LAROUCHE PAC CLASS

Can a Single Individual Change History And Bring about a New Renaissance?

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

[Print version of this article]

PART 2 OF 2

Part 1 of this class, conducted April 27, 2019, was published in the May 3, 2019 issue of EIR.

In 1986, as a result of Lyn’s influence in the United States, we had an election breakthrough in the primaries in Illinois, where colleagues of Lyn’s won the primaries for the number two and number three places in the Democratic Party. That, together with the SDI, with the idea to overcome the desired under-development in the developing countries was clearly what triggered a letter already in 1982 by the British to the United States Department of State on the prosecution of my husband.

In October 1986, the infamous raids occurred on our offices and homes. 400 FBI agents with armored vehicles, clearly designed that we would not survive this. But because we mobilized internationally, we called up the White House, the White House intervened and the worst was prevented. But this was the absolute turning point, because up to that point, we had only organized positive things—development programs. We wanted to create three private universities because we worked with about 100 professors and these professors were ready and wanted to create private universities with Lyn’s theoretical ideas. There was going to be a university in the United States, one in Germany, and one in Peru.

Naturally, all of these positive developments and activities were completely interrupted, as we had to defend ourselves against the illegal prosecutions; the Boston trial, the Alexandria trial, then the jailing of Lyndon LaRouche and his colleagues following 1989. So, for us, the situation completely changed. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark has called this prosecution of Lyndon LaRouche the worst atrocity in the history of law in the United States; and said this was not only aimed against Lyn, and therefore a person, but it was intended to eradicate all the beautiful ideas which came from Lyn and the movement he had created.

LaRouche in Berlin

Before Lyn was put in jail, he did two additional important things. In October 1988, we went to Berlin, and he forecast at that time that the Soviet Union, and the Comecon [Soviet bloc], would soon collapse; that was one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And in a speech at the Kempinski Hotel in Berlin, he said that given the economic difficulties in the Comecon, in one year, or very soon, there would be German unification with Berlin as its capital, and that the unified Germany should start to develop the Comecon countries with Western technologies. He proposed concretely the economic development of Poland, as a model.[fn_1]

Nobody believed Lyn when he said that the Soviet Union would collapse; but it did. When the Wall came down, Lyn was already in jail. We were the only ones who had had any idea that this would happen. We developed a concrete plan for economic development, during the many discussions I had with Lyn on the telephone, and after we were not even able to speak directly, and only through tape for half a year. Lyn developed the idea of the Productive Triangle, which I was very happy to help to put together and present as a proposal to overcome the under-development of the East European countries after the Iron Curtain had come down. In 1991, this proposal was extended to become the Eurasian Land-Bridge, by connecting the population and industrial centers of Europe with those of Asia through development corridors.

LaRouche Runs for President, From Jail

In 1992, Lyn did another absolutely incredible thing, namely, he ran a Presidential campaign from prison. He did that with the help of James Bevel, a close collaborator of Martin Luther King. That campaign helped to maintain the organization while we were working with dogged determination to get Lyn out of jail. We collected hundreds and thousands of VIP signatures appealing to the U.S. President to release Lyn; which only occurred after Bill Clinton was elected—and in 1994, Lyn was released from prison. During his incarceration, Lyn wrote his famous prison writings. I can only advise you to look at them, because he wrote them without books, without a library, without an internet, without Googling—without any such devices. These books contain the most profound ideas about the universe, about scientific method, and about Classical art; and anyone who wants to see the genius of Lyndon LaRouche should look at these prison writings.[fn_2]

After Lyn came out of prison in 1994, we accelerated the same campaign. We went to Russia. Lyn went several times to Moscow; he tried to get the Clinton administration onto a different course, despite the fact that you had the Boris Yeltsin years, which was a terrible period for Russia. With the help of Yevgeny Primakov, he tried to remedy that. We continued with our economic development plans.

In 1996, I went to Beijing, because finally there was a response to our proposal to conduct a conference on the Eurasian Land-Bridge. At that time, China had the idea that the Eurasian Land-Bridge would be the long-term development perspective for China until the year 2010. That did not happen, because, as Lyn predicted in the summer of 1997, the global financial crisis broke out. I just happened to have been in China that fall, in September, and I communicated Lyn’s prognosis to many of the leading think tanks in Beijing; and they all took note of the fact that Lyn had predicted the crisis of 1997.

When it finally did break out, we got many phone calls into our offices. Many people said, “Oh, Mr. LaRouche is a prophet. How did he know there would be a crisis?” which then was called the Asia crisis. “If we had listened to Lyndon LaRouche, we would have saved a lot of money.” Now Lyn was emphatic that this was not an Asian crisis, but that this was the beginning of a global financial crisis which would not stop until its causes were first remedied. It continued in the form of the Russian state bankruptcy, and the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund crisis one year later—and many of the consequences are still being felt.

The New Silk Road

We continued this throughout the 1990s, the 2000s, and therefore, we were extremely happy, when, finally, in 2013, Xi Jinping announced the New Silk Road as official Chinese policy in a speech in Kazakhstan. I’m not saying that what Xi Jinping is doing, and what China is doing is the exact fulfillment of what Lyndon LaRouche and our organization have done for the last 50 years: But it is a provable fact that the idea of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, of a New Silk Road, was promoted by Lyn first, that we had hundreds of conferences on five continents around the world, hundreds of seminars and conferences, and, as I said, we have affected many, many thousands of people who agree with us that this is the right policy.

I think there is a great affinity in Chinese history, so that they would come out with the same ideas. Because of the 2,500 years of Confucian tradition in China, they have this idea of a harmonious development of all nations, and naturally, because of the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, returning to what de facto is the American System of economy, China had incredible success, and is now offering that Chinese model to other countries to overcome their underdevelopment.

I can only assure you that Lyn’s influence on the world was not just through his writings, which we are going to publish as soon as we can. This will be a big, big job, because Lyn was the most prolific writer you can imagine. He has written not only hundreds and hundreds of books, articles, memorandums, presentations, and unpublished memorandums, so that the collected works of Lyndon LaRouche will impress the world. Probably the last time you had something like that, would be Leibniz. But it was not just the writings, the many speeches, the videos, the half-hour TV programs from his Presidential campaigns, but he directly affected the lives of hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands and maybe more individuals, who all said that “Lyndon LaRouche changed my life,” because it was getting in touch with the profound body of his ideas which completely reversed the way they thought about themselves their nation, the world, and the future.

What Lyn said in the short video we saw just now, was that there are only two nations which right now will make a difference in terms of the outcome of world history: the United States and China. And it is absolutely important that the United States does not fight this new paradigm, but joins it. Cui Tiankai, China’s Ambassador to the United States just two days ago made another offer, saying that the world needs the industrial potential of the United States to build the Belt and Road Initiative, and that the United States should not miss out on this great potential.

The genie is out of the bottle: There is practically now, with the New Silk Road, the practical realization of Lyn’s long fight. I can only touch upon some of the most elementary aspects of how Lyn has shaped the last 50 years, and that Lyn’s ideas must—and I’m sure they will—also shape the next 50 years.

LaRouche’s Vision of Earth’s Next 50 Years

One glimpse of that was this Woman on Mars video, which Lyn broadcast on March 3, 1988, where he showed how the future must be space colonization. He wrote at that time, that “On Day One” of his Presidency—this was part of his 1988 Presidential campaign—“I will declare a national emergency and initiate the largest economic recovery program in history. In the first two years . . . I will issue $2 trillion in low-cost federal loans for infrastructure development. I will create 5 million new industrial jobs,” basically outlining different aspects of the FDR recovery program. And then he said, “I will pick up where the old Apollo program was left off in the 1960s, and launch a program for Mars colonization.”[fn_3]

This program is now echoed by the recently announced Moon-Mars program of President Trump.[fn_4]

In 2005, Lyn wrote a beautiful book called Earth’s Next Fifty Years.[fn_5] He describes that in the next 50 years there must be a completely new set of international relations, which are based on the Vladimir Vernadsky conception that the noösphere increasingly will replace the biosphere, meaning that the number and quality of discoveries by human creativity, of new scientific and technological principles, and of creation of new great forms of Classical art, achieve the result that the increase of the part dominating the universe which has to do with human creativity, which Vernadsky called the “noösphere,” will have an increasing relevance over the biosphere. And that this will increasingly shape the relations among creative individuals relating to each other.

If you take the long arc of universal history and evolution of life on Earth, as it was developed by Krafft Ehricke and by Vernadsky, briefly, life developed out of the oceans with the help of photosynthesis, leading to higher forms of organisms with higher forms of energy flux-density in their systems, eventually leading to the evolution of man; man, first settling along the rivers and oceans; then, with the help of infrastructure conquering the interiors of all the continents for human habitation; and essentially you can say that “the New Silk Road becoming the World Land-Bridge” is actually the completion of that phase of human evolution and development. And clearly, the development of infrastructure in nearby space, the building of villages on the Moon, as a starting point for interstellar flights, for the colonization of Mars and other such endeavors, will be the next phase of the evolution of human civilization.

Discovery of Black Hole Confirms Einstein

Now, this is absolutely exciting. Just two weeks ago, astronomers were able to obtain for the first time an image of the immediate environment of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of the center of the galaxy M87, 55 million light years away. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than our Sun. The EHT was a project to unite and integrate an array of eight ground-based radio telescopes.

By having such a global network of radio telescopes, they were able to make photographs or images of this black hole region, a cosmic object of such an unimaginably large mass, contracted to an extremely small volume. The effect of it, is an extremely strong bending of space-time, and the environmental matter heats up very strongly so that, basically it starts to glow. This effect was predicted by Albert Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity, but at the end of his life, even he doubted that such black holes existed. But now they are proven to be there, and they are probably at the center of the two trillion galaxies which the Hubble Telescope has discovered so far.

If the existence of black holes having such a large mass does not impress you, I don’t know what will. And also the fact that we know of the existence of 2 trillion galaxies.

The beauty of this is not only that Einstein’s theory was proven in this way, but it required the linking of eight telescopes in eight different places: In Hawaii, Chile, Antarctica, Mexico, Arizona, and Spain. The technique used was something called “very long baseline interferometry” which, with the help of the rotation of the Earth, was able to create a virtual telescope of the size of the Earth. And the technique used is so precise that you could actually read a newspaper in New York, from a coffee plate in Berlin.

The beauty of the observation is, that it would not have been possible to do that with one nation alone. To have such knowledge of how our universe works, we need the kind of international cooperation that Lyn described in the book, Earth’s Next Fifty Years, the kind of Vernadsky cooperation, where one creative human being relates to another creative human being, disregarding any kind of national, or for sure, geopolitical so-called “interest.”

Discovering the existence of and imaging of this black hole is a milestone in our understanding of the fundamental dynamics of the galaxies in the universe. Exactly as Lyn had already talked about it in the beginning of the 1950s, such a discovery challenges all pre-existing knowledge and redefines every assumption that mankind has had to this point. One of the participating scientists from the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, Mr. Anton Zensus, has remarked that in the future, researchers will talk about the time before and after this discovery, because it represents a watershed regarding human knowledge of the laws of the universe.

The Difference Between Man and Beast

I mention that for two reasons: First of all, Lyn has pointed to the qualitative jump in human knowledge caused by creative discoveries, and therefore the EHT project pertains to that ontological character of human discovery having an effect in the real, physical universe. It is a vision of the future of how the human species can collaborate. And just as a last idea, consider what this discovery does to the ridiculous assumption of the Club of Rome about “limited resources on the planet,” and the even sillier ideas of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Let us now listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche [via video]:

Lyndon LaRouche: The way to deal with this problem—again, we have to come back and start playing again. Have fun! The remedy for every crisis, every emotional crisis: Have fun! Don’t get ugly; have fun! This difference between man and beast; it’s the basis of all civilized life. What’s the difference between a human being and an animal? Some people think there’s no difference. There was even a cartoon I saw in the Washington Post today, of George Bush, President George Bush, saying that he didn’t think that the contamination of stem-cells with mouse stem-cells was going to create a problem. And they have him, as President, standing there speaking, as President, with mouse-ears sticking out! I mean, this is typical of the problem! [laughter]

What’s the difference between man and animal? There is a difference. It’s a difference we can demonstrate. It’s a difference we call cognition. Only a human being can make an original, valid discovery of a universal physical principle. No animal can do it. Only a human being. Only a human being can cause another human being to replicate exactly that experience of discovery. No animal can do it. That’s why animals have fixed cultures. Because they’re incapable of developing a culture; they can not discover universal physical principles by means of which they increase their species’ power to exist in the universe. Only human beings can do that.

Now, if your relationship to other human beings is cognitive—in other words, instead of reading a book, or having your hind-end plugged into electric wires to the Internet, or something like that—if you are educated, by re-experiencing, as much as possible, the great discoveries actually made by the greatest minds before you, for thousands of years past, and if the memory of that act of discovery is living again today in your mind, you are human. You’re human in a functional sense, because when you look at the eyes of some other person, what you see is not the physical image of this human body; what you see is the function of that mind, that behind those eyes, on the other side of the room, there is a cognitive being, who is capable of incorporating and generating great fundamental discoveries of universal physical principle.

If you say, as Kant did, or as Locke did, or as Adam Smith did, as the empiricists and positivists do, as the stem-cell-embryo freaks do; if you say that man is only another animal, that there is no process of cognition, there’s no power of discovery of Classical artistic principles—it’s all just a matter of opinion—if you say that, you’re nothing but an animal. Not because you were born to be an animal, but because you’re thinking like an animal; you’re behaving like an animal, not a human being. You’re incapable of loving other human beings, as human beings. I think the record of marriage these days attests to the degeneration of morality on that count. People say, “Why’d you get a divorce?” “I got tired. It wasn’t exciting any more. I wanted a new experience.” “Uh, not fashionable. I changed the type I like. I saw a new movie star.” And this is what people do these days! They have become bestialized, who do not see that all beauty, all human beauty, lies in this quality of mind.

Isn’t it the most wonderful thing in the world, from the standpoint of understanding history, to re-experience, in your own mind, the actual act of discovery, of a great principle made by a great thinker from the past? Suddenly, that person is alive! They never died. Because an actual moment of creative thought, which they had, you have replicated in your own mind. They live inside you. When you act, if you act well, you change the outcome of their lives. When you take a discovery by a great scientist, say a hundred years ago, and that has been neglected, or has not been properly developed, and you, then, understand it, and then you apply it, to improve the condition of life: You have changed previous history, as well as the present, just as you will intend to change the future.

Look, we’re all going to die! So, what do you live for? Do you live like an animal, to go out with a whimper? Or, do you live like a human being, knowing that you are doing something, you are developing, in yourself, something which will be transmitted to future generations, to make humanity better in the future? You no longer are a little person, living in a little neighborhood, with a little mind, with little ambitions and little interests; you’ve suddenly become a very big person, because you have the minds of some of the greatest people in history before you, live in you! And your replication of exactly their act of discovery. You do things with pride! They’ll say, “He was right! This was a great discovery. We’ve to use it for mankind’s benefit.” You say, “I’ve got to do something to make the future better, for those who come after us. Then, I can die with a smile on my face. Because I’ve lived well. I’ve lived at peace with the greatest people of the past. Or, at least, some of them. And I can live at peace, with joy, in the people in the future. I will live forever, in this process.” That’s what it is to be human.

And when you think like that, and look at other people like that, you don’t have a problem. You may have problems, but that’s fun! Because, if problems force you to attack and solve problems, whether as an individual, or in concert with others, that is fun. It’s what the puppy does, when the happy puppy is playing. The worst thing you can do to a puppy is not play with it. They get angry. It gets bored. The worst thing you can do to a horse, is not play with it, not work with it. It gets bored; it’s unhappy. It may get sick and die on you. It has no purpose in life.

Human beings have a different kind of play. It’s that kind of play, called cognition, in respect to past and present, which makes an absolute moral difference; which defines the individual person, as a creature made in the image of the Creator. When you think in those terms, then you think, accordingly.

Now, how do we get out of this mess? I’ve defined implicitly, what the problem is: The problem is, we are gripped by a system, a doomed system, a self-doomed system. This system, this financial-monetary system, with its legal trappings, such as [Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia, with its popular trappings, such as popular opinion, with its lack of sense of what humanity is, a lack of moral principle—there is no moral principle. If you don’t have a sense of what humanity is, as I’ve described it, you have no morality. It’s all mechanical—there’s no morality in it. Morality involves passion. And moral passion, is love for human beings. It’s love for those creative people, who went before you. It’s love for those who are coming afterward. To do nothing shameful in the eyes of those, who came before you—even if you disagree with them. [applause] And, to do nothing, which is not beneficial to the society that comes afterward.

And Plato called this agapē. The Apostle Paul referred to this repeatedly, as in I Corinthians 13 as agapē! Don’t get involved, like crazy Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, with these dos and don’ts single-issues. Forget the single issues! Don’t worry about a list of dos and don’ts. Paul says the same thing: This is fraud! Concentrate on agapē, which is the essence of all morality. And, when you have agapē, you don’t need any other code, except good judgment. Agapē, essentially, knowing what a human being is; knowing what humanity is; knowing what cognition is; and loving what you have received as benefits from the past—cognitively. And loving the future, by giving to the future, that which the future, as human, needs.

And, if you always act according to that, you may fail in your understanding of what you need to do, but your intentions are always clear and moral. And that’s what we lack, essentially.

So, that’s the problem I face: I live in a society, in which my generation was de-generate; became my de-generation. And, my degeneration taught their children to degenerate still further. And, now the thing is collapsing. And people are saying, “You gotta fix the system. You can’t change the system. You gotta fix it. Don’t talk about changing the system! Why don’t you come up with some suggestion that will make the system work.” Like, you know: Find a way to make strychnine enjoyable. That’s the problem.

What it comes down to: We have a shortage of leaders. And, this problem of leadership has two aspects to it. One aspect is, people who are qualified to be leaders. What person is qualified to be a leader? A person, who is, essentially, from what I’ve said here, a person of agapē. A person who has passion, who has love for humanity; who wants to do good for future humanity; to honor the noble contributions of people from the past. And to give something better to the future. Those people are leaders. People who will not sell out the principle of agapē for the sake of opinion, or personal advantage. [applause]

I’ve only indicated the surface, the highlights, of what has been done to the American people in particular over the recent period.

LaRouche Dedicates His Life to Ending Colonialism

When I came out of military service at the end of the war, while President Roosevelt’s life was still in living memory of many of us who served abroad, we shared the opinion—most of us, even some boys from the South—we shared the opinion, that (as I would express it more articulately than most of them would at that time, but they shared it), that we had just come through a Second World War, which we were about to win. That was sure, at that point. For those of us who had served in Asia, and saw the conditions of life in Asia—the oppression under colonialism of people in Asia—the question posed was: You can not expect to go through two world wars, and fight them, with what these have meant, and ignore the great injustice to the great masses of Asia, and not expect to have a Third World War, come haunt you sometime soon, down the pike.

We shared that view. We said: As Americans, it is our job. I didn’t know what Roosevelt’s policies were, at the time; I had a smell of them, but these were my policies, and the policies, I think, most of the people who were in service with me at the time shared. We have to ensure that this ends! That colonialism, and all its trappings, ends! We have the power. We will come out of this war as the victors. We will have power in our hands. We can tell the world: This system of colonialism is finished! And these new nations are going to have the right—and with our assistance—to develop in the way we would want to develop. The way they choose, but with the same right.

Within about 18 months of that time, probably 95 percent of the people I knew in service, who had shared that view with me, were on the other side: a gift of Trumanism. These were the people of my generation, the returning World War II veterans. Most of them sold out, and were totally corrupt. I saw it. It stunk. I hated it. I saw my friends being self-destroyed. To see someone destroyed, is bad: But, to see a person self-destroyed, is the most horrible thing.

These people became opportunists. They told their children, especially those in suburbia, “Be careful. Be careful! The neighbors are watching.” And the children became shallow-minded hypocrites, who would get, on the one hand, from education—those who had better education—would get a sense of, certain values were good, and certain were bad. Certain things were fair; certain things were unfair. These kinds of positive values would occur. But they were very shallow. They didn’t have a deep sense of morality. They didn’t have a sense of putting your life on the line, if necessary, for a principle. You don’t put your life on the line because you want to die. You put your life on the line, because it’s so important to you to defend and uphold a principle, that you will not hesitate to risk your life to defend that principle.

And, that’s what these little kiddos didn’t get. And, when they got hit, as others did, with the 1962 missile crisis, and then, with the assassination of John Kennedy, most of the generation, of the children of my generation, went crazy. It was called the rock-drug-sex counterculture.

You know what happened: the ’68er phenomenon, as it occurred in the United States, as it occurred in Europe. These things happened. And, I found myself, more and more as we got into the middle ’60s, standing alone. There was nobody there to lead; not really lead. People called themselves leaders, but they were all fake. And, I found myself standing alone. And, I just said to myself, “I’ve got to do something. I must do something.” So I did it Some people in this room know, or have some experience with what I did. . . .

That’s the situation.

And, therefore, it comes to the point, as now, that sometimes upon us, falls a responsibility of leadership. That happens to all of us, in some way or another, or many of us. Every physician will face that, because every sick person is a different person, with a different disease, no matter what their diagnosis is. And, the physician has to face the responsibility of dealing with that problem. A great teacher, teaching a class of students, faces the same thing, about saving these young minds; a responsibility for saving them, under these conditions, today. It’s a great, awesome responsibility.

For some of us, the responsibility of the same singular variety, comes in a different way—each in a different way. But to all of us, one thing is in common: When destiny has given you a vocation, and you have a mission, especially when you’re the only one to play a key part in realizing that mission, you better accept it, and do it.

Thank you. [applause][fn_6]

[End video.]

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