America's Fight For Universal Progress: Interview With Anton Chaitkin

 

Anton Chaitkin has been an activist since his childhood in the 1950s.

In the early 1930s, his father, Jacob Chaitkin, a pro-Franklin Roosevelt lawyer, had blocked some of Wall Street’s financial arrangements with Hitler, and was legal counsel for the American Jewish Congress boycott against Germany.

Anton grew up committed to justice, with a strong sense of the realities of power politics.

About two years after the JFK assassination, Chaitkin heard from Lyndon LaRouche that financiers were shifting American strategy away from industrial progress, toward cheap labor, foreshadowing fascist policies and systemic collapse. An association was formed, to defeat those who had brutalized contemporary thought in science, economics, the arts, and philosophy.

Chaitkin began a systematic inquiry into American history. He found that the mental map of our former leaders was far more profound and more pro-human than anything available in the post-JFK era.

He has done sharply original work in American history, in hundreds of articles and in two books, Treason in America, from Aaron Burr to Averell Harriman – a 600-page unveiling of the Eastern Establishment as the tory-British-racist-imperialist faction – and George Bush, the Unauthorized Biography.

Anton Chaitkin's new book provides a completely new understanding of the industrial revolution and the strategic context for America's founding.

Chaitkin deeply documents the policy fight - industrial progress versus empire-dictated backwardness, exposing the shallow sophistries of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and revisionist ideologues on the origin of modern times.

"Who We Are" reveals:

1. Benjamin Franklin, based in England, inspired and coordinated a small circle of progressive innovators who built Britain's first canals, invented the steam engine, and brought on the Industrial Revolution.
2. Franklin and Alexander Hamilton's national banking, protectionist and manufacturing ideas countered the imperial doctrines of "free trade" and agrarianism promoted by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, formerly an anti-slavery revolutionary, had become the spokesman for Southern interests and the associated imperial trade system.
3. A team of 6 statesmen and military leaders in the early 19th century revived the Revolutionary legacy and organized America's industrial transformation, building the canals, the first railroads, the coal and iron industries.