A consequence of Louis XI’s founding of the first nation state in France, and similar nation-building efforts in other parts of Europe, was a broad alliance amongst the leaders of Spain, France, Germany, Austria, the Papacy, and others, against Venice, the authors of the 1345-1439 New Dark Age. The alliance was established at Cambrai in 1508. A year later, the "League of Cambrai" crushed a gathering of Venetian forces at Agnadello, and reversed 800 years of Venetian conquest on the Italian mainland. Were it not for the treachery of Pope Julius II, who accepted a bribe from Venice, and sold out the alliance, it were likely that Venice would have been defeated, and ultimately partitioned.

Lacking the ability to counterattack, and defeat its enemies militarily, Venice resorted to more treacherous means in order to survive. To begin with, in 1523, the Venetian oligarchy, under the leadership of Gasparo Contarini, allied with Martin Luther, and endorsed his misguided attempt to reform the Church. True to his oligarchic world-view, Contarini agreed with Luther’s notion of The Elect, which, in direct opposition to Renaissance humanism, held that only a precious few human beings were worthy of God’s grace. Venetian printing presses quickly turned out 40,000 copies of Luther’s writings, which were distributed throughout Europe. The ever-treacherous Contarini subsequently convinced Pope Paul III to approve the creation of the Jesuits, and to launch the Catholic Counter-Reformation. What followed was a virtual orgy of Venetian-manipulated Protestant versus Catholic warfare, beginning with the Peasants War, which left 100,000 dead, and culminating in the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War, which was arguably the most destructive war Europe ever fought. Venice emerged unscathed.

It was in the context of religious war, which eventually spread to England, that the first English settlers came to the New World. As we shall see, these settlers came to the New World with one principal intent: to finally realize the project of the Renaissance humanists by establishing a nation-state republic committed to the maximum development of its entire population. Accomplishing this task would require the ultimate defeat of the forces of oligarchism. This is a battle yet to be won.

The first English foray into the New World was launched by King Henry VII in 1497, when he commissioned John Cabot to sail westward in a bold attempt to flank Venetian controlled trade-routes by finding a northwest passage to the East. Henry VII was a humanist. Probably the first to introduce humanism into England, was Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester (1390-1447), who patronized several Italian humanists, and collected many classical manuscripts which he later donated to Oxford University.

Henry VII spent much of his youth in France, where he undoubtedly learned many lessons in statecraft from Louis XI before returning to England and leading the military defeat of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Henry surrounded himself with leading humanists, including Thomas Linacre and John Colet, and quickly emulated the successes of Louis XI. With many appropriate reforms, both legal and economic, he skillfully established England as a true nation-state committed to the general welfare of the entire population. However, beginning with his successor, Henry VIII, many of his accomplishments were in the process of being reversed.

When Henry VIII ascended the throne of England in 1509, Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist educated by the Brotherhood of the Common Life, forecast the dawn of a Golden Age. As a youth, Henry VIII was highly educated in Renaissance learning, and had all the credentials of a would-be philosopher-king. Before his death in 1547, however, he had ended his predecessor’s exploration of the New World, he had launched a series of expensive and pointless European wars, and he had executed England’s leading humanist, Sir Thomas More, for his refusal to recognize the schismatic Church of England. Most of this was done at the direction of Henry’s Venetian controllers, particularly Francesco Giorgi. Henry VIII, moreover, had refused to join the League of Cambrai, and instead offered his support to Venice. In spite of Henry’s failures, the Renaissance learning promoted by his father, Henry VII, continued to spread throughout England, and to dramatically increase literacy, thereby creating the conditions for the later emergence of John Milton, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, etc., and the republicans who eventually launched the American Revolution.

However, when the House of Stuart ascended the English throne under James I in 1603, hope for a renewed humanist nation-state in England was virtually lost. James I, for example, rejected with scorn a Puritan plea for reform, and drove many Puritans into separatism and exile in Leyden, Netherlands. From Leyden, some of the Puritans departed in 1620 to establish the colony of Plymouth in the New World.

The Plymouth colony, however, was initially a failure in comparison to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was established in 1630 under the skillful leadership of John Winthrop. Winthrop’s humanist intentions were clear. "The whole earth is the Lord’s Garden," he wrote, "& God hath given it to the sons of men, with a general condition, Gen: 1:28: Increase and multilply, replenish the earth and subdue it… Why then should we suffer a whole continent, as fruitful and convenient for the use of man, to lie waste without any improvement?" Through deft diplomatic maneuvering, Winthrop procured for Massachusetts a charter providing for self-government and independence as a commonwealth in New England. Soon, he brought to Massachusetts all the skilled labor he could muster, including engineers, toolmakers, construction workers, etc., with the intent to build a nation. Between 1630 and 1650, nearly 20,000 persons came to Massachusetts in search of a better life.

Winthrop was fully aware of his obstacles. Before he left England, he had deployed his son, John Winthrop, Jr., on a fourteen-month mission throughout Europe, which included a stopover in Venice, to investigate the designs of his oligarchic enemies. Once Massachusetts was established, maintaining it required a continuous political battle. In 1634, for example, the King’s Privy Council tried to recall the Massachusetts charter. Winthrop refused to comply, and responded with preparations for war, including the construction of military fortifications. Faced with the threat of popular resistance, the crown was forced to back down. Thereafter, Winthrop’s nation-building effort continued in earnest.

In 1636, Harvard College was established. In 1638, a 1,000 man, First Massachusetts Regiment of Militia was commissioned. During the same year, a group of Massachusetts colonists founded Connecticut, which, together with Plymouth, became an ally in John Winthrop’s New England Confederation, formed in 1643 for mutual assistance and defense. In the 1640s, a system of compulsory elementary education was instituted in Massachusetts, which provided the model for all the American colonies, and led to a 90% literacy rate, by far the highest in the world. Finally, in 1647, Massachusetts established the Saugus Iron Works, the first automated industrial complex in the New World, which was soon far more productive than any iron works in England.

The Parliament of England was appalled. In 1651, it told Massachusetts that it should accept a new charter under its control. Winthrop, once again, resisted the power of England, and defended the original charter. Shortly thereafter, in spite of outraged protests by the monarchy, Massachusetts created its own mint, and issued its own coinage, which was redeemable only within the colonies. The colonies continued to rapidly develop in freedom.

By 1674, the crown resorted to direct military assault against the independence of New England. Following the British acquisition of the Dutch colony at New York, royal forces under the command of New York Governor Edmund Andros seized a number of towns from Connecticut in eastern Long Island. A week later, an Indian force that had been bribed and armed by Governor Andros, began to destroy scores of outlying New England settlements. Andros then prepared to attack the heart of Connecticut, but when he found a far superior Connecticut militia mobilized against him, he was humiliated and forced to leave without a fight.

The crown was compelled to resort to a series of legal measures to subdue New England, beginning with accusations that Massachusetts was violating the Navigation Acts, which had mandated British monopolies on colonial trade. Finally, in 1684, after an intensive fight to save the charter, which was led by John Winthrop’s key collaborator, Increase Mather, the British Court of Chancery declared the Massachusetts charter void. A royal governor was soon appointed to the colonies. What followed was a precipitous decline in colonial development. Mather, however, did not give up the struggle. As a leading minister, scientist, author, and president of Harvard College, Mather directed a continued resistance to British rule. By 1710, Mather’s son and confidant, Cotton Mather, found himself at the center of an international conspiracy for global economic development led by the great German genius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

During the reign of Queen Anne, which lasted from 1702 to 1714, Leibniz’s key ally, Jonathan Swift, led a faction of Queen Anne’s government dedicated to reversing royal abuse of the colonies and unleashing westward development in the New World. Much of the energy for this new policy was provided through the offices of Electress Sophie of Hanover, Anne’s designated successor to the throne of England, whose Privy Counselor was none other than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Throughout most of Anne’s reign, England was at war with France. In spite of a long-standing rivalry, England and France had consistently agreed to stymie the development of their respective colonies in the New World in order to keep them at bay. The French, meanwhile, had established themselves in Quebec and Montreal and had pushed south all the way to the end of the Mississippi River, without any plans for serious economic development. At the same time, French-Jesuit (i.e. Venetian) missionaries had gained control of many Indian tribes to the west of the English colonies, and had continually used them as a hostile buffer against New England expansion.

In 1709, however, Queen Anne’s government, under the leadership of Swift and Leibniz, appointed Robert Hunter as Governor of New York, and Alexander Spotwood as Governor of Virginia. Spotswood’s plan was to break the backwardness of Virginia, and develop it all the way to the Great Lakes. Spotswood immediately began to negotiate treaties with hostile Indian tribes, and he even provided Indian youth with college education. He led expeditions across the Blue-Ridge Mountains, and established, with his own financial support, a frontier iron-manufacturing settlement, which he named Germanna, in honor of Queen Anne and the German émigrés who constituted the settlement. Shortly thereafter, associates of Leibniz organized additional waves of German emigration in support of Spotswood.

Robert Hunter, the newly appointed Governor of New York, had an even more notable mission. He was commissioned by Queen Anne to raise an armed force of colonists, to be joined by a British naval squadron, for a combined expedition against the hostile French colonies at Quebec and Montreal. Unfortunately, Lord John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was in command of the British armed forces. He sabotaged the naval deployment, and the colonists had to settle for the capture of Port Royal, Nova Scotia, which was renamed Annapolis in honor of the Queen.

The duplicitous Duke of Marlborough, ancestor of Winston Churchill, was the leader in England of what 19^th century British Prime-Minister Benjamin Disraeli described as the "Venetian party." The Venetian party was Queen Anne’s most treacherous obstacle in government. When Anne died on August 1, 1714, the Venetian-controlled speculative markets of England rose steeply. A mere three months earlier, Leibniz’s ally, the Electress Sophie of Hanover, died from natural causes, thereby removing the threat that Leibniz, the Venetian party’s most feared enemy, would have direct authority in the British government. Anne, however, was quite healthy, and it appears likely that she was poisoned and murdered to clear the throne for Sophie’s reprobate son—and Venetian party tool—George I. In any event, with George I on the throne of England, American independence became an absolute necessity.

As we have seen, the struggle for American independence, from the very beginning, was the continued struggle of Renaissance humanism against the heritage of Venice and her factional followers. Though it is not necessary to recount the well-known details of the American Revolution, it is necessary to set the record straight on the ideology behind the American Revolution.

The standard line of miseducation is that the American Revolution was the product of John Locke and Adam Smith. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, John Locke was an empiricist. Empiricism came to England from Venice, as a deployment against humanism, through Venetian intelligence agent Paolo Sarpi, who authored the seminal works of empiricism, Thoughts, and The Art of Thinking Well. Sarpi was the mentor of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Bacon’s famous work, Novum Organum, expounds in its first aphorism the fundamental tenet of empiricism: "Man, who is the servant and interpreter of nature, can act and understand no further than he has observed, either in operation and contemplation, of the method and order of nature." This is a theory which had been thoroughly disproven no later the third century BC, when Eratosthenes accurately measured the circumference of the earth without observing it. Bacon also preferred Atomism, a school of ancient Greek philosophy based on the assertion that nature is composed exclusively of atoms, and the void—little, hard balls, floating, colliding, and conflicting in infinitely extendable, three-dimensional space.

Bacon’s catamite, Thomas Hobbes, expanded the Atomistic theory to include organic, and human nature. Hence, the famous "Hobbesian nightmare," in which all human beings, through perpetual collision and conflict, are fundamentally at war with all other human beings. The epitome of empiricist philosophy is Jeremy Bentham, who was a member of the Manichean, Medmenham cult, which was forced to go underground in 1763 when a baboon dressed as the devil escaped a Medmenham ritual, and terrorized local residents. Bentham’s basic tenet is, since we are all living in a Hobbesian nightmare, the only good in the world is pleasure, and the only evil is pain. Hence, the moral quality of any act is determined by its utility in producing pleasure or pain. In support of this theory, Bentham, who served as England’s Prime Minister during the American Revolution, wrote In Defense of Usury, and In Defense of Pederasty.

Finally, John Locke, the empiricist, and purported inspiration for the American Revolution, was a member of King William III’s Board of Trade. In 1701, as the American colonist’s were struggling for freedom, Locke advocated revoking the charters of all the colonies, a royal dictatorship on colonial economy, and a ban on colonial manufacturing. Locke was also a fierce opponent of Gottfried Leibniz, who led the international movement against British-Venetian oppression. In 1690, Locke had written his famous empiricist treatise, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which regurgitated Bacon’s first aphorism by asserting that human beings are born with a tabula rasa, i.e., a blank slate. In Locke’s imagination, everything that a human being knows is the consequence of a physical impact on the senses. Leibniz thoroughly refuted this doctrine in his New Essays on the Human Understanding, where he shows that the human mind inherently mirrors the total ordering of the universe, most of which, of course, transcends the human senses.

Leibniz, meanwhile, was a correspondent of John Winthrop, Jr, son of the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The importance of Massachusetts was surely understood by Leibniz, who in 1670 set forth a strategy to create a harmonia universalis including America, in his paper entitled Considerations On the Form in Which Foreign and Domestic Security Can Be Firmly Established. In this paper, Leibniz envisioned a community of sovereign, nation-state republics throughout Europe, based on natural law. Russia, China, Africa, and America would be integrated into this community as rapidly as possible. Throughout his career, Leibniz worked tirelessly to make this vision a possibility. For example, he established a program for technical schools and universities throughout Europe and Russia. As advisor to Czar Peter I, he developed a program for Russian mining, and rapid economic development. Leibniz’s prolific scientific work included intensive study of the principles of heat-powered machines, and most famously, the development of the calculus.

In 1671, Leibniz wrote a founding work of the science of physical economy, entitled Outline of A Memorandum: On the Establishment of a Society in Germany for the Promotion of the Arts and Sciences. The purpose of the memorandum was "to supply and make useful resources and funds, and other things lacking, on a large scale…to establish manufacturing and consequently draw in commerce… to facilitate the crafts through improvements and tools, through always inexpensive fire and motion; to test and be able to work out everything in chemistry and mechanics, to work with glass, to create telescopes, machines, water devices, clocks, lathes, painting studios, presses, paint companies, weaving factories, steel and iron works, and even some quite useful things which, when done in a small way without organization are unfruitful." Happily, as Lyndon LaRouche points out, "During the eighteenth century, the influence of Leibniz’s economic science was strong in many parts of Europe, and spilled into the circles around Benjamin Franklin in America."

As was said above, Leibniz corresponded with John Winthrop, Jr. Another correspondent of Leibniz’s circles was Cotton Mather (1663-1728), whom Benjamin Franklin considered to be his greatest influence. (Mather was at the center of a global network and wrote some 8,000 letters during his lifetime). Franklin, in turn, corresponded with Mather’s son, Samuel. Finally, Franklin was also a good friend of John Winthrop’s descendent and namesake, John Winthrop IV.

Yet another close friend of Benjamin Franklin was James Logan (1674-1751), who was the secretary of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. Logan was the leading Leibniz scholar of his time in America. He had numerous works of Leibniz in his library, where Franklin frequently borrowed books. The influence of Leibniz’s philosophy on Franklin is evident in Franklin’s A Proposal for promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British and Plantations of America, which bears a marked similarity to the memorandum of Leibniz quoted above. Franklin proposes, "That one society be formed of virtuosi or ingenious men to be called The American Philosophical Society, who are to maintain a constant correspondence… That the subject of the correspondence be… improvements in distillation, brewing, and assaying of ores; new mechanical inventions for saving labor, as mills and carriages, and for raising and conveying of water, draining of meadows, etc.; all new arts, trades, and manufactures, that may be proposed or thought of… and all philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter, and multiply the conveniences or pleasures of life."

In a later work, entitled Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages, Franklin writes, "…the object of every political society ought to the happiness of the largest number." This is exactly the formulation of Leibniz in his work entitled On Natural Law, where he writes, "The most perfect society is that whose purpose is the general and supreme happiness."

Let us recall the Declaration of Independence, which reads "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these rights are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Let us also recall the preamble to the Constitution of the United States, which reads "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Clearly these are Leibnizian documents, and not, as the lying textbooks say, Lockean. John Locke, in fact, wrote an early constitution for South Carolina, which included a hereditary nobility, and declared that the purpose of government is Life, Liberty, and Property. South Carolina, in 1860, was the first state to secede from the Union.

In 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, British economist Adam Smith published his famous treatise on free trade, Wealth of Nations. The basics tenets of the treatise, i.e., "buy cheap and sell dear," are well known and popular today—so popular that it is widely believed that the economic success of the United States is rooted in free trade. While volumes can be written on this lie, let it suffice to quote Abraham Lincoln’s economic advisor, Henry Carey, who was a student of Alexander Hamilton, the founder of the American System of political economy, who in turn, was a student and protégé of Benjamin Franklin.

…Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labour of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation with increased return to all, giving to the labour good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to the continuance of that bastard freedom of trade which denies the principle of protection, yet doles it out as revenue duties; the other to extending the area of legitimate free trade by the establishment of perfect protection, followed by the annexation of individuals and communities, and ultimately by the abolition of custom houses.

Thomas Rooney

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