The Great Crash of 2004-2005 Is Here!
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.November 28, 2004
It is time to speak, in the spirit of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Schiller, of the Great American Tragedy of 2004.
Some featured cartoons in the weekend British and U.S.A. press, among other relevant sources, have announced that the world's present, great monetary-financial crisis is now accelerating into its phase as a general collapse.
Typical of this lunatic situation is the rising chorus of voices heard from Asia and Europe, which propose an immediate withdrawal from the collapsing U.S. dollar now, while, they propose, something of value must still be salvaged by pulling away from the dollar, "in time." Contrary to their delusions, the trend toward a "basket of currencies," as an alternative to the dollar, will merely accelerate the already onrushing world-wide depression.
Such a proposed solution is something clearly designed by "basket-cases," a scheme under which those nations act to accelerate the collapse of the dollar, thus pulling the whole, dollar-based world monetary-system down around their own ears, all the quicker.
So much for that world-wide assortment of liars and gullible fools who had insisted, up through November 2nd, that the actually collapsing U.S. economy, the economy now under the wonderful statesmanship of the world's worst idiot, President George W. Bush, Jr., was already on the way to a triumphant parade. So, Bush, like the famous Emperor of Hans Christian Andersen's tale, was seen by credulous true believers, as wonderfully clothed, and, so garbed, and garbling, moving outward and onward through the coming pages of history into the chilling nightmare just beyond the outskirts of his, and credulous admirers' delusions.
Meanwhile, among most of my visible leading rivals to be found among the world's notable economists and political figures, most, until now, have either flatly denied that such a monetary-financial crisis was already in progress, or have insisted that reforms must be confined within the conditions specified by authorities such as those two predatory instruments of world government which have done the most to cause this depression-breakdown over the course of the recent thirty-odd years, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.
Therefore, most important of the political facts of today's reality, is that I have been consistently right on this set of issues all along, since no later than the late 1950s when I was already forecasting a certain probability for the crucial breaking global economic developments which were to actually happen beginning the late 1960s. My initial forecasts, as increasingly widespread during the late 1960s, were confirmed by such signal events as the 1967 sterling and 1968 dollar monetary crises, and the monetary breakdown of 1971-72. This forecast, as updated during subsequent decades, continued from the 1967-1971 interval, up through the hot phase of the 2004 Presidential election-campaign. I made very few predictions, and concentrated, instead, on forecasts of likely turning-points ahead, during that entire period, from the late 1950s through the present day.
Therefore, under present circumstances, the most important political issue, whether in the township of West Podunk, Washington, D.C., or other world capitals, is the manifest corruption (or, simply incredible degree of ignorance) of those who, out of stupidity, cupidity, or simple foolishness, are unwilling to say that the most important political fact of this moment, is that I have been right all along, and those who either opposed me, or simply try to change the subject to diversionary local, or even totally irrelevant issues, have been fools. Such among my sundry opponents have been thus self-discredited by a factually undeniable, onrushing global economic avalanche. I repeat: Typical are those who refuse, slyly or otherwise, to discuss that "issue," but prefer to focus on localized or special "current issues" which have no direct relevance to the presently onrushing economic collapse of the entire world's present monetary-financial system.
Why should anyone listen to anyone who makes a fool of himself, by preferring to discuss "other issues" such as "local issues"? This includes those, among us, who play the opportunistic fool in that way, even now, when it can no longer be denied by any sane person, that the system which Bush praises is coming down fast, and hard. The fate of all humanity, for generations to come, is being determined, right now, by the issue of the refusal of governments, up to now, to face the onrushing reality which I have been forecasting, with repeatedly proven exceptional accuracy, over more than forty years. When will they become willing to discuss the real issue of today? After they are dead, or, perhaps dying in a Hitler-like, Bush Administration concentration-camp? Now, when that the great world financial collapse is onrushing, who is willing to make himself a public fool, still, by discussing "some other issue," some issue other than why I have been right, and my so-called critics proven terribly wrong, over all these years?
So much for people who claim to have "learned from experience."
Such a pattern of mental and moral disorders among the majority of a nation's leading official and popular opinions, defines a real-life Classical tragedy, such as Athens' suicidal folly of its Peloponnesian War, the New Dark Age of Europe's Fourteenth Century, the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War, and the two great "World Wars" of the Twentieth Century.
The Politics of Tragedy
Classical tragedy, as typified best by the work of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and historian Friedrich Schiller, does not focus, as Romantics do, on the alleged failure, and defeated desires of leaders of society, such as the pathetic puppet Bush, but on the failures of the cultures which the society's selected leaders fail to overturn. On that account, the great tragedians of our culture are the truest of its historians. To understand the U.S. and its people of today, you must be, first of all, a qualified adversary of the Romanticism which Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his followers applied to their influential, but corrupt commentaries on Shakespeare.
The source of tragedy lies within the characteristic feature of that culture to which it occurs, as the suicide of Pericles' Athens was rooted in the reductionist culture typified by the Eleatics and Sophists, and as the doom of Imperial Rome, like the empires of Mesopotamia earlier, lay within the nature of its induced, or otherwise acquired culture. The root-cause of such tragedies, such as that of the Hapsburg followers of Spain's Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada, was the culture of that Spain, as portrayed by Cervantes' Don Quixote, and consummated in the self-destruction of Spain in its religious-warfare and related barbarities of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. So, the tragedy of Europe, since the so-called "Seven Years War" and the February 1763 Treaty of Paris, has been rooted in the rising power of the influence of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal philosophy associated with the imperial British East India Company and its sequalae. From that latter source, came the fascism of the 1922-1945 interval, and the new, fatally tragic form of fascism crafted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, more accurately identified as "globalization" today.
The proximate source of our U.S. national tragedy today, is the assumption of politicians and others, that we must operate within the bounds of the ideology of contemporary liberalism, as liberalism is typified by fascists such as mass-killers as Zbigniew Brzezinski and his crony Samuel P. Huntington, and other avowed co-thinkers of the tradition of H.G. Wells' The Open Conspiracy, such as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Ideologies such as those act on the behavior of populations and their leaders as an electrified fence herds cattle. There is a grievous shortage of qualified political leaders, such as I am, who insist on breaking those fences.
That fear of electrical-like cultural fences controls not only nearly all our leading politicians and political parties, but the general behavior of assorted groupings within our general population. This works to such included effects as the following. As one now deceased relevant associate of former President George H.W. Bush said of the decision to frame me up for imprisonment, in 1988: "He tried to make policy without paying his dues, and this is where he ended up." Very few of our leading politicians have had the guts to do what I have done on those many issues which incurred the homicidal passions against me, of both some Soviet governments and the Anglo-Dutch Liberal establishment of Europe and the U.S.A. It is those politicians' lack of guts, on that account, which is the essence of the deadly national tragedy which holds the U.S.A. and all of its people in its grip right now, as this world-wide monetary-financial crisis comes crashing down.
The crucial issue on which the influence and potential for survival of our entire international association depends, today, is now posed, is the matter of my vindication as the fellow who has been right on the implications of world-trends in economic and monetary-financial policies under the 1946-2004 IMF system, over not less than forty-five years, but, emphatically, since I began teaching an increasingly politically controversial course in economics, forty years ago. What is demonstrated by that history, is that my systemic assessment of the implications of the trends of policy-shaping within the IMF system has been proven correct, and those who have opposed my assessment, over that interval of time, have been systemically wrong.
The crucial point about those systemic implications, is that unless my remedies are adopted as a reform now, the entire world monetary-financial system has now reached the point of inevitable ongoing disintegration, that there is no hope for civilization unless my corrective measures, as I have proposed, will either be adopted, our civilization as we have known it, is doomed for generations yet to come.
My personal role in this is crucial. Very few persons in today's society develop as independent of the crucially determining features of a controlled culture shared by most of the victims of a contemporary society. Only a maverick, almost from birth, develops the stamina to become the kind of leader who can resist the corrupting influences characteristic of even the relatively best representatives of a generation dominated by a defective culture, such as that shaped by the implications of the Congress for Cultural Freedom which dominated the world-outlook expressed by the children of the post-war births of the U.S.A. and European generations. For me, these distinctions are very clear, since I have known them intimately from experience of an entire lifetime. On this account, my intellectual gifts, and corresponding responsibilities, have been relatively unique.
In a rational world, my warnings would have been received in good faith. Since I broke through the electrical fences used to control the human cattle of our university faculties and others, my warnings were brushed aside, hysterically, out of cowardly fear of the minders of the electrical fences. But, this is not a rational world; ours is not, predominantly, a rational population, either in the Americas, or western Europe, for example. Only a few of us, who are exceptional survivors, in Europe and the U.S.A., of the experience of the war-time young-adult generation, are likely to understand what is wrong with our culture, and our ruling elites, today.
For those among my generation, who understand the leading generation in power today, there are three classes of pathological mental cases which, on account of, chiefly, electrical fences, will tend to continue, even tragically, to refuse that assessment.
First, the evil ones: who will cling to the present system, no matter how many nations and their populations will be mass-murdered in the attempt to "save the present monetary-financial system."
Second, the hysterical fools, who will simply deny, with screaming, howling, and kindred forms of logic, that such an eventuality exists. "No, no, no! The change we made in the leading edges of popular culture during the past forty years were right!" The Republicans' typical Ohio evangelical voters, who apparently will cling to: "No, no, no: We will refuse to listen to you, no matter what happens! We have faith in President Bush's recovery, all the way!"
Third, the academically and otherwise certified lunatics, including the fascist international fanatics associated with Spain's Blas Pinar and Italy's Alessandra Mussolini, and Fernando Quijano, who admit the fact of the collapse, but cling to some wild-eyed, fascist fantasy of their own.
Now, if my advice is refused, the people of the U.S.A., leaders, followers, and anarchists, alike, may therefore enjoy reading what I have just said, as their own collective epitaph. It is the very minimum I could have done for them, in that case.
In the alternative, everything I have continues to be "bet," my life included, on the alternative which I have followed these past decades, however difficult, at times, the achievement of that objective may seem. You who believe in the Creator, you will show that by seeming to risk everything for what must be done, as I have done. There is no other option available to those who know, like the Schiller characters of the Rütli Oath, that they "can not take it with you."
Join me, to win. Give up your "Baby Boomer" and other generational delusions. That is your only chance. That is our only chance.
