LPAC Videos
Complete LaRouches' Vision
of Eurasian Land-Bridge
by Nancy Spannaus
Oct. 23—Starting in 1941, before the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid out his vision for the world, which he was determined would emerge after the defeat of the Nazi threat. In the Atlantic Charter, imposed by FDR on Churchill at their meeting in Argentia, Canada in August, the prospect of a world of sovereign nation-states, freed of material want and oppression by empire, and collaborating to aid each other, was laid out in broad outlines, which FDR himself intended to pursue through the post-war United Nations Organization. Tragically, he did not survive to force that vision through.
FDR's drive to create such a world, unified in its common efforts to develop the potentials of all peoples of all nations, built on the shoulders of a succession of American patriots, and of great humanists before them. Most notable is the work of German philosopher, scientist, and legal scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz more than two centuries before, in the early 18th Century. Leibniz reached out, particularly through the intelligentsia, to the leading political powers of his day—including Russia's Peter the Great and the Chinese ruling dynasty, among others—in an attempt to create the basis for global collaboration on science and development. His commitment to building institutions dedicated to promoting scientific and technological progress had a lasting impact in shaping academies of science in Russia, Germany, and France, and in sparking the fight to create republican institutions in many nations—including, most emphatically, the United States.
Do you think FDR's and Leibniz's visions are simply part of the past, of "what might have been"? Think again. For today, with the work of American economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, and German scholar and stateswoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the potential for creating a global alliance among sovereign nation-states, for the benefit of all mankind, has not only been revived, but brought to a new and higher level. We stand on the edge of a new era of prosperity and peace for mankind—if we would only seize it.
The modern form which this vision takes is called the Eurasian Land-Bridge. The Eurasian Land-Bridge is a concept calling for corridors of transportation and economic development which will connect the entire globe, developing for the first time, the neglected interiors of whole continents, and raising the living standards and productive powers of labor of all people, to a level worthy of man's nature as the pinnacle of creation. A global rail network, universal electrification with abundant power, a network of new, livable cities, and modern agricultural and industrial facilities that will eliminate backbreaking, bestial conditions of work—all these are integral parts of this Eurasian Land-Bridge concept. It will bind nations together with the joint commitment to building and maintaining this new platform of development, while simultaneously collaborating on the next major leap in mankind's mastery of the universe, the colonization of space.
The Eurasian Land-Bridge concept has been the overarching conception of global development put forward by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche since the early 1990s. But now, with the recent work of the Basement Team of the LaRouche Youth Movement, this concept has been elaborated to a new level of completeness and richness, in video form. Starting with the animated videos of the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) project, which LaRouchePAC produced in early September, the Basement Team has put forward what was a relatively bare concept, in a sensuous form, accessible to the imaginations of large sections of the general public. The Eurasian Land-Bridge can now be presented in a form that proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it is "shovel-ready."
The final element in this array of video products was released this last week, with the production of "The Taming of the Darien Gap" (see below for full array). LaRouche described the achievement this way in the Oct. 20 LPAC Weekly Report:
"This represents, for us, and for me, a long-term achievement which started with the SDI project, actually. It went on to the Eurasian Land-Bridge. It went on to our work on the integration of an African development program, which was a serious African development program. And now, with going back to the McKinley Presidency, and the launching of the Darien Gap policy, we have, now, more or less completed, together with NAWAPA, a design for the rescue of the planet as a whole, through cooperation among sovereign nation-states, without empire, throughout most of the planet. And if civilization is to survive the Obama tragedy, now, this will be the way in which it's done: by ending this idea of whom do we crush, whom do we kick, in terms of nations; to finding modes of cooperation, as is illustrated by the Chilean miners' case, that kind of cooperation, which brings nations together, to cooperate, on long-term efforts which improve everybody. And that's where we stand."
The Land-Bridge Concept
The kickoff of the LaRouche movement's campaign for the global Land-Bridge concept came in 1992, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was then that Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, in collaboration with her husband, then a political prisoner in the United States, expanded the concept of the European Productive Triangle, which was conceived by LaRouche in 1989, as a plan for joint development between Western Europe's industrial heartland, and the Soviet Bloc, into a grand design for developing the Eurasian continent as a whole.
In one respect, the LaRouches' Eurasian Land-Bridge concept was not unique. It built upon the longstanding vision of restoring the Silk Road between Europe and Asia, a vision which the Chinese government had itself revived in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping. In fact, a railway connection was opened between China and the Commonwealth of Independent States (the alliance of post-Soviet nations of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia) in 1992, under the name of the Eurasian Continental Bridge.
LaRouche's concept of the Land-Bridge, however, proceeded from the fundamental breakthrough which he had made in economic science, namely the fact that the survival of the human species (and the Biosphere) fundamentally depends upon the consciously creative efforts of man to increase the potential relative population density of the planet, through discovering and applying new and higher levels of energy-flux density. Collaboration among nations to foster this quality of scientific and technological progress, LaRouche insisted, was the only alternative to conflict, and physical collapse.
The signature proposal which LaRouche made in this direction, was his campaign for "directed-energy beam" weapons, a development undertaken in 1977, by the Fusion Energy Foundation, an organization he co-founded in 1974. This "beam-weapon" program was eventually picked up by the Reagan Administration, which dubbed it the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the much-vilified program to "make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." In LaRouche's conception, which President Reagan adopted, the SDI would rest on scientific collaboration between the United States, the Soviet Union, and many other nations, toward developing technologies based on "new physical principles," which could not only be used to kill ballistic missiles. LaRouche also intended the SDI to revolutionize the productive potential of the planet, and avoid an otherwise disastrous economic collapse, coming from the stagnation of scientific and technological development due to the imposition of British imperial financial methods.
The promise of the SDI concept as a way of avoiding war, and as a science driver for the world's economies, was reflected in the way it inspired leading military and scientific layers in France, Germany, Italy, Argentina, and many other places, to join with the LaRouche movement in promoting the program.
When the Soviet Union, under British agents Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachov, rejected Reagan's offer for collaboration on the SDI, LaRouche, in 1983, warned the Soviets that economic collapse for them was in the range of five years away. And when the East Bloc as a whole was on the very knife-edge of disintegration in 1988, LaRouche renewed his offer for East-West economic collaboration, this time in the form of a Food-for-Peace proposal, issued in Berlin, on Oct. 12, 1988.
In November 1989, the process of economic collapse for the entire Soviet system arrived with political drama, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and LaRouche took a new initiative, calling for the creation of a "Productive Triangle" which would mobilize the industrial and technological potential of the region defined by the cities of Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, into a center of development reaching through development corridors into the East. His wife Helga took the point in organizing for this program, speaking at hundreds of conferences in Western and Eastern Europe, many of which involved collaboration from government circles, as well as with other professionals.
When the Soviet Union itself disintegrated, in 1991, organizing around the Productive Triangle conception became even more urgent—especially as the Anglo-American financial empire was determined to move in to pick the bones of the Soviet Union, and ensure that no new economic institutions based upon universal development could take hold. In this context, Zepp-LaRouche expanded her organizing perspective to include all of Eurasia, and dubbed the Eurasian Land-Bridge (Figure 1).
A high point of this organizing drive was the May 1996 International Symposium for Development of the Regions along the Euro-Asian Continental Bridge, convened by the Chinese government. The Symposium, two years in the making, brought together over 460 experts and diplomats from 36 countries, among them, a Schiller Institute delegation led by Zepp-LaRouche. Zepp-LaRouche's presentation, "Building the Silk Road Land-Bridge," laid out a vision of how the development of the Land-Bridge must proceed as part of a "grand design for peace through development," with the creation of high-technology development corridors that would include upgrading of power, transport, and water systems. To implement this program, Zepp-LaRouche emphasized, would require scrapping the bankrupt world monetarist system, and using American System economics to establish a world credit system, which could fund a global Renaissance.
In the wake of this conference, Zepp-LaRouche became a virtual global ambassador for the Eurasian Land-Bridge, for which she was dubbed the "Silk Road Lady" by her Chinese friends. No part of the globe was neglected by the Land-Bridge concept she put forward, as it included "spiral arms" of development into Africa, the Middle East, and eventually, the linkage into the Americas, through the Bering Strait. By 1997, this link across the Strait was an integral part of the Land-Bridge conception, as shown in the map developed that year by American engineer Hal Cooper, which was featured in EIR's definitive report, "The Eurasian Land-Bridge" (Figure 2).
From 1997—with the outbreak of the global financial meltdown of that year, and its subsequent eruptions—to the present, the Eurasian Land-Bridge has remained at the core of the LaRouches' programmatic proposals. The plan for the Bering Strait tunnel/bridge has become an important focal point, during much of this period, as a concrete example of the necessary collaboration among Russia, the U.S.A., and China in a post-monetarist world. Political motion on the Russian side, in particular, in favor of this proposal, has put it upfront.
But it was Lyndon LaRouche's decision to launch a mobilization for immediate implementation of the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) program, on July 24 of this year, followed by the LaRouche Basement Team's release of the first interactive, 3-D, animated map tour on a revived NAWAPA, on Aug. 20, that put new life into the global campaign for the Eurasian Land-Bridge. From that time forward, leading political and scientific circles internationally have been reanimated by the campaign for implementing NAWAPA, and the extensions which naturally flow from its implementation, and Biosphere-managing approach. Not since FDR's Tennessee Valley Authority, or the U.S. Moon landing, has there been such international excitement about a campaign for a scientific breakthrough, which will benefit and involve all mankind.
The Principle of Infrastructure
To comprehend what the LPAC Basement Team's work on the extended NAWAPA plan actually represents, is to begin to understand the conception of economic infrastructure in an entirely new way, the way which LaRouche's Riemannian economic method has defined the prerequisites for economic progress. As LaRouche has written extensively on this question in recent editions of EIR, we will only briefly reference the essentials here:
- "The Infrastructure Principle: Mankind Developing the Planet," a discussion by LaRouche on the LPAC Weekly Report, a transcript of which appears in {EIR}'s Aug. 6, 2010 edition, No. 30.
- "Learn from NAWAPA: Mind or Body?," a feature in {EIR}'s Aug. 20, 2010 edition, No. 32.
- "The Economic Past Is Behind Us! Money or Credit?," a feature in {EIR}'s Sept. 10, 2010 edition, No. 35.
- "LaRouche Webcast: `The New Economy,'|" a transcript of LaRouche's Sept. 24 webcast in {EIR}'s Oct. 1, 2010 edition, No. 38.
At the core of the matter is the nature of man, and his relationship to the physical universe, as it has developed over the millennia of human existence. LaRouche has defined this relationship in terms of a series of platforms, each of which is characterized by a dominant mode of productive activity, and the corresponding cultural modalities of that activity.
Thus, "infrastructure" is not simply the building of a railroad in the middle of a desert, or a factory in a Third World slum—as today's monetarists in fact do. Properly understood, infrastructure defines a physical and cultural environment which bounds, and/or uplifts, the entire society in which it exists. It is integrally related to the level of energy-flux density of the major power source, and thus, man's ability to master and develop nature. Contrast FDR's rural electrification program, to Obama's placing of solar panels in the desert, and you may begin to get the idea. Similarly, with the contrast between a rail line from a mine to a port, to a network of high-speed rail connecting major population and industrial centers.
LaRouche has identified four infrastructure platforms, that have so far characterized human development:
- Maritime culture, dominated by navigation of the oceans, and the growth of trade and development, centered on ocean coasts. This culture was based on an understanding of astronomy that defies the notion of "primitive" societies.
- Riparian culture, dominated by the movement of human civilization up the rivers from the coasts, and the construction of artificial rivers in the form of canals, which created the connections between the countryside and the coasts. The achievements of Charlemagne are emblematic of this platform of development.
- Railroad culture, which first followed the routes of canals, and later, as in the case of Abraham Lincoln's Transcontinental Railroad, laid the basis for integrated national development.
- Nuclear-energy-based culture, which defines a whole new capability for mankind's travel, availability of power, and skill level.
According to this principle of infrastructure, the platform that would be achieved by the NAWAPA project, and expanded to the Eurasian Land-Bridge, defines a whole new level of capability for mankind. This potentiality, which was outlined in the Basement Team's first paper on the NAWAPA project ("NAWAPA, From the Standpoint of Biospheric Development," EIR, Aug. 13, 2010), defines man, for the first time, in a practical way, as a creature, actually co-creator, of the Solar System, participating in the shaping of not only the Earth's landscape, but of climate and Biospheric processes more broadly.
Now, with the extension of this principle to development globally, we can see our way clearly to international collaboration for the "common aims of mankind." It's so much easier, when you raise your head up out of the mud.
The Crucial Role of the United States
No discussion of the Eurasian Land-Bridge development concept would be complete without addressing the question of the crucial role of the United States. It is no accident that the initiative, the scientific depth, and the political commitment to driving through this project, is coming from the United States. Ideas are immortal, but they live within the minds of real people, who have to act on them, and the United States, with its unique history, is the lawful place for this centuries-old idea, of a global alliance for scientific development, to come to life.
The United States became, and remains, the world's premier republic, because it was here that, far distant from the imperial oligarchies, the most advanced scientific and humanist ideas were able to take root. One could even say that the creators of the Italian Renaissance are the intellectual founders of America, and that those ideas and tradition have been able to flourish here politically, more than in the nations of their birth. The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are not mere words, but living traditions within the history of the country, although, in the years since Franklin Roosevelt's death, they have been increasingly attenuated.
The republican institutions, and residual power embedded in our scientific and industrial accomplishments, not only remain, but are absolutely essential to breaking the power of the globalist British imperial structures that are destroying the world. No other nation in the world can initiate the transformation required in the world economic and financial system—although it is essential that the United States ally with other sovereign nations, such as Russia, China, and India, in order to accomplish the task. Nor is this any secret to the rest of the world. Witness the tremendous excitement among international circles when they see that people in the United States are preparing to go back to great projects like NAWAPA. That very fact opens up the vista of hope for all mankind.
Implicitly, and by intent, that is exactly what the LPAC Basement Team, with the completion, thus far, of its video tours of the elements of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, has done.
All that is lacking is to remove the major impediment to realizing that vision—the British puppet Obama—from the Presidency of the United States, and moving ahead to implement FDR's Glass-Steagall. Indeed, the intensified drive to realize the Land-Bridge, with the release of the video series we review below, will hasten that day, which must be close indeed.
