Proceedings of the
First International Conference of
The Schiller Institute

Some of you are not like most people. The very fact that you are here may indicate that. You are superior on a very simple point, not necessarily by terms of education or wealth or accomplishment-- though some of you represent that--but something much more fundamental, something which is manifest in a child. A child that has had any love from its parents--that is, if the parents don't sniff cocaine, smoke pot, and don't act out Playboy, if they are loving, normal parents--that child will ask parents most frequently, "Why?" That is the child's most common question. The difference comes when the parents say with great irritation, "You'll find out when you grow up." There's some validity to that. But as a way of saying something else to the child, it's evil. That something else is this:

"Why do we do this?"

"Because everybody does it."

"Why do we believe this?"

"Because everybody believes it."

That was the beginning of my preparation for German classical philosophy, i.e. Leibniz, because I didn't like that answer, and I never accepted it. I've been a maverick all my life because of that. I got in trouble in geometry because I refused to accept the proposition that lines exist and points exist as axiomatic and postulational definitions. I refused to accept the existence of straightness as axiomatically defined; I couldn't see any sense to it. I couldn't see any sense to a point's existing. I couldn't believe in a point; I don't believe in points to this day (unless we're talking about the brain of Jimmy Carter). I was this kind of obstreperous maverick. Oh, I was a nice person. I've been a nice person all my life. Only the worst people in the world are my enemies, and everybody else we get along with, fairly well. We argue a lot, but we get along.

This prepared me. At about the age of 12, realizing I was running up against this kind of a world, in which all these idiots around me were saying-- in answer to the question "Why?"--"Because we all accept it," or "Because the right people accept it," or "Because this group accepts it, we accept it, so you have to learn to accept it," I said: "I never accept anything. Prove it!"

I had heard by rumor and reputation about philosophy, which had the reputation of being able to deal with this kind of problem. If you mastered philosophy, you could figure out what you should and should not accept, and be able to prove it. So I did the obvious thing that one might do at the age of 12. I began ransacking libraries for names of people who were identified to me as philosophers, and I began ranking the works available in terms of the date of their publication, and I went from the beginning to the end.

I started, unfortunately, with Bacon, because that was what was available, and I went to some of the eighteenth-century French philosophers, all of whom I despised (not as much as I do today, but with a certain just perception), and I hated the British more. You know the usual collection: Bacon; Hobbes, who seemed like a beast to me, even at that age; Locke, who made me sick to my stomach; Hume, Berkeley and his crowd--I couldn't stand them. Descartes was a little more interesting, but he's evil, a sneaky fellow. The British can't really be sneaky; they only cheat, they're not really cleverly sneaky. It takes a French Jesuit to be really cleverly sneaky. Then, of course, there's disgusting Rousseau.

But amid this, I ran across a few works of Leibniz, the Monadology, the Theodicy, and in due course the Clarke-Leibniz correspondence. And I must say that my entire life was shaped during that period of pre- and early adolescence, by recognizing that Leibniz was part of the human race--as opposed to all these other fellows--and I was trying to find out where the human race was. Leibniz represented conceptions which addressed the question "Why?" in terms acceptable to me.

I had a little fight with Kant, and wrestled with Kant for a few years after that, because Kant is a very, very tricky fellow. You know he's wrong, but you never can quite figure out how, or why, until you work that through. Then, later on in life, this commitment to Leibniz steered me in the direction of becoming an economist, but not because I was acquainted with Leibniz's work as an economist, not in any orderly sense. One day in 1947 I acquired an advance copy of one of the first Paris paperback- print publications of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics. The thing was very seductive, at least to people like me.

I'm sort of a gimmicky person in terms of mechanical devices; I used to like to build things and make them work. Designing pieces of apparatus of this type is real fun--little boxes that go around and find their own electrical outlets, and stick their little rear ends in the electrical outlets and recharge their batteries. We would try to figure out some gift to give to a friend at birthday time, and then they would open it and it would do various funny things, and that was considered a good time--and it still is, by me. I'm a very impractical joker.

There was another feature of the book which was not quite so innocently foolish: what was called the Wiener-Shannon doctrine of information theory. With that I became angrier and angrier and angrier, and I threw that thing against the wall. I didn't know that people like Hilbert had thrown Norbert Wiener out of classes at Göttingen, but I would have sympathized strongly with that if I had known that. At Göttingen they said they wouldn't tolerate that garbage-method Wiener was bringing into the seminars. Of course, this is also the doctrine of John von Neumann, who is sort of a calculating machine with a heart, and not a very good scientist, although he is a brilliant mathematician if you like that sort of thing. I hated it. I recognized in Norbert Wiener's information theory the enemy which I had been seeking all my life: that misconception of man which leads a biologist with an exposure to physical mechanics to get up and announce that it might be possible to prove that life can exist in the universe.

That filled me with a conviction to destroy this conception of negentropy as defined by Wiener and his accomplices, as the main enemy, philosophically, of the human race, and as the enemy lurking within science. Nobody else but me seemed very interested in the project, so I went onto it myself. And because of Leibniz, what I selected as the course of study and action--intending merely to refute and destroy this thing--led me first to Georg Cantor. And those of you who know Leibniz will understand why, if you have mastered Leibniz's Monadology, Cantor was a very natural place to go. Through Cantor I saw that my previous ideas about Riemann had been all wrong, and that Luther Eisenhart at Princeton (which was the text I had been exposed to) was wrong. Then I recognized from the standpoint of Cantor and Leibniz the significance of Riemann's work, and the rest is a matter of documentation.

There is another matter of my debt to German culture that illuminates this: the case of Beethoven. I do not think I would have survived without Beethoven. Get away from what people understand as musical theory today. Music is true science. The creative principle which is science, is expressed in the most concentrated way in well-tempered contrapuntal composition. The only way it would be possible to make a mathematical model of any major contrapuntal composition of Beethoven's, would be from the standpoint of Riemannian physics.

Great music--as distinct from this sub-chimpanzee thing which is popular in the United States today called "hard rock," where children turn themselves into something less than chimpazees and seem to enjoy it--is that music which, like great plastic art composition based on the principle of the golden section, is implicitly social. Great music is not composed by notes. Music is composed by poets. Music is derived from speaking. Music is derived from prosody. If you want to compose, first compose a line of poetry, and that will tell you how to compose music. The way you compose poetry, the kind of thinking embodied in that, will then be embodied in your composition of music, and the rest of it is simply making music so familiar a language to yourself that you can think in it consciously as you think in any other language. To the degree that you master the syntax, the grammar of music, particularly the point of creativity, then the fact that you are able to speak and to sing poetry will enable you to compose good musical compositions.

The essential reason people cannot compose music today--there is not a decent composer known in the 20th century--is because there is no poetry. Look at the poetry of a nation and you look at the soul of its music, its musical potential. People cannot understand music, they cannot compose it, because they do not have good poetry. The lied is the Rosetta Stone for the understanding of the connection between music and poetry. The great composers understood that, expressed that in such immediacy that I cannot believe anybody would be blind to it. It is axiomatic, if anything is axiomatic.

The point is, in saturating oneself with a certain kind of music, exemplified by the creative processes of composition of Beethoven, we are experiencing a dialogue. There is no vertical harmony. Some people believe in vertical harmony; some people believe in little green men under the floorboards. There is a chorus, a contrapuntal chorus of voices which are coherent, which are harmonized, not vertically, but in sequence, one after the other, across one another. This interplay, to the extent that it creates a problem which is solved, is the highest form of creativity. It is the relationship of creativity to generalized social practice, as distinct from individual practice.

What is science? Science is knowledge, yes, but what is knowledge? What is knowledge except as a meaningless abstraction, unless it is the process of communicating knowledge in such a way as to change the way other people behave. It is not the process telling them what to do--that anyone can do--rather, it is a process of informing their minds, informing their powers of judgment, to influence permanently what they shall do.

That is knowledge. Knowledge is social; it is not individual. Science is social; it is not individual. It is formulating ideas respecting the lawful composition of the universe in the form in which these discoveries can be made universal. Universality lies in contributing these discoveries efficiently to a generality of human practice. This is the significance of communication. Therefore the great problem of language, the great problem of music, the great problem of all social behavior, is where and how in the medium of communication you can include something essential which gas theory, statistical mechanics, and linguistics preclude.

How can you communicate creativity? How can you communicate causality? How can you communicate transformation of the domain? How can you communicate autonoesis? autopoesis? How can you communicate the idea of the transitive verb, "to create"? How can you communicate the ideas of God--that being which transforms itself to what it is becoming? Communicate that--not as a set of words, but as a concept mediated from one human being to another human being. Where in language, where in geometry, where in music can this essential idea be found? Dissect a language, show me "to create" in that language. Show me the substance of "to create," not as a nominalist substance.

How can we do 'it? Beethoven reminds you that it can be done. Because to understand, to hear Beethoven, you must utilize precisely those faculties of your mind which are of the highest order of creative mental power.

A scientist who does not like Beethoven is no scientist! He may be a good dictionary, he may be a good information storage device, but he is not a scientist, because his brain cannot function. It can not create. And whenever he is confronted with a problem that requires creativity, he will always give you the wrong answer. This is not merely an inference, this is a common experience.

You say to somebody, "Here is the axiomatic problem." Everybody in mathematics who has a terminal degree--which is what happens to you before they put you in a body-bag--knows the hereditary principle. Even Bertrand Russell knows the hereditary principle--or knew it, wherever he is today. Everybody knows that if you construct a logical system-- and mathematics as usually defined is nothing but a logical latticework (Garrett Birkhoff was no good, but at least his description of his own mental behavior was accurate)--everyone knows that if you start out with a system based only on axioms and postulates, and you develop only deductive theorems based on these axioms and postulates, that the entire latticework, which can never be closed, consists of nothing but echoes of the axiomatic assumptions with which you started. Therefore, if one of the axioms is false, the entirety of that field of knowledge collapses.

An example: If you say that the only thing that exists in arithmetic is the integers, as counting numbers--that everything else is synthetic--therefore, so the argument goes, all mathematics must be derived from the counting numbers as the axiomatic foundation. So you start with an axiomatic counting system, 1 + 1, you construct that, and from that elaborated basis you must develop all mathematics. This is essentially what Russell and Whitehead demanded: radical nominalism. Therefore, as the case of prime numbers implicitly proves--the Euler theorem or the Euler-Riemann theorem, the work of Gauss on prime number sequences, the ingenious foresight of Fermat on this question, the work of Pascal on the question of differential number series--the entire history of mathematics, centering around this fantastic little problem of prime numbers, proves implicitly that Kronecker was a malicious and malignant idiot, because the numbers do not have self-evident existence in this universe. Only continuity does. The problem is how to define it, as the Euler-Riemann theorem on prime numbers density illustrates the point. Similarly, if it is demonstrated that atoms are not made up of little quarks, elementary particles (i.e., elastic' bodies), but that these elementary things, as we like to call them, are actually very complex electromagnetic processes, and are in fact singularities of a larger process and not building blocks, then the entirety of a mathematical physics which is based on that kind of mathematics, falls.

The essence of creativity is focusing upon this problem. You can develop a system which is a stinking system, like modern algebra. Within certain limits, you can get by with using it. You will not be run over by a bus if you use it for these things. The moon will not collapse on your head if you use it, if you don't go too far with it. But fundamentally, these things are wrong. We have to get out of these limits. How do we get out of them? We pose an experiment, or simple experimental observation which fundamentally challenges one of the explicit or implicit axiomatic assumptions embedded in our present knowledge. We conduct an observation or experiment to put to the test one of the axioms underlying all generally accepted knowledge. That is Plato's method. That is the Socratic method. If we demonstrate that hypothesis, then the entirety of that department of scientific knowledge collapses, and every one of the theorems, no matter how many experiments were run putatively to prove it, collapses. The difference between a creative scientist and a non-creative scientist is that a creative scientist is always looking to make trouble in that way.

The non-creative scientist is the one who says, "What do you mean? Who are you to say that? Why, fifty of us, our degrees, our professorships, all depend upon what we were taught and what we have been regurgitating for years. Why, I have written ten textbooks on this subject!" And they will begin to go into a schizophrenic babbling, a litany of reciting as proof all of things which you have just disproved. If you prove that the use of the equality sign or the inequality sign in a linear mathematical expression is everywhere out of correspondence with the real universe, this fellow will come in and try to refute you, with precisely the kinds of systems of linear inequalities that you have just proven do not correspond at any place or any time to the real universe. That's the difference between the creative and the non-creative person. That is the difference between the person who likes the silly banality of these tunesmiths, of humming tunes over and over again, popular tunes. These people are dead. That is moral death, that is intellectual death, because there is no creativity in it. It is monotony. I could easily, if I take the time, get down in a workshop and, with a little bit of fiddling around because I'm rusty on it now, take some electronic parts and make a device that can do that. And you wouldn't want to marry it!

That is not human. That behavior is not human. Jazz is not human! Popular music is not human! Rameau was not human. That is inhumanity; if your mind identifies with that kind of thing, you destroy your own mind. If that is your pleasure, that is your mental death. If you divide your life into two parts--"One part is my profession, the other part is my personal life"--what you are in your profession will reveal itself in your personal life. Do not tell me you are a scientist if you like this kind of garbage, because your personal life reveals you. "Take a few cans of beer, get our socks off, and tell dirty jokes." I know about that.

It is the same thing that goes wrong with our education. We take some poor ambitious fellow who wants to prove to Mummy that he is going to be a success. He goes to school. He is given a textbook. Now, you have regular lies, you have extreme lies, and then you have textbooks. Because somebody falsified something, they put a series of things together in a completely incoherent fashion, never explaining where they came from, the child is supposed to perform exercises, or something equivalent to that, with a textbook. In a typical secondary school--I don't know what they have nowadays, but they used to have at least that--they have a list of problems at the end of each chapter, and if you wanted to pass the course, and your were smart, and you knew it was all garbage, you would start with the end of the book. Do you want to "master" a course cheap? Go to the end of the textbook, and then find out what in the textbook you have to do to solve these problems, and work your way backward. Or work your way to the point that you can do that, and then work your way forward. Start backwards. And then you become very mentally and morally backwards.

There is nothing real to it, but nevertheless, people still come out saying that their personal identity is associated with this textbook learning. They become an information retrieval device. But in these days of computers we don't need such people anymore. They have made themselves obsolete. Once we put this kind of stupid logic, this deductive logic into a computing device, and make these computing devices fairly cheap per-unit process, what do we need these people for? We have just put the textbook out of business, because people who think like textbooks, are not needed by the human race! We are getting to the point that we can devise a machine to do anything that a jazz singer can do, and probably better and faster and more often, and with greater pleasure in what they are doing.

What we need from human beings is that which distinguishes the human being from the machine or the beast, the power to create. And more than the power to create as such, the power to communicate creative power to others. That is what Beethoven represents. I do not know how many people--scientists, statesmen and others, who have contributed to the progress of humanity over the past 150 years or more--are really deeply indebted to that silent training and evocation of the creative powers of their own minds, that Beethoven represents.

That is why I hate Toscanini so much for his Beethoven recordings. He killed him and then embalmed him. I don't like to see my friend Beethoven murdered, the way Toscanini used to murder him, with his fascist simplicity. Toscanini was the Albert Speer of musical conducting.

I know that when I am saturated with Beethoven, I am restored. When I have had my fill of the philistines that we have to deal with, with Beethoven I am restored because I am partaking in a form of communication whose immediately characteristic feature is the creative powers of the human mind, which is the function of music for children and adults alike.

There are some people who try to separate emotion from knowledge. That is not possible, except in schizophrenia, where there is no knowledge. Emotion is the most essential part of all knowledge. Passion is the essence of creativity. Where there is no passion, there is no creativity. The essence of art, particularly as Beethoven exemplifies it, is to remind us, to instruct us exactly what that creativity is.

To underline this, let us take the case of Madame de Staël and her Nazi movement. Because actually, the Nazi movement was invented in Burgundy and Venice, in the form of romanticism, as typified by Wagner, Rameau, and the attempt to destroy Zarlino in the sixteenth century. The creative element in music, the difference between a blank and a real musician is that in real music the passion, the beauty, the excitement, is not located in chromatic sensual effects--that is romanticism. It is not located in the "freedom" of the "interpreter"--another word for liar--certain "gratifying effects," idiosyncrasies for which he is famous. The performer is properly enslaved to the music, not in any rigorous programmed sense, but in the sense that in great contrapuntal music, there is a progress of development, rigorous development: the creation of problems in a rigorous way, not an arbitrary way. There is 'also the solution of these problems in a rigorous way, not an arbitrary way--a solution which enlarges the power of music to create. A scientific discovery in music, in short.

The excitement of music is the same excitement that you feel in a profound scientific discovery, or the excitement that a child experiences in solving a problem and re-experiencing discoveries made before: The passion of music is the experience of that light turning on in your head at the point you have made a discovery. It is an emotion which is precisely congruent with love, in the most profound sense of love. To love someone is to love them in precisely these terms of passion--the passion of discovery, the passion to create, to elevate by creativity, to communicate something which will become immortally useful. That is, love, and music, and Beethoven especially, if properly performed, presents you with tension--the tension of a problem which you cannot deny.

In the hearing of music, in the performing of music, the duty of the performer and the composer is to guide the mind of the audience through every stage of this process, to focus, to put the question mark at the point of anomaly, the question mark at the point of discontinuity--tension, doubt, bewilderment. How do we solve this? There is a process of development, around discontinuity and anomaly, tension, just as there is in trying to solve a scientific problem, until you come to the verge of a solution. You recognize it, the climax but not the end. Now, you have to verify this, you have to make it coherent. You have to integrate this, which leads you to the stretto, or the equivalent of the composition. Then the mind knows that that particular part of the composition has been completed, is perfected. The great performer must bring that forth.

But of course he cannot do so if it is not there in the musk. The great problem of the performer is not to interpret the composition, in the way that some people define interpretation loosely; it is to get inside the composition and to find some more ingenious way, without violating what the composer intended, to bring forth in the audience precisely that recognition--to bring the audience not to recognize a sequence of effects, but to bring the audience into a process of composition.

Most performers do not allow you to realize that in a thoroughly composed sonata form, three or four movements may be of one type; they may be one composition. The experience of that as a compositional process is taken away from the audience by the performance, and at most, the performers get you through one movement at a time. Then, there is another movement that seems to be pasted onto it, because it seemed like a good idea to complement or contrast the preceding movement with this one.

Beethoven teaches us, elevates us, teaches us to be creative, teaches us that creativity is not simply the configuration of notes, that creativity involves emotion, the emotion of love-real love; whereas the romantic pursues any effect which happens to be pleasing at the movement, "anything which amuses my jaded appetites, anything idiosyncratic, anything arbitrary." A romantic composer works on the same principle of love as does the prostitute. People who like to perform romantic music, are therefore, what?

A child's most common question is" Why?"

Why are vital development projects like this Brazilian nuclear complex being dismantled?

Why are U.S. family farms, the most productive agricultural units in the world, being driven into bankruptcy, while millions in Africa are starving?

On Beethoven: There are many things to which I am indebted, but I could have accomplished none of these without Leibniz and Beethoven. Why?

Here you are, a young fellow out there. You know there is something wrong with all the stuff going on around you. You must have a reference point. You say, am I insane? I know I am right, but what's wrong, why is it like this? Is there somebody out there, who has gone through this before, who embodies the experience of those who have gone through this problem before, who can help me see the answer to my question as a child, "Why?" Without Leibniz, I would have had no sense of security, no sense of optimism. But one of the most celebrated minds in modern science agreed precisely with me on this question, and could inform my mind and respond to me. So I didn't care about these other teachers; I knew that they were a bunch of philistines who knew nothing. Here was one of the great minds who answered the question, and these fellows were incompetent because they could not answer the question.

Beethoven--because without the sense, you cannot think of knowledge abstractly, and so you have to think of love. You have to locate yourself inside the human species. You cannot be an eccentric on a mountaintop isolated from humanity. There must be that unifying sharing of love with humanity, as well as this rigorous passion for discovery, without which the complete individual, the creative individual, is impossible.

So, for these two people above all, and for everything they represented, and everything that went into them, we are all indebted to that interval of German culture exemplified by the span of Leibniz and the influence of Beethoven. We could not be ourselves, we could not be anything worthwhile, without that phase of German culture.

In Leibniz's time, France was the great nation. When Napoleon became emperor of France, France ceased to be a great nation. After 1815, France was destroyed except for a few individuals, who were fighting, fragmented and largely scattered and defeated. France was destroyed; the philistines had conquered it.

Germany, rising from the ashes of the Thirty Years War--which is another creation of people like Metternich, and the Calvinists of Switzerland-- turned to France and to some degree Italy, in order to rebuild Germany. So as Italy was being crushed, as France rose and was then crushed, so Germany succeeded France as the focal point of development.

This is exemplified by the relationship between Lazare Carnot and Alexander von Humbolt. Science was crushed in France by people like Buffon, who was the father of modern degenerate statistics; by Laplace, probably one of the most evil men that ever existed, with the assistance of Lagrange; and by the most degenerate mathematician that ever existed (next to Kronecker), Cauchy. French science was destroyed. The work of the École Polytechnique was deliberately destroyed by the Swiss, the Burgundians. The enemies of Louis Xl's France had conquered France, in the person of an Orleans, who is owned by Schlumberger, de Neuflize, and Mallet--this Burgundian horde, which prostitutes France to the present day.

Germany was crushed politically in 1850, but continued the struggle through the conspiracy in science centered around the brothers von Humboldt, along with Lazare Carnot's conspiracy to move science from France, where it could not exist, to Prussia, where it might, despite the royal family of Prussia which had betrayed the German people.

What destroyed France? Was it the Jacobins? Was it the Swiss alone? No. The destruction of France goes back to the fall of Colbert, when these Jacobins, these Swiss, these tribes of Mallet, the black nobility of Burgundy, and elsewhere took over France--the Jesuits. France was destroyed by Descartes. René Descartes destroyed French culture and destroyed much of European culture. He is much cleverer than that stupid Newton, or that prostitute in Britain called Hooker, who did most of Newton's work for him. France was destroyed by the French materialists, by the French Physiocrats, and again Jesuits all.

These were the enemies of Louis XVI. Who chopped his head off? Why, because he was a tyrant? He was not a tyrant; he was caught in a system that was tyrannical, but he was not a tyrant. When Lafayette proposed to make a constitutional monarchy around the king, this was not simply a piece of opportunism. The Bourbon family, as such, was not the problem; it was the French nobility, the black nobility, the Physiocrats, the Jesuits who were the problem.

The Oratorian order was destroyed by the Jacobins as soon as they could do it. These forces in France typified by Lazare Carnot and later by Louis Pasteur, were trying to make a comeback for civilization, trying to restore the Golden Renaissance, to crush the black oligarchy.

Who had their heads chopped off under the Jacobins? The king and other friends of the American Revolution. By whom? By the Swiss and by the British. Marat is the epitome of that--a Swiss degenerate, trained and recruited by SIS in London, run together with the Mallets and the ruling families of Britain, who, like Danton--also a British agent--was sent to behead France. The question of 1789 was who was going to behead whom, and by the time that Carnot and his friends made that glorious effort called Thermidor, which ought to be the French national holiday today--the greatest day in modern French history was Thermidor-- unfortunately it was too late. Too many people who were vital had been beheaded, too many institutions had been destroyed. And so, in Prussia, in Germany along the Rhineland, among the Huguenot circles in Prussia and in the Prussian court, there was an effort to advance civilization in Europe at a time when, everywhere else in Europe, civilization was dying.

So, we must look at German classical culture as I am indebted to it personally, and as I exemplify in this respect the general debt we have. German classical culture must be seen, not as something national, apart; it must be seen as a product of the indefatigable spirit of creativity in our culture and civilization. When greatness is crushed in one place, the spirit of greatness will move to another people who are receptive to it at that moment. It will not merely repeat in that area what it has accomplished and lost in the other; it will build, just as Scharnhorst's system was an amplification of Carnot's. Scharnhorst's system had political features which are not in Carnot. Carnot created the military system, the essence; Scharnhorst and his collaborators perfected it.

The modern military tradition is not a German creation in that sense, but it was perfected in Germany on the basis of what had been done immediately prior to that by Lazare Carnot, who was the political, philosophical ally of the Prussians who did this; the Carnot who was patriot and an enemy of that butcher and traitor, Napoleon. The great myth of France is that Napoleon is a national hero. Carnot is the hero.

Who built France and who destroyed it? Napoleon, with his imperial fantasies, fostered by the Genoese and the Swiss, and even to some degree the British, who played with him. Napoleon destroyed the program of Dante, of Cusa. He destroyed the program of the French Revolution, the American Revolution. He destroyed it from the moment that he went into Italy with his first Italian campaign. The Italian patriots turned on him with hatred, because they had thought a friend, a republican had come in arms, and they found just the opposite: another imperial tyrant on the Roman model, controlled by the Swiss from the time he had been associated with Robespierre and the Jacobin faction when he was a captain of artillery. Oh yes, he was a good artillery officer, and ail you had to be was a well-trained artillery officer in France and you could beat any other army in Europe at that time. The French knew something about artillery that nobody else did, as Vauban's and Monge's work shows. Napoleon had the intelligence and competence to utilize the inventions, the creation of Monge and Carnot, but he could not create it, and in spirit he was antithetical to it.

I am a humane person. I say bad things about the Soviets, and justly so. I am very careful not to say what I really feel, because that would be too strong-- I mean it! What they represent is a horror! Do not try to explain it in terms of Marx or Communism; it is a horror. It does not come from Russia; it comes partly from India. It comes from the Harappan culture, Shakti, the Harappan name for the Whore of Babylon. It represents the evil "blood and soil" cultures which degrade men to the condition of beasts, where the individual mind is not recognized as a reality. Everything that we should think is precious to us, is denied and abhorred among these barbarians.

The Russians are not the worst people on earth by any means. They are simply among the bad varieties the most dangerous. We have people down in Africa and other parts of the world, who, if they had anything like the power the Soviets have, would really be a terror for us. If such cultures were to dominate the world, it would mean the extinction of humanity. The Russians are the practical problem of the moment, as are our own oligarchical families, who are more evil than the Soviets because they are degenerate; the Soviets are merely underdeveloped morally. That is a vital strategic fact.

Take two cultures on the same level of degradation. One is in the process of developing upward; therefore, that culture will have a certain vitality. The other culture, like Rome, is going downward; that culture has no vitality except the vitality of death. That is our essential weakness. If we tolerate rule by these families, we are essentially doomed. We are going to be destroyed by the Russian barbarians--not necessarily physically destroyed, but more important, our souls are going to be destroyed, or the souls of our children. This precious culture, which we represent, will be obliterated from the earth.

Christianity will be obliterated, despite some fools in the Vatican, who think they can make a peace for a few generations with the church of Moscow. The Soviets will obliterate' it; they will seek to impose their cultural standards upon the world. They will not try to occupy every country in the world; they would rather not occupy it. They do not want to occupy Germany; they simply want to get what they want, when they want it, at the price they want it, and pay when they please. That is what they want from Germany. Why have the trouble? They would rather have Genschers and things like that running Germany, carrying out orders.

The British retreated from their colonies in the post-war period, but the colonial nations are more colonial now than they were before 1945, because the British and the French and the Belgians discovered that it is cheaper to let the slaves administer themselves--so long as they pay the debts and deliver the goods at the price required--than it is to support a colonial apparatus of occupation.

Take the concentration camps. The people inside the concentration camps ran the concentration camps--a much more efficient system, and nations are like concentration camps today. That is the way the Soviets would run it. That is the way the Achaemenid Empire worked. That is the way the Babylonian Empire worked. That is the way the Roman Empire worked. That is the way the Byzantine Empire worked. The system was a satrapal system of semi-autonomous areas which ruled themselves, but according to terms and conditions laid down by the ruling force.

The main drive of the Soviet Empire is not their stealing--that we could tolerate, if we had to; that we could resist. It is not the oppression and killing that they might impose with their slaughter squads-- they are great at the assassination business; they have no respect for individual life. (The Russian command to attack is "Rape!") The danger is, they would destroy our souls, and that would be their objective. An enslaved people, if it retains its souls, can arise to freedom, but a people whose souls are destroyed become their own conqueror, their own destroyer.

The point is not, therefore, simply to win a war with the Soviet Union. Who wants such a war under those conditions? The objective is not war; the objective is to gently change them, over a long time to come if necessary, to persuade them, by methods known to Beethoven, to become better than they are. To civilize them, as some Russians have desired to be civilized, like Pushkin. To be gentle with them, as long as they do not do certain things. The issue here is the very culture which we neglect and allow to be destroyed, as we allow the rock-drugs-sex counterculture to destroy our nations from within.

We are not allies of the Germans in the sense of convenience. We are so only in the eyes of fools who don't understand anything. We are allies of Germany because that is an integral part of our culture, and if we lose that, we lose everything. It is not the physical loss, it is the loss of culture; it is the loss of honor. The reason that we are willing to part with it today, is because we do not prize sufficiently that which is essential: Leibniz, Bach, Schiller, Beethoven.

The purpose of a nation lies, like the purpose of an individual, not within itself, or not primarily so. The purpose of the existence of a republic is its contribution to the advancement and defense of civilization as a whole. In that, the individual, by participating in the work of the republic, becomes a universal person.

The problem of German culture in the postwar period is that the Americans and the British and the Soviets all said, we are not going to let Germany come back again, because Germany caused two world wars. Germany did not cause two world wars. We should have sunk Venice, because the cause of World War I was chiefly a fellow called Volpi di Misurata of Venice, the man who organized and directed the Balkan wars of 1912 to 1914, the man who was behind the assassination of the archduke at Sarajevo, the man who sent Lenin to Russia through his agent Alexander Helphand Parvus, the man that put Mussolini into power, the man who created Libya--not simply as an individual, but for that period the McGeorge Bundy of the Venetian Council of Foreign Relations. These families--Swiss, Venetian, British, and American--put Hitler into power. They created the Nazi movement out of Madame de Staël's boudoir, the boudoir of the Jacobins, the boudoir of the people who hate the Golden Renaissance, like Nietszche, like Dostoevsky, who hate Dante, who hate Raphael, who hate Cusa, who hate the sovereign nation-state, who hate technological progress, who hate the Judeo-Christian conception of the individual person.

These oligarchs, these relics and echoes of the degradations of Mesopotamia, these children of the Whore of Babylon, these worshipers of Isis, of Cybele, of Dionysus, of Lucifer--this is the problem. We must defend ourselves against that and defend culture, and if we do not ennoble, apotheosize, develop, comprehend, what this means, we are not going to survive.

Military means are easy; we can create military means. We can create them overnight. People are capable of doing things they do not even think they are capable of themselves until they are put to the test, if the optimism is there. We could create a revolution in military science. I have seen enough of this stuff floating around to know that the opportunities are all over the place. I do not know what the solutions are, but I know if we got the right people together, we would create it. The problem is the moral problem, a lack of commitment to our culture, a lack of knowledge of what we are fighting for, an attempt to rationalize in terms of greed.

It was delightful to discover something through the aid of a person whose temperament is not unlike my own, but unfortunately deceased, the great Bal Gandgahar Tilak, the man who threw Annie Besant's movement out of India, the great soldier, poet, philologist, lawyer, patriot, who wrote books in which he took advantage of what had been done on Vedic and pre-Vedic astronomy, or astronomical calendars, to be more precise, beginning with Kepler, who was the first to look at the long cycles in the Vedic series of astronomical calendars, and by the immediate teachers of Gauss and Gauss's circle in the nineteenth century. Tilak simply used some of this evidence to demonstrate that the earliest Vedic hymns had to date from before 4,000 B.C. and most probably between 6,000 B.C. and 4,000 B.C., and he proved that he proved it. Then later, on the basis of similar evidence, he proved that the culture from which the Vedic or pre-Vedic culture had emerged, dated tens of thousands of years earlier. In fact, he thought about eight or ten. From what he talked about in terms of the best things we know today, it had to be an interglacial period within the Ice Age, and it had to be in the pole, so you have to find a period in the North Pole in which an urban maritime culture existed before the processes which led into the pre-Vedic culture in Central Asia, and then the aridization which led to the migration of the Aryan people, so-called, in about 3,000 B.C. and so forth, through various parts of the world.

But the point I see in that is that it is easy to demonstrate that a child will and can construct a solar calendar, a fairly accurate calendar, automatically, if he just lives in the right culture. The simplest thing to construct a calendar is to observe the morning sun, the mid-day sun, the setting sun. Take these same shots and shoot them against the night-time sky and make a few comparisons. Yu will measure the year, from perhaps solstice to solstice, or equinox to equinox. In about five years, you will have created a calendar of about 364 and a quarter days. No lunar calendars exist or need exist.

This sort of calendar indicates that sometime a long time ago, science began in such forms as astronomy. There were great cultures, but nonetheless despite the antiquity of such cultures, we find that in the recent 10,000 years of so of humanity, the apparently dominant cultures have been evil cultures of the type that the New Testament refers to as the Whore of Babylon: the goddess Ishtar, the Chaldean goddess Astarte, Isis, Cyebele, Magna Mater, Shakti.

Worldwide, China once had a great culture. We do not know what happened to that from thousands of years ago. Prior to 1,000 B.C., the level of culture in Central America was much higher than it was when Columbus and the Conquistadors arrived. The world history of humanity is largely a history of degeneration of cultures, and most of the things that are called primitive cultures are not; they are simply offshoots of degeneration, of failed cultures, dead cultures, degenerate cultures, immoral cultures.

Then look at us, and look at what we call Judeo-Christian European civilization. Look at the short and precious span of that. Ask yourself, what would be the condition of humanity as a whole if that culture were not dominant? Could there be humanity amid all these relics of degeneracy around the, world without the spark and influence special to Western European, republican, Neoplatonic Judeo-Christian culture and conception of the individual and of the individual mind? We are the only culture in the world that is free of the dogma of Ishtar, of the dogma of the mother earth-goddess. Others have good qualities in them, but they are contaminated heavily by mother earth, by Isis. We even allow people to worship Isis and call themselves Christians--British Freemasons; they worship officially the Whore of Babylon.

Only in this Neoplatonic republican faction of Western European Judeo-Christian civilization is there the spark which might assure the non-self- extinction of the human race. It is not Soviet conquest that is a danger itself; it is, the extinction of this precious spark of culture. It is for that that we fight.

We hold in our hands from our predecessors, we hold in our hands from all humanity, known and unknown before us, the obligation to defend, to propagate and to develop this precious heritage of our culture. And the alliance among our people is not simply based on resisting the Russian bear and his imperial delusions. The alliance is not an alliance against; it must be an alliance for that which promises, at least, to make the future of humanity human.