LYNDON AND HELGA LAROUCHE,
GUESTS ON THE LAROUCHE SHOW
Make 2009 the International Year of
Victory Against the British Empire
Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche were guests on Dec. 27 on The LaRouche Show, an Internet radio program that airs Saturdays at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Here is an edited transcript of the show, which was hosted by Harley Schlanger. The audio is available here.
Schlanger: Over the last 18 months, it has become clear to all but the most delusional people, that Lyndon LaRouche is the most accurate economic forecaster in the world. Since July 25, 2007, when he reported on an international webcast that the financial system had crashed, a growing number of people in governments worldwide have been following his analysis closely, and there are an increasing number of officials, in and around governments, who are studying his proposals for a New Bretton Woods monetary system.
With a new administration coming to power in Washington, D.C., and the global economy disintegrating at an accelerating rate, 2009 will be a year of decision. Will governments, particularly those identified by LaRouche in his Four Power proposal—Russia, India, China, and the United States—establish a New Bretton Woods based on the principles of the American System of physical-economy, and reintroduced by Franklin Roosevelt, with the original Bretton Woods agreement of 1944? Or, will the predatory financial forces allied with the City of London, the old Anglo-Dutch Liberal empire, instead, prevail, ensuring the plunge of humanity into a New Dark Age?
Joining us on the program today will be Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche, to provide us with both insight and marching orders on what we must do to ensure a victory for humanity in 2009....
Lyn, even the usual end-of-the-year analysis in the financial press is acknowledging that the unending bailout by Paulson and the 0% interest rates of Bernanke are having no positive effect on the economy. Where do things really stand now, with the global economy?
LaRouche: Well, you've got two things going on: You have hyperinflation, which is continuing, in terms of the magnitude of obligations outstanding, and the bailout, of course, is simply increasing that. On the other hand, you have a collapse of purchasing power at the lower end, by the consumer; so this is causing a deflationary effect, which is temporary in the current market.
Now, what happens, is you will get to a shortage of goods, you will then get a hyperinflationary plunge like Germany in 1923. This is not exactly the same thing as '23, because in '23 Germany was under the absolute control of the treaty agreement of Versailles. And therefore, they had an artificial box around Germany's borders, which caused a somewhat different process than is occurring now. But if you take into account the fact that you have an international system now, across borders, and with a much larger inflation, you have this dualism of a temporary collapse in prices, because of flooding of the market with currency, and the shortage of purchasing power. On the other hand, you have, again, a hyperinflationary process, in terms of outstanding obligations. So you're dealing with this particular form of breakdown, which is like '23, except with this one difference: that you don't have this border circumstance that you had around Germany in 1923.
Schlanger: There have been articles by people such as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Daily Telegraph, who say that we are risking hyperinflation, but we have to deal with the deflation. Are they unaware of the dangers of hyperinflation, or are they prepared to deal with that?
LaRouche: They're not prepared to deal with anything; they're simply reacting. Remember, you know, people think that, as in a chess game, or any other kind of competitive game, that if "someone wins, somebody loses." But, reality is not like games: In reality, what you think, is a game, where everybody can lose! There are no winners. And that's the kind of situation. And so, what he's doing is simply playing it out, and waiting for something to happen, that they hope will succeed. But, this particular thing, this game is not a "zero sum game."
Soros and the Obama Presidency
Schlanger: Given that what you've forecast, that this is a Dark Age, a breakdown unlike any since the 14th Century, is it the case that people like George Soros, and people in the City of London, are aware of that, and they're planning to use the breakdown?
LaRouche: I don't think they're that intelligent. They are using the breakdown in their own way, because Soros is essentially a thief, and he keeps stealing; he doesn't worry about what the end-result is, he just keeps stealing. And he's also just an agent of this process. He is not actually the Emperor of the Universe; he's simply an agent of the British interests behind him which are using him.
No, they are not really conscious of what the end-result of this process will be, if it continues.
Schlanger: So this is sort of the pride of oligarchy. They just assume that they'll be able to maintain control, and with little regard to the consequences.
LaRouche: I don't think they even assume that. I think they're like animals, who are fighting to death, and one will die and the other will bleed to death. They're not really thinking, in a sense. They're reacting. They're acting and reacting, like an animal. This thing makes no sense; from any standpoint of calculation, any calculation you could make, the whole thing makes no sense.
But, you're dealing with a point of a species which rules the planet, which is no longer fit to survive, but it keeps doing—it plays out its death agony, fatefully, not because it's using any kind of reason.
Schlanger: The Soros grouping tried to buy a Presidential campaign, or a Presidential candidate, with tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it from the drug-pushing Nazi Soros, but now even Soros's own allies are bemoaning that they may not be in control.
What's your evaluation of the incoming Obama Administration, given the crisis—
LaRouche: I'm hesitant on posing any kind of evaluation. It's obvious that the man is not stupid. He has limitations, but I don't think necessarily he intended to do as they intended him to do. I think this is a man who saw he was promoted by a couple of former members of Congress, and he saw a chance to get a nomination; he was backed heavily by international British sources, including Soros, who was a key part of this—and most of this was British money or British orchestration. So, he bought the thing, in a sense; he won the Presidency, in a sense, by this means. And then, suddenly, once he's announced that he's won the Presidency, he changes course! Maybe he's smarter than he appeared to be!
But right now, look what he's got: He's got essentially a Clinton administration. I mean, it's not a Clinton-owned administration, but you have personalities in this, the key personalities, many of them. You have the usual clowns—every President has a few clowns they have to put in their Presidency—he has a few of his own. But the key thing is, as Presidencies have gone recently, this is largely a very highly talented composition of what he's selected as his Presidency so far. Of course this is not confirmed yet; none of these nominations have been confirmed. But otherwise, this is a very sharp bunch of people.
Schlanger: From Nov. 11 to Nov. 19, after the election, you had a very active role in shaping the environment around the incoming President. I know that you're planning a similar series of events—in fact, I should announce that Jan. 22, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, there will be the next international webcast, and there'll be events leading into that. What is your message to this incoming administration?
LaRouche: Well, my concern is, since I do have a unique capability, and since many of these people know me, and many among them have respect for what I've accomplished and what I can accomplish: I think the prospect is, as it stands right now, I have to be prepared to assist this administration on a number of fronts, and I'm prepared and disposed to do so.
Schlanger: And the fronts, primarily, I assume: economics and security.
LaRouche: Yes. Those are things which I'm very much concerned with, and are very obvious. But my technical or scientific skills are the ones which I think are most crucial, you know, and I also catalyze a number of things among various people; people talk to me, and so forth, and I take the product of these discussions into my discussions with other people. So, I am a catalytic factor in the environment, as well as a direct factor.
British Operation Against India
Schlanger: I'd like to get into the catalytic side of things, then, because you and Helga just were in India recently; you had a series of public and private meetings with key people among the Indian political and military elite. What's your sense of the situation in India after the Mumbai attacks? And do the leaders in India accept your idea of their role in a Four-Power agreement?
LaRouche: I would say, there's a question mark there. We'll suppose that what I propose, as being affirmed as a proposal from President-elect Obama, they now have received the message. If they get the actual proposal from him, or from his official representatives, they will probably react favorably to it. Right now, they don't feel they're under pressure to react immediately to it. What was more of concern, than a distraction, at this point, was the fact that the British actually staged this atrocity at Mumbai. And the setup of this, which we tracked out, is the British element: The so-called members of British lodges, or British associations in London and that area—some of these are run directly by Saudi Arabia. And in all the cases of the terrorist-related operations, coming from Saudi and related circles, the Saudi connection is crucial.
So this is not a Pakistan operation against India, even though there were elements of the ISI and so forth—MI6, ISI, and so forth, involved; but the operation was not from Pakistan as a nation, as a government. It was from people who, in part, were Pakistani in pedigree. But the operation came from and was directed from London. Now, the importance of this thing is, that the capability that was set up to run the Mumbai operation is more serious, in one sense, than 9/11. Because 9/11 was a one-shot operation. What was done in Mumbai, could be repeated, again, and again, and again. And it comes from the same source: London.
The problem now, is that India so far has chosen to avoid confronting London, on what everybody involved who's in the intelligence business knows was a British operation, run through places like Dubai, against Mumbai. They're now playing it as if it were a Pakistan operation. It is not a Pakistani-generated operation; it's a British operation, run by elements in London who have a Saudi pedigree, and who were learning from these religious organizations in London. And it's run under the protection of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury. That's how the thing is run.
Schlanger: You put out a statement yesterday, warning that these troop movements are very dangerous, because they play into the trap that someone could ignite something bigger. And in the same statement, you said, it's time to go after the British drug networks.
How do these drug networks, under the British domination, how do they fit into the terror?
LaRouche: Again, you're dealing with a terrorist operation, which is running through things like the BAE operation. And the way it works is: When they set up the operation in Afghanistan, which is an Anglo-American operation, they recruited people through various Muslim religious groups, to go into Afghanistan as fighters against the Soviet Union. This is an operation which involved Vice President George H.W. Bush and others, so it was an Anglo-American operation.
Now, what happened, is, the Saudis used their religious training organizations and created a mechanism, which was used to amplify this kind of capability. And you'd have the Saudi donations to charities, Saudi charities, and the charities would go to designated individuals, who then could issue, utter the money to other people they chose, or institutions they chose to give it to. What would happen as a result of this, you would have perfectly legitimate Muslim organizations in London, particularly of Arab-related origin; and these Muslim organizations would then be gradually influenced by the money coming from the Saudi charity channels, so that, gradually, more and more of these religious bodies were taken over by Saudi choices, which were actually part of this terrorist capability. And the whole thing was protected, in London, by the Archbishop of Canterbury! What they did, is they let the heads of these religious organizations be treated as having diplomatic status under British law. And so, when the British police would catch on to some kind of a reason for criminal investigation, the Archbishop of Canterbury's office would step in: "No! We're protecting these people. These are diplomatic figures, you can not question them." In other words, they were given diplomatic immunity.
A very significant number of these organizations, are of people of Middle East extraction, Muslim extraction, who are perfectly decent people, in London. But a certain part of these guys become, now, a cover for these operations, and they're run by British intelligence services, back and forth across the world. What they've created, is a capability for using this same kind of operation they ran in Mumbai; they could run it again, and again, and again, in various parts of the world: hit-and-run operations. So, we have a new kind of international terrorist threat we have not faced before now.
Schlanger: And a major focus, then, of counter-terror, must be to shut down these drug networks?
LaRouche: The only way. Look, the British have been in the drug business in a big way, since the 1790s. At that time, the British had been running the slave trade, including the people in Boston and places like that, were part of the British East India Company operation. These guys discovered that the slave trade was not particularly profitable, for them. So they gave the slave trade, particularly in the period coming out of the Napoleonic Wars, to the new Spanish monarchy. And the Spanish monarchy ran the African slave trade, in capturing and transport. But the British, who pretended they had nothing to do with the slave trade, actually ran it; and any time the United States, or some other nation, would interfere with the slave trade, the British diplomatic services would step in, to protect the slave-traders.
In this period, in the 1790s, the British shifted to two kinds of drug trade: One was opium from Turkey at that time; and the second was opium from India. And they destroyed China, in a large degree, through that trade.
Today, the figure that's been given to me, is that—say, go on the border of Afghanistan: A farmer will raise a crop of a certain amount of money, and that will have a thousand times that value, when the proceeds of that crop reach Europe. And this is the same thing that's being run by Soros in the Caribbean; this is the same kind of operation that's being run in Boston, Massachusetts, with the attempt to legalize the drug trade; and in the United States generally. It's what's being run in every country in South America by Soros, except Colombia, which refuses to cooperate.
Crisis in China
Schlanger: Helga, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions, and I'm very happy to have you joining your husband. I know you'll be soon celebrating an anniversary, so we'd like to give you our congratulations.
But let me ask you about China, because this is a very serious situation now. Lyn was recently interviewed by two major business journals, one from mainland China and one from Taiwan. We hear stories of the collapse of exports and the effect of that. What is the situation in China, right now?
Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I think it's complicated. Because on the one side, we are getting reports of a really massive collapse, of especially smaller and middle-level firms in the coastal area, in Guangdong, in Sichuan, in the South. A lot of the migrant workers who were deployed in the periphery of these firms, have been laid off. And they used to send a lot of money back to their rural families, and that naturally is now stopping. We have heard reports that hotels are offering gigantic rebates, because of a loss of customers all of a sudden. There is potentially a very, very dangerous social situation developing.
So, on the one side, the signs are really in the direction of a tremendous storm. On the other side, we have talked with people who just came back from there, and somehow there is at least a certain portion of the political elite, which says, "Well, we will sit it out together with the United States, and we are not yet willing to look at it."
So I think it's very dangerous. The problem of the Chinese economy has been exactly, that it has been so absolutely based on cheap labor—Wal-Mart, and similar productions—that if the collapse in the United States and in Europe continues, which it is, then China is facing potentially a gigantic political explosion. By the way, the British Sun Times had already an article about in March, basically predicting that the Tibet operation can only really succeed in the context of a widening economic downturn in China, when you would have social unrest in many places, so that the central government would not be able any more to quell unrest in one or two provinces.
So I think this is very bad, it's very dangerous, and I think the only hope is really what Lyn was saying earlier: that the new administration makes a significant shift. Because, we have been told in India by many people, they like what Lyn is saying, they really would like to go with—but it has to come from the United States.
A Fight in Europe
Schlanger: Helga, I'd also like to ask you about Europe, because we see a fight emerging there, which is an interesting one. Even though the nations of Europe are not part of the Four Powers identified by Lyn, the fight there seems to be getting more intense. Your friend, the Economics Minister of Italy, Giulio Tremonti, is under tremendous pressure now from the pro-London faction there, the "Britannia Boys," who are trying to have him removed from the government. What do you see coming from Europe, in the new year?
Zepp-LaRouche: I think the fight really involves pragmatists of the European Union Commission. They are totally crazy, in insisting that the Stability Pact of the Maastricht Agreement must be honored. And that naturally means that the new indebtedness of every country must be limited to maximum 3% of GDP, which, give the fact that Greece and other places will probably reach over 100% fairly soon, in terms of total indebtedness compared to the GDP, this is not workable.
The people who are trying to get rid of Tremonti, who has been an outspoken proponent of a New Bretton Woods policy, of the New Deal, and basically, also of a bankruptcy reorganization of the system—the key person right now is one of the "Britannia Boys," as they are called, because of their meeting on the British royal yacht Britannia, in '92, where the sellout of Italy was basically agreed upon. The leader of that group is presently Mario Draghi, who heads the Financial Stability Forum.
I think we should really ridicule him! Because, he just was in Hong Kong, and there he made a speech—and I actually want to quote you some of it, because I think it's really typical of the insanity of this faction. He said: "One striking aspect of the crisis is precisely how its unfolding has continued to catch both policymakers and private sector players by surprise. It started with defaults in a marginal segment of the financial services industry, then quickly spread to virtually all assets. From being a U.S.-only event, it has become global.... None of these steps had been anticipated in a timely way by the relevant actors. And when I say 'in a timely way,' I mean with enough lead-time to permit action that could have affected the outcomes."
Now, I think this is something we should really ridicule, because, first of all, as you mentioned in your introductory remarks, Lyn uniquely has forecast this crisis, and we have the documentation to prove it—we have his webcast from the 25th of July in 2007, and all the many, many other documentations. We have a history of having organized, since 1997, for the New Bretton Woods; we had thousands of VIPs making appeals already to President Clinton, when he was still in office. So nobody can say that we didn't talk about this in great depth. And when this guy Draghi claims that the political elite was caught by surprise, it just proves that they're absolutely incapable of even saying the truth.
So, I think one of the most important things that we need to be doing internationally—I think in the U.S., but also in Asia, in Europe, and elsewhere—is to challenge people to answer the question: "What was the method which allowed Lyndon LaRouche to make these prognoses so accurately?"
The American System of Economy
Schlanger: Helga, you just anticipated my next question. (By the way, the Draghi statement shows that he's still working for Queen Elizabeth, because the Financial Times said Queen Elizabeth said, "How come nobody saw this coming?")
Lyn, I'd like to ask you about precisely the question that Helga just posed: You have a new document that's up on the LaRouche PAC website, "Why the Academicians Have Usually Failed in Economics?" I noticed you're quite generous to the academicians by saying they've only "usually failed," instead of "always"! You raised the point of economics as a branch of physical science: Why is that not known? Why do so few people know about the American System of economics?
LaRouche: It's a result of British imperialism, and essentially, that we've had this idea of empire and of economic systems based on imperial power. For example, the Roman Empire had a monetary policy of that type; the Byzantine Empire, and so forth. And with the Fall of Byzantium about 1000 A.D., about that time, a Venetian group took over the control of the international monetary system, and ran an empire, as the Crusaders were actually working for the bankers when they were doing the funny things they were doing during that period of time, up until the 14th Century.
So, what we have, is we have the idea of a monetary system which is international. It's actually controlled by private bankers, or private firms, such as, for example, the bankers of Venice, in ancient times and still today. And then these banks, or these systems of bankers, would make agreements with the heads of governments, of states, of nations, under which, in effect, the empire was located in the international monetary system, and the kingdoms were the subjects of the agreements they made with this imperial monetary authority.
Now, that tradition has been maintained, because actually, since 1763, in February, when the British Empire was created as a private empire, in the Peace of Paris—since that time, Europe and the world have been dominated most of the time by the British, except for the period when the United States was really asserting power, as especially under Franklin Roosevelt and even a bit before that. But so, we've had an empire of a monetary system, which is British-controlled—but not because of the people of England, but because of the nest of banks that run this empire, which used to be the pound-sterling empire. And this empire still exists, as a monetary empire. And the United States, since 1971-73, has actually been under the control of this international empire, which is called the British Empire. Not because of the British people or the British isles, but because that's the traditional name of it, and because it still has a headquarters in the Bank of England and the Queen of England, as the empire.
So, this empire exists.
And thus, people believe, in the habits of thought associated with operating within a system which is an imperial system. Like the Roman system, or the Byzantine system, or the old Venetian monetarist systems. And thus, they ignore the fact that there is no natural relationship between prices of things in terms of money, and actual economic value. We have to have a system of economic valuation of prices, because we organize society around agreement on these relative prices. But the system, the determination of what value is, economic value is, does not lie in prices as such. It lies in the value of the development of the economy.
So what we have in the American System, with our Constitution, where you do not allow a monetary system: Under our Constitution, our currency is uttered by the approval of a vote of the Congress, to utter a certain amount of monetizable credit. And this is implemented, then, by the Presidency of the United States. So there's no outside monetary agency, which controls our currency—or, at least, when we're functioning under our Constitution. All other systems in the world, in the main, tend to be part, have participation in an international monetary system, and that international monetary system is really the substance of the empire.
And therefore, the problem is that people do not know their history. And because they're habituated to the idea of thinking of money as something which has a natural value, where it doesn't have a natural value, but they think in those terms, and therefore, they believe in this price structure, instead of realizing that we can regulate prices, as we have under protectionist systems before, and we can regulate prices by an international fixed-exchange-rate system, as we did under Franklin Roosevelt, and kept that going until 1968-73.
No Bailouts!
Schlanger: And how would your New Bretton Woods implement that?
LaRouche: Well, right now, it means we would have to take Barney Frank and put him in a loony bin or some other place where he could safely howl all he wants to. But no more bailout! The key thing here is, no more bailout. What we're going to have to do, is go back and try to reconstruct what was destroyed by Barney Frank and his directors, over the course of about nearly a year and a half, now. And we're going to have to put the whole system back into bankruptcy. And those accounts, which would qualify as chartered bank accounts, previously, should be recognized as having validity. The other accounts will be put into a bankruptcy pool, to see what mess we make out of them.
That means, we would reverse the bailout. We would go through this whole thing, and reverse the bailout. We would then reconstitute the legitimate savings and other accounts, of the chartered banks, and put them under bankruptcy protection. If the bank as a whole were bankrupt, we would keep the doors of the bank open, and under protection. We would also attempt to reconstruct and re-establish the valid claims of depositors and similar kinds of interests, in those chartered banks, that is, at the state level and the Federal level.
Then we would have to use government credit to launch large-scale projects of development, initially, largely infrastructure. We need to fix our river systems, we need to rebuild a rail system, we need to build our machine-tool systems back up again. We have to go into production, we probably have to do reforestation, a lot of other things that are absolutely urgent to be done, that Roosevelt did, back in the 1930s, that type of thing. And we will just have to rebuild our economy, and make sure that people are taken care of, legitimate interests are protected, that people have opportunities, that their health care is protected, and so forth and so on.
And we're just going to have to put the whole thing through bankruptcy reorganization, and proceed on a basis of morality: of basic morality, that any American can understand.
Schlanger: Well, I have a contact who is somewhat of a moral person, despite being a professional economist. And he wanted me to ask you: Could you actually establish international agreements which would outlaw speculation?
LaRouche: Absolutely. Why not? I would do it immediately. All I need is the agreement of some powerful people to do it!
Problems of 'Youth Culture'
Schlanger: Okay!
Now, I have a couple of questions sent in from members of the LaRouche Youth Movement, and Helga, the first one is addressed to you, from Seattle. She wanted to know what you can tell us about the spread of youth anarchist groups. Of course, Seattle is a hotbed of these types; but also with the situation in Greece, with the threats of rioting in France, in Sweden, and other countries, what can you tell us about this?
Zepp-LaRouche: I think it is a definite, big problem, because, with the culture of death which has been increasingly dominating the so-called "youth culture," and the problem of no-future in growing unemployment, in a growing sense of depression, and so forth, the impact on a lot of the so-called youth culture, ranging from different varieties of pop music, which in part is outspokenly Satanic, to the violence of the video games, and to the spread to all kinds of synthetic ideologies—you have a new phenomenon, where some young people are just out to destroy things. And I think it's a new phenomenon, which has grown on top of previous layers and levels, and that is what is now active.
When you look at the riots in Greece, for example: You had some legitimate protests by the students, because of the death of this 15-year-old student, but then this was very quickly taken over by these other elements, who clearly have some financing which is not legitimate at all, and therefore, the thing which is really very worrisome, is that with the condition of a general breakdown crisis, the trust of the population in government is disappearing, in every country I know of. Look at these scandals, like the Madoff scandal, where the former head of the Nasdaq ripped off his customers by $50 billion! This is not peanuts any more! And then you see how masses of people are losing everything, they're becoming homeless, they're being laid off, and then you have these CEOs who fill their pockets with bonuses of hundreds of millions of dollars, and then you have more and more the discovery that this whole thing is thievery; so the confidence of the population—and naturally, young people—in the political class under these conditions, is just completely going out of the window.
Now, I think the big worry should be, if this thing is not stopped cold soon—and "soon" I mean really within weeks. You know, the fact that there are no more reports about hunger crises, doesn't mean that they're not taking place: It just means that the collapse of the financial system has sort of taken over the front page of the news. But if you have a continuous collapse, what I see as a big danger is that the Greek development, where you have this violence steered by certain oligarchical factions—this could spread, all over Europe. There is a big concern that it could spread to France, where you already have a very volatile situation in the suburbs—the so-called banlieus, which have already erupted a couple of times, and I think President Sarkozy is very aware of it, because he just took back a very unpopular education reform, so as not to ignite the situation further.
But if you have a general collapse of the economy, I have a vivid image what a Dark Age could look like: It's a combination of Somalia, which is sort of becoming an uncharted territory, where you have the disappearance of government, because Somalia is just taken over by different gangs. And in Europe, where you could have a mass protest. And frankly I also remember very well, the example of Albania, where you had a sort of Ponzi scheme which exploded in 1997, when people lost all their pensions, and wages, and savings. And there was unrest: People were storming supermarkets for food; the police and the army did not suppress that, but they participated in the storming of supermarkets, because they were hungry, too!
The idea which some people have concerning the use of the military domestically—I know this was a discussion in the United States, and in Germany it was also discussed—I think this is a very dubious prospect. Because if you have a general breakdown, I don't think these kinds of measures can do anything but heat up the situation and plunge the world further into chaos.
The LaRouche Youth Movement
Schlanger: Summarizing questions from two or three people, Lyn: Given what Helga just described, clearly economic policy, a New Bretton Woods, creation of jobs—that would bring about some optimism. But you have a nihilistic tendency in a number of youth, the problem of attention span, which you've talked about. One person asks, "How do you build this?" And a second question, "How do you communicate ideas? You've emphasized the role of the video work on the larouchepac.com website with the LaRouche Youth Movement. But what is the role of music and Classical drama, and the interrelationship of that with an economic policy that creates optimism?"
LaRouche: Well, that, of course, is crucial. But the other aspect is plain leadership: that we've often seen in history, that when a leader of a nation, or a group of leaders of a nation, which find the kind of conditions arising which Helga just described, make an appeal, which is a cogent appeal to order, the people will often rally behind them. This kind of disorder, is fomented by certain interests. You could build a counterforce against it, but this requires leadership and dedication by some people who are genuine leaders. You never have, really, I think, an absolutely hopeless situation, except in a protracted period of degeneracy.
Our job is to ensure that we don't enter a protracted period of degeneracy, which means we need leadership which does not vacillate. Which calls the people to defend themselves, their future, their children, their grandchildren, by acting now as a voice of sanity. And that usually will work, in the early stages of such a threat. If you allow it to continue, you may get into a Dark Age, as we've had before. And we are within the threat of a Dark Age, now.
So those leaders who say, we have to be "practical," we don't do this, we don't do that, we don't take these measures—those leaders are misleaders, they're fools! Because if you don't take the measures which must be taken early, then you will get a hopeless situation. But we do not have, yet, a hopeless situation, if leadership appears, which is cogent, and knows how to act.
Schlanger: A related question was, someone among the youth asked if you could discuss your ideas of the music program: How does study of the great Classical music—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven—how does that have an effect in the population?
LaRouche: Well, start with the fact that most people who speak, don't know how to speak: They do not know how to speak to convey ideas. They know how to speak to say, "I want bread. I want love, I want meat, I want something, I want this—gimme, gimme, gimme!" They know how to do that. But they don't know how to communicate ideas.
For example, we have noticed, in our work with the LaRouche PAC, that people from younger generations, can—in general—no longer transmit ideas by speech. They will take and pass along some sentences, or fragmentary sentences which really don't mean much of anything. They're like pointing, there's no idea involved; the finger is pointing—the finger of the tongue in words is pointing, but it's not communicating ideas.
We find, however, that we can get back to ideas by taking the combination of music, speech, and so forth, in poetic form, vision, by combining these elements as you can with the video, you present ideas of history, actual ideas, and present them to the same audience that can't understand the ideas when they're represented by ordinary speech or ordinary writing. But when they're presented in a video medium and done artistically, when you restore cadence and other characteristics of literate speech, you find that, suddenly, significantly large audiences can understand ideas, again.
So the point now, is to get into this. And without music as a reference point, you can't do that. Without Classical musical composition, singing, choral work, so forth—without that, you can not develop literate speech. And therefore, the purpose of singing, is to be able to communicate ideas, not simply to utter words.
Zepp-LaRouche: I would like to add only one thing, and that is, there is this Spiritual, and in it, is this line, "I sing because I'm happy," and that is a very important thing, because singing makes you happy!
Celebration of Schiller and Lincoln
Schlanger: Helga, I'd like to ask you, also, in a follow-up to that: This coming year [2009] will be the 250th anniversary of Friedrich Schiller's birth. I'm wondering if you have any ideas or plans for a Year of Schiller.
Zepp-LaRouche: Well, we have here [in Europe] a lot of young people who are quite enthusiastic about Schiller. And the idea is basically that we will produce lots of articles—for decades, our newspaper in Germany has had the the title, Nun kommt die Schillerzeit!, which means, "Now Comes the Era of Schiller," meaning a Renaissance of Classical culture. So, we are basically thinking to use this 250th anniversary to really present the entirety of the works of Schiller, have all the youth write articles, so that every week, we have one major article on different aspects of Schiller's work. Plus, we plan to have performances and recitations, and use this to bring in the whole discussion of what a wonderful cultural tradition that period really was, when you had the Classical composers whom you just mentioned, from Bach to Brahms, and even Hugo Wolf has written a couple of beautiful songs. That was the same period when Schiller lived, and a lot of other great thinkers, also in science and so forth. So it will be a forum to really celebrate the ideas of this period.
Schlanger: We're also coming up on the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, and Lyn, when you were speaking of the question of leadership, clearly, Lincoln understood this principle of poetry. If you read some of his great speeches, it's clear that he sort of exemplified what Shelley meant, when he talked about poets being the unacknowledged legislators.
LaRouche: Well, all great thinkers—Franklin Roosevelt, in his own way, also—any person who is a great person, has a sense of poetic expression, and musical poetic expression, and it's Classical musical poetic expression. And this is the mark, which you recognize, even going into a room sometimes—you recognize that here's someone who is a thinker, because of the manner in which they express ideas. This is obviously the case with Abraham Lincoln, and it was also the case, largely, with Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt's cadences, his manner of speaking, the way he formulated ideas, were an essential part of his power as a leader, just as Lincoln—Lincoln more significantly, of course—but Roosevelt had much the same tradition.
Schlanger: Now, one more question from two Youth Movement members. Lyn, I'd like you to take this up, and Helga if you have some thoughts. They want to know about the direction of the LaRouche Youth Movement. One wrote, "I know I won't be a youth much longer, so I want to see what your thinking is, as to where the Youth Movement is headed, and what we should be thinking about in our own development."
LaRouche: I think development is the name of it: But development is never abstract, in the sense of being timeless or outside of history. Development always occurs in terms of a response to an historical process. And it may be a response to a past part of history, in the sense that you're trying to bring it back. It may be a response to current conditions, to present an idea, which is necessary. But always, it's an attempt to convey real ideas, and in this time, the problem is, we live in a period of complete sophistry. Our culture, English-language culture today, in the United States, it's sophistry! Compare it with the 18th Century or compare it with the 19th Century, like Lincoln for example: You had people who actually could express ideas. And you had great music and great composers. Today, you have people who can not express ideas; they express a jumble of words, or they make sounds, like chimpanzee grunts and screams, which they call "music." So, it's lost!
And the first purpose, is to develop the ability to express ideas. Express them, yes, in a persuasive way, because that's important, but also to get people to suddenly see a vision of an idea. It's what the great poet does, and the great musician does, the great composer.
Schlanger: Helga, did you have any thoughts on that?
Zepp-LaRouche: Yes! I think this vision thing is important. [laughter] No, I'm saying it, because we had here the 90th birthday of the former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who did a couple of useful things, but unfortunately, is also famous for having said, that people who have visions belong in a psychiatric asylum. And that is exactly this problem of the "practical, reasonable man." And I think the challenge for the Youth Movement right now, is that internationally, there is a tremendous vacuum. The sophistry is breaking down, and the neo-liberal paradigm which was associated with globalization is really finished, but you don't yet have everybody understanding that, and not everybody is acknowledging it. But it will become pretty clear, that you need a completely different set of thinking, of axioms, of philosophical foundations to shape that, and to determine what should be the new paradigm, and what should be the philosophical ideas which replace this past, neo-liberal disaster.
You know, in a certain sense, it's on a world scale what happened, or rather, what did not adequately happen when the Communist system collapsed in 1989-91. There, a system collapsed, Communism failed, and basically, there was a vacuum, and then the free-market ideology just sneaked in. But now the free market is collapsing, and therefore, either it's a dark age, or it's a renaissance. And I'm an optimist, since I know that a lot of people are so freaked out about what could happen, that there is also a tremendous energy and desire by a lot of forces around the world to say, "We need a new paradigm for civilization, which puts this oligarchy behind us forever."
And I have said, many times, I'm really hopeful that people, in a couple of years, will look back at this present conjuncture of 2008-2009, and say, this was really the low point, when the Dark Age was looming, but then people, recognizing the danger, got their act together, and made a new Renaissance instead. And this time, ending oligarchism as a childhood disease, where people will laugh about it after a while, and say, "How could people be so foolish to chase after money? How could they waste their entire lives by speculating on the Internet or elsewhere, for something which then turned out to be virtual and didn't exist? And why did they waste their lives and not really pursue a creative life, which is much more joyous and much more rewarding?"
Schlanger: Well, you've been listening to Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche in our year-end program for 2008. On behalf of The LaRouche Show and all your friends around the world, I'd like to thank you for joining us today, and also wish you a happy anniversary. And let's make 2009 "The Year of Victory for Humanity."
On Jan. 22, at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, will be the webcast. This is something which should have the largest audience ever, coming two days after the inauguration of a new President. There'll be other activities leading into that: Keep tuned to the larouchepac.com website for updates. And also virtually daily, and in fact, sometimes several times a day, there are 3- to 6-minute video updates on larouchepac TV.
Let me conclude by urging our listeners to contribute, to make sure that 2009 will be a Year of Victory, and give us a call at 800-929-7566.
Lyn and Helga, thank you very much, for joining us today.
