Quo Vadis Germany?
For a New Atlantic Alliance
in the Tradition of FDR
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
This statement was issued by the chairwoman of the Civil Rights Movement Solidarity party (BüSo) on Oct. 6, following the election in Dresden.
How the configuration of personnel in the new government turns out, the "constraints" with which it will be confronted, will be dramatically different from the themes on which the politicians and the media spoke during the election campaign. These are the themes, about which only the BüSo spoke: 1) the hyperinflationary collapse-crisis of the global financial system, 2) the implications of the greatest strategic disaster in the history of the United States, the Iraq War; and 3) the effects of the storm of scandals in the Republican Party, and possible changes in the U.S. Administration.
No matter what, this next government will have to make decisions on which the very existence of Germany will depend. And it will have to face the reality which has up until now been "left out of the media." Whether it will be in a position to do this, will conclusively depend upon whether this government makes use of the analyses and solutions proposed by the BüSo.
The electoral result of the BüSo, which naturally, for the benefit of the country, should have been much better, nonetheless deserves the most intense recognition: 10 direct candidates in Saxony and Bavaria received between 1 and 1.8% of the vote, another 17 between 0.5 and 0.9% of the vote. Only if you take into account the total media-dictatorship, which would make Goebbels flush with envy, does the significance of these numbers become clear. Because there was not only a conspiracy among the media to report nothing of the content of the BüSo campaign, but if it did report, then it was only to make short, slanderous comments. When a youth member of the BüSo challenged a journalist of ZDF TV to report on the reality of the imminent financial crash, and the fact that the BüSo was the only party with solutions to this problem, this journalist countered: "What we report, is reality." We can be totally confident that this arrogance will survive the coming storms just as well as the levees in New Orleans did.
But the BüSo had a very much greater influence in this campaign than was evident in the voting results: The BüSo provided conceptual clarity from which politicians of other parties benefitted. The most important was clearly, that the attempted coup by the neo-cons against the German social state was shattered, at least for the time being. The two books by the BüSo, about the neo-cons in the U.S. and those in Germany, definitely provided the conceptual preparation, which served as the ammunition for bringing down Paul Kirchhof, who had threatened to smash the social state with his "sledge-hammer."
When the criminal negligence on the part of the U.S. government in the case of Hurricane Katrina made clear where the dismantling of the social state would lead in the event of a serious crisis, a BüSo leaflet warned of the not-too-distant consequences, namely, a near-term "catastrophe like that in Louisiana here in Germany," to which a Kirchhof policy of "shrinking" the state would have led. When [Christian Democratic Chancellor candidaate Angela] Merkel was asked by Mrs. Christiansen in the so-called TV duel, whether Bush had failed in the face of the Katrina disaster, the question was so unpleasant for her that she wouldn't comment on Bush's failure, and instead, spoke totally defensively about her policy for Germany. Chancellor Schröder, on the other hand, made his strongest point during the "duel," when he took up the argument of the BüSo about the dangerous consequences which would ensue if the state were further dismantled.
Mr. Kirchhof passed away into well-deserved oblivion, and the attacks by von Lambsdorff and Merz on Mrs. Merkel showed, how unhappy the German neo-cons were about this defeated coup attempt, which would have turned Germany from a social state into an Anglo-Saxon economic model. "Merkel light" is not to the liking of the financial locusts.
But Chancellor Schröder, despite his remarkable catchup maneuvers, which allowed the Social Democratic Party [SPD] to recover from 24% in the North Rhine-Westphalia elections, to 34%, has not succeeded in demonstrating to the population that he has a real concept of how to overcome the economic crisis in Germany. The bitter after-taste of Hartz 4 and Agenda 2010 remains, and has given the so-called Left Party an uptick. Whether this hodge-podge of the PDS and diverse protesters, which has no coherent concept of the pressing problems, will have any lasting existence as a party, is highly questionable.
The Tasks of the New Government
The most essential factor, which is leading to the delaying action in putting together the government, is not to be found in the programmatic differences between the SPD and the CDU/CSU, but in three inherently interlinked storm conditions. The first of these three "deep issues," if one wants to call them that, is the substantial weakening of Mrs. Merkel's political friends in Washington. The Republican Party is currently being convulsed by an artillery-bombardment of scandals: the twofold criminal indictments on party financing offenses against the majority leader in the Congress, DeLay, have checkmated Dick Cheney's sharpest whip. Already corruption charges have arisen against his successor, Roy Blunt. The neo-con agent Judith Miller, whose stay in prison lasted too long, has named Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby, and Bush's campaign manager, Karl Rove, as her sources of information in the Valerie Plame case. (Plame was the wife, working as an undercover CIA agent, of Ambassador Joe Wilson, who had exposed as a sham, the story of the so-called "yellow cake," that Saddam Hussein would have allegedly used for his weapons of mass destruction.)
The New York Times has reported on rumors that further prosecutions against two White House associates are imminent, in this connection; one of them could be Cheney. Furthermore, Larry Franklin, already accused of betraying secrets, has declared himself to be a crown witness for the prosecution in a "plea bargain," and will, over the next days and week, identify all the persons in the Pentagon who were betraying secret intelligence to Israel. It's now come to the point: The Republican Party will collapse from an existential crisis, and the clouds of Watergate have long since risen over Washington.
The second complex, which touches on the framework for forming the government in Berlin, is the "greatest strategic catastrophe in the history of the U.S.A.," that, in the words of the respected General Odom, the former head of the military intelligence service in the United States. According to reports by American officers on location in Iraq, the U.S. and Great Britain have totally lost military control in the country, and no longer have at their disposal the ability for an orderly retreat, because both the road from Basra to Kuwait, as well as the route by so-called Route One to Jordan, are controlled by the resistance forces. The damage to the image of the U.S., which is connected in the mind of the whole world with the Iraq War, is proceeding, in the estimation of the U.S. military itself, to that of the Vietnam War. Up to this point Mrs. Merkel has not addressed her brilliantly mistaken evaluation of the situation at the beginning of the Iraq War.
The possibility of an orderly retreat by foreign troops will only exist, if the Iraqi resistance and the rest of the world perceive a clear signal of a real change in policy in Washington. My husband, the American opposition politician Lyndon LaRouche, has said, that only the dismissal or resignation of the author of the Iraq policy, Dick Cheney, could be such a signal. As long as Cheney remains in office, the danger remains that a renewed terrorist attack on the United States would be used as an excuse for the U.S., without further investigation about who was responsible, to launch airstrikes against Iran, including the use of "mini-nukes."
The third aspect of the global context, which will determine the formation of the government and the challenges for the next government, is the hyperinflationary explosion and out-of-control derivatives bubble of the global financial system. The hopeless situation of the world financial system has long since been discussed in all meetings of boards of directors and governments with open and full panic.
In the face of this unparalleled historical and strategic situation, there is only one way out: The future government must assure, together with other leading institutions of Europe, that the growing bipartisan opposition against Bush and Cheney gains acceptance; that the government changes in Washington; and that the question of a new world financial architecture is put on the agenda. Only if a bipartisan coalition in the Senate and Congress returns to the policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Bretton Woods system, and the New Deal, can there be a way out of the systemic crisis. That this changing tide is already in under way, is evident by, among other things, the defeat of the White House when the Senate by a 90 to 9 vote approved the rejection of the torture of prisoners of war.
The decisive question will be, whether the new government will be conceptually and characteristically in a position to be ready to meet the existential challenges which we in Germany face. If nothing other than imposing a joint draconian austerity program occurs to the Grand Coalition, Germany will go under. Only if it succeeds in throwing out the window the neo-liberal, post-modern paradigm, that has brought catastrophe for the last 35 years of non-development, and returns to scientific and technological progress and Classical culture, will there be a positive way out.
Just as America has two traditions, that of the American Revolution and that of Anglo-American imperial thinking, so Germany also has two traditions, as you know: that of German Classical culture in art and science, and the ideology of the reign of terror of National Socialism. Today is the punctum saliens of history, where only if the America of the American revolutionary tradition, and the Germany of the German Classic, work together, can the inevitable change in the times lead to a better future.
Therefore there lies the question of which identity America will have: the land of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Martin Luther King, or the opposite; and which identity Germany will have: the land of Nicolaus of Cusa, Leibniz, Bach, Beethoven, and Schiller, or the contrary. The responsibility lies with us all.
There is, among many others, one very obvious reason why only the Classical tradition of the two nations can provide the basis for the solution to the world's problems. Reports are multiplying daily, of despairing Africans, who are trying, at great risk to their lives, to escape the hell of starvation and sickness which is ravaging their continent, and to reach a safe enclave in Spain. If an uncontrolled collapse of the world financial system should occur, then these pictures are only a foretaste of the tragedy which will play out in a world plunging into chaos.
Therefore, we must put the realization of a new, just world economic order on the agenda: a Marshall Plan, or better, a New Deal for Africa, Latin America, other parts of Asia, but also for Europe and the U.S. itself! The BüSo has worked out the program a long time ago: the construction of the Eurasian Land-bridge as the seed-crystal of the reconstruction of the world economy. What does the Classical tradition have to do with that? Very simply, Nicolaus of Cusa was already of the view that harmony in the macrocosm would only be possible if all the microcosms could develop themselves; Leibniz already had very specific plans for the development of Africa and the Orient; John Quincy Adams had the conception of an American foreign policy of a community of principle among totally sovereign nation-states, who were united with one another by the higher interests of mankind.
As I already said, the BüSo succeeded, despite the open manipulations by the media, in making a deep impression on the population. For example, the Sächsische Zeitung, shortly before the election in Dresden in Election District 160, in an obvious attempt to deter potential BüSo voters, published a forecast for the BüSo vote of 0.0%—although the BüSo had on Sept. 18 received 1.2% in Election District II in Dresden, for direct candidate Galle. Obviously, the paper felt the need to try, through this laughable forecast, to counteract the unbelievably inspired election campaign of over 60 young BüSo members among the potential voters. More than anywhere else, the LaRouche Youth Movement was successful in Saxony, in appealing to the heart and pride of the people in their great Classical tradition.
The many choral interventions, where the works of Bach and Beethoven, but also many excellently sung canons with unpoetical political texts were sung, have produced a resonance within the population, and made the BüSo in Saxony and a range of other places, an institution, which will remain and grow. That the BüSo succeeded in reviving the Classical tradition in Saxony and other places, is, from the standpoint of universal history in the sense defined by Friedrich Schiller, the most important accomplishment of this election campaign.
For the rest, the time which lies before us will prove that the BüSo has set all the important themes, around which things will now proceed.
