Jacques Cheminade
A Europe Not To Be Ashamed Of

Speed: Our next speaker, Jacques Cheminade, is a longtime representative of the LaRouche philosophical outlook in France. He is the president of Solidarité et Progrès. He’s a former French Presidential candidate, and is a friend of the real America, not the fake America.

Jacques Cheminade: A few days ago, I had a discussion with Swiss author Jean Ziegler, about the emergency initiatives to be taken to build a new paradigm in international relations. He fully supports our objectives, being a historical advocate of justice, and sharing of food for all. In that context, we immediately agreed that Europe, as it is, is a desperate case, a lost cause, to be ashamed of. The hotspots in Turkey or in Libya, speak for themselves against us. Our mission is therefore, given that European nations must play their part in this universal symphony—a harmonious tianxia, as the Chinese would say—our mission is to create instruments to be able to play the part of a Europe, a Europe not to be ashamed of.

I am going to start—briefly because it does not deserve much time—by talking about what the European Union is presently doing or mostly not doing. It behaves like a leaderless group, a leaderless group of oligarchical waste products, to be frank.

The recent European Councils prove, despite the absence of the United Kingdom, that the same spirit of divide and rule, and the same spirit of submission to the dictatorship of money, prevail. To get out of this despicable and self-destructive mess, we need to evoke within ourselves the best of our cultural and economic traditions, for the advantage of every European nation and for all the other nations of the whole world. Is that utopian idealism? No, just the reverse. Because it is the selfish ideology—shared, until now in the recent years, by all—the “realistic” and pragmatic ideology that destroyed our common immune system, our public health, and our financial immune system. The result is that, confronted by the pandemic, we had none or not enough masks, tests, respirators, and we were unable to forecast something that our leaders claimed was unpredictable.

All those leaders failed, like Hamlets, not individually as such, but because their adaptation to the individualistic, selfish monetary greed of our society led their impotence to become criminal by negligence.

To govern is to predict, and not to predict leads to one’s loss. Leonardo da Vinci adds ironically that “not to predict is already to moan.” So let’s briefly see what the European Union and the European states have done or not done. To say it with one example, they have imposed “just in time”—flux tendu as they say it in French—just-in-time short-term financial rules on our hospitals, ruining their capacity to react properly. In reality, it is rather states that should function for the good. Public hospitals are devoted to collective responsibility, truthfulness, and care for all.

Ideas and initiatives are what are needed, simply to be more human, rather than reports that provide figures and statistics as such, evaluated in monetary units.

ECB Inanity

The first thing that Christine LaGarde, the head of the European Central Bank (ECB), the true armed branch of the European Union, had to say was: “Debt cancellation is inconceivable; maybe it will take dozens of years to pay, but it must be paid back.” Then, as the United States and the United Kingdom are doing, the European Union and the European states are throwing around billions and billions of euros, in part to save producers and assist consumers through creating more debt during this pandemic, but most of it is to infuse more addictive money into the financial circuits of the oligarchy.

To make it simple: They are distributing electronic impulses called money, mostly to avoid a bankruptcy of their whole system. This is no more a so-called market economy, but a market economy without a market, where all the gamblers continue to gamble with tokens and marbles distributed by the central banks, which is the ECB in Europe.

Let’s be precise: The ECB used to be compelled by its own rules to repurchase securities from the banks, but only of a certain rating. It meant state bonds or triple A or first-quality bonds. Now it decided, on its own, to repurchase high-yield debts, junk bonds of lost causes. So with fake electronic money, the ECB saves everybody, in a similar way as the American Federal Reserve! Beyond that, on April 9, the European Union finance ministers decided to create a facility package of €540 billion—€240 billion from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), €200 billion from the European Investment Bank and €100 billion from the European Commission.

But most of it is borrowed, so-called leveraged money, borrowed on the markets! That money mostly goes back into the financial circuit; by lending the borrowed money, the ECB is then a sort of go-between lender of last resort for the benefit of the scammers! The European states, on their side, organized massive, national aid packages: €410 billion for France, €1.1 trillion for Germany, €475 billion for the United Kingdom—comparable to $2.2 trillion of the United States. Most of it is based on what? On new loans and deferral of charges, accumulating more debt without creating the means to reimburse it!

To make it understandable beyond the obtuse technicalities: The pandemic has only been a revealer of a financial hoax, based on an insane system of indebtedness, and a trigger for the crash, but not the real cause! It is because of the financial situation preceding the pandemic that nothing was done to prevent it! “Logically, it did not pay” in the short term, to do something. Then when the pandemic occurred, there were no masks, no ventilators, no tests, and the only possible solution to deal with it was the confinement, the lockdown of the population. It had to be done, and it was done, but in an improper way, without any real cooperation among European nations, which as a consequence blocked the economy.

Real Credit, Not Fake Money

And the solution has been to issue more fake electronic money, to counterbalance the halt of the economy, and prevent any bankruptcy, mainly, again, for the benefit of the scammers! More debt to save an over-indebted system, and most of it to save the initiated sharks! Then, suddenly, a Wall Street recovery occurred, through management of the bubble of all bubbles, without any chance, however, to have a real physical economic recovery within such a fake system.

Still, in Europe, the worst is to come: Because there is not enough money to keep the system going, the European Commission plans to either borrow €1.0 trillion on the markets or to take the European Community budget as a guarantee to print €1.5 trillion of so-called “perpetual debt,” based only on the payment of interest financed by an ecological tax, the capital being never reimbursed. Truly, we are aboard what was called in the Middle Ages, the “ship of fools,” with arrogant captains pretending to give orders among icebergs, and bankers repeating frantically, like the Governor of the Banque de France, François Villeroy de Galhau, “You will have to repay this money! You will have to repay this money!” Of course, not the gamblers of British vintage and their associates, but producers and consumers, all of us, together.

Pandemic Antidotes

So, let’s get out of this mess! This European Union and the heads of its member states are nothing more than oligarchical waste. Let’s rebuild with the spirit that prevailed during what has been known as the thirty glorious years of the European reconstruction after World War II, to do better—to do better, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche said, as it is needed to meet the challenge.

The starting point is that the best antidote against any pandemic is international cooperation. All the speakers have said it. This means human solidarity to build a win-win system, as the Chinese President has defined it in many, many of his speeches. The European Union, and more generally, the states of the west side of our hemisphere, unfortunately, follow in an opposite direction.

Proof of it, is the disgusting fight among states to buy the masks that each of them lacked because of their selfish policies. And also, the individual incapacity to understand, when one of such masks is available, why it is necessary to put it on, not for one’s own individual protection, but to protect the others from our exhalations. These two occurrences show that the concept of the advantage of the other—which was the foundation for peace among nations in the Treaties of Westphalia, which corresponds to the Confucian principle that what you do for others is what brings you on the way towards the Ren—this founding concept of civilization, both in the East and the West, has been somehow lost in our Europe of the 21st century.

Our mission is, therefore, not only to do for the other all the good that we wish he could do for us, but to create the best conditions for her or him to create the good for all. It is notable, in that context, that China, Russia, and Cuba were the nations which came to help Italy, while in France and Germany, and all the more in the United States, many selfish voices denounced that as a propaganda operation, even though their own countries had done very, very little.

Second, comes the implacable commitment to tell the truth, which is symbiotic with the advantage of the other. Our official Europeans have become liars, it should be said. In France or in the United States, because we had not been able to produce or buy enough masks, they first claimed that they were not necessary. The spokeswoman of the French government even claimed that they were too difficult for us laymen to wear, “too difficult to put on, even for me,” she said. This type of lie is not to be blamed as a typical characteristic of this pushy woman, but is a result of a financial world where lying is thought to be a clever move to win, at the expense of all the others; lying has become, in that sense, a perverse art.

Seeing the Future

Third, if you look at the world, and at others, right in the eye, inspired by a commitment to truth and to common good, you can anticipate what would happen, as opposed to what all our Western leaders are saying about the coronavirus. In fact, it’s even worse: they claim that it was impossible to anticipate something unexpected, while they accuse the Chinese government of not anticipating the importance of what they themselves have missed! Even worse, there is a campaign, as was said before, to scapegoat China and blame her, and even sue her, to pay heavy damages!

To anticipate, is to measure the consequences of what you will do or fail to do, and that is what is truly called governing. If you measure those consequences, and therefore your own responsibility, you can forecast a phase change. Not by deduction, induction, or extrapolating from what exists, but by measuring effects of acts on the future. This is what the Pasteurian epidemiologists—the various doctors who worked with Louis Pasteur—and virologists called “sentinel medicine,” a medicine related to the space-time of the sick, which looks with the eyes of the future to the relation between their physical environment and their sickness, always expecting change, and surprises, and taking them into consideration in order to progress.

If instead, you drop human priorities in favor of linear statistics of financial profit, you are doomed to commit political crimes. Then what they call “black swans” today, will be the expected consequences of such disastrous decisions for humanity.

For the commitment to the advantage of the other, truthfulness and anticipation is required. This is why Lyndon LaRouche, fully committed to the destiny of humanity, was able to predict the disastrous consequences of the August 15, 1971 decoupling of the dollar and gold, ushering in an era of financial and moral deregulation—financial and moral deregulation, together—which, if nothing was done to change the directionality of the society, would lead such societies to global pandemics. He wrote various warnings on this issue that other speakers will talk about, but such warnings were not taken into consideration, out of financial greed, out of the failure of our societies.

Then came the Washington Consensus, an agreement of the Western powers to compel the not-yet-developed states to reimburse their debts at the expense of all their infrastructure projects in public health, education and transportation, a debt much higher than the lent money because of the piling up of compound interest. It is through such a process that these not-yet-developed countries became “underdeveloped,” as they were called. This criminal behavior has led to the present situation and demands an immediate intervention from us in the West, together with China and Russia, to launch a top-down program of a global anti-pandemic mobilization. This is what Mauro Ferrari, president of the European Research Council of the European Union, tried to do, to carry out a scientific program to fight the virus, but he had to resign on April 8, in the middle of the pandemic, because the European authorities rejected it in principle and refused to even examine it.

The Several Viruses

We have ourselves, from the Schiller Institute, proposed our “LaRouche Apollo mission” to defeat the global pandemic, because heads of state pretend to be mobilized, as if in a war, but are unable or unwilling to lay out strategies, propose mobilizations or think differently than before. The truth is, that they are prisoners of at least four viruses which inspire their anti-human policies or paralyze their possible intentions to fight; they are either paralyzed or anti-human.

The four viruses—which altogether represent the viruses of empires founded upon slavery or serfdom through debt—are the financial virus, the Malthusian virus, the geopolitical virus, and the bureaucratic virus. Any form of international cooperation for the common good demands the eradication of such viruses, which in our European history have spoken different languages and accents, but who are today definitely British—the British Empire—as Helga Zepp-LaRouche explained before.

The financial virus should be obvious to most of us. There are no dark forces dooming us from some dark places; we are being robbed right out in the open, as the British Empire always did and does, throughout a world where the Sun never sets. It is based on the management of an odious and illegitimate debt, never based on useful programs to create platforms of development, but on the endless possession of financial assets. Such a system is unable to promote the discovery of new physical principles, generating—when developed as technologies—an increase in the potential relative population-density. The relation between that potential relative population-density, and energy-flux density, was the fundamental discovery of Lyndon LaRouche.

Today’s Europe is unable to provide the means to sustain even its own population at the present level. Humanity needs to sustain its present density at above the potential required to improve its future density. This profound understanding of economics is how LaRouche established scientifically that the West is, within its present way of functioning, doomed. The ECB or the American Federal Reserve may produce trillions of fake money, but never masks, ventilators, steel, bridges, airplanes, machine tools in general—they are unable to issue credit for a better future, because their eyes are fixed on what I would call the sterile nostrils of the past, not on the minds of those who in the past created the conditions for our future.

The second virus is Malthusianism, the social expression of the financial virus. It stands on the so-called “fact” that the world is composed of limited resources, and that production grows in an arithmetical proportion while the population increases in an exponential, geometric way, and this can only lead to total depletion of resources. Like what? Right, like a virus or as a cancerous metastasis, which is exactly what the Club of Rome had to say about us human beings. I confronted Aurelio Peccei, the president of the Club of Rome, on this issue. And Helga confronted other members of this Malthusian crowd.

Only the Malthusians Are Morbidly Fixed

The Malthusians say that humans have to reduce their consumption and their reproduction also, to adapt themselves to limited resources. Could this be true? Yes, if the world was defined as a relatively fixed whole, producing limited resources—well, yes, this is the world of the financial oligarchy! It means an entropic universe, ruled by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is true in a closed environment; again, socially, its environment is defined by the rule of the financial oligarchy!

But the real universe as a whole is different: It is in continuous accelerated expansion and does not obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is only valid in a locked-down system. The human being is in agreement with that law of development of the universe, being human because of his creative capacity: He elevates to the level of new resources what had been waste at a relatively inferior stage of development.

The very founding of science is this capacity beyond induction, deduction, and the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction—a capacity to find solutions to existing problems, as Albert Einstein said, with a mode of thinking of a higher form than that which has generated those existing problems. True, genuine science is anti-entropic. Europe, in that sense, has become a problem in itself: The European Union is an entropic box full of bureaucrats. It is laughable, yes, but its consequences are not: All Malthusianisms, whatever form they take—and the British Empire is a clear proof of that—lead to racism, crime and self-destruction.

The third virus is the geopolitical virus, the one-world expression of the financial and Malthusian viruses. It is the policy of the City of London and Wall Street, the British Empire, as it was said, heir of Venice and Amsterdam. For those present-day neo-conservatives, on both sides of the Atlantic, the political universe is a battlefield where enemies are doomed to fight, the winner grabbing all the power and all the money at the expense of the losers, whatever the cost of the battle, in terms of destruction or deaths of human beings.

So-called Global Britain, in terms of the Henry Jackson Society: financial globalization, Malthusianism and geopolitics, with always the same ideology and criminal way of behaving, even if it has today Five Eyes, instead of just one and a monocle. Such a world, unable to generate more human power, inescapably leads to wars to grab more of the limited resources.

The Bureaucratic Virus

The last form it takes is the bureaucratic virus. It is the typical virus of the European Union, the virus of the servants, the virus of a voluntary bondage. It is an order based on a supposedly finished world, like the world of the present viruses, always submitted to an outside power and opposed by its very nature to the inclusion and development of any creative idea. Fearful, and through its fear, the servant of the other three viruses; fearful, like all administrative systems.

All administrative systems are like that—if not directed by a strong political will, they become addicted to that evil proclivity to bend. It is the very nature of the European Union, subjected to an outside federator, as de Gaulle once said, the rule of the Anglo-American form of the British Empire, with the euro as a junior partner of an international dollar—not the currency of the American nation, but that of the world markets, of the men who rob the world, as accurately described by one Nicholas Shaxson.

Against that destructive universe, Professor Didier Raoult, of now hydroxychloroquine fame, has something very interesting to say. In an interview with Le Monde, given at the end of March, he said the following:

I think that it is about time that doctors return to their position, together with the philosophers and the persons that share a human and religious inspiration, at the level of moral reflection, even if some prefer to call it ethics, and that we need to get rid of mathematicians, which are but meteorologists in this domain.

This is as valid for choices of public health measures as for the definition of international cooperation among nations.

Statistics and mathematics maybe define a useful realm of already-created entities, but could never generate something new, breaking with the rules of the game for humanity, either new physical principles, discoveries of principle, or forms of better social solidarity. To pick up mathematics and administrative rules as ways to make the main decisions in times like ours is therefore a crime against creativity. The European Union and the way our states are organized, as entities obeying neither human solidarity nor creative powers, make of us the victims of the viruses that I mentioned before, the deadly viruses.

Europe as a Bridge Towards a New Renaissance

That is why I am speaking to you today: To call for a Renaissance of Europe in a true concert of nations. Think about it one moment: Let’s evoke among us now Cervantes and Goya, Erasmus and Comenius, Rembrandt and Leonardo, Rabelais and Dante, Schiller and Leibniz, and so many others, first of all Beethoven on his year, this year. We need them to inspire a true Europe, looking as far as China and America, a true Europe to be a bridge and not a dead-end on the way to the graveyard.

We need a new, young, more dedicated and more human leadership, which in turn needs our knowledge. Let’s think above ourselves and act together to save us from the coming hunger, death and locusts, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya, Chad, Zimbabwe: Let’s be again patriots and world citizens, with a renewed passion for our nations to bring the better of them to the advantage of the others, for a win-win project of civilization, a World Land-Bridge, as it has been our policy, as defined by Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche—a World Land-Bridge from the Atlantic to the Sea of China, eastward and to the Americas westward.

I hear from my balcony people joining hands and clapping to express their solidarity with our caregivers. The caregiving of our nations means the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche. Many of us are going to tell later about those laws to promote and nurture human creativity against all abuses. Not as a code or a formula to repeat, but as a power coming to challenge us from the realm of human thinking, from the noösphere.

We owe to our people in the hospitals, to our farmers, to our industrial workers, to our aged and often abandoned fellows, to the potential of the handicapped and the working poor, to our neighbors of all continents, also to our Yellow Vests, to make of these Four Laws the principled way leading to our future, shaping a Europe no more to be ashamed of. Let’s find together the vaccines against our four viruses, to accomplish great things, let’s be truly unlocked and unblocked very soon.

Speed: I want to thank Jacques Cheminade for his remarks, and particularly his reminding us that this is the 250th anniversary year of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven.