Commission To Be Formed Against the "New Violence"

EIR is in the process of publishing a series of ground-breaking articles by its founder, Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, directed toward arming the American population with the conceptual weapons need to successfully combat what LaRouche has termed the ``New Violence.'' As the global financial casino crumbles as spectacularly as did Roderick Usher's house in the famous Edgar Allan Poe story, the financial ``Wizards of Oz,'' including their Wall Street subsidiary, ``Oz.com,'' exposed, have turned mean. A type of violence, most efficiently identified with the virus of computer-kill-simulation games used to brainwash police trainees, very young children, and adolescents, emerges, designed to drown any effective political resistance to the impending, and inevitable, collapse of the financial oligarchy's house of (credit) cards into a sea of blood and Gore.

Speaking of Vice President Al Gore, who has just re-released his ecological Satanic Bible Earth In the Balance--sometimes referred to by those who have studied it carefully as ``Earth, I'm Imbalanced!!''--it is in the policies of the eponymous candidate, and his media twin, George W. Bush, the ``Texas Chainsaw Governor,'' on health care and education, that we see the spirit of hate behind the eruption of the ``New Violence.'' Jeffrey Steinberg exposes, in his contribution to this Feature, the roots of Al ``I Invented the Internet'' Gore's, and George ``What's the name of that country again?'' Bush's ``education'' policy. He quotes Bertrand Russell's The Impact of Science on Society, where Russell states: ``I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called `education'|'' (emphasis added).

It is the practices of teaching for the test, and of advocating ``computer literacy'' as opposed to Classical literacy, that create hatred for learning in the mind of the child, because it is clear to that child that the society does not value his mind. He or she cannot, usually, effectively fight this ``programmed learning'' by thinking, precisely because they have been ``dumbed down'' by a comic-book-like ``popular culture'' that they have imbibed since infancy--for example, ``Sesame Street.'' Thus, rage. Thus, impotent, violent, anti-social behavior. Thus, an Al Gore/George Bush constituency.

Candidate LaRouche, in response to a question put to him at the April 8 town meeting, held in New York City in response to his urging the formation of a National Commission Against the ``New Violence'' (see below), said, ``We must stir up a fight of sorts, within the teaching profession. Because it's the complicity of large parts of the teaching profession which allows this to go on, and which promotes this. We must address those who are responsible for giving out Prozac, and Ritalin.... They don't know what they are doing. They're just doing it.'' That is the explanation, not only for Columbine High School, but for why Columbine High School can happen in America, at any time.

There is a Bush-Gore constituency, particularly in places such as Silicon Valley, which has chosen to re-name violence and call it entertainment. Under this cover, the same intelligence agencies and Nazi doctors that pioneered the MK-Ultra drug-experiments of the 1950s, have now mass-marketed video games and kill-simulators, turning an illegal multi-agency ``secret government'' project into a ``main-stream'' multibillion-dollar business. This is amply documented by researcher Anton Chaitkin.

Where do we get the present generation of ``Nintendo cops,'' of the variety that kill innocent and unarmed men on the streets of New York City (``Why did you shoot him 16 times?'' ``Well, I thought he had a gun--and I only had 16 bullets.'')? It was the attack on the ``authoritarian personality'' and the idea of Progress, and the enlistment of the Baby-Boomer generation on the side of the anti-authoritarians, that paved the way for the ``New Violence.'' ``If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy,'' stated the conclusion of the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality. The erotic rejection, particularly by ``Baby-Boomer'' parents, of what is crudely termed ``the performance principle''--that is, any efficient responsibility to promote the general welfare of the country, and its posterity (i.e., their children), in favor of Dr. ``Virtual'' Spock methods of child-rearing, results in killer children--precisely as the Frankfurt School alumni intended would be so.

- The long-wave cultural matrix -

You will read in the Steinberg report, that one of the primary goals of Russell and the Dark Age precursors of the ``New Violence,'' was to create a culture of necrophilia, a ``sex/death constituency,'' like the viewer-audience of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). The non-thinking, irrational ``fan''--slang for fanatic--replaces the thinking citizen. The voter is replaced by the consumer. Consumer of what? Of ``WWF,'' ``slasher movies,'' ``Doom,'' ``comedy horror,'' ``gangsta rap,'' of Bushels and Bushels of Gore. That is what Marcuse and his friends, mean by the ``erotic.''

To end the New Violence, demands not a compromise with the present (counter) culture, but an overthrow of it. To that end, EIR presents this initial report, so that our readers may take conceptual ``arms against a sea of troubles, and, by so opposing, end them.''