Lyndon LaRouche in Dialogue with the Nations of the World

This is the full transcript of the 80-minute video, LaRouche in Dialogue with the Nations of the World, played during Panel 3, “Presenting the ‘LaRouche Library’—LaRouche in Dialogue with the Nations of the World,” of the Schiller Institute’s Sept. 10–11, 2022 conference, “Inspiring Humanity To Survive the Greatest Crisis in World History.” Links for the published English versions of five of the full speeches from which the excerpts were taken are also included—the other two have not been published. The 80-minute video can be viewed, beginning at 21:28, here.

Dennis Small: You are now going to have the privilege of traveling with Lyndon and Helga LaRouche to some seven nations in different parts of the world, where you will hear and see the way Lyn organizes. Our intention here is two-fold: first, provide you with both a small sample of what will eventually be available on the LaRouche Library site—these are just excerpts from seven much longer videos, out of the thousand or more full-length videos that will eventually be up on the site! And second, to present you his in-depth discussion of the most profound, and thorny, issues facing Mankind.

You will be able to look over Lyn’s shoulder, so to speak, as he deals with the rest of the world—from scientists to economists, trade unionists to students, elected officials to royalty. Yes, royalty—literally! You will begin to get an inkling of why, in nation after nation around the world, Lyndon LaRouche’s interlocutors viewed him as what they wished the United States to be, and therefore as the best hope for changing the world for the better. Frequently you will hear them blurt out: “Mr. LaRouche, if only you were the President of my country!” Or, more to the point, “I wish you were President of the United States!”

And so he should have been.

Over the course of decades, Lyndon and Helga LaRouche traveled to over 40 countries on every continent.

In the course of their travels, they met with dozens of Presidents and Prime Ministers, some of them in office, some not. Among the most famous are their meetings with India’s Indira Gandhi and Mexico’s José López Portillo, as well as Lyn’s conversation with Ronald Reagan. Table 1 compiles a list of those meetings, including those which direct envoys of the LaRouches held on one occasion or another.

The video which you are about to see includes Lyndon LaRouche’s discussions with audiences in seven countries, including those nations which, with the U.S., comprise his Four Powers proposal: Russia, India and China. In some cases, these were visits in person; others were conducted by video-conference. In most cases, being foreign countries, there are interpreters involved. Some of what you are about to see has never been broadcast before.

There are two specific matters by way of background that I’d like to point out about the video. In Russia, you will see Lyn having an exchange with Dr. Pobisk Kuznetsov, one of Russia’s most distinguished scientists and visionaries. Kuznetsov subsequently proposed that Lyndon LaRouche’s fundamental breakthrough in the science of physical economy, his discovery of Potential Relative Population Density as the best metric of human creative progress, was so significant in science that it required that a new unit of measurement be established and that he proposed it be named the “La”—for LaRouche.

In Brazil, Lyndon LaRouche in June 2002 was made an honorary citizen of the city of São Paulo, one of the largest in the world, at the initiative of the PRONA party of Dr. Enéas Carneiro, and Lyn and Helga traveled to Brazil on that occasion. Four months later, in October 2002, Enéas was elected to Brazil’s Congress with the single largest number of votes ever cast in Brazil’s history for an individual in a congressional race. Enéas spent approximately $20,000 on his campaign, and he habitually campaigned by holding up copies of LaRouche’s magazine EIR, and advising everyone to follow LaRouche’s policy proposals. At the meeting at the São Paulo City Council where LaRouche was made an honorary citizen, Enéas delivered a speech on “Who Is Mr. LaRouche?” which included a detailed explanation of why Lyndon LaRouche placed such great emphasis on the catenary to understand both physical geometry and strategic statecraft.

And now, sit back, do not relax, but concentrate on Lyndon LaRouche for the next 80 minutes. Have fun!

Lima, Peru
College of Public Accountants
Feb. 25, 2000

Host: It is my pleasure to welcome you to the fifth session of this committee, wherein you will be witnessing an international internet conference transmitted from the United States of America, which we have titled “International Finances and Economic Development for the Americas,” with the participation of Lyndon LaRouche, Jr., international economist, financial expert, and a candidate for President of the U.S.A.

Lyndon LaRouche: We’re in a situation in the world, now, which can best be described as being at the brink of a disintegration of the existing world financial system and monetary arrangements. This is not a matter of predicting the day of a crash. The crisis is systemic, it is not cyclical, and there is no possibility that the world system in its present form could survive the immediate period ahead.

This is a result of a change which occurred especially since August of 1971, when the world abandoned a workable system, set up by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, called the old Bretton Woods System. There were many injustices practiced, especially toward developing nations, under that system; but the system itself worked, with some reservations, up until about the middle of the 1960s.

In 1971, President Nixon took the first step to end the condition of fixed currency rates, or adjustable fixed currency rates, by a floating exchange rate system. And since that time, the progress that was made in the United States, Europe, and to some degree elsewhere, under the postwar monetary system, ended. And since about 1971–72, in point of fact, the world has become generally poorer. We’ve been living off past capital investment, past real physical capital, draining it down.

We’ve now reached the point, through a series of steps, at which the system is doomed.

Now, what we have at the moment, is a situation best compared to Germany in 1923, especially during the period from the spring and summer into the autumn of 1923….

We’re in that kind of situation now. Since especially 1997, with the troubles, so-called troubles in Asia, and then the crisis of mid-1998, the world has entered the terminal phase of this sick system. However, like the German authorities in 1923, the central banking systems and other institutions, have been pumping monetary aggregate into the system at fantastic rates, and looting everything in sight to maintain this.

So therefore, you can not exactly predict the day this system will collapse. Any accident can cause it to collapse. But in general, we can say this is going like the 1923 hyperinflation in Germany. The madmen will keep pumping the money in, to try to keep the system afloat from one day to the next, until the system simply disintegrates, or until some event in the meantime intervenes to bring the system down.

Therefore, we must expect that we’re going to have to face the reality of a general reorganization of the world financial and monetary and trade system in the near future. We will have to scrap globalization, we will have to return to a system of relatively fixed parities among currencies, and we’re going to rely largely upon reestablishing the role of the perfectly sovereign nation-state, and its sovereign currency and monetary system, as the partner, or the system of partners, which will build the new system.

What we will have to do, is to essentially revive the pre-1971 or pre-1966 type of Bretton Woods System on a global scale. And I would propose there are a number of differences that have to be included in that.

First of all, we’ll have to repeat the successful experience of the postwar period, up till 1971, because that, for us, is a proven precedent of a workable system. Extending the system to include developing countries in the way we did not in the postwar period, is one of the fundamental changes that will have to be made.

For example, I’ve emphasized that you can not build a workable system, without including major powers, such as China and India, as partners in managing the new monetary system.

We’re going to have to put much of the world through financial bankruptcy reorganization. Much of the world’s debt, including the so-called derivatives and related debt, will simply have to be written off. This is now, total, well over $300 trillion of short-term debt, in a world whose estimated global gross domestic product, is in the order of $41 trillion. Obviously, you can not carry this debt.

Other debt will have to be reorganized, especially honorable debt, especially the debt of governments. However, we have to recognize, for example, as in the case of the states of the Americas, that under the floating exchange rate system, if you look at the figures, you find out that the nations of the Americas, have paid more in debt retirement than they have received, in total debt due, formerly or in the subsequent period.

This anomaly has developed, precisely because every time there was a run on Ibero-American currencies, and international markets, international authorities would come to these countries and tell them to devalue their currency and take other measures, but at the same time, not devalue the debts which had been denominated earlier, the foreign debts.

And therefore, this rewriting of foreign debt, and the issuance of new credit against this rewriting, caused a debt crisis, such that the Ibero-American states have paid more in debt retirement, in the past thirty years, than the total debt which was actually incurred by them.

So, much of this debt will have to be reorganized. The ideas of His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, for a Jubilee Year, will have to be examined as one of the measures.

The other side of this, is, we’re going to have to reorganize our approach to an economy. We’re going to have to go to a fixed exchange rate system, to an emphasis on long-term credit; not loans, but long-term credit, trade credit, by which, in particular, developing nations, which need capital imports, will be able to buy these on long-term credit of 1% interest per annum or on that order, and with some grants as well, in order to incur capitalization on the order of 5 to 10 to 15, 20, or 30 years, as in the terms of long-term infrastructure.

In other words, we must think about building up economies, which could not pay for such things now, to the point that in the future, through the increase of their productive powers of labor, they are able then to retire some of that capital debt incurred through these long-term extensions of low-cost credit.

So therefore, we need that kind of a system.

Also, we can not do this under the present trends of globalization. You must have protectionist policies for all nations, otherwise, they can not guarantee the prices for their export commodities which will enable them to meet the old debts, or reorganized debts, and also carry the new debt incurred through long-term credit at low interest rates.

Therefore, we must have a protectionist policy, particularly in respect to building up the infrastructure of countries which are largely importing countries, technology-importing countries, to building up their agricultural system through necessary capital technology imports, to building up their private businesses and their government businesses through these measures, to increase generally the productive powers of labor in these economies.

And this means essentially, in my view, that countries such as the United States, or the core countries of western continental Europe, to some degree Russia, which has a large technological potential if it is mobilized, and Japan, are going to have to specialize in building up their capacity to export high-grade-technology goods, and also exporting long-term credit, to countries which are presently classed as “developing” or “semi-developing” countries.

Therefore, we will need a new international division of labor. We’re going to have to think in terms of 20 to 30 years of rebuilding, and building the world economy, and under those conditions, we can prosper.

We must, however, in the meantime, apply some new conceptions as to how to do our financial accounting. Instead of counting things merely in prices, money prices, we’re going to have to think in terms of physical content and the functional nature of physical content of costs….

Now, what I would do on the question of the Americas as such, under that arrangement, is, as I proposed back in 1982, in a book which was called Operation Juárez—which had some popularity in the hemisphere at that time, but not with Henry Kissinger—that, what we should sponsor, is a special monetary trade arrangement, within the Americas, among the states of the Americas, which the United States could co-sponsor.

And, on some general idea and agreement on development projects, we would then be able to write off paper on a long-term basis at nominal charges, and use otherwise unpayable debt, as a negotiable asset, financial asset, which is then used for the purposes of facilitating these kinds of long-term investments or long-term credit structures.

Now, for example, let’s take the case of Peru, concretely. Anyone who’s been there, as I have some years ago, knows exactly what infuriates me, as an economist, about seeing the condition of Peru. And when I look back to these aerial maps of what Peru was a long time ago—before the Spaniards arrived there, a long time before—we realize that this area, which is now considered semi-arid and undeveloped, can be developed.

And if we look at the sources of water in the area, if we look at some of the undeveloped areas, the highland areas, we realize that Peru is an excellent investment proposition, if it’s given the means to build the infrastructure, and also get the credit to develop the kinds of industries which fit its opportunities, and which enable it to raise its productive powers of labor…

I’ll give you an example of this. These institutions are generally associated with what’s called Project Democracy, or the National Endowment for Democracy. They’re offshoots. The International Republican Institute and similar things on the Democratic Party side are of that species.

Now, I’ve known this group for a long time, and they’re not exactly the people I’d recommend. For example, this is the same group which is pressing for legalization of drugs in the hemisphere, as in Colombia, for example. They would like to do the same in Peru. They would like to bail out Ecuador, by using an Ecuador in great trouble, bordering the Amazon region, to bring Ecuador into a functioning part of a big surge of cocaine and heroin production, in this part of the world.

They don’t like Peru, because they don’t like the fact that Peru has defended itself against Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path] and its offshoots so successfully some time ago, under a President who I think has behaved courageously and correctly in that situation.

This idea, anybody who proposes the legalization of drugs, as some people in the United States, including people associated with the Carter group, implicitly, are doing, or the International Republican Institute, in Colombia and elsewhere, are doing the same thing to the Americas, and to the United States, too, but to the Americas, that Palmerston and the British East India Company did to China in the 19th Century.

Palmerston’s demand, which was the issue of the wars against China, was a demand that the Chinese legalize drugs! The Chinese did so, under gunboat pressures, and they destroyed China internally, and it took a long time before China was restored.

The same thing is being done in the case of the Americas. So, what they do, is they take a government, like the government of Peru, which defended itself ably with its military, with limited resources, against a major threat. It may not have eliminated the threat, but it brought it under control. And you compare the condition of Peru today with that in Colombia, where we know that our friends in Colombia had essentially the same ideas as the people in Peru, but in Colombia, they weren’t able to carry it out. In Peru, they did. Some people can not forgive Peru that. It’s that simple.

The full transcript of Mr. LaRouche’s address is available here.

Warsaw, Poland
Schiller Institute Society of Poland
May 24, 2001

Now, this is an old problem in society. Until certain developments in Europe, every form of society was based on the overlordship of the people of society, by a small group of oligarchs. The oligarchs with their trusted lackeys, treated the rest of the population, as human cattle. And the greatest contribution of European civilization, to that, came out of the Classical Greek tradition. In part, as an example is the famous poem of Solon of Athens. The other thing was the development of Christianity, and particularly as developed in the Epistles of the Apostle Paul. Out of which we got a concept, which originally was Greek, which was given in European civilization, a Christian form, which was called in Greek, agapē. That is the law. That is natural law.

Therefore, we say that, in a crisis, the obligation is the obligation to serve the Common Good. This is not merely fairness in a dispute. This is the function of wiser men in society to lead society, to understand that what we must protect is not merely the rights of the living, we must protect the process of development upon which the continuation and betterment of society depend….

Look at, for example, two nations in East and South Asia: China and India. China has the world’s largest population. India has a population which will reach over a billion very soon. India has some high technology, but it also has a vaster army of greatly poor. China has developed high-technology capabilities, but the future of the Chinese population depends upon the development of the inland areas, and the desert areas, and the mountainous areas. So, these are countries which have some high-technology capability, but not enough to meet the needs of their populations as a whole.

Therefore, if we’re going to reorganize the world’s financial and economic system, what we would wish to do is take the areas which formerly have produced high technology, as in the United States, and Western Europe, and Japan, and increase our production of technology in cooperation with parts of the world that need this technology. This will require a long-term credit system, generally reaching to periods of 25-35 years, in other words, a generation. This means interest rates, simple interest rates in the order of 1%, in long-term agreements, especially in infrastructure development and in new technologies….

Think, in the case of Poland for example, how many revolutions have the Polish people fought in the struggle for independence? Why did those fighters who died for that, do that? As instinct, like animals? No. They fought to save the people and the nation. They were willing to sacrifice their lives. Without that, since the Mongol invasion, there would have been no Poland, and when you think of the people who did that—and you know many of them, and many of you were those people, in former times, the last Hitler period, and dealing with the recent regime here—it meant something. The life of the person who took the risk of doing that: It meant something to take that risk. How many people today would stand up to the same challenge?

So therefore, a great crisis is an advantage, in that it forces us, and forces the little people to pay attention to what some of their leaders have been telling them. Great tribulations sometimes come as a blessing, if there are prophets to awaken the people to what their true interest is….

There are some people here, in this room, who would be very happy for Poland to make its own policy. But it must ask for permission from the IMF, from the European Union: You want schools here for your children? You have to get permission from the European Union. You want to have a currency? You have to get permission from the IMF. So, our problem is—I’ve discussed in general terms—there is a solution for this mess: Put the thing through bankruptcy reorganization, under what we call the Chapter 11 principle in the United States; adopt a new policy of reconstruction, centered on the idea of developing cooperation in Eurasia; develop the great cultural dialogue between Europe and East and South Asia; and do this with the idea that this is the way to organize a benefit for the entire world. That is consistent with what we call the Common Good. That’s consistent with what [Pope] John Paul II has called the Common Good. Therefore, we should do it. Where do we get the permission to do it?...

And, in the meantime, what do we do? Well, I’m an old fighter. I’m impatiently patient. I’ll continue the fight. I will not complain if we don’t win tomorrow morning. I’m determined we’re going to win the war, though. I can’t tell you what day. I can’t promise. I can tell you how we’re going to win the war, though. I can tell you to stay at it until we win. That, of course, is an old Polish custom. That’s why Poland exists.

So therefore, what we need are the clear ideas. We need the ideas that we would want to have from the prophets. We must work for those ideas in whatever way we can, day by day. We must be prudent, but bold at the same time. We must be bold, above all, in the area of ideas. And we must see ourselves as merely a part of humanity which has been on this planet for a long time. And we must look at ourselves as this part of humanity as God looks at this part of humanity. We must say: What does God say our mission is for existing in our time? And we must accept that responsibility with joy. I think we can win soon. The main thing is to have a fraternity among us, among nations, and share with John Paul II, the idea which he’s expressing in action now. God looks at us in our time. What is our mission in our time? Let that be our joy.

The full text of Mr. LaRouche’s address is available here.

New Delhi, India
India International Institute
Dec. 3, 2001

Dr. Vijay Chopra, former Chairman, Press Trust of India

Chandrjit Yadav, former Union Minister and former Member of Parliament

Dr. Chopra: Regarding your prescriptions for the future, first of all, I fervently wish that we see you in the White House in 2004. In that high position, you will help implement the idea that you mentioned about the nation-state in the concluding part of your address.

Lyndon LaRouche: Thank you very much…. Now, 20 years later, the world has changed. It was done specifically with the idea—Mrs. Gandhi was then Prime Minister—and our intent was to provide to her—we’d had discussion with her before, in earlier times—and it seemed that the most useful thing we could do for India, since she was disposed to know about such things, was to provide something that she and her associates could use in India, to devise a plan for India. Because we thought that the long-term view was needed, and we thought that about two generations would be required to realize anything that India would accept as a long-term view.

And she, of course, was sympathetic, because she would always look at the poor of India, as her reference point: If it doesn’t benefit the poor, there’s something wrong. And that’s my view. If it doesn’t benefit the poor of India, to elevate their station, we’ve failed. If you’ve benefitted the poor, and uplifted them, why then you’re moving the whole country in the right direction.

Because we’ve seen things, as Mrs. Seth pointed out to us, at one of the villages we visited, you can see the problem of the teachers in trying to draw, get the parents to accept, bringing the children to the schools, which the teachers who are devoted to trying to help these students, these young fellows, so that in order to make the revolution in India that was required, you would have to actually motivate the process in which education would really take off, and people would understand the importance of supporting it.

So, we said 40 years. And we looked at some of the things that are required—two or three generations were required. So, it’s still relevant. I would simply situate it the same way of thinking, with some of the same objectives, today….

My view of relations is largely a spiritual one, in my sense of the term “spiritual.” That is, the cognitive powers of mind must be engaged; you must engage in transmitting concepts back and forth, not just words, not information. And my concern has been to establish relations, or re-establish relations, with people who think, who are the thinkers, typical of the thinkers in India, knowing that the radiation of thinking, among thinking people, is the way in which science works, and in which politics really works. And therefore, I was more concerned to have the opportunity to report on certain things, which I thought Indians ought to hear from me, personally, because I’m prepared to tell the truth, whereas some other people from my country are not. And that India should have the advantage of hearing some of the truth of the matter, so that they could judge for themselves, how to look at some of these problems.

But, mainly that. It was spiritual. What do we think? To engage, to set forth channels for the future, where we’re more efficiently engaged in communicating ideas, which might lead to useful results….

My view is that Russia is a Eurasian nation. It is not simply in Europe and Asia, but it is Eurasian in character. It has Eurasian instincts as a nation, as a national body. It has ties to China, to India, to other countries, which are crucial, which are unique. That doesn’t mean that India and China always agree with Russia, but it means it’s a bridge country, between Western Europe and the countries of East and South Asia. And therefore, my concern is to get Russians to adopt that view, and thus, to help to bring together. For example: Let’s take the question of bilateral relations between China and India, which are much discussed here, and I suppose are much discussed in China as well. How do you deal with the fact that, especially since 1962, there has been a continuing sense of a potential military conflict between China and India, which affects all of us? How do you bring these nations together? How do you define a common interest, over and above this continuing issue of conflict?...

Chandrjit Yadav: I must introduce myself: I’m Chandrjit Yadav, former Union minister and member of Parliament, as my friend K.R. Ganesh and by my side. I think that you’re visiting India after 20 years? Seventeen years. Even that is a very long period. I wish you could visit more often, to this part of the world: not only India, Russia, Southeast Asia, China, because as you rightly said that, this part of the world will play a very important role in shaping the new, just economic order….

There is no previously published transcript of this address.

China
Washington, D.C. EIR Seminar: ‘The U.S.A.-China Strategic Partnership’
Oct. 22, 1997

What I shall do today, is present the evolution of the policy, which is presented to us by the coming visit of the President of China—the history of it, as I was personally involved in developing that policy over a long period of time, partly as a personal effort, and later, as an effort which began to make some impact on the shaping of the policies of the world during the course of the 1980s …

The intent of London, the intent of the British Commonwealth, is to do to China what they did to the Soviet Union. That’s their policy. Above all, they do not wish to allow the United States to enter into a partnership with China, which is an alliance, in effect, among two nations seeking to find global stability and global economic growth.

And, thus, China is besieged and threatened on every border. That’s changing. What’s happened in Taiwan recently, with George Soros and company collapsing the Taiwanese economy, as he participated in collapsing the Southeast Asian economies, has had a political effect in Taiwan. But, from every part of Asia, we can trace British intelligence operations, supported in part by some scoundrels from the United States, such as George H.W. Bush, and his brother Prescott, which are attacking China, and trying to destroy it.

You have a pro-British faction in Japan, which wants to make trouble. You have in the Congress, members of the Congress, who never had a passport before they entered the Congress. And they’re now trying to make foreign policy! Most of them don’t even know where countries outside of the United States are. But they have strong opinions on the subject. Their ignorance strengthens their opinion.

This instability in Central Asia: It’s a cockpit of trouble. There are threats to China, from all around it, launched, largely, by British intelligence, and by the British Commonwealth operations. So, China is a besieged nation….

Okay, now, I’ll have played briefly, a section from a televised press conference, which I conducted in Berlin, on Columbus Day, October 12, 1988, at the Bristol-Kempinski Hotel: This is the same televised press conference which was later re-broadcast, in the United States, during October, the same month, as part of a nationwide election campaign—my campaign. This broadcast, and what led into it, is the actual genesis of the program I’ve just described, or identified. And is the genesis of the policy thinking which must go into the design of the agreements reached between the President of the United States and the President of China. Proceed [with the video].

Come with me to Berlin, where I delivered a major press conference, on the morning of Wednesday, October 12:

“Under the proper conditions, many today will agree, that the time has come for early steps toward the reunification of Germany, with the obvious prospect that Berlin might resume its role as the nation’s capital.

“For the United States, as for Germans, and Europe generally, the question is, will this reunification process be brought about by assimilating the Federal Republic of Germany into the East bloc’s economy, or economic range of influence, or can it be accomplished in a different way? In other words, is a united Germany to come into being, as a part of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, as President de Gaulle proposed, or, as Mr. Gorbachev has desired, a Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic?

“I see the possibility, that the process of reunification could occur precisely as de Gaulle proposed.”

What I forecast at that point, in the remainder of that address, was that, during the coming months, we would see the disintegration of the former Soviet bloc, for economic reasons. This disintegration would begin, politically, in Poland, would spread through eastern Europe. And, that the United States and Europe, western Europe, must prepare for this process of disintegration, of the Soviet-dominated economic zone. And, that the United States must support the early reunification of Germany under these conditions. And, that that proposal should be made in the context of offers by the United States, and others, to assist the states of eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, in economic recovery, by helping correct some of the faults in their system.

It happened, as you know, the following year.

At that point, I turned to my wife, Helga, and we discussed the implementation—this was at the point that the Wall was beginning to crumble—the measures which must be taken by the United States and Europe, western Europe, in order to deal with the disintegration, which was ongoing in the former Soviet bloc.

The proposal that came from that, first, was called the “European Triangle Proposal.” There is an area, in western Europe, an approximate spherical triangle [triangle on a sphere], whose key points, whose vertices, are Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. This represents the historic concentration of infrastructural and related economic and technological development in Europe, which has been the greatest in the world. Here was embedded, at that time, in 1988–1989, the greatest potential for machine-tool technologies radiation, from Europe into Eurasia.

My proposal was that the United States had to enter into an agreement, with these nations of Europe, in order to establish partnership, with this Triangle zone, in order to extend development corridors, based on transportation corridors, including the technology of magnetic levitation rail—rail substitute—into St. Petersburg, into Moscow, etc., down through Italy, and so forth, and beyond, as a great development project….

And, therefore, the crucial thing, to all of these parts of the world, whether it’s Africa, South Asia, East Asia, is to provide to these sectors of the world, the right to development. The right to development, involves education, infrastructure development, and, above all, the machine-tool design capability, without which you can not have continuous, sustainable development.

Thus, that was the principle of the sector: that, by developing land-routes of efficient, high-rate, high-speed transportation, throughout Eurasia, and using these routes, not only to support trade and industry, but to support the transmission, at a high rate, of the machine-tool-design sector, into these countries, then and only then, would it be possible to lift the greatest part of the world population, which is concentrated in South and East Asia—and also in Africa, secondly—to lift these parts of the world, out of the legacy of 19th-Century imperialism, and the legacy of second-class citizenship in world affairs.

The full text of Mr. LaRouche’s address is available here.

Moscow, Russia
Methodological University
April 26, 1996

Prof. Taras Muranivsky, President, Moscow Schiller Institute

Dr. Pobisk Kuznetsov, Dubna University of Nature, Society and Man, famed industrial-process organizer and visionary, survivor of the Gulag.

Taras Muranivsky: I greet you, and I now present our esteemed guest, Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche: There are two things which are of concern to me, being in Russia this week. Not only in Russia, but in the world as a whole, we have the greatest crisis of the 20th Century. I think you were acquainted with the situation in the former Soviet Union. It’s a disaster, it cannot continue. It can’t be reversible.

Those of you, who like my friend Pobisk [Kuznetsov], who are veterans of World War II, lived through a certain experience: the experience of the 1920s, as boys; lived through the 1930s, as adolescents; lived through the war, served in uniform, and the postwar period. And the world as it’s known to people who were born after the war is absolutely different than those of us who lived through the Depression and war. In our time, during the Depression and war, we were giants, compared to what came after. Take two examples—take Russia and the United States: In the 1939, the United States had been through a Depression for 10 years. We had mass unemployment, we had misery, we had people who had gone more or less insane, because they had lost their dignity. People with advanced degrees and scientists couldn’t get jobs, hardly as dishwashers.

In 1939–1940, Roosevelt launched the United States on a great industrial development program: It was for purposes of war. He took 17 million people out of the labor force and put them in uniform in the military services. Women replaced them in the factories. In four years, from a bankrupt United States, we created the greatest industrial machine in this country.

After the initial defeat in 1941, a similar, more agonizing experience occurred in the Soviet Union. People, with their bare hands, made an industrial war machine. For every Wehrmacht soldier who died on the Russian front, 10 Russians died. It was a great heroic mobilization. It was not pretty; it was monstrous. It was war at its most intense. Yet, the beautiful thing, was the people were capable of doing it! And there, and in the immediate period after the war, peace came, but there was no peace. The ruined country was rebuilt with bare, bleeding hands, by hungry people.

So people who lived through that experience, as in United States or Russia, know what people and nations can do in the face of a crisis like that we face today.

What was this based on, this progress before proper progress? Two things: the universalization of education or movement in that direction. The first standard of freedom is the ability to read and write, that is, to communicate ideas. The second standard is a process of education in which the student relives in the mind the greatest discoveries of principle of history before. Because the child who relives the great discoveries, reenacts in the child’s own mind, the great discoveries in geometry and other things, of the past thousands of years, is reliving the experience, not only of the storehouse of human knowledge, but is learning how to discover. A student who memorizes a mathematics or physics textbook is probably not a good physicist. The student who works through, in his own mind, the crucial discoveries of principle in physics is a physicist. He has not just learned ideas, he has learned how to discover.

And this was called a classical humanist education.

So, when you have a great number of children with that kind of education, in a society which offers them the opportunity to use that education, both to participate in production and to participate in running the society, participate in making the policy of society by discussing the policy, then no longer is a peasant an ox. He becomes a creative personality, who can increase the productive powers of not only himself, but his neighbors.

And thus, these ideas of education around discovery in art, discovery in science, the idea of using the discoveries to improve the power of man over nature, through investment in scientific and technological progress, this is the difference between man and the beast! For example, remember in Russia, Sputnik in 1957. Remember the optimism of hearing that silly beep. Remember the optimism among the U.S. population when Kennedy announced the manned landing on the Moon; remember the excitement in 1969, when man first stepped foot on the Moon. Look at that statue of Yuri Gagarin; remember when it was put up and why. Because it was a source of inspiration to the Soviet population; it made it good to live in such times.

If we can be conscious of this, and what these things mean, I think we can win. That’s the main purpose of my work here. [applause]

Muranivsky: [interpreted from Russian] We will now have some questions, if there are questions for Mr. LaRouche.

Dr. Pobisk Kuznetsov: [interpreted from Russian] If only there were candidates for President....

Q: [interpreted from Russian] And I think that your friend Pobisk Kuznetsov—and I mention his name, which you didn’t say—I think he will back me up in saying that there was in the Soviet Union, a great man, named Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fetisov, born in 1920. And he fought against Japan. He was a Navy man. He was the head of the rear services for the Pacific Fleet after which he went into systems analysis.

My question is, are all people who do systems analysis bad people?

LaRouche: No. They’re just like people who drink too much whiskey … The distinction is this: The point is today, most mathematicians, when they get their doctoral degree in mathematics, in general mathematics, go insane, if they haven’t done it before. Why? See, the question of development takes you outside of mathematics. You take the last words of Riemann’s statements in the Habilitation Dissertation: To deal with the question of development you must leave the department of mathematics and go into the department of physics, experimental physics. And when you have proven a physical principle you come back to mathematics and you change it. You make a new mathematics. But you cannot derive the physics from mathematics; you must derive mathematics from physics.

Q: [interpreted from Russian] Is there any physics without mathematics?

LaRouche: Yes!...

Q: Doesn’t it seem to you that you have taken the path of narrowing the question area, so that an answer can be found?

LaRouche: No! The point is that, as you know, in all scientific work the ultimate thing is to reduce the issue before you to a simple test of measurement. The question of measurement is man. For example, how do we know something is true? Formally, I can describe, and many have done that, describe exactly as Riemann does, how you can develop a system of scientific progress in a formal sense. But what’s the standard of that? How do you measure scientific progress? You are measuring not nature, you are measuring man’s ability to conquer nature. Therefore, the test of whether the human cognitive apparatus is a reliable instrument for conquering nature.

What is the test? The test comes out as a physical-economic test, as we increase mankind’s power over the universe by this discovery: Have we increased man’s power to exist? Have we increased life expectancy? Have we improved demography? Have we improved function of the individual? A higher-quality individual, who lives longer, who is more productive. Is it a method which preserves the achievements of past generations for the benefit of the future?

So man is the measure!...

Pobisk Kuznetsov: [interpreted from Russian] I think we have to establish one point, which is fundamental. All the monetarists repeat constantly, “There is no alternative to monetarism.” And we need to be able to say, quite clearly, when they say there is no alternative, we reply: “There is an alternative, it’s physical economy, that very natural, scientific approach to social and economic problems....

LaRouche: So the vast territory of Siberia, and Russia in general, which has an extremely low population-density, and with modern technology can become habitable, even the Arctic region, of course, with enough energy. We cannot become economically habitable, without large-scale transportation networks. And a transportation system must not only have a geographic destination, it must have an economic destination. So the way to develop Siberia, is by having transportation links to South Asia, and to China, which are the great concentrations of world population. This is strategically necessary for peace on the continent of Eurasia, under present and coming conditions....

There is no previously-published transcript of this address.

São Paulo, Brazil
Alumni Association of the Superior War College
June 11, 2002

What’s the solution? As I said at the outset, the problem today is denial. People are afraid. They’re afraid of power. They’re afraid of the power of the IMF. They’re afraid of the power of the United States. And therefore, they say, we have to play by the generally accepted rules among the nations of the IMF and by the United States. Therefore, when you try to solve a problem, you say, “We have to find a solution within the rules! You can’t violate the rules. You’ve got to find an alternative, within the rules.” But what I’ve indicated to you, there are no solutions within the rules!

This has been a long-term process of decadence, of culture and economy. We no longer have the kind of leaders in politics we had 20 years ago, or earlier. Our people coming out of our universities do not have the competence of people coming out of universities a generation ago. We are in a decadent culture, a decadent system, which is destroying us! And you’re not going to find solutions in a system, which has shown that the definitions, axioms, and postulates of the system ensure destruction! But people say, “But you’ve got to go by the rules!” What are the rules? The rules are precisely the axioms, the definitions, the postulates which have destroyed us!

Why can’t we change the rules? Aren’t we human beings? Read. You get this out of the first chapter of Genesis: Are man and woman not made equally in the image of the Creator of the Universe, and endowed with these powers? Do not we have the authority, above anything on this planet, to change the rules? We have the power! That’s what sovereignty means. Sovereignty means the power to make the rules by which we can survive. That doesn’t mean we can make any rules we want to. It means we have to have responsibility and competence; but we have the right to deliberate.…

The full transcript of Mr. LaRouche’s address is available here.

São Paulo City Council Chambers
June 12, 2002

We, in the United States, are in a mess—a terrible mess. We have great power still, but it’s a sham. Without the revival of the economies of South and Central America, the United States can not work its way out of its own, onrushing depression. Either we shall sail together, or we shall sink together. And, what I can hope to contribute, most of all, apart from what I do inside the United States and elsewhere, is to try to provoke among us, as nations, a dialogue on these great issues.

We must not have a hegemonic system. A slave is a poor worker. If you can not evoke the will power and creative mentality of a nation’s people, you cannot get much good out of them.

Some may be more powerful, some smaller and weaker. But all must be treated as personalities, with equal rights. From each, we must demand the same thing: that they muster their creative power to help solve problems. We need, above all, a community of ideas, a community of principle. We want to eliminate all kinds of supranational control over any nation among us.

And finally, look at Brazil: this wonderfully large, virtually untouched wilderness, with some concentrations of development, but vast, undeveloped areas, symbolized by the sheer might of the Amazon River. If you look at the Amazon region from the standpoint of the great Russian scientist, [Vladimir] Vernadsky, who devised the terms “Biosphere” and “Noösphere,” you have a sense of the great power for the future, implicit in the development of that, in a scientifically sound and rational way. That is one of the great projects of development for the planet as a whole. And it should be a source of inspiration, to all Brazil, about what this nation can do. And the United States should be very happy to have such a partner.

The full transcript of Mr. LaRouche’s address is available here.

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up (Arab League)
May 26, 2002

I wish to extend my gratitude to the Center, and to his Highness, for the invitation to be here with you today. My subject is: “The Middle East as a Strategic Crossroad.”

The world has come to a crossroads in modern history. If the world were to continue along the pathway currently chosen by my government and some others, civilization will be plunged, for as long as a generation or more, into a global dark age comparable to that which struck Europe about 750 years ago. We must not pretend that danger does not exist; but, also, we must commit ourselves to the hopeful alternative which wise governments will prefer. Therefore, I shall speak frankly, but also optimistically, of a second crossroads, the Middle East….

Whatever U.S. policy might appear to be now, the reality of the present world economic crisis will probably force some sweeping changes in U.S. policy and thinking during the near future. There is no hope for the economic revival of the United States from the present world crisis, without precisely such cooperation in the land-transport-based development of the Eurasian and African continents as a whole. If the U.S. is to find a solution to the inevitable early disasters caused by its present policies, this must include a special role for the Middle East.

The approach to a solution to that strategic crisis, does not lie in oil as such, but in the way petroleum production and marketing can be applied to serve the broader long-term interests of the region. Stable governments within the region, and stable relations within areas outside the region, are the first line of defense of the region from the forces and other perils which presently menace it. The crucial role of transport development is a leading example of the measures of defense required.

The special advantage of modern rail, or magnetic levitation, as compared with sea-based transport, lies in the elementary fact, that with rare special exceptions, the product transported by sea does not improve, in itself, during transport. Under the right conditions, long-range transportation corridors, which are based on a central role of modern rail or magnetic-levitation transport, are, in net effect, cheaper and faster routes of transport than the seas.

As in the case of the original U.S. transcontinental rail systems, these routes were not merely roads of transport; the transportation system transformed a virtual economic wasteland into a rich region of powerful economic development. In effect, every average kilometer of investment in the transport system along these main and subsidiary routes gave back to the nation a net amount of produced wealth from agriculture, mining, and manufacturing, far in excess of the cost of developing and maintaining the transportation system.

Instead of thinking of simply connecting two points with a long-distance rail line, or magnetic-levitation system, think of the transport line as the central spine of a development corridor of up to 50–100 kilometers width. Running parallel to the spine are main-line conduits of water and power. At appropriate places along the spine, agro-industrial-residential complexes are built. Satellite areas of a similar type also lie within the same corridor. What I have just described in a summary way, is a modern equivalent of the methods which produced an agricultural-industrial revolution in the U.S. approximately a century and a half ago.

By concentrating resources of transportation, water, and power within development corridors, the most efficient use of those resources can be managed. The most economical use of the total available land-area is achieved by tending to concentrate development in those corridors. Under conditions of continued growth, subsidiary development corridors will branch out from the principal ones.

This same method can be applied, with a combination of technologies either existing, or within reach, to transform the interior of Asia, including its deserts and tundras.

Under proper policies, he physical net cost of such development corridors is less than zero. As goods flow along the spine of the corridor, new wealth is being generated in and around each of the nodal agro-industrial-residential locations along the route….

Rashid Abdullah Al Nuaimi, UAE Minister of Foreign Affairs: There was a confrontation in the past between producers and consumers [of oil]. Do you see any hope in the future that both sides can sit and plan a future of cooperation?

LaRouche: I see a lot of hope. The hope is in precisely this. We are in a collapse of the world financial monetary system and a collapse of the economy. My magazine [EIR] has published all the figures on this; it’s clear. All the attempts to deny this are becoming undeniable. Under such conditions, how would the world recover? Now, you are looking at it from your background, which obviously includes this knowledge. You are looking at a system which is no longer a sane financial system. We are now operating on the basis of financial derivatives which run into hundreds of trillions of dollars. We don’t know how many there are, because they are unregulated markets. These are obligations. We have bubbles, all kinds of financial bubbles.

We see the collapse in the so-called telecom sector, which is collapsing. So, we are into a major bankruptcy now.

This means that we are at a point where we can save the economies through cooperation among national governments, but we require state-to-state agreements of the type we made in terms of the first IMF agreement. If we went back to the model of 1945–1965 and say: Should we do this? Put the world through bankruptcy reorganization; do the things you do in bankruptcy, around the so-called Chapter 11 of the United States [code]; get government credit mobilized to large infrastructure projects, and so forth. So, what do you do? Well, to maintain that system, we have to have a gold reserve-based system, because we have to have a fixed-currency value or peg ratio. Otherwise you can not have cheap loans, 1% or 2% in the international markets on long term.

Under those conditions, the next thing you go to, is certain categories of trade. Now this means, as I’ve indicated, that the price of petroleum should be a negotiated price between consumer and producer nations, among them, which should be fixed, because we will now be fixing energy, which is the biggest key commodity in international markets, we fix that to the rate of currency. Now we can have an economy that will work, and we can invest.

So, therefore, we have to go to a fixed-currency system, which includes precisely that kind of provision, that we used to think we had before 1971. We have to go back to that; and I presume that under conditions of a crisis, when governments admit there is a crisis, then they will be willing to come together as governments, and say, “Let’s make a new system based on the best experience from the previous system.” And under that condition, that would happen….

What is our interest as a total person, if we know we will all die? It is what we do with our life. It is what’s said in the New Testament of the “Parable of the Talents”: you are given a talent, it’s a life. What are you going to do with it? What you do with that life is what you are for the rest of eternity.

The people who are effective leaders of nations have that kind of love for their people and for the people of the world of that kind. Because they have a mission; it’s given to them. This ability to have this thing, this commitment to immortality, is something that is given to you. Life is loaned to you from birth to death, and what you do with that life becomes what you are. That’s your interest. Are you giving justice? Are you acting for the future of mankind? Do you have the eyes of the past dead upon you? Do you have honor in the eyes of those who died and went before you?

So you never elect a leader as a leader and trust them as leaders, unless they have that kind of moral commitment. We would hope, and I would hope that sometime in the future we would not need to find that such leaders were exceptions in their people. In the meantime, we count on such leaders to guide our people who can approximate that, to lead us and lead the people through the swamps of danger.

The full transcript of Mr. LaRouche’s address, including the question and answer session, is available here.