Germany's Future Potential:
Rebuild After the Collapse
Helga Zepp-LaRouche is the national chairwoman of the Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo), the party of the LaRouche movement in Germany. She gave this speech in Bad Salzuflen on March 20 (see last week's EIR for a conference report). The full title of her speech was "Reconstruction After the Collapse: Germany's Potential for the 21st Century." The speech was translated from German, and footnotes were added.
Phase Change in the United States
I will speak first today about the situation in America, because what is taking place there at the moment will have a major impact on developments in Germany and throughout Europe.
We are now undergoing a phase change, in that President Obama is running around like mad, from one Congressman and Senator to another, asking them whether they endorse LaRouche's ideas. And the reason is that tomorrow, on Sunday, Obama will try to get Congress to vote up the health-care bill, and right now he does not have enough votes.
Now, I have to say that in Europe, and particularly in Germany, this health-care bill is completely misunderstood, because the media make it seem that poor President Obama is finally trying to get health care for the 50 million Americans who don't have it. But something else is really going on.
The point is, that the U.S. debt has assumed a dimension that is no longer tenable, and there is now an attempt to force through a fascist policy, by brutal austerity. It is really not about the health-care bill (the so-called "public option" was abandoned long ago), but rather about reducing the total cost of health care by 30%. The model for this policy is the U.K.'s NICE [National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence], which in turn is based on [Hitler's] Tiergarten 4 "health-care" concept we had in Germany 70 years ago, which prioritizes certain categories of persons who still will receive medical care, while very young children and very old people do not—and that's the point.
But I'll have more to say about that later.
Obama views Lyndon LaRouche as the only important obstacle to implementing this policy. But that's not true, of course, since there is an unprecedented mass-strike process underway in America at the present time. After the media in Europe ignored this for so long, the situation has intensified so dramatically that it no longer can.
Yesterday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung ran a quite remarkable article, entitled "Legislative Running Amok," saying that the U.S. President does indeed have the right to give orders to drop atomic bombs, but has no right to operate domestically with such explosive means; that now, since he does not have the votes he needs to pass the health-care bill, he is trying, behind the scenes, to get a vote approving a hodgepodge of amendments, effectively getting the law through that way. The Süddeutsche Zeitung then writes that this approach by Obama is a declaration of political bankruptcy, because he is causing a political civil war in Washington, turning it into a civil war zone.
Also yesterday, [the French daily] Libération wrote that this health-care bill has nothing to do with health, but rather Obama's Presidency is at stake: He is in a real dilemma, because if he can force the law through by any and all means, the Democratic Party will be destroyed, because the people hate this bill; whereas, if he does not get it passed, he will immediately become a lame duck.
It is anyway incomprehensible why suddenly there is such a big hurry, since this law, even if it does get through, would not take effect until 2014. So there is something quite different going on. It's about the enforcement of fascist austerity policies. Obama, as you have probably also noticed here, despite the lack of media coverage, is achieving a new daily record for sinking popularity. And at least since March 2, when [LaRouche Democrat] Kesha Rogers won the Democratic primary in the 22nd Congressional District in Texas, with 53% of the votes against her two opponents (one received only 20% and the other 25%), a landslide has been in progress; and even more so, since my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, delivered his "earthquake" webcast on March 13, in which he called for immediate impeachment proceedings against President Obama, who is one of the main obstacles to setting the United States on a rational course. This information certainly spread fast.
What Barack Obama is doing right now—and this is why the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which is known for its Atlanticism, is using such terms—is that Obama personally, as well as his staff, is seeking out Congressmen such as Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who was a strong opponent of the bill because it no longer included the "public option" (i.e., the uninsured will not be enrolled in any national health insurance plan), summoning him to Air Force One, the Presidential aircraft, and working him over. Kucinich then emerged from the plane and announced that he would support the bill, because the Presidency is at stake. He then gave a press conference, where he indicated that he would return the contributions of any of his supporters who had backed him because he had previously opposed the bill.
Economic Disintegration
What is the background of this extraordinary situation?
For 32 months, the systemic crisis has been in full swing. At least 5 million people in America have lost their homes through foreclosures. America's real unemployment is 30%—not the official 10%, but in reality 30%, when all the categories are added up. Among African-American youth, unemployment is as high as 70%. Forty-nine of fifty states are bankrupt. The municipalities have massive collapses in tax revenue. They are being forced to cancel social programs. Tent cities are growing. Overall, since the crisis began, with the so-called real estate crisis, $23 trillion was pumped into the system—$23 trillion! While the managers stuffed billions of dollars of bonuses into their pockets, now health-care spending is to be cut by 30%, and the population is fed up, because they can't comprehend why taxpayers' money is going to pay $23 trillion in bailouts, at the expense of the standard of living of the population.
So, since last August, there has been a mass-strike process ongoing in America. A mass strike is not something that can be called out by strike leaders, but rather, a mass-strike process is what occurs when the population has lost all confidence in the government. This happened in August at the so-called town meetings, where every day, thousands of people confronted their Congressmen.
This continued with the massive electoral defeats of the Democrats: in Virginia, where they lost the governorship; in New Jersey; Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts; and then, as I said, on March 2, the primary election victory of Kesha Rogers, whose campaign explicitly demanded the immediate impeachment of President Obama, and that the NASA manned space program should not be eliminated, as Obama had just ordered.
Impeachment
Why is Lyndon LaRouche calling for the impeachment of Obama?
The United States is facing disintegration, and it should be clear to everyone that if America collapses into national bankruptcy and social chaos, it would not be without effect upon Europe and the rest of the world.
Sen. Arlen Specter [D-Pa.], in a recent interview with MSNBC, said that the mood in the American population is like "a hurricane, a tsunami, or the eruption of a volcano." The population is furious, he said, and he personally fears that America will become ungovernable.
And now, in the March issue of the strategic journal Foreign Affairs, there is an article by Niall Ferguson, "Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos," where he basically says that the imperial collapse the United States will come much sooner than many historians can imagine, if budget deficits coincide with an overextended military; that such a collapse has occurred many times before in history, and that the U.S. today faces a sudden, catastrophic failure, the possibility of abrupt, unexpected collapse—and that that should be the main concern of politicians and citizens. That, he says, would even have massive implications for American foreign policy, since if most interest payments in the budget are met, cuts in the military would naturally come next. Defeats in the Hindu Kush and Mesopotamia have often, in the past, been the harbingers of imperial collapse, he says, and he then refers to the Soviet Union in 1989, which had also been overextended in Afghanistan.
This means that the situation in America obviously has dramatic implications for Europe and the entire international strategic situation. What this clearly shows is that the global financial system is hopelessly bankrupt, beyond all possibility of repair. The system has already collapsed. And the only reason it's not seen that way, is that the investors, the people who have speculated in high-risk deals in recent years, want to maintain these paper values and are hysterically clinging to this state of affairs. But it is only a matter of time before the bankruptcy of this system is visible.
We are sitting in a house of cards that can collapse at any time.
Demise of the Eurozone
The situation in Europe is not much better. If you look at the plethora of headlines from just the past week, they are momentous, compared to what the ordinary person is used to, such as "Eurozone Faces Challenge to Its Very Existence": that we had better get used to state bankruptcy, which has always been there, and there is life after state bankruptpcy. How do we learn to live with inflation?
Of course, the main focus in the media has been the crisis in Greece, which became a real campaign: that Greece had been living beyond its means. Well, it turns out, that when Greece joined the Eurozone, it was none other than Goldman Sachs that manipulated its books to make it possible for Greece to enter at all. Now it turns out that during the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, it was none other than the British firms Ernst & Young and Linklaters, that took $5 billion in bad debts off the books each quarter, through so-called Repo loans in London, prettying things up by making the debt seem smaller.
As I wrote one year go, when the scandal broke around Bernie Madoff—the former head of the Nasdaq who had defrauded his clients out of $50 billion: You could say that the entire global financial system, as it exists, is in fact one huge Madoff swindle.
The whole system is bankrupt. It's not just the so-called "PIIGS" states—a name that is a real provocation and an insult, for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain—but even the United Kingdom. Now it is clear that Britain is a lot more bankrupt than Greece, and of course the U.S., but also Dubai, Pakistan, Iraq.
In fact, the Eurozone, at the moment, is at the breaking point, and the Treaty of Lisbon, just three and a half months after being signed, is already not worth the paper it's written on.
[German Finance Minister Wolfgang] Schäuble is now trying to solve the problem by saying that we need a separate European Monetary Fund so that he, going beyond what is allowed by the Maastricht Treaty's Stability Pact, can impose draconian austerity measures. This EMF would then have the right to kick out members of the Eurozone—e.g., Greece, Portugal, and Spain—and then impose draconian measures on those that remain.
This is of course totally wrong, because if we should have learned anything from the 1930s, it is that [Weimar Republic Chancellor Heinrich] Brüning's austerity policies led absolutely in the wrong direction. In a depression and collapse such as this one, if one tries to "save" through austerity measures, by cuts in social spending, wages, investments, and the state budget, then a bottomless downward spiral begins.
That is exactly what led to catastrophe in the '30s.
Chancellor Merkel is now saying that we must "further develop" the Lisbon Treaty. This is nothing but a euphemism for a new treaty. The French are vehemently opposed to that, because they know very well that it would open a Pandora's box. Nobody would agree to a new Lisbon Treaty. The recent referendum in Iceland was something of a mood barometer, given that only 1.6% of the citizens voted that Icelanders should pay for the debt of Icelandic banks in Holland and Great Britain, while 93% voted against it,
The French government and, more recently, Frau Merkel, are now calling for a European economic government that would practically make a single economic policy for all of Europe. But that is exactly the same problem, since ultimately the German taxpayer and the few countries that still have a surplus, namely the Netherlands and Finland (but above all Germany), would become the big paymasters; and Jur@augen Stark of the European Central Bank is already trying to get people in the right frame of mind by saying that we have to prepare ourselves for ten hard years. Axel Weber, who wants to become the new head of the ECB, wants to make the SoFFin [Financial Market Stabilization Fund]—i.e., the institution for bank rescues—permanent, so that it can intervene in new banking crises. SoFFin is not controlled by the Bundestag [parliament], but is run by people like Jörg Asmussen, who started the banking deregulation that is mainly responsible for the crisis. All these models that are being discussed are nothing but different variants of a bankers' dictatorship, none of which could function, and all of which would result in total social chaos in Europe.
Luckily, we still have one institution that is defending the German Basic Law [Constitution], and that is the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, which ruled last June that the Bundestag's vote on the "Act Extending and Strengthening the Rights of the Bundestag" did nothing of the sort, but was in fact unconstitutional. Instead of strengthening the rights of the Bundestag, those rights were all being delegated to the EU in Brussels.
This is now a situation in which, very soon, probably long before [the legislative elections in North Rhine-Westphalia on] May 9, it will become clear that this is unworkable. Therefore, it is very useful to take another look at the euro and the whole European Monetary Union, because what we are now experiencing with this collapse is the "curse of the evil deed," as Schiller says, "that, propagating still, it brings forth evil," so that each new version is worse than the one before.
Let's look once again at how we ended up with the euro.
The Lost Chance of 1989
The year 1989, when the [Berlin] Wall fell and German reunification was on the agenda, was a potential shining hour for mankind. Suddenly communism was gone—without tanks. The Soviet Union, the enemy of the West for almost 70 years, was suddenly gone. This situation could have been used to put in place a geniunely peaceful order for the 21st Century.
That was our plan at that time. We proposed to bind together the industrial regions of France, Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia through a so-called Productive Triangle, with investments in high technologies, in the Transrapid maglev train, in the high-temperature reactor, and other vanguard technologies, and thus usher in an economic motor for the development of the East. That would have swung the situation completely around.
We know this didn't happen, but that instead, there was a total economic wipe-out, through the privatization of the East's state-owned enterprises. That was a kind of test-run for what the hedge-funds did later, on a world scale.
We then proposed, from 1991 on, when the Soviet Union no longer existed, that the Eurasian Land-Bridge should be built, that is, that we begin where development stopped, prior to the First World War. That we link up the industrial regions of Europe with the industrial and population centers of Asia through so-called development corridors.
That would have been at that time not only an economic perspective, but also a war-avoidance strategy, because, if all the peoples of Europe were joined through a higher common economic interest, then there would no longer be any reason for war.
Why didn't this happen? Because [British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher began her campaign against Germany, to the effect that the so-called Fourth Reich was coming into being, and [French President] François Mitterrand insisted on the abandonment of the German D-mark as a precondition for France's agreement to reunification. And Bush Senior basically said that the reunification of Germany was only acceptable if Europe bound itself up with the corset of the European Union.
Chancellor Kohl himself said at that time that it was perfectly clear to him that a European Monetary Union could not function without a political union.
We published a book, The Lost Chance of 1989, in which we documented the various steps precisely: the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen, the head of Deutsche Bank; the murder of Detlev Rohwedder, which opened the way for Birgit Breuel and her Treuhand to wreak economic devastation of the East. I won't go into it further now—we have written a lot about it.[1]
We, that is, I and the BüSo, waged a campaign against the introduction of the euro, arguing that a government which has no control over its own currency, ultimately controls nothing. This is precisely what we are now experiencing, and one can say that this neoliberal paradigm of the last 40 years has now come to an end. Now, that is no reason for despair; rather it is a reason to change the situation, to produce a rigorous, clear analysis, an analysis of the causes of this crisis, and then we can change direction. That doesn't mean that we have to endure ten years of misery, as Axel Weber or Jürgen Stark proposes, but that we should change this situation, and correct what has been going wrong in all areas over the last 40 years.
The Steps Toward Decline
I could have said something earlier about the 1960s, but perhaps it would be better to once again identify the most important steps, or the most important places, where things went off course.
The most important was surely Richard Nixon's decision in 1971 to abandon the fixed-exchange-rate system, to give up the old Bretton Woods system, to make speculation possible through loans from the so-called offshore markets (e.g., the Cayman Islands), and the development of the Eurodollar market.
The next step, naturally, was the international intervention of the Trilateral Commission, which produced 24 studies, including one calling for the "controlled disintegration" of the world economy. That has become noticeable worldwide.
One consequence, among many, was that all these members of the Trilateral Commission were brought into the Carter Administration. At that time it was President Carter's intention—which he accomplished to a large degree, at least as far as Germany was concerned—to make the use of plutonium into a worldwide taboo, and to establish a worldwide moratorium on new nuclear energy development.
At the same time, starting in 1977, the so-called Red Army Faction [Baader-Meinhof terrorists] murdered key people in the field of nuclear energy in Germany. Jürgen Ponto was one of them, Hanns-Martin Schleyer another, and there were several others.[2]
Then in the 1980s, things proceeded further, with so-called Thatcherism and Reaganomics, the development of junk bonds, hostile takeovers. And so it went, until 1987, when Alan Greenspan became head of the Federal Reserve and discovered something which up until that time didn't exist, namely, so-called "creative financial instruments"—all the securities markets, the various instruments that eventually produced the toxic waste which is still the problem today.
In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union dissolved, another cog was added to the wheel, namely, globalization without limit, outsourcing for cheap production to the Third World countries, and in Europe, the treaties of Maastricht, then Amsterdam, Nice, and now today's Lisbon Treaty, and with it the deformation of Europe into a European version of this global empire of globalization.
Our Alternative: The LaRouche Plan
Today, we have come to a point where we must recognize that these steps were folly, and now we are faced with only two choices: If we continue to maintain this system, then there will be an inescapable collapse into chaos, into social revolutions, including in Europe, into a New Dark Age. And that in a very short period of time.
But there is an alternative, and that is the LaRouche Plan. That is the idea that one can bring together the four strongest nations of the world—the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India—that these nations jointly recognize that the old system of globalization is hopelessly bankrupt, that they will write off the so-called toxic waste, which is even now still sitting in the banks, in the amount of hundreds of billions; and that they will implement a worldwide Glass-Steagall standard.
The Glass-Steagall system is a split banking system, which would basically function as follows: Public banks, commercial banks, which deal with real production, with production in industry and agriculture, with trade, which must service people's pensions, wages, everything that is involved in physical production—these must be placed for a certain period of time under state protection. But not the other banks, the so-called investment banks, which are making investments of higher and higher risk—now, more than ever! What do they have to fear, since they have learned over the last 32 months that every time there is a collapse someplace, the state comes in and rescues them! Then the taxpayers are supposed to put them back on their feet, and so they have gone into riskier and riskier deals. This has got to stop, because a continuation of this system means an absolute collapse!
This split banking system must be part of a new system, no longer a monetary system, but a credit system, where national banks exclusively provide credits for productive investments.
We must combine this with multilateral agreements, trade agreements of 50 years or longer, which take into account the differences among the participating states. We have countries with huge territories and a lot of raw materials, like Russia; we have countries with a huge number of inhabitants, like China with 1.4 billion people; we have small countries like Latvia; we have countries with raw materials, with developed populations—all these things must be taken into account in these multilateral treaties; and the changes that are underway at this moment in America, are a battle around this policy.
Either America goes back to the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who brought America out of the Depression in the 1930s with precisely these policies—the New Deal, Bretton Woods, etc.—or America collapses, and with it most of the rest of the world.
This isn't simply a program which we've thought up, but something that is already a long way toward realization. The LaRouche movement, which exists worldwide, has been working for 40 years on this concept. There are in America very important groupings, such as economists from Stanford University, from Texas, and other places, who say that this is the way we must go. America has to apply the same policy that FDR did; and there are very important institutes in Russia, in China, and in India, that have been grappling with this LaRouche Plan, and the theory of physical economy which lies behind it, for a long time.
In October 2009, my husband and I were at a conference of the World Forum Dialogue of Civilizations in Rhodes, and we also presented these ideas there. Three days later, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin went to China and finalized 12 extensive treaties amounting to $500 billion, including the development of railways in Russia, which would for the first time permit Chinese direct investment in Russia, and thus lay the basis for the beginnng of a credit system. Because China faces the dilemma that, if America collapses, then China's export industry collapses along with it; and if the dollar collapses, then China's currency reserves of $2.4 trillion, which are for the most part dollar holdings, collapse too.
The accords include extensive cooperation for the development of Siberia, where the world's raw material reserves are located, under permafrost conditions; for the construction of the Bering Strait tunnel, which will connect Siberia with Alaska; and also, for space flight and the development of nuclear energy in China, with help from Russia.
Since then, since October of last year, there has been an abundance of bilateral and multilateral treaties among Russia and China, Russia and India, China and India, Korea, and Japan—all in the direction of nuclear energy, space flight, the Transrapid. All these things that were in part developed in Germany, and which can no longer be realized here for political reasons, are now being built in Asia.
Prime Minister Putin was just in India, on March 12, and there he concluded a treaty by which Russia will help India build 12 nuclear power plants—19 treaties in all, among them the mass production of a Russian reactor, a joint satellite navigation program, and many more things.
The Eurasian countries, particularly Russia, China, and India, have actually understood the financial crisis better than the Atlantic countries, and they are naturally quite conscious of the fact that there are unbelievably great imbalances. India, for example, has 400 million urban, educated people, who are on the same technological level as in Europe or America; but they also have more than 600 million people who are extremely poor. The same in China. And the approach that these countries have chosen to deal with this problem, is cooperation in high-technology areas, to use this high technology as a science driver, to make leaps in productivity, which are possible only in this way. These countries therefore are trying to make the best of things under conditions of the global breakdown crisis.
We are, however, of the opinion that this is not sufficient, because if you see the enormous poverty of Africa, of Latin America, of most of Asia, then the industrial potential these countries have so far is not sufficient to solve this crisis. And therefore, we need America, we need Europe, and we need, above all, Germany. Because Germany was once the people of poets, thinkers, and inventors, and we still have the know-how which these countries urgently, urgently, urgently need, and which is the only way out of this crisis.
The Challenge Facing Germany
In this crisis, how can we free Germany from its wrong direction? Certainly there are still some small voices that are saying: Perhaps this abandonment of nuclear power is not such a good idea. At the annual conference of the German Physical Association in Bonn, where 2,000 German researchers met, there were some who said that new nuclear power plants must indeed be built, because it would be much better to replace the older nuclear plants with more modern ones which are safer; and then gave a very timid critique of the unviability of renewable energy sources.
But if one looks at the situation very precisely—and we have demonstrated this really well, I think, in a video on the BüSo website—one can't help but see the contrast between Asia and Europe, and Germany in particular.
If we don't force a change in policy, Germany will soon be the "nuclear-free zone" of the West; we'll become an electrical-power-importing country, and the center of concentration of all international cooperation in nuclear technology will shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And then it will be too late for all the Greens, who will get so agitated about it, to do anything to stop it. Because there is really not much point in getting agitated about the safety of nuclear power plants operating in foreign countries: South Korea, for example, is building 98 nuclear power plants by the year 2030, of which 80 are for export, 18 for the internal market. They are already planning to develop a nuclear technology university for international students—maybe we will be able to send German students there, so they can learn something again.
We still have one area where we have a little bit of know-how, although I must say that, in preparing for this conference, I found out that in all the relevant fields—high-temperature reactors, nuclear fission—the qualified people are dying off! There are very few people who are still available at all.
But we still have an opportunity, because we do have some know-how in the area of the third generation of the European Pressurized Water Reactor. There are German-French preliminary studies and also tenders, offers for cooperation from Russia. And then, of course, we have the potential of the high-temperature reactor, which I strongly think should be the priority, because it is quite simply a concept in which a meltdown absolutely cannot occur, because the dangerous waste components of the nuclear fuel are permanently encapsulated in radiation-proof ceramic balls, and therefore there is absolutely no waste disposal problem.
In Belgium, a new reactor research facility is being built right now to deal with the separation of isotopes and the waste problem by this technique.
But we have realize that we really do not have much more time. I welcome the news that China is building the Transrapid, now not just from Pudong [airport] into the center of Shanghai, but also to the city of Hangzhou. I welcome the news that China will build the Transrapid in Malaysia. But I would welcome much more, the news that the Transrapid were to be built in Germany and become a major new German export, because after all, we developed it here!
The purpose of this event and this presentation, and of our political intervention in Germany, is to replace the paradigm that was the basis of globalization, and everything that axiomatically depends on it. Until this paradigm is clearly destroyed, the crisis must be used to effect a dramatic change in policy.
Now, how can this be done?
The Standpoint of Classical Culture
To deal with this problem from the right perspective and lift ourselves out of the depths of everyday practical politics, I would like us to do this from the standpoint of Friedrich Schiller, and from the standpoint of Classical tragedy.
That is: How would Friedrich Schiller look at the German people, what would he see? He would see small-spirited, fearful people. The phrase most beloved of the German is: "You can't do anything about it anyway"—a phrase which should signify penal servitude, by the way, because it condemns the person to political impotence.
Schiller would see that the race of poets, thinkers, and inventors, which was once a pearl in the diadem of nations—if you just think of all the great works which were produced by the Classical arts in Germany, of the many universal principles of science which were discovered in Germany by German thinkers, and which have been part of humanity's legacy of the good for so long: Germany, the land of Nicholas of Cusa, the father of the modern nation-state and of the representative system of government; of Kepler, who discovered universal gravitation; of Leibniz, who discovered an incredible number of things on the basis of which we live today; of Bach, with the principle of well-tempered composition; of Beethoven, of whom we have heard a wonderful performance this morning; of Schiller, with his wonderful conception of mankind; of the minds of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt; of Gauss; Riemann; Einstein—to name only a few. The pioneers of space travel, who later effectively made both the United States and Russia capable of space exploration. The phrase "Made in Germany," which was once a synonym for advanced technology; and the best social security and health-care system in the world.
Utilitarianism and Counterculture
The awareness of this tradition in culture and science has now almost disappeared from the heads of the younger generation. If you ask 20-year-olds today about Eduard Mörike, or about Moses Mendelssohn, about Leibniz, you will probably get the answer (for the last): "Cookies from Hanover ... !" In other words, the paradigm shift in Germany means that the culture of art and science is no longer dominated by the Socratic search for truth, which is the precondition for any progress, but rather by other things—by empiricism, by Sophism. Not truth, but public relations manipulation. Even journalism itself no longer exists, but rather campaigns, run by the same PR firms that do product advertising campaigns.
The statistical method is employed in all areas of science, but it is completely false. Why has Mr. Un-Sinn [Non-Sense][3] from Munich made so many forecasts which were completely wrong? He runs the so-called Ifo Business Climate Index, which asks 2,000 business people how they feel at the moment, and takes the geometric mean, or algebraic mean of this, and that is the forecast! That has absolutely nothing to do with science.
Utilitarianism: Everything is considered solely from the standpoint of its immediate usefulness. Yet back at the close of the 17th Century, Leibniz said that if there ever comes a time in world history when all social institutions are governed by utilitarianism, there will be a world revolution against it. And that's exactly the point I believe we've reached today.
Let's look not at Classical culture—you already saw and heard its power this morning—or poetry, which addresses the mind's creative faculties, but rather, let's look at today's youth culture: the entire array of what today's young people are subjected to—from "German Idol," where thousands, or even tens of thousands of young people learn, not the beautiful bel canto method of singing, but rather emit some such awful screeching sounds, merely because they saw some degenerate pop star doing it. And then, of course, punk, Gothic (which is downright satanic), rap—millions of young girls are ruining their lives with super-model shows. It's no accident—even if the PISA[4] study isn't a good research method—that Germany, which was once the leader in science education, has now sunk to the fourth-lowest position in the OECD's ranking, and that many graduates are no longer fit for employment.
Instead of focussing on fundamental research and breakthroughs in science, we're wandering off on side-paths, such as renewable energy, which is not economically sustainable, which costs us all a fortune, and which is based on a totally false premise: "green" jobs.
When Frau Merkel says that ecology is no longer a demand just of the Greens, but has made it into the mainstream of all parties—that was in the context of [Federal Environmental Minister Norbert] Röttgen's trial balloon for a "black-green" coalition[5] in North Rhine-Westphalia—unfortunately, she's right! All of Germany's parties—the BüSo excepted—are green!
In the aftermath of the e-mail scandal [exposing the hoax of global warming, at East Anglia University in the United Kingdom], along with all the other scandals, such as that about the "melting glaciers" in the Himalayas, the thesis of anthropogenic climate change has been revealed as an outright lie. Everywhere around the world, people have thrown it out the window, saying: It's garbage.
There is climate change, of course, but it has to do with processes other than the CO2 emissions resulting from human activity.
But in Germany, Frau Merkel and Herr Röttgen can stand up there and say, "Now's the time! We in Germany are going to be the vanguard for the EU's climate targets, even if this means collapsing Germany's industry"—and that, of course, would mean that what little development has been achieved in the Third World, would once again be obliterated.
Over the coming weeks, I'm afraid—perhaps even before the elections in North Rhine-Westphalia—we're in for a shock, a very sudden one, with no forewarning, one in which people who are currently living inside a wad of cotton—between Gottschalk and Nebel,[6] and "Germany Loves Folk Music" (I don't know the exact title)—these people are going to get quite roughly knocked out of their cotton wads.
This is particularly the case, because the top-down control over the news media is such, that we here in Germany are currently living in a Valley of the Clueless, like Dresden back in the days of the German Democratic Republic [East Germany]. But it's going to fail. The stock market culture is going to fail. How outrageous is it, when every morning, every lunchtime, and every evening, when you want to check the news, the very first thing you have to listen to, is the stock market results, which have absolutely nothing to do with reality?
Mobilize for Love of Germany
But even though we've been inundated with all these waves of social engineering—that's what they call brainwashing nowadays—I'm nevertheless optimistic that, if we succeed in building up a force in Germany that reminds people about Germany's culture in science and art, that the German people is nevertheless a people with enormous potential. You have but to consider all these great thinkers, and all those whom I could not enumerate earlier, but who thought in German, wrote in German, composed poetry in German. Access to them is quite easy. We don't need to translate things first: We have Kepler, we have Einstein, we've got all these works in the original.
So the only real question is: Can we now, in this crisis, mobilize the spiritual potential within our population? I believe that in this situation, we cannot avoid the challenge of bringing to life Schiller's concept of the Sublime.
We must create a situation whereby, in this crisis, people no longer locate their identity in the domain of sense-experience, in the domain of material things, but rather they come to link their identity with universal ideas, precisely those which comprise man's immortal nature.
In his amazing writings on the Sublime, Schiller said that when man succeeds in no longer being merely a physical individual—as a physical individual he can be injured, and must fear for his life; there are many forces that can injure him—but that instead, he binds his destiny to the long chain of preceding generations, and, as Schiller writes in his lecture on universal history, man senses a noble yearning to take what has been so richly passed down to him by his predecessors, and to pass this on, further enriched to some degree, to future generations—that only then, although man will still not be physically secure, his moral existence will be secure.
That's a quality which is absolutely essential: that you develop internal independence, that you shift your identity to the Sublime.
In addition, we also need the quality that Frederick the Great demonstrated at the Battle of Leuthen. Frederick the Great was confronted at the time with the numerically superior and well-trained forces of the Austrian Army, and he really ought to have lost the battle; but by means of a double flanking maneuver, he gained victory. That's a very good example of the principle of the supreme commander who takes personal responsibility for the historic outcome of a war. The principle of the flank is that you do something which lies outside of the Aristotelian paradigm of opposites, but that instead you think as Nicholas of Cusa did about the Coincidentia Oppositorum, i.e., that the One has a higher quality than the Many.
To reawaken the Sublime in the minds of the people, and to utilize this crisis in order to re-unite Germany with its own culture, with the Classical idea, as it existed in the time of Schiller, Beethoven, and the other great humanists: that, and that alone, is what will enable us to master this crisis. My husband has always said, and so often, that if we don't succeed in winning at least a decisive minority of the population back to Classical thinking, to thinking for themselves, to thinking scientifically, then our culture is not fit to survive.
I think it is possible. What we require, above all else, is a passionate love for mankind. I believe that if we can mobilize that, then we can also mobilize love for the German nation—and we're especially in need of that.
[1] Helga Zepp-LaRouche et al., "Germany's Missed Historic Chance of 1989," EIR, Aug. 14, 1998; "Two Decades of Organizing for the Four-Power Alliance," EIR, Nov. 27, 2009,.
[2] Helga Zepp-LaRouche, "Unmasking the Secret War by the 'Economic Hit Men,' " EIR, Dec. 10, 2004, p. 16.
[3] Hans-Werner Sinn is head of the Information and Research (Ifo) Institute for Economic Research in Munich.
[4] OECD Programme for International Student Assessment.
[5] A coalition between the Greens and the Christian Democrats (Chancellor Angela Merkel's party).
[6] Thomas Gottschalk and Carmen Nebel are German "pop culture" entertainment show hosts.
