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This Week in History
April 20 - 26, 1970

This Week in Universal Infamy:
Earth Day/Week: April 16-22, 1970

by Dennis Speed
April 2014 

“There is no human being, no, not one, whom I do not hate. There is no being, no, not one, whom I do not wish to see suffering the absolute extremity of mankind,” wrote Lord Bertrand Russell in an autobiographical short story. Russell, shown here at the UN’s Unesco House receiving the 1957 Kalinga Prize, had gulled public opinion into believing him a philanthropist and lover of peace, until Lyndon LaRouche exposed him as “the most evil public figure of the 20th Century.”

April 22, 1970 , Earth Day, and Earth Week April 16-22, was the official "roll-out" internationally and in the United States of what is today called the "green movement". This was never, in any way, a "grass-roots people's movement", but was merely the culmination of a century-old assault on the republican, anti-"idiocy of rural life" city-builders' culture of progress represented by the assassinated (April, 1865) Abraham Lincoln, and the earlier, also-assassinated physical economist, inventor of the U. S. Treasury and the National Bank, creator of the Paterson, New Jersey-based Society for Useful Manufactures, Founding Father and first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (July, 1804). Both were hated by Wall Street, and for the same reason—their successful launching of industrial-political revolutions against the British oligarchy.

The persecution of science internationally had reached a water shed, well before 1970, with the 1900 Paris attack on experimental science, and promotion of creatively sterile mathematics, by David Hilbert. Hilbert's successor, Bertrand Russell, "the most evil man of the twentieth century", had haunted the halls of American academia personally throughout the 1930s and afterwards, terrifying the world with his October, 1946 proposal to drop nuclear warheads on Russia. The American commitment to applications of already-discovered scientific principles, however, allowed for areas of continued technological advancement, though not fundamental scientific breakthrough. By the 1960s, and particularly with the role of Kennedy's space program, the "Promethean threat" of universal technological optimism, generated largely through Kennedy's Apollo space program, became the target for cultural assassination by European oligarchical figures, such as the Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development's (OECD) Alexander King, and later the Club of Rome.

Julian the Apostate.

Earth Day/Earth Week, strictly speaking, had actually little to do with the 1960s "student movement", although there is a still-pervasive "suburban legend" among surviving Baby Boomer generation members that they "invented the ecology movement"—more or less like Al Gore's infamous contention about his invention of the Internet (or his even more ridiculous contentions about "global warming"). Earth Day/Earth Week of April 1970 was strictly an establishment affair, a re-assassination of JFK's "Apollo economy", and guided by the British Empire's update of the ideological outlook of the emperor Diocletian (A.D. 284-305) of the Eastern Roman Empire, combined with the quasi-religious views of his later (A. D. 361-363) successor, Julian the Apostate, and Julian's pluralist "gods pantheon" (for example, "Gaia" and "the Gaia hypothesis"). Though most young Earth Day participants never expected the truth, or saw it afterwards, Earth Day/Week was actually prepared over a decade and a half in advance, starting, in the United States, with the efforts of the Ford Foundation.

The Pantheon.

"The Ford Foundation also has played a major role in creating and sustaining the environmental movement. Its conference on resource management in 1953...led to the establishment of the first and most prominent environmental think tank, Resources for the Future, which broke new ground by incorporating market economics into thinking about conservation (emphasis added). In the early 1960s the Ford Foundation spent $7 million (approximately $35 million today) over a three-year period developing ecology programs at seventeen universities around the country..."[1]. McGeorge Bundy, the "Voice of the American Establishment", former national security adviser to John Kennedy, and major advocate for the escalation of the war in Vietnam after Kennedy's death, became the president of the Ford Foundation in 1966. (Bundy had also headed, from 1964 when he was in the Johnson Administration, what was called "the 303 committee". This was the committee handling all covert action deployments of American intelligence, and not merely foreign.) By transferring to the Ford Foundation, Bundy was free to carry out "in the American theater" the same "counter-insurgency operations" that were being carried out in Vietnam and elsewhere—of the which, the environmentalist movement's depopulation policy (and depopulation wars, such as that in Vietnam) was the spear-point. "One specific role of the private foundations vis-a-vis the government was made explicit by Henry T. Heald, Bundy's predecessor as president of the Ford Foundation, in a speech given at Columbia University in 1965. 'In this country, privately supported institutions may serve the public need as fully as publicly supported ones,' Heald said. 'More often than not they work side by side in serving the same need'".[2]

Nor was the "American environmentalist" movement even American. British authors and agents were at its center from the beginning—as was the theme of depopulation. Rather than cite the usual Jay Forrester/Dennis Meadows Limits To Growth,or Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, which give the mistaken impression that the environmentalist movement had American roots, let us, rather, call attention to the "trans-Atlanticist" nature of this "Ango-Dutch imperial" deployment.

Prince Bernhard in 1942 (age 31).

"In 1970 a book written by the English conservation leader, Max Nicholson, was published; it had a rather assertive title—The Environmental Revolution: A Guide For The New Masters of the World. Nicholson was involved in promoting the Countryside Conference in England. This coincided with America's first Earth Day, the White House Conference on Natural Beauty, and the formation of the Population Commission led by John D. Rockefeller III.....1970 was also declared European Conservation Year..... In 1970, Prince Phillip (England), Prince Bernhard (Netherlands) and other prominent individuals like Joseph Slater of the Aspen Institute and Aurelio Peccei of the Olivetti Company (later the Club of Rome) were out promoting the revolution." [3]

Also notable was the role of British intelligence agent Aldous Huxley, far more famous for his promotion of psychedelic drugs in America than for his pivotal role in shaping the "American ecology movement", as shown in the series of lectures he gave at the University of California at Santa Barbara that commenced in February of 1959. To get a sense of what Huxley's students were introduced to, consider this portion of a May, 1958 ABC interview he gave to Mike Wallace:

WALLACE: This is Aldous Huxley—a man haunted by a vision of Hell on earth. A searing social critic...Today, Mr. Huxley says that his fictional world of horror is probably just around the corner for all of us.

Good evening, I'm Mike Wallace. Tonight's guest, Aldous Huxley, is a man of letters, as disturbing as he is distinguished. Born in England, now a resident of California, Mr. Huxley...just finished a series of essays called "Enemies of Freedom," in which he outlines and defines some of the threats to our freedom in the United States; and Mr. Huxley, right off the bat, let me ask you this: as you see it, who and what are the enemies of freedom here in the United States?....

HUXLEY: I should say that there are two main impersonal forces, er...the first of them is not exceedingly important in the United States at the present time, though very important in other countries. This is the force which in general terms can be called overpopulation, the mounting pressure of population pressing upon existing resources.

WALLACE: Uh-huh.

HUXLEY: Uh...this, of course, is an extraordinary thing; something is happening which has never happened in the world's history before, I mean, let's just take a simple fact that between the time of birth of Christ and the landing of the May Flower, the population of the earth doubled. It rose from two hundred and fifty million to probably five hundred million. Today, the population of the earth is rising at such a rate that it will double in half a century....." Huxley asserts that totalitarianism must be the necessary consequence of "world overpopulation". Wallace questions the Huxley assertion:

WALLACE: Well then, ironically enough one of the greatest forces against communism in the world, the Catholic Church, according to your thesis would seem to be pushing us directly into the hands of the communists because they are against birth control.

HUXLEY: Well, I think this strange paradox probably is true. There is, er..., it's an extraordinary situation actually...."

The Catholic Church was not Huxley's only Western cultural target. Huxley's 1959 lectures would not only oppose modern industrial progress; Huxley would even argue that Plato's Critias dialogue, in the which Socrates recounts the story of the collapse of Atlantis, was a coverup for the catastrophic flooding caused by overgrazing and other "anti-Earth" agricultural methods of the Greeks.

Earth Week Laboratory: The Philadelphia Story

More than any other single location, the still-highly-industrial city of Philadelphia, the center of the American Revolution—nicknamed "Filthy-delphia" by the media and local environmentalists—was chosen as the center of application of Ford Foundation counter-insurgency methods coupled with British counter-cultural kookery. The Idea of Progress, including as manifest in Genesis 1:28, was selectively pilloried. As recounted in the nationally televised Earth Day 1970 CBS Special hosted by Walter Cronkite:

"What it's all about is trying to convince everyone in Philadelphia, that industrial activity like this has serious drawbacks as well as advantages....And even the churches were prepared to do something about the depressing condition of the city's air and water. This was the Salem Zion United Church of Christ, and its pastor, Paul Hatrick, on Sunday: 'The church is also involved in Earth Week because some of its poor theology has helped to cause the ecological imbalance that we are facing in nature today. We have always, for the last several hundred years, addressed ourselves to the theme of progress as a theological principle. And we have believed and affirmed that those people who do progress, God certainly is blessing. And because we have progressed, and not thought about the ways, the methods that we were using in order to progress to grow into our technological expertise, we have plundered, we have raped, we have begun to lay the earth in desolation."

(The congregation then prayed):

"We have helped to foul up your air, pollute your streams, and clutter your earth with trash and gadgets, and we have destroyed many of your living creatures. Your forests have been cut down, and the earth's resources plundered without concern for the generations and the times to come..."

The fact that Kennedy's advanced technology outlook and space program was the basis to solve the legitimate problems that were the result of some technological obsolescence was explicitly rejected in favor of a theology of pessimism, the which has now become commonplace.

The interface between pre-selected and acceptable student-ecologists, and companies such as Robert O. Anderson's Atlantic Ritchfield, was also explicit in Philadelphia's case. University of Pennsylvania was one center of the Ford Foundation-financed and created Earth Week, and featured the antics of what was then termed the "Earth Week Steering Committee", covered extensively by CBS News. Student organizer Edward Furia, the head of the Earth Week Steering Committee, recounted with great "sincerity of feeling" at the time how his committee was confronted with the choice: "should the committee seek money and cooperation from ..the Chamber of Commerce (i.e., the Philadelphia "Main Line" WASP establishment). "The Chamber invited us to a meeting. We spent three days, here in these offices, meeting, trying to decide whether we should go at all. Uh- would we be co-opted by business. By accepting money, by accepting anything from business, would we not be diluting our effort completely? We finally decided to go, and see what would happen."

"What happened was that the Earth Week committee finally did decide to accept money from the very companies which are polluting Philadelphia's air and water," CBS reported. "The business establishment and the student committee—certainly an unorthodox alliance." The students were given checks for tens of thousands at the Chamber of Commerce meeting.

The various media, the three networks and Time, Life and Newsweek magazines, along with the nation's newspapers, did not just cover the environmentalist cause—they led it, prior to the actual Earth Day events. Even more scandalously, Earth Day/Week only missed being exposed as a completely artificial "movement" thanks to the perspicacity of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. Nelson, luckily for Wall Street, recognized the danger of using an explicitly "top-down" approach to manipulate the feared "crisis of democracy"—that the financial establishment's rule might be seriously challenged by a population led by those leaders, titled and not, capable of mobilizing the American people on behalf of the nation's true General Welfare. The independent "mass strike"social process, and true threat to a bankrupt "parliamentary democracy" that had once been posed by the civil rights movement of the recently-slain Martin Luther King, had been mortally wounded by King's assassination, the Presidential assassinations of the two Kennedy brothers, and the ultimately successful attack against the world-wide spontaneous optimism provoked by the landing of man on the Moon in July of the year before.

Gaylord Nelson and the Green Movement

U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson.

It was on September 20, 1969 that Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson first proposed, in Seattle, the idea of Earth Day as a national teach-in. This became media-marketed at the time as "the largest demonstration in American history", even before it happened. It was to be a reversal of the Kennedy era of great scientific progress. "But how to pull it off? Nelson and his Senate staff weighed their options. In October, a proposal arrived from Fred Dutton, a heavy-weight in the national Democratic Party....His Earth Day memo...gave instructions for turning Nelson's idea into a nationwide campaign.

"Dutton imagined an effort resembling a political campaign. There would be a staff director who concocted 'a detailed scenario for the entire project.' A board of prominent advisors—Dutton suggested the likes of Gloria Steinem, Jesse Jackson, Jacques Cousteau, and Ralph Nader—would lend the project legitimacy. Issue-specific task forces would prepare position papers on particular environmental problems Earth Day activities should address. Student involvement would be critical, but politically risky, so Dutton proposed that the director should work with the National Student Association (well known at the time as a CIA front) screening participants thoroughly. The Washington office would employ, as well, a publicist, fundraiser, and a lawyer. They would need to decide on a name for the event and then publicize it through official posters, buttons, and bumper stickers. They would commission the production of an official documentary and song to be presented at each teach-in."[4]Nelson shrewdly rejected this view, immediately recognizing that in order to sell Earth Day as real, a decentralized, non-"control freak" approach would be far more effective in cementing the illusion that this was in fact a new "grass roots uprising". "Local honchos" among demoralized and/or manipulated students would have to be allowed to "put their own ingredients into the cake mix".

(Nonetheless, it is interesting to reflect on how much of the "sales pitch campaign" carried out in 1970, now characterizes every so-called "anti-establishment, independent movement today: "Most important in Dutton's proposal would be the media blitz in the run-up to Earth Day: major concerts performed by famous acts, major polluters identified and denounced, a televised teach-in, and headline-making demonstrations. The hype these national measures would created would prove more important, Dutton believed, than 'the quality of the local teach-ins' themselves." Pre-Internet "virtual reality", in other words.)

Before his death, Nelson, in an April 2001 Earth Day interview, made clear that his notions of population control and its effect on "the environment" were what had always motivated him: "The bigger the population gets, the more serious the problems become…. We have to address the population issue. The United Nations, with the U.S. supporting it, took the position in Cairo in 1994 that every country was responsible for stabilizing its own population. It can be done. But in this country, it's phony to say "I'm for the environment but not for limiting immigration."[5]

So, population reduction, anti-industrialism, resource use limitation, scarcity economics, and ecological fascism were made respectable and popular, "in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye", before people, except those eye-witnesses directly involved that rejected the Ford Foundation and other manipulation and treachery, could recognize that the fear that had been planted in the hearts of Americans through the multiple assassinations of the 1960s had now sprouted into the flowers of evil of the "environmentalist/Green fascism" movement. Lyndon LaRouche and his associates had not only already rejected the "green" anti-technological bias, proving it morally and scientifically bankrupt—since resources are created by man's discovery of new physical principles, and there are no such things, therefore, as "natural resources". [6]  LaRouche had also already forecast, by 1966, that the monetarist manipulation of the fixed exchange-rate system established at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, had doomed that system to an inevitable collapse. That collapse would become irrefutably manifest on August 15, 1971, and from that time, the true "corporate fascist" nature of the environmentalist movement, especially its European form, would become, not only inescapably knowable, but also indefensible.

Footnotes:

[1]. G.William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Politics And Power in the Year 2000, 1998, pgs.132-133

[2]. Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Robert L. Allen, 1970, pg.75

[3]. Donald Gibson, Environmentalism: Ideology And Power, 2004, pgs 70-71

[4]. "The First Earth Day That Wasn't", taken from the web site "Gaylord Nelson and Earth Day: The Making of the Modern Environmental Movement"

[5]. Gaylord Nelson, interview, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, April 2001

[6]. Various LaRouche publications, including the book, There Are No Limits To Growth, and the pamphlet "Blueprint For Extinction", Campaigner publications, 1972