The Strategic View
from the United States
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
[PDF version of this transcript]
Here is Lyndon LaRouche's keynote to the Schiller Institute conference in Frankfurt, Germany, April 13, 2013.
There's a certain element of short but sweet in what I have to say. It may be sweet for some people, but not for others. It's sweet for me, because it's the truth. And it's a truth which is generally not recognized at all; and therefore, the truth that is not recognized at all is inherently the most beautiful of them all.
We're in a situation now, where, in point of fact, especially in the Americas, and in Europe and Africa, for example, mankind is in the greatest danger of virtual extinction of the species ever known to us in historical times. There may have been prehistorical periods which are legendary, shall we say, as opposed to historical, but never before, since those prehistorical times, has mankind ever faced a danger to the human species as great as the world as a whole faces today.
The center of that problem lies between Europe and North America. All the other regions of the other nations are simply secondary. They are not the principal drivers, nor do they provide the solution for the situation.
The key to understanding this is to shock a number of you, especially those who are European, as to what the situation is today. Everybody knows, I think, in Europe and beyond, that we have a great hyperinflationary financial crisis, and that populations are being starved, probably starved to death, in great numbers, in various parts of this part of the world. And they're doomed, unless the solution to this problem is identified and understood.
Mankind is on the verge of a quasi-extinction. This is not something "down the line." This is something in the immediate future. It's a problem which must be identified now, correctly; it's a problem which is not understood in most parts of Europe; it's little understood in the United States, though in the United States we have a better understanding than anyone else does. This system is about to go into a collapse.
A Doomsday Sign
Now, there's an intention behind this. The intention has been bespoken by the Queen of England, who considers herself the Empress of the world—and to a large degree she is. Europe, for example: Western and Central Europe are nothing but puppets of the British Empire. You don't have nation-states any more. You don't have sovereignty any more. You have a system, and the system is run essentially from London. And if their system continues, and is not defeated, the power of the British Empire over Europe, or most of Europe, most of Western and Central Europe, the power over the United States, right now, means that the doom that is threatened, seems to be almost inevitable.
The hyperinflation which has struck Europe and the United States, simultaneously—it's a Doomsday sign. And the rate of production of necessities is falling, and it's falling at an accelerating rate, and will continue to fall at an accelerating rate, as long as this trans-Atlantic system of power continues.
And no one in Europe has a chance, now, of doing much about it. Because they're all tied in, so heavily, to the so-called euro system. The euro system is a mass suicide system of the unwilling.
Now, what's wrong? Why is this hyperinflation—and this is a hyperinflation which makes what happened in Germany in 1923 a simple problem—this is the virtual extinction! Now, the British Empress, the Queen of England, has specified—we had this series of discussions involving Copenhagen,[1] at one point; it was shifted from there, and the British Queen went off in a different direction. It now has gone with a program of explicit genocide, mass genocide. Specifically. She's said it not on one occasion; she's said it repeatedly. She emphasizes it today. It's the policy of the President of the United States today—it's a policy of genocide against the trans-Atlantic population, in particular.
And it's a very efficient genocide. If not stopped, it will kill. What her goals are: The immediate prospect is to reduce the world's population from 7 billion people, to somewhat in the order of magnitude of 1 or 1.2 billion people. That's her policy.
That policy is being implemented throughout Europe, especially Western and Central Europe. That policy is being implemented inside the United States itself; a policy of deliberate genocide has been specified by the Queen of England and her puppet, the President of the United States, has now declared his support for that policy. We're going to have the greatest rate of accelerated death in the United States coming on, if this President remains President.
The policy is not his. The policy is hers. She bought and paid for him, with drug money, a vast flood of drug money which was used to secure his election as President of the United States.
He carried out that kind of program all the way through. He carried it out in the form of warfare. What happened in Libya; what is spreading into Syria; what is threatening throughout all of Africa; what is going on in the Middle East; what the threats are to Russia—all these things—the threats to China now. All these things are being done by her, chiefly through her instrument, the current President of the United States, who's nothing but her stooge, for her!
That's what we face.
Beating the Money Game
Now, how do we deal with this? They have an argument. The argument is, we've got a money problem. And we've got to solve the money problem: "We've got to be nice to money, even if it means being mean to people. Even if it means killing them!" And that is exactly what the policy is of the current President of the United States. He has not gotten it voted up yet, but that's his policy. That's his intention. His intention is genocide against a major part of the population of the United States, as well of Europe.
So, unless we can solve this little mystery, of what's the money game, then we're not going to solve the problem.
So, therefore, I've come to that particular point. What is the problem? Why are Europeans so stupid as to put up with this? Why are European governments more stupid than the people? Naturally, they're more stupid—that's how they got to be governments. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been allowed into government, if they hadn't been stupid, malleable.
There's only one solution, and that solution is Glass-Steagall. But most people don't know what Glass-Steagall is. They think it's a new kind of adjustment system. No. Glass-Steagall is the fundamental law of the United States. Glass-Steagall is the name given to that law, at a specific time in history.
It was not just the United States. It was the forerunners of the United States. This is something that comes out of Nicholas of Cusa, for example, and his great influence, and the great scientific development which occurred, that was then destroyed largely, by periods of great warfare, in Europe, in particular. Civil war.
Columbus was a follower of Nicholas of Cusa, who said the solution is to leave Europe, and go across the oceans to the people of other parts of the world, and build up a civilization, a global human civilization, which will make it possible for all parts of humanity to enjoy what human beings are, and should be allowed to be.
We had religious war. What did this lead to? Well, Columbus's expedition didn't work out too well; the original Columbian settlement, the middle Mexican settlement, these things worked out fairly well. But they were destroyed under the influence of the oligarchical system.
So, then you had this thing that came from a few Dutch, a few French, a few British, Irish, and so forth, and they came over across the water into the North American continent, as well as the South American continent. And in the United States, in particular, in that area we made two efforts to solve the problem which Europe faced, as a result of this situation.
They said, let's leave Europe. Let's get some people out of Europe. Because it is impossible to solve this problem in Europe. And it never has been solved. It just vibrated back and forth. Some progress was made, but things became weaker and weaker and weaker.
Well, we had something that worked out in Massachusetts, finally, in that century, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Now the Massachusetts Bay Colony was an act of genius. It created the economic system on which the United States was based.
Now the Massachusetts Bay Colony was crushed by the Venetian party, so-called, the same Venetian party that destroyed the independence of the Britons, and made them slaves of the New Venetian slavery system. And so, the new slavery system came into North America, into Massachusetts, where we had had the first economic system on which the United States was based.
We then got into a war with Britain, which had been taken over by the New Venetian Party. And Britain had become an empire, during the middle of that [18th] century.
At that point, in the middle of the century, the people in North America, including some of my ancestors, had set forth on a new system of economy, a revival of the same system as the Massachusetts Bay Colony's system. And it worked. And there was one man who actually figured out how to make the principle work, and he was, of course, Alexander Hamilton [1755/57-1804], whose brain designed the American System, the only competent system that solves this kind of problem.
Then the effort was made which succeeded.
But then we were crushed. The British, in particular, were constantly trying to get us to crush our new republic. We had a few great leaders in this republic, initial leaders in this republic. And then we had another group; and then they were crushed in turn. We were crushed again; we were crushed by a British intervention in what was called the Civil War of the United States. We came out of that successfully, but then we were betrayed again by British intervention, British imperial intervention.
Churchill's Perfidy
And then we got our power back, and then some damned fools in the United States decided to go join and support the British in the war called World War I, the most stupid thing that was ever done.
We came out of [War War II] successfully, under Franklin Roosevelt, who represented the same policy as Alexander Hamilton did, in defining the economic policy, the founding constitutional principle, of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt understood that policy, and put a version of it through. And it worked. We won the war. Unfortunately, Franklin Roosevelt died.
He died; why did he die? Because the British killed him. How did they kill him? Well, we were fighting this war, World War II, as it was called, and Roosevelt was the leader of the nation; he was the leader of the international effort to save civilization. But then Churchill had a cute idea: Let's not win the war too soon. That was the British policy. Let's not win the war too soon. Let's wait until Roosevelt is dead. Then when they saw that Franklin Roosevelt was about to die—and this is a matter of eyewitness, not my witness knowledge on some of this stuff—then they went and ended the war, after Roosevelt had died.
They wore him out, with the illness he'd gone through. They wore him out deliberately. And Churchill did it deliberately. He prolonged the war in Europe, to prevent the United States from going back to the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, and the commitments that Roosevelt had made to the peace. The entire peace policy of Franklin Roosevelt was obliterated, under the direction of Winston Churchill, and that sort of process.
Well, then, we were in trouble. Harry Truman, the President who replaced President Roosevelt, was a bum, a Wall Street bum, and a whore for the British Empire. They used nuclear weapons. Started by whom? Started by the British Empire, not the United States.
Nuclear Power, Not Nuclear Weapons
Then we got that straightened out, and went through a process of fighting back against what Churchill and others had done. We had weapons, yes. We had a nuclear arsenal, yes. (And Britain had a nuclear arsenal, given to them by us.) But it was not to be used unless there was a real need to use it. We did not want to unleash what nuclear weapons meant as a weapon of warfare. We were willing to have the weapons, but don't utilize them as a policy. Don't try to get into a war by using nuclear weapons. Do anything possible to avoid having to use nuclear weapons.
And nuclear weapons were not the purpose. Nuclear weapons were a variety of something else. Nuclear weapons were a reflection of nuclear power, where people like Einstein and Max Planck, in the 1890s, had already envisaged the basis for nuclear power.
And it's a natural thing for mankind to use nuclear power. It's an unnatural thing not to use nuclear power. It's an insane thing not to use nuclear power. Because the continued existence of man, in the face of the threat from inside the Solar System, from asteroids and other things in the system, which are now becoming an increasing threat, and source of threats—that will be reported elsewhere, later today. There was never a purpose for nuclear weapons. The Nazis had even thought about using nuclear weapons. Hitler had killed it, at that point.
But the intention of the nuclear policy did not come from a nuclear-weapons policy. It came from the need for progress of man's condition; of increasing the productive powers of mankind; for raising the standard of living of mankind; for increasing the density of power per capita and per unit of territory. We are now going to be going to thermonuclear power, not as thermonuclear weapons—we're going to thermonuclear power in order to get to Mars faster.
Because without thermonuclear fusion, you cannot get to Mars conveniently; mankind will never get to Mars, to live on Mars, without thermonuclear fusion as a power source. We will never be able to deal with the threats to mankind from asteroids and things like that, unless we bring those means to practice. Not for warfare, but for the development of man's role inside the Solar System, at least in the inner part of the Solar System. So, that's our nuclear policy.
Glass-Steagall Will Save the United States
How does all this work with the economy? Well, what we are proposing, and what we are working for—I'll just give you brief background—we had an organization inside the United States, which had in it a branch of our organization, which involved younger people. I positioned myself in the recent years to take the group of young people, young adults, and to build an organization within our existing organization, which would be the part of growth and our future role in politics.
Then, during last year, during the Summer and early Autumn, I just said at one point,
"Look, what we've got to do, we've got to shut down everything else we're doing, in order to take the core of our organization and get into Washington, D.C. in the period of this election campaign, and just sit on that whole pile of people, of members of Congress and similar kinds of people. And let's get our policy put through, and let's educate the Congress."
And that's what we did. Now today, we have reached the point where we do have a significant influence, far greater than anything we ever had before in terms of the United States. And the core of what we are proposing is Glass-Steagall.
Simply, the Glass-Steagall policy, if applied, will save the United States. If Europeans wish to survive, they will do the same thing. They will take a carbon copy of Glass-Steagall and bring it into Europe immediately, and eliminate any other variety of economic-policy system. And that's what's needed.
What people don't understand in all of this, what Europeans don't understand—they don't understand what economy is all about. That is, actual physical economy, human economy. We can learn a lesson from the animal kingdom, because the animal kingdom evolves. Evolution is the natural state of living processes. As far as we know, the general trend of all living processes is based on evolution. The evolution to higher energy-flux forms of existence.
And every bit of progress in mankind's status has always been a result of utilization and recognition of this principle. Now, in the animal kingdom, the animals that aren't so efficient, die; they go extinct. The same thing is true of nations. Nations that don't progress, die; they go extinct. Europe is going extinct. The United States has also joined the self-extinction club, under the past two Presidents, under the banning of Glass-Steagall.
And therefore, what's happening in Europe, in not considering Glass-Steagall, or not applying it; what's happening in the United States, even though we have a better knowledge of Glass-Steagall, and we have much more support for Glass-Steagall; but even in Europe, independent European thinkers are thinking in terms of Glass-Steagall as an economic reform. Even many people in England, many people in the British system, who are bankers, are saying, "We must go to Glass-Steagall." They know in fact that nothing else will work except Glass-Steagall. Without Glass-Steagall right now, civilization is dead! It cannot survive.
Mankind Evolves Voluntarily
What does all this mean?
First of all, take two things: One, all life is based on an evolutionary process, under which species go from lower qualities of development to higher. That's the animal kingdom; that's the law of evolution. Now mankind is different than all other kinds of animals, because mankind has the power to evolve voluntarily. Mankind evolves voluntarily, not by changing his biology, but by changing his mind. And the utilization of noetic powers of mind, and no animal species really has noetic powers of mind. Only human beings have noetic powers of mind.
And therefore, the object is always to go to higher levels of technology, which means kill off the green policy! If you want to survive, end the green policy; because that's a death sentence. It's a suicide pact! Mankind must always progress; we must always learn from the animals and apply the principles the animals don't know how to do. Rise to a higher energy-flux density. How do you do that? You make physical discoveries; you go from lower forms of energy-flux density to higher forms of energy-flux density. You find new applications.
Mankind is, for the moment, helpless against the asteroids which have arrayed against us inside the Solar System. We're helpless against the comets. We saw recently in Russia, we saw some quickie asteroids shooting through there. If they had a little more energy-flux density in that territory, you wouldn't have had a large number of people injured, you would have had mass deaths. Mankind is faced with mass death if we fail to progress adequately and rapidly enough to defeat the problems.
In the United States and in Europe, you have a common suicide pact; it's called the green policy, which is a species suicide pact. It's mass death! Without the increase in energy-flux density expressed in terms of technology and pure power as such, there's no future for mankind on this planet.
Therefore, what's this economic problem then? Which is what all my talking up to here is about. Unless we go to the equivalent of a Glass-Steagall policy, which is to say that our policy is to increase our energy-flux density represented by applications to man's benefit. At the same time, this is reflected in another way.
Again, we can learn from the animal species. Progress, evolve, or die! Progress, evolve, or go extinct! That's the law; that's the law of nature. Mankind is the only creature which does it voluntarily and can do it voluntarily, and that is by making discoveries with the mind, with the powers of mind to discover new principles, higher principles of development. Nobody but mankind is known to be able to do that voluntarily. And people who decide to give up that voluntary right, that voluntary capability, are committing their own mass suicide.
Nicholas of Cusa in the totality of his work and his influence, he was the engineer of science, was the engineer of progress. He was the salvation of Europe, from what had been the misery and the horrible conditions of the earlier centuries.
And therefore, this is a moral question. What's our economic system? Why is our economic system such a genius, as opposed to the poor Europeans who don't understand this yet? What is the principle? The principle of progress, the principle of going to higher energy-flux density, to higher standards of productivity. To be able to defend Earth and the people on it from the kinds of things that threaten Earth now, and the kinds of things that threaten the people of Earth now.
The American System
How do we do that? Well, it goes back to the American System. The American System is progress, progress, progress, as expressed in the currency of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Again, that's the beginning of it. We were crushed, we went back to the same thing.
We had a genius among us—Alexander Hamilton—who made it clear how the United States economic system could be made to work. And because we existed, even as a relatively weak power inside the Americas, the fact that we were promoting, as Benjamin Franklin had done, as his predecessors in Massachusetts had done—they based themselves on a policy of progress, of scientific progress. And on an understanding that scientific progress is based on increasing the productive powers of labor, which means such things as just plain innovation, or scientific discovery.
And we actually drove Europe into progress. Our existence forced Europe, it forced even the British to reckon with progress. And that the basis of money as such is not the basis of economy; the basis of economy is productivity, of increase of the energy-flux density, or increase of the productivity of our production in general.
The problem is, what are the other systems? You have the monetary system, the pure monetary system, the currency system. What's wrong with that? Well, the common currency system has no built-in feature of a drive for progress. Therefore, currency, a gold currency, is not the basis for progress. A silver currency, a monetarist system, is not a basis for progress.
The basis for progress is an increase in the manifest benefits of the productive powers of labor, so that every time that you are acting and producing, you are producing at a higher level than you were producing the day before. You do that in Classical music; you do that in Classical drama; you do that in everything that man does that's good.
And therefore, our currency, our system, the American System, the American Constitutional System, is based uniquely on the concept associated with Alexander Hamilton. We have never achieved anything of notability as a nation in the United States, except on the basis of the application of Hamilton's principle! And if you base yourself on a monetary system, a pure monetary system, you are not requiring progress; you're not requiring physical and technological progress. So how can mankind survive if we don't progress? If we just wear ourselves out, and, like animals, die because we become antiquated?
So therefore, our system is based on a credit system; the same system that was used in the United States, by our greatest early Presidents and their associates. The great things that were driven by the science-driver program. In Europe, the great pressure of the American Revolution forced more attention to this, because nations were competing. If they wanted to compete in Europe, they had to do something about trying to overtake and catch up with each other, to do something better than the next guy.
And it came to the idea of the system of investment, in our system; when it's applied, we always increase the productive powers of labor. And we recognized, that to do that, you have to increase the productivity potential of the population. You have to go to higher technologies, always, always, always, higher technologies. Master territories that before you couldn't inhabit. Conquer things that frighten you.
And the next phase we're at now, now, as you will hear from our other source here today [Jason Ross], the concentration is going to be on energy-flux density and things of that nature. It means getting out there in the Solar System, out to our neighbors in the Solar System. And beginning to get the power through scientific discoveries, and scientific development; to get out there and control the threats to mankind which are represented by these flying rocks out there, of which there are millions, between the Venusian and the Mars vicinity. They're out there waiting to destroy us. The intensity of these rocks coming by us is higher.
One of our people noted today, that if we were going to be hit by an asteroid, which was big enough and fast enough to destroy human life on Earth, there's not a damned thing we could do about it, within a year. If mankind's survival is going to depend upon going out and developing systems of defense against these kind of threats, and going out and reaching farther and farther, so the ability to defend the existence of the human species is made possible. We cannot do that without thermonuclear fusion as a standard of productivity for mankind in the future.
And so the principle is simple. It's the principle of the United States: progress. The principle of Nicholas of Cusa: progress. The principle of Charlemagne: progress. Charlemagne understood economy better than anybody in Europe today does. It's true! He actually calculated, he had a whole census. He examined the whole domain that he dominated during the period of his lifetime. He united the water systems. That was still being done in Germany back in the 1990s, in the final stages. He found out how much people had to eat, how much it cost to build a great system—which broke down after he was out, as they went back in history, went back to an earlier form.
But always this is a principle of progress, that man has a duty of progress, and has had it all along.
But now we've come to a time where we're now not looking out at the Solar System as a passive thing. We're now seeing new kinds of problems; and the thing that threatens mankind now, that really should frighten everyone, frighten us into doing something good about it, is to increase technology, the energy-flux density of technology; reverse the green policy which is our suicide pact in Europe, and in part of the United States. A green policy is a policy of human mass death, because without progress, the conditions of life under which man is able to continue life, human life on this planet, cannot do it.
And right now, the landmark of that at this stage lies in dealing with the threats of those asteroids out there. What once I used to call the Strategic Defense Initiative, when I pushed that policy and we got a lot of people to accept it, in Russia as well, or in the Soviet Union as well. And similar kinds of things. These kinds of inventions; these kinds of discoveries of principle, which depend upon mankind always becoming better than himself. Whoever you are, whatever you represent, you must become better than yourself.
We have a Solar System, and the Solar System is a nice thing to have, and we can use it; but also the Solar System is something which can kill you. And you better learn how to use that. And that's my point.
Just the whole point of the U.S. system, the system which we're trying to revive as a Glass-Steagall system today, is the only system which provides for a survival of civilization. So let's dump all those things that people have as cheap-shot successes. There's only one thing that will save mankind—increase the productive powers of labor. And don't stick to stagnant old ideas. There are new threats and new opportunities and new happinesses out there waiting to be seized. People have to know they exist, and then they have to choose to accept them.
[1] The November 2009 British Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, prior to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, was addressed by Queen Elizabeth II. Sir John Schellnhuber, who was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order (CBE) of the British Empire in 2004, by Queen Elizabeth, told a March 13, 2009 pre-meeting for the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference that the carrying capacity of the planet is below 1 billion people. See http://larouchepub.com/other/2011/3845london_war_depop.html.
