LAROUCHE LEGACY FOUNDATION SEMINAR

The World Must Listen to the
Wise Words of Lyndon LaRouche

by Mike Billington and Stanley Ezrol

[Print version of this editorial]

Aug. 14—Can the human race survive the crisis now threatening mankind itself? Will we as a race continue the descent into global nuclear war, an out-of-control pandemic, a hyperinflationary destruction of the means of survival, a cultural collapse into a new Dark Age? Or can this existential crisis serve as a spark of human creativity in enough citizens of the world, to both end the insanity which brought us to this point, and launch a new paradigm which unites the nations of the world in achieving the common aims of mankind—peace through development?

The answer lies not only in what people think, but how they think. Can we spark creativity in a population which has been degraded through scientific frauds, drugs, pornography, perpetual warfare and economic decay?

This was the theme of the seminar today, the first to be sponsored by the LaRouche Legacy Foundation. Helga Zepp-LaRouche was joined by leaders from around the world—political leaders, economists, musicians, scientists, and youth, from the United States, Russia, China, Slovakia, Germany, France, Austria, Argentina, Philippines, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Peru, Colombia and Ukraine, for a dialogue on “LaRouche’s Discovery” and on “Earth’s Next Fifty Years,” under the theme: “On the 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971, So, Are You Finally Willing To Learn Economics?”

The LaRouche Legacy Foundation is in the process of publishing LaRouche’s Collected Works, of which Volume 1 is now available for purchase here.

August 15, 1971

It was fifty years ago, on August 15, 1971, that Lyndon LaRouche became quite famous, but also became the target of what former Attorney General Ramsey Clark described as—

... a complex and pervasive utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations focused on destroying an enemy…. The purpose can only be seen as destroying—more than a political movement, more than a political figure—it is those two; but [the LaRouche movement] is a fertile engine of ideas, a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems, regardless of the impact on the status quo, or on vested interests. It was a deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost.

On this day in 1971, President Richard Nixon scrapped the Bretton Woods system, which had sustained world development in the post-World War II era, by decoupling the U.S. dollar from its peg to gold, allowing all the world’s currencies to float, to become the subject of speculation, and for the British system of “free markets” and deregulation to replace the Hamiltonian American System, which is based on the concept of directed credit to enhance the general welfare and lift the productivity of labor.

Panel 1—‘LaRouche’s Discovery’

EIR Economics Editor Paul Gallagher explained to the thousands of participants in the conference around the world (with simultaneous translation from English into Spanish, French, German, and Russian), that the Bretton Woods which was adopted after Franklin Roosevelt’s death was not the system intended by FDR. Rather, Roosevelt had insisted that after the war, the former European colonies must be granted full independence, and that American System production of the capital goods needed to industrialize the entire world would drive U.S. productivity, while also ending the colonial era for good.

But President Harry Truman, whom LaRouche denounced as a “little man” serving Wall Street, helped the Europeans to restore their colonies, while the U.S. was turned inward. The subsequent focus on internal consumerism through debt, rather than capital exports, LaRouche forecast—uniquely among all economists—would cause recessions and the collapse of Bretton Woods.

This was but the first of LaRouche’s forecasts, all of which were proven to be fully prescient. A video of LaRouche speaking in 2001 described his many forecasts, emphasizing that he “was standing alone” among economists who were trapped in British monetarist ideology, thinking of money, not the physical transformation of nature, nor the well-being of the human race.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote speech provided a powerful insight into her late husband Lyndon LaRouche’s capacity to inspire people from all different layers of society, “from heads of state to Peruvian fishermen and Italian shoemakers,” to grasp a different way of thinking—that one cannot separate politics, science, and culture, and that all aspects of life fall under the centrality of creativity as the difference between man and beast, driving the science of physical economy as the true science of human progress. She later noted that anyone who met LaRouche would experience an awakening of their own powers of reason, through LaRouche’s creative mind engaging theirs.

Zepp-LaRouche traced her husband’s debt to Plato, Kepler, Leibniz and other giants of history, in making his own discoveries. She reviewed the new means for measuring progress which he had created—“relative potential population-density,” and “energy-flux density”—and the interconnection between these crucial concepts.

She explored Lyn’s initial decision in the 1950s to combat the statistical method of “systems analysis” of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, which treated the mind as a computer, promoting artificial intelligence as a replacement for the mind. This false concept of the nature of man, Zepp-LaRouche said, has grown today into the insanity of the “models” which drive the climate hoax, financial speculation, and the oligarchical society. She concluded by calling for the “replacement of the quackery of information theory with the ideas of LaRouche in all universities.”

The leading Chinese economist Ding Yifan, who has written about LaRouche’s ideas in several widely-read books in Chinese, noted that LaRouche focused on two crimes which resulted from the ending of Bretton Woods: the abuse of currencies through the floating exchange rate system, allowing speculators to attack national currencies; and the deregulation of the financial system, which allowed the speculators to take over.

He noted two events in Chinese history, once during the Han Dynasty 2,000 years ago, and then in the Mongol era in the 14th century, when similar disregard for the difference between money and the real economy led to the collapse of the dynasties. Today’s Quantitative Easing (QE) and other hyperinflationary money printing, he said, is creating a cancer in the economy—a demonstration of LaRouche’s warning about entropy resulting from the failure to develop the real economy.

Józef Mikloško, the former Vice Prime Minister of post-Communist Czechoslovakia and former Slovakian Ambassador to Italy, described his friend LaRouche as the most educated man he’d ever known, and noted that 80 pages of his own book is about LaRouche and his organization. He described his trip to visit LaRouche in prison, where his optimism and agapē were undeterred. He also reviewed the injustice of LaRouche’s incarceration, and the worldwide mobilization of citizens who united to protest that injustice. He described LaRouche as the “Sakharov of America,” calling for a new revolution of Christian agapē. His recommendation that a “short book” be produced in all languages on LaRouche’s ideas, was embraced by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and moderator Dennis Small of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation, while observing that capturing LaRouche’s ideas in a “short” book would be quite difficult indeed.

Dr. Natalia Vitrenko, Chairwoman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine and a former Parliamentarian and presidential candidate, gave an impassioned presentation, titled “Saving Mankind Is a Mission-Possible,” on her cooperation with Lyndon and Helga LaRouche.

She pointed to the Biden-Putin Summit as correctly indicating the dangerous strategic crisis, but warned that it did not address the fundamental causes of that crisis, in the systemic destruction of the world economic and financial system. She reviewed the dire state of the world economy, and the necessary solutions posed by LaRouche. She called the state of the Western banking system a “speculative giant squid,” sucking the wealth out of the world. She also reviewed the destruction of Ukraine following the 2014 coup, driving the country from being one of the top ten economies in the world to now the poorest in Europe, with 10 million going hungry, and a population decline by over 20% since 1990. She closed: “Will we be a cemetery with windmills in place of crosses?”

Dr. Kirk Meighoo, a former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago, an author and a political activist, described how he became a development economist through his education (in Toronto, Jamaica, and the UK), but only when he discovered LaRouche through the internet did he realize that his profound ideas had been censored in all the universities. He described how the emergence of China, India and Russia as major economies should have led to a new world order, and that the G20 had made an effort in that direction, but failed, while the BRICS has now been torn apart. The pandemic destroyed economies around the world, he said, while money was printed in outrageous quantities to bail out the banks, “transferring the wealth from the poor to the rich.” Resolving this crisis can only be achieved by ending the neoliberal system altogether, he noted, and commended the LaRouche movement for leading that effort.

Yekaterina Fyodorovna Shamayeva from Russia, a senior lecturer, spoke on “Design and Management of Sustainable Development and an Interdisciplinary Synthesis of the Fundamental Ideas of the Schools of Lyndon LaRouche and Pobisk Kuznetsov.” The late Pobisk Kuznetsov, one of Russia’s leading scientists and philosophic thinkers, became a close friend and collaborator of Lyndon LaRouche following the fall of the Soviet Union. He proposed that a new unit of measure of the progress of physical economies be based on LaRouche’s dual conceptions of relative potential population-density and energy flux-density, and that the unit be called the “La,” after LaRouche.

Shamayeva described the continuing effort in Russia to bring about a synthesis of the ideas of Kuznetsov and LaRouche, emphasizing that economics cannot be separated from the laws of nature. She called for more of LaRouche’s works to be translated into Russian (there are already a large number of LaRouche’s major writings available in Russian). She commented later: “I would like to say that the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche can be called ‘cosmospheric,’ in the spirit of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, who—I would like to remind you—wrote in 1941,

What we are experiencing is not a crisis that distresses the faint-hearted, but an extraordinarily great turning point in human thought. And, being at this turning point, we should be happy, that we are able to develop science.

She also said:

I don’t see any obstacles to continuing to develop and introduce this unit of measurement [the “La”] as an alternative. And there is demand for this among our politicians. Therefore, to introduce it we simply need to make an organizational plan for our joint work.

The first panel closed with video presentations and comments about LaRouche from several people who have since died, among them: former Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the miscarriage of justice in the persecution of LaRouche; Dr. Enéas Carneiro, a former member of the Brazilian parliament and presidential candidate, on why LaRouche was granted honorary citizenship in the city of São Paulo; former President of Mexico José López Portillo, who in 1998 called on the world to “listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche”; and former Foreign Minister of Guyana Fred Wills, who in 1976 called on the UN General Assembly to adopt LaRouche’s idea of a New International Economic Order.

Discussion Session

A fascinating dialogue during the Q&A session centered on four questions from the audience:

• What is the difference between “forecasts” and “predictions”?

Zepp-LaRouche responded that a forecast includes foreknowledge, a prescience of what could, and should, be done to advance civilization, and of the disasters which would ensue if such positive means were ignored. A prediction, on the other hand, is merely a linear projection based on trends, ignoring the potential of non-linear phase shifts.

• Will AI (artificial intelligence) and robots cause mass unemployment?

Zepp-LaRouche responded that new technologies are inherently good, freeing men and women from former back-breaking labor, and thereby increasing productivity. But the question is the quality of the people who are deploying the new technologies. Are the new technologies matched with improvements in education? Are they used for good, or for evil, like the fake computer models pushing the Malthusian Green New Deal? She quoted the space scientist Krafft Ehricke, that in addition to new technologies we need aesthetic education, to make people more noble, beautiful souls, more agapic.

Józef Mikloško added that man must always be the deciding force—the use of technology by intelligence agencies to spy on everyone must be ended, and computers can never substitute for the human mind.

Kirk Meighoo added that LaRouche long ago demonstrated that the brain is not a computer, that ideas and consciousness are nonlinear and not material.

• How does LaRouche distinguish between Marxism, neoliberalism, and Christian social teaching?

Kirk Meighoo responded that Marxism and neoliberalism may appear to be opposites, but in fact they are both materialist, they don’t recognize the human soul.

• Is there any prospect for getting a New Bretton Woods?

Kirk Meighoo responded that there is an objective necessity for a New Bretton Woods, but that the “phobia” in the West against Russia and China makes it very difficult.

Zepp-LaRouche added that when Bill Clinton called for a New Bretton Woods, he was immediately targeted for destruction with the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Natalia Vitrenko and I, [she said,] joined in calling for convening a New Bretton Woods system, which at that time was supported by I think hundreds and thousands of parliamentarians and other influentials. And I think this is very urgent, because we have a hyperinflationary tendency which is very visible, and it will not be “temporary” as the Federal Reserve is trying to tell people: hyperinflation is something that once it’s in the system, it tends to grow like in 1923 in Germany.

To have a New Bretton Woods conference is extremely urgent. The G20 probably will not go for it. Maybe it has to be generated in some other circles and then gain momentum, because especially the developing countries have a lot to gain if there would be a New Bretton Woods system in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And they have a lot to lose, if the schemes of such people like Mark Carney would ever be fulfilled.

Panel 2— ‘Earth’s Next Fifty Years’

The second panel featured further discussion from colleagues of Lyndon LaRouche. Moderator Megan Dobrodt from the LaRouche Legacy Foundation board, launched the panel with a video tape of the LaRouches’ close friend and collaborator, Norbert Brainin, Founder and Primarius of the legendary Amadeus Quartet.

Brainin began a 1995 master class in Dolná Krupá Castle, Slovakia, by introducing the concept of Motivführung, or “motivic thorough-composition,” an approach to classical composition developed by Hayden and refined by Mozart and Beethoven, of thorough composition according to principle. Brainin explained to the class that he often talked about Motivführung with professional colleagues and students who recognized the term, but that the only person who understood it completely was Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche often said that Brainin had introduced this concept to him, but he recognized it as a universal process for developing, not only great music, but natural and human compositions of any kind. Knowing this, Brainin explained that true classical composers are “scientists.”

This was followed by a recording of Lyndon LaRouche addressing the issue of human creativity at the July 3, 2011 European Schiller Institute conference. He noted that human beings were the only known creative species, and explained that “classical artistic culture” can be transferred “to the department of physical science.” LaRouche explained that he determined to build a movement when he realized that no one but he understood the disaster the financial disruptions of the 1960s was creating. He started by visiting universities and discussing his ideas. He briefly identified his understanding of his fundamental principle:

You get a demonstration of that in the department of Classical artistic composition, in which the mind is experimenting with the attempt to discover principles, and expresses the yearning for that experimental result as the incentive of creativity for the human mind. That is creativity. It is getting outside the ordinary habits, or habituation, of life….

He concluded with the simple statement, “It’s not magic: It’s really humanity.”

The first guest on the panel was Jacques Cheminade, a long-time LaRouche associate, President of the Solidarité et Progrès party in France, and a former Presidential candidate. He described how, as a French diplomat, he first encountered LaRouche at an event in Manhattan and, while studying LaRouche’s writing, was confronted with a New York Times Supplement in which he saw a photo of French soldiers in World War I with the caption, “Who’s going to live? Who is going to die?” Several pages later, there was a picture of an Ethiopian mother and child with their “skin floating off,” with the caption, “Who will be fed and who will die?” This led him to decide that, despite his prospects as a young diplomat, “Well, these are my people, even if to join them I have to pay a dear price.”

Cheminade described his collaboration with LaRouche in writing a book titled France After De Gaulle, promoting the idea of getting France back on the path of republican development as characterized by General Lafayette’s engagement with the American Revolution. Maurice Allais, the only French economist ever to win a Nobel Prize, wrote Cheminade a letter on November 27, 2009 saying that he was “fully associating myself to LaRouche’s efforts to generate a wide public debate to radically rebuild the credit system and the international monetary system,” and authorized Cheminade to make this public. Former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, Cheminade said, also shared LaRouche’s economic outlook.

In 1983 LaRouche and his wife Helga led a Club of Life event in Paris. The Club was founded by Mrs. LaRouche as a counter to the radically Malthusian Club of Rome. The Paris event was attended by world-famous oncologist Georges Mathé; resistance heroine Marie-Madeleine Fourcade; and Charles de Gaulle’s associate, World War II hero General Jean-Gabriel Revault d’Allones. All of these later wrote to request freedom for LaRouche when he was incarcerated in 1989. LaRouche’s universal appeal was demonstrated by support from leading members of the French Communist Party as well as the Secretary of State under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Pierre-Christian Taittinger.

Following Cheminade, two representatives from Argentina, Roberto Fritzsche and Eduardo Fernández, used discoveries of the great Russian biogeochemist, Vladimir Vernadsky, to explain LaRouche’s concept of “relative potential population-density” in relation to “energy-flux density” and improvements in living standards. Man’s role in this complex was explained in relationship to Vernadsky’s concept of three realms of existence: the lifeless lithosphere; the living biosphere; and the realm of cognition called the noosphere. Man is the master of all three, and, as LaRouche has explained, also participates in a fourth realm, that of cognition that we can recognize in the design and growth of the Universe, but, as yet, do not know its source in the way we know how humanity can discover concepts and “laws” of the Universe.

They use Vernadsky’s calculations and more advanced knowledge to demonstrate that, with new energy sources which are on the horizon, the Earth could support a human population of 3 trillion.

This was followed by greetings from Carlos Gallardo Neyra, President of the Christian Democratic Party of Peru.

Harley Schlanger, a long-time leader of the LaRouche movement, followed with an ironically-revealing behind-the-scenes report on the origins of Richard Nixon’s disastrous August 15, 1971 announcement. It happened that on January 23, 1983, a dozen years after the event, John Connally of Texas, who had been Secretary of the Treasury under President Nixon, was present as his possessions were being sold off at a bankruptcy auction, and agreed to an interview. Schlanger asked about the August 15, 1971 decision, and Connally proudly declared it to have been his decision, and a great success. When Schlanger challenged him with LaRouche’s declaration that the decision was the cause of the subsequent disasters, which were, among other things, the cause of Connally’s personal demise, he became despondent, and eventually slunk away.

Daisuke Kotegawa, formerly a top official in Japan’s Ministry of Finance and Japan’s Executive Director at the IMF, sent a greeting backing LaRouche’s distinction between investments in the real economy as opposed to speculation, and called for restoring Glass-Steagall.

Fred Huenefeld, an agricultural economist who has served in multiple government positions in Louisiana, and a long-time board member of the Schiller Institute, gave an animated description of his years of agitating for LaRouche’s ideas and hounding the U.S. Congress to wake up.

Former South Carolina Senator Theo Mitchell, a long-time leader in the Democratic Party and a board member of the Schiller Institute, discussed his work exposing the FBI’s injustice in the prosecution of LaRouche and in its “Frühmenschen” campaign which targeted Black elected officials, including himself.

The concluding section, on “LaRouche in the Universities,” gave youth leaders of the LaRouche movement an opportunity to discuss their commitment to getting LaRouche’s work into universities and elsewhere.

Gretchen Small, a leader of the Ibero-American branch of the LaRouche movement and a representative of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation, began this session with audio segments of the notorious 1971 Queens College debate between LaRouche and a leading Keynesian economist, Abba Lerner, in which LaRouche induced Lerner to admit that Nixon’s economic policy, and his own, were in keeping with those of Hitler’s Minister of Economics, Hjalmar Schacht.

Sidney Hook, a leading academic “philosopher” of the day and an intelligence community operative responsible for stifling unwanted discussions, told a LaRouche supporter—after witnessing LaRouche’s impact on the downed champion, Lerner—that LaRouche would never be permitted another such contest.

The first youth speaker was from the Philippines, Carlos “Itos” Valdez, the son of Carlos “Butch” Valdez, the founder and leader of the Philippine LaRouche Society and many other organizations. Itos gave a sincere and moving description of how his understanding of the movement changed his life, beginning in childhood with his family’s involvement and continuing with his organizing others through the ideas of Plato, Leibniz, FDR and LaRouche.

Carolina Domínguez, an extraordinary leader of the movement in Mexico and throughout Ibero-America, spoke about the campaign to make the work of LaRouche available throughout the university system, and presented videos of three young colleagues from Mexico and Colombia. She described the problem by exposing an economics professor who said the purpose of education was to help students become part of the wealthy 50%, rather than to lift the poor 50% out of poverty.

José Vega of the Bronx, New York, closed the presentations with a video he had made discussing LaRouche’s policy for the next 50 years, including his idea of a “Space Civilian Construction Corps” modeled on FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, to recruit youth to participation in a revitalized space program.

Discussion Session

The prepared presentations were followed by a profound discussion among the participants on the significance of what had been done and what must urgently be accomplished. One comment by Jacques Cheminade briefly highlighted the secret to LaRouche’s success. He said he was delighted to see three generations of LaRouche Youth Movements in action: the early 1960s campus recruit, Paul Gallagher; people now in their 40s and 50s who were recruited by LaRouche in the 1990s-2000s, and are now playing a leading role in the movement; and those now in their early 20s who are ripening as a highly effective force.

The full conference can be viewed here.