The Global Truth About the ‘Egypt’ Crisis
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Feb. 8—Since the initial demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, and other Egyptian cities on Jan. 25, Lyndon LaRouche has been emphasizing that the so-called "Egypt crisis" cannot be understood, unless situated in the context of a global disintegration of the entire financial system, which is creating impossible conditions throughout much of the planet, starting in the trans-Atlantic region. Unless the bankruptcy of the entire system is redressed, and soon, the entire planet is headed into a New Dark Age.
"We are walking on thin ice," LaRouche said today."We have reached a point of vulnerability in the entire global system. Any regional assumptions about the nature of this breakdown crisis are trumped by this one, overriding global reality. Unless we remove President Obama from office, and immediately implement Glass-Steagall, wiping out $17 trillion in gambling debts, and return to American System credit, the planet is doomed to several generations of sheer Hell."
In discussions with colleagues on Feb. 6, LaRouche elaborated on this point, while also discussing the implications of NAWAPA for the Maghreb and Nile River region:
"Now, we're in a crucial situation in terms of Egypt. And I will, right off the top, indicate what the policy has to be: We have a good situation in Egypt. It doesn't mean this is a cured situation, it means it's a good situation. It's a winnable situation, in which the winning is not guaranteed. And what we're doing, and what our influence is in this process, is part of helping to make this a winnable potential, as opposed to a foregone conclusion. What has happened, of course—there, is the Hillary Clinton factor of the Secretary of State, and some other things, have taken over, where the idiotic President, the numbskull, the halfwit, is not fully in charge. Because he couldn't be in charge, because he's a halfwit. And so, therefore, this is crucial.
"But, what are we going to do? Well, we have a group of nations, which are, in a sense, partly centered on the Nile, but also bear upon an adjoining state, called Chad, which is a disaster state. We have, in respect to the disaster state, Chad, we have the Chad policy, for rebuilding Lake Chad—that program, which is opposed by Europeans, but a lot of Africans are for it. And it's treated as a very minor extension of the concept we have for NAWAPA [the North American Water and Power Alliance].
"So therefore, if you look at this area, and look at the area as a whole, Egypt, number one; then up the Nile—and then, into Eritrea, into Ethiopia, into Chad: Now, the aforesaid states, are states which are associated with the Nile system. So think about the Nile system.
"Now, also, think about the project of the Qattara Depression. For a long time, it's been understood that this is ancient lake, which is very much salinated by its history, because Africa has a very strange history in terms of these kinds of changes in climate. Once it was very green, very luscious, covered with water, covered with all kinds of things, like that during the period of the last glaciation; and then it became very dry, and lots of problems and so forth. But these characteristics of the land-area remained."
Let's Make Our Weather!
"Now, remember, as you look at what we're doing with NAWAPA, we do not talk about the land-area, its potenti part of Sudan and the main part of Sudan on cooperation in these palities and so forth, in the usual fashion: Is this a good place to build a shack? No, what we do, is we make our landscape! We now make our weather! We're not fully skilled at that, yet; we're limited in what we can do, in making our weather. But we are beginning to make our weather. The Three Gorges Dam is an example of making our weather. NAWAPA is the ideal example, of making our weather.
"Now, let's make our weather in that area! The quasi-desert area. Well, you have two things: Egypt, until 1982, was one of the leading nations of the world in grain production. Ah-ha! That's gone away! The greatest area for grain production in all of Africa is Sudan, which has made some steps in that direction, despite the British. So you have also, the entire region, which as a water system, goes to Eritrea in part, to Ethiopia; and if you have an agreement between the southern projects, water projects and food production projects, you can do fine.
"If we just put the Lake Chad project into this, which is taking a NAWAPA-type approach to the Chad problem, of taking the surplus water coming out of the Congo, and putting some of it across the mountains, as we're doing with NAWAPA, we now, with nuclear power, can now re-create Lake Chad. And the re-creation of Lake Chad will mean a change in the character of the whole area.
"So, if we include the Congo/Chad, Zaire/Congo/Chad operation, with the other nations, with Egypt, with Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, now you have a project, which begins to crack the Africa program! Because what you now have to do, is you have to say, 'Well, nuclear power, and modern high-speed transportation, by connecting Africa through the Middle East, by connecting it to Asia and Europe, you now have changed the destiny of Africa.' And you're not going to count on merely what kind of weather you have now, you're going to make it! You're going to do the things that change the pattern of weather, by increasing the incidence of evaporation over a large territory, which now is going to make fertile and productive an area which you now call 'desert.' So that's the process.
"So now we're going to make it. We have an Egyptian crisis, and without introducing a factor of this type, you may be able to control the present, maybe, but you're not going to control it for the long term—unless you do this!
"So, we've got to take the kind of thinking which is typified by NAWAPA, and apply that kind of thinking to other parts of the world. That's the only way we're going to deal with the problem.
But the real problem is psychological. It's in the mind of people. And therefore, they don't have a perspective of success. They are a defeated people in their own mind: They say, 'We have these problems! We're overpopulated....' Arrhhh! Well, I know how we could help that process a little bit. I've got a list, of specific cases of overpopulation. I wouldn't call it 'over'-population. Let's call it 'mis'-population, and I don't mean 'ladylike'! But only apart from the mis-population issue, we're not overpopulated; what we are, we're under-developed!
"So therefore, when you look at Egypt, today, what are you looking for? You're looking back to 1982. In 1982, Egypt realized—what I admired very much at the time—that, there's no way, by spending money on Cairo and Alexandria, in those days, back in 1982, by which you could not go from worse to worst. Every bit of money you spent in trying to manage the ghetto, made things worse, not better. So, they realized, that trying to jam all this propagation and population into these two cities in similar conditions, was a piece of folly!"
We Will Create New Cities
"So, they said, 'Oh! Well, we have nuclear power available, don't we? We can do something. What can we do with the aid of nuclear power? Well, we can start to reorganize the water management of this region! We are now going to create new cities, as satellites of the existing cities. They will be true cities. We will build them, we will take yellow sand, and by known principles, and with the aid of nuclear power, we are going turn yellow sand, into brown sand, and then into black sand, black earth.
" 'Now, we're going to take these cities, and we're going to call them agro-industrial centers. At the one time, we are building up the land-area: going from yellow to black land. On the side, this is going to create the new agriculture, the new food supply.'
"Now, remember, at that point, Egypt was also a major food producer, which it is not any longer, especially in grains. That was taken away. What happened is, Henry Kissinger and company moved in, as agents of the British, and said, 'No.' And Egypt went down, down, down, down, down, down, as a result. And, of course, Egypt is a key cultural center of all Northern Africa. One of the oldest cultural centers of Africa! The Great Pyramid, for example, was not built by slaves! It was built by artisans of a population! By technologies which boggled the imagination of people who tried to account for the Great Pyramid before them.
"So, if Egypt is going down, and you look at the history of Egypt, as known to the ancient Greeks, you understand this. So therefore, obviously, only by reversing the 1982 decision imposed upon Egypt, could you solve the problem of Egypt! The existential problem of Egypt.
"So, what if you take Egypt, and you take the idea of the Nile: The Nile is a water system! What's the problem of Northern Africa? Water! Water systems! So, now you have to build an improved water system, and there are many things you can do about that. This requires a lot of assistance from nuclear power, utilization of nuclear power. It means the approach which the Egyptians had in 1982, with the agriculture minister, who was behind this operation at that time—and do it!
"But it means, you've got to take the Nile, and look at the Nile itself, as a development project, including the White Nile and Blue Nile and so forth; which means you're going into Eritrea, you're going into Ethiopia. It means you're going into the southern region, which is a very impoverished region. It means that you're going to reach out into Chad, but you have to do that from Congo, from Zaire, with nuclear power.
"Now, you're going to change, and create a new climate in Africa, by exertion of the human will. Only if you do that, only if you have that determination, are you actually going to solve the problem, the existential problem of the region, now.
"So therefore: Creativity.
"And the solution, to the present Egyptian crisis can not be a permanent solution, but only a temporary one, until this is put in! More important, is the imagination of the Egyptian! Because if you're going to do something with Egypt, you've got to get the attention of the people of Egypt. It's not going to work unless the people of Egypt decide, that's what they want to do. So therefore, you're going to have stimulate that understanding, that knowledge among them.
There Is No Egyptian Problem
"Therefore, you can not talk about 'the Egyptian problem!' There is no Egyptian problem! It's primarily a European problem. Because all these conditions were imposed, by the Mediterranean imperial power, which at one point was Rome; there were conditions before. When you look at the Great Pyramid, you saw what conditions that Egypt was in, after the Great Pyramid—you see a degradation of quality. And you know about great wars and so forth that were fought throughout those regions, at least great on those terms at that time; which brought them down! So you saw degeneration, from the level of the Great Pyramid, to the time we know in modern historical times.
"Look: It's not Egypt. That's the whole point. The argument is, this is Egypt. It's not Egypt. It's Europe. It's the Mediterranean region. It's a grand, global operation. It's not an Egyptian problem! It's a problem which has been spilled into Egypt, it is not an Egyptian problem!
"Now, what you do have? You have a President of Egypt, who is now aged in his own terms. He used to be a brilliant pilot, combat pilot; he's now President, and he's on the fag-end of his career. And he has a wife, who has a son. And the son is a young opportunist, or younger opportunist, who wants to become President, and the mother is leaning toward affinities with the British, from the perspective, the British have won, over Egypt, what Egypt wanted to become in 1982. So, he's a man who is on the defeated end of life, who is looking for a legacy, for himself, for his family. Who implants this legacy as a burden on his son, who is a failure at this point, and a wife, the mother of the son, who is looking for opportunities, which she, like her husband, see as the legacy conveyed to the future, by their son.
"In other words, they have retreated from combat, for the future. They're trying to settle down, to something which will be a satisfactory conclusion of their existence, in the hope that their son, and their son's name, will carry their past into his future. So that's the problem.
"But the point is, the entire Maghreb, the entirety of Africa, the entirety of the Middle East, and also the entirety of Europe, the entirety of the trans-Atlantic is what's collapsing. It's not Egypt. It's the entirety of the trans-Atlantic region! As opposed to the Pacific region, which has problems, but the problems are not yet, intrinsically as severe.
"So that's the way it is. And there is no such thing as an 'Egyptian problem,' that can be solved as an Egyptian problem. That's why I said, today, you have to think about Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Chad. And it's by adding the name of Chad into that collection, that you now have an adequate definition, of what the alternative is, to what the collapse of Egypt might be. Because you've got the same principle, as in the Chad case, of the Lake Chad operation, as in NAWAPA. When you include the Chad development, among these nations, which are the Nile-based nations, you have the same kind of thing.
"So you have to think, not of how you 'solve' a problem, but how you create a state of affairs which takes you outside that problem. The world is now of that nature, as NAWAPA typifies that. Don't try to 'solve' the problem, of the world as it's organized, the United States as it's organized: Step outside the way it's organized! And find the new, higher plateau, from which you're going to operate, which NAWAPA typifies."
