Click here for Full Issue of Fidelio Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1995 ’s War Against Western Civilization by Webster G. Tarpley Prints and Photographs Division, The Library of Congress The currently ending 500-year cycle in European history, which came to the surface during the Fifteenth century, has been determined by the emerging conflict between the two leading forces within European culture during that century. On the one side, there were the forces of the Golden Renaissance, centered around such figures as Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa and the 1439-40 Council of Florence. On the opposing side, was the re-emerging power of the Venice-centered European aristocratic and financier oligarchy. All European history since the Fifteenth century within Europe and globally, has been dominated by the cultural conflict between the radiated influence of the Renaissance and the opposing, Venice-launched force of the so-called ‘Enlightenment.’ —Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. ‘The Coming Fall of the House of Windsor’

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© 1995 Schiller Institute, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. he British royal family of today typifies the tives crisis have brought about the potential for a new Venetian Party, and continues the outlook and collapse of civilization in our own time. This crisis can Tmethods of an oligarchical faction which can be only be reversed by repudiating in practice the axioms of traced far back into the ancient world. Oligarchism is a the oligarchical mentality. principle of irrational domination associated with heredi- tary oligarchy/nobility and with certain aristocratic The ‘Fondo’ priesthoods. At the center of oligarchy is the idea that certain families are born to rule as an arbitrary elite, A pillar of the oligarchical system is the family fortune, while the vast majority of any given population is con- or fondo, as it is called in Italian. The continuity of the demned to oppression, serfdom, or slavery. During most family fortune which earns money through usury and of the past 2,500 years, oligarchs have been identified by looting is often more important than the biological conti- their support for the philosophical writings of Aristotle nuity across generations of the family that owns the for- and their rejection of the epistemology of Plato. Aristotle tune. In Venice, the largest fondo was the endowment of asserted that slavery is a necessary institution, because the Basilica of St. Mark, which was closely associated some are born to rule and others to be ruled. He also with the Venetian state treasury, and which absorbed the reduced the question of human knowledge to the crudest family fortunes of nobles who died without heirs. This sense certainty and perception of “facts.” Aristotle’s for- fondo was administered by the procurers of St. Mark, malism is a means of killing human creativity, and there- whose position was one of the most powerful under the fore represents absolute evil. This evil is expressed by the Venetian system. Around this central fondo were grouped bestialist view of the oligarchs that human beings are the the individual family fortunes of the great oligarchical same as animals. families, such as the Mocenigo, the Cornaro, the Dando- Oligarchs identify wealth purely in money terms, and lo, the Contarini, the Morosini, the Zorzi, and the Tron. practice usury, monetarism, and looting at the expense of Until the end of the Eighteenth century, the dozen or so technological advancement and physical production. Oli- wealthiest Venetian families had holdings comparable or garchs have always been associated with the arbitrary superior to the very wealthiest families anywhere in rejection of true scientific discovery and scientific method Europe. When the Venetian oligarchy transferred many in favor of open anti-science or more subtle obscurantist of its families and assets to northern Europe, the Venet- pseudo-science. The oligarchy has believed for millennia ian fondi provided the nucleus of the great Bank of Ams- that the Earth is overpopulated; the oligarchical com- terdam, which dominated Europe during the Seven- mentary on the Trojan War was that this conflict was teenth century, and of the Bank of England, which necessary in order to prevent greater numbers of became the leading bank of the Eighteenth century. mankind from oppressing “Mother Earth.” The oli- In the pre-Christian world around the Mediterranean, garchy has constantly stressed race and racial characteris- oligarchical political forces included Babylon in tics, often as a means for justifying slavery. In interna- Mesopotamia. The “whore of Babylon” condemned in tional affairs, oligarchs recommend such methods as The Revelation of St. John the Divine, is not a mystical con- geopolitics, understood as the method of “divide and con- struct, but a very specific power cartel of evil oligarchical quer,” which lets one power prevail by playing its adver- families. Other oligarchical centers included Hiram of saries one against the other. Oligarchical policy strives to Tyre and the Phoenicians. The Persian Empire was an maintain a balance of power among such adversaries for oligarchy. In the Greek world, the center of oligarchical its own benefit, but this attempt always fails in the long run and leads to new wars. The essence of oligarchism is summed up in the idea This article was originally prepared as background documen- of the empire, in which an elite identifying itself as a tation to “The Coming Fall of the House of Windsor,” a spe- master race rules over a degraded mass of slaves or other cial report prepared by Executive Intelligence Review under oppressed victims. If oligarchical methods are allowed to the direction of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. The supplementary dominate human affairs, they always create a breakdown material is taken from the author’s “How the Dead Souls of crisis of civilization, with economic depression, war, Venice Corrupted Science,” a speech delivered to the Labor famine, plague, and pestilence. Examples of this are the Day conference of the Schiller Institute and International Fourteenth-century Black Plague and the Thirty Years Caucus of Labor Committees in Vienna, Virginia on Sept. 4, War (1618-48), both of which were created by Venetian 1994, which is published in full in Executive Intelligence intelligence. The post-industrial society and the deriva- Review, Vol. 21, No. 38, Sept. 23, 1994.

5 banking and intelligence was the Temple of Apollo at died, and the Platonic Academy of Athens decisively Delphi, whose agents included Lycurgus of Sparta and, influenced Alexander the Great, who finally destroyed later, Aristotle. The Delphic Apollo tried and failed to the Persian Empire before being assassinated by Aristo- secure the conquest of Greece by the Persian Empire. tle. Later, the Delphic Apollo intervened into the wars Then the Delphic Apollo developed the Isocrates plan, between Rome and the Etruscan cities to make Rome the which called for King Philip of Macedonia to conquer key power of Italy and then of the entire Mediterranean. Athens and the other great city-states so as to set up an Rome dominated the Mediterranean by about 200 B.C. oligarchical empire that would operate as a western ver- There followed a series of civil wars that aimed at decid- sion of the Persian Empire. This plan failed when Philip ing where the capital of the new empire would be and

Venetian Control Over How People Think

etween A.D. 1200 and about A.D. 1600, the world authoritative professional opinion. The Venetian Party Bcenter of gravity for the cancerous forces of oli- has also created over the centuries a series of scientific garchism was the oligarchy of Venice. Toward the end frauds and hoaxes, which have been elevated to the sta- of that time, the Venetian oligarchy decided for various tus of incontrovertible and unchallengeable authorities. reasons to transfer its families, fortunes, and character- These have been used to usurp the rightful honor due to istic outlook to a new base of operations, which turned real scientists, whom the Venetians have done every- out to be the British Isles. The old program of a world- thing possible to destroy. wide new Roman Empire with its We can identify the Venetian fac- capital in Venice was replaced by tion which has been responsible for the new program of a worldwide the most important of these scientific new Roman Empire with its capital and epistemological frauds. We can in London—what eventually came approach these Venetians in three to be known as the British Empire. groups: First there is the group This was the metastasis of the around Pietro Pomponazzi, Gasparo cancer, the shift of the Venetian Par- Contarini, and Francesco Zorzi, who ty from the Adriatic to the banks of were active in the first part of the the Thames, and this has been the 1500’s. Second, there is the group of main project of the world oligarchy and his right-hand man during the past five centuries. The Fulgenzio Micanzio, the case officers Venetian Party, wherever it is, for . This was the believes in epistemological warfare. group that opposed Johannes Kepler The Venetian Party knows that in the early 1600’s. Third, we have ideas are more powerful weapons the group around Antonio Conti and than guns, fleets, and bombs. In Cardinal Gasparo Contarini Giammaria Ortes in the early 1700’s. order to secure acceptance for their This was the group that created the imperial ideas, the Venetian Party seeks to control the Newton myth and modern materialism or utilitarian- way people think. If you can control the way people ism and combatted Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. These think, say the Venetians, you can control the way they three groups of Venetian game-masters are responsible respond to events, no matter what those events may be. for a great deal of the obscurantism and garbage that It is therefore vital to the Venetians to control philoso- weighs like a nightmare on the brain of humanity phy and especially science, the area where human pow- today. These Venetian intelligence officials are the ers of hypothesis and creative reason become a force for original atheists and materialists of the modern world, improvements in the order of nature. The Venetian Par- as reflected in the sympathy of Soviet writers for fig- ty is implacably hostile to scientific discovery. Since the ures like Galileo, Newton, and Voltaire as ancestors of days of Aristotle, they have attempted to suffocate scien- what was later called Dialectical Materialism. tific discovery by using formalism and the fetishism of —WGT

6 who would be the ruling family. These are associated lagoon. Charlemagne was forced to recognize Venice as a with the Social War, the conflict between Marius and part of the eastern or Byzantine Empire, under the pro- Sulla, the first Triumvirate (Julius Caesar, Pompey the tection of the Emperor Nicephorus. Venice was never a Great, and L. Crassus), and the second Triumvirate part of Western Civilization. (Octavian, Marc Antony, and Lepidus). Marc Antony Over the next four centuries, Venice developed as a and Cleopatra wanted the capital of the new empire to be second capital of the Byzantine Empire through mar- at Alexandria in Egypt. Octavian (Augustus) secured an riage alliances with certain Byzantine dynasties and con- alliance with the cult of Sol Invictus Mithra and became flicts with the Holy Roman Empire based in Germany. emperor, defeating the other contenders. After the series The Venetian economy grew through usury and slavery. of monsters called the Julian-Claudian emperors By 1082, the Venetians had tax-free trading rights in the (Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, et al.) the empire stagnated entire Byzantine Empire. The Venetians were one of the between A.D. 80 and 180, under such figures as Hadrian main factors behind the Crusades against the Muslim and Trajan. Then, between A.D. 180 and 280, the empire power in the eastern Mediterranean. In the Fourth Cru- collapsed. It was reorganized by Aurelian, Diocletian, sade of A.D. 1202, the Venetians used an army of French and Constantine with a series of measures that centered feudal knights to capture and loot Constantinople, the on banning any change in the technology of the means of Orthodox Christian city which was the capital of the production, and very heavy taxation. The Diocletian pro- Byzantine Empire. The Venetian doge Enrico Dandolo gram led to the depopulation of the cities, serfdom for was declared the lord of one-quarter and one-half of one- farmers, and the collapse of civilization into a prolonged quarter of the Byzantine Empire, and the Venetians Dark Age. imposed a short-lived puppet state called the Latin The Roman Empire in the West finally collapsed in Empire. By this point, Venice had replaced Byzantium as A.D. 476. But the Roman Empire in the East, sometimes the bearer of the oligarchical heritage of the Roman called the Byzantine Empire, continued for almost a Empire. thousand years, until 1453. And if the Ottoman Empire is During the 1200’s, the Venetians, now at the apex of considered as the Ottoman dynasty of an ongoing Byzan- their military and naval power, set out to create a new tine Empire, then the Byzantine Empire kept going until Roman Empire with its center at Venice. They expanded shortly after World War I. With certain exceptions, the into the Greek islands, the Black Sea, and the Italian ruling dynasties of Byzantium continued the oligarchical mainland. They helped to defeat the Hohenstaufen policy of Diocletian and Constantine. rulers of Germany and Italy.Venetian intelligence assist- Venice, the city built on islands in the lagoons and ed Genghis Khan as he attacked and wiped out powers marshes of the northern Adriatic Sea, is supposed to that had resisted Venice. The Venetians caused the death have been founded by refugees from the Italian main- of the poet and political figure Dante Alighieri, who land who were fleeing from Attila the Hun in A.D. 452. developed the concept of the modern sovereign nation- Early on, Venice became the location of a Benedictine state in opposition to the Venetian plans for empire. A monastery on the island of St. George Major. St. George series of wars with Genoa led later to the de facto merger is not a Christian saint, but rather a disguise for Apollo, of Venice and Genoa. The Venetian bankers, often called Perseus, and Marduk, idols of the oligarchy. Around Lombards, began to loot many parts of Europe with usu- A.D. 700, the Venetians claim to have elected their first rious loans. Henry III of England in the years after 1255 Doge, or duke. This post was not hereditary, but was became insolvent after taking huge Lombard loans to controlled by an election in which only the nobility finance foreign wars at 120-180 percent interest. These could take part. For this reason, Venice erroneously transactions created the basis for the Venetian Party in called itself a republic. England. When the Lombard bankers went bankrupt because the English failed to pay, a breakdown crisis of Venice Was Never Part of the European economy ensued. This led to a new col- lapse of European civilization, including the onset of the Western Civilization Black Plague, which depopulated the continent. In the In the years around A.D. 800, Charlemagne King of the midst of the chaos, the Venetians encouraged their ally Franks, using the ideas of St. Augustine, attempted to Edward III of England, to wage war against France in revive civilization from the Dark Ages. Venice was the the conflict that became the Hundred Years War (1339- enemy of Charlemagne. Charlemagne’s son, King Pepin 1453), which hurled France into chaos before St. Joan of of Italy, tried unsuccessfully to conquer the Venetian Arc defeated the English. This was then followed by the

7 Wars of the Roses in England. As a result of Venetian laus of Cusa, Pope Pius II, and the Medici-sponsored domination, the Fourteenth century had become a cata- Council of Florence of 1439. The Venetians fought the strophe for civilization. Renaissance with a policy of expansion on the Italian mainland, or terra firma, which brought them to the out- The Basis for the Golden Renaissance skirts of Milan. More fundamentally, the Venetians pro- moted the pagan philosophy of Aristotle against the In the midst of the crisis of the 1300’s, the friends of Christian Platonism of the Florentines. The school of the Dante and Petrarch laid the basis for the Italian Golden Rialto was an Aristotelian academy where Venetian Renaissance, which reached its culmination with Nico- patricians lectured and studied their favorite philosopher.

Paolo Sarpi and Galileo alileo Galilei taught mathe- and thus a very important agent of Gmatics at the University of influence for the Venetian Party. Padua from 1592 to 1610, and it This entire telescope operation had was during his stay on Venetian been devised by Paolo Sarpi, who territory that he became a celebrity. wrote about Galileo as “our mathe- Galileo was a paid agent of Paolo matician.” In 1611, a Polish visitor Sarpi, the chief of Venetian intelli- to Venice, Rey, wrote that the gence, and, after Sarpi’s death, of “adviser, author, and director” of Sarpi’s right-hand man Micanzio. Galileo’s telescope project had been Galileo’s fame was procured Father Paolo Sarpi. when he used a small telescope to Kepler and Galileo were in fre- observe the four largest moons of quent contact for over thirty years. Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the In 1609, Kepler published his phases of Venus. (The first tele- Astronomia Nova, expounding his

scope had been built by Leonardo first and second laws of planetary Prints and Photographs Division, The Library of Congress da Vinci about a hundred years motion. Nonetheless, in Galileo’s Galileo Galilei before Galileo.) He reported these Dialogues on the Two Great World sightings in his essay The Starry Systems, published in 1633, Kepler to that of Sarpi. Messenger, which instantly made is hardly mentioned. At the end, For Galileo, the trial before the him the premier scientist in Europe one of the characters says that he is Inquisition was one of the greatest surprised at Kepler for being so public relations successes of all “puerile” as to attribute the tides to time. The gesture of repression the attraction of the Moon. against Galileo carried out by the Sarpi’s achievement for Venet- Dominicans of Santa Maria Sopra ian intelligence was to abstract the Minerva in Rome established the method of Aristotle from the mass equation “Galileo = modern experi- of opinions expressed by Aristotle mental science struggling against on this or that particular issue. In benighted obscurantism.” That this way, sense certainty could be equation has stood ever since, and kept as the basis of scientific this tragic misunderstanding has experiments, and Aristotle’s had terrible consequences for embarrassingly outdated views on human thought. Lost in the certain natural phenomena could brouhaha about Galileo, is the be jettisoned. In the Art of Think- more relevant fact that Kepler had ing Well, Sarpi starts from sense been condemned by the Inquisition

The Granger Collection, New York perception and sense certainty. more than a decade before. Fra Paolo Sarpi Galileo’s epistemology is identical —WGT

8 Authors like Barbaro and Bembo popularized an Aris- tion like the League of Cambrai from ever again being totelian “humanism.” The University of Padua became assembled against Venice. Thus, the leading figure of the the great European center for Aristotelian studies. Protestant Reformation, the first Protestant in modern Venice also encouraged the Ottoman Turks to advance Europe, was Venice’s Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, who against Constantinople, which was now controlled by the was also the leader of the Catholic Counter-Reforma- Paleologue dynasty of emperors. When Cusa and his tion. Contarini was a pupil of the Padua Aristotelian friends succeeded in reuniting the Roman Catholic Pietro Pomponazzi, who denied the immortality of the Church and the Orthodox and other eastern churches at human soul. Contarini pioneered the Protestant doctrine the Council of Florence, the Venetians tried to sabotage of salvation by faith alone, with no regard for good this result. The ultimate sabotage was the Ottoman con- works of charity. Contarini organized a group of Italian quest of Constantinople in 1453, which was assisted by Protestants called gli spirituali, including oligarchs like Venetian agents and provocateurs. Venice refused to Vittoria Colonna and Giulia Gonzaga. Contarini’s net- respond to Pope Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini) works encouraged and protected Martin Luther and lat- when he called for the recovery of Constantinople. er John Calvin of Geneva. Contarini sent his neighbor The program of Cusa, Pius II, Machiavelli, Leonardo and relative Francesco Zorzi to England to support King da Vinci, and other Italian Renaissance leaders for the cre- Henry VIII’s plan to divorce Catherine of Aragon. Zorzi ation of powerful national states proved impossible to car- acted as Henry’s sex counselor. As a result, Henry creat- ry out in Italy. The first nation-state was created in France ed the Anglican Church on a Venetian-Byzantine mod- by King Louis XI during the 1460’s and 1470’s. The suc- el, and opened a phase of hostility to Spain. Henceforth, cessful nation-building methods of Louis XI compelled the Venetians would use England for attacks on Spain attention and imitation in England and Spain. Despite and France. Zorzi created a Rosicrucian-Freemasonic their incessant intrigues, the Venetians were now con- party at the English court that later produced writers fronted with large national states whose military power like Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. greatly exceeded anything that Venice could mobilize. Contarini was also the leader of the Catholic Counter- Reformation. He sponsored St. Ignatius of Loyola and The League of Cambrai secured papal approval for the creation of the Society of Jesus as an official order of the Church. Contarini also The Venetians tried to use the power of the new nation- began the process of organizing the Council of Trent states, especially France, to crush Milan and allow further with a letter on church reform that praised Aristotle Venetian expansion. But ambassadors for the king of while condemning Erasmus, the leading Platonist of the France and the Austrian emperor met at Cambrai in day. The Venetians dominated the college of cardinals December 1508 and agreed to create a European league and created the Index of Prohibited Books, which for the dismemberment of Venice. The League of Cam- banned works by Dante and Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini brai soon included France, Spain, Germany, the Papacy, (Pope Pius II). Milan, Florence, Savoy, Mantua, Ferrara, and others. At As the Counter-Reformation advanced, the Contarini the battle of Agnadello in April 1509, the Venetian mer- networks split into two wings. One was the pro-Protes- cenaries were defeated by the French, and Venice tem- tant spirituali, who later evolved into the party of the porarily lost eight hundred years of land conquests. Venetian oligarchy called the giovani, and who serviced Venetian diplomacy played on the greed of the growing networks in France, Holland, England, and Genoese Pope Julius II Della Rovere, who was bribed to Scotland. On the other wing were the zelanti, oriented break up the League of Cambrai. By rapid diplomatic toward repression and the Inquisition, and typified by maneuvers, Venice managed to survive, although foreign Pope Paul IV Caraffa. The zelanti evolved into the oli- armies threatened to overrun the lagoons on several occa- garchical party called the vecchi, who serviced Venetian sions, and the city was nearly bankrupt. Venice’s long- networks in the Vatican and the Catholic Hapsburg term outlook was very grim, especially because the Por- dominions. The apparent conflict of the two groups was tuguese had opened a route to Asia around the Cape of orchestrated to serve Venetian projects. Good Hope. The Venetians considered building a Suez canal, but decided against it. A New Approach To Destroy Science One result of the Cambrai crisis was the decision of Venetian intelligence to create the Protestant Reforma- During the decades after 1570, the salon of the Ridotto tion. The goal was to divide Europe for one to two cen- Morosini family was the focus of heirs of the pro-Protes- turies in religious wars that would prevent any combina- tant wing of the Contarini spirituali networks. These

9 Prints and Photographs Division, The Library of Congress The Granger Collection, New York Agents of Paolo Sarpi: England's (left) and Sir (right) The Granger Collection, New York Thomas Malthus Prints and Photographs Division, The Library of Congress Frederick the Great The Granger Collection, New York Nicolas de Malebranche The Granger Collection, New York The Granger Collection, New York 10 Leonhard Euler Francesco Algarotti were the giovani, whose networks were strongest in the Atlantic powers of France, England, Holland, and Scot- Antonio Conti and Newton land. The central figure here was the Servite monk Paolo Sarpi, assisted by his deputy, Fulgenzio Micanzio. Sarpi or the oligarchy, Newton and Galileo are the only was the main Venetian propagandist in the struggle Ftwo contenders for the honor of being the most against the Papacy during the time of the papal interdict influential thinker of their faction since Aristotle him- against Venice in 1606. Sarpi and Micanzio were in close self. The British oligarchy praises Newton as the touch with the Stuart court in London, and especially founder of modern science. with Sir Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, who got But Newton’s real interest was not mathematics or their ideas from Sarpi’s Pensieri (Thoughts) and Arte di astronomy. It was alchemy. His laboratory at Trinity Ben Pensare (Art of Thinking Well). Sarpi’s agents in College, Cambridge Prague, Heidelberg, and was fitted out for Vienna deliberately orga- alchemy. Here, his nized the Thirty Years friends said, the fires War, which killed half the never went out dur- population of Germany and ing six weeks of the The Conti-Ortes one-third of the population spring and six weeks network of of Europe. of the autumn. And Sarpi also marks a turn- what is alchemy? Venetian control ing point in the methods What kind of over Europe used by Venetian intelli- research was Newton (1710–1750) gence to combat science. doing? His sources Under Zorzi and Contari- were books like the

ni, the Venetians had been Theatrum Chemicum Prints and Photographs Division, The Library of Congress openly hostile to Cusa and Britannicum of Elias Sir Isaac Newton other leading scientists. Ashmole, the Rosi- Sarpi realized that the crucian leader of British speculative Freemasonry. Venetians must now pre- Newton’s love of alchemy and magic surfaces as the sent themselves as the great basis of his outlook, including in his supposed scientif- champions of science, but ic writings. In his Opticks, he asks, “Have not the small on the basis of Aristotelian particles of bodies certain powers, virtues, or forces, by formalism and sense cer- which they act at a distance. ... How those attrac- tainty. By seizing control of tions may be performed, I do not here consider. What the scientific community I call attraction may be performed by Impulse, or from the inside, the Vene- some other means unknown to me.” This is Newton’s tians could corrupt scien- notion of gravity as action at a distance, which Leibniz tific method and strangle rightly mocked as black magic. Newton’s system was the process of discovery. unable to describe anything beyond the interaction of Sarpi sponsored and two bodies, and supposed an entropic universe that directed the career of would have wound down like clockwork if not peri- Galileo Galilei, whom the odically re-wound. Venetians used for an empiricist counterattack against How then did the current myth of Newton the sci- the Platonic method of Johannes Kepler. entist originate? The apotheosis of Newton was arranged by Antonio Conti of Venice. Conti under- Growth of the Venetian Party stood that Newton, kook that he was, represented the ideal cult figure for a new obscurantist concoction of During the 1600’s, the Venetian fondi were transferred deductive-inductive pseudo-mathematical formalism north, often to the Bank of Amsterdam, and later to the masquerading as science. Venice needed an English newly founded Bank of England. During the reign of Galileo, and Conti provided the intrigue and the pub- “Bloody” Mary, the Stuart period, the civil war in Eng- lic relations needed to produce one, first through the land, the dictatorship of Cromwell, the Stuart Restora- French networks of Malebranche, and later, Voltaire. tion, and the 1688 installation of William of Orange as —WGT

11 King of England by the pro-Venetian English oligarchy, included Giammaria Ortes, the Venetian economist who the Venetian Party of England grew in power. asserted that the carrying capacity of the planet Earth During the first half of the 1700’s, the most important could never exceed three billion persons. Ortes was a stu- activities of Venetian intelligence were directed by a salon dent of the pro-Galileo activist Guido Grandi of Pisa. called the conversazione filosofica e felice, which centered Ortes applied Newton’s method to the so-called social sci- around the figure of Antonio Schinella Conti. Conti was ences. Ortes denied the possibility of progress or higher a Venetian nobleman, originally a follower of Descartes, standards of living, supported free trade, opposed dirigist who lived for a time in Paris, where he was close to Male- economics, and polemicized against the ideas of the branche. Conti went to London where he became a American Revolution. The ideas of Conti, Ortes, and friend of Sir Isaac Newton. Conti directed the operations their network were brought into Great Britain under the that made Newton an international celebrity, including supervision of William Petty, the Earl of Shelburne, who especially the creation of a pro-Newton party of French was the de facto doge of the British oligarchy around the Anglophiles and Anglomaniacs who came to be known time of the American Revolution. The Shelburne stable as the French Enlightenment. Conti’s agents in this effort of writers, including Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, included Montesquieu and Voltaire. Conti was also active Thomas Malthus, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Charles in intrigues against the German philosopher, scientist, Darwin, and other exponents of British philosophical and economist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whom Conti radicalism, all take their main ideas from Conti and espe- portrayed as a plagiarist of Newton. Conti also influ- cially Ortes. enced Georg Ludwig of Hanover, later King George I of Francesco Algarotti, author of a treatise on “New- England, against Leibniz. tonian Science for Ladies,” was another Venetian in the The Conti conversazione was also sponsored by the orbit of the Conti conversazione. Algarotti was close to Emo and Memmo oligarchical families. Participants Voltaire, and, along with the French scientist Pierre Louis de Maupertuis, he helped form the homosexual harem around British ally Frederick the Great of Prus- sia. Frederick the Great was Britain’s principal conti- Antonio Conti and Voltaire nental ally during the Seven Years War against France, when British victories in India and Canada made them rench literary historians are instinctively not the supreme naval power of the world. The homosexual Ffriendly to the idea that the most famous Frederick made Algarotti his court chamberlain at his Frenchman was a Venetian agent working for palace of Sans Souci. Maupertuis had become famous Conti, but the proof is convincing. Voltaire knew when he went to Lapland to measure a degree of the both Conti personally and Conti’s works. local meridian, and came back claiming that he had The book which made Voltaire famous was his confirmed one of Newton’s postulates. Frederick made Philosophical Letters, sometimes called the English him the president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. letters, because they are devoted to the exaltation of Frederick corresponded with Voltaire all his life; all things British. Most important, the Philosophical Voltaire lived at Sans Souci and Berlin between 1750 Letters center on the praise of Newton. After chap- and 1753. Voltaire quarreled with Maupertuis and ters on Francis Bacon and John Locke, there are attacked him in his “Diatribe of Doctor Akakia.” The four chapters on Newton, the guts of the work. mathematicians Leonhard Euler of Switzerland and Voltaire also translated Newton directly, and pub- Joseph Louis Lagrange of Turin were also associated lished Elements of Newtonian Philosophy. with Fredrick’s cabal. In 1759, Voltaire published his short novel Can- Venice ceased to exist as an independent state after its dide, a distillation of Venetian cultural pessimism conquest by Napoleon in 1797 and the Austrian takeover expressed as a raving attack on Leibniz, through of the lagoon under the Treaty of Campo Formio. But the vicious caricature Dr. Pangloss. When Can- the influence of the Venetian oligarchy over culture and dide visits Venice, he meets Senator Pococurante, politics has remained immense to the present day, both whom he considers a great genius; Senator directly through its own cultural operations like the Pococurante is clearly a figure of Abbot Antonio European Society of Culture (SEC) and the Cini Foun- Conti. Conti later translated one of Voltaire’s dation, but more significantly, through such British-led plays, Mérope, into Italian. institutions of the international oligarchy as the Interna- —WGT tional Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and Prince Philip’s World Wide Fund for Nature.

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