On this day 23 years ago, my husband and I were on opposite sides of the Washington, D.C. Beltway at traffic islands, distributing a broadsheet with an August 24th message from Lyndon LaRouche, warning of a potential for terrorist mobs to strike the nation’s capital. His reasoning was as follows:
“The world is presently gripped by the biggest, most deep-going, most deadly financial and monetary crisis since Europe of the middle to late Fourteenth Century. We are in a period in which economic and related circumstances have made the idea of regular modern warfare a sick joke, in which regional and other ‘little wars,’ terrorism, political assassinations, and other forms of destabilization, are leading items on the agendas of many of the strategic planners. The financial and monetary crisis in its presently advanced stage, drives desperate political forces to the brink, desperate political forces who would rather drive civilization itself to the brink, than tolerate the changes in financial and monetary institutions which the present crisis-situation demands.
“Washington, D.C. has become a very shabby sort of world power, but it is still the leading world power. Any movement which would terrify official Washington and its environs into fleeing under its beds, would be a major strategic threat to the peace of the world at large, just as the Jacobin Terror of 1789-1794 led fatefully to those Napoleonic wars which dominated Europe until the conclusion of that Vienna Congress which sowed the seeds of the later catastrophes to come.”
While the form of the terror attack was not precisely as LaRouche expected, on September 11, 2001, the attack occurred with exactly the intended effect he had forecast. As he warned, terror was unleashed among leading circles in the United States, and the American people were stampeded into a series of wars abroad, and fascist surveillance and censorship at home from which we have never recovered.
