THE SUBJECT IS `DYNAMICS':
There Is But One Issue!
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.November 15, 2008
[PDF version of Strategy section]
The existing world monetary-financial system is in the end-phase of a disintegration of that system into a breakdown-crisis. Only a replacement of that useless monetary system by a credit-system in the image of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's design could prevent the plunge of the entire world into a prolonged dark age comparable to that of Fourteenth-Century Europe, but far worse in depth and duration. Foolish governments, let by the most foolish of all, that of U.S. President George W. Bush, Jr., and the United Kingdom's Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are leading the discussion of an assortment of petty arrangements and sordid, global schemes, none of which address the issue on which the fate of civilization now depends.
On this past Tuesday, I led a discussion, among a select group assembled, partly in Washington, D.C. and partly in New York City, at which I outlined the only possible escape from the presently onrushing global, economic-breakdown-crisis currently in accelerating progress. The essential features of my proposal are published following the introductory remarks here.
These days, as the worst U.S. Presidency in more than a century, and the recent nearly two years of the worst session of the U.S. Congress experienced in recent decades, come to their respective, miserable ends, both the United States and the world at large are left with only one chance for escaping from a presently ongoing, global "new dark age," the worst such since the "New Dark Age" which occurred during Europe's Fourteenth Century.
That is the alternative which I outlined to the special audiences in Washington, D.C., and New York, this past Tuesday.
On this occasion we should be reminded that there are no tragic figures in real world history; there are, rather, tragic nations and peoples, such as those described by the Homeric Iliad, and the tragedies presented by Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller, a virtual Comédie Humaine, whose leaders have incurred the misfortune of being what the people of that culture had, like the citizens of our U.S.A., chosen to place positions of leadership.
This is not to say that all such misleaders were bad people. Some, like both George Bush administrations, were, admittedly, malicious. The fault of others, is that they gave the people the administration which it seemed that popular opinion desired; but, perhaps, they lacked the will to do better, since they lacked the stuff of which a President George Washington, a John Quincy Adams, an Abraham Lincoln, and a Franklin Delano Roosevelt were made.
A qualified leader of a great republic, especially one with that special quality of Constitution such as our own United States, is to know what the destiny of the nation and its people require, as Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt did, and to deliver the effort needed to bring the nation to safety, and, also, to contribute to the well-being of the community of nations generally.
I must concede the point, even as I must note the failures of the performance of recent Presidents, since Franklin Roosevelt, who were not bad, but who intended good, but lacked the standard of leadership. Leadership, especially in times of grave crisis—and this is now the greatest crisis in the history of all modern civilization—must be commitment to provide that mission which is required at that time, and, more than that, the destiny of coming generations.
For this reason, while there is a hopeful escape from the present general breakdown-crisis of the planet as a whole, there is only one course of action which could plausibly enable the planet to escape a global catastrophe now. I presented that option, in summary, in my leading remarks this past Tuesday.
