Time for Mankind To
Come Out of Childhood
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
This speech was given in Rome on April 10, 2003, on the occasion of the public release of a book by Italian economist Dr. Nino Galloni, Present at the Events. Subheads have been added.
To take the basic theme of Nino's book, and put it in the present global situation, we have presently two major crises facing all mankind: First, we are in the terminal phase of an economic collapse of the present world monetary-financial system; and the second problem is, we have, in my own country, a group of fascists, who are in control of a very limited President, who are determined to have world empire and world conquest, and are now engaged in launching world war. The two crises are related in the same way, that the crisis of the 1930s was related to the coming to power of Adolf Hitler. And therefore, while peace movements are useful politically, they will not stop war.
Remember, this war is organized by a tiny minority inside the United States, a dirty tiny minority. They are opposed by the leading generals of the Army and Marine Corps, with some of whom I've been in communication. It's opposed by the leading diplomats in the United States. Unfortunately, to stop the war, you have to pull the strings of power, to prevent these people, who presently control these strings, from carrying out the war. And, it's an often-overlooked principle of statecraft: Someone must have the will, to stop war, who's in a position of power to stop it. But also, it means the conditions to stop the war, because the continuation of the collapse of the world economy, will mean were inevitable, in any case.
Eurasian Development
So, let's look at Nino Galloni's book, in terms of the Eurasian aspect, of the conditions for stopping the war-drive, in Eurasia, as such. Now, Western Europe is now hopelessly bankrupt. The level of production will not maintain society at its present standard of living. On the other side of Eurasia, we have China, India, and other countries, which are the largest part of the world's population. China is growing. China will grow. If we can stop the danger of war with North Korea, we have a North Asian group of Japan, Korea, and part of Russia, which are key to this recovery. The ASEAN+3 group, which includes Southeast Asia, is engaged now in large-scale Mekong development project, for the whole region. We saw with the recent visit of Germany's Chancellor Schröder to Shanghai, the policy of technology transfer between Germany and China, was a key part of this discussion. We're trying to find a way to have peace in the Koreas, to unify them, at least in practice. It's a difficult problem, but I believe it can be solved, which is made worse by the Iraq War, which put the North Koreans into a stubborn mood. We're discussing these matters with our friends in India.
We have, now, therefore a China-India-Russia complex of cooperation, which is growing organically. Therefore, Western Europe can recover, economically, through large-scale trade with China, India, Southeast Asia, and so forth, through Russia. The potential is gigantic.
But the key, then, comes back to the question of this book: The largest concentration of so-called "natural" mineral resources in Eurasia, is in North and Central Asia—the largely arid region of Central Asia and the tundra region in the north of Asia. Central Asia is dry; great rivers flow into the Arctic Ocean. Here, from these natural resources, come the future of the population, the growing population of Asia—East Asia and South Asia.
So, to take a different view of this matter, take the work of the great Vladimir Vernadsky, who, from the standpoint of experimental physical chemistry, defined the universe as composed of three elements: Those universal principles, which are abiotic; those physical principles, which occur only as an effect of life; those changes in the Biosphere, which are the effect of man's mind. The challenge is, therefore, in order to have a long-term, 25- to 50-year prospect for peace and security in Asia, and Eurasia, we must manage the Biosphere and Noösphere, for man. We must have a sense of unlimited frontiers for human development through scientific progress.
We must couple this, with correcting a great injustice on this planet. We've discussed Italy in terms of the Mezzogiorno. We have large areas of populations, which are deprived of the rightful conditions of life, in the desperately poor populations of India, for example. So, the question of social justice and the question of economic development can not be separated. Our job is to create the conditions of development, under which the goals of human justice can be fulfilled, and, this must be planet-wide. But Eurasia is the largest single component.
We must stop treating man as an animal, who has limited technological capabilities. Man is not an animal. Man has a creative power of discovery of universal physical principles, which no animal has. If man were an animal, he would be a great ape, and there would be about, never more than several million such great apes living on this planet. We have over 6 billion people living on this planet today. Man is not an ape!
Therefore, we must provide the conditions, which put the emphasis on the nature of man. Man in the image of the Creator. Man developing his powers of reason, to make and implement the discoveries, which meet the goals of human requirements. We must, as Nino Galloni, does, take the blinders off our eyes, and see what man can do. We don't have limited resources; we have too many limited mentalities. If we want to find our identity, our immortality, in the brief life we have, we must use our life to give a gift to future generations, so they can live better, and more secure, than we. It's time for mankind to come out of childhood, and grow up. My view, that only a vision of what we can do with this planet, for human beings, will give us the power to ensure that no future world war occurs.
Thank you.
Environmentalism and the
New Bretton Woods
In reply to a question:
I don't agree with the Stockholm Resolution, on scientific grounds. I believe that the arguments that were made, were scientifically incompetent, just as the global warming doctrine is incompetent. If you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, by a modest amount, the plants will be very happy. You will have richer harvests. And it will not adversely affect normal people, who do not have lung impairments.
These ideas, that there are limits to growth, inherent in nature, have never been scientifically proven. The problem is, is we have a social-political problem.
Now, with New Bretton Woods, the difference is this: We have a system now, which is doomed. Either the human race leaves this planet, or the present monetary-financial system leaves this planet—one of the two. The total amount of debt, in the world system, is such, that could never be paid. The level of government expenditure required to maintain society in decent condition today, exceeds the revenues that government can acquire. The system is bankrupt. If we don't stop the bankruptcy, we will kill the people.
Now, the solution is obvious: The obvious solution is, the nation-state, which is the representative of the people as a whole, must put the system into bankruptcy. There also must be cooperation among sovereign nation-states, not just by one at a time. The last successful attempt of this type, was 1944, at Bretton Woods. It worked for the development of continental Europe and other parts of the world, up until about the beginning of the '70s.
Two things produced the bankruptcy: Beginning about 1964, in the United States and Great Britain—the United Kingdom—there was an ideologically motivated shift away from a production society, to a consumer society, which was associated with the spread of the ideology, of the so-called "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture." So, we destroyed the conception of society, in which people produced, in the United States, and in the United Kingdom. Continental Europe continued to progress, however, into the 1970s, while the United States and the United Kingdom were already in physical collapse. So, the United States and United Kingdom prospered by sucking the blood of the rest of the world, through their heart.
Then, we had the 1971 change of the monetary system, the floating exchange-rate system. That system is now totally bankrupt.
So, the point is, governments must now intervene, to set up, to put the thing into bankruptcy reorganization. We have two models for this: We have the model of Franklin Roosevelt in the United States, from 1933 on. How do we reorganize a bankrupt economy? The second one we have, is the post-war reconstruction coming out of Bretton Woods. So, we're going to have to do the same thing then, that we did between 1946 and 1958 in Europe. Those rules—they were changed afterward, but they still worked somewhat—but, 1958 was the end of the first, initial phase of rules.
So, New Bretton Woods has two meanings: One, is its practical meaning, because it's the only experience in recent generations' history that would work today. The second is political: You can not introduce sudden, vast changes in society, unless you have a precedent that the people in society can understand. The argument is: What we had from 1946 into the 1960s worked; what we had since 1971, has proven to be a catastrophe. Go back to what worked, and start there. Of course, there will be differences, but the principle is the same.
