December 20, 2007 (LPAC)--On Dec. 18, the Russian Rosbalt information agency distributed an article worldwide, by the prominent Russian political analyst Boris Mezhuyev, editor of the APN agency and associate of Intelros.ru and Smysl ("Meaning", in English) magazine, titled "The Empire Comes Out of the Shadows." Mezhuyev's piece was published in the year-end issue of Smysl describing how Great Britain was viewed in Russia during 2007, on the backdrop of the Litvinenko affair and London's continued harboring of Boris Berezovsky and Chechen separatist Ahmad Zakayev. It includes a lengthy discussion of Lyndon LaRouche's writings as a source used by Russians on the role of the British in history and today.
Among the 2007 publications, Mezhuyev singles out as especially important a series presented by Mikhail Leontyev on his Sunday Channel 1 TV show, under the title "The Great Game." Here, "viewers learned many new things about the Anglo-Russian confrontation of the 19th-20th centuries." Still, said Mezhuyev, the Leontyev series would not have had the impact it did, had there not been simultaneously an anti- British campaign in the Russian press.
According to Mezhuyev, some of these articles were motivated not so much by the Litvinenko affair, as by "the British track in North Caucasus events, discovered by Russian counterintelligence." Evidently, he added without giving details, "The British lion, after the American eagle broke its talons in Iraq, is once again returning to Asia and the Caucasus, step by step trying to push aside not only Russia and China, but also its own NATO allies."
While professing uncertainty about "whether or not a British 'secret empire' exists," Mezhuyev then presents what he calls "the three versions" of the British story. Version #2 is the one given by the American Lyndon LaRouche. Mezhuyev's summary may be quoted at length, to provide some sense of how LaRouche's analysis is known and understood in Russia:
"LaRouche rejected Marxism and became a defender of the so-called American System in economics, meaning the dirigist model in the spirit of President Roosevelt's New Deal. This state-oriented model is opposed by a different model - the liberal- oligarchical one, rooted in British economic liberalism and the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who is held responsible for all the sins of the modern era, colonial slavery above all.
"These quite sympathetic 'left-conservative' views, LaRouche spikes with a good-sized dose of fantastical conspirology. It turns out that the roots of today's financial globalization go back to Venice, which used Great Britain, which had come under its sway in the late Tudor period, to destroy the ideal model of an interrelationship of state and society, developed by the best minds of the Renaissance. Coming under the influence of the merchants of Venice, Britain began to promote economic liberalism, with which the colonial trade in human beings was closely associated. Continental Europe was unable to resist Britain effectively, leaving Lincoln's America as the main adversary of Britain. But Britain's allies in America itself were the Confederates, whose elite was closely linked with the British aristocracy through the Scottish Rite freemasonic network.
"The formal collapse of the Empire in the 20th century simply withdrew British colonial rule into the shadows: Now, they started ruling the world through the financial institutions they control. LaRouche sees his main objective as being to free the American Republic from domination by the British Empire and its henchmen in both American parties, like both Bushes or, for example, Al Gore.
"There is a rational kernel in LaRouche's system. It is not even just that the USA, rather unexpectedly, turned from being the most protectionist state in the West into the main propagandist for the British free market model. Rather, the point is that the ideology of Rooseveltian state capitalism, which at one time was the central component of the Democratic Party's ideology, has not become a fringe phenomenon. In Republican circles, conservative opponents of government intervention in the economy began to set the tune, while on the left, people have gotten more and more off into post-industrialism and defense of the environment against harm from industry."
Mezhuyev, taking the posture that what is said by LaRouche and others about Britain can't literally be true, concludes by suggesting that "Britain" is now the "brand name for an order based on inequality of people and nations." In the months before his commentary appeared, LaRouche's interview with Andrei Kobyakov of RPMonitor.ru has appeared on scores of Russian web sites under the title, "The Threat Comes From London."
