‘The Death-Agony of Olympus’

When was there ever such corruption of the U.S. elite—from academia to the “news-and-entertainment” media, government bureaucracies and the Congress—all of it together one pulsating mass of filth, like a fistful of live worms from a bait-basket—as what is now exposed daily in the impeachment charade?

Yet Lyndon LaRouche forecast it all quite accurately just 21 years ago in his work “The Death-Agony of Olympus.” He was diagnosing problems in the administration of Bill Clinton under totally different circumstances, but what he found is provably what we face today, to be overcome by the same means as those he set forth. (See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., “The Death-Agony of Olympus,” EIR, Vol. 25, #37, Sept. 18 1998.)

LaRouche began his diagnosis with the “Third Way,” which he treated as a convergence of then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “New Labour” with the 1968 “New Left” of the Weathermen, the “lost cause” of the neo-Confederate “New Agrarians,” and Newt Gingrich’s Republicans.

He said the root of the problem lay in this doomed elite’s unshakable support for “globalization” and “free trade,” totally oblivious to any contrary reality. “Globalization” and “free trade,” wrote LaRouche, are the hallmarks of a society which has lost the moral fitness to survive. It is no coincidence that the two pillars of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign were opposition to “globalization” and “free trade.”

No trick can save a nation (or a caste, we add) which has lost the moral fitness to survive, LaRouche said, appropriately citing Mencius, the great Classical Chinese thinker who was a contemporary of Plato.

LaRouche sent his readers to the school of Classical tragedy, to learn to recognize the fatal passion leading them on, to fight its false emotion, and thus to avoid inevitable doom. He wrote that what we are witnessing is the last act of the lost third play in Aeschylus’ Prometheus tragedy, poetically recaptured two millennia later by Shelley. It is the death-agony of tyrant Zeus’ Olympus—of the Zeus otherwise known as Satan.

“Instead of the real, mass-based political parties of the pre-1971-1976 interval, U.S. political parties have degenerated into parodies of kept women. They have been transformed, step by step, from instruments of political representation, into echoes of the worst sort of political party formations known from the history of Europe since ancient Rome’s politics of bread and circuses. Typified by the corrupting influence of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED,) they have degenerated into mere political fronts for the oligarchy-controlled institutions of governmental bureaucracies.

“This political change is typified by the symbiosis of Wall Street ‘chaos theory’ junkies with Wall Street hegemony over the financing and mass media propaganda-support needed to conduct successful election-campaigns, both combined with the permanent bureaucracy of the U.S. Department of Justice, all combined with the Federal Reserve System, and all combined with the leading globalized, and chiefly morally debased ‘mass news and entertainment media’ of the U.S. and other nations. This is a combination which has largely displaced the former function of mass-constituency-based politics from the national political life of the U.S.A., and of relevant other nations. This kind of miscreant has emerged as most typical of the presently ruling political class.”

After Wednesday’s Dec. 4 impeachment testimony by three corrupt professors, it might seem that LaRouche omitted the universities from this combination of degeneracy, but he brings them in later:

“After we have considered what modern European civilization had accomplished earlier, until the recent decades’ accelerating decay of our culture, we must face the fact, that what has come to pass, recently, respecting the standard for defining ‘educated persons,’ today, is worse than a great disappointment; it is, substantially, a terrible fraud. During all of this present century, to date, the most conspicuous expression of this decadence among so-called ‘educated persons,’ has been an accelerating rate of moral and intellectual degeneration in such departments of university and secondary education as literature, music, plastic art-forms, and the so-called ‘social sciences.’…

“During the latter time, each new generation’s elites, in particular, have been, on the average, less intelligent, less literate, less rational, less sane, than those of the predecessor generations. This judgment is not a mere matter of cultural ‘preferences,’ of mere personal ‘opinion;’ the possibility of the survival of civilization depends upon recognizing the clear evidence of that decadence, and reversing this decay in very specific respects. That crucial task is our subject here.”

Our elites have failed; they are self-doomed. As Doug Wead’s new book, Inside Trump’s White House: The Real Story of His Presidency, documents, Trump’s Presidential campaign was essentially the campaign of the Trump family. His government is forced to be largely a government of the Trump family, because most others will betray him and the country.

What must we do? We must recruit, train and educate a new elite from among America’s organic leaders. Refugees from the sinking ship will join us as well. Lyndon LaRouche’s spirit, acting through you, must now become in this respect the Benjamin Franklin of the 21st century.

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