LaRouche to West Coast Cadre School
Only Man Can Discover Universal Principles
Here are Lyndon LaRouche's opening remarks to a LaRouche Youth Movement cadre school on Jan. 24, and a selection of questions and answers from the two-hour discussion that followed. (Subheads have been added.)
My subject today is an interesting oneit's one I'll be addressing in other written formsbut it involves some nice paradoxes for youto chew upon, shall we say.
We're now at the point, that the United States is leading a process of a general collapse of the world's monetary-financial systemthat is, specifically, the existing floating-exchange-rate world financial-monetary system. The collapse is now at a terminal phase; that is, we're actually in the phase where the collapse is inevitable; it is not reversible, within the framework of the existing system. Only the replacement of the existing system, by a new system, and, specifically, of course, what I've proposed is a return to something modelled on the success of the earlier Bretton Woods systemthe fixed-exchange-rate system. That would work. It would work with the U.S. government's leadership; it would work if I were President, because other countries would now join with me, and those countries that would join with me, would create enough impetus so the solution would be globalwhich it has to be. I mean, we have to have a reform of our monetary system, but, obviously, since we are dealing with the question of long-term agreements, of 25 to 50 years, in terms of long-term treaty agreements, therefore, we have to have a partnership in the world, which is large enough to sustain a world system. Otherwise, our recoveryit wouldn't work without that.
Now, there are certain problems that come up in this. The great problem is, you're running intodirectlyinto the effects of the Baby Boomer generation. Now, we've talked about Baby Boomers before; we've made jokes about them, but unfortunately, they're not just a joke. You make jokes about them, because that way you can sort of put up with them. If you don't make jokes with them, you just get so angry with them that you don't function at all, but it's out of your own anger. But, the Baby Boomer generation is one which was so frightened by a succession of Truman's launching of the nuclear-warfare age, along the lines prescribed by Bertrand Russell; the fact of the right-wing turn which Truman led in the United States, which scared the pants off even most returning veterans, but became known as "McCarthyism" for awhilewhere J. Edgar Hoover was the nightmare in everyone's bedroom. Then we had, in the beginning of the 1960s, the Missile Crisiswhich really terrified people; the Kennedy assassination, which, because it was not investigated properly, terrified everyone; and then, the launching of the Indo-China War.
So, these things produced a change in a generation, a generation which was largely unwitting of what had happened to it. Because the children who were born in the 1940s did not understand, or recognize, what had happened to their parents' generation, and did not understand what they had been subjected to, as a result of being raised by those parents, in that generation, under those conditions. So, actually, the Baby Boomer generation of the world, was, in a sense, morally defective in its development, relative to the older generation; because the culture itself had taken a downturn, because of the nuclear-weapons age, and the right-wing turn in the United States and elsewhere, and the threat of a general nuclear war, then thermonuclear war, which had produced a state of mind in the young people who came into maturity as young post-adolescents in the 1960s. They really never understood what a real culture was. Maybe there are one, or two, or three people here and there, who did, but the majority of the Baby Boomer generation was culturally defective, in its moral outlook, from about its birth. So that, when they were hit by the succession of the Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Indo-China War, and so forth, this produced a defect which is called a cultural paradigm shift.
The Cultural Paradigm Shift
Now, the leading edge of the cultural paradigm shift, came first among university students, who went into a rock-drug-sex counterculturefleeing into LSD, a form of which is actually called psychomimetic drugs: that is, induced psychosis; induced total flight from reality, from which some travellers never returned. This produced the model around which the entire generation in the United States, and in Europe, and in most of the Americas, was developedthat whole generation. People now in their fifties, or very early sixties, are generally participants in a group-think tendency; an induced cultural shift, which nearly all of them participate in. There are no exceptions; the fact that you didn't roll in the dirt and take LSD in the 1960s, does not mean that you are not a Baby Boomer today.
Now, what happened is this. The other side of this was a denial of the reality of man, as distinct from the beasts. What happened to the American, was a mimicry of what happened in ancient Rome, under the Caesars, under which Rome ceased to be a producing nationthat is, Italyceased to be a producing nation. The class of farmers, which were the most productive part of Italian society under Romeand it was Italian; there was no such thing as a Latin culture; it was an Italian culture, with a Latin frosting on it. But the people spoke Italian; they thought Italian, and so forth. The languages of France, the languages of Spain, and Portugal, are actually Italian languagesthey're dialects of Italian, not Latin, but mixed with a lot of Latin loan words, because the Romans dominated the process, with their Latin language.
But, this culture went through a transition, from being a producer-oriented society, into a society which was dominated by the increasing resort to slaveryand slavery like that used against the maquiladoras in Northern Mexico, and Mexicans who come in here as illegalsthat form of slavery is what the Romans went through. So therefore, our people lost productive employment. They went into a highly inflationary society, in which virtual slave labor, from the poorer parts of the worldunder globalization; under NAFTAreplaced our own productive capacity. Our infrastructure was shut down, especially since the time of Brzezinski's role as National Security Advisor to Carter. It was shut down. So, we were destroyed as a nation.
The people who were the Baby Boomersthey don't believe in man, as something different than an animal. Not really. Their religious beliefs are more insane than the atheists. The atheists are saner than the so-called "religious believers," because the religious believers do not believe in the conception of man as made in the image of a Creator. They think of themselves not as having a future; they think of themselves as being animals, which die when they die. And, they think about having pleasure, in the sense of warmth and cuddliness all the way through, to the end of the journey. They are a no-future generation in their thinking.
What the no-future generation of people now in their fifties and sixties has created is a no-future culture, a no-future society, in the United States especially, but also to a large degree in Europe, and elsewhere. That is our problem.
Real Economy
Now this comes up, expressed most clearly in the notion of economics. Economy is based on what these people deny: that is, real economy, successful economy. It's based on what? If man were a higher ape, as most of these Baby Boomers look like higher apes, a little less hair than most higher apes, and they're losing a lot at the top, actuallythe men are, especiallybut they actually are pretty much like apes, aren't they? And they sometimes seem to behave like apes.
But anyway, if we were apes, there would never have been more than a few million of this type living on this planet, at any one time. We now have over 6 billion reported as living on this planet. So, they're not monkeys. They did something. And what they did, was essentially, by making discoveries, which correspond to what we call universal physical principles, or Classical forms of artistic discoveriesnot hip-hop, but Classical forms of discoveriesmankind has been able to increase our species' power to exist, in and over the universe, so that we now are able to support over 6 billion on this planet. And we could support a lot more, at a much higher standard of living, than we have now, even with existing technology.
How did we get there? We got there through man's ability to make discoveries of universal physical principles.
But we're in a society which says there's nothing but statistics! And a society which depends upon statistical projections, does not believe, effectively, in the discovery of universal physical principles.
So, therefore, the society, especially the free-trade society, a society that believes in free trade, a society that believes in entertainment, rather than production, a society that does not believe in investment in infrastructure, a society that would allow a baboon, like Schwarzenegger, to become the governor of Californiathat society is not going to live for much longer. It's doomed.
Now the problem that you and I have is that, if we know anything, we know that there is a recovery possible, but the recovery depends upon going back to a science-driver oriented form of society, a Classical form of society, not a society based on mass-entertainment culture, but a productive society. The Baby Boomers, the ones in their late fifties and sixties, resist that, and it is that, more than any other factor, which threatens the extinction of civilization, especially civilized life in the United States today.
So therefore, you're coming up against that. So, what people do is, they get frightened, and they say, Isn't there some way we can appeal to the Baby Boomers, in terms they will accept? Aren't we making a mistake by not going along with the mass media? Aren't we making a mistake by not going along with the standards of culture and entertainment, recreation, today?
That's not a mistake. The mistake is in the culture, not in us. Our job is to crack it. And we will not crack it by adapting to it. You don't cease to become a worm by being one.
So that's where we are. And that's what I'm running about. Because the question of economy is the question of role of creativity, of discovery of universal physical principles, of discovery of the significance of Classical artistic principles of composition, in organizing society, so that it will continue to develop, and man's power in universe will continue to progress, and we can work our way out of this mess.
So, we're at the point, where the young fellows, the ones 18 to 25, represent a generation on which the future of humanity depends. That is, if the ideas and cultural habits of those in the late fifties and early sixties in the United States today, and in Europe, were to continue, civilization as we've known it, is doomed. Gone. The population of the planet would probably drop to much less than 1 billion people, and that fairly rapidly. We would go into a long period of barbarism, as a result of this kind of collapse. A dark age beyond anything that we know about in any accounts of history. We only know about it from certain geological, archaeological results.
That's what we're faced with. If we can not turn this generation of Baby Boomers around, this society and its future is lost. And you have to accept that reality. Because when you accept the problem, then you're able to define the solution.
And our young people are doing a pretty good job. There's just not enough of them in it. And you see, among the older generation, even our own members who are in their late fifties, early sixtiesthey have problems. They have conceptual problems. They tend to be drawn, and driven, with a sense of insecurity about not acting like Baby Boomers. They resent the Baby Boomers, and yet they have inside themthere is the Baby Boomer, screaming and yelling inside them, and disrupting their effectiveness when they try to operate. They go into quasi-psychotic fits, because of the inner Baby Boomer, inside them, which is an echo of the society around them. And therefore, we need more young people, who understand the problem, and can take a Baby Boomer out of the gutter, where they like to rollthat is, the gutter of their own cultural traditionand get them out of the gutter, and get them to clean themselves up, and rejoin the human race.
That's our chance. That's where we stand.
So, I'm writing something now, which will be out soon, which refers to this. So, be prepared for it.
Okay, now I'll turn it back to you. We've got a short day, so we'll see what you have to say.
Dialogue with LaRouche
Question: Good morning, Lyn. I have a question, well, I was having a discussion about this idea of the divine spark of reason. And I guess we were talking about how this actually came into being, inside a human being. Was this an evolutionary process, this attainment of cognition? And I guess, that led us to another question, which is, where does the mind actually exist? In individuals, like you have a mind, I have a mind, we each have our own minds, but how does this actually exist? What space does it actually occupy?
LaRouche: This is now getting to be fun. Okay. First of all, what do we discover when we discover universal physical principles? Think about where that comes about.
We know something about this process in a concrete way, from ancient astronomy. For example, we have, through sources, such as those of Central Asia, and some of these Vedic hymns, and things related to that, which show that mankind understood long-term cycles, like equinoctial cycles, like a quarter of a 100,000 years cycle. And there were actually people who understood, in terms of what their calendars, what we recognize as the magnetic pole cycle, that is, the magnetic pole migrates, and it has a cyclical migration, and the fact that somebody had a calendar with that cycle built into it, indicates a fairly sophisticated job way back there by some ancient peoples. And also, who would discover the magnetic pole? That would only be discovered by a seafaring people, who were using compasses for navigation. And they would have to realize that the compass point, reference point, of the North magnetic pole, was moving around a bit. And they'd have to keep track of that, and come up with a cycle on that. Otherwise they couldn't do it.
We're talking about 2,000-year range, 1,000-2,000-year cycles, and there are a lot of them floating around. There are 25,000 approximately years cycle, of the equinoctial cycle. And these things are recorded in ancient calendars, and these are the kind of things that are actually transmitted through some poetry, and things of that sort.
All right. Then you have, more concretely, in modern European history, you have a reference point in the shadows of the Great Pyramids. These pyramids in Egypt are actually great astronomical instruments, with a certain unique kind of precision which tell us what they knew about astronomy. And there are some things that go with that, which give us more knowledge, insight into astronomy by these ancient Egyptians. And we're talking about nearly 5,000 years ago, in that alone.
So, anyway, this is the source of it.
Now, our culture, that is, our European civilization, comes out of what is now called ancient Greece. They didn't call themselves Greeks then, but we call them Greeks today. Now this culture, which was a Mediterranean, largely a seagoing peoples' culture, it was called a "peoples of the sea" culture, and you had places like Cyrenaica, which is on the northern coast of Africa, now part of Libya, next to Egypt, which was an integral part of the Egyptian culture, particularly the seafaring part. The Greeks were, to a large degree, actually a seafaring people, and they settled along coastlines in ancient times. And they had their fortifications toward the inland, against wild people, or something like that sort, who were the threat to the small cities, or communities, which the seafaring people built along certain coastal port areas.
So, this Greek people, as we can call them today, the ancient Greeks, typified by the case of Thales, who was Ionian, or the case of the Pythagoreans, developed a science based on Egypt, which is called spherics. Now spherics essentially is looking up to the heavens, at nightor, they actually did it in the daytimeyou'd build a deep pit, a deep well, and if the well is narrowly fixed, you can actually see stars during the daytime, and particularly in areas which are fairly arid. And that's when a lot of astronomy was done that way. They had the nighttime sky which they were able to survey this way, and also the daytime sky. Motions of the planets and so forth, they could see, in the dusk or whatnot.
So, this became known as spherics.
Now, people didn't know how far distant these things they were observing were. All they could measure was the angular motion, or the apparent angular motion, in observing these. So this became known as spherics. So, you didn't have any assumption about the nature of geometry. You assumed that all you knew about geometry was angular motion. And the sky, the universe that enclosed the Earth, was the universe.
So, spherics meant this particular approach. This is the approach of the Pythagoreans. There was no Euclidean geometry then. Fortunately. I say fortunately. Euclidean is part of the decadence of European civilization. It took us until Riemann in the 19th Century, to finally officially begin to get free of Euclidean geometry, the work of Riemann, on a generalized Riemannian geometry, in which there are no axiomatic assumptions. There are no definitions, axioms, and postulates, as such. Only universal physical principles can be used in the place of axioms.
All right. So this knowledge is there. Mankind is able thus, in astronomy and elsewhere, to look up at the heavens, not knowing exactly what they're seeing in sense perception, but by studying the angular periodicity, the periodicity of angular motions, and the aperiodicity of angular motions, observed in the domain of spherics, we come up with conceptions which we call universal physical principles.
Universal refers to universe: the ultimate domain of spherics. And therefore, we're looking for principles which exist in that universe, at all times. So, we're not talking about evolution of the universe, in that sense. We're talking about a universe, and therefore we don't start with yesterday and today. We start with discovering something which is presumably universal, and which we're able to prove is valid, as a universal idea.
Universal Principles
Now, then, coming back to Earth, having defined this notion of universal principles, you then find that there are three different kinds of experimental areas, experimental subject areas, three different qualities which exist. One: You have processes which do not correspond to living processes, or products of living processes. They are abiotic.
Then you have processes such as fossils, the fossils of this planet. Water is a fossil. The atmosphere is a fossil. The waters of the oceans and so forth were created by living processes' actions, and they left water behind as a fossil. The atmosphere was created by living processes, which left the atmosphere as a fossil. Most of the surface of the Earth, is covered by fossils, the bodies of dead plants and animals, piled one on top of the other, and this goes down a great distance. More distant than you'd want to go. Like the depths of the ocean, for example.
Then you find a third one. That mankind is able to change the universe, or change the Earth, in particular, in a way that living processes otherwise can not do. Therefore, you have three areas, as known to the ancient Greeks: the abiotic, the non-living, universal; you have the living processes, again relatively universal; you have the powers of the human mind, which are able to change the universe, as nothing else is. Again, universal. These we call phase-spaces in modern language.
So now, therefore, what have you got? You've got a universal principle called reason, noesis, or nous, from the ancient Greek. You've got the universal principle. Did that exist at the same time that the abiotic universe existed? Did that exist at the same time that living processes existed in the universe? Did not these three principles of abiotic, living, and noetic exist at all times, at the same time, as universal principles?
Okay, then what is man? Man is a product of the impact of a universal principle, which we can call cognition or noesis, as manifested upon a form of life which we call man. That form of life called man, is appropriate for the reflection of this universal principle, which we call noesis, or creativity. So, therefore, it does not come from inside biology. It does not exist in any other living processes, but it always existed. Because the laws on which the mind operates, are universal and have always existed, in the universe. We did not create those laws of the universethey existed. The difference is that man, by discovering these laws of the universe, and by applying them as products of the human will, is able to change the universe, not by introducing a new principle into the universe, but by introducing a new application of a previously existing principle.
And that's what the problem is for many people, when they're trying to deal with this question of evolution. They're always looking for some way in which you start with two balls bouncing against each other, and end up with living processes, number one; and then number two, you end up with a human being, who has evolved from the ape into a thinking human being. Not so.
There is something outside living processes, expressed within man, which is the creative power of man.
This is the ancient notion of the soul in ancient Greece, and in Christianity.
That sort of gets into it, and covers the other point as well.
The Historical Method
Question: My question was, as I read your papers, it seems I always get a new idea every time I read it. And lately I've been completely amazed on the way that you actually compose your paper.
LaRouche: Which one is that? Which paper?
Question: I read the "Tariffs" paper,1 and you had it incomplete. So, the question that was running through my mind.
LaRouche: Oh, you mean, the one that's not completed yet.
Question: Exactly, and that's what actually sprung the question: How do you actually compose these? I begin to wonder, okay, what principle do you use? How do you actually go about composing it? Were you inspired by Classical music to do it? What specific pieces? Obviously, the late string quartets [of Beethoven], because you always bring it up, right? Maybe I'm wrong.
But I'd like you to discuss it.
LaRouche: It's sometimes called the historical method. You have to live in history. You have to have a sense of immortality. You live in history. I live in a lot of history. I live in pre-historical history; I live in ancient times. I live in the sense of the historical specificity, of various places and times in history. I look at the reflection of ancient historical developments in us today.
I've often referred, for educational purposes, to the fact that I had a great-great-grandfather, Daniel Wood, who was born about the beginning of the 19th Century, about the same age as Abraham Lincoln, who had been involved in the Carolinas in struggling against slavery. He was a Quaker minister of some sort, and he was involved in this effort. And he had to scamper out of the Carolinas, because they were about to kill him. South Carolina was not a pleasant place.
So, he went up to Ohio, and he became one of the founders of the Underground Railroad movement in the United States. So, he was the oldest figure who had appeared at the family dinner table, in my family. And therefore, since he was a celebrated figure, I knew the place he'd lived, I'd been there, at his farm which had been one of the Underground Railroad stations north of Columbus, and in fact, the whole family, extended family, was living there. People around there all knew of him, knew him personally, and he figured at the family dinner table, as a constant topic of what he said, what this happened, how he did this, how he did that. So he was sort of the earliest figure who came to life at the dinner table.
Then I had other members of the family, of different backgrounds, and so forth, and so I got a sense, from childhood, from this kind of family relations, of how culture is transmitted from one generation to another. And how we find inside ourselves, the residues of cultural changes, which had come earlier in society. And I realized that there is no such thing as a flat land on which ideas are spontaneously developed in our contemporary society. Rather, we are the embodiment of an accumulation of discoveries and experiences which are transmitted and incorporated in us.
I always think that way: When I try to teach, I try to get people to locate themselves, historically. Because that's the way you have a sense of immortality. You locate yourself historically. People came before you. You are an expression, an outcome, of their having lived. You are a living continuation of what they produced, that's embodied in you, or embodied in your circumstances. You think about the future society, and what you're going to embody in the future of humanity. Which is to me, the way to educate. That all good education, is essentially an extended form of the practice and teaching of history. And that's the way I write. Always try to situate people; try to make a connection to ancient people; get these connections made in people's minds, so they're not just floating around in empty space, but have a sense of where they are in the universe.
What Is Christianity?
Question: In regards to religion, mostly Christianity, in the process of finding oneself spiritually, there seems to be a lot of people who have the belief that, if I just believe in this so much, just believe in it hard enough, it'll be true. Then you have the Christian fundamentalist line of, "Well, man's nature is to sin, and the reason we're at war is because it's built in. The idea of evil and of conflict is built in." And so, from within this context, what are the bounds of the Bible, being such an old document, and you have a lot of people who say it holds no ground? Is that true or untrue, and from this standpoint, where do you come in with this concept of what you addressed in Alabama, regarding religion and Dr. King?
LaRouche: Aha. Well, first of all, I don't have much truck with the Old Testament, because I know that the thing was manipulated at several points. Primarily, first, by the Babylonians, who in the 7th Century B.C., who tucked into what is called the Old Testament, a lot of Babylonian pagan myths which are not anything to do with Moses. And, when the Persians took overremember, first of all, they depopulated what had been called Judea, both times. It had been depopulated earlier, with the hauling off of most of the population of what had been the northern part of Israel, they'd been hauled off, away. Then, the second time, when the Persians took over, they hauled off the Jews, again the leaders, and took them to Mesopotamia, and they had them rewrite the sacred books again. So what you had was, a rewriting by conquerors, of the religious doctrines of the Hebrews and Jews, successively. This is a mess.
However, from the standpoint of Christianity, in my experience, we have no such a problem with the New Testament. There are problems in terms of certain of the ways it's been handled in translation and transcription, but essentially, in the essential features. Remember, the New Testament was in large part written in Classical Greek. The Gospel of John or the Epistles of Paul are written in Classical Greek. The method of argument used in these Gospels and these Epistles was Classical Greek, that is, Platonic Classical Greek, which was the leading culture of that part of the world in that period. Hebrew was no longer spoken in the area of the Middle East. It was a dead language. A written form of Hebrew existed, but not a spoken one. The spoken one was either Aramaic, which is a form of Arabic, or it was either Classical Greek, as by the leading Apostles, and also by Judaeus of Alexandria, or it was the vulgar, kind of waterfront Greek, which the ordinary Jew would generally speak if travelling. And the books are written in a rather vulgar kind of Greek in the written form.
So, therefore, the problem, in the case of Christianity, as I've said, with the New Testament and so forth, this is very clear. We know it very well. These were contemporary people. Christ was murdered on order of the Emperor Tiberius, who was then sitting at the Isle of Capri, and his legal son-in-law Pontius Pilate ordered the execution. This is not some mysterious thing that is known to us only through distant books. This is an integral part of history. Christianity was an integral part of history from that point on. And therefore, we can know it very well. So, that's what I stick to: what we know. I'd say, okay, the rest of it's fine. Look at it, study it, see what you think about it. But for Christians, Christianity, the New Testament is that.
Now, you had the crazy doctrines coming in, which were largely the result of heathen influence, which said that man is naturally guilty of primal sin, he's naturally evil. This came into the United States, in particular, with the campaign of the swine who was the grandfather of Aaron BurrJonathan Edwards. He ran up and down the Connecticut River Valley, telling people, "You're filthy pigs. You're worthless. God hates you and despises you. But I'm here tonight, and if you will join me tonight, God will bless you, even the filthy swine that you are, and give you all kinds of good benefits." That was the general foundation of fundamentalism in the United States, or what became the United States, by the grandfather of a traitor, who also was the head of what is now called Princeton University at the time, where Aaron Burr studied. So, not a very nice picture.
Mankind is not a worthless swine. Mankind is not a worm. Mankind is the best part of creation, and God does not have bad taste. He does not go out trying to collect bad, disgusting objects, but only the best. And we are the best. The problem is, is that we sometimes behave badly, because we allow ourselves to become corrupted. We no longer think of ourselves as having divinity. We no longer think of ourselves as having a certain kind of immortality of the spirit, a certain dedication, proper dedication to a mission in life. We are here to perform a job. We have to discover what the job is. It's for the good of humanity. Do it! That's the point, and that's where the problem comes in. When people say, "you are a worm, you are a disgusting filthy creature. You are worthless. God despises you, that's why he collects you." I mean that's not good theology! It's actually not even polite. So, that's where the problem lies.
I say, no. Man is the best of all creation. God does not have bad taste. That's why he loves us.
The Future Prime Minister of Japan
Question: Hello, Mr. LaRouche. I'm from Japan. I'd like to be the Prime Minister of Japan in the future. I'm very worried about my country, so I want to find solutions to problems in my country, but I don't have an idea yet, so give me some advice.
LaRouche: Well, what we've got in Japan is simple. Look what we've got. We have Asian culture. Now, most people from Europe or the United States don't really understand Asian culture. They really don't understand. But I've got some encounter with it. I do have some understanding. You have different cultures, and different cultural trends. I mean, when you get Koreans and Japanese in the same room, you've got a problem already, as we know. You've got China. You've got Southeast Asia. You've got the Philippines, which is a completely different kind of situation. You've got an Indonesian mentality, which is also different. India.
What we're going to be doing is, obviously, developing, because of the great population of China, India, Southeast Asia and so forth, we're going to be developing the area, extensively, in order to accommodate these large populations. China is already moving to the largest scale of infrastructure development on the planet, right now. Russia, together with Kazakstan, is very much oriented toward this strategic triangle of Russia, China, India. That cooperation is ongoing.
Japan is financially bankrupt, but Japan has another aspect to it. It has a legacy as a high-technology agro-industrial culture, especially industrial. Japan's tendency will be, given the characteristic of the islands. which are mostly mountainous and not particularly favorable to concentrated habitation, Japan's destiny is to assume its role as an advanced industrial-technology island, or set of islands, and to participate in long-term agreements for the development of Eurasia. That is Japan's primary mission. It was sometimes called the "Go South" mission in Japan, to go in the direction of development of areas that need development, which include opportunities in China.
So, my particular intention is, as a prospective President, is to take a section of the area, which includes north China, it includes Korea, it includes a part of Siberia, and Japanit's the North Asian area, which is an area of great potential development, even within that area. You have the Bohai area in China, which is the great bay area. You have the area to the north of it, which is adjunct to both North Korea and Russia, and also, across the water to Japan. It's a natural area for a great degree of development, particularly if we're doing this kind of trans-Siberian kind of development, this area becomes an area of industrial development comparable to the concentration in the Bohai area nearby, south, in China.
This is the kind of destiny we have, and my view is that I want that thing to work. I want that cooperation to occur. It is the future of that whole section of Asia, and it's also an integral part of the future for Eurasia as a whole. And Japan has, I think, a very clear mission to pick up and adopt and carry out in that context.
Absolute Chaos!
Question: Hello, Mr. LaRouche, My question is: What would happen in an economic collapse?
LaRouche: What would happen in an economic collapse? Absolute chaos! We're on the verge of it right now. You see the pattern of the collapse of industries and farms. For example, let's take California: You've got this Schwarzenegger. You've got a $15 billion estimated deficit in this year's budget. You have at least a $15 billion deficit or more in next year's budget. How is California going to deal with that? If you have Schwarzenegger, what are you going to get? You're going to get a more than $15 billion, actually $30 billion cut in expenditure of the state of California for essential services. What does that mean? What's the effect on the population? What's the total population of California? What is the effect on that population of a $30 billion cut, this year, in the budget of the state?
Now, look at other states of the United States, which are more or less in similar conditions, if not quite the same. Some worse, some better. What does it mean? What does it mean, if this happens in Europe, as it threatens to happen in Europe right now? They're all bankrupt over there, you know. Only a revival program, a recovery program, will save them. What about South America? What about Mexico? Mexico is totally bankrupt, hopelessly bankrupt. What about the entirety of South America? See what we've got? We are on the edge of a plunge into a new dark age. And look at the damn fools in the so-called Presidential debates, and see what they're talking about. They're not in the real universe.
So, therefore, what happens is, suddenly, these talking fools, as they drop by the waysideHoward Dean probably jumps off a cliff someplace and tries to float up to heaven, or somethingwhat do they do when reality hits, when the public has been saying, "Which of these candidates are we going to choose?" Or not choose. What happens at that time? You have a plunge into a new dark age of humanity, spreading throughout the planet.
So therefore, we have to win, because otherwise, look at 'em. Look at the candidates, look at the discussion, look at the opinions reflected by the mass media. Talk to people in the streets. What's on their minds? What would be the reaction to the equivalent of something worse than a $30 billion cut in the state budget of California, which is coming up now? You're looking at chaos.
Now, I as President can deal with that problem. I know how to deal with it. It's manageable, but it means overturning what most of these guys believe. That's the issue.
A New Nation
Question: What are some of the challenges people will be facing once the current economic system is replaced?
LaRouche: In a sense, when you go into a new societyit would be like being an immigrant into a new nation, because the nation is going to have to change. And therefore, a sudden, rather rapid change, into being a new nation, is somewhat like entering a new nation. That is, you're in the same physical surroundings, but suddenly the rules are different. The perspectives are different. The ideas are different. That's the point. That's the shock effect.
The key thing is, I'm relying largely upon the effect of a youth movement of the type we have, to spread that as a pattern, because what you need is the same thing you guys who are doing that, are doing. That is, to get into groups, where you thrash out issues and discussions of principle, you learn to cooperate in new ways, through that kind of discussion, and to extend that method of operation to include more people, because we're going to go through some very rapid changes. And therefore, what is needed is a sense of how to make these kinds of changes. And the best way to do itit has to be voluntary, as you know. That's why I've meddled as little as possible in the youth movement, because it has to be voluntary. You guys have to do it. You have to develop your techniques, you have to decide on it. I can give you some guidance, give you some stimulation, and direction. But the change that's going to be made, you're going to make, not me. And therefore, what you learn, from this experience, and what you do, will be valuable for other people, on a larger scale, once we start the change.
1. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. "On Tariffs and Trade," EIR, Feb. 13, 2004.
LaRouche Speaks to the Philippines
MANILA, Jan. 30 (EIRNS)Lyndon LaRouche gave a half-hour radio interview and cadre school combined in the Philippines today, hosted by the Philippines LaRouche Society and the Philippines LaRouche Youth Movement and broadcast on the nightly radio talk show hosted by LaRouche Society leader Antonio "Butch" Valdes on DZAR-1026 Angel Radio Manila. For this special occasion, Butch Valdes arranged for 16 LYM members to be with him in the studio, led by his son Anton, and a group of friends from the media and the business community to be wired in from a hotel meeting room in Manila, hosted by his other son Itos. After introductions by Mike Billington of Executive Intelligence Review and Butch Valdes, LaRouche spoke for about 10 minutes, and took questions from both locationsthe first cadre school in Asia outside of Australia!
The transcript follows; subheads have been added.
Butch Valdes: Tell us a little bit more about the efforts of the LaRouche Youth Movement, Anton.
Anton Valdes: The Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement, basically, what we do is, we are here under Lyndon LaRouche's direction to rebuild the future. We are calling on the youth as the future leaders of this country, of the world, to take the responsibility to rebuild the future, their own future.
Butch Valdes: The LaRouche Youth Movement is an organization here as well as in the rest of the world. What parts of the world is the LYM in?
Anton Valdes: Right now, the LYM is exploding in the United States, Europe, Australia, and in South East Asia, it is basically what we have here, and otherwise pretty much around the world.
Butch Valdes: We have our caller on the line, Mike Billington, calling from the United States. Good evening, Mike.
Mike Billington: Good to talk to you.
Valdes: We have here, awaiting your call, and Mr. Lyndon LaRouche's call, here in the booth we have about 16 members of the LYM and quite a number of others, and also with Itos Valdes in a conference room in the nearby Shangri-La Hotel, with quite a number of people there, too.
Billington: Good to have you all there.
Valdes: Go ahead, Mike, what do you have for us?
Billington: Let me say, first, that we have some good news and some bad news about this broadcast. Mr. LaRouche, as a result of the phase shift that is going on in American politics, is being inundated with requests from all levels across the country, to appear, to speak, and so forth, so there is a very exciting shift, and I will discuss this in a moment. But also, unfortunately, the schedule has given him a bit of a cold, and he is having some trouble with his voice today. He has requested that we keep this down to about 15 minutes rather than the hour we had hoped for.... [H]e has got to try to preserve his voice for this electoral campaign. But he is very, very glad to have the chance to speak to the Philippines again.
Let me just say that the phase shift over these last two weeks has been very dramatic. LaRouche went into this campaign with two fundamental policies which he knew had to be implemented now, not after the election, not campaign promises, but with an urgency upon which the fate of our country, and, really, of the world depended. One was that Dick Cheney and what he represents within the Bush Administration had to be removed now, that the threat that the failed and illegal war in Iraq would be responded to by this circle, this neo-conservative circle, whom we have been exposing for the last year and a half, that their response to that failure would be to expand into new wars, in Syria, in Iran, in North Korea, and othersthat that threat is extremely grave, and has to be met by identifying his crimes and removing him from office now.
Secondly, LaRouche warned that we were now in an irreversible global collapse, as evidenced by the collapse of the dollarand the collapse of all currencies, really, around the world, only the dollar is collapsing fasteras a result of the breakdown of the global productive system, and that unless this nation and, especially, the candidates in this election, take seriously this collapse, and propose or act upon the need for a new world economic order, of the sort that LaRouche has proposed for a New Bretton Woods system, like that of Franklin D. Roosevelt after the Second World War, then we were heading for an irreversible breakdown of civilization itself, and these two issues had to be met.
I can say with a great deal of joy and excitement that what has emerged over the last week is that there is now a dramatic shift on the issue of Dick Cheney and his role in history, his criminal, illegal, "Beast-Man" role in history. The focus of this, as you may know, after months of our inundating the country with our pamphlet called "The Children of Satan," we released a second version, "The Children of Satan II," on Cheney and the Beast-Men, George Soros and others, which has already saturated Washington and is being distributed in all of the states where primaries will be taking place. Then, this was met both by the release of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's book, which directly identified Cheney as the controller of the Bush Administration, precisely as LaRouche has warned all along, that a weak President is being run by this evil character and the people around him.
Secondly, the report by weapons inspector David Kay, which, in fact, pulled the final prop out from under those who were trying to say that there was any justification for the war in Iraq, it is now known that there was none, and that this criminal war has to be dealt with as an illegal, criminal war.
So, the result is that LaRouche's fight to forge this election campaign has reached a point where even the candidates themselvesand John Kerry took the lead on this, by publicly identifying Cheney as the problem last week. The test will be whether any of these candidates, as it narrows down to, basically, a campaign between LaRouche and Kerry, whether they have the courage to take on the global financial collapse and deal with the urgency of the proposals that LaRouche has made for saving the country and saving the world economy.
In that light, let me just mention that LaRouche's work around the world is the key to this. His addressing people in Russia, in India, in China, and in the Philippines and elsewhere, this is the key to whether we can pull together the New World Economic Order required urgently as this world careens into hell. So, with that I think we are ready to get Mr. LaRouche on, and Butch, can I ask you to introduceis Mr. LaRouche on?
LaRouche: I think I'm on.
Valdes: Mr. LaRouche, thank you for joining us this evening. We've been informed that you are not feeling too well lately. You have a snowy winter in that part of the world, and a very hectic campaign schedule, which makes us much more appreciative of your kind accommodation to give Filipinos a rare opportunity, indeed, if not the first in our history, to have a chat with a U.S. Presidential candidate. These extremely troubled and chaotic times leave many people all over the world very much disturbed, confused, and in many instances, desperate. Filipinos, like most human beings today, are frantically searching for answers. Over recent years the Philippines LaRouche Society, and especially in the past few months, through this radio program Ang Ating Katipunan, we have continuously insisted that because of your knowledge, your leadership, and your vision for all mankind, you, Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, as the next President of the United States, will show us the way out of the hole that most countries, if not all, have dug themselves into.
Members of the LaRouche Youth Movement are with me here at DZAR-Angel Radio station, while Itos Valdes is over at Edsa Shangri-La Hotel with some known personalities in media and business, all anticipating your presentation and eagerly waiting to chat with you, so without much ado, my fellow Filipinos, it is my privilege to introduce you to a Democratic U.S. Presidential candidate, Mr. Lyndon H. LaRouche. Good evening, sir!
Role of the U.S. Primaries in the World Situation
LaRouche: Thank you very much, and good day to you. We have a very unusual situation in the world today. It is one that most people cannot understand. For example, even though I have been getting a limited number of votes in the two [primary] elections that have occurred so far (one we don't know because there was a real jam-up because of a computer voting problemthe other one we don't know completely what it was). But the point is that we have effected a phase shift in politics, that is, we put the issues on Cheney and on the economic crisis and related things, and this has caused a phase shift in U.S. politics, as typified by what happened this last week in connection with the New Hampshire campaign. At this point there has been a much more significant turn, despite the opposition from the Democratic National Committee, among other Democrats to collaborate with me in one way or another.
This is going to take off. There is no established trend in the election campaign so far except for the dropping out of many of the Democrats, who either have dropped out or will drop out soon. Dean is doomed and Gen. Clark is doomed. Edwards will last a little bit longer, but I don't know how much longer. He'll probably last through the Carolina event, but beyond that I don't know.
Dennis Kucinich will go into a side niche in the campaign. The others are essentially irrelevant, and will become more so as the time passes, so it essentially is as Mike indicated, that it is me and Kerry.
Now what we are going to get is this: As the process develops, since I'm the one that uncorked on Cheney and got this thing to the point that other people are jumping on the case now, there will tend to be more and more discussion in a peculiar way between me, Kerry, and others, implicitly. This will be around the country. This is already significant in the so-called African-American community, a very significant response and exchange of views and interaction, especially since the Martin Luther King Memorial event, which I did in Talladega, Alabama. So this is the way it is going to go.
The crisis will come as Mike has said. When the international financial crisis hits with greater force, at that point there will be a change in the American voters. So far the behavior of the voters has been largely one of, shall we say, one of a Hollywood reaction. People are reacting to a news media event as an election. They are voting as if they were polled on a news media event.
Real issues, except for a growing issue on the war and on Cheney, do not exist in the mind of the voters generally. When the financial crisis hits with greater force, this will hit them and it will bring them into reality with a shock. This is a period which, therefore, will have a revolutionary character not only in the United States, but internationally.
You have coming up the Russian Presidential elections, which are coming up in this next month, March. This will be a phase change in world politics.
You have developments in Japan. How much longer can Japan continue to bail out the U.S. dollar? There are doubts about how far this can go.
There are changes in Europe, for example, Gerhard Schroeder, the Chancellor of Germany, announced a capan end to any more cuts in social services and in the welfare of the population.
These are phase changes, and there will be more of them, so you cannot draw a statistical trend line on the election. You are looking at breaking points. We have hit one already. It hit during the week just before the New Hampshire primary. You'll have another one hit strongly at the time that the financial crisis hits. You'll have an intermediate crisis as the Democrats now for the first time begin to go after Cheney. That will be a change in U.S. politics and a fierce change in U.S. foreign policy.
That's where we are, so I am extremely optimistic. I am not, shall we say, assured of anything in terms of who's going to win what, but I am extremely optimistic that what we tried to do, to bring about a phase change in U.S. and international politics, that has been accomplished.
We will now go through a series of phase changes, and, hopefully, the financial crisis will become apparent to people soon enough that they will react to determine how this election campaign in the United States goes. Obviously, the results in the primary campaign on the Democratic Party side, in particular, in the United States are going to have a determining effect on world politics, and that's the way I am watching it.
The Financial Crisis
Valdes: Thank you, Mr. LaRouche for your initial presentation. I would now refer to Itos Valdes and the group that we have at Shangri-La Hotel to field the first question. Itos, are you there?
Itos Valdes: Yes, Ka Butch, we have a question from Joey Bernales, to whom I will yield the floor, Joey.
Joey: Mr. LaRouche, good evening, sir.
LaRouche: Good evening.
Joey: You were saying the U.S. voters will change once the financial crisis hits. What will be the catalyst of the financial crisis? Will it be a rate hike by the Federal Reserve?
LaRouche: No, it could be, but not necessarily. It could be almost anything. The United States, at present, is actually bankrupt. The current account deficit is only typical of that. The collapse of the value of the dollar relative to the euro is again symptomatic. You have all kinds of bubbles in the United States at a time that the banking system of the United States, that is the private banking system, is essentially bankrupt, as a whole.
Now the key thing here, of course, is the international financial derivatives matter. In financial derivatives, we are talking about hundreds of trillions of dollars against a world economy estimated at $41 trillion. Obviously this is total bankruptcy, so that anything, anything can set it off. Also, political factors can set it off, because the idea that the U.S. is in any way growing, is a complete fake.
What you have is the following: The United States economy is collapsing, it has been collapsing, there is no question of it. But why do people think, and actually believe the nonsense that the U.S. economy is in an upsurge, in a growth pattern?
What they are looking at is gambling, and Wall Street is gambling. It is not the economy. It's gambling on stock values and similar financial values, so that is what the problem is.
Once it is apparent that these values are going to collapse, then the entire bubble, in the mind of the citizen, collapses. At that point, the citizen says, "Wait a minute!"; this is not a popularity contest, this is not a Hollywood event, this is real! This is me! This is not something I am looking at, this is me! I'm not voting on a horse race. I'm not betting on a side bet, on a crap game called Wall Street. This is me!
Now when that happens, of course, the chain reaction around the world will be immediate. You will have, for example, the yen will go through a crisis, and you know what the effect of that will be on East and South Asia.
That is what we are looking at, not any one thing. You have a hyperinstability in which many factors could be the trigger factor to set off a general chain-reaction collapse. What that will be, is uncertain. The fact that the Federal Reserve System moves to try to prevent something from blowing up, means that something else will blow up instead.
Joey: Will this crisis happen within the next 10 months?
LaRouche: It will happen soon. It will happen soon. You know, in this case, as long as you have this subjective factor of belief in a financial bubble, you can postpone, politically, you can postpone a crisis for some period of time, even after it is overripe. That can be weeks. It will not be many months.
Valdes: We have a question from the LaRouche Youth Movement, Mr. LaRouche, his name is Paul, go ahead.
Paul: Good day, Mr. LaRouche, my question is: What is our guarantee that the ideas that you represent are the ideas that can save not only the Americans and the Filipinos, but the entirety of humanity as well?
LaRouche: In fact, it goes the other way; they are the only ones that will, because of the nature of the crisis. We have gone through, globally, a cultural paradigm shift in the U.S. economy and politics since the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and the beginning of the Indochina war. Since that time, what happens in the United States has become an imperial factor determining the way the world goes. This also determines the way the international monetary financial system functions. Whatever happens to the United States, will determine what happens to the world, not in the absolute result, but in terms of what time a crisis breaks, what kind of a crisis, and what will have to be done to solve the crisis.
Now, in the United States presently, any existing ideas from any of my so-called rivals, from leading circles in the United States today, will ensure a collapse of the United States, and a slide of the world into a new dark age. I am the only one who has attacked this problem, and the only one who, as an expert, has had any understanding of it, in what I have said publicly over recent years. So it is down to the fact that I am the only alternative, and, if I fail, then we all fail, but I am determined not to fail.
The Importance of a Eurasian Orientation
Valdes: We've shifted back to Itos at the Shangri-La Hotel.
Itos Valdes: We have Hans Palacio Tondo, who wants to ask a question.
Tondo: Good evening, Mr. LaRouche.
LaRouche: Good evening.
Tondo: My question is, will the coming U.S. elections mean that there will be less attention paid to the events that go on here in the Philippines in the United States, especially, in the light of the fact that we are also going to be having a Presidential election this coming May?
LaRouche: At the present time, on the surface of U.S. politics, yes. In terms of world reality, no, because what we have here is a Eurasian orientation. This is coming up more and more in Europe. France has its own approach to this around President Chirac. Germany has an orientation, largely toward China and somewhat toward India. Russia is key in this because Russia is the pivot for the strategic triangle, that is, Russia, China, India cooperation, which, as you know, is increasing.
Japan has to make a crucial decision, and this is going to be very important for the Philippines. If Japan decides that the recent policy it has followed is insane, and if it decides that the alternative for Japan is to participate in the triangular economic cooperation with Europe and with the strategic triangle of Russia, China, India, and so forth; if Japan makes that decision, then Japan will go to an orientation toward becoming an industrial-goods-exporting nation, which is its self-interested role. At that point, you will have north China and the complex of China, North Asia, and Southeast Asia, will tend to click in, together with the effect of India on this whole process.
Those developments, developments of that kind, will put the Philippines back into focus. The Philippines is now being ignored (except for bad things coming out of Washington, chiefly), because it is considered irrelevant. The Philippines becomes relevant as a part of international culture because it is a European culture, essentially, or a European/Asian culture, in the Far East.
If we have an orientation, a long-term orientation, adopted as policy by Japan and other countries, then the Philippines comes back in as a political factor of significance. At that point, people will become concerned about the health and vitality of the Philippines.
So, I think, it is not just the United States that is going to determine this. It is going to be how Eurasia reacts, including Japan, to what's happening in the U.S., to the collapse of the U.S. dollar. This is going to change the situation, one way or the other, fairly soon.
Valdes: Another LYM member, whose name is Jehan, go ahead.
Jehan: Good evening, Mr. LaRouche. My question, Mr. LaRouche, you know very well the history of "Edsa" [the name applied to two Philippines military coups imposed under the guise of popular uprisings, and a third popular uprising that faileded.]that would be Edsa one, two, and three. These events in Edsa were all different demonstrations. My question is, what is "vox populi," "vox dei," for you? This is in relation to the pursuit of real freedom, and I will be connecting this to what had happened in Edsa on these three occasions.
LaRouche: I gave an address in Talladega, Alabama, on the occasion of the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King. That address is now being processed as a DVD, which includes the introduction by Amelia Boynton Robinson, and my address on that occasion. This will now be available internationally.
From that, anyone who knows these factors in history, especially in the history of Christian civilization, will know exactly what I am saying. This kind of message of rising out of issues, shall we say, popular issues, into the deeper issues of the individual relationship to a sense of immortality, is what my politics is. This, to the degree it has any influence, is going to influence politics of this type. Are we relevant to the politics of this type, to whatever degree it influences or not?
Assessing the Democratic Primaries
Itos Valdes: Mr. LaRouche, Tony Gatmaitan would like to ask a question.
Tony Gatmaitan: Good evening, Mr. LaRouche. How are things with you and the campaign for the President, of the Democratic Party?
LaRouche: Good evening. Well, it's coming down essentially to the fact that there are two candidates who are relevant in this race on the Democratic side, Senator John Kerry and me. The other candidates will be increasingly out of the race or irrelevant. That's where we stand. The issue is going to beKerry has come around to openly attacking Cheney on the right issues, which is good. He hasn't gone all the way, but he has gone in a good direction.
On the financial issues, I don't think that John Kerry yet grasps the nature of the international financial/economic issue. So the issue is going to be between me and Kerry, or among me, Kerry, and some others, on how we define, not only a more refined and accurate view of the Cheney problem, as I defined it on these issues on Synarchism, but also how we define the way we think about economicsand that especially for a period in which the international financial system is going through the greatest collapse in modern history right now. That is where the issue stands, and that is where I stand. I am in the middle of that, and things are changing very rapidly on the political scene inside the United States now.
I am in the middle of it. Where it is going to go, I don't know with certainty, but it is moving, and it is going in interesting directions. We will have to see almost week by week.
Butch Valdes: Mr. LaRouche, I know that we are imposing on you. I know you are sick, but I cannot stop all these questions from coming through to you. We have another question from the LYM member, whose name is Ver.
Ver: Hi, Lyn. As you may know we have an ongoing problem in Mindanao, where part of the Muslim population want to secede from the Philippines. How do you propose to resolve this?
LaRouche: From my standpoint, it is obvious that I have been the leading political figure in the United States, and also to some degree internationally, in opposing the attempt to organize a war, a clash-of-civilizations war internationally.
What is happening in the Philippines is in part a reflection of that. Now, there are Filipino factors that we have known for years on this issue in Mindanao. Back in the 1980s, we were talking about this. Back in the 1980s we were trying to prevent this clash in Mindanao from occurring. We were hoping for a positive accommodation among these forces to maintain the unity of the Philippines.
Now it has become much more difficult. However, I think that my specific role in dealing with and against this clash-of-civilizations policyif I am successful, if I can influence others to join me in this, if there is a U.S. commitment to opposing the clash of civilizations, then my Muslim friends in various parts of the world may be able to have a salutary influence on the situation in Mindanao and the Philippines generally. Obviously, we should, and I am committed to that. All I can indicate is what the resources are that we can use.
Remember that the demoralization of the Philippines by what has happened since the beginning of the 1980s, this demoralization has produced a condition under which communal conflict is more easily fostered. The fact that the Philippines has no clear, assured security for its future. The fact that the economic security is in jeopardy, creates a political vulnerability, which lends itself to these kinds of communal explosions. If people of the Philippines, in general, believe that there is an opportunity for a progressive development in the economy of the nation and its relations to the regions, and if the international Islamic forces which recognize me as being a defender of them against the clash of civilizations, intervened, then I think we have the potential for coming to some kind of accommodation. But these are all conditions. They are not spontaneous, they are not projectable as statistically certain, but they are the opportunities we have, which we must cultivate to try to bring about a solution.
How To Fight Fear
Valdes: We have another question here from the LYM.
Marlou: Hi, Lyn, this is Marlou. Fear is the worst enemy of human civilization, as Amelia Robinson says. Unfortunately, the leaders in the Philippines and definitely the leaders in other countries are afflicted with fear. Now, my question is, how can the members of the Philippines LYM tell our leaders to overcome the fear of making a stand on this world economic crisis?
LaRouche: We are doing a fairly good job. I have to do a better job. My campaign has to create internationally a sense that the alternative that I am proposing is feasible, that is, politically feasible in this period. That is what we have to do. We also have to give, in that context, give people a vision of a more hopeful world, a better solution.
If people believe that something is coming, or might come, or is about to come, which removes these evils, then the optimism of thinking that there is leadership somewhere in the world, which is going to push things in the direction we need, that will change the situation.
Itos Valdes: Here in the Shangri-La Hotel, this is Rene.
Rene: Good Morning, Mr. LaRouche, thank you for being with us.
LaRouche: Good Morning,
Rene: If Mr. Kerry wins over you, by the slightest margin, would you accept his offer of being his Vice President for the sake of the Democratic Party's unity?
LaRouche: The question is a bit too precise, because the realities of the situation don't correspond to that question. What is happening now, is that the Kerry initiative is impacted by what I'm doing. So what we have is a Democratic Party, in terms of the Democratic National Committee, which does not function. Large sections, however, of the Democratic Party, that is, the officialdom of the Democratic Party, in the large, are moving in the direction of collaboration with me and Kerry simultaneously. There is a movement around, for example, Sen. Kennedy, former President Clinton, and others, in this direction. So what we have now is not "Is Kerry going to win?" That is not certain. Somebody is trying to adduce that Kerry is now winning. That is not true. Kerry is the only one among the other candidates who has any credibility as a Presidential candidate.
I have greater authority as a Presidential candidate, and I am, in a sense, much closer to a Presidential institutional view than Kerry. Kerry is a Congressman. He is a member of the Senate. Very able, in his own way, but he doesn't think exactly the way that is needed to thinkmaybe he will learn quicklyhe has the opportunity to do so.
What you are going to see in this period is not a question of who is going to give way to whom. During this period we are going to be running as rival candidates, all the way up to some point. At the present time, what's important is not our rivalry. What is important now is our indirect collaboration in reshaping the topics of discussion. See, our problem is this: What the voters think is unimportant, right now, because they are going to change what they think. So don't look at what the voters seem to have thought two days ago or five days agoit's irrelevant.
Forget what the polls said a week ago. It is irrelevant, because there is going to be a sudden change in what the voters think, so therefore, we have to look at leadership not as a trend among the voters, but leadership as a factor in and of itself, which is always the case in a crisis. In a great crisis, the voters as such do not shape the leadership. In a crisis, the leadership changes the phase shifts among the voters.
What is going to happen is that the discussion, in whatever form it takes between me and Kerry, is going to shape the way the voters think. After we have seen how the voters respond to that change, then we will know what is likely to happen in November.
LaRouche and the Moon-Mars Program
Valdes: We have another question here from the LaRouche Youth Movement, from Edgar.
Edgar: My question is, how important to humanity is the latest exploration on Mars?
LaRouche: It is important. Not just the latest exploration. I think that some of the purposes in the operations are credible and useful, but what is important is the fact that the orientation towards space exploration has been reactivated; that is what is significant. I think the present program is a failure insofar as the long-term mission is concerned, even though what is being done now are useful steps that we will not waste.
What is needed is a real Mars exploration program, which includes the Moon, and develop the Moon as a logistical base for developing large-scale systems for exploration. But the key thing here is this, the world has got to learn how to manage what are called "natural resources." These are relevant elements of the periodic table of Mendeleyev. We are now using up some of the materials, which are in the planet as raw materials, of that type, more rapidly than they are being replaced. This is not an impossible, catastrophic situation. It is rather a challenge. Now to solve that challenge, what we have to do is we have to look at the solar system and its development, so to speak, its personal history, in new ways.
The only way we can do that is by space exploration. We have to look at the composition of what is on Mars, because we have to see that Mars was created by the Sun, as the Earth and the Moon were, and as the other planets were. We know what this system is that we are looking at, because Kepler solved that problem back at the beginning of the 17th century. We know that the solar system was formed in a very special state of the Sun, when the Sun was much younger. We know something about that. We have a problem on the question of an understanding of certain peculiarities of the Periodic Table, which we don't yet know. We've been working on that for years, off and on; we worked with my late friend, Dr. Robert Moon, formerly of Chicago University. We had something going. We are reactivating that.
We have something going in Russia, among the followers of the school of Vernadski, some very sophisticated work, and I am involved in some of this as a matter of discussion. We have to explore the physical experience of the solar system, comparing what Mars is, what we find on Mars and beyond, with what we know of the physical chemistry of the Earth. Therefore, we can focus then, with new approaches, to discovering how to manage the Periodic Table of Elements on the Earth for our needs here. So this is crucial.
Finally, the exploration of Mars is a normal course for a generalized science-driver program for humanity. If you wanted to pick a research program which would cover almost everything you wanted to know about anything right now, you would say, "Let's start with a space exploration program," because the idea of putting a human being into space, with all the biological problems that implies, and all the other problems, means that every aspect of scientific inquiry suddenly comes into focus when you say, let's go with a grand-scale, generalized mission-oriented Mars exploration program. That will be the science-driver for the future of the human race on Earth.
Valdes: Thank you very much, Mr. LaRouche, and we hope you get well soon for the sake of everybody in the world.
LaRouche: Also, I hope to be in better condition to talk to you guys!
Valdes: We look forward to that, sir. LaRouche: Thank you, thank you very much. Bless you all.
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