We Need a New Bretton Woods
To Defeat the Evil of Globalization
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Here is the keynote address of Lyndon LaRouche to an EIR-sponsored seminar in Berlin, Germany on June 27. See also Mr. LaRouche's remarks later during the seminar.In this period of time, we're in a world crisis without parallel. There's no comparison to this in European history, since the 14th Century New Dark Age, to what we're facing now. All the things since then, in terms of crises in European experience, have been less crucial than was the case in the 14th-Century New Dark Age.
But that New Dark Age is also a benchmark. Because, to understand the crisis we have today, and to understand how the solution must be designed, we must understand why a New Dark Age struck Europe in the 14th Century, to be prepared for the new dark age which is, right now, descending upon the entire world. There are solutions for this problem. But you have to understand the rules of the game, by which solutions work out.
So that, when people talk about "New Bretton Woods"—many people talk about it. But even the gentleman from Iran who recently wrote on this subject, and then asked, "Well, what do you mean by 'New Bretton Woods'?"—that is a very good question. Because, New Bretton Woods signifies that, at the end of World War II, the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, established a monetary system, a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, without which the world would not have recovered from the effects of World War II. This monetary system was crucial.
Now, the intention of the original Bretton Woods system, by Roosevelt, and the conduct of the Bretton Woods policy by his successor Truman, were two opposite conceptions, united by one common feature, a temporary, fixed-exchange-rate monetary system.
Roosevelt was an American; Truman was really not. He was born in the United States, but it was like a disease that infected us—he was not really a good American.
Roosevelt was committed to overturning the policies of the United States from the assassination of one President [McKinley]; the inauguration of Teddy Roosevelt; the inauguration of another fascist, Woodrow Wilson; the inauguration of fools—Coolidge was an evil fool; Hoover who was not a fool, but who was corrupt. So, the United States from 1901-1902 until 1933 was run by a policy entirely contrary to the Constitutional prescription of the United States.
When Roosevelt became President, in March of 1933, early March, Hitler had already become a dictator in Germany. And it was known to Roosevelt that he had two problems on his hands: First of all, the preceding Presidencies of the United States since McKinley—who was shot in order to make Teddy Roosevelt President—until Roosevelt's inauguration, was rotten. It was evil. It was run from Europe, not from the United States. Roosevelt had to eliminate the system which had created the Depression in order to have an economic recovery. He also had to prepare for what he knew was then inevitable: some form of what became known as World War II.
The British Launched World War I
Because, it happened in the following way: You have to go back to the close of the 19th Century. At that point, the British monarchy decided to launch a new world war, under the then-Prince of Wales, who subsequently became King of England. By operations in France, including the assassination of a President of France, Sadi Carnot, the Dreyfus Affair, and other things, France became totally corrupted. The rot inside France, which had been there under Napoleon III, came to the fore. And the British struck an alliance with France, or certain forces in France, which became the basis for World War I, through the establishment of the Entente Cordiale with the people who represented the tradition of Napoleon I and Napoleon III.
In order to get the war going, they took a foolish Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who was a fool, a British fool, of British descent; and another fool, who was a successor of a great Russian Czar, and put in a fool, Nicholas II. And these three fools—Nicholas II of course was a nephew of the King of England, just as Wilhelm II of Germany was a nephew of the King of England—these fools launched world war! Which Germany would have won, except for the U.S. intervention to bail out the British and French.
They were not satisfied with that. So, immediately, they went into a plan, again from the British, which was organized around the naval power agreements and negotiations of the early 1920s. These early power negotiations were essentially, crucially—with Britain and Japan—against the United States. Now, Japan had been made into a modern nation by the United States, by its intervention. But Japan had been taken over by the British monarchy in the 1880s-1890s, and had launched what became known as the first series of Japan-China wars, in 1894-1895. And at this point, it was an intervention of Japan, as a British puppet, a puppet of the British monarchy, which was out to work with the British to eliminate the influence of the United States in the Pacific, especially in China.
So, the British sponsored the Japan wars against China, and other wars, as part of this policy in the 1920s. As part of that policy, of course, there was the plan for Japan, and the British, together with other European naval powers, to conduct a naval attack on the naval forces of the United States, to eliminate the U.S. naval power in the world, and to restore British hegemony in naval power. This was the basis for the plan, at that time, where Japan was supposed to attack Pearl Harbor as part of its agreement—this is in the 1920s, early 1920s—to attack the United States' base at Pearl Harbor. This was the issue.
Later, Japan ended up as the ally of Hitler, but for the same reason. Japan had become the perpetual enemy of the United States, from the 1890s, on the issue of U.S. influence in Asia, in favor of British influence. But Britain, under the influence of Roosevelt, decided not to support Hitler, whom they had supported up to that time—Hitler was put into power by these guys, including some guys in New York; including the grandfather of the present President of the United States, who was the guy who signed the order to move the money from a German bank to support Hitler's party and keep it in place, so that Hitler could be made dictator of Germany, on behalf of the interests of the French Synarchists and the British Bank of England.
The Treason of the French Synarchists
But then, at a certain point, at the time—go back to 1940: The beaches at Dunkirk were the turning point which leads up to modern history. Hitler had held back the tanks, the tank units at Dunkirk, to allow the British to escape. Now, why had Hitler done this favor for the British? Hitler held back the tanks, because he didn't want to offend the British so much that the British could not surrender, as the French were about to do, and were doing, to Hitler.
The intention had been, which was the revised plan of the Nazis—the original plan was to go East first. Then the German High Command said, "That's idiocy. You never go East and attack Russia, when you've got the British and French on your tail. Eliminate the British and French as a threat, first." So, in the first case, with the help of the French Synarchists, inside the government of France, Germany was allowed to conquer France. Germany did not have the military capability of destroying France. The door was opened by the French government!; by the Synarchist bankers, who we'll come to again, today, to understand what New Bretton Woods means.
So therefore, France became what it wished to be! A puppet of the Nazis! With some objections of some French, but France was essentially a puppet of the Nazi regime, as so-called "Occupied France." But it was willingly occupied. It was like the prostitute who says, "I'm being raped," while taking the money—in this case, paying for the privilege.
However, Roosevelt had intervened into British affairs and this had induced the famous statement by Churchill, that if the German forces should attempt to invade the United Kingdom, the British government would order the British fleet, including the fleet of the colonies, to go to the United States and operate under U.S. command. Now, this turning point in the war meant that the British were allied with the United States against Hitler, where up to that point the predominant leading forces in England had been for Hitler. And had been for the idea of surrendering to Hitler, in order to attack the Soviet Union. That had been the plan.
So, what I've said is fact. But it's contrary to what is commonly taught, which indicates: Don't believe the newspapers!. Don't try to do intelligence by interpreting breaking news in the newspapers, or on radio or television broadcasts. In a period of crisis, the newspapers are the biggest liars of all. Never trust them, and never say, "We must respond, we must interpret this." Anything the press tells you: Don't believe it. Treat the newspaper reports as diseases, and think like a physician: You've got a disease on your hands. Don't let the disease influence you, but identify the disease and control it, which means, control the newspaper editor, control the publisher. Because they all lie.
And this is particularly true today: Most of the things you get in the press, leading press today, are absolute lies. They're not meaningless, because even a lie tells you something about the liar. But you have to know it's a lie. Then you can identify the meaning, why did the liar lie? What is the purpose of the lie?
So, in intelligence—I'm pretty good at intelligence. I can tell you, if you want to be a good intelligence officer, pay very little attention to the press. You have a clinical department, called the garbage department, to say what's coming out in the garbage, to analyze that. It's like you want to find out what's going on in a plant, you look at what they throw away in the backyard, and then figure out what was going on at the plant. So, this is the situation.
FDR's Plan: To Eliminate Colonialism
Now, we come to a point, that at the end of the war, Roosevelt died. Roosevelt had a plan, an intention—which is why the United Nations was proposed by him—to eliminate colonialism and everything like it, internationally. And to use the power of the United States to break any government that tried to maintain a colonial system, by the power of the United States; to support struggles for independence by peoples of oppressed nations; and to assist them, with a new system, in being able to develop their economies to true sovereignty. This is based largely on a three-way agreement, among certain forces in China, with the agreement of the Soviet Union, and the United States. These were the three great powers at that time. China was not nominally a great power, but it's a great nation, inherently. And therefore, Roosevelt's conception was, that if you have the United States, China, and the Soviet Union in agreement on this order for the post-war world, and a program of post-Hitler recovery for the world, that you would create an order called the United Nations, under which these old nations and freed nations, would come together to establish a diplomatic vehicle for cooperation and economic development and other things.
Now, the day that Roosevelt died, that aspect of policy went out the window. And we had a virtual fascist, Truman, became President—and that's a story in itself, as to how he became President. At that point, Truman adopted a policy which was crafted by Bertrand Russell, from England, and the policy was called "preventive nuclear war." Russell's policy, which was fully adopted by the United States under Truman—and it was adopted virtually the day that Roosevelt died!—was to launch a preventive, so-called, nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, to dictate to the Soviet Union submission to world government—not a system of nations, but world government—as a price for not being bombed perpetually by nuclear weapons.
This was the Bertrand Russell policy, as stated in September of 1946, when it was published. But it was the Truman policy, from the beginning.
Now, at the point that the war had ended, Japan had already negotiated surrender to the United States. The surrender had occurred through the Vatican, through the Foreign Office of the Vatican, through the Department of Extraordinary Affairs. It was done by a Monsignor [Montini] at the point, who later became Pope Paul VI. So, the conditions of surrender had already been reached with the United States, while Roosevelt was still President.
But when Truman became President, this was stopped. Why? Because the United States had, at that point, two remaining prototypes of a nuclear weapon, one uranium, one plutonium. These were laboratory prototypes. They were not production-line weapons systems. The United States dropped two, totally unnecessary, nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as part of the policy of demonstrating nuclear weapons; as part of the Bertrand Russell policy—the great pacifist: You know, if you kill everybody, you have peace—the Russell policy of permanent warfare, nuclear warfare, to establish world government, to eliminate the nation-state. That is, to establish what's called, today, "globalization." Elimination of the nation-state, world government under a concert of financier forces which eliminate sovereign government as is being done, today.
The Intention Is Called 'Globalization'
So that, many of the things that are happening, are not inevitable events today, something that happened because of a process, or some non-understandable process. Things that are happening today to nations, as to Germany, as to France, as to Italy, as to other parts of the world, these things are part of a long-term policy with an intention behind it! The intention is called globalization. The intention was first expressed in Europe, and in the United States, shortly after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt.
The generation that went to war, my generation, would not put up with the kinds of things that are happening today. It's only because my generation has been replaced in power, that a younger generation, now between 50 years of age and 65, or slightly older, is running the world. The generation comes from the upper 20% of family-income brackets of Europe and the United States. This generation is called the Baby Boomers. Or, in France, the less-complimentary name, "BoBos." A more accurate term: Bourgeois Bohèmes.
So this has been planned all along. At first, under the Bretton Woods system, it was kept alive. The colonies which had been liberated, or were about to be liberated, were suppressed, or absorbed in a new way, by France, by Britain, by the Dutch. The Dutch were particularly nasty at this business in Indonesia. Everyone was involved in the suppression of Indo-China, reconquering of Indo-China, which had already declared its independence through Ho Chi Minh, who had been Roosevelt-sponsored at the time. So, Europe was totally corrupt. The United States was totally corrupt, on this issue.
And we had an anti-Communist movement, which was absolutely insane! There was no reason for it; it was absolute insanity. But under this program, what did they do? They said, "You can not change the older generation," my generation, or the generation which was still older which was living then. "You can't change their ways, they still believe in the modern nation-state. They believe in scientific and technological progress. They believe in agriculture. They have these Roosevelt ideas, about opportunities, like health insurance for everyone—that sort of thing. These ideas must go—and this older generation is embedded with these beliefs, and these political and social values. We have to create a new generation to come to power, which will not go along to believe in these things."
So, from the beginning, from 1946 on, with the launching of a right-wing campaign of terror inside the United States and inside Europe, you had the beginning of a mobilization for a change in direction of society, which became the characteristic of the Baby-Boomer generation. Those who were born between 1945 and approximately 1957—that generation. And this generation was directed to go into the leading universities, from which the leading layer of the next generation's leaders of society would come, whether in government, in business, in universities.
And you had a takeover of the universities, where the quality of the professors became poorer and poorer and poorer—even before this generation took over. Then, you had the great explosion of 1968, in Europe and in North America, simultaneously. And the values, the new values, the existentialist values expressed by certain kinds of fascists, the Frankfurt School fascists, the existentialists—they said, "Move over." And the demonstration, as you see in Germany, for example, the environmentalist movement, the Green movement was created as a result of this. Absolute insanity, using a program which had been developed by Hermann Göring in Germany as part of a cultural program, in the 1920s on, this program took over. And Germany was destroyed from within, largely, finally, in the 1960s already, was destroyed, in part, by the Green movement against nuclear energy, and against technology generally.
Once the Soviet Union had collapsed, immediately, the next phase was, consolidate it. Who did it? The British monarchy and the French, Mitterrand, otherwise known as Napoleon IV, a British agent like Napoleon III.
So this was the process. In the United States, the same thing: the Kyoto demands, these reforms, so-called environmentalist reforms. A complete fraud! To shut down the world economy.
So, what you have, is you have a generation in power, which says you either support, or you have to go along with policies under which your own country is going to be destroyed. And your objective is to submit to a new system of things, called "globalization": You're no longer going to have industry. You're no longer going to have independent farming. You're now going to submit. To what? Or better said: To whom?
So, when you understand the crisis in the United States today, or attempt to understand the crisis in Europe, don't look at what are called the "important forces," because they're not important. No government of Europe is important. None! The former Comecon states are worse off than they were under Soviet direction. Every one of them, vastly worse! Germany has been in worse, and worse, and worse condition, ever since about the middle of the 1960s. Not as collapsed, immediately, but the process leading toward eventual collapse, was in progress. France became more and more degenerate. De Gaulle made an effort to reverse that tendency. Again, it was taken away from him, after 1963, after the assassination of Kennedy. With the launching of the Vietnam War by the United States—this was the beginning of the end.
So that, by 1971-72, after the monetary system had already been wrecked, first by the British, by the Harold Wilson government in 1957; and then under [Lyndon] Johnson in 1968. The system was gone. We had a floating-exchange-rate system. The Bretton Woods system was destroyed. You look at the 1970s, where 1971-72 were the end of the Bretton Woods system, through 1981, the point that poor President Carter, who didn't know what he was doing, left office. Brzezinski did it, not Carter. Carter didn't understand a thing.
So, this group destroyed the United States, destroyed regulation. Destroyed everything in economic policy on which the achievement of Roosevelt had depended; destroyed everything which was in the Roosevelt policy, which is based on the U.S. Constitutional conception of government. And similar kinds of things reverberated in Europe—led by England, which was the worst of all these places—by Britain.
The Origin of the Problem
So, what we have today is this, is a culmination of that process. We've come to the point that the United States is not the source of the problem. The United States is the key symptom of the problem. The origin of the problem, which you see in the United States, is inside Europe. And you have a couple of people visiting today, who will give some reports bearing on that, from Jeff Steinberg and from Cliff Kiracofe [see below, for their presentations].
The source of this problem is essentially a connection between a phenomenon in France, called the Synarchist International, which essentially took over at the Versailles Treaty, in alliance with the British and Dutch. The alliance largely took the form, as you will hear today—I won't go into the details, but just to indicate the nature of the problem—took the form of the Synarchists associated with Lazard Frères, and particularly, specifically with André Meyer of France; leading Synarchist bankers who moved into an alliance with Royal Dutch Shell, and the Dutch royal family and the British royal family. This is the phenomenon today called the Bilderberg Society, which is not really a society, it's just a meeting of people who reflect this. They're not the controllers, there's no Bilderberg conspiracy. It's a completely different conspiracy. But the Bilderberg Society is one of the events which occurs periodically, as now, which is a reflection of what the problem is, of who the problem is. It's a problem centered in Europe, with strong tentacles inside the United States, which we know in the United States as the "Party of Treason," which is centered in bankers. Bankers such as the grandfather of the present President of the United States, who financed Hitler's coming back to power, together with the British and others. They're out to destroy the United States. And the immediate operation was to focus on the machine-tool capacity of the United States, because, without the United States' machine-tool capacity, no recovery is possible.
There are two things to consider here: First of all, the objective is globalization. Europe is absolutely incapable of defending itself now. There is no force in Europe which will be willing to defend Europe, that is a capable force. France is bankrupt. Italy is worse than bankrupt. Germany is condemned to bankruptcy, as you see in Berlin, the destruction of the industrial potential of Berlin.
Germany could, you would say, survive. We've often talked about this. All you have to do, is have a system of state credit. You have a source of state credit, you can find by the proper investments, you can increase the economic output of Germany more rapidly than the cost of this credit. You just need the right program, largely based in infrastructure: Rebuild the machine-tool industry and so forth. But, what's not allowed, especially since Maastricht: Germany is not allowed to do that! Germany is ordered to destroy the industrial potential of Berlin, much below the level it was at the time of 1989.
So, unless Europe is willing to break the political bonds of slavery, within Europe, led by the Anglo-French-Dutch alliance, then there's no country in Western Europe or Central Europe which has the ability to survive. Poland is already virtually dead. The other countries of the former Comecon countries are virtually dead economically, or dying, rotted. Russia has been looted into weakness. It has some program for recovery, but it has no recovery yet. There's no hope, in Eurasia generally, for this kind of recovery. Yes, you have a recovery in China—but, do you have a recovery in China? No, you don't really have a recovery in China. Economic growth is occurring in some parts of China. Economic growth based largely on using U.S. product designs, with U.S. credit to produce products for the world market, especially the U.S. market. If the U.S. economy collapses, the Chinese economy collapses—and China has a social crisis as a result of it. Because you have a disparity between the rich and the poor in China, which is part of the foolish policy adopted by China. You don't have billionaires in a country with very poor people: That is not intelligent policy. You don't give tax-free bonuses to people who are just parasites, to become billionaires, while you have your countryside full of over a billion people who are extremely poor, with no real prospect for the future unless there's a change in their condition of life. Hmm?
Then look at India. India has a better situation than China, because India has greater inherent stability and less dependence upon the world market. India also has its own potential for growth. If India goes into the full-scale thorium high-temperature gas-cooled reactor program, which fits its requirement—which I've been recommending for years, as have others—then India could have a very rapid internal improvement in the basic infrastructure and power. So, India could undergo, under certain conditions, a significant recovery, and would have greater resistance to the political effects of a general collapse of the economy than China. China would be faced with an immediate social crisis, which would probably explode in some kind of violent crisis, under the present conditions.
So, there is no hope, looking at the rest of Asia; there is no hope, if the United States' economy were to collapse; there is no hope of rescue from Asia. Nor is there presently any political hope of rescue of world civilization from Western Europe. None.
The United States Must Change Its Policy
Therefore, you can't say, as many foolish people are saying, that if the United States goes under as this great imperial ogre, then we will be free of the United States' tyranny and we could find a solution, perhaps with our friends in Asia: Doesn't exist. It's a complete piece of foolishness. It's absolute nonsense.
Yes, the cooperation between, for example, Germany, Russia, and the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, is a model of what must happen; as a factor in a general economic recovery, it must happen. But it will not work, unless the United States changes its policy. And that's what I'm concerned with: getting the United States to change its policy, because otherwise, the rest of the world doesn't have a chance of escaping a new dark age. You find some government in Europe, which is prepared to overthrow these governments now, and establish a government committed to the kind of policies that Roosevelt represented in 1945? Or, policies that Germany represented back before the middle of the 1960s? And turn it back to those kinds of policies? No, none. None.
Because, Germany is controlled by something, also. It's controlled by the evil, which is more resident here than in the United States. In the United States, evil is a European import, and always has been. In Europe, it's the oligarchy.
You know, Nicholas of Cusa, after the fall of Constantinople, and after a defeat against the Turkish Ottoman forces in the Balkans, made a policy, and said: The function of Europe must be to reach out across the oceans, to people living on the other side of the oceans, and establish alliances, in cooperation with them, to rebuild civilization along the lines upon which the great Renaissance had been launched.
As a result of Cusa's efforts, specifically, for example in the case of Christopher Columbus—Christopher Columbus read a copy of the will of Nicholas of Cusa. On the basis of reading the will of Nicholas of Cusa, Christopher Columbus, who was an experienced navigator, got in touch with the friends of Cusa in Italy, in an exchange in 1480, extensive correspondence, and planned the trans-Atlantic voyage of discovery to find the New World on the other side of the ocean, and knew it was there. He didn't have the right location, thought it was China and Japan, because the Venetians had lied about how far it was to walk to China.
But nonetheless, the discovery of the Americas was the result of the influence of Nicholas of Cusa, in the late part of the 15th Century, in prescribing these trans-Atlantic and other voyages, to meet the people on the other side of the world. And to establish collaboration with them, to overcome the great problem which threatened the integrity of the Renaissance.
So what happened as a result of that, is that the Europeans began to move, gradually, increasingly, across the ocean, into the Americas. We went through, from 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, until 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia, you had a process of bloody, religious warfare throughout Europe. A policy of racism and murder, echoing the Crusades—the most evil thing since the Crusades. And therefore, people, more and more, left Europe, especially in the early 17th Century, left Europe, into the Americas, and established branches of European civilization in North and South America—with complications. But, the result was, in the 18th Century, the standard of living and productivity in the young United States, at the time of its adoption of its Constitution, was about twice the level of productivity and standard of living of people in England: twice. Why? Same culture. We were Europeans. We represented a European culture. We embodied European culture. But we embodied it, free of the burden of an oligarchy!
The Issue Is Liberty
And therefore, the idea was not democracy. Democracy is trash. Look at what happened in Greece: the Peloponnesian War. What caused the Peloponnesian War? Democracy! An evil philosophy called sophistry. Democracy is not the issue. The issue is liberty. The issue is individual liberty, the right to liberty; the right to a society in which liberty is defended and promoted; the right of the liberty of the minority against the majority. Not democracy. So, the idea of liberty, which is the idea on which the United States was founded, which its Constitution represents: This was the issue.
So, what we've represented all along since that time, and we have been in battle with what became an empire; Europe has been dominated predominantly by a rising empire, which is the Anglo-Dutch empire with a French connection, especially the Synarchist connection. The corruption we suffer in the United States has always come from Europe. And it's come from the British monarchy, the Dutch monarchy, and people like that. The alliance of the Synarchy with Royal Dutch Shell, and with the British monarchy, is simply the most recent phase of this process. The goal has always been to establish an empire, empire, EMPIRE. Globalization is nothing but an empire; it's a new form of empire. It's the elimination of the nation-state; it's the elimination of liberty; it's the elimination of the rights.
Now, who's doing it in the United States? Who's my enemy? Well, the most prominent, obvious enemy, is a fellow called Felix Rohatyn. Felix Rohatyn is a fascist. He was a protégé of the André Meyer, who was part of the organization which set up the deal with Royal Dutch Shell, which set up what became the Bilderberg Society, so-called. This is the power bloc.
Now, these bankers are a special type: They invest largely in gaining property, not just in money, because they know the money system is vulnerable. They want to have the property in their hand, under their control, at the time things break down. Their method is to destroy independent industries, which are not under their control, and to grab control of assets which are presently not under their control. And they have orchestrated, this crowd—in the aftermath of '71-72, the change in the monetary system—has orchestrated step by step, each of the developments inside the United States, which have destroyed the U.S. political and economic system. And they're doing the same thing inside Europe, the same people. You look at André Meyer and his descendants, you look at the reports that Jeff [Steinberg] can refer to and others, on the question of exactly what the continuity of this is: It's the same enemy.
An Old Enemy: The Sophists
What is this enemy? It's an old one. Nothing original about it. It's an enemy we know from the Sophists who were responsible for the corruption of Athens, which led to the destruction of Greek civilization through the Peloponnesian War. And the policy is like the policies of Cheney toward Iraq, is pretty much the same thing, as the policies of Pericles and company, toward his victims, starting the Peloponnesian War. No difference. The policies, today, in the United States—the social policies, the so-called "liberal" policies today—are no different than the sophistry by which Greece destroyed itself, Athens destroyed itself, in the Peloponnesian War.
The heritage of ancient Rome, Imperial Rome: There's nothing good about Imperial Rome! A completely degenerate and evil culture, from the beginning! There's nothing good about Byzantium, it was evil from the beginning. Charlemagne was an attempt to establish a civilization of the Augustinian tradition, in cooperation with Muslims represented by the Caliphate of Baghdad, and with Jews who were a mediating portion, and playing a key role in the cooperation between Arab and Christian, in the case of Charlemagne and his immediate successors.
That was a period of hope. It probably saved civilization, in the sense of creating an impetus which we could turn to later to revive civilization.
But then, the Venetian crowd and the Crusaders came in. They were nothing but butchers, with their Crusades: Kill the Jews! Kill the Arabs! Great Crusades! Perpetual warfare! And they destroyed themselves in the 14th Century, in the collapse of the monetary system, which is about to happen now.
We're at a point, where the ratio of collapse of production per capita, the collapse of basic economic infrastructure, in Europe and in the Americas, especially in the United States, is so great, that we can no longer sustain the existing level of population, on the basis of the existing level of financial debt. It can not be done. There's no way that you can pay these debts, none. It is inevitable now, that the present financial system will become extinct in a very near period of time. It's finished.
However, from our experience with Roosevelt, the experience we had in reconstruction in the United States earlier, and reconstruction in Europe in the post-war reconstruction—from the end of the war, approximately, until the middle of the 1960s—that these methods are an example of what will work today. We simply have to find, in the present situation, the method of applying these lessons of experience which are an immediate reference point, and applying these lessons of experience to the present situation.
We can put the entire international monetary system into bankruptcy! It's only a paper organization. It's only a creation of governments. The Federal Reserve System in the United States is totally bankrupt! All these banks are hopelessly bankrupt! There's nothing we can do with them, except put them into bankruptcy. It only takes one act by the government: The President and the Congress agree to put the Federal Reserve System into bankruptcy, into receivership; take the Federal Reserve System in—the whole thing is under control! Then you have to know how to manage the system that you've put into bankruptcy.
How do you do that? Very simply: large-scale infrastructure projects, with state credit at low interest rates. So, you build up basic economic infrastructure, you build up the industry, the development of industry, by building up the infrastructure. You build water systems, power systems, other kinds of systems which are in the public domain. And by building them up, you stimulate the market for private enterprise. As rapidly as you can develop the technology, you can expand. It was done in the post-war here, it was done in part in France, it was done in the United States.
So there's no problem, in putting a financial system through bankruptcy: After all, it is, as John Kenneth Galbraith said at one point, "It's only paper!" It is not real, it's only paper! It's worth nothing, except what government assigns to it as a value. So actually, the physical values are the important ones. So, in a crisis like this, you don't try to save the financial system. You try to have an orderly reorganization of the financial system. Orderly, which can only be done by governments.
Then, what you do, is, you must create state credit, and credit which is a byproduct of that, to launch immediately, large-scale programs of basic economic infrastructure, which are aimed to support an expansion of private production: agriculture, industry, and so forth. You change the orientation away from a greenie orientation, to what we used to have, prior to '68, back to a science-driven industrial-agricultural orientation. Change the character of universities, back to a production-oriented, science-oriented, physical-science-oriented objective, and start to produce, again, improved products which increase the productive powers of labor.
What Distinguishes Man from a Gorilla?
Now, one final point on this: The key reason why people don't understand what is, for me obvious, is because they don't understand, at least on the level of public policy, they don't understand the difference between man and a gorilla. All you have to do, is read any of these business reports and talk to any of the typical managers: They don't know the one factor that distinguishes man from a gorilla. Because, if man were, as the existentialists tell us he is—like the Frankfurt School crowd, hmm?—if man were as that, man could not make a discovery of a scientific principle. No gorilla could do that. No lower form of life can do that. Only a human being, the individual human mind, is capable of developing a discovery of principle, such as universal gravitation, for example, as Kepler did.
European civilization's progress, above the level of stagnation which had existed previously, was based on the impact of the work of particularly Nicholas of Cusa in the launching of modern experimental scientific method. It's a result of the spread of that, and the development of culture, Classical culture and literature and so forth, on the same basis, in the ideas of Dante for example, that Europe began to move as a civilization which had a significantly higher standard of living than Asia. That was the real beginning. The roots were already there, but the number of people who had expressed these roots was limited, confined, by the prevalence of empires.
So, the key to economy, the key to the ability to rise from a few million individuals living on this planet at one time, to over 6 billion today, is the creative powers of the human mind. What has happened, as Aeschylos warned us in his famous Prometheus trilogy, particularly the second part, the one that's available, Prometheus Bound: The crime for which Prometheus was condemned to torture by the Olympian Zeus, otherwise known as Satan, was that man should not be allowed to know how to use fire. Man should not be allowed to discover universal physical principles and change the way man behaves, based on the power of the individual mind to do something no gorilla can do: Is change its culture, change the character of its culture by technological progress.
Everything that was done in the post-war period, for example: In the U.S. today, the typical person coming out of a scientific education doesn't know what a scientific principle is. And the problem is illustrated by the debates in the correspondence between Albert Einstein and his friend Max Born, in a book published of these letters between them, on this subject. The typical trained scientist today, does not know what a physical principle is; he knows a mathematical formula. The name of a physical principle for him, is simply a mathematical formula. He does not understand, from an experimental standpoint, how you construct the experiment which proves the principle, as a physical principle. And that the mathematics is never an accurate representation of principle. It is simply a symbolic reflection of the principle, the experimental principle itself. And it is the elaboration of that principle in its richer form, beyond the mathematical formula, which expresses creativity.
The same thing is true of poetry. Most of today's popular poetry is garbage. Today's popular music is garbage. There is no creativity expressed in it. Yes, there's innovation. But innovation, like pretending you're having sex with a monkey, is not really creativity.
It's the ability to discover a universal principle, to discover something which lies beyond the formal, "logical," so-called, form of expression, of description of things. That is what drives society. That's what the difference is between man and a beast.
Now, if you look at it from that standpoint, there's a moral implication involved. Man is not evil. Man is not inherently wicked. Man is inherently good. But the inherent goodness of mankind, is expressed in that which makes man different than an ape. And that difference is the power of creativity, the power of the human being to discover universal principles of the universe, and to apply those principles to changing man's practice. This applies not only to practice in terms of man's mastery of nature, physical nature; it also concerns man's relationship to man, creative relationships of man. The characteristic of a society which can do that, since every society has a language which is more than just a language, it's a language-culture, it has to be done in terms of the language-culture. Because it's in terms of the language-culture that we communicate with each other. And it's the ironies of communication, not the literal statements, which define the meaning of a culture. It's the ironies of music, which define music, not the explicit notes of the score: How do you perform the thing, to make it work? And you won't get that, by reading the score. You have to know how to do that, as some of our young people have discovered, more and more.
So, the point is, man is essentially good. The idea that man is necessarily evil, is primarily evil, and has to be rescued from being man, is false! It's a fraud! Man is intrinsically good. The best living thing in this universe: Man is good!
But! Man can be corrupted. And he's corrupted, particularly, by the Olympian Zeus, the prototype of Satan, who says, "Man shall not discover principles, and apply these principles to the improvement of mankind's power to exist in the universe."
What we need as a driver, is not a system of accounting. When you're discussing economics, throw the accountants out of the room, because you won't get an economics discussion. When you want to discuss economics, you discuss creativity. You discuss how you balance physical actions, and coordinate them, in order to create an increase in the power of man to live, and the power of his ability to produce: creativity.
What is lost today, is, we've lost contact, especially under the influence of the Baby-Boomer reign, we've lost contact with the idea of creativity. Creativity is no longer a motive. The desire to get into a plant, and produce and innovate, is no longer there. The idea to make money! How to take money, not how to earn it, and how to account for taking the money—or not accounting for it—is the standard of performance.
So, the point is, man is necessarily good. The problem where we have evil, like the evil of Felix Rohatyn and his friends, is because we tolerate, in society, a standard of a conception of man which does not correspond to the natural goodness of man. And evil in humanity is simply a rejection, or flaunting, of the natural goodness of the human being. We teach people how to behave, how to obey orders, how to get rich—by stealing, preferably—not how to produce.
And the typical characteristic of the intrinsic evil of the Baby-Boomer generation, of the 68ers, is exactly this. They said, "We hate blue-collar workers. We hate farmers. We hate scientific and technological progress." That was the 68ers. That's what happened in Germany—it's called the Greenie movement. That's what destroyed Germany from within, especially. What destroys France from within. What is destroying the world from within.
We reject the goodness, that man expresses, in terms of Classical musical composition, great Classical poetry, great Classical drama, great Classical science. We reject those things! These things express the goodness of mankind, his natural goodness. And we introduce an artificial element of evil, and what might be called fairly, Satanic evil; of the idea of having a society in which people do not produce in factories and farms, do not create ideas in laboratories, do not improve the power of mankind over the universe. Do not progress with nuclear energy, immediately, on a mass scale, which is necessary to save humanity, now! Do not proceed to crash on thermonuclear fusion, which is desperately needed for man in the next generation, now.
So, man is not evil. What is evil is the culture we've imposed upon ourselves, as typified by the 68er culture.
