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The following is part of the proceedings of a June 11, 2002 conference sponsored by the Alumni Association of the Superior War College (ADESG) and Executive Intelligence Review, and held in the auditorium of the Latin American Parliament in São Paulo, Brazil. Lyndon LaRouche was the featured speaker. For an overview of Mr. LaRouche's visit to Brazil, see "Lyndon LaRouche's Visit to Brazil, June 11-15, 2002."

Dialogue With LaRouche

The question-and-answer period following Lyndon LaRouche's address was chaired by Adauto Rocchetto, president of the São Paulo ADESG. The questions asked of Mr. LaRouche have been slightly abbreviated and translated from the Portuguese original.

Q: I would like to thank the speaker for his vast explanations, although perhaps contradictory at the same time, just as life is....

I believe that democracy only flourishes within a free and open society, because I have already lived under contrary situations, in a secretive and closed society, that was called popular democracy—a police regime par excellence....

Within globalization, within democracy, which I believe in, is a conspiratorial interpretation of history possible? That's my first question....

The famous general Konstantin Kutusov, who defeated Napoleon at Borodino ... was approached by many generals who asked him to attack right away. Kutusov told them: Don't make Russian widows; he has to face General Ice and General Mud. That is the logistics of a strategist....

From the times of Philip II of Macedonia, no one defined psychological warfare better than he, as narrated in Philippics by Demosthenes. In warfare, Philip said, the objective is not to physically destroy the objective; it is to destroy the will to resist. So, that antecedes logistics. One can win through the verb, and nothing else....

[Regarding] the murder of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.... At that time, the Serbian Premier, Nicola Pashit, achieved a major objective: To infuriate Russia and detonate the First World War. Today, after Sept. 11 of last year, there is a danger of making the same mistake. This time, it is not the Serbs; this time, it is Israel. Can the United States go mad? Because war is no-holds-barred. I think that two points have to be attacked to defeat terrorism: Make peace in the Middle East and recognize the states of Israel and Palestine. I'm not Palestinian; I'm from the Balkans. And we must bring Hollywood to reason; because if war is the destruction of the will to resist, then will weakens, starting with Hollywood....

So, can this occur in the United States?

LaRouche: First of all, it's possible to answer this rather briefly. Conspiracy, when properly used, means that people think together. Essentially, it means—usually—that they operate on agreement on certain principles, or what they adopt as principles, such as definitions, axioms, and postulates. There are many things written about conspiracy, and against conspiracy, most of which is nonsense. A conspiracy is the most normal kind of relationship which human beings enter. A person who does not conspire is autistic, or dead. Any other meaning to the word just leads to all kinds of nonsense and confusion.

In the Moscow case, remember, this was, of course, the famous story spread by Tolstoy. The reality of the matter was of the Prussian generals who advised the Tsar not to allow his soldiers to engage Napoleon decisively at the border, but rather to retreat toward Petrograd and Moscow, and to prepare to bring the city down around the conqueror, and then save the Russian soldiers, to fall upon the rear end of Napoleon, which is what happened. That's real strategy, and that's what the real meaning is, as opposed to these myths. Tolstoy told some interesting myths, but that's fine.

On the question of Ferdinand. We do face such a situation today. The King of England was guilty of the war. The Emperor of Austria was a fool, the greatest fool of his time. The Tsar of Russia was a fool. And the Kaiser was a fool. And so the three fools allowed themselves to be drawn into a war against each other, for no good reason except the greater glory of the British Empire.

Today, in the case of Israel, Israel is not the controller of the United States, contrary to many myths. The British and the Americans control Israel, and they own this fascist gang which is running Israel today, the Likud. This is no secret. The Russian secret service, the Okhrana, created the founder of the Likud, which was an avowed fascist organization. The Likud today is a fascist organization, which is dominating Israel. The United States and Britain are using Israel like a hand grenade, which you throw against your enemy. When it explodes, it destroys itself, and you intend that it should also destroy your enemy. If Israel continues this policy, Israel will destroy itself. But why should you throw the hand grenade? Because you want to start a world war.

Where Is the 'Black Box' of Power?

Q: Good evening, I'm a rural producer and a lawyer.... We have learned a lot today, but we didn't pursue the main objective, the factor which generates these situations. We have to look for the elements of power that create those situations. A developed Africa would be an advance for all of humanity. So, my question is, why doesn't that happen? Because it is against the interests of certain groups. And I believe—and if anyone disagrees, please forgive me—that, as thinking beings, we have to look for who is interested in having this state of affairs.

So an economic discussion is sterile if you don't look for the generating factor, that is, the power centers. We have to decode the black box of power, to know who is harming humanity and know what we can do about it. Thank you.

LaRouche: I think that the question of the black box is not the problem. People think in terms of motives, but I understand motives differently, and I think I'm right about this. I look at motives the same way I look at scientific problems. Motives generally flow in human beings from the set of definitions, axioms, and postulates which they've adopted as the way they react. They may not be fully aware of these assumptions, but there are a set of assumptions which human beings make at certain points. And they react to situations based on the governance of those motivations. They do not necessarily have an intention, in the sense of a specific goal. That is, they are not goal-motivated. They are stimulus-reactive. Only when we rise above this, to be aware of our creative potential, when we realize that there is a contradiction in the problem confronting us, that we have to use our creative potential to find a solution for that problem. That problem then becomes an intention.

The word intention was used in that way by Johannes Kepler in defining gravitation. He said the universe, the Solar System, in its orbits, operates in a way which is contrary to all of the definitions, axioms, and postulates of the astronomers before him. Therefore, he says, we must find the intention—and in a sense, he meant the Creator's intention—which would cause the Solar System to operate in a way which defies the existing assumptions about the Solar System. And therefore, he said, that's an intention, and we have to discover and adopt that intention to have power over the situation. If we do not take that attitude, as Kepler took towards this problem, then we become the victims of our pre-existing prejudices and we react to a stimulus with our prejudices. This is the way we are often controlled. Governments and others who understand the prejudices of people, will often trap people, by provoking them to react according to their prejudices and thus controlling them. That's our big problem.

So, therefore, it's this understanding of man which is crucial. I do not believe that there is a conspiracy in the sense of an intended result. The conspiracy is blindness to one's own assumptions and being trapped into reacting to something, saying, I have to react in this way, and thus someone can manipulate you into reacting against your will, by provoking you.

What Is the Zionist Lobby?

Q: I'm a systems analyst, and I'd like to congratulate Mr. LaRouche for his presentation. I knew something of his work through the Internet and some newspapers.

One question which grabbed my attention, was the point LaRouche made about Israel being an instrument of the U.S. and England. A work of LaRouche's which struck me is called The Ugly Truth About the ADL, where he exposes how the powerful Jewish-Zionist lobby acts in the U.S. I would like to ask Mr. LaRouche ... if he recognizes the existence of those lobbies in the U.S., not, perhaps, in the sense of the Israelis being the ones who control the U.S., but if it is Jewish-Americans, through political-economic influence who maintain that lobby in the Middle East and in the U.S. itself. That's more or less my question.

LaRouche: One has to understand something about the history of modern Judaism, European Judaism in particular. Modern Judaism was actually developed in Germany, as a movement around Moses Mendelssohn in the 18th Century. He was one of the greatest minds of modern history, one of the creators of Classical culture. We've written a good deal about this. Mendelssohn was the person whose influence, resulted in the recognition of humanity, political humanity, for Jewish individuals in European civilization. Joseph II, the Emperor of Austria who was also a friend of Mozart, was the first to give the Jew political status, as a person, in Europe. But as a result of this reform, led by Moses Mendelssohn, you had the great contribution of Jewish scientists, doctors, and so forth, to European civilization. It was a great movement. This was spread into Eastern Europe in the form of the Yiddish Renaissance. If you know people in the United States, as I do, who were immigrants from those parts of the world, this is what they represented. For the most part, they represented this tradition, this Moses Mendelssohn tradition, or things like it.

You had an opposition to this, which was organized by the British, which was organized by the Austro-Hungarian system, it was organized under Tsarism. And you had the birth of the Zionist movement, which was created as an attempt to destroy the influence of Moses Mendelssohn and the Yiddish Renaissance in Europe. Part of this led to Nazism. Therefore, you had a division in Judaism, of those who were influenced by these government operations, really police-state operations. B'nai B'rith was created in the United States by the Portuguese-British slave traders, who were the founders of B'nai B'rith in the United States.

Subsequently, you had the Hitler phenomenon. You had a shock to world Jewry. You had a great wave of sympathy for Zionism, because of what happened to Jewry under the influence of Hitler. Therefore, you had a process from 1967 to the present time, especially in the late 1970s, in which this fascist element, which is ultimately of Russian police-state origin, the Okhrana—the Jabotinsky movement became the dominant force in Israel. You had a similar crowd, controlled by British and American intelligence services, which became the dominant feature of the Jewish lobby in the United States, which was organized largely around organized-crime figures. So, there is a Jewish lobby of that type, but when you're talking about Israel, about how these things work, you can't understand this, except from the standpoint of an intelligence organization. You have to see it as an intelligence professional would, and see how people are manipulated.

The same thing applies to the previous question. The thing we have to understand is the degree to which our behavior is manipulated. And don't blame other people because we're manipulated. Free ourselves from the susceptibility to be manipulated, by being creative people. Don't be reactive people who act like animals, who say, "I have an animal nature, and you can provoke my animal nature. I must react according to my animal nature." We are not animals. We have to react as human beings, not as animals.

The tragedy is that the Israelis, who are conducting this horrible, Nazi-style war against the Palestinians, that the Israelis themselves—as Prime Minister Rabin emphasized—would be destroyed if they continue this policy. He went to peace with Arafat, to try to prevent this from happening. The Likud fascists killed him. They assassinated him. And they profit from that. And there are Jews in Israel, and around the world, who are fighting against this thing, who recognize this and who have the courage to stand up.

So, it's not a Jewish question. It's a human question. It's a leadership question. Stop acting like animals. Stop reacting according to program, as if you were a programmed beast, and when faced with a contradiction, try to examine that contradiction, try to understand it, discuss it, and free yourself from the compulsion to react. The best way to kill or defeat an army, is to count on its generals and its troops to react according to profile. An army which does that, is setting itself up to be outflanked.

On U.S. Power and Leadership

Q: My country is competent and sovereign. What are the rules today, if the U.S. alone has the power and makes the rules as well? As a leader, what is your view of politics, of the power of global corrupt politics? You consider yourself a leader: Would an example be through the theories of Max Weber? I am an economics graduate student.

LaRouche: I don't accept Max Weber at all. He's not my man. On the question of leadership, am I a leader? Yes, I had perforce to become a leader, because of a shortage of the species. But on the question of the power of the U.S. today. No, the U.S. is being destroyed, and the U.S. will not win this fight, the way it's conducting it. It will not win it. If the United States continues the policies of the present President and the people around him, unless that President were to change those policies, the United States will be essentially self-destroyed.

As I said—and it's not an exaggeration, it's not really something that can be much debated, except in an academic way—this system is finished. We're at the end of it. We're at the end of the present monetary financial system. It requires simply an act of will to decide that we will learn the lessons of experience, and return to those standards which at least worked prior to 1965. If the United States makes that decision, if it says it will do that, I think other countries in the world, as I know them today, will agree. I think if the United States were to say, this is wrong, we're not going to have another world depression, we're not going to have a Dark Age—if the United States, through the President, said that, and said that to other governments, I think we would have an instant response, a discussion, and something profitable and good would come out of the discussion. That's the challenge of leadership today.

The problem again is, that we are behaving as animals. The human species is reacting according to profile—definitions, axioms, and postulates. I've studied a number of these things, and I find that, even from a military standpoint—a military force which clung to pre-existing definitions, axioms, and postulates, was waiting to be crushed by a military force which wasn't so foolish. And it's the same thing with leadership in general. We simply have to find the people who will form a coterie of leadership among nations, to ensure that we make that decision, that we do not accept trying to work within the existing rules, because if we do, this civilization will be slaughtered.

You know, God is a very clever fellow. He created the universe, and turned us loose in it. And we created cultures. And He had a rule in this culture: You have the ability to make a mistake. You have the power to decide to destroy yourself. You also have the power not to destroy yourself, and to fulfill your mission. If we are not willing to change from the system we now live under, the international system, we will be destroyed, as empires have been destroyed in the past, and as most cultures which have existed in the past have been destroyed. We, too, will be destroyed. The problem is this state of denial, the unwillingness to face the fact that we face such a problem. Because we say we are not going to accept that, we deny that, there has to be a solution within the existing rules. If we say there has to be a solution within the existing rules, then I will pledge to you that we shall be destroyed.

A U.S. Police State

Q: I'm a lawyer. After the Sept. 11 attack, we've seen a reduction of civil liberties of U.S. citizens and the transformation of the U.S. into a police state, in the name of security. What influence will that attitude of the U.S. government have on other democracies in the world?

LaRouche: I gave a broadcast in early January [2001], just before the inauguration of the present President, and I stated at that time, that if he were inaugurated with the choice, particularly, of the Attorney General that he designated, that we were headed for adventures and a police state in the United States. That was in January 2001. Sept. 11 was Sept. 11, 2001. Since Sept. 11, 2001, you have seen—especially since January 2002—the rapid progress of the United States toward becoming a Nazi-like police state. It's not become that yet, but what you saw in the recent fraud that was broadcast on television about this poor fellow from Chicago, who was found guilty of no particular crime, but an American citizen of no particular crime was put into military custody, and denied access to an attorney or any other provision of justice. We have this Guantanamo procedure, the same kind of thing. This is exactly what Hitler did after the Reichstag stunt in February 1933. Exactly the same. And this is what I warned against in January of 2001.

This is typical of the problem. If we do not recognize the fact, that what I was able to foresee quite clearly in January 2001—before this President was elected—what this would potentially mean to have this President inaugurated. There's nothing mysterious about it. I explained everything. It was all factual. There was no speculation. It was all a matter of scientific certainty, that if he continued the policy commitments he was based on, and put in that Attorney General, that would be the result. We now have that result.

What's the danger to other nations? It's total. The question is correct. It's total! We can be in the kind of world that nobody wants to live in, worldwide, as a result of this. And my concern is that the world isn't waking up to it. The Europeans are lying on their backs on this question. Others are lying on their backs on this question. If we allow this to happen—look, the United States can't win, but the United States can destroy civilization, in destroying itself. Just like Israel. If the United States tries to start a war in Iraq, as competent military people in the United States have said, it can't win it! It's not possible! The United States is bankrupt. How are we going to mobilize, with a war economy mobilization, with a bankrupt economy? You can't do that! So, it is ominous.

As I said earlier, let me just repeat, that it's a question of leadership in crisis again. When you are leading, as I lead—lead in warning, lead in proposing—you'd better know what you're doing, first of all. But secondly, you have to know that you're taking a personal risk, and you have to know that you must take that personal risk. Why? Because people will only come to their senses when the crisis forces them to give up their illusions. But the people will not react to the crisis positively, unless someone has prepared them for it. So, sometimes the function of leadership is a lonely function, of exercising leadership, when you know that people are not yet ready to accept it. Because if you don't forewarn them of what they face, then when the crisis hits, they will go crazy. They will simply react.

And so, all I can say, regarding the question. Yes, the question itself is good, because if people do not raise these questions of law, now, then we are not preparing the minds of people to be aware of the danger, and helping them to prepare to react appropriately at a moment of crisis when we otherwise might have the opportunity to change direction. I think that's the only appropriate answer.

The Politics of Oil

Adauto Rocchetto: ... I wanted to end with a brief question, that I believe requires a long answer. But the U.S. has already announced, in a certain way, that it may invade Iraq shortly. Probably Iran would follow. We have a serious problem here in Latin America, which is: Our neighbor Venezuela, which is a major oil producer and sells 90% of its oil to the U.S. So my question is conjunctural. Venezuela is part of OPEC, and has strong ties to Saddam Hussein, Khamenei, Fidel Castro. In that situation, would the U.S. run the risk of not having that oil from Venezuela, because of those links of Venezuela with other oil producers? And what would the consequences of that be for Latin America?

LaRouche: I think the danger of an oil boycott is not as likely as many people feel. I was just in Abu Dhabi, where I gave a keynote address at a meeting of what was the Zayed Centre, which is a part of the Arab League organization. And we had a number of things occur during that meeting and presentations on the subject of oil and Arab policy. The general mythology about the Arab reaction is exactly that, and obviously, I'm somewhat in the middle of the situation in terms of trying to find solutions to some of these things.

But that is not the nature of the danger. The attack on Iraq is a danger because it tends to set into motion what Huntington, Brzezinski, and Bernard Lewis, a British intelligence operative who collaborates with them, has proposed as a Clash of Civilizations. Remember the Roman Empire, and I'm sure that people who have had the relevant military training may have gone through this one before. The Roman Empire, in an attempt to maintain an empire, set up a system called the Limes, which was a border system. And they had the equivalent of the Nazi Waffen SS, which was set into motion by the Romans at that time—as a matter of fact, the Nazis copied it from the Romans—under which they recruited legions from many parts of the Roman Empire and outside. These legions were deployed in the way the present military policy of the U.S. utopians propose: to send people around the world not as warriors, but as killers per se. Not as armies to win a war and to bring about peace, by aid of military means, but actually just to kill. To kill to control. Like the Ku Klux Klan, trying to control the freed slaves by terrifying them.

So, the danger is, if you start that sort of thing, with what I know about the physical economic fragility of this planet, and what globalization has done to make this system much more fragile—because you don't have real national independence, you don't have countries. The United States itself does not have physical economic security. The United States and other countries have denied nations the right to maintain and cultivate national economic security. Food security, for example. Energy security. That's the question of nuclear energy here in Brazil, for example. The same thing. Brazil has the right to have energy security. It's essential. Otherwise, how can you maintain a decent life?

So, under conditions where the United States does not have the economic ability to sustain a global war, but enters into a global war nonetheless—and the Iraq war would be the beginning of such a global war. The extension to Iran would ensure it. What they've designated is this. It's called geopolitical. They've said: "Let's take the Islamic population of the world, which runs to 1.2 billion or more, and let's declare that an outlaw population, just the way the Romans did under the Roman Empire. Now, let's hunt them down and make them fight each other, different factions. Let's get other groups—we'll call them 'rogue states,' or call them 'Empire of Evil' partners—and hunt them down too." Now, if you do that in Central Asia, where they started this thing, then you prevent any stability in Eurasia. You threaten India, Pakistan, China, Kazakstan, the Caucasus region, Turkey, the entire Middle East, the entirety of North Africa, all of Africa, and so forth. You set into motion Hell on Earth, because you started a war you couldn't fight.

You see, if a terrible victor wins a war, they may at least preserve some kind of order. But if you start a war and can't win it, but just keep fighting it, then you get the worst horror in human history. Long periods of religious warfare. As Europe was almost destroyed internally, after the Renaissance, in the wars which erupted in the period between 1511 and 1648, these kinds of wars. Endless wars. Dark Age wars. And that's what frightens me about this situation. It is a danger.

Therefore, I look at it from a total situation. I say: The reason for this great instability is that populations are going crazy. The U.S. population is going crazy. The population of Europe is going crazy. What happens if the populations are crazy and this kind of thing starts? Then there's no way to stop it.

Therefore, first of all, you need to bring a factor of stability into the situation, and you do that best by economic measures, which are aimed at the general welfare. If you can go to a population, and convince the population that you are going to take effective action to maintain the general welfare, so that people can live in their neighborhoods in peace, so they don't have to fight in garbage dumps for food, and that sort of thing, then you can establish a civilian authority to govern. You have credible government. And if you have credible government which is dedicated to maintaining the general welfare, then governments will look at war in those terms, and can decide they are not going to have this war, and can negotiate peace on the basis of the principle of general welfare.

The problem now, is that that is exactly what's being undermined. All the factors in the history of European civilization, in particular, all the factors which led to the birth of the modern nation-state in Italy—not in Italy, but as a result of the Italian Renaissance in the 15th Century—the development of peace in Europe, the first semblance of civilization after the great religious wars, with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, all of the great achievements. The United States' independence, the struggle for independence, especially after the 1820s, in South and Central America. All of these things came about as the fruits of a people being mobilized for national independence and the general welfare. And people that are mobilized for national independence and the general welfare will be peaceful people. They may make wars, but they will be peaceful people, because they will recognize that the objective of war is peace. And they will fight about the conditions for peace. And I think that's what has to be emphasized.

We have to look at the principle of strategic defense not merely as a military principle, as Carnot and others have defined it, but we have to think about strategic defense by saying the military leadership does not want to have unnecessary wars. The military leadership wants to help create the conditions of peace—that is, strategic defense. Because, what are you falling back on? You're falling back on the ability to mobilize the population about the idea of the political institutions of the general welfare and sovereignty. In that case, we can control these operations. And that's what I mean, for me, by the extension of the notion of strategic defense as a military policy, to the policy that we hope will come to the post-military era, the time that war is no longer thinkable among peoples.

Adauto Rocchetto: I would like to thank all those present. My thanks to Mrs. Silvia Palacios, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Lorenzo Carrasco, and principally to Mr. Lyndon LaRouche, Jr., who, though an American, behaves as a world-citizen, bringing his message, which is often against the position of his own native country. Thank you very much, Mr. LaRouche.