until March 23, 1983. This involved an issue which Graham had earlier raised, while still head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), during the administration of President Gerald Ford. Graham was fanatically opposed to the role of science in defense systems; he insisted, that “off the shelf” technologies, presently reposing in the inventories of defense contractors, ought to be used, instead, even if that meant relying upon systems, typified by Graham’s “High Frontier” recipe, which had become hopelessly obsolete more than a decade earlier! The connection of Graham’s views to his association with that Mont Pelerin Society subsidiary known as the London-directed Heritage Foundation, was no coincidence. The Heritage Foundation dim-wits proceeded from their induced, crude, Anglophiliac ideology, to argue against government-funded science-driver programs. This was reflected in their gobbledygook propaganda arguing the allegedly principled distinctions between “fundamental” and “applied” research.

Soon after President Reagan had announced the “SDI,” Heritage Foundation ideologue Graham turned about, to profess himself a born-again advocate of the very strategic ballistic missile defense system for which he had attacked me and Dr. Teller so violently during the Summer and Autumn of 1982. During the Summer of 1983, an uneasy compromise was struck between the respective representatives of Graham and Teller; Graham prevailed with his emphasis upon obsolete conceptions of “kinetic weapons” technology. Consoling bits of money were passed around to Teller’s backers, to keep the troops quiet; I was pushed out of the way; and, despite President Reagan’s clear voice at Reykjavik, “SDI” was soon virtually dead as an ongoing strategic conception.

The crucial point to be stressed here, is the following.

Start with what has been my repeatedly stated principle: the power of mankind over nature, per capita and per square kilometer of the planet’s surface, is located entirely in the realization of scientific and technological progress as an effective increase of the productive powers of labor. In that sense, and in that degree, the origin of essential strategic power is precisely that. This is expressed either as the realization of such modes of increase of the productive powers of labor, or, from the Mont Pelerin Society and other opponents of progress, the suppression of such development.

We witness this principle at work in the rapid rise of the per-capita income and power of the France reconstituted by King Louis XI. We witness this in the impact of scientific and technological progress in Europe since Brunelleschi’s early Fifteenth Century. We witness this in the role of France’s Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The strategic principle of the science-driver effect, is shown, in the most brilliant fashion, under the leadership of Lazare Carnot, during 1792-1794. This is shown, again in the most brilliant fashion, in the explosive upsurge of the U.S. economy in its generalized machine-tool revolution, during 1861-1876.

Compare this with a relevant, telling observation made by a friend.[fn_33]

As the family of Empress Maria Theresa might agree, Prussia’s Frederick the Great was not a nice person; but he was, political follies such as Voltaire aside, a military genius. Alfred Graf von Schlieffen’s account of Frederick’s brilliant, double-flanking victory over the Austrians, at the Battle of Leuthen, illustrates the same military-strategic principle otherwise demonstrated by science-driver cases.

In brief, the principle of the flank, as documented by von Schlieffen’s Cannae,[fn_34] is not a principle of the sand-box as such; it is a principle of the mind. For example, if my enemy is operating on the basis of Riemannian set n, then I must outflank him by operating on the basis of Riemannian set n+1. Hannibal’s counteroffensive, from a seemingly hopeless, back-to-the-wall situation, to effect defeat of the relatively much superior Roman forces at Cannae, was not a matter of sand-box principles; Hannibal’s mind was superior to that of the self-misguided Roman commanders. Frederick was vastly outgunned at Leuthen, and confronted by what might pass for a perfect, Cannae-modelled flanking assault; but, the combined discipline of Frederick’s vastly outnumbered troops and the thick-headed formalism of the Austrian commander, enabled the mind of Frederick to outflank, and rout a vastly superior Austrian force, not once, but twice on the same day.

If one can confront a prospective adversary with the fact of the economic impact of realized scientific superiority, then, that adversary must either adapt to that principle, or accept defeat. There is a military parallel for this in General William Tecumseh Sherman’s continual hammering of his flanking operations all the way to and through Atlanta. It was, above all, the superiority of Sherman’s mind to that of the Confederate commanders, which is the crucial fact of that situation. The most relevant fact was the moral and scientific superiority of the Union forces over the pack of neo-feudalist degenerates dominating the Confederate command. Once Lincoln was able, after Gettysburg, to purge not only the dubious McClellan, but other liabilities, from the U.S. military command, the preparation for the delayed Union victory took shape. The Confederacy was not a “lost cause”; it was the cause of a pseudo-nation which, from its inception, had lacked the moral fitness to survive.

If one is in a position to assume the high ground, both culturally and technologically, and also globally, one will thus shape the direction of changes in political-economic practice among the nations so affected. It is not necessary, nor desirable, to attempt to dictate the internal affairs of individual nations; rather, let each nation shape its own internal development, through the natural process of its attempts to adapt successfully to the global environment within which it is located. Concentrate, therefore, on shaping that global environment.

In 1945, the difference was, that, prior to the close of World War I, the financier-oligarchical forces centered around Britain and the Netherlands controlled “the world market,” a position which the British had regained from the U.S.A., between 1873 and 1879, through the establishment of the British gold standard and the accompanying adoption of the treasonous U.S. Specie Resumption Act, that by a corrupted U.S. Congress. We see today, how the bandits running international financial and monetary institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, are able to effect the piratical looting of entire groups of nations, seemingly without any available recourse by the victimized nations themselves.

Conversely, we should be able to recognize, that without a new global financial and monetary system, modelled upon the pre-1959 Bretton Woods system, no recovery from the presently ongoing, global, financial, monetary, and economic collapse could be expected at any time during the decades immediately ahead: without that change, and very soon, the United States, and virtually every other nation of this planet, is hopelessly doomed to a decades-long passage through the virtual Hell of a prolonged “new dark age.” Control the rules of the international financial and monetary system, and subject that system to domination by the exigencies of realized scientific and technological progress, and the objectives of Franklin Roosevelt’s “American Century” image could be realized, even beginning today.

So, situate the Truman-MacArthur controversy with respect to the original, March 23, 1983 proffer of SDI.

From this latter vantage-point, the principal problems of 1949-1951 were, that the U.S.A., in its foolish excess of power-sharing with the British and other dubious allies, had surrendered the sovereignty of the U.S.A. to an increasing degree of meddling by supranational authority. Thus, the same U.S.A. which had assumed principal responsibility for the state of the world, had surrendered its ability to meet that responsibility, by denying itself access to means which might not be pleasing to the Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill devotees of a nuclear march toward world government. The farce of making the war in Korea a “United Nations war,” was the root of the problem.

Had MacArthur been allowed to pursue a sovereign U.S. solution to the challenge, there would have been no war with China; it was the weakness of the U.S., as demanded by the British-dominated UNO, and self-imposed by Truman, which lured, and virtually provoked China into the war. China did not cause the expansion of the war; it was the disgusting weakness displayed by Truman and the UNO command, which incited the attack from China. Had MacArthur been allowed to assert his clearly enunciated, and militarily obligatory set of rules of engagement at Korea’s northern border, there would have been no further war, and the world would have become, rapidly, a far better place than it has been since 1950, to the present date.

In matters bearing upon strategy, and vital national interest, globalization and national sovereignty are mutually exclusive notions. Without honoring in full a clear community of principle respecting the economically “protectionist” form of perfectly sovereign nation-state established under the U.S. Federal Constitution of 1787-1789, there exists no tolerable, durable basis for supranational condominiums. We should never have tolerated, for a single day, the agreements of that sort which have become increasingly popular since the establishment of that lunatic “floating exchange-rate monetary system” which has proven itself the present undoing of the world economy as a whole.

A Tour Through Mediocrity

There were many good ideas in circulation among Republicans, and others, during the Eisenhower administration. Veterans of that administration’s time, whom I came to know either as friends or friendly acquaintances during later years, were unquestionably moral, professionally capable, and valuable persons with whom to exchange ideas. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace,” was among the good things set into motion during that period. It was a far more comfortable period in which to live and work, than during the nightmare of the Truman years; but, nothing seemed to be able to break through that confining envelope of mediocrity which controlled the administration from its inception.

On this account, that administration’s economic policy was its worst side; the case of the temporary abortion of the Huntsville rocket program, typifies the way in which the administration’s mediocrity in economic matters spilled over into its strategic practice generally.

The fairest summation of the Eisenhower administration’s performance, overall, is that it was a post-MacArthur administration. There was no compelling commitment to anything reflecting the kind of “American Century” outlook of the early 1940s. There was no impulse to drive scientific and technological progress beyond immediately visible boundaries, no commitment to accelerate the ratio of the machine-tool-design element within the composition of U.S. employment and output. No Everests to climb, no frontiers to breach. There was nothing inspiring. Even the Eisenhower administration’s reluctant revival of the moribund U.S. rocket and space program, occurred only as a result of prodding by the insistent beeps of the Soviet Sputnik. The ill-fated Eisenhower consumer-credit expansion of the middle 1950s, brings the generalized, characteristic mediocrity of the period’s policy-making into the clearest focus.

The retail passenger-vehicle sales expansion, typified the folly of Eisenhower economics. The use of increasingly loose consumer credit to sustain an expansion of new car sales, involved sundry, high-binding and kindred accounting and marketing tricks. In summary, by late 1956, the unpaid balance on a predominantly mature thirty-six-month automobile loan, was in the vicinity of the point that the replacement of that same make and model, on a used-car lot, was less than the balance due on the original new-car loan. During the same period, the trend toward “value engineering” approaches to product cost-control, which were employed at the manufacturing end, assured that the useful life of the vehicle was probably less than the life-span suggested by the terms of the thirty-six-month new-car loan. A similar pattern pervaded the area of large-ticket home appliances, and so on.

The result of this combined folly of the administration and the automobile manufacturers, was the 1957-1958 recession, which broke out in February 1957. Although the rate of recession slowed in mid-1958, there was no genuine economic recovery until a candidate doomed by the price of the Eisenhower administration’s economic mediocrity, Richard M. Nixon, was pushed aside for the inauguration of President John Kennedy.

The strategic implications of the Eisenhower policy of economic mediocrity, are most usefully stated in terms comparable to those we have employed in discussing the Truman-MacArthur controversy.

Define the term “military technological attrition,” as signifying the combination of technological superiority of weapons and related systems with increased productive powers of labor in producing functionally equivalent, or superior systems. It is on precisely this point, that the Eisenhower administration fell down on its economic-strategic responsibilities. A peaceful world order, under established adversarial conditions, depended upon a margin of growing absolute superiority of the U.S.A. in terms of rates of technological attrition. The tempering of U.S. strategic growth, which was prompted by a combination of pro-monetarist economics mediocrity and quiet probing of Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Russell’s design for détente, should be viewed in this light.

Consider the Teller-Oppenheimer “thermonuclear bomb” controversy as casting some light on this matter. It is not necessary to go into great detail on that matter here. Two points are sufficient. On Oppenheimer’s side, he was tuned to the more radical version of Bertrand Russell’s tactics on the issues of nuclear-weapons policy; his leading points of difference with Teller, over H-bomb development, are located adequately in precisely that point. Teller, on the other hand, was correct in principle, in the degree that, respecting scientific and technological progress, one must always crash the strategic frontiers, whatever one’s strategic guesstimates might be otherwise. The specific kind of bitterness injected into the dispute at that time, was unnecessary; perhaps Dr. Teller should have been less reluctant to reference the sometimes complicated connections among himself, Eugene Wigner, and Bertrand Russell, and thus provide more clarity and less mud to the controversy of that time. It was on this same point, that the mid-1950s semi-mothballing of Huntsville’s rocket program, was typical of the military strategic side of the Eisenhower administration’s leaning toward strategic mediocrity.

Kennedy: A Few Golden Years

“New Frontier” was an apt choice of term.

President John Kennedy represented my own generation from World War II; he was slightly older than I, but not that much. After living through the bad Truman years, and the mediocrity of the Eisenhower years, my generation was entering the leading executive positions in government, professional, and corporate life. The change showed in the growing support for the Civil Rights movement. The change showed also, in the explosion of a pent-up passion for breaking out of mediocrity, for pioneering into new frontiers. For my generation, the memories of FDR were strong, still fresh and vigorous. That made the difference in the 1960 election-campaign, and during the President’s performance as an incumbent.

The special historic significance of the Kennedy period is most clearly shown in the coincidence of the strategic interventions among Kennedy, France’s Fifth Republic President Charles de Gaulle, and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer. These implications lingered, with a crucial, if somewhat attenuated impact, even after the death of Kennedy and ouster of Adenauer. Three of de Gaulle’s most crucial actions are to be emphasized: 1) de Gaulle’s push for a “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” de Gaulle’s own efforts to pick up on Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to projected post-war dealings with Stalin’s Soviet Union; 2) de Gaulle’s open and sudden break with NATO, largely in response to a London-dominated NATO’s persisting efforts to conduct a coup d’état against the French state; and, 3) the Force de Frappe, de Gaulle’s response to the lunacy of the post-MacArthur legacy of strategic follies.

Overall, the sum and substance of the Kennedy period, is the slogan “New Frontier.” The thrust of the Kennedy Presidency, and the joint impact of Kennedy, de Gaulle, and Adenauer, was to break free of the sodden nightmares left over from the Truman and Eisenhower periods, to break out, to dare the limits, and reach beyond. This was a moment of anti-entropy, a short-lived interruption of that reign of entropy which has otherwise ruled the post-Franklin Roosevelt world until the present day.

Despite the 1962 Missile Crisis, the initiatives associated with Kennedy, de Gaulle, and Adenauer, during, and immediately following the Kennedy period, remain today a point of reference for relaunching the essential features of that brief, happier period of recent history.

The good times did not last for long, even if one included the 1964-1969 phase of the space program. While President Kennedy lived, pleasant, nostalgic echoes of the FDR years encouraged followers to follow; but, in the wake of the President’s assassination and the Warren Commission caper, few among those disposed to follow still possessed the passion to lead. The shock of the 1962 “Cuba Missiles Crisis,” followed, by the November 1963 assassination of the President, left mostly emotional rubble in the aftermath.

After the horrors of 1962-1963, a deep cultural pessimism gripped the youth entering university during the 1960s. President Johnson’s capitulation to McGeorge Bundy’s insistence on the war in Vietnam, put the political detonator on the explosive social charge. The notorious “cultural-paradigm shift,” the shift to the “rock-drug-sex counterculture” and to “post-industrial” utopianism, emerged as relatively hegemonic campus and post-campus phenomena of the 1964-1972 interval.

British Proconsul Kissinger

For what happened after the assassination of President Kennedy, two historic reference-points are perhaps the most appropriate. The first is the case of the ancient, Phrygian cult of Dionysus, the terrorist cult otherwise associated with the satanic worship of Gaea-Python and the Roman cult of Bacchus. The second, the post-World War I spread of a theosophical, existentialist youth-counterculture throughout Europe, as typified by the rise of Nazism, the influence of Georg Lukacs, and the rise of the satanic cult otherwise commonly referenced as the “Frankfurt School” of Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, et al.[fn_35]

The key to the rise of this counterculture, is twofold.

The modern roots of the rock-drug-sex and post-industrial countercultures, are traceable to two key events of post-Napoleonic Europe: the Congress of Vienna itself, and the fascistic Carlsbad decrees of 1819.[fn_36] The virtual banning of the influence of that Friedrich Schiller who had been the chief intellectual author of the reforms underlying Germany’s 1813-1814 Liberation Wars,[fn_37] defines the spirit of hatred erupting during the period in which a gifted Trier Johann Hugo Wyttenbach student, Karl Marx, born in 1818, was later recruited into virtually satanic cults, first at the University of Bonn, and, later, under the influence of the circles of the fascistic G.W.F. Hegel and Karl F. Savigny, at Berlin. The case of Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the key forerunners of Friedrich Nietzsche and Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, is another relevant case. Related is the case of the two Mazzini followers, Wagner and Bakunin, who came to play leading roles in establishing the cornerstones of both modern European satanism and Nazism within Machian late-Nineteenth-Century Vienna, Budapest, and the Bayreuth of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Richard “Parsifal” Wagner.

As we have already pointed to this, the right-left commonalities of these satanic cults are aptly represented by the perverse union between Hannah Arendt and Nazi existentialist Martin Heidegger, both in common with the satanic figures of Theodor Adorno and the de facto den mother of the “Frankfurt School,” Georg Lukacs.

The currents of Romanticism, Modernism, and post-Modernism spawned out of the post-Vienna-Congress, post-Carlsbad-decree cultural pessimism of the middle Nineteenth Century, gained an increasing influence in the organized intellectual life of European civilization on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Massachusetts and South Carolina branches of Palmerston protégé Giuseppe Mazzini’s “Young America” organization.[fn_38] The influence of Bertrand Russell, is a key element in the corruption of intellectual youth, such as Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, on both sides of the Atlantic. Under the conditions of the Truman and Eisenhower periods, these spores of existentialist pessimism found the culture-medium for which they might have been intended.

The qualified amorality which overtook the majority of U.S. citizens, for example, during the Truman and Eisenhower years, exploded into such forms as the rapid spread of the “rock-drug-sex counter-culture,” from 1964 through 1972. The continuation of the war in Indo-China was among the crucial factors in bringing about the emerging hegemony of an anti-science movement, “post-industrial” utopianism.

The fact that emergence of an organized youth-counterculture around “post-industrial” utopianism reflected the emergence of the forementioned types of psycho-social conditioning, should not be read as evidence that the emergence of the movement itself was in any sense “spontaneous,” or “natural.” Very little in modern history has been less natural, indeed more unnatural, than the self-styled nature cult which has grown up, “on behalf of the environment,” around the 1961 initiatives of Prince Philip’s and Prince Bernhard’s reactionary World Wildlife Fund. The members of the new youth-counterculture were virtually campus-laboratory guinea-pigs, whose behavior was induced and directed, from the top-down, from the outset. The environment preparing this operation was established as early as the 1920s, under British Brigadier Dr. John Rawlings Rees of the London Tavistock Clinic. The entire operation was dominated by relatively highly refined methods of mass-brainwashing, assisted by such networks as the Lewin centers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the network of Freudian and kindred brainwashing networks, such as “MK-Ultra,” spun out from under the direction of Julian Huxley at the UNO and the London Tavistock Clinic.

During the most relevant years, during 1964-1972, I was directly involved in exposing and opposing this “brainwashing,” on the scene, with first hand, and often detailed knowledge of the agencies, including Kissinger sponsor McGeorge Bundy’s Ford Foundation, and many of the key personalities, such as Herbert Marcuse, playing the key day-to-day roles of Mephistopheles in corrupting their pathetic “Fausts” of the 1967-1969 Columbia University and other campus scenes. The Foundations and funding of the process leading from McGeorge Bundy’s and Herbert Marcuse’s interventions into the Columbia University situation, into the 1969 emergence of the offshoot known as the “Weatherman” terrorists, or the related case of the Jonathan Jackson Brigade, are exemplary. To this day, a check of Foundation grants and related connections is often still key to tracking the actual pedigrees and motives of most of the still operating, exotically “radical” operations built up with aid of coordinated mass-media puffery.

This youth-counterculture development of 1964-1972 did not occur in a political-economic vacuum. It overlapped two leading economic policy-developments of the same period: the 1966-1967 take-down of large parts of the forward, cutting edge of the U.S. space program, and the process leading into the August 1971 sinking of the U.S. dollar. It also overlapped, in a most significant degree, the rise of the Queen’s own Henry A. Kissinger to the position of virtually acting President of the United States.

The changes experienced during this 1964-1972/1976 interval, intersect the fact, that, excepting a few brief, extraordinary developments during the first Reagan administration, since the murder of President Kennedy, no President of the U.S.A., to the present date, has actually provided that quality of Presidential leadership for the United States we associate with even a Truman, an Eisenhower, or a Kennedy. Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, have been, usually, like the virtually anonymous Presidents we tend to view as the janitorial agency which locks up after the parliamentary government has gone home for the weekend; moreover, none of them seemed able to do anything to change this. As in Clinton’s case, even if he wished to act as a real President, a cabal of combined mass news media, right-wing Congressional “Robespierres,” and permanent governmental bureaucracy, has not allowed him to so do. There is no mere coincidence in this; the underlying reasons for the post-“Watergate” shift, from a Presidential to a Europe style of parliamentary government, are elementary, and historic.

Most citizens, and members of both judiciary and Congress, appear to have forgotten the time, before “Watergate,” when we ran our government differently. This is among the policy-matrix changes which has occurred since 1964-1976.

The emergence of “post-industrial” utopianism, as the hegemonic trend in policy-shaping, on all fronts, is the characteristic, dominant, if not exclusive, policy-shaping factor in the administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton-Gore. Blindly plummeting entropy is the dominant mood of politics in these times; the 1964-1972 interval, from the assassination of President Kennedy, until the establishment of the post-Bretton Woods “floating exchange-rate system,” marks the transition, away from all semblance of earlier patriotic standards of U.S. economic policy-shaping, into the lunacy of the junk-bond and derivatives age. With the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. Presidency degenerated rapidly, seemingly irreversibly. The continuing cause for this process of degeneration was the increasing hegemony of the cult of “post-industrial” utopianism. The sap was out of the tree, and the branches were dying.

Consider the political and economic revolution of 1964-1976 in light of its correlation with the “post-industrial utopian” form of cultural-paradigm shift.

When the U.S. Economy Stopped Growing

The assassination of President Kennedy marks the point of departure, from the time our nation was still committed to economic progress, until it began to move radically in a downward direction: changes in U.S. economic-policy began which were more damaging than even the worst of what had occurred under Truman and Eisenhower.

The first round of such radical shifts, downward, in U.S. economic thinking, came in two developments of the 1966-1967 interval: the State Department’s initial adoption of population-control policies directed against other nations, and the drastic, if partial shut-down of the space-program during those fiscal years. The “Great Society” hoax was a complement to this process of beginning to destroy the U.S. economy.

The second round of measures leading into the wrecking of the U.S. and world economy was developed during the interval 1967-1972, beginning with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1967 sinking of the British pound sterling, and concluding with the developments of 1971-1972, nullifying the Bretton Woods agreements, and launching that “floating-exchange-rate monetary system” which has led the U.S. and world economy, step by step, to the present global catastrophe.

Later, during the 1970s, it was argued, that for every penny spent on the space program, more than fifteen cents had been returned to the U.S. economy. The latter benefit occurred as a fruit of the spill-over, into the economy as a whole, of the scientific and technological progress radiating from the space program.[fn_39] This benefit was precisely what the Johnson administration cut out of the space program and closely related things during 1966-1967. Thousands of the best-qualified scientists and technicians were dumped from the payrolls, creating effects such as a virtual economic depression around Greater Boston’s Route 128 aerospace and related premises. It was said, in 1968-1969, that such throat-cutting acts of national economic suicide would benefit the economy by “bringing the space dollar back down to Earth” in such forms as the (predictable disappointment known as the) “Great Society” program. With only marginal exceptions thereafter, the economic-suicidal pattern of such cuts in high-tech research and development, not only persisted, but was generally accelerated, from 1966 onward to the present day.

As a result, the net physical output of the U.S. economy per capita, has shrunk consistently, and disastrously, from the close of the 1966-1972 interval, to the present day. In fact, there has been no net physical-economic growth in the U.S. economy from that time, to the present day. “More jobs,” yes: but less net physical-economic income per household than when the average number of jobs per-capita of labor-force was fewer.[fn_40]

The tail-end of net U.S.A. post-war economic growth was reached about 1971-1972. What had kept some growth in place during the 1966-1972 interval, was largely to the credit of large-scale infrastructure-building programs set into place by (chiefly) the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and kept moving somewhat under Johnson. After 1971-1972, the amount spent on combined expansion, improvement, and maintenance of basic economic infrastructure, was spectacularly less, in effect, than the wear, tear, and depletion of pre-existing programs. The 1975 “Big Mac” collapse of infrastructure in New York City, is only an apt illustration of the general pattern during and since the 1970s.

Typical of the drastic changes in economic philosophy effected under President Richard Nixon, were the imposition of savage wage-cuts imposed, under the rubrics of “Phase I” and “Phase II,” following the President’s decision to sink the U.S. dollar, on August 15-16, 1971. The philosophy, if one may call it that, behind Nixon’s politically fatal follies in economic and monetary policy, is typified by the introduction of foolish Mont Pelerin Society fanatic Milton Friedman as cottage philosopher of the Nixon White House. There had been forewarnings of this under Truman, and in the influence of Arthur Burns over the Eisenhower administration, but Nixon had gone over the wall. The U.S. no longer had an economic policy consistent with our constitutional tradition; the effort to purge FDR’s memory from national economic and social policy was rampant. The arrival of a new editorial figure, Robert Bartley, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, typified a new crew in charge of the thinking of the nation’s financial centers, a Wall Street gone utterly mad.

Here lies the key to the political and moral decay of the U.S. Presidency during the past thirty years.

The exceptional character of the U.S. Federal republic, its historic specificity, centers around the differences in economic and closely related philosophy, which we have already referenced, between the U.S. and an oligarchy-dominated old Europe. The fact that we, in opposition to the evil doctrine of Adam Smith, were the only nation-state committed to such economic principles, required a national defense policy attuned to the continuing global implications of such conflicts in economic and related philosophy. The fact, that our economic system functions successfully only as a “dirigist” system, in which the state plays a specific, if limited, leading role in the national economy, requires qualities of our national executive which were neither desired nor tolerated among the oligarchy-dominated states of old Europe.

The sensible strata of U.S. citizens have always had what might appear to be an instinctive appreciation of these implications of our national historical specificity. All except such pathetic creatures as the “Nashville Agrarians,” recognized the importance of industrial development and matching progress in development of national and regional economic infrastructure. The sensible strata regarded such an orientation, together with national defense, as a crucial part of the job implicitly assigned to our Federal and other levels of government. “More and better” were integral standards of performance demanded of the performance of government, especially the Federal government and its Executive Branch.

The radical changes in economic policy which began during 1966-1968, and accelerated during the Kissinger era, 1970-1976, were an overturning of that traditional commitment to performance around which the role of our Federal government had been defined under all patriotic leaders of our nation since 1776-1789. By nullifying that commitment, the Federal government itself joined in destroying that foundation upon which our Executive Branch’s implicit authority to rule had depended up to that time. Like the Biblical Belshazzar, we had “lost the mandate of Heaven.” We shall not be able to restore the institution of the President until that error is corrected.

Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger’s role in setting up the oil-price hoax of the mid-1970s, his role in the lunatic Rambouillet monetary summit of 1975, and Kissinger’s emergency flight to Paris, shortly after Rambouillet, in the efforts to head off my influence among Arab and other states, were rumbles of what was to become the economically catastrophic Carter Period.

Carter as a Wall Street Puppet

On paper, the Carter administration was a hand-picked creation of David Rockefeller and Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission. The content of that administration was supplied by a group, headed by future Carter Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, future Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Miriam Camps. The details were worked out by the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), under the rubric of “Project for the 1980s.” There was nothing introduced under President Carter, or the early days of Vice-President (and Trilateral Commission veteran) George Bush, which was not spelled out in the 34 volumes of that report.

Not too much blame should be placed upon Carter himself. Prior to his election, apart from his sometime association with the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-submarine-development program, he had acquired none of even the rudimentary qualifications of a serious candidate for the President. No evidence shows that he ever actually understood the practical implications of the critical policies of his administration, even those which he appeared to advocate with some degree of personal passion attached. On balance, it would be fair to say that he was used by his handlers.

The one political quality which does stand out as Carter’s own inclination, is his leaning toward the prejudices of the Nashville Agrarians. The autobiographical piece published on behalf of his first campaign for the Presidency[fn_41] strongly suggests this variety of “country boy” leaning, as do many of his public utterances during the 1976-1980 interval of his original Presidential campaign and incumbency. That public relations caper, of searching for Carter’s ancestral home in England, was a cynical, raw, and obvious stunt by his handlers. Contrast Jimmy Carter with Huey Long’s actual economic recovery programs for Louisiana, and the differences are very clearly defined. Otherwise, be fair: do not search for the blame for the important developments under the Carter administration within Carter himself. The New York boys picked him and used him, and, when the time came, discreetly discarded him as another man who had been “used up.”

The Trilateral Commission under Vance, Brzezinski, et al., had one principal mission, under both Carter and Vice-President George Bush: destroy both the U.S. economy and our national sovereignty. They did both rather well.

1. The leading expression of the Carter administration’s persisting efforts to destroy the sovereignty of the U.S.A., is typified by the repeated babbling of Secretary G. William Miller, proposing to bring the U.S. Treasury and Dollar under the supranational authority of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).[fn_42]

2. The leading expression of the Carter administration’s attempts to destroy the U.S. Constitution and economy, was the package of drastic “deregulation” measures introduced to the area of transportation and other matters.[fn_43]

3. Carter’s actual destruction of the U.S. economy was launched in October 1979, with newly appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker’s program of “controlled disintegration of the economy.”[fn_44]

These rabidly destructive changes were carried forward in the following administration, led by Vice-President Bush’s connections to the Garn-St Germain, and related “junk bond” looting of the nation’s savings and loan institutions, and a bonanza to Wall Street parasites known as the “Kemp-Roth” bill. This combination of measures, introduced during the 1977-1982 interval, is what wrecked the U.S. economy internally. It was the addition of an added quality of changes in international financial and monetary, and “free trade” measures, introduced with the backing of a consortium led by Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, France’s “Francisque” Mitterrand, and President George Bush, which, unless suddenly and dramatically reversed, dooms the world economy as a whole.

Unless those measures, and the earlier establishment of a “floating-exchange-rate monetary system” are reversed, there is virtually no chance that the U.S. as we know it today, will live out the close of the century.

A Decade of Bush-League Strategy

Beginning 1986—perhaps 1985—President Ronald Reagan was becoming increasingly a figurehead within his own Presidency; from the last weeks of 1983 onward, the Reagan team was being systematically ousted from power; a cabal fairly described as “the Bush League,” including the ultra-ambitious James Baker III, was taking over. The last illness and death of Vice-President George Bush’s deadly rival, Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, virtually eliminated any checks upon the rampages of a gang nominally headed by the de facto head of the U.S. secret-intelligence community, Bush.

Bush’s most important base of operational power, was within the military side of the secret-intelligence community, typified by a vast army of mixed military and private elements, centered around a section of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff known, since Allen Dulles’ days, as “the focal point.”[fn_45] During the Reagan Presidency, Bush’s base was located under special secret authorities attached to a December 1981 facility, known as Executive Order 12333. Bush, in addition to being Vice-President, was operating out of his own corner in the National Security Council, as the head of the dirtiest operations run underneath the cover of 12333. “Iran-Contra,” including its extensive drug-running operations, including “crack,” into the U.S.A., was not run by the CIA; it was run by Vice-President George Bush.[fn_46]

It is not being implied that Bush is an evil genius. His biography presents us with the image of an indelibly mediocre mind, a personality whose position and influence is derived from his father’s and uncle’s power and influence, both key figures within the extended Averell Harriman clan.[fn_47] Mediocrities assigned to positions of power, are, like oversized schoolyard bullies, often the worst tyrants.

Bush’s significance is to be located in his position as a part of the hard-core Anglo-American, Anglophiliac gang, the source of his affinities to Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and, by derivation, to that scurrilous parody of Lord Palmerston’s Napoleon III, President François Mitterrand. It is President Bush’s dealings with, chiefly, Thatcher, Mitterrand, and Gorbachev, during the crucial period of 1989-1992, which laid the basis for the present, final stage of degeneration of the world economy.[fn_48]

My own role in the events of 1988-1990 is crucial.

During my February 1983 meeting with the relevant Soviet representative, I made the same point otherwise presented to other circles, in other locations. My argument was: If President Reagan offers your government the package we have been discussing, and if your government then insists on rejecting that offer, the Soviet economic system will disintegrate in about five years. The point was, that if the U.S.A. and Soviet governments, among others, were to cooperate in a crash program to develop ballistic missile defense based “on new physical principles,” and if those technologies were spun off into the Soviet and Third World economies, the resulting technology boom in the U.S.S.R. and related states, would save the world from collapsing into a general economic breakdown crisis. If the Soviets refused such an offer, the Soviet system was doomed to collapse before the so-called Western economies, in approximately five years.

On October 12, 1988, I delivered an address to a press conference in Berlin, in which I announced the impending collapse of the Comecon system, a process which would probably erupt first in Poland during 1989, and would probably lead to the reunification of Germany with Berlin as the designated future capital. A televised copy of this Berlin address was broadcast to a nationwide U.S. audience that same month. During November and December 1989, I worked with my wife and others, to elaborate a proposed program based upon my Berlin 1988 address, a proposal which coincided in crucial features with a speech prepared for November 1989 delivery by Deutsche Bank chief Alfred Herrhausen—an address never delivered, because Herrhausen was assassinated before it could be delivered.

The clearly feasible alternatives proposed by various circles, including my immediate collaborators, Herrhausen, and others, were never implemented. A cabal of madmen, led by Thatcher and Mitterrand, blocked such moves. Bush reached a compromise with Thatcher and Mitterrand, a compromise which led inevitably to the presently ongoing disintegration of what remains of the economy of Russia. It was this compromise which doomed the world economy to enter the present crisis.

Notably, the proposals of my immediate collaborators, first for a Europe-wide “Productive Triangle,” and then, beginning 1992, for a Eurasian “silk road” development based upon the same principles as the “Productive Triangle,” are an echo of the same “American Century” perspective which would have been carried into effect more than fifty years ago, but for the untimely death of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Relative to the life-spans of individuals, history unfolds over generations. It is world-historical personalities, who think and act on such long-term commitments to principle, who, alone, shape history’s outcome for the better. This is the lesson which the United States government will now learn very quickly, or one can pass off any U.S. election-campaign for the year 2000 as a sick joke.

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