Brug jeres enestående, menneskelige potentiale til at
bidrage til skabelsen af en højere tilstand af eksistens for menneskeheden!
I løbet af de 10 dage, siden Tyrkiets nedskydning af det russiske bombefly … , har de barske kendsgerninger, som hr. LaRouche har advaret om i årevis, hævdet sig meget levende, og på uigendrivelig måde: at, under denne præsidents fortsatte politik befinder verden sig kun en hårs bredde fra en fuldt optrappet atomkrig, en krig, der kunne bryde ud, hvornår det skal være, og en krig, der ville blive absolut uden fortilfælde mht. det omfang af død og ødelæggelse, som en sådan krig ville udløse. Engelsk udskrift.
Utilize Your Unique Human Potential To Contribute
To the Creation of a Higher State of Existence for Mankind!
International Webcast for December 4, 2015
MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening. It’s December 4, 2015. You’re
watching our regular Friday evening webcast here from
larouchepac.com. My name is Mathew Ogden, and I will be your host
here this evening. I’m joined in the studio tonight by Jeffrey
Steinberg from {Executive Intelligence Review}, and by Benjamin
Deniston from the LaRouche PAC Science Team. And the three of us
did have an opportunity to meet with both Lyndon and Helga
LaRouche earlier today, and what we present here tonight will be
informed as a reflection of the outcome of that discussion.
We meet here tonight under very urgent circumstances. In the
10 days since the shooting-down of the Russian fighter jet by
Turkey over Syrian territory, the stark reality of what Mr.
LaRouche has been warning about for years has asserted itself
very vividly, and in an indisputable way: that under the
continued policies of this President, the world is currently only
a hair’s breadth away from all-out thermonuclear war, a war which
could occur any hour of any day, and one whose consequences would
be absolutely unprecedented in the magnitude of death and
devastation which such a war would unleash.
As Mr. LaRouche was very forthright in the hours following
that incident on Nov. 24, and was echoed and confirmed later by
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Turkey was by no means
acting alone in the decision to take this incredibly provocative
action, but must have possessed some sort of prior agreement
directly from the United States to shoot this Russian plane
down-the very first such direct military action against a Russian
military aircraft by a NATO member country in over 60 years, and
one taken with the obvious foreknowledge of everything that such
an attack implies in terms of the rapid chain of escalation of
response, and counter-response, which can very quickly, under
these circumstances, lead to the issuance of a command for the
launch of a nuclear strike.
Thus, as Mr. LaRouche has not ceased to warn in very clear
terms, every day that Obama has his finger on the red button of
the United States strategic nuclear arsenal, is a day of
existential danger to the entirety of the human race.
Now in the aftermath of this incident, the dire urgency of
this grim reality has begun to sink in. We saw the article that
we mentioned last week in {Politico} magazine on Nov. 27, by
Bruce Blair, a nuclear security expert at Princeton University,
and one of the cofounders of the Global Zero movement for the
elimination of nuclear arms. The article was titled “Could
U.S.-Russian Tensions Go Nuclear?”, and described in detail the
so-called launch-on-warning status which have the nuclear weapons
of both Russia and the United States on hair-trigger alert in
which the decision to launch a full-scale nuclear barrage by
either side, must be made within a matter of mere minutes, if not
mere seconds. The author, Bruce Blair, says the following:
“The public doesn’t realize just how little time exists for
our leaders to make a decision to use nuclear weapons, even
today. And if anything, the atmosphere has become even more
hair-trigger. A launch order is the length of a tweet. Missile
crews in turn transmit a short stream of computer signals that
immediately ignite the rocket engines of many hundreds of
land-based missiles. For the United States, this takes one
minute. Given the 1 to 30 minute flight times of attacking
missiles, 11 for submarines lurking off the other side’s coasts,
and 30 minutes for rockets flying over the poles to the other
side of the planet, nuclear decision-making under
launch-on-warning, the process from warning to decision to
action, is extremely rushed, emotionally charged, and pro forma,
driven by check lists. I describe it as the rote enactment of a
prepared script. In some scenarios after only a 3 minute
assessment of early warning data, the U.S. President receives a
30 second briefing on his nuclear response options, and their
consequences. He then has a few minutes — 12 at most — more
likely 3 to 6, to choose one option.”
The author also quotes President Reagan, who in his memoirs
complained of having “only 6 minutes to decide how to respond to
a blip on a radar scope, and decide whether or not to release
Armageddon.” — which, parenthetically, is why President Reagan
decided to take up Mr. LaRouche’s proposal for a joint
U.S.-Russian space-based missile defense system, the so-called
Strategic Defense Initiative, to render nuclear missiles impotent
and obsolete. But as we well know, Barack Obama is definitely no
Ronald Reagan.
Now in addition to this article by Bruce Blair, yesterday
former Defense Secretary William Perry, said in a very
significant presentation which he made in Washington, D.C., the
following: “The U.S. is on the brink of kicking off a new nuclear
arms race that will elevate the risk of nuclear apocalypse to
Cold War levels. ” He said, “We’re now at the precipice, maybe I
should say the brink, of a new arms race,” and called for the
dismantling of the ICBM component of the so-called nuclear triad.
And he went on to say, “the risk of nuclear war is exacerbated by
the dismantling of the relationship between Russia and the U.S.
that had been formed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Without
clear military to military communication between those two
nations, the risk of conflict increases. I probably would not
have said this 10 years ago,” he said. But today we now face the
kind of dangers of a nuclear event like we had during the Cold
War, an accidental war. I see an imperative, therefore, to stop
this damn nuclear arms race from accelerating again.”
And finally, we have the confrontation by Congresswoman ,
Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, during a hearing of the
House Armed Services Committee, of Obama’s Defense Secretary
Ashton Carter, which we’re going to play a video clip for you in
just one minute. Representative Gabbard’s remarks were covered
quite extensively in the press, under headlines such as “Tulsi
Gabbard says, Obama Policies could trigger war with Russia,”
which was in the Huffington Post, and “Democratic Congresswoman
Warns, Obama Could Drag the U.S. into a devastating nuclear war
with Russia,” Daily Mail. What you’re about to hear Congresswoman
Gabbard say, also echoes statements that she made a few days
earlier in a CNN interview, after having returned from Paris, in
which she warned that Obama’s policies in Syria ” put the United
States and Russia into a head-to-head conflict, with the
possibility that one side will shoot down the other’s planes,
kicking of what is much larger, potentially world war, and a
nuclear war between the United States and Russia, and she said,
“We’ve got to ask ourselves: what will the costs of this be? The
devastation to the American people and to the world, and for
what? What’s the benefit? Why are we trying to do this in Syria?
Why are we trying to go to war with Russia over this disagreement
concerning the overthrowing of the Syrian government of Bashar
al-Assad. It’s crazy.”
So let’s see this short video clip of Congresswoman Tulsi
Gabbard and Ash Carter:
GABBARD: The policy to overthrow the Syrian government of
Assad has thrown us into a potential direct head to head military
conflict with Russia. I have some important questions along this
line. How many nuclear warheads does Russia have aimed at the
U.S., and how many does the U.S. have aimed at Russia?
CARTER: Congresswoman, I will get you those precise numbers
as best we know them. Let me just summarize it by the fact that
we have a, I’m confident, a strong, safe, secure, reliable
deterrent. But it’s also true that Russia, like the Soviet Union
that precedes it, has a massive nuclear arsenal.
GABBARD: Right. And it would be accurate to say that both of
our countries have the capacity to launch these nuclear weapons
within minutes?
CARTER: We do.
GABBARD: I’ve seen pictures, films, and images from Nagasaki
and Hiroshima; I know you have as well. And I presume you would
agree with me that nuclear war would be devastating to the
American people; the amount of suffering that it would cause and
the devastation to our families, our children, our communities,
our planet, our future generations is difficult to imagine. So,
I’m wondering if there’s been an assessment done on how many
lives would be lost and the damage that would be done if this
nuclear war between our two countries were to occur?
CARTER: Congresswoman, I’ve been doing this for a long time,
including during the Cold War, and working on nuclear weapons
since the beginning of my career. And to answer your question,
there have been estimates made right along. When there was a
Soviet Union, then a Russia, and it’s a very simple story; it is
as you say. Nuclear war would be an absolutely unprecedented, and
result in a catastrophic destruction; that is why deterrence is
so important, that’s why prudence in the field of nuclear matters
by leaders all over the world is so essential.
GABBARD: So the fact that we now have our F-15s patrolling
the Turkey-Syria border with a primary air-to-air combat
operation; there’s no air-to-air combat against ISIS. They don’t
have any air assets. So, I can only presume that the purpose of
these planes would be to target Russian planes; is that accurate?
CARTER: Congresswoman, let me answer the point you began
with, which is we have a different view, a very different view
from Russia about what would be constructive for them to do in
Syria. We have that disagreement; we can’t align ourselves with
what they’re doing. We’re opposing and want them to change what
they’re doing in Syria. That’s not the same as the United States
and Russia clashing; I think that the Chairman and his
counterpart in Russia just talked yesterday about making sure
that we didn’t by accident have any incident involving US and
Russian forces. So, we have a sharp disagreement there, but
that’s not the same as blundering into an armed situation with
one another.
GABBARD: But that sharp disagreement — sorry, sir, I only
have a minute here — that sharp disagreement with two
diametrically opposed objectives. One, the US seeking to
overthrow the Syrian government of Assad, Russia seeking to
uphold the Syrian government of Assad, creates that potential;
that strong potential and that strong likelihood for that
head-to-head combat, or that head-to-head military conflict. And
Russia’s installation of their anti-aircraft missile defense
system increases that possibility of whether it’s intentional or
even an accidental event, where one side may shoot down the other
side’s plane. And that’s really where the potential is for this
devastating nuclear war, for something that could blow up into
something much larger.
CARTER: I have to correct something, Congresswoman, that you
said; which is that I would characterize Russia’s prospective
differently. And by the way, what they say and what they do are
two different things. What they said they were going to do was
fight ISIL and pursue a political transition; and not support
Assad endlessly, but instead, try to pursue a political solution.
What they’ve done militarily has had the effect of supporting
Assad, no question about it. And they haven’t gone after ISIL,
they’ve gone after moderate — that’s our source of disagreement.
We’re having that disagreement and trying to get them to come
around; that is what Secretary Kerry is doing, to a more
reasonable and constructive position. But at the same time, as
the Chairman’s efforts indicate — and the Russians agree with
this intent on avoiding an accidental situation in the air over
Syria.
OGDEN: Having seen that, the question that you must ask is,
what is the necessary action that must be taken to defuse this
very real and immediate threat of thermonuclear war which
threatens us as a direct consequence of Obama’s policies, both in
Syria and elsewhere. And I’m going to ask Jeff to come to the
podium to address this question; but as Mr. LaRouche has
repeatedly said, the only guarantee is for responsible parties in
this country to take the Constitutional action necessary to
remove Barack Obama from the Presidency of the United States,
specifically through the activation of the 25th Amendment to the
US Constitution. Which stipulates that if the President is deemed
mentally incapable of serving in the role of Commander in Chief,
he can be removed and replaced through the predetermined line of
succession. Mr. LaRouche has been calling for this measure to be
taken for a number of years; but just this week, discussion of
this measure has exploded into the mainstream press, including
very significantly in an editorial that was published in the
{Washington Times} by staff writer Charles Hurt, which was
titled, “Has the President Lost His Ability to Discharge the
Powers and Duties of Office?” The editorial begins by asking,
“Has our President officially lost his ability to discharge the
powers and duties of his office? Anyone who listened to President
Obama speak to reporters in Paris on Tuesday, would reasonably
conclude that it is high time to start drawing up the papers to
transmit to Congress for his removal.” And after describing in
detail the rambling and largely incoherent performance by Obama
during his press conference in Paris earlier this week, the
author concludes by stating the following: “Someone alert the
Senate Pro Tem; somebody call the Speaker of the House, and let’s
all dust off the 25th Amendment.”
So Jeff, with all this evidence of a growing acknowledgement
in public discussion of the danger which Mr. LaRouche has been
warning about for years, of world war resulting from the
continuation of Obama’s policies, what can you tell us about what
the discussion is among responsible persons behind the scenes,
and what must be done now to remove this imminent threat of a
global thermonuclear war?
JEFFREY STEINBERG: Thanks, Matt. I think it’s important to
take note of the fact that the {Washington Times} did publish
that Charles Hurt piece, but that there were other commentaries
along exactly the same lines. There was a similar editorial
comment, picking up on the {Washington Times} story in the
{Washington Enquirer}; and in both cases, there were references
to a series of commentaries that appeared recently in the
{Washington Post}, which is generally thought of — along with
the {New York Times} as one of the mainstays of the liberal
establishment media apparatus. You had Richard Cohen and Dana
Milbank, two of the senior regular {Washington Post} editorial
columnists taking note of the fact that President Obama was
completely disoriented and when his teleprompter broke down
during the course of his presentations in Paris, he stammered and
staggered 336 times in a speech that ran a total of 13 minutes.
Never mind that the gathered world leaders were told that they
had a firm 5-minute limitation on their speeches. It may have
taken the President 13 minutes to deliver a 5-minute address; I
haven’t reviewed the text, or timed it or anything. But clearly,
he is suffering from severe mental exhaustion, a breakdown;
someone who — as Lyndon LaRouche identified as early as April of
2009 — suffers from a form of extreme narcissism, can’t avoid
the reality that the world is going in a very different direction
than his narcissistic delusions would have him believe.
Just prior to the attacks in Paris, on the 13th of November,
the President issued a statement saying that ISIS was contained
and on the way to being defeated, and didn’t pose a threat.
Earlier he had called them “the junior varsity of terrorism.” I
think reality tells us something quite different.
Earlier this week, he said that there is no measurable
security threat, here, inside the United States. And what we saw
happen in San Bernardino, California several days ago, clearly
demonstrates that that was not an accurate reflection of reality.
The response of the White House has been to put pressure on FBI
Director, [James] Comey, and on the media, to hold back from
drawing the obvious conclusion, that virtually anybody in their
right mind has drawn, from even the media coverage of that San
Bernardino incident, namely, that it was a pre-meditated
terrorist attack. It’s very much reminiscent of what happened on
September 11th, 2012, when President Obama ordered a false
statement, a patently absurd false statement, about the attack in
Benghazi [Libya] that led to the murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris
Stevens and three other American officials. And that, of course,
is still an issue that’s pending before the House [Select
Committee on Benghazi]. So, we’re clearly dealing with a
situation where the President’s grip on reality is slipping
precipitously.
Under similar circumstances, back in the early 1970s,
members of President Richard Nixon’s own political party, were
grounded enough in reality that they were willing to recognize
that Nixon was “losing it” mentally, and represented a grave
danger to the survival of the United States, and they were
seriously contemplating invoking the recently-ratified 25th
Amendment, that provides for the immediate removal of the
President of the United States. These recent articles, published
this week, have openly said that Vice-President Joe Biden should
reach out to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and similarly
consult with the Cabinet, and consider invoking the 25th
Amendment. That process can remove Obama from office within a
matter of {hours}. And so, we’re here in a situation. We’ve seen
the developments. We’ve saw the Tulsi Gabbard exchange with
Ashton Carter.
And, I think it’s noteworthy, that the statements that Matt
just quoted from, from former Defense Secretary Bill Perry, have
very much bearing on the situation, because Perry and Ash Carter
have jointly written a number of articles in military journals.
They’re very very close. One could almost say that Perry is
Ashton Carter’s mentor. So, if you’ve got someone like Perry
alarmed enough to come out publicly — and really, in a sense,
reverse his own statements of the recent years — and say we’ve
got to get in synch with the Russians, and you hold that up
against what Carter is saying as an official spokesman for the
Administration, putting the onus on Russia, and really refusing
to directly address the issues that were raised by Congresswoman
Gabbard, you get an idea that there is a disconnect from reality,
with respect to the most pressing and dangerous issue facing
mankind today, which is the question, “Are we close to the kind
of incident that could get out of control and lead to nuclear
war?”
Nobody in the Administration is talking about what the
consequences and implications are, of the fact that President
Obama {publicly, after the fact}, endorsed the actions of the
Turkish government in shooting down that Russian Su-24 over the
border area between Turkey and Syria. I’m told by leading U.S.
military and intelligence contacts that there’s unanimous
agreement among the leading countries of NATO, including the U.S.
military, and all of the major European militaries, that,
basically, the Turks had no business shooting down that Russian
plane; it was an act of {absolute provocation}. If Turkey was not
a member of NATO, with that Article 5 mandate for collective
security backing them up, without the idea that [President]
Erdogan had, that he had the full backing of President Obama,
it’s very unlikely that he would have even remotely considered
ordering the bombing of that Russian plane.
Now, what is the aftermath of that action by Turkey? From a
strictly military standpoint, as we talked about this last week,
leading figures within the U.S. military and intelligence
command, immediately got on the horn with their Russian
counterparts. And there was an agreement reached that this would
not be, in and of itself, a trigger for an all-out war in the
region, a war between Russia and Turkey. President Putin
refrained from any direct military retaliation against Turkey.
And that’s a good thing.
What Russia {did} however do, as Representative Gabbard
referenced, Russia has deployed their S-400 Air Defense Systems
to the airbase in Latakia Province inside Syria. That airbase is
32 miles from the Turkish border. The S-400 Air Defense Systems
have a range of 250 miles. In order words, Russia has the ability
to knock out Turkish aircraft 200 miles {inside} Turkish
territory. That’s an area in which U.S. fighter planes and drones
are also operating.
The Russians have now equipped all of their entire range of
Su fighter planes with air-to-air missile capabilities, so that
you’ve got both American and Russian, and now you’ve got the
added complexities of British and French, perhaps soon German,
planes, all flying within that same general airspace.
So, to say that we are not in a situation where the
conflict, even if it’s a disagreement over policy toward Syria,
that this doesn’t represent a hair-trigger situation for a war
that could directly involve U.S. and Russian forces, not
surrogates, but direct U.S. and Russian military forces, would be
an absolute denial of reality.
Now, a number of military thinkers have come out with
measures that could be taken to mitigate the risk. There are
those, including [ret.] German General [Harald] Kujat, who’ve
called for the re-convening of the NATO-Russia Council, to create
a mechanism for coordination between NATO and Russia, in which
the Syria-Turkey issue would be one element of it. Former top DIA
official and retired U.S. Army Colonel, [W.] Patrick Lang, in his
widely-read website, has said that Turkey should be suspended
from NATO, because their irresponsible behavior could, by itself,
be a trigger for general war. There are proposals, reflected by
[U.S. and Russian nuclear security expert] Bruce Blair; reflected
by Gen. [James] Cartwright, who was the former vice-chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff [and] former head of the U.S. Strategic
Command, our nuclear triad; along with Russian [Maj.] Gen.
[Vladimir] Dvorkin, who was the chief intelligence analyst for
Russia’s strategic rocket force — who’ve all said, “Let’s
immediately abandon launch-on-warning. We’ve got to, basically,
create an alternative to this hair-trigger situation, where a
decision about global nuclear annihilation, has to be made in a
matter of seconds.”
The reality is, that there is another option. It’s the
option that was referenced in the {Washington Times} and the
{Washington Examiner}, and even implicitly in the {Washington
Post}. And it’s the option that Lyndon LaRouche has been
discussing {for a very long time}. You’ve got to {remove} one of
the most crucial factors that continues this threat, which is the
continuation of President Barack Obama in office. The 25th
Amendment is there. His behavior in Paris, his erratic behavior,
has caused alarm bells to go off all over the place, and the
question that’s got to be posed, is: “Are {you}, Member of
Congress; are {you}, American Citizen, willing to run the risk of
maintaining a President in office, who may very well be “losing
it” mentally, and who certainly has exhibited a policy of hatred
towards Russia
and particularly towards President Putin, that under the present
circumstances poses a grave danger of general war, a war that
could be a nuclear war.
So, that’s the question on the table. And now that Mr.
LaRouche is no longer the only leading American political voice
openly talking about immediately invoking the 25th Amendment,
maybe it’s time for a serious national debate and dialogue on
that issue to put the kind of pressure on Vice-President Biden,
Secretary Kerry, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, to not run the
risk, to not play, to use a bad analogy, Russian roulette, with
nuclear warheads, and the barrel of a gun, when the survival of
humanity is at stake.
We are really now in a very different place than we even
were a few weeks ago. The actions taken by Erdogan have brought
us to that moment of hair-trigger, and while there are many
things that could be done to ameliorate that danger, the fact is
that none of them are possible so long as President Obama is in
office. So the tools are right there. The 25th Amendment can be
activated on a moment’s notice. We could have a regime change,
purely constitutional, here in the United States, as a measure of
caution against someone in a state of mental breakdown, being in
a position of having his finger on the nuclear trigger. And I see
no justification whatsoever for running the risk of mankind’s
survival, of waiting another day to activate that potential.
OGDEN: Thank you very much, Jeff. Now, I’m just going to
pose the institutional question for this evening, and Jeff will
deliver what Mr. LaRouche’s response was to this, as well as
Helga LaRouche’s insights. The question reads as follows: “Mr.
LaRouche, the German Bundestag has voted to support the U.S.
coalition military operations in Syria against the Islamic State,
and the British Parliament has also taken similar action. What is
your view of German and British involvement in the fight against
the Islamic state in Syria?”
STEINBERG: Well, I think that one thing that’s obvious, the
first comment from Mr. LaRouche on this was, yes, we’ve got to
defeat the Islamic State. It’s got to be done, and there’s got to
be an alliance of countries involved in doing that, and with
that, he said, of course always be cautious. You can never trust
the British.
Now, the fact of the matter is that there are measures that
could be taken, that would lead to the crushing of the Islamic
State, to the taking back of Raqqa, their nominal capital, to the
ouster of the Islamic State from Mosul–the military options are
all quite clear and are being openly discussed, and are being
proposed around the tables all over the place. Seal the border
with Turkey. The Erdogan government in Turkey through the son
Balal Erdogan, son of the president, has been the major source of
black market revenue for the Islamic State, since the very
beginning. We know that there are massive black market oil deals
going on between ISIS and the Turkish black market, which is
really the mafia underbelly of Erdogan’s AKP Party, and the MIT,
which is the Turkish equivalent of the CIA, run by one of
Erdogan’s very close associates.
So, you can seal the borders. You can start the economic
squeeze against the Islamic State. You could create a single
joint military command operation fully integrating Russia, into
whatever other military operations are going to be run. President
Hollande of France, when he was in Washington, and then in Moscow
last week, specifically proposed that there be a consolidated
unified air campaign against ISIS, and that on the ground the
Syrian army be integrated with some of the rebel groups that are
strictly made up of former Syrian military personnel-some element
of the Free Syrian Army, in particular. That kind of ground
force, maybe with some other assistance from the Iraqi military,
along with a massive air campaign, through a single unified
command, could wipe out the Islamic State, at least in so far as
it’s operating out of a major safe haven territory in Syria and
Iraq.
The problem, however, as has been demonstrated by Paris, by
San Bernardino now this week here in the United States–on a much
lower scale, of course– by the bombing of the Metro jet, Russian
metro jet over the Sinai, by the suicide bombings in Southern
Beirut, all of these things indicate that you’re dealing with a
much larger problem that’s not going to be solved overnight. You
can crush the nominal Islamic State militarily, but you’ve got to
address a much more fundamental issue, which is that the
policies, the geo-political policies coming out of the leading
Western powers-the United States, particularly Great Britain,
France to a degree, certainly Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the
United Arab Emirates, Turkey- there’s been a long-standing policy
of promoting the Saudi-Wahhabi neo-Salafist agenda, and spreading
this disease, this Dark Age ideology, all over the globe.
You have large swaths of territory in the Middle East, in
North Africa, in other parts of Asia, that are ungovernable, and
have been turned into no-man’s lands as the result of the
prolonged policies– I would say that it’s the Twentieth and
Twenty-First Centuries’ Thirty Years War, except it began
operationally in 1979, when Jimmy Carter and Brzezinski were
still in office, when there was a presidential finding
authorizing the assembling of the Islamist mujahideen to drive
the Soviet Red Army out of Afghanistan, except, of course, that
operation began 6 months before the Soviets even went into
Afghanistan.
So, we’re in the throes of a multi-generational process of
creating Dark Age conditions in many parts of the planet. If you
were born 35 years ago in Afghanistan, you’ve never lived under
anything other than 30 Years’ War conditions of violence and
chaos. And don’t say that Afghanistan was always like that,
there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s emphatically not
true. Throughout the postwar period, the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the
United States’ presence in Afghanistan was largely through the
Army Corps of Engineers, the Peace Corps, and other organizations
like that, and the place was relatively peaceful and stable. It
was not the world’s opium production capital. So, the point is
that there are alternative policies that must be enacted to
really defeat this Dark Age phenomenon.
The Chinese have adopted the One Belt/One Road policy of
developing vast corridors of infrastructure, of industrial and
agricultural expansion, of water management, throughout much of
Eurasia. For that program to work, it’s going to be urgent that
we achieve stability in places like Syria and Iraq, and in many
parts of North Africa. So, the real question here is, if you’re
prepared to commit to defeating the phenomenon that ISIS right
now is the most visible representation of, you’ve got to be
prepared to fundamentally change your thinking. You’ve got to be
willing to abandon geo-politics, altogether. Abandon the British
Empire, because this policy of permanent warfare across this
great big crescent running from North Africa through the Middle
East and Central Asia, all along the southern borders of the
former Soviet Union into Western China,–that’s a British
geo-political policy. It was called the Bernard Lewis plan back
in the 1970s, of spreading fundamentalist chaos along that entire
what they called crescent (arc) of crisis.
That program hasn’t changed. It’s British geo-politics at
its worst. It’s population warfare at its worst. And those
policies must be abandoned all together. There was even a
commentary this week in the {Wall Street Journal} of all places,
asking the question of whether or not China’s New Silk Road
policy might not be the key to saving the situation in Syria and
Iraq, and throughout that region. You’ve got to give people hope
that there is a viable prospect for a future, if you’re going to
get those leading strata within Syrian society back from Europe,
where they were driven out by ISIS; back into Syria to rebuild
their country. They’ve got to know that there is a commitment to
a kind of a global Marshall Plan, which the Chinese have proposed
as part of their One Belt/One Road policy. I had the privilege,
earlier this week, of being in Tokyo, attending two conferences.
One where Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke about the urgent need to
avoid the war dangers by the United States and other western
countries, by becoming fully involved and committed to working in
conjunction with China and the other BRICS countries on this One
Belt/One Road policy. We’ve got to build development corridors
from areas that are now strictly war zones. I spoke at a second
conference earlier this week with Mrs. LaRouche in Tokyo; and we
both took up this question very strongly. You need a new paradigm
of thinking; you need to think at the level of real human beings
who uniquely are capable of thinking about the future. Of
creating a new future; not one that’s defined by the geopolitics
of population war, but one that’s defined by scientific
advancement, by the betterment of all mankind. So, the issue on
the table is, you can defeat ISIS militarily with some readily
available tool; especially if you drop the war confrontation with
Russia, and get into an alliance with Russia, which means getting
Obama out of office under the 25th Amendment. It’s doable, but
you’re not going to solve the deeper underlying problem of the
consequences of the last 35 years or more of this hideous
geopolitics of pitting one nation, one people against another,
promoting irrationalism and fundamentalism. You’ve got to
basically roll up your shirt sleeves and begin real development
of the kind that China has correctly defined as the win-win
policy of the future.
At this conference, there was a leading representative from
Russia, Dr. Yakunin, who said that the Russians have concluded
that their Eurasian development plan for major infrastructure
projects, is completely compatible with China’s One Belt/One Road
policy. India, as a leading BRICS country, is fully on board with
that prospect. We’re about to develop a plan and publish it in
the coming days, for the United States to become fully integrated
into this global World Land-Bridge policy. But this requires an
overhaul of thinking; and that overhaul of thinking is now long
overdue, because the very survival of mankind is literally on the
table is we don’t make that change.
So, we’ve got a much bigger challenge and a much bigger
agenda. Even if we’re serious about defeating the Islamic State
and other manifestations of this Dark Age policy. It’s going to
have to be done through a vast change in thinking, and a return
to real human thinking about what kinds of projects can insure
not just the survival, but the betterment of mankind going into
the future.
OGDEN: Thank you, Jeff. Just by way of quick introduction of
Ben Deniston, who’s going to conclude our broadcast here tonight,
I want to pick up here directly off of what Jeff just ended with.
As those who have been following the website this week know; and
who had the chance to participate last night in the Fireside Chat
with Mr. LaRouche, Mr. LaRouche’s emphasis has been one of saying
that this entire Dark Age situation which we now find ourselves
in today — both internationally as Jeff just elaborated, and
also here domestically with the Dark Age of rising death rates,
addictions, violence, and so forth, that is plaguing the American
people as the result of 16 years of a Bush and Obama
Presidencies, Mr. LaRouche said, “The future cannot be created by
a continuation of the failed policies of the past. This Dark Age,
which we now find ourselves in the midst of, cannot be overcome
without the conscious elimination and overturning of the failed
axioms of the present system. A New Paradigm today, as Jeff was
just discussing, just as with the Golden Renaissance of Filippo
Brunelleschi and Nicholas of Cusa, is never something which can
come about through an evolutionary change,” as Mr. LaRouche said
last night, “but only as a consciously revolutionary effect of
the intervention of a great genius. The effect that a great
genius has on history; a genius such as Brunelleschi or Cusa. Or
more recently, you can use the example of Albert Einstein.
Geniuses who reject the failed ideas of the past, and instead
introduce something completely new; a valid, newly discovered
principle upon which a valid and viable future can be built. So
this is something which obviously Mr. LaRouche has done
consistently throughout his life; and has based his entire career
on. But for those of you who had the chance to participate in the
Fireside Chat with Mr. LaRouche last night will know, you heard
him call on all of you; on all of the American citizenry to adopt
that perspective of genius as your personal commitment going
forward. And this is obviously something which all of us have to
think about very profoundly.
So Ben, I guess I would ask you to elaborate for us a little
bit, what is the equivalent of the great Brunelleschi’s dome, you
could say, of today; which can be the herald of this new
Renaissance for all mankind today?
BENJAMIN DENISTON: It’s quite a task, I think, Matthew. But
as Matthew said, I’m just going to pick up off of — we’ve been
working on, the LaRouche PAC Science Team — this program of
putting together a picture for the American people, what it would
mean for the United States to join this New Silk Road
orientation. What it would mean for us as a country to really
return to our roots, as founded by people like Alexander
Hamilton, as Mr. LaRouche has put a great deal of emphasis in his
most recently developing flank in Manhattan being real soul of
the nation where we could pivot the United States back to an
orientation like Matt just referenced in terms of a real pursuit
of mankind as a creative force. What will it actually mean for
the United States to once again participate in that process? And
this is something that, as was referenced, at least a thesis
perspective on what that would look like for the United States.
But I wanted to open by just referencing something that was
mentioned earlier, just to get a sense to get at the real
principle of what we were talking about. There was a rather
unprecedented study that came out, a study that’s rather shocking
that pointed to an unprecedented reality which has been uncovered
in just the last couple of months, which is the realization of
the increase in death rates among white, American, working age
people. And we have a graphic illustrating the comparison of the
death rates for this particular demographic, in comparison with a
number of other developed nations. [Figure 1] And we can see in
red there, from 1990 up to past 2010, the change in the death
rate for, again, white Americans from age 45 to 54. And I just
want to put this on the screen for a minute, because there’s a
lot of stats we can go through in terms of what’s happening, and
a lot can be done to give a sense that I think most Americans
have their own clear sense of, living in this nation, of the real
process of death of the U.S. economy, under the Bush-Obama reign.
But I think this one is rather shocking, because these are
people that are supposed to be in their prime. We’re talking
about people who are supposed to be reaching their, towards the
peak of their productive contribution to society, people who are
supposed to be approaching the pinnacle of their ability to
contribute to the advancement of the society of which they’re a
part. And what are we seeing in that layer of the population?
This dramatic acceleration, continual year to year increase, in
the death rate of this section of the population. As the authors
of the study stated, “We have half a million Americans who are
now dead, who frankly should not be dead,” according to what we
would expect from a healthy economic process.
And what’s the cause of this? What are the major factors
contributing to this increase in the death rate? You have drug
addiction, alcoholism, substance abuse, prescription drug abuse,
heroin abuse, suicides. These are diseases of despair as has been
said. These are diseases of a dying society, where people who
should be at their prime contribution to the economic process,
are instead ending their own lives. They’re killing themselves.
What’s supposed to be our leading productive sector of the
economy is instead destroying and ending their own lives, through
their own willful choice of these substance abuse, drug
addiction, suicide, what have you.
So I think this should be taken as a very clear signal of
what’s happened to the United states, what’s happened to the
American economy. And what we have to reverse. And what I want to
talk about just briefly is trying to get at the essence of the
issue, to the degree possible. Because we can talk about putting
people back to work, we could talk about creating jobs, we could
talk about rebuilding things-but that’s not going to get to the
real essence of what we confront right now as a nation. We have
to really re-find the purpose of the existence of our nation, as
Matthew referenced as Mr. LaRouche said last night, in an
understanding of what is mankind’s purpose as a creative force in
the Universe.
Why do people work? Why do people have jobs? Why do people
work to contribute to society? What’s the purpose of existence?
That’s been eliminated really over two generations, increasingly
though in a rapid acceleration, under the Bush-Cheney regime. The
very idea that mankind is inherently creative species; I mean,
that mankind creates its own existence meaning that {you}, as an
individual part of that species, part of that process, can
participate in the actual physical creation of the future state
of society. That if society moves forward, … And what do we
mean by “move forward”? LaRouche has spent decades developing a
science of physical economy. What is economics for mankind? We
can support a greater population, higher population density, with
better living standards for everybody; that unlike the animals,
unlike the Greenies’ ideology, there’s no zero sum game for
mankind. There’s no finite, fixed amount of wealth for the human
species. That mankind can uniquely create a fundamentally higher
state of existence for his species as a whole.
That doesn’t come from merely finding some new resource, or
exploiting some new resource, but from the unique creative powers
of the human mind. Something {unique} about the human mind that
we don’t see existing anywhere in animal life per se. That that
unique capability is the substance, the principle, underlying
what makes mankind a unique force on this planet. We have to
again find our existence in exercising and implementing that
principle–the idea that based on that principle, we can create
wealth for our nation. We can grow our population. We can have a
large population with higher living standards, better
infrastructure, better conditions of life, better health care. We
can provide all that. Mankind has the ability to do that. But the
way that mankind does that is by the creative contributions of
individuals acting in coordination with society.
We’ve lost the connection to that. We have to re-establish
the connection to that. Really in a scientific sense. That
mankind has a real physical immortality that he can create for
himself. He can be the creation of the future existence, not just
the extension of the past, not just the extension of the present,
but the creation of a state of existence for society which would
not ever exist if not for the actions, the contributions, of the
earlier generation of the earlier state.
That’s what we have to return to. Creation of new states for
mankind, not just perpetuating or rebuilding what we had in the
past, but rising to a new level. And we need that now more than
ever. That has been at the root of our existence as a republic,
again going back to Hamilton, people like Lincoln, people like
Franklin Roosevelt-that’s been understood to varying degrees,
that this is what makes mankind unique, and we have to focus our
efforts of government, of society, in exercising and facilitating
that creative process.
So what do we need to do now, today? Just to go through some
of the obvious things that we should be focused on, and doing as
a nation. One leading element is going to be rebuilding our
nation, rebuilding our infrastructure, and in a sense not really
rebuilding, but building anew, building a higher level of
existence for our nation. And one of the things we’re going to be
featuring in our prospective program for the United States is
actually building a modern, high-speed rail system. This is just
obvious. That transportation in the United States would be a joke
if we didn’t have to deal with it every single day. The idea of
people just wasting their lives on these highways. Hours upon
hours upon hours daily, just wasted.
If you go to the third graphic here, we have a comparison,
just to give people a sense of–in the green, we see existing
high speed rail systems in the United States and China. Now, in
the United States this has been debatable whether we could
actually include the green corridor we’ve included as technically
high-speed rail. Relative to what we have, we could consider it
high-speed rail, but that’s not saying much. It’s stretching the
definition, but it’s the closest we have. and throughout the rest
of the United States, you see one proposal, among a number of
proposals, for what kind of obvious, sane high-speed rail system
we should have: travelling 150 miles per hour, to get people to
different locations in a quick efficient manner.
You see China is doing this. You see China’s program now,
what they’ve built, and what they’re committed to building I
believe out to 2020, for their high-speed rail program. So this
could be done. This needs to be done.
We have the water issue. We have, to put it lightly, insane
governor in California, who, despite living on the coast of the
largest body of water on the face of this planet, seems to think
that we’ve run out of water. Well, we have plenty of means
available to us to provide all the water we need. Some of this is
illustrated in the next graphic, the fourth graphic. This is
something we’ve covered in more detail on the LaRouche PAC
website and other locations. But mankind fully has the capability
of managing the water cycle in completely new ways.
We have desalination. LaRouche has been talking about
desalination for decades. Nuclear-powered desalination, you can
provide the water you need in the coastal areas. You can do water
transfer. There’s rivers that exist that have abundant excesses
of water that just flow into the ocean unused. And we can really
go to the frontiers. We can look at mankind managing the water in
the atmosphere. This is actually happening right now as we speak
in various places around the world. We have technologies now to
actually manage precipitation in the atmosphere; increase
precipitation where we want it. Some of this is drawn directly
from insights into how our Earth’s climate system actually
responds to different galactic environments — the galactic
conditions affecting our climate. Understanding this gives us an
insight into how we can manage those conditions; how we can
increase the rainfall where we need it. How we can actually
direct flows of atmospheric water vapor to where they’re needed.
We could be drawing the atmosphere of water vapor from over the
Pacific Ocean into California and increasing the rainfall in
California. We can do that.
Power, energy, nuclear power; we’ve been sitting on nuclear
power for decades. It’s been suppressed; fusion has been
suppressed. There’s been a conscious policy to not put the
resources into fusion that are needed to develop fusion power.
We’ve had in effect a policy of not developing fusion power for
decades. You just look at the budget compared to what was known
to be required to develop it; it’s obvious. And various experts
have made clear, we can have a demonstration functioning fusion
power plant in 10-15 years, if we decided to do it.
Obviously, all this would require a high-speed rail system,
solving our water crises, mass production of nuclear power, a
crash program to develop fusion power. This would force us to
confront the fact that we need to rebuild our manufacturing base;
rebuild our industrial base. We’d be forced to confront a certain
reality that now we look at an unemployment problem; with this
program, we’re going to be confronted with a little more
frightening reality. We actually have an unemployable problem; we
have people who have no skills. We’re going to need to look back
to things like Franklin Roosevelt’s CCC program, and figure out
how to upgrade that and advance that for an entire new challenge
of taking not just a labor force, a society that’s had no
productive work for a decade or more. And look, we’ve had two
generations of zero-growth policy; two generations of
de-industrialization, a shift towards this insane, so-called
“services economy”. Wall Street bubbles. We’ve had fewer and
fewer people who have any idea of how to contribute a productive
contribution to the economic process.
So, we’re going to need to actually tackle all these issues.
And, again, this is not just rebuilding stuff we had before; it’s
not just rebuilding our infrastructure. It’s not just recreating
the state of the economy as it was 20, 30 years ago. This is
looking at how do we increase the potential productivity of the
economy as a whole to a completely new level? Modern
transportation, water, power. We can open up entire new regions
of the continent; entire new territories of the nation can now be
developed. New agriculture; new production; new industries; new
cities. We could actually be developing new Renaissance cities,
organized around a conception of man as a creative process. The
city itself can be an expression of the principle of this new
Renaissance; this New Paradigm that we want to create. The
construction of sane, organized city population areas, centered
around cultural development; educational development. Centered
around universities and cultural systems as the core of the
development of your population, of your society. That organizes
this city. Around it, you have the various agriculture, industry,
etc. that’s an expression of mankind’s creative capabilities. But
actually coherently designing the city in which the population
around this new principle, this new conception of mankind.
So, this is what we can do; this is what we need to fight
for. But I think to attempt to address what Matthew said in terms
of Mr. LaRouche’s remarks in terms of actually creating a new
future; that has to be the number one guiding principle. And Mr.
LaRouche in recent years has again come back to the pedagogy of
the difference between mankind and the animals. And I think
that’s something that most people still don’t understand the way
he understands it. What is it that mankind has that makes our
species separate; that makes us distinct? What is that actual
principle which mankind has the ability to tap into and employ if
he chooses to; if he chooses to organize his society in a truly
human way? And what would that mean for us today? Well, again, it
wouldn’t mean just doing what we’ve done in the past. It would
mean that right now, what we have to do is bring society to a
level that we’ve never had before. And we have to fight to engage
the American population again into recognizing that their meaning
to history, their meaning, period, depends upon that. That the
meaning of their very existence depends upon recognizing that
they have a potential to contribute to the creation of a higher
state of existence for society. And for mankind, if we’re not
doing that, if we’re not organizing society to do that and
exercise that, and implement those creative leaps of mankind,
then you’re not being human; and your population is being denied
an actual efficient access to their true scientific immortality
as a human species.
There’s obviously a lot that could be said, but I think
that’s the principle that we have to focus on; that it’s not just
about creating jobs. It’s not just about employing people who are
various economic statistics; it’s about coming to a new, higher
understanding of economics really as an expression of this unique
spark of human creative potential. And we have to, again, focus
on that as the number one issue; the cause, the substance of what
will allow us to progress and move forward. And that really is
the whole purpose of all of this.
So, we’re going to have more coming out; a lot more can be
said, but I think that’s the challenge that we have right now.
And I think it’s going to be a huge challenge, given what’s
happened to the population; especially in the last two
Presidencies. But the fight is to awaken that in the American
people; they have to realize that this is the only thing that’s
worth fighting for. Fighting for creating the future in a way
that is truly, uniquely human.
OGDEN: Thank you, Ben. And what Ben referred to, is a
forthcoming programmatic feature which is intended to be a
supplement to the EIR Special Report, “The New Silk Road Becomes
the World Land-Bridge”. This is going to be titled, “Why the
United States Must Join the New Silk Road”. I also know this will
be the bulk of the subject of the presentation which Helga
delivered in Tokyo, which Jeff was referring to; and will be
available in transcript form in the next edition of {Executive
Intelligence Review}. So, I’m going to bring a conclusion to our
broadcast here tonight. I would encourage all of you to continue
participating in both the Thursday night Fireside Chats, which
Mr. LaRouche hosts every week, as well as if you are present in
the New York City area, the Manhattan Project meetings, which
occur every Saturday afternoon. Another one will occur tomorrow.
So, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you to both
Jeff and Ben, and please stay tuned to larouchepac.com
