PRESS RELEASE
LaRouche E-Mail Dialogue Continues
On Eurasian Peace, Development
Here, we publish more e-mailed questions and comments, along with LaRouche's answers, as he makes his way through the hundreds of responses provoked by his Sept. 6, 2006 webcast.
Poland
Boguslaw Zeznach: Hello, Mr. LaRouche. Best greetings from Poland, and even better wishes in your search for sanity, common sense, and basic ethical principles in today's crazy and declining "Euro-Atlantic" world. Here is my contribution to the online debate:
1. Poland, my country, should naturally benefit from your idea of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, as we are directly on its way from Berlin to Moscow. Yet, the example of the Baltic Gas Pipeline, which is being built between Russia and Germany, so as to omit Poland, for outlays 6 times higher than if going on land through Poland's territory, shows that strategic thinking is still far away from that idea in both Berlin and Moscow. True, it is in part meant to punish the present, very short-sighted and primitive Polish (rightist) government for their pro-U.S., anti-Russia, anti-EU stance. Anyway, that is a fact proving that rulers of the world prefer to invest against someone rather than for something. Which means that the real battle is not for money, but for people's minds and souls, which you rightly emphasize in your teachings, too. I would suggest that you use also this example, when skeptics ask you how to get money for the Eurasian Bridge itself.
2. Poland as a nation-state is among the most homogenous nations in the world. Ninety-six percent of citizens claim Polish ethnicity; 93% have been baptized in the Roman Catholic Church; the Polish language has virtually no local dialects—i.e., you cannot tell whether a speaker comes from Wroclaw, Warsaw, Lublin, or Gdansk. And that is good, as it spares a good deal of tensions, friction, and internal conflicts. However, the EU laws and propaganda are telling us that we have to abandon that homogeneity and open ourselves to newcomers who come with their money to buy land and houses here, whereas young Poles should rather go and look for jobs elsewhere. More than 2 million young people and skilled hands have done so over the last few years. I know that, while coming from the multi-ethnic U.S., you're also a strong defender of a sovereign nation-state. In view of the above, do you think that EU membership is any good for Poland?
3. Recent developments in Mexico, building parallel structures of power, seem particularly interesting and politically promising. Unlike revolutions in Venezuela and Bolivia, which I also welcome, but which come as a top-to-bottom initiative by populist Presidents and are enthusiastically but passively received by their respective peoples, the softer leftist current in Latin America, represented by Mercosur leaders (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay) and Mr. Obrador in Mexico is—I believe—by far more reasonable and promising, as it is rather an evolutionary bottom-up process, actively involving citizens into a better understanding of their rights and in defense of common good. Here I would also expect your comments.
God bless you, Mr. LaRouche. Many people wish that you live long, keep healthy, and never stop sharing your thoughts with us.
LaRouche: The problem has been the trends in the policies of Poland's recent governments, but not only Poland's governments. Throughout eastern Europe's former Comecon economies, the price of relative political freedom from Soviet domination has been a collapse of the physical economies of those nations to levels far below those of 1989. Under the Maastricht Treaty and its principal effects, as dictated by the Thatcher-Mitterrand government, the former Comecon region of eastern Europe, has been degraded, together with Germany and Italy, to levels of economy below that of 1989, while those states have also been pushed into participation in NATO.
As for the economic problems of Poland now: They are virtually all the result of the chain-reaction effects of the Maastricht and ECM systems.
This is also the state of affairs in the region of what was formerly known as the D.D.R. All of western Europe is now virtually bankrupt, and sinking into a pit which leans toward a plunge into a new dark age. Without breaking free of what the now archaic NATO system represents, there is no hope for any of the present nation-state economies of western and central Europe. All arguments on matters of the type to which you refer are rooted in that single issue. If Poland had not been raped, as it continues to be raped by European Union and related policies, the inequities to which you refer would not exist.
Hence, my current approach to these ironies in Poland is currently trapped, as I have laid this out in my Sept. 6, 2006 Berlin-D.C. webcast, and will resume the discussion of that in my new Berlin-D.C. webcast being scheduled for the last week in October. We must change the system, and then many of the predicated problems of the present system can be removed.
—Lyndon
Jerzy Czeszko: Mr. LaRouche, how should we deal with the divisions resulting from different religions and cultures between nation-states, especially in the context of the Mideast conflict, where Islam is wrongfully blamed as a source of war and terror? Also, I would like to hear your thoughts about the cultural dimension of the cooperation within the Eurasian Land-Bridge. Thanks and looking forward for your answer.
LaRouche: Ecumenical policy, as adopted by Charlemagne, by Cardinal Mazarin's initiative in the 1648 Treaty of Westphailia, and by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's De Pace Fidei, must be premised upon the concept of natural law.
I have been explicit on this in my treatment of the issue of the conception of the personality of the Creator of a continuing universal Creation. Whether persons and states accept my knowledge of the subject of the Creator as defended by Philo of Alexandria, for example, or not, the natural law, as Johannes Kepler understood this correctly, like Cusa before him, is the principle upon which urgently needed cooperation among nations depends absolutely. I ask nations to agree to that conception of natural law, and of man's unique nature under natural law, and no more than that on theology.
The evidence that all mankind is trapped in a single, presently leaky boat, creates a sitaution comparable to that which Cardinal Mazarin and others faced in 1648. Men and nations sometimes agree only because there is no other visible choice. The chance that they might agree to needed changes in principled relations among states now, is premised on the sheer awfulness of failure to come to such working agreements, as in the situation of the Westphalian Treaty.
Prof. Dr. Janusz Czyz, Warsaw, mathematics professor:
1. Mr. LaRouche, in his recent government declaration, the new Polish Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, spoke about the need to develop energy alternatives for Poland—among them nuclear energy. A commission has been created in the Economics Ministry which is studying the question of nuclear energy. What do you think would be the impact if Poland would go with nuclear energy?
2. What do you advise the Polish authorities to do, so as to protect themselves against the attacks which are coming from Western mass media against the present government?
LaRouche: I would hope that notable private personalities from Poland would become participants in the attempt to define agreement on perspectives of cooperative development which I am pressing with the initiative around the Sept. 6, 2006 webcast. What is needed is deliberation among leading scientific and other relevant representatives of their respective nations, representatives whose participation in these discussions would provide their respective governments with evidence of existing alternatives for governments to examine, and, hopefully adopt.
The best way to remove a nagging conflict among nations, and also others, is a clear vision of a desirable common benefit in some form of cooperation over one or two generations to come.
The general need for certain changes in economic policies of, and among nations, points to the role of general cooperation in the nation's shared used of nuclear-fission and future thermonuclear-fusion technologies, as a fulcrum on which to lever cooperation in many other important areas
India
Prof. Lokesh Chandra, historian, and former Member of the Indian Parliament, Sept. 6 (five questions, with answers from Mr. LaRouche interpolated):
Mr. LaRouche, you have proposed both the construction of the Eurasian Land-Bridge as a way of integrating Eurasia economically and infrastructurally, as well as a 50-year perspective for a new Peace of Westphalia agreement for the development of existing raw materials, as well as the creation of new raw materials in the spirit of the Russian scientists Mendeleyev and Vernadsky.
Could the Shanghai Cooperation Organization become the vehicle for this, or how do you see the future role of the SCO? Do you think that the SCO could be an option to get the world out of the crisis, without an induced change of U.S. policy?
LaRouche: It could be an included vehicle. One among the essential arrangements required for long-term financing of development will be packaged treaty-agreement arrangements with ranges of between a quarter- and a half-century maturities. These will often be of the character of multi-national agreements. The fact that the SCO is already developing its role as a multi-national form of cooperation in development assures its potential role as a large factor in Eurasian development.
Chandra: Given the danger of geopolitical conflicts in the future, what in your view would be the best way for the SCO to relate to the U.S.?
LaRouche: It will be necessary to bring about a rather radical change in the current foreign-policy orientation of the U.S.A. The orientation must be toward those forms of cooperation which would have been launched in 1945, had President Franklin Roosevelt's death not brought Winston Churchill's accomplice, President Harry Truman, into the Presidency. Without such a change from recent decades' trends, especially since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and, more emphatically, the anti-progress aspects of the 1968 youth tumult, the world as a whole were already doomed to the new dark age implicit in the current international monetary and financial systems.
Chandra: Many people in India have a completely different explanation for the origins of terrorism, than that presented by the United States or Great Britain. For example, there is the view, that a lot of the problems in the region from Southwest Asia to South Asia come from the colonial policies at the end of the Second World War and the division of India. Earlier the Sykes-Picot Treaty created the seed of future problems.
Given the fact, that some of the countries in the region have severe economic and social problems, which help to nourish terrorism, how could the Eurasian Land-Brigde contribute to the stabilisation of these countries?
LaRouche: The view of the problem as rooted in "colonial policies" is too simplistic and diversionary. Among the Marxists, Rosa Luxemberg was right in defining "imperialism," where Lenin and the German Social-Democracy were absurdly wrong. The U.S.A. veteran diplomat Herbert Feis's studies of imperialism confirm Rosa Luxemberg's derision of the German Social-Democracy and Lenin's mechanistic views precisely.
The present system, since the Paris Treaty of February 1763, has been the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of imperialism crafted by the British East India Company's Lord Shelburne and Shelburne's Jeremy Bentham. The Anglo-Dutch Liberal system which has dominated the world, but for relatively brief periods of U.S. leadership, and which has ruled the world since August 1971, is modeled on the Venetian ultramontane system of empire during the nearly four centuries of domination of medieval Europe by the alliance of the Venetian financier oligarchy and the Norman chivalry. The system of submission of governments to the authority of so-called independent central banking systems, not colonialism, is the core of modern imperialism. The attempted imposition of "globalization" would mean both the perfection of the neo-ultramontane system of Anglo-Dutch financier imperialism, and also the virtually immediate general, chain-reaction collapse of the present world society into a prolonged new dark age, planet-wide.
International terrorism is an instrument of policy of the present form of the Anglo-Dutch-Liberal system. Its present goal is the breakdown of governments to the extent needed to eliminate the nation-state as a power-factor in society everywhere.
Chandra: Mr. LaRouche, given your love for India, which goes back to your presence in 1946 in the struggles in Calcutta, and the fact that you worked in 1979 on a 40-year development plan for India for Indira Gandhi, many people in India think that you are an American they can trust. So what would be your suggestion to emerging Asian countries in this perilous world situation?
LaRouche: We must accelerate the rate of development in, most emphatically, basic economic infrastructure, in order to create the platform to defeat the worsening effects of poverty on the lower seventy percentile of the poor of Asia. This requires such measures as a massive development of nuclear power, with the intent to enable a rapid, qualitative uplifting of the potential relative population-density of the whole population over the coming two generations. This will be the means for attacking the deadly water crisis now menacing India, using approaches which increase the potential relative population-density by transformation of the land-areas in which present and slowly improving skills of the poor are working. Power, water, and kindred basics of basic economic infrastructure are factors whose benefits run, initially, way ahead of gains through cultural uplifting of the skills of the population.
Chandra: Don't you think, that the heavy emphasis of the Indian economy on the computer and IT sector, is a vulnerability of India if the system of globalization collapses, and what should India do to deal with that? How can one create productive jobs for millions of people? How can India overcome the poverty, which was a big concern for our leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru?
LaRouche: Reliance on the advancement of such sectors would be dangerous, unless the higher priority were based on development of high-gain potential of basic economic infrastructure. The problem today is that economists generally have no conception of the fact that real economies are physical first, and financial a poor second, and, that economic processes are not mechanistic, but dynamic. The factor of infrastructure is more important than technology, just as sanitation and good nutrition are more significant than medical care in promoting the general welfare of the population as a whole.
Philippines
Ronnie Velasco, the former Minister of Energy and head of the Philippines National Oil Corporation under the Marcos Administration, who directed the construction of the first nuclear plant in Southeast Asia:
Iran will not give up its nuclear aspirations. Israel clearly has the bomb. The U.S. took out Saddam, and Iran took over the group. Therefore, Iran believes that it must have nuclear weapons, to counter Israel. Am I reading it correctly?
LaRouche: You misread my statement. The Bush Administration's argument on this account is a lie, expressing a feature of policy-shaping which is typical of the Bush Administration and Bush himself on virtually every significant subject-matter.
All nations have the natural-law right to access to nuclear technology. However, the state of the world has passed the point at which the NPT agreement on nuclear and thermonuclear weapons is a remedy.
However, the application of this principle is complicated.
For example, I had a mid-1970s meeting, in New York City, with the celebrated, then former Foreign Minister Abba Eban of Israel. The subject of our discussion was the need for an affirmative approach to Israel's relations with the Arab nations, the Palestinians most emphatically. His word of caution was, that it is not so simple: "Some heads of state are clinically insane." He was correct on that point, of course.
The general remedy, without which solutions are not possible, is the modern application of the first principle of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The prolonged conflict between Arab and Jew, which has been cleverly engendered and nourished by the malignant actions of such typical British agents as the British Arab Bureau's Bernard Lewis, has created a situation comparable to that of the 1618-1648 Thirty Years' War. Without a replication of the Westphalian Peace today, the entire "Middle East" is condemned to a Hellish mutual extinction of Jew and Arab, in which Israel's already existing nuclear-weapons capability is a characteristic factor.
The U.S. assertion that the issue of "nuclear weapons" is the current U.S. issue with Iran, is a fraudulent piece of U.S. propaganda. The Bush Administration's belligerent policy toward Iran is based on that administration's policy of "regime change." The Bush Administration's policy toward Iran is the same as that adminisration's fraudulent pretext for war against Iraq: "regime change." Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction" at that time, and the lying Bush Administration knew that. There is no near-time potential of the alleged type in Iran, and the U.S. administration knows it.
The issue is nuclear power, not nuclear weapons.
Without nuclear power, no nation could be sovereign today.
Sen. Nene Pimentel, leader of the opposition in the Philippines Senate:
How can a return to the gold standard be achieved internationally, and what would be the effect of that on the world economy, and on developing sector countries in particular?
LaRouche: We must be precise and accurate in our use of terms such as "gold standard." The fact that President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the use of reserve gold as a standard for the Bretton Woods system, does not mean that the Bretton Woods System employed a "gold standard."
The "gold standard" was a standard of imperial policy of the British Empire. The U.S. Constitutional system, which was created and defended against the British system, is a constitutional state-credit system. Under the British system, and present systems of western and central Europe today, governments are not sovereign, but are subjects of control by the private financier interests represented as "independent central banking systems." No government which submits to the existence of an "independent central banking system" is actually a sovereign.
The British gold standard used its control, since the Napoleonic wars, of the price of gold currency as an instrument of imperial hegemony over the nations of continental Eurasia and beyond. However, in 1931, the British gold standard collapsed, and a period of international monetary chaos persisted until U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt seized control over the gold of the U.S.A. itself. Had he not, Adolf Hitler would have conquered the world.
For example, the collapse of the British gold standard was a part of the process of Britain's intent, at that time, to bring Adolf Hitler into power in Germany. The crucial event in that attempt was the establishment of the Basel Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which was to serve as the instrument through which its member, London's protégé Hjalmar Schacht, prepared the arming of Nazi Germany in preparation for the war which Schacht's patron, the Bank of England's Montagu Norman, organized through credit made available by operations associated with both the BIS and France's fascist Synarchist financier houses.
It was Franklin Roosevelt's intervention which brought Britain into the anti-Hitler camp, despite the massive pro-Nazi factor within the British (and London-linked New York City bankers') establishment of the 1930s.
The Bretton Woods system was a fixed-exchange-rate system within which gold bullion, not gold currency, was used to settle accounts for the purpose of maintaining that fixed standard of exchange. The British "gold standard" was based on a floating-exchange-rate form of free-trade system.
What is needed is a return to a fixed-exchange-rate credit system, a virtual return to the Bretton Woods system, in which gold bullion at a fixed rate would be a convenient means for managing threatened imbalances in accounts.
The purpose of a fixed-exchange-rate system, such as the Bretton Woods system, is to maintain a supply of international long-term credit at low fixed charges of between 1-2% over a span of a quarter to half century, with credit so extended chiefly for long-term investments in basic economic infrastructure and technologically progressive private enterprises. The British gold standard was designed to loot the world for the imperial purposes set forth under the direction of the British East India Company's chief thug, Lord Shelburne.
With the events of 1971-1972, the U.S. became a part of what had been established under Shelburne as the British world empire.
