From Volume 2, Issue Number 17 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Apr. 28, 2003

This Week You Need To Know

Secure Peace on This Planet

by Lyndon LaRouche

The following statement was delivered by Lyndon LaRouche as the opening remarks to a group of 35-40 university newspaper editors and reporters, who participated in an international webcast press conference on April 24, 2003.

I'll take up summarily five points here. First of all, on January 2001, I gave a webcast, where I characterized the expected prospects for the early period of the coming Bush Administration. In that, I emphasized two points: the economic catastrophe, which was already in motion by the spring of the year 2000, would hit with greater force during Bush's first years in office. That has happened.

Secondly, I warned that, comparing the present situation with what happened in the world and particularly in Germany between 1928 and 1933, that we had to fear under these circumstances that some forces behind the scene, some desperate forces, would do what was done with Hitler with the Reichstag fire on the 27th of February of 1933, which made Hitler a dictatorship, and essentially caused World War II to become more or less inevitable.

On Sept. 11, 2001, of course, we had our Reichstag fire. We had the bombing in New York and in Washington, D.C. with aircraft, which were steered into those structures. We have since then, at that point, the same day and the following day, Vice President Cheney, who had been Secretary of Defense in the previous Bush Administration, back in the early 1990s, came out with a proposal for a war against Iraq and similar kinds of warfare, which he had made unsuccessfully, as Secretary of Defense under the first Bush Administration, and Bush, then, had turned him down.

Cheney came out with that policy immediately on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001 incidents, and has continued that policy to the present time. Therefore, we are now in a war, which most of our four-star, retired and active service, ground force generals have condemned as incompetent in design, and there is no end to the war.

We have been in Afghanistan. We are not out of it yet. We have gone into Iraq. We're not out of it yet. There are efforts to get peace. The Palestinian-Israeli peace in the Middle East. It's not yet out of the woods. So, the danger of warfare continues to spread around the world at the time that we have a continuing terminal collapse of the present international monetary, financial system.

Now, that's the second point. I have been quite successful in forecasting this for the past, nearly, 40 years, that is on the public record. I have never made a mistake, in terms of a long-term forecast. They have all come true in a timely fashion, as I have forecast.

What's happened is this: Back in the beginning of the 1960s, the world, and especially the United States, was put through an agonizing experience, which started slowly with the Bay of Pigs incident, went into the major crisis of 1962, the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis, then the assassination of Kennedy, and the plunge into the Indochina War.

This was a great shock. In the course of this shock, two things followed during the later 1960s. One, there was the introduction of a cultural paradigm shift, often associated with the youth counterculture movement on campuses, college campuses, during that period. This shift was part of a shift from what the United States had been, as the world's leading producer society per capita, into becoming a parasitical consumer society, in which we today live largely on our ability to get cheap goods imported to us, without actually paying for them, from other countries, rather than producing ourselves.

So this change was in the middle of it in 1971. Nixon, under the advice of Kissinger, Paul Volcker, and George Shultz, made a decision on Aug. 15, 1971, which destroyed the successful postwar monetary system, and introduced a floating-exchange-rate monetary system, which was the beginning of our economic disaster, as a nation, and which is the root cause of the terminal phase of the present international monetary financial system now going on today.

So, we have two issues: war and the economic crisis. If we solve the economic crisis, I believe we can control the war crisis.

At the same time, in other words, as a third point, during the present period, despite the fact that there are some leading figures in the Democratic and Republican Parties, whom I respect, some of them I respect simply because they are decent people, others I respect because they actually do have important contributions to make to our national political process, but, unfortunately, at present, I am the only prospective candidate for President running, who is competent to deal and is competently addressing the major issues of the war, and the actual issue of the war, and the major issues of the world and national economy at this time.

The key to understanding the problems we face today, especially the problems of youth, goes back to the 1964 cultural change, which is both the youth counterculture change and also the shift from a producer society to a consumer society. As a result of that, people who entered the labor force or universities during the middle to late 1960s, never had an experience of a culture of a successful economy.

We had been, as I said, the most successful producer society in the world prior to that point. We became gradually a consumer society with a consumer-society mentality, much like Ancient Rome, the Ancient Roman Empire, which lived by using its power to extract from other countries what it needed at that time.

We have done the same thing. As a result of that, people in government today, in leading positions in corporations, who are the under-60-years-of-age generation, the so-called Baby Boomer or "Now" generation, have instinctively no understanding, as a matter of instinct, of how to run a producer society.

They have become accustomed to the habits we developed over this period and, really, in large degree, don't know any better.

Now we come along and we have the "Now" generation. The "Now" generation is this generation of the postwar period, who are the pleasure society—"get it now," "it's for me now," "don't worry about the future!"

Well, many of these people in this generation had children. Many of these children of theirs have come of age, in particularly the 18-25 age group, the university age group, in or out of universities, and they find themselves, in fact, in a "no-future" generation. So, therefore, we have developed in our country a generational conflict between those younger people, who are young adults now, who find themselves in a "no-future" generation, and they find their parents' generation is still in the "Now" generation, the "Me" generation.

So, there is a conflict that has developed in our country between the parent generation, those under 60, who are in most of the top positions running the country, and those in the 18-25 age group, who think like adults, who are trying to master the world as adults, and to cope with the world as adults, who find that they have a different outlook on reality than their parents' generation.

The big problem we have is to take the problems faced by the "no-future" generation, the young people 18-25 years of age, who are willing to master things they must master, but who see no future before them under present conditions, or, if they see a future, they're usually pretty disillusioned about what the future is.

So, our problem is to move these younger people. Remember the American Revolution was a youth movement, of this generation, to get the younger generation to move politically, in order to bring their parents' generation back into the world of reality by inspiring them to rejoin the human race in terms of building a future for their children and grandchildren.

That is the big political problem. That is the problem that the political parties are not addressing. You look at this in political party meetings. In a sense, the party meetings are a joke. You don't see youth in the party meetings. The youth who are organizing with me are often the dominant factor in these meetings among youth because there are no other youth! Or no significant amounts of youth.

So, therefore, you see this generational conflict of the party organizations, which are controlled by the people of the under-60 adult generation, who are trying to hold on to the power they have, who are unwilling to face the reality of the world, which they have contributed to making, and the younger generation, which is turned off from this because they sense that they are excluded, that they have been relegated to the status of the "no-future" generation.

My concern—political concern—is to motivate people in the 18-25 generation to get their parents' generation back into the human race, in that sense.

Now, there are solutions to the problems we have today. The present world financial, monetary system cannot be saved. You cannot save the IMF in its present form. The banking systems of most nations are bankrupt. China is, in a sense, an exception, but the U.S. banking system: The major banks are bankrupt. The major European banks are bankrupt. The total amount of debt outstanding could never be paid on present terms, but it is possible for governments to intervene, jointly, to return the world to the kind of measures that Franklin Roosevelt took back in the 1930s, and to create, again, based on the lessons of that experience, a new monetary system, a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, using the lessons of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, to build a system of reconstruction, which will get us out of the mess, and which will build a basis for economic cooperation around the planet under which we can survive.

Presently in Europe and Asia today, you have in Western Europe, you have a group of nations around Russia, as well as Germany and France, and other nations around them, who will tend to agree with them, who are moving in a certain direction toward cooperation, toward solutions.

You have on the other side, in North Asia, in South Asia, in Southeast Asia, you have a movement among peoples looking for cooperation for economic development. You have a movement from Europe, Western Europe, into Asia for long-term cooperation in long-term projects of 25-year, 50-year projects, which can work, and which are the basis for the growth of the world economy.

We can do similar things in the Americas, between North and South America. If we restore Europe and Eurasia to growth, we can solve the suffering of the peoples of Africa.

There is hope. There are possibilities. In this process, we have to look at the United States in a very special way. The United States was a unique creation. It was not created by people only here. It was created by people in Europe, in part, who supported the independence of our country, who supported the formation of our Constitution, and they did so from Europe because they knew at that time in Europe, they could not develop true republics under the present conditions of that time there.

So, therefore, they supported us. They contributed their ideas and their assistance to our independence. We became, as a nation, sort of a unique phenomenon in the history of this planet, and despite the division within us, and despite the mistakes we have made, we are still a unique nation on this planet.

We are not to be an empire, but we have the ability, which is embedded within us, within our history, to make a contribution to bringing other nations together to realize on a planetary scale, the kind of purpose for which we were created, to be a catalyst, to create a community of sovereign nation-states, of people cooperating around the planet in different nations to a common purpose.

The function of the President of the United States today, in my view, is to be a person who understands that, who understands the problems, the messes we have gotten into, who reaches out to other nations, who is respected by other nations, who can bring other nations to meetings with us, so that we, our government and other governments can make the decisions that have to be made now to give us a new monetary system, a new financial system for the world and also a program of general economic recovery.

If we succeed in building around an idea of a general economic recovery of the world, that idea itself becomes an overriding interest, that overriding interest can be the basis for securing peace on this planet.

I believe we can secure peace on this planet. There may be cases in which we would still require the assistance of methods of strategic military and related defense. That could happen, but, in general, the policy of government today should never be war!

We may have to fight a war, if it is imposed upon us, but our policy should never be war. Our policy should be cooperation for peace with the means to secure that peace, to defend it if it were necessary.

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