News / Brèves Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente In Grand Strategy, Choose Lyndon LaRouche, Not Bertrand Russell 5 January 2022 EIRNS—Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has insisted that only a metanoia—a 180 degree, spiritual “bootlegger’s turn,” away from a self-defeating, self-destructive indifference to promoting the General Welfare of people all over the world—can preserve any nation, including the declining United States. In times of pandemic, this should be clear. It could be done, for example, in consultation with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) addressed last week on Dec. 28 by Vladimir Putin, by redirecting the world’s military capabilities to the task of saving millions now threatened with death by famine and by infectious, possibly species-threatening diseases. We could ensure a moral upshift in international relations through establishing a world health platform that reverses the medical apartheid of the past two years (and more) and establishes a world “public sanitation” policy as recently discussed by Russian head of the Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare (Rospotrebnadzor) and Chief Sanitary Physician Dr. Anna Popova, and as continually discussed by former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders and Helga Zepp-LaRouche. The stakes are higher than at any time in human history. Now that spokesmen from Russia and China have described their respective roles in securing the recent P5 re-statement of the 1986 “Reagan/Gorbachev Resolution” that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought (see slugs), what can be done to cause the United States and the trans-Atlantic world to honor that premise? We know, that refuting the presently publicly stated “confront Russia” outlook on Ukraine, as espoused by the Atlantic Council and others, requires an affirmative response to the Russian proposal that the decades-earlier broken promises of NATO and the United States, concerning “no NATO expansion eastward,” now be guaranteed in writing. Given the undeniable record of the United States and Europe in not only breaking their strategic promises, but also “restructuring”—i.e. looting and depopulating—Russia for several years in the 1990s through predatory financial “shock therapy,” that doesn’t seem a lot to ask. We can be sure that the true gravity of the present circumstance has been registered in several, even many, national capitals. It may even begin to episodically puncture the media curtain now drawn around the truth; but if so, that will largely be our own doing, in collaboration with institutions that aid that effort. At home, however, the “Prompt Global Strike” and related “Beyond MAD” digital knuckle-draggers of the “Silicon(e) Valley Department of Defense” have, at best, an outdated, post-imperial, Bertrand Russell-like view of “how to handle Russia and China.” In this era of political correctness, they wouldn’t dare say it this way, but in a 1952 interview, as he approached his 80th birthday, which can be viewed on YouTube, Bertrand Russell opined, “It’s very difficult for anybody born since 1914, to realize how profoundly different the world is now from what it was when I was a child.... A world where ancient empires vanish like morning mist. Where we have to accustom ourselves to Asiatic-self assertion.... The world is altogether so different from what it was when I was young, that it is an extraordinarily difficult thing for an old man to live in such a world.” (Emphasis in original.) Answering the question as to what part “Asia” would play in the near future, Russell said: “Well, Asia ... is not prepared any longer to be subservient to the white man. It hasn’t noticed that Russians are white. If it had, it would take a different line. But it seems to think that Russians are yellow, or black, or some other color. And I think our propaganda ought to be mainly devoted only to saying, Russians also are white. I believe that would be the effective propaganda to use in Asia. ... But, if Asia does not overwhelm the rest of the world with a vast flood of population and poverty, Asia must live up to its responsibilities. It must learn the sort of things that we have learned in the West, which is, how to maintain a roughly stationary population....” The Malthusian premise luridly on display then, wears the modest garb of “climate change” today, but it still has Bertrand Russell’s face. Hence, the surprise, panic, and shock now being expressed among “policymaking circles” that have awakened to realize that the China-Russia alliance is real. Yet, out of their depraved indifference to American history, illiterates are referring to this as “the greatest challenge ever to American power.” They would be horrified to realize that it is precisely this China-Russia alliance, together with the United States, that Abraham Lincoln, Czar Alexander I, Dmitri Mendeleyev, Anson Burlingame, Wharton Barker, and the Self-Strengthening Movement of China worked to create in the 19th century, expressed in the Trans-Continental Railway, Trans-Siberian Railway, and Sun Yat-Sen’s national China railway designs. It is neither “communist,” nor “capitalist.” It is the transformed physical economy, first called the American System, later transferred to Europe and the world by the German-American economist Friedrich List, and then recently completely revolutionized by Lyndon LaRouche and his discoveries, that is, as of now, more studied, appreciated, and understood in Russia, China, and some other countries than in the United States itself. LaRouche is the only American statesman in the last half-century to offer an advanced conception of American strategic policy, one diametrically opposed to British Liberal-Imperialist Bertrand Russell and his intellectual tradition. Perhaps, in this year of LaRouche’s centenary, several nations and institutions will see fit to discuss this “best kept secret.” LaRouche proceeded in his strategic policy designs from the vantage point of physical economy, as invented by the 26-year-old genius Gottfried Leibniz in his essay “Society and Economy.” Through a series of books and lectures, as well as through his eight United States Presidential campaigns, LaRouche insisted that strategy, as well as political action, must proceed from a philosophical method of a particular type. LaRouche identified that method with the person of Socrates, and the politically-suppressed writings of Socrates’ student Plato and Plato’s School of Athens. In his introduction to the LaRouche organization’s polemically authentic translation of Plato’s Timaeus dialogue, “Plato and the New Political Science,” LaRouche wrote: “Contrary to the myth of Plato the merely contemplative speculator, Plato was the leader of the most active and far-flung political intelligence operations organization of the city-builders faction of the fourth century BC.... Platonic ideas, properly so termed, take as their subject the characteristic features of the mental processes by which hypotheses concerning empirical scientific knowledge are formed. It is therefore such Platonic ideas which rightly appear very modern to informed readers today.... It is only by methods of composition which force the reader’s attention away from primary emphasis on prosaic facts of the ephemeral here and now that the reader’s attention is directed to the relatively transfinite, subsuming successive transformations of knowledge in the ephemeral here and now. We, today, must pursue the same method if we are to arrive, at last, at abstraction of sets of principles which account for the ordered course of the history of civilization in the past, and into the future. “Here is the practical importance of historiography to every citizen, whether a public official or an individual man or woman lacking any conspicuous status in public affairs. What we do—or fail to do—in the present, in our here and now, determines how we and others shall live in our own personal future and in the future of our posterity.” Bertrand Russell’s view of Plato was... somewhat different. “For a time I found a certain satisfaction in the Platonic eternal world of ideas, which has a sort of religious flavor. It gave me a certain satisfaction. But then I came to the conclusion that that was nonsense. And then I was left without any satisfaction with it.... And remain so....” This “higher manifold” of intelligence warfare is the real domain of the ongoing strategic discussions of today. The disadvantage for Americans is that Bertrand Russell’s “liberal imperialist” outlook is more popular in the State Department and other institutions than is that of Lyndon LaRouche. As a consequence, until the seminal role of Lyndon LaRouche is at least acknowledged in terms of his role in the strategic dialogue with Russia and China over the past 40 years, even on matters of basic historiography, let alone grand strategy, America is doomed, when it comes to matters of grand strategy, to repeat the same self-defeating mistakes over and over, starting with the axiom that “Great Britain/Iago is America’s/Othello’s closest ally.” It is our job to induce a metanoia, a moral “bootlegger’s turn,” including through the evolving pandemic, and the crime against humanity unfolding in Afghanistan, to give the trans-Atlantic world back the moral fitness to survive.