LaRouche in Berlin Webcast:
Bring Back the Axioms of FDR
This is a transcript of Lyndon LaRouche's international webcast opening presentation Sept. 6, from Berlin and Washington, D.C., sponsored by LaRouche's Political Action Committee. The meeting was chaired in Berlin by Jessica Tremblay and Jonathan Tennenbaum, and by Debra Freeman in Washington. Video and audio recordings and a PDF version of the webcast are also available. See also the transcript of the question-and-answer session.
Jessica Tremblay: Good afternoon. My name is Jessica Tremblay, a representative of the LaRouche Youth Movement here—and good morning, of course, in Washington, D.C. This is an international webcast, and the first time that a webcast of this sort has taken place simultaneously in Berlin and in Washington, D.C., so, it's quite an historical event, and a great honor also to be able to introduce Mr. LaRouche at this point.
Mr. LaRouche wrote a discussion paper about three weeks ago, called "Dynamics & Economy," which was sent to many relevant international institutions and dignitaries throughout the world for discussion, a question of the discussion of a solution for this international financial crisis. Many of the questions that we will hear, will be a part of this discussion process on the question of a solution to this international financial crisis, and they will reflect the ongoing dialogue with Mr. LaRouche.
I think the most important thing to say is that Mr. LaRouche has said that these proceedings today, and his keynote address, will be historically even more significant than in October of 1988, when he predicted the collapse of the entire Soviet system of the Comecon. And if I think of how important that was, and what it meant for history, I think that this will be quite a special day. ...
So, Lyn, are you ready?
Lyndon LaRouche: Thank you very much.
The cycle of world history which is coming to a close during the current months, began with the April 1945 death of President Franklin Roosevelt. My first prescience of the fact that this was the beginning of a new cycle of history, a break with the old cycle of history, struck me on the evening that our military unit, which was then passing through India on the way to service in northern Burma, received the news of the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. Now, during the course of that day, a number of the soldiers came to me, and asked if they would have an opportunity to discuss something with me that evening. So, after the Sun set, we went out and we met, and the question was very simple: What does the death of President Roosevelt mean for us now? Now the question came. I wasn't really surprised by the question, but I was surprised. And I heard the words coming out of my mouth, and I can still remember my reply, because it astonished me—my own reply, to the present day—and I said: "I'm really not certain. But I know that we entered this war under the leadership of a great man. And now, the country is being led by a very little man. I'm afraid for our country."
That was the beginning of a new, current cycle of world history.
More than a year later, as I was back from service in northern Burma, and I was stationed for a while in Calcutta before returning to the United States. I made the acquaintance of a large number of people, because I was simply that kind of person. I simply got the telephone directories out, looked up all the political parties in Calcutta, and made appointments to meet with leaders of these parties, in each case, to find out what really is going on in this country. And in the course of that, having met a large number of the leaders in the Bengal area, there was a case in which one morning, some people assembled in a trolley area on the north side of the Maidan, between Darma Hata and Chowringhee juncture, and some of these fellows I knew. And they were going out for a routine demonstration to the Governor General's Palace, which was down this long street, which extends from Darma Hata, and this was usually a routine demonstration, protesting for Indian independence, and so forth.
But on this particular day, the guards, who were armed with large bamboo sticks with brass tips on them—it was called a lathee—made a lathee charge against the people, and killed and injured a number of people with these particular weapons. This resulted in a large protest, because the country was explosive in its temper at the time. And so, on the following day, there was an influx, a great influx of people, to protest this.
Now, the Maidan—it's still there—is a central area, a park area, in Calcutta. And the main street, Chowringhee—what was then the most prosperous, the shopping street, and so forth—Chowringhee ran up toward an intersection with Darma Hata Street, which cut across and ran you out to the direction of the Governor General's Palace. So, the crowd got off the trains, and several of them were coming down Darma Hata in the direction of the junction of Chowringhee and Darma Hata. At that point, there were British police, with heavy machine guns, stationed at the street at this junction. And as the protest mob came down the street, they opened full fire with machine gun fire into the mob.
On the following day, when I happened to get out there to see what had happened on the previous day, the streets were still covered with the accumulation of dried or semi-dried blood, of these people.
As the result, at that point, the whole population of Bengal virtually swarmed into Calcutta, and the police shut down the trains so more people couldn't come in. But millions of people began marching—around and around the city, day and night. And I would get out in the Maidan area, as a soldier; the British had left town; only Americans were left there, apart from the Indians themselves. And I watched this great surging mob, marching abreast, just marching, marching, marching: And one cry would be "Jai Hind!" from the Hindus. And then there'd be a responsive cry, by people in the same ranks, "Pakistan Zindabad!" And they were marching together, for their freedom, and against this monstrosity which typified the British role throughout the British Empire, especially in countries which didn't look white enough to satisfy the British monarchy.
'We're Going to Have American Methods'
So, because Roosevelt was dead, and Roosevelt had intended, as he warned Churchill, repeatedly, at the end of the war: "We are not going to use British methods; the world is going to be ruled by American methods. We're going to free the colonies! We're going to assist them to develop, including Sub-Saharan Africa." And he had plans for Africa, for its development. "We're not going to have your methods any more, Winston! We're going to have American methods."
But the moment that Roosevelt died, that policy died. And Churchill and the new President of the United States, Truman, did a number of things, to prevent that from happening.
Recolonization occurred. The Dutch army, the wonderful Dutch, moved into Indonesia to suppress the free people there. The British government, with support from the Americans, took the Japanese prisoners of war out of the prisoners-of-war camp in Indo-China, and freed them! Whereas the United States, with Ho Chi Minh, had freed Indo-China from Japanese occupation—Ho Chi Minh, an American ally. And this was the policy in Africa and elsewhere. The repression of the aspiration of peoples, whereas Roosevelt had meant the freedom of peoples who had been oppressed, and assistance from the American war machine now producing materiel required to assist these countries in developing their infrastructure, and developing their economies, and achieving the full purposes of freedom, this had changed.
Now, some decades after these events, a friend of mine who had served as the chief for the OSS operations on the ground in Italy, recounted his visit to the anteroom of the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, where he had accompanied the head of OSS, General Donovan, for Donovan's meeting with Roosevelt. Then, as he described this to me, Donovan came out, gray-faced, saddened. And he said to Max [Corvo], "It's over." And my friend said of that moment: "A bad time for the U.S. and the world at large, became the decades-long story of world history since the day that Franklin Roosevelt died."
In the meantime, some other developments by August of 1945 had confirmed my prescience of April that same year, 1945, of the nation's fate under Truman. The same OSS veteran who had accompanied Donovan into that anteroom of the President's office, had also been a witness on the ground in Italy (because he was doing all the spying against the fascists and so forth), of negotiations which were being conducted on behalf of the Emperor Hirohito of Japan. This was in the Spring of 1945. Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, had used diplomatic channels, through the Vatican Secretary of State, and specifically through Office of Extraordinary Affairs of the Secretariat of State, which at that time was headed by a Monsignor Montini, later known to the world as Pope Paul VI. And during these negotiations, to which my friend had been privy at that time, the Emperor and other countries (that is, Allied countries), had negotiated what were eventually adopted as the terms of surrender which occurred in 1945, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But then, Roosevelt had died.
Now, Truman, who had not known of nuclear weapons until the time he became President, adopted a policy of the most evil man of the last century: Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell prescribed that nuclear weapons—because he was involved in the scientific side on the British side—should be used to attack the Soviet Union with a nuclear attack, for which there were no weapons available after Hiroshima and Nagasaki (for reasons I'll explain). And that the purpose of doing this, as Russell published his policy, that he had earlier established, which was British policy and Truman policy, was the policy of preventive warfare against the Soviet Union by a nuclear attack, at a time that they believed that the Soviet Union would not have nuclear weapons. And this attack was to do one thing: Not to defeat the Soviet Union, but to have the Soviet Union submit to world government, a world empire, the elimination of the sovereign nation-state by use of nuclear weapons.
And it was near the end of the war, that the United States, after the German surrender, about that period of time, had three nuclear devices, explosive nuclear devices of weapons quality. One was simply an experimental product of a laboratory job, which is the famous Los Alamos test bomb. There were two others: One was a uranium bomb, a laboratory prototype, not a mass-production weapon. The second was a plutonium bomb, again, a laboratory product, not a mass-production thing. So the United States, having a Japan which had to surrender, because the main island of Japan was totally isolated, both by the Soviet forces coming down into Manchuria, and by the U.S. Navy, and U.S. Army, Air Force, submarine, etc. blockade: Not a single Japanese ship could get in or out of the main island of Japan. And the main island was collapsing economically, because it depended upon imported raw materials, which it could not get access to, from the continent any more.
So, this was done. Totally unnecessary bombing of Japan! There was no military justification—it was a crime against humanity! To postpone a surrender of a defeated adversary, and bomb the population with a new kind of mass destructive weapon, not for the sake of peace, not for the sake of winning a war, but for the sake of launching a policy of nuclear imperialism, to eliminate the institution of the sovereign nation-state on this planet! And that was what the policy was, and that was what Truman's policy was.
So, in April, when I had a bad feeling about the death of Franklin Roosevelt, I was more than right.
No sooner had the death of Franklin Roosevelt occurred, than the strategic policies of the Truman Administration followed entirely the policies of Winston Churchill, who was on the way out as Prime Minister at that time. Churchill, Truman, and their accomplices agreed to do exactly what I described, Bertrand Russell's policy: Bertrand Russell, the most evil man of the 20th Century. Hitler was mild compared to Bertrand Russell; he just didn't get the opportunity to do it.
And the policy, then, as today, of the same faction, is a policy of imperialism, called "globalization." Maastricht is an instrument, for example, of globalization. Maastricht is an implement of imperialism. The policy was to establish world government.
Now, Ben Bernanke, who is the head of the Federal Reserve system, is not particularly intelligent, at least on performance. He said he's going to establish an American world empire, a new Roman Empire all over the world, which, in a sense, is his own muddled understanding (as he has a muddled understanding of about everything else he talks about), of what his purpose is. The model of empire, which the British adopted under Lord Shelburne, after the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the policy of empire was not the Roman Empire policy, but the Venetian empire policy. And you see the policy today, very clearly—but then, Bernanke is too stupid to know what that policy is. He's also stupid about some other things as well, especially economics.
But the policy was a Venetian policy, a policy which was established about 1000 A.D., when Byzantium began to collapse and the Venetian financier-oligarchy took over control of a group which became known as the Norman chivalry, which had earlier been used by Byzantium against Charlemagne and his legacy.... Charlemagne had been in close collaboration with the Baghdad Caliphate of Haroun al-Rashid, had been a collaborator of Jews from the Middle East with Charlemagne's system, as a policy with Jewry, which had a policy of cooperation with Haroun al-Rashid and Charlemagne.
The Venetian Policy: Clash of Civilizations
What happened is, the Venetians and Norman chivalry declared a policy of anti-Islam, just like today's policy from Washington—the Clash of Civilizations policy. The Clash of Civilizations, which a British intelligence agency, the so-called Arab Bureau, had established as a Clash of Civilizations policy, is the anti-Islamic policy of today, the same policy which had been instituted by the Venetians and their Crusader allies a little over a 1,000 years ago. And with that came, at the same time, massive persecution of the Jews, and denial of their rights throughout Europe. The same policy as Hitler. And Hitler got the policy from the chivalry, who passed the policy to the great Grand Inquisitor Torquemada of Spain, who passed the policy on to the rest of Europe.
So the policy against Islam, the policy against Jewry in various countries, is the same policy, the policy of the Venetian Crusader organization, to this day. That's the enemy. To rule the world by divide and rule, by methods of terror. And so that was the policy at that time.
Now, after that, circumstances and times changed rapidly. In the course of events, Truman was forced to back down, and not run for another term, after '48. Because the Korean War was a mess, the Soviet Union had developed nuclear weapons, and it had developed the nuclear weapons actually on its own, independently from anything they stole from the United States. The Soviet Union did get the model for the American nuclear weapon—they got it from the British by way of Canada. Stalin had a choice. He said, "If we're going to use nuclear weapons, or display them, we're going to test them as the American model and if they fail, we'll blame the Americans,"—whereas they had a Russian model which worked perfectly fine. And the fact that the Soviets had developed this kind of technology ahead of the United States, was demonstrated by the tests of the first hydrogen thermonuclear explosion, which was of military grade in terms of high quality.
So, these events shifted things. Truman was told, "Git, you boy, git!" And a part of the former Roosevelt machine, President and General Dwight Eisenhower, took over the leadership of the Presidency, and probably prevented us from actually going to a nuclear war during the 1950s.
But then, the policy continued!—which is what we have to understand today. The policy continued, despite Eisenhower. Eisenhower warned against this at the time he was going out of office, with his famous good-bye speech, of a privately controlled military-industrial complex. This is the policy of the Bush Administration today! Private armies to replace regular armies. Ruin and destroy the regular armies of the military of countries, and replace this by private armies, like some kind of privately owned SS system. That's the policy of the Rumsfeld Defense Department. That's the policy being carried out in Iraq. That's the policy which is intended against Iran. That's the policy which is intended throughout Southwest Asia and beyond. So, the policy goes on, despite the resistance to that, by forces gathered around Eisenhower.
Then you had other developments. You had Macmillan, Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. A scandal was rigged, to get him out. And after getting him out, after an indecent interval, they brought in Harold Wilson, who destroyed the British economy, and set the pace to help destroy the Roosevelt world system at that time.
We had a picture: Macmillan's out. They went after de Gaulle, with repeated attempts at assassination, by the Nazis. The Secret Army Organization was the Nazis—the section of France which was for Hitler, in the French Army. The Synarchists of France, which conducted the attempted assassination of de Gaulle. They got de Gaulle out in another way, broke him in another way. But that was what happened.
Adenauer, under British pressure, was pushed to take early retirement to get him out of the way. And then, in the middle of the 1960s, they got rid of [Ludwig] Erhard, and ran a junk coalition government, in order to have the United States, through John J. McCloy, appoint John J. McCloy's "pet" as the Chancellor of Germany: Willy Brandt. Willy Brandt would not have gotten a job of even dumping ashes, but for John J. McCloy.
So, you had a process of the destruction of the relics of the institutions upon which European civilization was based, in its better state of affairs, better state of organization, in its process of recovery from the wartime period—the destruction of civilization, destruction of the institutions.
The Committee on the Present Danger and the NPT
In this process, there are some people who have deluded themselves to believe that the Non-Proliferation Treaty is the efficient instrument to prevent thermonuclear war. It is not. The thing to understand, is the policy of Bernard Russell, as nuclear attacks on the Soviet Union. That policy has not gone away. It's still very much alive. It never stopped. When the preventive warfare attack by Russell had failed, they went to a new approach, which is the acceleration of long-range missile devices for delivery of thermonuclear weapons. They used that to provoke the NPT treaty! in response to this thing in Cuba. But the policy never went away!
Now, there's an organization in the United States, which keeps coming back to the surface, which represents that policy: It's called the Committee on the Present Danger. The first formation of the Committee on the Present Danger was in the 1940s under Truman. Then the thing was hidden, in the sense that Eisenhower said, "Get rid of it." It was brought back again, in this context.
Then in 1976, when the Presidential candidacies were up, and I was a candidate at that time for President. The Committee on the Present Danger was reorganized around a group around the Trilateral Commission, which included also Scoop Jackson, a nominal Democrat (who's sort of a Stone Age Democrat, now dead, probably more stoned than ever). It was revived again. I had gained private correspondence among these characters, of what they planned to do: They planned to stage a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, once Brzezinski was in charge of the government in the Carter Administration. So, I blew it on national television, particularly in a famous October half-hour address, in which I exposed the thing, and it killed it—and they wanted to kill me!
All right. Now, again, under the guy who really controlled the Bush Administration, which is George P. Shultz—the guy who put Pinochet into power in Chile, the world's worst totalitarian. You want to find a guy who doesn't believe in democracy? Take George P. Shultz: He was the one who created the current Bush Administration. He was the one who convinced poor George Bush to run for President. He was the guy who crafted and created the Bush Administration. He was the sponsor of Condoleezza Rice. He is the one who built up Cheney, sponsored him, and put him in power.
He's behind and controlling the Committee on the Present Danger, today, which is the war committee.
The danger that he will succeed, with his accomplices, in getting Cheney to Offutt Air Force Base, to launch a pre-emptive, unannounced attack, aerial attack—full-scale—on Iran, is still one of the great dangers at this moment today. This danger leads to a nuclear confrontation.
If you do what they plan to do, and what they are doing, you are working toward a nuclear confrontation, but of a new kind, where the world is torn apart by asymmetric warfare of the type you see now in Southwest Asia, which is spreading all over the world, and will continue to spread, unless we stop it.
This will continue, and there's an intention of using nuclear weapons. The Committee on the Present Danger means nuclear war—if it's allowed to run its full course.
So, people today have to realize you can not say, that we can hide behind a Non-Proliferation Treaty agreement. And as a matter of fact, the point is, that the U.S. government doesn't care whether Iran develops nuclear weapons or not. They don't care. They would just as soon have them do it: Because the intention of the U.S. government, that is the Bush Administration, on Iran is not that they're upset about the nuclear program in Iran. They're not in the least bit upset! They're lying! They're upset about the existence of the Iranian government! The program is not one of non-proliferation: Their program is one of regime change. And regime change means what Bernanke said: world empire.
But it's not a Roman Empire he's talking about, because he's too stupid to know what he's talking about. It's a Venetian-style empire, which is today, if we understand our history, actually the model, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model.
The Anglo-Dutch Liberal model means sophistry. It means governments which have no principles, they have only sophistry. They do as they damned please. The basis for this, is, "Let money rule the world." This is the policy of John Locke, the policy of Bernard Mandeville, the policy of the British generally, the policy of the Dutch. Just look at the Dutch population: Try to find somebody over 70 years of age, alive in Holland today. That's Liberalism.
So this is the kind of policy we're dealing with, the idea that the bankers shall rule the world. Or financier groups shall rule the world, and governments will simply be playthings of that. You have that in Europe, for example, in the form of the so-called independent central banking system. And an independent central banking system, is not a governmental institution. It is a private institution, which, because the governments submit to the bankers, the governments don't do anything that the independent central banking system doesn't allow. If they do, they may overthrow the government. And parliamentary governments are easily overthrown. So, if you have a parliamentary government, and you have submission to an independent central banking system, your government can be overthrown almost instantly, any time you displease the independent central banking system—which is the financiers behind it.
That's the condition in Europe, today. That's the meaning of Maastricht. It's a step toward imperialism, to destroying the sovereignty of every country in Europe. And they want to do the same thing to the United States and the rest of the world as well.
So that's our policy.
A General Breakdown Crisis of the System
Now, to understand this: What this means, is the policies which were introduced under Truman, under pressure from the Anglo-Dutch Liberals, against the Roosevelt policies, opened up a change in world history, and opened up a cycle in history, which has played out from April of 1945, from the point of the death of Franklin Roosevelt, to the present day. What we are now dealing with, in the world as a whole, is a general breakdown crisis of that system. Because the system is breaking down, the bankers at the top level, who understand this, are moving to make fundamental changes in the forms of government and other things immediately. Because the old system is finished. It can be a matter of days or weeks, that the entire financial system presently existing in the world collapses, and there will be no part of the world which will be exempt from that collapse—a collapse of the United States and Europe.
Let's take just the sequence: Right now, the likely trigger of collapse is the combined British and American real estate investment bubble, with reflections in Europe, which you're seeing in Germany now, especially in recent periods with hedge fund raids, the Heuschrecken. If that collapses, this inflation—organized by London, by the Bank of England, their circles, and the Federal Reserve System under Alan Greenspan—depends entirely on hyperinflated investment in real estate. This bubble is about to come down. When the real-estate bubble comes down, the entire system will come down. We're at the point where we can say the month of September is a probable time for a general chain-reaction collapse of the system. This means, immediately, the trans-Atlantic system, but it also means Asia: It means India, it means China. Because these countries, in Asia, now depend upon the market which is represented by the flood of easy overnight money from Japan, into the smart-money operations in Europe and in the Americas.
Therefore, if that system collapses, then the exports of China collapse accordingly. The exports of India collapse accordingly. There are no Asian solutions! Some people say if Europe collapses and the United States collapses, that means Eurasia will prosper: No! How many poor people are there in Asia? What percentile of the population of India and every other Asian country is poor? Extremely poor? How many poor are there in China? You may have billionaires and millionaires in these countries, but you also have a tremendous number of poor people. And these poor people are much more important than the rich, because they are the population. If you have a chain-reaction, a social crisis in these countries, they will go down into the pit, too, with Europe and the United States.
Therefore, that's the issue we face. The issue we face, is, unless we take measures which are feasible, rationally feasible, to prevent this crash by a fundamental, immediate change in the international economic and financial-monetary system, there is not much hope for life on this planet for some time to come.
So, that much, as I said, is a manner of introduction.
Let me turn your attention to something which happened, midstream, so to speak in the course of this development from the death of Roosevelt, to the present moment of crisis, the full cycle. So, let's look back, first of all, to February-March of 1983, and then to October of 1988, and look at that period, and go, for example to understand that, go to the Kempinski Bristol Hotel in Berlin on Oct. 12, 1988. You'll see that on the screen now. [A transcript of excerpt from 1988 speech follows.]
LaRouche's 1988 Forecast
"My purpose of being here in Berlin, as Volker has indicated, is to read into the record in this geographical and political location, a formal statement, a short statement but a formal one, on the subject of U.S. policy, a change in U.S. policy on the prospects of reunification of Germany. Now, this statement among its other effects, will be an included feature of a nationwide half-hour television broadcast which will appear in the United States, before the coming election, and will have some impact on the election.
"I should also qualify, before delivering the statement, that I'm an economist in the tradition of people like Leibniz, Alexander Hamilton in the United States, and Friedrich List, of course, in Germany. My political principles are the same, those of Leibniz, List, Hamilton, and of course, are consistent, therefore, with the politics of Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt. And like the founders of my republic, I should say, I have an uncompromising belief in the principle of absolutely sovereign nation-state republics. And therefore, I am opposed, and will attempt to prevent, by every means within my power, the attempt to destroy the sovereignties of independent nation-states, by such means as Europe 1992, and anything else which might undermine the sovereignty of any nation.
"However, like Schiller, I believe that every person who aspires to become a beautiful soul must be, at the same time, a true patriot of his own nation but also a world-citizen. For these reasons, during the past 15 years, I've become a specialist in my country's foreign affairs. As a result of this work, I've gained increasing and significant influence among some circles around my own government, on the subjects of U.S. foreign policy and strategy. My role during 1982 and 1983 working with the National Security Council to shape the adoption of the policy later known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, is an example of this.
"Although the details are confidential, I can assure you that I speak today at a time that my influence on the policy-shaping in part of the U.S. establishment, is greater than ever before, at this time. Therefore, I can assure you, that the statement I'm about to make, on the subject of proposals and prospects for the reunification of Germany, is a proposal which will studied most seriously among the relevant establishment circles in my own country.
"Now to the statement itself.
"Under the proper conditions, many today will agree, that the time has come for early steps toward the reunification of Germany, with the obvious prospect that Berlin might resume its role as the nation's capital."
The SDI vs. Economic Collapse
Now the background is the following. As I indicated to you earlier, there was this paper we picked up in 1976 from the Committee on the Present Danger, outlining a threat, a nuclear threat to the then-Soviet Union, as a gimmick, a stunt, a political maneuver. That, on the basis of my reaction to that, which did change some of the politics of the Carter Administration: Because we blew the whistle, they couldn't do it. They wanted to get rid of me. But I went to work with an organization which we had founded in that period, the Fusion Energy Foundation, which represented some leading scientists in the United States, and some other countries. Therefore, we had a scientific capability, which enabled us to define the alternatives to the use of ballistic missile barrages as a method of controlling world affairs.
This became a part of my Presidential campaign for the 1980 Democratic Party nomination. And in the process of this, I met personally with Ronald Reagan, who was then a candidate, and then, I had an approach later, after he was President. And I had a certain kind of relationship with the Reagan people at that time. We had a walk-in from a UN-based Soviet official, who said that his government was concerned to try to find, aren't there new options for discussion with the new President. So I sent a message to the relevant people in the institutions of the Presidency, and said that this approach had been made by a Soviet official to us, and I recommended that the U.S. government take up the option of discussion; it would be in the interests of both parties to have such a discussion.
So, the U.S. government, through the U.S. National Security Council, accepted the idea that I should be the interlocutor for a back-channel discussion with the Soviet government, which I conducted between February of 1982 and February of 1983. Now, in this discussion, I outlined the situation and proposed that the Soviet government and the U.S. government, together with others, have the capability of developing a new type of system, which, with their agreement, could prevent the use of a nuclear attack as a successful tactic for changing world politics. We had leading flag-officers in Germany, in France, in Italy, and in the United States, and other relevant people who were associated with me in that period in this project. It seemed to be going well, until Andropov was confirmed as the new Secretary of the Soviet Union. And, we had our last discussion with the Soviet representative in Washington, and he said that his government under Andropov would reject the offer. I outlined to him exactly what the offer would be, that I thought it would be, and said the following. I said, "If"—and I indicated what the offer would be in my view—"If the President of the United States accepts my proposal, and if he presents it to the Soviet government; and if the Soviet government were then to persist in rejecting the offer, the Soviet government would collapse in about five years."
And it did collapse, in about five years.
So, I'm rather good at that sort of thing, in forecasting, and that's a very relevant thing for the situation we're discussing here today: This was a part of the cycle. This was a point which demonstrated that you can change the cycle. You can change the cycle by the agreement of governments, particularly powerful concerts of governments, who, if they agree to change the policy, can change the cycle. The problem is, that ever since the policies were brought in by the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April of 1945, the world has been running under that policy!
There've been changes in many things. But the policy has remained the same, the strategic policy. That has led us to the point that the entire world system, at this moment, is on the edge of a total chain-reaction collapse. Not a financial crash, not a depression, but a disintegration of the world economy. Because, the problem today is, as the result of several things—and I'll indicate what the problems are—that between the late 1980s and today, people who are more than ten years older than I, have generally either died out or become inactive. They've been replaced in leading positions, in Europe and in the United States, by people from the upper 20% of income brackets or social status of the respective populations.
That is, people who were born between 1946 and 1957—the 1957 U.S. recession for example—who were brainwashed, extensively, as a policy by what was called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The brainwashing of an entire generation, from their infancy into this period, resulted in the same kind of effect that happened in ancient Greece, in ancient Athens, when the Cult of Delphi introduced a conditioning through teaching of the education of the youth population of Athens and related Greek cultures, so that Athens went into a crime against humanity against the island of Melos, genocide against the island of Melos. And the entire Greek culture collapsed, as a result of continuance of that policy, which resulted in what was called the Peloponnesian War. And Greece never recovered, to the present day from that policy of Athens.
The Brainwashed Baby Boomers
Similarly, the same policy was introduced by the same social forces behind the Truman Administration, called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was very operative in France in particular, in Germany through some of the leftovers of the existentialist movement, and in the United States. So you have a brainwashing in sophistry, a modern version of Classical Greek sophistry, in these countries, and you have the problem itself: You have people who are viciously, today, just as bad as the Nazis. But the Nazis had access to a group of resources, of managements who were technically competent. The Nazis were a danger because they were the most technologically competent; Germans were the most technologically competent people in Europe. When you take the most technologically competent part of a population, an economy, you have a machine, which, if it turns to do evil, is very powerful, very effective at doing evil. As a matter of fact, without the United States alliance with Joe Stalin, we would not have defeated the Nazis!
Look at it today: Today, in Germany, and other countries in Europe, as in the United States, the generation which retired or died out about 10 to 15 years ago, which had competence, is replaced by a leading generation typified by Ben Bernanke, a generation of dangerously incompetent people! They're perfectly capable, under certain circumstances, of using weapons to control the world—but they couldn't feed it. They couldn't maintain it, economically.
And that's our problem: That we have this sophistry. They say, "Well, public opinion is what's important to people." You have an alienation of the lower 80% of population strata, by the upper 20%. Politics in the United States is made largely by the upper 20%, and it's already headed toward the approval of the upper 3% in income brackets! What we're trying to break in the Democratic Party, is to break exactly that, to get the Democratic Party to go back to the Roosevelt orientation and go back to the people, the ordinary people: To inspire them, and uplift them. To go into the poor areas in the world, where people are poor, and to win them over, to a way of life which should be accessible to them, for a better way of life. To base politics, not on public opinion, but to base politics on doing good for the majority of the population, doing good for the coming generations of entire peoples.
And this is where problem lies.
So you have incompetence: Incompetence says, "If I've got money, I don't care." You have parents, who are now between 50 and 65 years of age, and so forth. They had children sometimes. One wonders sometimes how they did that. But they don't seem to care much about them. They consider them more of a nuisance, a problem that has to be controlled. That problem pervades society.
The other aspect of this, which is a correlative, is that economy is not based on money. This is the great illusion. Money is a necessary instrument of organizing circulation in society. But as we demonstrated under Roosevelt with a system of regulation, there is no intrinsic value in money. The essence of British Liberalism, Anglo-Dutch Liberalism in Europe, is that money has an intrinsic value. The basis of this value is something like gambling, as described by Mandeville, and others of that persuasion. And we have systems which say you have to bend economic policy, to meet the requirements of the circulation of money. Whereas what Roosevelt did was exactly the opposite: We set up a system of regulation, in terms of priorities, in terms of systems of taxation, and so forth, which kept the economy in balance.
Large-Scale Infrastructure Investments
See, the key thing we have to do right now: We have a world which is in a state collapse, economic collapse, physical collapse; the infrastructure of Europe is collapsing, the infrastructure of the United States is collapsing. We can no longer continue to support the existing populations in the existing way under these systems. We have to change. We have to have large-scale investments in water management. We have to have large-scale investments in mass transportation, instead of all these automobiles jamming things. We have to have investment in health care; investment in developing the territory, more trees planted and so forth, things of that sort.
You have about 50% of any economy which is soundly organized, modern economy, 50% goes into areas which are neither white-collar work in a sense, nor non-skilled work, but into things which are investments in basic economic infrastructure, which are investments which have a 25- to 50-year life, physical life. And these investments are made possible by government sponsorship of the creation of the capital to be loaned, to be invested in these investments, and also in private investments which are contributions to society. And then by regulating and protecting these by price protection, by fair-price levels rather than free-trade levels. If you're going to invest in a firm, you're not going to bankrupt it by driving the price down to the point that it can't carry its own capital. You're going to regulate! You're going to regulate taxation. You're going to regulate prices, as we did under Roosevelt.
We produced, between the time that Roosevelt entered office, and the end of the war, we produced the greatest economic machine the world had ever seen! We defeated the Nazis not because we were better soldiers. We weren't. We defeated the Nazis because we had tons, where they had hundreds of pounds of raw materials. We contributed to the Soviet ability to defeat the Wehrmacht, by matèriel. Tanks, yes! Lots of other things—planes; the ability to make planes, the ability to build tanks: Logistics.
And therefore, you say, 50% of the total national revenue must be considered as going into investment in, and maintenance, of basic economic infrastructure. No free market.
In private initiatives, you're looking for ingenuity. You want to product the ingenious, creative, and useful producer. You want to give opportunities. You don't want too many big industries. You have a lot of what we call closely-held industries, where the purpose of the investment is not to make profit for a stockholder. The purpose of the investment is to allow an entrepreneur to build up a firm which is useful to society, and whose motive in existence is not just to make a lot of money, but to be a success, a success in the coming generations of an industry which is useful to society.
An ugly thing that is missing in this, is that people don't understand what value is. Value is not monetary. Monetary value belongs to a slave system, or a degenerate form of society. The source of wealth is not speculation, is not price competition. The source of wealth is science, primarily. The source of wealth is the individual mind's mastery of principles of nature, that no animal could discover; is applying these discoveries of principle to increase man's power per capita, and per square kilometer, in the territory of society.
The same thing is true in culture: Classical culture, which is the mode of developing people's relations with other people, which enables them to cooperate and be more productive; which enables them to think, as people used to do (even in the more poor cultures, people used to think). Before the Baby Boomer was invented, they used to think that what I'm doing with my life, is going to be realized in my children and my grandchildren. What is beautiful to me, is the fact that my life could make things better for the coming generation, and I can live in such a way, I have a sense of a participation in immortality. Which is done with Classical art, done in similar ways.
Developing a Beautiful Culture
So the development of a beautiful culture, a beautiful people, who are not beautiful because they've got tattooed or because they wear junk in their faces, or this sort of thing, but beautiful because they sweat and work and scheme, to make sure that the coming generation is better, more capable than their generation. And they will see grandchildren, who are better, in terms of opportunities and skill, than anybody else that they know. They say, "My life is not for nothing. My life means something."
But we live in a culture, which is corrupt, in what way? Corrupt as the Zeus, the Olympian Zeus, as Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound describes. We live in a culture which says: "Be practical. Don't tell me about theory, don't tell me about culture! I want to get my thing off. I want to get sexual satisfaction. I want to get amusement. I want to get some drugs to fix my head, so it doesn't bother me, it doesn't interfere with my pleasure." Hmm?
What we've come into is a society where we treat people like animals. Don't think. Don't discover. Don't create. Don't think about immortality. Don't think about coming generations. "Just think about gettin' by an' enjoyin' y'self. Heh-heh-heh!" Hmm? This is what we've done to people! This is our culture!
But if we don't progress, if we don't make scientific and technological progress, then the coming generations will be worse off than we are! Which is the trend today. If we don't develop culture, the next generation will be more brutish than we are. And that's no immortality.
And therefore, economic value comes, first of all, from physical economic value. The ability to provide a better physical standard of life, for members of society, per capita and per square kilometer, that's one value. This is done chiefly by scientific and technological progress. But scientific and technological progress does not work, unless you have cultural progress. And therefore, society depends upon these considerations: That the way ideas are passed around society is based on the culture. And the way you develop, is you improve the culture. The cultures are associated with the languages. Culture, because it involves communication, means that you have to use the medium of language, as all Classical periods of language did. You just don't use words with literal meanings, like they were game parts you throw around to play with. But words are full of irony, full of contradictions, full of insights to how silly what you just said was; how irrelevant it is to reality.
And by great Classical drama, by musical work. You realize that, you don't sing a note. There is no such thing as a fixed note. It's an ironical function of the Pythagorean comma, in counterpoint. And what you see on the score is not what you should hear. You should hear something better, which comes from the interaction and the dynamics of it.
The other part is this: that this kind of mechanistic way of thinking about man, which dominates society today, and allows a lot of evil to occur, is called the mechanistic view of Descartes: We think of people as little pebbles. We think of objects as pebbles. We do statistical checks on details, pebbles, which doesn't mean anything.
Real systems are what are called dynamic: For example, living systems, are different in what way from non-living systems? Dynamics. The same elements react in living systems that exist in non-living ones, but they react differently. But why? Because, as Vernadsky pointed out, dynamics. Society is not a collection of individuals "doing this," all the time interacting and trading. Society is the interaction of the people, the interaction of processes. Therefore, you have to think dynamically.
Think Dynamically; Reductionism Doesn't Work
Look at all your statisticians' economics, what do they do? They follow statistical methods. Statistical methods are Cartesian, reductionist methods. They don't work. Every economist, in the sense of forecasting-economist, every economist I know is incompetent, because they think in statistical terms. They're taught to think in statistical terms. They're incompetent.
You have to think in terms of dynamics. How can you improve the whole process of society, the process of cooperation in society? In production? In the work? So, that's what the issues are. And that's what I specialize in, is this question of dynamics. And what we're doing now, for example, just to get this around, because I know we want to get into more discussion, and I have a lot more to say. But, it can't all be crammed into one occasion.
We are taking young people, 18, up to 30: We're taking them, we're putting them through an educational program, which is based on dynamics. In physical science, they start with the ancient study of Sphaerics, which is actually another name for astrophysics, which was passed on as a method from the Egyptians to the Greeks. This is the work of the Pythagoreans, the work of Plato, and similar kinds of things. The tradition of the Platonic Academy through people like Eratosthenes in Egypt, and so forth. We started them with that. Then we have taken them actually into a Riemannian physics. And the entirety of modern physical science, is located essentially in the methods of Kepler, as this process started by Kepler, in systematic science, moved up through Riemann, through Riemannian dynamics.
So, today, we know that we've lost the scientific generation, of mostly my generation and older; they've died out. The generation which is trained in schools and colleges today, is generally incompetent in science. It's not their fault. It's because they've been educated incompetently, they've been educated, downgraded, into a Baby-Boomer mode, a post-industrial culture which no longer understands physical science.
So, we're got to look at the people who are now—if we're thinking of the future, if we're thinking about policy—18 to 30. We've got to make sure that they're educated, and they're developed, to think in terms of dynamics, to think in these terms. You've got to create a generation which has a leading component within it, of people who are the foundation for the future development of science. Science, not as something to contemplate, science as a way of thinking about what you're going to do, what you're going to accomplish.
We've come to the point that the statistical mechanical systems which are popular and taught today, like that poor idiot Bernanke who knows no better—those systems don't work. If you adapt to them, you're a fool; you're committing cultural suicide. So you've got to create, like this case here in Berlin: Berlin is typical of this problem—largely because of Maastricht—but Berlin is not capable of generating sufficient income to maintain it's existing population because it has no industry. It's losing its industry. Without industry it can't grow. It can't even continue to exist! The issue is not debatable! The issue is debatable only from the standpoint of either the people who hate Germany, who want to take away the industry; or people who are foolish, who don't want to work; they don't want to produce anything. But it's the fact that the leverage you have when you do creative work, as in modern technologically progressive industrial work, creates more wealth than is required to employ the people who produce it! You create a higher standard of living in the employment of people who produce, than you do in anything else.
The worst economy is one which is a services economy, an unskilled services economy, an economy that is doomed, by its own will.
But this is not the characteristic of Germany, of Berlin, or anything else! It's the characteristic of Europe and the United States which were brainwashed by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the 68ers who were brainwashed into believing "take your clothes off, throw your brains away, and go out and have fun!" And they don't believe in producing! There's no satisfaction about achievement, there's no intellectual satisfaction. They want to be entertained! Because everything they're doing is intrinsically boring. It's only exciting if they didn't do it yesterday. They no longer have pleasure, satisfaction of the ability to understand what a real idea is! The joy of doing work, because you like to do the work. You don't do the work because you want the money—yes, you need money to live on. But you do the work, because you like it! You have a sense that this is important, that you're doing something important for mankind. You can walk proudly down the street, as a person who's doing something for mankind, who doesn't have to be ashamed of life, of living.
And we've done that to a whole generation, the generation born between 1945 and 1957: We generally have destroyed them, especially those that were told they were going to be the upper class. By going to universities, they were going to be very smart (they weren't going to know anything, but they were going to be very smart). They were going to get ahead, they were going to be important, they were going to get larger incomes than the rest of the people. And they would look down on the rest of the people as failures, the lower 80%, which is the situation in Europe, and the situation in the United States today.
'Stop Being Monkeys'
What we need to do is simply, recognize these kinds of facts, that we're in a culture which has dynamic characteristics. And there're some people, in society, who have organized to start this society around certain ideas, certain systems of organization which have caused this cycle from the death of Roosevelt to the present, this general collapse of civilization worldwide. And we will never free ourselves of this disaster, unless we can get up off our hind legs, and say, "Stop being monkeys," hmm—get up on our hind legs and say, "We're going to change the world system now." We can do it. Because when people realize, as they've done before—all great revolutions have done this—when they realize that they can not go on the way they're going, there is no possibility for living under this system for the next ten years. Or even five years, or even two! Then they know they have to change! And that's the time that revolutions occur.
Now, good revolutions are based not on getting bloody. Good revolutions are based on ideas, and the value of ideas. And the problem we have today, the biggest problem I see, is that we have people who are not unintelligent, but they're cowards. They will not stick their necks out to exert the kind of leadership that's required, to "damn the torpedoes" so to speak, and to go against the authority, that is holding society back. And say to the authority that is holding back, "You are in the way!" "Change or get out of the way!"
This is the time you make industrial revolutions, cultural revolutions, great leaps forward. This is what happened in Germany with Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Lessing, who inspired a Germany which was going into the pit, like the rest of Europe, under Liberalism, and caused an eruption in Germany, which is the German Classic, which rejuvenated other parts of the world—including the United States, including France, and so forth.
So, a revolution in ideas, as typified by the work of Gauss, the work of Leibniz, the work of others; the work of Beethoven, the work of Mozart. These kinds of revolutions have to come along, and break through, and change society, to stop doing what is considered conventional. To find leaders who are courageous, who will speak, because what they say is the truth, and they know it, not because they want to be approved of for what they say.
And that's where we stand today.
We'll get into the discussion. I could say a lot more, but this I think is enough.
[Mr. LaRouche's remarks were followed by a question-and-answer session.]
