On Immortality Losing Precious Friends
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
August 4, 2003
Over the course of a rich experience of life, I have lost many friends to death. For a time, from three older generations, then, more and more, from my generation, and, lately, the generation in their fifties and sixties. The news of those deaths keeps coming, often as a personal loss which seems impossible to bear. Share my moment of my own experience of that pain with me.
At such sudden jolts as those latter ones, I think often of Johannes Brahms composing his "Four Serious Songs," in reflection of the death of a great person precious to his memory. For about five decades now, any of the rare truly accomplished performances of that work have had a special, private importance within me, especially the last two, "O Tod" ("Oh, Death"), followed by Brahms' setting of I Corinthians 13. There is a place of transition in the latter, at the short rest before "Aber die Liebe," at which a great performance prompts the use of that rest, as Brahms clearly intended, to create a breath of great tension at the instant of transformation in the four-part composition as a whole. Few performances actually realize that tension adequately, but once we have recognized it, we can relive that quality of tension by hearing the performance of that passage in our memory.
There is a relevant similarity in effect of such a performance of that work, in the principle of Classical Greek sculpture. When we remember a friend who has departed, the memory comes to us not as a photographic image, but as a memory of the face of the living person in motion, hearing that voice speak, perhaps sensing the presence of the foliage, the warmth of the sun, and the passage of a zephyr by our cheek. It is that quality of memory, echoed by Classical Greek sculpture, which lives with us long after the death of a friend, just as a great performance of a Classical drama brings the essence of an important moment from the living history of mankind to dwell thus in our memory's imagination: to make that moment of real history spring back to live for us, living today.
If we are wise, if we are therefore moral, such memories guide us into the ways of true wisdom. We, too, shall die. Through our memory, the deceased companion lives in us, participates still, as a living person, in our life. We think, then: How shall we live, after we, too, are deceased? All truly great Classical artistic composition addresses this category of question.
At such points of reflection, most men and women wish to cry the tears which Hamlet should have sensed welling from within him in the concluding lines of his Third Act soliloquy. How could he know if the ghost were real? Was it merely his imagination, or, does the immortality which imagination might suggest, actually exist in the real universe?
For the past fifty-odd years of my life, I have been ruled by a certain comprehension of the meaning of the "complex domain." My notable emphasis, has been on the existence of ideas belonging to a complex domain of social processes, a domain whose existence Classical artistry expresses. As we know, by relevant kinds of experimental methods, the reality of those efficient universal physical principles which are invisible to the senses, we are also, by relevant methods, to know the certainty of the existence of a true imagination of social processes within the simultaneity of eternity. When a work by Beethoven or Brahms is adequately performed, does the real composer live as an efficient presence in our imagination of that composition? Does the performer not thus breathe the life into the memory of the living composer's work?
Should we permit ourselves to live differently than such reflections on that performance suggests? Should our lives not be played in memory as a composition of benefit for generations to come? Must we not see the living face of our departed friend with a sense of the true reality of that imagination? Thus, do the living gain strength by loving so those who have departed. So, in such solemn moments, should we remind us how to live.
Poor Hamlet, who failed the world in which he lived, because he could not decide whether the ghost were real. Let us pledge to our departed, on this occasion, that we shall not fail on such account.
Getting the Nation Safely Through the Crisis
Lyndon LaRouche was interviewed Aug. 3, on "Sunday Live with Barry Farber," on Talk Radio Network. The 50-minute interview aired nationally on 80 stations.
I'm Barry Farber. Keep your radio fixed right where it is, and you'll get the political ride of your life. I've been doing this since the year 1960, and I've taken many kinds of rides, many kinds of political rides. I've never taken a ride like the one I'm taking you on right now. On my newsmaker line is the most unusualI would say most unique, but there's no such thing as most unique, it's either unique or you're not, and he is. He is Lyndon LaRouche. He's going to get nervous now, because he knows that air time is precious, and I'm going to take a nice little rambling introduction here, but I'm going to give him more time than I said I would, because I've done a little research, and I just need a little more time with Lyndon LaRouche than I had indicated to his staff earlier.
It was in the 1980s, I was on a local station in New York, and Lyndon LaRouche was in one of those solar flare controversial periods right there; his people had just won some elections in Chicago, and the entire Democratic Party were having a fit because the voters didn't know that these were really Lyndon LaRouche's people. I sort of thought about that when Pat Buchanan got a lot of votes in a very Jewish section of Palm Beach, remember, in the 2000 Presidential election; well, they were obviously not intending to vote for Pat Buchanan, but, Pat Buchanan got those votes, those were his votes, according to history. And, Lyndon LaRouche's two people in a local [statewideed.] election in Chicago won fair and square, but the Democratic Party just had to take a pill and lie down.
And I had Lyndon LaRouche on, and somebody saidoh, at that time, the papers were full of sinister reports that he has like a secret compound in Leesburg, Va., and nobody knows what goes on there. And it was just almost accusing Lyndon LaRouche of making weapons of mass destruction in this compound. And I said, "Can I come visit you?" And Lyndon LaRouche said, "You can come, but the Queen of England can't come, because she's a drug pusher."
Well, I gotta tell you, I went, and I was advised by people who I'm not going to mention, I'm not going to embarrass them, but they were really afraid to have me go alone behind the wire-enclosed compound of Lyndon LaRouche in Leesburg, Virginia. Well, I went alone, and I had the lunch of my life. I should at least let Mr. LaRouche's voice be heard. Mr. LaRouche, welcome to these proceedings.
LaRouche: Good to see you, or good to hear you, anyway.
Farber: Okay, good. Well, I'll never forget, you welcomed me, you took me into a dining room, and there were two pictures, two portraits on the wall. Let me see, was one Indira Gandhi, and the other Evita Peron?
LaRouche: Yeah, I think so, yes. I know Indira Gandhi was there.
Farber: Okay, good. Now, I call your attention to the fact that a doctor, for example, when he's talking to you, you understand him, but when he's at a medical convention talking to other doctors, he's way over your head. Same with lawyers, same with anybody else. Well, we're going to understand everything Lyndon LaRouche says, as to why he's running for President, what he sees wrong in America and the world. You're going to understand everything he says, because he's going to be talking, you know, like a professional to a layman. But Lyndon LaRouche overestimated my intelligence, because as I sat there at lunch, I would ask a question, and withinyou know how long a cowboy can stay on top of a bucking bronco, I think the world record is eight secondswithin eight seconds I was hopelessly lost, and I remember saying to myself, "This man is either clinically insane, or he is the most brilliant man, he has got the most brilliant mind I have ever encountered."
And I discounted the first possibility: He could not be totally divorced from reality and command an organization as large and as loyal as Lyndon LaRouche has. So, I just had to conclude that I am not as smart as I thought I was. Mr. LaRouche, I just want you to take me on one little sample of that trip again. I remember asking you about Swedish Premier Olof Palme, who was later assassinated.
LaRouche: Right, well, this is
The New Nazi International
Farber: And you casually said, "Oh yeah," and then talked about his mother taking him to Nazi-occupied Lithuania; you talked about something, the new Nazi Internationaldo you recall?
LaRouche: Yeah, yeah. Yes, I do. I recall at least the background. We were then in an investigation of what was going on with him, you know he was assassinated in that period, and I was concerned with trying to define what the actual background was. They tried to pin me with the assassination; it was actually done by some different parties, but, I was quite concerned otherwise with what the truth might be.
Farber: Well, what was the new Nazi International?
LaRouche: Well, it wasthat's a descriptive term. The Nazi International would be called in technical terms, the Synarchist International, which is fairly well represented today in the Vice Presidency by the incumbent Vice President, Dick Cheney. I don't know how bright he is, but what he represents, together with the people around him who are called neo-conservatives sometimesthey do fit the model of what would be called in loose language, the new Nazi International.
Farber: Okay. My nostalgia is taken care of; my recollection has been put on the table. We now go into the order of an interview on radio by me with a Presidential candidate, Lyndon LaRouche.
Mr. LaRouche, why is it, your people who I met on the street, manning a card table in Manhattan, and they tell me that you are somewhere between the middle and the top in fundraising. You don't even get mentionedthey talk about "the nine," the nine Democratic candidates, and they just keep you fromyou don't even get one molecule of media oxygen. How did you get so many contributors?
LaRouche: Well, maybe I'm the ball, and they're the nine pins, and I'm just about to knock them over. My base of support financially is not in the big-pockets areas, the people with the big pockets have much more, but in the number of contributors who make financial contributions of the registered variety, and otherthat is, $200 contributions or more registers as a contributor, officially, in one category; and then you have the other contributors, who contribute smaller amounts. So that, actually in terms of consistency, apart from this little flurry by right-wing Howard Dean, this consistency of my actual base of financial support in numbers of Americans, is the largest.
Farber: Well now, wait. You call, see, here we goyou're calling Howard Dean a right-winger?
LaRouche: Well, you know what his background is. You know he's a third-generation banker with right-wing views; you know what his views are on HMOs, and things of that sort. By normal standards, on economic policy and other things, he's a right-winger. He, in a sense, has jumped into trying to get some money raised from a lot of people who are IT fanatics, who contribute a certain amount of money in large numbers in a short period of time, but actually, he's a fly-by-night, because there's no long-term durability to him. He is not really a serious candidate, in terms of the broad spectrum of strategic issues which are going to face the United States in the coming 18 months, for example.
The LaRouche Youth Movement
Farber: I have heard that candidates the media finds inconvenient, annoying, because, you know, there are only so many journalistic resourcesyou have to assign reporters, you have to read press releases. Al Sharpton is a candidate the media finds inconvenient, but at least you read about him. Ralph Nader is a candidate the media finds inconvenient, but you read about him. They've shut you out completely.
LaRouche: Well, not really. They haven't succeeded, because, my method is, we have a fairly substantial youth movement, which is political and very high quality. I think the youth movement, now organized around me, is probably the highest quality youth movement the United States has seen in a long time, in terms of intellectual quality. Very broad base of background, in terms of social background; mostly between 18 and 25 years of age, that is, the university-age group. Very good thinkers. We spend a lot of time on actually the equivalent of a university on wheels. So, they're very effective, and we do a lot of mass work. So, we are more in touch on the streets with the people than the other candidates, who are largely this media, formula type of candidate, which is not exactly my idea of real politics.
Farber: Well, you know, when you first appeared on the nation's radar, I think I remember your name from as far back as the 1960s, New Yorkers were arguing whether you were a communist, or a fascist.
LaRouche: [laughs]
Farber: Yes, I read a column by the late Max Lerner about you.
LaRouche: Oh yes, yes.
Farber: He said, well, it doesn't make any difference what he is, because left and right meet each other at the back door. They go all the way around like a snake swallowing his tail. So, far left and far right join each other, and that's Lyndon LaRouche. But, reading your material now, it looks like you are, shall we say, left of center, very much left of center, and pointing the bony finger of indignation at everybody else as being right-wing, from Dick Cheney to the left-most of your Democratic opponents, Howard Dean.
LaRouche: Well, he's not really left-most. I don't really know what left means sometimes. I don't believe too much in this left-right split. I would say, that you could fit me as a person who thinks that my job as President will be to apply to the present economic crisis the kind of
Farber: Okay, hold it; hold it. We'll start right there; matter of fact, we'll start with 9/11, and work up to right there. Lyndon LaRouche, Presidential candidate, on my newsmaker line.
[Commercial break]
The FDR Precedent
Farber: This is truly remarkable. I remember everybody who was warning me about Lyndon LaRouche, and I mean, there was an element of fear. It was almost like the LaRouche movement was some kind of sinister, dangerous, underground movement. I'm going back to real political practitioners, and I could even say scholars, there weren't many statesmen, I'm talking about New York local politics; four major partiesDemocrat, Republican, Liberal, and Conservativefour major parties in New York. But the ones who were the most alarmed about Lyndon LaRouche, were the ones who were most in love with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, I have a four-page document, written by Lyndon LaRouche recently. I'm going to do like they do in Israel, and start at the end. Listen to this, here's how Lyndon LaRouche closes this four-page manifesto:
"Unless the United States voters choose a candidate who is committed to the same sense of history as Franklin Roosevelt, our nation, and those voters, will generally have no chance worth mentioning, even for the personal lives of most during the years immediately ahead. Right now, I," writes Lyndon LaRouche, "am the only qualified such candidate in sight to save this nation from who knows what coming down in the months and more ahead. We require again a President who will face both economic depression and the warlike threats of the Synarchists, as the lesson of Franklin Roosevelt's Presidency warns us, a nation must sometimes be led. The next President must look Hell in the eye, and make it back down."
Now, thatI wouldn't think the people who love Roosevelt would be alarmed at anybody who says that. Have you changed your opinion on Roosevelt, or did the ones who were warning me about you 30 years ago, did they have it all wrong?
LaRouche: No, they had, I think they had a different agenda, and they liked to wrap it at that time in a Roosevelt tradition. Remember, if you go back to the early 1960s, the time that Kennedy was President, and slightly after that, the concern, and I think that after Trumanyou had that also with Eisenhowerthat despite the fact that Eisenhower beat the Democrat Adlai Stevenson, nonetheless, the fact was, that the Truman Democratic Party was rather unpopular with many voters, who were nervous about McCarthyism and other things that had developed under Truman.
So, Eisenhower represented defense to the American people, especially the veterans returning from war, represented a return to some kind of sanity. Kennedy was considered the man who was freest from Nixonism at that time, and represented a return to Franklin Roosevelt, as Eleanor Roosevelt, who campaigned for Kennedy, had said. So that, in the middle of the 1960s, to be a Democrat, it was still fashionable to consider yourself respectable as calling yourself a Roosevelt Democrat, whether Franklin Roosevelt would have agreed with that or not. And then later, in the 1970s and later, especially after the 1980s, of course we had this suburban, DLC-kind of phenomenon, and the people decided that Roosevelt was not a good idea; that you had to stick to the suburban voters and avoid the poor, which was the new concept.
I, today, believe that we've got to get the poor out of the mess, and a lot of Americans are suddenly becoming much poorer than they were before, and the time has come for a return to Roosevelt for a while.
Who Are the Synarchists?
Farber: I know what Nazi means, I understand what communist means, I understand what liberal means, I understand what conservative means. You throw a new one at usthe Synarchists. Synarchists: Who are they?
LaRouche: Well, Synarchist is actually the proper generic term, from behind the scenes, for 20th-Century fascists. The Synarchists were groups of bankers who had political forces, sometimes with a certain occult, mystical kind of feature to them, who were in the tradition essentially of Napoleon Bonaparte's achievements, as they saw them. The Nazis, for example, were Synarchists. Mussolini was a Synarchist. The Vichy and Laval governments of France were Synarchists. Franco was a Synarchist. You had people in England who were Synarchists; you had people in the United States who were in the same direction.
When I made the reference to Roosevelt and fighting Synarchism, one has to remember that as Defense Minister, Winston Churchill called to Roosevelt for assistance, saying the Nazis are about to invade England. If they take over England, and take the British Navy over, they'll control the British, the Japanese, the French, the Italian, and German navies. If Hitler takes over Eurasia by conquering the Soviet Union, then the United States will have no chance; you've got to help us.
And Roosevelt said, I'll do the best I can now; we're not prepared for that. But, then Churchill said, I agree to bring the British Navy to Canada in case the Nazis invade Britain. And from that point on, you had Churchill and Roosevelt, who otherwise did not like each other, or agree with each other, but allied to stop Nazism, which they understood as the Nazi takeover in France, Italy, and Spain, as well as Germany, of Europe. We had to fight this, because it was in the interest of humanity to stop this thing while we still could.
We are now in a situation where somewhat different problems exist, but also, you have people like Cheney in the Vice President's office, and others, who have the same temperament in the United States that people in Europe of that time hadwhom we would call fascists from that time.
Farber: Look, I 'm not going to be like Tim Russert, and just look for new places to kick you and bite you, but are you mentioning Dick Cheney with the late Adolf Hitler, and Mussolini, and Japanese warlord Tojo, and Francisco Franco?
LaRouche: In a sense, yes. They might feel insulted by the comparison if they were around to object, because I don't think Cheney is that bright. Cheney is a very sneaky fellow, but he is a guy, who I think we'd be a lot safer as a nation, if he were suddenly to go into retirement.
Farber: Why the emphasis on Cheney? He's only the Vice President.
LaRouche: Yeah, but the point is, the President ain't much. The President is not a man of great intellectual temper, shall we say. I don't think he's capable of understanding most of the issues of the world. He does have strong opinions, and strongly expressed opinions, but I don't think there's much cognitive substance to them. Cheney is not much, but he has a lot of advisershe has Wolfowitz, he has a lot of other people who advise him, and he has people behind him who support him. Remember, that Cheney and Rumsfeld, as sort of a Bobbsey Twin chain, ran the 1975 Halloween Massacre in the Ford Administration. They were the boys behind the scenes who orchestrated the event. So, these guys are old coup specialists.
They're also committed to the idea of preventive nuclear warfareCheney in particularthey're committed to seeking wars when we don't need any, and they're alsothey don't like people too much, they're not great on people, so I think that they're dangerous. But Cheney is especially dangerous, not because he's that good or that powerful, but because he's a man in a position in a certain time of life.
Farber: Okay, stay where you are, because I'm going to give you a chance to lay out your platform, and I will do what I intended to do in this segment, and that is, go back to 9/11, and bring you forward politically, economically, and regarding the war on terror.
[Commercial break]
Managing the President
Farber: Oh, I can hear my friends, I can already hear my cousin Ernie, saying to me, "Barry, Lyndon LaRouche sounds like an intelligent man, but by golly, I understood everything he said. Why were you so in awe of his intellectual powers?" Well, Lyndon LaRouche, right now, is playing customer's golf. He's just going at a fraction of his intellectual pace. If he wanted to, he could take off into one of those flights through history, bringing up names like Olof Palme, and Szalasi, the fascist leader of Hungary for a few days before the Soviet Army. He has such an incredible, encyclopedic knowledge of history, and as I say, when he's talking the way he's talking now, I can deal with him, I can argue with him, I may even find an occasion or two to pat him on the back, but when Lyndon LaRouche gets real, I can't hang on to what he's saying for more than eight seconds.
Well, Mr. LaRouche, I understood what you said in the last segment. You said that Hitler, Mussolini, Francothey would sneer at Dick Cheney's low intellect, and you're saying Dick Cheney sneers at the President's low intellect. That doesn't put the President very high on the intellectual chart, does it?
LaRouche: No, it doesn't. But, when you're serious about government, as I am, you don't just look at Presidents like tissue paper that you throw away. It's an institution, the Presidency, and you've got an incumbent in there who's a problem. You try to manage the problem; you don't go spinning around it, you try to manage the problem, and I have a great challenge, a great intellectual challenge in figuring out how we, the American people, or the institutions of government, could manage this President, because he's a very difficult person to get competence out of him.
Farber: Well, how important is that kind of intellect in the Presidency? Jimmy Carter was a failed President, and literally a rocket scientist, a nuclear scientist in name.
LaRouche: [laughs]
Farber: Harry Truman was a high school dropout, and he's regarded as one of the better Presidents.
LaRouche: I think they dropped him on his head.
Farber: Is that nice?
LaRouche: No, it's not nice, but my feeling at the time, as a veteran returning from war to Harry Truman after having experienced the war under Franklin Roosevelt, there was big letdown.
Behind 9/11
Farber: Okay, let's go back to 9/11, and I'll just sit back and let you take, use the microphone as a piece of chalk and the air across America as your blackboard.
LaRouche: All right. 9/11 had two important precedents in history; there are other precedents. One was in France in June and early July of 1789, at a time when people thought that France was going to adopt a Constitution like that of the United States, under Bailly and Lafayette. A bunch of characters, steered from London, called Philippe Egalite and Jacques Necker, staged a stunt called the siege of the Bastille. The siege of the Bastille was an event, a shock event, orchestrated event, which succeeded essentially in destroying the government of France, and destroying the chance of actually getting a republican France, of the type that the United States represented.
Later, in 1933, you had this fool, Hitler, who had been appointed, a dangerous fool appointed by Hindenburg to become the Chancellor of Germany, and in March, Goering, who was the top boss of the Nazi Party of Brandenburg at that time, staged an event. He set fire to the Reichstag; Hermann Goering was responsible for that. The Reichstag Fire was used to throw out about 80 deputies, out of the Chamber, the parliament of Germany, and to make Hitler a dictator, and that dictatorship continued until the end of the war.
On September 11, 2001, we had an accident which I feared would happen, I had said so in January, that the danger of a Reichstag Fire-type event in the United States was a serious danger for the period ahead. As a result of that event of September 11, 2001, the policies of Cheney, which had been his policies since 1991, were suddenly brought forward, and have become the policies or predominant policies of the United States ever since.
Farber: Forgive me, Lyndon LaRouche, I've got to knife in at this point, because I can't believe I'm hearing what I'm hearing. The Reichstag Fire was set by the Nazis, but one thing I've never understood is, just because you don't have a place to meet where you used to, why can't you meet someplace else? Why did that end parliamentary government? Don't waste time with that. We're just about through with this segment anyhow, so this is drama; this is a cliff-hanger, because what I'm hearing from you, and I want you to clarify it after the next commercial breakwhat I hear from you is, 9/11 was a Reichstag Fire-like event. In other words, until you clarify, I'm going to be laboring under the supposition that Lyndon LaRouche is accusing George Bush and Dick Cheney and their government of causing 9/11 ourselves!
[Commercial break]
Farber: Well, we have fundamentalist Islamic imams who say America did 9/11 to itself; we have some fringies and some crazies who say that; there are even a few Americans who believe that; but do we have an American Presidential candidate who says that the George Bush Administration staged 9/11? Lyndon LaRouche, when you say that 9/11 was a sister event to the Reichstag Fire, what other conclusion can I come to?
LaRouche: Well, you have to think as I think. First of all, we may never solve who actually did the operation. It's like the Kennedy assassination; it was an assassination, we may never solve it, at least we haven't solved it so far, and we've had no luck in solving what happened in 9/11. But, we have to live with the fact that it did happen, we have to understand the nature of the event, and government must go on, taking into account the fact that it did happen, without necessarily coming to the bottom line of who did it.
Obviously, President Bush did not. He's not capable of doing it, he's just not intellectually capable of even conceiving of how to do it. It hadthere were certain peculiarities in this thing. Remember, that I've been in the business, in the sense I was involved in proposing and designing the SDI proposal in 1982-1983 with the Reagan Administration, through a special job I was doing with them. I've been involved in things of that nature, scientific and so forth, and military security, with our government and that of Germany, France, Italy, other countries back in that period. So, I looked at this as a professional, knowing that the potential was there, and knowing how these things work. And I knew that the configuration of data, the way it happened that dayand I was on radio at the time when it happened, and I described it thencould not correspond to any foolish thing of the type that's been interpreted, by some bunch of Arabs in the Middle East or something of that sort. This was a highly professional, well-trained, very difficult operation to execute as it was executed. So, this was done from a very high level, by somebody who knew that certain parts of our previously established security system were not working, otherwise you couldn't have gotten three planes in that way.
So, somebody did it, somebody with a great deal of knowledge at a very high level. Over a year to a year and a half of preparation, had done that job; it was not some bunch of Arabs. It had to be somebody inside the United States, or someone with inside access.
Farber: So, does anything that you've just said steer your campaign, or steer your views on the war on terror?
[Break in feed; commercial break]
A Banking Crisis 'Beyond Belief'
Farber: I'm Barry Farber, and we're in our last segment with Lyndon LaRouche. And you were explaining that, although we don't know who caused 9/11, you're convinced that the story of Osama bin Laden and his ragtag band of Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle Eastyou don't believe that. Well and good; let's leave that. We've just got a few minutes left. Tell me what you would do as President, economically.
LaRouche: Well, first of all, we have a banking crisis beyond belief. Now, we're going to have to put banking systems into receivership around the world, in most of the world, Europe, and in particular, here. We've got to protect the integrity of our economy. We must insure that things continue to function, and therefore, only the Federal government has the power, under our Constitution, to do that. We have to do some of the things that remind people of what Franklin Roosevelt did, or intended to do. We have to get the economy moving again. We have to build up the level of employment in production to the point that we're above breakeven in terms of what we're producing in wealth with what we need to maintain our economy. So, we need a recovery.
The danger is, that we will be afraid to bite the bullet on doing the things we need to do to revive our economy, and the fear of biting the bullet, may lead to a disaster. So, we have a terrible situation, but it's curable with the right leadership. We've got to have the guts to do what's needed to do to get this nation safely through this situation in the same spirit that Roosevelt approached the Depression in 1933.
Farber: Practically, in how many states are you going to be on the ballot in the Democratic primary?
LaRouche: I intend to be all the way, and I intend to be in virtually all. The first challenge, of course, is to establish my position even more than with votes; that is, with the number of people who are respectable people, shall we say, who come behind me, who would represent a portrait of the kind of people I would be bringing into government. Even before the primary, my objective is to show the American people that I am prepared to lead government from Day One of the next Administration. That I have the people around me and behind me who, like Roosevelt with his team, are prepared to do the job.
Farber: Well, isn't it insurmountable, when they don't even invite you to appearances with the so-called "nine"? Why don't they make it ten, and include you? How can you hope to achieve anything if you're shut out of thehow can you score a touchdown or win the game if you're not allowed onto the playing field?
LaRouche: Well, let's put it this way. I have more popular support, financial support, that is, in terms of numbers of supporters, than any of the other candidates. Now, what does that say about the other candidates? What does that say about the "nine"? Doesn't it say that maybe they're going the wrong way? That maybe I'm right? Maybe I'm the bowling ball, and maybe they're just the nine pins, ready to be knocked over?
Farber: Well, you haven't appeared with them yet, have you?
LaRouche: I've challenged them to appear, and they haven't had the guts to do so. And that, they haven't had the guts to deal with any of the real issues; they duck all the real issues. They talk about some gimmick; this gimmick, that gimmick. They're no place. I don't think there's a candidate the Democratic Party has, apart from me, as an actual running candidate. They have a bunch of guys out there doing something, but it's certainly, it doesn't look to me like seriously running to become the next President of the United States under the present conditions. I'm not impressed by them.
'We're Doing Just Fine'
Farber: Has anybody who runs one of these thingsyou know, we're going to get all the candidates down here in South Carolina, we're all going out to a barbeque in Iowahas anybody tried to include you with the other nine candidates?
LaRouche: There have been efforts to do so, but the DLCthe Democratic Leadership Council, which is now a dying organization by the wayand the DNC, the Democratic National Committee members, especially with Joe Lieberman and probably Al Gore too, have put the maximum pressure on the DNC to exclude me at all costs. It's not going to work; it's only a temporary game. Very soon things are going to change.
Farber: Would you tell us how many followersothers start campaigns and attract followers, you seem to have had a whole cadre of loyal followers, from the very beginning. How large are your forces?
LaRouche: Oh, I don't know. We're talking about thousands, of course, in terms of people overall. I don't know exactly how many thousands, because we have a lot of people we talk to all the time, a lot of people who work with us, a lot of people who support from time to time this or that. So, I have a lot of people who are associated with me, a lot of institutions. I'm well known in the population, so I don't worry about these things. I think we're doing just fine.
Farber: The four-page document that I cited, the headline is "The DLC WanesSewers Are Often Suburban." You talk a lot about, you seem to hate fascism, and you're constantly attacking fascism, and yet, you seem to oppose a war on Iraq, which eliminated one of the dangerous fascists in the world today.
LaRouche: I don't think he was. I think that Saddam Husseinwell, he was not a person I'd recommend, but you don't conduct a war against a country because they have an objectionable leader. We have had a lot of people who are heads of government, including our own, who are highly objectionable; we don't make wars on that account. We do try to deal with the situation. In this case, in the case of Iraq, I believe we could have dealt very successfully with the situation working with the UN Security Council; we should have stuck with that. There are ways of dealing with the problem.
You see, when you go to war, as our generals understand, and as some of the Defense Department does not, you don't go to a war to see how many people you can kill; you go to a war to bring about a peace at the end, a satisfactory peace. We went into this thing with no preparations for peace, just to kill. And now, we're in a mess. That's a mistake; you don't go to that kind of war.
Farber: Lyndon LaRouche, you are, as I said before, unique, and I salute you for your energies over all these years, and I'll be watching your campaign with the most intense kind of interest.
Lyndon LaRouche, he's the tenth that they don't tell you about, or at least one of the ten Democratic candidates for President.
Choose Gray Davis
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
August 8, 2003
LaRouche Says:
If you know someone in California,
Vote for the man, not the machine.
We need Gray Davis.
Germany tried importing one right-wing head of state from Austria. It didn't work out.
We need Gray Davis.
Argentina TV: LaRouche Interviewed in Neuquen
Lyndon LaRouche was interviewed Aug. 7 by host Alejandro Polizzo of the popular "Ten Minutes" program on Channel 7 TV in Neuquen, Argentina. The 20-minute interview aired at midnight that night, which is prime time in Argentina; an estimated 150,000 viewers tuned in to the program.
Alejandro Polizzo: How are you? Good evening. Welcome. We will begin here with "Ten Minutes" on Channel 7 of Neuquen. No one will be actually seated here in our interviewee's chair today, at least not physically, but he will be here through telephone communication.
He was born on Sept. 8, 1922, in the United States, with professional experience as a management consultant and economist between 1947-48, and from '52-72, founder in 1974 of the weekly Executive Intelligence Review, co-founder in 1975 of the Fusion Energy Foundation, also member of the Schiller Institute. I am speaking of Lyndon LaRouche, a contender for the Democratic Party Presidential candidacy in the United States in the years 1980, 84, 88, 92, 96, 2000, and for the coming 2004 elections in the United States.
He was the Labor Party Presidential candidate in 1976, and candidate for Federal representaive [Congress] for Virginia in 1990. He was convicted in 1988, in December of that year, and jailed on conspiracy charges from 1989 through 1994, in a political trial, which the German jurist Prof. Friedrich von der Heydte said in 1989, was comparable to the scandal of Capt. Alfred Dreyfuss in France. All that we could find out about the case against Lyndon LaRouche was no more than another painful reminder of the exploitation of the judicial system for political ends. Disgracefully, it is a method that has been used repeatedly in our times, both in the West, and also in the East. And we Argentines probably know something about this.
A little while ago, we held a phone conversation with Dennis Small and Carlos de Hoyos, in the United States, and with Lyndon LaRouche in Germany, with whom we are now going to have a 20-minute interview. We are going to discuss various things, having to do not only with international policy from the standpoint of economics, of what is going to happen with the war in Iraq, how he sees Mercosur, how he sees Argentine integration with other countries, and if there are possibilities for getting out of our financial crisis.
Greetings, Mr. Lyndon LaRouche. Thank you very much for this telephone interview. I would like to know, from your international viewpoint, Mr. LaRouche, how do you see the Argentine republic? From what point of view do you see our foreign debt? It frightened us when the military government ended in 1983, how large the debt was, and today, that debt has tripled or quadrupled. How do you see this from the outside, and how did this come about for our country?
Lyndon LaRouche: There is a solution, but it's going to take an international conspiracy by people who care about the principle of maintaining a community of sovereign nation-states. We can do it. It's a difficult fight. I've been in it for a long time, but I'm determined that we shall win. As an American patriot, I'm determined that Argentina should succeed in overcoming this difficulty.
The question is, how many people in Argentina must suffer before the problem is solved? So, my solidarity with the people of Argentina, as a Presidential candidate of the United States is, I think, an important factor. I'm optimistic we can win, but it's going to be a difficult fight.
Polizzo: I agree with your sentiment. It is going to be a difficult battle, because what we have right now in Argentina, is that half the population lacks genuine employment, and of those, 60% are under the poverty line. So, would you think the battle is lost here before we begin it?
LaRouche: No, because all it would take, going through the history of the Depression of the 1930s, which I lived through, is a decision by the United States government on reorganizing the international financial system, and we could create credit to immediately begin the reival of the economy of countries such as Argentina.
I would add one very important point. In 1946, Argentina was about the fourth-highest-ranking country in the world in standard of living. That reflects a deep cultural root in the combined leading populations of Argentina of Spanish, Italian, and German origin. And whatever the criticisms of Peron, as such, the fact is that the culture which he reflected was a culture which is capable of doing this.
In my study of the history of renaissances since ancient Greece, if we unleash a revival of the economy of Argentina through credit, we will find the cultural factors which are deeply embedded in three or four or more generations of the population, will begin to produce the rest of the result. And the other factor is that the countries of Central and South America are the first line of defense, together with the United States, of the Americas as a whole. And therefore, when the United States comes to its senses, as it would under my Presidency, there would be a revival, a renaissance, throughout the hemisphere.
At present, I would tell people, from what I know from behind the scenes, my chances of becoming President are greater than probably anyone outside inner circles imagines. So, we have not won the war and we have no guarantee of winning the war, but I believe that we can win the war.
Polizzo: We just have one minute left [in this segment]. The crisis in Argentina is not only national, but international. So, what would be the solution at an international level? An international bankruptcy?
LaRouche: In a sense, but it has to be a qualified international bankruptcy. A consortium of nations of the world must declare the International Monetary Fund in bankruptcy, and take it into receivership, and reorganize it. Unfortunately, this is not likely until the conditions become so badwhich will happen soon, howeverthat they are willing to agree to such a measure.
But you start from the Christian principle, that the lives of human beings are sacred, but money is not sacred, which is the fundamental priniciple of natural law. This is also the fundamental law of the United States, and it's the impulsive law of all states of this civilization. Therefore, if we decide to save people from the genocide of a great depression, then we will act to save the people first, and reorganize the banking system as a secondary interest, as Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933.
Therefore, this aspect of the Roosevelt tradition is very important for all of the Americas. And though I'm not directly a simple follower of Roosevelt, I follow the Roosevelt tradition, because that is the tradition in my own country, which could be mobilized to bring about this change. That's the basis of my confidence.
Polizzo: How do you see the situation in Iraq? We are puzzled, we can't justify, and we can't comprehend. Where is the justification that there existed a world threat of weapons of mass destruction that was the basis for the U.S.-British invasion.
LaRouche: First of all, I can assure you from the experts that I know, that there were never any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The whole business of the war was a fraud. It was forced by circles around Vice President Cheney, the man who I'm trying to have impeached from office for his crimes against humanity, and against the Constitution of the United States.
The place is a mess. We now have irregular, guerrilla warfare in Iraq. It's an endless pit unless we get out of there. Therefore, I am organizing internationally for the immediate resignation, or impeachment, of Cheney, and for bringing the issue of Iraq back into the United Nations Security Council, where I believe we could solve the problem.
Polizzo: What about your candidacy? We have seen reports that come through Resumen Ejecutivo and EIR, that your campaign is growing rapidly.
LaRouche: I have the broadest, actually active, popular financial support of any candidate in the Democratic Party right now. I am also building an organization from among people in government circlesthat is, the permanent establishment, military intelligence, diplomatic, and so forthwhich would be the people I would take into government as President. I am prepared to govern the United States, and I think that none of my rivals, including the present President, are qualified to do so.
Polizzo: In Resumen Ejecutivo, in March, there is a headline on a picture under the caption, "Friend of Martin Luther King, acclaimed by 50,000 Germans" [the photo was of Amelia Boynton Robinsoned]. What can you tell us about that?
LaRouche: I represent, in partone of my key constituencies, to which I am most closely attached, is the so-called African American Civil Rights lobby, especially people who are in state and Federal office. And these are among my closest collaborators. Obviously, I'm in the tradition of Lincoln. We're committed to fight this fight out, not only in the United States but internationally.
Polizzo: Finally, something that interests Argentines a great deal, in the minute and a half that remains: How do you view our Argentine President, and integration with Mercosur.
LaRouche: I don't really judge Presidents, because of a matter of discretion, as such. I do sometimes make comments on them.
My commitment is, that I am a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, and I am committed to a correct relationship with whoever is the President of Argentina. What I will represent in that relationship is my policies, which I will recommend as the terms of collaboration between whoever is the President of Argentina, and me. In other words, the Presidency of Argentina is a personal friend of mine, whether the incumbent President makes mistakes or not. The friendship is permanent.
Polizzo: Thank you very much, and we certainly hope you can visit us in Argentina sometime.
LaRouche: I'd be delighted to.
The following statement was issued on Aug. 7 by LaRouche in 2004, the Presidential campaign committee of Lyndon LaRouche.
Modern Korea Needs No 'Salem Witch Trials'
The tragic death in Seoul Aug. 7 of Hyundai Asan Co. Chairman Chung Mong-hun, "should finally shame the corrupt Korean media, and old regime elites, to end to their politically biased witch-hunt against the modern development of Korea," U.S. Democratic Party pre-Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche said Aug. 4. Over the past months, "friends of the Republic of Korea (ROK) have watched, in sadness," as the architects of President Kim Dae-jung's Sunshine Policy, have been indicted or carted off to jail, on the charge of bribing North Korea to hold the June 2000 Pyongyang summit, in order to "buy" President Kim's Nobel Prize.
"Men of vision worldwide," view this treatment of some of Asia's ablest leaders, as a political frame-up, a sick travesty of justice, "and patently absurd," LaRouche said. "The Republic of Korea is a modern industrial state, and has no need of the 16th-Century methods used in the infamous Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts."
The May 22 arrest of President Kim's chief adviser, former National Intelligence Service head Lim Dong-won, was, until now, the most outrageous in a set of biased prosecutions, featuring the arrest of President Kim's sons, the arrest of Korea Development Bank President Lee Keun-young, and of several more Blue House officials. Not a shred of evidence has been produced in any of the trialsmuch as with the Iraqi "Weapons of Mass Destruction."
"Let us say, with the death of Hyundai's Mr. Chung: now, enough is enough," LaRouche stated. Chung had been on trial for the illegal payment of $100 million to Pyongyang, in "conspiracy" with Lim and Kimalthough his company had such large-scale business dealings with the DPRK as to easily account for such transactions. Only sheer embarrassment has kept prosecutors from arresting President Kim himself, who is in grave healththanks to these legalistic atrocities.
Moreover, it is time for the ROK media and political elite "to ask serious questions, regarding the true motives of the neo-conservatives in Washington," who have been urging these corrupt prosecutions, LaRouche said. Washington neo-cons have been hammering at Seoul since January 2001, insisting that the Sunshine Policy must be reversed, he notedbut it goes far beyond just that.
The Cheney 'Axis of Preemption'
"Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and their neo-con salon, have their own agenda, with zero regard for the ROK population," LaRouche said. "Since 1991, they have been lobbying for the ideological theory of a U.S. 'pre-emptive first strike' against weaker nations. For over 12 years, they have promoted this 'Dr. Strangelove' policy for the Korean Peninsula, as in Iraq, Iran, and around the world, disregarding its likely result: the nuclear incineration of millions in the ROK and Japan."
"North Korea policy is not the real issue," LaRouche said. "What is at stake here is the national sovereignty of South Korea." President Kim and his successor, President Roh Moo-hyun, in all their efforts to modernize Korea, have come up against an ancien regime in Seoul, which includes long-entrenched law enforcement, bureaucracy, and politicians, some put in place by previous military governmentsand many under the influence of Cheney's "axis of preemption" in Washington.
Presidents Kim and Roh, in building the New Silk Road "from Tokyo to Pusan to Paris," have proposed to transform the ROK into a driving force to help create a new Eurasian economic superpower. The rise of such a new Eurasian superpower was expressly attacked as something not to be allowed, by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Wolfowitz, in their original Pentagon 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, drafted when Cheney was Secretary of Defense.
Now that the USSR is gone and the USA is the sole superpower, Wolfowitz wrote in the 1992 draft, "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival ... from dominating a region whose resources would be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia." Not only China, but Japan and the European Union, were openly targetted to be "contained." This view is so fundamentally against the American Constitutionand it so angered Bonn and Tokyothat even former President George Bush, Sr. ordered Wolfowitz's original draft be toned down.
Now back in government, Cheney's group is promoting their old plan with a vengeanceand they see the Eurasian Land-Bridge and the Trans-Korean Railway as an adversary. "But the economic modernization of Eurasia, via construction of the Eurasian Land-Bridge and the Trans-Korean Railroad, is in the fundamental self-interest of the entire Korean population, as well as the population of Japan, and the Eurasian landmass," LaRouche said. It has nothing to do with a payoff to Pyongyang, which is being used as an excuse.
Weighing the self-interest of the Korean, Japanese, and Eurasian economies, against the narrow self-interests of Cheney and Wolfowitz, the road forward is obvious, LaRouche said. "In honor of the memory of Mr. Chung and his father (Hyundai founder Chung Ju-Yung), let us honor the dying words of Chung Mong-hun today."
In a suicide note found on his desk after he jumped from his 12th-floor office window on the morning of Aug. 7, Chung asked Hyundai Asan President Kim Yoon-kyu, to "strongly promote" Hyundai's many Inter-Korean development projects in North Korea, begun by the elder Dr. Chung. Born in North Korea, Chung's father pioneered numerous South-North projects, personally driving 1,500 head of cattle over the border in June 1998, at the height of the DPRK famine, to launch economic cooperation programs. These featured the development of the area around the historically revered Diamond Mountain and the Trans-Korea Railway. In June, Hyundai broke ground for a large industrial park in Kaesong, a North Korean city just over the DMZ where the railway lines are being re-connected. In another note to his family, Chung Mong-hun asked that his ashes be strewn at Diamond Mountain.
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