Start with the canals on the moon NOW!
I keep half a thought in reading King’s book on what I could drag out onto this blog. It seems most of what I’d want to settle from his book onto here, for … oh… Chris? … I’ve already done and dealt with, independent of goddamned or godblessed Dennis King. But some things pop out, the mainstream media of which I had relied on was not paying attention to some things, some things that pop out in Larouchian discourse today. Witness:
Item #1:Â an encounter I recently had trying to cross Commonwealth Avenue. Somebody (who looked and sounded like a German exchange student) approached me and said, “What are your plans for the development of the solar system in the next fifty years?”
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked. I thought perhaps I had misheard him.
He repeated, “What are your plans for the development of the solar system in the next fifty years?”
I explained to my interlocutor (whom I will call Hans) that I did not have any plans for the development of the solar system in the next fifty years. Space travel is costly and time-consuming, and fifty years from now I imagined us possibly somewhere in the late-exploration, maybe early-colonization phase — but definitely not in the development age.
Hans wanted to know why I didn’t have plans to develop the solar system.
I tried to explain that with the time and distance involved, it wasn’t practical, and that more importantly, I didn’t particularly care about developing the solar system.
Hans wanted to put 200 billion people on Mars. Then he started talking about how modern science was a conspiracy against human progress. Then he asked why I hadn’t read the complete works of Kepler. Then he talked about Bush and the Right-Wing Conspiracy. I think all my professors were in the conspiracy as well.
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Item #2:  One of those fascinating items from our history is Operation Paperclip. It is something worthy of speculative and uneasy conspiratorial fodder. The United States and the Soviet Union inarguarted the Cold War by scooping up Nazi scientists, and employing them in our military industrial complexes. Cheekily, we can credit the advantage the Soviets had over the Americans in the early Space Race with the fact that they happened to have nabbed better Nazis than we did.
The uneasy conspiratorial speculation runs along the lines of — to what degree did they infect their host nations with their nazi ideologies? If I were thinking a bit more darkly, I would contemplate that the nazis had a sort of alliance across the two spheres of influence, and continued to plot and proceed plotting with their dreams of the 1,000 Year Reich. This is sort of dashed quickly, because it seems we more easily had two sets of Dr. Strangelove types. In the American case, advocating SDI not so much for defense, but for offense against the Soviets.
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Item #3: From Dennis King’s book (You know the one), pages 80-81 or thereabouts…
FEF = Fusion Energy Foundation, Larouchian advocacy organization. old-timers = ex-Nazi scientists, here in the 1980s. Kraft Ehricke (*)
In 1985 the old-timers held their fortieth reunion at the Alabama Space and Rocket Museum beneath a giant picture of von Braun. Linda Hunt, a former Cable Network News reporter, recalled a darkened auditorium full of aging Naziss eagerly watching a slide show of the latest laser-beam weapons. She said taht when the lights went on, the FEF’s Marsha Freeman went to the front and delivered a tirade against the OSI to ahearty applause.
This event was mild compared with the Krafft Ehricke Memorial Conference held that year in Reston, Virginia. Sponsored by the FEF and the Schiller Institue, it united support for SDI, defense of Nazi war criminals, glorification of Peenemunde, and a messianic vision of the conquest of outer space. Fusion boasted that participants included “military, scientific, and diplomatic representatives from four continents.” Former top Nazi cientist Hermann Oberth sent greetings from West Germany hailing Ehricke’s “vision of Homo Saphiens Extraterrestris,'” the New Man who would leave behind the “flaming harbors of the Earth.” Speakers included Admiral Zenker and Peenemunde rocketeer Konrad Dannenberg. Larouche gave the keynote address, entitled “Krafft Ehricke’s Enduring Contribution to the Future Generations of Global and Interplanetary Civilization.” Resoultions were passed calling on President Reagan to adopt Laourhce’s crash program for SDI and halt the Justice Department’s investigations of the old timers. Since the only timers being probed were those allegedly served at Mittelwerk, the FEF/Schiller Institute’s hoopla about underground factories on the moon and the spirit of Peemunde in space technology was suggestive, at the least.
Over the next two years LaRouche assumed Krafft Ehricke’s mantle. He outlined plans for cities on Mars and in the asteroid belt — an extension of his earlier earthbound citybuilding schemes so reminiscent of the SS plans for Aryan colonies in occupied Russia. His prototype design for a space city was based on the geometry of cosmic spirals. He said his inspiration had come from the work of German scientists who, at the end of the war, while “awaiting reassignments” had amused themselves by drawing up plans for rebuilding the Ruhr.
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Item #4, from an ex-Larouchite posting at FACTNet, a fairly quick clip on how these associations damned legitimate technological goals:Â Democracy is not a strongpoint for Lyn, and no matter how valid some of his views may seem they reflect the worst aspects of Plato’s philosopher king ideal. To this day, I still support the idea of fusion research, although again Lyn treated it as a catchall, and I have no idea whether the fusion torch will be around in less than another 50 years.
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(*) Great. Even Larouche’s kooky ideas are lifted from elsewhere. Damnedit.