January 14, 2000

The Issue of America’s Manifest Destiny for Today

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this transcript]

 

Editor’s Note: This speech was first published in EIR Vol. 27, No. 4, January 28, 2000, page 22-35.

 

This is the edited transcript of a live video webcast conducted by then Democratic Party Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, from the Wyndham Hotel in Billerica, Massachusetts. Subheads and embedded links have been added.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I’ve chosen to do this in New England for a number of reasons. First of all, because the issue of Manifest Destiny as a debate over the foreign policy of the United States, is the leading issue today. The currents, the opposing currents on that debate at the end of the last century, and at the beginning of this century, those issues remain today more important than ever before.

And they’re more important than ever before because we’re in one of the worst crises worldwide we’ve seen in any recent century. And this policy has to be understood. Unfortunately, very few candidates who are running for President, have even the glimmer of ideas of what this means. Most American citizens no longer know what the issue is, or what its practical implications are. And tonight, I will attempt to make that, in a shortened version, clear to you.

This is New England, a good place to choose for dealing with this, because it was here in New England, as defined in 1630 by John Winthrop, the founder of New England, otherwise known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony at that time, that the foundations of the states of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were made, under the leadership of Winthrop and those associated with him.

From that point on, there was a certain policy about the developing of a nation in North America, starting from the Massachusetts Colony. That policy has continued as a viable policy to the present day.

It did not, however, start entirely here. It was a concept which was brought to North America by Europe. It was a policy which, in one form or the other, already dominated the late Fifteenth Century, the so-called century of the Renaissance. And, it was from the Renaissance that the ideas of our present, or what should be our present foreign policy, and what it has been in the best times in the past, was founded—from those ideas.

From the time of the Roman Empire, from the time of the birth of Christ, civilization in the Mediterranean region had collapsed, degenerated, and continued in a degenerate form of one degree or another, for about fifteen centuries.

But with the birth of Christ and the leadership role of his Apostles, there was a new conception of man and society, which was based largely upon the foundations of the Classical Greek tradition, especially the ideas associated with the work of Plato. And in the Apostles, especially in the Gospel of St. John, or the Epistles of Paul, you’ll find this conception of man on which our later foreign policy here was founded. You’ll find it established there; especially, for example, in Paul’s Epistle in I Corinthians, Chapter 13, where this concept of man was set forward.

The Power of Cognition and the
Golden Renaissance

But the idea is that man is not an animal. Man, unlike any other species, is capable of willfully increasing our species’ power in and over the universe. This is possible, because we have a power which is called, technically, cognition, the power to discover universal physical and other principles, to prove that those principles are correct, and to apply those principles in ways which enable us to increase man’s power in and over the universe, and to improve the conditions of life of the human being.

This quality in the person, the quality of cognition, combined with a determination to do good—in the sense of increasing man’s power in the universe, in the sense of improving the conditions of life of human beings through the use of this power—was called, in the Ancient Greek, agapē, which is the term which was the subject of the original Greek version of Paul’s I Corinthians, notably I Corinthians 13.

For a long period of time, almost fourteen centuries from the birth of Christ, there was a struggle by Christians, to establish a society which was consistent with that principle. That is, that all men and women are equally made in the image of the Creator, by virtue of having this power of cognition, the quality of agapē, the potential to increase man’s power in and over the universe, and to improve the conditions of life through the discovery of these kinds of principles, which no animal could do.

And thus, we must have a society fit—a form of society fit, for that quality of creature: man cast in the image of the Creator. And it was only in the Fifteenth Century, in a period called the Golden Renaissance, that the first successful steps were made to actually establish this kind of society, for which people had struggled and dreamed over the intervening fourteen centuries.

This developed in the middle of the Fifteenth Century, around an event which is called the Council of Florence. But the enemies—the Roman feudal tradition, tried to stop the emergence of this form of society, which we call today the sovereign nation-state. And therefore, powerful forces, centered in Venice, organized a revolt against the efforts to form this kind of society.

The first such nation-states based on this principle, were France under Louis XI; and following that, modelled on the success of Louis XI in France, Henry VII in England founded the first modern nation-state in England, though his son and successor, Henry VIII, as we all know, erred. He stepped in the wrong direction a few times. He had a Monica Lewinsky in his life.

So, as a result of the struggle in Europe—and remember, Europe was dominated, from about 1517 until the middle of the Seventeenth Century, that is, 1648, by religious wars. Those who opposed the nation-state in Europe, tried to defend the old feudal order, in one way or another, by pitting parts of Europe against each other in religious wars. And terrible religious wars dominated Europe during most of the Sixteenth Century and the first half of the Seventeenth Century, until the Treaty of Westphalia.

A New Nation-State in North America

Now, it was under these conditions that people in England and elsewhere, conceived of establishing a new nation-state on the continent of North America. The first such venture was the founding of New England, by that name, by John Winthrop, in 1630. And it’s from that, that the United States came.

Now, Massachusetts was not always good; New England was not always good. It deteriorated. But nonetheless, what was done under the leadership of Winthrop, and collaborators of his, such as the Mather family, in education and so forth, this was the foundation of what was continued by Benjamin Franklin during the Eighteenth Century, in leading this nation, or what became this nation, to founding the United States.

At a later point, the question came up, and it came up around the question of the Constitution in the 1780s, and in 1789 in particular: What was the mission, and what was the purpose by which we, as a nation, should define ourselves? How should we define our relations to other nations, in particular, but to the world in general? What was our purpose and our mission, which would be a kind of—our law, as it pertained to what purpose would guide us, in dealing with other parts of the world?

Now, back in the Fifteenth Century again, a crisis erupted. The Venetian oligarchy, which is a financier oligarchy, organized the fall of Constantinople, and turned Constantinople over to the Turkish or the Ottoman dynasty, thus dividing Europe, cutting Europe apart, and obstructing the development of the spread of nation-states which had been planned throughout Europe, nation-states such as—pioneer nation-states, such as France under Louis XI, or England under Henry VII.

And at that point, still in the Fifteenth Century, one of the founders of the Council of Florence, one of the organizers of it, Nicholas of Cusa, with his friends, launched an alternative to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, to try to save civilization as a whole, and European civilization in particular, by colonization, by voyages of exploration—by finding allies behind the back of the Ottoman Empire.

So, a map was drawn, drawn by one of the associates of Cusa, a geometer—who drew a map of the spherical Earth. This map was drawn by Toscanelli. The map went to Portugal. It was a map which influenced the Portuguese, in exploring the Atlantic, and going into the Indian Ocean.

The same map was picked up by Christopher Columbus, who had a correspondence with Toscanelli. And Christopher Columbus went to a woman, Isabella I of Spain, who was a little bit better than her husband, and much better than those who followed her as the rulers of Spain. And she sponsored Columbus’s voyage to America, using the map to rediscover the continent on the other side of the Atlantic. And he succeeded.

And therefore, we had a Spanish development in the Americas, where people who didn’t like the conditions of life in Spain and who had some courage, would flee to the Americas, to the so-called Hispanic Americas, to establish what became the foundations of nations in Central America and South America, that is, the Spanish-speaking part of this world.

At a later point, at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, you had the great effort of John Winthrop to found New England, as the germ of a new nation, a new kind of sovereign nation-state republic, based on those principles, and to spread that. From that time on, from 1630, the patriotic Americans, who were dedicated to that heritage, including, typically, Benjamin Franklin, worked to develop the United States, or what became the United States, as a nation, to move westward, and to move toward Asia.

And the struggles: beginning with the King Philip’s Wars here in New England, where the British and French tried to stop the spread of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, by organizing what was called King Philip’s Wars, to stop the spread of the colony.

Other efforts were made. But nonetheless, the struggle went on. The struggle was always—colonize westward. Bring the best people from Europe, the best common people who believed in this idea; bring them to this land, develop this land, move westward, open the way to the west, keep moving westward.

This continued. Of course, in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, you had the great effort of Lincoln and others, to build a transcontinental railroad, to spread and develop this land, by building railways which would enable us to conquer the land, to make it open to the people.

Remember, the railways were actually development areas. Where a railroad went, on both sides of the railroad, you developed farms, you developed industries, you developed towns. You developed the land. You brought people in, people from Germany, from other parts of Europe, to settle and build farms, and spread the area under development.

U.S. Technology Was a Model

And then we came to the West Coast. So, in 1861 to 1876, under Lincoln’s leadership, and his followers, immediate followers, the United States emerged as the most powerful single economy in the world, the most advanced technologically. Not necessarily the most advanced scientifically, but the most advanced technologically.

Our level of technology was a model, so that by about 1876-1877, the entire world was looking to the United States as the model to be emulated. Russia adopted the model of the Americas. We had Mendeleyev, who was at the 1876 Philadelphia celebration of the Centennial of the founding of the United States. He went back to Russia, and he built the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

You had developments in Germany. Germany, in 1877, changed its policy fundamentally, so that the German economic policy was a copy of the American economic policy.

Japan in the 1870s, adopted the American model of Henry Carey. And Henry Carey directly had a hand in directing Japan in doing that, to lay the foundations of what became the economic successes in Japan. And the same thing happened with Sun Yat-sen at a later point.

Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese who was educated in Hawaii. While educated in Hawaii, he became the future founder of the nation of China as a republic. He was backed by the Americans. He was hated by the British, and persecuted by the British.

But if you look at the plans for the development of China by Sun Yat-sen, in a book, The Vital Problem of China, which we republished, even in China, to get it back-translated into Chinese, for the benefit of the Chinese. His model for the development of China, was the model of the United States, the model of 1861-1876: the American model.

A Great Debate

So in this period, there came a great debate, a debate between the patriots and traitors of the United States, particularly in the latter part of the century. The patriots of the United States looked at the Pacific Ocean, and said, in continuation of the ideas of Cusa, that we must go across the Pacific, to help the nations of Asia develop.

And they understood something more about this. They understood that the culture of European civilization—when we speak of European civilization, we’re talking about, essentially, a Greek-founded, or Classical Greek foundation for European civilization, in all its achievements. So, it was a Christian matrix imposed upon the Greek Classical model. This was the model upon which our Constitution was based, our laws. This is the difference between us, and the British laws and the British traditions; that we recognized that we dealt in the world with other cultures: the culture of China, the culture of India. That we, being the products of European Christian civilization, must find our way to come to an ecumenical agreement and cooperation with people of other cultures in other parts of the world.

And the great drive, and the great debate in the last part of the Nineteenth Century, between the patriots, on the one side, like Blaine from Maine, who was Secretary of State for a while, who was an associate of President Garfield, an associate of the great heroes of our nation in that period, had this conception: We must go across the Pacific to establish an ecumenical relationship and bond with the peoples on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, to develop the world as a whole for our common benefit. And we must reach out to other nations.

What was the other idea here? That because of problems in Europe—and, of course, I have a great deal to do with Europe, personally. I know a good deal about it. I have a wife who beats me if I don’t learn enough about it—

But in any case, if you look at European governments and European political systems, the political systems of Europe are, at their best, inferior to the form of government which we established here in the United States, with our Constitution.

What’s the difference? Our head of state is an elected President. There is no person, under our law—of course, the Congress doesn’t obey the law too much, too well these days—but there’s no person under our law, who has greater authority in the state as a person, as an elected official, than the President of the United States. That is the characteristic of our Constitution.

Democratic Reform in a Feudal System

Now, what’s the difference, in Europe? With the exception of what de Gaulle tried to do with the Fifth Republic in France—which was an abortive effort, because when he went out of power, the Fifth Republic degenerated—European governments are not true republics. There has never been a true republic in Europe, not since the Greeks at least, or since the efforts in the Fifteenth Century.

Why? What happened in Europe, is, under the impact of the American Revolution, the idea of freedom received a jolt, and there were continuing efforts in the late part of the Eighteenth and in the Nineteenth Century, to develop republics in Europe. But the Europeans never succeeded in building a republic. What they built was something different. They built movements which moved for democratization, to democratize society. And thus, what they did, is they put pressure on the existing form of government—which was a feudal form of government, based on a monarchy, or somebody who took the place of a monarch, a permanent bureaucracy, which stayed no matter what the government was otherwise, and a parliament.

Now, the parliament was a feudal institution. It was not a republican institution. And always, as you can see, if you look at the history of European governments, the monarch, the king, or the bureaucracy as such, could overthrow the parliament at any time they wanted to. All they would do is form a parliamentary crisis, and they’d dump the government. So the government had no real power. The government had power to lobby, to pressure the state, to pressure those who rule society. But no power to actually make policy—power to help shape policy, power to pressure. So, what we had in Europe was a democratic reform in a feudal system. And that’s what the governments of Europe are to the present day. Look at the way their governments function. They are not true republics.

We are the only true republic, in that sense. We are the ones who bear this principle. So it was understood by the best people in our society: two things.

First of all, that what we are did not come from the ground in the United States. It did not come “from the frontier” as such. It did not come from barrooms on the frontier, or from cowboys and Indians shooting each other, which is what Teddy Roosevelt thought it came from, or said it came from. But he was a great liar, so you can never believe what he said anyway. But the United States, as a republic, came from the greatest thinkers of Europe, typified by people like John Winthrop; typified by others who came here, and brought the best ideas of Europe here, with the hope that on this ground, those ideas could grow up and flourish as they had not been able to grow up and flourish in the same degree in Europe.

For example, in the end of the Eighteenth Century, the United States, our republic, was called a “temple of liberty and beacon of hope for all mankind.” And our function as a nation-state, as something produced here through the best influence of the best ideas of European civilization, was to create a form of society which would be an inspiration and a friend to all humanity, in bringing forth on this planet, a system of sovereign nation-states, which would cooperate, for their mutual benefit, in an ecumenical way.

The Principle of Reason

Now, what does that mean, “ecumenical,” in this sense?

You have a whole history of ecumenicism, particularly in the Mediterranean region. Because you had, first of all, Judaism and Christianity. And you had the great Jewish writer—rabbi, as he’s called, Philo of Alexandria, who was a friend of the Apostle Peter, and who wrote very important writings, who actually helped to civilize the Jewish religion at that point, which had been a captive of Babylon and the Romans at that time. And he laid down a principle of ecumenicism.

Later in the Fifteenth Century, the same Nicholas of Cusa to whom I referred, wrote a paper called De Pace Fidei, or The Peace of Faith, a dialogue among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, on what the relations must be among the people who represent these different religions. What is the common basis to avoid religious war, and to have a peace among the faiths, based on the adoption of certain common principles? It’s the same principle of Christianity. We call it the principle of reason.

In fact, if we can discover the truth, if we can discover a principle of nature, what we call a “universal physical principle,” if we can prove that principle to be valid, demonstrate it to be universally valid, then we’d know, by the power we have to make that discovery, there’s something going on in our minds which is not formal logic: the power of reason.

What we say, therefore, if we have a difference with others on religion, or on culture, we say that we must reason together, we must use this power of cognition, the principles which are made known to us through this sharing of this power of cognition, to recognize whatever our differences are in a particular faith as a given faith, that we must work together on the basis of reason. We must reason together, find a true universal principle, adopt it commonly, and work together on the basis of reason.

Civil society must not be a religious society, but civil society must be of an ecumenical form, based on this principle of reason. And that is the way that we will have to deal with cultures such as China, or the culture of India, or other cultures which come from roots other than European civilization. In the case of European or Mediterranean civilization, in dealing with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, you have problems and struggles, but you shouldn’t have them, but because of a common root, you have an easier task in coming together in adopting common principles. Whereas, you go into other parts of the world, you don’t have the same cultural background. Therefore, you must look deeper, to the principle of reason, to find a common foundation for working together for a common interest. But it must be a voluntary association, based on reason teaching us that this is the thing we must do together, and civil society must be based on that.

For example, I referred recently in things we’ve published to one of our heroes, Moses Mendelssohn. Moses Mendelssohn in Germany, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, played a key part in creating what is the modern Classical German culture. Now, you might say Classical German culture is a Jewish conspiracy. And in a sense, it was. And he was part of it. He was also the great liberator of Judaism from persecution, by these ideas. One of his most famous writings, was on this subject. He remained, to his death, an Orthodox Jew. And he said he would, always. But, he said at the same time, society must be based on the principle of reason: Political society, civil society, must be based on the common principle of reason.

We Must Dedicate Ourselves to the Truth

And that we in the United States in particular, must exemplify that: the principle of reason. Not religious bigotry, but the principle of reason: that if something is true, we can discover the truth, and we can test it as to which is true and which is false, in universal principles. And other than that, we must dedicate ourselves to the truth, even when we don’t yet know it. That is, if we don’t know what the answer is, we can at least dedicate ourselves to the urge and desire and method of finding the truth. And that’s what our society is based on.

So, the conception among all the greatest thinkers of American politics, was in that direction. They may have said something slightly different than what I’ve just said, but we would all agree, among us. If they were alive and standing here today, we would agree. And Blaine would agree, even though I have some differences with some of the things Blaine said. But we would agree.

And the function of this nation is to be, still, to become again, the beacon of hope and temple of liberty for mankind, which it’s not right now. Not even for our own citizens. For the 80% in the lower income bracket, it’s not. But it must become that again. That’s our purpose. That’s the function we have among nations. That’s the role that the President of the United States must have, in dealing with other nations, in leading this nation, in his negotiations with other powers: to come to those forms of collaboration and agreements which are consistent with that. We must call ourselves that, we must see ourselves as that, and we must function to that effect. We’re not doing it now. What’s the situation now?

We’re Producing Less and Less

We’re in a terrible situation. Not only is the United States in an economic crisis—and if we weren’t stealing from other countries, we’d know how bad our poverty is. The United States is using its power and the power of the British Commonwealth combined, to steal massively from other nations.

For example, you wouldn’t have the boom on Wall Street, unless, for the past fourteen years, the United States had been looting Japan. We have been stealing from Japan. Japan is printing money, and issuing it, at a quarter-percent interest overnight. Japanese yen, which are being issued by the Bank of Japan at a quarter-percent interest, are being borrowed by Americans and by Europeans, and others. They convert them into dollars; they use the yen to buy dollars. Then they come into our markets, and they jack the markets up, with financial speculation, like this great Internet bubble that’s now ready to pop.

In this country, we have a deficit, a national so-called current account deficit, that we as a nation, are spending $300 to $400 billion a year more than we are taking in. We are taking that money, from other countries.

We are living, not on what we produce, but—we produce less and less. We’re living upon slave labor, or virtual slave labor, from other countries. We don’t produce our goods—or less and less. We get cheap goods from other countries, through virtual slave labor abroad. And our companies buy those cheap goods, and dump those things on us. And that’s how we get along.

Look at our supermarket malls, for example. They’re disgusting. No decent goods. Look at the fact that our satellites don’t go up regularly, because they don’t work so well any more, because our engineers and our firms are no longer as competent as they used to be, because we’re not a productive nation any more.

Our farmers, generally, the real farmers, the family farmers, are going bankrupt. When farmers who are now in their 60s and 70s die off, what’s going to happen to the farms? There are no replacements for them, except cheap labor working on company farms. Gone.

Where are our industries? Look at New Hampshire, for example. How do people in New Hampshire live? We used to have industries here. We used to have respectable industries. We used to have some farming here, to get by. It was always a rather poor state, relative to Massachusetts, but a proud state. We used to make jokes when I lived up here, about the Massachusetts drivers and things like that. But we were proud, we had some dignity. Now, we take in people’s laundry. New Hampshire lives by tourism in the summer, and tourism in the ski season. And a few other things. But New Hampshire overall, as an economy, is no longer a viable economy. Look at what’s happened to Massachusetts. The collapse of the industrial potential of this area, of the technological potential. It’s being destroyed. So, this is true of the United States as a whole. We are being a self-destroyed nation. And the bills are piling up. Since [President Jimmy] Carter, since the middle of the 1970s, our national debt has become a cancer. Our total indebtedness has become a cancer, which is about to crush us.

When Japan goes down, as it may soon, or when Russia goes down, or a combination, and Brazil goes down, Mexico goes down, Ecuador’s already gone, there’s a crisis building up in Europe, we will go down too. And you will have people who are now in the upper 20% of income brackets, working as middle management at $60,000, $70,000 a year, with stock option bonanzas, which they’re using to buy $300-400,000, $600,000, million-dollar shacks, tar-paper shacks with Hollywood frontages on them, shacks that will collapse if people don’t stay inside to keep the walls straight—this terrible stuff.

The Danger of Fascism

This is what we face. The white shirts can turn into brownshirts very easily in this country. You have people who have no skills, really, who are middle management, who are generally psycho-managers more than goods managers. And when they lose their jobs, when the Internet bubble collapses—not all the Internet industries will go down. But some of them are just fly-by-night operations, essentially. And when they go down, these people—who have got $600,000 to a million-dollar mortgages on these tar-paper shacks, with a little bit of glorification and fancy faucets—when they go down, those mortgages will be unpayable. They’ll be migrating, looking for a job, and we’re going to have panic in this country, not so much among the people who are already poor, because they’ve gotten used to poverty. But these people will go crazy.

And if we don’t provide a solution for this problem here, a [Franklin] Roosevelt-style solution, we’re going to have white shirts turn into brownshirts. And you’re going to have the rage, which you see in the death-penalty cases, the finality rule in death-penalty cases, as in particularly Virginia and Texas, or now in Florida, where you’ve got the—both Bushes who want to kill everybody. I don’t know, just for pleasure or what not? They might as well open a Roman circus, and just get ’em out there, and kill each other or something—a meanness in the American people, an absolute meanness. You turn that kind of thing loose, with the absolute lack of morality—as we used to understand morality as morality, person to person—drive these people into a rage, and you’re going to have the brownshirts, or their equivalent, stampeding through the society, destroying us, tearing us apart.

So, we have a crisis. Since last August, when the financial crisis, the Russian crisis hit, we’ve been getting into wars. It started with [Vice President] Al Gore and his friends.

[President Bill] Clinton had a problem with the Lewinsky case—actually, with the Starr Chamber. He was distracted. In the absence, while the President was distracted by this impeachment process from last summer on through February, Al Gore and his friends inside the administration began organizing wars, together with the British government.

You had the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. There was no reason to do that. They were not involved in terrorism, or producing something—It was done because Al Gore and Madeleine Half-bright wanted it done. You had other incidents. You had Al Gore’s fanatical speech, for example, in Kuala Lumpur, attacking the Prime Minister of Malaysia in a way that even a Nazi diplomat wouldn’t have dared do in his time. Filthy behavior! The same crowd. Then you had the forcing of the renewed bombing of Iraq, pushed through by Al Gore. Not the President. By Al Gore and his friends, Madeleine Half-bright and so forth.

Then you had us go into a no-win stupid war, organized by the same people, behind the back of the President, in the case of the so-called Kosovo war, or the war against Yugoslavia. The bombing war, which has simply destroyed the territory. It solved no problem. The conditions are far worse than when the war started, throughout the entire region, including Kosovo. The same forces, the heirs of Bush and Thatcher, have launched terrorists internationally, headquartered in London. They’ve launched it in Transcaucasia. They’ve launched wars between India and Pakistan, virtual wars, now ongoing, and similar things throughout the world.

So, you’re in a situation which reminds you, in a sense, of what happened during the 1930s, during the period of the 1930s Depression.

But, at the same time that the economic situation is ready to blow, we’ve got this chaos—threat of wars. We have already the threat of a deflationary collapse: A 60-80% collapse of the stock market, for example, could occur at any time. Nobody knows when, because political factors will decide when and how things happen. We have a hyperinflationary tendency in real estate and elsewhere already building up, reminding us of Weimar Germany in 1923. They could go that way.

We’ve got wars and chaos spreading. We’ve got the two biggest dummies in politics, running as leading Presidential candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties. Either of these idiots in power, whether they’re just dummies or not, is a threat to our national security. That’s our situation.

Now, what’s the solution? That means we’re coming to a point in foreign policy, this financial system, this monetary system, this crazy thing that was started in 1971 with Nixon and the floating-exchange-rate system, this is about to come to an end, one way or another.

We’re in a time in which the people who represent money, big money, are hysterical. Their plans are not to have Wall Street go up forever; you’ve got people who have bought into what they call “income streams”—people who have bought up raw materials, especially through London. The mega-mergers are grabs. They take all the money in sight, and they’ll never pay the bills. But somebody behind the scenes, who is behind the money grab, who has an angle on grabbing those assets when these mega-merger organizations go bankrupt. This means gold mines, it means petroleum, it means the communications industry—which is being grabbed up now. The idea of the communications industry being indispensable—anybody who controls communications after the system goes belly-up, will be able to control that income stream as a monopoly, or as a syndicate that controls it as a monopoly.

And we have the same thing with our power system. We’re running out of power. But people are moving, like Enron, to grab up power from companies, power companies that are going bankrupt, that control your energy. Control communications, control energy, control food supplies, control raw materials, the things on which life depends: to control those things, means you control whatever income stream exists when the thing goes belly-up financially. And they’re already moving for it. They have the suckers who are still betting on Wall Street. They’re still betting on these crazy stocks, betting on these financial ventures. They’re counting on their mutual funds, their money-manager accounts. They think they’re making money on it. They’ll be wiped out.

We don’t know exactly when, but it’s coming. No. The smart guys are not doing that. They’re letting the suckers do it, especially the suckers in the upper 20% of income brackets.

They’re grabbing up, around the world—they’re grabbing assets. Petroleum assets, mineral assets, communications system assets, power system assets, water assets, food monopoly assets. They’re grabbing them up. And when the malls go bankrupt, when the suburban projects go belly-up, they’ll be there, controlling the income stream and controlling the world. That’s their idea. They’re mad and greedy. That would mean a New Dark Age. We’ve seen this before in human history, in European history in particular, this kind of thing. And if we don’t stop it, don’t prevent it, it’s going to mean Hell, Hell on Earth, at least for decades to come.

We Have to Take Roosevelt-Style Decisions

So, what’s the solution? The solution is, of course, that we have to take Roosevelt-style decisions and answer the crisis. We have to act. We have to create a new monetary system. We have to put the thing into bankruptcy reorganization. We have to make sure that people don’t die on the streets because their pensions aren’t paid, because their savings accounts have disappeared.

We’ve got to keep order, so normal life continues. We’ve got to improve employment and production. We’ve got to do those things as emergency actions immediately. We’ve got to prevent chaos and bring back order, and start to put ourselves back together again.

But we can’t do it all by ourselves. We have to do it with other nations, or at least some other nations. Now, we need some other nations. Well, most of the world’s population, where is it? Most of the world’s population is in Asia: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, other parts of Southeast Asia, Central Asia, China, Japan, Korea. And then, also Africa.

This is where the great part of the human population is. Then we have ruined areas of the world, which could be great and prosperous, with good labor forces, at least the remnants of them, in South and Central America. Many of these countries have good labor forces, under good conditions.

So, we have people with whom we should cooperate and can cooperate, to put this planet in some kind of order.

And this brings us back to the question of Manifest Destiny. Does the United States still have the function, of being a temple of liberty and beacon of hope for these nations of the world? And can we do that by making sure we do it also internally, to restore the nation internally, as a temple of liberty and beacon of hope, in order to give it the moral authority to be a temple of liberty and beacon of hope worldwide? Could it be done? Yes, it could be done.

A LaRouche Foreign Policy Approach

Let’s take the case of my own, and Helga’s, and our friends’ foreign policy, which we’ve been practicing. This is not something we dreamed up, it’s something we’ve been practicing.

It started in New Hampshire, in the New Hampshire primary campaign in 1980, when I was sitting at a table at a gun club event which had about 2,500 people up there in the Concord area, at what used to be the old New Hampshire Highway Hotel. And because we were arranged at the table as Presidential candidates, in alphabetical order by surname, Ronald Reagan was at the end of the table, and I was next to him. And you had all these other funny fellows there, too.

So, Ronald and I got into a little bit of discussion. There wasn’t much substance to it. It was just a discussion. But I saw, when he put his speech together, a five-minute speech which we were each allotted to do, I saw the way he did it, and realized the man was not as dumb as he was supposed to be. He had problems, but he wasn’t stupid. And I recognized that from talking to him.

So, when he became President, or had been elected, I, as a Democrat, got into a conversation with some of the people who were going to form, who were in the process of forming the new administration. And I said, “Well, what’s your agenda?” You know how politicians talk. And a whole bunch of them, including Richard Richards, and so forth, said: “What’s your agenda?” So, I would discuss with these people the things that I thought the United States ought to do. And they would say, “We like that, we don’t like that, we like that, we don’t like that.”

So, we would go around (Helga went with me to some of these meetings), and we’d meet various people, and we’d talk with the Democrats. I would say to the Democrats, leading Democrats in the Congress, “This is the way I think we ought to deal with the Reagan administration. We ought to move quickly, because there are some bad things over there. But we ought to move quickly to find common denominators which are good for the nation, and get this thing going in that direction now.”

Well, one of the results was that at the end of 1981, I had a project. And the question was discussing it with the Russians, or the Soviets then. So, to make short of the thing, I got involved, on behalf of the Reagan administration, in discussing with the representatives of the top Soviet circles, on my policy for dealing with the weapons crisis and related matters. So that led, eventually, about a year later, to Reagan making the famous speech announcing his SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative], on March 23rd, 1983.

Now, that went awry afterward. And I was out of the picture soon, because my enemies got into it pretty quick. And they made a mess of it. So what they’re talking about, about missile defense systems today, is mostly nonsense. Even though there were some people in the background who knew what we were talking about.

But since that time, and in earlier businesses in dealing with non-aligned nations and developing nations generally, I’ve been pretty much involved with the question of foreign policy matters, over a period of about at least three decades. And I know a lot of people, if you look at some of my endorsements [as a candidate for President] from various parts of the world, from leading figures from South America, Europe, Asian countries, and so forth, you see a reflection of the fact that I have been a significant figure on their horizon, in terms of relations with the United States and others, over this period of time.

In many of these countries, there are people who wish I were President. They think it would be good for them and good for the world. And they say so.

A New Bretton Woods System

So, I know these countries. I know what we can do. And I know that if I were President, I could deal with this problem. The problem is, that we must have an emergency action to put the present monetary system, which isn’t functioning, into bankruptcy, bankruptcy reorganization, by governments, by sovereign governments. In other words, we all agree that each government will take its chunk of the problem, and they’ll put that chunk through their own bankruptcy reorganization. But then we will coordinate our efforts, to get something out of this which will be stable for all of us.

Now obviously, if you’re going to make a sudden move like that, you’ve got to base your move on something which is a proven precedent. You can’t come up with some completely newfangled thing that nobody ever heard of before, and expect the people, as well as the politicians, to suddenly accept that as a plan of action. You’ve got to say, here’s where we went wrong. Here’s where we were doing things that were working, relatively speaking, and here’s where we went wrong and we began to do the wrong thing. That’s why we’re in a mess. Now, let’s go back to the point in the road where we made the wrong turn, and let’s begin to move from there.

So, this idea of a New Bretton Woods, is very simple. We had, from 1944 through 1958 and somewhat beyond, we had, with all its faults, a monetary system and a general economic policy which worked. It may not have worked the way we liked it, but it worked, relative to anything we’ve seen since. We had recovery of the world from the war, economic recovery.

We had the Marshall Plan. We had a rebuilding of the United States economy, based largely upon Marshall Plan exports into Europe. So we built up our industries in helping Europe develop, and Japan develop, through Marshall Plan cooperation, and through that kind of policy; through the Bretton Woods agreements, the old Bretton Woods agreements: sovereign nation-state, gold reserve, fixed parities, tariffs which were protective for all countries, each and all countries, trade agreements of that type, and so forth. Low-interest, long-term loans to promote international trade, and that sort of thing.

It worked. With all the failures, it worked! With all the problems, it worked, relative to anything we’ve seen since 1971. If we had never stopped doing that, we wouldn’t have the world financial and economic crises, or the U.S. crisis we have today. It should be obvious to nations which have gone through this kind of experience of the present IMF system—they all know it doesn’t work, they all know it’s destroying us. Well, let’s get rid of it. Well, you don’t ask one nation, by itself, to get rid of it. You try to get a group of nations together, to say, “We will jointly agree this thing has to go.” And if you have the majority of the human race in the deal with you, it’s likely to fly. And if the United States is a partner in it, the President of the United States, it’s likely to fly, particularly if the American people at that time perceive a major crisis which needs some fixing.

And our argument to the American people is: This is what worked. We’ve got the facts to prove it. You’ve got senior citizens who remember how it worked, who can remind you of it and tell you about it. That worked. What you’re doing now, has failed.

Now, let’s simply go back to the turn in the road where we made the wrong turn. Go back to the Bretton Woods model, maybe change the relations among states a bit, but do basically the same thing. Go in the same direction. Learn the lessons of the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s, and go back to that.

A National Mission

Now, what does that mean? As I dealt with this yesterday, in a press conference in Concord, where the question came up, particularly from one of our friends who is in the machine-tool area: How do we do this? I said,

Well, you can’t just have an economy and set up a master plan of how it’s going to work and have it work. You’ve got to have a national mission. You’ve got to have a sense of purpose. What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?

Well, the general condition of this planet is as follows. Presuming we’ve gone back to the old Bretton Woods model, or something like it, the same principles, the same general idea, now. How are we going to build our way globally out of the crisis? How are we going to have a mutual advantage: China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South America, Central America, Europe, the United States? How are we going to have a deal that is equitable to all? What do we have to do?

Well, the basic problem of the planet is that when [Franklin] Roosevelt died, we didn’t do what he intended to do, that is, to rip up all vestiges of Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French colonialism and imperialism, and end the domination of this planet by a free-trade system. That was Roosevelt’s intention, as he stated plainly and repeatedly, to Winston Churchill. But, when Roosevelt died, Winston Churchill won. And the Washington gang took orders from Churchill, along with the people who worked for Churchill. And they put the policy in.

So, as a result of that, we did not address the question which Roosevelt intended to, to transform what had been the colonial region of the world, or semi-colonial, under free-trade domination and looting, and transform this into a collection of sovereign nation-state republics, which would be in partnership with the United States in particular, as well as Europe, and to try to build this world up so that you had just economic conditions throughout the world as a whole. To bring nations together as sovereign nation-states, so we would not create a situation where we’d look forward, in Roosevelt’s view—and mine at the time, when I was in service—to a world where you wouldn’t have another terrible world war.

And the way to do that, is to have a just economic system, and a just political system, in which sovereign nation-states have a partnership, a sovereign partnership, in terms of doing things together, which are in the common interest.

We Must Rebuild the Nation

Now, what does that mean today? That means in countries like China, or India, or Southeast Asia, or South America now, Central America, you have nations which could not by themselves, with their own resources, recover in time to meet the desperate condition of all of their population.

One case is China. China has now currently a rate of growth, annual rate of growth, of about 7-8% per year, maybe 8.5. It depends on how you calculate. But that sounds very good, considering the fact that the United States has no growth, really no net growth. You take the hot air out of our financial system, we are contracting, as manifest by the fact that we can no longer afford the health care we used to have. They tell us we can no longer afford the pensions we used to have, we can no longer have the educational system we used to have, we can no longer afford anything that we used to have, we’ve become much poorer. And anybody who’s telling us that things have become better is kidding themselves, or blowing hot air, blowing bubbles, as they’re doing on Wall Street.

It’s not enough to have a certain rate of growth, you’ve got to be able to sustain the growth. Now, you can have growth in the inland area of China, for example, where very poor people live. The Chinese economy is mostly located on the coastal areas, or near the coast, traditionally.

Inland, it’s poor, very poor, desperately poor. They’re one of the poorest parts of the world. They’re just better organized than some other parts of the world. But they’re very poor.

And the social stability of China, depends not merely on improving the economic conditions of these people, but improving the cultural conditions; and the improvement in economic conditions, is necessary to improve cultural conditions. That means you have to have a higher standard of living, more education, and all the things that go with that. Well, they’re not going to be able to do that, without a lot of high technology. You can not sustain growth at high rates, without also increasing the average productive powers of labor, as measured in physical terms.

We can do that. We have on this planet the ability to produce the technologies, which, used by developing countries such as China, or India, or South American countries, or Africa, we have the technologies, which, on the long term, will enable these countries to sustain growth, real growth, on a stable basis.

Ah! We used to be machine-tool exporters. We used to be high-technology exporters. Europe, especially continental Europe, used to be high-technology exporters. Present-day Russia has some industries, the scientific, military and scientific-industrial complex, which could produce machine tools—capable of doing it. Japan has a machine-tool capability.

If we, the nations which have a machine-tool type of capability for science-driver machine-tool development—we can supply the developing sector of the world with the tools and the technology which they need, to increase their productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer. That solves their problem.

We need to employ our people. We need to get back to work. What should we do? We should build those industries, and farms, and so forth; we need to maintain our own national economic security at home.

But what should we export? What should we concentrate on, in terms of exports? We should concentrate, together with Europe, together with Japan, and other countries which have a high-technology capability, on building up—what? Our universities, particularly science education. Our university laboratories, which test discovery and development of scientific principles; our machine-tool capabilities, including the highly specialized ones, and develop the new principles, including the ones that produce the applications for sophisticated machine tools, including the mass production machine tools that go with that. And helping these countries get also the supporting repair capabilities and maintenance capabilities, in the area where the industries are developing, which they don’t have in these countries now, at least not adequately.

That should be our mission, particularly for the next quarter-century, next 30 years. We should rebuild ourselves, not only to put our own shop at home in repair, but to orient ourselves, using this aerospace industry as a focal point or driver for this thing, to retool the United States with a mission. We, together with other countries which can do this, are going to adopt a mission of helping the rest of the world transform itself to end this kind of deprivation and misery, which affrights us and disgusts us. And thus we, those nations and we, should be able to meet together to come to the kind of terms which will be durable, because they’ll be beneficial over a long period of time to come. We have to understand our Manifest Destiny.

The Role of Legitimate Government

Our Manifest Destiny lies in Classical Greek civilization, its unique contribution to global civilization. It lies in the role of Christianity, especially the Apostles, like John and Paul, in taking this Greek Classical legacy and using it as the tool of Christianity, to improve the condition of mankind, as the Renaissance did later.

We need to develop the nation-state, the idea that a national government has no moral authority, except as it is founded on an absolute commitment to promote and defend the General Welfare of all of its people, including their posterity. That’s the only right that a government has to rule. Otherwise, it’s simply some group of people that treats the government and the people as their personal property, and passes down laws accordingly.

But the only foundation for law, is the principle of the General Welfare: that all human beings are equally made in the image of the Creator. It is our obligation to promote their General Welfare so defined, as creatures of cognition and reason, to develop and cultivate their powers of cognition and reason, to develop all children, to develop all adults, equally, and call that the General Welfare. To improve the condition of the present and future generations, the General Welfare. That is the only moral authority and the chief responsibility of legitimate government.

Our concern is to have on this planet the emergence of governments which correspond to this principle of the General Welfare, which is the foundation of law in the Preamble of our Constitution, and of our constitutional law. And to make that commitment, define that, our being the temple of liberty, make that the definition of our being a beacon of hope. And let us reach out to other nations, with that message, with that commitment, with that purpose, and say, “Let’s end this nonsense. Let’s learn the lesson. Let’s deal with the crisis.”

And let us, in the process, to show this is no novel idea, let us understand the Greek Classic. Let us understand the mission of the Apostles. Let us understand the accomplishments of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance. Let us understand the achievements of the great scientists and others who struggled to make the Renaissance possible, including Abelard and Charlemagne, or Dante Alighieri and others who came before that, who made it possible.

What it Means to be an American

Let us remember that, and let them live in us. This is no wild idea. We are simply affirming the proven principles of history, and the history of the United States in particular. Let us project that. Let us encourage our children, our citizens, to project that. When they say, “What are you?” You’re an American citizen. What does that mean? Other countries have citizens. What do you mean by your being an American citizen? What does it mean? What’s your mission, what’s your commitment? What’s your standard for picking the politicians you elect? What do you demand and expect them to do? Where do you expect them to stand? On some bite-size slogan they put out? Some phony gimmick, some sideshow, boola-boola, or do you want someone who thinks like that, who you can trust, because they are committed to that?

To educate our children, so that when they reach maturity, they’re that kind of a person, where each person can finally see themselves in what I call the simultaneity of eternity. Not an unusual term, but one rarely used.

That once we understand our nature, we understand that we are made in the image of the Creator, each equally so. We must cultivate or redeem that quality which is within us, given to us at birth. We must relive the acts of reason, the discovery of universal principle, which has been passed down to us, for us to re-experience and absorb in ourselves.

We are short-lived. We are born, and we shall die, all of us. Then, what is the meaning of our life, as our human life? Is it not to assimilate and cultivate in ourselves, those qualities which define us as human; to absorb the gifts of reason from preceding generations, from history; to utilize those and preserve and defend those gifts of reason, to add something to that for future generations, so that when we pass on, we have retained a permanent place in the span of eternity?

That is the natural capability, and also the right of every human being: not to be an animal that is born and dies, that has pleasure in the meantime. The right of every human being is to live in such a way, that they, in their own way, can have their powers of reason cultivated, can find something good to do for humanity, so that they can die with a smile on their face, because they die with the assurance that in the life they had, they have secured a permanent place, an identity for themselves, in the simultaneity of eternity.

That’s the commitment we must have. That is, to spark what’s inside us, and must radiate from us, so that we become a true Beacon of Hope and Temple of Liberty for all mankind. That’s what all of my predecessors in this political profession, who were good people, thought and dreamed. That’s what Blaine, in his own way, from Maine dreamed. That’s what John Winthrop, the founder of New England, dreamed. That’s what Benjamin Franklin attempted to do. That’s what Cotton Mather preached, and preached to others. That’s what Lincoln represented. That’s what Garfield represented. That’s what McKinley represented. That’s what Cleveland didn’t represent. That’s what Wilson didn’t represent. That’s what Coolidge didn’t represent.

That’s what Roosevelt, in his own imperfect way, tried to represent. That’s what poor Kennedy, who was assassinated, was groping to try to represent, too. All the best people at least tried to represent that, in their own way. And that, for us, as Americans, when we were good, was always, for us, our choice of Manifest Destiny. Thank you.