Bring the `New Politics' to Germany;
Create a Sovereign, Republican Nation
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Mrs. LaRouche, chairwoman of the Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo), gave this speech at the party's conference in Frankfurt/Main on Dec. 17, 2006. It has been translated from German.
Dear members of the BüSo and guests,
I think it is clear to everyone that the world has arrived at a point at which, although no one knows exactly what the future will bring, everyone knows that we have come to the end of an era. A total reshaping of the world is imminent, and everyone, including the financial press, knows that the financial system will probably not survive beyond a few more weeks, that developments are in store that will either lead to a new dark age or, contrarily, to a positive development: a new Renaissance.
We have been dealing with this problem for our entire political lives. We are now in the throes of a systemic crisis that is in no way limited to the financial system; all aspects of this system, be it political institutions, social institutions, or cultural institutions, are right now collapsing and, ultimately, the value system that is now dominant will not survive. Ending up in a new dark age remains a definite possibility. There are dangers facing us that all those who reflect upon the world know very well, and I will go into some of them.
But I would like to begin with another thought, and that is that we also have the possibility to launch a new Renaissance, as Lyn [Lyndon LaRouche] writes about in his paper on "The New Politics."[1] We are at the onset of a development that makes a totally new paradigm possible, with an end to the world as it now exists—with its value system based on globalization, egoism, a dog-eat-dog mentality, brutalization, and the oligarchical principle in which man has absolutely no importance for those who rule, and the top 400 companies, their managers and "global players," write off entire continents, and treat entire continents as human cattle, at best.
This paradigm will be destroyed, because these people cannot win. But we could introduce another paradigm: Mankind, for the first time in history, could give itself an order in whose center man himself stands, in his dignity, man as a creative individual. What distinguishes man from all other living creatures, is human creativity, the human ability to continually discover new universal principles, to better understand the Creator's order, and what makes man imago viva Dei [in the living image of God] could actually become the basis for politics.
That may sound far-fetched for European or German cultural pessimists: "But we can't do anything." "How could that work?" "Only idealists say such things." But I am absolutely convinced that we are standing at the dawn of a new era, with what we just saw with the LaRouche Youth Movement [LYM] in America, with what Lyn launched so brilliantly with the youth mobilization in the election campaign: by actually focussing on creativity, on young people who can credibly transmit to others the idea that the creative spark is what gives man his dignity, that we can make this effective as a political mass effect. That is what produced the landslide for the Democrats in America.
Nicolaus of Cusa Showed the Way
I know that people think these are utopian ideas. But I would like to go back to Nicolaus of Cusa and what he said in his prologue to the Concordantia Catholica, in 1433: that he realizes a new era of human history is imminent. He indicates the numerous sources he had studied, noting that he went back to original writings that had been hidden for centuries in old cloisters; and he says that, as a humanist in the tradition of the great Italian humanists such as Petrarch and the Paduan scholars, he dealt with the idea that it was necessary to go back to the great Greek thinkers. And he was aware of the fact that, by so doing, he had overcome the 14th-Century Dark Age.
It is important to understand this. Plato had died almost 1,700 years before. In Petrarch's lifetime, almost nobody in Germany or elsewhere in Europe knew ancient Greek. Petrarch had tremendous difficulties finding a teacher who could teach him the language. He never really learned Greek, but he struggled with it throughout his life. And what this generated was a Renaissance.
The Concordantia Catholica that Nicolaus of Cusa wrote as a young man—I think he was 29—was the beginning of the first formulation of a republican system. The third book of the Concordantia Catholica, for the first time in the history of mankind, developed the idea of a republic, of the republican representative system in which the individual citizen participates in government through his representatives. This was a tremendous breakthrough, absolutely unique for the birth of the modern nation-state, and it is important to understand how this would lead to the American Revolution. This is the essential idea that was concretized in 1776.
Later, Nicolaus of Cusa wrote the De Docta Ignorantia, which marked the beginning of modern science, typified by Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, and LaRouche. Still later, he wrote De Pace Fidei, his great thesis of ecumenical dialogue. This led to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the beginning of international law.
Out of these ideas grew the Italian Renaissance. The high point of it was the Council of Florence (1438-39), to which Nicolaus made the crucial contribution, as he had found in Byzantium the writings of the first Councils of the Church and could prove through them that the Filioque principle[2] was already present then, and was the basis upon which unity of the churches—Orthodox and Catholic—would become possible.
In other words, through a handful of people, Nicolaus and a few others, such as Bessarion and Plethon, the Dark Age of the 14th Century was overcome. And Nicolaus knew it. This young man of 29 said at the time: "I am the beginning of a new era of mankind, and I think something that has never before been thought before." He was conscious of the fact that his Coincidentia Oppositorum was a totally new step in mankind's development of the history of knowledge, and introduced, in fact, modern history.
It was, above all, contact with Plato's works that brought about an explosion after the Council of Florence.
I have consciously chosen this retrospect of the 14th-Century Dark Age and the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, because people usually think that politics is "business as usual," but this is just what the LYM refuted in this election campaign in the United States. Young people who reject the old paradigm and the values represented by globalization, catalyzed the divine spark in the people they talked to, by spreading ideas that go back to the Greek Classics, to the Italian Renaissance, to the German Classics, to Germany's great Classical music tradition from Bach to Beethoven, by bringing Schiller and Shakespeare to them.
The discussion on universal ideas, in Kepler, in [Bach's motet] "Jesu, meine Freude," awakened the Renaissance principle, and that principle has always characterized whatever progress was made in the history of mankind. But it has not often prevailed. If you look at universal history, you see that there were only brief periods in which that principle was active: in Classical Greece of course, in the Italian Renaissance, in the period that created the preconditions for the German Classics, from 1750 to about 1789, when even Friedrich Schiller was absolutely convinced that the Age of Reason was about to dawn—a hope that was later dashed by the failure of the French Revolution.
That is the effect we now see. I think it is extremely important that we not consider our own historical achievements as simply day-to-day politics or something minor, because we are part of history, and our actions, our deployment, our mission for mankind will determine whether this era ends in a catastrophe, or whether we succeed in freeing mankind from the oligarchy's yoke.
The Youth Factor in the U.S. Elections
That is the issue. That was the issue in these elections, when the Democrats were still convinced in September that they couldn't win. If one had asked in September if it were possible to take the Senate and the House, an overwhelming majority of them would have answered: "No. The Republicans control the institutions so tightly, that it probably won't work."
[Democratic National Committee Chairman] Howard Dean did not attribute any importance to the midterm elections; he didn't focus on them. He had a completely different idea: He wanted to build up the organizational infrastructure in all 50 states, with offices and bureaucracy, but he did not have the idea that the Democrats should actually win the elections.
So how did the landslide victory happen? The main reason is the tactical master-move by Lyndon LaRouche, who said: We have to let the youth loose; we have to bring the political control that the adversary imposes on young people to an explosion point."
In the beginning, many people did not understand why Lyn wanted to focus on the gestapo, the thought police in the universities. Even young people were saying, maybe it would be better to do door-to-door organizing in the election districts. So it was really not so clear.
Then the LYM members themselves made a decisive contribution by simply going to meetings at Harvard to see how this machine functions. And that gave rise to the pamphlet "Is Joseph Goebbels on Your Campus?"
We saw for ourselves that the neo-con machine, led by Lynne Cheney, by John Train, with people such as David Horowitz, and the Ayn Rand Institute, had set up a reign of terror in the universities, where students did not dare to become political. They were told: "You have to concentrate on your studies; don't criticize the policy of Bush and Cheney. If you criticize the Iraq War, for example, you're being anti-Semitic, or if you criticize the Lebanon War, you're being anti-Semitic." In this way, terror reigned and even the professors were intimidated.
When we broke through that offensively, mainly with interventions on campuses near crucial election districts where we wanted to ensure a Democratic victory, then a real explosion was detonated. Because suddenly professors who had come under pressure themselves, started to defend the students and to admit they had been pressured too. And as expert election analysts, such as James Carville, as well as Democratic Party officials, noted later on, the youth mobilization was crucial, as were the thousands of individual discussions, which should not be underestimated. Our youth talked to thousands of people on campuses, in decisive election districts, on the telephone, about Renaissance ideas, about the need to bring America back to her true tradition of the American Revolution, to defend America as a republic. And this led to an explosion, where suddenly other people in the Democratic Party who had been completely passive, started to mobilize; so that many candidates who had not been supported by Howard Dean, but who had launched their campaign on the basis of the need to impeach Bush and Cheney for their crimes in the Iraq War and other situations, were unexpectedly elected: 29 seats were won by the Democrats in the House, as well as a majority in the Senate, and among the governors.
We saw how the same gestapo machine called, in a certain sense, for genocide: For example, David Horowitz, [Ayn Rand Foundation head] Yaron Brook, and others went to universities and called for the death of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, in a war against what they call "Islamo-Fascism."
The Crisis in Washington
And now, the Democrats who won the election have a mandate from those who voted for them; they owe nothing to Howard Dean. They have a mandate to impeach. So we have a revolutionary situation in the Congress, in the Senate, that the European media are not at all reporting.
If you compare the coverage in the European media to what we know personally and first-hand of the battle in America, the discrepancy could not be greater. We have a highly dramatic situation, as Bush and Cheney and the neo-cons who are still in the Administration are facing the greatest strategic catastrophe in U.S. history. That is not only the evaluation of Lyndon LaRouche, but of a majority of traditional military leaders, of whom General Odom is probably the most often quoted. The situation in Iraq is completely out of control, with a civil war taking place; the situation in Afghanistan is uncontrollable. If the U.S. wanted to pull out of Iraq, it would need the support of countries such as Iran, because they would need gigantic logistical reinforcement just to be able to get out.
Given this catastrophe, a large part of the establishment from both parties, both Republican and Democrat, have taken up the proposal made by Lyn in 2004, in his LaRouche Doctrine for Southwest Asia.[3] That is, that a solution can only be found with the participation of Syria, Iran, and other neighbor states in the region, and that peace must include a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and economic development for all. So that proposal is now on the table. That is now American policy [for leading figures outside the Administration]. It is absolutely an echo of what Lyn has proposed, and it has created a tremendous amount of pressure, because a large part of the institutions that support the Baker-Hamilton proposals know perfectly well that Bush and Cheney are threatened with impeachment, which means they could be indicted and possibly sent to prison. Consequently, as long as these people remain in power, the danger of a preventive attack against Iran, either by the U.S. or Israel, remains very much on the agenda. That was stated again very clearly by Daniel Ellsberg, of Watergate fame, about ten days ago in Stockholm: That danger still exists. However, the Baker-Hamilton plan is also on the agenda, so we are in a certain sense in a race against time.
Impeachment Is Not 'Off the Table'
Today is Dec. 17. The new Congress will be sworn in at the beginning of January, and the committees responsible for investigating the crimes of the Bush-Cheney government are busily gathering evidence for impeachment.
Given the changed situation in Congress, you should absolutely not believe press reports saying that impeachment is "off the table." A change is taking place in the Democratic Party. This was particularly clear in the run-off election in San Antonio, where seven members of the LYM carried out a 12-day mobilization at the universities. The election was for a seat in the House that had been in the hands of the Republicans for 14 years, and there was no reason to believe that it would be possible to take it away from them. But then, when it became clear that the LYM was mobilizing there and circulating Lyn's paper on the "New Politics," Bill Clinton came to the campus on the last day of the campaign, mobilizing 2,000 students, and during a conference call in the Democratic Party after that, Clinton said: This is the new politics—with an obvious reference to Lyn's paper.
This has created a situation in which Howard Dean will probably not remain head of the party for very long, and James Carville has called for his resignation.
And in Congress, the "Economic Recovery Act" proposed by Lyn, on the need to reconstruct and convert the auto industry and its machine-tool capacities, is being discussed in the relevant committees, as a bill.
The collapse of the automobile sector and the whole spectrum of machine-tool capacities has created immense pressure. And now, the possibility that the Congress, the Democratic Party, will work out and introduce such a bill is not only important for America, but is also the only chance for Germany, for Europe, and the rest of the world. Because the Democrats' taking up the tradition of FDR is the only chance we have of coming out of the crisis.
Imminent Financial Collapse
In addition to the strategic crisis, the other point I want to mention is the fact that the financial system is collapsing, so much so, that even the financial press is talking about it, like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Daily Telegraph, or the Financial Times; over the past weeks, articles on the imminent crash have been outdoing one another. Meanwhile, the housing and mortgage markets in America are undergoing a collapse. In places where the housing bubble led to so-called McMansions, for instance in Loudoun County, Virginia—people are simply moving out, because they can't get the market value for their home on sale, and they know the banks will simply take over the property.
Moreover, the situation is such that the Federal Reserve should actually raise interest rates, given the onrushing massive outflow of capital. In the past, American deficits were only compensated by an inflow into the U.S. of $2-7 billion per day, and that has been reversed for some time now, so that even American investors, and of course European investors as well, are putting their money into Asia, into Europe. To reverse this process, the Federal Reserve would have to raise its rates, but to do so would collapse the housing market. So the Fed is in a deep dilemma and, in fact, paralyzed. It can't do what it would have to do to correct the situation.
At the same time, the insane wave of mergers and acquisitions in hedge funds and private equity funds, which really exploded this year and this Autumn, has created a totally wild debt crisis. The U.S. current account deficit is at $860 billion for the moment—a record high. According to official reports, financial derivatives worldwide in over-the-counter transactions—i.e., the ones that no one controls, neither governments nor central banks—amount to $370 trillion by now. For those who wish to visualize that sum in figures: it is 370, followed by 12 zeros! The amount has become so gigantic, that it exceeds the imagination. In addition to that, you have $120 trillion that is transacted on the exchanges. So, the total amount of derivatives worldwide has reached half a quadrillon dollars in outstanding contracts!
One of the categories of derivatives, credit derivatives, has exploded from $17 trillion in 2005, to $35 trillion this year. You have to understand that this is all fictitious, it's really only a bubble. An example will make it clearer.
Let's assume that someone purchases Volkswagen bonds for $100 million. Now, the banks and hedge funds and private equity funds go in and offer a guarantee against losses, for a fee of 2% (in this case, that would be for $2 million), saying that should these bonds collapse, the purchaser will be compensated for the loss. VW is not asked for its say in the matter, nor whether it agrees; this is just a private contract between the owner of the bonds and the banks.
There are billions and trillions of such contracts that have no meaning whatsoever, they are fictitious in a certain sense. Just now, on Dec. 17, the rating agency Standard & Poor's announced, from its Risk Department, that these hedge funds and private equity funds have four times more debt than could be considered as secure.
You have to realize what [former Social Democratic Party chairman] Franz Müntefering meant when he spoke of "locusts." To take an example, the Hertz rent-a-car company was just bought out by a private equity fund, following the "smash and grab" principle. These buyouts are similar to a brutal break-in: The robbers break a window pane in the house, go inside, steal everything of value and leave. Fundamentally, that is what happened with Lone Star and many others. Then they buy up the mortgages from homeowners or others, they make short-term profits, and leave the cadavers behind.
The amounts of money involved are simply insane. The largest private equity fund is the Carlyle Group, with a total capital greater than $1 trillion, which it uses for these takeovers. The biggest hedge fund is Goldman Sachs, with $1.3 trillion. Eighty percent of these hedge funds are based in the Bahamas, where no government can control them. And they create groups in which two or three hedge funds or private equity companies are active. One example is Cerberus and Appaloosa, which came together to buy up GM's auto supplier Delphi, consistent with the "smash and grab" principle. We know some of the people who have been hit by this, people who lost their very means of existence—but that is of absolutely no concern to the funds.
Now, in their latest report on risks, Standard & Poor's warns that this dynamic can no longer continue, and that a wave of bankruptcies is imminent. The combination of the housing crash in the U.S. and the debt of hedge funds and private equity companies, has come to an end. So we are in the terminal phase of the casino economy that was launched and escalated in 1987 by Alan Greenspan, with derivatives. In fact, derivatives are only the most insane form of gambling—i.e., a hyperinflationary form of primitive accumulation,[4] in which hostile takeovers, mergers, and cartelizations occur, in which some people earn a tremendous amount of money and become enormously rich, but physical production is destroyed through primitive accumulation. So in the short-term, stock prices go up, but they have absolutely no value from the standpoint of the real economy.
As for these $490 trillion in derivative transactions, one could hit the delete key on the computer and they would disappear, and that wouldn't have the slightest effect. Because they don't really exist—it is virtual money, which only exists in the minds and the fictions of a few people. But unfortunately, the result is a collapse of the physical economy.
The Crimes of Globalization
Therefore, in the reorganization that we must undertake, whole sectors will have to be written off. If it were only "Monopoly," one could say: "Let the people who want to speculate and do these things, do so." But the fact is that this speculation steals flows of income out of the real economy. So we are not dealing with a morally neutral phenomenon, but a series of crimes.
The situation in Africa is a consequence of globalization. If thousands of people are attempting to flee Africa today, if they risk their lives in boats headed for the Canary Islands or Sicily, or somewhere else, this is a reflection of that policy.
But it's not only in Africa. In Germany too, there is an increasing margin of poor people. The latest report on German poverty states that there are 14 million poor people here, of which many are children. And in the present system, these people have no chance. Therefore, we cannot but recognize that the paradigm linked to the present system of globalization is an absolute failure. Therefore, we need a reorganization that can only come from a changed situation in America.
I am a true friend of China, I love India; all my life I have been preoccupied with all these countries. But when one looks around the world, one sees no other place that can provide the solution. China will not propose a solution for the world's problems. Russia is concerned with Russia, and rightly so, but it won't make proposals for saving Europe, Africa, or America. India is in a wild internal crisis, because the compromises the present government has made with globalization have led to an acute crisis. The European governments don't work: The German government, with its "small steps," is headed for the abyss; Belgium is in a crisis, as well as Holland, France, and Italy. So it is very important for us to understand that a solution can only come from a changed situation in the United States. If, and only if, the Democratic Party, under the influence of Lyndon LaRouche and his youth movement, implements the policy that Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted with his New Deal and the Bretton Woods system, can we reach a solution in time.
That means that we have to mobilize that side of the United States that Friedrich List once correctly called the difference between the American System and the British System. The tradition of the American Revolution must be revived, and that is something that Europeans really do not understand. I know it because I have been grappling with this problem for years, and because Lyn showed me a side of America that very few Europeans know. There is truly in America, a living republican tradition, that is the idea that it is a republic that must be defended. And the soul of America—of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and, today, of the LaRouche Youth Movement—is the most important factor to be decided upon today.
Why Germany Is in Crisis
Now, I would like to come back to some problems we in Germany have. Let us recall that only 17 years have passed since the peaceful revolution. Seventeen years ago, Eastern Germany still existed, as well as Western Germany; then the Wall fell, and reunification was made possible. I remember very well that at the time, when we were fighting for the Productive Triangle, I often said in speeches that if Germany were to make the mistake of trading the bankrupt system of communism, for the equally bankrupt system of the "free market economy," that in a few years, it would fall into an even greater collapse, exactly the point at which we are today, and naturally, it was then clear, that the already bankrupt system of the "free market economy" could only save itself for a few years through the primitive accumulation it could carry out against the formerly Comecon sector, but only with the result that we are today in a global crisis, in comparison with which the collapse of communism was really "peanuts."
And I would like to point out once more, that at that time, the political devastation was aimed at the new Federal states, at first against the G.D.R. [communist East Germany] and then the new Federal states, through the Treuhand—the Treuhand, which had been allegedly founded to save the public property that the G.D.R. population had created. That was expressed in the first Treuhand statute, after which political devastation occurred under the De Maiziere regime, and then, in the reunified Germany under the Kohl government, after which, in hindsight, one must understand that that was the beginning of the takeover of Germany by the "locusts." Because what occurred with the property of the publicly owned operations of the G.D.R., and then in the new Federal states—privatization without any consideration of the social consequences—was the introduction of the principle of the locusts, which we now see in all of Germany, where these locusts, the hedge funds, the private equity funds, buy up and swallow everything, from the medium-sized enterprises, the public housing, the villas, the castles, whatever is not in some way nailed down, and then, just as it was a crime against the population of the new Federal states, it is a crime against the population still today. And we were totally right during that whole time, with our Monday demonstrations, with our campaign in Saxony, "In Sachsen muss die Wirtschaft wachsen" [In Saxony, industry must grow], where we denounced precisely these things.
But obviously we have still another problem in Germany. I know that many people have constantly gotten enraged when Lyn has taken up the debate about Baby Boomers and the paradigm which is responsible for this crisis. But in a certain way, you must exempt the population in the East, because they were first confronted by these values, by these Baby Boomers and the 68er generation, after 1989, whereas they had previously lived under a system in the G.D.R. which was not so good, but where Classical art—Bach, orchestras, Schiller—played a much greater role.
The main problem in Germany is this paradigm-shift. If we now are confronted with a ruinous situation, we must understand that it was the result of the oligarchical policy, which, beginning with the Frankfurt School after the Second World War, consciously attacked Classical culture, with Theodor Adorno, who said that the idealism and humanism of the German Classics leads inevitably to fascism, and with other members of the Frankfurt School, who, along with the whole generation which at that time got their education in the universities, and was brainwashed, namely the so-called "68ers." Therefore we have a huge problem today, because we have a population which has been cut off from its roots.
Parliamentarism and Feudalism
Let me take the problem still a further step back. In America, we have the American System; that is, we have Senators and Congressmen who are responsible to the voters. In America, every voter can go to his representatives in Congress and say: "I have elected you, now answer me: Why are you not carrying out the policy for which I elected you?"
In Germany, we can't do that. In Germany, we cannot go to the Bundestag and say: "Federal parliamentarian, I have elected you because of the following electoral promise." Here we have a situation in which Mr. Münterfering says: It is unfair for people to recall, months after the election campaign, what was said in that campaign.
That is precisely what Lyn referred to as the Anglo-Dutch parliamentary system, which we know very well here in Germany. In Germany there is no responsibility on the part of parliamentarians to the truth, or to principles, but rather coercion by the party caucus. If you speak from time to time to a parliamentarian here, he says: "I find what you are saying absolutely terrific, I agree with you totally, but I must now go back to the caucus, and until I have been re-elected, I can't speak about what we talked about, because I will not be reappointed."
This European parliamentary system and the existence of the so-called "independent" central banks, are the reason why Europe doesn't function, and as long as we have these independent central banks and this parliamentary system, Europe and Germany will not be able to defend themselves. Therefore, as long as we accept the European Central Bank [ECB], as long as we accept the Stability Pact, Maastricht, and the European Union in its current form, Germany cannot defend itself, and that would be a very pointed topic for Germany to raise, when it takes over the chairmanship of the EU on Jan. 1. And as Mrs. [Chancellor Angela] Merkel has already said, she will take as the most important theme, the reorganization or redrafting of the European Constitution, a constitution which has already been described by the Karlsruhe Constitutional Court as toilet paper, because the voters of France and the Netherlands have already voted it down, and it has no foundation left.
Therefore we need a different constitution, a different system. Because what is most important is what the BüSo has put forward: that we must put into effect in this coming era, the coming change of an epoch, the principles which were expressed in the American Revolution, and which unfortunately were never put into effect in Europe. That means, to consider the ideas of the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, which have been said to be totally incontestable: that a government is only legitimate, if it is responsible for the general welfare of the population, and if it ensures absolute sovereignty, not only for the current generation, but for all future generations. Or the ideas of the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, that all men have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—happiness, which is different from the Hobbesian idea of property: the right to the development of all man's inherent capabilities, the right to the development of his cognitive identity, and the right to a fulfilling life in service to mankind; this sense of happiness, which is included in a certain way in the first Article of the German Basic Law: that the dignity of man is inviolable; and which is echoed in a certain way in Article 20 of the Basic Law, that Germany is a social state, and that the population has the right of resistance, if someone tries to tear down the character of Germany as a social state.
But we don't really have our own sovereignty. We don't have the right to create credit, to decide on economic policy. As long as we accept Maastricht, the ECB, the Stability Pact and so forth, we don't actually control our own government, regardless of whether it looks like it or not.
We must return—and I have said this often, and it remains the defining issue to which I have dedicated my life—to the idea that the American Revolution was a watershed in history, and all the great minds of Europe—Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and many others—in their time looked at America with the hope that it would be possible to establish the model of a republic in Europe. Each one thought that it would then have been possible in France, as it appeared, at the very least, when under the leadership of Jean Sylvain Bailly in 1789, a Constitutional Assembly decided to stay in session until it had created a constitution, which was based on the American model. But everyone knows that this was destroyed by the domination of the Jacobins, by the storming of the Bastille, by the self-coronation of Napoleon as Emperor, and his perversion of the idea which, properly speaking, should have emerged from the French Revolution.
In Germany, we achieved the best approximation of this idea of a republic during the Liberation Wars. The Liberation Wars, which have disappeared from German history books, were not only a war against the foreign domination and yoke of Napoleon, but they were a real constitutional movement, in which the Prussian reformers—Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, vom Stein, von Humboldt—were the leaders of a movement which, in the hope of Germany being able to overcome its splintering into 300 dukedoms and fiefdoms, was expressed through the insurrection which the Prussian reformers had called into being throughout Germany, and the uprising of the German population for the ideas of a republican nation-state.
When vom Stein and von Humboldt went in 1814, as representatives of Germany, to the Congress of Vienna, they had memoranda which they had worked out themselves, on the Russian battlefield against Napoleon. They had a strong determination that a constitutional state should be produced out of the Congress of Vienna. That came to nothing, because of the conspiracy by all the oligarchs of Europe, by Talleyrand, Castlereagh, and Metternich, as well as Tsar Alexander and the Prussian kings, so that in May of 1815, the Congress of Vienna came to an end without the question of a German constitution and a unified German state having been put on the agenda. The Holy Alliance, which followed, was a gigantic step backwards. All the reforms, which the Prussian reformers had put in place, were rolled back, and things returned to the status quo ante, and with that, the oligarchical mentality manifested and consolidated itself in Germany.
One of the people who described this most aptly was Heinrich Heine, who polemicized against the staleness of the proverbial "German Michel" [preoccupied with his personal comfort], the staleness of the German in the Biedermeier era, who would block out reality and, confronted with Metternich's police and spy system, retreat into his living room, fold the sofa cushion exactly in the middle, with the typical German housewife's gesture, then place it neatly in the corner near the lace curtains—this mentality, which condemns the Germans to political impotence, which exists even today: That is the greatest problem which we have in Germany.
Lyn and I were once—through unfortunate circumstances—invited to the home of Johannes and Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. That was a total mistake; we didn't correctly evaluate beforehand what we were getting into. But I shall never forget how, after dinner, a servant in Spanish livery, in green livery from the 17th Century, was addressed by "Her Highness," Princess Gloria, in the third person: "From which village does he come?" and then he said, in the third person,: "He comes from Niederhanskofen"—or some such Bavarian village. That made it totally clear to me for the first time, what this oligarchical principle is: that there are people in Germany who accept that there is an aristocracy; that there are people whom Joseph de Maistre described very clearly in his paper on the Russian nobility, who have, from birth, God-given rights, privileges, and that they have the right to rule over other people.
That is the problem in Germany. That is the chief problem which we must solve, because the danger today is that, because Europe and Germany never have made a republican revolution like that in America, the population will not notice whether the old feudalism has been seamlessly replaced, or whether it has been replaced by a new feudalism.
The new feudalism consists in privatization: that is, whether you forget or recognize the label, it really makes no difference whether it's a Count Metternich or a John Kornblum, or someone else. For example, Kornblum and Felix Rohatyn held this conference in 2001 where they said that we need a new system which abolishes the nation-state and the sovereign state, and instead, replaces it with management by about 400 top "global players," such as top companies, multinational conglomerates of mega-firms, supercartels, where then, the top managers—who, according to Kornblum, have a "global corporate identity," that is, an identity as "world managers"—decide the business of firms, hedge funds, partnerships, and cartels, make the decisions, and abolish everything which national governments decide—that is basically the idea of feudalism.
And the reality is—which, for example, the population of Germany is not attuned to, and does not understand—that the fight for the German Constitution, the fight for Article 1 ("The dignity of man is inviolable"), for Article 20 (that Germany is a social state), must be achieved, and we must absolutely banish the oligarchical principle from Europe, because we in Europe, in Germany, in every European state, need the equivalent of the American Revolution—that is what we in Europe must fight for.
There Is a Way Out
We have in Europe an imminent revolutionary situation, and this must be strengthened. In France, that is the mood, for example, among the mayors, where we are now trying to get the necessary number of signatures for Jacques Cheminade's Presidential campaign—a revolutionary situation. Whereas Lenin correctly said that the Germans, if they want to make a revolution and occupy a train station, they first buy a ticket for the train—that is naturally still a big problem; but I am convinced that with the coming shocks, Germany will also turn over a new leaf.
For example, there is already a really unparalleled situation, in which the discrediting of the elites—in politics, management, and culture—has reached a point that it never had before. If you ask the ordinary population a question today, about what they think of the politicians, they really think they're worth nothing. What should they think of the managers who stick tens of thousands and millions into their own pockets, while they, at the same time, lay off 20,000 workers; or of Herr Welteke, who wants to raise his own pension? It's the same with the cultural elite, as we have seen in the case of Günter Grass. There has never been a situation where the mass of the population of the Federal Republic has identified so little with the current system. And therefore, we must intervene with our conception of the "New Politics," and we need in Germany exactly the same divine spark which the LaRouche Youth Movement in America has created with its intervention into the Democratic Party.
We must also be prepared to find ourselves, within a very short time, in a situation where the financial crash becomes so obvious, that people are shocked to such a degree that the ordinary person cannot imagine it. Then, if from America the New Politics in the form of [LaRouche's proposed] "Economic Recovery Act," the bill for saving and transforming American industry, is put on the agenda, and the policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt is put on the agenda by the U.S. Congress, not only the New Deal—that is, state credit creation—but also a New Bretton Woods system, then the point will have come where we in Germany must put through the BüSo program, if this country is going to have a chance.
The theme of the BüSo in the last Federal election campaign—that we need sovereignty over our own currency again; that the euro does not function—has brought the whole Eurozone in distant lands to the point where Poland doesn't function, nor the Czech Republic, nor Hungary; so that when the euro flies apart, sovereignty over our own currency will become our theme. Whether we call it the deutschemark or something else, we need our own sovereign currency. Because, in the wake of the reorganization in America, we will need exactly a program like the New Deal in Germany. We need at least 200 billion euros, or the equivalent of 400 billion deutschemarks in state credit, exactly in the same way, whether it's put into operation by the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau [Reconstruction Finance Agency], or by a National Bank, the nationalized Bundesbank. Without this program, Germany has absolutely no future.
And this is something which we naturally have to connect with the vision of Eurasian integration. It's not only important for Germany to look 50 years into the future, but also for the entire Eurasian continent. I have often said that Bush will likely be noted, Bush and Cheney, for having hastened the process of Eurasian integration, in a way that would not have been possible over 40 or 50 years; but due to the imposition of Anglo-American unilateralism, we have the development of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, whereby the Eurasian states are drawing closer together and carrying out comprehensive economic cooperation. We not only have cooperation among China, Russia, India, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and Iran, but in Ibero-America we have total determination by countries such as Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Equador, Venezuela, and apparently very soon also Mexico, to move in the direction which Lyndon LaRouche developed with President José López Portillo in 1982: the idea of Ibero-American integration. There is broad-ranging cooperation within Eurasia, between Russia and China, and Ibero-America. China is totally engaged in Africa, and what we have proposed for a long time—that the Eurasian Land-Bridge must become the cornerstone of a New World Economic Order and the motor for reconstruction of the world economy—will serve as the motor for the development, above all, of Africa.
This program is our life's work. We fight for it because we are in this organization. This is the organization which Lyndon LaRouche called into being, which we joined because we could not tolerate the unjust conditions of this world, when we were young, and that is what motivates the young people in the LaRouche Youth Movement today: that they cannot tolerate the injustice of this oligarchy-dominated world, and will risk their lives for that purpose. We are totally determined to achieve what Lyn described in his book on the Earth's Next Fifty Years, as the test-case, namely, to vanquish poverty from this planet—in a situation where now a third of all people are hungry every day, where every day 50,000 children die for no reason at all. In Germany, poverty among children is a growing phenomenon, and that is something we must overcome. And we will fight for a world order with the principle that the creativity of young people sets off the divine sparks, until they create a mass effect.
And that obviously means that we fulfill the mandate of Friedrich Schiller, namely that a great moment must find a great people, because we will not again allow a historical opportunity, a glorious moment for mankind—i.e., the collapse of the old system—to find a little people, but we will prove worthy of our great thinkers and poets, and create a positive outcome from this opportunity.
Thank you.
[1] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Johannes Kepler & The Democratic Challenge: The New Politics," EIR, Dec. 8, 2006.
[2] The Filioque in Christian theology (Latin: "and from the Son") refers to the interpretations of the Nicene Creed by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. The Western Church's creed reads, "We believe in the Holy Spirit ... who proceeds from the Father and from the Son." The Eastern Church maintains that the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father."
[4] See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "On Academician Lvov's Warning: What Is 'Primitive Accumulation'?" EIR, Aug. 17, 2001.
