PRESS RELEASE
LAROUCHE INTERVIEW ON `CONSERVATIVE' WEBSITE:
`Lyndon LaRouche Explains
The Collapsing Western Economy and
How the World Really Works'
June 21, 2010 (EIRNS)—The Swiss website entitled The Daily Bell, self-described as "A Daily Compendium of Free-Market Thinking," published an interview with Lyndon LaRouche on June 20. The interview, which was done by mail, was given June 11, and was entitled as above. According to the publisher, the website got 4 million hits last month.
Immediately, the interview was reposted on the rightsidenews, a website registered in Great Britain, but identified as "for Americans" under the same headline.
Most interesting is the extensive addendum which The Daily Bell appends to the interview, to explain why it is publishing an interview with a pro-FDR, pro-nation state economist. That same addendum appears in the Rightsidenews. Leading quotes from it are included following the reproduction of the interview, here below:
Mr. Lyndon LaRouche Daily Bell Interview questions, and answers.
Daily Bell: Your writing and thought are well known. But for the purposes of this interview, please answer our questions as if our readers and we were not aware of your broad curriculum and equally broad thought.
1. Can you give us some background? Where were you born and where did you grow up?
LaRouche: In Rochester, New Hampshire and Lynn, Massachusetts
2. Can you summarize what you are doing now professionally how do you describe yourself and your organization in paragraph or two? Is it worldwide?
LaRouche: I am in fact the leading economist, in performance, in the world today. My influence is fairly described as "world-wide," in. one fashion, or another. I am, for example, the most successful forecaster on record since 1956-57. with approximately world-wide relevancies today.
3. How did you become interested in politics? Why did you end up as a leftist as a youth and how did your politics evolve?
LaRouche: Since my initiative in Calcutta, India during the late winter and spring of 1946, hating the British Empire, and desiring the fulfilment of President Franklin Roosevelt's intention to bring an end to colonialism and imperialism in the post-war world.
4. Would you describe yourself as a socialist today or a free-market person, or a regulatory libertarian. Do you have a label for your politics and belief structure?
LaRouche: None of those categories are to be regarded as relevant for defining me. I am essentially a devoted proponent of the American model developed inside the U.S.A. since A.D. 1620. I am myself, the alliances which I have embraced from time to time, have been exactly that. The mission remains the same as that anti-imperialist commitment which I adopted in Calcutta during the Spring of 1946.
5. What is the biggest problem of the world today and how can it be solved?
LaRouche: At the present moment, the world at large is trapped in an onrushing general breakdown-crisis whose principal pathological feature is the lunatic spread of what is generally identified as "financial derivatives." A return to a fixed exchange-rate credit system of a type consistent with a Glass-Steagall standard, combined with a return to a fixed-exchange-rate system, is the absolute requirement for evading a global breakdown-crisis during the immediate period ahead.
6. Why are you such a fan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Wasn't Roosevelt a fairly manipulative fellow who tried to pack the US Supreme Court and to do other things to increase the size of government and decrease freedoms? Wasn't he complicit in dragging the US into war after maintaining that he was anti-war?
LaRouche: None of those characterisations is true of the FDR administration.
7. What do you think of free-market thinkers and the Austrian economic school?
LaRouche: Implicitly, the school is a fraud in fact, and a disaster in effects.
8. What do you think of marginal utility?
LaRouche: The dogma of an irrationalist form of late Nineteenth-century cult.
9. What do you think of Adam Smith?
LaRouche: He is disgusting.
10. What do you think of von Mises great work, Human Action?
LaRouche: It is a childish concoction.
11. What do you think of Thomas Jefferson?
LaRouche: A complex figure, who was reliable while Benjamin Franklin lived, but a foolish Romantic as Secretary of State and later President, who came to his senses during the Presidency of Monroe.
12. What do you think of Alexander Hamilton?
LaRouche: He was among the key architects, after Benjamin Franklin, of the American System of political economy.
13. What do you think of Ayn Rand?
LaRouche: A mentally disturbed personality, like her devotee, the sometime Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan.
14. Why are Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant such great philosophers?
LaRouche: Only Leibniz was honest. competent, and one of the greatest geniuses in modern history. Descartes had a sick and foolish mind. If Moses Mendelssohn had not succumbed to his own illness, Kant would have cautiously kept his mouth shut during his own later years of the 'Critiques."
15. Please fill our readers in on the history of the Venetian banking conspiracy.
LaRouche: In the aftermath of the developments leading into the founding of the actual city of Venice, Venice emerged, about 1000 A.D. as the control-center of the Mediterranean-based international monetary system, and the author of the monetary manipulations which launched the 14th-century" new dark age." It remains a key element of what is identified as the British empire of today, as the case of Lord Jacob Rothschild's founding of the Inter-Alpha group launched in 1971, illustrates the case.
16. Was Luther an agent of the Venetians? Was the Reformation really inferior to the Renaissance? Why?
LaRouche: All significant forms of European imperialism, have depended, as did the Roman Empire, on "divide and conquer." So, the Venetian circle gathered around Cardinal Pole generated that break within Europe which dominated Europe and the Mediterranean through the time of the 14th-century New Dark Age. The Renaissance was the antidote to the New Dark Age, and was also the founding of a new form of European society which defined modern Europe, as distinct from medieval. That accomplishment was significantly ruined by the religious warfares of the interval 1492-1648.
17. Some free-market thinkers decry the Age of Enlightenment (Rousseau, etc.) as a precursor to humanism and the idea that humankind is perfectible via government programs. What do you think? What do you think of the movement Voltaire, Rousseau, etc. What do you think of the French Revolution? Was it a Venetian conspiracy?
LaRouche: Rousseau was silly, and Voltaire was a disgusting lackey of the operation conducted, until 1749, by Abbe Antonio S. Conti. The French Revolution was a product of a countermeasure launched by Lord Shelburne"s circles against the nations which had been crucial allies of the U.S.victory over the British at Yorktown.
While Venetian interests were a significant factor, the essential fact was that Napoleon's regime launched a wave of warfare in continental Europe which destroyed the power of the nations of continental Europe to the great advantage of the rising British empire.
18. Do you believe generally that Protestantism is inferior to Catholicism? Even today? Why?
LaRouche: Without the Protestant-Catholic conflict, it would not have been possible to maintain what became British control over continental Europe.
19. You were brought up as a Quaker, yet one could link Quakerism to Luther as an element of the Reformation, couldn't one?
LaRouche: Not in my book.
20. Were the Renaissance and Reformation influenced or caused by the Gutenberg printing press? Is the current free-market ferment (Tea-party, etc) the result of the Internet?
LaRouche: These are not relevant matters of concern in respect to the context our exchange here.
21. Do you believe as we do that the "elite" manipulates people by fear-based promotions, also known as dominant social themes?
LaRouche: In some significant degree, yes.
22. Are the Venetian banking families or the Rothschild's more powerful today? Does it matter? Do such families in a sense "rule the world" or is that merely a simplistic and silly way to view modern history?
LaRouche: They are, essentially, the same thing, even when apparently rivals.
23. Do enough people listen to your philosophy and take heed of it—or do you have a ways to go yet?
LaRouche: I do not think, or act, in such terms of reference.
24. Is Barack Obama an agent of change or just an agent of powerful interest groups?
LaRouche: Obama is a British tool who happened to be deployed because of certain interests' fear that Hillary Clinton might succeed in winning the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.
25. What did you think of the Bush administration?
LaRouche: It was a disgusting puppet-regime.
26. How is the LaRouche Youth Movement doing? What is the future of your movement? Do you have a successor?
LaRouche: We have good reasons to be proud of as much as we do accomplish. The present and future of my mission is crucial; there, the matter ends for me.
27. There are many rumor about you as a government agent, a disinformation agent of some sort spread by your enemies, no doubt. Please take the time to rebut them, at least generally, if you don't mind.
LaRouche: "Disinformation agent": never. Truth is my idea of genuine fun. The issue is, still today, that of the American Revolutionary period and later, between our patriots and the agents of the legacy of Lord Shelburne's British East India Company.
28. Where do you receive funds from? How do you make a living? How can people reach you to donate?
LaRouche: We are funded with considerable difficulty. The reach is presently, all things considered, very broad and rapidly spreading, again, since the Summer of 2007.
29. What do you think of Ron Paul? Do you plan to run for President again?
LaRouche: I am nearly 88 years of age, with a certain career likeness to Helmuth v. Moltke on that account. Ron Paul is not really qualified to be President, but he does do some useful things.
30. What books and articles from your extensive writings would you recommend most and where can they be found?
LaRouche: My concerns are far too broad to be judged so. The bibliography is very large, and, when taken in sequence, has an organic sort of unity as a process of development of concepts which have grown up, so to speak, around a consistent motive and theme.
Thank you for your time. It has been a most fascinating interview!
Addendum, posted as "Daily Bell After Thoughts:"
Why do an interview with Lyndon LaRouche when he has been damned (often) with such faint praise, and when his political tactics can be called "hard ball"—to put it mildly? Well... he is also an interesting person intellectually. No matter what else can be said of LaRouche, his analysis of the current globalist mercantilist central banking system has been broadly justified by the events that have taken place early in the 21st century. Meanwhile, his world view, while extreme to some, seems to us broadly confirmed by such books as Carroll Quigley's highly documented Tragedy and Hope, which is a history of the power-elite that LaRouche so despises....
[The addendum then cites a long attack on FDR, after which it reproduces a summary of LaRouche's economic idea in the form of an excerpt from a posting on Amazon.com which describes Lyn as a physical economist. It then compares LaRouche to Ellen Brown, and her book (which cites LaRouche) entitled "Web of Debt." The after-thoughts section then concludes with the following.]
....But despite all the controversy we find the argument of LaRouche and others who actively seek to integrate the "great conversation" and its historical insight into their thought processes to be far more compelling (in terms of process) than those who do not.
Anyway, we were pleased to get the chance to interview LaRouche, given that he is not a young man. We believe that aspects of his thought, as well as his life and times, have perhaps, in some ways, been misunderstood. Of course, he and his organization, especially in times past, may be seen as brutal and manipulative, and there is surely a broad gamut of suspicion regarding why he has acted as he has. But his tools, underlying all, have been those of ideas, developed idiosyncratically from the warp and woof of history.
