EDITORIAL
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Edited excerpt of the final portion of Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s discussion with the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee's Policy Committee on Dec. 27.
Dave Christie: I have a question, which is, it looks like they’re trying to sort of retool Obama for his after-Presidency. In other words, he’s setting up his office at the World Wildlife Fund, and he did quite an insane interview where he claimed he could have beat Trump, and “the dream is still alive”; and such really narcissistic kind of rant. My thinking is that, first off, I think the American people have already said they reject Obama and they’re not going to fall for it—but any idea of propping him up for some sort of afterlife or being active after the Presidency, would be in effect to intimidate the Democrats, because they never have broken with Obama, and therefore, they have fallen in line with everything that he represents in that sense.
So it would almost be to keep them in line. But on the other hand, here we have these war crimes that are being exposed, mass graves in Aleppo, and the ability to actually have Obama put in prison for these sorts of crimes,— well, we should do that I believe. But the question is, how much should that be an emphasis? In other words, as we try to move forward with the New Paradigm, how much effort do we actually want to expend, to have these Nazi forces in the United States brought down, like Obama? How much of an emphasis should there be on that?
Lyndon LaRouche: I don’t think it’ll work. The rejection of Obama, whose chief characteristic was his ability to kill citizens in the United States, regularly, that was his characteristic ... When he is defeated, in a process of being defeated, he will disappear; or turn up in some prison some place. I wouldn’t worry about it. I’d go at the positive things right away and build them up. That’s what they need.
All the things that used to be skills, productive skills in the working classes—it’s all been shattered, destroyed. We have to build up the people who were destroyed by what the Bush family and Obama did! That’s the issue. Or we call it the New Bush League—what we’re getting here, our option is the New Bush League. That means, at the end of Obama.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I thought it was funny that Newt Gingrich, who himself is a nasty fellow, used this image of an inflated doll; the air has gone out and it shrinks, and shrinks, and shrinks. That was my first image I had of Obama in 2008, in an editorial I wrote with the headline, “Obama, The Soufflé.” [laughter] You know what happens to a soufflé when you treat it badly: it shrinks and collapses.
I agree. I think you should go with the new paradigm, and really go with the idea that we absolutely have to leave this era of misery of sixteen years of the Bush/Obama period behind us.
LaRouche: You have to do something about that Helga, also, just from the standpoint of your voice right now. You’ve got to get the people back to understanding what is available to them. We’ve got to break the ice on slavery, on various kinds and degrees of slavery inside the United States. And the ruin of our educational system, all these kinds of things. These things have to be rebuilt. Because it is those kinds of things which, when done properly, will lead the recovery of the United States population.
Zepp-LaRouche: Why don’t we resume the Weekly [New Paradigm] Reports, and have a series of classes on Lyn’s physical economy? All the discussion of Hamilton is fine, but Lyn is the author of physical economy, and we haven’t really been discussing it in depth for quite some time.
Kesha Rogers: That’s good, yes. That is the basis of what we discussed in our revamping of the Hamilton pamphlet,— to put the educational aspect around Lyn’s conception of economics more up front, with the “Four Laws,” and then the development around that.
I won’t start that discussion until we’re ready for it. But ...
Restore a Human Culture
Zepp-LaRouche: I don’t just mean the Four Laws. I mean an in-depth economics class. Lyn has worked on this for 50 or 60 years, he has written numerous articles over this period, and there are a lot of conceptions in it which are not being talked about now, and we should absolutely revive them.
Benjamin Deniston: A few of us were looking back at what Lyn was doing around 2010, in fighting to upgrade people’s understanding of the concept of infrastructure. And this led into the NAWAPA work, but at that time you first started developing the “platform” conception. I’ve been going back and rereading a number of your papers and some of the discussions from around that time, and I think there are a lot of very rich conceptions, and some very important conceptions, that we need to get across right now. Because there’s all this talk about infrastructure, and about space, what the space policy should be, but a lot of it is not centered around any scientific conception.
And I think back to what you laid out at that time, for how to think about infrastructure as a sequence of successive stages or platforms. And you said that infrastructure is not an add-on, which is the way people normally think about it. Rather, it is the entire basis of your economy. It creates the actual synthetic environment in which the entire economy operates and which it depends upon. So when you’re talking about creating new stages or levels of infrastructure platforms, it means creating anew an entire, higher-order, synthetic environment that supports a completely new level of productivity of mankind.
So that’s one arc of development which I think would be really critical to bring back in this exact context right now.
We were also talking about the point you made, Helga, going back as far as Lyn’s conceptions around the Power of Labor, and that driving his economic discoveries. Lyn, you might have more to say about that. This goes to the question of how you came to understand the increases in relative potential population density. And these ideas that really shaped the development.
Zepp-LaRouche: Without the education of the labor force to a higher level of productivity, and naturally creativity, this cannot work. I mean by this, the tremendous deterioration of the cultural and moral level. I think you can contrast that with what Xi Jinping said about virtue and morality being the key to having the right attitude on the education question. And Putin spoke earlier about how the West has completely deteriorated culturally by throwing out all human values and replacing them with perversions. If you don’t correct that, I don’t think you can get the kind of productive labor force that is required—because if people are still pornographic in their thinking and full of admiration for violence, how can they be creative? They cannot.
And that is something which is completely lacking in the discussion. At least I haven’t heard anybody other than us talking about it.
How To Inspire Creativity
LaRouche: Look at the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s pioneering of a new way to greater advantages for the people of the United States and elsewhere. Take the way that worked. You have to realize how much, afterwards, was put into destroying the skills, and the minds of the skilled labor force generally, at the end World War II. Everything went rotten. The worst thing we had was not World War II, but the rottenness of the U.S. labor force critics who crushed the financial functions of the labor force. And I know that cold, detail by detail, with bitter memory.
Zepp-LaRouche: Just remember, the oligarchy can’t exist if they have an intelligent population, so the moment Roosevelt was dead, the Truman administration really moved in to destroy the axioms which had made Roosevelt possible; and one of their devices was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had the deliberate aim of uprooting people from Classical music—Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, they all tried to completely destroy,— on the one side to destroy the Classical tradition, but then also destroy what little was left of the Classical tradition to replace it with ugliness. Furtwängler was replaced with Herbert von Karajan, and the right interpretation was thrown out of the window; modern music was mixed with Classical music so that people would just not build up their concentration span. All of these things went into really downgrading the population over a long period of time.
LaRouche: Yes!
Zepp-LaRouche: And that has to be reversed.
Science-Driver Is the Starting Point
Deniston: One reference point we’ve often looked to for the general idea of educating and training the labor force, was Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) program. I wonder if we could look at that, and how it would need to be expanded, possibly including some of these aspects of Classical education and musical training. What Lyn just said is critical: that we’re obviously dealing with a deeper and longer degeneration than Franklin Roosevelt dealt with. You must also look at the drug crisis. I think we need to put more thought into all of this: how we actually uplift this population as a whole, and get it trained to the point where it can be productive and creative.
And if we’re seriously talking about pursuing this whole program, and we don’t have that defined, then people are not going to believe us unless we have a real idea and a road map of what it’s going to take to transform the population. It might take a generation or more to really do . . .
Zepp-LaRouche: And if you look at all of the university teaching: Science has been replaced with algorithms; economic theory is just neoliberal monetarism; medicine is health economics—all of these subjects have been completely distorted. History is the history of imperial order interpretation . . . You can look at practically every field, and you find that there has been tremendous distortion.
LaRouche: But most of the people of the United States have been brainwashed. And I do mean, literally, brainwashed. And that’s the thing you’ve got to correct. You’ve got to bring people who are actually ignorant, not just ignorant of particular things, but ignorant in their behavior towards society in general. And if we want to win this, win a recovery of the U.S. economy, you’ve got to do that.
Zepp-LaRouche: But it’s the same thing in Germany, except that here the ignorance is paired with arrogance.
LaRouche: We’ve got the arrogance all over the place; it’s not here, it’s all over the place! Every idiot is his own genius! [laughter]
Deniston: From the standpoint of my understanding of Lyn’s principles of economics, it seems that the starting point should be the science-driver program, the space program and fusion . . .
LaRouche: Yes. Yes!
Deniston: And the challenge is then linking that all throughout the economy as a whole, because that creates the framework in which you need to uplift the middle class, and the lower class, the downtrodden, to participate in an economy that’s organized as a whole from that standpoint.
LaRouche: I think we have the latent option—in the United States for example—I think we have a latent option for this. I think we can probably get that back again, and can push away the kind of thing that destroyed the financial system, the U.S. financial system, when President Franklin Roosevelt was crushed. It was that simple. And this is what you’ve got to have, the leadership which goes—like Franklin Roosevelt’s campaigns—to the issue of what is necessary to instruct people to recognize what will make them better in terms of their behavior in society.
Rogers: Right. I think that’s very good, because it gives a real direction for the thinking process of our organization as a whole, and what we’re actually out to create.
LaRouche: Yes. Being an old man, I know a lot of the things which are not secrets, but they were poisonous nonetheless!
Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, and no matter what the Trump team may do, they may even go after drugs, and they may do this and that, but the positive thing, I cannot see where it can come from, unless we inject it.
LaRouche: Yes. You have to educate people by using the kinds of tools of education which make them creative. That used to happen in the United States; that used to happen. And then it went down, when Franklin Roosevelt dropped out. But now we’ve seen everything, all the dirty business in the United States is still there, and it has to be removed. In other words, all these things from the people who were opposed to Franklin Roosevelt—that has to be removed and a vision of what Franklin Roosevelt accomplished, in a decade, particularly—that’s what has to be created, and what things must be based on.
Zepp-LaRouche: Okay, good! So, let’s work on these things.
