Lyndon LaRouche attacks fascism #12
Walter Alter
on Sept. 3. An edited version of his speech follows.
I have been asked to speak about the legal ``theories,'' or the theory of
government, of the Conservative Revolution gang. They don't really have a
sophisticated outlook of how human beings should govern themselves; their
simplistic theory of government can be summed up in two notions:
decentralization and privatization: take power away from the government; and
``law & order,'' i.e. let the government get ``tough on crime.'' Get tough
by enacting ``three strikes and you're out'' legislation for repeat
offenders, abolish parole, set up prisoner chain gangs, such as has been
done in Alabama, eliminate amenities for prisoners, etc.
Sounds contradictory?
They say we have too much government, but, we don't have enough
government....
They say that the government can't be trusted to deliver a letter, run a
post office, run a railroad, or even to run a sanitation system.
They say: The government can't be trusted to pick up the garbage, yet it can
be trusted to run a bigger and more powerful criminal justice system. You
can't trust the government to deliver a letter, but you can trust it with
your life (well, not yours--they always figure it will be someone else,
usually someone with a darker tone of skin, and someone a lot poorer than
they are).
They think the government can be trusted to run a fair court system, to
arrest people properly; put them on trial, and kill them--without making a
mistake.
But, the government can't be trusted to run a sewer or water system; that
should be privatized. But it can be trusted to decide who should live or
die.
Most of the idiots in the Conservative Revolution in the United States don't
even see the paradox, or they don't care about it. They're just following a
script.
But follow the trail of the Conservative Revolution script-writers, back to
London, and you'll find that there, the present-day authors of the Conservat
ive Revolution, do understand it, and they even boast about it.
As Peregrine Worthsthorne wrote in the London Telegraph last July 23, ``A
Police State Beats a Welfare State'': ``Given that the state won't be able
to afford security for `our people' from the cradle to the grave, all but a
small minority of hopeless cases will have no choice but to fend for
themselves. This is how it is going to be. Life for many of `our people' in
the late 20th and 21st century is going to be nasty, brutish, and even
short.... In revolutionary times, the only form of security for property and
the bourgeoisie comes, not from think tanks, but from tanks proper....''
Now, you might say, this has been going on for a long time. Conservatives
have always been for decentralization, for states' rights, for law and
order. What's new?
Well, you are right: It is old stuff. A lot older than you might think. They
are old ideas, but conveyed today with a new urgency and immediacy--because
of the imminence of the financial collapse. Newt Gingrich may dress up his
ideas in ``futurist'' wrappings, but they are old, old ideas.
How old? For 200 years, Great Britain has been trying to break up the United
States, to shatter our federal union into pieces, be in two pieces (Civil
War), three pieces, or nine pieces, as in the Nine Nations of North America
scheme, or into the individual states, be it 13, or now 50.
Our national slogan is E Pluribus Unum, or, ``From Many, One.'' Theirs
should be: ``From One, Many.''
How old? For the past 600 years, the European oligarchy, centered in Venice,
and then having moved north to England and Holland, has been waging war
against the principle of the Council of Florence, against the Commonwealth
conception of state as LaRouche described it yesterday, against the idea
that the purpose of the state is to nurture and foster those qualities that
set man apart from the beast, the faculty of creative intelligence, the
image of God after which man is created.
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Oligarchy vs. The Republic
You can go back 2,500 years, for that long, it has been the oligarchy's
policy to utilize forms of the state which preserve their power, by efforts
to immobilize and degrade the population, keeping it in a condition of
actual slavery, or moral and intellectual slavery. This is what Schiller
showed in his 1789 essay, ``The Legislation of Lycurgus and Solon.'' in
which he gave us a timeless presentation of the two models of
government--oligarchic and republican.
Schiller writes that Lycurgus, in founding his Spartan state, ``worked
against the highest purpose of humanity, in that ... he held the minds of
the Spartans fast at the level where he had found them, and hemmed in
progress for all eternity.'' Industry was banned, science neglected. ``The
business of all its citizens together, was to maintain what they possessed,
and to remain as they were, not to obtain anything new, not to rise to a
higher level.''
But, in contrast to this, says Schiller, ``the progress of mind should be
the purpose of the state.''
That was the issue in the drafting and creating of the U.S. Constitution.
John Locke's ``Life, liberty and property,'' was rejected, in favor of the
Leibnizian idea of ``life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.''
James Wilson of Pennsylvania said it in almost exactly the same terms as
Schiller did two years later. At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, during
the debate over a property qualification for electors, Wilson's remarks are
reported as follows: ``he could not agree that property was the sole or the
primary object of Government & society. The cultivation & improvement of the
human mind was the most noble object.''
In 1791, Alexander Hamilton argued for the superiority of manufacturing over
agriculture in his Report on the Subject of Manufactures: ``To cherish and
stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of
enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which
the wealth of a nation may be promoted.''
Hamilton's reports on credit, on manufactures, and on the national
bank--submitted during the first Washington administration--laid the
foundation for what became known as ``the American System of Political
Economy.''
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The American System
The three pillars of the American system were 1) a national bank, 2)
internal improvements of infrastructure (energy, water development, schools,
hospitals, transport, communications, etc.), and 3) a system of tariffs to
protect the development of industry.
This is what the British have been trying to destroy for the past 200 years.
Lord William Rees-Mogg and Peregrine Worsthorne are only the latest variants
on this ugly theme.
After the Revolution, the new nation was barely a nation, existing under the
Articles of Confederation in which the nationl government could not tax
without the agreement of nine of the 13 states. Very much like the
Conservative Revolution proposal for ``super-majorities,'' where
three-fifths of the Congress would be required for any tax increase.
In fact, if you take almost any proposal out of the Gingrich Contract With
America, you'll find it's been tried before. A couple of years ago here, I
gave a presentation on the Confederate Constitution of 1861. This was before
the Conservative Revolution takeover of Congress in last November's
elections, but the same gang of scoundrels who provide the anti-American
platform of the Conservative Revolution, were already pushing the
Confederate Constitution.
Llewellyn Rockwell, the president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (Jeff
talked about von Mises and the Austrian School, a teacher of von Hayek) was
already promoting the Confederate Constutition in a Richmond Times-Dispatch
article headlined ``The Southern Solution.'' He wrote: ``With all the
Washington, D.C. scandals, ideas for government reform are as common as fire
ants in Georgia, and about as helpful. But I have a suggestion for real
progress: bring the U.S. Constituion up to Confederate standards.''
Rockwell attacks the ``general welfare'' clause in the U.S. Constitution as
``an open door for government intervention,'' and he compares the two
preambles.''
Notice the difference:
Whereas the U.S. Constitution begins by declaring, ``We the People of the
United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,'' the Constitution of
the Confederate States of America takes a fundamentally opposite approach:
``We the people of the Confederate States, each state acting in its
sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal
government|....''
What else does the Conservative Revolution crowd like about the Confederate
Constituion? A recent edition of the newsletter of the von Mises Institute,
The Free Market, opens by arguing that the way to solve the problem of
special interests using the democratic process for their own benefit, is to
remedy this with the Confederate Constitution. It affirms strong support to
free trade and opposition to protectionism. One could as well say: It
affirms strong support for British imperialism, and opposition to the
American System which built this country into what it is today.
What do they like about it?
the elimination of the ``general welfare'' clause, from both the Preamble
and from Article I (the powers of Congress, to tax for the general welfare);
the prohibition of protective tariffs;
the prohibition of government-financed internal improvements;
the line-item veto and other provisions restricting the power of Congress
with respect to revenue. The Confederate Constitution had provisions that
Congress could not make any open-ended appropriations; any appropriation had
to be for a specified time and a specified amount, i.e. no entitlements.
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The Supreme Court
Speaking of Confederates, we've had a Confederate heading the U.S. Supreme
Court for some time.
Throughout the 1980s and up until recently, Chief Justice William Rehnquist
has been pushing a juridical version of the Conservative Revolution agenda,
most obvious in his attacks on the power of the federal government to do
good, his promotion of states' rights at every opportunity, and--what we
know best--his destruction of constitutional rights in criminal proceedings,
so that the states (and even the federal courts) were allowed, even
encouraged, to ride roughshod over the constitutional rights of defendants.
At every opportunity, Rehnquist sides with the enemies of the Constitution
and the Republic; he, more than any other single individual in the United
States today, is reponsible for the police-state conditions that pervade our
criminal justice system, and operates hand-in-hand with the permanent
bureaucracy in the Department of Justice.
Even Rehnquist and his gang took heart from last November's election
results. You remember the old saying, ``the Supreme Court follows the
election returns''?
Well, in the Supreme Court term that ended in June, the Supreme Court gave
signs that they were considering joining Gingrich and Gramm in their
campaign to dismantle the federal government and ``roll back the welfare
state.''
The case was called U.S. v. Lopez. The formal holding of the case was that
the court invalidated a federal law barring guns near schools, holding that
the statute was not a proper exercise of federal power under the
Constitution's provision of power to the Congress to regulate interstate
commerce. Well and good.
But, in giving their interpretation of the commerce clause, some of the
justices went on to propose that we should go back to the years before 1937,
when the Supreme Court routinely struck down any exercise of economic power
by the federal government.
Let's listen to what Llewellyn Rockwell of the von Mises Institute had to
say about this:
``The Supreme Court has suddenly and thrillingly rediscovered the plain
meaning of the Constitution.... Since 1937, after Franklin D. Roosevelt's
villainous court-packing scheme, the Supreme Court has rubber-stamped
statist legislation and justified nearly all of it under the Commerce
Clause.
``The result has been a dreadful erosion of property rights, economic
freedom, states' rights, and the liberties of the people. More than any
other legal perversion, the misuse of the Commerce Clause has fueled
government power and hobbled the economy. It is the basis of everything from
public housing to disabilities regulations to farm subsidies.
``With last week's decision in U.S. vs. Lopez, this 58-year distortion
appears to have come to an end'' (Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr., Washington Times,
May 3, 1995).
In striking down the school gun statute, Rehnquist didn't just say that it
was an improper exercise of power by Congress under the commerce clause. It
is clear from the opinion written by Rehnquist--and much more so in Clarence
Thomas's concurring opinion--they wanted to use this case to get a foot in
the door to pry open the whole question of federal economic power--which was
thought to have been settled in the 1930s, in FDR's second term, after the
Supreme Court earlier had invalidated nearly all of Roosevelt's economic
measures which were attempting to deal with the collapse of production.
Clarence Thomas suggested--in language not heard in a long time--that
current law is an ``innovation of the 20th century,'' and he proposed that
``the Court's dramatic departure in the 1930s from a century and a half of
precedent'' was a ``wrong turn.''
After all, if Newt Gingrich and his gang of glassy-eyed freshmen can march
on Capitol Hill threatening to roll back the so-called welfare state, the
New Deal, and everything since the days of Herbert Hoover, why should the
Supreme Court be left behind?
Fortunately, with the recent Clinton appointees, Rhenquist's majority is no
longer guaranteed, the way it was for many years. The court has given signs
that is is pulling back, if ever so slightly, from some of the worst
police-state rulings of the 1980s Rehnquist court.
Four weeks later after that commerce clause decision, with a switch of one
vote, the same court threw out one of the favorite rallying themes of the
Conservative Revolution crowd: terms limits. The ruling itself--in which
Rehnquist was, happily, in a minority--showed that term limits had been
rejected by the Framers of the Constitution, and that the framers intended
that the specific qualifications put in the Constitution were not to be
added to, or supplemented, by the states. The ruling actually showed, about
as well as one could expect from a modern Supreme Court justice, that this
is not just a technical question, but that it bears on the fundamental
question of the nature of the Union. The majority ruling argued--again, in
terms not heard in the Supreme Court for a long time, that the national
government--they actually called it that, not the federal government, but
the national government--derives its power from the people of the United
States as a whole, not merely from the states, or even from the people of
the states as such, but from the people of the Union as a whole.
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The Battle Is On
That ruling was a kick in the teeth to the Conservative Revolution, states'
rights crowd: It shows that the battle is on. These kinds of rulings reflect
that we are in turbulent times.
The battle is going to get a lot tougher.
To get the best understanding of where Gingrich and Gramm and that crowd are
going, you don't want to ask them. Ask their masters. You don't ask a puppet
why he it is doing what it is doing. It you see something dancing on the end
of a string, follow the string. As you come toward the top of the string,
you will find that the string-pullers do have public spokesmen.
The most forthright publicists for the oligarchy's efforts to destroy the
United States as a republic, and to replace it with a fragmented, fascist
dictatorship, are Lord William Rees-Mogg and Peregrine Worsthorne. Not
accidentally, they also happen to be among the most forthright publicists
for the campaign to detroy the Presidency of the United States and its
occupant, Bill Clinton.
On May 21, a few months before his ``Police State'' column, Sir Peregrine
Worsthorne, writing in the London Sunday Telegraph, demanded a ``form of
authoritarian politics'' that would allow for ``cruel belt-tightening [and]
bitter medicines to be forced down the throats of body politics.''
(For Worsthorne, advocacy of dictatorship runs in the family. His
stepfather, the late Sir Montagu Norman, was the Bank of England chief who
was instrumental in installing Adolf Hitler in power in Germany.)
Worsthorne's May 21 piece took the form of a dialogue with Rees-Mogg. This
one was entitled ``The Right-Wing Path to Oppression.'' In it, Worsthorne
favorably cited Rees-Mogg's recent articles advocating giant cuts in public
expenditure and radical moves to roll back the state--and he praised Newt
Gingrich for pushing these same policies in the United States.
But Worsthorne criticized Rees-Mogg--for not explicitly admitting that such
measures would require an ``authoritarian'' regime.
Worsthorne said:
``People who argue--and some of the wisest in the land, like William
Rees-Mogg, most convincingly do--that the only future for this country, and
for the Western world as a whole, is to take a veritable axe to the social
services ... never seem to spell out ... the political price, in terms of
loss of freedom, that might have to be paid for such economic realism. For
while it is certainly true that rigorous and sometimes cruel
belt-tightening--particularly for the relatively defenseless--will be
required ... it is also true that today's democratic body politics are
unlikely to be able to swallow such bitter medicine without a desperate
struggle. Just how desperate, nobody can be sure.
``But the possibility cannot be ruled out that the bitter medicines will
have to be forced down the throat of body politics.
``Those who argue that the politics of the next decades, truly `modern'
politics, must not flinch from taking an axe to the welfare state, should
also, if they are honest, go on to warn that these truly modern politics may
also have to take an axe to many of our democratic freedoms.''
We determined very quickly that Worsthorne's support for dictatorship
reflects the debates going on in the upper echelons of the Club of the
Isles. We found that the Mont Pelerin types are actively discussing what
they think to be the central ``paradox'' of current times--what they refer
to as the ``dilemma of democracy'': that radical measures to ``roll back the
state'' and destroy vital state-supported infrastructure projects and social
services, will require authoritarian means to implement.
After the publication of this piece by Worsthorne, one of our colleagues in
Europe discussed it with one of the chief Mont Pelerin Society ideologues.
He asserted,
``This is a well-known argument. Democracies foster weaker governments, and
there is no majority for measures to roll back the state. This introduces
the paradox, of needing some kind of strong government, precisely to roll
back the state.
``We have definitely been discussing this idea, in recent times, in the Mont
Pelerin Society.... It is the problem of the `dilemma of democracy.'|''
He went on:
``We have to find a way to have an authoritarianism, which keeps out of
economic life, and sticks to the classical role of the state, for protection
and security, and nothing else.''
(This is the real meaning of the ``paradox'' we discussed at the
beginning--that is, you need one to do the other, you need to police state
to enforce the destruction of the ``welfare state.'')
This Mt. Pelerinite insisted that accelerating global financial
disintegration would force this to happen.
``What has to be figured out, is how to roll back the state by an
authoritarian regime. I don't see any of our western societies, in their
current form, having the will to do this. Probably only a deep crisis will
make it possible. Without a crisis, there is no will.... It is well-known
amongst us, that the system we have lived under in past decades is
disintegrating. We are all living over our means. We will go into crisis.''
Commenting on the weakness and lack of will in western governments as they
are currently constituted, this Mont Pelerinite also insisted that these
``authoritarian measures'' would have to be preceded by ``drastic
regionalization and decentralization.''
As an example, he praised the ``states' rights''-secessionism offensive in
the United States, remarking that ``the United States was once conceived as
a confederation of sovereign states.''
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Cybercountry
This takes us up to what Rees-Mogg wrote just a couple of days ago.
This is the same theme, in a slight variant on the ``futurist'' Tofflerite
themes which Rees-Mogg loves so well. In an article headlined ``The End of
Nations,'' he predicts the end of the sovereign nation-state, and the
disintegration of much of Europe, Canada, China, and India, which he says
will all go the way of the Soviet Union.
``The United States may or may not hold together,'' he writes, ``the tax
system and bureaucracy are atrocious, but the entrepreneurial skills and
technology remain very impressive.
``Yet the most successful country of all will have no geographical
location.'' This is what he calls ``cybercountry'' the replacement for the
nation-state:
``The monolithic 20th-century nation-state has been built on the ability,
developed in two world wars, to tax, and spend up to half the national
income for state purposes, basically war and welfare. The communications of
2025 will have long since taken many, and perhaps most, of these taxable
transactions into cyberspace. That is a country with no taxes, the greatest
tax haven of them all, Bermuda in the sky with diamonds.''
How will it work?
``The bright people, the so-called cognitive elite, will deal with each
other on the networks of cyberspace, outside the existing
jurisdictions....''
The ``cognitive elite'' again. This takes us to our discussion at the last
conference, where Jeff Steinberg discussed another Rees-Mogg column,
published last Jan. 5 and entitled ``It's the Elite Who Matter,''--and
Dennis Speed's discussion here of Charles Murray's ``cognitive elite'' (see
page 8).
Here, Rees-Mogg calls for phasing out universal public education, as no
longer required for an emerging ``information'' society, in which 95 percent
of the population would be ruled by an ``elite class'' of 5 percent, and in
which Britain would reign supreme by its capabilities in ``finances'' and
``tax havens.'' Indeed, such a neo-feudalist society would require
dictatorial forms of rule, to crush the opposition that would inevitably
erupt.
This is the face of fascism today--to relegate 95 percent of the population
to the scrap heap, just as in days of old. And it they don't want to jump
into the scrap heap--or the rock pile--make 'em.
As you've heard from this panel, it's not necessarily going to look at first
like the old-style fascism; but it's going to do the same old thing, but in
Newt, futuristic wrappings. But it is an age-old battle, a 200-year-old
battle, a 600-year battle, a 2,500-year-old battle, which we have to win,
for once and for all.
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