From Volume 2, Issue Number 30 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published July 29, 2003

Latest From LaRouche

LaRouche To Youth Movement: - 'What This Planet Needs Now, For Humanity, Is A Future' - July 26, 2003

Well, folks, we're at a very interesting point in world history. This is really something. It's something that doesn't come along, nothing comparable comes along in pretty much less than a century, and something like this, we're really going back. We're going back to the 17th or 16th Century, that kind of thing.

So, we're in an interesting time. We're in a time of crisis. We exist under the world domination of a monetary-financial system which was set up, the IMF system of this form, was set up initially in 1971-72: first, by Nixon in August of 1971—I understand some of you weren't born yet; and then in 1972 at an Azores meeting, there was an agreement of submission to the United States prescription, on a floating exchange rate monetary system.

Now, that monetary system, and the financial system associated with it, is dying. It is more than the financial system associated with it, and the monetary system—there's something else. There was a transformation in the United States, and the United Kingdom, in the middle of the 1960s, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, the wake of the previous missile crisis, the wake of the launching of the U.S. war in Indochina, and the arrival of the Wilson, Harold Wilson Administration, the first one, in London. As a result of that in London, and in the United States, there was a change in policy, not so big a change for the British, but big for us: a change from what we had been, during the entire period from the Roosevelt recovery through the end of the war. We had emerged as the world's biggest, most productive economy in the world. We had a lot of faults. There were a lot of shortcomings, and failures, and some evil being done, but our economy was, nonetheless, despite all these, under its existing policy, the most productive economy in the world, per capita.

Now, in the middle of the 1960s, that changed. We went through a reaction to a young generation, adolescent generation, for most of your parents' generation, who were coming out of adolescence in the early '60s, or middle '60s, and going on in many cases to university, in the middle to late '60s. These became known, the campus crowd, became known as the '68ers, and they were characterized, at the worst, by what was called the rock-drug-sex-counterculture. They were the precedent for an anti-industrial, anti-production consumerist mentality, which was essentially Malthusian: that is, against technological progress, and so forth, and so on.

All right. But it was not just those '68ers that became part of the Baby Boomer generation. The demoralization which hit the United States, the whole population of the United States, of people of that generation, the whole population of Western Europe, of that generation, and spread beyond, into South and Central America, went through a transformation, a cultural shift, from a production-oriented world, to a consumerist-oriented world. That was part of the system.

Now, the consumerist-oriented world combined with the financial and monetary system in the following way: The United States and Britain were able to dictate, essentially, the terms of trade, the terms of values of currencies, through manipulation of markets, all over the world. So, therefore, the markets, and debts, of the countries of South America, of Africa, of Europe, and other parts of the world, were increased artificially, relative to the dollar, and the pound sterling, of course. So therefore, the United States, in the process of going out of production, shifted into cheap labor, from Central and South America, and looting of resources in these parts of the world, so that we began to get, in the United States, we began to live, and suck the blood, of the rest of the world, through this combination of a consumerist orientation inside the United States and Western Europe—and it took off in Europe more slowly than in the United States and Britain—and we were sucking the blood of the world because of these methods. We were using cheap labor, which we forced to be cheap, by dictating currency values, by imposing debts, and so forth, artificially, we began to live on the blood that we were sucking, of the rest of the world. And we called it prosperity.

Now, actually the prosperity was fake. Because if you look at the physical parameters of consumption, without even considering the social conditions of family life, but just the physical parameters—food, and job opportunities, and so forth, and incomes—the lower 80 percent of the U.S. population has been losing income catastrophically—that is, real income—per family household over the past period since 1977. It's worse because there's been a massive inflation, but the inflation has been concealed by a completely artificial lies, by the Federal Reserve System, and by the Federal government, which, with this Quality Adjustment Index, had faked the figures to show a low rate of inflation, when actually there has been a very high rate of inflation.

There's been a movement of financial capital, and so forth, out of industry, production, agriculture, into financial markets, investment in financial markets. And these have been hyperinflationary. So therefore, the conditions of life, the welfare of our people, and so forth, have deteriorated.

Now, we've come to the point that this system is about to collapse. And the system is about to collapse because the accumulation of nominal financial assets, in current monetary terms, have zoomed, have skyrocketed, while the physical values, of consumption and production by the population, have collapsed.

So, therefore, we've reached the point that the ability to maintain the financial system, on the physical basis—it's collapsed. There's no basis for it. So, we're now in the terminal phase of the system. We're not in a depression, we're in something worse than a depression; we're in a general breakdown crisis. That is, the present system could never come back, could never have a recovery, in its present form.

And that is what makes this period of history so special.

Now, this has been in process, it's been obvious since the period of the Carter Administration, when the deregulation set things into motion. Then the Kemp-Roth legislation, the cut of taxes on capital gains, and shifting the burden to other parts of the economy.

So, we've gone through a shift of this type, which has been gradually leading into a general collapse—we've now reached the outer limit. The reason is that the rate at which money has to be printed, or printed electronically, in order to maintain the present financial system, to prevent its collapsing, has reached the point that we're nearly at the zero interest rate and discount rates in the United States. And when the United States dollar gets close to a zero discount rate, done to maintain the financial system, or prevent it from collapse, then you know you're at the end of the road. This thing is going to go, and nothing can stop it.

The 1928-1933 Parallel

Now, the nearest approximation of a world experience, like the world experience today, is the 1928 to 1933 period, that is, the period of the failure of the Young Plan negotiations, the collapse of the Mueller government in Germany as a result of it, through Hitler's accession to power, in 1933. This is a crucial period in history, of systemic collapse of the Versailles monetary-financial system, which was based on using the German war debt to prop up the economies of France and Germany, and thus in turn, prop up the creditors of France and Germany, the United States. So, this is a comparable period.

Then, when the financial system was threatened with a blowout, you had two ways to go: One way was typified by Franklin Roosevelt's recovery program, the other way was Adolf Hitler. And for a time, Adolf Hitler won. And Adolf Hitler was put into power by key financial interests, which were afraid that, under conditions of financial collapse, that governments would intervene to save the economy, at the expense of the financiers' interest-control over the economy.

So, rather than accept that, financial interests, typified by Lazard Freres in France, and so forth, moved to set up a dictatorship, they hoped in the United States, and also in Germany. And in France, and in Italy, and in Spain.

So, we went into a period where Europe was dominated by fascism, by the fascists in Italy, the first ones. The fascists in Austria. The fascists in Spain. The fascists in Germany. And also the fascists who became the Laval government, and the Petain government, in post-1940 France.

So, the United States was faced with a threat of consolidated fascist war against the United States, and if they had succeeded, in getting the British fascists to take control of the United Kingdom, then we would have had the entirety of Western Europe, with its navies, and the Japan navy, which is part of this, allied against the United States. And then if Germany had moved eastward, to destroy the Soviet Union, with the support of France, Italy, Spain, England, and so forth, under those conditions, all Eurasia would be controlled by this fascist empire, which had the greatest naval power in the world, and we would be up the creek. We, as the United States, could not have survived.

Under those conditions at that time, Winston Churchill, who represented a group in Britain who were not willing to accept the consequence of Britain becoming an also-ran part of a fascist empire based on continental Europe, Churchill appealed to Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, to help Britain escape from the fascist trap, of fascists like, pro-Nazis like Lord Halifax and so forth in Britain. And so, the people who were behind Edward VIII, who was a pro-Nazi, the King Edward VIII, these people were pushed to the side, and an alliance between Britain and the United States, or that faction in Britain, existed. And that became the basis for the history of World War II, and the postwar period.

We're in a period like that.

Now, the threat does not come from Western Europe. The threat comes from inside the United States.

Now, the financier interests in Europe, as well as in the United States, behind fascism then, are the same crowd today. The difference today is, that the United States, because of nuclear weaponry, is a relative military power of such overreach, that the United States is the power to beat. So, in the United States, you have a faction, which is associated with the people we call the Neo-Cons, on the surface, which includes people like Vice President Cheney, who's not quite human. Behind them are certain bankers, banking financial interests, including some of the same financial interests who were behind the Hitler plot, back in the 1920s and 1930s. They are moving to a coup d'etat, which occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, in which Cheney and company, as the political lackeys, took control of the puppet President of the United States—this damn fool George Bush—and have been controlling him, more or less, up to the present time.

Under this set of conditions, the United States is moving toward a fascist dictatorship inside the United States, typified by Ashcroft, the Attorney General, and by the Patriot Act. And at the same time, it is moving toward world war, nuclear wars against all kinds of nations, especially in Asia. And they intend to use nuclear weapons. They'll find the first pretext they can to use nuclear weapons. The fact that the Iraq war didn't turn out they wanted, has jammed the works up a little bit. We have been able to jam the works up, with my attack focussed on Cheney, and related things. Only from us have you had the initiative, which has been picked up by other forces in Europe, as well as the United States, have we been able to jam the works up a bit, and prevent this thing from going as it was planned.

Now admittedly I have a lot of support from people who may not be directly talking to me, but they're supporting this effort: from the military, from other institutions from within our government, from sources outside the government, private resources, as well resources in Europe. They are moving to prevent the United States from becoming a fascist terror of the world.

Therefore I have focussed, understanding the circumstances, on the fact that certain financier interests, now as back then, are moving to establish a fascist world system, as their answer to a general collapse of the financial monetary system. Because they want them to be in charge, when the collapse occurs, and not us—that is, not the people, not the governments. Therefore, that's the fight. We're in a similar period. Here we are. Right.

The Youth Movement

Now, we're having some success, as you know, and the youth movement has been a key factor in the success, because the youth movement has delivered a shock value, into the political system inside the United States, and to some degree, outside, which has managed to push people in certain directions, to respond. And they're responding to me, largely because of the added factor of the impact of the youth movement. Plus the fact that events have proved I've been correct, on all of these crucial issues. And therefore, a lot of people are saying, "Okay, okay, he's right, we've got to work with him."

And, we're doing it. We have no guarantee of victory. None whatsoever. We have the opportunity for victory, but no guarantee of it.

And that's where we stand. We are in that kind of crisis.

Now, there is another aspect to this, which the youth movement as such is dealing with, which I realized was necessary. This youth movement, of which you are participating with this event, is different than all other youth movements of the past century. This is a youth movement based on a principle of truth; not a protest movement, not an explosion of adolescent rage, or something, against the present system. This is a calculating intellectual youth movement, based on discovering a truth, at a time that the generation of the parents of the present youth, are off wandering in never-never land. looking for the fifth sex, as a kind of recreational way of getting through the next six months, or the next year.

That is, the consumerist generation, now in their 50s and 60s, the generation that is generally running the government, and running most institutions, is actually in Never-Neverland. It's called the "Now" generation. The pleasure and satisfaction they get now, the pleasure from having a lifestyle now, even if it's only a fad, is the beginning and end of most of their day-to-day controlling concerns. They're not in the real world.

However, you, the generation of their children, find yourselves dumped on the street, so to speak, in a "no-future" generation. And therefore, you recognize your parents, your parents' generation, are the children of this time, and you, relatively speaking, morally, the adults. That you recognize you must convince your parents' generation to become human again. That is, to adopted a future-oriented view of policy-making and of society. This means that you can not go by mere tradition, because the tradition that your parents represent, that is, the period 1964-2003—that tradition stinks, and that will get you nowhere except into the gutter, always. Therefore, you can not go by tradition. You can not say traditional popular opinion, traditional institutions. It doesn't work. They're all too corrupt! And if you're going to get into that boat, the boat is sinking. So therefore, you have to come along with a new set of values—not new to history, but new, at least to this time of history—which is based on truth. And the truth involves what?

The essential issue of truth is: What is the difference between man and a monkey? Now, most people, in Congress and elsewhere, perhaps, at least in the Democratic Party leadership, or in the White House, don't know what that difference is. I mean, you know, imagine a monkey coming along and saying, "I'm a Christian fundamentalist." I mean, what do you think of that? The President of the U.S., who makes Mortimer Snerd, the famous puppet, Edgar Bergen's puppet, look like a genius! And this guy says he's a fundamentalist Christian. The man is acting like a monkey; and he's acting with this rage—he's showing his teeth, as he did recently on the question of the display of two bodies of the sons of Saddam Hussein—a disgusting exhibition. And he's acting like a monkey, showing his teeth, and screaming, like a monkey. And he's saying "I'm a Christian." Well, a monkey can't be a Christian, because a monkey isn't human. A monkey can't be Jewish, because a monkey's not human. A monkey can't be Islamic. People who believe in Islam are human.

Well then, what's going on here?

They believe in physical pleasure. They believe in manipulation. They believe in monkey games. They believe in being apes. Aping one another. The idea of: What is human? Well, human is very special. Being human is different than being an animal, because no animal could discover a universal physical principle of the universe, and act upon it. Now, if man were as he is, physically, and if you said, well, man were an ape, then the human population on this planet for the past 2 million years could never have exceeded, at any time, much more than several million individuals living at that time. We now have 6 billion. How'd that happen? Therefore, we're not an ape. Man is not a monkey. Because man is capable of discovering and transmitting discoveries of universal physical principles, from generation to another. And by applying these discovered principles to control nature, and to change the way we behave, in general, we're able to increase man's power over the universe, per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth's surface. And that power is not limited. It can go on and on, and there's no limit to it.

So it's this ability of people who are mortal—that is, we all die; we're all born, and we die—and in the course of history, that lifespan is really very short, it's within 100 years, generally. And that's fairly short, when you think about history. The events of history involve thousands, tens of thousands of years. So how does this work? Well, it works in the fact that we, as individual human beings, by acquiring discoveries of those before us, adding to that stock of discoveries, and passing the improved stock on to those who follow us, create the continuity of humanity's existence on this planet.

And therefore, you have, in a simple expression of this, the grandparents who devoted their life to ensuring that their children, and grandchildren, in particular, would have a better future than they had experienced. So this future orientation in society, among relatively simple people, like the farmer who built up the farm from taking over a piece of land which was nothing but wilderness land, and building up a prosperous farm over two or three generations—that is typical in U.S. history of the individual's future orientation. The parent who says, "I'm going to give my children a better education than I had," who fights to improve the school system, and so forth, to ensure that occurs. Who works for better conditions in the community for the benefit of their children and grandchildren. This was the typical future orientation of sane and moral individuals. That is what has been lost over the 1964-2003 period, at least for the generation now in their 50s and 60s, by and large.

That doesn't mean they don't know about that entirely; it's they don't have a feeling of conviction about it. They say, "Yes, that may be true, but I have to think about my pleasure. I've got to think about my lifestyle. I have to get through tomorrow, and I need to have my lifestyle in order to get through tomorrow, psychologically." And that's what they pass on. So that's the situation.

That's the key thing we have to do in order to mobilize people against the onrush of fascism, led, particularly at this moment, by Dick Cheney in the U.S. What we have to do, is we have to not only mobilize the older generation, as well as the younger ones, to fight for the necessary changes—we will not succeed in that unless we become a revolution of ideas. The revolution of ideas is essentially, first of all, to rediscover the principle of truth, as scientific effectiveness defines a sense of truth, and to put the value of a human being—all parts of the human family—put the value of a human being, as being in this characteristic of an individual person to discover universal physical principles, and related kinds of principles, to pick them up from previous generation, value them as gifts from earlier generation, from all over the world, in point of fact, as gifts we must transmit, enhanced, to future generations. That is a sense of the future, a commitment to the future, which gives us the ability to mobilize ourselves for all kinds of good things.

Now what's the problem? The problem about universal physical principles? And I've addressed this in many writings over the course of years, but most recently on this subject of visualizing the complex domain. We have what we think are perceptions of the world around us. We call these sense perceptions. We talk about "sense-certainty." We talk about "I know because I smelled"—that is, not I radiated a smell, but I perceived one. Some people just radiate a smell. Because they believe that senses are a picture of the actual world outside their skins. That's not true. Our sense organs are part of our biological organism, living organism. These sense organs, therefore, react to what the world does, how the world impinges upon our senses. This is sense-perception. Therefore, we do not know the real world outside out skins, so to speak, from sense-experience, not directly. What we know from our sense-perception, are the shadows of the outside world. By being able to understand certain errors which occur in the picture of the universe provided by these shadows, we are able to discover the presence of some unseen hand, beyond sense-perception, which is controlling what we experience.

Generally, these things we discover are universal physical principles, chiefly. Like gravitation, or a principle of universal least action. These are principles which exist out there—you can't see them, you can't touch them, you can't taste them—you don't know them as sense-perception. But you know them as a result of the errors in sense-perception. That sense-perception makes mistakes, and by understanding those mistakes, you're able to detect the cause of the mistake. The cause of the mistake says that the cause of the way sense-perception is behaving to create these mistakes is some physical principle, such as gravitation, acting beyond the ability of the senses to directly sense it. These are called universal physical principles. They are the unseen. They are the essence of the complex domain.

We have two geometries: the geometry of what we can experience as sense-perception; then we have the hidden geometry, beyond, of principles which are acting from outside the range of sense-perception, and fiddling up, shall we say, the things we perceive. Only human beings can do that.

And thus, the most important thing for us is to get across to people in society, what an idea is. All ideas, including artistic ideas of any value, are ideas which exist—are expressions of principle which lie outside the range of sense-perception. Therefore, the most important thing for us, is to know what these ideas are. Or to know their nature, to understand them, to become familiar with them. Because it's around ideas, ideas that determine the future of mankind, ideas that enable us to understand the past of mankind, ideas that enable us to understand who we are, as human beings, in the midst of this continuity from past to present to future—and that's what we're doing.

We're building a youth movement based on mobilizing the adult-erated population—not the Baby Boomers—the adult-erated population, mobilizing them to find their humanity again, and trying to make them part of a force for change that must be made now. But to do that, we must motivate them around ideas, not simply greed. Therefore, we must understand, at least many of us, must understand what an idea is, and what truth, in terms of ideas, means, so that we can mobilize people around ideas. Because only by mobilization around ideas, can you cause people to commit themselves to create a future. And what this planet needs now, for humanity, is a future. And you have to play a key, catalytic role in bringing that future into being.

And therefore, these are the kinds of items which come up on our agenda of discussion.

Now, your turn.

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