LaRouche Revives `FDR's Miracle'
To Rescue the Nation
by Nancy SpannausThe Presidents' Day conference of the Schiller Institute and International Conference of Labor Committees (see program and media archives)—meeting bi-coastally, near Washington, D.C. and near Los Angeles, California—over the course of two extraordinary days of presentations and discussion, analyzed the process whereby during the 2004 Presidential campaign and its aftermath, Lyndon LaRouche succeeded in mobilizing and transforming the Democratic Party under his increasingly visible leadership. The conference discussed how to build on that breakthrough, and lead this newly determined, newly unified party, in the battle to make of George W. Bush and his Administration the lamest duck there ever was, to avert the global threat of perennial war, of nuclear war, of economic catastrophe that Bush embodies, by hammering him into defeat on the central issue of Social Security privatization.
Approximately 900 people gathered in both locations, under the banner "A New World Agenda: Stop the Genocide." That new world agenda had been elaborated by LaRouche in a series of discussion documents going into the conference. These began with his Nov. 24, 2004 "The Follies of the Economic Hit Men: Re-animating the World's Economy" (EIR, Dec. 3, 2004) and continued with "Toward a Second Treaty of Westphalia: The Coming Eurasian World" of Nov. 29, 2004 (EIR, Dec. 17, 2004) and "The Dialogue of Civilizations: Earth's Next Fifty Years" of Dec. 19, 2004 (EIR, Jan. 7, 2005). The first of these was also issued as a pamphlet by LaRouche PAC, the former candidate's political action committee. On the eve of the conference, LaRouche issued two more discussion documents, which we include here: "The Global Option for this Emergency: Beyond Westphalia Now," and "Franklin Roosevelt's Miracle."
The conference itself was dominated by the LaRouche Youth Movement, which, along with its young guests, comprised the majority of those attending, and whose members presented two of the conference's five sessions: an open rehearsal of J.S. Bach's Jesu, meine Freude, a performance of the first two acts of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, under the direction of actor Robert Beltran, and combined with a pedagogical discussion on the role of Classical drama in uplifting popular culture.
But the highlight of the weekend's events was, without doubt, LaRouche's keynote presentation on Feb. 20, in which he addressed the question of immortality in very personal terms, and made his personal commitment very clear:
"We have pushed for the kind of leadership I knew we needed to prevent this planet from falling into the hands of the friends of George Shultz.
"Some people in this world think that if the U.S. under Bush were to collapse, that would be a good thing, LaRouche cautioned, saying sardonically, "Because then, geniuses in Europe would suddenly take leadership, and the world would be better. There are no such geniuses in Europe! That China, as a nation of the future, would triumph from the collapse of the United States—bunk! The collapse of the U.S., the collapse of the U.S. dollar, would cause a crisis in China from it could not really survive. The same is true for India and the rest of the world. The United States, because of something embedded in its history, in its character, must again take the leadership, and prevent this crisis from going to its full extent.
"And I'm in the center of it. I have to keep pushing: Because I have the knowledge, the understanding, to do what needs to be done. I have lived my life—as I can say, looking backwards—I have lived my life for these days.... This in future history, will be acknowledged as the immortal purpose of my life: To save civilization....
"My job now is, having reached a position of leadership, of growing leadership influence, is to use, from my stock of immortality, what is known to me and understood by me—as not by others around me or by others generally—to use that knowledge, and the passion which I have, through which I express that knowledge, to push this planet, including the leaders of the United States and others, into taking the kinds of actions which echo, for our time, what Franklin Roosevelt did for his time."
A New Leadership Position
As LaRouche emphasized in his remarks, and as was elaborated in some detail in the panel on "Bringing Back the Democratic Party of FDR," given by LaRouche's national spokeswoman Debra Hanania Freeman, his West Coast spokesman Harley Schlanger, and EIR editor Jeffrey Steinberg, LaRouche has succeeded in the last six months in achieving a position of influence, particularly within the Democratic Party, which can permit him to play the necessary leadership role.
That reality was underscored at a pre-conference meeting on Feb. 18. which brought together a few dozen leaders from the Democratic Party. labor, and Congressional offices for a discussion of the immediate tasks ahead, with leaders of the LaRouche movement, including Helga Zepp-LaRouche, LaRouche's wife, who heads a German political party, and founded the Schiller Institute. The meeting included representatives from some key Congressional offices in Washington; a very broad cross-section of elected state and local Democratic Party officials; and an unusually large, very energized turn-out from the labor movement, from many parts of the country. People came from the Washington, D.C. area, Ohio, Missouri, Michigan, Georgia, and other states, including as far away as California.
The lengthy discussion centered around the strategic mission, as defined by Lyndon LaRouche. Debra Freeman, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and Jeffrey Steinberg went through a strategic tour d'horizon, including the financial crash, the urgent danger of war, and every aspect of the strategic situation. They elaborated why Lyndon LaRouche put the Social Security issue forward as the strategic vulnerable flank to bring down the Bush Administration.
In the course of the discussion, a certain optimistic sense was conveyed about what the Democratic Party is doing, as a direct result of LaRouche's leadership. And EIR's Berlin conference from earlier this year was continuously brought into the discussion, so that people had a sense of the larger, global environment in which LaRouche is operating.
Defeating the New Thirty Years' War
The conference was opened on Feb. 19 by Amelia Boynton Robinson, the legendary civil rights movement leader, now in her 90s, who serves as the vice chairman of the Schiller Institute. She introduced Erin Smith, a leader of the LaRouche Youth Movement, who in turn presented the keynote speaker, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who spoke on the theme "It's Time To Put Out the Flames of the Thirty Years' War: Let's Create a Beautiful Mankind!" Mrs. LaRouche began by reviewing the ongoing "hot spots" dominating the world strategic situation, from Southwest Asia, to Russia, to East Asia, to the tottering world financial system, which is already overripe for a crash.
"So," Zepp-LaRouche asserted, "I think if you look at this picture, ... Lyn [Lyndon LaRouche] is absolutely right when he says the Thirty Years' War has already begun....
"This is much worse than the Thirty Years' War, because the Thirty Years' War was limited to Europe, to a part of Europe. But this is already engulfing the entire globe....
"The world is already sitting on a powderkeg, and the name of this powderkeg is World War III. The fuse has already been lit, at five, six, seven, eight points."
To deal with this, she said, "we have to look at history like tragedy. And we have to learn from Classical tragedy, how to uplift ourselves, how to uplift the population in order to find a way out."
To illustrate this in practice, she turned to the Thirty Years' War itself (1618-48), to the historical writings on the period by Friedrich Schiller, the great German poet, and to his Wallenstein trilogy, three plays written on a central character of the Thirty Years' War, the General Wallenstein who first fought for the Hapsburg Empire, and then turned against it.
"The real struggle of mankind to increase the spiritual side, the intellectual, cognitive side, is what this play is all about," she continued. And the desperate attempt to find an end to a terrible war. "So, that must be the lesson for us today. 'War must stop during the war' "; and as LaRouche has written, the world needs, today, more urgently than ever, a new Peace of Westphalia—the treaty that ended the Thirty Years' War, based on the concept of the advantage of the other....
"And that is very obvious, why we need today a Franklin D. Roosevelt approach for the reconstruction of the torn areas of the war. It is why we need the proposal by Lyn to have a New Bretton Woods; a Eurasian Land-Bridge as the basis for a reconstruction of the world economy, which is based on the interest of the other....
"America, predominantly, has to make this decision—and I'm calling upon you, and the Americans in general, to not have the world turn into barbarians, and not turn the world into a global nuclear rubble-field, a Dark Age."
A Movement Inspired by Youth
In the discussion period following Zepp-LaRouche's presentation, two distinguished foreign guests addressed the conference: Dr. Nino Galloni, a former official in the Italian Labor Ministry and an expert on pension funds, and Maxim Ghilan, an Israeli freedom-fighter who edits the journal Israel and Palestine Strategic Report. Most the remaining sessions of the conference focussed more directly on how to create a movement in the United States, that can reverse the disastrous direction of the Bush Administration.
As LaRouche said in answer to one question, the crucial element missing is "a revolutionary movement to take the country back," in the way that Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He personally is committed to creating this movement, but it will not be done without the inspirational role played by the LaRouche Youth Movement, in the immediate days and months ahead.
The audio and video archive of the conference is available at www.larouchepub.com. Full transcripts are being posted as they become available.
