This article appeared in the August 6, 1999 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

The Twentieth Century:
Century of Catastrophe

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Mr. LaRouche gave the following keynote speech to a Schiller Institute seminar on July 24, in Oberwesel, Germany, which was attended by more than 250 people, mainly from eastern and western Europe.

I have to be careful when I speak, because I always say the same thing to all audiences, which is considered a violation of the tradition among American political candidates. I speak in the sense of being the presiding officer of the magazine Executive Intelligence Review. I speak in the capacity of being number three on the present list of pre-candidates of the Democratic nomination in year 2000. And I speak in my other capacities, which are variously known to various among you. And, to all, I have to say essentially the same thing. But on different occasions, and to different groups of people, I must put what I have to say in the form which is most likely to be useful to them.

We are now in a process which is typified by the act of the Governor of the Bank of England, Eddie George, in looting his own bank of up to $1 billion and probably more, in concert with an international syndicate which includes the backers of Vice President and fading Presidential candidate Al Gore.

This act of the Bank of England, stealing from itself, for the benefit of a group of cronies of the director of the Bank of England and of the Queen of England, is typical of these types. It must be said that what happened to Russia during the past six years, was found so good by the Western banking system, that they have imported the Russian model, of stealing from their own country's assets, into the West.

For example, there is nothing remarkable or unique in what Eddie George is doing. In every part of the world, we have a form of criminality called privatization. "Privatization" is a multi-syllabic word for stealing.

For example, in Germany, the Stadtwerke, the municipal utilities, are the present object of stealing, under the label of "privatization"--something that every Russian can understand.

If you're going to privatize a firm, you're going to steal from it. That's what "privatization" means. It used to be called, in the Eighteenth Century and the Seventeenth Century, "privateering." That's when people get a legal license to go out and loot. Sometimes they were called "pirates," and if they had a piece of paper from a government, they were called "privateers." So, you don't call the Russian liberals "pirates," you call them "privateers," because they've been given a special license to steal from their own country, their own banks, and everything else in sight. Privateers even steal from each other.

And when times get tough, the frequency and the intensity of stealing from one another increases. It could be said that, with probably a rare exception, that at this point, every leading bank and every leading other financial house in the world, is engaged primarily in stealing--stealing from its own assets.

Now, in the case of Eddie George's stealing of gold, what happens is that the gold is stolen by selling it below its value to a private syndicate of cronies. A small group of people are allowed to buy this gold below price. They are going to hoard that gold, until after the great financial crash wipes out all financial institutions around the world. And that's in process now. When the crash is over, they intend to come back with their gold.

In the meantime, they're driving down the price of gold, in order to bankrupt the gold mines in South Africa, Russia, and so forth. So, they will buy up the gold mines which have gone bankrupt, and they will control the world's gold and gold production after the crash is over--not far into the future.

Every bank is doing the same thing--virtually every bank. Maybe there's an exception, here and there. But I've checked with some bankers, and they don't know of any exceptions. Every bank and financial house is stealing from itself. That is, the relevant directors are stealing assets, and, by various kinds of loan mechanisms and others--with which I'm familiar from the old days, investigating frauds and bankruptcies and so forth, and probate proceedings, in the United States and Canada.

What they do, is they move the money through a lending procedure, or a trade procedure, at reduced prices to a second party, who passes it on to a third party, who passes it on to the fourth party. And the fourth party is the collaborator of the person in the bank who is doing the stealing. When the crash comes, each of the intervening parties, including the bank itself, will go bankrupt. And the bank official hopes to retire on the basis of what has been stolen by the fourth party. It's an old method of stealing. It was practiced in the 1950s, the 1960s, in the United States and Canada. I investigated many such cases.

What is being done now is no different, except that it's done on a grand, global scale.

Whenever you hear the world "privatization," you scream "Thief! Catch thief! Stop, thief!" Every time you hear of privatization of a Stadtwerke in Germany, you say, "Stop, thief!" when you hear somebody proposing it: "Stop, you accomplice of a thief!" The politicians who are owned by financial interests, are bought. And they put through the laws of privatization which enable people to steal. There is the greatest amount of theft in history now going on around the world. Government politicians, governments as such, are stealing. They are stealing for the people who pay them, who support the political parties, who have bought and paid for the politicians, who are now stealing for pay under the guise of being elected, and other officials.

Looting and lying

Why is this going on? Why doesn't somebody stop it?

Well, this thing can go on only under one condition. The stealing at such levels, on such a scale, with such profundity: It only happens when the system is about to go under, when every one of the people behind authorizing it, covering up the stealing operation, knows that the entire world financial system is about to blow. Those who tell you that the system will not crash because they have it under crisis management, are lying. They are lying--why? To buy a few more weeks and months at most, in order to complete the process of stealing. In order to steal, they have to keep you quiet, confused, and believing that the system will not crash. That's how they steal.

So, when a banker says the system will not crash, he is lying. Every leading banker in the world knows the system is crashing, because they're stealing. And they wouldn't dare steal the way they were stealing if they didn't know the system is about to crash--and if they didn't know that virtually every other banking and related financial institution in the world is doing exactly the same thing. So, they don't blow the whistle on each other. That's what's happening.

In the end, they will rob every savings account. They will loot everything, and leave the poor public, especially those who were foolish enough to invest in mutual funds, absolutely destitute. That's the situation we're now in.

For example, the system began to disintegrate in the spring and summer of 1998. We had entered this phase before this, during the summer into October of 1997. The process leading into this had been established in 1994-1995, with the Mexico crisis and the mishandling of the Mexico crisis by the United States in the so-called bailout. So, these are the steps. We've entered, step by step, going back all the way to the middle of the 1960s, in fact, but in terms of financial systems, 1971, and then the Carter administration in the United States.

The famous names who are responsible politically for setting this into motion, include the first and second Harold Wilson governments in Britain; and you see the result of the Harold Wilson era in a television report yesterday, on the British Sky TV News, on the Great Western Railway System, which is a privatized section of the former British Rail system, a victim of Thatcher. This privatized rail system had a crash. And the crash occurred because of privatization. People were killed because of privatization. Because the only way to make profit out of a bankrupt system, is to gut it. So, the safety signals, which should have been operating--about six of them, according to the British report--didn't function. So the train crashed. And people were killed.

This is typical of the effects of privatization. We saw the same thing with the crash in Hanover of the ICE [German high-speed rail system], where a cheaper wheel was used. Safety precautions were not taken. The same thing was done in the German rail system, that was done at Mercedes Benz, with the A-Class--of scrapping the engineering departments which are necessary to develop and prove workable systems, and letting a computer idiot, a nerd--a mere nerd, not a human being, but a nerd, on a computer--decide how the thing should be designed. A nerd who understands nothing about the principles of physical science, but who thinks that, if you know how to operate a computer, and a little mathematics, you can solve all the problems. This is a form of psychosis. This is not anything else.

So you see all over the world, the private and public systems are being looted, consciously, willfully, with willful criminal negligence. They call it negligence, but it was willful. What do you call that? That's called an intentional crime. If you strip away safety systems--for example, you might say, by U.S. standards, that the victims of the Western Railway crash this week, were the victims of HMO-style management--that is, the privatized takeover of medical insurance programs. The cutting of medical care, as Andrea Fischer pushes that here in Germany, is calculated mass murder! If you adjust the conditions of life, such as to wittingly increase the death rate and suffering rate, you are a mass-murderer. If you do this for financial reasons, then it's a crime whose motivation for murder, is stealing. But this is typical--what is happening with the HMO and the medical system inside the United States, what is typical of Congressmen of the United States, who are bought and paid for by Wall Street, who put through the bills which will not allow the victim of an HMO murder to sue for damages in case of injury or loss of life, for criminal negligence.

This is the characteristic of the present world system.

Now, what about crashes? When people hear about crashes, they think about the 1929 crash, or perhaps the 1923 blow-out of the Reichsmark and the great hyperinflation. Well, you want to know about Germany, Weimar, the Reichsmark blow-out in 1923? It's happening right here, in the United States--on a world scale, in Germany, everywhere, the same thing is happening.

What has happened, is--and that's what the present phase of the situation is, which is why all bankers generally are stealing, why privateers are stealing, why bought-and-paid-for government officials are voting for stealing, which is called "liberalization." Don't make crime a crime any more--liberalize it. You don't call people immoral, you call them "liberal." You don't call them murderers, you call them "liberal." In the old days, they would have called a Nazi death-camp manager a "liberal," because he was liberally handling the problem.

This is the way of the world we're in. What's happening?

A brainwashed generation

During this entire period, you have a series of steps.

First of all, you had the shift to a post-industrial utopia, which started in institutions around the world which were influenced by the famous Frankfurt School here in Germany. That was the center of it--the new post-industrial culture, the so-called Baby-Boomer culture, or the 1968 culture, which you saw in universities and other institutions, but especially university populations in the United States and Europe in 1964 to 1968 and beyond.

So that from that point on, there was an attempt to reverse progress, to reverse scientific and technological progress, and to say we must stop progress, and go on to a different kind of society.

Some people said plainly what they meant. They referred to Nietzsche's program of the "dawning of the Age of Aquarius." This was called the "New Age," it was called various other things. I called it a few things myself; I didn't call it "New Age."

All right, this was done.

So, a generation of students at universities were brainwashed. And those that were not brainwashed, generally did not have such good careers. Those who became total idiots, immoral, were advanced, when they got out of the universities, to higher and higher positions. And most are running the top positions in government and finance, and so forth, in the United States and Europe today. That's how it happened.

Then, the Vietnam War was a great impetus, and the Vietnam War opposition, which was largely based, in the United States, on pure cowardice. People in the United States were opposed to the war because they didn't want to go to Vietnam and get killed. Therefore, they discovered a conscience. The conscience said, "I'm not going." We used to call it draft-dodging. It was actually that. It was that simple. Plain cowardice. I was there. I saw it. I met these people. Don't tell me it was something else. It was plain cowardice. There were a few of us who thought the whole thing was a horror show and had to be stopped. But, we didn't go that way. We went a different way: to try to get the policy changed.

So these cowards, with no morality, and the Baby-Boomer style of indifference to reality--flying into "my personal feelings," not into their responsibilities for the future, completely selfish, and concerned about their personal feelings about things, and negotiating their personal feelings with everybody, including feeling everybody up, so to speak.

This became a cultural change. The cultural change was symptomized by the introduction in the U.S. State Department in 1966-67 of a policy, that the United States State Department thereafter, in its dealings with other countries, would shape its policies with regard to the need to reduce population growth in "overpopulated" countries, which usually turned out, in time, to be so-called Third World countries. "We must reduce the population of the Third World countries. And therefore, the economic and other foreign policy of the United States must be shaped to foster the cessation of population growth in developing countries. Even reduce the population in developing counties."

The Green movement is launched

And out of this process, that started in 1961, with a meeting between a former member of the Nazi SS, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and the Duke of Windsor, Prince Philip of England, they founded the World Wildlife Fund; they were the kind of world wildlife, I suppose, that they were working for. They also founded the 1001 Club, which is a group of influential financial circles to fund the operations of the World Wildlife Fund, and this is the birth, at this time, of the so-called organized environmentalist movement.

Then in 1972, under British control, at a meeting in Stockholm, the international environmentalist movement, or the Green movement, was officially launched. It had been organized beforehand, by British intelligence, Dr. Alexander King, Lord Solly Zuckerman, and so forth, of the Club of Rome, which is a continuation of the 1001 Club operations, and the World Wildlife Fund. It was followed (since the Soviet Union would not join the Club of Rome directly, for various reasons, although efforts were made to do so), in Laxenberg, Austria, where they founded the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, which was a subsidiary of Cambridge University, England, a subsidiary of the so-called systems analysis group under the leadership of Lord Kaldor, at Cambridge University in Britain.

So, in 1972, these various currents of people-haters had a conference in Sweden, which launched the international Green movement, which prepared to destroy science, technology and its applications, and to do everything possible to increase the death rates and the abortion rates among populations, especially in Third World countries, and also in Germany. It always is a common thread: The British hate the Germans. They say they love them, but what they love, is they love to see them die! As Thatcher expressed this view in 1989 and 1990. Keep the Germans down. Don't let them prosper. Germany is the great danger. It must be kept down, and Thatcher and Mitterrand, supported by George Bush, agreed. That's why Germany has problems. For that reason.

So these were the policies.

Nixon wrecks the financial system

Then, in 1971, to further this same Age-of-Aquarius policy, poor dumb Nixon--and if you read this week's edition of U.S. News and World Report, you know that American politicians can not be elected President unless they are stupid. This has been my great difficulty. Actually, Clinton is not stupid, but he's a Baby-Boomer, and sometimes it works to the same effect. A certain cowardice and vacillation, and so forth, even though he's under tremendous pressure and death threats, and so forth.

So, a stupid Nixon, who was actually rather stupid--some people said the contrary, but from everything I've seen, including private discussions, and what statements he made over the years, the man was not intelligent. He was sly--but a snake can be sly, even the dumbest krait snake, this little, brown, worm-like snake whose bite will kill a man in about 60 seconds--he can be sly. And he's about the dumbest snake there is in all of creation. So, some of our politicians, like Jimmy Carter, for example, are like that.

So, this dumb President, Richard Nixon, made a decision, under pressure, on Aug. 15-17, 1971, which crashed the post-war international financial system, and created what was called a floating exchange-rate system.

The entire reconstruction of the world economy, following World War II, had been based on a system of fixed exchange rates--adjustable, but not floating parities--on a U.S.-centered gold reserve basis system, with extreme protectionist measures of the forms of capital controls exerted internationally, exchange controls, enforced internationally, and by sovereign governments, and by financial controls applied internally. Without these measures, and interest rates in the 1-2% range globally, you could never have had the recovery in Europe, and other countries, from World War II. Could not have happened. These were the Roosevelt-era measures which survived in part the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

In 1971 and 1972, with Nixon's actions, with the Swedish action launching the Green movement, which more and more has shaped world policy, and with the Azores Conference of 1972, which has savaged the present, floating-exchange-rate international monetary system, and unleashed wild liberalization which we're suffering from today, the entire world changed. And it was from that point on, that the world was threatened by a New Dark Age.

Now, people who are small-minded, foolish, don't pay attention to reality, say, "If it isn't going to happen next week, I'm not concerned about it." Some people with slightly larger minds will say, "If it's not going to happen till next year, I'm not concerned about it." Politicians generally say, "Well, if it's not going to happen until after the next election, I'm not concerned about it." This is the kind of world we live in, with a lot of very stupid people! Not stupid because they were born stupid, but stupid because they are parts of cultures which stupefy them!

The case of Germany

For example, one of the great destructions of civilization occurred in Germany, in the course of the Brandt reform of education. Now how did the Brandt reform--how was it introduced in Germany? This produced a result such that people who achieved their Abitur before the Brandt reform, are almost a different, superior species to those who received their Abitur after the Brandt reform. You have almost different species of Germans these days: those who had their Abitur before the Brandt reforms, and those who suffered through the effect of the change in educational policy after the Brandt reforms.

The elimination of Classical education, Classical culture, the elimination of science, teaching physical science as a matter of computer mathematics, or similar mathematics, rather than pedagogical laboratories, and similar methods: produce people with degrees, but not much content to the degrees.

It's like the guarantee you get with many things built by outsourcing firms. You get a list, an almost unreadable list of specifications and guarantees, but almost none of them work. And you try to get the thing repaired, which is supposedly under warranty: Fat chance! In the old days, you had things you could fix yourself, and you were capable of fixing them. And people used to be able to fix their washing machines, fix their automobile, things like that. No more. It's outsourced. Whenever I see a "smart car" on the street in Germany, I say, "This car looks bad, but I'd hate to see the driver!"

So, what they did is not only destruction of the form of the economy, there's also been a destruction of the content of the people in it. The people today lack the skills, knowledge, education in which to locate their identity.

For example, Germany has a history. The German is a product of European and German history, most immediately. That history, the history of modern Germany, goes back essentially to the middle of the Eighteenth Century. The rebirth of Germany from the effects of the Thirty Years' War goes back to the middle of the Seventeenth Century.

The first period of the development of Germany, which corresponds somewhat to the period of the Great Elector, or of Mazarin and Colbert in France, was a redevelopment of Europe in the wake of the Thirty Years' War, which is typified, at the pinnacle, by Gottfried Leibniz, an international figure, not just a German figure, and Johann Sebastian Bach.

The revival of Germany, after the catastrophes in Europe, throughout Europe of the early Eighteenth Century, was conducted--we'll have a discussion of more of that this week--under the influence of some people who had been sponsored by the Christian Wolff circles, of Lessing and a friend of Lessing's, adopted by Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn. Moses Mendelssohn was a young genius, recognized as such by Lessing, and brought into his circle.

The Jewish root of the German General Staff

And among other things, as Andreas Ranke will explain to you, the German General Staff was a Jewish conspiracy! And anything that's good in it today is still a Jewish conspiracy! Why? Because Schaumberg Lippe created the educational institution which produced Scharnhorst, on the advice, the detailed advice on designing such an academy, by his consultations and help from Moses Mendelssohn. All of the principles that you know as Scharnhorst's--his Auftragstaktik, and so forth, which are the characteristic of German General Staff methods--are a product of the design supplied to Schaumberg Lippe by Moses Mendelssohn, the man who virtually created the German view, and also by influence, created the Yiddish Renaissance in eastern Europe.

So, you want to know the truth about Germany? The General Staff is a creation of a Jewish conspiracy. A Jewish-led conspiracy. As a matter of fact, the role of the German Jew, as a professional, in art, in science, in many functions, in building up Germany, from the late Eighteenth Century, depended upon Jews who adopted these professions under the influence of the reform organized by Moses Mendelssohn--with whom?

Well, the Mendelssohn family is important because of its relationship with Johann Sebastian Bach, and it was the extended Mendelssohn family which saved Bach's work for the world. It was the Mendelssohn family which directly influenced Mozart, which directly influenced Haydn, which influenced and sponsored, even financially, Beethoven. So the entirety of German Classical culture, including music, came from this circle of Lessing and Mendelssohn, and people associated with them, in the middle to the latter part of the Eighteenth Century. That is the heart of German culture, that is the heart of the development of the German language. And if you don't know that, how can you be a German? If you don't know this?

This is also the essence of the reforms which occurred under the influence of the Yiddish Renaissance in eastern Europe: in Poland, in Ukraine, in Russia, where the fight for the educated, cultivated Jew, against the Hasidic idiots of the type which are now trying to cause wars in the Middle East, was crucial, even under the conditions of the pogroms. In the United States, at a certain point, the German Jew played a crucial part in developing the United States. The Jew of the Yiddish Renaissance, especially from Poland, played a crucial part in the Twentieth Century history of the United States. The Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King could not have existed as it did without the influence, the leading influence of the Yiddish Renaissance in mobilizing support for the Civil Rights Movement. That was the big difference. The Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King succeeded only because of the marginal difference supplied by the Yiddish Renaissance, the very people who were opposed by the Netanyahu types, and so forth, in Israel and elsewhere.

That's history. And if you don't know where you come from, how can you tell me who you are? If you don't what your relationship is to the past, how can you possibly think about the future?

The lessons of universal history

In former times, a Classical education, under the Humboldt system for example, you had an education in which you were not taught what to believe. You were not taught to pass tests, though you may have had tests. The essence of a proper education under the Schiller-Humboldt policy was, the student must concentrate on the great concepts--the universal principles which had been discovered in the past, usually beginning with Classical Greek, and that you, the student, must relive the act of original discovery.

The student who goes through a modern education, knows nothing. They have learned much; but, they know nothing. Because they did not develop, within their own minds, the enactment of the discovery on which knowledge is based. They didn't discover, therefore they don't know. They only learned, in the same way you train a dog to perform tricks.

So, today you have Germans coming out of the schools, who have learned to perform tricks which they have been trained to perform; but who, generally, pitifully, know almost nothing.

And that's the condition around the world, in large degree. People are eager to learn how to do tricks in order to prosper, to succeed, in sex, or whatever else their profession is. But they don't know anything. Because they did not have the kind of education and cultural experience where they relived the act of original discovery.

To be a human being in European civilization, you have to go back to ancient Greece. You have to relive ancient Greece. You have to, in a sense, start by reference to the epics of Homer, whether you read them in the original Greek or not. You must start with the epics of Homer, because, in the epics of Homer, you have a picture of the mind of the Greek of the period to which these epics refer.

That Greek is a very poor fellow, who did not believe he could think. Whenever he had a problem which he could not solve in a customary way, some god, evil or good, would appear to him, and give him an instruction on how to change his behavior. This is the characteristic of the Iliad, this is the characteristic of the Odyssey. How did Ulysses survive? Well, Athena came to him and gave him some advice on how to deal with Poseidon.

So, then you have the image later, of man revolting against these gods, as in the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus.

Then, you have the higher level, the higher of the conceptions of the Prometheus concept which is the works of Plato: that man has within himself the cognitive powers to know, rather than to learn. And, through the Socratic method, of attacking and finding out the assumptions which lay within you, and questioning those assumptions, as to whether they are universal principles, or not. And, purging yourself of assumptions which don't meet that test. And, using the same method to discover what might be universal principles, and then proceeding to learn to validate what you believe to have been the discovery of universal principles. This is the method of science, and this is the method of Classical art.

And, when you look at this in this way, what is the result?

You look at the history of the question of civilization, European civilization, as it's been extended worldwide. What do you do?

You say, where did this civilization begin?

For what do you look?

Let's take the case of this team up at Göttingen, who wrote this paper on a discovery in a deep mine in Germany. Where they discovered artifacts which demonstrated that at least 400,000 years ago--in Germany (Oh boy, the British won't like that!)--someone went and crafted throwing spears whose crafting showed that they had discovered principles, something that no ape can do, including Prince Philip!

Philip professes to be an ape, therefore, obviously he's an animal. He says he's an animal. He says his son is an animal, and after all, he ought to know. Maybe it's because of him; maybe it's because of the girl he married. But somebody's responsible for the fact that poor Charles is merely an animal--according to his father, and he should know. He signed the papers; makes it official.

But, how do you know the difference, that this was a man who had these spears, not an ape? How do you know that? By looking at the specimen of the man? By subjecting him to a gene test? By getting biologists to come in and look at the evidence? No. You can't learn very much from the biological evidence to distinguish between a great ape and a human being. What's the difference between an ape and a human being? The human being is capable of Socratic forms of cognition, the ape is not. How do we know this is a human being, 400,000 years ago? Because the product of his hand was the fruit of a mind with cognition, or minds with cognition. How do we develop our children, when we develop them? By instilling fruits in them, through the forms of nurture and education, to stimulate their Socratic powers of cognition.

Therefore, what is history? Monkeys have no history. Apes have no history. Perhaps the British monarchy has no history. Or, maybe, no future history. Man has a history because we owe to our predecessors the ability to reenact those discoveries of universal principle, and the validation of those discoveries of principle, upon which we depend. It's the foundation for what we can do, is what we gain by reenacting the discoveries passed down to us as fruits of cognition by previous generations.

Man's history: the history of cognition

So the history of the human species, the history of people, is not the history of their biological descent. It is the history of cognition. The history of an ongoing, Riemannian type of manifold of aggregation of universal principles, physical principles, and Classical artistic principles--including the Classical artistic principles of politics--which have been passed down to us from one generation to another.

The history of man, the history of a people, is a history of ideas. The importance of language, is not that language contains knowledge. It does not! No language, in itself, can contain knowledge. Learning a language can produce an idiot savant, not a thinking person. A language is a device shared between parents and children, and others. A device of social relations, through which the users of the language prompt one another to share the replication of cognitive experiences. Therefore, the importance of a language is its use, not its literal content. Its use.

This comes up in music. Every musician knows that a literal interpretation of any score is an abomination. The attempt to improve a literal interpretation of a score by some enhancement, emotional enhancement, is a crime against humanity. Like the Frankfurt School, or similar kinds of things. The function of a language, is a device which people share as a method of communicating, for the purpose of prompting one another to replicate cognitive experiences.

This is the meaning of poetry. A poem which is a literal poem, no matter how artfully composed, is no poem at all. It is only when it contains a metaphor which can not be understood by literal interpretation, precisely a part of the poem which breaks down if you try to give it a literal interpretation; it's a self-contradiction. That metaphor is the idea, or is the prompting of the idea. So, by communicating the metaphors which the other mind to whom you are speaking recognizes as a metaphor, as an irony, you force that other mind to relive discovering the solution to the metaphor. That is what is the idea. That is the process of cognition.

The same thing in music. In music, which is a derivative of Classical poetry, a polyphonic derivative of Classical poetry, you introduce, in a lawful way, contradictions, paradoxes, ironies, metaphors. Now, a great conductor like Furtwängler--a poor conductor will perform the notes. A great conductor will perform the metaphors. For a poor conductor, it's the succession of particular states which is important. Each section subject to a literal, accepted, academic interpretation.

To a great conductor, like Furtwängler, the performance, the literal performance, is a mechanical aspect of the problem. You learn to play the fiddle or you don't. If you learned to play the fiddle properly, under direction, okay, you're in the orchestra; if you didn't, you're out. So, that takes care of that.

But, the performance of the composition, the performance of the music rather than those notes, requires a higher level. And, that is, you must have a contradiction, which is generated by the rules of composition itself.

This contradiction can only be understood, and located, if the mind, number one, recognizes the irony, the dissonance, and if it finds the way in which that dissonance, governed by an idea, causes you to make the transition, defines the location of dissonance in such a way that the entire composition of the performance is transformed. So, you're performing a series of dissonances. The dissonances are like transitive verbs. Such that, that dissonance transforms the meaning of what has happened before, and defines the launching-point for what follows.

Therefore, a succession of these transitions, understood as one process of transition, is the music. Not playing the part, not playing the notes. Idiots play the notes. Great performers play the music, and recognize that the score is only a mnemonic device, to prompt the performer, to put the music in their head, and to get the score out of their mind, but to perform the music without violating the score.

Ideas. This is the importance of the German Classical composition, the sonata and fugue form, and the development of thorough-composition, beginning with Mozart, based on the Bach discoveries. It was something Mozart was able to do because of the help of the Mendelssohn family, directly. That music, which is a universal language, the music of thorough-composition, of polyphonic, well-tempered, bel canto mode, thorough-composition, is the highest standard of universality in all of the non-plastic arts.

The same thing in the question of the Greek. I first ran into this in 1946, in lectures back then, in the case of Scopas and Praxiteles. The difference between the Greek and the Egyptian tombstone art, called archaic art, the kind of the art which idiots in the modern times are trying to turn to, the so-called art--to say nothing of post-modernist.

The Greeks discovered how to take a piece of stone, and create an idea, in stone, by forcing the mind to recognize something in mid-motion. In other words, an irony, a paradox, a metaphor. Something in mid-motion. So that the art of the great Greek sculpture, which the Romans could not understand, could not copy effectively, is located in ideas, in a paradox, which lies in the mind. Greek sculpture does not lie in vision, it lies in the mind. The sculpture provokes the mind, to get the idea.

So, all of this, science, discoveries of principle, discoveries of astronomy, the discovery of ancient calendars which have any approximation of accuracy, the discovery of the principles of poetry, the development of language according to the principles of poetry and science--all of these things are the transmission of ideas from one generation to the next.

The function of education, is to make the most important of these ideas--ideas of physical principle, ideas of Classical art--to make these the personal property of a developing young mind. So that the young mind, coming out of an educational process, and out of the life-experience of growing up, becomes an adult person who, in that degree and sense, embodies all of history before them, for generations and generations and generations. And by direct knowledge, that is, by replication of discoveries, they know much about history. They know the names of discoverers, the inner mind of Plato is more familiar to them then the bum who is walking across the street. They know him better. They have a closer relationship to Plato, than that poor bum, that poor Penner.

That is history. It is to see yourself, to see the past, to see the future, as this kind of continuing process. People who don't know history, are called slaves. They're slaves in the literal sense, or they are kept like animals, not knowing where they came from, and not knowing where their children are going. They have no control over their own lives, control over their own nations. They are meaningless, existentialist wanderers in a post-industrial nightmare, a post-modernist nightmare.

And, that sense of history, is what's been destroyed.

The character, the essential moral character of populations, has been systematically destroyed, by what came out of the Frankfurt School, and what the Frankfurt School came out of. The Baby-Boomer culture of the 1960s, and what has followed, is typified by the destruction of science, by the destruction of technological progress, and by the destruction, above all, of education and morality.

The establishment of the nation-state

The greatest progress which mankind has made in establishing the principle of equality of human beings, was made through the creation of the institution of the sovereign nation-state, which actually began in the middle of the Fifteenth Century, in Europe. The nation-state means, essentially, that for the first time, after a long period of the Babylonian, Roman, Byzantine, and other empires, and feudalism--for the first time--it was defined that the function of the state, is a principle called, in the U.S. Constitution, the "General Welfare."

That the state is responsible, accountable, not to the opinions of the people--because the opinions of the people are diverse; how can you say, "We represent public opinion"? There is no such thing as "public opinion." Opinion in any society is highly diversified. There is no uniform public opinion, except among lynch mobs, deranged mobs. What there is, is a sense of accountability, of the state, to care for all the people. To provide justice, for all the people, as the character Socrates, in Plato's Republic, defines justice, as a principle of natural law.

So, the state is now bound to be the servant of history, the servant of the history of all of the people. The welfare, promotion, well-being of all of the people. Justice for all of the people. Progress for all of the people. And the state must be an instrument for all of the people, in that way--not for public opinion, but for all of the people. Somebody is suffering: What do we do about it? Injustice: What do we do about it? The state is responsible, it has the final responsibility, and its character is this caring for all of the people, including the legacy of past generations and the welfare of future generations.

That is what was destroyed, by the process which I've described, especially that of the 1960s, as consolidated in 1971-72.

So, in 1971-72, the world was sliding down the road to Hell. But, because most people are small-minded, and think only about their pensions, or think about their neighborhood, or think about the next election, or foolish things like that, they said, "Well, it's far away, it really isn't important, is it?"

A new trajectory of development

Now, let's take the case of a planet. Now, the solar system is rather old. It had a beginning when there were no planets. The Sun, which was then spinning rapidly--dizzy, because there was nothing to look at, looking around and around, looking for planets, no planets to see. So, the Sun was spinning.

Now what the Sun was doing--this spinning was a headache. So, just like the man sweating takes off clothing, the Sun began to shed some of its rotation. And it created a corona, which probably would have looked something like the corona of Saturn, the rings of Saturn, around itself, as it spun this material off.

Now, because of the nature of rotation, this particular material became polarized. And, subject to radiation from the Sun, this material went through a process of thermonuclear fusion, producing not just some helium, and hydrogen, and so forth, but began to produce higher orders of elements of the periodic table. And it spun these off, in a great centrifuging kind of operation, and the heavier material concentrated on what became known as the inner planets, and the lighter material was concentrated in the outer planets. And all these things were displayed according to a lawful principle. And from that time on, when these planets appeared and formed in this way, in their preassigned orbits, the orbital system has more or less stayed there, for billions of years.

How did this happen? Well, it happened because the orbit is not a result of a Newtonian relationship among planets and the Sun. The orbits are a result of a trajectory, an orbit itself. So, the orbit determines the position of the planet, not Newtonian forces, or Galileo forces. As Jonathan Tennenbaum and Bruce Director have documented in a recent issue of Fidelio, how Gauss confirmed that the accuracy of Kepler's calculations for the orbit of a necessary, missing, but formally necessary planet, which had exploded because of its orbit, this shows, that the way in which the orbit is determined is not explained by Newtonian and similar kinds of things. But, by things which are very small, very small, almost infinitesimal differences, but which are regular, which are persistent. They're not constant, but they're consistent and regular. And thus, the orbit of a planet has been determined over billions of years, again and again and again. Even more, the orbits undergo changes, but these changes are built into the system. And that's gone on for billions and billions of years.

Now, a scientist who wants to think about astronomy must think in those terms.

Now, what about society? In society, if you choose an axiom, an assumption, a policy, and society begins to behave according to the influence of that axiom, that assumption, then society will take a trajectory of development, like a planetary orbit, which will carry it with great regularity, toward a predefined destination. In some cases, if that's a bad orbit, society is doomed. And society can escape from this doom, only by changing its orbital characteristics.

The changes which I refer to which occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s, were a decision to change the parameters, the orbital characteristics, of European civilization. What we have seen is the lawful unfolding, the unfolding of the seasons, and the Earth's orbit. This has undergone, lawfully, a succession of transformations, which has brought us now, to the doom of the system, in just the way an orbital trajectory will determine the doom of a comet which, over millions of years, has been following a track which destines it to die in the Sun.

Therefore, people who are stupid say, "Well, I didn't know that from my experience in the past weeks, I don't think that works at all. From our experience of observing the Sun in the past month, I wouldn't say that winter is ever coming."

That is the problem we have, that people are so small-minded, and so concerned with false values, that they blind themselves with illusion, to the reality of what is happening. So, what we've described, or what I've described, actually, over more than 35 years, in point of fact--when I was, in 1963, horrified, when I recognized what was about to happen, and said, if this civilization continues in this direction, it is doomed, this is the greatest danger civilization has had in all modern times--I was right. The problem was, I was faced with a lot of dumb people, who said, "No, no, that couldn't happen. My experience says that that could never happen."

Well, often things happen that have never happened before.

`Where's the crash?'

For example, go back to the situation that I began with. People say, "Where's the crash? You're talking about a crash. Where's the crash?" Well, the problem is, buddy, that there's so many crashes occurring every month that you don't even notice them any more. For example, on June 10-11, 1999, there was a bigger crash than the crash of last October. Bigger! That is, the crash that occurred on June 10-11, worldwide, this year, was bigger than the crash that occurred last October. The whole system went into a phase-shift, where a crash occurred in February, centered around the Brazil crisis. The Brazil crisis, which was addressed by George Soros, collaborators of George Soros, to flood the thing with money, was not an end to the crash, the crash occurred. But a crash is a phase-shift of the system, which has defined the present, terminal phase of the system today.

What do they do? By flooding the system with money, in February of 1999, following the flooding with money, and, on a lesser scale, in October 1998, what did they do? They did something whose only parallel, on a limited scale, is what was done in Weimar Germany in 1923. In order to deal with the debt crisis, associated with the French occupation of the Rhineland, and the threat of France to reoccupy and loot all of Germany if the debts were not paid on time, the Versailles debts, the German government went into the printing press mode to pay these debts, to France, especially. And the blackmail of French bayonets. That resulted in a phase-change in all German politics, which produced the rise of Hitler, which was done by these guys.

Now, what they did, in printing money--if you look at the records; Bill Engdahl has done a report on some of this--you see that the rate of inflation, the manifest rate of inflation, inside Germany, during the early periods of this great money-printing operation, the effects were rather moderate, as inflation goes. Then, suddenly, it reached a point, in late Spring-early Summer of 1923, at which everyone in the banking system, then, as now, recognized the Reichsmark was doomed. And they did then, as they're doing now, as Eddie George illustrates the case. They began stealing left and right to squirrel assets away--or the nuts were storing squirrels, I guess, in this case--to put assets away for the post-crash effects. They knew the system was going to blow up, the Reichsmark was doomed, so they got their money out of the system, and they either bought foreign cash--at fire-sale prices, they would sacrifice anything to get some money parked someplace where they thought it would be safe. Or, they would buy hard-commodity assets, which they thought that they would be able to control and use after the crash of the Reichsmark had occurred.

The entire population of Germany which depended upon financial savings, was bankrupted by the resulting effect, just as the mutual funds holders in the United States, which consists of about 40 million families, will be wiped out by what's about to happen. So, these guys began dumping assets, in order to park some part of those assets out of the system in a safe place, either as hard commodity forms or as foreign currency. The effect of this, was to drive up the prices inside the German economy. The result was a rapid devaluation of the mark, to which the Reichsbank responded by increasing the rate of printing of Reichsmarks. So that over the process of the Summer into Fall of 1923, the whole system went into a hyperbolic, hyperinflationary zooming of both depreciation of Reichsmarks, and prices, commodity prices.

What happened during this Spring, as manifest at the beginning of June of this year, was a phase-shift in the hyperinflationary process, which was set into motion by the events, first, of October 1997, and then, by the ensuing developments of the Spring into October of 1998. The Brazil crisis, and the attempt to wall this thing over with money, the collaboration with Soros, accelerated this process. In the process, the swindlers, in trying to maneuver money and assets around, relied upon an agreement which Larry Summers, the current, dumber version of a U.S. Treasury Secretary, negotiated with Japan. Whereas Rubin had said in 1997, "not a nickel to save the banks," Larry Summers and the Japanese government went for the opposite policy, of save the banks, and sacrificed Japan to save the banks, to bail out the banks. Japan was printing money, through its central banking function, by dropping the interest rate to what became as low as a quarter of a percent, or lower.

What then happened was, that these guys who were trying to get out of the U.S., European, Brazil, other crises--what they did was they began to borrow yen, overnight, at a quarter of a percent, on short term. They would then take the borrowed yen to buy dollars, deutschemarks, and so forth, and euros. Now the danger was, that if the collapse of the dollar, euro, and so forth, proceeded, then the value of the yen would go up. If the value of the yen went up, then the people who had borrowed yen at a quarter of a percent, would have to pay the difference between the old price of the yen and the new price, as payment, as the equivalent of interest payments, as back payments. They would then all go bankrupt. This is called the "yen carry trade." And since most of the world was up to its ears in a vast flood of yen, generated by the "yen carry trade" at a quarter of a percent, from the yen central banking system, the Japanese system, that meant that the whole system was ready to go, entirely.

This was called "crisis management." "We will crisis-manage our way through the system, so that no crash will occur." That's what they said. It's what Summers and various banks said here. "No, you're wrong, the system will never crash. We will manage it. Yes, there are problems, but we will manage it. There was a meltdown before, but there won't be a meltdown now. It won't happen." Why wasn't it going to happen? Because they were going to get through it with crisis-management. The key instrument of crisis-management had become the international "yen carry trade."

Now, the "yen carry trade" threatened to blow out the entire system. And therefore, they began pouring from the euro, from the United States, and so forth, pouring everything they could get, into trying to push down the price of the yen, or to keep the price down. While in Japan itself, they were trying to keep the yen down, while they were also trying to keep the borrowing costs on the yen below one-quarter of a percent; as was said by Japanese officials, down to virtually zero.

So, you had the "yen carry trade," which involved an operation just as hyperinflationary as in the worst period of the Weimar hyperinflation of 1923, run through the "yen carry trade" on a world scale. The whole system now hung on crisis management, and the crisis management was held on the keystone of the "yen carry trade." The "yen carry trade" now threatened to blow out the system. Thus, the crisis management became the disease. This is a terminal stage of cancer in a financial system.

This is where we presently are. We are now in a system where the more they try to keep the system alive, the bigger and quicker it falls. It's over. The party is over.

The comet is about to enter the Sun. The travel along the long trajectory is now about to be completed, with a certain finality. So, the question is, "So, the system is finished, the banks will be gone, the world will be bankrupt, no hope of recovery. What do we do?"

Well, John Kenneth Galbraith, years ago--he's still alive, by the way, and probably smarter than any banker in Germany--said, of the 1929 crash: What was falling was just paper.

What is collapsing in Russia, and other places today, is only paper. The only reason we're suffering, is we're paying too much attention to that paper. Why don't we burn the paper?

I've written a piece which reports on some aspects of this which will be published in the July 30 edition of the EIR, but just to indicate what the perspective is. What do we have to do?

You need LaRouche as President

Well, you have to have me as President, otherwise it will be tough to make it; we may not make it. Or, the idea that I'm going to become President, that will do the same thing.

First of all, a group of governments--and I have chosen the United States, joined by cowardly Germany, with Russia, China, India, and a few other countries--simply decides, as an executive decision, the following:

The world financial situation is hopeless, a hopeless catastrophe, nothing can save the world financial system in its present form. Therefore, let's stop trying to save the world financial system, or monetary system, in their present forms.

What do we do?

Number one, we declare and avow, that we are each perfectly sovereign nation-states, and have the absolute power, embodied in us by virtue of being perfectly sovereign nation-states. Globalization just died. We killed it.

Number two. With this power as sovereign nation-states, we agree--whether anybody else does or not--as sovereign nation-states, we are making a sovereign decision, which we are making in common, and we represent a majority of the human race, so that's probably important. You put together China, Russia, India, Iran, Malaysia, a few other countries, my friends in South America, in Central America, the United States, and Germany, what have you got? You have the majority of the human race. You have the future of the human race, assembled.

Because the German economy is the only economy in Europe. Any other economy in western Europe lives just on dole, taken out of the German pocket. Without stealing from Germany, France couldn't exist. Who else is going to pay for the big hole called Crédit Lyonnais? It's a bottomless pit. That's where the devil lives and sups tea with Mitterrand. It's the bottom of the hole, called Hell. The hole called Crédit Lyonnais. And actually, Mitterrand has special privileges there, because he created the hole.

So, the first thing we do as sovereign nations, is we declare that all gambling debts, including derivatives and junk bonds, are now retroactively declared to be null and void. No one among us will ever honor again, any gambling debts, such as financial derivatives and junk bonds. Now, that does the positive thing of taking at least $300 trillion of current financial debt out of the world system. If you don't do that, there is no possibility of reorganizing society, and saving civilization. That's the price. You cancel $300 trillion, approximately, of gambling debts, such as financial derivatives, and say that they are null and void as if they had never existed--which sovereign governments can do, if they're perfectly sovereign and if they represent nations which represent the majority of the human race, that's a pretty good decision, about as good as you can get on this planet. That's the beginning.

What about the rest of the junk? Put it into bankruptcy reorganization. Freeze it. Freeze the accounts. Terminate interest payments on these accounts. End it. Government takes over. The government puts each part of its society into generalized bankruptcy reorganization under state supervision. You want to survive, you're going to do that. If you don't do it, you're not going to survive. You have no choice. The comet has reached the Sun. You have no choice.

The `General Welfare' clause

What do you do, then? Well, you then say, we're going to do a number of things. First of all, we're going to use, as the legal principle here, the "General Welfare" clause of the preamble of the U.S. Constitution, which is the only constitution which has a provision of Socratic or Platonic natural law in it, the General Welfare clause. This is principle upon which all European civilization, modern civilization, is based, beginning from the time of France, under Louis XI.

That was a great revolution, the establishment of the sovereign nation-state. The power of the sovereign nation-state and its obligation to enforce the principle of the general welfare, which is sometimes called, in the Sixteenth Century, the commonwealth. That means, that we give special protection to the claims of households to their private savings, up to a certain amount--it's guaranteed. We give protection to the accounts of small businesses. Because our concern is to keep the households intact, and functioning as if there had been no crisis, to continue to live without losing a step. We must keep the local businesses functioning, upon which the population depends, without losing a step. The butcher, the baker have to be there in the morning. The bread has to be sold in the store in the morning. The people have to have the money to buy the bread. They have to keep their jobs, if they're useful jobs. We'll unemploy immediately all of the stockbrokers, financial agents, and so forth--the parasites. They will go into an unemployed pool. We'll find work for them, but not selling stocks and bonds. We will then take the rest of the accounts, and we will freeze them, including freezing the accounts of the banks. So, from the banks, the banks will be ordered to honor certain payments to depositors, in order to keep society stable.

We'll also keep certain businesses in operation, either by letting them draw on their accounts, savings accounts, or, by issuing credit against the frozen accounts, to enable them to keep employing, paying the salaries, keeping people alive.

Now, beyond that, you have to do something else. The first thing, is to have absolute stability, social stability, and security for the population in general, that is, the ordinary people. The businesses, the banks which they depend upon, they have to--the doors have to be open even if the bank is bankrupt, even if every asset in that bank is frozen under bankruptcy, that bank must stay open, because you must have a place to deposit, you must have a place to move credit into the local community. And, therefore, that banker, unless he's an absolute thief, or we can replace him, must stay with his doors open, to continue to perform those social functions.

So, you have a general bankruptcy reorganization of the whole society. The first thing is to keep everything useful functioning, to keep everybody employed or under some kind of unemployment compensation protection, immediately.

Putting society back to work

Now, we then have to put the society back to work. The general objective is to decrease employment in parasitical areas, such as stock markets and all these other parasites. We'll shut down "Smart" production, perhaps, in order to make real cars again.

Now, we have to expand production. We use the same method that was proposed by Lautenbach and company, this thing that was used in Germany, in part, during the postwar period, for reconstruction under the procedures used by Hermann Abs and the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau. You use state credit, state-guaranteed credit, in order to put funding, credit, into maintaining and expanding production, especially expanding production.

What do we do? Number one, we have a vast infrastructure deficit throughout the world, especially in the Balkans right now. The Balkans can absorb a great amount of rebuilding. Rebuilding the Balkans will involve every part of Europe, in terms of engineering and related capabilities. This will be a great stimulus for the entire European economy. Take unemployed people from Ukraine, Russia, everywhere from all over Europe, engineering and related facilities, you put them into great projects, infrastructure projects, in these areas, under the direction of competent people who are competent to direct these kinds of projects. You finance the infrastructure on the basis of 20-year to 30-year credit, based on not more than 1% interest, plus grants.

We have other great needs. The development of Eurasia requires the development of these corridors, which we've referred to as Land-Bridge corridors. That will keep people busy. That will also create the opportunity and means, and the foundations, for an expansion of production in general. Remember, farmers do not grow crops by throwing seeds into barren ground. That's not a good way to get a good crop. You get a good crop by preparing the soil, by maintaining it. In the same way that you must prepare and maintain the soil in agriculture, you must prepare the soil for industry and urban life--transportation systems, energy, high-technology, high-density-power energy, abundance of energy.

The best form of energy, which happens to be nuclear energy--because it takes less waste, there is less transportation cost involved, it can be done more locally, you can quickly develop an energy wedge. You don't do the wasteful thing of moving power from Chernobyl into Germany, that is pure idiocy and waste. Transmission of power is costly, in terms of power losses and efficiency. If you want to produce energy, do it nearby. Besides, with nuclear plants, it's easier.

If we have nuclear plants in an area, particularly, then we can produce natural gas or methane--synthetic methane, with the aid of nuclear power, in localities. We have now the technologies in Germany and elsewhere for high-temperature reactors, from 100 to 200 megawatts capacity, which are multi-use capacities, which can produce fuel, in the form of methane and natural gas. You don't need to haul oil and gas all over the world. You can make it where you are. You can retool vehicles, including aircraft, to fly, not on inefficient petroleum, but to fly, or drive along the highways, either on natural gas, or methane, combustion engines, or, through types of advanced fuel-cell operations, which also use the same chemical processes, locally. Which means you take the great burden from the world economy of moving fuel, at great distances all over the place, and you shift out of using petroleum as a fuel, into using it as a petrochemical feedstock for production of useful materials.

So, we have a lot of work to do. If you want to build industries, you must build the environment, you must create the transportation systems, in which whole complexes of industries can function together. You don't want the vendor, or the machine-tool plant that services an industrial plant, 500 or 1,000 miles away from the plant which the machine-tool plant has to service. You want a high density of supporting small industries wherever you intend to put large industries.

The great problem of Asia, is a lack of sufficient machine-tool and machine-tool-design and related capabilities in the area where people want to put plants. People come along and say, "Build this plant. Build that plant. Let's build this big plant. Let's build that." It doesn't work, because you do not have the local support or supporting industry that you used to have in Germany. All the good German industries had support from machine-tool industries, which employed, generally, 50 to 100, 250 people, under the direction of people with scientific and engineering backgrounds, who would be used by all of the major corporations, as indispensable for the development programs of these larger industries. So, you must have corridors, of population, power generation, and so forth, which you can develop.

For example, in the case of the United States, under Lincoln: United States policy, from colonial times of the Americas, was to develop development corridors, both as highways, then, and as waterways, which allowed the population to move to the inland territories of the United States--the Ohio River Valley, the Mississippi River Valley. And then beyond, across the trans-continental route. The trans-continental railways were not just railways. The trans-continental railways were conceived as development corridors. The way they worked, is you would build farms, and communities, in areas along the route of the railway system. These farms and communities were the source of the wealth which supported the functioning of the railway, and transformed what otherwise had been useless desert land, into areas of population and economic development.

We have a great interior area of Eurasia, which is lightly populated and vastly underdeveloped, including the Arctic, including the desert in the Central Asian area. We have these vast areas. So, building roadways, railways to China, to the Subcontinent, to the Arab Gulf--which is what the British fought World War I to prevent--building these corridors along these routes, means that this vast area of unused potential, is opened up, by development corridors, to be colonized, by the progress of modern technology. At the same time, bringing together a Europe which is a natural place of machine-tool design capability, if we revive it, and bringing it together with the areas which need the support of that kind of machine-tool capability, such as China, India, Southeast Asia. And, moving into Africa the same way, with the same program.

A great opportunity

So, the amount of work to be done, to ensure the survival of our civilization and our children and grandchildren, over the coming 40 to 50 years, to live beyond the crisis which is now tearing down the world, is a great opportunity.

And by that, and by science-driver programs, which introduce new physical principles and new technologies into that process, we create a future for humanity. We turn the collapse of a rotten system into a bonanza, a great benefit. We use the occasion to get rid of the system which is crushing us, to build up a system under which humanity as a whole can survive.

And we would hope that by doing this, in this way, that we bring humanity into a sense of what humanity is. We say, "Yes, we must end globalization. We must destroy it and ban it forever."

We know globalization in Europe: It's called feudalism. When, in the Thirteenth Century, and even earlier, leaders in Europe, from the time of Charlemagne, sought to realize Christian principle, by developing the peoples and nationalities of Europe, through a cooperative effort, typified in the Thirteenth Century by the work of Friedrich II Hohenstauffen, the Venetians and other evil people of the feudal tradition sought to destroy the nations in Europe--in Italy, in Sicily as such, in Spain under Alfonso Sabio, in France, and Central Europe--by launching what were called the Welf League wars. The Welf League, in the period from about 1240 to 1340, in these wars, wars which brought to prominence a Venetian-controlled gang, called the Lombard bankers, destroyed Europe, halved its population, eliminated at least one-half of all local communities, parishes, unleashed insanity, Black Death, and other disease, to create what became known in the middle of the Fourteenth Century as the "New Dark Age."

That, is globalization.

This was done to prevent the rise of the nation-state. In the Fifteenth Century, the work of people like Peter Abelard, of Augustinus earlier, of the Christian Apostles, succeeded, in the Council of Florence, around the conception of nation-states, as this concept was explored by Nicholas of Cusa in his Concordantia Catholica.

The first nation-state, born of a conspiracy organized in Italy, by the same people who were associated with Leonardo da Vinci--it was created in France, out of the training of the Dauphin who became Louis XI, a program, which established the first modern nation-state. Because it was self-governing by the principle of the general welfare. All kinds of disparate elements: feudal oligarchs, plebeian intellectuals in the city, and so forth, were put together, under Louis XI, to form a kind of federation of forces, united by a common principle: You will all subordinate yourself to the common interest of France as a whole--it was done under conditions of invading armies from England, from Spain, and so forth. Under the threat of invasion: We must work together in a common interest to develop and strengthen our country and all of its people.

And that was the beginning of the modern nation-state, which is what the Welf League had tried to prevent. Which is what feudalism tried to prevent.

Now, we have degenerates who are promoting globalization, in the name of liberalism, which is nothing but a return to the same old monstrosity which the Welf League represented in the great wars of a hundred years, which plunged a growing Europe from relative prosperity and progress into the darkness and madness of the New Dark Age of the middle of the Fourteenth Century. That's what we have to deal with.

It's a revival of that, organized around the center of those forces associated with the British monarchy, which is the enemy of mankind today. That enemy must be defeated. The collapse of that monarchy's present world system, along with that of its satraps, is now vulnerable, if we mobilize the people to recognize the interests of the people, as expressed by the notion of the general welfare. We have at this moment, if we can find a few more leaders to lead the process, the opportunity to end this crap, and to establish a world based on the community of sovereign nation-states which unite in common efforts in recognition of the common aims and common welfare of mankind as a whole.

So, this is the greatest, most terrible time in all known modern history. No part of modern history is more dangerous, more catastrophic than the moments we're living through now. Oh, you may not see or feel that there's a crisis out there. But, let me tell you what's going on, so that you can feel it, right now.

You'll get a crash soon enough. A crash worldwide, which will remind you, if you study it, of what happened in Germany in 1923, in the fall of 1923. That's happening. That's going to happen. But, in the meantime, you have another form of crash, something just as bad as a crash: Were any of you ever in an earthquake? Were you ever standing where an earthquake was happening? You thought you were standing on solid ground, and suddenly you weren't certain which way was up, and where the ground was going. The ground began to feel something like quicksand. That's what's happening now. You're in that phase of an earthquake where the first shocks are coming through, and the ground under you, the social ground, the political ground is turning to something like quicksand. It's a warning: The big one is on the way.

But, we can be optimistic, because we have to recognize that when things are this bad, we've destroyed the illusions of people. And when their illusions are destroyed, you must quickly organize them around a well-founded program of hope.

If you do not, then you'll get an effect. It was in the autumn of 1923 that in Bavaria, the Adolf Hitler movement got off the ground.