Overcoming the Existential Threat
of Thermonuclear War
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
[PDF version of this transcript]
The following is Helga Zepp-LaRouche's keynote speech to the Berlin conference of the Schiller Institute on Feb. 25, translated here from German. An overview of the conference and the transcript of the videotaped speech by Lyndon LaRouche appeared in last week's issue.
We convened this conference not out of pessimism, but with the intention of intervening in world history to change the paradigm underlying world policies today. And we are optimistic that this is possible.
But still I must begin with some quite terrible things, because for anyone who is observing developments around Iran and Syria, and the strategic situation as a whole, there is no doubt that we are living through the greatest crisis in modern history. And if this direction is not changed immediately, the crisis will end horribly. Unless urgent steps are taken to define the whole situation in a new way, I think we may be actually only days or weeks away from a huge catastrophe.
Ostensibly it was the situation in Syria and the escalation around Iran that ignited the crisis, but actually this crisis is inextricably linked to the escalating disintegration of the financial system in the trans-Atlantic region.
Unfortunately, I have to declare the highest level of alert, because the indications right now are that the intention is—I won't say it will definitely happen, but the intention is—to launch a military strike against Iran, perhaps in early March or April. And if this happens, it would be the trigger for a global thermonuclear war, with the United States, the U.K., NATO, Israel, Australia, and maybe a few other countries on one side, and Syria, Iran, Russia, China, and other countries on the other. Given the incredible destructive potential that would be unleashed by a global thermonuclear war, one can assume that there is a risk that this would be the end of human civilization.
I can assure you, and I say this with the benefit of background knowledge, that all the world's leading governments and all military leaders are absolutely clear about this, and the evidence is available to anyone who takes the trouble to follow strategic developments.
Comparing this with what is being disseminated by the mass media and the so-called "mainstream" politicians, one can only say that there is more confetti being strewn around here than at the Carnival parade in Mainz.
Iran's Nuclear Program
The most recent report, for example, that Iran had denied experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency access to Iran's nuclear sites, led immediately to a hue and cry: "Aha, this proves that Iran still has a nuclear weapons program!" And of course the spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, [Ramin] Mehmanparast, immediately explained that the assignment of this team of inspectors was not to examine the nuclear facilities themselves, but to negotiate the framework for future cooperation with the IAEA—i.e., there was simply no obstruction of this assignment. And then it was reported that this team had requested access to the Parchin military base. Of course, no country would give a team of inspectors access to secret facilities unless that had been explicitly mandated, especially not in the case of Iran, given that almost every day since last October, there have been statements from Israel, Great Britain, and the United States, that a military strike is likely by April.
Meanwhile, according to the media, the deputy head of Iran's Armed Forces, Mohammed Hejazi, declared that Iran was ready to launch a preemptive strike if its national interests were threatened. The Iranian ambassador to Russia, Seyed Mahmoud-Reza Sajjadi, immediately issued a correction, saying that Iran had no intention of preventive military action.
If you consider this disinformation to be psychological warfare, then you have to ask: What role is the current leadership of the IAEA playing?
And this agency's latest report, which stated that Iran would have nuclear weapons within a year, was extremely dubious. It was immediately contradicted by Hans Blix, former head of the IAEA. It is also contradicted by the November 2011 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, which is the evaluation of the umbrella organization of all the American intelligence agencies; the NIE confirmed its finding of 2007, that Iran has not been pursuing a nuclear weapons program since 2003. Hans Blix also said that all the information that the IAEA obtained came from French, British, and American intelligence sources, and was not specifically investigated by the agency itself.
Now a new IAEA report has been published, which in effect repeats that Iran was not willing to cooperate; a definitive report is expected early in March.
All of this is coming to a head this week, with the March 4-6 annual meeting in Washington of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an organization usually dominated by the hawks). And U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that a military strike against Iran by Israel is likely during between April and June—June being a "red line," because by then, Iran will allegedly have managed to bunker its nuclear research installations deep underground, so that bombs could no longer reach them.[1]
The new IAEA report is supposed to come out during the first week of March, and would hit the AIPAC conference like a thunderbolt. That would be about a day after the Russian election, which Vladimir Putin is expected to win.
So, we are looking at an immediate escalation in March-April, or perhaps even earlier. The truth is that we may be only days or weeks away from a global thermonuclear war. And that would be tantamount to the obliteration of civilization.
Background to the Crisis
Let's look at how things could get to that point. Look at the alliance of the forces of the British Empire—understood to mean the whole combination of financial institutions of globalization, i.e., central banks, investment banks, hedge funds, holding companies, special purpose entities, insurance companies. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when there was a chance to actually create a new world order of peace for the 21st Century, the so-called neocons in the United States around the Bush, Sr. government, along with the British government, decided to create a globalized empire on the basis of the Anglo-American special relationship. That was the idea, from 1990-91 on, to carry out "regime change" in all countries whose governments resisted the Empire's. That was the reason for the first Gulf War. This process was interrupted by the eight years of the Clinton Administration, but the trend toward global empire continued in the background even then, as represented by Richard Perle, or the policy of the so-called "Clean Break,"[2] which was the neo-cons' response to Bill Clinton's Oslo policy.
This policy was continued by Bush, Jr., leading to the second Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, and of course to the war of aggression against Libya and the murder of Qaddafi. And now, continuing this policy, regime change and military operations against Syria and Iran are on the agenda.
How close we are to World War III was shown by nothing so clearly as the revelation of a de facto alliance among the United States, Great Britain, al-Qaeda, and the Iranian terrorist organization MEK (Mujahedeen-e-Chalq); the latter two are operating in both Iran and Syria, where the new head of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is the string-puller behind the suicide attacks in Damascus and Aleppo, for the sabotage of pipelines and other infrastructure, for the murder of Syrian government officials and military personnel—all the while operating from Iraq.
What does this mean, if the present governments of the United States and Great Britain apparently have no qualms about working with the September 2001 assassins?
The background to Sept. 11 was revealed long ago: the role of the al-Yamamah Anglo-Saudi apparatus, with Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan playing a very crucial role in financing al-Qaeda; the role of the British BAE group, which essentially built up this apparatus about 24 years ago, and which is now supplying the Syrian opposition with money and weapons.
The MEK, under the protection of U.S. military forces at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, has been carrying out acts of sabotage against Iran since 2003. They were responsible for sabotage of Iranian military facilities, and probably also for the assassination of four Iranian nuclear scientists, to which Iran has actually responded relatively mildly. But looking at this escalation, one must state very clearly that the war has actually already begun.
The news media scarcely took note of it, but anyone who wants to investigate can find out that since last Autumn, an absolutely massive military buildup has been under way in the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean. There are currently three U.S. aircraft carriers there, each with the capacity to carry several hundred fighter planes and cruise missiles; there are also destroyers, frigates, nuclear submarines, plus British and Canadian warships. Overall, there is a nuclear destructive power there which is several orders of magnitude larger than would be required to wipe out the entire human race, and which bears no relation whatsoever to support for the Syrian opposition, for example, or to operations against Iran.
It is the logic of the regime of thermonuclear weapons, that once they are used at all, the entire arsenal is used. The Third World War will not happen with first one nuclear weapon being launched, then a counterstrike, and then another; in a nuclear war, the entire arsenal of one side will actually be deployed, because counterstrikes would be anticipated.
In view of this situation, and of course the fact that the European missile defense systems are viewed by Russia as part of the tactic or strategy of encirclement, Prime Minister Putin has just now announced that Russia's military potential will be increased by EU583 billion. He explained that in a world filled with such turmoil, certain forces are tempted to solve their own problems at the expense of third parties—for example, by demanding that resources of global importance be removed from the exclusive sovereignty of individual nations, and this of course refers primarily to Russia's resources, in Siberia and the Far East; that Russia will not go along with such a thing, not even theoretically; that conflicts and new regional and local wars are breaking out repeatedly along the very borders of Russia, intentionally manufactured chaos, undermining the basic principles of international law.
Putin warned that Russia will find an answer to all this with an effective and asymmetrical response to the global missile defense system, and that it is Russia's position that this missile defense system is a significant expansion of the strategic missile system by other means, because it destroys relative parity.
President Medvedev acted on this by activating the radar facilities in Kaliningrad, as a first measure. Foreign Minister Lavrov was even more explicit. He said very unambiguously that the power center of economic potential has shifted to Asia, and that there are obviously people or forces who want to distract attention from this by means of provocative adventures in the Near and Middle East.
The danger of the situation is underscored not only by these statements by Putin and Medvedev; in Russia now there is a television debate on the most popular TV channel between Presidential candidates Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Mikhail Prokhorov, who spoke openly about it: There will be a war this Summer. We are already in the same position as in 1937-38, i.e., with only half a year to go. Who will be next? Syria. Why did we let the Americans and NATO come up to our southern borders? And then scenarios were developed on how an escalation could occur. The details are not important, and could be seen differently; but what is important, is that in prime time on Russian television, there was a debate about World War III being right around the corner.
What War Means for Europe
We in Germany clearly have a problem, because we are hostage to this threat of global nuclear conflict. Defense Minister [Thomas] de Maizière was recently asked, at the Munich Security Conference, how Germany would act in the event of a war against Iran. De Maizière refused to make any statement or to speculate about it. The only problem is that Chancellor Merkel adheres to the dogma that Israel's security is a raison d'état for Germany, and that Germany is prepared to defend Israel in case of emergency. One thing must be absolutely clear: If such an emergency should occur, we are talking about World War III, in which Germany would be on the side of the United States, Great Britain, and NATO, and would be involved in a thermonuclear exchange with Russia, China, and some other states. In plain language: Nobody in Germany would be expected to survive such a war.
And so, we urgently need an alternative to this insanity. But now, if you consider the financial policy background of these developments against the backdrop of the escalating euro crisis, yet another dimension comes into view. Every five minutes, Mrs. Merkel repeats that "If the euro fails, Europe fails." But precisely the opposite is true! Namely, if we do not rid ourselves of the euro as quickly as possible, Europe will not survive. If we do not regain our sovereignty, we won't even be able to decide whether—or not—we want to become cannon-fodder for a third world war.
Let us recall that the price we had to pay for reunification was our abandonment of the deutschemark and the formation of the European monetary union. Mitterrand, Thatcher, and Bush Sr. declared at the time, that they would not allow Germany to reunite, unless Germany hobbled itself by becoming integrated into the EU, and became constrained inside the corset of the European Union. And as Jacques Attali, the éminence grise of French politics and a close advisor of François Mitterrand, recently said in an interview, the European monetary union was deliberately created with a birth defect, so that later on, political unification could be forced into being, which was not possible at the outset. In other words, looking at the European Union today, we see that it has become a supranational dictatorship aimed at eliminating the nation-state, and that the escalating series of EU treaties, from Maastricht to Lisbon, has invested the EU with ever more extensive imperial structures.
Let us recall that one of the top advisors to the EU's so-called "Foreign Minister" Catherine Ashton, is Robert Cooper, who was quite open about the fact that he's aiming at a new liberal imperialism. And in his 2003 book, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century, he proclaimed that the EU is an imperial "post-modern system," which is a necessary counterweight to the pre-modern states which tend toward chaos, on the one hand, and on the other, the great nation-states such as the United States. Cooper writes that "The most far-reaching form of imperial expansion is that of the European Union.... The post-modern European answer to threats is to extend the system of co-operative empire ever wider."
Neither the EU nor its governments are going to admit that, of course, but already back when [Hubert] Védrine was France's Foreign Minister, a fracas broke out when Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote an article in the journal The National Interest, where he stated that Europe is more or less merely a militarized colony, and that in any case, the image of man has changed so much that whereas up to now, Homo sapiens has been at the center, now we're in a post-human era, and that the age of the Peace of Westphalia is over, and that therefore the expansion of NATO and of the EU all the way to Russia's borders must be aggressively pursued. The remarks contained in this article touched off a huge scandal, and Védrine recalled all French ambassadors from around the world to Paris for a meeting. But apparently, Brzezinski himself has gotten panicky in the meantime, since he recently issued an urgent warning against a military strike on Iran, because it would have unforeseeable consequences.
But Brzezinski was entirely right when he pointed out that the EU treaties marked the beginning of a "post-human era"—as we can see today in what's happening to the Greeks, the Italians, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese. The propaganda line of the EU advocates, and of the advocates of European integration, has always been that a single Europe promotes peace; but today we see the reality, when people in Greece are burning the German flag, and hideous caricatures of Mrs. Merkel are in circulation. As a direct result of this policy, not since World War II have the peoples of Europe been so at loggerheads with each other, as they are now. The unified European state exists only inside the heads of the EU bureaucracy's oligarchical elite. For the European population, on the other hand, there is no common culture, and no such thing as a media-shaped sphere of public discourse. What do Germans know about how people in Brittany are thinking, or in Sicily? What do the northern Swedes know about Slovakia? So, the whole idea of a unified state is a fiction.
Failure of the Euro System
The euro is a failed experiment. And now, if there's an attempt to leverage the European Financial Stability Facility by a factor of ten to one, into a money-printing machine, or to establish the European Monetary System as a de facto permanent bailout mechanism, then this would be the end of our sovereignty and control over our own budget, the so-called "sovereign right of parliament." We would lose all sovereignty to an EU dictatorship which would no longer be in any way accountable to our citizens. It is a relapse, not into a post-Westphalian order, but rather into a pre-Westphalian order—that is, the period before the Thirty Years War, or perhaps the preceding 150 years of religious warfare—only this time, in the age of thermonuclear weapons.
The next-to-last President of Germany, Horst Köhler, resigned rather than putting his signature on the first bailout package for Greece. And what about [the most recent President] Christian Wulff's resignation? I think the key to that is in the speech he delivered in Lindau, along with other remarks he made previously in Lower Saxony. Let me quote from his Lindau address:
"At the German Banking Congress I warned the financial sector that we've neither dealt with the causes of the crisis nor can we say today that we've recognized the risks and done everything to eliminate them. In fact, we're faced with a development which resembles a game of dominoes. First, individual banks rescued other banks, and then, states rescued their banks, and now the international community is rescuing individual states. But the question that should be asked is: Who will ultimately rescue the rescuers? When will the accumulated deficits be distributed among whom, and who will shoulder them? ...
"Instead of setting a clear regulatory framework, governments are increasingly allowing themselves to be driven by global financial markets....
"First of all, politicians have to regain their ability to act. They have at long last to stop reacting frantically to every fall on the stock markets. They mustn'¬ "!t feel dependent on or allow themselves to be led around the ring by the nose by banks, rating agencies or the erratic media. Politicians have to formulate policies for the common good and they have to show courage and strength in the face of conflict with individual interest groups. They have to put structures into order and, if necessary, adapt the regulatory framework so that scarce resources can be used in the best possible way and business and society can thrive. Politicians have to take a long-term view and, if necessary, make unpopular decisions. In a liberal democracy, decisions always have to be made in parliament. For that'¬ "!s where legitimacy lies. In a democracy the power comes from the people, who elect and vote for their representatives."
I think these remarks make it quite clear that the position which Wulff took in Lindau is in total opposition to the current policy of the EU and of the German government. And there exists no connection between this and the unparalleled media assault against him over receipt of favors, which perhaps aren't very pretty, but which are totally normal in politics, and something that almost all politicians engage in. And now we are to get a new President who characterizes the Monday demonstrations against Hartz IV as foolish, who describes the Occupy Movement as "unspeakably inane,"and who believes that the free-market economy, which has just proven to be more bankrupt than the G.D.R. ever was, is our "guarantor of freedom."
What we urgently need, is the same measure of transparency about this [incoming President Joachim] Gauck, as the media and politicians have created concerning Christian Wulff—only this time before he has been sworn in.
Alternatives for Germany
If we look at this situation, then I think we need a completely different kind of politics in Germany. If we simply go along further on this path, in the direction of the NATO military alliance,then we're hostages to the impending new world war. If we continue in the direction of the EU, Germany's fate will be absolutely sealed.
But there are, of course, alternatives. For example, in 2001, Russian President Putin delivered an address before the German Parliament in which he proposed to intensify absolutely extensive cooperation between the two countries. The current Deputy Prime Minister, [Dmitri] Rogozin, recently reiterated the offer that the common problems of humanity will have to be solved jointly by a Strategic Defense of the Earth initiative—the SDE proposal, which is absolutely in the tradition of the SDI[3] policy. Former Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov has likewise called upon the world's nations to jointly develop the unbelievably rich resources of the Arctic.
Anyone who is not completely blind has to recognize that the EU in its current form is not in Germany's interests, but that rather it has become an empire, an oligarchical system directed by a tiny money and power elite, by an EU bureaucracy which is essentially serving the financial beneficiaries of the bailout packages, while the masses of the populace are deliberately kept in backwardness.
How does this oligarchy operate? Through manipulation of sense-perception, and a dumbing-down of the emotions associated with those senses. It's based on the model of the Roman Empire: bread and circuses—in modernized forms, of course. If you look today at how full-grown men, week after week, show more interest in their favorite soccer team's game scores, than they do in humanity's future over the next few weeks; when you see how our youth have been poisoned by the counterculture, and that for the entire population, from disco to the Musikantenstadl TV program, from Black Gothic to Lady Gaga, the main leisure time occupations are shopping and perfecting one's vacation plans, seeking more and more pleasure in the here and now, playing video games, spending all one's spare time on social networks, attending wine festivals; and when you also see how today's media in Germany are more controlled than they ever were in the days of Goebbels, then you get a basic picture of what the problem is.
Humanity is on the cusp of being annihilated in a Third World War, and 99.9% of all people don't have a clue that this danger even exists! People are running here and there, they are all oh-so-busy using up their brief lives, yet they've scarcely lived, consciously.
The Image of Man
And that, of course, is the intention of the oligarchy, which has deliberately created an image of man that is based on the deliberately false theses of the Club of Rome, namely that the world is a closed system governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a world in which man is merely a parasite who is ruining the environment, using up scarce resources which emit too much CO2, a world in which human population growth is the greatest threat to the beetles and the toads.
You've been in the forest at one time or other, and have seen an anthill, and you've seen that this anthill is perfectly organized according to the anthill's internal logic. The hierarchy functions, tasks are accomplished systemically and perfectly, infrastructure is built, each has his own task to perform, and no single ant ever gets the idea that there is a world "out there," governed by entirely different laws.
And so it goes with people who rely solely on sense-perception—on a higher level, of course, with much more complex processes—but for these people, the world is fundamentally the same box. If, however, we look at the universe as it really is, we realize that the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not hold true, and that we're not inside a closed system. Our planet Earth is located in a galaxy which is developing, amid countless other galaxies which are likewise developing. The most recent measurements of the red-shift of electromagnetic emissions, whereby the light from a galaxy appears to be more shifted toward the red, the more distant it is from us, gives us insight into how, on the macrocosmic scale, the universe is expanding into an ever-higher form of organization. Only when we bring the Earth's political and economic order into agreement with the cosmic order, will we be able to overcome humanity's existential crisis, and the potential extinction of the human species. This necessity corresponds to a profound philosophical principle in the Christian-humanist tradition of European intellectual history. But this idea also exists in other cultures—for example, in the Vedic tradition in Indian philosophy, or, in another guise, also in Confucianism.
The laws of the universe are anti-entropic. The kernel of this idea was first recognized in the 15th Century by Nicholas of Cusa, who discovered the so-called biogenetic law of evolution. It was he who, for the first time, distinguished among three completely distinct domains: the domain of the inorganic, of the biological, and of human reason. And for Nicholas of Cusa, there was also the fourth domain of divine reason. He basically defined evolution in such a way, that no mode in any of these domains can fully accentuate its potential, unless it also participates at one point with the next-higher species. Which is to say that man is only wholly man when he participates in divine reason. And Nicholas defined evolution such that, unlike with Darwin, for whom evolution was from the bottom up, the lower are, as it were, pulled upward by the higher, so that development occurs from the top down.
Kepler grasped this idea, but first and foremost, it was Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian scientist, who added to the domains of the inorganic and the biological, the domain of reason, which he called the Noösphere, which reaches ever higher levels of complexity, and whose action on the universe is continuously increasing. That is, with advancing evolution, the impact of human reason becomes increasingly efficient. The German-born scientist Krafft Ehricke, a space pioneer who developed crucial rockets for the Apollo program, determined, from this standpoint, that space travel and colonization must be the next step in human evolution.
Life, which, with the help of photosynthesis, developed out of the ocean, and has arrived at ever-higher levels of energy-flux density, reached a new level with the appearance of mankind, which must find its next level with the colonization of space. When you consider that in the history of our universe, mankind is an extremely recent phenomenon, then measured against the age of the universe, the Earth has existed for only a single day. The development of complex life-forms has existed for three hours, mankind has existed for three minutes, and what has come down to us as recorded history, has existed for a mere 10 seconds.
Anti-Entropic Development
Now, there are pessimists among scientists, among geophysicists and others, who are convinced that mankind will disappear again a second after midnight. But this will only occur if we fail to act more intelligently then the dinosaurs did. Over the last 500 million years, there have constantly been cycles of 60 to 65 million years, at the end of which, in each case, there have been extinctions in which up to 96% of all species have been obliterated. But every time, following the extinction, a more highly developed form of existence has come into being, whose metabolism and basic means of subsistence were associated with higher energy-flux densities. For example, after the extinction of the dinosaurs, the last great extinction, came the mammals, which had already existed in a rudimentary way before, but which now became the dominant species.
That is, we can find proof in the history of the universe that the development of the biosphere on Earth operates absolutely anti-entropically, never in the opposite direction, but always at higher energy-flux densities. And the species which, for whatever reason, wanted to remain at the same level, have always died out, as did the dinosaurs; and if mankind were to stick with green ideology, the same fate will befall us.
Galactic Threats
At the same time, we have to deal with the dangers resulting from our planet's position in the universe, and which we had better acknowledge. The Earth has almost been struck by asteroids nearly 5,000 times in the past, and so far we do not have the technical capabilities to deflect them, although it would be very serious if they were to hit the Earth. We have had a clear increase in the number of earthquakes over the last period, including the March 11, 2011 earthquake of 9.0 on the Richter scale, with the known results at Fukushima; we have had extreme weather phenomena—droughts, floods—and volcanic eruptions, none of which have anything to do with so-called "anthropogenic climate change." Instead, over the last year, we been had to register unusual activity throughout the Solar System. For example, in December 2010 there was a massive storm on Saturn, which lasted until July 2011, and thus beyond the usual 30-year cycle which has to do with Saturn's orbital period. This storm came seven years ahead of schedule, and was the largest storm since observations began to be made.
We also have solar activity which has not been observed for 400 years, and which points toward a long-lasting solar minimum, which would perhaps be like the period of the great Irish Frost around 1740, which ushered in the longest cold period in modern European history. There were two huge X-class solar flares at the beginning of 2011. In the Sun's Northern Hemisphere there were several X-class flares, while at the same time, in the Southern Hemisphere, the situation at the end of the year was remarkably peaceful—and then suddenly it became very active, and there were several coronal mass-ejections, which had large-scale effects on processes on Earth. The so-called solar maximum was not expected to be reached until 2013, but there are various indications that it already occurred at the end of 2011, with potentially enormous dangers for the Earth.
If coronal mass ejections strike the Earth's magnetic field, this can result in geomagnetic storms which could, in serious cases, shut down the electricity supply of entire continents, and would practically produce a dark age overnight. In the second half of 2011 there were more such coronal mass ejections, which the Earth only barely escaped. The Sun's activity has a huge influence on our weather; by contrast, man's CO2 emissions are totally negligible, something like the impact of mayflies on an elephant.
A year ago, the climate mafia still had relative hegemony. Although scientists such as Hendrik Svensmark and those at the CERN research facility had long since reported their research on the influence of cosmic rays on cloud formation, and had established the effect of cosmic radiation on our atmosphere, namely that the formation of clouds has to do with ionization, it was still common doctrine that man was responsible for climate change. But this cosmic radiation has an enormous effect on the cooling or warming of the Earth, and on the amount of precipitation.
But meanwhile, even the gutter press is now reporting that the Sun's activity influences our weather, and I would say that this is, at a minimum, the result of our own activities worldwide.
Considering all these relationships, it must be really clear to anyone, that if mankind remains within the paradigm of the oligarchical system and green ideology, and thereby of the monetarism and positivism with which it is consistent, then our fate will be the same as that of the dinosaurs and of millions of other species which were not creative, and did not adapt themselves to the anti-entropic laws of the universe.
In contrast to all other forms of life—at least of those forms we know of so far—mankind is a unique species, which, by virtue of our creative capacity, can understand the laws of the universe ever more profoundly and with greater precision, and can discover and apply new universal principles; and therefore we are also the only species that can deal with these challenges, and therefore we are potentially the only immortal species.
The reason for this lies in the principle which Nicholas of Cusa already understood in the 15th Century, namely that the laws of the microcosm, human reason, and those of the macrocosm, the self-developing universe, are absolutely identical.
Plato described this as mankind's capability to form appropriate hypotheses. Nicholas took this same point further, namely that the intangible idea which a man can generate in his creative reason, is capable of generating a change and further development of the physical universe. In other words, an intangible idea has a physical effect in the physical universe, and this is the proof that there is this coherence of the microcosm and the macrocosm.
Look to the Stars!
If we want to overcome the crisis on Earth—the potential extinction of the human species in a thermonuclear World War III—then we must, in this hour of danger, not only turn our gaze toward the stars, but to the galaxies, and look at the unbelievable expanse of a self-developing universe.
Kraftt Ehricke coined the concept of the extraterrestrial imperative, namely that mankind will only grow up once it accepts the fact that the next level of evolution lies in manned space flight and colonization of space. But Krafft Ehricke was also aware of the fact that this absolute affirmation of scientific and technological progress must go hand-in-hand with the humanist education of man, because it is never technology in itself which is good or bad, but rather it is the human individual who decides whether a technology will be employed toward a good or a bad end. Mankind can only survive if the majority of people grow up, if the knowledge of universal principles in science and art, which are verifiable—they are universal, because they can at any point be proven, and thus they signify rationality—if these principles become the basis upon which the greatest proportion of mankind thinks.
In just the part of the universe known up to now, there are hundreds of millions of galaxies. Just imagine: It's almost the limit of human imagination which is being challenged here. And this evening, we'll hear the choral section of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in the musical part of this conference—the symphony for which Beethoven took Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy" as the foundation, and in whose chorus comes the wonderful line, "Over the starry tabernacle, a loving father must dwell" ("Überm Sternezelt muß ein lieber Vater wohnen"). And as I gaze upward at that tent of stars, composed as it is of hundreds of billions of galaxies, I say, with awe, and with optimism: "Over the starry tabernacle, there must dwell a loving father!"
[1] See David Ignatius, "Is Israel Preparing To Attack Iran?" Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2010. The evaluation about Iranian bunkers is attributed by Ignatius to "the Israelis"—ed.
[2] "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," issued in 1996 by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Jerusalem. Directed to then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it called for a shift toward pre-emptive military action, and for regime change in Iraq, Syria, and Iran—ed.
[3] Lyndon LaRouche's concept of a strategic defense initiative, which was officially adopted by President Reagan in 1983, envisioned U.S.-Soviet cooperation for mutual ABM defense based on "higher physical principles," in the common interests of mankind. This policy was sabotaged on both the Soviet and U.S. sides.
