Hooray for the Global Crisis!
by Leonid Ivashov
This article by Mr. Ivashov, General-Colonel, and President of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, was published in Russian, on the website of the Strategic Culture Foundation (fondsk.ru), on Jan. 26, 2008. The translation into English for EIR is by Rachel Douglas. Subheads have been added. See also Lyndon LaRouche's reply.
Mankind is watching with alarm, as crisis hits the American and world economies.
The G. Bush Administration is seeking a way out of the crisis through war. The President of the U.S.A. has just visited the Mideast, where he attempted to put together an anti-Iran alliance. According to reports received Jan. 25, the members of the UN Security Council have prepared a new draft resolution on Iran. The new version essentially unties the hands of the U.S. President and the Israel lobby in the American Congress for war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
But, will a new war save the world economy and the world's reserve currency?
The present model of the world financial and economic system is unipolar, with the ruling pole being the country that controls the world currency. And that nation, in turn, is controlled by the owners of major private monetary fortunes.
That is the U.S.A., which functions merely as the instrument of global power and money. The Bilderberger Society's formula says that power is merely a commodity, although it is the most valuable one. Therefore, the wealthiest people should have power.
The United States, despite the seeming democracy of its Presidential elections, is under the power of finance capital. Mao Zedong's aphorism, "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun," sounds different today: "Power grows out of the dollar." If the dollar collapses, however, the financier international and the U.S.A. will be compelled to give up their dream of world rule. And without that dream, America will hardly even be able to survive as a unified nation, because the Americans have no worldview, other than the utopia of world rule.
Patrick J. Buchanan, former advisor to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and candidate for the Republican Party Presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996, forecast in his book The Death of the West (Russian edition, 2003) that the U.S.A. would split into three independent nations by the year 2025: one African-American, one Hispanic, and one Anglo-Saxon.
Anticipation of a global catastrophe can also be found in the works of F. Fukuyama, E. Wallerstein, S. Huntington, and other well-known researchers.
Of course, such a course of events will be a catastrophe for current generations of Americans, just as the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. was a catastrophe for the majority of its inhabitants. What about the rest of the world?
The collapse of the U.S.A. and the dollar will cause suffering for all countries that are linked to the world currency and integrated into the global market system. But, aren't those peoples suffering from American effrontery already? Aren't nations losing their sovereignty, while the power elites in most of them serve the interests of global capital, rather than the needs of their own population?
Moreover, the very survival of modern civilization is becoming Problem #1 for mankind. Economists, ecologists, demographers, physicists, medical professionals, and anti-globalists warn of this.
Thus, perhaps, we ought not to be sorry about the current crisis of the world economy, but rather welcome its collapse and take the necessary preemptive measures?
The Meaning of Life
But, first we must understand the essence of today's world order. We must think again about the meaning of life, the place of Earth's civilization in the Universe, and our relationship to God. We must remember Plato's conclusion, that the civilization of Atlantis perished precisely because it stopped communicating with Heaven, and sank into a life of luxury and pleasure.
Russian Academicians G.I. Shipov and A.Ye. Akimov have scientifically proven not only the existence of a physical vacuum and of torsion fields, but also the dependency of natural and cosmic phenomena (including catastrophic ones) on the thoughts and worldview principles of mankind, and the state of consciousness of masses of people. A. Einstein also approached an understanding of how the state of affairs on the planet depends on human consciousness.
The world system that was constructed after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. is a hierarchy that presumes one financially powerful country at its head, while the philosophy of life it imposes is strictly tied to the cult of money and pleasure. It is the first time in the history of mankind, that the economy has become so immoral.
The philosophy of monetarism is based, as the Russian scholar V.G. Sokolenko put it, on "the idea of a union of money and law, or the so-called capitalist absolute ... against which all the great ideas of the epoch of historical Romanticism, and the social revolutions aimed at improving the organization of society, ran aground. By the 20th Century, rationalistic philosophy and liberalism had brought capital to the point of absolute power over the world." (V.G. Sokolenko, Capitalism's Global Rule, Moscow, 2005).
Philosophers, poets, musicians, or explorers of distant worlds are not the ones who set the pitch for people's lives today, but rather financiers and businessmen. Material gain, money, luxury, and power have become the fundamental codes for the great mass of people.
The physical-spiritual dualism of the human being is reduced, more and more, to its "body" component alone. Such a human being, however, is neither of use to Nature, nor acceptable to God. Therefore, he is fated to disappear. For man was created in the image and likeness of God, while his physical existence is sustained by his connection with the plant and animal world, and non-living nature.
The contemporary model of being, based on the ideology of monetarism, ought to be replaced by cognitive, spiritual being. Therein lies the salvation of human civilization. This can be done, only by passing through the furnace of a crisis of the world financial and economic system, wherein the crisis is a means to deprive the global oligarchy of its real power.
Lyndon LaRouche, who has warned repeatedly about the coming collapse, has issued this call: "Rather than continuing the foolish attempts to stimulate the corpse, the United States Government must use its sovereign powers to put its own financial system through bankruptcy proceedings, setting a precedent and providing the context in which other nations can act."
Unfortunately, there are no sovereign governments in the U.S.A., Russia, or Europe. To a limited extent, they exist in China, India, Iran, Japan, and other Eastern countries, and in several Latin American nations. The rest are controlled by the world financial oligarchy.
Monstrous Inequality
Three hundred and fifty-eight family clans of billionaires have a combined income that exceeds the combined income of 45% of the Earth's population, in dollar terms. The quintessence of this monstrous inequality is the mafia-style oligarchical syndicate, presided over by the wealthiest people on the planet. They determine how processes unfold in the world, while they themselves remain in the shadows, out of the public eye. They also control the bulk of the planet's resources, finance huge illegal armies and NGOs, and have developed networks of influence within the governments and parliaments of most of the countries in the world.
That is the pinnacle of the unipolar world. This financial oligarchy is incapable, however, of directing world development. It knows how to make money, seize power, and hold that power for the sake of generating additional profit. Nothing short of the collapse of the dollar pyramid will shake that power.
What may be the consequences of a dollar catastrophe?
Negative scenario:
- Around $500 billion in cash will be taken out of circulation, while tens of trillions of virtual (electronic) dollars are wiped out. This will be a blow against the economies of all nations and transnational corporations, as well as millions of people. Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, and other "non-dollar" countries will fare better.
- The Americans will implement "forgiveness" of their debts to everybody, to the tune of almost $27 trillion (including vaporizing the dollar component of the Russian Stabilization Fund and international reserves).
- The parity and exchange rates of remaining convertible currencies will be deformed.
- Chaos will arise in the world economy, as governments and transnational corporations attempt to cobble together new economic models on an emergency basis, creating some kind of defense system for their national economies; some will shift to a closed economy (autarky).
Positive scenario:
- The role of the institution of the state in the world economy and international relations will be revived.
- In the majority of countries (including Russia), governments in the national interest will be formed, and national revival programs adopted.
- Consolidation processes will be activated among non-Western civilizations (Russian, Chinese, Indian, Islamic, Buddhist, Latin American [sic]), while a dialogue of civilizations develops.
- The role of the UN and other international organizations will increase.
- Western (Euro-American) civilization will weaken and move into decline, though continuing to exist for many decades in the status of a secondary pole of the world.
- A new pole of the world will arise, based on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
- Peoples will again turn to God, rejecting the dollar as their idol; culture, science, education, and health care will develop, while moral values and national traditions are experience a renaissance.
- Man will return to harmony with the Earth and the Cosmos.
Thus, mankind will gain a chance to survive. Thus, hooray for the global, merciless, purgative economic and financial crisis!
