World in Crisis Needs
a New Monetary System
The following is the transcript of the seminar at the India International Center, on Dec. 3, in New Delhi. Subheads have been added. The moderator, Professor Kaushik, is former chairman of the Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and present chairman of Maulana Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta.
Prof. Devendra Kaushik: At the very outset, allow me to extend, on behalf of Maulana Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta, on my personal behalf, on behalf of many friends and admirers of Mr. LaRouche here, to extend a most cordial welcome to Mr. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., and Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It is really a matter of great pleasure that they are in our midst.
I think, and most of you here will agree with me, that we have with us, one of the most powerful thinkers of our times. A physical economist, an economist with a difference, for whom economics is not just a matter of money, but a commitment to the general welfare, and common good. I'm glad that I have this opportunity to greet and welcome Mr. LaRouche, because I'm associated with an institute which is located in Calcutta, and Calcutta is the first city with which Mr. LaRouche's association with India had begun. If I'm right, in 1946, he had come there, in the wake of the conclusion of the Second World War. He had been south, in Southeast Asia, while in the U.S. Army. And since then, Mr. LaRouche has been committed to India. He is an admirer, a great admirer of India, and I'm proud that my association with him has enriched my understanding of the ongoing processes in the world.
He is a wise man, of the Renaissance tradition. An economist, who enriched further the ideas of Leibniz, and invented the Leibniz-LaRouche method of quantifying the relationship between technical advances and growth of the physical economy. It's a pity that in India, LaRouche—though India is very centrally situated in the scheme of things—is not so much known, as we would have liked him to be known; his ideas, I mean. But in many important areas of the world—Ibero-America (Latin America), Africa, Europe, Italy, France, Poland, and in Russia—his ideas are acquiring a great influence.
I'm a student of Russian affairs, and I know how powerful is the impact of his ideas on contemporary Russia: Read Academician Lvov, or Academician Abalkin, or Glazyev, who is chairman of an important Duma committee. His views are expressed, prominently displayed, in the Russian journals, and Russian newspapers, such as Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, Pravda, Izvestia, and Russki Predprinimatel—I happened to read, it's a very decent publication, a very important interview given by him. He has appeared several times before the Duma, the State Duma [lower house of parliament] of Russia, for hearings, and I think in Russia, and China also, his ideas, and the ideas, you know, of this couple, here present in our midst—Eurasian Land-Bridge. Mrs. Helga LaRouche is a tireless campaigner for this idea of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, which offers the only hope to redeem this world, which is now besieged by the impending doom of the international financial and monetary system.
I would not like to anticipate what he is going to say here. Once again, I welcome both of you, sir, Mr. LaRouche, and Mrs. Helga, into our midst, and request you to enlighten us with your presentation. Mr. LaRouche.
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.: Thank you. I'm very glad to be here, of course, and of course, I know, or have met, many of you attending, personally, and I'm glad to see you again, always.
What I'll do is, there are three points I shall make. The idea here is not to present so much a report, in the ordinary sense, but to give an outline of the structure of thinking, which must be used to understand both the present situation, and the probable solutions for the present world crisis.
First of all, we have to redefine history, modern history, because what is usually accepted as modern history, is not modern history; it's fiction, invented to apologize for the policies of one or another group, and make up, like family histories—you pick invented ancestors, instead of the real ones, and much of history has that character.
We Must Redefine History:
The Modern Nation-State
The beginning of modern history goes back, of course, in Europe, to the 15th Century, to a Renaissance. And the significance of that for today, is principally, that a new kind of institution, the modern nation-state, was conceived in Italy in the 15th Century, in the Renaissance. The difference between that, and all preceding forms of civilization, even though there were intimations of that in earlier developments—the essence of this revolution, was that, for the first time, the idea that one group of people could rule over other people as virtual human cattle, was denied to be a principle of law. This was the imperial principle of law, on which, from ancient Mesopotamia, Sparta, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and European feudalism had been based, on the idea of a majority of the population being treated by a limited minority, as if they were wild, or tamed, human cattle. And hunted down, bred, utilized, and culled, according to the pleasure of the masters, as the Malthusians today argue: "If the population is excessive, regretably, we'll have to cut the herd." The same kind of idea.
So, under the modern nation-state, it was established that there is no moral authority for government, except as that government is efficiently committed to promote the general welfare, the common good, of all of the people over whom it rules, and their posterity. That's the basis, that principle of the general welfare, or common good, is the foundation. This idea was first brought to successful expression in France, under Louis XI, who made a revolution in creating the foundations of modern France, out of rubbish. This French revolution was echoed in England, by the overthrow of Richard III, and the installation of the government of Henry VII, who was sane, unlike his son, Henry VIII.
So, at that point, the forces of oligarchy, led by Venice, sought to overthrow the nation-state. And the nation-state, as a result, was thrown into a period of civil war, religious war, from 1511, till 1648, until the Treaty of Westphalia. Under these conditions, the possibility of restoring the kind of nation-state which Louis XI of France, or Henry VII of England, or Henri IV of France, had attempted to bring into being, was in jeopardy. And therefore, Europeans looked to the Americas, where colonies, European colonies, had been developed, in the hope that republics of the desired form, could emerge in this area.
This did not succeed in the Spanish area, principally because of the Hapsburg influence internationally, and British influence. But it did succeed in the United States—in what became the United States.
The Ideas of Leibniz Shaped the
American Constitutional System
Now, the United States was created with the backing of all the leading intellectual circles of Europe, the good ones. In France, but throughout Europe as a whole. The major intellectual influence in shaping the United States, and its Constitution, was Gottfried Leibniz, the great scientist of the 17th and early 18th Century. The ideas of Leibniz, as opposed to those of Locke, or opposed to those of Hobbes, were the foundation of the American Constitutional system.
The problem we had in creating our republic, is, we had a rotten element inside it. We have the same problem in India, of course, in the freedom of India. You had to take what you had, and make a government of all of the elements, including some which might not have been too agreeable, at the time. We had that too.
We had a financier interest, closely tied to the British East India Company, principally, in New York and Boston, the Boston area. We had also Southern slaveholders, centered in the Carolinas and Georgia. These were elements which polluted the founding of our nation.
In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars—the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the United States, which had just been created, became isolated. And thus, the wars of Europe became the determinant of the fate of the United States, which was a small nation, floating like a cockboat on the seas of the world as a whole, and always in jeopardy. We became corrupted. The power of a New York-centered financier group, the power of the slaveholders, increased, until Lincoln led a revolution, which overthrew a British puppet-government, the Confederacy, and established, between 1861 and 1876, the United States as the most powerful single nation-state economy, the most advanced technologically, on this planet.
Growing American Influence
This occurrence, as viewed in 1876, by leading Europeans, led to a revolution in Europe, and Asia. It led to the so-called Meiji reforms, of the 1870s, in Japan. Modern industrial Japan was actually a personal creation of Henry Carey, the leading economist of the world at that time, deploying his student, E. Peshine Smith, into Japan, to guide the Japanese in creating the foundations of a modern economy. At a later point, you had in China, the influence of Sun Yat-sen, who was educated and developed in Honolulu, who became the leader of a struggle for the foundation of modern China.
In Russia, Mendeleyev, the great scientist of Russia, was, in 1876, at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. He returned to Russia, delivered his report to Alexander II, and with the later support of Graf Witte, established the American model as the direction in which the Russian economy was being developed. It was Mendeleyev who developed not only the Trans-Siberian Railroad, with the cooperation of Witte in the completion, but also, created most of the industries of Russia, based on the American model. The letters of Mendeleyev to the Tsar, on the subject of industrial projects in regions in which the rail system was being constructed, are a model for reference still today.
In France, there were positive influences after the ouster of Napoleon III. This went on until about the 1890s, in which the American influence was an increasing influence throughout the world, in shaping the direction of reforms in the Old World. In none of these cases, was a true republic developed in Eurasia. You had czarism in Russia. You had the Hirohito system, essentially as we referred to it in the World War II period, in Japan. You had oligarchy-run Europe. You had the Hapsburg tyranny, which was still squatting like a succubus in Vienna. You had all kinds of relics of the past.
And what Europe did, was essentially make certain reforms. The reforms were reforms in feudal institutions. The parliamentary system is a feudal relic. It was created by imposing reforms upon monarchies, in which the forms of parliament, which had been created originally to represent the oligarchy, and advise the monarch, were compelled to make concession on lawmaking, to various levels of popular opinion. And this gave us the parliamentary forms, which people in Europe prize as being a gain. They're vulnerable forms of government, as you know, because a parliamentary government is inherently subject to destabilization. You can have a parliamentary crisis: The government's out. So therefore, the problem in parliamentary systems is to maintain a long-term continuity of policy, sufficiently long-term—and I'll come to that—in order to make the project successful.
So, Presidents are elected, and governments composed, of certain durability, which have democratic features within them, but are durable. Which means that people can make commitments to terms of five to ten years, and longer, in terms of policy. And virtually no reform can be carried out, in almost any country, effectively, and brought to success, in less than a five- to ten-year period—which I'll get to.
But, despite those shortcomings, we had around the world in the late 19th Century, what looked like an American Century. That is, the influence of the success of the American Revolution, as attested by the developments of 1861-1876, as a model for reform of the world as a whole, and of relations among states.
This changed during the course of the 1890s. The British monarchy recognized, that the development of trans-Eurasian rail systems, and economic development, meant an end to the ability of a maritime power, an imperial maritime power, to dominate the world as a whole.
Remember, historically—as you know from the history, or sometimes prehistoric history of India, in which the Dravidian-speaking language group dominated the entire Indian Ocean region, and its adjoining littoral, as a great maritime power. Sumer was created by Dravidian-speaking peoples. Yemen, Abyssinia, were developed by Dravidian-speaking peoples. The culture which radiated from the subcontinent, radiated all over the oceans, the Indian Ocean, and Asia.
And the British had inherited that idea of maritime power. Economic power was largely based on the littoral areas, adjoining the oceans, or up the riparian rivers, and riparian systems of the rivers. The inland areas of the continents were not adequately developed—as in China today. The great problem in China today, is the coastal region, and the great riparian channels, tend to be developed economically; the inland regions, beyond the reach of the coast, beyond the great riparian conduits of trade, are not developed. And that's the great problem there.
However, if you develop systems of transport and power, across the continent, as we did in the United States, with the transcontinental railway system, then you can unite a continent, and it becomes cheaper to move freight across the land-mass, and much quicker, than by sea. And this results in a great revolution.
The British React with 'Geopolitics'
So, therefore, under the conditions typified by the Mendeleyev work, in developing the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the threat was that Eurasia would unite, in cooperative ventures of this sort, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean across the land-mass, and this would make a great revolution in the human condition, under which the interior of Eurasia would become a development area. This, London recognized as a grave threat to the power of the British Empire.
And therefore, the British developed two plans, one typified by Admiral Fischer, the head of the British Navy, who invented the Dreadnought, the so-called Dreadnought policy, to dominate the seas absolutely. And also, to create Kuwait, which was originally owned entirely—stolen by the British monarchy, and owned by it, and created as a source of oil for an oil-fired British Navy, intended for what became known as World War I.
But, the idea was: How do you overthrow and disrupt the tendency for cooperation among France, Germany, Italy (which emerged as a nation during this period), Russia, Japan, China, down to India? How do you do that?
And they came up with the idea called "geopolitics": Set the nations which you wanted to have cooperating, against one another's throats. This was called World War I.
World War I began in France in about 1892 with the Dreyfus Affair, which was actually a plan for the overthrow of the existing government of France, making the way for the horror-show which came in later—1898: The power of France was destroyed by Kitchener, above Khartoum, and broke the attempt of the French to create a railroad system which would link Dakar to Djibouti across the Sub-Saharan region. This led to the formation of the Entente Cordiale between France and Edward VII. This led to the Balkan wars, to the increasing alliance with Russia against the Ottomans, with France. This led to the folly of Germany, in allying itself with Austro-Hungary, which lured Germany into the trap of what was called World War I.
The Crucial Feature of Modern History:
McKinley's Assassination
Now, the crucial feature here, which defines modern history, is the 1901 assassination of the President of the United States, McKinley. McKinley was the last President in that period, until Roosevelt, who represented the American System tradition, exemplified by Lincoln. This brought into power a man who was a total British asset, Theodore Roosevelt, who was the nephew of the man who had been leader of the Confederate intelligence service, and trained by him. So, you had a British agent, Teddy Roosevelt—took over the United States, and with his friends in Wall Street, and among the former slave-owners of the Confederacy, established their power over Wall Street. This was done directly by Edward VII through Jacob Schiff, who was Edward VII's chief agent on Wall Street, who created the Federal Reserve System, and some other things.
Wilson, who's the important successor of Teddy Roosevelt, after Taft, and was put into power by Roosevelt's intervention, was a man of a Southern tradition, a Confederacy tradition—not only pro-slavery, but an admirer of the Ku Klux Klan. And the man who, from the White House itself, launched the mass revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, leading to the Ku Klux Klan horrors of the middle-1916 period, through into the 1930s. So, American racism today, is essentially a consequence of the revival of pro-Confederacy views, by a Democratic President, Grover Cleveland, who introduced Jim Crow; by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who were advocates of the Southern cause against the Lincoln tradition. And all of whom were allies, and essentially Governor-Generals, for the British monarchy, of the British monarchy.
This began the phenomenon which defines the 20th Century: 1901 on, the Anglo-American Imperial Century.
FDR Interrupts the Anglo-American Imperial Century
The interruption and disturbance of this came with one President, especially: Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt was the great-grandson of one of Hamilton's collaborators, Isaac Roosevelt, an ally of Hamilton's. And Franklin Roosevelt represented that family tradition—the patriotic tradition—against what was called the "English tradition," or the "British tradition." So, he attempted to use the occasion of a crisis, to attempt to reverse the trend, back to the Lincoln legacy.
This was the cause of the Roosevelt era, its characteristic. And this was the impulse behind Roosevelt's commitment, up until the time of his death, and just slightly beyond, for decolonizing the entire world. As he warned Churchill, in a famous meeting at Casablanca, Roosevelt's intention was, that the power of the United States, which would be established by the close of the Second World War, would mean that the United States would have the power to bring about the instant freedom from colonial rule, of all colonial subjects of Portuguese, British, French, and so forth, and Dutch, imperialism.
And Roosevelt's body was not cold, before the Truman Administration accepted Churchill's proposal, and Indochina, Indonesia, and other parts of the world, were colonized, or recolonized, again. Which led, of course, to the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement in the immediate postwar period, in reaction to this kind of recolonization process, and its implications.
So, therefore, we can understand the entire history of this period, in those terms, leading up to the present.
Here are some of the breaking points, which have to be kept in mind. Therefore, you have the 1861-1901 period of U.S. history, and world history, which might be called the period of the ascendancy of the American Revolution's influence in changing the world as a whole, and threatening to bring about what John Quincy Adams, who had been the actual mentor of Lincoln, had intended: a community of principle, shared among perfectly sovereign nation-states. The intent of Roosevelt was exactly that: that the world should become, in the postwar period, a community of shared principle, among sovereign nation-states, each perfectly sovereign.
This was disrupted, of course, by the 1901 development, the assassination of McKinley, which was done by a British-linked influence, run by a terrorist mob, steered from London. It was broken in 1945, but there were some features to this, complications.
Roosevelt's impact on the world, and the United States' impact on the world under Roosevelt, could not be denied. So, although the decolonization policy of Roosevelt was cancelled, within the week he died, nonetheless the Bretton Woods system, created in 1945, essentially, launched after the war, until 1963-1964, functioned very well for the countries which participated in it. You would find in most of the Americas—as in the United States, Canada—Australia, New Zealand, and so forth, and in Japan, and in Western Europe, that the Bretton Woods system functioned to the net benefit of the populations, in terms of an improvement in the standards of living, and similar kinds of benefits. That the world as a whole was better because of that system, despite the injustices, and despite the disparities which were included within it.
With the assassination of Kennedy, this came to an end.
A Paradigm Shift
Now, take the characteristics of this. You had the period from 1962 to 1965—was a period of great crisis. Crisis for India, for example. The India crisis, the war with China. The things that broke Nehru's heart, were all a reflection of this change. The attempted assassination of President Charles de Gaulle, in 1962. The ouster of Macmillan with the Profumo scandal, orchestrated in that same period, 1963. The assassination of Kennedy, these and other things, were all reflections of a fundamental change, in policy, from the Bretton Woods system.
And with the launching of the Vietnam War and some other things, the policies of the United States and other nations began to be pushed away from a policy of expanding economic progress, economic development, into a policy of Malthusianism, of so-called "neo-Malthusianism." Under this policy, the world economy has decayed as a whole, consistently, over the entire period, from 1965-1966 to the present time.
The crucial point was 1971. You had the Wilson government in Great Britain, which first inaugurated the destruction of economy. The destruction of the British economy, United Kingdom economy, under Wilson, the first Wilson government, was unbelievable; it was terrific. This was imitated in the United States, beginning 1966-1967. The force initiating this was the Nixon campaign for the Presidency, in 1966-1968. During this period, 1966, Nixon went down to Mississippi, and other places, to negotiate with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, and allied racists, such as the Trent Lott who is presently the leader of the Republican faction in the U.S. Senate. Therefore, Nixon embraced racism, as an integral policy.
Following Nixon's introduction of the 1971 destruction of the Bretton Woods system, which led to all of the world financial chaos which is now hitting us, the Democratic Party decided it, too, had to join the racist cause, and therefore Zbigniew Brzezinski picked a fool, Jimmy Carter, to become President. And hand-steered him, and controlled him, with the New York crowd, from the beginning to the end. Jimmy did more to destroy the U.S. economy than any President since the death of Roosevelt. By himself: deregulation; radical introduction of free trade; the introduction of the destruction of the world economy, which was done by Paul Volcker, with his Volcker measures introduced in 1979, which was the policy of the Brzezinski crowd; which has now been continued by Greenspan, the successor of Volcker. So, that system has been the problem.
So, this is a crucial part of the whole process.
During this entire period, from 1945 to 1989, the world was dominated, strategically, by a peculiar kind of alliance, and a hostility, between the Soviet Union and the Anglo-American powers. A hostility which became a kind of partnership, based on hate. Nuclear weapons had been introduced from London by the faction of H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, with the explicit proposal, that by introducing nuclear weapons, you would create a situation in which nations would surrender their sovereignty rather than risk war, and therefore would give up sovereignty for world government.
So, this was the arrangement. The way they started it, they started a conflict between the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain, which was launched from London, which began the entire period. This evolved, from 1961-1962 on, into a peculiar kind of partnership between the two opposing powers, called détente. So, the world was now managed by whatever the United States and Britain, on the one side, and the Soviet government, on the other side, could agree to, in terms of world policy. This was an integral part of the process of disintegration, and marked the significance of the 1962-1965 period. This was the period in which the postwar developments had been brought to the point, through the missile crisis of 1962, where the world was now ruled by a peculiar kind of détente arrangement between two superpower blocs, and the rest of the world was subject to that. This meant doom for all of the aspirations of the Non-Aligned Movement, and similar kinds of things in the developing sector generally.
Look at the pattern. India and China are powerful nations, in their own right. They're not world powers, and therefore, have been able, in various ways, to resist this, as was the characteristic of the Indira Gandhi government, in particular—her governments in particular, to resist this particular entrapment, in this cage, this captivity, of the agreement between two superpower blocs, which was the problem of India, during the entire period of her prime ministership.
How do you negotiate the survival of India, and India's interest, when the world is dominated by a pair of superpower blocs? That was the problem.
Malthusianism and the Destruction of the Nation-State
So, this led to 1989, and the inevitable collapse of the Soviet system. The collapse of the Soviet system was then seen by the Anglo-American powers, as the occasion for destroying the institution of the nation-state, which had been first introduced to European civilization in the 15th Century, with Louis XI, and with Henry VII. Malthusianism, globalization, free trade, and so forth: These were measures intended to destroy, to eradicate, the roots of the nation-state, and its culture, from the world. This was a policy based largely on destruction. People have been looking for stealing—well, stealing goes on, because that's the instinct of these creatures, but the essential strategic purpose is destruction, not conquest. Because if you can destroy the institutions which defy you, then you have conquered by default.
This means Malthusianism, which I'll come to now. It means Malthusianism because, as long as you have to educate a population to master modern technology, the education of that pouplation in science and technology creates a population which is not going to consider itself, would not accept the idea of being human cattle. If you can think, if you understand the laws of the universe, at least in some degree, if you understand the principle that man can improve his condition by willfully mastering nature, then you are not going to accept being cattle. And therefore, if you wish to reduce the human race to a mass of human cattle, ruled over by a minority and oligarchy, like an Anglo-American globalized oligarchy, you have to destroy the ability of people to maintain technological progress. You have to eradicate much of the roots of existing technological progress.
So, now you come along; you say, "We have to defend nature against man." When you go to defend nature against man, what does that mean? You're wrong.
So, what you're doing is, you're demanding the greatest collapse in the level of the human population, in a rapid period, ever imagined. You're demanding global genocide. You're demanding the destruction of those institutions upon which the modern society is based. That is the intent. If you read the literature, if you get into the conferences, you get into the fights with these creatures, who are the advisers and think-tank associates of these kinds of policies, that's what they say. They say it in one way or another. The best way to smoke it out, is to propose the contrary policy, and they'll run screaming around like banshees, around the room, around the ceiling. And that is the problem we face.
You have a group of people who have been determined to destroy—and they've said it; neo-Malthusiansim, ecologism, globalism: These are the means, the policies, by which the destruction of the human race over several successive generations has been intended.
And it's working.
Look at Africa: There are virtually no African nations left. Africa has become a no-man's-land, which Anglo-American and Israeli mercenaries deploy to kill, to organize killing, and to loot raw materials. Look at South Africa: South Africa has virtually no sovereignty over its own raw materials resources. Anglo-American interests control the thing entirely. Look in Central Africa, the Great Lakes region. Look at it today: You have a genocide going on, beyond belief. This is the image of the world, the future world, if we let it go that way. The image for India. It's the way to understand what's going on in Southeast Asia.
Economics: Mankind Can Change Its Population-Density
Now, let's look at economics, from that standpoint. The issue then becomes that of economics, in that sense.
The crucial thing is that mankind is the only species which has the willful capability of increasing its population-density. No other species can do that, willfully. No other species can change its own apparent nature. Species can adapt to their conditions, but they can not change their nature. And that's the essence of economics, and that's the essence of the issue in economics today.
We have one kind of economics which is essentially Malthusian by implication: That's called "accounting." It's called "contemporary accepted science." Because an accounting is essentially linear. It does not allow for any radical change in fundamental principles of science. It does not allow for that kind of society. You teach people how to manage existing technologies, not how to introduce new ones.
For example, let's take the case of India, as I saw it when Mrs. Gandhi was still Prime Minister. I looked at the IITs [Indian Institutes of Technology]; I looked at the problem in India. India was producing some of the world's leading academically qualified people, who were being exported to the United States and Europe, and elsewhere. You took the top 10% of the graduates of IITs, and they were being shipped around the world, to find employment outside of India, not in India.
Then you look at the other problem which is imposed by India's defense of itself, against the IMF and similar predatory institutions, which meant that you maintained a tight budget, which was intended to protect this precious independence of India, which depended upon the farmer. Therefore, you could not open up the Indian market for free trade. Because once you did so, then the farmer would no longer be free, as a farmer, and then India would be torn apart, as other countries has been torn apart, which do not have agricultural independence.
So, Mrs. Gandhi, in a sense, was right, in her tight-money policies, her tight policies against conceding to free-trade demands, and her tight administration of the policy. But the effect was horrible. The effect was in the universities itself. What did we see in the IITs, the ones I visited? You saw a lack of pedagogical experimental apparatus. You saw a lack of access to research experimental development, which meant that you were doing something terrible to anyone who's studying physical sciences in particular. You're denying them the ability to understand physical science, which means you're producing a nation of great mathematicians, in one sense, but who are not necessarily good physical scientists; who do not have the impulse to go out and do what India needs: which is, develop science, and apply it to the Indian production, the Indian population itself, to raise the level of productivity of the land and people of India.
So, there was a trap: Where, in order to defend India as it was, India was being denied the ability to develop India as it must become. The same problem, is the problem we see in China. You have an agricultural population, which is precious. The independence of the country depends upon that food supply, by that population, to be the independence of the country. It's also a source of export income. You see in China a similar characteristic; a different kind of situation, but a similar problem. Here are two countries, the countries with the largest population of any country on this planet, neither of which has had the freedom to fully develop scientifically, the productive forces of its own nation. And this has resulted in a stagnation, in certain respects, within the national economy.
We see the same thing in other parts of the world. But, this is the Indian situation, and I refer to it in particular, because it's concrete.
Science: 'Plausibility' vs. Solving a Paradox
Now, the problem is this: When you teach science at the blackboard, you are creating a problem. Because the fraud that is created, is that the teacher attempts to make the scientific discovery plausible, without giving the student the experience of the paradox, which provokes the discovery of the principle. The attempt is made to make the scientific principle plausible, by a mathematical exposition at the blackboard. When, in point of fact—. Let's take two great discoveries, as points in fact. Modern, comprehensive mathematical physics was begun essentially by Nicolaus of Cusa, who was the founder of modern mathematical physical science, and followers of Cusa—Luca Pacioli of Italy, and his promising student, Leonardo da Vinci.
The great, explicit follower of Cusa, Pacioli, and da Vinci, was Johannes Kepler. Johannes Kepler was the founder of modern, comprehensive mathematic physics. He was the discoverer of universal gravitation, and no one else. This discovery is recorded, and the originality of his discovery is recorded, in his famous 1609 publication, The New Astronomy. The completion of these discoveries by him, was essentially summed up in his World Harmony, where he went to the planetary system as a whole.
Now, the discovery in this case was based on, what? All previous European systems—that of the hoaxster, Claudius Ptolemy, that of Copernicus, and that of Tycho Brahe—were all intrinsically failures. Because they assumed that the universe functioned in terms of perfectly circular motion, as defined by the blackboard; by drawing circles on a blackboard, or on paper, or similar kinds of things. And it doesn't. Kepler pointed out—that is, in the orbit of Mars—that you had an apparent eccentricity: that the orbit was elliptical, rather than circular. And, through his experimental work on this question, showed that there was a principle operating, which could not be explained at the blackboard; but that there was a principle existing outside the blackboard, and similar minds—an intention, which was governing the regularity of these astronomical cycles. This was the principle of gravitation.
You had a similar discovery, by Pierre Fermat, the French scientist, who showed that, in reflection, as opposed to refraction, it might appear—as the fellow at the blackboard would argue—that the light is propagated in terms of shortest distance. But, he also discovered, that, in terms of refraction, light is refracted in terms of quickest time.
Therefore, geometry, as taught at the blackboard, does not correspond—and mathematics, as taught at the blackboard, does not correspond to reality.
What is at stake here? It's a very elementary principle, which Vernadsky struck upon from a different standpoint; which is the difference between economics as taught today, and economics as a physical science. Economics, as taught today, is linear. Linear mathematics, which has no correspondence to physical reality. It is at the blackboard; it is on the computer; it is linear.
It's wrong.
The collapse of the so-called "New Economy." The great bubble—the so-called Information Theory bubble, which has just collapsed catastrophically around the planet, is a demonstration that von Neumann was a hoaxster and an idiot, and Wiener, too. But, people believed in it, because they wished to believe that you could explain science and economics at the blackboard. Not by work. Not by actual production.
Improving the Power of Man Over the Universe
It also denies the nature of man, which is the crucial issue. Man is the only creature, who can make discoveries, in the way in which Kepler and Fermat did. The human mind is capable of a capacity, which sees the world outside the limits of so-called "sense certainty." Sense-certainty is what? Sense-certainty, or the senses, do not show us the real world. The senses report to us, the experience of a part of our biological apparatus, and try to interpret the experience on the periphery of our system, and try to find out what is going on, outside our skins, to cause the things that we feel inside our skins. This process of discovery is what is properly called "science."
How do we discover? We discover a paradox. We discover, that experience shows us, that some things don't work the way our senses tend to suggest they do. Microphysics, for example, is a perfect expression of this: All of microphysics is based on things which are efficient, which determine our power to exist, especially today, but which exist beyond the power of our senses to detect. How do we know these things? We know these things, because we solve paradoxes, with a power of the mind, of insight into the significance of certain paradoxes in our experience. Like physical paradoxes. Like the paradox that Kepler used, to discover gravitation. The paradox which Fermat introduced, which caused modern European science to develop a so-called relativity of physical space-time conception.
The same thing is true in economics. The basis of man's increased power over the universe, the power to exist, the power to increase the life-span of populations, and by increasing the life-span of populations, increase the possibility of the development of populations. Because if you have a life-expectancy of 30 to 40 years, how can you have a developed population? Who is going to support the children, for 20 to 25 years in development, if the parents are dying between the ages of 30 and 40? You can't do it. Impossible. Therefore, the important thing is: How can we increase man's power to act, in and over the universe, to improve the life-span of our people? To increase the amount of development we allow for our children, who are really children from the ages, essentially, of zero to 25, today, in terms of professional development? How can we provide 25 years of life, of a child, to the full development of that child's cognitive capabilities as a future adult? How can we do that? We must improve the productive powers of labor, to the included effect, of increasing life-span, increasing the possibility of health-care to [deal with any condition] which threatens life-span. And, by these means, we make it possible to improve the quality of man.
We educate people: How, properly? Not how to learn how to repeat what someone said before us, but how to re-experience the great discoveries from the past. For example: Why is Vedic and Sanskrit so important for study in India? Because, we know that that aspect of the language, as Panini reflected, came from a long time before. I saw in one of the recent science magazines, a recent discovery, of an argument among three different views on the significance of river systems, which obviously existed, in part to the west of here, some ancient times ago. This is important! Also, as Tilak emphasized; we know these things today, we know scientifically, that Tilak was right: That some of the ancient calendars, which are transmitted to India, come from ocean cultures, which are Arctic Ocean cultures! We also know, from the work of Barry Fell and others, who traced some of these linguistic patterns throughout the waters of the Pacific and Southeast Asia, that there were great maritime cultures, which existed, which have had impact upon people.
And, if we're going to understand the roots of language, if we're going to understand where our people came from, if we're going to understand the various influences which shaped the culture, which a cultivated person can have today in any of these countries, they must, in a sense, be allowed to experience what their remote ancestors experienced, in the way of important discoveries. Ancient poetry, for example, is extremely important for this, especially the Classical forms of ancient poetry, which reveal to us certain characteristics of language. And, enable us to criticize the language we're using today, by insight into how language is developed.
So, the key thing, is to develop a person, who is—what? Who is an effective reflection of the great contributions of past mankind to the present, especially of the immediate population, of which he's a part, the immediate culture of which the person is a part. And, to be qualified to address not only the current problems, but to foresee the requirements, which the future must have, from the present.
And, this is economics: That the idea of accounting for things, of course, is obviously necessary. But we should never try to develop an economy based on accounting. We should rather look at the past, the present, and the future, and say: "How can we foster the development and utilization, of those discoveries of principle, which represent man's discovery of increased power over nature? And, how do we organize those discoveries, and create the conditions of work, under which we can bring forth the future?"
Therefore, man is, in a sense, mortal, but immortal: Man is mortal in the sense that our lives have a beginning and an end. We are immortal, as no animal is immortal, because we are capable of re-experiencing cognitive discoveries of principle, which no animal can make. We benefit from these discoveries from our predecessors, from whom those discoveries are transmitted to us. Our children should know those discoveries. We should not die, without transmitting those discoveries to our children. Our children should learn from that process of re-experiencing discoveries, how to make their own discoveries; how to judge the present and the future. We must have a sense of mission, of what mankind must accomplish, 40, 50, 100 years from now—a vision of what that must be. We must make our policies, today, on that basis.
Infrastructure: The Essence of Economy
For example, just in conclusion, on this point: Infrastructure, basic economic infrastructure—transportation, power, water management, education; health care is a part of the same thing. These are the essence of economy! Well, the science of economy, is not what someone does, sitting on a pile of dirt, with a certain technology. The ability of that technology to work, depends upon the infrastructure: If you want an efficient economy, you must have an efficient mass-transit system, especially for freight, as well as people. If you wish an efficient economy, you must have a health-care system: You can't have essential people dying on you, for reason of diseases, which you could cure. Therefore, you must have a universal health-care system: Because you can't protect one person against conditions that threaten life if you don't protect all. Therefore, you have to have a universal health-care approach. No matter whether it's private, or public—it must, in net effect, be a universal health-care system.
The investments in infrastructure, improvements of land—for example: Let's take the question of the water management of India. How do we get sufficient water into the Deccan, for an extended period, in order to transform the potential of the population of the Deccan? What kind of investment is that? That's an investment, which involves approximately a 25-year, or one-generation cycle, to get that thing fully in operation and self-sustaining, before the benefits are fully realized.
What about the question of power development, in India? Well, a nuclear plant: The optimum nuclear plant, today, is a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, which runs between about 120 to 200 megawatt output. This kind of plant, which is the safest kind of plant we now have—which is being used in South Africa, it's being developed, also, in China, which they got from Germany—would be optimal for India, because it's very readily adapted to the so-called "thorium cycle." And, the thorium cycle is very valuable, in the sense that it is not a weapons-oriented cycle of fission. Therefore, since India has a good thorium potential, the idea of using a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor in the thorium cycle, is optimal for India, as a peculiarly Indian development. Which would also fit the needs of countries which would desire such reactors, in the vicinity of India's market. If you have these kinds of things, placed around India, at the right locations, you have, for the present time, the optimal source of energy, for development in any part of the country you choose.
But, these kinds of things, like an educational system, are essentially a quarter-century investment. And, therefore, how do we do this? How do we get this? We create public credit. That is, we go into debt; the government goes into debt, to create the cheap credit, to make these long-term investments possible. And so, these come out as 25-year-span investments—some longer, some shorter. You invest in an industry: What does it take to invest in a technology in an industry—a new technology? This means: Is it a five-year investment, a ten-year investment? Just to design a new product! A 10- to 15-years' investment to cycle out the investment in a machine tool, of a new type, a new technology. You must have credit for this.
And, therefore, we must organize the economy, around long-term thinking. What are good long-term prospects for humanity? For 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years? No government is thinking, unless it's thinking 25 years ahead! Because the effects you desire, the roads you're going to take, will affect the nation for 25 years to come. It will also affect relations among nations, for a quarter-century, or longer, to come.
So, we must choose the road we're going to walk into the future. We must create the impetus, for walking in the future. We must think of ourselves, not in terms of the satisfaction we get, from what we eat, or enjoy as pleasure, or entertainment today. We must derive our pleasure from the joy, as a poor parent does, in fostering the development of a child for the future. We must think of ourselves in the present, as creating the future, and doing nothing shameful in the eyes of the past. And find our identity, which is a kind of spiritual identity—as distinct from the sense-certainty identity—in that process.
The Current System Can Not Be Saved
Today, we have, with the breakdown of the present corrupt system—and this system can not be saved: The present monetary and financial system can not be saved. Anybody who is trying to save it, by internal reforms, is a fool! It can not be saved. You have to cancel it! Don't treat that as the mother of economy. The mother of economy, a modern economy, is the sovereign nation-state. You have to say, Marx was an idiot, when he invented the term "capital," as he used it: There is no such thing as capitalism, except as a form of disease: It's called "the British disease"! The ideal form of modern economy, is the American System, which was created by all of Europe, and which was admired greatly in other parts of the world, for many years, until recent times.
The American System of political-economy, as set forth by various Americans, including the first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, is elementary: The state is responsible for infrastructure. It must control all credit. It must direct banking. It must ensure the flow of credit to those things, which are useful to the nation. The things that are required, are: One, basic economic infrastructure. Second, you must foster inventions—art, improvements; and foster the entrepreneurs who are willing to invest, and risk, in making those improvements. You must protect the markets, which give these entrepreneurs the opportunity to bring their inventions to fruition, not subject to the ravages of free trade. That is the American System. That is the system of economy which is derived, in principle, not from the United States by itself, but from all of Europe's knowledge, in bringing together the idea of the modern nation-state. It's a form of government, whose existence and motive must be the promotion of the improvement of the general welfare, of all of the existing people, and their posterity.
And that must be government.
We've come to a time, when the alternative has failed. Free trade, globalization, and so forth, have become horror-shows, which destroy us. The floating-exchange-rate system has destroyed the world. It must end.
We look back to the period, 1945-1963, '64, and we find that the old Bretton Woods system, the fixed-exchange-rate system, with a lot of regulation, a lot of protectionism, worked. India's survival, for example, has been based on the limit imposed by India's instinct for protectionism. Otherwise, India would have been crushed, as many other countries were crushed. Indira Gandhi was right, in her instinct for protectionism. Her father, and others, were right, in the Non-Aligned Movement, in saying, "You can not function, merely on national protectionism. You must find a new, more just, world economic order, in which the possibility of utilizing these principles, can work, can succeed." Not in the constraints under which Mrs. Gandhi, for example, had to operate, in her managing the system.
And, then, we simply say: "We do it that way. We learned from the lessons of experience. We take the models of the past which did work. We apply those models, because they will be most acceptable, because we can prove experimentally, they were right. We do that." Now, how do we do that? Well, we have to do what the Non-Aligned nations really wished to do. What we have to do is, we have to take the crisis, in which it is easily demonstrated, that everybody who wants to continue the present system, is some kind of an idiot! And, a dangerous one, at that. We have to say, "We have to go back to the modern nation-state as a matter of principle. And, nation-states which wish to survive, must accept the fact, that the present monetary system, the present financial system, is a hopeless piece of rubbish. And, don't try to kill your children, to save the system.
"We don't need it. If we, as governments, or a number of governments, agree—as sovereign governments, representing sovereign nations and sovereign peoples, if we agree, to put this stinking, rotten system into bankruptcy reorganization; and to say, we're going to continue the economy, but not the monetary and financial system, then we use the authority of sovereign nation-states, and agreements among sovereign nation-states, to put this stinking hulk into bankruptcy reorganization!
"We, as a group of nations, make agreements among ourselves, on credit, which we will create, by agreement among states—and this credit among states, will be used through banking channels, which we control, including private banking channels; we will put the money through banking channels, for the required purpose, in order to make long-term credit agreements, under which long-term transmission of technology can occur, in order to save the world economy."
And, that is exactly what we proposed in terms of the Eurasian Land-Bridge. The present situation is: That, if we can agree, and understand that the nations of East and South Asia require an early, and rapid infusion of technology, to develop these economies so that they can survive; and if this can be done through credit arrangements, extended by governments for periods—of within a 25-year period, at interest rates of 1 to 2% simple interest, on long term; and if we take the great infrastructure projects and so forth, as the driver force; and if we unite the need of Western Europe for markets, for this type of technology, and the role of Russia, as the transmission belt between East and South Asia, and Western Europe; and if we think of this as the center of the world, and bring nations in Africa, in the Americas, into the same arrangement, then we have the basis for creating a new monetary system, under which this world can come out of this mess.
If we do not make such agreements—which is the other side of the thing; if we do not, then we're headed for a new dark age.
Thank you.
Professor Kaushik: I think we just had a highly stimulating, thought-provoking lecture. It looked as if we are attending lectures at various faculties—history, economics, science, education, culture. But, the fact is, that all these lectures are delivered by a single person in, a very, very integrated manner, in a single auditorium, and we don't have to rush from one faculty to another, in order to learn lessons.
I thank Mr. LaRouche for his brilliant exposition. And, before we throw open his presentation for discussion, I think Mrs. Helga LaRouche would like to say something, just to supplement it, with her ideas on the Eurasian Land-Bridge. And, then we can have a discussion.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche:
The Urgency of the Eurasian Land-Bridge
Very briefly. Mr. LaRouche gave you the historical evolution of the idea of Eurasian infrastructural integration. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the idea of uniting Europe and Asia, through such infrastructure corridors, and, in that way, elevating the populations of the frequently land-locked areas, to the same level which before, only maritime cultures enjoyed, was an acute item on the agenda. So, in 1989, Mr. LaRouche had the brilliant idea, immediately after the fall of the Wall, to extend these corridors eastward, into Eurasia. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, around 1991, we developed the first comprehensive proposal of such a Eurasian integration. And, for several years, we were like lone voices crying out in the desert, propagandizing such a policy.
And, a good thing is that, now, especially in the last year or so, after Putin became President of Russia, this is no longer just an idea and a program, but many, many projects are under way, to integrate Eurasia in this way: For example, between Japan and Russia, the idea of building a tunnel to Sakhalin Island; the integration of the South-North Korean railway, with the Siberian railway; to have the Siberian railway open up the northern regions of Russia, which are a tremendous wealth of raw materials, and could be a tremendous source of development for the entire continent. The Chinese government, with its westward orientation, recognizing that the U.S. market as an export market for Chinese products is disappearing, is now moving very fast in the direction of connecting the Old Silk Road with the European and Middle Eastern regions. Egypt is playing a very important role, by recognizing that it is both an Asian and an African country. And especially given the extremely proud historical tradition, Egypt, being one of the cradles of mankind, is recognizing that, if it goes back to its ancient tradition, in being a promoter of universal development, that the modern function of Egypt is to connect the Eurasian Land-Bridge, through infrastructure, into Africa, and in that way, creating the real possibility to save Africa, from an otherwise certain death.
So, one of the concerns which brought us to India, at this point, is to try to get the Indian elite, in particular, to recognize that a renewed effort has to be made by the planners of this country, because the moment of crisis will come very, very soon. And, as a matter of fact, it's not one second too late, because we're in the middle of this financial collapse. And, if people have the right conception, then this crisis can be used to put the new world economic order, based upon the Eurasian Land-Bridge, back on the agenda; and, not only on the agenda, but to realize it.
So, I'm actually optimistic, because, while there is a great danger to civilization right now, the positive thing is that many forces in the world are moving to save mankind from collapse.
I just wanted to add these short remarks.
