On Friday, Aug. 30th, LaRouche independent candidate for U.S. Senate from New York Diane Sare aired her video Weekly Symposium, “Thomas Cole’s Warning to the American People.”
Sare reported on the latest imperial raid on a peace activist, this one in England at the home of Sarah Wilkson, in the elites’ desperate attempt to silence the truth about the current world situation. The looming financial crash as well as Ukraine’s collapsing military position is going to shatter the narrative of those Western elites.
Sare’s guest was Fox Green, a graphic artist, activist and founder of the New York Energy Alliance. Green discussed the immense contributions of 19th-century artist Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School of painting. Cole, born in England in 1801, emigrated to the U.S. and settled in the Catskill Mountains, and produced many paintings of New York’s Hudson River Valley. He studied Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt and Friedrich Schiller. Environmentalists have tried to co-opt Cole in their efforts to shut down nuclear power and push depopulation.
Rather, Cole was trying to deliver a warning, but not a pessimistic view of technology and progress. In fact, he loved nature, and looked forward to a beautiful future brought about through humanity’s efforts. He wasn’t warning about environmentalist damage, but rather the danger of empire! His famous series of five paintings, The Course of Empire, depicts the rise and fall of society, highlighting the destructive nature of empire, where “man has conquered man—nations have been subjugated.” Although he died in 1848, before the U.S. Civil War, he saw the growing corruption of our Republic and deeply feared the return of all the evils of empire should our unique experiment in democracy were to fail. Through art, we can reach truth beyond the corporeal world. “Without Art Man would scarce be human; with it he rises above the brute and takes a divine nature.”
Commenting on Green’s amazing presentation, Sare said it gives us a picture of what the U.S. had been like, and how it produced people like Douglas MacArthur, Lyndon LaRouche and many others. The senseless wars the U.S. is funding do not constitute what we are as a nation.
Green said that we may all be imperfect, but we always have the capacity to change and to grow. We must learn what helped our nation to grow in the past and discover new ideas to become better in the future.
