10 JAN 2025 EST EIRNS: by Harley Schlanger
"During each tragic moment of great crisis, every nation, every culture is gripped by the need for a sudden and profound change in its quality of leadership. Its survival then depends upon its willingness to choose a new quality of leadership which is typified by those extraordinarily exceptional individuals who stood, in retrospect like immortal souls, apart from, and above mere popular taste of their time." (Lyndon LaRouche, "The Historical Individual", Executive Intelligence Review, November 1, 2002)
The passing of former President Jimmy Carter on December 29, 2024, at the age of 100, was met with sentimental remembrances and expressions of nostalgia, praise for his honesty and decency, and admiration for what a {Washington Post} columnist described as his "golden post-presidency." Others, in keeping with the polarization of our times, were less charitable. To them, he was described as weak and indecisive, whose presidency was brought to its knees by Islamic radicals who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979 and took 52 hostages, holding them for 444 days, not releasing them until the day his successor, Ronald Reagan, was inaugurated.
Carter's election in 1976 was fueled to some extent by voters seeking an escape from the intense polarization of the preceding years. The urban violence and assassinations of the 60s, the Vietnam war, episodes of campus unrest and "Black Power" activism, Watergate, and reports of government spying on civilians and CIA covert operations, which were the subject of the Church Committee, in hearings beginning in January 1975, fostered cynicism about politics and politicians in general.
To many, Carter, a Georgia Governor and a peanut farmer, seemed to be a welcome change. In opening his campaign, he pledged that, as President, "I would not tell a lie....And I would not betray your trust." He entered the White House with a 75% approval rating. But by the end of his third year, as the nation was hit by a series of economic challenges -- high inflation, high unemployment, high energy prices due to the 1979 energy crisis -- his approval rating plummeted to 29%. Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory over Carter in 1980, gathering 489 Electoral votes to just 49 for Carter.
What happened to the momentary wave of release from the tension of the preceding years? In a statement issued by Lyndon LaRouche in December 2006, "I Defend President Jimmy Carter", he offered the following summary: "Former President Jimmy Carter had the great misfortune of being elected during a time that the 1970-1981 destruction of the U.S. economy was the reigning policy imposed upon any President who had the historic misfortune of becoming the scapegoat for the wrecking of our economy which occurred under the hegemony of institutions typified by the Trilateral Commission."
LaRouche was referring favorably to the publication a month earlier of Carter's book on his continuing efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East. In the book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid", Carter argued against the accepted knee-jerk defense of Israel's often murderous military enforcement of the occupation of land ceded by the United Nations and international law to the Palestinians. LaRouche wrote that in Israel's treatment of Palestinians, there "is nothing differing from a continuing practice of Apartheid." He added that in spite of general recognition that this is true, few leaders "are willing to be caught saying that publicly" (see the full statement below).
As President, Carter presided over twelve days of grueling talks between Israel's Prime Minister Begin and Egypt's President Anwar Sadat in September 1978 to hammer out what became known as the Camp David Accords. This was the basis for a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, which was signed in March 1979. While the Accords ended the adversarial status between the two states, which had led to four wars in the preceding forty years, the "Palestinian problem" -- including such thorny issues as the status of Jerusalem and the "right of return" for Palestinas who lost their land -- was left unresolved.
Further, Israel's control over Gaza and the West Bank, which was left unresolved, remains at the center of deadly confrontation to this day, as Netanyahu and his extremist coalition partners remain intent on "recolonizing" those Palestinian territories.
The ultimate failure to resolve the "Palestinian problem" was the topic addressed by Carter in his 2006 book. While he continued a personal crusade to find a solution this problem, playing what LaRouche called "an important role, at times as a virtual maverick" as an ex-President, peace in the holy land remains elusive, and the Apartheid nature of the status quo has degenerated into a genocidal assault against the Palestinians, in response to the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.
The root of this problem is identified by LaRouche as coming from the hegemonic influence of the Trilateral Commission (TLC). Founded in 1973 by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller, the TLC produced a series of working papers, the "1980s Project", which were adopted to be implemented by Carter, who was himself a member, and he promoted many of those who drafted the papers to cabinet and sub-cabinet positions. Among this select group were representatives of what former President Eisenhower identified as the Military-Industrial Complex. This included Defense Secretary Harold Brown, Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal, and Brzezinski, who served as National Security Advisor. Another noted member was Paul Volcker, who had been part of the team responsible for Nixon's decision in August 1971 to scrap the post-war Bretton Woods system. Volcker, who called for the "controlled disintegration" of the existing world economic system, was appointed by Carter Chairman of the Federal Reserve in August 1979.
As an advisor to Carter, and then as Fed chairman, Volcker used his position to affect a controlled disintegration. His tools included deregulation, which began with the airlines, and later imposing record high interest rates, allegedly to fight inflation. While it did cut inflation sharply (as had previous such efforts imposed by Hitler's Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht in Germany in the 1930s), it did so at the expense of the physical economy, leading to deindustrialization, high unemployment and elimination of many family-owned small businesses and family farms. It was the acceptance by Carter of Volcker's policies, combined with an acceleration of anti-technology Green "environmental" regulations, which caused the economic hardships which collapsed support for him.
It was the influence of Brzezinski on foreign policy which is the basis for the tragic legacy of the Carter presidency. In addition to holding back pressure on the Zionists to finalize Camp David -- in order to maintain Israel as a military bulwark for Anglo-American operations in the region -- Brzezinski imposed an updated version of classic British imperial geopolitics as the core of his Russophobic intent. Sometimes called the Arc of Crisis, or the "Islamic card", he applied the axioms of British operative Bernard Lewis to run a new "Great Game" strategy, aimed at breaking apart the Soviet Union, in a divide-and.conquer imperial strategy to prevent the emergence of a Eurasian "rival" to a global Pax Americana.
Long before the "Wolfowitz Doctrine" in the early 1990s insisted upon the U.S. serving as the hegemonic "Sole Superpower", Brzezinski operated with this as his goal. It included the launching of "Project Democracy" as the agency for covert operations leading to false flags to justify wars and regime change coups. The most egregious example of this was his employment of the "Great Game" strategy to lure the Red Army into Afghanistan. Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 24, 1979, Brzezinski convinced Carter in July 1979 to issue a secret "finding" to provide military aid to Afghan rebels opposing the pro-Soviet government. In a January 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski was asked if he had intended to "provoke" a Soviet invasion. "It wasn't quite like that," he said. "We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would."
Asked if he regretted doing so, he replied, "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea....It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap, and you want me to regret it?...(F)or almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that finally brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire."
Left unsaid in this interview is that the use of the "Islamic card" -- the arming and training of Islamic militants -- continued to the present day, with the CIA and MI6 training and deploying terrorist militias which have destabilized the Middle East and attacked targets worldwide, as in Syria today, where yesterday's Al Qaeda head-chopping terror group is being hailed today as "moderate" liberators.
One additional legacy of Brzezinski's intent to break up the Soviet Union as a rival to the U.S. influence was his sabotage of SALT II arms control agreement. After months of negotiations, the U.S. walked out without signing the accord.
Brzezinski intended to weaken Russia was made clear in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard." Among the maxims he crafted was this: "...it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America." This remains the outlook of Brzezinski's heirs, such as Secretary of State Blinken, in continuing to escalate the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
As great classical dramatists, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Schiller, teach us, tragedy does not emanate from the actions of a "tragic figure", but from the accepted axioms of a society which chooses leaders unable to rise above the prevailing popular culture. In declassified documents released from the Carter presidency, there are tangible hints that Carter was not fully on board with Brzezinski's geopolitical hijacking of the U.S.
A declassified NSC Weekly Report delivered by Brzezinski on April 25, 1978 exemplifies this. Brzezinski called for tactics to impose U.S. intentions, including an occasional “demonstration of force ... to infuse fear;” or “saying publicly one thing and quietly negotiating something else.” Carter's hand-written note in the margin responded to this with one word: "lying?"
Brzezinski concluded this report by writing, “The world is just too complicated and turbulent to be handled effectively by negotiating ‘contracts’ while neglecting the need also to manipulate, to influence and to compel.” Whether Carter disagreed with such imperial tactics remains unknown. As LaRouche states in his defense of Carter, his commendable post-presidential activities show that he had an underlying set of moral principles, but was unable to prevail against the power behind the TLC circles surrounding him.
Such is the tragic circumstance which faced Brutus in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar", when he confides to Cassius (Act IV, Scene 3),
"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in sorrows and miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat."
From evaluating the tragic outcome of the presidency of Jimmy Carter, leaders must emerge today in the TransAtlantic world with the strength to overcome the fears and delusions embedded in the population, which otherwise make "historic misfortune" for future generations inevitable.
see: Lyndon LaRouche: I Defend President Jimmy Carter https://larouchepub.com/lar/2006/061210lar_jimmy_carter.html
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