LAROUCHE IN PLYMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE

LYNDON LAROUCHE AT MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE

LaRouche to Ibero-American Cadre School: The Classical Principle Is Intrinsic To Humanity

From Volume 2, Issue Number 48 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Dec. 2, 2003

Latest From LaRouche

LAROUCHE IN PLYMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE

Here is a the transcript of Lyndon LaRouche's remarks to a forum for Presidential candidates, at Plymouth State College in Plymouth, New Hampshire, on Nov. 13, 2003. LaRouche was introduced by a student moderator, who read from a summary of the biography on the LaRouche in 2004 website.

I have not yet, nor do I expect to reach the record set by Harold Stassen, who had more Presidential campaigns. He was formerly the boy-wonder of Minneapolis, Minnesota, as a mayor, and he was, then, the governor of the state of Minnesota, during the period of the Eisenhower Administration. He was man of conscience, who had belonged to a time when conscience was stronger, and therefore, he was less well received, in the 1960s and 1970s, than he was earlier in his life. But, he was still a man of principle, and his memory should be honored today. But, that's not my game.

We're now in a world crisis and a U.S. crisis. And, I'll speak on three themes, which are relevant to this crisis, and relevant to you. First, is the nature of the military crisis. You could be in a general war, of a special kind, which could spread globally during the coming years ahead. This war is not necessary, but it could happen. And therefore, preventing this war from happening, is a prime concern, and should be a concern to all of you.

Secondly, we're now in the period of the breakdown of the monetary system, called the floating-exchange-rate monetary system, established between 1971 and 1972, both by Nixon's actions in August of 1971, and by the Azores Conference decisions of 1972. This system is now disintegrating. And, it will fall. Now, with economic processes, the difficulty in predicting exactly, when a collapse might occur, is that, governments can take action, such as printing a lot of money, to postpone a collapse. They can not prevent the collapse. They can not prevent its occurring within a limited timeframe. But, they can make it come sooner, or they can make it come later.

This collapse is now on. We're looking at things like a collapse of the real-estate bubble. You won't see it so much in this area, but if you look around New York City, or you look around Washington, D.C., or parts of California, you will see shacks—which are really tar-paper shacks, they're wrapped with shrink-wrap, and then they put some plastic exteriors on them, and they sell at mortgage prices at $400,000 to $600,000 apiece. If the mortgage bubble collapses, these houses will collapse in mortgage value, from a half-million range, to about half that or less. And, the people will no longer be homeowners, but they will probably remain as squatters.

This is the kind of situation you have to expect. Which we can deal with: It's a soluble problem.

The third question is something I'm very much involved in: About four years ago, I decided the time had come to build a new kind of youth movement. And we started it in California, and a couple of years ago, we began to spread it, and it's spreading around the world, now. It played a significant role in the recent election in California, where we tried to defeat Arnold Schwarzenegger's run for governor, and recall of Governor Davis. In the part of the area we took as our responsibility, in Los Angeles County and the Bay Area, where we played a significant role—the youth did—we turned it around. When we went in there, it was 60%-40%, for Schwarzenegger against Davis. By the time the election occurred, in Los Angeles County, it was 51-49% in favor of Davis; and we had a much more successful effect, in the Bay Area.

We recently were asked to participate in the Philadelphia campaign for reelection of the mayor, who was targeted by the Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, and we turned that around. We didn't do it ourselves, but we all agreed on the policy; we went in there, did our job, and we had a small landslide victory over the Attorney General of the United States—not by vote, but by the results of that election.

We're now doing other things. And, this matter pertains, of course, very much to you and your future, and your future in the university, your future after the university.

A little more question: The thing which is probably lacking in most education today, on the secondary and university level, is an actual study of history, in the sense that history was presented as a course in better universities and secondary schools, in the United States, years ago—for example, in my generation. There was actually a serious course, in secondary schools, in American history. There was also a second course, in good high schools in the United States, in modern European history. And some touches of other things. So, people understood some history. There was a teaching, of some degree of competence, of basic science, basic physics, basic mathematics, in a more competent form than is generally taught in schools today, in universities today. There were changes made, to the so-called "New Math," at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s.

But, the problem is, that today, the students generally have a very poor background in history. People coming out of secondary schools, the so-called honor students, say, "I wasted my time. I got really nothing out of it. I passed the courses, I passed the tests, but I really don't know anything. And, that's bad." And therefore, for a generation such as your own, which is going to have to take the reins of power—10, 20 years from now—more and more, it's important to have a grasp of history, so as not to repeat some of the mistakes that have been made over the past 40 years, in changes.

And therefore, the idea of the youth movement was to, first of all, to emphasize an understanding of what ideas are. And for that purpose, I picked Gauss's 1799 paper on "The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra," which actually is the modern definition of what's called the "complex domain." And that, which references Classical Greek studies, in so-called "constructive geometry," is actually one of the most efficient ways of presenting what we mean by ideas in European civilization, from the time of Thales and Pythagoras, and so on, and Plato, to the present time. Once we understand what an idea is, and there's some confusion about that in modern usage, then we look at the history of ideas. And, in European civilization, or globally extended European civilization, we begin with Greece, in debt to Egypt. For example, we might take a picture of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, which are very significant astronomical phenomena: That is, they were constructed as actually devices, to show principles of astronomy, on a long-term cycle.

This knowledge from Egypt went to Greece. It's reflected in the work of Thales. It's reflected in the work of the Pythagoreans, and others.

So, we often start there. And, we trace the evolution of European civilization, through the disaster called the Peloponnesian War, through the rise of the Romans; through the tyranny of Europe by an alliance of Venetian bankers and Norman knights; into the emergence of modern civilization in the 15th Century, and the struggles that occurred since then, including the founding of new nations in the Americas, beginning at the end of the 15th Century.

Now, in this period, there are a great number of ideas, which are embedded in our history. And, unlike the animals, which do not transmit ideas from one to another, human beings transmit ideas. They go from one generation to the next, and what we have, as a culture today, is based on an accumulation of the effects of the transmission of these discoveries from one generation to the next. So, to understand ourselves, to understand history, to understand how we got here, it's important to know where we came from. And what we came from is buried in the history of ideas. And therefore, the youth movement is based on those two conceptions: What is an idea? The history of ideas.

The youth movement is independent. I don't run it. I inspire it. I provoke it. I try to protect it. But they're on their own. They are essentially a university on wheels. They spend a good deal of their time on these subjects, of study; they spend the rest of their time, intervening in the political process, and therefore, there's their course in sociology. And they're doing a very good job. They're the most effective political force we have in the United States, per capita, when it comes to mass organizing. So, that's the point.

Now, what's the nature of the financial crisis? You have to look at this from the standpoint of history: The United States went into a Great Depression, with much of the rest of the world, between 1928 and 1933. In Europe, this resulted in the spread of fascism, as typified by Mussolini, earlier, and Hitler, Franco, and so forth. In the United States, we were saved from that, by the election of Franklin Roosevelt. And Franklin Roosevelt led the United States up, out of the Depression, over a long process, and into the point that, at the end of the World War II, we were the most prosperous, most powerful nation in the world.

Despite the mistakes that were made after the death of President Roosevelt, we continued to be the leading nation, in productive power, in the world, through the middle of the 1960s. Then, after the Missile Crisis, which scared the pants off most people, in 1962; after the assassination of Kennedy; and the entry into the Indo-China War, we began a process of change, which was called a cultural paradigm-shift: a change from a producer society—the world's leading producer society—to a post-industrial society.

And this change progressed under Nixon. In 1971-72, there was a change from the monetary system, which had built up the world, built up the United States, in the post-war period. We began to shift, by exporting our jobs from the United States, into places where the poorest people in the world would work cheaply for us. And, we're now in a situation, where most of our industries—say, in New Hampshire: You can travel up and down the Merrimack Valley, and see areas that used to be centers of industry. You could see areas in this state, which used to be centers of agriculture, apple-growing, and cattle, and so forth—they are now destitute. They're depending upon other kinds of income. The state was depopulated, in part, because young people left the state, to go to other parts of the country, to get jobs. Families were broken up. The population became older, in the sense of demographically, because the young people moved away. This happened all over the country.

Today, most of our jobs are exported, as jobs, to other countries, where poor people live. Poor people in China produce a lot for us. Poor people in Mexico, a broken country, produce for us, at slave-labor wages, and the jobs have run away from the United States.

So, in the process, we're now in a state, where 47 states, of the 50 states in the United States, are now bankrupt, in the sense, that the state can not raise enough money to pay for essential services, except by taxing people or doing other things which will injure the tax revenue base of the state. In other words, a losing cause. If you increase the taxes, you will lower the incomes of the state. Therefore, you will ruin the economy. If you try to cut more, you will collapse the state the other way. So, the states are in that position, and they need the help of the Federal government, to take changes, which will enable these states to go through a process of recovery.

That's the mission before us.

Also, we have, at the same time, this terrible war. How did it start? There was a big change, which came in the course and at the end of World War II: A change in military practice, internationally, for the worse. The signal of that change, was the dropping of two nuclear weapons on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was no military necessity for dropping those weapons: Japan was already defeated, was waiting for an approval of the terms of surrender, to officially surrender. Those terms were withheld, in order to let the bombs be dropped, unnecessarily, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This was the beginning of a philosophy, which was called "preventive nuclear war." The principal author of the policy was Bertrand Russell, the well-known Bertrand Russell, who developed this nuclear strategy: The idea of using nuclear weapons, as weapons so terrible, that nations would submit to world government, and give up their sovereignty rather than submit themselves to a war. From 1945 until the Soviet Union developed a deployable thermo-nuclear device, the United States was operating on the basis of a long-term policy, of preventive nuclear war, to bring the rest of the world into subjection.

When the Soviet Union developed the first deployable thermonuclear weapon, that had to be called off. You can't have a preventive nuclear war, when the other side's got a thermonuclear weapons. And, soon after that, we developed thermonuclear weapons.

So, we went through a long period, until the present, which was called a period of "Mutual and Assured Destruction." Shortly after the retirement of President Eisenhower, that became policy. The 1962 Missile Crisis, the negotiation between the United States and the Soviet Union, with Bertrand Russell in the middle, we went into a system, which later became known as détente, after the 1972 period. So, we went through a new idea of warfare: We would now create weapons systems, which are so horrible, that a thermonuclear war would destroy the planet, or virtually destroy it. Then, you had conventional war, at the other extreme.

So, the policy began to focus on what was called "Utopianism," of how to find a way, to fight nuclear war without actually going to thermonuclear war. And that is what preoccupied the world, from the time of the Korean War, to the present time. At present, you have the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, is committed to preventive nuclear war, a policy which he recommended in 1991-92, when he was the Defense Secretary. After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, he brought the policy out. It had been resisted earlier, by the U.S. government. The United States is now, more or less, operating on the basis of a doctrine of preventive nuclear war.

Now, this created another situation, which is called "asymmetric warfare": That is, how do you fight war, how is war fought, between the past history, of the pre-1945 level of so-called conventional warfare, and general thermonuclear war? How do you find a way to fight war in that area? Well, this leads to what's called asymmetric warfare. We saw it, clearly, in Vietnam. The United States, which was foolish enough to get into the Korean War, by the stupidity of President Truman, got into Indo-China War in a similar way: The United States assumed—correctly, at that point—that China would not make a big fuss about a U.S. attack on North Vietnam. So, the United States proceeded to go ahead with the attack on North Vietnam, assuming that there was not going to be any serious opposition from China or other countries.

What happened is, the Soviet Union intervened, to assist Vietnam, in planning an asymmetric defense. And, we lost the war. Because, one of the things that arises out of this middle area, is that, people say, as was done to Napoleon in 1812: "Come into our country. We can't defeat you at the borders. But, invade our country, and you will be face-to-face with our general population. And our general population will attack you, man-to-man." And when it's man-to-man, superweapons don't work. This is precisely what happened in Indo-China, because everybody was around everybody, in terms of Indo-China. The same thing is now happening in Iraq, when the Iraqi population, in general, is in touch with the American soldier, the American soldier has no place to go. He can go into Hedgehogs and try to hide, that's all. But this thing is going to come to an end—it's a failure.

The problem is that those in Washington—chiefly in Washington, and chiefly Cheney's friends—who are determined to attack Syria, to attack Iran, to attack North Korea, and other countries; to keep this process of spreading war as far as possible, aiming to use nuclear weapons, or so-called "mini-nuclear weapons," in the process. The result of that will be, in the next President's term, unless we stop it now, will be a spread of warfare, involving Russia, China, India, and many other countries—most of the world against the United States, in the sense of being opposed to this war, or the spread of this war, as you've already seen since 2002, when this began. Under those conditions, with mini-submarines, with special nuclear weapons, and with various other features of so-called "low-intensity warfare" or "asymmetric warfare," the world will be tied into a war, of a type that most of you could not imagine. It could be the death of civilization.

And therefore, we must stop this war. It's not necessary. We don't need it. There's no problem we can't solve without it.

We have to bring about a new order on this planet, which, from my knowledge of dealing with countries abroad, and leaders in some of them, they're ready to accept: If the United States would change its policy, to a prospect of what John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of State, put in the mouth of President Monroe: The objective of the United States, from the beginning—it was a Constitutional objective—was to establish, here, a republic, and to make that republic secure, by fostering the development of other republics, in other countries; and to enter into a community of principle among republics, among these nations. John Quincy Adams laid that policy out for the states of the Americas. We should now proceed, as Roosevelt had intended to do during his time, and make that the policy for the United States toward the rest of the world.

We don't need world government. We don't want a world empire. We must respect cultures, because people can not have democratic representation unless they're able to express it in terms of their own culture. Therefore, you must have a principle that different cultures, or people who choose to form different cultures, should be sovereign in their self-government. But that we, as nations, as a group of nations, so committed, should find common principles, principles of agreement, where we can solve our problems: Not through world government, and not through supra-government, but by simply adopting common principles, which we think are the common principles of humanity for this time.

So, the war can be controlled.

One of the drives for war, is the economic crisis. If you look back in history, we just went through Veterans Day, which was once called Armistice Day. Armistice Day was Nov. 11, 1917, when World War I paused. Then, we got into another war, a Second World War, in my generation. My parents' generation were in World War I; my generation was in World War II. The generation of your parents was in the Vietnam War, among others. You're now in the Cheney-era wars. So, we have these cycles of war. You find that the pulsations of these wars, coincide with major financial changes and major financial crises. At any time that you have a major financial crisis, somebody gets the idea, of trying to manage the financial crisis by setting up dictatorship, or using dictatorial measures—as it's tried now; as it's being pushed in the United States by Ashcroft, by people who are complaining about this.

And therefore, these are dangerous times, in which the impulse to go to war, is suddenly increased. And that's the ways these other wars have occurred. And these wars have presently have occurred. They occurred because the present administration of George Bush, came into office, not having created the depression—it was already fully in process, before he came to power. But, as I observed, just before he was inaugurated in 2001, that, since he's a dumb man, as not very intelligent on these matters, he was going to be stupid, and we were going to have a very serious economic crisis. And, I warned, that under these conditions, we would probably be heading into crises, or internal crises and international crises—and we have been!

So, we have to look at the war danger, and the problems of the economy, as related. If we solve the problem of managing the financial crisis, the economic crisis, we can manage the world military crisis. Because, there are opportunities for cooperation with China, with the nations of Eurasia in general. There are opportunities in some of our neighbors in South America, who would like to cooperate with us. So, we could rebuild a world economy, in much the same fashion we proceeded to rebuild the war-torn economy, at the end of World War II. That's possible.

But, we have to do one thing above all: The American people are frightened and confused. The lower 80% of family-income brackets have been dropping down in the physical conditions of life, since 1977. The lower 80% of the family-income brackets of the United States, have become almost a lost generation. And, politics has been limited to the upper 20% of family-income groups—the so-called "suburban policy" of the Democratic National Committee is an example of that. So, the majority of the population has been neglected. And the neglect shows, in the faces and conditions of life of our people.

We can solve this the way Roosevelt did. There are opportunities to build up our industries. We need large investments in basic economic infrastructure: For example, New England will go into a collapse, if we do not begin to develop new sources of generation and distribution of power. We're on the verge of a power crisis throughout New England—that is, at least, in planning terms, from the government standpoint. We must get to work now, not only in New England, but other parts of the country, to begin to build up power generation and distribution networks which are reliable. We must deal with some of the water crises we have. We have sanitation crises. We have urban crises. We have a breakdown in mass transit. We're clogging highways with traffic. People are spending more time using the highways, the superhighways, as parking lots, than they are sometimes working! It's a waste! It's destroying family life.

These things have to be done.

We have to rebuild our hospital system. We have to rebuild our health-care system: Go back to Hill-Burton, and forget this HMO system. These changes have to be made.

Many involve expenditures by government, long-term expenditures: Not current costs, as much as capital expenditures. When you create a big project, you create jobs. If you create enough jobs, then the income of the state rises above the breakeven level for operation of the state. So therefore, the object, in a condition like this, is not only to increase employment, but to increase certain kinds of productive employment, which are a stimulant for the growth of the private sector. That's where government comes in. Government can make rules, which help investment proceed. Government can also, directly, on the state and Federal level, can take action, for long-term infrastructure projects, to build new utilities, which can become private utilities, but to rebuild what we've lost.

If we start in that direction, we can convince the American people, that we care about them. And the problem is, people today think that government no longer cares for the people. The people are often against government, big government in particular, because they think it doesn't care for them. When government intervenes on behalf of the people, people like government. When government intervenes against the people, as people believe that the leading parties have done recently, and policies have done recently, then they're against government. So, if we're going to restore confidence in government, we have to start to pay attention to the needs of the majority of our people. And the time has come, that I think we can do that.

But, to do this all, someone has to tell the truth. Some politicians have to tell the truth. They can't give you the usual political guff you've been getting from these so-called "candidates debates": ducking the issues, doing fast-talk, with no substance to it. Where's the action? They promised this. They promised that. What are they going to do? Well, in order to explain what you're going to do, they have to do what I do: You have to discuss the nature of the problem, define the problem, and define the actions by which you're going to solve the problem.

Those who say, "We have to defend the U.S. policy of going into war in Iraq," are insane! They're not addressing the problem! Iraq was simply one of the stepping-stones toward a global war, a spread of global war. We have to stop it. It was the wrong policy. There was no reason to go in: Cheney lied! That's the way, we got into it! They lied about the problems! There was no reason to go in. There was no need to invade the place! It had nothing to do with terrorism—not against the United States, anyway.

So, we shouldn't have gotten into it. But candidates, even Democrats—Gephardt will not admit it was wrong. And Kerry, who's probably one of the best of my rivals, will not admit it's wrong. He will fudge around it.

On the economic question, none of them will tell the truth on the economic question. The U.S. government has given a new meaning to the word "Snow job," through Treasury Secretary Snow. There is no U.S. recovery. It's a Snow Job. The U.S. economy is collapsing. The jobs are collapsing, the industries are collapsing. What he's talking about is a big accounting swindle, with fake figures.

So, first of all, to get this process, political process, there has to be a discussion, in which people who intend to run for high office, should go before the people, and stop the guff, and talk about the kind of problems I've addressed. You have to talk about the war problem, how to stop it, what the alternative is. They have to deal with the economic problem, discuss it, define the problem, debate the problem, and debate the solutions. What's important is not whether they're right or not. What's important is to change the character of the political discussion, from this guff, of swapping guff, and funny stories, to actually present to the American people, to the public, each candidate's conception of what the nature of the problem is, the real problem, and what they have proposed to do, by whom, to solve the problem!

They have to do that on the question of war, they have to do that on the question of economy, and they have to do it in relationship to your generation. Because you are going to be the decisive factor in this election campaign. You are the muscle, the political muscle. When you organize, you have more impact, per person, on the political process than any other citizen of the United States. Because when people see you—and you are the future of your parents' generation. You are the future of your grandparents' generation. And what happens to you, determines the outcome and meaning of their lives. When you mobilize yourselves, and demand that the questions be discussed, demand that the answers be concrete, demand that the debates among these different proposals occur, when you intervene, you shake it up.

We've demonstrated it with the youth movement now. We demonstrated it in California, we've demonstrated it on the streets of Washington, D.C., we've demonstrated it in Pennsylvania, and we'll demonstrated it elsewhere. You can be the difference.

What has happened in this country, because of the change from a producer society, to a consumer society, which hit your parents' generation, we have become a consumer society. Now, what happens is, you come along, and the consumer society is a failure. The world is bankrupt. We're going into new general wars, where somebody's going to ask you to fight. And you're saying, "There's no future."

You also know around you, that the people you deal with, of your generation, and younger, you're dealing with a drug problem. Not just because of drugs as such, but because the lives of many people in your generation, and younger, are completely screwed up by this drug problem. Ritalin, in schools. Prozac, in schools. Other drug problems. People trying to manage their problem. Trying to function despite the drug habit they've got. Trying to fight the drug culture which invades them all around.

You find yourself saying, "We're part of a no-future generation, that we have been given no assured future."

You have to realize that, you do realize it, and you have to somehow reach out, to your parents' generation, and your grandparents' generation, and say, "We care. We want a future." And because, once they remember, that you are their future, and the children that you bear, will be their future, then you've got a grip on them. Because they're all going to die—we're all going to die. And therefore, what are they looking forward to, as the meaning and outcome of their life? You contain the secret of the meaning and the outcome of their lives.

And when you deploy, when you deploy effectively, you have an impact in the political process, which cannot be matched by any other stratum of the population.

So, think of yourself as important. And I turn it back to you. Any questions you have. [applause]

STUDENT MODERATOR: At this time, we're going to open up the floor to any questions you may have for Mr. LaRouche. So, step right up.

QUESTION: Hi. I've read that you advocate a universal service policy, and I was wondering if you could speak a bit on that, concerning the military service.

LAROUCHE: Yeah, I'm for it, first of all, because I don't think we ought to have a professional army as such, controlling us. Secondly, we've got a big problem in the United States, of an employment problem. We've got to create a lot of new jobs. These jobs are going to be in categories which people in the United States are not generally employed with, or are not trained for.

Now, we had an experience in World War II, when I for a time was in a training capacity, and we would have these fellows scraped from the streets, and slums, and swamps, of America, and I would have a platoon to train. And when I'd line them up on the company street, the first time they got there, with their duffle bags, I would think to myself, "We just lost the war." And you would think pretty much the same thing today, taking a bunch of people into that.

But what happened was, we transformed, in a 16-week basic training program, and then the supplementary programs beyond that, we transformed a population of people who had been crippled by the effects of the Depression. We transformed them into an effective force, a productive force. The United States was not a military great show, in World War II. We were a great logistical force, and the way, as MacArthur dealt with the problem in the Pacific, we relied on as few battles as possible, and as much logistical superiority as possible. And that's where the United States was superior.

Therefore, our people came out of the war as a more productive people, both through the war production efforts, and through the military experience. And they went out, and they built a society, a prosperous nation, on the basis of that upgrading of our population through military service.

During a similar period, during the 1930s, we had a thing called the CCCs. And we'd take people who were otherwise headed for gang life, or misery, and we put them in these military-like camps, in forestry and other things, and we gave them some background. For example, from Michigan, you had division, an entirely military division, that came virtually out of the CCCs, and just marched out of the CCC camps, went into military training, and went overseas as a division.

So, this kind of process.

Now, my military policy is strategic defense, and it's defined by Lazare Carnot, and Scharnhorst, and others earlier. I do not believe in unnecessary wars. I believe in strategic defense. But, I do believe in an adequate capability. But I also realize that the military, by having a military of that reserve—every citizen has his duty, or Selective Service kind of thing—by having that kind of program, we can use a military program, for developing an engineering force, because a good military force is primarily an engineering force. That's its essential capability. And we need to take a population which is paperwork oriented, or soft oriented, to be able to build things: to build bridges, to build systems, to build highways, and to do it with modern engineering.

We need to have a population reoriented, toward production, and toward technological production. So therefore, I have two things that I think are necessary. I've joined Charles Rangel, who proposed this, and I echoed it immediately: I said, we should restore military service. Why? Look at the mess in Iraq. I'll tell you what the problem is.

We have generals and colonels and so forth today, in the Army and Marine Corps, who by all standards are competent. But: What are we doing with our youth? Some of you may know about it. What happens is, the military will go into a family, a 17-year-old kid, and give a donation, or help, to the parents if the kid will sign up for military service. They go into military service, what do they get for training? They didn't get the benefits of my excellent training, they get something else. They got a computer. They've got video point-and-shoot training.

What are they good for? Point and shoot. They're like the Columbine killers! They were point-and-shoot experts. They were trained on these videos, which are military-style, point and shoot training. We have police forces, special units of police forces, which are dangerous. All they know is point and shoot. They get a suspect, and they'll unload every weapon they have, and then say, "What'd we do that for?" They just have this instinctive point and shoot.

So, we're sending point-and-shoot people into a situation which is largely an occupation, engineering job, and we didn't have the troops for it. We didn't have the Corps of Engineers. We used the little Corps of Engineers we had, for policemen, for traffic policemen, in Baghdad. So, we had no capability of occupying the country; we didn't have enough troops in there to do an occupation job, if we were going to do it, and the troops we had were not generally qualified to deal with that kind of situation, they weren't trained for it.

So, my view is, we need a military which is competently trained. We need to listen to the generals and colonels, about what an operation, before going to war. And when they say "Don't do it!" and give you a good reason why, don't do it! As the generals, and the Marine Corps generals, and the Army generals, said to Rumsfeld: "Don't do it! It's a mistake, it's horrible."

And the second thing is, we need to get a sense that this country is ours, and when you're in military service, even as a reservist, you sense that you're part of a country that is yours. It's not somebody else's army, it's your army. And you demand the kind of training which fits your requirements. And therefore, to me this idea of special programs of education, work and education, to get some of the people who are on drugs and so forth off the streets, out of the crime areas—get them out there, give them a future! Put them to work in ways that they can get their dignity back, and get some knowledge.

And also use the military with the idea of not having something that's going to go to war necessarily — something that's competent if it had to go to war, as in World War II—but the basic training is to produce a military Corps of Engineers, which would do, when emergencies come up of any kind, you have a military Corps of Engineers which is qualified to step in, and adapt itself to any task in the national interest, or be called upon as National Guard, by the governor for an emergency in a state. And that's the purpose.

QUESTION: I'm kinda talking about that too. Gen. Wesley Clark has a proposed program called Civil Reserves, which is kind of like the National Guard, but it's for civilians where they can volunteer their time. They can be called up like National Guard with job security and everything, and they can do civilian projects for the country, like fight wildfires, terrorist attack relief, and stuff like that, and to into humanitarian situations abroad. And that's a way of helping the country through civilian work, and non-military. Do you have a plan for civilian volunteerism? Because, I mean, President Bush has cut Americorps funding by 30%. Because not everybody wants to wield a gun, even if it's not really for shooting, so...

LAROUCHE: I know. Well, that's fine. I have no objection to that. It makes not difference. When people are taking some, what's called alternate service, fine. We have plenty of room. We don't have to get worried about that.

I'm not too enthusiastic about General Clark. He's a well-trained staff officer, but he's lousy in command. That's why we bounced him out of the Balkans. He made a mess of things. And he doesn't understand it.

The thing is simple. Don't come with these kind of programs. Go with a basic Corps of Engineers approach, to a strategic-defense-oriented military, with the idea of a national reserve, which is a reserve which can be used by the President, and the National Guard can deal with emergencies in that way. What I propose is, of course, a special training program, which is a better version, shall we say, of the CCCs, to deal with this other project, or projects. For emergencies, yes. For emergencies, the military is a reserve, and the reservists are part of that reserve. And therefore, yes, the National Guard, yes. But that's not the way to approach the program.

See, the problem is what Clark leaves out is, what kind of jobs do we need? What should the government do? Not just jobs.

What we need are, basic power generation and distribution. That's a big—we're talking about trillions of dollars, in capital investment, over a 25-year period, a 25-year cycle. Trillions. Remember, the national product of the United States is estimated in the order of magnitude of $11 trillion. That may be generous. But we're talking about something in the order of magnitude of more than the national income of the United States, being spent over the next 25-year cycle, in basic economic infrastructure. In things like power, water management. We have a great water project, if we get Canada into it, which will change the character of the United States, in terms of opening up new areas for development, in what's called the Great American Desert, which involves cooperation with Mexico, as well as Canada. We have that kind of project.

We need a national rail system. It's crazy. I mean, if you've been on the highways, maybe not in northern New Hampshire in the off-tourist season, but otherwise, we have—our superhighways are often parking lots, where people spend time. It's crazy! An efficient mass transit system, both for freight and for passengers, is an essential part of life, for communities, for urban communities, for inter-urban areas, and for long term. We must rebuild it. We should be building maglev, magnetic levitation, for very long-haul methods. We can do it. Germany is doing it. China is now doing it. China has a magnetically levitated railway system—we don't have one! They have one in Shanghai. We don't have one. I'd buy in China on that one.

So, we need this sort of thing. So, what we need is a program, somewhat like what Roosevelt conceived, but a program which has earmarked targets, which means investment. It means raising the capital investment, with Federal credit, run through various kinds of institutions like Jesse Jones' operation under Roosevelt. But these have to be kinds of projects, like the TVA project. So you have to come up with a menu of projects, which I'm doing. A menu of projects, and then say, how are we going to fill the job on these projects.

My big thing is to use the idea of building a Corps of Engineers, a military Corps of Engineers, around the military, for that purpose as such. And something in that direction will work.

Many people are kicking these things around now, because everybody knows you need a jobs program. But the problem is, that you have to find the right one, and the right jobs program is twofold: First of all, you've got to change the rules of business, the rules of taxation, to foster investment in the private sector. We've got to stimulate the national economy, with Federal and state projects, backed by the credit-creating capacity of the Federal government. And the basic thing therefore, is the military and other things, would play a part. And also a program such as an alternate service program, for projects. Define a project, and have an alternate service program for training in that project, and for implementing it. Fine. No problem.

QUESTION: Recently the Bush Administration has been slacking on with the EPA. I'd like to know what your feelings were about conservation, and if you're planning on developing railroads, how are you going to conserve? The United States area is 4% of the world's population, and we consume one-third of the world's natural resources. I just wanted to know what your feelings on conservation were?

LAROUCHE: Well, I'm involved in, I spend half my time outside the United States, and I'm involved with circles of governments in many parts of the world, including Asia, Russia, Europe, South and Central America, and so forth. And also with the Africa problem, which is a different dimension of problem, especially sub-Saharan Africa.

What we have now, is, in Europe, is something I got involved in, especially in 1998, when the Russian bond crisis occurred. I proposed that we should, I proposed actually to the Clinton Administration, that we should support a Strategic Triangle policy, of cooperation among Russia, China, and India, on the basis that such cooperation among three nation with somewhat different objectives, and different cultures, would create a basis for uniting cooperation, throughout Eurasia. Because Western Europe needed the market of development of Asia, seriously; they desperately need it. And therefore, you're talking about the major part of the world's population involved in Eurasia, with large nations, such as India, over a billion people. China, 1.3 billion at a minimum. Southeast Asia, a tremendous population. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and then the Koreas and Japan, and so forth.

So, and then you take Europe. This is the largest part of the world, is the Eurasian continent. That's what we're involved in.

My policy essentially has been, and I've been involved in this: I developed this policy called the Eurasian Land-Bridge policy, which was actually part of my work in 1988 on, with this content. For example:

You have all these populations. You have in China, 1.3 billion; India, 1 billion. Bangladesh, Southwest Asia, Myanmar, Indonesia, a large country, and so forth. Where are you going to get, for a growing population, with China moving more and more inland from the coastal areas, through infrastructure development, large-scale water projects, and so forth; where are you going to get the raw materials, the minerals, to meet the requirements of those coming generations? Of this large section of the world?

Well, that's in Central and North Asia. In Kazakhstan, in Russian Siberia—that's where the minerals are. Under tundra, in desert areas. There are also problems in managing minerals in this area. In some parts of the world, you know, most of the minerals we get, come from fossil deposits, that is, forms of life concentrate minerals, and when the forms of life die, in these stratified fossil areas, you get some of the minerals are located. Why? Because the animals, when they died, or the plants, when they died, left a concentration of these minerals. And that's how we find many of them.

Now, we are presently using up, in some categories, we're using up some of these minerals more rapidly than we can replace them. So, therefore, we have a great management problem—which actually goes into Russia's science, and geology, where they're experts in this area — in which we have to have a twofold program. One, the general development of Central and North Asia, as habitable territory, inhabited with industrial and similar development. That makes it possible for us to develop the use of areas of mineral resources.

We also then have to have a larger program, which is global in its implication, over the coming generation: of how are we going to manage the mineral requirements of this planet, since we're using up some minerals more rapidly than we can readily replace them? We can deal with that problem. It's a problem in advanced science; we know what the area is, the work has to be done.

So, therefore, what we will be doing, in the United States, for example, where we have tremendous mineral resources, in undeveloped areas of South America, for example, we will be cooperating with these areas of the world, scientifically and otherwise, to develop a global program for mineral resource management, to make sure we have the programs to use the kinds of minerals, or to replenish, or alter, the kinds of minerals we require, for future needs. And thus, we're able, then, to deal with the needs of countries like China, India, Bangladesh, and so forth, by assuring them that they have a future. And thus, we have a role to play, as the United States, in that respect.

We also have another role to play, as the United States. Ours—which some people don't know—ours is the only Constitutional republic, whose Constitution has not been overturned repeatedly, since ours was founded. No other part of the world has a Constitution as durable as ours. This durability lies in two things. First of all, we're a Presidential system, not a parliamentary system: that's one of our great strengths. When you assign executive functions to a parliament, as if you assign it, say, to the Congress, you will get a lousy government. It won't function.

You need checks and balances, which include the Congress, on the Federal function. But without our kind of Federal government you can't function—it's the best way, this way.

Secondly, now have durability. Every crisis will crack a parliamentary government. Our government is the only one that's capable, under our Constitutional system, to deal with that kind of crisis effectively, without a fundamental change in our Constitution.

Secondly, we are free, in principle, under our Constitution, from control by private banking interests. Admittedly, that has changed. That has been corrupted under Jackson, who brought in the Land Bank system, which was corruption. We were corrupted by the introduction of the Federal Reserve System, which has undermined our sovereignty to a significant degree. But under our system of government, where every other government in the world has troubles, when it comes to a financial crisis, when the debts are so great that they can't be paid, when you're under the control of the banking interests, they will say, "Let the people die, the debts get paid first."

If you're under the U.S. government, with a President like Roosevelt, you say, "The people come first. We'll manage the banking crisis. But the people come first, the general welfare comes first." It's a peculiarity of our system of government, which is relatively unique in the world, and therefore, despite what we've become, under some bad governments, bad Presidents, we are still the model republic for the world. Because things happened in Europe, it never really worked there, yet.

And therefore, we have two roles. We a historically determined role, despite the lousy performance we have now. We are a key republic for the world. We used to be admired by the world, before the present Administration, when Roosevelt was still alive. We were admired by the world, before. They wanted us, they trusted us. No more. But we still have a historically the position, that we are a nation to be trusted, when we are true to ourselves.

And therefore, we look at the problem of Eurasia, of trying to bring together diverse cultures, many nations representing diverse cultures; of dealing with the genocide in Africa; dealing with the crisis of Central America and South America: We in the United States, if we are committed, we can change the world. And I know it personally, because I'm in touch with many of these people. I know what we can do, I know what I can do as President. We have the people in the United States, who are available; I can throw a government together quite easily. We have people around the world, who are willing to cooperate with this kind of program. We can do it.

We are not the great power in numbers, but we're a great power in terms of an idea, the idea of the American Revolution, the idea of our Constitution, which is still a viable instrument. And with that instrument, we can be a force for good in the world. We can bring people together for cooperation, who will not otherwise come together for cooperation.

So, we are important. But we have to understand what our importance is, and when we try to use force to repress the rest of the world, we're no longer important.

MODERATOR: I think we have time for one more question.

QUESTION: I just want to say, I was a student at the University of New Hampshire years ago, and now a resident of Vermont. And Howard Dean is in this area, and making a big splash. A lot of people aren't convinced about his actual faith in ideas, versus just making the bottom dollar work. There's a certain bullying nature, people are anxious about. But what I've seen in this area, observed, is that many people that have very progressive ideas, and would leap at your answers—as I do, because I think they're the soundest ones out there—are swayed by the idea, or the concept, false concept, that they have to elect the candidate based on the most amount of following. And this is sort of a lemming approach, following the sense of build-up in momentum around one candidate, with the idea that their primary target is to beat Bush, no matter what.

I was just wondering if you could comment on the thinking, the fallacy in that thinking.

LAROUCHE: Well, you see, people think that they have to, they think that government is a delicatessen, and they go into the delicatessen, and they have to take what's offered in the delicatessen. They don't realize that our government is such that it doesn't belong to anyone, really, under our Constitution. The Constitution is something that the people who are elected, must conform to. Our government has an implicit mission-orientation, embedded in us, from the formation of the government, from Benjamin Franklin, and Europeans who supported us.

So, the person who becomes President finds that, instead of occupying the office, the office will occupy him. The office will take over the President. Because the President can't give orders. The President can give a command, give an Executive Order, but how is it carried out? It's carried out by a vast apparatus of government institutions, with the consent of the Congress. The President has special powers, but they lie in the institutions of government: the military, the intelligence services, the various departments of government. These institutions are the ones that actually make the Executive decisions that move things.

And when a President walks in there, he works for them. He's a part of the Constitutional system; he can make certain kinds of decisions, but he's limited by that.

So, therefore, the President is not usually as important as most Presidents think they are. He's a functionary of government. He's elected to serve for four years, but government goes on. He's part of the continuity of government, and has to have a sense of that mission.

Now, then you get these ideas that the parties control the government: the Democratic Party, or Republican party, control the candidacies. But that's not what our system was set up to be. There's no Constitutional provision for political parties, in the Constitution of the United States. There never was. They have no intrinsic Constitutional authority. They have no Constitutional right to determine a candidate. Anybody can. But they are convenient methods of association.

Now, we have a situation where the Democratic Party is disintegrating, and the question is, under the present Democratic National Committee, it's not, who's going to win the next election, but, who's going to lose it? Because you have people, instead of competing to win, they're competing to lose, by what they're doing in practice. All of the Democratic candidates I'm up against, are losers. They're not doing anything to win.

So, the question now is, the person has the myth that somehow there's a system, such as the news media, or some other system, that's going to determine who's a credible President. Well, a credible President depends upon having a credible population, a credible citizenry.

Let me go back one step, just to get this clear. The nature of history, the nature of government, is, it proceeds in long cycles. Why?

Because, often, popular opinion and institutions, make wrong policy decisions, as we made back in the middle of the 1960s, in going into the Vietnam War, and going from being a producer society to a consumer society. That was a mistake! This mistake became popular. It became more and more popular. Changes occurred. Deregulation. So-called free trade. These were insane ideas—they became popular. They were taught.

So, now the American people have destroyed themselves over 40 years, with bad ideas that most of them have adopted. Eighty percent of the population hates the policies, because they're suffering under them! But they still believe they're obliged to go along with it, because it is so-called "official popular opinion."

Now, then you come at the end of a cycle, where bad ideas, like bad axioms in a geometry, will lead to a crisis, sooner or later. Then, somebody has to make a change. We are now in a time of change. The reason the Democratic candidates, I'm running against are so bad, is not that all of them are bad. Some of them are not bad. Some of them are, for ordinary times, very good. A Kerry would be a good man for ordinary times. But they're not measuring up to the fact of the situation.

We're in a time of fundamental change. We have to go from being a consumer society, to being a producer society. We have to go from a consumer society, on its way to Hell, by way of war, to a society going back to prosperity, and peace. This means a change in the assumptions of behavior held by most of the population. The person who is qualified to be a President, is the person who goes out there, and changes, or is qualified, to change the ideas of the people about their own ideas. It's to convince the people, it's time to change their own opinion.

So, popular opinion, or convention, should never be allowed to govern who is the President. Somehow, sooner or later—and you have to be patient around this, as I can tell you—sooner or later, you have to have the right ideas, but you have to have patience. Because if the country's going to survive, sooner or later, they're going to accept the change in ideas. And they're going to accept the person who is qualified to implement, not accepted ideas, but the necessary changes in ideas, the way they elected Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

And, in a sense, I'm analogous to Roosevelt in 1932. And I have all of the people against me, who were against Roosevelt in 1932, or the comparable people. And if I make it, we make it. If I don't make it, I don't know whether we make it or not.

That's the way history is. Nations go down. They pay terrible penalties for mistakes. The Germans made a mistake, when they allowed Hitler to stay in office, in 1933! Because when the Reichstag Fire occurred, Hitler became a dictator, and world history was determined. The German people did not have the sense to react against Hitler at that time; before, they had a chance to do so.

And that's often the case in history. The penalty is, you make a change in a nation, when you have to, when the time comes that you have to make the change, against bad ideas, bad habits. You have to have people who will lead the charge, on changing habits. And you have to have a population who's willing to accept that change. That's all I can do, all anyone can do. I do the best I can.

Thank you. Thank you all. [applause]

Lyndon LaRouche gave the following address, by telephone hookup, to Youth Movement cadre schools in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina, on Nov. 23, 2003.

There is a problem, which is international, with existing populations, partly because of a general defect in popular culture and in public and higher education: That people today, generally, do not have a practical understanding of the difference between man and a beast. And I speak of this difference now, as it applies to politics.

The point is, that animals can not develop ideas. Not in the sense that human beings have ideas; they're incapable of it. An animal dies; it leaves no personality behind, except in the memory of human beings, who may be associated with that animal. But, a human being, as Plato said, is capable of doing something no animal can do.

So, man is capable of discovering ideas, typified by—and I've used the example many times—is the principle of universal gravitation, which was uniquely discovered by Kepler, not by anybody else. Kepler discovered this, by looking at things, such as the apparent looping of the orbit of Mars, which showed that there is no regular sense-perceptual system to the Solar System. And therefore, the behavior of the Solar System had to be located in something external to perception, but which could be formulated as an idea. And once you understood the idea of this efficient presence, which itself you could not see with your senses, then we had a notion of universal gravitation.

Everything else we know, in terms of principles of the physical universe as such, and in terms of the principles of society—that is, as opposed to opinions about society—but the principles which will make a society effective: All of these things are invisible to sense-perception. To animal-like sense-perception in human beings. They exist only in the mind of the human being.

Now, if a human being were an ape, there would never have been more than several million human beings living on this planet, at any time, during the past 2 million years or so, and under the conditions we know of the past 2 million years. Today, we have reported over 6 billion people as living on this planet. This means that there's some difference between man and an ape, a fundamental difference, a difference of three decimal orders of magnitude, right now. The difference is, that we, by discovering two kinds of principles, are able to do two things: We're able to change the relationship of the individual's behavior to nature, as through the discovery of physical principles; and we're able to have concerted action by society, in making those changes of man's relationship to nature, through the discovery of social principles, such as the principles of the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States. Which is a universal, physical principle, discovered by man, and applied to design a nation-state on the basis of that principle.

Without these two kinds of principles, society does not function. That is, without the sense of the individual's relationship, physical relationship to the universe; and also, the individual's relationship to the universe through social processes, which are governed by discoverable social principles, which have the same force and effect as principles of natural science.

In the latter case, the best example of these kinds of social principles, is uniquely, Classical forms of artistic composition: No form of artistic composition, except the Classical, has a correspondence to natural principles. All other notions of social relations, or artistic composition, are unnatural principles. That is, they have no basis in the natural organization of the universe.

All right, so this is the difference between man and the ape.

Now, obviously the important thing here, the difference between having, say, several million individuals as human beings on the planet, and over 6 billion today, is that we, by discovering and applying these principles, are able to achieve this affect. We do this, because ideas developed over many thousands of generations before us, have transmitted their contributions to our knowledge of universal principles, to us through culture. This includes artistic culture. It includes political culture, and so forth. And, through physical ideas.

Looking Back Generations

So therefore, to understand a person, today, you have to understand what culture is embodied in their development, as something more than a piece of flesh, as something more than a beast. Now, for this reason, to understand the problems of the world today, you have to look back, immediately, several generations. For example, to understand the history of European civilization, including that of the Americas, you have to go back to the 18th Century, and earlier, but particularly the 18th Century. Because that's when the crisis which we face today was born.

Now, as you recall, or should recall, in the 18th Century, you had a King of Spain, Charles III, who was a good king, and who fought for the improvement of the lives of people, inclusively, in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. He was replaced by kings who were not so good, and by a Spanish 18th-Century monarchy, which widely promoted slavery. The Spanish monarchy was one of the chief vehicles for the capture and import of African slaves into the Americas, including the United States. That's during the 18th Century.

And this continued until Abraham Lincoln stopped it, and until the overthrow of Maximilian, in Mexico, and the restoration to power of Benito Juárez stopped the process, as well. Or, began to end it, essentially, in the Caribbean area. And, then later in the century, the Spanish monarchy, finally, abandoned the practice of officially sponsoring the trafficking of African slaves into the Americas.

So, we go back to this period.

Now, what happened? Why did this change, in the policy which created the United States, where Charles III of Spain supported the independence of the United States, together with the King of France, and others? Why did this change come? Why the problems? Why didn't the founding of the United States result in the spread of independent republics, immediately, back into Europe, as well as throughout the Americas? What was the problem?

And therefore, our history, today, what we experience inside ourselves, is most immediately a reflection of more than two centuries, of the extended history of modern European civilization. And, of course, lots of things before then—2,000 years before. But, to understand why we behave, why we as peoples, why we as nations, change our behavior, we have to look back at the accumulation of cultural paradigms, which were built into us, by transmission, from generations—of older generations still living, but also many generations which are long dead.

And these effects are built into us: For example, language. The development of language, is a process of culture, which is transmitted over many generations, which starts with people who are long dead. For example, Spanish started with Italian, principally. It started with Italian, of Italian soldiers as Roman soldiers, as in France, who settled in the southern part of France and in Spain. And, since they were Italian, and therefore tended to speak Italian in their homes—not Latin—the language is a combination of the natural people's language—Italian, the predominant language of the period of Italy in the Roman Empire—and then, added to that, technical terms which were imposed by Roman rule. So that, the Spanish, French, Italian language today, is a combination of Latin words imposed upon an Italian popular root. Therefore, that's what our language represents, in this case.

So, we have to understand this transmission of culture, including language, and its development, over many successive generations. And what we speak, the way we speak, the way we communicate, reflects this embedded in us, to the transmission of culture, in the family, in society, and so forth. And, by studies, of course.

The 'Venetian Party'

So now, look at what happened to us generally. Go back just to what I referred to often as the end of the 18th Century: The United States had just then, formulated the final phase of its adoption of a Constitution, the Federal Constitution. This was formulated first in 1787, and was completed in 1789. Now, at this point, the intention was, in France and elsewhere, to use the example of the American Revolution, the establishment of the U.S. republic, as a model for the reform of the nations of Europe.

But, something stepped in: The British monarchy, or rather, the British East India Company, which is otherwise known as the Venetian Party—that is, the name by which ruling forces in England identified themselves, was as "the Venetian Party." The Venetian Party was also a name used to identify the so-called culture of the 18th Century: The so-called 18th-Century Enlightenment, was a morally degenerate form of culture, called the French and English Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which was typified by England under George I, II, and III; or better said, under Lord Shelburne, who was the chief political figure of that century, the middle and latter part of that century, in dominating the British system, and also in the role he played in Europe.

Now, this Shelburne, from the British East India Company, intervened into France, as well as into the Americas, beginning in 1763, at the time that France was defeated by England on the seas, signed a peace treaty, and Shelburne launched a policy of destroying the possibility of the emergence of an independent nation in North America—that is, the United States. And also the spread of the American model into Europe, especially through the destruction of France, which the British monarchy (or actually, the British Empire at that time) saw as its chief continental European rival, the chief threat to British imperial rule over continental and adjoining Europe.

So, what this fellow did, this Lord Shelburne, he organized the French Revolution, every essential part of it: From 1789, the storming of the Bastille was done by agents of Lord Shelburne, under his personal direction. The Jacobin Terror was done by Shelburne, or under the direction of Shelburne, through people like Jeremy Bentham. Napoleon was brought into power, through the organization of Shelburne. So, the entire history of Europe, from 1789, particularly from July 14, 1789, through the Vienna Congress, was organized by Shelburne.

Out of this process, there emerged, what was called then the Martinist cult, a form of freemasonry, which was later renamed as Synarchism; which was later spread into, for example, in part, into Mexico through Maximilian. Maximilian was actually an agent of what we would call Synarchism, at his time: Introduced by a follower of Napoleon Bonaparte, his nephew Napoleon III, with the aid of the Spanish monarchy, and with the backing of the British, and of course with the Hapsburg family involved, also.

At a later point, the Synarchist International was used in the organization of World War I. It was also the key to the existence of fascism, from 1922, with Mussolini, through 1945. It was Synarchism which was run by the Nazis, through Franco's Spain, into Mexico, and by way of Mexico, into all of South America. It's where the pro-Nazi organization, the Synarchist International, operated in the Americas in that period.

Today again, the Synarchist International, as represented by the forces, or the so-called forces around Cheney, who are looking for preventive nuclear warfare, as a way of dominating the planet: This is an expression of Synarchism. The neo-conservatives, who tend to dominate the present Bush Administration, around Cheney: These are Synarchists.

Civilization vs. Synarchism

So therefore, what you have today, in terms of the immediate political culture, the immediate conflicts in society, in Europe, in the Americas, and by reflection, worldwide, we have a war between civilization and Synarchism. Synarchism, the same Synarchism, which gave us Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, the Pétain government, the Laval government in Europe; the same Synarchism that invaded Mexico through the Nazi Party and through Franco, the same Synarchism is now threatening civilization again.

That is our essential strategic problem.

In the process—come up closer to the present; what happened to us, just to review what I've said many times, on many occasions, around the country and around the world: The problem started with a fellow called Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell is very influential—he's very evil, but he was very influential. For example, he was, in a sense, the author of this religious cult around Norbert Wiener, the so-called "information theory." The same kind of religious cult around John von Neumann, of systems analysis, this whole branch of modern economics, of the idea of synthetic intelligence, or artificial intelligence.

This guy was against the existence of the nation-state: He hated the United States. He was determined to create a world empire. This form of world empire he conceived was called "world government." That was not an original idea, with Russell. The idea of world government and empire are interchangeable ideas. They mean the same thing: The idea of a universal system of law, imposed from the top-down on what had been nations or nationalities, is a form of imperialism, in the same sense as the Roman Empire, in the same sense as feudalism under the combination of Venice and its Norman allies, over the period from about the time of the Norman Conquest of England, up through the modern civilization.

So, this is the problem, this fight.

Most recently, what happened with Russell, is that Russell devised the idea, together with his buddy, H.G. Wells—who was a bit of a pig, himself—and they devised the idea of using nuclear weapons, or developing them and using them, as weapons so terrible, that the people of the world would submit to world government, as a way of avoiding being hit by nuclear weapons. At the close of the Second World War, the war concluded with the deployment of those nuclear weapons, by a pig, who was then President of the United States, Harry Truman, against the civilian populations of two cities of Japan: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was no military reason, which required or justified, the use of those weapons on that occasion. The reason it was done, was to terrify the world, and to commit the United States to a policy of threatening to conquer the entire world, by threatening preventive nuclear war—the specific language adopted by Russell, and used by Russell, to explain his policy.

From that time on, the United States, and many other countries, were divided, by two political currents: One was the traditional military current, which at that time, was typified by Generals of the Armies Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, as leading generals. On the other side, the opponents of this military tradition of civilization—the so-called tradition of classical strategic defense—were these so-called Utopians, the followers of Bertrand Russell, who were determined to use nuclear weapons, to bring about the establishment, through terror, of world government.

Now, these people, the Utopians, were all Synarchists. They were controlled by bankers behind the scenes, whose idea of world government was based on the interest of that kind of private banking, as usury. As we see, throughout the Americas today, you see the debt of the nations of South and Central America, is all illegitimate. The outstanding debt claims against these countries, are far in excess of anything they ever owed. That is, these countries have already more than paid off, the debts which existed, say, by 1982. They're paid off. The debts that exist in these nations today, are artificial debts, imposed by syndicates of private bankers, who have used institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF to artificially impose these debts on these countries.

This is the Synarchist character. This is the thing we're up against.

The Cultural Paradigm-Shift

Now, why do people put up with it? Well, take another step: As a result of the terror, of the Missile Crisis of 1962, the assassination of Kenney, the launching of the Indochina War, a section of the U.S. and European populations, and also spilling into Central and South America, the young people who were then in the process of becoming adults, such as university students, at that period, went crazy. They went crazy, because of the effects of the terror they'd lived through: the Missile Crisis, the launching of the Indochina War, and things related to that.

As a result of that, we went through a change, in the United States and Britain first; then later, spilling over into continental Europe and into the Americas—a change from a belief in a producer society, into a belief in a post-industrial or consumer society. What happened is, that the United States and Britain, or the bankers there, said: We're not going to pay people to work in our countries much longer. We're going to shut down our industries, and instead get our things we need, manufactured products and food, from other countries, who will work as slaves for us, because we have reduced the value of their currency, artificially. And they now work as virtual slaves, as cheap labor, as you see, in the slave-relationship of much of the population of Mexico and the Mexican economy, to the United States, under this system. Where the United States has shut down much of its industry, much of its agriculture, and depends upon the cheap-labor products that it extracts from other parts of the world.

The U.S. economy, of course, is now disintegrating. The world economy is disintegrating, because of that arrangement. But therefore, to understand ourselves, we have to understand some things. We have to understand, that many people today accept the idea of globalization. They accept the idea of post-industrial society. They accept the idea of free trade. They accept the idea of deregulation. They accept the idea of so-called "natural energy systems," as opposed to modern energy systems. Where do these crazy ideas come from? It comes out of history. It comes out of this long process, in which the nations of European cultural extraction, emerged in the 18th Century—again, after the period of the religious wars of 1511 to 1648—emerged as a great force in culture, the greatest force that world civilization had ever known, in terms of productive potential, in terms of the improvement of the conditions of mankind. But then, the French and British Enlightenment, as typified by Lord Shelburne, the British East India Company, and the forces behind the French Revolution of 1789-1815 decided to try to turn the clock back, in a form which includes what we call Synarchism today. The destruction of civilization.

And, what has happened? We have had many steps upward, by humanity. There's been much progress during this period, since 1789 to the present. But there has also been much retrogression. And, since the assassination of Kennedy, the Missile Crisis, and the beginning of the Indochina War, the direction of civilization has been—in Europe, the Americas, in particular—has been chiefly downward.

People, therefore, today believe, in standards of behavior, in ideas, which have been foisted upon them by this so-called cultural paradigm-shift—a cultural paradigm-shift which coincides with the influence of Synarchism. If we respond, if we say, we are going to be governed by popular opinion, or prevailing, generally accepted opinion up to now, we will destroy ourselves. Therefore, to understand ourselves, we have to decide, who are we? Are we the junk, the garbage, which is dumped upon us, in the typical university classroom or other classroom today, or by the international mass media? Is that who we are? People who believe in that garbage? If so, we are going to be destroyed, self-destroyed.

Take the example of the United States: I'm running for President. Do you know, there's not a single rival candidate for President, who's fit to be President? Not because, say, Kerry, who is a Senator and who is also a rival of mine, is not generally considered a competent politician. He is. But, he is stuck, with adherence to a philosophy of government, a cultural philosophy, which dooms the United States. Other candidates running for office, rivals, are worse. Or less good, or worse.

I'm the only candidate who is qualified to become President of the United States, if the United States is to survive. That's a cultural phenomenon. Why? Why? Because I'm such a genius? Well, that's not the case. Because I resisted, rejected, the cultural process which led to this self-destructive role of the United States. I'm the only matured politician, who has the influence and the knowledge, to turn the United States back from depression, to recovery, in the sense that Franklin Roosevelt did back in the 1930s.

But, the problem here is, that I've got to deal with the American population: I've got to induce them to change what they believe. I've got to educate them out of their bad opinion, their self-destructive opinions.

Habituated Thinking

You have a similar situation in Mexico, it's a little different, but it's similar. In other parts of the Americas, similar, but different. In each country, you've had the conditioning of the population, to accept as conditions of life, as almost natural conditions, ways of behaving which would ensure the perpetuation of a process of self-destruction of these nations, including the United States. The problem is, the belief that you must accept this, is deeply embedded in the habituated thinking of the people themselves. Therefore, if you're appealing to popular opinion, you're going to lead the people to their self-destruction, like leading cattle into the safety of the slaughterhouse.

Therefore, you have to lead people against their opinion! Against popular opinion.

Take the case of the United States. The key to the United States, is the fact that 80% of the lower family-income brackets of the United States are living under depressed conditions. Their conditions of life have become progressively worse. Politics has been largely located, in the upper 20% of family-income brackets; whereas, the lower 80% sort of goes along, or simply impotently rejects the political process. Now therefore, the key to politics in the United States, which I'm following, is to go directly to the people—not through the controlled mass media—but directly to the people, especially the people of the lower 80% of family-income brackets, among those parts of that population, the lower income brackets, who are more sentient, more responsive. And also, other individuals in society, who are people of conscience—maybe from the upper 20%—who are people of conscience, who also respond.

So therefore, you have to make an overturn, in the social process, an overturn, in which the upper 20% of family-income brackets have been ruling the United States, to a system in which the lower 80% are given justice, and given expression of their vital interest, as the interest of the nation.

To do this, we have to understand several things, and what I emphasize in the lecture circuit in campaigning, is to make people aware, of what the present three living adult generations represent: That is, you have my generation, people under 90 years of age—my generation; you have a generation of my children, the people who are now in their 50s—that age-group; and then, a younger generation, of 18 to 25, the so-called university-eligible age-group. These are the three politically significant layers inside the United States, in particular.

Now, my job, as a candidate, is to appeal to all three of these layers simultaneously, with the greatest emphasis on the youth. Why? Because, if people understand what my generation has gone through, and understand why the moral decadence of the second generation, my children's generation—why they decayed morally and intellectually, then, to turn to the last generation—the young ones, the ones who are now between 18 and 25—who now recognize that their parents' generation has given them a no-future society, and they know, if they're sentient, that they have to change the way this society is going, or there is no future for them, or for any children or grandchildren they have. And therefore, the problem here, is, to somehow get the generation which dominates the institutions of government, the generation of my children, to accept an impulse of leadership from a generation of young adults, of this 18-to-25 youth generation. That is, to recognize, that the youth generation has the right, to demand of their parents' generation, a joint effort to change society, so that we all have chance to survive.

And the way to get this clear, is to get the young ones, and the ones of my children's generation, to recognize the historical process of cultural change, which I have experienced, which each of them has experienced, and to see this all as one continuous process. And, in the meantime, to use that experience, to guide them to look back further, more deeply into the history of European civilization, in particular: to see where ideas came from, beginning with ancient Greece, for example, the Greece of Pythagoras, the Greece of Thales, the Greece of Solon, the Greece of Socrates and of Plato. To see, tracing from there, and from the Egyptian culture which informed Greek scientific thinking, see how the whole process of European civilization, with its ups and downs, has evolved, to bring us into existence today. And to recognize that, inside ourselves, that we are not animals, that we embody within us, large elements of the culture, which had been transmitted in some accumulated way, from successive generations to the present.

Then, we understand ourselves as human, which unfortunately, too few people today, do.

And that's my essential message.

Dialogue with LaRouche

Here is a brief excerpt from the discussion that followed LaRouche's presentation.

Question: Yesterday, we were discussing, what is the soul in the human being? But, we also were discussing how Leibniz defined the fact that some animals also have souls? So, I didn't quite understand that part, so I would like you to talk about that. Also something else, which I was asking myself: If Gauss understood in the same terms in which Schiller writes the "Aesthetical Letters of Man"? Did he understand with that same vision as Schiller personally? How would you comment in this regard?

LaRouche: Well, Schiller was a genius, a true genius, in the sense of being an individual who developed ideas which were unique in his time and place, who also uplifted the conception of drama, from the foundations given to him by ancient Greece and also Shakespeare, in particular, to get to this conception of the Sublime....

Maria Stewart is an example of this. The case of Jean d'Arc, is the most famous, and simple, and clearest examples of this. That the individual, faced with a crisis, is capable of finding that their fundamental self-interest is located in what they do for humanity. That mortal life is short, but there's an immortal aspect to human life, which is immortal, and that is what we represent with respect to preceding and coming generations. What do we do while we are visiting this mortal planet, that gives satisfaction to the aspirations of those who went before us? Which solves the problems left unsolved by generations before us? And which provides a foundation upon which a better future can be built by humanity. This idea of the Sublime: That you locate your identity not in what you experience within your biological existence as such, but what you develop under the circumstances of your biological existence, which is of external value. And therefore, you find the true meaning, true self-interest.

Schiller made this clear; he made this clear with his drama; he made it clear with his politics. The important thing about Schiller, which is an idea which Shakespeare would have accepted, but which is unique to him, is that Schiller developed this concept of the Sublime, as a true self-interest of mankind, and developed this as a method of popular education, using Classical drama. That is, Schiller never composed a drama in the way that Shakespeare is often explained in universities, in my lifetime as a student, and earlier, and later. The influence on the English language, of course, you would have people who I was opposed to, like Bradley and Coleridge, and people like that: Romantics.... Romantic interpretation of aesthetic or morality examples. Schiller did not do that. Schiller approached everything from the standpoint of the Sublime, or as a negation of the Sublime—the true tragic principle.

For example, I just gave you an example of this in my outline on the history of culture since the 18th Century, of European culture as it exists in the Americas today. Therefore, to understand the tragedy of European civilization, since the 18th Century, you have to see the tragedy as posed, as if on the stage, by the disgusting immorality of the French and British 18th Century Enlightenment. And then, you have to see the struggle to free European civilization from this tragic force of the Enlightenment, this corruption, this degradation. You see the struggle upward, in the case of the support from around the world of the American Revolution, as typified by the support from France, the support from Charles III of Spain. An upward struggle. Then you see this terrible thing happens: The French Revolution, organized by Shelburne and company from London. We see to the present time this degeneracy, a worsened form of Enlightenment culture, this degeneracy—pulsations of it have taken over. And now it has brought us to the virtual end of the existence of civilization.

Therefore, to put this on the stage, in such a way that the audience is sitting on the stage, looking from their imagination, lifting themselves up from being little people on the street, into being people in society, looking at society over the long term, over generations, and seeing the mistakes, and seeing the challenges which man has faced. And seeing the role of the Sublime, the role of leadership of this quality, of pulling man through these crises, to levels of safety. That is the way in which to see this.

Now, going back to the question of the individual soul. As I said, the individual soul can be defined in only one meaningful way. There are many ways in which this is described, and most of it is nonsense. It's taught as nonsense, probably by priests who don't understand what the soul is anyway, so they try to give an explanation despite their ignorance of the subject. The soul is simply the fact that the faculty of mankind, which in the first instance, is capable of discovering universal physical principles as Kepler did, for example; and doing this not only for man's individual relationship to the physical universe, mentally, but also in terms of soul processes. That's one aspect. No other creature has this capability.

In the animals in general, the animal dies with its death as a mortal creature. Man does nothing with his or her death. Man may live on, through the work he does in influencing the domain of ideas, the domain beyond the mortality of biological life. That's the difference.

Now, in terms of the animal soul. Well, the animal can get a soul as Nicholas of Cusa emphasized, by the concept of participation. Cusa used the conception of man's participation in God, as the animal's participation in man. That is, when you adopt a puppy or kitten, especially a puppy—puppies are much better at this; kittens are much more asocial, essentially. Dogs tend to be a little more social in their behavior, as some of you know. But, when you take a dog who, met in the wild, is a very nasty fellow, more or less like a wolf, hmm? But you raise a dog from a puppy, you humanize the creature. The creature depends upon you. With its own little doggie way, it finds a way of participating in you. It becomes an emotional reaction to you, an emotional reaction with you, and therefore, we see a reflection in the animal of that. You see this also in the relationship of the farmer to his horse or even to his cow, who he may slaughter later on, or the donkey. (I like the donkeys very much on this thing.) They participate in you, they look at you, they depend on you. They act to please you, so to speak, they act to help you.

For example, we have a donkey here. The donkey's called Ambrose....

Now, the horse was feeling sick, and the horse fell down. The horse is old, it's arthritic, it's stiff, and so forth. Ambrose went over to the horse, and Ambrose nudged the horse, and he bit the horse in the rump: "Get up!" As if he sensed that the horse's life was menaced if he didn't get up. You know, it's bad for horses, when they're sick, to lie down like that, at least for long periods. So, he's concerned about the horse.

Ambrose would be concerned about us, too. He would be concerned about our dogs. So, they participate in us, in the sense that their participation in us, through our cultivation of them, projects qualities which are human-like, into them. But they never achieve the power of reason. They have a certain kind of animal insight, but it's not human reason.

So, the attempt to find the human soul as a product of the animal soul, is a mistake. More adequate would be, that we give to the animal a sense of soul, when we take an animal, such as the horse that works for us, the ox, or a mule—we give them a sense of soulness, through participation in us, and therefore they participate in our soul. And thus, as man participates in the Creator, so these creatures, as Cusa put it, participate in us.

The General Welfare

Question: I want to ask you why only the Western artistic conception corresponds to the human conception of the universe? And, how can we get the human character in the different Latin American nations, with traditions and philosophies which are also millenarian?

LaRouche: Millenarian philosophies and traditions are a disease, not a culture in the ordinary sense. They don't belong to human beings. The problem here is this: Remember, there's been a long struggle of humanity, to do what? To free man from forms of culture in which the majority of people were treated as human cattle, either as wild human cattle to be hunted down, or herded human cattle to be raised, used, and culled, as necessary. So therefore, prior to the emergence of the idea of the modern state in Greece, the prevalent culture of every part of the world we know, was an inhuman culture, in the sense that it treated the majority of the human species, not only of other nations and languages, but its own, as human cattle. That problem persists to the present day.

So the idea of the modern nation-state, as typified by the influence of Solon, and by the work of Socrates against the Sophists, and by Plato, gave birth to the idea of the republic. It's a nation which is accountable, and government which is accountable, to the general welfare of all of the people, and their posterity. In other words, a government which is committed to the service of the upward progress of humanity, and of the condition of the individual in human society. This progress depends on developing a notion of two facets. One, a notion of truth, a notion of absolute truth. Second, a specific notion of truth, of the truth that man and animal are completely different forms of existence. Man is not something that evolved from an animal, or from animal processes. Man has a quality which we call reason, that is, the power to discover universal physical principles, and to apply them, which no animal species has, which no living process per se has, as a living process. This is something which has intervened in the universe, into the existence of an animal form of life called humanity, which has something which is human, not just animal. And that is this power of reason, this power of discovery.

Therefore, the composition of society, and the notion of truth, are inseparable from this quality of reason which is typified, for example, by Carl Gauss's attack on Euler and Lagrange, in Gauss's 1799 paper on the question of the fundamental theorem of algebra, on the question of the complex domain.

So, therefore, there is only one conception of truth, and this is specific to the nature of man.

Now, most of the cultures of this planet are still cultures which are based predominantly on traditions of treating most people as cattle. For example: In Mexico, how are most of the people of Mexico treated today? As human cattle, not as citizens! The exploitation, the maquiladoras, the way the Mexican population is herded across the border. Oh sure, Mexicans do good work for the United States. We depend upon them! Somebody says they exploit the United States? We depend upon them! Who's going to do the work for us?

But the point is, the struggle is that Mexico must be sovereign. It lost its sovereignty in 1982. The swan song of Mexico's sovereignty was the great address by President Lopez Portillo, to the United Nations in October of 1982. After that, after the defeat of me, and of Lopez Portillo, Mexico lost its sovereignty. Now, there are still Mexicans who believe in sovereignty, and will fight for it. And I'm all with them. But the fact is, the problem exists.

The same problem exists in Venezuela, where certainly the people are not treated as sovereign. They have a couple of oligarchies squabbling over the spoils, like vultures over the dying, over the people of Venezuela. This Chavez thing is a monstrous thing. This terrible situation in Colombia; the fact that there is no option provided in Bolivia to help people get out of the grip of the cocaleros . Look what's happening to Argentina. This is immoral! What's happening in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa: It's immoral! It's done by the United States and Britain, in particular; and Israel. What is done in most of the world is immoral, still today. People are still treated as human cattle. And the principle—the difference between man and an animal—must be the law. It is natural law. And any action which is contrary to that law, should be nullified, is unlawful. Any cultural tradition which is contrary to that, which bases itself on human pleasure, sense-certainty, is immoral. It's rotten. Only a Classical humanist culture.

Now, look at the history of mankind from that standpoint. How old is Classical culture? It's very old. It's as old as the human race, undoubtedly. Always, the way the human race has survived, has been this impulse, of some, at least, to recognize human nature for what it is, and to try to order the processes of society, accordingly. There's always been this struggle to find the true principles of the universe. But this struggle has been limited essentially to a few. Sometimes, the ruling stratum is dedicated to this idea, as you see in the case of the Classical culture in ancient Greece. There were people who were dedicated to this conception. But Greece didn't achieve it. But the idea of it existed in Greece.

The Negro Spiritual

You find, for example, in the United States, you have the case of the so-called Negro Spiritual. The Negro Spiritual was a product of several things. It was a product of an intersection, largely, of African cultures, cultures embodied in African people, intersecting the culture of the United States. When this was looked at, at the end of the 19th Century, by great musicians, it was recognized that there was, in the Negro Spiritual, as it evolved as a body of practice, from among slaves, originally, that this contained a Classical principle: an aspiration for the affirmation of the distinction of man from the beast. And a self-affirmation of one's role in that. And therefore, you saw in this, in the Negro Spiritual, often great beauty, which was refined and honed, to become an integral part of Classical culture by some of the great musicians of our time, particularly of the 20th Century. As opposed to the so-called pop-art, or pop-culture, which is drug-related degeneracy.

So, all through humanity, there is a Classical principle. What we have, fortunately, in European civilization, in the development of the Classical principle based on the heritage of ancient Greece and its influence, and based on the development since the Renaissance in particular, the highest level of development of Classical culture, has occurred within European civilization, because of our successes, our political successes, in particular, of the type which were impelled by the examples of ancient Classical Greece. So therefore, we're more advanced in terms of science and arts, than other parts, non-European parts of the world, but the Classical principle, is intrinsic to humanity. It just is more or less well developed, according to the circumstances, whether it finds itself as a seed, or on fertile or impoverished ground.

LYNDON LAROUCHE AT MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE

Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche addressed a college audience in Middlebury, Vermont on Nov. 14. The event was sponsored by the Middlebury College Democrats. Opening the meeting were Laura Kelly and John Brand, co-presidents of the College Democrats.

KELLY: Welcome to this afternoon's presentation. I'm Laura Kelly and this is Jon Brand, and we are co-presidents of the Middlebury College Democrats. Today's forum is one of a series of events that will be facilitated by the College Democrats, in order to increase dialogue, regarding the Presidential primary. The views expressed by the speakers throughout the series are not reflective of the positions or beliefs of the College Democrats organization, or its members. In accordance with our mission statement, this series will stimulate an active interest in politics, promote awareness and participation in all levels of the democratic process, and ideally, increase social awareness, and voter registration.

BRAND: The exposure to a full spectrum of views is obviously the point of the democratic process, as well as broader academic learning, both on and off Middlebury's campus. Recognizing that the democratic process rests upon the responsibility as participants, we ask that present individuals, regardless of personal views, conduct themselves in a respectful manner towards all those involved.

Today's forum will begin with a talk by eight-time Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, and followed by a question and answer session. We have provided index cards on all of your seats for questions, which you can pass forward towards the conclusion of Mr. LaRouche's speech.

KELLY: And first, to introduce Mr. LaRouche is Bruce Marshall, who has introduced us to the entire LaRouche campaign. So, without further ado, Bruce.

BRUCE MARSHALL: Thank you, and welcome. Hello, everyone.

Middlebury College was the first institution of higher education in this country, to call for the abolition of slavery, a legacy to uphold. It is befitting that the Middlebury College Democrats have so invited our speaker here today, thus sending a historically significant message of fair play, which the Democratic Party's other Presidential candidates, and mainstream media, have patently ignored. It is the abolition of slavery in its many variations—the slavery of economic injustice, the slavery of war, but more importantly, the slavery against the mind, which is the most important thing that's hurting our world today. It is the life, passion, and work of Mr. LaRouche to save this country, and rectify these evils.

So, today, I'd like to introduce Mr. LaRouche, who's a great teacher, perhaps one of the greatest living today, a Promethean genius, that genius being that he is so proven, and brought forth, in the tradition of Plato, that genius can be taught. It is the message of truth and freedom that so invigorates the international youth movement. And it was that with desire which I wished to bring to this college, and so made contact with the Middlebury College Democrats.

These is no mere animal race between mules and pachyderms. This is a true concern for the future of not only humanity—well, it is humanity, it's the universe.

It's Mr. LaRouche, live at the Chateau! [applause]

LAROUCHE: Thank you all. In order to squeeze in as much as we can in this scheduled event, I shall limit myself to four basic things. First, I shall summarize three points, the three points which I believe are most crucial for the United States at this time, for choosing policies, Presidents, members of Congress, and so forth. Then I shall turn to the third of these themes, which is on the subject of the generation gap, and the problem it represents in politics today.

The first three themes are, in themselves: first of all, we have unnecessary war. We are now in the grip of the Vice-President's policy, a policy which was not invented by the President, but has historically the policy of the Vice-President, Mr. Cheney, and is associated with the neo-conservatives. That policy is preventive nuclear war. And we are in the process of a spreading preventive nuclear war. This has led to a deep division between the United States and the nations of Eurasia. The United States is at its lowest ebb, known to me, in modern history, in relations with its traditional partners in Europe, and with Asia, over the policies which have been more actively pressed, since President Bush's speech, State of the Union speech, in January of 2002.

The situation became aggravated, by the developments in September of 2002. It was aggravated further, by the break with the United Nations Organization in having an unnecessary war, over the objections of the United Nations Security Council, when that negotiation should have continued. As we see today, with the mess in Iraq, it was a mistake for us to go into that war. And now, we're going to have to turn to the nations which we opposed, in the United Nations Security Council, to get us out of this war.

I'll come to that later.

The second problem is, we're in the greatest economic crisis of more than a century. The situation presently is comparable to that which we experienced between 1928 and 1933. In that period, we saw, in the 1920s, '21-'22, the rise of Mussolini. We saw the rise of Hitler, orchestrated in 1933; we saw Franco; we saw the spread of those conditions and movements in France, which gave us the fascist movements in France, around Petain, around Laval, and so forth. And we were at war. We were virtually at war, and by 1934, it was inevitable that we would be at war, because you couldn't stop the juggernaut that had started.

So, there's a relationship in history, between the occurrence of major wars, especially over the course of the 20th Century and the present. My father's generation was involved in service in World War I. I was involved in World War II. The generation that's younger than I was, were involved in the Vietnam War. The present generation is now involved in the Cheney wars. And these pulsations of economic crisis, and similar crisis in war, continues.

We've reached a point, that this must stop. Because what we're seeing in Iraq—which the President is denying, and others are denying—we're seeing the outbreak of something comparable to what happened in Indo-China. Let me just quickly review this, because I want to get to the other subject.

The United States was convinced that China would not object strongly under the government of Mao Zedong, to a U.S. attack on North Vietnam. On the basis of that false assumption, the same kind of false assumption that Truman made, which led us into the Korean War, we found ourselves in a kind of war we didn't expect, in which, what's called asymmetric warfare, was used to try to defeat the U.S. forces. We had absolutely superior air power, and so forth, in the situation. But, we really lost the war. Why?

Because in asymmetric warfare, which is a modern version of the principle of strategic defense, military defense, what populations do, when they're faced with an enemy with superweapons, or relative superweapons, is, they say: "We will retreat. We will let you invade our country. But once you've invaded our country, and your troops are man-to-man with our people, then you are put on an equal footing with us, or an almost equal footing with us." And then, you have "people's warfare," as it's sometimes described, breaks out, where a population which is apparently disarmed and defeated, surrounds and attacks a military invader at close quarters. That's what happened in Indo-China, an impossible war. That is what is happening now in Iraq.

Now, some of the people involved that were targeted by Cheney, are great powers. Russia has nuclear weapons, and similar weapons, which are still comparable, despite the fall of the Soviet Union, to our own. China has modern technology. We gave it a lot of it, and destroyed our own. India is involved in this. These nations are not going to submit to a world imperial demand, from the United States.

But these are also our friends. For example, Russia is trying, under Putin, is trying to establish a relationship of cooperation with the United States. And yet, at the same time, he's preparing for war, or a future war, by the United States on Russia, as well as on China. That's the situation.

So, what we're faced with is an unnecessary war. Not a war designed by our military specialists, but designed by civilian nuts, who don't know what they're doing. And this kind of thing must stop. We must go to our friends in Europe, and elsewhere, and we must find a basis for cooperation, to address these problems in a new way, in a fresh way, to build upon this planet a community of sovereign nation-states, which are united in principle, but divided by their sovereignty. This was intent of John Quincy Adams, when he wrote the words read by President Monroe, as the Monroe Doctrine, under John Quincy Adams' policy: a community of perfectly sovereign states, within the Americas. This has been the implicit desire of all great patriots of the United States, is to establish a world community of sovereign nation-states, each sovereign, each committed to the general welfare of themselves and others, but at the same time, united by those principles.

That is feasible. That's what I'm struggling for. That's what I intend to do.

Now, on the economic process. This goes to the generation gap question.

In 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated, we were, and had become, the most powerful nation on the planet, and the wealthiest per capita. We were the greatest productive machine on the planet. Then it changed. We made a shift, beginning about the time we went into the Indo-China War, into becoming a post-industrial society.

After '71, with the change in the monetary order, in '72, we began to arbitrate the prices and values of currencies, of various countries. We told them what the value of their currency was, and we did it arbitrarily. Then we forced them to work for us, as virtual slave-labor. We shut down our farms and industries. We imported what we used to produce, from these countries which we had reduced to slavery.

Today, cheap labor from China is the biggest single factor in replacing U.S. labor, and U.S. production. Nothing wrong with China progressing, but the point is that we have destroyed our society. We have destroyed our culture. We've now come to the point where we are the victims of what has become, ironically, recently, with the appointment of John Snow as Treasury Secretary, the present administration is committing the biggest "Snow job" on finances in history. This country is bankrupt. There is no recovery. Yes, there is a zooming, nominal monetary output. There is still a somewhat zooming, and large, financial growth. But the physical economic production, and consumption, per capita and per square kilometer, of the American people, is collapsing.

We are on the verge of a collapse of the mortgage-backed securities system. It can happen at any time. These kinds of things can not be predicted as to date, you can only predict the condition, and governments will try to postpone things, by printing money and other similar kinds of tricks. And these will work for a while — while making the situation worse. So, we're going into this kind of situation.

Now, let's go back to this question of the war theme, and look at the generational crisis, from the standpoint of the war issue, and the economic issue.

As a result of this cultural change, a cultural change which occurred, and became known as the rock-drug-sex counterculture (there are other names for it), which occurred during the 1960s. You have a generation which is running government and most business today, which has become habituated to the habits of the post-industrial, pleasure-seeking society. A non-productive, post-productive society. At a time that our physical economy is collapsing, and that we are so deeply in debt, we could never pay our debts, at present.

What this represents, this change from a productive society, the world's most productive, to a bankrupt, post-industrial, pleasure-seeking consumer society, living increasingly on the basis of virtual slave labor of production in other countries, while denying employment to our own people: How did this come about? This is not unusual in history. And some of you have been studying history, I suppose, a few of you study Classical Greek. And, if you study Classical Greek, you will look at the Peloponnesian War, as a paradigm for the kind of problem which hits civilizations.

Here was the mightiest power of the Mediterranean in that period, Athens with its alliance. And it destroyed that alliance, and went into a long war, called the Peloponnesian War. And Greece never recovered from the effects of that war. There was a Hellenistic period in the aftermath of Philip of Macedon. There was the Roman Empire. But it was not until the 15th Century, that a full-blown restoration of Classical Greek culture was established as a leading influence inside Europe, in Italy and other countries. And the first modern nation-states, France, under Louis XI, and England, under Henry VII, were the beginning of a new process which we call modern civilization.

So, in studying history behavior, in studying elections and so forth, do not look at things merely in the short-term, because the determinant of history is measured in generations, or many generations, or one generation. In this case, we're talking about two generations. Approximately 40 years, of a change from the world's leading producer society, to a bankrupt consumer society. A bankrupt consumer society, which, like Rome, in its decadence, is going to unnecessary wars around the world, rather than working together with its friends abroad, to find practical solutions, for problems which do have solutions.

What happened, therefore, the pleasure society becomes a no-purpose society. It means the generation in power, thinks in the short term. They think of pleasures. They think of seeking new kinds of fads, and pleasures. Now, you come along, and you're a generation. And you probably are better off than most in your generation, in terms of your prospects for the future. But many of you may become diplomats in the future, and become parts of government, may go into U.S. intelligence services, and so forth, because of these kinds of skills. Or other kinds, the same kinds of skills as they occur, in the financial community, or the business community, where language skills and related skills, and knowledge of history, are essential for these functions.

But it's your generation, the generation you typify, that has to look at this situation: How are we going to get out of this mess? You know, that your parents' generation, by and large, are part of a no-future culture. That 40 years of folly, 40 years of overconfident sliding into a new way of life, called a post-industrial consumer society, has brought us to the end of the skein. Like the end of the Peloponnesian War. It must stop, now!

You know, looking around you, and looking at people in your generation, looking at the conditions of life of the lower 80% of family-income brackets in the United States, over the past period, since 1977, you know this is a no-future society, in the way it's going. You know your lives are before you. The lives of your generation are before you. You have a possibility, of what we're trying to do with a youth movement, with me, of activating people of your generation, that is, the generation especially of 18 to 25, the university-eligible generation. And we have a special program—that's something we'll discuss otherwise. And we have shown, so far, in recent years, especially—this thing started about four years ago — we have shown that youth, of your generation's age, 18 to 25—with this kind of understanding, are the most effective political force per capita, in the population, per capita.

We almost stopped, for example, in the case in California, we stopped Arnie Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles County. It was done largely by the added effort of the youth movement. We stopped Schwarzenegger in the Bay Area, largely through the work of the youth movement. We were asked by the Democrats in Philadelphia, to come in with our youth, to assist them in dealing with the fight against John Ashcroft, over a mayoral campaign in Philadelphia. We turned it around, not just by ourselves, but by the added effort we had put into it. We all agreed, in the fight to save the situation. And we conducted a fight, and we had a landslide victory.

These are cases which only demonstrate, in a conspicuous war, that when people of your generation are properly organized and oriented, motivated, with a sense of a mission orientation, you are the most effective people per capita, in politics today. Because you are the ones, who can go to your parents' generation, your grandparents' generation. You are the ones who say: "We are your future. Our children are your future. The kind of society our children will enjoy, is your future. The way your lives will be judged, is what comes out, in the form of our children's generation. Are you willing now, to correct your mistake, to abandon the consumer society? To abandon the pleasure society? And to go back to those things, perhaps in a different way, but the same principle, which made us successful under Franklin Roosevelt, which made us the most powerful producer nation on this planet. The most powerful nation on this planet."

Are you willing to do that? Can you get them to do that? I think you can.

But I think that what is needed in this, is, you have to proceed from the standpoint of knowledge, not merely enthusiasm. You need enthusiasm, but you need knowledge. The American people today are deprived of any real knowledge of history. They may know history as a collection of facts, reported in textbooks and other sources, but they have not re-lived history. You have to imagine yourself, as a Greek in Athens, huh? in the age of Pericles, and seeing the Sophist on the streets, corrupting the society. And seeing doom there, in the beginning of the Peloponnesian War! You have to be a Greek in your own mind, living in the time of Alcibiades, when the Peloponnesian War was spread to Magna Graecia, which was the doom of Greece, of Greek culture.

You have to re-live that history. You say, we're part of European civilization, which began there, it began in Greece, and with a great contribution from Egypt, from the Egyptian culture of the Great Pyramids, for example. And then we are a European civilization. Not to deprecate other parts of the world, but we are a European civilization. How did we, as representatives of European civilization, develop into what we are today? What were the ideas that were transmitted from one generation to the other? How were they transmitted? What were the experiences? What were the wars? Imagine you lived through each one, each one of those experiences, and try to understand what people went through, in each crisis, as if from the inside.

So, you're not talking about comments, comparative comments, on history. You are reliving history, and you realize that what you know today, especially if you take your education seriously, is what you know because of that history. You are a living expression of a history which is expressed in you, and your job in education, is to come to know what that history is, and recognize it in yourself.

When you do that, when you have a passion about the past and the future, you can impart to your parents' generation, and other generations, a sense of the future, and ask them to give you, a commitment, to building the future, that gets us out of this mess.

Thank you. [applause]

QUESTION: The first question for LaRouche: How do you see the role of the Jewish bank owners in the international financial system?

LAROUCHE: What?

QUESTION: How do you see the role of Jewish bank owners in the international financial system?

LAROUCHE: I don't think that that is a determining feature of international politics. The role of bankers in the international financial system, politically, is typified by—I normally get to these things, as many questions as possible, I'll keep these answers short — there's an organization that's called the Synarchists, which was traditionally called the Martinists. This was a group that was organized by the then-head of the Bank of England, or the British East India Company then, Lord Shelburne. They were called the Martinists; they included people like Mesmer, Cagliostro, Joseph de Maistre. These were the people who were used by the British intelligence service, to orchestrate the French Revolution. Out of that process, and out of Napoleon, who was a part of that process, there came a tradition in Europe which became called the Synarchist tradition, which is responsible largely for the First World War, it was clearly responsible entirely for the Second World War. Hitler was a Synarchist, and so forth.

You take the names of the bankers. The bankers in question were, the British East India Company, and Barings Bank. Now, there are many bankers who happen to be Jewish bankers, who were involved, like the Rothschilds in this process. But the question of Jewish bankers is irrelevant. The banking tradition involved is the Venetian fondo, the Venetian-style fondo banking system, or private banking. That's the problem. And whether someone happens to be a Jewish banker or not, is rather irrelevant to the outcome of history.

QUESTION: As a student at Middlebury College, I've come to value environmentalism more than I have in the past. My question for Mr. LaRouche is, how do you think our environmental policy could be improved?

LAROUCHE: Our environmental policies actually stink, because we talk about preventing some things, and we're...

Let's take the case of energy. We have in this country, presently, as a result of deregulation, and a result of certain ill-conceived environmental ideas, we have a situation like that which exploded in California, around the energy issue. We have in New England, a similar situation. We have a catastrophe about to hit the entire economy of New England, on the basis of a collapse of production, and distribution of power.

Now, we're going to have to, as our job-creating effort, in connection with this bankruptcy we're in now, we're going to have to employ people—and we're talking about trillions of dollars, over the next 25 years, of investment in simply sufficient energy production and distribution, to maintain the economy at least on a comparable level to what it is now.

So, therefore, this is the direction. There are other things. I am, shall we say, a follower of Vernadsky, on the question of the environment, and I think rather than taking these ad hoc questions on environment, we should be looking at it scientifically, from the standpoint of Vernadsky, the discoverer of the so-called Biosphere concept, and the Noosphere concept. That's my policy.

QUESTION: Again, these questions are just coming from audience members.

How do you defend your anti-Semitic, anti-Irish, anti-Chinese, anti-homosexual, and other generally racist hateful comments to the public?

LAROUCHE: Well, there's one way to do that, and those of you studying here have a way of looking at it, because you have access, just in studying languages, in particular. The attention to language gives you an idea of what the community of peoples is.

And therefore you ask the question, what is the difference between man, and a beast?

If we were beasts, there would never be more than several million of us, because if we were higher apes, our population potential, of living population, would never have exceeded about 3-4 million animals. We have now reported on the planet, 6 billion people or more. We have achieved this, because the human mind is capable of discovering universal physical principles, not only of man's relationship to nature, individually, but also of those principles by which we are able to cooperate, in using and promoting scientific discovery to change man's relationship to nature.

Therefore, when we recognize that, without putting it in the pocket of religion, we come up with what is sometimes called a religious idea: the conception of man as divine. That man is distinct from any animal species, and the characteristic of human reason, of the ability to discover universal principles, not only of man's physical relationship, as an individual, to nature, but also relations among people in cooperating, to deal with the problems of man's mastery of the problems man faces as a whole.

In this respect, all persons are the same, so any attempt to make good or bad, defined on a division of the human race into different types, is wrong, and evil. What you have to recognize, however, is that man is able to express this quality, through cultures. As you know from studying language, I presume, that metaphor and irony, are the essence of language, not dictionary words. It's a culture, which enables a people to know how to communicate with one another, through irony and metaphor, to impart new ideas, and to understand paradoxes.

Therefore, if you deprive people of their culture, they are disarmed, they are unable to communicate and share the communication of important ideas. Therefore, we must have sovereign republics, based on the right of a people, with a culture, to work out their problems, as individuals, within the context of that culture. They must be sovereign.

But, at the same time, since we are, despite our differences in cultures, are all the same, in nature, have the same ultimate destiny, therefore, we must be united as sovereign nations, by a community of principle. To try to find fault in humanity, by blaming some people, of some ethnic or racial or national designation, is wrong. And the answer is not just to fight against those kinds of ideas which are evil. The answer is to work, to bring people to an appreciation, of what every human being is: that every human being has the potential, of expressing a quality which theologians and philosophers call divine. Unique to the human being. Every child born expresses that quality. Our concern is to be sure that every child born has the opportunity to express and develop that quality. [applause]

QUESTION: Could you expand upon the relationship, between the British monarchy and U.S. foreign and economic policy?

LAROUCHE: Well, the British monarchy is a very complicated animal. Because it's not a Constitutional form, it's a relic, in part, of several things: It's a relic of the Norman-Venetian system of maritime power. And when Venice collapsed, toward the end of the 17th Century, as a military naval power, at that point, the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model emerged, over the period between William of Orange, and the coronation of George I in England. So, the world is now dominated in most part, except the United States itself, is dominated in Europe, by this Anglo-Dutch Liberal parliamentary model, which is different than our system of government.

So therefore, there are many forces in England. For example, right now, there are leading people in Britain, some of them are Conservatives, some of them are Labour, who are very sympathetic with what I'm doing on an international scale. I don't have a problem with these Brits, on that level. We may have disagreements on other things.

But, the complication is this: We are the first republic, in the world, created from Europe, largely, during the 18th Century. But, because of the French Revolution and things that happened afterwards, the intention of the Classical humanist movement in Europe, to spread the American Revolution throughout Europe, as reforms of government, didn't occur. So, we remained the only Constitutional republic, based on a Presidential principle of our type; based on the principles of the Preamble of our Constitution.

We have survived, with our Constitution, without any essential change, in our core of our Constitution, to this day: No other government of the world, has done that. No other government has a Constitution, which has survived as long as ours. We've gone through great crises—the Civil War, the Depression. We still exist!

Our existence is threatened, today, by the present crisis. But, we have within us, a heritage, given to us largely by Europe, by the best minds of Europe, embodied in the founding of our country, which is a model, in terms of its intention, for what republics must be. We have to make that our conscience, and we have to act with respect to the rest of the world, on the basis of that point of view. We have to be true patriots, not patriots like the jerks in the street with a little Confederate flag or something. We have to be true patriots, who understand the mission for which this country was created: The mission of our republic; the mission of our Constitution; the mission of the fight against slavery, by Abraham Lincoln and others; the mission of Roosevelt, to save the country, and save the world from fascism.

In that sense, we must be patriotic, about what the United States represents as a historical phenomenon. We must use that tradition, to help bring other countries together—with us—to form a community of principle among nations.

QUESTION: As you stand in front of an audience as diverse as this one, can you honestly expect us to take your "pseudo-you have the power" message seriously, when you've been deemed a racist by both the Washington Post (I assume), and the New York Times?

LAROUCHE: Well, the Washington Post has been my declared enemy for a long time. And, they're not just nice enemies, they're very dirty. The New York Times has also been my enemy, since 1973 in particular. But, they're different. The Washington Post is much more inclined toward neo-conservative ideas, which are—not quite like those of Cheney, but a little less irrational.

Whereas the New York Times has sometimes found itself "in bed with me" so to speak, as recently, on the question of Cheney: That they agree, as do many of our leading circles in government, in the State Department, in the intelligence services, in professional military services, agree with me. We've discussed these matters—that what is done in Iraq is insane. It's insane from a military standpoint. It was said so, before it happened: Our military said, "Don't go there! You are insane." Europeans and other people said, "Don't go there. That would be insane!"

If you read the autobiography of Colin Powell, when he refers to reflections on what the experience in Vietnam was, when he said, "We must never allow that to happen again," it is now happening! On his watch. Maybe he's not responsible, but it's happening on his watch. Maybe he's just staying in there, to hold the fort down, hoping that when Cheney goes, he'll be there to pick up the pieces for the President. But, that's the issue.

No, there is no simple solution to this. Look, take the other side, because really what's implied is something else. Let's take my criticism of the Democrats—I won't go to the worst losers, but let's take the case of Kerry for example. Senator Kerry: Senator Kerry probably will suddenly surge back, because I've known in the past week or so, that they've decided, in those circles of the Democratic Party, to dump Dean, and to bring up Kerry. And, that's in process now.

But, Kerry's weakness is, that he's never faced up to certain questions; he's ducked the issue. And, as you, I guess with your education, should be able to recognize, that some of these politicians are giving a lot of guff, and a lot of propaganda, a lot of slogans, a lot of phrases, but we're in a condition of war; we're in a condition of an economic crisis; we're in a condition a social crisis; we're in a generational crisis. And, nothing is being said about that, concretely. We are the victims of a "Snow job," the John Snow job, from the administration. Nobody's talking about it.

Here we are, the country is facing a crisis, and leading politicians—such as Kerry, who in my view is a competent politician; I don't think he's doing a good job, but he's a competent politician—when he gets on television, when he gets before an audience, he will not mention these things! He will not directly address the Cheney question, even though he did in the Congress—but then, never said it again. He was told not to.

That's the nature of our problem. The Democratic Party has degenerated over the past period, for obvious reasons, the ones I indicated. The Republican Party has degenerated. Therefore, the conflict between Republicans and Democrats does not mean what it used to mean. If I'm President, how am I going to form a government? I'm going to form a government, which is going to include some Midwestern Republicans, whom I need for their skills, and to unify the country; as well as some Democrats, who probably will outnumber the Republicans, as it did with Roosevelt.

So therefore, the question now, is, how to unify the majority of the people of the country, around an idea, as Roosevelt did; and then, to assemble people from all kinds of backgrounds, with indifference to previous differences, as one force to rebuild and save this nation?

And therefore, the Times, the Washington Post, their differences, their problems, these are things that belong to a fallen, failed era. We now have come to the end of that fallen era. We must start a new era. We must survive. The world must survive. And therefore, the question before us all, is not what are our antecedents and what are our prejudices, but what are we willing to consider, and do now? And can we do something to kick Kerry, and a few other politicians who I might name, into talking more seriously, and actually discussing the real issues? I think Kerry is capable of discussing some of those issues. I wish he would. [applause]

QUESTION: The last question from the audience: "Mr. LaRouche, what do you say to the fact that your youth movement has been termed a cult? And that a former member has said that it would be best understood by reading Orwell's 1984?"

LAROUCHE: Well, I think that pretty much is gibberish. I don't think anyone who thinks seriously would take that kind of criticism seriously.

It comes essentially, from one well-known source, a fellow called John Irwin III. He's a grandson of a former governor of Arizona. He now resides in Arizona. He's involved with rackets, involving the Indians down there, trying to steal things from the Indians. And, he's also associated with the Watson family. And they set up a group called the American Family Foundation, and most of this specific kind of garbage, you mentioned, in the question, it comes from him; it comes from his American Family Foundation. So, you know the source: Instead of worrying about the question—say, "What source does it come from? And where's the evidence?"

QUESTION: I would. I'm actually a reporter, with the Addison Independent. This is now the eighth time you've run for President. I'm wondering what sets this year apart, whether this year will be any different from previous campaigns? Are there any specific things you can point to, that sets this year aside? Sort of fill us in on, what may distinguish this?

LAROUCHE: See, I implicitly answered you—. You asked the question, which I implicitly answered, but I didn't explicitly answer it, in the process.

As I said, we've been in a 40-year cycle, a cycle in the change in the world's most productive society, the most powerful, to a junk heap, an economic junk heap, a wasteland. Now, that means that the American people, or the majority of them, over an increasing period of the past 40 years, have been lax, and lured, into stupid ideas, which have become considered as prevalent popular opinion. You can not blame governments alone, for the stupidity of governments, particularly in a government like our own, where popular opinion does count for something, at least sometimes. The reason that governments have been able to get by, with swindles of the type that have occurred, is because the people believed, that popular opinion had moved in favor of those policies, which caused this disaster. This is not unusual. You take the Thirty Years' War in Europe, from 1618-1648: People were killing each other, over stupid ideas! Which were finally resolved under the intervention of Cardinal Mazarin, with the famous Treaty of Westphalia, of 1648—which is still the foundation of law, of international law, in civilized European culture, today. The same thing happened again, with Roosevelt. We went through insanity in the 1920s, under first Coolidge and Hoover. Popular opinion thought Coolidge was good. They were wrong. Popular opinion thought Hoover was good, at first. They were wrong.

Now, the way things work in politics, is they work, as I said, in terms of generations. And stupid ideas, or the failure to correct ideas, when they need to be corrected, carry society into long waves of disaster. Now, what saved society, the way that society got out of these messes, like the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years' War, and so forth, was because someone, at that point, was listened to, at a certain point. The question is, are the American people today, ready to listen to what I warned them against, accurately, and for what I proposed, accurately, over the past nearly 40 years, but especially since, shall we say, 1975-76?

I was right. I made commitments. I made forecasts. I proposed policies. Today, those forecasts have all been confirmed. Today, those policies look good. Have the American people gone through the experience, of learning from their mistake, built up over 40 years of public opinion?

So, eight years or eight campaigns, is far short of Harold Stassen's record. It doesn't mean a thing. It means the American people, in various ways, did not decide to support me at that time. They were wrong. But, that's often the case in history, with people. Now, they have a chance to be right. And, they don't have much of a chance to go along with the bad policies, they had from the past.

That's the way to look at it. Look at this from the standpoint of history, not connecting the dots.

QUESTION: Just to revisit some of the other questions that were asked: You accused John Kerry of ducking a lot of questions. I would say, that some of the questions that were asked here today, you ducked. Returning specifically to the questions about potential racist or anti-Semitic remarks that you've made, and also the British monarchy. If you could, you know, address those, in perhaps a less circular manner, in talking about how the British monarchy influences the government today? The past, you know, couple of administrations? And, you know, talk about specific remarks you may have made?

LAROUCHE: Well first of all, the questions were based on people being subjected to false information by various channels. And therefore, I did not duck the questions. Because the questions presumed something false. I simply asserted positively what the truth was. And that was the truth. The information to the contrary to what I said, the appearance that I ducked the question, is only based on too much credence for false rumors, spread through various channels, such as the John Irwin channel.

How many people would quote Dennis King? Or Chip Berlet? Or sources such as that, who are part of the property owned by a section of the intelligence community, including the American Family Foundation? Or the Smith Richardson Foundation, and so forth.

QUESTION: Just one last point. I read an interview with you in 1995, with the EIR, where you claimed the British monarchy was partly behind the Oklahoma City bombings. If you could just expand upon that?

LAROUCHE: No, I didn't say that. I said something else. I said something quite different: I said, a statement by a rather distinguished chief editor of the London Times, had pointed to certain things about the Oklahoma bombing.

Now, what I was concerned about in this case—we were concerned about it before it happened. We knew that there was something fermenting, in the direction of an incident of that type, among certain groups which were internationally influenced, but domestic groups, apparently tied to a certain part of our intelligence services. And they were targetting some operation of that type. When the bombing occurred, I insisted that we investigate—take that line of investigation into account.

What happened was, they got the defendant in the case, the principal defendant, in the case, to cop a plea. And his coping the plea was used as a pretext for burying the investigation. We do not know, to this day, who orchestrated. We do know, that my acquaintance in London, who was then chief editor of the Times, had published a statement on the effect, that some rumbling was occurring in the United States in that direction. And I referenced the fact, that part of the British press and part of the British Establishment, was aware of what was happening.

We knew something was there, we had to stop it. I was involved in the investigation of trying to deal with it, to discover it. We still don't know the answer. We do know, that we don't know the answer. And we know that we don't know the answer, because the Justice Department, for some reason or other, decided to close the investigation, with an execution, rather than continuing the investigation.

I mean, this goes to this death penalty thing: We don't know who killed Kennedy. We don't know to this day! The thing was sealed! Now, I don't want to offend the sensibilities of the Kennedy family, over the assassination of both Jack and Bobby; but, I think our government should have know, even if we keep it under secret seal and don't reveal it unless absolutely necessary, should have known what really happened in the Kennedy assassination. Because this kind of thing may come up again. It may have some relevance to what happened with Kennedy—which was not simply Oswald. The Oswald story was a fake. There was something more involved. We don't know what it was.

But, we know we don't. We should know. Because, if something as important as the assassination of a President, which changes the course of our national history occurs, we should know what happened. We should know it, for justice; we should know it also, for justice for us, as well as for the victim; we should know it as a matter of precautions, so that it doesn't happen again! And, I think it could happen again. But, I think it could happen again, because we have not been serious.

For example, the 9/11 investigation was essentially shut down! It's frozen. I think it's wrong. I think, at least, responsible agencies must conduct the investigation. Must inform the public of what the public has a right to know, which is not going to compromise things. And keep that information, and pass it from Presidency to Presidency, so that, if the time ever comes, that that knowledge from the past, is relevant to a present development, that that knowledge is available to the people who need to have it. And, if that's the American people, they need to be told—tell them!

QUESTION: In your talk, you've taken a broad account of history, trying to draw lessons from the past, from the Peloponnesian War to the war in Iraq. And I'm interested in your comments on, what the limit is, as far as what we can learn from history? And when we cross into territory, in which historical lessons are so narrowly defined, you take one lesson from the Peace of Westphalia; one lesson from the Peloponnesian War—when that becomes kind of a scare tactic and slightly misleading? What is that line, and how do you walk it?

LAROUCHE: I don't think it's a line. Implicitly, on one side, you're saying something I agree with: I do not think that you should study history, by comparing—the way Plutarch did: You have to know that Plutarch was a chief priest of the cult of Apollo, in Roman times. And he used Sophists' methods, in the comparison of the lives of so-called "great men," Roman and Greek. And that was not quite too accurate. So, comparing one case with another is not the way to do it. History must not be studied as a comparison, on a flat plane, as a connect-the-dots thing. History must be studied as a process. For example, what is the issue of European civilization? The issue is, of trying to struggle, to bring man out of a situation, which had been prevalent in all earlier history, in which some people held other people, as human cattle, either to be hunted, or to be herded and culled. This was issue posed by the question of Athens versus Sparta, for example.

So, the question is the struggle to try to find the form of society, and to develop a form of society, which recognizes the nature of man, as being divine, in the way that Socrates defines this, in the first books of Plato. Or, Moses Mendelssohn, for example, in his famous resurrection of the argument on the soul, of Plato, in the 18th Century. This is the thing. Study the process.

Then, take things like, you have figures like Plato. Let's take the case that I use often, among the youth movement: The case of Gauss's 1799 paper on The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra; in which he attacks Euler and Lagrange, for fakery, empiricist fakery. All right. What's he referring to? The significance of that paper, is, he refers to the constructive geometry—a pre-Euclidean constructive geometry: that of Pythagoras, Thales, and so forth, especially the school of Pythagoras. Which did not have postulates of Euclid—the definitions, axioms, and postulates of Euclid—but had a purely constructive approach, based on what was called "spherics." That is, observing the spheroid, which is the universe above.

This became the notion of universal law, developed by the Pythagoreans, of what are the universal laws, which we see, in the universe, in this spheroid above us? And, the anomalies, the paradoxes in our observations, as typified later by Kepler's discovery of gravitation, through the anomaly of the looping of Mars: That these anomalies force us to recognize that there are principles in the universe, which operate, but which are unseen by the sense, but which we can discover and learn to control.

All right. Then, you take figures in that case—. Call this "ideas." Then you take a figure, like Archimedes, for example. Today, you can take the work of Archytas, on the solving of the tripling of the cube; or Archimedes on many things, there are many books in French and otherwise, on the works of Archimedes. You can take these experiments, and you can re-live the process of the discovery of the experiment, of that person. How many thousand years ago! You, today, can leap across millennia, to re-experience what happened in the mind of a person, as a human being, thousands of years earlier. You can look at the pyramids, and study the Great Pyramids. You can go back, almost 3,000 years, to the design of the Great Pyramids—and, by studying the pyramids, you can see how the mind of the Egyptians who did that, worked! Because it's based on astronomy, therefore it's verifiable. You can experience the discovery of that person now, almost 5,000 years ago.

So therefore, history is based on the ability to leap across generations, to leap across thousands of years, and to leap, in the imagination, to what must have happened to man, when the ice was on the top of the Northern Hemisphere, for over about 200,000 years. This is what's important.

So therefore, we should look not at history, as the history of events, or the history of gimmicks, or the history of practices. We should look at it, as the history of ideas: Like the ideas of the Pythagoreans, the ideas of Plato, the ideas of Socrates, the ideas of Archimedes, or Eratosthenes of Egypt, as a contemporary. So, by re-experiencing these ideas, and seeing how they work in each generation—the idea of man; the idea of society—these are ideas which have a continuity, which all the great minds of history, who have shaped history, used, and thought about, and talked about, and discussed. The work of Petrarch, the work of Dante Alighieri, the work of Nicholas of Cusa in founding the concept of the modern nation-state; or founding modern experimental science. The work of Leonardo da Vinci. The extensive work of Kepler. The work of what the significance of what the discovery of the principle of quickest action, by Fermat and his followers. These are ideas. They are not slogans. They are not memory tricks. They are not policies.

And, it's only by understanding human beings struggling, against the condition of people being human cattle—being put out in the field, say, "We treat our people right." In China, and other places, "We treat our people well." They don't treat them well. They put the cow in the field; they put the cow in barn; they feed the cow in barn; they let the bull enjoy the cow. All these nice things are done, as in our society, in our human society today. But, then, when the cow gets old, or the bull's calves get weak feet, the bull goes to the slaughterhouse, and so the cow goes to the slaughterhouse, thus saving on medical expenses: Sort of, animal HMO.

So, the issue of what is a human being? What are the rights of a human being? As an idea, as a principle, is also an idea which we can trace through the entirety of history.

So therefore, yes: To make simple comparisons and try to judge, like Plutarch did in his Lives of Great Men, that's the method of Sophistry. No, you're right: No good. But we have to work from ideas, as ideas. We have to work from concepts, and situate them in this historical process. That's why European civilization is so important to us: Because, in European civilization, we are capable of tracing European civilization back to ancient Greece.

What we're engaged in now—my wife, and I, and so forth—are dealing with this problem, we're dealing now with Asian cultures, as well as European culture: How do we come about with a reconciliation, an ecumenical reconciliation, among the different cultures of Asia, and that of European civilization? How are we going to establish global peace, based on ecumenical principles? Therefore, we must deal with these ideas. We must discuss with Asians, what these ideas are in their culture. We must find a commonality of understanding, of how cultures develop. And therefore, we can work together. And, that's what's important about it. [warm applause]

QUESTION: You describe yourself as being in the tradition of the American republic. And as a child I would love to read Edgar Allan Poe, who, you know, is completely—. When I went to school, I was told he was a drug addict; he was an alcoholic; he was insane, pederast. And, you seem to be the only one defending him. And, I was wondering, you know, where is that coming from? And, in particular, I wanted to ask, where is that—Poe describes being a mathematician as being the most limited way of communicating an idea; where a poet is the most efficient way, the highest way of communicating an idea. And, what's funny is that, you know, Poe does write in other languages, but when he writes in English, his books are actually edited. And most of the books we see, today, are edited. And, I was wondering why such an operation against him?

LAROUCHE: You've touched on something that's very well worth studying. Edgar Allan Poe was a foreign counterintelligence agent of the United States. He was the grandson of the Quartermaster General in the Southern District for the American Revolution, and therefore, because his parents had died, he was a member of the Society of Cincinnatus. Now, the Society of Cincinnatus, which is the organization of the officers and their first, primus descendants, functioned as the intelligence service of the United States, the foreign intelligence service.

He was a sergeant major in the Army, at the age of 19. He went into it on that basis. He went into it on that basis. He was then recommended by James Monroe—or, was it Madison—to West Point. He went to West Point, but in his first year, he developed epilepsy. So, he was discharged from the military, from West Point, because of epilepsy. He then went into service, as a writer, and functioned as a counterintelligence specialist for the United States. For example, without going into the full story, for example, in about 1832 (somewhere in there), he was in Paris, on a letter from James Fenimore Cooper, who was also an intelligence agent of the United States, especially on naval intelligence, and a specialist in foreign intelligence. As was Washington Irving, for example. This is all the same kind of people.

While he was in Paris, he came into contact with the work of Dupin. And he sort of immortalized Dupin—the real-life Dupin—as the figurative Dupin of his two mystery stories. That's what he was.

Now, when he died, because his enemies, including an editor called Griswold, went to his wife; got control of the estate by paying money to the wife, who needed money. And Griswold began a campaign to defame Edgar Allan Poe. And, what you get today, in the general line on Poe, is defamations of Poe, which were originally minted, by Griswold, the New York publisher. And this keeps going on, and on, and on, and on. It's a lie. We've done some writing on this thing. We've done a lot of the research; we have manuscripts on this thing; we've worked on it for years. I proposed a book on this subject. Some of our friends have the work that I did and others did, and we're going to try to get this book published soon.

It is a very important subject. It's a matter of justice, for a great American. It's also a lesson, to all of us, of how we sometimes commit injustices against our patriots and heroes.

QUESTION: In a New York Times article, written by David Kirk [ph], you are quoted saying, that a person with AIDS running around is like a person with a machine gun running around. Your Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee, which you often refer to as PANIC, aimed to promote, and I quote again "the universal screening and isolating, or quarantining, of all individuals in active carrier states." Do you still believe that this is a realistic solution to the global AIDS epidemic?

LaRouche: Ah, do you remember tuberculosis? All right. What I proposed was simply—the insanity—here we had a new disease, which we did not fully understand. There was a lot of fakery to cover it up. I pressed hard on the Reagan Administration, which I had some influence on, at that time, to get the Attorney General to make a declaration: We proposed a $40 billion program, for dealing with the HIV problem, in the United States. We also demanded that something be done, seriously, about the problem in Africa: And that problem has not been effectively addressed to this time! So, there's nothing wrong with that.

We had some people who were very "het up," because they were incited to be "het up" about what I did. But, now, recently, having looked at what I wrote, after the reflection on what I wrote back then, today, the same people who were among my strongest critics then, said I was right.

We still have an unresolved disease problem in Africa. We have, in parts of Africa, absolute mass death, and it's hitting the best-educated sections of the population, in this part of Africa. And we still will not allow the medication to get to these people, which will help them control the infection, if not remove it.

The problem is, our health policy in the United States, today, stinks! We went from a Hill-Burton policy, which was sound, with a commitment to treat people whether they had money, or not. Today, we are culling the crop, the way you would cull an animal crop. We're culling people who are the most vulnerable, by denying them health care. The HMO system is a swindle. It's mass murder. And, that's what we fought against then. That's what I'm fighting against now. What I proposed was right: That people who have a deadly disease, as we dealt with tuberculosis, should be dealt with in that way. And, we should try to get to the bottom of it quickly, cure them, and free them of disease.

We didn't know what to do about it!

We had some ideas of what to do about it. But we—it was the first time we'd been hit by that kind of retrovirus infection, affecting the human species. We had no record, of any similar retrovirus infection affecting the human species. We didn't know what the area was. We hadn't done the work. We knew something in animal areas about it, but not then.

So, I think there's nothing to apologize for, in my policies then. I think it's the right policy for today. Today, we know something about it. Today, we can do something, so the solutions are different. We can, we can neutralize the carrier—and they can help neutralize the thing themselves.

BRAND: Thank you for everyone who organized and attended the meeting, especially Mr. Lyndon LaRouche. We feel this is an excellent series of discussions, and it will be continuing, with another speaker in the next few weeks. So, thank you very much. [applause]

LaRouche to Ibero-American Cadre School:

The Classical Principle Is Intrinsic To Humanity

Lyndon LaRouche gave the following address, by telephone hookup, to LaRouche Youth Movement cadre schools in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina, on Nov. 23, 2003.

There is a problem, which is international, with existing populations, partly because of a general defect in popular culture and in public and higher education: That people today, generally, do not have a practical understanding of the difference between man and beast. And I speak of this difference now, as it applies to politics.

The point is, that animals can not develop ideas. Not in the sense that human beings have ideas; they're incapable of it. An animal dies; it leaves no personality behind, except in the memory of human beings who may be associated with that animal. But, a human being, as Plato said, is capable of doing something no animal can do.

So, man is capable of discovering ideas, typified by—and I've used the example many times—the principle of universal gravitation, which was uniquely discovered by Kepler, not by anybody else. Kepler discovered this, by looking at things, such as the apparent looping of the orbit of Mars, which showed that there is no regular sense-perceptual system to the Solar System. And therefore, the behavior of the Solar System had to be located in something external to perception, but which could be formulated as an idea. And once you understood the idea of this efficient presence, which itself you could not see with your senses, then we had a notion of universal gravitation.

Everything else we know, in terms of principles of the physical universe as such, and in terms of the principles of society—that is, as opposed to opinions about society—but the principles which will make a society effective: All of these things are invisible to sense-perception. To animal-like sense-perception in human beings. They exist only in the mind of the human being.

Now, if a human being were an ape, there would never have been more than several million human beings living on this planet, at any time, during the past 2 million years or so, and under the conditions we know of the past 2 million years. Today, we have reported over 6 billion people as living on this planet. This means that there's some difference between man and an ape, a fundamental difference, a difference of three decimal orders of magnitude, right now. The difference is, that we, by discovering two kinds of principles, are able to do two things: We're able to change the relationship of the individual's behavior to nature, as through the discovery of physical principles; and we're able to have concerted action by society, in making those changes of man's relationship to nature, through the discovery of social principles, such as the principles of the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States. Which is a universal, physical principle, discovered by man, and applied to design a nation-state on the basis of that principle.

Without these two kinds of principles, society does not function. That is, without the sense of the individual's relationship, physical relationship to the universe; and also, the individual's relationship to the universe through social processes, which are governed by discoverable social principles, which have the same force and effect as principles of natural science.

In the latter case, the best example of these kinds of social principles, is uniquely, Classical forms of artistic composition: No form of artistic composition, except the Classical, has a correspondence to natural principles. All other notions of social relations, or artistic composition, are unnatural principles. That is, they have no basis in the natural organization of the universe.

All right, so this is the difference between man and the ape.

Now, obviously the important thing here, the difference between having, say, several million individuals as human beings on the planet, and over 6 billion today, is that we, by discovering and applying these principles, are able to achieve this effect. We do this, because ideas developed over many thousands of generations before us, have transmitted their contributions to our knowledge of universal principles, to us through culture. This includes artistic culture. It includes political culture, and so forth. And, through physical ideas.

Looking Back Generations

So therefore, to understand a person today, you have to understand what culture is embodied in their development, as something more than a piece of flesh, as something more than a beast. Now, for this reason, to understand the problems of the world today, you have to look back, immediately, several generations. For example, to understand the history of European civilization, including that of the Americas, you have to go back to the 18th Century, and earlier, but particularly the 18th Century. Because that's when the crisis which we face today was born.

Now, as you recall, or should recall, in the 18th Century, you had a King of Spain, Charles III, who was a good king, and who fought for the improvement of the lives of people, inclusively, in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. He was replaced by kings who were not so good, and by a Spanish 18th-Century monarchy, which widely promoted slavery. The Spanish monarchy was one of the chief vehicles for the capture and import of African slaves into the Americas, including the United States. That's during the 18th Century.

And this continued until Abraham Lincoln stopped it, and until the overthrow of Maximilian, in Mexico, and the restoration to power of Benito Juárez stopped the process, as well. Or, began to end it, essentially, in the Caribbean area. And, then later in the century, the Spanish monarchy finally abandoned the practice of officially sponsoring the trafficking of African slaves into the Americas.

So, we go back to this period.

Now, what happened? Why did this change, in the policy which created the United States, where Charles III of Spain supported the independence of the United States, together with the King of France, and others? Why did this change come? Why the problems? Why didn't the founding of the United States result in the spread of independent republics, immediately, back into Europe, as well as throughout the Americas? What was the problem?

And therefore, our history, today, what we experience inside ourselves, is most immediately a reflection of more than two centuries, of the extended history of modern European civilization. And, of course, lots of things before then—2,000 years before. But, to understand why we behave, why we as peoples, why we as nations, change our behavior, we have to look back at the accumulation of cultural paradigms, which were built into us, by transmission, from generations—of older generations still living, but also many generations which are long dead.

And these effects are built into us: For example, language. The development of language, is a process of culture, which is transmitted over many generations, which starts with people who are long dead. For example, Spanish started with Italian, principally. It started with Italian, of Italian soldiers as Roman soldiers, as in France, who settled in the southern part of France and in Spain. And, since they were Italian, and therefore tended to speak Italian in their homes—not Latin—the language is a combination of the natural people's language—Italian, the predominant language of the period of Italy in the Roman Empire—and then, added to that, technical terms which were imposed by Roman rule. So that, the Spanish, French, Italian language today, is a combination of Latin words imposed upon an Italian popular root. Therefore, that's what our language represents, in this case.

So, we have to understand this transmission of culture, including language, and its development, over many successive generations. And what we speak, the way we speak, the way we communicate, reflects this embedded in us, to the transmission of culture, in the family, in society, and so forth. And, by studies, of course.

The 'Venetian Party'

So now, look at what happened to us generally. Go back just to what I referred to often as the end of the 18th Century: The United States had just then, formulated the final phase of its adoption of a Constitution, the Federal Constitution. This was formulated first in 1787, and was completed in 1789. Now, at this point, the intention was, in France and elsewhere, to use the example of the American Revolution, the establishment of the U.S. republic, as a model for the reform of the nations of Europe.

But, something stepped in: The British monarchy, or rather, the British East India Company, which is otherwise known as the Venetian Party—that is, the name by which ruling forces in England identified themselves, was as "the Venetian Party." The Venetian Party was also a name used to identify the so-called culture of the 18th Century: The so-called 18th-Century Enlightenment, was a morally degenerate form of culture, called the French and English Enlightenment of the 18th Century, which was typified by England under George I, II, and III; or better said, under Lord Shelburne, who was the chief political figure of that century, the middle and latter part of that century, in dominating the British system, and also in the role he played in Europe.

Now, this Shelburne, from the British East India Company, intervened into France, as well as into the Americas, beginning in 1763, at the time that France was defeated by England on the seas, signed a peace treaty, and Shelburne launched a policy of destroying the possibility of the emergence of an independent nation in North America—that is, the United States. And also the spread of the American model into Europe, especially through the destruction of France, which the British monarchy (or actually, the British Empire at that time) saw as its chief continental European rival, the chief threat to British imperial rule over continental and adjoining Europe.

So, what this fellow did, this Lord Shelburne, he organized the French Revolution, every essential part of it: From 1789, the storming of the Bastille was done by agents of Lord Shelburne, under his personal direction. The Jacobin Terror was done by Shelburne, or under the direction of Shelburne, through people like Jeremy Bentham. Napoleon was brought into power, through the organization of Shelburne. So, the entire history of Europe, from 1789, particularly from July 14, 1789, through the Vienna Congress, was organized by Shelburne.

Out of this process, there emerged what was called then the Martinist cult, a form of freemasonry, which was later renamed as Synarchism; which was later spread into, for example, in part, into Mexico through Maximilian. Maximilian was actually an agent of what we would call Synarchism, at his time: Introduced by a follower of Napoleon Bonaparte, his nephew Napoleon III, with the aid of the Spanish monarchy, and with the backing of the British, and of course with the Hapsburg family involved, also.

At a later point, the Synarchist International was used in the organization of World War I. It was also the key to the existence of fascism, from 1922, with Mussolini, through 1945. It was Synarchism which was run by the Nazis, through Franco's Spain, into Mexico, and by way of Mexico, into all of South America. It's where the pro-Nazi organization, the Synarchist International, operated in the Americas in that period.

Today again, the Synarchist International, as represented by the forces, or the so-called forces around Dick Cheney, who are looking for preventive nuclear warfare, as a way of dominating the planet: This is an expression of Synarchism. The neo-conservatives, who tend to dominate the present Bush Administration, around Cheney: These are Synarchists.

Civilization vs. Synarchism

So therefore, what you have today, in terms of the immediate political culture, the immediate conflicts in society, in Europe, in the Americas, and by reflection, worldwide, we have a war between civilization and Synarchism. Synarchism, the same Synarchism which gave us Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, the Pétain government, the Laval government in Europe; the same Synarchism that invaded Mexico through the Nazi Party and through Franco, the same Synarchism is now threatening civilization again.

That is our essential strategic problem.

In the process—come up closer to the present; what happened to us, just to review what I've said many times, on many occasions, around the country and around the world: The problem started with a fellow called Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell is very influential—he's very evil, but he was very influential. For example, he was, in a sense, the author of this religious cult around Norbert Wiener, the so-called "Information Theory." The same kind of religious cult around John von Neumann, of systems analysis, this whole branch of modern economics, of the idea of synthetic intelligence, or artificial intelligence.

This guy was against the existence of the nation-state: He hated the United States. He was determined to create a world empire. This form of world empire he conceived was called "world government." That was not an original idea, with Russell. The idea of world government and empire are interchangeable ideas. They mean the same thing: The idea of a universal system of law, imposed from the top-down on what had been nations or nationalities, is a form of imperialism, in the same sense as the Roman Empire, in the same sense as feudalism under the combination of Venice and its Norman allies, over the period from about the time of the Norman Conquest of England, up through the modern civilization.

So, this is the problem, this fight.

Most recently, what happened with Russell, is that Russell devised the idea, together with his buddy, H.G. Wells—who was a bit of a pig, himself—and they devised the idea of using nuclear weapons, or developing them and using them, as weapons so terrible, that the people of the world would submit to world government, as a way of avoiding being hit by nuclear weapons. At the close of the Second World War, the war concluded with the deployment of those nuclear weapons, by a pig who was then President of the United States, Harry Truman, against the civilian populations of two cities of Japan: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was no military reason which required or justified, the use of those weapons on that occasion. The reason it was done, was to terrify the world, and to commit the United States to a policy of threatening to conquer the entire world, by threatening preventive nuclear war—the specific language adopted by Russell, and used by Russell, to explain his policy.

From that time on, the United States, and many other countries, were divided, by two political currents: One was the traditional military current, which at that time, was typified by Generals of the Army Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, as leading generals. On the other side, the opponents of this military tradition of civilization—the so-called tradition of classical strategic defense—were these so-called Utopians, the followers of Bertrand Russell, who were determined to use nuclear weapons, to bring about the establishment, through terror, of world government.

Now, these people, the Utopians, were all Synarchists. They were controlled by bankers behind the scenes, whose idea of world government was based on the interest of that kind of private banking, as usury. As we see, throughout the Americas today, you see the debt of the nations of South and Central America, is all illegitimate. The outstanding debt claims against these countries, are far in excess of anything they ever owed. That is, these countries have already more than paid off, the debts which existed, say, by 1982. They're paid off. The debts that exist in these nations today, are artificial debts, imposed by syndicates of private bankers, who have used institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF to artificially impose these debts on these countries.

This is the Synarchist character. This is the thing we're up against.

The Cultural Paradigm-Shift

Now, why do people put up with it? Well, take another step: As a result of the terror, of the Missile Crisis of 1962, the assassination of Kenney, the launching of the Indochina War, a section of the U.S. and European populations, and also spilling into Central and South America, the young people who were then in the process of becoming adults, such as university students, at that period, went crazy. They went crazy, because of the effects of the terror they'd lived through: the Missile Crisis, the launching of the Indochina War, and things related to that.

As a result of that, we went through a change, in the United States and Britain first; then later, spilling over into continental Europe and into the Americas—a change from a belief in a producer society, into a belief in a post-industrial or consumer society. What happened is, that the United States and Britain, or the bankers there, said: We're not going to pay people to work in our countries much longer. We're going to shut down our industries, and instead get our things we need, manufactured products and food, from other countries, who will work as slaves for us, because we have reduced the value of their currency, artificially. And they now work as virtual slaves, as cheap labor, as you see, in the slave-relationship of much of the population of Mexico and the Mexican economy, to the United States, under this system. Where the United States has shut down much of its industry, much of its agriculture, and depends upon the cheap-labor products that it extracts from other parts of the world.

The U.S. economy, of course, is now disintegrating. The world economy is disintegrating, because of that arrangement. But therefore, to understand ourselves, we have to understand some things. We have to understand that many people today accept the idea of globalization. They accept the idea of post-industrial society. They accept the idea of free trade. They accept the idea of deregulation. They accept the idea of so-called "natural energy systems," as opposed to modern energy systems. Where do these crazy ideas come from? It comes out of history. It comes out of this long process, in which the nations of European cultural extraction, emerged in the 18th Century—again, after the period of the religious wars of 1511 to 1648—emerged as a great force in culture, the greatest force that world civilization had ever known, in terms of productive potential, in terms of the improvement of the conditions of mankind. But then, the French and British Enlightenment, as typified by Lord Shelburne, the British East India Company, and the forces behind the French Revolution of 1789-1815, decided to try to turn the clock back, in a form which includes what we call Synarchism today. The destruction of civilization.

And, what has happened? We have had many steps upward, by humanity. There's been much progress during this period, since 1789 to the present. But there has also been much retrogression. And, since the assassination of Kennedy, the Missile Crisis, and the beginning of the Indochina War, the direction of civilization has been—in Europe, the Americas, in particular—has been chiefly downward.

People, therefore, today believe in standards of behavior, in ideas, which have been foisted upon them by this so-called cultural paradigm-shift—a cultural paradigm-shift which coincides with the influence of Synarchism. If we respond, if we say, we are going to be governed by popular opinion, or prevailing, generally accepted opinion up to now, we will destroy ourselves. Therefore, to understand ourselves, we have to decide, who are we? Are we the junk, the garbage, which is dumped upon us, in the typical university classroom or other classroom today, or by the international mass media? Is that who we are? People who believe in that garbage? If so, we are going to be destroyed, self-destroyed.

Take the example of the United States: I'm running for President. Do you know, there's not a single rival candidate for President, who's fit to be President? Not because, say, Kerry, who is a Senator and who is also a rival of mine, is not generally considered a competent politician. He is. But, he is stuck, with adherence to a philosophy of government, a cultural philosophy, which dooms the United States. Other candidates running for office, rivals, are worse. Or less good, or worse.

I'm the only candidate who is qualified to become President of the United States, if the United States is to survive. That's a cultural phenomenon. Why? Why? Because I'm such a genius? Well, that's not the case. Because I resisted, rejected, the cultural process which led to this self-destructive role of the United States. I'm the only matured politician, who has the influence and the knowledge, to turn the United States back from depression, to recovery, in the sense that Franklin Roosevelt did back in the 1930s.

But, the problem here is, that I've got to deal with the American population: I've got to induce them to change what they believe. I've got to educate them out of their bad opinion, their self-destructive opinions.

Habituated Thinking

You have a similar situation in Mexico, it's a little different, but it's similar. In other parts of the Americas, similar, but different. In each country, you've had the conditioning of the population, to accept as conditions of life, as almost natural conditions, ways of behaving which would ensure the perpetuation of a process of self-destruction of these nations, including the United States. The problem is, the belief that you must accept this, is deeply embedded in the habituated thinking of the people themselves. Therefore, if you're appealing to popular opinion, you're going to lead the people to their self-destruction, like leading cattle into the safety of the slaughterhouse.

Therefore, you have to lead people against their opinion! Against popular opinion.

Take the case of the United States. The key to the United States, is the fact that the lower 80% of family-income brackets of the United States are living under depressed conditions. Their conditions of life have become progressively worse. Politics has been largely located, in the upper 20% of family-income brackets; whereas, the lower 80% sort of goes along, or simply impotently rejects the political process. Now therefore, the key to politics in the United States, which I'm following, is to go directly to the people—not through the controlled mass media—but directly to the people, especially the people of the lower 80% of family-income brackets, among those parts of that population, the lower-income brackets, who are more sentient, more responsive. And also, other individuals in society, who are people of conscience—maybe from the upper 20%—who are people of conscience, who also respond.

So therefore, you have to make an overturn, in the social process, in which the upper 20% of family-income brackets have been ruling the United States, to a system in which the lower 80% are given justice, and given expression of their vital interest, as the interest of the nation.

To do this, we have to understand several things, and what I emphasize in the lecture circuit in campaigning, is to make people aware, of what the present three living adult generations represent: That is, you have my generation, people under 90 years of age—my generation; you have a generation of my children, the people who are now in their 50s—that age-group—and then, a younger generation, of 18 to 25, the so-called university-eligible age-group. These are the three politically significant layers inside the United States, in particular.

Now, my job, as a candidate, is to appeal to all three of these layers simultaneously, with the greatest emphasis on the youth. Why? Because, if people understand what my generation has gone through, and understand why the moral decadence of the second generation, my children's generation—why they decayed morally and intellectually—then, to turn to the last generation—the young ones, the ones who are now between 18 and 25—who now recognize that their parents' generation has given them a no-future society, and they know, if they're sentient, that they have to change the way this society is going, or there is no future for them, or for any children or grandchildren they have. And therefore, the problem here, is, to somehow get the generation which dominates the institutions of government, the generation of my children, to accept an impulse of leadership from a generation of young adults, of this 18-to-25 youth generation. That is, to recognize, that the youth generation has the right, to demand of their parents' generation, a joint effort to change society, so that we all have the chance to survive.

And the way to get this clear, is to get the young ones, and the ones of my children's generation, to recognize the historical process of cultural change, which I have experienced, which each of them has experienced, and to see this all as one continuous process. And, in the meantime, to use that experience, to guide them to look back further, more deeply into the history of European civilization, in particular: to see where ideas came from, beginning with ancient Greece, for example; the Greece of Pythagoras, the Greece of Thales, the Greece of Solon, the Greece of Socrates and of Plato. To see, tracing from there, and from the Egyptian culture which informed Greek scientific thinking, see how the whole process of European civilization, with its ups and downs, has evolved, to bring us into existence today. And to recognize, inside ourselves, that we are not animals, that we embody within us, large elements of the culture, which had been transmitted in some accumulated way, from successive generations to the present.

Then, we understand ourselves as human, which, unfortunately, too few people today, do.

And that's my essential message.

Dialogue with LaRouche

Here is an excerpt from the discussion that followed LaRouche's presentation.

Question: Yesterday, we were discussing, what is the soul in the human being? But, we also were discussing how Leibniz defined the fact that some animals also have souls. So, I didn't quite understand that part, so I would like you to talk about that. Also something else, which I was asking myself: If Gauss understood in the same terms in which Schiller writes the "Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man"? Did he understand with that same vision as Schiller personally? How would you comment in this regard?

LaRouche: Well, Schiller was a genius, a true genius, in the sense of being an individual who developed ideas which were unique in his time and place, who also uplifted the conception of drama, from the foundations given to him by ancient Greece and also Shakespeare, in particular, to get to this conception of the Sublime....

Maria Stuart is an example of this. The case of Jeanne d'Arc, is the most famous, and simple, and clearest example of this. That the individual, faced with a crisis, is capable of finding that their fundamental self-interest is located in what they do for humanity. That mortal life is short, but there's an aspect to human life which is immortal, and that is what we represent with respect to preceding and coming generations. What do we do while we are visiting this mortal planet, that gives satisfaction to the aspirations of those who went before us? Which solves the problems left unsolved by generations before us? And which provides a foundation upon which a better future can be built by humanity? This idea of the Sublime: That you locate your identity not in what you experience within your biological existence as such, but what you develop under the circumstances of your biological existence, which is of external value. And therefore, you find the true meaning, true self-interest.

Schiller made this clear; he made this clear with his drama; he made it clear with his politics. The important thing about Schiller, which is an idea which Shakespeare would have accepted, but which is unique to him, is that Schiller developed this concept of the Sublime, as a true self-interest of mankind, and developed this as a method of popular education, using Classical drama. That is, Schiller never composed a drama in the way that Shakespeare is often explained in universities, in my lifetime as a student, and earlier, and later. The influence on the English language, of course, you would have people who I was opposed to, like Bradley and Coleridge, and people like that: Romantics.... Romantic interpretation of aesthetic or morality examples. Schiller did not do that. Schiller approached everything from the standpoint of the Sublime, or as a negation of the Sublime—the true tragic principle.

For example, I just gave you an example of this in my outline on the history of culture since the 18th Century, of European culture as it exists in the Americas today. Therefore, to understand the tragedy of European civilization, since the 18th Century, you have to see the tragedy as posed, as if on the stage, by the disgusting immorality of the French and British 18th-Century Enlightenment. And then, you have to see the struggle to free European civilization from this tragic force of the Enlightenment, this corruption, this degradation. You see the struggle upward, in the case of the support from around the world of the American Revolution, as typified by the support from France, the support from Charles III of Spain. An upward struggle. Then you see this terrible thing happens: The French Revolution, organized by Shelburne and company from London. We see to the present time this degeneracy, a worsened form of Enlightenment culture, this degeneracy—pulsations of it have taken over. And now it has brought us to the virtual end of the existence of civilization.

Therefore, to put this on the stage, in such a way that the audience is sitting before the stage, looking from their imagination, lifting themselves up from being little people on the street, into being people in society, looking at society over the long term, over generations, and seeing the mistakes, and seeing the challenges which man has faced. And seeing the role of the Sublime, the role of leadership of this quality, of pulling man through these crises, to levels of safety. That is the way in which to see this.

Now, going back to the question of the individual soul. As I said, the individual soul can be defined in only one meaningful way. There are many ways in which this is described, and most of it is nonsense. It's taught as nonsense, probably by priests who don't understand what the soul is anyway, so they try to give an explanation despite their ignorance of the subject. The soul is simply the fact that the faculty of mankind, which in the first instance, is capable of discovering universal physical principles as Kepler did, for example; and doing this not only for man's individual relationship to the physical universe, mentally, but also in terms of soul processes. That's one aspect. No other creature has this capability.

In the animals in general, the animal dies with its death as a mortal creature. Man does nothing with his or her death. Man may live on, through the work he does in influencing the domain of ideas, the domain beyond the mortality of biological life. That's the difference.

Now, in terms of the animal soul. Well, the animal can get a soul as Nicholas of Cusa emphasized, by the concept of participation. Cusa used the conception of man's participation in God, as the animal's participation in man. That is, when you adopt a puppy or kitten, especially a puppy—puppies are much better at this; kittens are much more asocial, essentially. Dogs tend to be a little more social in their behavior, as some of you know. But, when you take a dog who, met in the wild, is a very nasty fellow, more or less like a wolf, hmm? But you raise a dog from a puppy, you humanize the creature. The creature depends upon you. With its own little doggie way, it finds a way of participating in you. It becomes an emotional reaction to you, an emotional reaction with you, and therefore, we see a reflection in the animal of that. You see this also in the relationship of the farmer to his horse or even to his cow, who he may slaughter later on, or the donkey. (I like the donkeys very much on this thing.) They participate in you, they look at you, they depend on you. They act to please you, so to speak, they act to help you.

For example, we have a donkey here. The donkey's called Ambrose....

Now, the horse was feeling sick, and the horse fell down. The horse is old, it's arthritic, it's stiff, and so forth. Ambrose went over to the horse, and Ambrose nudged the horse, and he bit the horse in the rump: "Get up!" As if he sensed that the horse's life was menaced if he didn't get up. You know, it's bad for horses, when they're sick, to lie down like that, at least for long periods. So, he's concerned about the horse.

Ambrose would be concerned about us, too. He would be concerned about our dogs. So, they participate in us, in the sense that their participation in us, through our cultivation of them, projects qualities which are human-like, into them. But they never achieve the power of reason. They have a certain kind of animal insight, but it's not human reason.

So, the attempt to define the human soul as a product of the animal soul, is a mistake. More adequate would be, that we give to the animal a sense of soul, when we take an animal, such as the horse that works for us, the ox, or a mule—we give them a sense of soulness, through participation in us, and therefore they participate in our soul. And thus, as man participates in the Creator, so these creatures, as Cusa put it, participate in us.

The General Welfare

Question: I want to ask you why only the Western artistic conception corresponds to the human conception of the universe? And, how can we get the human character in the different Latin American nations, with traditions and philosophies which are also millenarian?

LaRouche: Millenarian philosophies and traditions are a disease, not a culture in the ordinary sense. They don't belong to human beings. The problem here is this: Remember, there's been a long struggle of humanity, to do what? To free man from forms of culture in which the majority of people were treated as human cattle, either as wild human cattle to be hunted down, or herded human cattle to be raised, used, and culled, as necessary. So therefore, prior to the emergence of the idea of the modern state in Greece, the prevalent culture of every part of the world we know, was an inhuman culture, in the sense that it treated the majority of the human species, not only of other nations and languages, but its own, as human cattle. That problem persists to the present day.

So the idea of the modern nation-state, as typified by the influence of Solon, and by the work of Socrates against the Sophists, and by Plato, gave birth to the idea of the republic. It's a nation which is accountable, and government which is accountable, to the general welfare of all of the people, and their posterity. In other words, a government which is committed to the service of the upward progress of humanity, and of the condition of the individual in human society. This progress depends on developing a notion of two facets. One, a notion of truth, a notion of absolute truth. Second, a specific notion of truth, of the truth that man and animal are completely different forms of existence. Man is not something that evolved from an animal, or from animal processes. Man has a quality which we call reason, that is, the power to discover universal physical principles, and to apply them, which no animal species has, which no living process per se has, as a living process. This is something which has intervened in the universe, into the existence of an animal form of life called humanity, which has something which is human, not just animal. And that is this power of reason, this power of discovery.

Therefore, the composition of society, and the notion of truth, are inseparable from this quality of reason which is typified, for example, by Carl Gauss's attack on Euler and Lagrange, in Gauss's 1799 paper on the question of the fundamental theorem of algebra, on the question of the complex domain.

So, therefore, there is only one conception of truth, and this is specific to the nature of man.

Now, most of the cultures of this planet are still cultures which are based predominantly on traditions of treating most people as cattle. For example: In Mexico, how are most of the people of Mexico treated today? As human cattle, not as citizens! The exploitation, the maquiladoras, the way the Mexican population is herded across the border. Oh sure, Mexicans do good work for the United States. We depend upon them! Somebody says they exploit the United States? We depend upon them! Who's going to do the work for us?

But the point is, the struggle is that Mexico must be sovereign. It lost its sovereignty in 1982. The swan song of Mexico's sovereignty was the great address by President Lopez Portillo, to the United Nations in October of 1982. After that, after the defeat of me, and of Lopez Portillo, Mexico lost its sovereignty. Now, there are still Mexicans who believe in sovereignty, and will fight for it. And I'm all with them. But the fact is, the problem exists.

The same problem exists in Venezuela, where certainly the people are not treated as sovereign. They have a couple of oligarchies squabbling over the spoils, like vultures over the dying, over the people of Venezuela. This Chavez thing is a monstrous thing. This terrible situation in Colombia; the fact that there is no option provided in Bolivia to help people get out of the grip of the cocaleros . Look what's happening to Argentina. This is immoral! What's happening in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa: It's immoral! It's done by the United States and Britain, in particular; and Israel. What is done in most of the world is immoral, still today. People are still treated as human cattle. And the principle—the difference between man and an animal—must be the law. It is natural law. And any action which is contrary to that law, should be nullified, is unlawful. Any cultural tradition which is contrary to that, which bases itself on human pleasure, sense-certainty, is immoral. It's rotten.

Now, look at the history of mankind from that standpoint. How old is Classical culture? It's very old. It's as old as the human race, undoubtedly. Always, the way the human race has survived, has been this impulse, of some, at least, to recognize human nature for what it is, and to try to order the processes of society accordingly. There's always been this struggle to find the true principles of the universe. But this struggle has been limited essentially to a few. Sometimes, the ruling stratum is dedicated to this idea, as you see in the case of the Classical culture in ancient Greece. There were people who were dedicated to this conception. But Greece didn't achieve it. But the idea of it existed in Greece.

The Negro Spiritual

You find, for example, in the United States, you have the case of the so-called Negro Spiritual. The Negro Spiritual was a product of several things. It was a product of an intersection, largely, of African cultures, cultures embodied in African people, intersecting the culture of the United States. When this was looked at, at the end of the 19th Century, by great musicians, it was recognized that there was, in the Negro Spiritual, as it evolved as a body of practice, from among slaves, originally, that this contained a Classical principle: an aspiration for the affirmation of the distinction of man from the beast. And a self-affirmation of one's role in that. And therefore, you saw in this, in the Negro Spiritual, often great beauty, which was refined and honed, to become an integral part of Classical culture by some of the great musicians of our time, particularly of the 20th Century. As opposed to the so-called pop-art, or pop-culture, which is drug-related degeneracy.

So, all through humanity, there is a Classical principle. What we have, fortunately, in European civilization, in the development of the Classical principle based on the heritage of ancient Greece and its influence, and based on the development since the Renaissance in particular, the highest level of development of Classical culture, has occurred within European civilization, because of our successes, our political successes, in particular, of the type which were impelled by the examples of ancient Classical Greece. So therefore, we're more advanced in terms of science and arts, than other parts, non-European parts of the world, but the Classical principle, is intrinsic to humanity. It just is more or less well developed, according to the circumstances, whether it finds itself as a seed on fertile or impoverished ground.

All rights reserved © 2003 EIRNS