It's Still the Physical Economy, Stupid!
by Lyndon H. LaRouche. Jr.
Lyndon LaRouche's opening address to the Nov. 9, 2004 LaRouche PAC webcast was opened by the LaRouche Youth Movement chorus singing Bach's motet Jesu, meine Freude. Its attendance was dominated by more than 80 LaRouche Youth Movement members and 20 other youth, who were fresh from election organizing in Cleveland and Colombus, Ohio; Boston; Louisville, Kentucky; Detroit; Philadelphia; and Washington, D.C. In addition to youth from all over the United States, there were youth members frolomats, also attended. The webcast was moderated by Debra Freeman.m Africa, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Mexico, and Italy. They planned a "Week of Action/Agape" in Washington, following the webcast. Elected officials from around the country, plus diplomats, also attended. The webcast was moderated by Debra Freeman. See also the transcript of the question-and-answer session and the video and audio archives, on file at the LaRouche PAC website.
Thank you all. And, as they say in German, "Fängt an." ["Let's begin."]
Now, what we're going to do, to begin with, which is not a prelude to the political presentation I shall make, but an opening, integral part of that, as I shall explain. But, without much further ado, I shall say, the chorus which was from Boston, where it has been working up there, under the rehearsal direction, and direction immediately of John Sigerson, is going to present an enhanced performance, for them, of Bach's Jesu meine Freude. As I said, this is not a musical prelude to a political event: This, as I shall demonstrate, is an integral, first-step lesson in real politics.
Proceed, young men and women!... [chorus performs J.S. Bach motet Jesu, meine Freude]
Now, as those of you who know me, or are at least familiar with my tricks, there is a very definite purpose in all of that. As a matter of fact, there are many purposes, and they pertain to saving this nation, and civilization, from the threatened catastrophe which has just occurred: The announcement of the re-election of the world's worst idiot, George W. Bush.
Now, what happened here are several things: First of all, the chorus that you heard perform, was brought into being some time ago, by John and I—John Sigerson who directed this, and I, and some other people. It occurred on the question of the occasion of defining the spread of a youth movement, which had been founded on the West Coast, particularly in Southern California, and to bring it into the East Coast, and to expand it further around the world.
Now, the program which I had begun, had started with a two-part program: First of all, we had people who were largely in the 18 to 25 age-bracket, which is a bracket defined as young adults, as distinct from adolescents and old you-know-what. These people are normally of university age in modern society, though they don't all go to universities—and some wish they hadn't, and sometimes I wish they hadn't either!
But, in any case, the point is, this is the future of humanity. The young adults of 18 to 25 are the foundation of the future of any nation. And any population which does not understand that, is a pack of idiots, like much of the present population between age-intervals of 30 to 50 years of age. They don't understand the importance of this generation.
Because it is the development of the young adult generation, now considered of the college-age interval, which defines what will run the nation and the world, a quarter-century or more ahead. And that's the way you have to look at it. And we had a high degree of disregard for that in the United States, in two ways: First of all, that university education was becoming more a poison than a benefit in the way it was being done. And secondly, there was a general disregard for the actual development of the minds of our young people generally, even at younger ages.
And so therefore, to save this nation, we had to give it an objective, a broad objective, which is not uncommon in civilization: Of where children of parents, are viewed by the parents as their personal future—as grandparents look at their grandchildren as their future, and the future of their society. And we have not been developing our young people, nor giving them a perspective of employment and careers, which are fit to guide a great nation, let alone a nation which is supposed to dominate the world, at least by its weight.
And therefore, finding a social phenomenon in the United States, that about five years ago, young people of that age-group no longer paid any attention to their parents—and for damned good reason! Because the parents no longer paid attention to the future. Parents, in their Baby-Boomer age and younger, were living out their lives, trying to sustain a prolonged process of pleasure-seeking, so they wouldn't notice it, when death overtook. They're withdrawn from reality; they don't care where society goes as long as they enjoy the trip. This has become the characteristic of our population, increasingly, since 1964, with a certain amount of the rot starting earlier, on the day that Franklin Roosevelt died and Truman became President.
But, to this point, about five years ago, as a survey of secretaries of state of the United States showed, the younger generation, in the 18 to 25 group, no longer had any respect for the minds or the morals of their parents. And that with good reason. And therefore, they didn't fight with their parents. They either became simply demoralized by the kind of society to which they'd been dumped like a garbage pail. Or, they just didn't quarrel. They just went their own way, knowing that they had been dropped by their parents, into a no-future society, and knowing you couldn't talk to your parents' generation, in general. You couldn't talk to them; they wouldn't listen. They had their own stubborn ideas: Stubborn ideas that were carrying this civilization, and this nation in particular, to Hell.
So, we found the beginnings of such a group in California. And I said, "Keep the old goats away from it! They'll destroy it." So, I had a few trusted people in California, such as Phil Rubinstein, and Harley Schlanger, and Leni Rubinstein. And they concentrated on doing what I wanted. We had retreats where these young people could meet, run the things pretty much themselves, and try to wear me down with questions. And we had a discussion process, a sorting-out process, from which there emerged a group of youth which had a certain degree of cohesion.
And this was the group of people, youth in California, which demonstrated the cowardice of the Democratic Party leadership, against Schwarzenegger. When Schwarzenegger the fascist—and he does carry out his father's Austrian tradition; a similar Austrian tradition to another famous Austrian, and we're seeing that in California now. Clinton went out there and did make an effort to defeat the Recall effort, on behalf of Schwarzenegger. But, he walked out of California because the rest of the Democratic Party was paying no attention. Didn't care. So, he washed his hands of it.
I said, "No. We don't wash our hands of it." So, we took two areas of California, in which the youth movement were concentrated out there, in the Los Angeles area and in the Bay Area. And we, contrary to the rest of the party, played a key part in bringing about a victory—a defeat of the Schwarzenegger candidacy—in those two areas. Where, in the rest of California, where the Democratic Party's then-current policy predominated, we lost.
And this loss in California, engineered by the Democratic national leadership, which said, "Let Schwarzenegger win," in effect—this carried all the way through, the primary campaigns up to the point of the Convention. And that's why we had a relevant catastrophe in the past period. The Democratic Party brought it upon itself, because it forgot a few things.
Now, in the meantime, some years before, in developing the youth movement, they'd come to me, and they had yelled at me, as they would wish to yell at their parents: "Where are we going to get our education?!" I said, "You're going to give it to yourself. And you're going to start with Gauss," and I was referring to the 1799 paper of Gauss, attacking and denouncing Euler, Lagrange and so forth. "And you're going to understand from Gauss, what an idea is. Then, you're going to study history, from the standpoint of ideas, as this wrestling with Gauss's challenge gave you a sense of what an idea is."
See, most people are running around, they don't know what an idea is. You talk about a physical principle, and the typical idiot—with a PhD, or DDS, or whatever—will tell you, "Look up this formula in this textbook." They think a mathematical formula is a principle! And if you learn enough mathematical formulas, you know the principles of the universe. And we know, they don't know anything. They just know how to look up a formula in a textbook, or the equivalent. They never actually discovered, or made acquaintance with the principle which they are trying to describe by a mathematical formula.
Then, the second question, particularly as we're bringing the youth movement concept back to the East Coast: What do we do with it? "Well," I said, "the one thing that's missing—we need a music program, a Classical music program." So, we had the meeting at the house, which John was at, and we spent the evening there. And we discussed this. And I said, "I recommend that we choose Bach's Jesu, meine Freude motet, and together, in the set of the other motets, as a basis for developing a sense of Classical artistic composition among young people. So, we have an integrated personality. On the one hand, a personality which is educated and largely self-educated, to understand physical science, how the universe is run from the standpoint of the individual human mind. But we also have to have something else: We have to have an insight into those social processes by which those individual minds cooperate, and develop, to take care of the needs of humanity, and to come to agreement on the programmatic results for humanity."
And so, we started with this focus on Jesu, meine Freude. And it continued. And it continued through a process, which led into the Boston Convention, where the Democratic Party was headed toward mass suicide at that point. And that Convention was largely a ritual act of mass political suicide, if any of you closely watched it. It had a few points in it, which were salvaged, where former President Clinton addressed the thing, to a sort of disinterested audience. And where Kerry made a speech, which in the first parts was not bad, at all, but which dwelt too much on this military swift-boat issue—and then went off into a string of this and that and this, like a garbage display in a delicatessen. And that sort of bored the people. So, he came out of there, at that point.
But, as a result of what the youth did, and what I did, in introducing a platform, which the Democratic Party then didn't have! They had no intention of making a platform! They threw something together with some old rotten boards, and called it a "platform." Nobody wanted to stand on it, hmm? So, I gave an actual platform.
But, that wouldn't have worked, except for one thing: A little over 100 young people, in Boston, singing on subways and elsewhere, and occasions, and around the site of the Convention. And the role of these young people singing, at that Convention, created a catalytic effect on the mood of the Convention, so they came out of the Convention with an agreement by most people, or by most leading circles, to work together, around Kerry.
Now, Kerry was not a perfect candidate. As a matter of fact, he was my third choice. Number one was me; number two was Clinton, who wasn't eligible to run; and number three was Kerry! In that order. Not that Clinton is perfect—but, you know, Kerry is not a bad guy. He is qualified for the rank of major or colonel in any military force in the world. But he's not qualified for commander-in-chief. And there's a difference.
And, I've said it before, and I'll say it again, because the illustration is relevant to what we're dealing with here. We don't have a commander-in-chief now, in the United States. We have something. As you saw here, earlier—we have a monkey on a string, who doesn't know the difference between man and beast. But, we don't have a commander-in-chief.
I'll give you an example of a commander-in-chief and give you an example of an alien commander-in-chief: Take the case of Frederick the Great, of Prussia, who was foolishly caught in a war, which was a trap, which was organized by the British. It was a British effort to take over Europe and create an empire. It was called the Seven Years' War.
But, he's out there fighting, and he's up against all of the armed forces, France, Russia, Austro-Hungary, so forth—all of them against him. He's up there, with a territory, which has no natural boundaries for defense. A sort of plantation, stuck there around Berlin. And with an army, a capable army. And, on one occasion, at a battle in a place called Leuthen, he was faced with an Austrian force, under Francis, which was about double his own military force; a well-qualified military force, with a very good plan of action, a classical, Cannae-style, double-flanking operation. And Frederick, who had the capacity of being both the head of the military forces in the field, but also the head of state of Prussia, made a decision at great risk, which everyone would have advised him not to do. But, he did it. And he beat the Austrians twice on the battlefield, by an outflanking operation, on the same day.
You had a similar thing by a man who was qualified to be President, Douglas MacArthur, in Korea, at Inchon: Inchon was a high-risk flanking operation, which would go into the same category as Frederick the Great's operation at Leuthen. But, he acted like a commander-in-chief, who took personal responsibility for the outcome of the war, on his own shoulders. He saw the destiny of his nation in his hands, and he did not shrink from assuming the responsibility of leadership that that required on that occasion. Whereas Truman was a mess—the President—who made a mess of everything.
So therefore, the quality of leadership, which poor Kerry did not have, and does not have, the quality of a true commander-in-chief of a great nation, in a time of great peril, to realize that he can not[?] do anything he chooses. He must choose something, even at great risk, to save the nation. And he couldn't do that.
But, I supported him, nonetheless, on the view that, if he were elected, to get the monkey out of the White House—getting the monkey off our backs, so to speak—that we could build something, a team, around Kerry, and create the equivalent of a commander-in-chief, by the kind of organization we would build around a new Presidency.
That is still the principle which we must think of, in dealing with this crisis now: Because, on the books, the way things are right now, the United States will not continue to exist for four years, under George Bush. It may not even exist for one year, under George Bush. That is reality.
So, the George Bush election, if you say it's a final, settled question, you're saying, "Let's go commit suicide. Let's be the lemmings we're behaving like, and jump off the cliff." Because, if this nation continues under George Bush's Presidency, this nation will not continue to exist for the full four years of the term to come.
And people who can not face and accept that reality, are not in political reality. People say, "No! There's got to be a different way! Isn't there some gimmick? Don't tell us this! This is too ultimatistic!"
But that is precisely the Hamlet problem! That's where Kerry goofed: He didn't have in himself, the necessary quality of leadership, that I have: to take a situation like that, and say, "We're going to win this damned thing—at all risk." He didn't do it. Kennedy was not helpful; Kennedy flopped all over the place on this election campaign. Tried to distract from the economy, when the issue was the economy. This entire world economic system is now finished. It's dead! It's in its death agony. And nothing can save this system in its present form. Only measures which are modeled upon those of Franklin Roosevelt, in March of 1933 can save this nation! And can save humanity, from a New Dark Age.
People who can't see that, who shrink from that, are Hamlets, who, by their own inability to face reality, say, "I can't believe that." Wishful belief—"I can't believe that." Like the foolish people in Ohio, who, for religious reasons voted for Bush: They were idiots! They were fools! Their behavior was inexcusable! Nobody can make an excuse for them: Because they were Hamlets! Little people, who couldn't face reality. Who, when the nation itself is in danger, when a whole civilization is faced with destruction, say, "We gotta stop same-sex marriage." The most infernal danger I ever heard of! I mean, that's a short-term menace—less than one generation! What're you worried about that for?
So, what happens? You're in a period, now, where we have a bunch of cowards, called "American citizens." They are the overwhelming, great majority. And they will say, "Well, there's nothing I can do about it. Give me money. My problem is money." Well, that's a tough proposition, you know. The U.S. dollar is about to go to about $2 to the euro—and down. The dollar isn't worth a dollar any more. About today, a euro is worth $1.30.
And, when the full impact of the current account deficit, the mortgage-based securities bubble, the rising, zooming price of raw materials, including petroleum, which is now headed toward $100 a barrel, that's the vicinity it can be safely estimated it's moving toward; when the world is dominated by a rising price of all kinds of raw materials, zooming price, in a great inflationary bubble in raw materials, based on speculation by people bidding to grab control of raw materials, the United States is finished as an economy in its present form.
The dollar in your pocket, is imminently worth nothing! You want to get paid dollars? You need money? Ha-ha!! What a fool you are! What you need is a house, and food, and clothing, and education, and medical care! You don't need money!
So, fools will run into these substitute, these surrogates, "what I need is—." You know, it's like the mathematician who married a plastic dummy, because her measurements were nice. Your typical American, today!
And the root of all this, is that the people who go to church, are the least Christian of them all: Because the characteristic of them, is, none of them believe in immortality. They're concerned about the pleasures and security they get out of mortal life! And hope, that by praying in some direction to someone they don't know—who may be Satan, for all they know—that somehow a miracle is going to descend upon them. And they're going to get these good pleasures, and material satisfactions.
They don't think about immortality, because they don't believe in it. Why don't they believe in immortality? Because they don't know the difference between man and a beast. And they don't know what it is, to be human. Because, we all die, don't we? The first, basic fact, which anyone should know, from experience, from early childhood: We all die. What's your goal in life? Mortal pleasure? You're going to die! That ends! All these religious characters who're concerned about praying for this, and praying for that—praying for the Battle of Armageddon, so they won't have to pay the rent next month! These so-called Israeli fundamentalist anti-Semites.
No, these so-called Christians, the new Israelis, they believe, that "th'battle of Ahmageddon's gonna come. Gonna come soon. We fixed it. Geoahge, who talks directly to Gawd 'bout these matters." Of course, God's not quite sure who's on the other end of the telephone—or if anybody's there at all, or not!
And they assume, that everything will be taken care of for them. But where?! In this life! Or, mebbe they gonna get re-incarnated—without any sensation of pain in between, and live forever. And what they believe is, that the day they conquer the Middle East, and git ridda those Jews, who don't convert—"we'll get ridda them, jest like Hitler did!" And this is called the Christian fundamentalist type: They believe in killing Jews, who don't convert to Christianity! That's their belief; it's been the belief with this crowd ever since the 17th Century in Britain, when this particular crowd of Bible-thumpers was brought into being. (Or, misconceived.)
They are racists; mostly racists. Anti-Semite. And they don't wash those sheets they wear at night!
And most Protestant fundamentalists are that. The right-wing Catholics are worse—they simply go directly to mass-killing. Hmm? These are the fundamentalists; these are our crazy fellow citizens, the worst of them.
They don't believe in immortality. They don't believe in a Creator. They believe in a magician—outside reality, who's going to perform magical benefits for them, if they do the right tricks. And they're also Hamlets, who flee from the reality of life, into secondary pursuits, as into pure pleasure, pleasure-seeking.
The person who understands what a human being is, knows we're immortal, because he knows we're not an animal: Knows that we have the power of creativity, to discover and employ the laws of the universe, to mankind's advantage—and to God's advantage—to make the universe a better place, by means of our work, than it was without us.
This transmission of immortality takes the form of ideas: Such as, ideas of principle, which are transmitted from generation to generation, so that people who do good, real good, can die with a smile on their face, not because of pleasure, but simply because of confidence that their life has meant something. It has brought honor to their ancestors and brought benefits to their posterity. And this benefit is chiefly, the transmission of ideas which have been discovered, or products of ideas which have been discovered, to coming generations. As we benefit, today, from the discoveries we re-enact, of the greatest discoverers in physical science, over thousands of years before us. When you sense that your life is brief, as between the bookends of birth and death, but the book goes on. The book you represent goes on, is a benefit and honor to your ancestors and your descendants: You can be happy in being a human being. And you can be a Christian—a real one! Not one of these fake ones, these fundamentalists.
Because you see yourself as caring for your fellow human being. You are here, to do for the dead what they can't do for themselves, they wish they could have. You are here, to make your grandchildren possible. You are here, to make the planet better—maybe to make the Solar System better! And things beyond that.
When you have that, you have the strength to say, as Jeanne d'Arc did, for example, to accept a mission, even if it means death, because the mission is your identity, not your possession of that fragile thing called "mortal life." And your development as that kind of person, is what's precious to you.
Now, that's what we're talking about, for example, in two things—and let's go to music at this point. As has been explained by the youth and others, many times, the Jesu, meine Freude came into existence as a Lutheran hymn, in Germany, under conditions following the great, terrible, Thirty Years' War, the genocidal Thirty Year's War, of that century.
It was a simple hymn, which Bach used, as he did many other things, as part of the process of creating music, a principle of music. A work in this direction, we can trace back from the ancient Greeks; we can see relics of it, for example, in Vedic poetry, which takes us back about 8,000 or 9,000 years—these principles of musicality. But, the idea of modern polyphony, modern, Classical polyphony, which was sought by people like Leonardo da Vinci, in his largely lost work De Musica, which was practiced in the Renaissance—15th-Century Renaissance—in Florence. As the sculptures on the wall of the Cathedral of Florence, which show Florentine bel canto voice training, in practice there. And from looking at the stones themselves, the carvings themselves, you can know what they're singing.
So, this became, a part of what? It's an outgrowth of the greatest characteristic of language, which is called poetry, Classical poetry. It is through Classical poetry, before the extent of writing, that the communication of ideas by peoples over thousands of years was made possible. The natural part of the language—which is taught against, in schools today; taught against, by television announcers today—is the art of irony. The art of being able to create with a poem, a clear communication of an idea, which did not exist in the vocabulary of the language before then.
Now, this is done by certain rules, which are natural rules of the human mind and body, which we can call "musicality." The accomplishment of Bach, as expressed in the Jesu, meine Freude, and other works, was to develop a sense of what's called well-tempered composition, well-tempered polyphony, which brought to the fore a possible perfection of that art of communication. And that is what you see reflected in the transformation of a simple Lutheran hymn, Jesu, meine Freude, into a motet, which expresses, in fact, what you heard—expresses all of the potentialities of Classical musical composition and performance—all of it.
There's another aspect to that, which is expressed by the fact that these young people did the presentation under John's direction, here today. From the start, the performance was not perfect, by any means. They started singing, and singing competently according to rule. But, you know, the idiot thinks that a chorus is a bunch of people, each singing their own part. Now, if you've ever heard that process, it's pretty bad: Because choral music, which is the essence of all competent music, is the singer of one part, hearing his or her voice within the performance of all of the parts. Which means, that there has to be a moderation in pitch, a tuning process, of tuning the individual voices to perform within hearing the total effect of the chorus as a whole, as they sing their part; and to adjust their singing of their part in that place, according to the effect of that upon the whole.
Jean-Sebastien, who led a pedagogical at the recent conference, showed, in the case of this Trotz section of Jesu, meine Freude, that you have a dissonance buried in there: The dissonance is there, but resolved by Bach in the performance. And the most powerful aspect, the pivotal aspect of the entire motet, is that pivot, where Bach introduces a dissonance, but resolves it at the same time, so that when you hear the performance, you don't hear the dissonance. But, if you don't know the dissonance is there, you don't understand the performance.
So, what has happened is more. So, John has done what I asked him to do, and he was willing to do it and happy to do it, was to go a deeper level: And what we did, is we concentrated on a group of people who had been a core of the singers in the Boston Convention operations. And thus, to try to perfect the process of doing the motet by going into these kinds of problems, these kinds of deeper problems; and getting a consciousness, through a kind of program which does require about two hours a day of daily training, of daily reliving of the process, to come to a perfection of the composition.
Let's take another example of this: You have the case of the Negro Spiritual, which is an integral part of American culture. Without the Negro Spiritual, and understanding it, you don't know anything about the United States. Now, what came along, was, Antonin Dvořák, a great composer, came to the United States, after having worked on folk music in the footsteps of Johannes Brahms in Europe. And he came into the United States. And he was looking for what he would call a basis for study of possible American folk music in situ. And he picked two areas to look at: some of the music of the American Indian, the folk music ofthe American Indian; and the folk songs of the descendants of American slaves. And out of this, together with an expert in the subject, Harry Burleigh, Dvořák and Burleigh, crafted the American Negro Spiritual.
Now, this is not simply an arbitrary art form. This is a form of song, which was condemned by the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, to become property. And slavery in the Western Hemisphere came from Spain and Portugal, under the influence of this fascist gang, headed by the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, of that century. So, we brought into the Americas, people who were hunted down and herded, like wild animals, in Africa. The strong adult men were slaughtered; the old women were slaughtered; the young women and children were put on boats and hauled into the Americas, principally, into the new colonies—where they became property. Just like wild animals, who've been rounded up, herded, selected, and so forth, and turned into property.
But, they weren't property. They were treated as property, but they were human beings. And human beings have within them the quality of a human being. By calling them "property," you can not make them un-human beings! So, the human beings developed a means of culture, including that of slaves in the field, out of which came a distillation of exposure to the Bible, largely by oral tradition, and ideas which existed among the slaves, who came out of slavery, remember—only something like 140-odd years ago!—that, in my time, we knew people who had been slaves, who were still living. Many people are descendants of slaves, two or three generations, today, in the United States.
You have a similar thing, as I've emphasized, from Mexico: The same Spaniards, who classified the African as "animals," classified the native, indigenous population of Mexico as "animals," or "semi-animals," with touches of humanity, and said, therefore, they had wild passions and they had to be treated as if they were animals and herded as peons. We have, in the Americas today, in Mexico and in the United States, the right-wing tradition of the Spanish, who classified the Mexican indigenous population as semi-animals.
So, we have, in the United States today, a legacy of a disregard for the equality of man which distinguishes man from the beast. We have a revolt against that in the United States, which was passed down to people like Burleigh, and into the work and studies of Dvořák, called the Negro Spiritual. And it works!
It works, because, just as Bach took Jesu, meine Freude, a hymn reflecting what had happened to Europe, under the Habsburg influence, of the slaughter of the Thirty Years' War, and the freedom from that slaughter, expressed in joy, as this simple Lutheran hymn, is now transformed by Bach, in the same way, that Burleigh and Dvořák looked at the Negro Spiritual and some of the Native Indian music: Is to realize, that buried within this music is an expression of the aspiration of humanity, which is a part of our culture. And thus, all over the world, wherever the Classical form of Negro Spiritual—that of Burleigh, or typified by Roland Hayes, and Marian Anderson and so forth—wherever that is performed, and performed competently, it reaches people! Because something from inside the slave, which is human, asserts itself in its aspiration, in a way which is resonant with us today.
And that's the significance of this Bach. The taking, through music, through the weapon of music, through the art of music, and taking that which is a most intimate expression of ideas, which is the musical expression of ideas, the musical choral expression of ideas, and bringing that into modern society, to establish our viable links to the generations that have gone before us, and to give us a sense of immortality! To give us a sense of the immortality of the slave! The immortality of the peon, subjected to fascist conditions by the Spanish monarchy, and that sort of thing to this day.
Now, this involves a process. Great artists, who had the collaboration of Burleigh and Dvořák, on the question of the Negro Spiritual, the systematizing of Burleigh's work by the singer Roland Hayes, as by Marian Anderson and others, is a treasure which is transmitted from the past to the present. Just as Bach picks up from the miseries of Europe, as expressed by the Thirty Years' War, and takes something from that, and uses that to present a better way of transmitting these ideas than before.
Now, this also happened here: It happened, because the young people, who were in Boston, who remained in this part of the program, particularly the Jesu, meine Freude featured program, also have undergone steps of improvement, in going more deeply, and deeply, into the deeper implications of this particular motet and how it has to be performed, what you have to take into account, what Bach took into account.
You have the same thing in great music, generally. You have the case of a great conductor, Wilhelm urtwängler. Wilhelm Furtwängler was the one who really taught me the inner principles of music—just by hearing his recorded performance, of all things, a Tchaikovsky symphony, sitting overseas in India in January of 1946, after the end of the war—and I heard something coming out of that recording, which was amazing. And then, I understood it. It was what he referred to, as "performing between the notes."
And that's the secret, here. Already. The secret of the Bach motet, is, "performing between the notes." And, John had, I think, some great fun in helping people see more clearly, what it means, "singing between the notes," in order to get the connection of the whole composition to each part within it, and how the parts relate to this whole idea.
This is the social process. This is what society really should be like: Is, to look at ourselves, in this way; to look at ourselves, as an immortal kind of creature, which is born in the flesh, and dies in the flesh, but participates in immortality, between those bookends and beyond. To reach out to generations like those of slaves and others, before us, and to hear their voices singing to us; when we sense that they are immortal, because they left us something, which lives in us, today. And that we do not fully understand these gifts, when they are first presented to us. And part of our development, is to relive those gifts. And, as these young people did with the chorus, is to work deeper and deeper, into an understanding, of nuances, which are not something that we added to it, precisely. In the case of this work, Bach already intended it. When people are learning to perform the thing better and better, today, they are realizing what Bach already intended. When Furtwängler made great conducting of Beethoven exceptional quality, he was doing what Beethoven intended.
So, this relationship of development in the individual, development in the composer, development in the audience, development in those who come after us, is an expression of that immortality.
The same thing is true in physical science: We discover things which we can not see with the senses, but which are the most powerful forces in the universe. No one has ever tasted gravity; or chewed it. I've never seen it—but it's a very powerful principle. We can describe it. We can master its functions. We can apply it. But, you can't see it with the senses. True ideas can not be seen with the senses: They lie between the cracks. They lie in those discoveries of principle which no animal can make. They lie in the transmission of the experience of discovering principles, from one generation to another. And that is precisely what this society lacks.
What's the problem? The historic problem of mankind, is typified by that ultimate bastard: Zeus, of Olympus. Merely typified, because there were bastards like him before then. And on top of that, he never existed, though a Zeus did exist. But, the Zeus that we know, as the Greek gods—they were whores! They were degenerates! They were evil! There were no good Greek gods. The only Greek god that was any good, was one that was imported from Egypt: Athena. And she was an Egyptian goddess, not a Greek one. And she came to try to civilize those bums.
But, the condition of mankind, as you find with the Zeus cult, is that people must not be allowed to discover the principle of fire. Prometheus must be tortured, because he gave the people the principle of fire.
The basis of modern society, to this day, has been to keep people largely as animals: That is, to deny them that which distinguishes the human being from the beast. The ability to discover those universal principles such as gravitation, and other universal principles, on which man's mastery of the universe depends. The slave-masters, the oligarchs, like the oligarchy of Olympus, in the case of ancient Greece—which was the tragedy of Greece; there were no good gods in Greece!—was to keep people as cattle. That's the issue of the great drama, by Aeschylus, the Prometheus Trilogy: to keep people as animals. How do you keep people as animals? By denying the fact that they have creative powers; that they have creative minds; they can discover universal principles. So, today, they teach you mathematics, how? To make sure you never discover a principle. You're given, for example in geometry, certain principles called "definitions, axioms, and postulates." You're supposed to interpret the universe and experience in science by that. It's a fraud! Euclidean geometry is a fraud! It's shackle on the mind of slaves, who are not permitted to think.
And the power of the human mind, to make original discoveries; the right of the individual mind to be developed, with the power to make discoveries; from it, through the processes like a Socratic dialogue to make discoveries, is the nature of man. Scientific progress, and cultural progress, are the nature of man. The nature of man is to reflect upon mankind, to reflect upon our past; to reflect upon our origins, from generation to generation; and to take responsibility for the direction we give, for the development of man for time to come.
What do we have now? We have the "free trade" system. Free trade in slaves. We have predators, called bankers, or financiers who own bankers; who own political parties, who control them; and you are told, to behave yourself, and you might get a cookie passed out to you. You're told there are too many of you, as Henry Kissinger did, in 1975 in National Security Study Memorandum 200: "There are too many people on this planet! They're eating up our raw materials. They belong to us; the raw materials of Africa belong to us! The Africans are eating them—we must stop that! We must reduce the African population. We must prevent them from developing technology, because they'll use the raw materials more freely!"
The world today is run by a Physiocratic tyranny, of gambling and control of raw materials. The United States, the British, the Western and Central Europeans, Russia, control raw materials of the world, or most of them. China is the biggest bidder for raw materials in the world. We have a big "who's gonna eat whom?" system on this planet, now ongoing.
The idea that human beings have an intrinsic right, that human beings are sacred; that the quality of development of ideas is sacred; the power of communication across generations though aid of art and science is sacred: They don't think that way!
And when you put a certified mental case, an idiot in the White House—and you try to do it a second time!—you're not human. You can't be human and vote for George Bush. It's sort of like tearing up your citizenship in the human race.
All right, now, the problem is this. Therefore, the remedy: I've stated the tragedy. I've indicated some of the beauties. Now, let's talk about the remedy, which is where we go from here. You are going to be exposed—see, you are the remedy. You, out there, are the remedy. Your development is the remedy. Your freeing yourselves of the shackles of illusion, is the remedy. Your giving up belief in money, is the remedy. You don't have to believe in money: We make it. It's our slave. We should not be the slaves of money! Our sovereign government should make the money, organize it, teach it to behave properly. The money system itself is a fraud.
All right, what do we have to do? Over the past period, we've gone through Hell, and I've documented a good deal of this. We went to Hell—I knew it. I knew it, the day Roosevelt died. I was then in India, in a military camp in India, on my way to Burma. And some GIs came to me, stealthily, and said they wanted to talk to me, that night. So, we designated a place to meet, and went off to talk. I said, "What do you want?" They asked me, "What do you think the death of Franklin Roosevelt means to us?" And, I was taken, in a sense, by surprise, because I'd had the question in my own mind, in a sense. So I just gave a quick answer: I said, "I'm afraid, that a great man is being replaced by a very little one. And I'm afraid for the world."
And by the time I got back from service abroad, in the spring of 1946, I found that the country I had left, to go abroad under Roosevelt, had been changed into a nightmare under Truman, this fascist pig. And I say it advisedly, without exaggeration.
What happened was, that Truman was forced as a vice presidential choice, upon Franklin Roosevelt, with the knowledge that Franklin Roosevelt was very ill. That's the summer of 1944. It was forced by the financial interests, the banking interests, the international banking interests of London and New York. And then Roosevelt died. And Truman became a stooge for the Averell Harriman, whose bank had written the order, refunding Hitler's party to make Hitler the dictator of Germany; and Harriman was a Nazi. And he was a controller of the President of the United States, who was a cheap, stupid fool. Just a thug; a Ku Klux Klan type.
And what happened is, this crowd, under people like Allen Dulles, brought the hard core of the Nazi SS system into the institutions of Western Europe and the Americas, to the degree, that the SS General Wolf, the German commander of the SS in Italy, was personally conduited by Allen Dulles, into becoming a key part of the Gladio secret organization in Italy, which later assassinated, in the 1970s, Aldo Moro, who had been fingered for assassination by Henry Kissinger, right here, in Washington, D.C.—to his face. And I have an eyewitness to that.
This became the birth of what was called the right-wing in the United States, or the utopian wing. The nuclear warriors. This is what's running the United States today: Is a group of financiers, who are the same network of financiers, from Europe and the United States, who were behind Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s; who later turned against him, only because he was German—if he'd been British they'd have been all for him. And we got Britain to fight a war against Hitler, for that reason. But, once Roosevelt was dead, the right wing began a struggle to take over this country and the world: The British and American right wing; the Anglo-Dutch Liberals, who are Liberal on Sunday, and Fascist on Monday.
The problem we have with Bush today, is not Bush as such. Bush is a tool. He's a little animal. He's not really fully human—I mean, he's got mental problems which disqualify him, I mean, for voting rights even. He's controlled by Cheney, who is a sociopath—who is not really the controller—who is controlled by people like George Shultz, who works for a syndicate of bankers. And the whole crowd is this same bunch of financial institutions which were behind the whole Nazi operation in Europe, back in the 1920s and 1930s, into the 1940s.
That is what we're faced with today! People believe in free trade, which is these people's idea.
And, the problem is, therefore, not so much with the Democratic Party leadership, except the Democratic Party leadership has capitulated, with its upper 20% idea, of sticking with the upper 20% of income-brackets in the United States, that's what the problem was. And that's been particularly the case, since Brzezinski took over the Carter Administration. Since that time.
So, what we were doing, this past year, in the course of this year, we were fighting to try to get the Democratic Party to become, again, the party of Franklin Roosevelt, rescuing it from what Truman had done to it as the beginning! It took about two decades to do that, because, we who had returned from war, even though many of us capitulated to Truman and what he represented, we voted for Eisenhower instead; we got that fascist Truman out of there. But, then Eisenhower went out of office; Kennedy was killed, and the right wing took over.
So, the problem we have, is to go back, go back in our History: To go back to Presidents like Roosevelt—and Lincoln before him, in particular; who is the great, heroic revolutionary, who saved the United States, enabling it to become a great power, among nations. We have to go back to that.
But, the way we go back to that, is by understanding what it is to be a citizen. Now, the way I'm going to approach that, the way I am approaching that, is a change in the way in which economic facts are reported. We're now in the greatest depression in modern civilization's history. This is much worse, now, already—you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop—but it's worse now than it was in the 1930s, already. The full effects have not yet hit you. People are living on borrowed money; and when somebody tries to collect on the borrowed money, you're going to find out you're hopelessly bankrupt—you have nothing, that money is worthless.
So therefore, we're at a point, where the state has to come back in, as it did under Roosevelt, only more, as I've laid it out. We have to force the government of the United States to act as Roosevelt would have done: That is, to declare bankruptcy of the international monetary-financial system. And to put the banking system, including the Federal Reserve System, into government receivership, to force the doors of the banks, where necessary, to keep open; to force the continuation of essential features of life; to prevent people from being thrown out of the homes that they're going to be thrown out of en masse, on the day that the real estate bubble pops! And real estate values drop to one-half, or less, of their present value.
Anybody who's living in a house mortgaged for $400 to $500,000 is bankrupt. They have a hopeless case. That thing is going down much lower—it's highly inflated! It's over! The game is over! The party is finished!
Banks are about to close up! Savings are about to go! The money you think you have has vanished tomorrow! It's on the road, it's on the way, right now! Not next year, not four years from now, but right now! And anybody on the inside in Europe and the United States knows that. Only people who are not on the inside, don't know it.
So therefore, you need a government, which says, "This is a government based on the General Welfare principle." The Federal government steps in, and with the power of government, with the Constitutional power of government, puts things right; by saying: We put everything financial into bankruptcy reorganization; we use the power of credit, which is unique to our Constitution, to generate large masses of credit, for large-scale infrastructure; to generate the employment of 10 million more people, in useful ways, as in infrastructure, and promote other things. We bring the states back into balance, so that the income earned within the state, is enough to maintain the balance of accounts within the state. We do these kinds of things.
Now, what I have to do, in this process, is to get Americans to understand what economics is. And, I don't propose to go out and burn the economics professors alive. Something more moderate would be sufficient. I do propose to replace them. And what I'm going to do, is, I'm doing it already: As you've seen in some cases with examples, and we'll get a few in here.
Let's just take some example of this:
Some of you've seen this before, but I'll go through this again, because it makes the point. It's just a simple illustration up to the year 2003. All right now, let's take "What's Up with Water?"
I think we have somebody who knows something about this.
You would think they were brainwashed and duped? Of course they were? The Democrats were also duped, but that's a different story. The collapse of industrial jobs, in the Midwest and Ohio:
All right, but look at the other side, just to get the picture of it. Let's take:
Remember, manufacturing has collapsed; agriculture has collapsed in the state of Ohio. Obviously, the Bush voters are overpaid hotel maids and restaurant workers, huh? Then, there could be, just to get an idea of what's crucial in this same area.
This is the thing to focus on, this particular curve, for reasons I shall indicate. Okay.
Now, what we're going to do is this—what I'm doing now. We have a program of education in economics, which will be largely on the Internet, for an obvious reason, but there will be other media used as well. Be it the Internet, or reproductions of things that can be projected on projectors in rooms, for example: To demonstrate the nature of a principle in economics.
Now, most people who teach economics don't know anything about principle. They think it's a complement of interest. But, they don't know about principle, as a physical principle, something that makes something happen. And, what we're going to do is the following: Let's just take an example of this. Let's take, Mars in 2000 and 2003
and we'll follow that with the retrograde observed movement of Mars.
What you're seeing here, is what you actually will see in the sky, as lapsed-time photography of the observation of the planet Mars. This is now the year 2000; this is from 2003, June-July. What you're seeing now, is the so-called retrograde motion: That, at a certain point in observing things in the sky, it appears that Mars turns and loops on itself backward, at a certain point in the cycle.
Let's take another one—let's take this one: That's the best one to do.
What this is, is just a diagrammatic picture, and it's actually to scale, of actual motion scale, of the relationship between the asteroid Ceres, whose orbit was discovered by Gauss, with respect to the Earth orbit. You see the red one is the Ceres, and the blue one is the Earth.
Now, this is an example of an animation. It's an actual animation; it shows in a short period of time—as in lapsed-time biological photography. Many of you have seen that. One takes a series of shots of a plant growing, such as a weed, or another plant, and then reduces the time-scale of that to a short period of time, so that the development of several weeks or months, may be collapsed into a few minutes of viewing it. And suddenly, you see the plant which you thought was loosely waving around, is actually going through definite motions, in a very deliberate way. You can see very simply what the difference is between a weed, and another kind of plant, in this way.
So, this is the principle of animations: Is to take what is happening, or will happen, in an economy, over a period of years, or months at least, and to accelerate that into a lapsed-time picture of the actual changes occurring over that larger period of time, in order to get the human mind to understand what a principle is, in economics. And we will be doing that, as the basic educational program.
Now, we tried that in Cleveland, Ohio, for example, with an audience there, just with some of the Ohio figures, and it clicked for them, immediately—exactly what's wrong. They saw their state, going down in a lawful process! They saw the state being transformed from one of the richest industrial states in the United States, over a period of about 10-15 years, into a rust-bucket, based on cheap hotel maids' jobs and restaurant jobs. And they saw it! And they were shocked by it.
So, to convey the idea, we have to get away from so-called statistical charts, which really are just confusing, and often are wrong. That is, they may be accurate as to data, but they're wrong in the impression they leave, as to what they're depicting. We have to show change. We have to show complexes of change: for example, capital factors. The typical idiot today, in economy, the economist, the management of a plant, they don't know anything about capital factors. They don't know how an economy actually works! They know how to steal—Enron methods. They do not know how an economy works.
For example: To build, as Perry [Kentucky State Rep. Perry Clark] will remember, to rebuild, to maintain, a lock system on the Ohio River, involves an approximately 40-year life-cycle of that lock. That means, that what we have not maintained, around the country, in systems like that, locks and dams, power systems, and things like that—what we have not repaired, or replaced, during the past 40 years, is now collapsing. The power industry, the water production, all of the essential infrastructure of the nation, which has not been renewed by capital formation, in the past 30 to 40 years, is now becoming a junk pile. Transportation systems, all kinds of municipal systems. We have water systems 100 years old, are now rotting away—municipal water systems. Similar kinds of things.
So therefore, for the past period, the past 40 years, when we were transformed from a producer society into an importing society, a bread and circuses society at home, importing our labor from cheap labor around the world, and shutting down employment and production here, we have destroyed the infrastructure on which a successful economy has depended.
We are now at the point, that the world, as a result of the past 40 years doctrine in economics, especially since 1971-72, since the change in the monetary system, the world is now worse off, physically, especially the Americas and Europe, is worse off, than it was in the 1920s or under Hoover. It's worse. We have a bigger job to do today, to organize a recovery in the United States and Europe, than we had, actually, in the United States in 1933, or in Europe in the post-war period.
The most conspicuous part of this is the loss of basic economic infrastructure: mass transportation; municipal systems, that is the welfare systems of cities; the organization and structure of cities; we have allowed the cities to be destroyed. We've turned cities from engines of production and progress, into high-priced residences for people who really can't afford to live there. And we've driven the people out of the cities—we drive them out, as we're doing in Washington, D.C., to build a stadium here, after shutting down D.C. General Hospital. We're doing that! We're destroying the cities.
We destroyed New York City! To the degree that New York City is gentrified, which is a process which has been going on, since 1945, the post-war period, instead of rebuilding the city as a functioning city, they went to outsourcing; they went to suburban development.
So, now we have, where you used to walk to work, or take a short trip to work, and you had several places of employment available to you, you now commute; and you commute an hour or an hour and a half, or longer. We've turned superhighways around cities into parking lots at rush hour—and sometimes it's even worse.
So, we have destroyed the city: It is not a machinery for life. It is not a place where you walk to your school. It is not a place where you go to the stores, where you select what you want. It is now a nightmare! A nightmare of boutiques which are really pretty worthless, and vast shopping malls, from which we buy junk, imported from virtual slave labor overseas, while we shut down employment in our own country.
We have to reverse that process.
That means, we must educate the U.S. population, in the ABCs of physical economy. Forget monetary economy. What counts is the physical effect: Do you have a job? What conditions of life do you have, as payment for that job? What are the conditions of life for your family? What're the conditions in the community? What is the rate of progress in conditions of life?
And how do we organize the money system, under a system of regulation of the type we had under Roosevelt, and in the immediate post-war period; how do we organize the monetary system and financial system, through regulation, to make sure that the money system functions in a way that corresponds to the physical intention of the nation? And of its laws?
We don't have it any more. You see, we're being destroyed.
Now therefore, by aid of this method of animations, which is largely computerized animations, we are going to produce and flood the market, so to speak, with an educational program, in the ABCs of real economy, based on animations. To re-educate the population, rapidly, by these kinds of visual aids, in what the principles of economics are, what the significance of various kinds of legislation would be, and that sort of thing. We are going to—particularly from my standpoint—we are going to take the PAC that we now have, which will be a key element in the Democratic Party as a whole, by fact—by merely fact—and the fact of our connections and so forth, involved in the effort to elect Kerry: We'll be part of the Democratic Party process.
We will be a catalyst in reorganizing the Democratic Party, for the fact that Bush is going to fail. The war in Iraq is lost. It's finished. The financial system, of the world, is collapsing. It's finished. There'll be a general financial collapse, worldwide, beyond anything that most of you in this room could even begin to imagine—and it will come on fast. That, everything you think is fixed, that is in the works, that is pre-programmed, is going to go.
And at that point, the only chance we have, if Bush is confirmed by the Electoral College—and there are some reasons to suspect that he should not be confirmed: The kinds of fraud which were perpetrated by the Republicans alone in this election, were sufficient to send these guys to jail, if not to unelect them. For example: Voter suppression—voter suppression! That's tyranny! That's dictatorship. And there was a lot of it. There was fraud of every kind, is turning up daily. We have some people in the Democratic Party we work with closely, who are looking at particularly that thing. And what is pouring in, in terms of evidence, day by day, is the evidence of a massive fraud by the Republican Party, which amounts to the thing—the thing is practically a criminal conspiracy, not a party!
And, not all Republicans are Bush-leaguers. Many Republicans are actually human. We will probably trade some of them, for the non-human Democrats. To simplify people's understanding of who's who!
So therefore, what we have to count on, in this situation: We have to count on the United States as an institution. Because I can tell you, from no other part of the world, is this change that has to be made going to be made! Other parts of the world will assist it, will be happy to see it happen, but they won't make it happen. We have to make it happen here.
The way we can make it, within our institutions, is the way we got rid of Nixon: in the Congress. And this means, Republicans and others of conscience, in the Congress, who are made clear two things to them: I find in history, you don't—. Scandal is not the way to orchestrate politics. Sometimes you have to report things that are scandalous. But, that does not solve your problem. What solves your problem, is presenting solutions. And the obvious solution, under our system today, lies with the members of the Federal Congress.
Now, we had an effort to prevent Ashcroft from being confirmed, in January of 2001. Many Democrats, including from the Congressional Black Caucus, made the effort to have a Senator endorse the challenging of the appointment of Ashcroft. Not a single Democratic Senator would stand up and support those members of the House of Representatives, who, one after the other, submitted this motion. That's our starting point: We want Democrats, to be willing to stand up, in such a way, that their potential Republican partners, who out of patriotism and disgust, will act jointly with Democrats to bring this tyranny to an end, to save this nation.
We must educate people now. We must move, and organize, now, between now and the inauguration proceedings, to ensure that we have a bipartisan assembly, of men and women of conscience who are prepared to move in the Congress on the day that happens, to make sure that the worst does not happen. It, at this point, is the only visible chance for the survival of the United States.
An essential part of our job, and of my job in particular, is to make clear, to people that we do have policy alternatives to an onrushing, great world depression. There are things we can do. Because, people will be discouraged; if they do not believe there are alternatives to a depression, they'll try to adapt to it, rather than change it, or prevent it. We have to convince people, who are intelligent, who are influential in their communities, that there are positive economic policy solutions for our problems.
We also have to do something else, morally, which goes back to where I began here this after: to Bach. We have to get at the spiritual side, of the people. The spiritual side as typified by this work of Bach, and what it involves; the spiritual side as typified by the history of the Negro Spiritual, in the 20th Century, under the impact of Burleigh and Dvořák and so forth. We have to go back to these roots, which emphasize that people are human; that people have an essential immortality; that immortality lies in those ideas, which respond to the aspirations of those who went before us; the ideas which we give for the security of those who come after us. That we are not people of physical pleasure. We are people of more pain than pleasure—at least as you go through the course of life, or the full span. We are people, whose pleasure lies largely in our sense of identity: The sense of identity, which causes a man who's dying to smile from his death-bed, knowing that his run has been a good one.
We have to give people the sense, that their run in life can be a good one. That's the great moral power! Not the power of the disoriented evangelicals; above all, not the power of these nutty, Satanic ultras.
We have to put the positive side, we have to bring the spiritual side forward, in the real sense, not this fake, tent show, snake-oil, sense that we get from these fundamentalists. But, the real sense: That man is a creature made in the image of the Creator! And that man must be respected as that; man must be developed as that. Man must have regard for other human beings based on that. Nations must cooperate on that basis. Cultures must be developed on that basis.
It's the spiritual pleasure, as of the child, who makes an original discovery for the first time in his own life—that kind of pleasure. To discover, "Hey Mommy! I'm human! I know what it is to be human!" No, that is one of the greatest experiences—it happened to me; it happened to others. The greatest experiences of life: to re-enact an original discovery you know is valid, and realize no monkey could do it. And you say, "Hey, Mommy, I'm human!"
Thank you.
[See transcript of the question-and-answer session following Lyndon LaRouche's opening remarks.]
