`I Stand at the Bedside
of a Doomed Empire'
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Here is LaRouche's keynote speech to the Presidents' Day Conference of the International Caucus of Labor Committees and the Schiller Institute, on Feb. 14, 2004. Audio and video archives are also available.
This is, as I have promised, a truly momentous occasion. It's a historic occasion, more than historic. Because, we're looking at not only the collapse of an empire, which came into being about 250 years ago, between 1755 and 1763, when the British victory over the French, in particular, established the British East India Company as an empire, casting itself in the image of the Roman Empire, an empire which was constituted by a group of banking interests, essentially of Venetian origin. The British Empire, as it then existed, was led by a man who had not quite reached his 30th birthday, known as the Marquess of Lansdowne, later, and also more notorious as Lord Shelburne. This man set forth two operations, part of the same thing, in place, which have governed the direction of world history—as world history—from that time to the present day. The first intent of Shelburne was to destroy the English-speaking colonies of North America. And he assigned a number of people, including Adam Smith, as agents, to conduct that policy.
This was a policy which led to the American Revolution, and led to the establishment of the greatest threat, which the British Empire has faced, to the present day: The American Revolution, and the establishment in 1789, of the Federal Constitution of the United States. The greatest single threat to the empire, on this planet, over the entire past quarter-century has been that process, which created the United States.
At the same time, Shelburne and Co., through agents including Adam Smith, most notably Jeremy Bentham, and others, organized in France, around some of the followers of Voltaire, organized a cult, a freemasonic cult called the Martinists. This Martinist cult, which included assets of Shelburne, such as Jacques Necker of Lausanne, Switzerland, Philippe Égalité, and others, set into motion on July 14, 1789, the Bastille event, which was intended to bring the danger of the spread of the influence of the United States to an end worldwide. Because, at that moment, you had had the attempt by Bailly and by Lafayette, to introduce a reform in France, which would have established a constitutional monarchy, which would have steered that monarchy along economic-development lines, akin to those policies adopted by the United States, with its Constitution.
So again, this is the way history has gone. The two English-speaking foci of the current of world history, the United States, which represented the best currents in Europe—typified by the Classical humanists and the influence of Leibniz; typified by the tradition of the Treaty of Westphalia; typified by the legacy of the 15th-Century Renaissance: These were the great English-speaking forces in the world, which were assembled for a collision, which is now coming to a point of historic decision, in the weeks and months immediately ahead of us.
One way or the other, this is the end of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model of parliamentary government, and its influence in the United States—either for better, or for very much worse.
Now, it should be recalled, that the Martinists, who were used by Shelburne, and run largely, directly out of London by Bentham, as the head of the secret committee of the British Foreign Office, which had been created by Shelburne: They ran the French Revolution. They ran the affair with the Bastille. They ran the Jacobin Terror. Danton and Marat were British agents, trained in London, deployed from London, and delivering speeches in France, written in London, under the direction of Bentham. The Jacobin Terror was run from London. Napoleon was a creation of the Martinist freemasonic lodge, the Napoleonic Empire. And then, when the time came, that Napoleon and his empire had essentially destroyed much of Europe, then the British said, "Okay, get rid of Napoleon." It was done by Germans, actually.
And they set up the Vienna Congress—which was a sexual Congress of Vienna, where countesses and others diverted the count-heads of state for the British, and Castlereagh and Castlereagh's stooge in Austria, ran what became the Vienna Congress.
And in good time, as the British had planned well, that Metternich disappeared, over the period from 1830-1832 to 1848. It was an operation run by Bentham's successor, Lord Palmerston, who ran Giuseppe Mazzini, the head of Young Europe, an organization which included Karl Marx. The entire operation of the Revolution of 1848, was run by British intelligence, for the purposes of finishing off the power of the Habsburgs, and making them a subordinate agent, within a British-controlled empire.
We were almost crushed, repeatedly. The intention of Britain was to destroy us. This was the perpetual policy, of the British toward the United States, and the policy of the key traitors within the United States: Such as Gallatin, such as Aaron Burr, such as the leadership of many of the political parties. The controllers of agents, such as Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, who were agents of the enemy, determined to destroy us.
In the process, the American patriotic tradition had a resurgence: around the tradition of Lafayette, around the personality of John Quincy Adams, and with a very significant recruit by John Quincy Adams to his cause, the Whig, Abraham Lincoln, who was Quincy Adams' voice, in the Congress in denouncing the Polk Presidency for the war against Mexico, of that period. And that President Lincoln, later, led the United States to return to itself, as a nation. And we emerged from that Civil War, as the greatest single nation- state power on this planet, in terms of economics. The British had more power, as an empire. But, we were the most powerful state, the greatest economy, the most progressive economy, in the world, by 1876.
This was the work of Lincoln's revolution: We had become ourselves. But, meanwhile, the Anglo-Dutch Liberals were already at work, subverting us, with Andrew Johnson, who was a disaster, and others.
And so, we went through these processes. At the beginning of the century, we were destroyed by the assassination of a President, McKinley. An assassination run by the same interests, for the purpose of putting Teddy Roosevelt in the Presidency. Teddy Roosevelt was a member of the Confederacy tradition: His uncle, who trained him, who steered him, who crafted his career, Bullock, was the chief of intelligence of the Confederacy, who operated from London during the period of the Civil War.
The real successor of Teddy Roosevelt—who destroyed the American System, in the name of "trust-busting"! He destroyed the American System, in order to create hegemony for New York-based, British and other bankers, for their system. In other words, he transferred the power, from industry and agriculture, to the financiers. He was succeeded, by a passionate advocate for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan: Woodrow Wilson. And Woodrow Wilson launched the mass mobilization and revival of the Ku Klux Klan, in the United States, during his Presidency, from the White House, publicly and personally.
So, this was the corruption which grabbed us, from the time of the McKinley assassination, until Franklin Roosevelt. And Franklin Roosevelt, despite his own party, became President. His party did everything possible—the Democratic Party—to prevent him from becoming the Democratic nominee! And, it was also the same filthy bankers, of the Teddy Roosevelt/Woodrow Wilson tradition who did it.
But, Franklin Roosevelt saved the United States, in a unique way, by his leadership. But then, he died. And even before he died, we were in trouble.
The history of this process in the 20th Century is quite interesting. The British policy, that is, the policy of the British East India Company, and its followers, had always been to use war on the continent of Europe, as a way of putting the nations of the continental Europe against each other's throat, in such a fashion, there would never be a threat of a challenge to British supremacy, from the continent. This was a characteristic of the 19th Century. It was also the continuing characteristic, deep into the 20th Century.
So, time came, at the end of the so-called First World War, which had been concocted by the British, especially by a man who had been dead—Edward VII, the man who created the Federal Reserve System in the United States through his agents here, including Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The British had decided at the end of World War I, to close in, and create a new kind of world empire. The empire was the empire of fascism: It was the empire of the Synarchist International, which we knew as fascism from 1922 through 1945. The forces behind this fascism, were bankers, including Lazard Frères, France; and others. These bankers conspired to install fascism on the continent of Europe.
Some of these fascists went further, around Hitler. They conceived of creating a world empire, along the following lines, which came to a crisis point in 1940, when the remains of the British Expeditionary Force were sitting on the sands at Dunkirk, waiting for Hitler's tanks to pounce, and finish them off. Hitler held back his tanks, at that time—very momentous. Because, Hitler thought that the British Establishment was going to join the Nazis in a program of world conquest, whose included target included the destruction of the United States. Here was the plan. Now, this is Churchill, as Defense Minister of Britain, sitting in opposition to these fascists, not because he wasn't a fascist; but because he didn't think it was in British interests to play this game. Or, British imperial interests.
The fascist plan, including people in London of very high rank, some of whom were never prosecuted for what they did, conceived of taking the British Navy, the German Navy, the French Navy, the Italian Navy, and the Japanese Navy, as one force, which, once the Soviet Union had been quickly destroyed by this alliance, would then turn on the United States and destroy the power of the United States. The reason that didn't happen, is that the British Navy did not join the Nazis at that point, that Hitler was sitting there poised, ready to receive them with open arms, as part of his alliance—which is why he didn't crush the British Expeditionary Force, when he could, at Dunkirk.
Churchill said, "No, we will not let someone from the continent of Europe, even if we like his nastiness, such as Hitler, to take over control of the British Empah! And therefore, we will even degrade ourselves, to go to our so-called 'American cousins'—even to one we hate the most, Franklin Roosevelt—and seek his cooperation in defeating the Nazis." So, a German official, Canaris, who was not exactly a Hitler man, prevailed upon Francisco Franco—another nasty fascist, in the tradition of the Inquisition—not to occupy Gibraltar: Because, had the alliance gone through, and had Gibraltar been occupied by the Nazis (i.e., Franco), then the Mediterranean would have been a closed lake, controlled by this alliance. Under those conditions, the existence of civilization would have been in jeopardy. Canaris prevailed upon, and frightened Franco, into refusing Hitler's demand that he seize Gibraltar.
So, this combination of decisions: Churchill says, the British fleet will go to Canada, if England is invaded, and will ally with the United States. This decision did not prevent the war. But it ended the possibility of Hitler's world conquest. Therefore, in 1944, once the Allied forces, led by the United States, had made the breakthrough in Normandy, and the Wehrmacht position on the continent of Europe was in terminal jeopardy—and was saved only because the British intelligence services informed the Nazis of the plot for peace, and they hanged the generals, in 1944.
At that point, there was turn in U.S. policy: That those bankers, who had been for Hitler, like Harriman, Morgan, Mellon, DuPont—the same types of bankers who had conspired to assassinate the President of the United States in 1933-34, in the thing that was testified before the Congress on the Generals' Plot—these guys went back to their old ways. Their policies were, at that point: Take a right turn; go to a utopian policy; use weapons of mass destruction, including the nuclear weapon which the United States was developing in experimental mode, at the time; and air power, to conduct a new kind of warfare. And to use a war against the Soviet Union, or with the Soviet Union, as the pretext for this policy. In other words, going back to the same Nazi policy that Hitler and Co., and his allies in France and Italy and so forth, had had up to June 1940: Go for a war against the Soviet Union, as the way of putting this policy into place.
We had, in the United States, we had a reign of terror in the United States which reached a peak in about 1947. Later, it became known as McCarthyism. McCarthy was a joke—Joe McCarthy. Truman was the problem. But, not all of our people in this country were fools. There was the plan already, which I, sort of, was party to, in a, sense in 1947: To have Eisenhower run for the Democratic nomination, and get Truman out of there. The only way to save the United States. Eisenhower turned it down, but did run for President later.
Then, Truman got us into a Korean War, through his own stupidity, his own recklessness, his own fascist qualities. Some people may not like that, but that's what he was, don't kid yourself. He's a bankers' man.
And the Korean War became a mess. And, about the same time, it was discovered that the Soviet Union had developed priority in a thermonuclear, deployable, weapon.
Preventive nuclear warfare, using air power, went off the agenda. Truman was told not to run again. Eisenhower was put in place. The Korea mess was put into, not deep freeze, but was put into some kind of management. And we stumbled through two Presidencies fairly well.
But then, when Eisenhower left office, warning against the danger, not in a clear way, but in a frank way—some honest details—warning against what he called "the military-industrial complex," the military-industrial complex was nothing other than the Bertrand Russell policy, the Winston Churchill policy, the policy of what we call the "Utopians" in the United States, of using nuclear weapons and air power, as a way of terrorizing the world into submitting to world government: a new form of empire; an echo of the Roman Empire; a continuation in a new form, of the British Empire.
That's what he was warning against, when he said "military-industrial complex." It was not a "military-industrial complex," it was actually a commitment, by the same crowd whose policies are expressed by Cheney, today, for world government, through nuclear terror. We have lived under different, various faces of nuclear terror, since the close of the war. It was for this reason, that Truman dropped two totally unnecessary nuclear weapons on Japan, on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The last two weapons of the type we had—they were experimental prototypes. It took some time, before we got online, producing nuclear weapons in a line sense. So, we went first. Truman's policy was the policy of preventive nuclear warfare! The policy designed by Bertrand Russell, the man who's considered a pacifist. I guess killing everybody makes you a pacifist: Nobody shoots back.
That was the policy—until the Soviet development of a deployable, thermonuclear instrument was known. At that point, Bertrand Russell opened negotiations with Stalin's successor, Khrushchov. This was done in London. And, what happened was, that Khrushchov and Russell agreed on negotiating a system, a so-called permanent system of world rule, based on what we later called "Mutual and Assured Destruction."
Now, once Eisenhower was out of office, having made his warning speech, the right-wing surged forward, in the form of Allen Dulles's caper, the Bay of Pigs. It surged forward, in the realization of the plan which Khrushchov and Russell, among others, had concocted, in the form of the 1962 Missile Crisis. And after the Kennedy assassination, which cleared the way for launching the Indo-China War, we underwent a great change, which leads to the immediate subject we have to consider now, in these weeks: We have to decide, as a nation, as nations, whether civilization will survive on this planet. That decision will be made, in the course of the coming weeks! And I shall indicate what the problem is. But first, get the situation.
What happened was, that we, in the United States, underwent a transformation in our national character, which has threatened us with doom, today. The danger comes, not from someone outside our skins. It comes from our own people. It comes from those who are large 60 years of age, or slightly younger: the so-called Baby-Boomer generation, which occupies the key positions in government, business, and other institutions of the United States, today. This is the source of the danger. Not someone from the outside, but a generation from the inside, which did what? They underwent a cultural paradigm-shift, as it's called, typified by the rock-drug-sex counterculture, during the middle of the 1960s. This was the result of the cumulative effect on their parents' generation—that is, my generation—and on themselves.
Remember, their parents' generation had gone through what? We had gone through a nightmare, the Coolidge-Hoover-Mellon nightmare. We were being destroyed as a nation: I can tell you, from my memory of the 1920s, we were disgusting! And then, we were hit by the Depression. And we became sheepish, frightened, worried.
Roosevelt appealed to the "forgotten man," in a campaign speech delivered in West Virginia. This aroused the nation. He was able to defeat the Democratic Party, and become the Presidential nominee. The nation was inspired, with the idea that recovery, that hope was possible.
People had been ground down, already. Their character, our character, changed in the beginning of the 20th Century. Look at the literature. Look at what was considered popular entertainment. Look at the popular culture, at the beginning of the 20th Century: It was disgusting! This is the period of Jim Crow! It was disgusting! We were a disgusting people, in our behavior. We were humiliated, like the hand of God had humiliated us! We were thrown into a Depression. [affecting "dumbo voice"] "I guess we weren't so good, huh? We must'a made some mistakes, huh?"
But, not only were we humiliating, in our illusions, in our delusions: We were also given hope. We were given a chance, the reality of a recovery that this, too, shall pass. We were inspired. And this degree of inspiration continued in the American forces, in the United States and overseas, for example—the military forces—up until about the time the two bombs had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Things were going bad already. But, this little man—this Truman—. There was an incident I had, when I was in service in India, when I was on my way into northern Burma. And, some GIs came to me— Roosevelt had just died; the announcement had just come through—they said, "We want to talk to you." (This was during the daytime.) "Can we meet tonight?" So, we had one of these improvised meetings at night, with a bunch of GIs and me. And the question was: What does the death of Roosevelt mean for us? My answer was simple. I said, "I don't know. But, I'm terribly worried, that such a great President should be replaced, in such a time as this, by this terribly, little man." And I was right.
The right-wing took over. I saw people, who had been battle-hardened, who I though I had understood; and within a year or so, after returning from military service into civilian life, I saw people who had been turned into stinking cowards. This was my generation. This was 95% of my generation. It was later called "McCarthyism." It was actually better called "Trumanism," because it was done under Truman. And it was done under the Harriman crowd, the same Harriman crowd, who had been part of the forces that had put Hitler into power in Germany in the first place! The right-wing had taken over America.
There was a reaction, a reaction against the Korean War. The Eisenhower reaction. There was a feeble attempt, around President Kennedy, to go back in the direction that we had been in, under Roosevelt. That was crushed. Young people, whose parents had become prostitutes—i.e., my generation: "Don't say anything, don't do anything, don't think anything, that might get our family into trouble. Think of your father's job! Don't say anything. Don't associate with anybody who might get you in trouble, and jeopardize your father's job! Or cause you to be ostracized in your school, by a whispering campaign." Everybody was afraid of the FBI. The great scarecrow of America.
The children were raised: [whispering] "Be careful!"
"Be bold! Be optimistic! Be bright! Be shiny! Be acceptable! Learn to 'go along to get along!'"
"Go with the crowd. Go with the flow."
And the flow was civil rights. The flow was similar things. And these young people went along with it. They played a significant role in this. But then, they were hit by the hammer: The hammer of the Missile Crisis—where people were going into bars, looking for God. Atheists were suddenly jumping into a bear-keg—"I found God!" And, for several days, that was the characteristic of this country. I was there; I remember; I saw it! Don't tell me it didn't happen, I was there. I was a witness to it.
I saw most of entire generations go insane! My generation is, again, insane: Fear! Crumbled before the idea of an Indo-China War—crumbled! Everything they said they had fought for—no longer!
And their children had gone worse than crazy: The rock-drug-sex counterculture. Remember where it had occurred: The rock-drug- sex counterculture, which had existed as the "Beatnik culture" of the early of 1950s, emerged where? It emerged among young people, in universities, either on state subsidies or families which could afford the tuition, at the leading Ivy League and other universities in the United States, presumably studying to master history, to master science, professions, and so forth. What are they doing? They're fleeing from their textbooks, into a night with marijuana, and red wine, mixed. A night with LSD. A night with sex with anything that crawled, and then figure out what the sex was in the morning. This was what happened! The throbbing beat, of the drum: to silence thought, to silence all thought. Wild entertainment. The Cult of Dionysius, reborn in America.
Where did it start from? It started from the so-called "cream of the crop"—the young generation, entering universities, especially leading universities, during the middle of the 1960s. They turned against technology: "Technology's bad! We've go to stop technology. We've got to go back to nature." And they took their clothes off, to prove it.
We became that. Therefore, we have undergone what is called a cultural paradigm-shift, over the past 40 years, in which the generation which entered universities in the middle of the 1960s, are the worst offenders. And the more high-ranking they are today, generally, the worse they are. Because, they represent the leading edge of a cultural trend. It's a great cultural transformation: And this is the great source of danger.
See, we've been through depressions, follies, before. But this has something different in it. We, in the United States, never before, as almost virtual an entire generation, have repudiated the culture of modern Western European civilization. And this, of course, spread in Europe the same way. It's spread in other parts of the world. We never repudiated it. We've sinned against it, we've violated it, but we didn't repudiate it! For 40 years, the generation now in leading, controlling positions of power in the United State, Europe, and elsewhere, have repudiated civilization.
We have, in the United States, gone from being, in Kennedy's time, the world's leading producer society—the greatest producer of agricultural and industrial goods, the world leader in technology: We went from being that, to becoming a relic, a caricature of Rome under the Caesars.
Especially after 1971-72. In 1971-72, what did we do? We shut down the monetary system, the fixed-exchange-rate monetary system that Roosevelt had established. The system which had given us the possibility of recovery in the post-war period. We shut it down. We went to what is called a floating-exchange-rate system.
What did we do, with this floating-exchange-rate system? We went to poor countries of the world, more and more; we said, "We will determine the value of your currency, under a floating-rate system." We sent the IMF and the World Bank to enforce it. We pushed down the value of their currencies, by speculative runs, organized on the London financial market. We then went to the government, and said, "Call in the IMF. Call in the World Bank. Get some advice." The advice was, "Drop the value of your currency."
And the frightened governments said, "All right. So, we'll pay in our—"
"No!! You don't pay in your money any more! You pay in dollars!"
"How do we do that?"
"Well, we give you a debt, an additional debt, you didn't incur. We dictate it to you. We create it, and we tell you to take it. This debt is based on the estimated difference in value between your currency before we devalued it, and afterward."
That is what the debt of South and Central American countries, today, is. There's no country in South and Central America, in general, which owes a nickel to anybody! Including Argentina. The debt is entirely artificial. [applause]
And then, what did we do? And, look at Mexico, after 1982, after what they did to Mexico in 1982, between August and October of 1982. What did they do? They destroyed the Mexican economy! What did they do then? They said, "We will use your cheap labor."
So, what we have done, as a nation, we have gone to the poorest countries of the world—or those we made poor, by decree; we told them, "You will now produce cheap goods, for us! And they're going to be cheap, buddy— even if you die doing it!"
Then, we said: Okay. We're getting our goods, not from our production. We're getting it from cheap labor, in foreign countries. Therefore, we can shut down our factories. We can go into globalization. We can let NAFTA go into effect. We now suck the blood of the world. We bring slave labor into the United States, and we call it "illegal immigrants." But, we bring it in, because we want the cheap labor. We force Mexico to supply cheap labor, even at the cost of the lives, of people who are paid so little that they can not survive, or raise a family on that income, not physically. We do the same thing throughout South America.
We conduct genocide in Africa, because, in 1974, Kissinger and others devised a policy of genocide against Sub-Saharan Africa. The policy, "This raw materials in the Africa—they belong to us-s-s! We can't let the Africans use them up. If we let their population grow, they will use them up! If we let Africans have technology, they will use them up more rapidly.
"Therefore, we have to do something about these Africans. And their voracious tendencies to survive.
"How do we do it? [sing-song] Ge-no-cide!"
And genocide is an Anglo-American-Israeli trick, in Africa. It's that simple. It's done through corporate vehicles, it's done in other ways; it's done through private armies, organized in the usual, customary way. The same way Iran-Contra was organized. That's how it's done.
So, what we've done, is we've now created a world, which is no longer self-sustaining. Europe is bankrupt. It just happens that the United States is more bankrupt. And Japan, financially, is the most bankrupt nation in the world. How'd they become bankrupt? By subsidizing the United States' dollar.
So, we now come to a world, which, in terms of Europe and the Americas, can not survive on its present levels of productivity. Our level of infrastructure collapse, in the United States today, in power generation and distribution, in mass transit, and so forth, is poorer, by a large margin, than the time when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President. We are on the verge of destruction.
And what's the enemy?
Well, what're the alternatives? As President of the United States, or if it were decided that I was going to be nominated, as President of the United States, today, the problem would be under control, as far as the international monetary-financial system exists. Because, I know, from our discussions with people in Europe, and elsewhere, that the potential—just like what happened yesterday, in Italy, in this discussion there, in the Italian Parliament: That the people in Europe, if the United States would make certain proffers, of policy, that most of the nations of continental Europe—including many of the Brits—would agree to go along with that policy: Which would be essentially, a return to the philosophical standpoint of the original Bretton Woods agreement, to put the entire present system into monetary-financial reorganization; to ensure stability, and to launch a pattern of growth on this planet.
That, in a sense, echoing what Roosevelt did, philosophically, in 1933-34, that can be done today. It requires the political will; it requires an initiative from the President of the United States, or someone who was understood as going to be a President of the United States. Under those conditions, leading nations of Europe and other parts of the world, will immediately begin to adapt to such a proposal from the United States. That, I can guarantee. My job is to deliver that. Because, I'm the only American who knows how to do it, and has the credibility around the world, to be believed, in doing that.
That's one side of the problem. But, why isn't that decision made? Why are Americans insane? Why don't Americans pick a President, whose role would ensure a solution, for a problem which is crushing the people of the United States, among others? Why are they so insane? Because we have gone—in the generation which dominates politics, which dominates life in the United States today—we have gone from being a producer society, whose standard of values is to measure things in terms of productive output, and producing for the needs of humanity, to a Roman-style pleasure society.
Look at the minds, look at the minds of the generation now in fifties and early sixties. Look at them. What are their attitudes? And what is the conflict, which has emerged, in the United States, in particular, between young people who are over 18 years of age into the twenties, and their parents' generation? Studies have been made, by political institutions of the United States, over the recent period: Several years ago, there was a change, a fundamental change, in relationships between the youth generation and their parents' generation, from a sense of tolerant friction, to one of hostility. Young people today, in Europe, as in the United States, are saying to their parents' generation, "You have given us a no-future society, in which to live! You are the enemy. Not because you're the enemy, but because, as long as you insist, successfully, on imposing this no-future society on us, we don't have a chance to live! And you won't have any children or grandchildren, to work for."
What has happened is, today, you have people who, as a result of the cultural paradigm shift, who no longer have productive values, who no longer think of what they give to humanity—they think of the pleasure, the entertainment they get, to get them through the next terrible errors, of unreality. We are a pleasure society! Look at us! Entertainment—look at us! We are a nation of gamblers, not producers. Everybody is looking for money, for nothing, by gambling.
What do people do in states? The state's got a problem: "Bring in the gamblers." The states have a problem: "Legalize dope."
We are an entertainment society, an entertainment culture, in the same way, that Rome, with its Coliseum, its Circus Maximus, with the slaughter of Romans by Romans, under Emperors like Claudius, Nero, and so forth: We have become that kind of sick culture. We have become a culture, in that generation, which has lost the moral fitness to survive. They would rather die, than change their way of life. They would rather die, than give up their entertainment.
They will say, as I've written on a number of occasions: "I stole this stateroom, fair and square! And I'm not giving it up, even if this whole ship sinks!"
That is the idea, "I want my pleasure! I want my way of life! Don't try to make me rational! Don't ask me to behave rationally. I need my entertainment! I've got to get through tonight! And otherwise, if I have to face reality, I know I'm a piece of dung." And therefore, the only that keeps me from considering myself a piece of dung, is my pleasure! My entertainment, my diversion!
You see these crazy models: If you take a dirty garment, you rip it to pieces, you put it on a naked, skinny girl, it's a high-fashion garment! This is the society we've become!
This is our problem.
This is the same problem I addressed in Talladega, in pointing to the significance of Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King had a sense of immortality, which the people around him, including Jesse Jackson, didn't have. So, when Martin was killed (by courtesy of J. Edgar Hoover, or the wish of J. Edgar Hoover), what happened? The civil rights movement was fragmented. Why? Because leaders did not have the values that Martin had. Martin, as I said, had a sense of immortality: That life is a passage, from birth to death. There's nothing in it, that you can hold on to, except what you contribute by living. And therefore, it is what you are, immortally, which is what you are in life.
Now, every great leader in society, in a time of crisis, has been a leader precisely because they faced that reality. Not only because they had the talent to lead, but because they had the moral commitment, to say, that "I can not be bought. You can not buy me, with my fear of death. But, I will lead."
The problem is, the pleasure society is the worst extreme of people, who do not believe in their children's future. The Baby-Boomers do not believe in their children's future! And that's what the children of the Baby-Boomers are saying! In their sense of hostility toward the Baby-Boomer generation: "You have given us deliberately, a society which has no future! You're asking us to live in a cage, where the animals aren't fed. And we don't like it. We want you to change." They don't say, "We want to kill you"; they haven't gotten to that point yet. That may come later. They say, "We want you to change." And, that's the conflict.
If we can not change, if we select our choice of President, if we select our policies, now, in these weeks and months, the way things are going now, in general, this nation will not long survive. And either way, this system, that was consolidated, first in 1763, at the Treaty of Paris, proclaiming the victory, and establishment in fact, of a worldwide British Empire—intentionally modelled upon that of ancient Rome, an empire of a financier power, not legions—that empire has now come to its end. It will not survive. Either we will put it to a merciful conclusion, by a revival of the world economy, and bringing together a confederation of perfectly sovereign nation-states on this planet, around principles and issues of construction of the planet, and on promotion of development of the individual, within their national cultures, or we shall not survive.
We must do that.
We must not talk about the precedents of former history, as if they were legal precedents we must follow. We must talk about the lessons of former history, as I've indicated some of the lessons here, today, in brief. We must make a choice: We must say, The time for the way we have put humanity through brutal experiences in the past, must now finally come to an end."
We have, in our aspirations, and the founding of our republic, we've established the principle of the sovereign nation-state, as the most suitable for of government for a people. We have also understood, that all people have an interest, whether they recognize it yet, or not, in having such a form of state for themselves. We should understand, by now, that the principles of that sovereign state, are so common to us all, that despite the fact that we are separate and sovereign, we have a common interest, in a system of relation among sovereign states, which recognizes that principle reflected in our Declaration of Independence and Preamble of our Federal Constitution.
The time has come, when we need to have a new vision of leadership of this planet. A sense, we must now, for the sake of humanity, we must now create a global alliance, of respectively sovereign nation-states, committed to recovery, and committed to the principle of the immortality of the human individual. That the meaning of the individual lies, not merely in what happens between birth and death—which is a very short period of time on which to base a policy—but morality is based on a sense of what we, with our lives, with our talent, give to future generations; and to realizing the intentions of the generations before us: The kind of intention, which enables us, if lived, to die with a smile on our face, that we have performed our mission, and it is good. And we are pleased.
Why do you think someone like Jeanne d'Arc, would, knowing that she was going to be burned alive, if she did not compromise, would stick to her mission? If she had not continued her mission, the first modern nation-state, France, would not have come into existence. The Papacy would not have been restored, as it was. Modern society would not have come into existence, the modern nation-state. We'd be still living in some kind of feudal hell-hole.
She had a sense of mission, as all other great leaders of mankind have. And their sense of their interest in their mission, overrode the fears of mortality.
We need to select, and encourage, leadership of that kind. With that kind of leadership, and with insight which should be given to us by studying of the history of mankind from the past, we should understand the time has come for a change in the planet: The change to a system of sovereign nation- states, united by certain common ecumenical principles. We do not need to look forward to war. We will still need to maintain strategic defense. But, the transition to strategic defense, will be to a world in which war, as we've known it in the past, is no longer a necessary condition of mankind.
If we can do that, we shall survive. If we can not do that, we shall not survive. And if we can not do that, then we look forward in the early period, to a rate of mass death on this planet, from forces already set into motion, where the numbers of over 6 billion persons reported living today, will be reduced, fairly rapidly, to something significantly less than 1 billion.
We are looking at the brink of a precipitation into a New Dark Age, beyond anything that recorded history has given us before.
We have the option, the alternative, of moving upward again. And learning this lesson of the mistakes we've made, by taking steps to ensure these mistakes are not made again, then we can recover from the present situation.
That's the message of today. And we have to make the choice, in the immediate days and weeks ahead. If we don't change, we are finished. We better start changing, now.
