The True History of the Declaration of Independence, Ratified 250 Years Ago, Exposes the Philosophical Fraud Behind the “Special Relationship”

Harley Schlanger's Speech at Berlin Conference

I am aware that the title I have chosen for my talk today, "King Charles, Trump and the Philosophical Fraud of the 'Special Relationship'", might provoke some confusion, as the reference to something "philosophical" relating to the current U.S. President raises questions about the credibility of the speaker. 

What I will demonstrate is that the recent visit of King Charles to Washington, and especially his speech to the members of the U.S. Congress on April 28, were a deliberate provocation designed to revitalize the so-called Special Relationship, which Charles' peers in the City of London fear would be lost with Trump in the White House.  The timing was part of the provocation, coming less than three months before the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

The King opened his address by expressing his gratitude, to "thank the American people for inviting us."  After stating he has the "highest respect" for the Congress, he launched into a string of falsehoods about the "interlinked" destinies of the two countries.

We are "instinctively like-minded", he said, with a relationship which "spans four centuries."  Sharing the "inheritance of the British Enlightenment" has enabled us to forge "a unique relationship of an Atlantic partnership", which is "more important today than ever", as we jointly face an increasingly aggressive Russia.  He then pivoted from "feel-good" generalities to a call for the "resolve for the defense of Ukraine and her courageous people."

We are building F-35 jet fighters together, he said, and modern submarines for AUKUS, the military alliance of Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.  to contain China.  He referred to the new tech agreements signed when Trump was his guest at a banquet in Windsor Castle last September, where $42 billion in military tech and AI contracts were signed by CEOs from both countries.  British and American ingenuity "lead the world", Charles exclaimed, in an "alliance to defend our shared partnership."

Trump responded warmly as he had during the September 17 banquet in London, calling the King, notorious  as a promoter of Malthusian population reduction, "a good guy."  Echoing the King's narrative of the two nation's "shared destinies", he said, "Our bond is priceless and eternal, it is irreplacable and unbreakable."  He lavished praise on the British Empire's "culture, character and creed....Our ancestors would surely be filled with awe and pride that the Anglo-American revolution in human freedom has spread across the world," Trump proclaimed.

Basking in the glow generated by the sentimentality of these comments, it is not surprising that no one called attention to a report issued by Chatham House's International Relations and Defense Committee on April 22, just days before Charles' departure to the U.S.  The report is titled "Adjusting to new realities: rebalancing the U.K,-U.S. partnership," and was presented to the House of Lords by Lord Robertson, the former Secretary General of NATO, who described it as finding that the U.K.could no longer count on the U.S. to defend their common interests, and will have to develop more diverse partners.

As for this trip being a provocation, not a single Member of Congress addressed the glaring irony of the occasion, that Charles was promoting a delusional view of the "strategic alliance" to reaffirm the Special Relationship on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, from the British Empire!  Charles himself made a reference to  the irony of his presence there, quipping that he had not come "as part of some cunning rearguard action." 

America Revolts Against the Empire

Contrary to the fictional version of the Anglo-American relationship presented by the King, there was no idea of an equal partnership between the City of London oligarchs and the American settlers, from the 1607 establishment of the first permanent colony in Jamestown, Virginia, until today,   The London imperialists treated their colonies with the same disregard as their imperial rivals did theirs, as a source of raw material wealth, cheap labor and in some cases military assets.  The British trading companies imported furs, lumber, naval stores and fish, and deployed men from the colonies as soldiers, for example, against the French on the American front of the Seven Years war, from 1756 to 1763. 

A brief review of the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony demonstrates the empire's intent.  Founded in 1628, the Charter was revoked in 1684 as the Americans began to rebel against their treatment as a cheap source of wealth for the trading cartels of the Empire.  The Navigation Act of 1660 was passed by the Parliament to limit their economic freedom.  It prohibited the use of non-British ships for trading; required that all exports, including raw materials, must first go through London: and that proceeds from trade must be used to purchase goods manufactured in Britain.  This Act is an early example of imperial actions to undermine sovereignty, with constraints imposed on countries, e.g., the use of sanctions, embargo, structural adjustment plans and credit restrictions which continue today, for example, against Iran -- which were praised by U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent as 'economic statecraft.'  Note that a recent report from the British military-intelligence think tank RUSI (Royal United Services Institute) held up the EIC, which dissolved in 1874, as an example for mutinational corporations today!

The passage of the Navigation Act generated resistance, as it was correctly seen as an attack on the independence of the colonies. The Massachusetts Bay Company responded by coining their own money, the "pine tree shilling" to provide credit for farmers and entrepreneurs in the colony, and engaging in trade with the other American colonies and  European countries.   Though such trading was considered by the British authorities as smuggling, legal action was not pursued for fear of provoking rebellion.

 This changed in 1773, when the revenue of the British East India Company (EIC), the leading corporate entity of the empire, suffered losses  in Asia.  To compensate, the "Tea Act" was passed, granting monopoly status to EIC tea sold in America.  Protests from Bay Colony officials were rejected, as were appeals to the Parliament to repeal the tax on tea.  This provoked the "Boston Tea Party" on December 16, 1773, when colonial rebels threw the tea shipped to Boston on EIC ships overboard into the harbor.  

In response, in July 1774 Parliament passed the Boston Port Act which shut down the harbor, revoked the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company and mandated that all trials of citizens be moved to London.  Further, a demand for restitution to cover the losses of the EIC was imposed, and the Quartering Act passed which required the housing of British troops without the owner's permission, all of which served as a catalyst for rebellion.  A last appeal to Parliament against these actions occurred on February 1, 1775.  It was rejected, as Benjamin Franklin watched from the chamber.  Two months later, on April 18, shots were fired against the British army in Concord, then again the next day in Lexington -- the famous "Shot Heard 'Round the World."  

There Was No "Shared Inheritance"

The disputes over economic/trade policy were a reflection of a deeper gulf separating the colonies from London, a philosophical disagreement over the nature of man and the role of government.  On one side was the "English Enlightenment", in the tradition of British philosophical radicalism as promoted by the theories of man and government of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke,  who both served as propagandists for a feudal society in which an oligarchy ruled over human beasts.  This was stated openly by Hobbes as a world in which life was condemned to be "nasty, brutish and short", dominated by an "eternal war of each against all", in which the strongest prevail.  For Hobbes, the avoidance of such a state depended on the existence of a powerful sovereign, a Leviathan, who ruled with absolute authority.

Locke's social contract theory parallels Hobbes in many ways, except for his  claim to support "individual freedom".  In practice, his "liberalism" is actually coherent with feudalism or neo-liberalism.  While espousing "individual freedom", it remained subject to constraints imposed to benefit a ruling oligarchy, as proven by his support for "free trade and free market" policies and a balanced budget, and his defense of usury, slavery and child labor. In 1694, he was involved in the creation of the Bank of England and was a member of the Council of Trade responsible for the Navigation Acts.  

In 1699, Locke drafted the Constitution for the Government of the Carolinas, with an emphasis on preserving the power of a landed aristocracy.  In defending this, he wrote that preservation of property is an "end of government". 

Pursuit of Happiness

Long before the shots were fired in Concord and Lexington, a philosophical battle had been underway, with John Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, providing an inspiration for those who followed him, including Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin.  Winthrop's dedication to establishing a republic in the New World is the subject of a book, "How the Nation Was Won", written in 1987 by LaRouche associate, the late Graham Lowry.  The fight over the primacy of the defense of private "property" is one of the subjects that reflects the irreconcilable difference between the British and American view.  While Locke puts defense of private property as an "end" of government, the Declaration of Independence makes "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" the business of government.  And while Jefferson's original draft describes the truths underlying the ends of government to be "sacred and undeniable", Franklin changed the wording to read "we hold these truths to be self-evident", which implies a process of discovery on the part of the citizen.

The fight against Locke's neoliberalism was an extension of the efforts of German scientist/philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, and was part of a broader campaign against British empiricism conducted by Leibniz in collaboration with republican scientists in England (including Jonathan Swift and Robert Harley) and in Germany.  Leibniz's cothinkers included Abraham Kaestner, the founder of anti-Euclidean geometry, and his students Mylius and Lessing, and included cothinkers in Leipzig, Berlin, and Göttingen.  Through the outreach of the Leibnizian James Logan, the American Benjamin Franklin was brought into collaboration with this anti-Lockean, anti-Newtonian network. In 1766, during a visit to Germany, he met with Kaestner in Göttingen.   The intellectual ferment spreading from these circles was made available to co-thinkers in the American colonies, through Franklin with his "Junto" group, which he formed in 1727.  This network was developed by Franklin to  fight against British empiricism, which was  the guiding philosophical current behind the empire's campaign to crush the growing rebellion against it.  

The view of the "social contract" of Locke and those who came after him, such as Newton and Bentham, was coherent with his view of the static nature of the physical universe.  For Locke, the human mind could register sensations, but like the mind of a beast, could not create.  Had he lived to see it, he would have been horrified by the assertion in the Declaration that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed"; and that when governments become "destructive of these ends" -- as had the English government with the denial of rights -- "it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government."  To those anti-Lockean Americans, happiness required the freedom to change axioms when one discovers that the prevailing axioms are wrong!

One of the opponents of the American Revolution in Britain was Jeremy Bentham, who put forward his "Utilitarian" theory of happiness to counter Franklin.  In his "A Fragment on Government" in 1776, he presented a contentless conception of "happiness", declaring that "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong."  He expanded on his disagreements in his "Short Review of the Declaration", dismissing the argument for separation from Britain by writing "Of the preamble I have taken little or no notice.  The truth is, little or none is deserved."  Continuing to display his contempt for the arguments of Franklin's allies, he wrote "The opinions of modern Americans on Government,,,would be too ridiculous to deserve any notice."  He concluded by asserting there exist "no natural and unalienable rights," rejecting the "maxims" of the Declaration as "repugnant to the British constitution." 

Battle for the American System

 The surrender of the British in Yorktown, Virginia in October 1781 ended the successful war of independence against Britain.  It was a victory for a concept of government based not on the power of weapons or money, but of ideas.  This battle has continued to the present day.  It was reflected in a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, written in 1815.  Adams, a Founding Father who was the second President of the United States, wrote, "What do we mean by the Revolution?  The war?  That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it.   The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington."  The proof of this, he concluded, can be found in the articles and pamphlets produced to inspire the colonists to fight the better-armed and funded imperial forces.

This battle continued for the next century-and-a-half, as the concept of a republic committed to the principles enumerated in its founding documents was repeatedly tested, at times by war, but also by subversive attacks against the ideals of its Founders. One of its promoters was Henry Carey, an adviser to President Lincoln, whose father Matthew had been an ally of Ben Franklin.  In 1851, Carey wrote a pamphlet, "The Harmony of Interests", which was a report on this continuing fight.

Carey wrote, " ... Two systems are before the world .... One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other to increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks toward universal war; the other to universal peace. One is the English system: the other we may be proud to call the American system...."    

The "Special Relationship"

The oligarchy of the City of London never ended its effort to stamp out the American System.  After World War II, British leader Sir Winston Churchill invented the term "Special Relationship" as he was desperately seeking a means of sustaining the power of Empire as the actual physical productive power of the empire was in rapid decline.  Having failed to convince the Americans in the aftermath of the victory over the Nazis - to join the British in an invasion of the USSR in Operation Unthinkable, Churchill enlisted Harry Truman to place U.S. military and economic power behind the British plan for sustaining the empire, as a crucial ally during the Cold War..  

This included the creation of NATO, which was aptly described by one of its creators, Lord Ismay, as having one job: "To Keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."  As an expression of classic City of London geopolitics, it remains a danger to the USA to the present day.

On July 4 of this year, as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the best way to give thanks to the Founding Fathers of the U.S., is to reassert the principles which underlie our freedoms, as elaborated in this document, and to reject the appeals from today's imperialists that we revive the Special Relationship.