2016: America’s Moment of Decision

by Diane Sare

This article is the fourth in a series of writings which are presented by the LaRouchePAC National Policy Committee, in direct collaboration with Lyndon LaRouche, as part of his campaign to create the New American Presidency. The first three can be found on larouchepub.com.

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, sometimes, it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
(Traditional Spiritual)

In November 2000, just days before the ill-fated US Presidential Election—ill-fated because like today, there is no possible winning outcome—Lyndon LaRouche wrote an extraordinary and prescient paper entitled, “Politics as Art,” which concludes, “…There is a precious lesson to be learned by all citizens and other residents of the United States, especially those oppressed by the ruinous policy-trends of the past thirty-five years, from, among relevant other sources, the polished form of what is called the Negro Spiritual.”

Sixteen years later I believe that this is more urgently true than at the time LaRouche wrote that earlier paper, which is why the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus is learning several African-American Spirituals as part of the upcoming 9-11 Memorial Series of concerts featuring the Mozart Requiem.

Review what has happened since that dreadful November 2000 non-election, and reflect on Mr. LaRouche’s forecasts every step of the way. The first forecast LaRouche made about the 2000 election was that no one would actually win. In fact, it was weeks before George W. Bush was declared the winner.

Then, when Ashcroft was named as possible US Attorney General, LaRouche warned on January 3, 2001, that this regime would only be able to govern through “Nazi tactics” and “crisis management” following a “Reichstag Fire event.” Just nine months later, on September 11, 2001, four planes were hijacked and flown into the World Trade Towers in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and one crashed in Shanksville, PA. All the passengers and hijackers were incinerated. Thousands more were killed in the buildings that were struck.

Rather than launch a full investigation into the role of Saudi Arabia, which was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, as well as Saudi-British deals like the Prince Bandar/Margaret Thatcher “Al Yamamah” oil for weapons deal – which created a giant slush fund capable of financing such an attack—Vice President Dick Cheney blocked all references to the Saudis, and instead sought to focus on Iraq.

By March of 2003, with substantial prodding and complicity from the now-thoroughly-discredited and incriminated then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a full invasion of Iraq was begun. On April 3, 2003, Lyndon LaRouche was interviewed on BBC about his opposition to the Iraq war and he identified explicitly the role of Vice President Dick Cheney, who had moved after September 11, 2001 to get his 1991 war plan back on track.

Also in 2003, on July 17th, former UN weapons inspector Dr. David Kelley turned up dead after publicly accusing Tony Blair of sexing-up documents purporting to prove that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Kelley’s death was officially declared a suicide, but a team of medical doctors and others have subsequently expressed serious doubts that he could have died in the manner claimed by members of the Tony Blair Government. He was most likely murdered.

As of June, 2016, nearly 4,500 Americans have been killed in Iraq. The suicide rate of Veterans in the United States is now over 8,000 per year. The suicide rates in the general population have increased significantly, as have rates of death by heroin overdose and alcoholism.

This increase in the death rate has occurred for two reasons. One, the satanically evil policies of the Bush and Obama Administrations, Presidents who were tools of the British Monarchy, with policies enforced by Wall Street and the FBI; and two, up until now, the American people have chosen to capitulate to Wall Street and Hollywood-funded-and-orchestrated public opinion.

Think about what Americans have willingly gone along with in the last 15 years.

Remember the 2008 TARP? In July of 2007, Lyndon LaRouche warned that the entire trans-Atlantic system was completely bankrupt, nothing could be done to save it, and he put forward the “Homeowners and Bank Protection Act” to halt foreclosures and reorganize the banking system under Glass-Steagall standards. Even though thousands of bankers and mortgage brokers had been engaged in outright theft and fraud, no major banker has yet been jailed. Instead the very institutions and individuals which created the mess received billions upon billions of dollars of bailouts and bonuses, creating unbearable inflationary expenses for the average American, as millions were expelled from their homes. Did Americans object?

No. They decided to go along with then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson—who has just endorsed Hillary Clinton for President—when he threatened the Congress there would be riots in the streets if Wall Street did not get this money, and that the first $700 billion simply had to be issued, and then the next one, and the next one…

The American people gave Cheney and Bush their permission to torture prisoners in their name at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. They went along with Obama’s bombing of Libya for 250 days, which the Congress never authorized, they accepted Susan Rice’s lies about the video that caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, and they went along with the ludicrous idea that we could have a health care system run by the IRS.

It was exactly this mini-Dark Age which LaRouche foresaw when he wrote in the the aforementioned paper, “Tomorrow, U.S. election-day, November 7, 2000, we shall witness an awful real-life tragedy on the world stage, the threat, if not yet the actuality of a new dark age. That threat is today’s outgrowth of a long-standing, widespread violation of those Classical principles of statecraft which every citizen should have been given the right to know…”

If Americans understood Classical Drama, they would recognize that The United States of America no longer runs global policy. There is a new leadership on the planet which represents 70-plus nations and two thirds of the world’s people. This leadership is embodied in Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China.

Particularly since August of last year when President Putin visited China for the spectacular V-J Day parade, these two heads of state have been running circles around the western leaders, including an increasingly desperate President Barack Obama who, thanks to his own gigantic ego, still has yet to realize how badly he has been defeated.

It was Putin’s announcement at last year’s UN General Assembly to form a coalition against terror, starting with defeating ISIS in Syria, which created the anvil against which the LaRouche organization would hammer against Obama’s protection of the Saudi and British apparatus, the very nexus which ran the 9-11 attacks 15 years ago.

Under these conditions, Obama could no longer avoid the release of the famous 28 pages of the 9-11 Joint Congressional Inquiry which, contrary to US-based media reports, are devastating to the Saudi Royal Family as well as to the FBI and CIA which have perpetrated, to this day, a cover-up of the Saudi-British role on behalf of both the Bush Administration and the British Empire.

Although the American people are arguably more insane now than at any time in history, all is not lost. Thanks to the collaboration of Putin and Xi and the tireless commitment of Lyndon LaRouche over decades, we are presented with the opportunity to break from this misery and chart a new course toward a bright future. With the release of the 28 pages, justice is closer in the 9-11 case, and Glass-Steagall is a policy plank in both major party platforms. But to claim the victory, Americans have to remember what it is to be human—i.e., that human beings are NOT animals. That we are creative, and that this creativity is fueled by a love of our fellow man, and a love of mankind and posterity.

It was not the atrocity committed on September 11, 2001 that nearly destroyed our Republic, but our inaction in the face of a great evil – an evil which claimed the lives of thousands of our own citizens – which has rendered us almost unsalvageable.

This is why the African-American Spirituals, in their Classical form as developed by the collaborators of Dvorak, are so important to our survival. When I was directing a predominantly African-American chorus in Washington, D.C., Sylvia Olden Lee would visit, and she would say to the members of the chorus, “Remember your Aunt Hattie.” And she would clutch her hands together into her stomach and bow her head as if remembering some distant painful sacrifice made by those who came before.

Sylvia, and Robert McFerrin and Bill Warfield, whom I had the pleasure of observing both in performance and as teachers, conveyed very clearly that these songs are not slave songs. These are songs of noble human beings unjustly held in bondage, who are expressing their dignity and confidence in their own immortality. As Dr. Eugene T. Simpson, who was a trusted collaborator of Hall Johnson writes in his book, “The Hall Johnson Concert Spirituals,” “Perhaps the most important thing to remember in interpreting the spirituals is that they are not songs of defeat, but songs of survival.” I would go farther and say that these are songs of triumph of justice against evil, and the victory of the human spirit.

As we organize the people of Manhattan and the surrounding areas to participate in the Schiller Institute Chorus, or sign the LaRouchePAC petition to get justice for the victims of 9-11 by ensuring that such a thing never happens again, we discover a population that has not been able to reconcile their emotions, or been able to come to terms with what occurred on that horrible day, and the fact that nothing has ever been done about it.

The African slaves and their descendants who created and sang the Spirituals under conditions of horrific physical deprivation, torture, and captivity succeeded in keeping their dignity and immortality as human beings with a direct relationship to God.

Mastery of these songs, in their polished form as developed by Hall Johnson, Burleigh and others, is a pathway for Americans to access their own humanity. Once this spark has been reignited, as we saw in Selma in 1965 and in Berlin in 1989, the people will no longer accommodate injustice. We are almost there.

Were you there when they rolled the stone away?
Were you there when they rolled the stone away?
Oh, sometimes, it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
You were there when they rolled the stone away
(Spiritual as sung by Elvira Green)