Lyndon LaRouche: make-believe scholar
Did he even bother to read the Cliffs Notes summaries before setting himself up as the world's greatest expert on Shakespeare, Homer and Aeschylus?
By "Eaglebeak"
(Originally posted on Factnet as "The View from Windbag Hill: Gleanings from the Briefing Room Floor.")
Here are a few excerpts from recent briefings [daily reports from LaRouche headquarters] emailed to me by someone who thought I might want to comment. And so I did.
First, here's LaRouche on the Latin language:
"That's how the Italians became civilized, they got rid of Latin, or to a large degree....This idea that Italian was a product of Latin, it's an idiocy! Anybody who looks at Italian knows its [sic] an idiocy: There’re [sic] no particles in Latin. Latin was actually a polyglot synthetic language developed by the Cult of Delphi, in the process of getting rid of the existing culture in Rome at the time. So they got rid of the Etruscans and they destroyed all record of the Etruscan language--except names on grave sites. Why? Because the Roman script is based on the Etruscan. So they had to get rid of the traces of the Etruscan language, because it was only by the aid of rape that they got Latin-speakers going!....
LaRouche seems to be dredging up a murky memory of the legend of the rape of the Sabine women (depicted here in Hans Rottenhammer's 1597 painting). The problem is, the Sabines were not Etruscans.
"So, now, the French language, and Romanian, and Spanish, and to some degree, largely, Portuguese, are languages which are products of Italian! But polluted with a certain number of Latin loan words, which were the technical terms, like equus and [cavallo?]--difference. So, the obvious kinds of things. As a matter of fact, in France, during the 19th century, until the late 19th century, Parisian French was not spoken. French as a form of Italian was spoken. This kind of thing!
"So that, the development of poetry--and Latin has very poor poetry; it doesn't have good poetry. Singing Latin is very tough stuff--until you Italianize like hell, you can't make it work!"
Comments:
This passage is made especially funny when (a) you know that Lyn doesn't know Latin; (b) you know that Lyn knows almost nothing about Etruscan; (c) you realize that Lyn is desperately striving (and failing) to remember the idiotic speech on Latin that Webster Tarpley[FN 1] gave at the Labor Committee's "Roosevelt Hotel Conference" in December 1981.
Take it from the top.
"There're no particles in Latin." Rubbish--there are all kinds of particles in Latin. Quidem. Don't look, but there goes one now.
Maybe Lyn meant "articles"--and this would be true. Latin lacks indefinite and definite articles. And the appropriate response would be: so what?
Never mind all the claptrap about Delphi and the Etruscans. The Roman alphabet derives from the same source that the alphabet of the (non-Indo-European) Etruscan language derives from: the Western Greek Cumaean alphabet. The Greek alphabet, of course, derives from the Semitic (gasp) alphabet of the Phoenicians.
So, no, "they" didn't get rid of the Etruscan language to destroy the original Roman culture. Latin is, of course, an Indo-European language--and Lyn was always a huge fan of Indo-European languages, and inflection, until he discovered that Latin is more inflected than Greek, at which point he smelled a plot.
The ever-obliging Webster Tarpley, who at least had the advantage of knowing Latin, prepared a totally specious speech to "prove" Lyn's thesis that Latin was a fascist, imperialist linguistic construct.
When Lyn stutters and stammers incoherently about "But polluted with a certain number of Latin loan words, which were the technical terms, like equus and [cavallo?]--difference,” he's referring to one of Webster's key "proofs" that the Romance languages descended, not from Latin, but from Italian, and that Italian did not descend from Latin.
That "proof" was the fact that the French word for horse is cheval; the Italian, cavallo; the Spanish, caballo. But, said Webster triumphantly, the Latin word for horse is equus. Therefore, we see that French and Spanish (and Portuguese and Romanian) are derived from Italian, not this fake language Latin.
Of course, Webster did not bother to tell his glazed-eyed audience that, just as English has more than one word for horse (horse, steed, nag, courser, etc. etc.), so does Latin. Guess what one of those words is? Caballus. The Latin word for horseman is caballarius--suspiciously like, for example, Spanish caballero, or French chevalier.
See what I mean? It is believed that Latin got the word caballus from Gaulish--a Celtic tongue--from whence it passed through to the Romance languages.
Well, you get the idea. Webster was intellectually dishonest in his speech because he was trying to curve-fit to prove Lyn's ridiculous point.
And Lyn now vaguely remembers something about that equus/cavallo stuff, but he's not too clear on the details...Was he ever?
Meanwhile, having trashed Latin as a synthetic fascist tongue with no idea-content, Lyn was hard-pressed to explain the great Latin writers from classical times to modernity--people from Virgil to Augustine to Leibniz. (Oh, and what was the great Leibniz’s favorite book? Virgil’s Aeneid. Hmm.)[FN 2]
And then we have Lyn's marvelous coda (from the Latin word cauda, meaning tail): "So that, the development of poetry--and Latin has very poor poetry; it doesn't have good poetry."
Absolutely. No great Latin poets here. No Virgil, no Ovid, no Catullus, no Horace, no Juvenal, no Lucan. In later years, no Petrarch (most of what he wrote, kiddies, he wrote in Latin).
No great Latin writers. No Cicero, no Tacitus, no Livy, no Lucretius, no Sallust, no Pliny, no Jerome, no Augustine, no Thomas Aquinas, no Leibniz...
Can there be any doubt that Lyn is the world's greatest lover of the Classics, and their greatest exponent? His capacities in Latin are surpassed only by his mastery of Greek.
Just ask him.
And now, LaRouche on Shakespeare:
"Let me give another example of this: What is taught, and has been taught for some time, in universities and similar locations, is that the principle of tragedy is the principle of the tragic figure on the stage or the tragic figure in history. Well, that's a bunch of bunk. Shakespeare didn't believe that. Aeschylus didn't believe that. Tragedy comes from the mass stupidity and corruption of the mass of the people. And the tragedy occurs because there is no leader who defies the generally accepted opinion of the people.
"Tragedy occurs because the culture is tragic. For example, Shakespeare had gotten into a period where Bacon had taken over, under James I. And Shakespeare was the target of these characters. So he could no longer do the kind of drama that he'd been doing before. So he changed his drama to bring in things like Hamlet and things like the Scottish and English plays, which are all inherently tragedies of the most disgusting quality. Lear is a depiction of a purely disgusting culture. Macbeth: a purely disgusting culture. Hamlet: a purely disgusting culture, with disgusting people in it.
"In this thing, as in Hamlet, for example, you have one figure, who really doesn't participate in the action, but just comments on it at the end, and says, 'Let's relive these events before we do some more foolishness,' at the end. But Hamlet is not a tragic figure! Hamlet is a representation of his entire culture. The culture of Denmark was a rotten culture! It was the culture that went down, with Shakespeare's play! Macbeth was a rotten culture! There were no heroes in Macbeth. Lear: There are no heroes; there are only fools, and corrupt people.
"Alas, poor Yorick, Lyn skimped on thy health insurance."
"So, Shakespeare had no heroes to portray any more, because it was against the law, so to speak, under James I and Francis Bacon. That's the true nature of culture. And that's what Aeschylus teaches you, as I've gone through this before. Let's just review it: Let's take the two Classical dramas which are famous, the ancient dramas--the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, one man comes out alive, hmm?--a success. In the Iliad, nobody comes out alive. As a matter of fact, they don't all die at once. Successive generations of them die! What is Aeschylus doing? Aeschylus is pointing out the continuation of the implications of the Iliad. That the culture is rotten! And all the people in it, are rotten. With the exception of Athena in two places, in the Iliad, where she plays a different role as the Egyptian goddess; and then, of course, in the Odyssey, in that form.
"But the problem is, that the culture is rotten! And it's that the culture is rotten, is a paradigm of the culture of European civilization today. European civilization has the legacy, the tragic legacy, in it of the Iliad, and of the Aeschylus tragedies. And they're all part of the same--Aeschylus was working on the Iliad tragedy as a continuation of the Iliad tragedy, as what was wrong with Greek culture. What was rotten in it!"
Comments:
Hard to know where to begin, but maybe Lyn's definition of "tragedy" as coming "from the mass stupidity and corruption of the mass of the people," with the "tragedy [occurring] because there is no leader who defies the generally accepted opinion of the people” is as good a place as any.
Why? Because it expresses Lyn's two most heart-felt emotions: Humanity is rotten, stupid, and corrupt. And there is no Great Leader except himself.[FN 3]
Here's the acme of Lyn's Shakespearean criticism: "For example, Shakespeare had gotten into a period where Bacon had taken over, under James I. And Shakespeare was the target of these characters. So he could no longer do the kind of drama that he’d been doing before. So he changed his drama to bring in things like Hamlet and things like the Scottish and English plays, which are all inherently tragedies of the most disgusting quality. Lear is a depiction of a purely disgusting culture. Macbeth: a purely disgusting culture. Hamlet: a purely disgusting culture, with disgusting people in it."
No wonder Lyn pulled Ken Kronberg (and Paul Gallagher) out of the drama work. Ken was way too smart to fall in with Lyn's nonsense, and in those days Paul wasn't a cretin either. (I don't know about now.)
On the "details, details" front: Shakespeare was targeted by Francis Bacon and James I? One would like to see a teensy bit of evidence for that. Lyn's assertion that Shakespeare had to change his drama "to bring in things like Hamlet" is a little jumbled, inasmuch as Hamlet was most likely written around 1597, under Elizabeth I, and published in 1600, still under Elizabeth I (who died in 1603).
However, we shouldn't entirely pooh-pooh Lyn's erudition, because Hamlet may have been substantially reworked before it was published again in 1604, under James I. Maybe someone told Lyn that.
"Things like the Scottish and English plays"--who on earth knows what that means? The Scottish play, of course (there's only one of them), is Macbeth. "The English plays"? Does he mean the History plays? With the single exception of Henry VIII, those were all written before James I came to the throne.
The chronology of Shakespeare's plays is, to put it mildly, a vexed subject.
But here are the plays believed to have been written under James I:
1602-03 All's Well That Ends Well
1604-05 Measure for Measure
1604-05 Othello
1605-06 King Lear
1605-06 Macbeth
1606-07 Antony and Cleopatra
1607-08 Coriolanus
1607-08 Timon of Athens
1608-09 Pericles
1609-10 Cymbeline
1610-11 The Winter's Tale
1611-12 The Tempest
1612-13 Henry VIII
That's one Scottish play, two pre-English British plays (Lear and Cymbeline), and one History play--an outlier.
Who knows what Lyn means when he says "Scottish and English plays"? He certainly doesn't.
Another conundrum: When Lyn says Shakespeare had "no heroes to portray any more" under James I, that presupposes that he portrayed heroes under Elizabeth I. Let's ask Lyn to name a few. You know, just to show his familiarity.
LaRouche on the Greeks:
We've seen Lyn on Latin--let's see how he does with the Greeks. To repeat the relevant portion of the above passage on Shakespeare:
"And that's what Aeschylus teaches you, as I've gone through this before. Let's just review it: Let's take the two Classical dramas which are famous, the ancient dramas--the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, one man comes out alive, hmm?--a success. In the Iliad, nobody comes out alive. As a matter of fact, they don't all die at once. Successive generations of them die! What is Aeschylus doing? Aeschylus is pointing out the continuation of the implications of the Iliad. That the culture is rotten! And all the people in it, are rotten. With the exception of Athena in two places, in the Iliad, where she plays a different role as the Egyptian goddess; and then, of course, in the Odyssey, in that form."
Anybody? The ancient dramas the Iliad and the Odyssey are, of course, not dramas, but epics. But we know Lyn well enough to know he won't be troubled with any questions of form.
Here's what the greatest mind of the millennium takes away from two of the greatest works of Classical Antiquity: In the Iliad, no one comes out alive. In the Odyssey, one guy comes out alive. Oh, and their culture is all rotten, and all the people are rotten.
No wonder LYM [LaRouche Youth Movement] recruits drop out of school to follow this genius.
Another "details, details" question--does Lyn think Aeschylus wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey? I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he's commenting on what Aeschylus portrayed as the aftermath of the Trojan War. I don't remember Aeschylus pointing out that everybody's rotten, any more than Homer did.[FN 4]
But that's just me.
So here we have the greatest mind of human civilization characterizing all art as portraying one fundamental truth about mankind: You all stink.
Okay, that's Art Appreciation 101 with Lyndon LaRouche.
Last one to leave, turn out the lights.
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Footnotes by D. King:
[1] Webster Tarpley is a former top aide to LaRouche who dropped out of the cult in the mid-1990s. He then set himself up as what one might call a conspiracy entrepreneur, giving lectures and peddling books that articulate a kind of LaRouchism without LaRouche. He is a leading proponent of the theory that rogue elements in and around the U.S. government were behind the World Trade Center terror attack in 2001. His books are sold through various far right outlets, including the website of Argentina's sinister National Condor Movement, while articles under his byline have appeared in the American Free Press, a weekly founded by the neo-Nazi Willis Carto.
[2] LaRouche claimed in his autobiography, The Power of Reason (1979), that he had read Leibniz in high school and had conducted imaginary conversations in his head with a "collectivity" of Leibniz, Kant and Descartes. He has also asserted that many of his greatest purported intellectual achievements were inspired by Leibniz, that Leibniz was the intellectual author of the American Revolution, that Benjamin Franklin had been a Leibnizian, etc.
[3] I think we need to make a distinction between LaRouche's factual errors re philology, Shakespeare, etc., on the one hand, and his "ideological" comments, on the other. If the latter are interpreted according to their overt meaning, they seem demented. But viewed as psychological manipulation they are actually quite brilliant. Here we can see Lyn locking the members of the LaRouche Youth Movement--prison door after prison door--into a system of nested cognitive framings that cuts them off from the influence of the outside world.
The recruit ends up believing that the entire outside world is (and always has been) completely rotten--and salvation can only come by standing with one's LYM comrades, and with Lyn himself, in the final conflict against this entire rotten heritage (which means dropping out of your rotten college and working 16 hours a day at a card table shrine trying to cadge donations from rotten passers-by). Viewed from this angle, the supposed ramblings of LaRouche suddenly make sense. The master, in other words, has not lost his touch--and is certainly not senile.
And then there's the extra twist he's added over the past decade--the assertion that the organization's "Boomers" have become as rotten as the outside world. The only purity and truth--LaRouche now suggests--is in his new parallel organization: the LaRouche Jugend.
Frankly, I think LaRouche is really going to succeed in his final master stroke. I think he will leave behind a new generation of followers to carry on his cult after his death.
Whether these young people--many of them recruited out of high school and lacking the skills needed in today's world--will ever get LaRouchism back to first base politically (where it was in the early and middle 1980s), or get it to second or third base, is another question altogether. Maybe they'll end up living in caves outside Chicago and wearing gas masks on military patrol, like in Howard Chaykin's comic-book vision of a post-nuclear-holocaust LaRouche movement.
[4] Read further comments by "eaglebeak" here on LaRouche's ignorance of Greek literature.
