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A NEEDED VIEW OF RUSSIA TODAY!:

The Roots of the U.S.A.

By Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

May 2012


Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

This article appears in the May 18, 2012 issue of Executive Intelligence Review and is reprinted with permission

[PDF version of this article]

May 5, 2012


The birth of what was to become the United States, must be traced from the powerfully radiating impact of the work of one of the greatest scientific minds in modern history, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. The most crucial elements of Cusa's expressed genius are to be found most concisely as the central, crucially ontological principle of his De Docta Ignorantia.

The impact of his most exceptional achievements in science includes the gripping historical fact, that the discovery of North America by Christopher Columbus, was the result of Cusa's own specific influence in generating what became Christopher Columbus' trans-Atlantic discoveries. This is to be recognized as a direct consequence of the resonant influence on Columbus of Cusa's founding of an actually modern science. That is also a consequence which must be recognized as fact when the process in that development of science is combined with insight into the original creation of the modern trans-Atlantic settlements within the Americas, but also, most emphatically, the original development of that Massachusetts Bay Colony which was the origin of the United States of America.

Just as there can be no adult without the earlier birth and preceding conception of the child, there is no competent insight into the history of modern trans-Atlantic civilization without the most historically crucial developments of Europe's development since the birth of both that man of his century, Nicholas of Cusa, and the life's work of Cusa's relevant predecessor and contemporary in modern science and Classical artistic composition, Filippo Brunelleschi.

We must, therefore, take into account the historically crucial combination of the facts, that Cusa has been a leading figure in the founding of the European Renaissance, and a leading founder of the root-principles of a modern European science. He was a singular man, who had been confronted with those ruinous effects of what had been, for a time, that late Fifteenth-century Venetian resurgence which would be centered directly into those ruinous great waves of mass-murderous religious conflict which would dominate Europe from 1492 until the Peace of Westphalia, and what was yet to come.

In serious scientific investigations, no mere sequence of successive events is to be permitted. The succession in actual history is not simply sequential, it must be systemically "organic," contrary to those fools who wish to know very little of historical importance for mankind.

It was a Cusa who had taken, thus, a combination of the new-Venetian crisis-factors of his own time into account, who would have, personally, set into motion the evolving policy which motivated the virtual cultural "earthquake" which had been set into motion by Christopher Columbus' trans-Atlantic missions for establishing the roots of a new-born culture within the Americas.


Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa (1401-64), in response to New Venetian Party’s takeover of Europe, set into motion a cultural “earthquake” with Columbus’s trans-Atlantic missions establishing the roots of a new-born culture within the Americas. Left, Columbus; right, Cusa.

What was to become the United States, had been prompted, directly, by the original Massachusetts settlements of the early through middle of the Seventeenth Century. The brilliant cultural and scientific-economic accomplishments of the Massachusetts Bay Colony during that earlier interval, had been, admittedly, crushed, if temporarily, by an imperial Britain abroad, during the last quarter of that century. A Massachusetts which had been crushed by the invasion by the New Venetian Party which was led, then, by the consummately evil William of Orange.

However, it would be through the critical role of the inspiration of Benjamin Franklin by Cotton Mather, that the British imperialism which was actually established by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, prompted the reactions of those patriotic American circles which came to be led in a most-exemplary fashion by the scientist-statesman and genius Benjamin Franklin. Franklin's life was to appear to span a century with his role as the sheer genius who did so much, as since the time of the death of Leibniz, to establish a new kind of constitutional system of government specific to North America.

This was a system founded as a reflection of principles derived chiefly from the same great influence of Gottfried Leibniz, as this was later re-echoed in the U.S.A.'s West Point, as by the scientific contributions received from places such as France's Ecole Polytechnique of Gaspard Monge and Monge's associate known as the military and scientific genius Lazare Carnot.

That system of government and economy launched as the original Federal Constitution of the United States, had been greatly influenced beforehand by such as the scientist-statesman Benjamin Franklin who had developed features largely original to himself, but through those of his own accomplishments respecting those crucial, distinctly scientific features of economic and related development which have not yet been sufficiently well understood by most other nations of the world, still to the present date: even among most among those who had actually been the nominal founders of my United States.

The principal source of what we must admit as having been the imperfections of the United States as a system, has been an effect of a ruinous, continuing influence expressed by the British imperialist policies of Wall Street, and by the related financier interests expressed by such wretched, effectively treasonous scoundrels as the British agent Aaron Burr, the consummate scoundrel Andrew Jackson, and the wicked Martin Van Buren, then, and in the present likeness of the American followers of Britain's most consummately evil Bertrand Russell and his like today.[1]

My intention in these pages, is to inform the reader of what had been those specifically original, essential constitutional principles of the American system, which remain urgently needed, but virtually unknown among European nations today. Notably, there is the fact of the crucial role of the Franklin D. Roosevelt whose legacy is still bitterly hated by the combination of such places and persons as London, Wall Street, and U.S. President Barack Obama, up to the present moment. This fact is a consideration which needs urgent attention, again, today: all of which can be fairly identified, as I shall do in the course of the following pages.

Those principles which I present here, are of absolutely crucial importance now. They are crucial for the purpose of the reshaping of the future fate of the world into the becoming of a refreshed gathering of respectively sovereign nation-states today. The need is an immediate one, as Russia's present leadership will be, hopefully, successfully continued as typical of such a direction.

The particular potential of our United States to be called, or recalled to our attention here and now, is to be recognized as located in our republic's most crucial, strategic role in providing the needed historical link among the sovereign nations of Asia and Europe, as also elsewhere, a link which reaches from across the respective reaches of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as also from the Arctic to a crucially needed base once more operating on our Moon.

I. The Needed End for Empire

There are two mutually opposing currents of thought which are to be regarded as having been combined to express the characteristics of what is named as our United States today. Such a division had long been presented as what has become a United States divided between, chiefly, bitterly opposed Patriot versus Tory during the Eighteenth Century, or a similarly continued moral division within the United States of today. This had been the relevant situation since the time of that 1763 Treaty of Paris which established the British Empire as both an offshoot of the New Venetian Party of such as Britain's William of Orange, and as the original British Empire of the Lord Shelburne who was a leading political heir, still to the present moment, of the evil tradition of the same original Roman Empire which had slaughtered Christians and others en masse in its own reign, as today.

The key to the strictly scientific definition of that British Empire which reigns under the present Queen Elizabeth II today, is that specifically oligarchical tradition which is deeply embedded in European cultures since a time as early as the siege of Troy. During such times, European culture, in particular, has been, most often, dominated by a process which has been predicated upon what is classed as a systemic "oligarchical principle." That has remained as a principle, an outlook which has been based on the wicked fiction of belief in money per se, a mode systemically distinct from the U.S. Constitutional principle of a credit-system, as that latter, constitutional, credit system, has been distinct, even when frequently violated, from all monetarist systems of the planet, still today.

For this time, as I do here, what I have prescribed is an urgently needed renewal of the original intention of the Constitution of the United States. This renewal is to be based upon the need for a threefold, leading economic policy of a type which would be indispensable for the present recovery of the United States of America, and other nations, too.

Two of these indispensable features of such a currently needed reform, are to be derived simply and directly from the U.S.A.'s original Federal Constitution, which include: (a) a Glass-Steagall reform which is still required to provide needed corrections for the exemplary wickedness of such as the trio of Wall Street's treasonous combination of such as Aaron Burr, Burr's Wall Street accomplice, Martin van Buren, and the consummate, murderous scoundrel Andrew Jackson; (b) the needed replacement of a Wall-Street-design for a monetarist system, by a credit system.

Why NAWAPA Now

In addition to those two just stated affirmations of the intention of a constitutional composition of a proper government of the United States, I have now added the urgently needed remedy of c) the prescribed, now urgently needed installation of a program named "NAWAPA" (North American Water and Power Alliance), the greatest project of this type within the known history of mankind, this far.

NAWAPA is a project which shall employ about six millions trained persons directly, a project whose benefits will be combined, developed as an undertaking based on a system of public credit, which will be employed as the investment-driver for the massive economic recovery of the otherwise, presently, hopelessly bankrupt United States. The effect of NAWAPA would prompt the development of productive employment reaching beyond the estimated six millions and more immediately engaged within the project itself.

FIGURE 1
North America: ‘NAWAPA-Plus’
Sources: Parsons Company, North American Water and Power Alliance Conceptual Study, Dec. 7, 1964; Hal Cooper; Manuel Frías Alcaraz; EIR.

NAWAPA, which embraces the potential development of North America as far south as northern Mexico, and deep into the Arctic, would be the essentially needed, immediate complement to the mutual advantages of such leading projects of Russia as the Bering Strait development and the leading great developments now projected as immediate prospects for the Russian Arctic and leading Siberian projects, among others.

This development perspective, as promoted to be shared among cooperating nations such as the U.S.A., Russia, and many others, is, at the same time, the basis for a new space-development program which is urgently needed now for such purposes as defense of our planet Earth from the deadly threats to mankind from shards and comets of Solar space, and beyond, which are threats to the continued existence of human life on our planet during the span of the immediate and later times ahead.

What is otherwise crucial in the design which I am committed to support, is the use of a credit system, rather than an oligarchical tyranny known as a monetarist system. This preference for a credit system, presents us with the only method of finance which could fulfill the kinds of objectives which these projects now require.

In other words, by removing the notion of economic value from the notion of merely money as such, we are enabled to establish a system of credit already consistent with the originally successful intention of our republic's Federal Constitution. That means a system which pledges credit to national economies based on the expansion effected as future developments, rather than past events, rather than an a-priori fiction of a nominal value of money per se.

In fact, all the greatest achievements in economy by the United States during the exceptionally appropriate times past, had been premised on a notion of "national banking" which is opposed to even the very existence of a monetarist system. The replacement of that oligarchical relic, which is called a monetarist system, by the re-establishment of a U.S. constitutional system of public credit, provides a model which establishes a means for development of the interacting governments of nations whose physical-economic value grows as the nation grows; such is the only means by which a general recovery of this planet might be presently induced, that through emphasis on the realization of great science-driver programs which could be realized under such policy-shaping from now onward.

These were precisely the principles of economy and related practice, by which a United States led by Franklin Roosevelt enabled the build-up of the credit system on which the crushing defeat of the Nazi monster was accomplished among the allied nations. Without the role of that credit system, the military and related economic achievements of the military forces against Hitler, could not have been sustained.

The present, globally dominant British empire, must be superseded by a system of credit-systems of respectively sovereign republics. The replacement of monetarist systems by credit systems according to the model which I specify for a credit system, is required. That is the only method by which the presently accelerating general, physical collapse of the planet, especially that within the trans-Atlantic system, could be reversed. That was already the quality of remedy specified for President Franklin Roosevelt's continuing intention-had he lived.

Unfortunately, it has been a radical, anti-Franklin Roosevelt change in U.S. policy, which was imposed on our United States by the British empire and its accomplices (i.e., Winston Churchill, et al. and the U.S. Wall Street flunkey Harry S Truman) which sent the United States into a direction contrary to the intention of Franklin Roosevelt, as into the continuing plunge of the U.S. physical economy launched by that assassination of President John F. Kennedy through which the present plague of British-created "permanent warfare and permanent revolution" had been set into motion throughout the planet.[2]

In the meantime, the British empire proffers viciously, and shamelessly, mass-murderous prospects which are nothing different in their effect than genocide, even global mass-extinctions throughout the planet.

II. The Notion of an "American System"


EIRNS/Stuart Lewis
A credit system, rather than a monetarist system, was embedded in the original U.S. Constitution under the leadership of the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton. This statue of Hamilton stands in front of the U.S. Treasury building in Washington.

The implicit intent of what the original Massachusetts Bay Colony had represented, was first made clear during a precious interval of the economic policy embedded as the intention of that Colony under the policy of what became known as the reign of a mid-Seventeenth Century system known then as "The Pinetree Shilling." The proper name of that policy is "A Credit System," rather than a monetarist system. This was the same policy embedded in the pre-stated intention and successes to be recognized in the practiced qualities of the original U.S. Federal Constitution under the leadership of the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton.

That was the same Hamilton who was later assassinated by that U.S. traitor and British agent Aaron Burr (1756-1836), an assassin and traitor who was closely associated with the utter scoundrel and (later) sometime U.S. President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), and also with Jackson's accomplice and swindling Wall Street banker Martin Van Buren (1782-1862), as also others of a kindred inclination and ilk.

The standard opponent of the concept of the "credit system" is what is named as a "monetarist system." The other, technically precise name for a "monetarist system," is the same "Oligarchical System" of pure usury associated with such precedents as the mass-murderous outcome of the siege of Troy, as also the same policy of practice associated with both the British monarchy and U.S. Wall Street cliques presently. In effect, Wall Street finance and the existing form of the British Empire, are inseparable institutions which prey, through the present day, under an intrinsically treasonous conduct of a President Barack Obama's preying, in the practical expression of a London-Wall Street predator and tyrant, upon the nation and people of the United States.

However, that much said respecting London and Wall Street, still presently, a competent understanding of the real implications of the present world's existential crisis, must go to the deep-rootedness of the legacy of an actually oligarchical system, a system which has been based traditionally on the notion of money, rather than the actual creation of the realizable wealth of human beings, and the creation of the existential nature of their actual progress as an increasingly powerful species within the universe.

III. Creativity & Life

Some necessary considerations which must now be included here, include a required scientific world-outlook of specifically Russian origin: if not in language, then at least in the powers of the human mind shown by V.I. Vernadsky. That outlook is in opposition to the hand-held puppet of the British empire's evil Bertrand Russell: the unfortunate Alexander I. Oparin, the Russell puppet who was nothing more than a kind of "wind-up toy," expressing a mechanical sort of an intrinsically lifeless physics. A person whose conception was based on blind faith in randomly ordered collisions, as in John von Neumann's lunacy of randomness in space. What I have to present now, may present systemic difficulties to the reader, but they are both truthful and indispensable.

The study of living processes presently known to our Solar system shows them to have been ordered by the requirement, that living processes be adapted to an ordered increase in the relative "energy-flux density" of the "ambient" medium which the relevant living species inhabit. The exterminations of failed classes of species in nature, reflect this sort of "natural selection," rather than the silly opinions of Charles Darwin.


NASA/JPL-Caltech
“The continued existence of human life on Earth depends on the ability to destroy or evade the trajectories of nasty objects in space, including very much worrying comets.” Shown: an artist’s concept of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft orbiting the giant asteroid Vesta.

To state the point as simply as it were permissible, we are presently confronted with three most notable classifications of existence: non-life, simply living, and human-creative. The essential consideration, is the experimental proof that a so-called "Second Law of Thermodynamics" was already a fraud when the mathematician Rudolf Clausius had concocted that hoax, a hoax which violates every bit of evidence adduced from the record of living processes of evolutionary succession. It was "simply believed" because Clausius had asserted it, but is contrary to every successive phase of the history of life.

The particular point of emphasis in treating the human species, distinguished from other forms of life known to us presently, is the requirement of a progressively increasing standard of relatively higher energy-flux density. This is typified by the fact that only the human species, among all presently known living species, "willfully uses fire." Today, we examine that standard of fire by different categories of fuel-equivalent substances, each and all ordered according to rising patterns of energy-flux density through to the range of so-called "matter/antimatter" actions. This coincides with the patterns broadly adduced from study of the long-ranging, evolutionary progress of living species generally.

These patterns to which I have just referred in such a fashion, correspond to what we may fairly approximate by the notion of "energy-flux density" as an ordering principle specific to the progress of processes from relatively lower, to relatively higher orders of "energy-flux density."

To bring a needed improvement in the ordering of such arguments, we should make the following categorical distinctions. 1. The argument to be made respecting a confinement to the category of non-living processes. 2. The argument to be made, as by V.I. Vernadsky, for non-human living species. 3. The unique quality of "experiment" specific to the progressive ordering of what are recognizable, as in the specific case of the characteristically noëtic processes of the human mind.

The same topics, but topics treated by a different standpoint of reference, lead us to recognize the categorical distinction between human mental life and the behavioral characteristics of both non-life, and of life as expressed by plant and animal species (other than human). In study of the charts which outline the relatively comparative, categorical data, the noëtic capabilities of the human species present phenomena in that universe which exists "outside the bounds of" both non-living and merely living processes.

From the specifically human standpoint, there are two types of cases to be considered which have a certain unique importance for the human species. One case is the fact of the expected extinction of the Sun (within an estimated two billions years), and the worrying fact that the continued existence of human life on Earth depends on the ability to destroy or evade the trajectories of nasty objects in space, including very much worrying comets.

We human beings are not "individual" objects in space; we are a part of the realities of space which are, by implicit design, existences implicitly challenged by the concept of a quality of "survivable" existence which converges on an implied "motivated-destined" characteristic embedded in the existence of the model provided as visualizing the role of the human species in Solar or galactic space. This is a conception intrinsically absent from the presumptions of such as either a wicked Bertrand Russell, or those of the pitiable likeness of an Alexander I. Oparin.

Yet, such conceptions as these are not only the inherent characteristic of human morality; they express the origins of any notion of an actually human morality: we may die, and most probably will die; but, the natural intention of our existence is not only immortal: it performs service to an immortal intention which clearly resides "outside" any simplistic vision of our own mortal existence.

Another Side of the Question

The properly developed, and matured, individual human mind, was once expressed for us as a wonderful illustration of Albert Einstein's notions of "matter/anti-matter," and, also, of universes which are finite, but not bounded. So, the great Johannes Kepler had foreseen the effects of a principle which he named as that of a principle of "vicarious hypothesis," for which we might prefer the term "metaphor."

There is nothing properly regarded as "queer" or "exotic" in this distinction. Consider a Classical drama presented as "on stage." There are the persons (treated as characters on "stage") and the actors whose performance is attributed to the drama itself, not the actors as such.

So, Nicholas of Cusa presented his De Docta Ignorantia. So, akin to that, the challenge we must include on our listings of experiences, is the need to recognize what is, on the one side, the ironically juxtaposed folly, but also, on the other side, the usefulness of those mere shadows which are presumed to represent human "powers of sense-perception," such as what Kepler identified as "vicarious hypothesis." Truth lies not in the flesh as such, but what casts the efficient effect of the efficient dreams, as on the great stage of our own Commedia. "The reality is the effect!" which you must seek to understand, and learn to master in effect.

But, "effect on what?" You must be the experience of reality, as the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler identified as "between the notes." What is sensed, in the case of a meaningful presentation of a story on stage, is of the content of meaning as a form of "vicarious hypothesis." Which is real, the sense-perception of the process on stage, or what we identity as the "meaning" of the story put on stage? Which is meaningful, the images on stage, or "the story" on stage?

That is essentially what Kepler had done in emphasizing the effects of "vicarious hypothesis." The point here is to recognize that human sense-perceptions should be recognized as also a form of expression of what is tantamount to "vicarious hypothesis." That was the significance of the argument constituted as Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia: the same viewpoint is to be adduced in considering Kepler's "vicarious hypothesis." The same class of experience as the use of instruments as vicars of what is real, but not simply seen. That is the same class of experience as the work of Max Planck and Albert Einstein.

That takes on a most interesting character when we begin to appreciate the rarely understood principle of musical composition as presented by Wilhelm Furtwängler's use of the musical form of expression of the principle of higher hypothesis.

What is rightly identified as Classical musical composition, especially so when this is extended to embrace Wilhelm Furtwängler's exceptional notion of "between the notes," or the reading of the ironical principle of Bach's compositions from a related vantage-point, is to be considered as an example of the manner in which the cultivated human individual mind reads the message which lies behind the mere experiences of human sense-perception.

The point of my argument here, is my emphasis on the fact of the systemic difference between sense-perceptions and their properly adducible "meanings. "Die Hauptsache ist der Effekt!" ["The important thing is the effect!"] of "Das Spukschloss im Spessart," (German 1960 comedy film) is "a playful play" on exactly such ironies cast in Classical metaphor.

In the instance of the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach or the direction by Wilhelm Furtwängler, musical composition is carried to a much greater "depth" of meanings for the real world than most people attempting to understand that real world are enabled to recognize. My essential point in this present moment here, is that we must work to expand our abilities to apprehend the metaphorical messages which the experience of sensing the universe implicitly wishes us to recognize in a manner akin to the reality of the drama on stage rather that the mere sense-perception of what is presented in the so-called literal activity as such on stage.

"If the Creator spoke to you, would you hear the message, or merely the sounds projected as the utterance?" In short: the principle of Kepler's vicarious hypothesis. In brief, the method of Nicholas of Cusa. Extended, the methods which must be extended for a more efficient comprehension of what is being "spoken" by such voices as that of our galaxy.


[1] See H. Graham Lowry, How The Nation Was Won, America's Untold Story 1630-1754 (EIR, 1987); Anton Chaitkin, Treason In America, New Benjamin Franklin House, 2nd ed. (1985).

[2] The actual author of "Permanent War, Permanent Revolution," was the British Fabian Society asset, (Vickers, et al.) arms trafficker, terrorist, and mercenary, Alexander Helphand aka "Parvus." The source of much of the mistaken opinion on the subject of Helphand can be blamed on a mistaken view on the origins of what was called "World War I." The actual beginning of that period of British imperialist schemes is properly dated to events such as the ouster of Prussia's Chancellor Bismarck, which was done to unleash a series of events which were intended to break up Bismarck's role in preventing the Great Powers of Prussia, Russia, Austro-Hungary, and France from launching a series of wars, beginning with the original British-Japan alliance against China and, later, Russia. In his own time, Chancellor von Bismarck and Graf von Moltke had recognized that the threatened war among the nations of continental Europe was a British imperial scheme which Bismark and von Moltke referenced among themselves as "A New Seven Years War." This was a reference to seven years of war, concluded at the 1763 Peace of Paris which established the British Empire (in fact). Both of what have been misnamed as World War I and World War II were actually what Bismarck and von Moltke had recognized as "New Seven Years Wars," wars organized to establish and extend world domination by the British empire. The now-threatened thermonuclear warfare, using U.S. and British forces against Russia, China, et al., would be, in effect, a "Fourth 'SevenYears' War." Hence, the true political identity of Frederick Engels' playing host to Alexander Helphand in London on behalf of what are referenced as "The Fabians."