The Creative Spark

Putin signed a new strategic doctrine for Russia yesterday. Although it has not yet been translated into English, there are reliable indications of many of the main points.  Given who Putin is and what he represents, the thrust is positive, and most of the points are true,— but unfortunately even the truest will be generally misunderstood.  The document calls for a revival of the role of science, for instance, which is absolutely necessary,— but most people today, even most Russians, have no idea what science is.

But some of the thinking that went into it was first-rate, reminiscent of Ben Deniston’s intervention into the last ten minutes of the LaRouchePAC webcast of last Wednesday, Dec. 30, where he forcefully polemicized that actually, totally new ideas are required now if mankind is to survive,— thus pushing forward the polemic LaRouche has been waging around Brunelleschi.

To return to the Russia-centered process: the U.S. Army published Putin’s November address to the United Nations in the current issue of its journal, Military Review, along with a February 2013 article by Russian Chief of General Staff Valeriy Gerasimov and an explanatory article by a U.S. specialist on Russia.  Gerasimov’s article went through the thinking behind the later, May 2014 Moscow conference on “Color Revolutions” on which we reported at the time.  But the mental processes of Gerasimov, and obviously some others, went far beyond what we knew then.

“We must not copy foreign experience and chase after leading countries, but we must outstrip them and occupy leading positions ourselves.  This is where military science takes on a crucial role,” Gerasimov wrote.  Gerasimov notes that the outstanding Soviet military scholar Aleksandr Svechin wrote, “It is extraordinarily hard to predict the conditions of war.  For each war it is necessary to work out a particular line for its strategic conduct.  Each war is a unique case, demanding the establishment of a particular logic and not the application of some template.”

“The state of Russian military science today cannot be compared with the flowering of military-theoretical thought in our country on the eve of World War II,” Gerasimov wrote.  [yet] “at that time, there were no people with higher degrees and there were no academic schools or departments.  There were extraordinary personalities with brilliant ideas.  I would call them fanatics in the best sense of the word.  Maybe we just do not have enough people like that today.  People like, for instance, Georgy Isserson,” who predicted exactly how the next war would begin with attacks long-prepared in secret before any declaration of war.  Isserson, a wide-ranging pioneer in military thought, was arrested in 1941 and not released until 1955.

“The fate of this ‘prophet of the fatherland’ unfolded tragically.  Our country paid in great quantities of blood for not listening to the conclusions of this professor of the General Staff Academy.  What can we conclude from this?  A scornful attitude toward new ideas, to nonstandard approaches, to other points of view is unacceptable in military science.  And it is even more unacceptable for practitioners to have this attitude toward science.

“In conclusion, what I would like to say is that no matter what forces the enemy has, no matter how well-developed his forces and means of armed conflict may be, forms and methods for overcoming them can be found.  He will always have vulnerabilities, and that means that adequate means of opposing him exist.”

After some discussion of the Russian background, Lyndon LaRouche responded as follows.  He said that most people today are pretty stupid.  It’s because they get one of these shibboleths,— come up with various shibboleths,— and they say this policy is the policy.  And it’s always something like a deductive model.  And they have no understanding of that because they’re not creative; they’re absolutely not creative.  They call themselves creative, but the minute you run into something where the group decides to make a decision of what is right, with finality,— this is where things fall apart.  Because they insist on adapting to some group-think kind of thing, and they assume that has to be the policy.  But they get into this practical attitude, and they lose the creative spark, which is the secret of all good war-winning.

LaRouche continued: the idea,— like communism,— you’ve got to come to an agreement.  Everyone has to step into line, or more or less.  Or if they’re not stepping into line, then that becomes the issue and ultimately the problem.  Most organization’s leadership, with a few exceptions,— is pretty much dumb, in that way.  That they’ll be clever in designing a scheme, but the scheme is rarely going to work.  And they’re reluctant, they’re just so reluctant to give up on that method of thinking.