The Eurasian Land-Bridge As a Global Strategy Today

by Helga Zepp LaRouche

Helga Zepp LaRouche gave the second keynote speech to the ICLC/Schiller Institute Conference in Reston, Virginia, Sept. 5, 1999. It appeared in the Sept. 27, 1999 issue of the weekly New Federalist newspaper.

I'm going to speak to you today at great length about the international strategic situation: how it evolved, what are the immediate dangers, and what has to be done to overcome it. And I ask you to be patient and follow me through various parts of the world, which some of you may know, others may not. But I really ask you to be patient and not think it's not important.

Because, whenever I come to the United States--and I think there are many people, especially Americans, who, when they go abroad and come back, are absolutely stunned about the virtual reality in this country, and how little Americans know about what is going on in the world. And this may surprise you, but I can assure you: Most Americans have not the slightest idea of what the American government is doing in the world, what the effect of American policy is, or what other countries are thinking about America. And therefore, I decided that rather than talking about other issues, that I would try today to give you a really in-depth understanding about the strategic situation. Because I personally was reminded, especially when I came this time, and I turned on the TV, and I tried to find out what is this issue doing, what is that issue doing.

When the D.D.R. [German Democratic Republic/East Germany] still existed, people would only find out about what was going on by listening to Western radio, or Western TV, which was, naturally, forbidden. But those people who had a TV, they would listen to the channel, and they would find out what was going on in the world.

This was done by almost everybody, except there was a little valley around Dresden, where, for mountainous and geographic reasons, they could not receive Western radio. So, these people did not know what was going on, and they were called "The People from the Valley of Those Who Have Not the Slightest Inkling." (Laughter.) "The Valley of the Clueless."

And I came to the conclusion that America is the "Continent of the Clueless." (Laughter. Applause.) So, I'm going to try to change this a little bit, and motivate you to become like an underground fighter to find out the truth by subscribing to the EIR, to the New Federalist, because then you are tuned in.

LaRouche's Key Role

Now, what I'm hoping to present to you, is that you will see that there is no bigger discrepancy between the actual role Lyndon LaRouche has been playing for the last 20 years and the way in which the American media have portrayed him. Especially if you look at the last 25 years, and most particularly the last 16 years, that there is no bigger difference between the historic figure Lyndon LaRouche, who shaped international policy, like nobody else living on this planet right now, and the absolute slanders, vilification, and stupid epithets which were given to him by the media in this country.

And it is important that you understand the issues involved, because only if you are certain of {who this man LaRouche is,} will you be able and have the inner authority to help us to explode the LaRouche campaign in the next couple of weeks, which is exactly what is needed in the short term, and will decide the question of whether we will have the worst crisis of this century for sure, despite two world wars, or if we can avoid it.

Now, we will hear more about this, and Lyn already mentioned it. We will see, in the coming period, the blowout of the financial system, for which the international financial institutions have, since many years, developed a cover: the famous computer virus, Y2K, which supposedly will cause all kinds of problems; and, if you equate Y2K with financial collapse of the global system, you have it about right.

The British government will start, in a couple of days from now, I think on Thursday, Operation Surety, which is a top-down run military-security operation, assuming that because they have moved up the famous Millennium Bug from the year-end of 1999 to the 9th of September--9/9/99--supposedly because they expect large riots and domestic disorders destabilizing the established order of Great Britain. And they have the military ready to deal with that; and actually, if you think that they expect a financial blow-out, people will indeed have violent reactions, and such phenomena as Mark Barton, the run-amok shooter from Atlanta, could become indeed a mass phenomenon.

Now, ask yourself: What will happen in the United States, if the stock market in New York were to go down 40%, 50%? Some international financial experts are even talking about the possibility that the dollar may slide like the Indonesian currency. That went down 80%.

You can imagine what would be the effect, if people who are hooked on this speculation--what will happen. You have the absolute time-bomb of the Japanese banking crisis; the Latin American situation is about to explode in another wave of financial turbulence; the Russian situation.

That is the background, in front of which you have three major crisis spots, in which what we call the BAC forces--the British-American-Commonwealth financial oligarchs--are meddling. And these three crisis spots are so hot, that they could, in the short term, especially in the face of this financial collapse, deteriorate into war, including the use of nuclear weapons.

And I'm going to show you these different situations, how they evolved, so that you have the best possible picture.

The first very dangerous situation, is the Transcaucasus in Central Asia, which is aimed at the destruction of Russia. The second one is a conflict between Pakistan and India, over Kashmir and other questions, which is really aimed at the destruction of India; and the third one is the effort to manipulate Taiwan into independence, which is really an effort to start to break up China. And there is no question that the combination of all of these, means that this could get awfully out of control, and indeed lead to World War III in the short term.

But to understand how the world came to this point, I want to take you back to the events of October 1986. This was the last time the famous Strategic Defense Initiative, offered by Lyn and accepted by President Reagan as official American policy on the 23rd of March, 1983, was on the table. To the surprise of everybody, President Reagan at the Reykjavik Summit in Iceland, put this back on the table and offered the Soviet Union cooperation in the development and implementation of the SDI.

President Reagan said explicitly that his idea about the SDI was to free the world from the terror of revenge weapons. When this proposal was rejected not only by Gorbachov, but also by almost everybody in the Reagan administration--by Bush, Sr., Don Regan, Schultz, Sir Caspar Weinberger, that meant that a tremendous chance to change the world was refused. So, it was not only a rejection of the SDI; but, as we now know for certain, this also included a deal between the two superpowers, between Gorbachov on the one side, and these evil elements in the Reagan administration, to eliminate the influence of LaRouche forever.

Why was this such a hot issue?

Mutually Assured Survival

You have to understand what the SDI was. Mr. LaRouche developed the idea of a strategic ballistic missile defense based on technologies of new physical principles, starting in '79, presenting it long before it became American policy, in conferences in Europe, in Paris, Rome, Bonn, Stockholm, also Washington, during the years of 1981-82.

And it was the idea to overcome the major doctrine, MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, and to replace it with what he called Mutually Assured Survival. It was the idea to have a new ballistic missile defense based on laser beam technology, and to develop that in a crash program on a continuous basis.

This was an absolutely revolutionary concept, because it was the idea to use these new technologies, to make the defensive less expensive than the offensive, and in that way, for the very first time, make nuclear weapons obsolete. By simply making it more expensive to build nuclear weapons than to have these ABM systems, it would eliminate these weapons forever.

In 1984, long after the SDI had already become American policy, Mr. LaRouche wrote a most beautiful document. It was called "A Protocol for the Superpowers," and it proposed the joint development and implementation of these systems in order to avoid the possibility that, since the Soviet Union was already developing its own system, and the United States was also developing it, the danger was that, if one superpower were to install these systems, the other one could be compelled at the last moment to use these nuclear weapons, before they became technologically obsolete.

And therefore, the idea was that both superpowers would develop them together, and implement them together. Given the fact that these new technologies were based on new physical principles, the idea was that these would serve as a science-driver, also for the civilian economy, and would have a so-called economic spillover effect, like the Apollo program did, when the United States and the Soviets were flying to the Moon, where, in the case of the United States, for every one dollar invested in the Apollo program, you would have a $14 return in the civilian economy.

So, the idea was, that if the two superpowers would develop these systems together, you would have a gigantic increase in the productivity of the world economy, and you could end a situation where the world would be controlled as a condominium between the superpowers, with the Third World just used as playgrounds for proxy wars. But you could have a gigantic technology and capital-goods transfer to the Third World to overcome their [lack of] development.

This proposal of Mr. LaRouche, was really the most advanced, most modern, most beautiful idea to stop the superpower game, and to return to the idea of an entente of sovereign nation-states, in the tradition of John Quincy Adams.

So, the purpose of the SDI was never to win a war over the Soviet Union. And all--and here we come to the "Continent of the Clueless" again--the "Star Wars" propaganda had absolutely nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact, it was the total opposite. It was the effort to eliminate the nightmare of nuclear terror, and to eliminate the causes for this war at its root.

The proof of it is very simple, because when President Reagan offered this cooperation to the Soviet Union, he offered the Soviet Union Western help in the application to the civilian economy, something which he did on the 23rd of March, and he re-emphasized in the letter he wrote to the Soviets in August of that same year.

Moscow rejected that. And the argument was that the West would benefit more from these technologies than the Soviet Union. The real reason--and people many times don't say what the real reason is--was that the Soviet Union had their own imperial plans for world hegemony. They had the Ogarkov Plan, where they were hoping that one fine day, they would conquer the whole world.

Now, there was another man who was also playing an important role in this, who was Dr. Teller, who correctly talked about the fact that the SDI would be a fulfillment of the common aims of mankind.

On the 27th of October in 1982, he said "By cooperation with those who are fully willing to cooperate, we can improve the very horrible way of life in the Third World. We can, by using technologies, create a situation where the reasons for war will diminish and keep diminishing."

If the Soviet Union had accepted that offer, naturally, all the efforts to establish world government, going back to H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, and the idea that countries would submit to world government rather than be destroyed by such horrible weapons, a policy which had continued throughout the Pugwash Conferences and the whole disarmament period, and especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, all of that world government nonsense would have gone out of the window.

And because Mr. LaRouche succeeded in getting the President of the United States to offer that to the Soviet Union--this was not a little thing--there was a gigantic freakout on both sides, from the one-world representatives of both sides.

The Soviet press went absolutely bananas. They said this is a casus belli, Mr. LaRouche is troglodyte. They had articles in Izvestia about Mr. LaRouche as Rambo and me as Teutonia, with horns! And so they were completely freaked out.

And Gorbachov, in November 1986, shortly before the Reykjavik Summit, made a public attack on Mr. LaRouche, not by name but unmistakably by implication.

End of September '86, on the 30th, the Sovetskaya Kultura complained about the growing influence of the LaRouche movement: Why is the IRS not doing something about him if they can't be stopped politically?

You all heard on radio and TV--now that the ugly truth about the Waco affair is coming out--that the FBI lied to Reno; that they used inflammable tear gas to set on fire mostly women and children, which is an unbelievable terror against their own population. These people were not a threat to anyone.

Leesburg and Waco

And the reason that I tend to get very emotional about this, is because on the 6th of October, a couple of days before the Reykjavik Summit, the same FBI and Pentagon forces and others--they carried out a similar raid, quite like that at Waco, against the offices of our organization in Leesburg, and against our residence.

I will never, in my whole life, forget how on the 6th of October, I woke up a quarter to seven, because helicopters were flying around our bedroom window, and 400 officials, FBI agents with armored vehicles, tanks, and guns, were outside. And it was based on the briefing that we were a terrorist organization, very dangerous. Because these agents were full of fear. They had gotten a briefing to "expect the worst," and this was a set-up for murder.

And I thank God that I'm still alive, because it's a miracle, which took an intervention from Mr. LaRouche: our international mobilization, calling up all our contacts worldwide, putting pressure on the White House to intervene, so that we survived this.

But {we were scheduled to be killed, exactly like this Waco affair--by the same people.} The then (I think) deputy head of the FBI, Larry Potts, was in charge of this operation--the same man who was responsible for Ruby Ridge, shooting the innocent woman and her child, and who was in charge of Waco.

The raid against us, Ruby Ridge, and Waco were done by the same people with the same motives, representing the parallel government, that went after President Clinton with the impeachment.

That is the problem in this country. And hopefully, if we mobilize in the right way, this mess can be cleaned out. And now the fact that the truth is coming out, will lead to a situation in which this evil will be eliminated.

Anyway, Gorbachov and the anti-SDI forces in the Reagan administration who were behind this raid, agreed to deliver the head of LaRouche on a silver platter, as a proof that these policies would be rejected forever.

And it is the terrible irony and tragedy: Had the Soviet Union accepted the SDI offer, which Reagan did hold out briefly at Reykjavik, the world would be out of the woods, so to speak. And maybe this was one of the two greatest opportunities of this century, which was ruined because Yuri Andropov, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union at that time, rejected this offer without even exploratory negotiations.

Lyn, in a recent paper on the ABM Treaty, recounts the fable of the fisherman who throws away a pearl worth much more than the entire wealth of his impoverished island. And the Soviet Union threw away that pearl, because it was not directed against them. It was an effort to save them, to save Russia, to save the people of Russia. And one can only say "What gigantic foolishness!" Which now many people in the Soviet Union, scientists and academics, have long recognized, and have drawn the right conclusion.

If you look at what is in the children's stores today about "Star Wars"--you know, these {ugly, ugly, little monsters}--I mean, can you imagine a bigger perversion? Here was the most beautiful idea: to establish a true peace order in the world. And this is what they make out of it. And I think, this shows you the perversion of the people who are running Hollywood.

LaRouche in '84, forecast that if the Soviet Union were to reject the SDI offer, in five years, they would collapse. And that's exactly what happened. LaRouche was the only statesman who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think this is a very noteworthy fact, because almost nobody ever assumed that this system would one day no longer exist.

In '88, LaRouche held his famous press conference in the Kempinsky Hotel in Berlin, and predicted again, as the only statesman on record, the early unification of Germany; that in the face of the economic problems of the Comecon, that soon Germany should unite, and, together with Western technology, develop Poland with the methods of the physical economy.

He predicted that on the 12th of October, '88. And some of you know, just a couple of weeks later, in November '88, the same illegal Department of Justice apparatus, made the "Rocket Docket" trial against LaRouche and his associates, which can only be compared with the Freisler Court of the Nazis at the time.

By that time, as we now know, President Reagan was already out of it, and the government was de facto run by Vice President Bush, of Iran-Contra fame. LaRouche was put in jail on the 27th of January in '89, only a couple of days after Bush took office.

In November '89, the Berlin Wall came down, signalling the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And still in November, LaRouche from jail made this beautiful, great vision about the great vision to have the Productive Triangle, Paris-Berlin-Vienna ({Map 2}), which was the idea to use this largest industrial concentration of the world, the largest machine-tool and other high-technology concentration, to use that as an engine to integrate eastern and western Europe, through these corridors, reaching into the East.

At the point when the Wall came down, this would have put the East-West relationship on a completely new basis. And it would have represented the first peace order of the 20th century. And what people don't understand, is that this was exactly the same conception as the SDI: to use modern technologies as a science-driver, and as a cornerstone for a just, new world economic order.

At that time, the big question was: How would the West react to the break-up of the Soviet Union? Would they go the way LaRouche proposed, with the Productive Triangle and later the idea to have the Eurasian Land-Bridge and the global reconstruction/new world economic order approach; or, would they go in the direction of H.G. Wells and Russell and world government?

In looking back over these last 10 years after the Soviet Union vanished, with the exception of little nuances here and there by President Clinton--he did something positive on Ireland, he did something positive on the Balkans, which was a little bit messy, but at least some good things. He tried to get Mideast peace. He did some good things here. He tries to keep up the strategic partnership with China, even though he doesn't have the control in his hands.

But, apart from these nuances, the last 10 years, unfortunately, one has to come to the conclusion, we're, more and more, going in the direction of what Brzezinski wrote in his disgusting book, The Grand Chessboard, namely, that geopolitics and the strategic policy of the BAC has taken over American politics.

What Brzezinski writes in this book, is: "The last decade of the 20th century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged, not only as the key arbiter of Eurasian power relations, but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole--indeed, the first truly global power.

"Whether it represents the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power, remains central to America's capacity to exercise global primacy. Eurasia is thus the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played, and that struggle involves geostrategy, the strategic management of geopolitical interests."

That is Brzezinski. Now, if you compare what was happening and what is happening, use your own judgment.

On the 31st of November '89, just after the Wall had come down on the 9th of November, Alfred Herrhausen, the then-head of the Deutsche Bank, was assassinated by the non-existent third-generation of the Red Brigades, or the RAF in Germany.

Why? Because he was, outside of LaRouche, the only man who had a policy of development of Poland outside of the IMF, on the basis of the Kreditanstalt fu@aur Wiederaufbau, the Credit Bank for Reconstruction. This is a prime case of geopolitical interests, the way Brzezinski describes it.

A couple of days later, on the 2nd of December '89, Bush and Gorbachov had a summit in Malta, where they agreed to slow down the developments in Germany, which proved to be futile, because the idea of unification was unstoppable.

Then, in May 1990, it was the Bush administration which, at a conference of the CSCE, insisted, through the persons of Scowcroft and Eagleburger, that Eastern Europe must submit to the IMF, to the shock therapy, to the reform policy, and be integrated into the globalist system.

The Looting of Russia

You have heard and read about the biggest money-laundering scandal ever, where probably only the tip of the iceberg has come out in the fact that the Bank of New York has laundered $15 billion, in part monies from the IMF, involving the Yeltsin family, Chernomyrdin, and all the reformers.

And now, what LaRouche has been warning about from the beginning, is coming out through investigations from Switzerland, from the United States, and other places: that the entire reform policy towards the former Soviet Union, was only a nice word for the unrestricted looting of Russia, the criminal takeover of the economy of the ex-Soviet Union.

Bush, Jr. wants to make the question of "Who Lost Russia?" the major foreign policy theme of his election campaign. And remember that last year, I made a speech at the Labor Day conference on exactly that subject: the lost historical chance of 1989, and on the question of who lost Russia?

Bush, Jr. wants to target Gore, who is indeed deeply involved. But Gore only jumped into a bed which was prepared by Bush, Sr., and Margaret Thatcher. And who would want to be in bed with them? (Laughter.)

At the same time, when the Bush-Thatcher combination set up Eastern Europe, and later the ex-Soviet Union for the criminal looting of the reform policy, they made the trap for Saddam Hussein to move into Kuwait, which was the pretext for Desert Storm.

What was the purpose of Desert Storm? Bush declared the new world order, and he said: "We have to have this new world order to defend the lifestyle of the Americans," which meant to loot, shoot down, terrorize, suck the blood out of the rest of the world, for the sake, not of the American people, but for the sake of this small oligarchical, parasitical group on top. This was the beginning of the effort to implement Anglo-American hegemonism in the world.

Then, on the 5th of June '91, Bush appointed Robert Strauss, the Democrat from Texas, to be ambassador to Moscow. And Lyn made a statement about this appointment, and said: "George Bush is sending the Prince of Thieves to Moscow to teach the KGB how to steal," which he succeeded in doing. And Strauss--who at that time was on the board of Dwayne Andreas' Archer Daniels Midland grain cartel, and the R.J.R. Nabisco company, and also, a director of the Hollinger Corporation--this guy Strauss had one most important task: to draw Russia into the IMF, to ensure that no measures were taken to interfere with the unrestricted looting of Russia.

On August 21, '91--some of you may remember this--when Yeltsin was standing on the tanks in Red Square. This turned out to be the last blow to the Soviet Union. When Yeltsin was standing on the tanks, a certain person, named Mikhail Kagalovsky, was meeting with John Major at 10 Downing Street. And he happened to have been one of a whole group of young, promising future criminals, who were picked up by the Mont Pelerin Society, to be groomed as future "economists" for the shock therapy in the East.

Now he, together with such people as Chubais and Fyodorov and Potanin, basically became those people working with the West in looting Russia.

Kagalovsky, who has now turned up, along with his wife, in the Bank of New York scandal--involved in money-laundering--was named the first liaison to the IMF and became the IMF director of Russia in Washington.

Yeltsin chose Gaidar as Prime Minister. So the way to understand this, is that when the Clinton administration came in, and Gore became the "expert" on Russia policy, self-appointed, more or less, they took over this Bush-era network of Mont Pelerin kleptocrats, which had been set up by the Bush administration earlier.

The way to understand it, is that Gore is as much a man of Wall Street as is Bush. And both of them represent BAC interests. And as everybody who was involved with the Clinton administration can tell you, Gore, together with paying lip-service to the President, but he, together with some other people, tried from Day One, to kick out all the people from Arkansas out of the Clinton administration.

In 1992, Lyndon LaRouche, who was still in jail, initiated the extension of the program for the Productive Triangle to be extended into the Eurasian Land-Bridge ({Maps 2 and 3}). And he proposed three main lines: one along the North through Siberia, and two in the South, building on the old Silk Road, as a way of using the fact that the Soviet Union had collapsed, to extend development into the East.

Then, in 1993, Yeltsin used the tanks against the Parliament in Moscow. And whatever democratic tendencies had started to carefully emerge out of this collapsed Soviet Union, were crushed by Yeltsin.

In 1994, Mr. LaRouche came out of jail, due to a massive international mobilization of VIPs around the world. I can not tell you all the names, but I can assure you, we had hundreds of sitting parliamentarians, former heads of state, heads of general staffs of countries; hundreds of bishops, cardinals, and other such people, appealing that Mr. LaRouche should be let out of jail.

In February, immediately after he was free, he made his famous Ninth Forecast, in which he predicted that the continued speculation would lead inevitably to a collapse of the system.

LaRouche Goes to Moscow

In April '94, Mr. LaRouche went to Moscow, and had a seminar with very important economists, the former Soviet Prime Minister Pavlov, Osipov, Lvov, very famous academicians.

And there he made, for the first time, the proposal that the only way to save the world, would be to go back to an FDR alliance, where the United States, China, Russia, India, and others would work together, to defeat the BAC forces, which has really saturated Russian intelligentsia circles.

But these looters--the collaboration between the Yeltsin family and the circles around Gore--decided something different. In 1995, after they had already looted Russia through the privatization, which was really nothing but asset-stripping in order to use the money from privatization to go into speculation on the global markets; in '95, they escalated that through the so-called "loans for shares," which now targetted energy companies, the telecoms, natural resources like oil and gas.

And this "loans-for-shares" policy was the brainchild of Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then head of the Menatep Group, was one of the people who became a billionaire in a very short period of time. Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Pyotr Aven, Vladimir Gusinsky: in a very short time, in months, in one or two years, they became billionaires, while, naturally, the population of Russia became poorer and poorer, so that more than 40 million people in Russia now live below the poverty line, having $30 a month or less.

The unemployment officially is 25%, probably much, much higher. The life expectancy of males has shrunk to the 50s. It collapsed, went down by more than 10 years.

So, Chubais, whom we saw before, agreed to this plan of the loans-for-shares in a cabinet meeting in March '95. And he called it "a pact with the Devil."

At that point, the CIA gave this famous report to Al Gore, saying that Chernomyrdin had pickpocketed $5 billion into his own pockets, and that they had documentation of that. And then Gore wrote the famous barnyard epithets--I think it was B---S----. (Laughter.)

Then, in '95, the bubble in the meantime had grown, this time nourished by the addition of the looting of Russia. And even President Clinton and Jacques Chirac at the Halifax Summit in '95 in Canada, they were talking about financial AIDS--that speculation is the financial AIDS of the system.

Because of this looting in Russia, Yeltsin became extremely unpopular, and Zyuganov, the Russian Communist Party head, was about to win the election in '96. After the parliamentary victory for the Communists, Yeltsin fired Chubais, and Chubais went to Davos, to meet with Western bankers, who agreed: "We will support these reformers, because they're in the interests of our banking operation."

The Schiller Institute in China

In May '96, I went, together with a delegation of the Schiller Institute, to Beijing, and we participated as speakers in a conference, together with 34 countries, on this question of the Eurasian Land-Bridge.

The Chinese government at that point made beautiful speeches, saying that this economic integration of all of Europe, Russia, Asia, Southeast Asia, India, China: when that becomes one economic bloc, this will represent a new era of mankind, because, for the first time, you can overcome the geographic disadvantages of the landlocked countries, and you can use these infrastructure developments, to open up every part of the world for development.

Now, our particular proposal was the idea of the economic corridors, which was the idea that these infrastructure arteries should just be the backbone around which you then have cheap energy through inherently safe nuclear plants, new cities, building thousands of new cities, new industries, so that you would not use infrastructure to exploit raw materials from the areas you open up, but that you drive the development in there, so that it would be really a new world economic order.

However, there was a representative of the BAC, the then-vice president of the European Union, Sir Leon Brittan. The European Union co-sponsored this conference.

Sir Leon Brittan said--and we were very shocked when we heard this--"Forget your Eurasian Land-Bridge, because there will be so much political destabilization along the countries of that Eurasian Land-Bridge, that it will never come into being."

In the summer of '97, Mr. LaRouche forecast the outbreak of the global financial crisis to come in October. And indeed, that is exactly what happened: in October, the famous "Asia Crisis," which was only the regional expression of the global crisis, started to erupt.

And between October '97 and '98, we were three times at the point of a complete meltdown. The IMF responded to it by massive liquidity-pumping--just printing money to prevent the collapse.

On the 17th of August last year, the Kiriyenko government of Russia declared bankruptcy. Why? Because this speculation in Russia, had led to a situation where the Russian state bonds, the famous GKOs, had become ever more short-term, higher and higher interest rates, so that in the last phase, they would try to get 150% interest rate for three-month GKOs, and nobody wanted to buy them, because people were afraid that if they were to buy them, even if they were promised such a huge profit, that it would not exist in three months.

On the 28th of August 1999, the New York Times had an interview with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was Kagalovsky's boss at Menatep and Yukos Oil. And he basically said that the $15 billion laundered through the Bank of New York, would have been monies pulled out of the GKO bond pyramid shortly before it crashed, by insiders of the Russian government, who knew about the pending rumored devaluation and the freeze of the GKO market.

And he said many Russian officials began selling government securities in the summer of '98. So, that is really something.

The findings of the Russian Federation Council, earlier in 1998, were precisely that: that the huge IMF package announced in July 1998, and where a $4.5 billion tranche was supposed to be delivered express, served as a time-buying operation for insiders to get their money out of the GKOs, convert it into dollars, take it abroad to places like the Bank of New York--an unbelievable looting operation, which indeed we knew all along. But now, it is coming out.

The truth is that the IMF reform policy for Russia, was exactly what we said from the beginning: Loot Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, and keep stealing, until the country really falls apart.

If this investigation continues, it will come out that the IMF was involved in insider trading, to make a huge profit on the default of Russia. And that is what the Bank of New York scandal touches upon.

End of August, remember, after this insider trading happened, Al Gore made desperate phone calls--I think he was vacationing in Hawaii--behind the back of President Clinton, trying to reinstall Chernomyrdin as the Prime Minister. And when that failed, the LTCM, the largest hedge fund, collapsed, and the system was at a point of a meltdown.

The Post-Crash Scenario

At that point, the BAC forces made two decisions: pump money into the system to prevent such bankruptcies, and accelerate the globalization of NATO, and have a series of wars, grab the raw materials for purposes of control after the expected crash, and go for control of the world.

A couple of months ago, Brzezinski spoke at a conference in Vienna, in front of a dozen heads of Eastern and Central Europe. And he said: "Global hegemony of the United States"--one could say the BAC--"is not the right way to characterize America's role. American omnipotence is a better word."

For that reason, these people are now determined, in an active policy, to break up Russia. Because if you look at Russia, it's the country with the largest territorial extension in the world. It is a country which has tremendous richness in resources.

And they have now made a decision, to be satisfied not only with the elimination of the Soviet Union, but to break up Russia. They are also determined to break up China, which has the largest population in the world, to break up India, and to break up Indonesia.

Now, the first step after the near-meltdown in October '98, which in the meantime has been admitted by the BIS and Camdessus, was the effort to bomb Iraq in November '98. It failed, because President Clinton intervened and stopped it one hour before the bombs were to hit the ground. But they succeeded in preventing Clinton from going to the APEC meeting in November, where he would have met Primakov, Jiang Zemin, Mahathir, and therefore exactly the kind of combination of people who are necessary to find a way out of this international crisis.

Instead, Al Gore went, and he insulted [Malaysian Prime Minister] Mahathir, which was really the first smell of what this BAC hegemonism would become.

They succeeded in bombing Iraq in December '98 while the U.N. Security Council was meeting on the issue of Iraq, using the faked Butler Report.

And you may not have noticed this, given that you are in the "Continent of the Clueless"; but, in December '98, a dramatic, dramatic shift in world politics did occur. All international law was thrown out the window, international law as it had developed since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; the U.N. Charter, the Helsinki Accords; all of this went out the window, and was replaced, from December '98 on, with Anglo-American hegemonism.

Now, the March war against Yugoslavia, was really to demonstrate, first of all, that Russia was so much destroyed and looted by the IMF reforms, that they would no longer play a decisive role in the Balkans, which historically is an area of Russian influence. It was supposed to, secondly, demonstrate that China can no longer expect to have a voice in the U.N. Security Council, and be treated as a global strategic partner.

And especially the deliberate bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on the 7th of May, was to say to China "Ha! You can not do anything about it." And we will use that to convince China that, you know, you are the enemy, that we have an adversarial relationship between the United States and China, and to justify future military operations.

And certainly this war around Kosova, was supposed to teach Continental Europe a lesson: to confirm what Brzezinski had said in Vienna, that Europe is not a partner but a protectorate, because they lack the military strength to oppose the geopolitical designs of the Anglo-Americans.

And it was supposed to smash a pro-Russian government in Serbia, and install a pro-Western regime to fill the gap in the geo-military land corridor. If you'll look at the map ({Map 3}), these are the NATO countries. The idea is to eliminate Yugoslavia as a pro-Russian country, then have Turkey, and then have the Partnership for Peace NATO program extended into Central Asia; in that way, start to break up the southern flank of Russia, and {to make NATO the direct neighbor of both Russia and China, which both of these countries really regard as a vital threat.}

Now, the 78-day NATO war left the Balkans and Southeastern Europe in an absolute economic catastrophe. Even the conservative Swiss paper Neue Zuricher Zeitung wrote that "In Serbia, Albania, Kosova, and Macedonia, hunger is spreading, and no visible economic activity is taking place any more." The places are just dying.

Now, what you have instead is that Kosova and Albania, is practically now taken over by the UCK, sponsored by Madeleine Albright, which is a narco-terrorist gang, not less dangerous than you will hear later about the FARC, and the ELN in Colombia.

And the economic destabilization of the Balkans, and the fact that now, a major drug route runs through this area, is one of the major security threats to Europe at this point.

When NATO had its 50th anniversary summit in Washington, there was the burial of the old NATO as an Atlantic defense alliance, and a new strategic concept was discussed and agreed upon. The amazing thing--and I ask you, have you heard about it? Did you wonder about this? No, because you are in "The Continent of the Clueless."

The old NATO strategic concept, without public debate in any country, has been abandoned. The old one was based on Article V of the 1949 Washington Treaty, to defend the territorial integrity of NATO members against a possible attack by the Soviet Union.

This is no more. Gen. Hugh Shelton, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the Royal United Services Institute in London on March 8: "The narrow view of the collective defense is however insufficient to counter the more sophisticated and subtle dangers we face today. Therefore, NATO must broaden its strategic perspective to protect all of our interests from a myriad of complex asymptotic threats that span the conflict continuum.

"NATO must place new emphasis on the unpredictable and multi-directional nature of threats, such as regional conflicts, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism."

In other words, this is a carte blanche for global interventions any place in the world, under any kind of pretext desired.

Two weeks later, the 78-day war of NATO against Yugoslavia over Kosova started. And the issue was clearly not Serbian atrocities; because if the West wanted to defeat or do something about Milosevic, they should have started to do that in '92, when Milosevic started the genocide against Croatia and Bosnia.

So, what it was, was that NATO exploited an existing situation for their global strategic purposes. And Brzezinski, the modern-day version of the British geopoliticians Haushofer and Mackinder, describes the Caucasus, Central Asia, as the "Eurasian Balkans."

NATO Expansion: A Casus Belli

After the war against Yugoslavia, there are now basically three points of escalation, targetting the entire southern flank of Russia. The Russian military has communicated to the United States and the European establishment, without a margin of doubt, that any attempt to extend NATO into the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, or the Caucasian states--Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan--would constitute a red line, and would not be tolerated.

Both the governments of Azerbaijan and of Georgia, have already called for joining NATO, and for establishing either American or Turkish bases, or bring in NATO or U.S. peacekeeping forces.

On the 29th of June, Murtuz Aleskerov, the speaker of the Parliament in Azerbaijan, said our country must become a NATO member-state. On the 1st of July, deputy foreign minister Giga Burduli announced that Georgia also had requested NATO membership.

When U.S. Defense Secretary Cohen was in Georgia in August, he offered NATO membership to that country. Azerbaijan and Georgia have requested that NATO peacekeeping troops should replace the CIS troops in the region, and the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia--next, the blowup--in and around the Armenian region of Karabakh, that these troops should be placed there.

Now, go back to the map of Armenia. Armenia, just to highlight one country, is caught in a particularly tough position. During the time of the Soviet Union, almost all of Armenia's trade was done with Russia. That trade has completely collapsed, and only military ties exist, essentially because Armenia needs Russia, because otherwise, it loses control over Karabakh, you know, the [Armenian enclave] inside Azerbaijan.

Now, if Aliyev, the head of Azerbaijan, who is old, were to die, civil war is very possible. And the opposition in Azerbaijan, is a very aggressive force. They were the ones who began the war against Karabakh in '92 to '94, and they demand part of Iran and, naturally, Karabakh. And the United States, just now, offered $110 million to Armenia as an encouragement to negotiate over Karabakh with the concept, "More Autonomy and Less Independence."

The purpose is to clear the way for the Transcaucasian pipelines, and that obviously creates tremendous mischief with Iran, because the Armenians would be forced to evacuate the territory south of Karabakh, which they have now occupied. And now, Iran and Armenia have a joint border of 180 kilometers. If they withdraw, they will only have 50 kilometers. And the Iran pipeline goes through the area with the 180 kilometers. So obviously, this is a tremendous situation.

And then you have the Dagestan rebellion, which just took place. This was carried out by the so-called Wahhabite Islamic rebels, which is really an Islamic terrorist organization sponsored by Saudi Arabia, but also by the British and others from the West.

In Dagestan alone, you have 30 different ethnic minorities. Then you have Chechnya, which has been de facto militarily independent since August '96. And in all of these places, in Chechnya, you have now a great number of armed gangs, both native Chechen extremists, and so-called Islamic mujahideen, who are trying to get rid of the government of Aslan Maskhadov.

Since the beginning of this year, there have been many cross-border raids against Russian forces stationed near Chechnya. These networks, which operate in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, are all financed from both Saudi Arabia and the West. And they are supported by Islamic Afghanistan war veterans and the Taliban. And British Intelligence has a very large influence among these terrorist networks.

Now, Turkey was supposed to play the major role in all of that. And this has been dampened, for the time being, through the earthquake, where you have a case that even the most evil plans of the tyrants sometimes fail. Because when the earthquake hit Turkey, and it became clear that they had no civil defense, that the Army was completely unable to help the people, the population began to turn against the government.

And you can see that if natural law comes through, that all these plans can be blown away in no time.

Naturally, the big factor in this region is the natural resources, especially oil and natural gas. I personally tend to think that the oil and natural gas capacities of the Caspian Sea are vastly {over}-estimated, and only used to fuel a desperate fight of these different countries over pipelines.

And actually, if you look at this map, you can see that at every point where there is a pipeline, you have an insurgency movement with international inputs. And it's no surprise that Brzezinski is a consultant to Amoco, and also that these pipelines are all operated by BP, Shell, and you know, they have nothing to do with development; they are just there to extract the raw materials.

In July, coming back to the "Continent of the Clueless," you'd better watch what your Congress and your Senate are doing: in July, a bill was passed by Senator Sam Brownback, called "The Silk Road Strategy Act of 1999." And this act calls for assisting regional military cooperation among the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia, through such programs as the Central Asian Battalion and the Partnership for Peace of NATO.

And this act calls on the U.S. to sponsor the usual kind of democratic government, human rights, NGOs, independent media, transparency in political practice and commercial transactions. It really is a joke, because the corruption is really, as the Bank of New York case demonstrates.

This bill was co-sponsored by Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, Richard Shelby, and others. And a similar bill exists in the Congress, sponsored by Representative Don Bereuter.

What Brownback calls "the ancient Silk Road," is really an unveiled effort to keep China, India, and Russia out of this region. So, we are looking at a powderkeg.

The Russian military sees that as the threat to the entire Russian flank. They still have a strategic nuclear arsenal. As a response to both the Yugoslavia war and events in the Caucasus, the Russian military has announced the rapid development of 10,000 nuclear warheads, because they have drawn the conclusion that NATO doesn't pay attention to them any more, and that they do not believe that Russia will use its strategic arsenal.

So, they are now building 10,000 tactical nuclear warheads to be used in these operations. And that is only one spot where this is going on.

Now, the recent Russian maneuvers, following the NATO war in Yugoslavia, assumed a strategic nuclear attack on Russia. And they changed their entire strategy, assuming that this is going to happen. The Russian military {is convinced} that it is the policy of NATO to break up Russia. This is playing with fire.

The India-Pakistan Crisis

The next crisis spot is the conflict between India and Pakistan. The hopeful spirit of the Lahore Declaration of last February, when Sharif and Vajpayee met in the so-called bus diplomacy, has completely vanished. And right now, both countries seem to be on a course, at least no alternative than war. And both countries have developed nuclear weapons.

Pakistan is in a terrible situation. They were literally used during the time of the Cold War, and have been turned into a drug- and gun-running center, especially after the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan. And that all helped to bring generals to power there, steered by the BAC. And they are using Pakistan for continuous manipulations over Kashmir.

Well, you see, this is an area which is partly occupied by Pakistan, and partly by India.

Another problem in Pakistan, is that you have these feudal landlords, who are the single most dominating social force in Pakistan, again supported by the Anglo-Americans, as a result of which there is almost no industry in Pakistan. They have to import virtually all finished products, and only export cotton-related things.

Pakistan is fully dependent on the IMF, which controls everything. And the only thing which is growing in Pakistan, is unemployment and illiteracy.

Now, the Anglo-Americans have been building up the Pakistan military as a bulwark against Russia and India, and basically building up Pakistan against the Hindu India, which has led to a tremendous, massive intellectual corruption of the Pakistan elite. And the British have been playing this game since the partition.

It became worse after '79, and now, Anglo-American forces have encouraged a mighty cultivation of opium, production of heroin, and training outlaws of different Muslim nations militarily as jihads, formerly against the communists, and now these people are spreading everywhere.

And you have one of these phenomena, where something was built up during the Cold War, and it's now infesting all of these places. The jihad Islamic fighters have spread to Chechnya, Dagestan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Xin Jiang Province in China. And these terrorists, who are, in large part, run by British Intelligence, are exactly what Sir Leon Brittan meant, when he said "Forget the Eurasian Land-Bridge, this will never be built because of the political problems along this region."

Now, India, on the other side, which never really confronted the impact British colonial policy had, is now convinced that they have no other chance. They think that after the collapse of the Non-Aligned Movement policy and the Soviet Union, they think, being the second-largest country in the world, being one of the creators of human civilization; you go back 6,000 years in Indian history, you find the most amazing things.

But they are amazingly inwardly-oriented. Their biggest vulnerability is their obsession with Kashmir. And they feel very betrayed, because while the Lahore process of bus diplomacy was going on between Vajpayee and Sharif, so-called rebels from Pakistan compared the battle around the Kargil region of Kashmir. This war, which just took place, where Pakistan military regulars in mujahideen clothes--this is in a territory which is very mountainous, and very difficult to keep.

After the so-called Kargil war in the inaccessible hills of Kashmir, the talks between India and Pakistan completely broke down. During the Kargil war, Pakistan shot down a MiG-21 and MiG-17 helicopter. Later, India shot down a Pakistan Maritime Surveillance aircraft, claiming that they had entered Indian air space.

All of these are signals that India and Pakistan may get involved in a full-scale war very soon, and that given the condition of the military terrain, neither India nor Pakistan can occupy large areas of the other country without a large campaign. And therefore, if a dangerous mood is spreading both in India and Pakistan, Pakistan being paranoid and contained geographically....

For example, all its fuel comes through one port, Karachi, which could be sealed off by the Indian Navy very easily. The Indians are furious about the betrayal of the Pakistanis and the continuous destabilization of Kashmir and even Punjab. So, there are some forces in India who say "We have to hit Pakistan real hard."

Now, I'm not saying that war is inevitable. But the British right now, and the BAC, are trying to get a war between India and Pakistan, as one way of blowing the world up. The fact that India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons as such is not the problem, because there is a big difference between nuclear policy and nuclear weapons.

And actually, what India just did, by announcing its own nuclear doctrine, is what de Gaulle did by insisting on its sovereignty and having a tous azimuts (all-out defense) policy. But this is an extremely dangerous spot.

China: War, or Strategic Partnership

Now, the third situation where nuclear war could break out in the short term, because some people are pushing it, is the question around Taiwan and the efforts by the BAC, including some Japanese input, to push Taiwan into independence.

From a Chinese standpoint, this is as if somebody wanted to declare California or Rhode Island to be an independent country. And despite some tensions up through last December, China had only one foreign policy priority. That was the strategic partnership with the United States in the 21st century.

China, up until last December, would have done absolutely nothing to risk that. But the first major blow to this conviction came with the Iraq bombing in December, then obviously with the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy.

And when Zhu Rongji was here in March, he still wanted to cement the strategic partnership, But when the bombing of the embassy occurred on the seventh of May, this was an absolute political earthquake. And you have to understand 200 years of Chinese history, [to understand] why there was such a strong reaction. Because China only has really experienced in the last 15 to 20 years, stability and economic progress. And they see the threat.

Nobody in China believes that this bombing was an accident. They all are convinced it's deliberate. And I was in China in May, and people asked: "Who is in control? Is it the President? Is it the Pentagon? What does it mean for the future? Will it happen again?"

Then, the Cox Report came out, saying China stole all of these secrets. The most moving experience I had in May, during my visit, I had a little time, so I went for half an hour to a little temple. And a girl was there with her school class to pay tribute to the journalists who were killed. There was a little exhibition. She spoke very bad English, and we had a difficult time talking. And I asked her what she thought about the bombing of the embassy.

And she said, "Tell your President: Come to China. Love my country." And then she started to cry. And this was a girl I just happened to run into.

Between the 9th and 11th of July, there was in Hongkong a symposium organized by the Taiwan Peaceful Reunification Association on this question, on the peaceful reunification of China. There was a high-level delegation from Beijing--25 people--and from Taiwan. And 80 papers were presented, and it was a very constructive discussion, with widespread media coverage.

During the Farewell Dinner, Lee Teng-hui, the president of Taiwan, dropped a political bomb by announcing that from now on, the relationship between Beijing and Taipei would no longer be the One China Policy, but of two states.

This is a clear provocation, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the existence of the People's Republic of China. And it is supposed to influence the upcoming elections in Taiwan.

Lee's prote@aage@aa, because he can not run again as president, is a person called Lee An-Chen, about whom it is said that he makes the wooden Indian Gore, look like a charismatic fireball. And he is one of the richest men in Taiwan. He is for independence, as is the DPP. And again, this on top of the bombing of the embassy, the war against Yugoslavia, and so forth, this represented another step in the perception of the Chinese, that the United States is out to destroy China.

They put out an incredibly harsh statement, saying "The Chinese people love peace and only would choose military force as the last option. But China will also not bow down to foreign intervention.

"The U.S.A. is openly selling arms to Taiwan, conducting exercises with aircraft carriers, using extortion and other despicable methods to connive with Lee Teng-hui and the other Taiwan authorities to split the country. This can only lead to a further worsening of China-U.S. relations, increasing the arrogance of Taiwan authorities' actions to split the country, and to push the nervous situation across the straits towards the brink of war.

"On August 14th, George Bush, Jr., the son of the former President Bush, and present Governor of Texas"--this is still a quote from the Chinese press--"who is hoping to win the Republican nomination, has been playing up his promise that he, were he to become President, would defend Taiwan by military force. Bush, Jr. declared that the U.S. should adopt a tough and unyielding stance in dealing with China as a strategic adversary and competitor."

They say "It would be a very big mistake to think that China only has the ability to conduct a media war. At present, they have already carried out all necessary preparations to launch a military attack on Taiwan."

There is presently a great fear in the region over what will happen if either China liberates Taiwan, or the U.S. protects Taiwan from the Mainland. Sure, President Clinton has said repeatedly, that the U.S. has only a One China Policy. But de facto, they are communicating to Taiwan, you can not trust the Mainland, because you also have the Taiwan Relation Act, and therefore we need new strategies and new weapons systems, new maneuvers and a new military alliance between South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan against the Mainland.

Lee Teng-hui escalated this situation further by announcing mid-August, that Taiwan is interested in participating in a regional-tactical missile defense alliance, together with the U.S., Japan, Korea, and so forth.

Apart from the fact that the TMD conception, which is presently being pursued by the U.S. and Japan, is technologically absurd, as Mr. LaRouche outlined in his paper. Unfortunately, it has a big psychological effect, because it convinces the military in China that they only have a grace period of maybe two years at most, for a military option, in case Taiwan goes for independence.

China has made it crystal clear that they will go to war before they will accept the sepration of Taiwan. And they have made it clear in no uncertain terms, that China has a geographic superiority, they have an enormous strategic maneuvering room, so that even if the U.S. were to attack, they will not be defeated. They have the moral superiority. And that the United States would lose a war of attrition.

Now, I'm asking you: Is it really in the interests of the United States to push this policy, a policy which is implicitly supported by Gore, and explicitly supported by all the Republican candidates? If the U.S and the British and others were to stop pushing for Taiwan's independence, the military threat from the Mainland would stop instantaneously, because they have no urge.

So the danger of the war comes from this push. Other articles in Russia, China, India, all express the common view that Western strategy, that what they mean by the "new world order" has become clear in the Desert Storm: to use the entire arsenal of one superpower prepared for a full-scale nuclear war with the other superpower, against relatively small countries, like Iraq, Yugoslavia, and others to come, to impose an aura of schrecklichkeit (terror) and to bomb these countries into submission. In the case of Iraq in 1990, they did not use nuclear weapons. But in the case of Yugoslavia, they already talked about the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Milosevic. Gen. Clark did that, and the British press.

So, people say "Okay, that is the West, Western strategy. First, to destroy Russia, use shock therapy to weaken the military potential of Russia, first split the Soviet Union, then Yugoslavia, then destroy the socialist countries, one by one, then break up Russia, India, and China. And what Lee Teng-hui is doing is just an expression of this strategy."

In Beijing in August, there appeared a paper commenting on the fact that the expansion of NATO demonstrates the fact that NATO discounts both the weakened conventional forces of Russia, and its functioning strategic nuclear arsenal. And since no one believes Russia would risk its own nuclear annihilation, that Russia can do nothing.

The paper emphasizes the fact that Russia plans to build 10,000 miniaturized nuclear warheads, which would enable Russia to attack military targets at any point on the Earth in a precision attack, which would not trigger an all-out nuclear war. But that is a question and a proposition, because if you imagine the financial collapse: the Caucasus threatening Russia in its vital interests, the India-Pakistan crisis and the Taiwan provocation--I can see how all of this could get out of control very, very quickly.

The Survivors' Club

Now, there is no question that there is an increased military cooperation among China, India, and Russia. And what LaRouche used to call the "Survivors' Club," namely the countries of Asia who defended themselves against the effects of the global financial crisis, this now, more and more, has a military component.

The relationship between China and India has intensified. They talk about the same strategic interests, which is clearly a response to the NATO globalization.

The problem is, that this intensification is only an echo of the BAC globalization of NATO. And then, with the intensification of these regional conflicts and the global blow-out of the financial system--I mean, this is the sure road to World War III: either chaos, a Thirty Years War, or indeed a global nuclear war and a Dark Age.

The only way the world will come out of this terrible mess, and avoid a disaster which would make the two world wars of this century look like a picnic, is for the United States, China, India, Russia, and hopefully continental Europe and Japan and other countries, to adopt in the short term the LaRouche program for the New Bretton Woods and the Eurasian Land-Bridge.

If you think about what I just laid out, in terms of this situation, you must think about the Eurasian Land-Bridge as a vision for the 21st century. And remember, the 21st century is only four months away!

You must get a sense of the excitement of what the world could look like in a short period of time, with the New Silk Road, which would not be a silly geopolitical manipulation around pipelines, but where large infrastructure corridors around all of Eurasia are built, as densely as you could find it, for example, let's say in Germany today.

You have integrated maglev trains, highways, waterways, from Rotterdam to Jakarta, from Gibraltar to Siberia into the Northeast and from there, into Africa; and through the Bering Strait, to the Americas.

Forget how the economies are functioning today, and think back to how Franklin D. Roosevelt got the U.S. economy out of the Depression, into a booming economy. Imagine that if all the governments along the Eurasian Land-Bridge--and they would do it, if the United States, China, Russia, and India would cooperate--were to take the same approach as FDR did to put the U.S. economy on a war footing.

And this time, it would be done {to avoid} World War III. The governments would give credits for projects in the common good, eliminate unemployment, increase the productivity through the maximum use of science and technology. Jiang Zemin just talked about making science and technology the most important element of a new Chinese renaissance.

Build 1,000 cities, beautiful cities, along these infrastructure corridors; not ugly cities, like suburban strip malls, but beautiful cities, using the best traditions of architecture of the respective cultures. All infrastructure built in modern fashion, underground, and then on the ground, institutions of study, research, learning, universities, museums, theaters, opera houses, libraries.

At the outskirts of the cities, new modern industries, inherently safe nuclear energy plants, supplying plentiful cheap energy for industry and agriculture, irrigation, and desalinization.

With infrastructure, would come economic development which would transform the underdeveloped areas, not just to exploit the raw materials, but to bring industries in, so that these resources could get processed into semi-finished and finished products, so that the living standard of the people living there, gets increased. Their life expectancy lengthened, their health taken care of by modern standards, and that the principle of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, would be applied for all of these countries.

Just imagine what would happen if the children could enjoy universal education. Don't you think that when the general climate changes in this way, that the appeal of these terrorist gangs, which are now marauding, destabilizing country after country, that their appeal would disappear, and that the combined power of the United States, Russia, China, India, would be sufficient to eliminate this pest?

Now, the only reason why this is happening in the Caucasus, in Kashmir and in Colombia and other places, in Central Asia, you have 90% unemployment. If this were to be taken care of, this terrorism would vanish.

Don't you think that the people in Kosova, Albania, Colombia, or Congo would like rather to have real economic development, than to be terrorized by narco-terrorists and gun-runners?

Clinton Must Change U.S. Policy

The only way this can happen, is if the United States--and you are key to that--takes leadership, so that President Clinton changes U.S. policy in support of the Eurasian Land-Bridge. And this will only happen if the LaRouche presidential campaign explodes in the coming days, and that you go out of this conference with a noble commitment that this misery can not continue, that you become the instrument to change American policy. Because only if LaRouche becomes a determining factor in U.S. policy, can trust among these countries be reestablished.

LaRouche has a tremendous record in Russia. From Day One, he warned them that the IMF policy would destroy them. He taught them the principle of physical economy. He suggested to them, an alliance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the participation in the Eurasian Land-Bridge. So, Russians--patriotic Russians--know that LaRouche is an honest friend and a true friend.

People in China respect LaRouche in the highest way, because he has warned them of financial AIDS. They love his economic theory.

Think about the fact that our collaboration with India goes back, way back, since the times of Indira Gandhi, where we suggested a 40-year development program for India.

Just now, something very beautiful has happened, and that is that in India, a remarkable event took place. When former Prime Minister Primakov went to New Delhi last December, he proposed a Strategic Triangle between Russia, India, and China. At the time, China's reaction was reserved, because they did not want to risk the strategic partnership with the United States.

But after the war against Yugoslavia and the [bombing of the] Chinese Embassy, they have changed. And recently, academics from the three countries came together and formed the Triangular Association as the first step towards an eventual coordination of the three countries on various levels.

They made a founding declaration of this Triangular Association, in which they said its objectives are cultural, scientific, technological cooperation among the three countries, utilizing their strengths to improve the conditions, not only of their people, but also of the region and beyond.

They want to have study projects and publications on the global economic and financial crisis, and the building of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, which will connect the easternmost parts of Asia to the Western coasts of Europe, as of vital importance to all three countries. Studies will be undertaken to highlight the importance of the Eurasian Land-Bridge in developing the region.

Now, this was founded by academics of these three countries, and they appointed Mr. LaRouche as an official adviser to the Trans-Asian Association. (Applause.)

If you want to undo all of this, it is very easy, because to win friends for the United States around the world, just make sure LaRouche is the most important voice, and all the countries will love America. Because nobody wants to be at odds. People want to be friends, but they have to have a basis for trust.

China has said the basis for a good relationship is trust and common interests. We have many common interests, but how can we have trust? How can you develop trust at this late stage?

If you think, whom do you trust? Obviously, only that person or that nation whom you know very well. A good friend of whom you know his habits, his virtues, his character, the contributions and even the weak spots--as long as you know him, you know that this person has that habit and this freakout at this moment, it's okay. Because you know, it's just his way. (Laughter.)

Well, but since you know them, you're not scared of them. So the same approach has to be taken, in terms of foreign cultures. We already have a tremendous political hurricane worldwide, a hurricane which will pick up strength and destructive power in the next period. And very, very soon, in the moment of the financial crash and other political earthquakes, there will be a period of profound shake-ups among the population not only of the U.S., but around the world.

People will realize that the system which they thought to be self-evident and eternal, is crumbling, and all the institutions associated with it. And in that moment of shake-up, the population will be perceptive for profound conceptions about their identity, and that of their nation; about the goal of mankind, and the meaning of their lives.

That will be what Moses Mendelssohn called the "fertile moment," when a return to Classical thinking can be caused, provided that some outstanding individuals act as teachers.

What is required, is that each culture looks at its own history for those high points, which not only contributed to the greatness of their own culture, but which contributed to universal history. And people who have taken that elevated level, look at the rest of the world with the eyes of their great predecessors to understand the high points of the other culture.

For Americans, that means to think like Benjamin Franklin, like Alexander Hamilton, like John Quincy Adams, like Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and most obviously, like Lyndon LaRouche.

If you think like these great individuals, and then you look with their eyes on Hollywood, and the now-dominating popular ideas, you can easily agree with Confucius, who lived 2,400 years ago in China, and who said about his time that the world had lost the right way: wu tao. And you can agree with him, that the world is in urgent need of ren, which is love and benevolence--agape@am--rather than selfishness and materialism.

Confucius said "My teaching contains an all-pervading principle, ren and its realization." Ren is the desire to develop oneself to develop others. Love has its source in oneself. It is a mental cultivation on the part of the inner self. Therefore, its realization is very easy. So soon as I desire ren--love--love is there.

Nicolaus of Cusa, Leibniz, Moses Mendelssohn, Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt: They all agreed that it is a conscious decision to love which changes you instantly; that you instantly decide, "I will stop hating people, and I will love people."

Confucius says, "The people are in need of ren more urgently than of water and fire. The principle of love should be applied to the governing as well as to the governed. And when the gentlemen are earnest to their kinsmen, the people will be inspired by love. The key is not to have love, but to practice it."

What is needed today in this world situation, are outstanding people, such as you here in this room, who are committed to change history, because you are filled with a compassionate love for mankind, a love not only for your own culture, but a love for the greatness of other cultures, and the idea of reestablishing a peaceful international community of people.

If such a great renaissance occurs in each country, inspired through great teachers of our time, something totally unprecedented will happen. If we take the best works of India, of Sanskrit, of the Gupta period, the great ideas of thinkers like Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi, and they are revived; if the same happens with the great tradition of Russian culture, with the great scientific tradition of Mendeleyev, the beautiful poetry of Pushkin; or of Spanish culture, of Goya and Cervantes; the Greek Classics; the Renaissance of the 15th century, the Weimar Classics, which was alive in the United States until the beginning of this century--and I only name these as examples of a similar approach in every country--and if then a conscious exchange and dialogue among these ideas from different cultures occurs, I predict an explosion of creativity, and a more beautiful renaissance than ever existed before. There are many examples in history which demonstrate that people in moments of great crisis and shock, tend to turn to profound conceptions.

Therefore, the perspective of a soon-to-be-realized New Bretton Woods system, and a just, new world economic order, has to be combined with the idea of a cultural renaissance. If in this period, great teachers in the spirit of Confucius, Pushkin, Tilak, and Schiller, not only teach their own population, but if the exchange and dialogue among these ideas is taken as important as the production and trade of physical goods, an explosion of creativity will occur.

If people in Asia truly discover the treasures of European culture, if Europeans truly start to understand the beauty of Chinese and Indian culture, then this will become a pregnant moment, out of which a more beautiful renaissance will be born.

I believe that with Confucius, Plato, Leibniz, and Schiller, that man is limitlessly perfectible. Therefore, I don't think that the early Nineteenth Century or the Ming Dynasty were the last periods where man could produce outstanding works. I'm certain that the era of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, will be the true springtime of all humankind.