LAROUCHE TO SOUTH AFRICAN RADIO:
`The Universe Does Not
Belong to the Devil'
Lyndon LaRouche was interviewed on Radio 786, in Cape Town, South Africa, hosted by Fahri Hassan's program "Prime Talk" on April 18, 2006. Hassan, the news director, last interviewed LaRouche on Dec. 28, 2004. The Muslim community station was founded in 1995.Hassan: Assalam-aleiykum, good evening and welcome to Radio 786 on 100.4 FM stereo, your link with the community, your link with the world. I'm your host Fahri Hassan, and that means it is Prime Talk: discerning, dissenting, never disappointing. The program that tackles the crux of the matter, unravels the controversies, and educates the public about events, local, national, and, international. Tonight we focus on the global crisis, with its nexus in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and most importantly, the impending implosion of the world monetary system. We shall hear tonight of a gigantic fraud, perpetrated by international financial interests to launch a potential, diabolical, perpetual war. We shall hear of the real reasons behind these plans of the reshaping of the geographic landscape of the region, under hegemonic control, and subjugation by these financial interests, using an anti-Islam crusade, engineering a form of a Clash of Civilizations.
Driven by neo-conservatives, or neo-crazies in the U.S.A. regime, or as former U.S.A. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche called Bush and company, "lunatics, clowns, and fools," who it may be said, are promoting the interests of the Israeli lobby, who is driving the world to a potential nuclear holocaust catastrophe.
In this context, we hope to also focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which has reached a new escalation with the advent of Hamas to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, a situation, it would appear, untenable to Israel and the Israeli lobby.
We are faced with a world held ransom by a few, "a tyranny based on the threat of war, and the fear of men": So starts American statesman James Madison's address on April 20, 1795. It continues: "Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and envelopes the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies, from these proceed debts and taxes, and armies and debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied. And all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud growing out of a state of war, and of the degeneracy of manners and morals engendered by both. No nation shall preserve freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
So says James Madison.
Tonight, we host a very special person, a former U.S.A. Democratic Presidential candidate, and noted economist, Founder and Contributing Editor to the acclaimed journal Executive Intelligence Review; a prolific author of numerous books and publications, and a well-respected intellectual worldwide. It is indeed a privilege and a great honor to welcome Mr. Lyndon LaRouche to the airways of Radio 786.
Good evening, and welcome Mr. LaRouche.
LaRouche: Thank you for having me.
Hassan: Great, thank you. It's our pleasure. Please note that you can access Mr. LaRouche's writings at www.larouchepac.com, or at www.larouchepub.com. Mr. LaRouche will also be conducting a webcast on the website, on the 27th of April—I think it's round about 6 or 7 p.m. our time—in which he will address the threat represented by the privatization of military functions being carried out by the Cheney-Shultz-Rohatyn grouping through the Bush Administration.
In a statement issued March 21st, entitled "Private Armies, Captive People," Mr. LaRouche blasted the moves by the international financial syndicates to break the power of governments, through globalization, including the employment of private armies and private secret police forces, to implement a new world dictatorship in imitation of that designed by the Nazis.
Without further ado, Mr. LaRouche: Let's get straight to the topic tonight. We are focussed on the global crisis, and you called it in your publication, a "crisis on the global chessboard." You called it a revival of Bernard Lewis's global anti-Islam strategy, centered around the concept of perpetual war, to promote global imperialism, or globalization as you put it. Mr. LaRouche, please explain.
LaRouche: Well, if you go back in history to about 1000 A.D., you had the development of a movement in Europe, which was a positive movement which was associated with Charlemagne of France. Now, as many people in Islam know, this was made possible by the great Baghdad Caliphate's role at that time, and particularly with the personal relationship of Haroun al-Rashid to Charlemagne. There was an organization in Europe which was a struggle to free people from the vestiges of various kinds of Roman imperialism—Byzantine and other.
In response against that, a force centered on Venice at that time—there were Venetian bankers who'd come to power as the Byzantine Empire's power had declined—and they organized the Norman Crusaders. And they did around what they called the Crusades, which was religious warfare. And we recall, that from the period of essentially that time, until the Renaissance in Europe in the 15th Century, and then again, from 1492 with the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain by Crusader traditions, until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, that Europe was dominated by religious warfare.
What has happened in the case of Bernard Lewis and his friends in the Arab Bureau of British intelligence, which has now moved him into the United States, from where he has been directing the policies of Brzezinski, Huntington, and so forth—we're now back at it, in using religious war as a means of world empire. The target, of course, has been Islam, and that's the key to understand the whole situation.
The problem is clear, when you look at the alternative: We have made, in spite of all the things that have happened, we have made great progress in some respects in European and world civilization. It was Roosevelt's intention—unfortunately it was set back when Roosevelt died, and Truman came in with policies of Winston Churchill and so forth. So, we went back to a new Crusade. This time, the Crusade was first the Soviet Union, declared by Churchill. Nonetheless, we progressed. We progressed economically; many parts of the world did recover to some degree. The tendency toward recolonization which had been launched by Truman and Churchill, that abated by the time of the late 1950s. We were on the way to progress, until a series of events, including the assassination of President Kennedy and the launching of the war in Indo-China, then, we began to shift into a new policy.
With Nixon, from the Nixon Administration on, we have been shifting toward a kind of imperialist policy, which is opposed to everything in economic policy that the United States in principle stood for, that Franklin Roosevelt stood for. We're now going to a policy of globalization, which is another name for imperialism. It's a form of imperialism, which is traced especially to the period of the Crusades, from about 1000 A.D. until the fall of the power of this banking power in the 14th Century crisis.
So, now we're back to it. And the same kind of evil, which brought the world into crisis in former times, and various empires, has struck again. And the question is, do we have the stamina, do we have the will, do we have the knowledge to prevent this from going forward now?
Hassan: Sorry, Mr. LaRouche, just following on from what you're saying, one of the features that I find—in reading some of your articles and your propositions—is that, we're looking at a global economic meltdown. It would appear that the international monetary and financial system, seems to be imploding. And this, it would appear, is at the bottom of all the machinations that the Bush government and the British government, and all the allies are busy with. It seems that this underpins all the movement that is taking place within the Middle East, and its surroundings. This is at the bottom of that.
You also mentioned that this is based on a gigantic fraud. Can you put that in a nutshell for us?
LaRouche: There are two aspects to it. In ideology, people may have a bad ideology which may lead them to do bad things. But they also, themselves, they become the victims of what they believe. And this is a perfect example of it: They wanted to destroy the influence of the model, the American System model as associated with Franklin Roosevelt, which is the model of which we say, all of society is entitled to the protection and promotion of the common good. And that was the intention; it's been the intention of the United States at the inception; that was the intention of Roosevelt. We've gone in other directions at different times, but that's our policy.
Now, what's happened, in Europe and in the United States, is that, over the past 40-odd years, there has been a reversal, a cultural paradigm-shift which came out of the immediate post-war period. And this cultural paradigm-shift has moved people to destroy those institutions, economic and other institutions, which were the basis of Franklin Roosevelt's power, the power of the United States coming out of World War II.
But that became their ideology: The idea of a post-industrial society, the Greenie movement, became a part of destroying the Franklin Roosevelt and similar kinds of thinking around the world. You now have a group in power, which are determined to have a Venetian-style, financier-controlled world empire, called globalization. And they have largely destroyed what we had built up, worldwide, into the 1960s, built up as an economic system which was actually, at that point, with all its problems and errors, was nonetheless increasing the productive powers of labor, increasing the standard of living around the world, physically, during that period.
We reversed that: We are now going into a great financial crisis, which is a result of that bad policy, a bad policy which is a built-in ideology of leading forces, including some members of the political system of the United States. So therefore, you might say: It's the law of God, that evil will destroy itself. And these evil ideas have brought us to the point, where at the same time they tried to destroy the world, in effect, by globalization, with the aid of religious warfare as a religious theme, for religious warfare, but at the same time, they're destroying the very economic power upon which their ability to attempt to control the world depends.
Hassan: Mr. LaRouche, in your thesis, you also mentioned that what certainly seems to be happening is that this Cheney-Bush regime—and there's many others that you mentioned as part of this cabal, or neo-conservative grouping—that they are actually being also controlled by certain financial interests, and that clearly you are saying that there are groupings behind them that are driving this policy. You also mentioned, in fact, in your pieces, that there's a gigantic bubble that's about to implode, that this bubble is about to burst. Is it the property bubble that you're also focussing on?
LaRouche: Yes.
Hassan: Can you unpack this all for us, so that we can understand what is happening in the Persian Gulf, and what is coming out of the promoters of this policy, how this all fits in?
LaRouche: Well, if you look back in history, and you say that some of the most powerful forces of their time were also intrinsically evil, and in the long term, stupid, and brought about their own destruction through their own evil. Now, this takes the form of some people sometimes behind the scenes, who try to control and orchestrate events. To orchestrate events, they use various ideological methods of moving certain forces, which are essentially their puppets. And they move these forces to do the dirty work.
Take the case of the fascist regimes from 1922 through 1945: Beginning with Mussolini, who was put into power by the British system, through an Italian-Venetian banker, and through the adoption of Hitler, Franco, and the other fascist movements, these things were created by a financial interest called the Synarchist International at that time, which was orchestrating these various fascist movements. The fascist movement was defeated in 1945 with the fall of Hitler, and of course, with the surrender of Japan. But the people behind the fascist movement were not rooted out. That is, we punished some Nazis, we shot this guy, hanged that guy, whatnot, we tortured others—but we did not go at the root of the problem. What we did is, we went at the tool which was the Nazis and the other various fascist movements. But we did not root out the banking circle which had organized this, the Synarchist banking circle.
The same Synarchist banking circle, which ran the Nazi operation, is back, doing the same thing again, today. I name Felix Rohatyn, for example, in the United States, who's typical of this. I mean, Rohatyn, for example, was the guy who financed, or organized the finances to take a Nazi, Augusto Pinochet, and make him the dictator of Chile! And it was the same forces which, organized under the Pinochet government, took the entire Southern Cone of South America, and they organized—with Nazis, second- and third-generation Nazis—organized mass murder of a Hitler type, in Argentina and so forth, in the Southern Cone, and spread this stuff into Central America later.
So, it's the same kind of thing. The same enemy is there. The enemy is an enemy of—it's the financial kind of thing which Venice typified, which the Roman Empire typified, and so forth. But they have, also, their instruments who are the instruments of repression. It's like a man who kills somebody: He gets a gun. He kills the person with a gun. People say, the gun killed the man. Yeah, but who pulled the trigger? So, what's happened is, that you make a distinction between the instruments of evil, and the trigger-pullers of evil.
But, as in this case, in the end, these people will lose. Because this universe does not belong to the Devil. And therefore, eventually, this power will be crushed. And I think the time has come to crush it.
Hassan: Some pundits or some commentators have said that these forces, and Bush, in fact, have got a messianic type of vision, and that it's driven by corporate greed, and driven by, as you've mentioned, fascist ideologies. But now, coming to the present crisis, I want to start off with the Iran crisis, perhaps work backwards to Iraq, and picture what's happening in that region.
The Iran crisis, at the moment, the United States—or at least the way the media and the various groupings are promoting it—is at a standoff on the nuclear issue. Apparently the United States is—Seymour Hersh has revealed that they're planning a nuclear strike on Iran, and planning full-scale military campaigns. And this of course, in total contravention of international law.
But, having said that, is this the real motive behind what is happening in that region? The nuclear standoff—are there perhaps other underlying motives for what is happening in the Persian Gulf region, at the moment, Mr. LaRouche?
LaRouche: Well, to understand this situation, you have to say some undiplomatic things. First of all, the President of the United States is crazy. He's insane. He does not really know what he's doing. He does not have the brain power, in terms of understanding, or, if he has the brain power, he doesn't have the emotions to use the brain power. But he's a puppet essentially. He's a puppet of forces which are typified by George Pratt Shultz and international banking circles—actually the same international financial circles which were behind the Hitler project, back in the 1920s and 1930s, 1940s.
Hassan: Sorry to interrupt, Mr. LaRouche: Is this the George Shultz that's also part of the Carlyle Group, part of the George Bush Sr. cabal, that's—
LaRouche: Absolutely.
Hassan: Financial investment—is that the group?
LaRouche: That's right. Shultz was the fellow, who actually orchestrated and pulled together the elements which designated George Bush, Jr. to become the President of the United States. George Bush is their puppet. There are various people who were put in as controllers of George Bush. Now, George Bush is an individual who has the authority and power to say certain things: For example, today, he said in a television interview—national, international press covered it—that he is not opposed to using nuclear weapons against Iran. And he did this in defense of his Secretary of Defense, who's his tool, Rumsfeld, in defiance of the fact that active service, and other major military officers, flag-rank military officers of the United States, have threatened to resign, and denounced his actions, in terms of this Iran option.
He is now in the process, like the Emperor Nero, of destroying himself. And Shultz and this crowd are behind him.
But, as I said, you've got to look at the factor of insanity. Now, you could say, technically, that George Bush is insane. He is not a sane person. He has deep emotional, mental problems; that he, in that sense, is insane. But, more important, is, the crowd he represents, the instruments behind this policy, are criminally insane! And that's our problem.
My question is, do people have the courage—many people will condemn George for saying this, will condemn the Bush Administration's action: Will they stop it? No one in Europe is prepared to intervene to stop this thing! They're prepared to oppose it, but not to stop it! In the United States, we have some people who are determined, especially military officers who know what this involves, who have said, it's got to be stopped. Others who say, it's got to be stopped. I know, from the inside, from working with many of the people in leadership in our government—that is, in the Congress and elsewhere—that there is the intention to stop it. But there's also the command facility to be able to give the commands that actually stop the thing. And my concern is to stop it! Not just to complain about it.
Hassan: But, there's another thesis, that several commentators are putting forward, that in fact the underlying cause, or the underlying reason, is really because Iran is wanting to form their own Iranian euro-based oil exchange board, and this frightens the Americans.
LaRouche: No—
Hassan: This frightens the American regime and its allies, because of the fact that going over to a euro-based—it will in fact encourage many of the European states, and other countries, to start putting their money in euros, and this would create a major helpless dollar, and cause the dollar to crash. What about that thesis?
LaRouche: Well—forget it. That's a childish thesis. It has no correspondence to any reality. If the destruction of Iran—which would not be the total destruction of Iran, what's intended—but the coming in there with nuclear bunker-busters and things like that, the MEK retooled and so forth, and things like that, is not going to eliminate Iran. It's going to turn Iran from what it is now, into a focal point of destruction of the entire system.
Now, what would happen for example, to the price of petroleum, if the attack on Iran occurred? There is no knowledge as to what the ceiling would be for the price of petroleum. We're now looking at $150 to $200 a barrel.
The euro system is dead: Expect nothing from the Europeans. The Europeans are not a power. There's not a single government there that has the guts to do anything. There're bankers in there, financial interests—they have power. But the governments are totally impotent.
If it were to occur, you would plunge the entire planet into a Dark Age. That gets you right to the heart of the issue: These guys, behind this issue, are prepared to have a Dark Age! They're not entirely stupid. They're criminally insane, but they're not entirely stupid. If you get an oil price equivalent going to $200-250 a barrel, you're not going to have an empire of the euro! You're going to have a destruction of civilization globally.
At the same time, we're at the point, at which it is impossible to proceed with civilization without the extended use of nuclear power: The old ideas of the Green Revolution, all these kinds of things—this is dead. We have to go back, we have to provide a system which can provide the economic means to deal with a population which is now over 6 billion people; to deal with that population which is growing, among people in these countries such as China and India, most of whom are very poor, who have the aspiration to improve the conditions of life of coming generations. And we have to provide the physical economic opportunities to fulfill those aspirations.
We're now using up the cheap natural resources, the ones which are the so-called richest natural resources—we're using them rapidly. That's not a problem: Because, if we use high-density energy production, such as nuclear fission, and going on to nuclear fusion, we can meet these problems, we can handle these problems. We have a water crisis, already, worldwide. We're using up fossil water—we can't continue that. We have to start to desalinate water on a large scale. We can meet the problems.
So, what we're looking at, is, one force which knows that it's playing with the danger of putting the entire planet into a Dark Age. And they say, "Yes, okay, we'll accept that." They are the ones who're going ahead with this. You have a man who's insane, the President of the United States, he doesn't know what he's doing, he doesn't care. He's blind—he's going by his ideology. He's narrow, small-minded. You have people around him, who are, also, as I know, insane. In terms of functionally insane—not personally insane, but functionally insane: morally insane. They will do that. They will not know what the consequences are. They didn't know what the consequences were when they went into Iraq, this last invasion. They don't know what they're doing, in terms of effects. They're not supposed to know: They have their passions, their ideology.
But those of us who understand, know, that at the higher level, in terms of the leading international financiers such as, in our country, say, Felix Rohatyn—who was the guy who helped put Pinochet into power; and who is one of the people behind this policy of using private armies to control the world—these people are doing this.
Hassan: Coming to that point, where you are saying about the private armies, and you can bring in that aspect if you can perhaps take a part of your webcast that you're going to speak about—there are, within the United States, and various rightists are promoting the same thesis. That it is in fact, these interests, as you said, the international financial interests, through the multinational corporations such as the armaments industry, and Halliburton, the Bechtels, and these companies, they are in fact funding the beast of the American military, these private armies, to fight their battles, these future battles, for them. And at the moment, as it's come to light, I think it was a couple of months ago, where the British soldiers were found with bombs; and of course, in recent times in Iraq, you found in the Samarra bombing, this pack of death squad activity also coming through—is this what is happening at present in Iraq, and what we can see for the foreseeable future? And how do we solve the problem?
LaRouche: That's exactly what you can foresee, is a likely thrust of attack. For example, go back to the British East India Company, back in the 18th Century, early 19th Century: the British army was not the British government's army. It was the British East India Company's army. And that was not original. You go back to the Crusades: who were the Crusaders? Well, they were primarily the Norman chivalry, called the "Crusaders." But who were they? They were private armies. Financed by what? Financed by Venetian bankers, who funded the whole operation, who controlled the Crusades.
Today, you have Halliburton. Now Halliburton has become a private army, has probably got close to $12 billion for its part in the war in Iraq, so far. The policy of Felix Rohatyn, for example, the policy of Cheney: The policy is to destroy the regular military forces, and, as Hitler did with the SS, in taking down the Wehrmacht, to replace it by an SS—the same thing is in process today.
So, if you're going to run an empire, you can not run it with soldiers which have patriotic inclinations toward a particular country. You do it as the Roman legions did it, recruiting people from many peoples of the world, into legions, and parading them around the world to conduct extermination campaigns against entire populations. The Byzantine Empire did something quite similar, just like the Crusaders.
And this is the mentality: That a soldier of a country, who is moved by patriotism, by patriotic service to his people and his country, is a different proposition than a mercenary.
And what these are, are mercenary armies which are being used. And Felix Rohatyn is one of the leading sponsors of a policy for replacing regular military forces by mercenary armies. And that's what the generals in the United States are revolting against, in revolting against Rumsfeld: They're really revolting against an insane President Bush, for whom Rumsfeld is by law, merely a puppet.
Hassan: Coming back to the Iran crisis, and just looking at what is unfolding around the issue of the nuclear standoff, from an outside observer and a commentator, one sees that the American regime has set up military bases all around that area, and clearly in Iraq, it would appear they already have laid down plans for building military bases. So there's a clear strategy of not pulling out, but of staying there. And it would appear—and I'm quoting here from certain groups like the RAND Corp., which has produced several documents, to destabilize the Muslim world; and also, interestingly, this brings in the Israeli lobby, because they've also cottoned on from—I think in the U.S. regime there were certain individuals that were—well, in fact it was attributed to them, a document called "The Strategy of the Realm" [referred to as "Clean Break"—ed.], which was a policy document for the State of Israel, and how they were going to, kind of almost destabilize that Middle East region, in order to secure the interests of Israel.
How powerful is the Israeli lobby in devising and influencing U.S. foreign policy on this, Mr. LaRouche?
LaRouche: Well, the Israeli lobby, as such, is not that powerful. It's only powerful in the sense that it's a glove, into which somebody puts a fist. The fist is not Israeli. The fist is primarily Anglo-American, and Anglo-American-French.
You look at the entire region, you go back to 1905-1915, the emergence in the wake of what happened in Sudan in 1889, under Kitchener, and you saw a policy coming out of the Kitchener operation in Iran and elsewhere; you saw an operation which actually led into the whole Sykes-Picot operation, which included Iran, which included Southwest Asia in general. So, the whole area was carved up in an agreement which the British government, the British monarchy, together with the French, cut, involving Turkey, and involving Iran, and how they were going to recarve the Ottoman Empire. And this also resulted in this agreement between Czar Nicholas II and the British, on the partition of spheres of interest in Iran.
What you're looking at in that area, is you're looking at a combination of the old British East India Company, its operation, and the India Office, which then split off immediately after World War I, to form the Arab Bureau, with Glubb Pasha, and with the present things.
So, what you have, is you have the Middle East policy has been used, ever since the period of the Crusades, has been used as a pivot for global power. The targets here, and the reasons for the bases in that area, have nothing to do with the base; the Israelis are essentially puppets of the operation: The objective is the destruction of China, the destruction of India, the destruction of Pakistan, the destruction of Russia and the Near Abroad. That's the objective. And that's why the bases are being put there. These bases are not permanent bases, they are expendable. Nobody knows what's going to happen to them. But the problem is, they're plunging toward a Dark Age for all humanity: because, the war they're trying to start, can not be won by anyone. The human race would lose.
Hassan: But having said that, one doesn't kill off the system, and you also die by that same [blow]. So the banking system as you put it, the financial interests behind this, they would obviously secure themselves, you know. And how do they ensure that, with a Dark Age?
LaRouche: Well, look at history: You have the first financial system of this type, was centered around the Cult of Apollo, the Delphi Cult. This, at that time, was a representative of what were Middle Eastern—that is, the Persian Empire—and other banking or financial interests, which ran a system, very much like the international banking system today. They orchestrated the destruction of Greece's culture, because Athens was a threat to their power. That led, after a period of time, to the emergence of the Roman Empire, which they created. You look at the Roman religion, so-called, the pagan religion, was a direct copy made by the Cult of Apollo. The Romans were not a people; the Romans were a bunch of people created as a people by an orchestration, to destroy the branch Hittite culture, which was the Etruscan culture. They became an empire: The control of the empire was a financial system. All the Roman emperors were setting up a financial system, a continuation of the Delphic system.
Then, you have the Byzantine system: the same thing! It was a financial empire, at core. Then you had the Middle Ages, the Crusader age, and this was the same thing. The Venetian bankers ran this! When Venice fell into bad times, as a power, as a political power, toward the end of the 17th Century, the Dutch East India Company took over. And Venetians suddenly adopted Dutch and English names. And so, today, you have the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system in Europe, as a continuation of an unbroken chain of financier power, from Mesopotamia, where it came from, through the Delphi Cult, through the Roman Empire, through the Byzantine Empire, through the Crusader period, and into the modern British-Dutch empire, and those in the United States who have pretensions in the same direction.
Hassan: So, if you can just put into a nutshell: How does the attack on Islam, as you stated with the Bernard Lewis strategy, how does the attack on Islam—well, one understands that most of the Muslim lands at present find themselves on the black gold. But, how does this hegemony, because, some of these plans that are being put in place, like the "Strategy for the Realm," and of course, the Strategy for the 1980s, somehow tends to promote this idea of hegemony by dividing up and balkanizing this entire region. How does this benefit these powers, attaining hegemony in that region?
LaRouche: Well, sometimes power is the purpose of destruction. There are over a billion people who are identified with Islam: If you make them the enemy, if you target them with very cruel and brutal methods, as were done with the case of the recent Iraq war, under George Bush II, if you do that, you enrage them. Now you look back, look back at the religious war in Europe in a more recent time: 1492 to 1648. The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, by actually a continuation of the Crusader faction, set forth religious warfare which almost destroyed Europe internally.
You go back, again, you find that religious warfare, or large-scale warfare, or what is called today in technology as "irregular warfare" or "asymmetric warfare," is deadly. If you turn the planet, which is now collapsing economically in most parts today, you turn it into this kind of holocaust, a religious warfare, no one will be able to maintain a nation-state form of society on this planet. Because religious warfare destroys the conception of the nature of man: man as a creature who is not an animal, but a creature made in the likeness of the Creator. Once you get people who think of themselves as being followers of the Creator, in the likeness of the Creator, killing each other, they are destroying the image of man as made in the image of the Creator, and degrading him to the image of a mere beast, a feral beast!
If you turn man, from man to man, to beast to beast, you can destroy civilization. Some people, out of a strange kind of hatred, and these are centered in these financier groups, are determined to do exactly that.
Hassan: Hmm. Yes, this is certainly food for thought, there.... About the Iraqi debacle and what is happening there: The U.S. and its allies have got no intention of getting out of Iraq—I mean, they're there to stay. And it seems like the policy is such that, as you've mentioned, the international financial interests, are pushing it to maintain the hegemony over that region. And of course, noting that, according to Colin Campbell, one of the oil experts in the world, the world oil has reached its peak. That's certainly one of the ways of maintaining hegemonic control over the resources, is to maintain a military presence there. Is that a fair assessment, Mr. LaRouche?
LaRouche: Well, not really. I had a discussion back in 1976 with Abba Eban, who was then out of service, but who was, of course of South African origin, and was the Foreign Minister of Israel under the Labor government. And we were discussing the possibilities which I was working on at the time, for trying to get some agreement for getting the Palestinians back their rights. And in the course of discussion, he said to me, "This is all fine," he said. "But you forget, that some heads of government, heads of state in the world today, are clinically insane."
Now, this could be said of some Israeli governments among others! But he was right at that point. Don't assume, in dealing with these matters, that the people who are authoring these evils are sanely aware of the consequences of what they're doing. They're sometimes like mad beasts, clouded by their own special ideology, their own greed, their own illusions. We know people like that in society. We sometimes ignore the fact that people like that, we know as crazy people, are in our neighborhood—you know, madmen—that these people are sometimes in top positions of government and leadership.
This whole thing is not going to work. It can not work.
See, because you look at the other side of the thing: How do we progress? You have cycles of evil regimes come in, and take over for a while. Then the people come out and emerge, and often, again, this leads to the emergence of a better form of society. Which then may go through the same cycle again. But overall, since we have moved from, say, 700 million people on this planet prior to the European Renaissance, to over 6 billion today, and better conditions of life had existed generally, prior to the end of the 1960s, we have progressed. Mankind has progressed.
The power that I like to concentrate on, is not the fear of the power of evil, though that has to be faced, and I do have to face that. But, I look at the things that will lead to happier results, results more in keeping with mankind. How do we build a coalition of forces, and of forces which do not necessarily have to agree with each other on everything: But they have to agree on the nature of man, and the purpose of humans' existence and the betterment of the human condition; and peaceful relations among peoples. So, my concentration is to look at these things, not from the standpoint of the evil I've often described, as I have today so far, but to look at these matters of evil, from the standpoint of the alternative: the Good. What should we be doing? And if we could get people mobilized more about what we should be doing, we would be stronger for facing evil.
This is the problem I see in Europe, today. Europe is, Western and Central Europe in particular, is right at this moment, completely hopeless—it's a complete waste, strategically! It's corrupt, it's gone, it's going no place.
We, in the United States, despite our corruption, have the responsibility of turning the corner on this. But, as I've found out, and I've demonstrated recently, the only way you lead people away from evil, is by proposing the alternative good. You inspire people to see that there is a better way of doing things. Then you can muster the strength to make the decisions you have to fight evil. And that's the situation we have today.
Hassan: Just before I ask you to elaborate more on those solutions, we have a caller on the line, so caller please go ahead.
Q: I just want to pose a question to this learned person, you know. To me, taking a great interest in world politics, to me the main obstacle for a peaceful solution for world problems, and I think this could play a major role in world politics, which is being dominated especially by the U.S.A., is the United Nations. And I think the sooner the people, the peaceful peoples of the world try to oust this group, and form a new group, that has peaceful intentions for mankind, the sooner we will move forward. But as long as the UN is playing this devious role that it's playing at the present moment, I think the world populace is coming on a very slippery slope, as it is at the moment.
Hassan: Hmm, interesting point here. Thank you, caller. Mr. LaRouche?
LaRouche: There's a misunderstanding of the situation. Remember, the United Nations was created by Franklin Roosevelt, who's intention was, that at the close of the war, the U.S. power would ensure that nations that had been colonialized, or semi-colonialized, would be not only given the right to establish their own independent self-government, but would be assisted economically with long-term credit, to build their nations.
Churchill was of a different persuasion. Churchill hated Roosevelt, even though he was allied with him during the war against Hitler. But he wanted to preserve above all, the British Empire. He did not want decolonization. Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt as President, shared Churchill's outlook, and therefore, the United States, together with the Dutch government, the British government, and the French government, conducted brutal, repressive actions against the peoples of Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, in the attempt to preserve some form of colonialization. And now, as you know from South Africa, there was—in Africa as a whole—there was a kind of a de-colonization, which was not really de-colonization, because the power never got to the people.
The problem has been, as in the United Nations, for example, I was one of the contributing factors in the conference held in Colombo, in Sri Lanka, in 1976. It was the Non-Aligned Movement conference, at which we proposed a remedy on this to the United Nations. One of the speakers, one of my collaborators, was then the Foreign Minister of Guyana, Fred Wills. At Colombo, at the conference in August, the majority of representatives of the Non-Aligned nations group voted for the proposal which I and others had crafted. When we got to New York, for the UN General Assembly meeting, the only person on this planet from an official position who defended the adopted proposal of the Non-Aligned nations group, was my friend Fred Wills.
So, the problem is not in the United Nations. The United Nations has not been an alternative, and will not be an alternative. The United Nations was created to be an instrument of de-colonization and freedom. And the problem is not the governments; the problem is not the lack of UN control; the problem is not the nation-state principle: that's a mistake! People can function only as they are able to express this through their own culture: Their own culture is a nation-state culture. It is the unity of cooperation of cultures which is what we seek. Therefore, we must strengthen the nation-state, not destroy it. We must have protectionist systems. For example: Poor countries can not match powerful countries: they need protection, they need protectionism. It has to be agreed among us.
So, we should look always at the positive solution, here. The United Nations is not a positive solution. It should be transformed, back into what Roosevelt intended: An instrument to affirm the equality of peoples as sovereign nations on the planet. And that's good. That must be done. But there must be an agreement among states, especially among powerful states: that we can not live on this planet with the kinds of insanity which threaten us now, today.
Hassan: So, Mr. LaRouche, if I understand you correctly—I mean, what of course the Third World has been experiencing has been years of repression, years of colonial oppression, and of course occupation in various forms. And, clearly that was continued with the IMF/World Bank policies, and of late, of course, we have now the World Trade Organization imposing the globalization strategy. And clearly this strategy is continuing. In the Third World, what do we, as subjugated—and I believe we are still very much, because here in our country, in South Africa, there seems to be a marriage between government and big capital; that seems to be the case, here: How do the ordinary people extricate themselves from this hegemony?
LaRouche: Well, that's what I've devoted a good deal of my adult life to. I didn't set out to become a Jeanne d'Arc. I started, came back from military service at the end of World War II, but, I came back to find a country in the United States, which was no longer the country of Franklin Roosevelt; it had become something else under Truman, and the same forces we had fought against in Hitler, were back at it again, but this time in new clothing.
So, my view is that we have to have two things: You need an international consensus, in a sense, building up among people about the changes we have to make. That's what I've been working for, for most of my life, increasingly especially over the past 40-odd years! And it's a tough fight. The forces are such, that those of us who have influence of power, and nations which have influence of power, have to recognize that their existence, the moral significance of their existence depends upon the betterment of mankind as a whole. And what my fight has been, is for the development of peoples of the planet. I was involved emotionally and otherwise in the Indian struggle for independence, when I was still in U.S. uniform, back in the 1940s. And I've been at this thing, off and on, for a long time. The only path that works, is that we've got to fight to reestablish that. And you have to bring some major powers into the play, major powers of people who realize, we have to protect our brothers, who may be weaker and smaller nations. We have to protect them and ensure their rights.
And that's the kind of government we have. It's the only one that's going to work. You have to have—power has to be in the hands of those who are dedicated to that purpose.
Hassan: Before we get to the point where I'm going to ask you, how do we achieve that, there's a caller online. Caller, please go ahead.
Q: The United Nations ... was established for what you fought for in the Second World War, so we don't repeat the same mistakes we did in the First World War, and the Second World War....
My dad fought in the Second World War, he was a prisoner of war in Poland; I learned a lot from him. He spent his time in Poland, he was fighting for the British and all that.... America could do mass production of planes because they had infrastructure, they had everything. Other countries couldn't do it. I mean holding the enemy off, with all the Luftwaffe in Germany. Americans were producing bombers in the hundreds.
Now, another question, America's image is now outdated, which they have to get rid of. How do you get rid of something like that... ?
Hassan: Interesting point, thank you caller. Mr. LaRouche, did you hear that?
LaRouche: Yes, I did. I think, the point is, I've dealt with power, and I know from history, and I know from my own experience, that we're up against power. And the power is international. The power is not located in nations, it's a power that uses nations. And therefore, it places the greatest importance in using the more powerful nations, because that's the way power can be exerted.
But the problem lies with the fact we have a system, a financier-controlled system, which has managed—essentially as I've traced it earlier, from the fall of Greece under the influence of the Delphic Cult of Apollo, which corrupted Athens and led to the Peloponnesian War, that all throughout this history, these thousands of years, you look at the history of European civilization: It has been a struggle between two forces, and what you see in, for example, Plato's writings, particularly in The Republic and other writings, the conflict between these two forces has continued. If you look at the implications of the European struggle, that is, internal European culture—which is now the Americas as well as Europe, and the extensions of that culture in various ways to other parts of the world, we find that the same force which has controlled European history—-the same conflict of forces which controls European history is now a worldwide conflict. There's no part of the world which is exempt from it. We have to have unity of forces which are determined to eliminate this evil, and the evil is the financial system.
The struggle has been—go back to the end of the war, when Roosevelt set up the Bretton Woods system, when the U.S. currency was the only currency on the planet that was worth anything, we used that currency, initially under Roosevelt's intention, to rebuild the world, as a fixed-exchange credit system. That was destroyed. That was destroyed in steps, by the launching of the Indo-China war, and by the launching of the change in the system to the floating-exchange-rate system.
Since that time, the developing nations, the weaker nations of the world have had no power. Because they don't own their own currency. They don't control their own fate. Their fate is controlled by international financier forces. The only people who can break that power, are in leading nations. The United States is the principal nation, which should lead in breaking that power. If we're going to survive as a nation, the United States, now, we're going to have to dump that system. Because, if the United States tries to defend the financier policies, which have dominated the United States for the past 40 years, the United States is not going to exist much longer. We're going to go into a world of chaos.
So therefore, the point is: We've got to understand what the real difference is. It's not nations against nations. It's not peoples against peoples. It is peoples played against peoples by a higher power. That higher power has to be understood, and defeated. We have to become the higher power.
Hassan: But on that point, just finally, Mr. LaRouche, in your country, how are you going to achieve that? Because back here, we also have the same fight, if I understand you correctly, between those who do not have, and the elite, the top controllers of the financial system. How do the only people—for instance, I mean, the media is controlled, and so the people are duped into believing in this system which George Bush was elected into; and they believe that the electoral system has been working for them. Likewise here in our country, and in various other countries.
But, the systems are in place which dupe the people into believing that this is the only system which will work. And at this moment in time, I don't see how, under the hegemony of this group, and with the control that they have over the mass media, how ordinary people are going to break out of this?
LaRouche: Well, go back in history, go back in U.S. history, in particular. Go back to 1932: This system was fully in control of the United States, during the 1920s. You had military officers who were opposed to it, and others who were opposed to it. Then, you had the election: Franklin Roosevelt was elected. Franklin Roosevelt changed the system, and beat the system. He then died. And when he died, the same crowd came back in again.
We're now at the point, that the system under the leadership of these bankers, who are, as I know, totally incompetent, is about to crash. This system is about to crash. If the people of the United States are going to survive, they're going to change the system in the way I indicate it must be done. Similar is true in Europe.
Now, we have also, at the same time, we have a great development in the world: We have important developments toward unity in South America. Unity in terms of cooperation. We have great movements, you have China, India, Russia, and these are becoming a bloc of people who represent the core of Asia, the Asian population. So, the Asian population does have a voice. If you have a similar development in the United States—which we do have and we're on the verge of retrieving it—then we can get out of this. We have a chance before us. One chance: That in the breakdown of this system, which is coming on now, we will have the opportunity politically, if enough of my friends have the courage to continue it, we have the opportunity to reform this system! And when we reform this system, we're not going to let go: because we're going to do what Roosevelt did.
And then, if we succeed in preventing Hell on Earth from erupting, as threatened now, let's hope that the next generation is prepared to make sure that we don't make the mistakes that were made when Roosevelt died, or after Roosevelt died, in the post-war period. The important thing now, in my view, and I'm concentrating on this now: We have to develop among young adults, that is, between 18 and 25 years of age—it's a certain precious period of lifetime—the basis of development, so that when we pass on, if we succeed in doing this, when we pass on, this generation will be qualified to make sure that the mistake that we made under Truman is not going to be repeated, again!
Hassan: Very positive. Very clear. And very concise. And I think the people have listened. And certainly, and indeed, an inspiring hour of talk radio. Indeed, an education for us. And, indeed, Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, certainly it was uplifting and very positive. And I think people are feeling much more positive in this hour, in this time of desperation. I think, for the public, listening to you certainly would have gained lots of courage from your speech....
Mr. LaRouche, I'm very pleased to have had you tonight, and once again, it's been an education for me and a privilege. And I thank you.
LaRouche: Thank you!
