Back in 1996, Reagan's former Defense Secretary, Sir Caspar Weinberger, co-authored a book with the Hoover Institution's Peter Schweitzer entitled The Next War, in which a set of scenarios were spun out about how an upcoming U.S. war might occur. The book's third script laid out a war with Mexico as follows:

The fictional pro-U.S. President Lorenzo Zapata is assassinated, and is succeeded by Eduardo Francisco Ruiz, a charismatic university professor "trained by the Jesuits" and steeped in Nietzsche and Hegel. Ruiz attempts a land reform and nationalizes banking and insurance, scaring off foreign investors and causing a severe depression, which sets off a mass exodus of 1 million refugees per month fleeing into the United States. Ruiz is also in the pay of drug gangs that are flooding the United States with narcotics. The U.S. President orders an invasion to topple Ruiz-and, of course, secure Mexico's oil fields-figuring the GIs will be welcomed as saviors.

Until recently, such a scenario would have been considered far-fetched by most readers, and waved off impatiently. Today, after the invasion of Iraq scripted by the chickenhawk gang in Washington, it is not so easily dismissed. In fact, such a gameplan to destabilize Mexico, and other nations of IberoAmerica, and impose a supranational government upon them, is in the forefront of the thinking within the neoconservative cabal, which has seized operational control over the Bush Administration. As good protégés of Leo Strauss, and the international Synarchist networks which spawned him, they have centered their strategy on intentionally rekindling the religious warfare which almost destroyed Mexico in the late 1920s, during the Cristero War.

That bloody civil war pitted "right-wing" Catholic masses against the "left-wing" anti-clerical government-with both sides being ideologically manipulated, top-down by international banking and oil interests (including the Buckley family), and the Synarchist apparatus they had put in place over prior decades-going all the way back to the 1860s occupation of Mexico by French Napoleonic forces, and their imposition of Maximilian von Hapsburg as Emperor of Mexico. Rekindling such religious warfare is the Western Hemisphere equivalent of the Synarchist "Clash of Civilizations" strategy for the Middle East and Asia.

As explained in the book The PAN: the Party of Treason, published in 1985 by Lyndon LaRouche's associates in the Mexican Labor Party:

"The Cristero War was neither a product of the state's religious intolerance, nor the religious fanaticism of the population. While those elements were present, the development of the conflict followed a preconceived plan in which the actors merely played out the roles assigned them. From the ranks of the Jacobin CROM, led by Morones and Lombardo Toledano, the atheist priest-haters like Tomas Garrido Canabal and Jose Guadalupe Zuno, governors of Tabasco and Jalisco respectively, imposed a series of measures that were intolerable for clergy and parishioners. From the Church side, radical Jesuits groped around the archbishop of Mexico, Manuel Mora y del Rio, responded to every single provocation, finally reaching the point of armed rebellion...

"The final purpose of the Cristero War was not to impose Cristo Rey [Christ the King] in Mexico, nor to take power for the masses; but rather to use the Catholic militants as cannon fodder to install a government that would faithfully pay its debt to the Morgan banks and guarantee conditions favorable to foreign investment."

Synarchist/Nazi...

Although hardly a major force` on the Mexican political scene today, it is nonetheless crucial to look into the origin, nature, and philosophic underpinnings of Mexico's Synarchist organization, the Unión Nacional Sinarquista (National Synarchist Union, UNS). The ingrained axiomatic views about the nature of man and God, which are so glaring in the case of the Synarchists, are actually shared by the majority of the population-of Mexico and elsewhere. And it is this vulnerability which is being exploited yet again by the financial oligarchy, and which threatens the very existence of the nation-state. Back in the 1940s, U.S. military intelligence kept extensive files under the heading "Synarchist/NaziCommunist." That characterization was accurate back then, and it remains so today.

Synarchism was formally established in Mexico in 1937, with the founding of the Unión Nacional Sinarquista, upon the initiative of the Belgian Jesuit priest Bernard Bergoend, and the Mexican Catholic activist, Jose Antonio Urquiza, who had studied sociology at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Bergoend had gone to live in Mexico in the early part of the 20th Century, after having been steeped in the ideas of Charles Maurras, the French right-wing royalist and creator of group Action Frangaise, who was officially condemned by the Vatican in 1926. Maurras was greatly admired and sought out by today's U.S. chicken-hawks' ideologue, Leo Strauss, as we shall see below.

The current national head of the UNS, Clemente Gutiérrez Pérez, in a recent interview posted on the UNS's website (www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/9136), halfheart edly tried to distance his organization from Hitler and Mussolini"both fascism and national socialism have socialist origins, and both are atheistic by nature, nihilist, Nietzschean"—but did admit: "We cannot deny that Synarchism takes some elements from those movements, such as a militarized organization, the use of uniforms, a flag and salute." He went on to explain, "Synarchism has more things in common with the Spanish Falange and with the Romanian Legionnaire movement of Corneliu Codreanu, than with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism."

In fact, the UNS website prominently features links to the Spanish Falange and to Codreanu's group-as it does to the American Falangist Party.

Who was the Romanian Corneliu Codreanu that Mexico's Synarchists so admire? He founded the Legion of the Archangel Michael in 1927, which shortly thereafter became known as Romania's Iron Guard. One favorable, overtly proNazi biographer (www.libreopinion.com/members/kantauri) reports that the Iron Guard "was accused of being Hitlerist... because it used symbols such as the swastika... Besides, the Iron Guard was always virulently anti-Jewish; in some cases it could be said that they even surpassed National Socialism in their rejection of the Jews... [and] they took recourse, when necessary, to direct armed action against the Jews and their followers." Codreanu's own writings confirm his unabashed antiSemitism.

Codreanu was assassinated in 1938. His successors in the Iron Guard organized an army of thousands of Romanian Legionnaires to fight alongside Hitler's troops on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union during World War II.

On the Mexican political scene, Gutiérrez Pérez continues, the UNS today has "a relationship of solidarity and mutual support" with the National Catholic Movement Christ the King (MCNCR), among others. The MCNCR website, like that of the UNS, features links to Codreanu's Iron Guard, to the Spanish Falange, and also to another shared icon: Leon Degrelle, the founder of the pro-Nazi Belgian Rexism movement.

Degrelle was born in 1906. He was educated at a Jesuit school, and went on to study at the University of Louvain. Like his fellow-Belgian, Bernard Bergoend, the founder of Mexico's UNS, Degrelle became a follower of Charles Maurras and Action Frangaise. In 1930, he travelled to Mexico as a journalist, and linked up with right-wing Catholic networks there, including from the Cristero movement. He returned to Belgium to found a publishing company called Christus Rex, and thereafter the political movement of Rexism.

During World War II, Degrelle organized the Legion Walonie to join Hitler on the eastern front, where it became the 28th Division of the Waffen SS. For heroism in battle, Hitler awarded Degrelle two Iron Crosses, and reportedly told him, "If I had had a son, I would have liked for him to be like you."

After the war, Degrelle wrote numerous works, including Memoirs of a Fascist and The Russian Campaign.

...And Synarchist/Communist

Such views and allies would seem pretty much to close the case that Mexico's Synarchists are overtly pro-Nazi. But it turns out that there is a second Union Nacional Sinarquista (UNS) in Mexico, with the exact same name, which disputes the abovementioned pro-Nazi UNS over who deserves the title of real Synarchists. The second UNS is... procommunist leftist! Their homepage (www.sinarquismo.americas.tripod.com/index) features:
• Praise for Mexico's Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN) guerrillas, because they "have taken up the task of making a People," tempered by the fraternal criticism that "Zapatism has missed some opportunities."
• Anti-International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic writings by Noam Chomsky and James Petras (the principal American apologist and promoter of Colombia's narcoterrorist FARC);
• The sociological blather of Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga, Brazil's top exponent of the Theology of Liberation;
• Existentialist essays on indigenism, mysticism, spirituality, and so forth;
• Promotion of the "humanist, social thinker" Paulo Freire, the. Brazilian-born architect of "de-schooling" menticide;
• Gratitude to the Cuban Jacobin leader of the early 20th Century, Jose Martf, who "gave us a key: be radical." Martf was a leading light of the Young America movement of Giuseppe Mazzini,idolized by Count Richard CoudenhoveKalergi's Pan European Union (see preceding article).

So, this second UNS is apparently Mexico's leftist Synarchist organization... or is it? On their website, they have an area for discussion with site visitors, where the first item featured is a promotional for new book published in Spain by Ediciones Nueva Republica, called The Russian Campaignwritten by none other than Leon Degrelle, the proNazi founder of Belgium's Rexism movement! The book is puffed as "an exceptional human and historical testament... by the Belgian Rexist leader who enrolled in the ranks of the armies of the German Reich."

It turns out that Ediciones Nueva Republica belongs to the Movimiento Social Republicano of Spain, a leftist grouping which denounces imperialism, supports Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, and has recently announced that they were opposing the Iraq War by joining forces with... Spain's National Falangist Forum!

Synarchism is indeed Nazi-Communism.

Enter Hobbes and His `Leviathan'

The two UNSes have more in common than their name. Philosophically, both descend from the same anti-Platonic, anti-Christian view of man as essentially an evil being, devoid of creativity, incapable of knowing God or truth, and thus requiring an overbearing power or authority, a tyrant, to rule society and impose order-sometimes in the name of "the people."

For example, the second, or "leftist" UNS hails the philosophy of Paulo Freire. The Brazilian-born Freire became famous in the middle of the 20th Century as an educator who proposed "de-schooling" and a "pedagogy of the oppressed." He was a follower of the philosophical nihilism, or existentialism, associated with the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. And he denounced Plato and the Socratic method for attempting to communicate concepts, as opposed to simply the names of things. In fact, he went so far as to argue that pantomime is the natural form of communication for Africans, and that they need learn nothing more. On the root issue of the Platonic method, Freire said:

"Socratic intellectualism-which mistook the definition of the concept, for knowledge of the thing defined, and this knowledge as virtue-did not constitute a true pedagogy of knowing."

As for the first UNS, and their pro-Nazi outlook, the philosophic worldview of such circles is aptly represented by Carl Schmitt, the "Crown Jurist" of the Third Reich and ideologue of authoritarianism, who had a seminal influence on Leo Strauss (see " `Leo-Cons' Fascist Anti-American Roots; What the New York Times Won't Print," EIR, May 23).

. Schmitt states his own starting point as follows: "One could examine all theories of state and all political ideas for their anthropology and divide them according to whether theyconsciously or unconsciously-presuppose a man who is `by nature evil' or one who is `by nature good.' "

Schmitt argues forcefully for the former view, of man's intrinsic evil, going so far as to taunt: "If man were not evil, then my ideas would be evil." From that premise, he draws the conclusion that man cannot know either truth or God by the path of reason, but only by "revelation," i.e. external authority. Schmitt summarizes his own doctrine of justice in the dictum:

"We are obliged to something, not because it is good, but because God commands it. " Now we have come to the philosophical hard core of the fascist, Synarchist view-a view which is, of course, not original to them. It dates back at least to Plato's time, and is famously expounded by Thrasymachus, in Book I of Plato's Socratic dialogue The Republic: "I declare justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger." Plato also reports it in his dialogue Gorgias, where Callicles tries and fails to convince Socrates that "justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior."

A more recent (17th Century) exponent of this worldview is Thomas Hobbes, one of the founders of socalled British philosophical radicalism and a guiding light to Leo Strauss. In fact, in the early 1930s, Strauss obtained a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study Hobbes in Paris and London, with the help of a letter of recommendation from his friend and mentor, Carl Schmitt. Strauss, in a letter to Schmitt in July 1933, took note of another prominent Hobbesian of the time, Charles Maurras-the same Maurras who was so intellectually influential with UNS founder Bernard Bergoend and Hitlerally Leon Degrelle of the Rexist movement. Strauss wrote to Schmitt:

"I have been somewhat occupied with Maurras. The parallels to Hobbes-one can probably not speak of dependenceare striking. I would be very glad if I could speak to him. Would you be in a position and willing to write me a few lines by way of an introduction to him?"

Let us follow Hobbes's reasoning on the subject of law, in his most famous work, the 1651 Leviathan: "To confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will, which is as much as to say, to appoint one man or assembly of men to bear their person . . . and therein to submit their wills every one to his will, and their judgments to his judgment... This is the generation of that great Leviathan (or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god) to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defense."

Why does society need such a tyrant, according to Hobbes? Because the natural state of mankind is one of war of each against all:

"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man."

And why is war the natural condition of man? Because man is a creature of his appetites, not reason, and "private appetite is the measure of good and evil." For Hobbes, creativity does not exist; man's mind is nothing but a senseperception apparatus:

"There is no conception in a man's mind which has not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original." And from all this, Hobbes derives his concept of justicea concept fully endorsed by Schmitt, Strauss, and the Synarchists:

"To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent: that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice."

Leibniz on Justice

Perhaps the most incisive rebuttal of this ThrasymachusHobbes-Strauss-Synarchist view, comes from the great German philosopher and scientist, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In a short essay written in 1703, Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice (see box), Leibniz begins by posing the paradox:

"It is agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good and just."

Leibniz's formulation is identical, conceptually, to the way Plato poses the same issue in his dialogue Euthyphro, where Socrates asks:

"The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods."

Recall Schmitt's answer: "We are obliged to something, not because it is good, but because God commands it. " Leibniz disagrees, arguing that such an outlook justifies tyranny, and more fundamentally leads to the inability to distinguish between God and the Devil-a point more recently underscored by Lyndon LaRouche in his decision to refer to today's followers of Leo Strauss as "the children of Satan." Leibniz then launches into a polemic against Thomas Hobbes, by name:

"A celebrated English philosopher named Hobbes... [who has laid down truly wicked principles and adhered to them with too much fidelity]... has wished to uphold almost the same thing as Thrasymachus, for he wants God to have the right to do everything, because he is all-powerful."

In other words, man can know what goodness and justice are. They are intelligible to human reason. God wills the Good and the Just because he is incapable of doing anything but that which is good and just. And man is capable of knowing that that is the case. These concepts, Leibniz insists, are accessible through human reason. Man can know justice, just as he can know truth, and come to know God.

Modern followers of Schmitt, Strauss, and the Synarchists, bridle at Leibniz's formulation. And they reserve particular venom for the Golden Renaissance, attacking this flourishing of human creativity as an age when Man arrogantly considered himself the equal of God, and forgot his proper place in the order of things. They often call for a return to the values of the Middle Ages, and to the idea that God, and his created universe, is ultimately incomprehensible to man, but must be blindly obeyed.

No better answer to this question exists, than that supplied by Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa, the 15th-Century German philosopher and scientist who presented the following exchange in his dialogue The Layman: About Wisdom, on the question of if and how man can conceive of God:

"Orator: I want you to tell me how I am to form a concept of God, since He is greater than can be conceived.
Layman: You may do so just as you form a concept of concept.
Orator: Explain.
Layman: You have heard how it is that in every conceiving the Inconceivable is conceived. Therefore, the concept of concept approaches the Inconceivable."

This striking reaffirmation of the Platonic Christian idea that man finds the image of God in his own mind's creative powers, and consequently of man's essential goodness, is the best of rejoinders to modern-day Synarchism of every stripe.

Leibniz indicted kcal Conception of `Justice'

The following is excerpted from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's 1703 essay, "Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice. "

It is agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good and just: in other words, whether justice and goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things, as do numbers and proportions. The former opinion has been followed by some philosophers and by some Roman [Catholic] and Reformed theologians; but present-day Reformed usually reject this doctrine, as do all of our theologians and most of those of the Roman Church.

Indeed, it would destroy the justice of God. For why praise him because he acts according to justice, if the notion of justice, in his case, adds nothing to that of action? And to say stat pro ratione voluntas, my will takes the place of reason, is properly the motto of a tyrant. Moreover this opinion would not sufficiently distinguish God from the Devil. For if the Devil, that is to say an intelligent, invisible, very great and very evil power, were the master of the world, this Devil or this God would still be evil, even if it were necessary to honor him by force, as some peoples honor such imaginary gods in the hope of bringing them thereby to do less evil.

This is why certain persons, too devoted to the absolute right of God, who have believed that he could justly condemn innocent people and even that this might actually happen, have done wrong to the attributes which make God lovable, and, having destroyed the love of God, they have left only fear...

The sacred scriptures also give us an altogether different idea of this sovereign substance, in speaking so often and so clearly of the goodness of God, and presenting him as a person who justifies himself against complaints. And in the story of the creation of the world the scripture says that God considered what he had done, and found it good. That is to say, he was content with his work, and had reason to be. This is a human way of speaking, which seems to be used explicitly to show that the goodness of the actions and productions of God do not depend on his will, but on their nature...

Plato in his dialogues introduces and refutes a certain Thrasymachus, who, wishing to explain what justice is, gives a definition which would strongly recommend the position which we are combatting, if it were acceptable: for that is just, (says be,) which is agreeable or pleasant to the most powerful...

A celebrated English philosopher named Hobbes, who is noted for his paradoxes, has wished to uphold almost the same thing as Thrasymachus: for he wants God to have the right to do everything, because he is all-powerful. This is a failure to distinguish between right and fact. For what one can do is one thing, what one should do, another. It is this same Hobbes who believes (and almost for the same reason) that the true religion is that of the state and that, as a consequence, if the Emperor Claudius... had placed the god Crepitus among the authorized gods, he would have been a real god, and worthy of worship.

That is to say, in covert terms, that there is no true religion, and that it is nothing but an invention of men. Similarly, to say that "just" is whatever pleases the most powerful, is nothing else than saying that there is no certain and determined justice which keeps one from doing whatever he wants to do and can do with impunity, however evil it may be... [Rather, I say,] justice is nothing else than that which conforms to wisdom and goodness joined together: The end of goodness is the greatest good, but to recognize it wisdom is needed, which is nothing else than knowledge of the good... One may ask what the true good is. I answer that it is nothing else than that which serves in the perfection of intelligent substances...

Justice is nothing else than the charity of the wise, that is to say, goodness toward others which is conformed to wisdom. And wisdom, in my sense, is nothing else than the science of felicity.