This is the edited transcript of the presentation of Diane Sare to the Schiller Institute’s Oct. 15, 2022 conference, “Build the New Paradigm, Defeat Green Fascism.” Mrs. Sare is the LaRouche independent candidate from New York for U.S. Senate. The title, subheads and embedded links have been added.

I’m really glad to be here. I really enjoyed the first panel. What I want to do is prepare us, to arm us, spiritually and emotionally and culturally for this fight. Because the thing that’s really been disturbing me, what I keep asking myself, and what keeps me awake at night is, “Where is the bottom?” What I mean is, just when you think it can’t get worse, then our government, NATO, the UK, does the next worse thing. When you say, “How can this be continuing? Where is the point where people will stand up and stop this descent into total annihilation?” That’s what I want to take up.

As often in these periods, I turn to LaRouche. In 2004, during Cheney/Bush, he commissioned a book called Children of Satan; appropriately named. Interestingly, he begins the chapter titled, “What Does Culture Do?” writing:

As we have documented this fact in locations published earlier, the turn in direction of pathway, away from President Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership toward the catastrophe which is our nation’s terrible condition today [that is, 2004], was begun as part of an operation in which the later head of our Central Intelligence Agency, John Foster Dulles’ brother Allen, played a key role toward the close of World War II. This is a role he played together, and over the later decades of his life, with accomplices including his James Jesus Angleton. Dulles and Angleton typify those who played a key role in bringing a key part of the Nazi SS intelligence apparatus into the inside of what became, later, the NATO system.

Doesn’t that seem appropriate today? Now, and you see it. What are we defending? What are we idolizing, what are we funding in Ukraine for our own purposes? Somehow, while candidates such as myself do not have freedom of speech or the right—we have the right, it’s just not being respected—to be included in debates, or heard in the mainstream media. It is somehow acceptable for perpetrators of violence to be wearing all kinds of Nazi insignia, and the United States and Ukraine did not support the resolution to condemn the glorification of Nazism. Is that merely a political question, or a military question? Or, is that a cultural question? And how did we come to this point?

Consider ‘Amazing Grace’

The first thing I thought we would do is, we’re going to sing. I handed out some lyrics, which I hope you got. We’re going to sing the 1st, 2nd, and last verses of “Amazing Grace.” Sing it with me. [Audience and Diane sing “Amazing Grace.”]

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound—

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found;

Was blind, but now I see.

 

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,

And grace my fears relieved;

How precious did that grace appear

The hour I first believed!

 

The Earth shall soon dissolve like snow,

The sun forbear to shine;

But God, who called me here below,

Will be forever mine.

Bertrand Russell’s ‘Psychology’

Great; thank you. Now, just keep this in your mind, because you may wonder what this has to do with fascism. We’re going to get to that. But let’s hear from Bertrand Russell. I’m going to read you a little bit which is not up here. Some of you may be familiar with some quotes from his 1953 book, The Impact of Science on Society. Russell writes:

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these, most influential is what is called “education.” Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one. The press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time, anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young, and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship .... The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakeable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity.

Russell concludes the section:

Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely, without the need of armies or policemen.

Theodor Adorno’s ‘Music’

Russell wasn’t really the founder of something called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was not created toward the beginning of World War II, but really at the end; because they had a problem, which was that they wanted the U.S. to go fascist. Germany went fascist; you had Vichy France; Spain went fascist; Italy went fascist. The U.S. didn’t. They tried to assassinate FDR; that failed. They tried to run a coup against FDR; that failed. So, what was it? What was resolved upon by people at the Tavistock Institute and the CIA and Hollywood and elsewhere, is that you had to destroy the culture. So, there was a project which involved a very nasty fellow named Theodor Adorno. If you have the view that genius and insanity are very close, that if someone is a genius, they’re probably also insane, you can thank Adorno for that.

In his 1949 book, The Philosophy of Modern Music, he writes:

What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man. [Man is a pretty miserable species; we’ve been discussing that. —Sare] The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes at the same time the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme, toward gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other, towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.

You don’t hear that in Beethoven; you don’t hear that in Bach. You might hear that in Schönberg, who agreed with this quite vehemently. Adorno is the guy who created—this is before everyone’s time in my audience here—this thing called the Top 40 on the radio. Whatever the top 40 hits of pop music were, you got to hear them over and over and over again. He said, “What’s the purpose of this?”

Adorno answered: The purpose is fourfold. One, depersonalization, loss of connection to one’s own body. Two, hebephrenia, which he defined as the indifference of the sick individual towards the external. You’re oblivious to what’s going on around you, how it’s going to affect you. Three, catatonia. “A similar behavior is familiar in patients who have been overwhelmed by shock.” And four, finally, necrophilia. He said, “Universal necrophilia is the last perversity of style.” That’s the goal. The question is: How much has that sunk into our culture? Has this become our culture? Can we defeat it? How might we defeat it?

Consider ‘Were You There?’

Now, we have another song. Everyone can sing along with me, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” We’re going to just do verses 1, 2, and the last. Sing with us; you’ll get the idea. [All sing “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”]

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

 

Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?

Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?

Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.

Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?

 

Were you there when they rolled the stone away?

Were you there when they rolled the stone away?

Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.

Were you there when they rolled the stone away?

Thank you. What is the difference between the two songs that we sang? I’ll give you a hint. How many people are there in the first one—“Amazing Grace”? How many people are in that song? One. There is just one person in this song. What kind of person is it? Yeah, it’s a wretch, that by some arbitrary intervention which they had absolutely nothing to do with, has become saved. I’ll let that sink in. You can think about it, and think about the implications for mankind and everything else.

Now, in the Spiritual we sang, first of all, what’s the singer singing about? It’s about you watching something that is happening to someone else. And you’re not only watching something happening to someone else; you are talking to someone, asking “Were you there when this thing occurred?” Then, there’s the higher universal question about this and what happens in the song. And now, what I want to share with you—

William Dawson—the Meaning of the Spirituals

We’ll hear a professional singer do this, but first we have a quote from William Dawson, who was a wonderful composer of Negro Spirituals. He taught at Tuskegee Institute for many years, and had a lot to say about the performance of this music. He writes:

Two passages taken from the antebellum archives will give the reader some idea of what American slavery meant to the Black man; introduced here to give vividness and authenticity to this analysis of the meaning of religious folk music of the Negro, properly called Spirituals. One is taken from an act of the legislature of South Carolina in 1741, apparently intended to put a curb on the torturing of slaves.

“In case any person shall willfully cut out the tongue, put out the eye, castrate, or cruelly scald, burn, or deprive any slave of any limb or member, or shall inflict any other cruel punishment other than by whipping or beating with a horsewhip, cow skin, switch, or small stick, or by putting irons on, or by confining or imprisoning such slave, every such person shall, for every such offense, forfeit the sum of 100 pounds current money.”

The second passage is taken from an address by Henry Berry before the House of Delegates of Virginia, January 20, 1832.

“Pass as severe laws as you will, to keep these unfortunate creatures in ignorance. It is in vain unless you can extinguish that spark of intellect which God has given them. Let any man who advocates slavery, examine the system of laws that we have adopted towards these creatures, and he may shed a tear upon that. And would to God, sir, the memory of it might thus be blotted out forever. Sir, we have, as far as possible, closed every avenue by which light might enter their minds. We have only to go one step further to extinguish the capacity to see the light, and our work would be completed. They would then be reduced to the level of the beast of the field, and we should be safe. And I am not certain that we would not do it, if we could find out the necessary process, and that under the plea of necessity.”

These excerpts give deep and poignant meaning to the words of the Spiritual familiar to most Americans, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See.” With such a background, we marvel at the lack of a single word of hate in the religious folksongs of the Negro. In the midst of inhumanity, he sang, “Lord, I want to be a Christian. I want to be like Jesus.” In these songs, one can hear the cry for deliverance and freedom which lurks behind every measure, because the Negro literally poured his heart into them. Besides suffering, slavery brought to the Negro the story of Jesus. In that story, the slave found the counterpart of his own tragic experiences and instantly claimed the hero of that epic drama for his own; which gives meaning to the oft-recurring “my Jesus” in these songs. The slave identified himself with the savior of all mankind, whose travail and triumph became the hope and assurance of his own deliverance. Thus, religion became the medium for expressing the slave’s laments, and aspirations for physical as well spiritual release.

So, what’s the power in that music? Because what people did, what the Spirituals were about, was the power of the human spirit to transcend death. If your identity is located in that domain, then you will not be fearful. You won’t be cowardly; you won’t be a loser. You won’t look at other people and complain about how much worse off you have it than they do, and “don’t they know what real suffering is like?” This is the principle that’s in the paper that Mr. LaRouche dictated from prison, which is inside the center of each printed program you received when you entered this conference room.

‘Soggy Sentimentalism’

There’s much more I can say, but time is short. I hope we get to discuss it, because there’s a certain really soggy sentimentalism—maybe we’ll go to that last thing, I’ll just show it. You can think about why this is wrong, and then we’ll listen to the song.

Here’s a typical local news story: “Homeless man buys stranded woman gas with last $20—here’s how she repaid him.” This kind of stuff is all over the social media. Everyone is supposed to get all choked up. Oh, this homeless man, who was a veteran but got addicted to drugs, and he’s out on the side of the road. This woman ran out of gas, and she was stranded, and he gave her his last $20. Then, she set up a GoFundMe, and raised $300,000 for him. He’s no longer homeless.

Now, isn’t that great? [Someone in audience shouts out “It’s a fake!”] It doesn’t matter; most of them are. The point is, why would you have such shallow emotions to allow yourself to be sucked into this? Like a tearjerker. When my sister and I would watch “Little House on the Prairie” every night and cry, our father would say, “Why are you watching these tearjerkers?”

What does the story I told you about the homeless man and the stranded woman do for the good of mankind? What does it do to stop 1.5 billion people from dying of starvation? But we read and we feel so warm; such goodness just happened. That’s the same quality in inversion of the “Amazing Grace.” It allows a population to do nothing when the supposedly representative government of that population is committing crimes against humanity all over the world, and against people within the United States.

With that I conclude. Now we will listen to Elvira Green, a wonderful mezzo-soprano, singing what we just sang.

[Elvira Green sings “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”]