LaRouche: Fight To Overcome
Our National Tragedy
On Sept. 30, at 1:00 A.M., the 111th U.S. Congress adjourned, having taken no action, nor even taken up debate, on the existential question facing the United States, and the world, economy: the restoration of FDR's Glass-Steagall banking law. Despite enormous popular pressure, largely organized by the LaRouche Political Action Committee, the Congress capitulated to the demands from President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In fact, Pelosi herself had to cast the deciding vote to force adjournment, since 39 Democrats, many of them Glass-Steagall supporters, had voted against it, tying the House 209-209.
Midday, on Sept. 30, LaRouche PAC Chairman Lyndon LaRouche addressed the strategic situation in the wake of this failure, on LPAC-TV's Weekly Report. We present here an edited transcript of his opening statement, and recommend viewing the full hour of discussion, which can be found in archive on www.larouchepac.com.
What's interesting in particular, is to look at the behavior of the members of Congress, and they are behaving with their usual impotence. And it's not their impotence alone: It's the impotence of our whole population. There is no real leadership, that's recognized as real leadership, in the political system. But there are people who feel they have to adapt to the "powers that be," whatever they are. And, I mean, Madame Pelosi is not my idea of someone who is well-suited to power. She's petty, nasty, dishonest—you know.
But this is the nature of the human tragedy in a general way: It is fairly rare in history, that institutions and large populations behave sanely. They just don't. Because they believe in a system, which they feel part of, and they believe that they have to behave according to their perception of their rules of the system, sort of like a freemasonic club. And their conception of what the universe is, that they're adapting to, has no direct correspondence to reality.
Now, it's easy to understand how this works in modern European society. Modern European society, except when the United States is actually sovereign, which has been fairly rare in recent times—the U.S. is, generally, more often, actually a captive of the British Empire. And Wall Street and the Boston crowd are typical of what was left over, when we received our independence, in which the British maintained control over Boston, they maintained control over New York City, the New York market, and they maintained increasing control over other parts—like Chicago became a British bastion.
So, therefore, people believed in a system, which is based on a principle of pleasure and pain, which is essentially the official British system. It's the Sarpi system, which is different from the Aristotelean system. And therefore, they don't believe in reality.
If you study carefully all the teachings of the 18th-Century liberals, they specifically reject the idea that reality exists as a known factor in human behavior. What they agree on, is that pleasure and pain are the primary factors in human history. And therefore, they act according to their perception, of how pleasure and pain determine the mass behavior of institutions.
In other words, there is sort of a code of how we shall interpret pleasure and pain. And it shifts slightly when the perceived government shifts, or the perceived tyranny shifts. And masses of people respond, not to reality, but respond to what they think the prevailing sense of currents of pleasure and pain dictate what they should believe.
And therefore, we come into a situation, such as we have now, where I am dealing with reality. And these fellows out there, the smart ones in the Congress, for example, accept the fact that what I'm saying is real. But their action on this, is based on the assumption, well, they will say to me implicitly, or even sometimes explicitly, "Yes, you are right, but you can't do it that way."
All right, so therefore, what they think is the acceptable standard of artificial, liberal perception, of pleasure and pain, is what they feel is the supreme power in society, particularly when they're massed in large meetings of themselves. Then they react as an institution to their perception of the shared perception of pleasure and pain.
And therefore, you find that even the extremely intelligent members of the legislature, the Federal legislature, do not act intelligently, under pressure. They act on the basis of what they think the powers are, that regulate pleasure and pain. And therefore, you will find Congressmen who will agree with me, know I'm right, will say so, even initiate that statement, and show that they know what they're saying! They will not act that way, when it comes to casting a vote. Except under very exceptional conditions.
The Hyperinflationary Crisis
And therefore, recently, we have a situation, in which you have, typified by our non-friend from the Daily Telegraph: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has officially announced—and obviously, this was something he announced, Sunday [Sept. 27] at the latest, and actually put out on Monday—the statement that the system is now coming down. The system is finished. It's in a breakdown crisis. Then, you find two other institutional figures in Britain, who said the same thing. Of course, some British press don't say the same thing, some do.
In the United States, it is a fact: The United States has entered the phase of a general breakdown crisis. So has the British system, and so has the Western European system. Russia is feeling the pressure, of being a captive, in terms of its relations with its neighbors, of being a captive of that.
And when you look at the planet from my standpoint, you see that this planet is now a great tragedy. We are living in a tragedy. And the real signal of the tragedy is, we have a bum as President, whose policies are actually congruent with those of Adolf Hitler, in his own way, and we don't do anything about it. "You have to respect this President." This President does not respect human life, why should we, who are part of human life, respect his opinion?
So, that's our problem. The problem is, you know, people say, "Why aren't you more influential?" Well, I say, "I'm perfectly influential, as things go. But you guys aren't in the real world. In the real world, I'm influential, but you're not in the real world! And look at the way you behave, look at what you vote for. You all, 80% of you, in the Congress, agree that Glass-Steagall is necessary to save this Republic. You won't do it! Why?"
"Well, the President wouldn't allow it."
"You mean, this jerk? You're kissing this jerk's butt, when the majority of the American people despise him?"
And that's the lesson that we have to take from recent behavior, as to where we are. That doesn't mean the situation is hopeless. It means that, if you are counting on an intelligent response from even the legislatures, once they know the truth, that they are going to react according to it, you are making a big mistake. These members of the legislature are not going to behave on the basis of truthful belief, or knowledgeable belief! They are going to behave, on the basis of what Nancy Pelosi, for example, will allow, as recently! And that can destroy this nation!
The Essence of Tragedy
This is the essence of tragedy! The essence of great tragedy, of all civilizations, is that they have the ability to know—the famous case, of course, is from Homer, the case of Achilles. A great tragedy, which affected civilization, which was the Trojan War, was, according to the story, the "rage of Achilles," that resulted in this very destructive thing. And the Greek historians of that time, looking back, recognized that. And actually, the fall of Greece, which represented, together with certain elements of Egypt, the highest level of civilization, of culture, at that time, was incapable of mobilizing itself sanely. It was trapped into the Peloponnesian War, a suicidal attack.
You know, you have idiots in Europe, especially in France—and the French will think that Napoleon was a great hero of France. They will say, yes, he was this, he was that, he was bad, and so on. But you have to accept the fact that he was a great genius in warfare!
Well, he lost the warfare—that's great genius. But on top of that, he was not really his own man! If you go from 1782, after the defeat of Cornwallis, when we had secured our freedom, with the support of France, and Spain, as sovereign nations, and the League of Armed Neutrality, led by the Tsarina of Russia; here we had triumphed in achieving our independence.
What happened is, from 1782 on, from approximately May-June of 1782, when the incumbent boss of the British East India Company tore apart the alliance, and set into motion confusion, which destroyed Europe, and Europe was destroyed in what became the Napoleonic Wars. And what ended up, was an alliance, temporarily, immediately, of course—there were no true allies in this business—an alliance between the Habsburgs and the British Empire: And an empire was imposed on Europe, from which Europe has not fully recovered to the present day!
They are still living—I mean, when the Frenchmen think that Napoleon was a hero, Napoleon was the guy that destroyed France! How? By getting France involved in perpetual warfare throughout Europe, which resulted in the triumph of the British Empire over France, a condition which exists to the present day! Now that's a helluva bad choice of patriotism!
...And we are in a situation where we have to make clear to the American people, why they are behaving like such fools. You have over 80% of the U.S. adult population, recognizing that this government and these parties, are no good for them. However, what do they show then? They show that, in significant part, by talking about this crazy new party [the Tea Party]. Which is nonsense, a complete piece of nonsense. And why do they like it? Because it's not the Republican and not the Democratic Party. It's a helluva bad choice!
So anyway, you are dealing with a population which, when talked to individually, or talked to in the right kind of subject area, will respond sanely. When it comes to political behavior, mass political behavior, both as members of Congress, or political systems, or members of the population, when mobilized around their representatives, behave insanely! The insanity is the popular opinion based on pleasure/pain. And they can't free themselves from that! They've been conditioned!
"You can't do that." "Why?" "Well..."—long answer, but it amounts to pleasure/pain. And you have members of the Congress, who agree with me, specifically, on the action to be taken, did not take it. Now, they put the entire nation, going into November, into the continuation of what is presently a global breakdown crisis, which can be the end of civilization, planetwide. And these damned fools are doing it.
But, you know, you can't just scream at them. You have to recognize that they're mentally ill. And the mental illness is this belief in liberalism, that is, the belief that there is no truth, knowable to the average citizen out there, except the effects of pleasure/pain, and pleasure/pain is regulated by popular opinion: That is the device which measures what pleasure/pain is. And measures not truth, but pleasure/pain. And that is what we saw, so far, this week.
Now, it doesn't mean, that that's inevitable to continue, because we are at a breaking point. There is a hyperinflation, fully under way now. People are pretending that it does not exist, but it does! There is a total breakdown of the world monetary-financial system, and physical-economic system, now in process. And the only thing that's going to change it, at this point, is the effect that pleasure/pain is negated by pleasure/pain: A breakdown of the system, negates the existing rule of pleasure/pain, by a new principle of pleasure/pain. And that's the only thing we left!
The Dangers Ahead
And this is the kind of thing that led to the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a very destructive process, not because the issues did not exist, but because the issues had not been responded to, as real issues, but other issues had taken over. And so, the French population went to insanity, under Napoleon. And Napoleon was a British agent, in fact, who destroyed Europe, to make way for the victory of the Habsburg-British alliance, which was not maintained too comfortably, for too long, after that.
But nonetheless, for the time, 1812-1815, this worked. And we saw the virtual destruction of civilization; and we saw the United States was then plunged into, under these conditions of the Napoleonic Wars, was plunged into, a process of self-destruction.
And rarely have we had Presidents who were fit to be President, for this reason: The British influence, from Boston, from New York City, the banking communities, which are really British East India Company, have dominated this country. And only under very exceptional circumstances, have we had a man who was fit to be President, as President. Like the case of McKinley. McKinley was qualified as a President; he was good. But they killed him on orders from Europe, orders through Teddy Roosevelt, who was part of this operation. And Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, got us into a war, which we had no business getting into, hmm? That would have finished the British Empire. But they were British agents, and they saved the British Empire.
Then you had a parade of clowns, like Coolidge and Hoover. And then we had Franklin Roosevelt, under conditions of crisis. And when he died, we were plunged into it. If we had Eisenhower then, Eisenhower would have been a good President. But in the meantime, between the time he came out of service, and the time he was president of Columbia University, until he became President, the United States had changed: The American people had been broken. And therefore, even though he did things which were consistent with his character—he and MacArthur both, as others did, as well, it wasn't enough, because the other side had taken a dominant position.
And when Jack Kennedy got out of control of the enemy, they killed him! It was no lone assassin. It was done with the British Empire and its assets in the United States, and in France, and in Spain. And these three guys came in, and shot the President, and got by with it, because of the cover-up. As a result of that, we were destroyed as a nation, by the entry into this ten-year-long war in Indo-China. We never recovered from that war. We were ruined by that. And the fact that we were ruined was used by the Nixon Administration, the Carter Administration—the Carter Administration and the Nixon Administration were two of the worst administrations we have ever had! What Jimmy Carter did was criminal, but he didn't know what the hell he was doing. He was nothing but a dupe and a stooge, at that time. Maybe he knows a little bit better now....
Anyway, that's what I think the situation is: This irony, that we are in the greatest crisis imaginable: The system is in a hyperinflationary implosion, right now in process. You have leading spokesmen of the British financial establishment who are saying that this has happened. They're saying the U.S. government is clinically insane, in effect, and that is true, it is! And we still sit back, and we vote to support Nancy Bulosi—sort of, who was it? Bella Lugosi and Nancy Pelosi?...
And that's what we have to, as an organization, and in terms of part of the political process, what we have to reckon with: We can not apologize, for the manifest, clinical stupidity—and worse—of our friends, even in the Congress and in the political system, because they are adapting, in a way, which would ensure the destruction of this nation. And therefore, their present behavior, their choice of political alternatives, are in fact, clinically insane.
And the only thing now, that seems to possible, is that the very shock of what they have assented to, may bring them to their senses, to break with this liberalism that they believe in. Because the political system, as it functions, in terms of leading forces, the political system of the United States, has now broken down: It is no longer sane. You have sane people in it, but the behavior of the system, collectively, is not sane. And that's what we have to consider, here, today, in terms of how we're going to deal with this thing.
After about 45 minutes of further discussion, LaRouche concluded as follows:
Every tragedy by a great tragedian, always portrayed a society which destroyed itself. And a leadership which did what was necessary, to cause that society to be destroyed, self-destroyed.
Well, we do what we can, and we have a policy which can save humanity, and that's what we're going to do, because that's the only thing that's morally fit to be done! So, we are going to do it! And we might get lucky, and humanity might be saved! But we have to understand, that it will not be because of our Congress.
