From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Versailles System:  an Act of Unparalleled Madness in History
Date: 31 Aug 92 7:46:1 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems

The Versailles System: An Act of
Madness Unparalleled in History 

by Jacques Cheminade 


We are now reaching the end of the 20th
century and fortunately so. 
   Progress, like at the end-phase of
the Roman Empire, has been reduced to a
set of technological tricks, material
realization of scientific impulses
coming from an often remote past.
Metaphysics and science--true science
associated with non-linear
discovery--are being erased from earth,
leaving the ground to formal logics on
one side, deductive materialism, and to
a false spiritualism on the other,
magical gnosticism. As French Catholic
philosopher Jaques Maritain once put it,
the human mind is no more enabled,
generally, to understand and create. It
is as if a universe without man, our
universe, were left to a wild angel
driving a cybernetic machine--a rusting
machine, doped by a gleaming computer. 
   Worse of all, we are losing the
moral fitness to survive. We are losing
that precious quality of mind that both
makes us love our neighbor and discover
new ideas, we are losing the cognition,
the moral, active knowledge, that we
have all been created in the image of
God, even if some repeat it at random
with dead words. Most of us have lost
the capacity to intervene when our
fellow human beings are suffering and
dying before our own eyes. 
   If we are committed to give the
capacity to be to our children and
grandchildren, and beyond to future
human generations, we have to break
with the axioms under which we and our
predecessors have lived for so many,
many years. 
   To break with such axioms is not
just a matter of making a decision and
acting, in a practical way, like a Wall
Street trader deciding to buy some new
stock and pushing a helpful button. It
demands from us much more, it demands
that we confront a matter of life or
death for our species, to face what
Lyndon LaRouche calls, after Cantor,
the ``absolute transfinite,'' the
transfinite of the transfinites, what
the first Christians called ``to commit
one's soul to God.'' It is the
passionate experience of change guided
by reason from one set of axioms to a
superior one, which cannot be within
the axioms under which we are living,
because change implies their death, but
necessarily in a ``beyond.'' 
   Let's now look at the 20th century
from the standpoint of that ``beyond,''
to face what has happened to us. The
truth is that we have almost lost what
the Greeks called {koinonia,} the sense
of one's link to the species, and what
was further accomplished by
Christianity as {agape@am,} transcendent
{caritas humani generis.} 

   Our Sick Century

   Let's look at what happened during
our century, our sick century: 
   @sb|{mass butchery wars,} with
mass killing means given
``democratically'' to all. It started
with the Civil War in the United
States, exploded in World War I,
furthered in World War II, with the
willful killing of soldiers and
civilian populations alike, such
as in Hiroshima and Dresden;
   @sb|{mass-scale concentration
camps,} killing human beings by
slave-labor and eliminating the useless
eaters in mass murders. What happened
there is the negation of universals,
the negation of human beings as all
belonging to the human species. In the
extreme case of Nazism, even the use of
the word ``corpse'' was forbidden, and
instead, the dead were referred
to as ``figuren'' (puppets) or ``schmattes''
(rags); 
   @bs|{mass-scale Malthusianism,}
with an oligarchy of human beings
committed to destroy part of their own
species and cut their reproductive
powers, through forced sterilizations
or other means. In Africa today, as
in the concentration camps of
yesterday, even the corpses have no
right to a soul, only to a picture for
our television-sets; 
   @bs|{propagation of mass-scale
diseases} as a consequence of blocking
the development of infrastructure, as
the IMF does in Peru, or destroying it,
as the American bombers did in Iraq; 
   @bs|{men treated as a commodity,}
as a mere ``product,'' not only at
work, but at his private home, more and
more reduced to a rabbit's hutch, a
geometrical rabbit's hutch, while a
growing minority is even deprived of
that and thrown into the streets to
become statistics as ``homeless''; 
   @bs|the worst irony of all, is
that {those today condemning the
past crimes of the century are often
the very ones preparing and
accomplishing the crimes of today,}
against the peoples of the South and of
Eastern Europe, and against the very
future of our species as a whole. 
   We have to face it: Rarely in
world history, has man been so inhuman,
inhuman with such an Orwellian quality
of hypocrisy, black is white, death is
life, liberalism is freedom and
shock-therapy is progress. 
   We are therefore left with only
two possible conclusions: Either man is
evil, and the world is doomed, or man
is perfectible, and as a man his task
is to change and perfect the world. 
   The evilness of man is the
hypothesis of the Cathars, the
Bogomils, who negate God by negating
his creation, his creative powers, and
locate ``perfection'' in the refusal of
life. Bogomils means
``buggers''--sodomizers of the dead
ones. Remember, corpses treated as
puppets, as rags, or as marketable
pictures. 
   Is not that the conception of our
century: human bodies treated as if
they were dead matter, with an absolute
negation of their soul as in the image
of God? Is not the ``politics'' of our
century mainly defined by the ability
to control such an inhuman universe from
above? Mass fascism, mass communism,
mass-media control: total disrepect for
the individual human being, manipulated
like a dead corpse, drowned in
bestialized masses, deprived of a soul. 
   Well, that is precisely what
defines the much-touted ``Versailles
order''--my subject of today. It is the
view of the universe from the
standpoint of an infantile
oligarch, throwing red ants against
black ants, and trying to control the
flows and the dead in both camps. The
problem is that such an infantile
oligarch cannot secure the continuation
of life. He thinks that he can
control the process of destruction. But
the process of destruction--the sleep
of reason--engenders monsters,
Godzillas or Frankensteins, which
destroy all, including the oligarch's
own house. 
   That is why today we have reached
the end of the Versailles order, its
point of collapse: The oligarchical
powers are no longer able to even
maintain the universe, their own
universe, and what is ahead of us is
either chaos, unmasterable chaos, or
man acting in the image of God and
securing, once again in history,
``peace through development.'' 
   It is with that purpose in our
mind that we have to look at the
Versailles order. Not with the purpose
of learning history to add facts in our
brain and successfully get some
university degree in advanced buggery
or butchery, but to better know who we
are, so as to know our targets as good
warrior angels, and perfect this sick
world. 
   ``After the butchery, the sharing of
the spoils.'' 
   ``A vindictive, dishonorable and
deceitful Treaty, if adopted would be
the precursor of a century of strife
and conflict.'' 
   ``The terms are an act of madness
unparalleled in history.'' 
   ``A gigantic military conflict leads to
a {universal international civil war.}'' 
   These comments on the Versailles
Treaty of 1919 were not made many years
after, by pro-German commentators
measuring its impact, but during the
negotiation itself, by leading
advocates of the British cause. Indeed,
right from the beginning, the more
intelligent--if morally flawed--leaders
on the side of the victors were fully
conscious that the world they were
building was not one of stability and
peace through mutual economic
development, not one of ``peace without
victory'' and ``respect of Germany,''
as President Wilson had said in his
famous 14 points speech of January 9,
1918, but a world of ``punitive
treatment, prelude to quarrels in a
deeply divided and hideously embittered
Europe.''                       
   The symbol of Versailles, the
Ancien Regime symbol, was clear to
everybody: the ``peace'' was a
continuation of the Congress of Vienna,
and based on ``{containment,
counterrevolution and geopolitics}.''
The package included an adjustment of
borders according to the dictates of
Anglo-American balance of powers, and a
system of financial control from above
through debt management. The indebted
nations that fought the war, both the
German ``loser'' and the French
``victor,'' were subjected to the banks
of London and more directly,
Washington. John Maynard Keynes put it
bluntly: ``In 1919, Europe was in
complete dependence on the food
supplies of the United States, and
financially she was even more
absolutely at their mercy.'' And he
adds ``her [America's] delegation had a
precocious understanding of economic
power as an instrument of control in
the international politics of this
dawning era of civil war; the lesson
from England was well learnt.'' 
   Concretely, first of all it meant
{punishment and debasement of Germany}.
Germany was considered ``guilty'' and
should therefore be subjected to the
payment of ``war guilt reparations''
taking into account ``damages done to
property and humans'' and ``pensions to
orphans and widows of war.'' Needless
to say, the reparations clauses ignored
Germany's obligation to meet the needs
of her own population, and the
impossibility for the post-war German
governments to pay constantly fed
``eagerness to revenge.'' Furthermore,
economic clauses spoiled Germany and
German firms on a world scale. 
   Second, {Europe was geopolitically
divided in such a way that nations were
pitted against each other, and
``checked'' through a balance of powers
based on ``permanent French-German
opposition.''} Therefore, World War II
was embedded into the peace Treaty of
World War I. France not only got back
Alsace-Lorraine, which was fair, but
was given the administration of the
Saarland coal mines, Saarland itself
being subjected to 15 years of League
of Nations control. The League of
Nations was created as a league of
victors, without Germany. All German
colonies were taken over by the League
of Nations' administration, and the
British were granted de facto control
of the seas. The allies were granted
the occupation of the left bank of the
Rhine River for 15 years, with an
evacuation of one-third of their forces
pledged every five years as long as
Germany met the schedule for payment of
its war reparations on time! The German
Army was reduced in principle to
100,000 men, without aviation and heavy
artillery. The right of the Polish
nation to state sovereignty was rightly
recognized, but within borders that
were neither firm nor just. The
arbitrary ``carving out'' created
conditions for wars with Russia (1920)
and Germany (1939), and for increased
hostility with Lithuania, formerly a
friendly neighbor! Instead of becoming
a center for East-West European
development, Poland was set up as a
platform for unending strifes in
Central Europe. 
   The Austro-Hungarian Empire was
destroyed, and if we are not going to
follow today's new geopolitical fashion
and spill tears over its fate as an
Empire, we have to stress that not only
was it brutally divided without taking
into account the will of the people,
but it was replaced by a combination of
synthetic nations. All were given a
poisoned pill in their very cradle: For
example, Yugoslavia was made up of
Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats and
Slovenes, with Hungarian and Moslem
minorities, and Czechoslovakia was
divided into Czechs, Slovaks, and a
significant German minority in the
Sudeten. Finally, any German-Austrian
unification was explicitly forbidden by
the law of the victors.
   All these
arrangements were willful provocations,
creating the conditions for a conflict
to be unsolvable among nations,
promoting ``ethnic riots,'' and
demanding ``control from above.'' In
that sense, more than the 1815 Treaty
of Vienna, the order of Versailles is the
first financial-geopolitical
supranational order, based on an
everlasting civil war checked by the
League of Nations as an appendage of
London and Washington. 
   Third, {the ``peace'' was arranged
to prevent ``the occurrence of any
Prussian-Russian alliance.'' In a word,
the Anglo-American design was, and is,
never to allow peace to occur between
France, Germany and Russia.} Germany
and Russia should be prevented from
establishing bilateral relations
outside the control of London and
Washington: As early as March 28, 1919,
the still young Herbert Hoover writes
to the aging Wilson: ``If the militant
features of Bolshevism were drawn in
colors with their true parallel with
Prussianism as an attempt at world
domination that we do not stand for, it
would check the fears that today haunt
all men's mind.'' To avoid this, the
Anglo-Americans decided to play on both
sides, and control them through the
``new weapons'': {capital, food and
economic aid.} As for Russia, the
Americans considered that ``bolshevism
can be cured and used cleverly....
Military truce combined with economic
aid is bound to redirect the
revolutionary currents into reformist
channels in Russia''--in other words,
create the conditions for a more
efficient looting by the American firms
located, for example, at 120 Broadway
in New York City, with the Hammers and the
Schiffs acting as middlemen. Britain's
Lloyd George expresses the same more
bluntly: ``We must call in the Soviets
and talk to them as Rome used to do
with barbarian tribes.'' 
   As for Germany, Wilson's design
was to ``bring the social reform forces
(such as the Social Democrats, the
Progressives and the
Christian-Democratic Center), through a
democratic revolution, into an alliance
with London and Washington.'' The
William C. Bullitt papers indicate to
us why: ``In spite of the developments
of the Russian revolution, the moderates
have clung to their creed that Germany
can only find salvation in democratic
development and understanding with
England and the United States.'' 
   It is therefore clear that the
Versailles order meant the ``European
vassalage'' under Anglo-American rule,
the victors being treated ultimately no
better than the losers on the
continent. 

   Axioms of the Versailles Order

   The order of Versailles was not
only the cold-blooded letter of a
treaty, it was a conception of the
world. This conception had developed
throughout the end of the nineteenth
century, only to culminate after 1919, and lead
to the two monsters of the 20th
century, fascism and communism. 
   This conception is that the world
is ruled by conflict, permanent strife,
not by peace, and that the power of the
elites can be maintained only through
the oppression of the others, either in
terms of elite nations or elite
individuals. It is, at the bottom, the
world of Social Darwinism, as conceived
by Victorian England and its leading
``philosopher,'' Herbert Spencer,
promoted in the United States by the Carnegies
just after the Civil War. His
ultra-liberal ethics were based on
social competition and the survival of
the fittest against the others, a
conception that the war in the trenches
of World War I made extremely popular.
In Germany, it took the form of the
``Great Germany'' and eugenics in Ernst
Haeckel, and in France the
neo-Nietzschean conception of a
Sorel--regeneration through strife and
violence--or the cult of ``sacrifice to
the blood and soil'' of the unfortunate
Charles Peguy at the end of his life.
This set the terms. In that sense, the
ultra-liberal, Darwinian worldview was,
and is, the ground on which fascism
(race struggle) and communism (class
struggle) both grew. Before they grew
up fully, the sort of ``sense of doom''
with which the populations went to war
in all European countries, came from
the popularization of the
British-originated worldview. 
   This has to be stressed to
understand the three heads of the
monster. Socially, it is Malthusianism:
Only the fittest and the best species
survive. Economically, it is usury:
money flows go to feed the rent (the
world of 1913 as the world of 1992 was
a world of rentiers, with very high
interest rates) and not for production
and the development of the human mind.
Scientifically, it is entropy: a dual
universe where creation is infinite but
unmeasurable (spiritual) and technology
is measurable (useful) but linear,
deductive. Therefore, the universe upon
which man can act is necessarily doomed
to an end, the management of the
permanent crisis having to be
controlled by a ruling elite, lucid,
pessimistic and enjoying the pleasures
of impotent meditation. 
   Such a world has a smell of death,
and Versailles is the result of that
smell, which infected the trenches and
butcheries of World War I. 

   How Versailles Could Be
Sold
 
   The question now is: How could
such an infamous order be accepted by
human beings? A beginning of an answer
is given by the famous saying that,
psychologically, Adolf Hitler was born
in the trenches of World War I. Rarely
were human beings subjected to such
mistreatment and degradation as the
soldiers of those days. Bombarded day
and night (the noise of the cannons,
like volcanoes, never stopped during
more than four years on the
battlefront), often half-abandoned and
unfed, subject to epidemics and
``triaged'' if wounded, sent into
``offensives'' that were meaningless in
most of the cases and killed between
one fourth and half of them, these
soldiers generated a sense of pessimism
and despair convenient to the thinking
of the degenerated elites. 
   World War I was the first in
history where all countries involved
gave weapons to all their young men to
kill each other at random; it was the
first butchery to which all were
compelled to go. It was the first time
in history also that such a density of
means to kill was produced. To this
unprecedented mass-killing corresponded
a mass brainwashing: War censorship was
established in all countries and
nothing could be written on life in the
trenches. The strategy of the French
and German general staffs was to bleed
each other ad nauseam, and the Allies
finally ``won'' only because of the
arrival of fresh American troops. For
example, in the two-week offensive of
the Chemin des Dames, France lost
147,000 men, and in Verdun, France and
Germany lost together 770,000 men
(killed and heavily wounded) in 302
days, in less than one year. 
   By the end of the war, about 1.5
million had been killed in France, 34
dead out of every 1,000 inhabitants,
the figure being 30 per 1,000 in
Germany and 21 in England. More than 25
percent of the French men between 18
and 27 were killed, 14 percent were
permanently disabled and about 40
percent had been wounded! In France,
where the war took place, 350,000
houses were destroyed, 62,000
kilometers of roads, 5,000 kilometers
of railroads and 1,900 kilometers of
waterways were lost, more than 2.5
million hectares of agricultural land
were burnt. 
   The financial cost of the war was
enormous. In France, the war consumed,
in only four years, 16 years of the
peacetime national budget! 
   The financier and the war
speculator (as shown for example in the
paintings of Grosz on the German side)
increased their status, and vast
fortunes were made without labor by
ignorant, incapable, or cowardly
persons, while the flower of the
population was killed in the trenches.
Civil servants and retired people
brutally lost part of their income, not
only in Weimar Germany
but also in France, where the pace of
inflation, expressed in yearly terms,
was, for example, 100 percent between April
and July 1917. The social status of 
teachers and professors collapsed,
6,000 of the latter were killed out of
a total of 65,000. The war speculator
and the financier won over the teacher
and the professor, while the
demobilized soldiers felt at loss in
their civilian lives. 
   A desperate ``post-war''
counterculture became rampant, with the
idea that no noble cause was possible,
sacrifice for the fatherland was a bad
joke and the ``ennoblement of the
self'' was an idiocy. At the same time,
a ``cult of war and pain'' was
developed, with war monuments in every
village of France and Germany, and
cyclical war ceremonies. An obsession
with death, in an atmosphere of misery
and pessimism, was the common
denominator. 
   In France, the demographic
bloodletting produced a society of
widows and old maids: In the young age
groups, there were 12 women for 10 men. 
   As a result of all this,
Malthusianism spread in society, with a
fall in the rate of marriages and
fertility, and an ideology of hedonism
to compensate for the fears of the past
and those of the future. The philosopher
Henri Bergson started saying that
over-fecundity is the cause of wars,
and the League of Nations should put
mandatory birth controls on those
countries enjoying too high a
population growth! In Germany, there
was a sense of betrayal: The war was
lost without having been fought on the
national territory, and for the elites,
``Wilson's democracy served no other
purpose than a spread of idealistic
veneer over a predatory treaty.'' The
war veterans were enraged, and the
``Republic,'' the ``Weimar Republic,''
was from the beginning seen as the
product of injustice and vassalage. 
   Over the ruins of human thinking
and hope grew a pagan, Nietzschean,
anti-Christian worldview, accusing
Christianity of being ``the religion of
the weak and the cheated,'' like ``we,
Germans, were cheated.'' Ernst
Ju@aunger, with others, promoted the
conception of a ``soldier-worker,''
born in the trenches to ``regenerate
the nation'' through labor and
violence. The ``soldier'' was promoted
as the ``only example of morality,''
while fringe but influential groups in
the oligarchy, such as the Thule
Society, celebrated the Wagnerian gods
of the North against the Christian God. 
   Counterculture spread through all
Europe, with two seemingly opposed
faces that had in common being
implicitly or explicitly based on the
commitment to destroy Judeo-Christian
values. On the one side, was the cult of
the strong and the race, that
culminated with Nazism when the economy
collapsed. On the other, was a
hedonistic, anti-authoritarian
destruction of all values, first
expressed in Switzerland during the war
itself with Dadaism, leading to
Surrealism. Russian ballet music,
celebrating the pagan gods of the
North, was introduced by emigrating
Russian oligarchs, while jazz was
brought into France and Germany by 
American soldiers. The Frankfurt School
and Lukacs explicitly promoted the
``destruction of the values of the West
to promote new values'' based on
``marginality'' and ``rejection of the
father image.'' 
   We asked at the beginning of this
article: How was it possible to impose
the Versailles order, an order of death
and strife, on human beings in their
right mind? The answer is simple: Those
human beings were not in their right
mind! The horrible reality of the war
and the counterculture that first
preceded and then ``rationalized'' it
afterward, together with the economic
and social disintegration, drove most
people into demoralization, sickness,
or madness, making them vulnerable to
the axiomatic bases of a
self-destructive world. The
Spencerian-Darwinian conception of the
British oligarchical elite had spread
to broad layers of the population of
Europe. They were doomed to fight each
other, while the debt, culture and
geopolitical negotiations were
``controlled from above.'' 

   The Lesson of 1923-29

   The only answer to our own crisis
today is, politically, what the
Anglo-Americans did not want at the
beginning of the century: a continental
European alliance, involving France,
Germany and Russia, and expanding from
Eurasia to Eurafrica and the whole
world, based on peace through mutual
economic development. But the failure
of the Russian-German and French-German
alliances during the 1920s show that
the mere political intention is not
enough. 
   Let's take the case of the
French-German alliance conceived in the
1926-29 period. 
   The French elites understood, by
1924-26, that the real master in the
world was not the French army ``which
had shed more blood than all others,''
but the British and Ameican banks. It
was then that they decided to shift
their policies, and ``achieve not only
an alliance of the weak with Germany,
but national reconciliation.'' 
   France softened her obsession with
``guilt reparations,'' Germany invested
in French industry, and a trade treaty
was signed on August 1927. A steel
agreement was signed on a continental
basis, and psychological detente
followed the economic arrangements: a
French-German Committee for
documentation and information was
created, to drop the idea of an
``absolute German responsibility in the
war'' and reestablish ``the historical
truth.'' 
   More interestingly, a project for
an ``European Zollverein'' was put
forward, with explicit references to
Friedrich List and Cauwes, the French
economist enemy of free trade and of
the British system at the end of the
nineteenth century. In parallel with
German initiatives, the French created
a Union Economique et Douaniere to
promote that idea. 
   This was now a real threat to
England and Washington: A German-French
alliance was in the works, based on
industrial and infrastructural
development, in potential combination
with Russia, while the British
responsibilities in World War I
threatened to be established by the
common French and German historical
work. 
   Yet, the French-German Alliance
did not work. The lessons of that
failure are very relevant to the
situation in Europe today. 
   First, the French authorities did
want an agreement with Germany, but
without confronting London and
Washington, while the German Social
Democrats and Christian Democrats were
also reluctant to face the
Anglo-Americans head-on. Briand and
Poincare@aa, in France, hesitated between
a deliberate policy of continental
alliance or gaining an instrument of
pressure over England. A genuine
promoter of the French-German alliance
writes: ``The advocates of a
Continental bloc were too often nothing
but frustrated Atlanticists.'' 
   Second, partially as a result of
the above-mentioned indecisiveness, the
command of the alliance policy was left
to``field operators,'' such as
industrialists or thinkers, and had no
strategic brain. The French population,
in particular, was not organized for
that purpose, and the ``alliance''
remained a matter reserved to the
elites. 
   Third, and most important, axioms
of the Versailles order were not
frontally attacked, and the alliance
was seen more as an improvement of such
an order than as its reversal.
Economically and culturally, the
French-German alliance was therefore
unable to get off the ground.
   Disaster started when the French
government, instead of going for a
break of newly allied Germany and
France with London and Washington, tried
instead to ``contain'' Germany within a
set of international economic and
political agreements, notably within a
European Federation. The dynamics
of the process were then blocked, as
they are today within the confines of
the Maastricht Treaty, and for a similar reason!
The alliance finally collapsed into the
chaos spread by the Wall Street crash
of 1929, when for lack of common goals
and policies, Paris and Berlin went on
an ``everybody for himself'' rampage. 

   From Versailles to Our Times

   The first point to be made on the
Versailles order is that it was a
failure from the beginning. We should
not overestimate Versailles as a grand
scheme to control the 20th century; it
was a social, economic, and political
failure, of which the spread of
Stalinism, fascism, social-democratic
corporativism and unchecked liberalism
are the products. Versailles is a
permanent crash, an attempt to avoid a
Krakatoa explosion through the
organization of a permanent mudslide.
It is a dream to control disintegration,
leading to the nightmare of a chaos,
plunging everybody in the mud. 
   The second point is that such an
order is today finished; it led to
disaster and cannot be mended. The only
question left is what comes after. 
   Third, it has to be emphasized
that in the Versailles period 
Europe was in a revolutionary
situation. Indeed, the peace
treaty was signed in the first place,
to try to check the revolutionary
process. It succeeded only because the
leadership of the revolution was itself
misguided by the same prejudices and
axioms as those embedded in the peace
treaty itself! The ennoblement of the
human condition and the improvement of
what Friedrich Schiller and Charles de
Gaulle called ``character''--the
capacity of the human soul to naturally
lean towards the common good--was on no
one's agenda. What followed was our
century of continuing mass murders,
concentration camps, and holocausts. 
   We are now at the end of the 20th
century, and fortunately so. The order
of Versailles has reached its end,
because it has no future. But,
``naturally,'' ``objectively,'' without
our subjective intervention and change,
what is coming will lead to chaos and
death, as shown by the present
situation in the Third World and
Eastern Europe. 
   What is therefore the task before
us? What have we to accomplish that our
French and German predecessors did
not? What is the real issue at stake?
What can immunize us against
self-destruction? 
   We have just mentioned some of the
omissions of our predecessors, but we
have to go beyond. Let me call your
attention to a very interesting capital
sculpture that I saw a few months
ago in the church of Autun in Burgundy,
and came recently to mind 
while reading ``Il mio secreto,''
Petrarch's dialogue with Augustine. 
   The capital shows the two main
theological virtues compared to their
equivalent mortal sins: on top, Agape@am
and Hope and beneath, Avarice and
Melancholy. This is, in the most direct
and simple terms, a devastating attack
against the ``Aristotelian axioms,'' in
the Middle Ages or in our own times. 
   What is Aristotelianism?
Fundamentally, it is precisely what has
loomed large in all our poor century:
the cult of death. It is a fixed world
of self-evident objects, with no
opening to the Absolute. The
{Nicomachean Ethics} is quite explicit
about it: The key to Aristotelian
ethics is a praxis, a form of activity
which has its principle in itself. It
is the concept of self-sufficiency of
the moral subject, which ends up in the
Kantian autonomy of practical reason.
It is the method of sociology, where
you start by the self-evident
objects--as later in
Cartesianism--within a ``closedness''
that leads you to admit as
``rational,'' logic, what controls and
dominates the world at a given point.
As said by Aristotle in his {Politics},
if production is based on slavery,
slaves are doomed to be slaves, woman
to be an inferior species, and the
universe is ruled by a Malthusian law,
which not only justifies, but defines as
``good,'' euthanasia, murder of newborns,
and birth control through sodomy. 
   This dead and rear-end world is
the world of Aristotle, and it is the
intellectual fraud upon which the
Versailles order is based. 
   In such a universe, human
attachment goes to ephemeral,
perishable things, to the finite
earthly paradise. And this paradise
becomes an inferno, precisely because
it is dead-ended, self-enclosed,
affected by the worst disease of the
soul, according to Augustine: the
obsession with the visible. 
   In such a race for glory and
earthly rewards, there cannot be any
true, lasting satisfaction. 
   Avarice is precisely this
attachment to objects, mere objects,
``phantasmata'' as the Greeks and
Cicero put it, ghosts. The mind is then
affected by an overburdening with
unnecessary details and dispersed among
sensible objects; concentration becomes
impossible. Such a human being,
counting only on his own forces and
rejecting the Creator, ultimately loses
his soul and his capacity to think. If
you want to get a precise view of that,
look at the average customer in a
supermarket, or to your
fellow-traveller wearing a Walkman. 
   Avarice, the mortal sin symbolized
by the grabbing of two egg-shaped
purses, leads ultimately to the
negation of God and to the belief in
fortune; the impotence of a ``gambled''
life, defined by an outer Force,
replaces the creative identity defined
by an inner God. Man becomes a vain
beast subjected to mortal objects that
arouse the flames of desires which
cannot provide rest, but endless
torments. Man becomes Dostoyevsky in the
Wiesbaden casino. 
   Avarice is therefore the first
consequence of Aristotelianism. The
second is what the ancients called
melancholy--think of the Du@aurer
engraving--acidia, or Weltschmertz, or
the very polished British ``spleen.''
This is the ultimate consequence of
Avarice: the human being, never able to
reach a satisfaction that earthly
objects cannot provide, becomes a hater
of the world. He falls into the
romantic rejection of the world, he
dooms it as evil. Here we close up the
circle: We are at the point at which we
started this presentation to define the
oligarchy of our century, the Bogomil,
the bugger, buggering.           
   This is the man that refuses any
ordering principle or harmonic rule in
the universe, and takes an evil
pleasure in violating his laws. It is
the cult of death, as in Stravinsky's
``Rite of Spring,'' danced in Paris on
May 29, 1913, the account of a pagan
human sacrifice in spring time, but
further, the slaughtering of harmony,
composition, and beauty. Remember that a
connoisseur like Jacques Emile Blanche
once said: ``Often during the war
(World War I), in this cubist, chemical
and scientific war, the nights teared
apart by air raids, I day-dreamed
Stravinsky's Rite.'' 
   Blanche was right: Culture is not
separated from reality, and the moral
degeneracy which led to Stravinsky's
``Rite of Spring'' was the cause of
World War I, the puppetmaster behind
the order of Versailles. 
   Avarice: overburdening with the
temporal, the ephemerals, pagan
vitalism. Melancholy: rejection,
refusal of a universe where
satisfaction can never be found and,
ultimately, denial of the Creation
itself. Avarice and Melancholy ruling:
isn't it the course of the world today?
A world obsessed by physical death,
escaping from it in ephemerals, and
then playing with its obsession in the
worst self-destructive way. Look at the
media, look at the entertainment
industry, look at what they are playing
upon within yourselves. 
   They sell the images that unleash
the beast. 
   Instead, let's activate in our
minds certain other things, let's
create paradoxes, notions of
differences, thus awakening to the
understanding concepts. 
   The Aristotelian world, the world
of Avarice and Melancholy, the
Malthusian dead-ended world, can never
generate a single concept, because it
is flat. 
   The world of Versailles, the world
of the earthly ends, of the endless
manipulation, is now as dead as its
cultural basis. 
   To understand its deadly
impotence, we have to locate its roots
in time: it is the world of the
counter-Renaissance, the Aristotelian
conspiracy against the Renaissance. It
is not a world {for} something, it's a
world {against.} It started, against
the Renaissance, in Venice, spread to
Bologna and the gardens of Florence,
met the Sorbonne of Paris, spread
further into both the Reformation and
the Counter-Reformation, to culminate
in the Cartesian seventeenth century, the
Enlightenment eighteenth century, the
romantic and positivist nineteenth century,
to end in the battlefields,
concentration camps and Third World
abominations, to end in what once this
Pope called ``the earthly infernos of
the 20th century.'' 
   It is the world defined by
geopolitics, Malthusianism, usury and
entropy--a world with neither Hope nor
Agape@am. A world with no ``beyond.'' 
   If we are all gathered here, it is
because we know it or suspect it, and
are committed to change it. 
   Let's take the image of a circle,
or the value of the Golden Mean, and
communicate it as such: We are in the
world of Aristotelianism, the world of
ephemerals. Let's take an historical
situation, and comment about it,
accurately communicating facts and
developments: We are again trapped in
the world of Aristotelianism. 
   But then let's give a chance to
construct something, a circle with
rotating action, the Golden Mean with
the reproduction of our species, and
let's teach that activity of the mind,
through for example the rigorously
defined architecture of a building ``in
God's image:'' we have a cathedral. We
have Van, Autun, Aachen or Chartres. 
   Let's give a chance to construct
something, Europe as an economic great
design breaking through the borders of
earthly empires: we have, as de
Gaulle once said, the European Cathedral,
not for itself, but for the world. We
have the Productive Triangle. 
   As Lyndon LaRouche never ceases to
repeat for the hard of hearing among
us, our direction is to seek for truth,
to break with the world of
self-evident, self-gratifying images,
and recognize in one's own mind the
relation to the Absolute, the ordering
of paradoxes, differences, in which we
recognize the existence of the human
mind--it is the truthful commitment of
our soul to the Creator. 
   One mind arousing another mind
through a literate language, the
rigorous use of that language forcing
our attention to a ``beyond:'' Hope and
Agape@am. 
   That is why we think, write, and
talk to others, that is why we act
according to what we think, write and     
say. 
   Isn't that beautiful? 
   Let's then convey that beauty in
our deeds, and there could one day be a
new Renaissance, a new Age of Reason
after the Versialles order--not chaos. 

From New Federalist v6, #33.



----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com

Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.politics.misc