| http://www.larouchepub.com/lar/2002/2903_continue_amer_rev.html
This article appears in the January 18, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. Continue the American Revolution! by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. January 6, 2002 As announced, on January 24th, a two-and-a-half-hour-long international webcast will be broadcast from a conference held at a Washington, D.C. hotel. It will begin with my opening, keynote address, with the title, "And Now, A Year Later," and will feature participation both from members of the audience assembled there, and also from participants calling in from among listeners in various parts of the world. That address and discussion will be devoted to an open intellectual and moral challenge to the governments, leading political parties, and prospective heads of state and government of the world's leading nations, especially my own. The focus of that challenge will be the crisis which now confronts each and all nations and their incumbent and prospective heads of state and government. My presentation and the ensuing discussion will be focussed on today's four most urgent, interrelated topics: 1-The global implications of the way in which the presently accelerating breakdown of the world's present monetary-financial system, provides a unique confirmation of each and all of my published long-range economic forecasts and assessments, for both the U.S. economy and the international system. The world is gripped, at this moment, by what I had forecast as a generally accelerating collapse of most of the world's physical economy. This economic collapse expresses the terminal phase of that international, "floating-rate" monetary-financial system which was introduced in August 1971. Unless that bankrupt, present monetary-financial system is put through what I have prescribed as a reorganization-in-bankruptcy, conducted under the authority of sovereign nation-states, the general economic and social situation will soon become a more or less hopeless one. 2-This economic collapse is accompanied by the threat of a global "clash of civilizations" war. That is the world war proposed by those often identified in the relevant professional literature as "utopian" strategists, who follow, still today, the doctrine set down in 1928, in H.G. Wells' The Open Conspiracy. These utopians are typified inside the United States by the Smith-Richardson, Olin, and Mellon-Scaife Foundations, and by the circles of Harvard's late Professor William Yandell Elliott. Those fanatics have taken increasing control of United States and other nations' military and foreign-policy doctrines, during a period of approximately fifty years to date. Their ideology, against which leading U.S. patriots, such as President Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and Senator William Fulbright, had warned, has pushed the planet to the brink of an immediate plunge into a world-wide, genocidal convulsion, akin to the more limited religious warfare which almost destroyed central Europe during the interval 1618-1648. 3-There are well-defined, proven precedents from modern history, which would provide a model for safe passage out of both of those two threats to civilization. This, however, defines a most crucial third problem. This combination of existential crises of civilization as a whole, catches western Europe and the Americas in an unfortunate posture. Today, most among the leading political parties and present governments, including the leading political parties of the U.S.A., exhibit a lack of the capacity to devise, adopt, and implement the specific kinds of clearly defined measures, which are needed to free their nations from the monetary-financial policies which have brought the planet as a whole to the brink of chaos. 4-The fourth and most relevant issue of the present world crisis, is the matter of the role of the world's most powerful nation, the U.S.A. How should we now assess the past, and possibly continuing role in world history, which the American Revolution of 1776-1789, and of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, continues to represent, even under the present conditions of threatened descent of the world into a new dark age of humanity? Is it likely, that the needed global economic and related reforms could be made in a timely fashion, unless the U.S.A. were to assume the role implicit in what Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton defined as the American System of political-economy, and unless it carried out that role in a manner consistent with the qualities of leadership of Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, in great crises of the past? Or, to restate the point, what role should other leading nations of the world wish the United States to adopt, in face of the three threats to global civilization which I have summarily identified here? Could civilization survive, were the United States to fail to adopt that role of primus inter pares within the community of nations? I speak for that American intellectual tradition typified as the legacy of Franklin and Lincoln. That is also the legacy of then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams' definition of a community of principle among a multi-polar array of sovereign nation-state republics. I define what I mean by the phrase, "The Continuing American Revolution," the thematic topic which unifies the continuing discussion of the four issues I have identified above. I now turn your attention to two crucial lessons from the history of the United States, lessons which point to those issues which will, most probably, determine whether or not world civilization will escape the threatened collapse looming before us. 1. The Roots of the Revolution The past 1,100 years of what is now a globally extended European civilization, were dominated by a struggle of those reformers who sought to define what became the modern sovereign nation-state. This was a struggle against the imperial "globalizers" of that time. Then, as now, the would-be "globalizers" sought to subject many nations and peoples to an arbitrary imperial authority, which was chiefly modelled, then as now, upon the traditions of ancient imperial Rome. About 600 years ago, came the first significant, if qualified success for those reformers, in the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance's attempt to establish the form of sovereign nation-state based upon that principle of natural law known variously by the names "the general welfare" or "common good." That principle of natural law signifies, that no government has the moral authority to reign, except as it is efficiently committed to promote the general welfare of all of its population and that population's posterity. No government has the moral authority to lead other nations, unless it is as zealously devoted to the general welfare of the community of nations, as to its own. This quality of government, the general-welfare principle, which was adopted as the fundamental constitutional law of the U.S.A., in the Preamble of the Federal Constitution, defines the only moral form of government. This is a form of government which has repudiated such abominations as the Roman Empire; whereas, contemporary U.S. utopians, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, base their perverted model of soldier and state, on their intention to establish a form of government, by beasts, reigning over hunted or herded human cattle. Typical of the qualified success of the Renaissance, was the leading role of Nicholas of Cusa in defining the need to establish a community of principle among sovereign nation-states (Concordantia Catholica), and Cusa's leading role (e.g., De Docta Ignorantia) in defining the principles of modern experimental physical science. The role of Cusa in launching that policy of trans-oceanic exploration, which resulted directly in Columbus using the knowledge supplied by Toscanelli to reach the Americas, and the great impetus to modern science given by Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci, are typical. Also typical, is the combined impact of the leadership shown by France's Jeanne d'Arc and Jacques Coeur, in making possible the creation of modern France, under Louis XI, and by the England of Henry VII and Thomas More. However, the enemies of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, led by the hegemonic imperial maritime power of that time, Venice, struck back, plunging Europe into a series of devastating religious wars, during that 1511-1648 interval, which some historians have rightly defined as a "little new dark age." It is that interval of evil, of Venice's policy, and that of its Habsburg accomplices, which is parodied by the present homicidal madness of the "clash of civilizations" policy of Professor Elliott's Golems, Samuel P. Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Europe which returned to sanity, under the peace established through the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, turned to the European colonies in the Americas, especially the North American English colonies, as the only likely place in which to reestablish a new precedent for that principle of sovereign nation-state republicanism associated with Renaissance figures such as Louis XI and Henry VII. The leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, under the Winthrops and Mathers of the Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Century, provided the seed-crystal around which the future United States was built. Europeans linked, directly or indirectly, to the leading influence of Gottfried Leibniz, played leading roles from early in the Eighteenth Century, in building up the foundations of what become the future United States, in colonies such as Pennsylvania and Virginia. It is of crucial importance, today, that our U.S. citizens and their children understand the role which the greatest patriots of England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe—such as Leibniz and the networks which he created—played, in acting to bring our North American republic into existence. Their conscious intent, as typified by the case of the Marquis de Lafayette, was to bring forth in our new republic what Lafayette described as "a temple of liberty and beacon of hope" for all mankind. Our victory in 1782-1783, and our escape from chaos, with the Philadelphia draft Constitution of 1787, struck terror and rage in those enemies of humanity ensconced in the British monarchy's East India Company and the Habsburg-centered, imperial interest of the Central European princely powers. Thus, the Jacobin Terror was launched by London-directed agents of the British Foreign Office's Jeremy Bentham, to prevent the implementation of the Constitution adopted under the leadership of Bailly and Lafayette. Five years of Jacobin terror, the reign of Barras, and the first fascist tyranny, that of self-proclaimed "Caesar" Napoleon Bonaparte, eliminated the earlier role of that France which had been the crucial strategic supporter of the cause of our independence. France was thus transformed into our enemy for that time. Metternich's Congress of Vienna established the domination of all Europe by two rivals, the British monarchy and the Metternich-led Holy Alliance, who were united in one cause: their hatred of, and determination to destroy both the image and actuality of the United States. Under the strategic conditions associated with these developments of 1789-1815, the United States of the time of Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, became relatively culturally pessimistic and significantly corrupted. During the gloomy decades up to 1863, patriots such as the American Whigs, who were rallied around Clay, the Careys, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams, saved the U.S.A. from dismemberment; but, the expansion of slavery and the spread of the related forms of corruption typified by Martin Van Buren's and August Belmont's Democratic Party of Jackson, Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, and McClellan, were the principal political correlatives of the continued, combined moral and strategic weakness of the nation. This weakness prevailed up to the time of what has been justly called "The Second American Revolution," President Lincoln's great victory over the British monarchy's puppet, the Confederacy. Despite the assassination of Lincoln, the victory over the Confederacy and the development of the U.S.A. as the world's leading nation in agricultural and industrial development, over the 1861-1876 interval, caused the spread of the intellectual influence of the American System of political-economy through much of the world. This was to be seen, in such exemplary cases as Germany in 1877, Czar Alexander II's and Mendeleyev's Russia during the same period, in Meiji Restoration Japan, and throughout the Americas and, into the emergence of Sun Yat-Sen's leadership of China. Thus, as the 1890s approached, France, Germany, Russia, and many other nations, were coming into cooperation around transcontinental railway developments, and related cooperation. This was inspired by the image of the achievements of the Franklin, Hamilton, Lincoln, Carey American System of political-economy, as the obvious alternative to the rival, parasitical, British system. |
