Discussion Session

This is the edited transcript of the Discussion Session, which concludes Panel 3, titled “Presenting the ‘LaRouche Library’—LaRouche in Dialogue with the Nations of the World,” of the Schiller Institute’s Sept. 10–11 Conference, “Inspiring Humanity To Survive the Greatest Crisis in World History.”

Dennis Small (Moderator): I’m going to take the chair’s prerogative to ask the first question myself, which combines some written questions we have received. This is directed to Helga in particular. Several people wanted to know when and where have Lyn’s ideas actually been applied to the development of a physical economy.

The broader question which I want to pose to you has to do with the power of ideas, or as he put it in his autobiography, the power of reason. Some prominent people around the world have turned to LaRouche’s ideas, perhaps the most famous one is José López Portillo, the former President of Mexico, who once said, “It is now necessary for the world to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche.” Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General of the United States said, “Mr. LaRouche will certainly find his place in history. He was treated unfairly in his life for his vision and his work. His courage is especially notable.”

We have the rather touching and significant letter that was sent to Helga on the occasion of Lyn’s passing, for the memorial in his honor; this came from Sergei Glazyev, an important Russian economist and Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. I’m reading from his statement from 2019:

“Lyndon LaRouche has left us. He was a titan of thought, a man of incredibly encyclopedic knowledge, great soul, and love for humanity. He will always remain in our memory as an ardent fighter for mankind’s happy future, based on implementation of the principles of physical economy; a realistic school of economic thought directed toward the creation of material benefits and the conditions for socio and economic development.

“LaRouche enjoyed enormous respect among the expert community in many countries around the world. I’ve had the opportunity to meet his supporters in India, Latin America, China, Africa, and of course in Europe and the CIS countries. One would hope for this international expert community, inspired by the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche to be preserved. Today those ideas are coming to life in a new world economic paradigm which we call integral, for it unites the interests of the people of various countries in the harmonious development of humanity.”

Helga, the broad question to you: The significance of LaRouche’s ideas; where they have been applied; and where does this take us moving forward?

Where LaRouche’s Ideas Have Been Applied

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Many come to mind. López Portillo, who you quoted, actually called Lyn to come to Mexico in 1983 when the peso was under attack and there was a huge capital flight out of Mexico. The Mexican economy was tremendously threatened. We went to Mexico and met with López Portillo, who asked Lyn if he could write him a program to defend the Mexican economy against this attack.

Lyn then not only wrote a program for Mexico, but he included all of Latin America. He developed not only measures for how Mexico and the peso could be defended, but also how the industrial integration of the entire Latin American continent could occur. The program was called Operation Juárez, in the tradition of the collaboration of Benito Juárez and Abraham Lincoln. This was in the summer. On the 1st of September, López Portillo implemented the first aspects—namely, capital control—he went in the direction of a national bank and issuance of credit for development.

It just so happened—this was so funny—that on that very day, Lyn and I had had a meeting with the board of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau in Frankfurt, an institution which had had a better tradition in the past playing a role in the reconstruction of Germany in the postwar period, which was based on the ideas of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of President Franklin Roosevelt. Now, they are more Green and not so positive anymore.

So, we were standing there having a welcome coffee, when a top Frankfurt Stock Exchange trader stormed into the room saying, “Look, the banks are bankrupted; Wall Street is going bankrupt. Mexico just implemented capital controls; they are probably going for the debt bomb in all of Latin America.” He was completely freaked out, and there was significant tumult in the group. Lyn said very calmly, “Don’t worry. We are trying to save the banks by forcing them to reorganize in an orderly fashion.” Then he explained what was behind this policy of López Portillo.

Then, unfortunately, López Portillo could not stay long in office because there was a change in government, and also at that time, Brazil and Argentina did not act in solidarity, which was really the big problem. Unfortunately, Argentina shortly thereafter had to pay the price when the British started to go after the Malvinas Islands. The British call it the Falkland Islands, but it’s actually Malvinas. In any case, this was a very successful attempt to implement Lyn’s ideas.

We met with Indira Gandhi twice, and she started to implement the program which, again, Lyn had written in commission for her, “A Forty-Year Development Program for India.” After she was assassinated, the program was then continued by Rajiv Gandhi, and we kept very close contact with many people of her Cabinet afterwards, including K.A. Ganesh and Ganesh Shukla.

There are many other examples, but I would say maybe the most interesting one, since you also mentioned Sergei Glazyev, you mentioned the beautiful letter he wrote for Lyn’s memorial. I just got a fantastic tribute by him, a greeting for the 100th birthday of Lyn. This conference, and the Festschrift for Lyn’s birthday, which I have posted on my Facebook account, is linked there. So, if people want to see it, you can go to my Facebook and look for it.

What Glazyev says there is really very important:

“If the world would have listened to Lyndon LaRouche, a lot of the pain which we are suffering now in terms of the social upheaval as a result of the economic crisis, would not have happened.”

Lyn warned, and Glazyev describes in great detail, of all the problems of the financial system; the gap between the physical economy and the financial aggregates which Lyn portrayed so well pedagogically with his famous Triple Curve. Then he basically says that however, now, the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche are being implemented by the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative in collaboration with the Eurasian Economic Union. And all the countries which are economically successful today are actually working with the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche.

I think this is really very good, because in a certain sense, that is the reason why this Legacy Foundation webpage is so useful. We want to get a lot of people to study the principles of physical economy. Sergei Glazyev is probably the best economist of Russia, and he’s working with the Chinese on a new economic system and a new currency. From what I could see from other written publications, he’s using a lot of the ideas of my late husband.

We are seeing right now the implementation of Lyn’s ideas in real time. I can only hope that people in the West, who clearly have lost their way, so to speak, really will reflect on why the neoliberal system is not functioning. They should study the reasons with the works of Lyndon LaRouche, and then also start to learn the principles of physical economy, which are not so far off from the periods when the economies in the West did function, like the American System of Economy developed by Alexander Hamilton, which, by the way, is very close to what the Chinese are doing today.

If people would stop wearing these idiotic blinders and drop their prejudices, they would recognize that the principles of the success of the early American republic and what the Chinese economic miracle is accomplishing, are very close. Friedrich List, the German economist who is closest to this tradition, is the most-read foreign economist in China today.

I think it’s really the time to review all of that and use these absolutely important ideas to fix the world, which is in such a terrible crisis right now. I want to thank Dr. Glazyev for having sent this incredibly beautiful assessment of my husband’s work.

LaRouche in Translation

Dennis Small: Thank you, Helga. Here’s a comment from Paraguay which is indicative of what many people are saying:

“I just wanted to say that despite the fact that so many decades have gone by, the thinking of Lyndon LaRouche remains totally valid today.”

I have two questions which are really one, which I would like to direct to both John and Gretchen. The first is from Liliana Gorini, the head of the LaRouche movement in Italy:

“It’s very inspiring to watch LaRouche’s hearing at the Peru Finance Committee. It reminded me of his testimony to the Italian Finance Committee at the Italian Parliament in Rome in 2007, which was also translated by a professional interpreter like the one in Poland. I could contact the Italian Parliament to see if they still have the recording of that hearing, so that it could be included in the LaRouche Library. He also had a hearing at the Italian Senate, which is recorded in the official Senate record, but only in written form and in Italian. Does the LaRouche Library include also other languages?”

A related question from a member of the Schiller Institute Youth Movement in Peru, Sebastián Debernardi Ruiz-Eldredge:

“Hello! This is a great initiative. I hope the youth will begin to use it. I wanted to know if the LaRouche Library is going to be in other languages as well?”

John Sigerson: The LaRouche Library has the technical capability to do that. Right now, we’re focussing on Lyn’s English-language material, because there’s so much of it. There is provision for other languages in the website, so it certainly can be added at a certain point. We just have to figure out; we’d have to add to the manpower of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation in order to have people who can work in those various languages. It’s something that can be done; I think we should do it. I just don’t know how quickly we can do it.

Gretchen Small: This is something that the youth movements around the world in Ibero-America, in France, in Germany have to begin to think about preparing for, when we’re going to be able to post such material on the LaRouche Legacy Foundation website, and start assembling the material. A huge amount of work went into producing what we’ve been able to do so far.

It’s urgent that people begin coordinating. A committee, for example, of the Ibero-American youth, who would want to work with some of the people who do this. Get a list together so we know what we have in terms of the translations of Lyn’s works. We have videos, we certainly have done articles over the years, those kinds of things. Put that together and begin preparing as the future curators when it becomes possible to post this material on the LaRouche Legacy Foundation library. The conception is that it is to last for all time. The idea here is to make sure that LaRouche’s work is not lost to future generations.

In the Ibero-American work, which I know more about, it’s a way of beginning to actually go through and get a higher-level perspective of what LaRouche was doing. Because often people read one article, another article, watch a video or whatever. Working on Vol. II, it was a wonderful thing to have to do, because Megan Dobrodt and I had to go through a number of articles from a far larger list. John Sigerson was helping and involved in preparing the list.

We had to read Lyn, and we had to read him in a bulk form, and we had to think about the unity of his thought and the various ways he went about developing that. A little bit about what John was saying, about the chronological understanding of how Lyn’s thought developed. That’s a wonderful thing. That’s what I was thinking of, in terms of, if you read simply a selection of 12–14 articles, you come out with a higher-level, a higher-order view of how Lyn looked at it, than if you read them one by one.

Beginning that task of assembling the work, thinking about it, there are various ways we can begin posting things as people put it together. The German site, the French site, we have an Arabic site, Swedish site, a Danish site, Spanish of course, a Chinese site, a Russian site. They all have aspects of this, but begin to think about it in a more systematic way. That would be extremely important to do, and very valuable intellectually to the development of the youth movement.

Preserving the Integrity of LaRouche’s Works

Dennis Small: One of the things we are absolutely committed to in this project is total fidelity to what Lyndon LaRouche said and wrote, and so on. When John talked about the curating process, this is one that is designed to absolutely preserve what Lyn said or wrote in both archival form for preservation and also presenting to the public.

So, the question of fidelity becomes extremely important as part of our stated mission. That poses a particular challenge, and I mention this because Lyn himself often commented about what happened after Leibniz’s death, which is that all sorts of “Leibnizians” or “neo-Leibnizians” appeared with the purpose of destroying his work. There’s no question that the same idea will appear and has appeared already with regard to Lyndon LaRouche. Despite the fact that Lyn himself clearly stated, and as is evident from everything you’ve seen, Helga is, in fact, the head of the LaRouche movement. There have been those who have tried to deviate in a direction which Lyn himself would have either laughed at, or spat at, or both.

That said, this question of fidelity is extremely important and challenging for the translator and the interpreter. We must and we will get to the point of being able to present LaRouche’s works in numerous languages. But that poses an enormous responsibility to those of us who have made the effort to try to render these things into other languages. Probably the single most challenging intellectual task, speaking personally, has been to translate or try to translate Lyn into Spanish. It’s enormously rewarding.

I can only second Gretchen’s proposal that this be taken up by the LaRouche Youth Movement. This is exactly implicit in what Sebastian had proposed. This is obviously required, and this sort of work will both guarantee that those works are rendered and made available in other languages, and we will technically be able to do that. But, more importantly, by such activities, train and educate an entire new generation to then wield the power of LaRouche’s ideas as he did throughout his life.

One specific question came over to us from Panel 1, but I think it’s very important at this strategic moment to pose to her, and then I’ll have a question which I’d like the three of you to answer in conclusion.

Blowout of the Neo-Liberal System

This is a question that was sent in from Germany:

“Now that the Queen has passed away, can we talk about the collapse of the House of Windsor? One hears again and again that King Charles III, not possessing sovereignty like his parents, will rather yield to the pressure coming from outside. We always talk in our conferences about the end of the financial system, and already have the solution ready with the New Bretton Woods. How do you see this situation? I address this as a question to you and to this conference.”

Zepp-LaRouche: I think this new King Charles III is not the most jubilant representative of the monarchy one can imagine. As a matter of fact, even the British press has been writing that he lacks charisma, he lacks the kind of stature which they attribute to Queen Elizabeth. I’m not so fond of her stature either. But I think he will have a hard time.

Great Britain right now is socially exploding. The trade unions, railway workers, and others, are protesting and striking. We are in a breakdown crisis. It’s very difficult to predict. The combination of Charles being King, and we have published many of the quotes where he came out as a complete Malthusian, as a complete proponent of the Great Reset and the Green policies, which would reduce the world’s population potential by billions if it would ever be implemented. So, he is now King. Liz Truss, the prime minister, came out and on the question of if she would be prepared to use nuclear weapons, she said, yes absolutely; this belongs to the tasks of the prime minister. Not even considering what are the consequences and that this could be the end of humanity.

There is another new development. As an option, the present Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, [Chrystia Freeland] is being mooted as the successor to Jens Stoltenberg, General Secretary of NATO. She is not exactly the opposite of a war hawk. So, that combination would be really a factor in more warmongering and so forth.

But then on the other side, I think the primary issue of the next period will be the blowout of the neoliberal system. The inflation rates in many countries are around 10%; the energy and food prices are going through the roof; energy prices are becoming completely unpayable for many people. I think this is the kind of period where—and I mentioned that yesterday—the spreading of ideas of Lyn’s solutions is the most crucial. Because this is a period where people reflect on the fact that things are not working.

Look at this so-called Economics Minister of Germany Robert Habeck, who is a green philosopher who has all kinds of ideas, but no knowledge about what the economy of the fourth largest industrial nation in the world requires. He was up in the polls and praised, and now he’s becoming the punching bag for everybody who is frustrated; and that is just the beginning.

We are in a period of great turmoil, and I think this is the period where all the ideas we have been discussing in the last 36 hours or so, are extremely relevant.

I’m really hoping that the people who are watching this conference would come forward and be volunteers and help us to put the Four Laws of LaRouche on the table; the need to go for a global Glass-Steagall banking separation. Some developing countries are already de facto implementing this, because of the need to have capital controls to protect their economies. Together with Glass-Steagall, we absolutely have to go back to a national banking system in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton. The sovereign control over credit generation has to come back to nation-states and not be in the hands of the private financiers. Then, we need a credit system. A credit system is being developed already by the countries of the Global South, the BRICS, the SCO. In a few days we will have the big summit of the SCO in Uzbekistan. I expect major proposals to be issued there.

We should discuss this in a rational form with people in the United States and Europe, to enter into meaningful dialogue about the urgent need to fix this poor world. We have an incredible crisis, and confrontation will not solve any problems. But cooperation for constructive ideas, for real development, to go back to the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The idea he intended with Bretton Woods was to have the increase of the living standard of the developing countries as the only guarantee for a durable peace. That is more urgent than ever before.

So, I’m calling on the viewers of this conference to enter with us into an effort to try to implement the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche and straighten this economy and this poor world out. I think that that is what we should be doing.

The LaRouche Legacy Foundation
in the Future

Dennis Small: I will just preface the next questions by restating what I have said before, and John and others have said, which is that your contributions and your bequests, and those of others, to the LaRouche Legacy Foundation are absolutely essential for us to be able to carry out this monumental and monumentally important task.

“What do you see as the future of LaRouche Legacy Foundation activities in print, digital, and otherwise more broadly?”

Gretchen Small: We could decide if we go for certain opportunities. One thing, the question just reminded me of, we’ve had one seminar as the LLF, and I think we can consider that would be—we can have an educational role to play. We’ve been working on expanding or getting placed in libraries, The Collected Works of Lyndon LaRouche. We have the first volume out to do that.

It has been difficult. The problem we have run into is that most libraries are run by nominalist information theorists and Aristotelians. I think the only solution is that rather than just throwing the books around, I think the only, the best solution, actually, particularly in the United States where the book is more available, is to have people in local communities, who know their librarian, who have some standing, who talk to their neighbors, take the responsibility to take in a copy of that Vol. I and talk to their librarians and organize them to put it on the shelves. That would be a very important thing to do; it may not happen in the big cities—if it does, all the better. It has to happen in the universities. If it happens even in the small towns in America, it will revive the right to deliberate that we were talking about earlier in the conference.

The effect of studying Lyn’s ideas is really crucial these days, as the Schiller Institute has proven. These are very hard times. People may have noticed that I’ve been working on the Ukraine fascist project—not an easy subject to take on. Reading through Lyn’s cultural work is an absolute antidote to that, which is what the Schiller Institute is doing.

I think we should consider having more seminars, where appropriate; university seminars, if someone wants to organize that, and work on the distribution and fight to get the book into libraries wherever we can.

Sigerson: I forgot to mention something that maybe you saw on the webpage, but in case you didn’t, the website address for the LaRouche Library is: https://larouchelibrary.org/. That’s the place to visit. It is already being catalogued by Google, so it will show up in Google results. I don’t know what the ratings are for it in terms of how high it will be in the results, but it’s a new website, and it’s my experience with websites that when Google sees something that’s serious and is in for the long-haul, like for instance, the larouchepub.com website which has been around pretty much since the internet has existed—that’s the EIR website, they give high ratings to such serious endeavors.

We have an enormous amount of work ahead of us just to process the thousands of videos, some of which are catalogued. What we’re operating with on this is not just putting these things up one by one. We’ve got a database which is offline, just our own database, which we use to process and track the videos in terms of their progress through the process of curation all the way from the raw video on through. That’s a tremendous amount of work.

It’s been a tremendous amount of work just putting up the first 250 EIR articles. That’s a mere 10% of all the EIR articles that Lyn wrote. Then of course we have so much more from all the other publications. Articles he wrote in the Campaigner magazine, and its successor Fidelio magazine; Fusion magazine (shut down illegally by the U.S. government) and its successor, 21st Century Science & Technology; and many other publications. And that includes books and so forth. There’s just lots of work there.

The other thing that I plan to move on is integration of the collection, similar to other Presidential libraries. We want to integrate the collection into the worldwide digital cataloguing mechanisms that already exist, such as WorldCat, and so forth. This then will come to be part of the library system; the digital aspect of the worldwide library system, which is quite significant. The LaRouche Library collection items will show up everywhere as part of the world library system. That has yet to be done.

The main thing right now is to grow. It has to grow very much. We have a lot of videos that have not even been catalogued yet. If people have, we would certainly be willing to accept contributions of documents and other things we might not already have. For example, memos both public and private, especially things dating back into the 1980s, when our filing system was not as systematic as it later became. We have a lot.

One thing we have not even put up yet is an audio collection. We have hundreds or possibly thousands of audios that are just of LaRouche talking, both over the phone, briefing various people around the world; some of which we will release, some of which are private, and we probably won’t release, at least for now. But also, many other types of audio recordings; for instance, I personally was at many wonderful musical evenings that we had with Lyn, where we would make presentations. I would make presentations, or others of our friends, musical presentations mostly, and we’d have long discussions with Lyn about these things. Some of those things we also want to make available to the public at this point.

It’s so much! The reason I talked about the foreign language material is that we’re going to have to have other people who are working on that. I think the decision would be as to whether to integrate the foreign language capability into the existing website, or to actually create websites underneath the LaRouche Legacy Foundation specifically dedicated to those languages. There are reasons why it would probably be better to do it that way.

This is an exciting project. If you have suggestions of things that you think ought to be in the archive, please send it to the contact address—info@larouchelegacyfoundation.org—and get in touch with us. If you have collections of things. Not necessarily the publications; I think we have most of those. But any other semi-public or private things; even if you disagree with Lyn, or you were with Lyn and somehow you drifted away. Some people have such things. Fine; get in touch with us. We will put anything up that is significant from Lyn.

I would also say that Lyndon LaRouche also wrote many articles in the 1950s, and the early 1960s. Many things from other publications; eventually, we’ll be able to include all of those. There are copyright issues to be dealt with, but we’ll be moving on that as well.

Work with the Universities

Zepp-LaRouche: The work with universities is also very important. We already had some professors who had the wisdom to include Lyn’s economic theories in the history of economic thought in Brazil, in the Arab world. So, I would encourage students and professors to approach and work with the LaRouche Legacy Foundation.

I’m really convinced that if the world gets out of this crisis, it will be with the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche. The people who are now dominating the universities in the Western world, will be still available, but they will be read from a clinical standpoint as those theories which led to the disaster. And the tradition of economic science which Lyn carried so much further, will be accepted, and will have become something you no longer have to fight for. It will become proudly read. Right now, I see the majority of the world going in this direction.

So, I think the work with universities, professors, students, writing your doctoral thesis on aspects of Lyn’s work, all of that should be discussed and encouraged. I am very happy that we were able to launch this incredible, beautiful project.

Dennis Small: Thank you Helga Zepp-LaRouche, John Sigerson, Gretchen Small. And thank you all for listening. This concludes Panel 3.