The Middle East Blow-Back Effect
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.The following is an edited transcript of Lyndon LaRouche's opening remarks to a Washington, D.C. seminar and international webcast on May 1, 2002, sponsored by LaRouche in 2004, his Presidential campaign committee.
My subject today is focussed on the question of the horror show, in the danger to civilization, which is expressed in the Middle East crisis. And also, to indicate the possibilities of solution for that crisis. However, the Middle East crisis is not a crisis of the Middle East; nor was it created in the Middle East; nor is it the creation of protagonists in the Middle East. This is a world crisis, which, for various strategic reasons, has exploded in the Middle East, threatens to spread out throughout that region, and threatens, under present circumstances, to bring an end, for generations to come, to civilization, worldwide, as we have known it.
Some of the things I will say today, which are not generally said publicly, coincide with the views of many of the people from around the world—not only critics in the Arab sector, but others, in Europe and elsewhere. But nonetheless, no one else says it, no one else in a position, with the voice to make it heard, says it publicly. As you know, if you've looked at your Congressman recently, in the United States, and have watched him going away, and you look at their back, in your mind's eye, you see a sign on their back: "Space for rent." This is the general situation with the parties, in politics, in the United States today.
So therefore, in the mud and slime of existing U.S. politics, in the confusion and chaos and insanity which comes out of the teleprompter which the President reads, and similar kinds of things, where is there a solution? Where is there a clear voice defining policy? Nowhere, in general. And no one from inside the United States.
One of the problems here, which I will make a bit clearer today, is very few people, even in the United States, know what the United States is, and what its problems are. Many people would like to defend the United States, but they don't know what they're defending, and sometimes, they pick the wrong side, when they choose a cause. My job is to make that clear to you.
The context for this, which I will address first, and then I will come to the Middle East matter itself, later—the context for this crisis today, is that the world as a whole, especially European civilization, extended globally, is experiencing presently, the worst and most dangerous crisis in the history of Europe, since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. No crisis, including the wars of the last century, was as severe and dangerous to civilization as what you're seeing reflected in the Middle East crisis, today. This is the one crisis which could destroy modern history, for generations to come.
And, as you see, we have no President of the United States. We have an elected President—not elected, probably, but inaugurated, anyway, despite all the misunderstandings, and whatnot. I think, actually, Al Gore inaugurated him, because Al Gore could have won the election in Arkansas, but he chose to ignore Arkansas, perhaps because it had something to do with Bill Clinton—and went to Florida instead, and threw the election away in Florida, where he had it won in Arkansas, if he'd not wasted his money on Florida. So, he actually gave the election to President Bush. And he is now a creature of the past, and let's hope he remains that way.
But, the problem is—it goes deeper: that since 1964, with one exception, no President of the United States, has, on a matter of grave strategic importance, expressed the actual interests of the United States, except for one incident by President Reagan, on the SDI, in the early 1980s. Since 1964, since President Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights legislation, no President of the United States, with the one exception of Reagan's support of the SDI, has spoken in a manner which is consistent with the actual, fundamental interests of the United States. For example, you had the Suez Crisis: President Eisenhower acted in the interests of the United States, and he understood them.
FDR's Post-War Vision
Now, what I've described as the problem here: At the end of the war, after Roosevelt had died, the United States turned away, in large degree, from the commitments which Roosevelt had, from the path he trod, and from the post-war world we would have had, had he lived. Roosevelt, for example, was for the abolition of colonialism, immediately, at the end of the war. The United States emerged from the end of the war, as the only world power, as the only power, built out of the wreckage that was left by Coolidge and Mellon, from the Depression. There was no other power on this planet. And Roosevelt intended to use that power, as he told Churchill, to bring about a new system in the world, one not based on the 18th-Century policies of Adam Smith and the British, one not based on colonialism; but to use the power of the United States to effect the immediate liberation of all colonies. And to use the policies of the American System, the anti-Adam Smith policies, to rebuild, and build the economies of the world, with U.S. backing. That was taken down: Under Truman, colonialism was restored at the point of a bayonet, with the backing of the United States, and on the instruction of the British government.
However, we did have a system that worked somewhat. The post-war monetary system, which had many features of Roosevelt's policy continued in it, was a very successful policy, for about 20 years, until about the middle of the 1960s. The United States prospered, in a continued recovery, despite all the mistakes of Arthur Burns' influence on President Eisenhower, and so forth, the United States prospered economically. The conditions of life for most citizens improved. Opportunities increased.
The same was done in Europe, with U.S. cooperation, with the ideas of Jean Monnet of France, who was an admirer and collaborator of Franklin Roosevelt. The same thing happened in Japan, and to some degree, in South and Central America. But the period then, even despite Truman, and under Eisenhower, and despite his mistakes, was a period of progress for most of the world. Then, it suddenly changed. The change came after Eisenhower's death. And it became worse, and worse, and worse.
Here's what happened: Look back at the history of the United States. The United States was a creation of Europe. That, after the period of religious wars, from about 1511 to 1648 in Europe, the hope of building a modern sovereign form of nation-state in Europe had gone into the rubbish pile, into the ditch. So, on the basis of the Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, there was an effort to begin to build up sovereign nation-states in Europe. However, the rubble left over from the religious wars, and from the feudalist interests, and things of that sort, prevented this from being successful in Europe.
So, during the course of the 17th Century, and especially the 18th Century, more and more of the intellectual leadership of Europe, from many countries—France, from England, from Russia, included, from Germany—focussed on the United States, or what became the United States, as the hope of building, in North America, the kind of republic which European civilization had aspired to build on the basis of the wreckage of the Roman Empire and feudalism. These people concentrated on us, educated our people, imported their people to assist us in building this republic. And we built, what is still, to this day, in terms of its constitutional design, the only true sovereign nation-state republic on this planet, which was described by Lafayette as a "temple of liberty and beacon of hope for all mankind." Which it was. And which it does remain, at least in the wishes, if not the reality, for many people today.
We are still a power—we don't deserve it, but we are. That is, we have the capacity, as a nation, because of our historic authority—not because of our present government, or our recent habits—but because of our historic authority, to intervene in world affairs, not as a dictator, but as a moral influence and a power, to cause things to happen for good, which otherwise could not happen.
The case in the Middle East is typical of that: If the President of the United States would find the gumption and the wisdom to intervene in the Middle East, this horror show would stop immediately. Not because the United States has the physical power to suppress what Sharon is doing, but because if the United States took that position, then the nations of Europe who want that result, would rally to, and cooperate with the United States, other parts of the world would rally to and cooperate with the United States, and the entire world, or most of it, would, as if one with crushing blow, stop this murder in the Middle East now, and bring about peace.
Our problem is: How do we bring that about, with this President, this inaugurated President? And that's what I want to lay before you today. The problem exists—I'll turn to the problem, the worst manifestation of it. Solutions exist, at least on paper, as ideas; I've worked since 1975 to try to bring about Middle East peace, and looking back on that period, over 25 years, I made no mistakes: What I said then is valid today. What others did to the same or similar effect is valid still today. What has been lacking is the will and the authority to put that into place and into work. My concern is, therefore: How do we implement the solution realistically, not how do we simply propose, once again, a solution that I and others have been proposing, rightly and justly, for over 25 years?
The 'Perpetual War' Faction
This is the problem: At the end of the war, the same forces which hated Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, seized control in the United States—not totally—those of us who had returned from the war wouldn't have put up with it. We had remembered the war; we had been uplifted by Roosevelt and what he represented; many of us had rediscovered the legacy of the American Revolution in our history. We wouldn't have put up with it. But, we became fat, and lazy, and corrupt. Men returning—remember, 16 million of us were in military service during the war, at the high point. We returned after approximately five years in U.S. involvement in this war, to start families, or to build families. Married couples would decide to have children at about that time. We began to move into suburbia, as in these Levittown shacks out there, in the potato fields outside of New York City, to build up suburban life, and other kinds of life. Women, who had had their husbands in the war, said, "No, you've got to do everything to catch up for five years of lost time. We've got to make the babies now. We've got to have the schools for them now. We've got to have a house now. We've got to have this now."
And, they had a kind of "now generation," which became the Baby Boomer generation. They went to universities, not to get knowledge, but to get a job, a better job. And so, they became corruptible. And so they were corrupted. I saw it all. I hated it then. I hate it more today, when I see what the outcome was.
What happened in the United States was, a certain faction, whose legacy is the Confederate States of America, typified by the Nashville Agrarians, led by a virtual member of the Confederacy, William Yandell Elliott, united with certain financial circles in Boston, in New York, and Washington, and elsewhere, to conceive of an anti-Roosevelt world, an anti-Franklin Roosevelt world. Their conception was this: If the power of the United States could be joined and controlled by the power of the United Kingdom, of Great Britain, then, we could create an English-speaking world empire, modelled somewhat on the Roman Empire, but with British-financier characteristics, as opposed to Roman characteristics. Then we could rule the world, we could put military force to work, to control nations in the way that Ancient Rome had controlled nations with its legions, and its policies, and religious wars, and ethnic wars. This policy became known, in the course of the 1950s, as the "utopian" policy. It was a policy of leading banking firms and law firms, accounting firms in New York City, and in Washington, D.C., and in Boston.
These people were conjoined with a faction inside the U.S. military, centered around the buildup of the Defense Department, around what became the RAND Corporation, became the various foundations which dominate United States policy-making today. So these foundations and financier interests and law firms and so forth, together with a certain faction in the military, set out to transform the United States and the world, on a model in the distant past, on the tradition of the Roman Empire—an English-speaking world, largely, and also modelled, in military policy, on both the Roman legions, and also, the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Waffen-SS.
The Change in Military Policy
So, the change in direction occurred then. What happened—the changes in military policy? You had the firing of MacArthur, who was the best commander the United States had in World War II. He conquered more territory, with fewer losses, both to U.S. forces, and to their Japanese opposition, over a shorter period of time, relatively speaking, than anyone else in modern history. Probably, the most successful military commander in modern history. He became the overseer, so to speak, of Japan. And he did not have to use nuclear bombs on Japan—he'd never use them. This came from London and Washington. Truman decided to drop the bomb. There was no military need for dropping those bombs. Ever. Japan had been successfully blockaded by an aerial and naval blockade. And Japan, which depends upon imports of raw materials for its existence, the United States, principally, had so effectively blockaded Japan from the air and the sea, that the military faction, which was still in opposition to the Emperor Hirohito's determination to surrender, would have to give up soon.
So the U.S. policy, in the Summer of 1945, under MacArthur, was not to drop bombs. The policy was to sit. Not to attack a defeated nation. Standard military policy: Never attack a defeated enemy—you might start a new war. But Washington was not happy. The utopians were not happy. They wanted to use those bombs. They had intended to drop them on Berlin; if Berlin had not surrendered by the end of June 1945, Berlin would have been obliterated, with one or two nuclear bombs. That was U.S. policy. But Berlin surrendered. Hitler surrendered—or, didn't surrender, but the Germans surrendered. They couldn't use the bombs. So, they said let's drop them on Japan. They dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One of the reasons they dropped them, was to take the credit for the victory away from Douglas MacArthur, because the issue was military policy. Douglas MacArthur represented the traditional military policy of modern civilized society, the policy of the United States, the policy of Lazare Carnot of France, who was one of the great revolutionaries in making modern military policy, the policy of Gerhardt Scharnhorst of Germany. This was the military policy of the United States, especially after Lincoln's victory. MacArthur represented that policy. President Eisenhower, with all his wavering on some political-economic issues, nonetheless, represented that same tradition and that same policy.
What happened? The firing of MacArthur, which was ordered by the financier interests of London and New York—it was a set-up—resulted in what? A no-win war in Korea, which has not been ended, in fact, to the present day. The issue about Korean policy is: The President of South Korea, with the encouragement of President Clinton, at a certain point, proposed a new policy for the Koreas, for the effective reunification, as a process of cooperation between North and South Korea. But the Korean War continued to the present day. And those who still put North Korea on the list of the "Axis of Evil" are actually expressing that determination to have a perpetual war in Asia, called Korea. They probably would like to do it in Indochina, where they did make a perpetual war, based on the precedent of Korea, after the successful assassination of President Kennedy.
What they've done in Iraq is a perpetual war. They went in and conducted a war against Iraq: The war has never ceased. Peace has never been declared. The war goes on. The Bush Administration went to a silly war in Afghanistan, which nobody but a brainless, militarily incompetent idiot would do. After what the Soviet experience in Afghanistan was, you'd never go in and do that again. A few tens of thousands of fighters, as long as they continue to be supplied, can pin down 200,000 or more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, permanently, the way the Soviets were pinned down. And it's happening, and will continue to happen. We're still in it. A perpetual war. We're about to reactivate the perpetual war in Iraq, against Iraq, throughout the Middle East.
So the policy has been one of: Pick enemies, the way the Romans did, the way the Nazis did, and declare perpetual war. How do you fight perpetual war? By conventional warfare means? No. You fight wars of annihilation and intimidation. You force nations to submit to your will, the way the Romans did. These are the utopians. What they hated above all, is they hated the United States. It's a long tradition in the United States, which very few people outside our borders have really come to understand.
Two Traditions
You have two traditions in the United States. One, which I defend, which is called the American Intellectual Tradition—something that Kissinger denounced on a number of occasions. And that is the tradition of those who founded this country and its republic. The idea of creating a modern nation-state, whose purpose was not to dominate the world, but in the advice of John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of State, to President Monroe, to create a community of principle among perfectly sovereign nation-states, which was John Quincy Adams' recommendation to Monroe, in the case of the Americas, and was the basis for the so-called Monroe Doctrine.
The United States was not in a position, at that point, militarily, to kick the Hapsburgs and the British out of the Americas. But Monroe said, and Quincy Adams said: The United States should be determined to build up its strength, to the point that it is able to kick the British and the Hapsburgs out of the Americas. And to allow the people of these countries, who aspired to their own governments, their own sovereignty, to enjoy a perfect sovereignty, under the umbrella of alliance with the United States. A community of principle for common purpose, but respective sovereignty, in terms of power. That was the intention of Franklin Roosevelt for the post-war period. It's my intention today.
Let me just explain what this is, and then get on to this.
The fundamental question which has to be asked—and it's not asked often enough, and sometimes our churches are the worst enemy of religion on this account: The foundation of Christianity, of Judaism, and Islam, is the concept of man, as created in the image of the Creator of the universe. This defines the individual as different than any animal. That each individual has, with the cognitive powers of reason, a power of creativity, which no animal has. And therefore, each human being is born good, or at least redeemable to good; and each human being is a life which is sacred in the eyes of the Creator, because we embody the quality of the Creator. And therefore, the function of government must be, not to impose religion, but to recognize this as a principle of natural law: that government has no right to exist, except insofar as it is efficiently committed to promote the general welfare of all of the people, and their posterity. And to honor the aspirations and achievements of those who have gone before us, who created the foundation upon which we are able to do good. That's the function of government. That's the meaning of the Preamble of the Constitution, which is the fundamental Constitutional law of the United States—the principle of the General Welfare—to promote and defend our sovereignty, and to promote the common good, both for our people, and in our relations among states abroad. That's our law. That's the American Intellectual Tradition. It's a European tradition in particular, a tradition of those who struggled to build the kind of society, which is free from what was characteristic of Roman society, in particular.
Under Roman society, or under Mesopotamian dictatorships before, man was never free, because man was classified generally as a form of human cattle. And there were three kinds of cattle: There were the cattle that ran wild; there were the cattle that were captive cattle; and there were the wild cattle you hunted down. Now, the captive cattle, you raised like you raise cows. You cared for them; you fed them; you helped them to reproduce to the numbers you desired, but insured they did not reproduce to numbers in excess of what you desired. You'd kill them and slaughter them when they were no longer useful to you. That was economy. That's called agriculture.
And, that was the kind of society. The majority of human beings were human cattle, under the subject of rulers who behaved like beasts. Now, some of these societies made significant contributions to culture, but they made them out of societies that were ruled in a bestial fashion, as if by beasts. Like the Roman emperors, for example; or the Byzantine rulers, for example; or the feudal system, for example; or the Hapsburgs of Spain and Austria, for example, with the exception of Joseph II, who did some good things.
Promotion of the General Welfare
So, the question was, to form a society, which developed the qualities of the individual, in the image of the Creator, which freed mankind from the destiny of being captive or wild human cattle, which treated mankind as mankind. And thus, in order to promote that, it is necessary to develop among the people, their own taking of responsibility for maintaining this kind of order. You can not have this kind of order, unless the people themselves will work to maintain it. And therefore, the people themselves must participate in the promotion of the general welfare; the promotion of education; the promotion of scientific discovery; the promotion of longevity, and so forth and so on. The people themselves must resolve to do that. And the function of government is to be responsible to the people, as an executive function, as a governing function, to ensure that that practice is continued and promoted. That's the American Intellectual Tradition, in essence.
You see it reflected in the discussions leading into the Declaration of Independence in 1776; you see it in the discussions around the Constitution. You see it expressed most nobly by Abraham Lincoln, who understood this. And there's not a critic of Abraham Lincoln I've ever heard of, from any side, who is not wrong. He was right on everything, on every count, on every decision he made. He was not always right in terms of knowing what to do, or knowing the correct decision, but he was always right in principle.
Now, as long as Eisenhower was President, the military faction, the utopian faction, which had intended to create this new Roman Empire/Waffen-SS-like system which we have today, were not able to function. And the Suez Crisis, under Eisenhower, was an example: Eisenhower responded to his understanding of the fundamental interests of the United States, and said: "We crush them. This is a crime against humanity; it will be stopped now." And he stopped it. He was a real President. He may have been on the golf course too much, he may have played too much golf with George Bush's grandfather—the President's grandfather, Prescott—they were on the golf course a lot together. (It was a kind of a racist golf course, too. Noted for that around Washington.) But, when it came to the question of U.S. policy, and U.S. interests, internationally, Eisenhower knew what it was to be a soldier, and a President. And he acted accordingly.
You had tendencies in that direction by President Kennedy, but he was killed. The last time we saw that, as I referred to before, by a President, consistently, was by President Johnson in 1964, where Johnson had the courage, to know that the fundamental interests of the United States, demanded that the Civil Rights Act, the two Civil Rights acts, be pushed through. And he pushed them through. Not because he liked this or liked that, or had this influence or that influence. He did it because he knew what it was to be President. When you're President, you embody the executive capacity of the self-interest of the people and the nation, and the intention of its existence. You are responsible to its past, and you are responsible to its future. And you, if you stand absolutely alone, if you're an elected President of the United States, you must act as a President against all comers, including your own citizens. You must stand alone as the conscience of the nation, as the defender of its fundamental interests. If they kill you, you still do it, because that's your responsibility. And no one should run for President, unless they're willing to take that responsibility. Unfortunately, many do.
Once Eisenhower was out of the way, the utopians went wild. We had, throughout the world, waves of assassination: the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle in 1962—done by whom? It was done by the fascists, including Jacques Soustelle, known to me from his career in Mexico and elsewhere. Evil man. With the backing of Franco, a fascist, an evil man. The backing of the Spanish Carlists, who are evil, and their sympathizers of the old Pétain regime in France, who are evil. They were determined to kill him. These were the same crowd that targetted—we don't know who shot Kennedy; it certainly was not Oswald, but we don't know who the three riflemen were. But we do know who targetted him. It was the same crowd that went after de Gaulle. We do know who killed [Enrico] Mattei—the same crowd that went after de Gaulle. We do know why Macmillan was ousted with the Profumo scandal in London—the same crowd.
So, this crowd, which we call the special-warfare interests—the Allen Dulles crowd, people like that—moved to set into place, a new kind of warfare, which they affirmed by launching the war in Indochina, in the middle of the 1960s. This crowd was constrained by the fact that, though it had a deal with the Soviet government, a so-called détente deal, which went in various degrees: first with the British and Khrushchev, who made negotiations with London through Bertrand Russell, in the middle of the 1950s; later, with Khrushchev again, on the basis of the [Cuban] Missile Crisis, and so forth and so on. Despite these agreements, the Soviet power was real, and other nations of the world who resented U.S. arrogance, would sometimes align with, or play with the reality of Soviet power, as a way of playing against the threat of a utopian dictatorship from London and from Washington.
With the collapse of the Soviet system, over the period 1989-1991, they thought they were free. When the paperwork was signed on the agreements among Thatcher, Mitterrand, the former President George Bush, and Gorbachov, these fellows were convinced that the Anglo-American Empire would now be able to rule the world, or proceed to establish the changes which would eliminate the institution of the sovereign nation-state; which would institute global population control; which would eliminate all forms of competent education; turn the people, mentally, into human cattle, which we're seeing today; and thus, set up a military system, modelled most immediately upon the Nazi Waffen-SS, which would rule the world. And that is the essential background of the Middle East war.
Using Israel as a Tool
You have, for example, in Israel, you have a group—people will sometimes say, the Israelis run the United States, through the Zionist Lobby. That's not true. The utopians run Israel through their asset, which is the followers, chiefly, the followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky, who is not only an avowed fascist, whose movement, the Betar, was a fascist movement in the Mussolini sense, but a Jabotinsky who publicly offered to support Adolf Hitler's government, if Adolf Hitler would come to the term of dropping anti-Semitism.
So you had in Israel, coming more and more into power, especially in the late 1970s, you had the emergence of a fascist power, centered around the party called the Likud, who are fascists—and actually, there's no difference between fascist in the generic sense and Nazi. It's just a matter of colors and details. So we created this thing in the Middle East. We had created—the British and we had created in the Middle East—a situation of perpetual warfare, as a way of managing the Middle East.
This thing started in two ways: It started with the British during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, when the British were determined to intervene in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, by finding some inside influences inside the Ottoman Empire to control the destruction. And they took the area of Palestine as one of the areas, key areas, for this intervention.
Then, toward the closing decades of the 19th Century, the time of the British Admiral, Admiral Fisher, the British had decided that they were going to have a war, a jolly war, a jolly world war, in which the British Navy would reign supreme. And to this end, they decided that what they would do, is build the so-called Dreadnought Navy of Fisher. And with this Dreadnought Navy they would power it, not with coal, but with petroleum, with oil. And that's when they stole the oil at the head of the Gulf. And it became the personal property of the King of England, later the Queen of England, and was then called British Petroleum, at a later point. One of the biggest assets of the British monarchy.
They decided then that the entire oil-bearing region of the Middle East would now become a basis for their control of world petroleum and world energy supplies, for strategic purposes. And therefore, the object was to take and chop the people into little pieces, to play one against the other, to create parties and factions against each other, and thus control this area of the world, which is of strategic significance. It is the junction point of Eurasia and Africa. It is the junction point from the Mediterranean into the Indian Ocean. It is implicitly, and has been historically, the strategic pivot of the world. So to control politics in this region of the world, was the strategic objective of the British Empire, and became, under Wilson, and under Coolidge, became the strategic objective of what became the Anglo-American Empire, in fact. And that's the genesis.
For this purpose, they needed to create a destabilization factor in the Middle East. Now initially, as you recall, the Israeli, the Jewish settlement in the Middle East was limited, and it generally involved a certain degree of cohabitation among Jews and their neighboring Palestinians, among whom they settled. But somebody said, that's no good, so they organized a movement to create some atrocities against the Jewish settlers in Palestine, and the Jewish settlers, through some Russians who were sent to them by the head of the Secret Police of Russia, Colonal Zubatov, created what became later the Haganah, the defense organization, which was sent in there by the Russian Secret Police from Odessa, in response to the provocations which were orchestrated through British circles, anti-Jewish provocations, so the Jewish defense effort against the provocations which the British organized, became the basis for creating the seed of a permanent Arab-Jewish conflict in this part of the world.
And thus, by playing this and similar kinds of things, to play parts of the Middle East against each other, in order that the outside force, the imperial force, the Anglo-American force, would control the region. And thus control, not only, then, the petroleum interests, which were crucial, but to use the petroleum interests as a key part in controlling the world, not only the navies, but the world in general—and also to prevent other things from happening. To create a factor of permanent destabilization in the strategic pivot, the Middle East, which connects Africa, and Eurasia, which connects the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. That's where the problem lies.
So what we face is not—this is not an Israeli question, it is not a Palestinian question. It is not an Arab question. It's a strategic question: Are we going to be able to live on this planet? Because if what is proposed now, the "Clash of Civilizations," of Samuel Huntington, of Bernard Lewis, of Zbigniew Brzezinski, of Henry Kissinger, and other swine—if these things are allowed to continue, this kind of war, which they've got young Bush tied into right now, then I assure you, given the realities of the economic situation, given the military realities, given the political realities, you will not have civilized life on this planet for generations yet to come: a dark age for all humanity.
Are we willing, are we morally capable; do we have a President of the United States who's morally fit to be President; who's capable of making the decision tougher than Eisenhower made on the Suez crisis? The principle remains the same. The same principled decision we had to make against Hitler, to fight Hitler. Are we sufficiently aware of our responsibility as a nation-state, as a nation as such, are we aware of our responsibility to protect the people of this planet and ourselves, our own people, from this kind of horror, or are we not? If we are, we will stop this thing right now. Now let's get onto it.
The World Crisis and the Triple Curve
Now, let's look at what the world crisis is.
In 1995, as an outgrowth of my participation in the Vatican conference on health care, some discussion came up of what the problems of health care were, and my attention turned to the issue of the economic-financial aspect of the collapse of health care worldwide, the danger to human life as a result. So to try to make clear—because you know, you had a great assortment of religious bodies, you had priests and others, nuns and others, who were in that conference, and they don't know much about economics. So how do I make clear to them, what the danger is, with which we have to deal, if we're going to have the resources needed to meet the health-care standards of humanity in this coming period?
So what I did is, I drew this Triple Curve (Figure 1), which was a representation, for pedagogical purposes, of what my studies showed the problems have been of the United States and the world, since about 1966. Because in 1966, the world economy changes character on the initiative of the British and the Americans, from what had been a producer society, a society based on production of wealth, based on educating populations and investing in order to increase the productive powers of labor, to a society which, like Ancient Rome, following the second Punic War, had become a parasite society. That is, Rome stopped producing for its own needs—Italy. Rome instead reached out and looted neighboring countries, to supply the food and other things it required for its wealth, resorted to unproductive slavery inside Italy itself, and created a class of citizens who were nothing but parasites, much like our citizens today are becoming. Which is why they vote the way they do. Bread and circuses.
You don't think we're corrupt? You don't think that we, like the Romans, who were corrupt, go into large stadiums to watch bodily contact sports? We haven't got officially gladiators yet, except on the screen. What do you see on the screen, the television screen? You see mayhem. And you see that the kind of thing coming out of Hollywood—not only Nintendo games, which I'll get to, the kind of things which Joe Lieberman doesn't oppose, Sen. Joe Lieberman.
Now what happened with this change to a so-called consumer society, which is really an imitation of the degeneracy of Ancient Rome—change from a producer society to a consumer society? Well, what happened was, we began to reduce, from about 1966 on, we began to reduce the per-capita physical output of our economy. We kept the economy going, how? By pouring money into the system, from the Federal Reserve and other sources, and from foreign sources, to pump up financial assets, and to give us the buying power to buy what we didn't produce from abroad.
We send our industries overseas to cheap-labor markets overseas. How do we buy our food, if we send the industry over there? How do we buy our goods from cheap labor markets abroad? We printed the money. How do we get the buying power to print the money to buy? Well, we use the money to build up the financial bubble—like stock values and things like that, real estate values. The biggest bubble that's ready to pop in the United States is the real estate bubble, mortgage bubble. A big, giant bubble that's about ready to pop. And when that goes, the U.S. system goes, financially.
So these were the three tendencies. The physical economy was being stripped down, from about 1966 on, with the 1966-67 budget. From the same period, about '66, you had a rapid increase in monetary aggregates, which were initially explained as the need to finance the Vietnam War. You had, as a part of that, a shift of stock-market values into an appreciation of stock values. Then, in 1971, it became worse, when Nixon shut down the economy. He shut down the monetary system which had worked very well for us in the immediate 20 years following World War II, and we went to a floating-exchange-rate system which wrecked everything, and this process accelerated. Then we went, recently, in the year 2000, to a second step (Figure 2).
Weimar Germany's Hyperinflation
Now what happened there, what happened to the United States, in particular, in the year 2000, was the same thing that happened in principle, in Weimar Germany in June-July of 1923. Now, Weimar Germany, post-war Germany, was being looted under the Versailles agreements. Assets were being stripped out of Germany to feed the French and the British. And the British and French owed us a great deal of money, to the United States, were paying the United States. So the system was, the United States was the creditor of the world; the British and the French were living by looting the Germans. So the German economy was being stripped, asset-stripped.
So. what the German government did, was to print money, reichsmarks, to generate a flow of cash, which was then used to pay off the British and the French, from 1921 on. There was no significant inflation, in Germany until late Spring and Summer of 1923. At that point, what happened was, that the amount of money that had to be printed to roll over existing financial assets, was greater than the amount of financial assets rolled over. The result of that was, under conditions in Germany at that time, a hyperinflation which wiped out the existence of the Reichsmark in that form by October-November of that year.
What happened to us in the Summer of 2000, was essentially something similar. The amount of monetary aggregate which Alan Greenspan—and what he's able to extract from abroad—is able to generate, to keep the stock market and other markets from collapsing, is greater than the amount of financial assets they're supporting. That's why you see the kind of stock-market behavior you're seeing in the U.S. stock markets. The stock market collapsed; they had to accept maintaining the financial values of the stock market at a lower level, so the value of market indices dropped, as a reflection of the inability of the U.S. system to continue to pump money into the system at that rate—but they're still doing it.
Where they pumped the money, was into something which many of you know about. The phenomenon of cashing out. The way the economy is being sustained, apparently, today, is that mortgages are being artificially pumped up, through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and so forth—with the Federal Reserve System. The bankers who take mortgages are able to bundle these mortgages and dump them on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example. The bankers thus have the cash turned loose, they turn around and with the payments they receive, on their deposit of these bundled mortgages with banks, the banks now issue more credit. Then the real estate operators in that area—as in the Northern Virginia area, around the Washington Beltway, for example—the real estate dealers will get together with the bankers, and they'll pull an operation. They will then front an operation which boosts the indicated sale price of real estate.
Now the people who are already mortgaged, as the mortgagees, they now go to the bank and they cash out. They write the mortgage up, to reflect the new value which the realtors establish for these properties. They then take the case, and they spend that for food, clothing, and whatnot—and for their credit card debt. And that is what this economy is based on.
If you look outside Washington, D.C., the Beltway in particular, what you will see is exactly this phenomenon. You see shacks, which are Hollywood set-style tarpaper shacks, built with a few sticks, some shrink-wrap, some plastic exterior, and some gold fixtures inside the place; these things are going for up to $500,000 to $1 million, apiece. They're nothing but shacks, sitting on top of a hillside, or on a plot. They're disgusting, their rear ends are sticking out on the highway, they're mooning you—they're junk, and people are living in them, and the person who's now, who's mortgaged, the person is now an instrument for creating the illusion of a flow of payments into the banks for the mortgages, and this illusion is now the basic value of the understructure of financial values in the United States. And it's about to pop. So, that's what happened then.
All right, now, the third one (Figure 3): These figures are '96 to 2001 figures, and these are figures that correspond essentially to what I'm talking about. The manufacturing employment collapse, which is a reflection of this; you have corporate profits fluctuating, you have the debt growth—look at the rate of growth of debt, and look at the rate of increase here of money supply, relative to growth of debt. So what you have, is an economy which is not producing wealth, is producing debt. Debt is being used as wealth, and the way it's being done is by pumping money, including money from Japan, from the Japanese yen and so forth. And that's how the economy is functioning.
Increasing the Kill Ratio
All right. Now this is one characteristic of the system. There's another characteristic. In Germany, recently, in the city of Erfurt, which is in the eastern part of Germany, there was a killing which involved 19 victims, two students and 17 teachers, in a school, from a fellow who came in with a pump gun and pistol, and killed these people. Like Columbine—one guy. Like Columbine.
Now, the Germans did a better job, a more honest job, than we've done in the United States, because Hollywood and Joe Lieberman will not tell you the full truth about what's going on inside the United States. Because Hollywood makes a lot of money out of people dying through things like Columbine. And Joe is very close to Hollywood. That's where his money comes from.
It's a problem, a part of the same thing: Years ago, back in the Korean War period, people like those who admired Sam Huntington up at Harvard, The Soldier and the State, complained about the kill ratio in World War II and in the Korean War. That the American soldiers were not firing their guns often enough, and they weren't killing enough people. And therefore, they decided to develop a program, a psychological program, to condition U.S. forces to kill more people, more rapidly, without thinking about it.
As an outgrowth of this, particularly in the course of the Vietnam business, the Indochina War, that was intermediate, the United States began to experiment more extensively with increasing the kill potential, not only of soldiers, and policemen, but also ordinary teenagers. So what you have, you have in the Nintendo games, for example, and related types of games, these games are intended to condition young people to become stone, mass killers.
Now in the case of Germany, they investigated this case, and other cases, and the police reports in the recent two weeks, have covered a lot of this: how he was trained; where he was trained; how it worked; how it was set up. And the fact that in Germany, which has about one-third the population of the United States, there are listed by these agencies, 170,000 young people who are potential killers of the same type.
Guess how many we have in the United States?
Now, look at it. What are we looking at? We're looking at Nintendo games; we're looking at Hollywood-produced entertainment, which has the same essential content. We're having the sexual entertainment of Hollywood, essentially the same content. We know this is going on. We have police departments that are being trained on that basis. We have these wild shootings by policemen, who've been trained to respond in this way—one of the great problems in urban areas. We have kids: a young kid picks up a pistol, never used one before in his life, turned into a stone killer. A marksman. Never fired a pistol before in his life. Picked one up and became a stone killer, one of these types.
Is this a national security risk? Is this a concern? Should we be aware of this? Should we be aware of what Hollywood represents, of what it's doing to us? Should we also be aware of something else: How many Americans know this is going on? How many American parents know their teenage and younger children are addicts of Pokémon or Nintendo games or similar games, which produce the same effect? What's their attitude about it? What's their attitude about Harry Potter? This British production, which induces people to believe that they can solve problems by exerting arbitrary, magical powers to bring about the destruction of people who offend them.
What about the Tolkien cult, the "Lord of the Rings" cult, which is a milder form, but the same thing? How many parents know this? You have people talking about pornography on television. Well, that's something. But what about this? Mass killing, and training your child to be, to kill you? You get two kids sitting out there in the room saying, "Let's go in and burn Mommy and Daddy tonight." This is the kind of culture we're creating. And thus, this kind of culture then reflects itself in what? It reflects itself in our military policy overseas, which is insane.
The Warsaw Ghetto and Palestine
Now, let's look at what happened in the Middle East. Let's start with Warsaw, Warsaw 1943. Let's see what Sharon is actually doing, look at what we're up against. This is the title page of a report which is produced by a Nazi general of police, Jürgen Stroop (Figure 4). Jürgen Stroop was assigned by the Nazis, by Himmler, to go into Warsaw and clean up something which in 1943, the Germans, Nazis, wanted to clean up. Remember, the Nazis had taken those Jews they hadn't killed otherwise, in Poland, and they herded a great number of them as cheap labor, into Warsaw, into the Warsaw Ghetto. As a matter of fact, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were often chiefly occupied in producing things for the German military. In the Warsaw Ghetto, some people in the Warsaw Ghetto, decided to resist. And with a few carbines and pistols and ingenuity, they staged an effective resistance. At that point, the Nazis said: "How do we clean this thing out?"
And Stroop came up with a policy for eradicating the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto, and killing all the inmates immediately, or sending them off to camps where they died soon after.
Then he sent a message to Hitler, "The Warsaw Ghetto is no more." And he published this report.
This is the Stroop report. This is what the Stroop report represents. Again, same thing. Warsaw. 1943. Jewish victims about to be killed. Sent off to concentration camps to die. 1943; Stroop report. Nazi. So forth and so on.
Now let's look at Palestine today. Think of the Stroop report. Palestine today. What's the difference? What's the difference? It has the same purpose, is to get rid—it's called the settlements policy, or the Eretz Israel policy of the Likud, which is the fascist movement in Israel. The idea was to make Warsaw Judenfrei—free of Jews. Now, it's to make the West Bank free of Arabs, of Palestinians.
So a few people resist, among the Palestinians. The tanks march in. The killing goes on. There's no difference. Moreover, as Ha'aretz reported, the way in which this operation was designed, which was done under Sharon's direction, designed by the Israeli Defense Forces command, was modelled on a study of the Stroop report. To study the problem which the Nazis faced in dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto, and to say: We have the same kind of problem here, in Israel today. We're gonna clean 'em out. The same kind of process.
And when the President of the United States refers to Sharon as a man of peace, I'm sure that Sharon feels insulted.
But the point is: Why, then, does the United States support this? It's not because there's a Zionist Lobby. As a matter of fact, you have some of the worst anti-Semites in the United States, are the so-called pro-Armageddon Christian fundamentalists. They're anti-Semitic. Anyone who comes from the southern part of the United States knows that. These guys were, these are the real anti-Semites in the United States. These are the real Nazis. They think like fascists, anyway. You think these guys like Jews? No! They don't care about Jews. They don't care about that. What they care about is their policy. They're saying, look, if you can get the Rapture next week, I don't have to pay my rent next month! I mean, it's that bad.
So, we have created a society of madmen in these so-called "thunder cults," these thunder religious cults inside the United States. They're crazy. Psychotic, in effect. Not in the real world. They have become a significant political force behind people like Pat Robertson in Virginia, for example. They're dangerous. This is the constituency, the constituency of hate, the Ku Klux Klan constituency. They have to have somebody to hate, somebody to kill. And they say, "Them A-rabs—look like black people to me." They do, don't they?
Look, I'm an old man. I've been around this country for a long time. I know what goes on in this country. I was training troops in the Army back during World War II. I know what we were sweeping in from southern parts of the United States. I know what they said. I had to deal with them. We've got that—that rot is deep in our country. And it's come forth. And it's used as a weapon. The purpose is to do what they're doing. You think these Nintendo games are some accident that crept up on us because of Hollywood? Yeah, Hollywood is doing it, doing that kind of thing—. No, this was done by the U.S. military. It was done intentionally, to do what? To create among our youth, stone killers who can be recruited to be sent in various parts of the world, and do there, exactly what the Israelis are doing there.
No, it is not the Israelis who control the Zionist Lobby, who control the United States. It is an Anglo-American faction of this type, which has an instrument inside Israel, called the right-wing Likud, typified by Netanyahu, who's more dangerous than Sharon is. These guys are the killers who are doing the work of the Anglo-American Roman Legion mentality in the Middle East.
What do these guys want? Well, Israel can not continue this operation. It will lose, if it continues this operation, for military reasons, which are well understood in some circles in Israel. Matter of fact, Rabin, the former Prime Minister, understood this very clearly. Israel cannot continue to do the kind of thing that Sharon represents, and Netanyahu represents, and survive. How then can Israel survive? Well, they really don't care. There's a Masada complex among some of these nuts. They'd rather go over the cliff, than be defeated.
Iraq and the Clash of Civilizations
But the key thing is Iraq. The key purpose behind this operation is to use this, to get a wider war going, to get the Clash of Civilizations war that Sam Huntington, Brzezinski and company want. So what you have here is a combination. The training and recruiting of large numbers of otherwise useless youth, psychotic youth or quasi-psychotic youth, by Nintendo games designed by the U.S. military, put into general circulation through the military, with cooperation of Japan's production of Nintendo games and so forth.
We are now taking from our population, our youth, our adolescent and other youth, we're turning a large portion of them into potential intended killers, who are trained killers, trained on their videogames, who then simply have to go out and get trained with actual weapons and do what they've been trained to do on videogames. Recruit them as soldiers and send them in various parts of the world, as part of a Clash of Civilizations war. Put the two things together, and you have the new Roman Legions, the new Waffen-SS, to send around the world.
So what we're suffering, our corruption, is a result of our policy, which many people in our country in high places know, but they haven't got the guts to say. And therefore, we come to the position that I have to say it, because there's nobody else. In almost any significant circle in Europe or the United States, you drop my name in a meeting and you're going to have a freakout. The place is going to go wild. Just say the name LaRouche; the whole place will go wild. So actually, that my impact inside the United States and also in Europe, and other places is rather large, especially so in the United States. So when I speak, people listen. They may not like it, but they listen. So I use the voice I have, and the influence I have, to try to force people to face the truth about the situation.
Now, how is peace possible? Implicitly, it should be obvious. We have the power in the United States—and Europe is prepared to join the United States in such an effort, I can assure you; most of Europe—Italy, most of Germany, so forth—are willing to support the United States in such an effort: to say that we are going to bring an economic basis for durability of peace in the Middle East. That we're going to do what was proposed earlier—two states, equally sovereign, side by side, living together in peace.
Why? Because, first of all, you've got to provide the water so that they can all have something to drink, something to live, and there isn't enough water. Some of the big impetus for war in the Middle East comes from a shortage of water in the aquifers. We're capable of generating large-scale, efficient desalination programs which can produce water economically, for drinking and other human purposes. We can overcome the water crisis of the Middle East. The Middle East is, because of its position, as a point of traffic of Africa, through Eurasia, a crucial point of transport from the Mediterranean into the Indian Ocean; is an ideal place for the development of industries which are on the line of transportation. You can take the Sinai, you could take whole parts of the Middle East, and you could develop them as areas of industrial and related development. Very relevant, to the relationship not only to Africa, in general, but the relationship of Europe as a producer of high-technology goods, into areas of Asia which desperately need infusions of high-technology goods.
So there is no basis, in either the interests of the people involved, or in the interests of Europe, or the United States, or Asia, to have this war go on. The purpose of justified war was to produce peace, was to bring about a state in which the person you fought against, would accept you, to live with you in peace because they saw the reason to do so. Because you gave them a reason to do so.
The purpose of war is not to kill; not justified war. The purpose is to bring about peace in the quickest possible way, for the most people. You want to bring about peace? We have the power to bring about peace in the Middle East, because we have not only the capability ourselves, but we have friends in Europe and elsewhere who would enthusiastically join with us in any program of reconstruction of the entire Middle East region.
Now, we don't have much as a President of the United States, but the man is President, and therefore, why don't we work on the problem of trying to create around him an environment where it is communicated to him, that the United States does have an interest—he may not fully understand it, but make it clear to him what that interest is—the way it was clear, in a sense, to Eisenhower, the way it was clear to Johnson, in terms of the civil rights legislation. That something has to be done, because it's in the interests of the United States. Tell him not to be afraid of the so-called Zionist Lobby in the United States. We'll take care of that for him. Do the job, and give him some good advisers, so that you say to him—how do you motivate a guy like George Bush? There's only one way to reach a fellow with his limitations, and that is to say: "You've got a job here, it's an important job."
He says, "Yes, it is an important job."
"Well, do you want to be a success?"
"Yes."
"Do you want to be remembered in future generations as having been a great President?"
"Yes."
"Okay, you agree to that, we'll make you one".
And that's what we have to do.
Thank you.
