April 25, 2011

AN IRISH MESSAGE

Jonathan Swift’s Legacy

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This essay appeared originally in EIR, Vol. 38, No. 23, June 10, 2011, pp. 64-65.

We, our patriots of such places as both the United States and Ireland, share what we are properly disposed to believe, is the immortal mission to be accomplished by the work of both our presently living and those often precious, departed souls from whom we have inherited our immortal mission for today and beyond.

On that account, consider the provocative notion of the fact, that today’s insight into the special affinity of Ireland’s folk to what was to emerge as the United States, owes much to my late friend, the historian H. Graham Lowry, whose 1988 How the Nation Was Won proffered a deeper insight into the affairs of both of our respective nations presently.

Graham’s achievement as a scholar has pinpointed the direct connection of the great Gottfried Leibniz to what would emerge as the United States of America. Graham’s discovery located the precise connection in Gottfried Leibniz’s intervention, in the opening decade of the Eighteenth Century, into the resistance to the crushing of both Ireland and that Massachusetts Bay Colony led by the Winthrops and Mathers. He brought our attention to the remarkable role of Jonathan Swift in leading a continuing resistance to the heirs of that William of Orange who was the actual founder of the British Empire as an attempted replica of the Roman empires before it.

The present trans-Atlantic community is in a state of an apparently current submission to such traditionally British imperial appendages, as lately emphasized by Queen Elizabeth II, and also of the United States under rabidly anglophile U.S. Presidents such as George W. Bush, Jr., and, even worse, President Barack Obama. Despite all that, there exists a certain, inherently efficient immortality of those among our presently departed opponents, as among us the living who share our determination to free us from that imperialist evil flowing through the New Venetian Party’s William of Orange. So, in all just warfare against the power of evil, a sense of the immortality which is specific to the human soul, persists as the stubborn force whose very stubbornness presages the stirring of the spirit for the prospect of ultimate victory.

Betwixt the troubles we had already shared among us, there is both the onrushing threat of the greatest economic collapse in modern history, and additional great troubles introduced by a menacing turn in our Solar System’s currently increased vulnerability to a mix of bad weather, including such troubles as seismic eruptions on the scale of “8” and above, and an addition of very nasty weather to match.

To add to those troubles we have already known all too well, a new peril exists throughout our planet. We are capable, if we have the will, of resisting the effects of this change in the weather; we have the ability to save lives, if we will, and the potential, if we are determined to do so, to bring some effective degree of control over the presently menacing global developments as well. In such matters as those, I am an old soldier for whom a new front in an old war is, in principle, familiar territory.

Bless us all in these most worthwhile endeavors. Consider the evidence which Graham Lowry’s work had added to greatly improve our insights into those foundations on which our policy-shaping for today and tomorrow properly depends in large degree.

A Matter of Economic Principle

For the greater part of what we know of the history of the trans-Atlantic regions (and beyond), European civilization, since the awful folly of the Peloponnesian War, has been ruled from the founding of the Roman Empire in negotiations on the Isle of Capri, by an imperial system of monetarism, which began with the Roman Empire, was restarted under Byzantium, was restarted under the Venetian monetarists’ control over the abomination of usury and mass murder which was the system of the Crusaders, and, after an interlude leading into, and coming out of the great ecumenical Council of Florence, we have experienced the ruinous pattern of religious warfare which dominated the interval from 1492 until the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. We are thus confronted with the breakdown of European economy and culture which began with that assassination of President John F. Kennedy which permitted that great folly of an Indo-China war, a war which the British Empire had designed and exploited for the purpose of ruining the power of United States to contain the evil inherent in the British empire of that time. The destruction of the last remnant of economic sanity in the 1999 repeal of what President Franklin Roosevelt had introduced in 1933 as the Glass-Steagall law, has opened the gates of virtual Hell into which the nations of Europe, and the trans-Atlantic region, have been plunged, presently, into the breakdown-crisis now centered in that great reign of madness called “The Euro.”

The principal currency blocs of the planet are, thus, locked in an advanced expression of something like what was imposed on Germany in 1923. It now appears that those events of 1923 are now being reenacted on a trans-Atlantic, or even broader scale. Europe, and the trans-Atlantic region more widely, are presently located on the calendar for a probable end-game of the world economy no later than the Autumn of this present year. Thus, we have now reached near to the point of a general, hyper-inflationary breakdown of trans-Atlantic civilization, unless the suicidal folly of the present “Euro” system is aborted, and that, now, very soon, for the benefit of a system of respectively sovereign European states.

The objective which we must keep in mind in working to defeat the terminal moment of a collapse of the “Euro” system, is the reform which transforms the trans-Atlantic, and wider, economic system, a transformation away from the monetarist tradition established by the succession of Roman-like empires, to a fixed-exchange-rate credit system. The potential for success of such a reform as that, lies along a pathway of science-driven progress leading into, and beyond the present brink of a thermonuclear age in the selection of the systems of sources of power needed to enable us to meet the requirements of present and future mankind.

That pathway of progress requires two seemingly ironically juxtaposed, governing intentions. We must foster that Classical tradition of the artistic imagination of the people of each national culture, its cultural sovereignty, which is the root of all science-driven progress in true practice of freedom, while increasing the rigorous deployment of physical-scientific progress needed to meet the physical challenge of ensuring the impassioned scientific progress needed to enable us to meet the needs of a growing population of mankind. The design for the evolution of the progress in the charm of a Classical artistic world-outlook on the creative imagination, combined with the rigors of physical-science-driven effects for the benefit of mankind, is the essentially ironical nature of the mission set properly before us.

We must approach such subject-matters of policy-shaping direction as given by differing shadings of human cultures to a common ultimate purpose. After all, mankind has existed on this planet within a presently estimated term of between two and three millions years, a most modest, and relatively most recent lapse of time in the vastness of even that galaxy which our Solar System presently inhabits. Against the backdrop of such realities as those, we are a tenderly young species, as if one born only yesterday. We are mortal in our bodies, but with portents of eternity in our proper mission. For that mission assigned to us, we must be generously modest, but also very much bold. We are mortal, but through that power for creativity among us, our existence within the breadth and depth of physical-space-time in this universe, is the expression of an immortal opportunity which our brief moment of mortal existence has presented to us as the eternal meaning of our having once lived.