Mandag i denne uge markerede den officielle begyndelse af FN’s Generalforsamlings sammentræde i New York City, hvor en stor del af verdens ledere vil være samlet for de næste to uger, midt i en meget usikker, og også meget farlig og omskiftelig, global strategisk situation. Som Helga Zepp-LaRouche sagde i en erklæring, hun udstedte for et par uger siden »En hasteappel til FN’s Generalforsamling«, så kunne dette være menneskehedens sidste chance for at droppe systemet med geopolitik og indvarsle et nyt paradigme, der bygger på menneskehedens fælles mål. I erklæringen siger hun: »Kun på denne måde vil vi overleve som art. Og efter denne standard vil statsoverhovederne på Manhattan blive målt.«
Af denne grund vil der være meget fokus på de første dage i næste uge, hvor statsoverhovederne vil samles på Manhattan for at holde taler og mødes; disse statsoverhoveder inkluderer Kinas Xi Jinping, Ruslands Vladimir Putin og USA’s Barack Obama.
Engelsk udskrift.
We’re coming to you LIVE tonight! We have plenty to update you on, so tune in LIVE at 8pm Eastern.
Transcript
MEGAN BEETS:
It’s Friday evening September 25, and I’d like to welcome you all to our regular weekly webcast. My name is Megan Beets, and I’m joined tonight in the studio by Jeffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review, and Jason Ross and Ben Deniston of the LaRouche PAC science team.
Monday of this week marked the official start of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City, where much of the leadership of the world has convened for the next two, in the midst of a very precarious, and also a very dangerous and rapidly transforming global strategic situation. As was said by Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a statement that she released a couple of weeks ago, “An Urgent Appeal to the United Nations General Assembly,” this could be mankind’s last chance to dump the system of geopolitics, and to usher in a new paradigm built around the common aims of mankind. She says in the statement: “Only in that way will we survive as a species. And by that standard will the heads of state in Manhattan be measured.”
Now for that reason, much attention is focused on the early days of next week, when the heads of state will be gathering in Manhattan to speak, and to meet, heads of state including Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Barack Obama. Now, this brings us to the subject of tonight’s institutional question which reads as follows: Mr. LaRouche, President Obama is set to have a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. According to a senior administration official: “Given the situation in Ukraine and Syria, despite our profound differences with Moscow, the President believes that it would be irresponsible not to test whether we can make progress through high-level engagement with the Russians. In particular, our European partners have underscored the importance of a unified message about the necessity of fully implementing the Minsk agreements. President Obama will take advantage of this meeting to discuss Ukraine, and he will be focused on ensuring Moscow lives up to the Minsk commitments. This will be the core message of this bilateral engagement.” What is your advice to presidents Obama and Putin?
So with that, I’d like to invite Jeffrey Steinberg to the podium to deliver Mr. LaRouche’s response to that question, and also his views on the more general strategic situation.
JEFF STEINBERG: Thanks, Megan.
We had a lengthy discussion this afternoon with Mr. LaRouche, and we discussed this; and for the sake of precision, I want to briefly read you the pretty much exact comments that Mr. LaRouche made, and then I’ll give some elaboration and set some context for what he had to say.
He said: Putin will handle the meeting with Obama fine. Let Obama get stuck. After nearly two terms, it is clear you cannot deal with him. You can only denounce him. He is no good, and never was. Only half-wits support him. Look at what he is. His step-father was the prototype. In essence, he is a nasty. Putin is fine. Obama is dangerous, after his step-father.
Now, I think it’s important to realize that the statement, that was included in the institutional question from a White House senior spokesperson, is typical of what you get from Washington, D.C. today. This is true from the first day of the Obama presidency, and it was true throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, with Dick Cheney looking over his shoulder. There’s nothing that is said in Washington that can be presumed to be truthful. There’s nothing that is said in Washington that can be relied on as an accurate account of what’s actually going on.
The fact of the matter is that the only reason that President Obama, at the very last moment, agreed to this meeting with President Putin, is that he was boxed in to an absolute corner, and in fact, the proposal from Moscow for there to be just such a face-to-face meeting, was made over a month ago, and it took the White House just until the last 24 hours, to make the decision that they could not weasel their way out of this face-to-face meeting. So, when you get this high-falutin’ language about, it would be irresponsible not to sit down with Russia, despite these tremendous differences, and the attempt on the part of Obama to turn the entire issue of the discussion around the situation in Ukraine, and to completely ignore what the Russians have done in Syria — and the opportunity that represents for actually defeating the Islamic State and these other Salafist jihadis — is sheer folly.
Mr. LaRouche’s view is that if President Obama attempts to turn the discussion in that private meeting around Ukraine, his simple advice to Mr. Putin is to just say to Obama, “Mr. President, you made the decision, beginning in November of 2013, to support an outright neo-Nazi coup against a legitimately elected government because that government refused to sign on to a rotten deal that would have wrecked Ukraine, and would have led to the kind of crisis between Ukraine and Russia that we’re seeing right now.” And in fact, that’s the simple truth of the matter. President Obama is committed to the idea of war with Russia. That commitment has been there from literally the very beginning of the Obama presidency, and in November [I think it’s October—ed.] of 2011, when there was a decision made between President Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and then-French President Sarkozy to summarily execute Libyan leader Qaddafi, rather than capture him and put him on trial, and go through the prolonged process with all that would have come out during the course of that trial, Mr. LaRouche said, this is vectored against Russia and China.
Now in the last days, just preceding the events now beginning to take place in New York City, the German national television network, ZDF, aired a news magazine — kind of their equivalent of 60 Minutes — which went through a detailed exposé of the danger behind the fact that the United States is in the process of deploying a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons into Western Europe, and in fact, the B61-12, this new generation, is in fact an intermediate-range weapon which is a clear violation of both the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force INF Treaty that was signed in 1988. These weapons, in fact, blur the lines of distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons. They are no longer simply deterrence against the old Cold War fears that the Soviet Army would come rushing through the Fulda Gap and would basically occupy half of Western Europe before anybody could do anything about it. The situation right now is that these new generation weapons are far more accurate, will carry a much-reduced payload, and can be fired from combat stealth fighters that will reach deep into Russian territory. The fact that the German national television network, a week before all these UN events, chose to put a very prominent documentary exposé of the danger behind this Obama decision, is indicative of the fact that it’s not that there’s unity between the US and our European allies over the situation in Ukraine.
There’s been a decisive break led by Germany, now also including France; because they have come to the realization that Obama is a dangerous lunatic when it comes to Russia, and is jeopardizing the real possibility of a nuclear war on European soil. So, the Europeans have broken with Obama in a very demonstrable way. Germany, then France, then other European countries, have also come out fully supportive of the Russian military deployments into Syria; and have called for a much broader diplomatic initiative that does not exclude Russia, that does not exclude Assad in Syria, and does not exclude Iran. So the idea that there’s unity within the western nations is an absolute fraud. Obama has created the conditions where Europe, in many critical areas of security, is breaking with the United States and is moving — at least by natural impulse — towards seeking cooperation and an alliance with Russia.
So remember, when Russian President Putin a month ago began the deployment of significant military equipment into Syria, this was a strategic game-changer. The United States was in the advanced stages of reaching a rotten deal with Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Kuwait, to establish a no-fly zone in the northern part of Syria that was to ostensibly be a safe haven against ISIS; but was in fact to be a zone where the jihadists could operate freely, because the Syrian air force was completely denied access to that. Now, you’ve got two squadrons of Russian advanced MiG fighter planes at a base just south of Latakia in northern Syria on the Mediterranean coast. This week, several thousand Russian engineers arrived in the port of Tartus to expand and modernize that port to be able to receive larger Russian battleships and supply ships. So the game has been dramatically changed in the Middle East, and it was not on the basis of President Putin seeking out a compromise with President Obama. It was based on taking a very clear political military calculation that by hitting Obama on this strategic flank in Syria, it would completely destabilize the White House; and it would create the conditions where Obama would make a series of significant political mistakes. If he mishandles the summit meeting next week on Monday with President Putin, this will be another indication of Obama walking into the kind of trap that has been set for him; first by his own behavior, and by his commitment on behalf of London and Wall Street to fomenting war against Russia.
And we’ve seen the same things in the case of China. President Xi Jinping arrived in Seattle, Washington earlier this week; and had three days of meetings out there. And now, has been here in Washington last night and today for a summit meeting with President Obama. Preceding that summitry in Washington, the President sent Penny Pritzker, part of the Chicago mafia apparatus that put Obama in office; that created his political career. She’s now Secretary of Commerce, and she was the finance chair of Obama’s two Presidential campaigns. She was sent out to Seattle as a kind of a minder to sit in on all of the meetings that took place between top American business leaders and President Xi Jinping; to make sure that they toed the White House line of making accusations about China unfair business practices in dealing with American companies. So that kind of crazy behavior on the eve of a heads of state summit is another typical indication of how this President has tended to do business. So, again as Mr. LaRouche said, “Putin will handle the meeting with Obama fine; let Obama get stuck. After nearly two terms, it’s clear you cannot deal with him; you can only denounce him.” So that is, in all likelihood, the kind of approach with velvet gloves, that President Putin will take; and that certainly is Mr. LaRouche’s recommendation of what he should expect out of this meeting with President Obama.
Now, I should say that there are elements within the US military — high-level people — who favor the idea of US-Russian military cooperation to genuinely go after and crush the Islamic State and the Nusra front. Their view is that: 1) there must be negotiations on what’s called “de-confliction”; the US and Russia are going to be operating in the same theatres of activity over Syria, and it’s very important that there be a level of coordination to avoid an accidental incident that could get out of control. There are those in the Pentagon and in the US intelligence community who wish to see direct intelligence sharing and ultimately coordinated operations against the Islamic State, involving the United States and Russia. There is a line of communication between President Putin through Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, into Secretary of State Kerry; and it’s very clear that there is both a diplomatic and a military initiative coming out of President Putin. And he’s expected to present that in considerable detail Monday morning when he addresses the UN General Assembly. That’ll be just several hours before his Monday afternoon meeting with President Obama.
So, the Russians have taken a number of bold and critical initiatives. They’ve created a series of strategic faites accomplis; that’s why President Obama authorized Defense Secretary Ash Carter to engage in phone discussion with Russian Defense Minister Shoigu last Friday. There will be a working group at the Pentagon chaired by Carter, but with representation from the Joint Chiefs and CENTCOM [Central Command—ed.] that will be negotiating and talking on an ongoing basis with Russian counterparts. This didn’t come from negotiating and compromising with Obama; it came from forcing his hand and creating a series of unavoidable options. So, Obama is shaken; he’s furious at what’s happened around the Syria situation. He’s furious that the efforts to create a blockade of Russian air links into Syria failed miserably; they couldn’t even get Iraq to go along with banning Russian over flights over Iraqi airspace. So, the corridor from Russia through Iran and Iraq into Syria has been wide open; and that’s the basis on which the Russians have carried out a very rapid and very significant military build-up inside Syria.
So, that’s the backdrop to what’s going to be happening in New York beginning this weekend and extending into next week.
Now, I think that there’s an over-arching message that my colleagues will be addressing throughout the duration of this webcast, but I just want to put it clearly on the table right now, which is that there has been so much compromise, so much “practical decisions” that have been made over such a long time. This long pre-dates Obama, long pre-dates Bush-Cheney, really goes back decades, that the kinds of compromises on core principle have an erosive effect that is a grave danger. In fact, it’s the single gravest danger to the survival of mankind, that there is a willingness to make compromises on fundamental issues of scientific truth. We’ve seen that with the Pope’s compromise in the encyclical, that gave ground to outright British genocidalists on this concept of global warming and climate change. So these kinds of compromises, which are considered to be in good taste, or to be expected of honorable gentlemen and -women, is a flaw, a deep pragmatic flaw that right now has created the conditions for the crisis that the world is facing. So, in the case of the Putin-Obama meeting coming up on Monday: no compromise. Truth. And on that basis we can get through this crisis, and avoid the kind of thermonuclear war that President Obama is toying around with.
BEETS: Thank you, Jeff.
Now, as Jeff just referred to, leading into the heads-of-state meeting that is to begin Monday in New York, events at the U.N. this weekend have been co-opted by the attempt to shape the ongoing discussion in a major way around the rotten agenda, the fraud, of so-called sustainable development. Now, a major part of that was kicked off this morning by the speech of Pope Francis in front of the plenary session, where he again, very unfortunately, pushed the doctrine coming from the British, that man is destroying the Earth, and must shift to a mode of stewardship and living harmoniously with Mother Earth, and to face the threat of climate change. So this began a weekend full of meetings of the U.N. Sustainability Summit around their 2030 agenda for sustainable development, which was, as Jeff said, in terms of a real tragic concession, voted up unanimously by the session shortly after the Pope’s speech.
Now, as we’ve documented thoroughly in these webcasts, and also as is covered in great detail in the newly-released EIR Special Report, “Global Warming Scare Is Population Reduction, Not Science”, the entire program of so-called sustainability is nothing new, and it’s a fraud which has been pushed time and again throughout the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries by the leading factions of the British Empire. So what I’d like to do now is invite first Ben Deniston, followed by Jason Ross, to come to the podium to address, number one, what is the fraud of the policy of sustainable development, and number two, what would a real policy for human progress look like?
BEN DENISTON: Thanks, Megan.
I think I just want to start by referring to Mr. LaRouche’s very clear and concise assessment of the situation around the Pope. You know, he’s, I think, put this question in some terms that have important precision. The question we have, is, what convinced this Pope of all people to go along with this policy which is a genocide program. We may not know every aspect of why he’s going along with this, for his personal motivations. Mr. LaRouche has made that clear a number of times, including in a discussion last night, his so-called Fireside Chat discussion, which is available on the LaRouche PAC website, but he’s made that point a number of times. We may not know all of the motivation behind the Pope himself, but the facts are what they are, and we know that he’s going along with the policy, which is a genocide policy, and we know exactly what forces have moved in on this Pope, and what they’re characteristics are.
First and foremost, what we’ve identified and we’ve discussed on these shows, and we’ve discussed on the LaRouche PAC website, and one of the key individuals is this guy John Schellnhuber, who has been for many years a leading operative and collaborator of the British Royal Family, very specifically in their genocidal population-reduction program. He shares the view of Prince Philip, of the Queen, of this degenerate oligarchical faction, that the world is well beyond its carrying-capacity and needs — and world population must be reduced to around a few billion people. This is the view of Philip, and the other British Royals. This is the view of Schellnhuber. He’s the one who’s become a key advisor to the Pope on these environmental issues, on the so-called climate issue, including playing a leading role in this encyclical that the Pope released a couple of months back.
Now, you know, just to make this clear and put this on the table, just look at the guy’s profile. In 2004, Schellnhuber was deployed along with Tony Blair’s top science advisor at the time, Sir David King, together to go over to the United States to try and strong-arm the Bush Administration into going along with this climate change fraud policy. And apparently they were so egregious in their attempt to strong-arm the Bush Administration, that the Bush Administration issued a formal complaint to Tony Blair, complaining about the trip of Schellnhuber and the way he acted on it. It was later that same year, that Schellnhuber was named an official Honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, by Queen Elizabeth, and it’s been said that he very much is offended if you do not call him by his official title given by the British Royals. In 2005, he worked with Tony Blair to organize a conference for the G-8 Summit in Scotland at the time, on the issue of this climate change fraud. Schellnhüber edited the proceedings of that conference, and the introduction to the whole thing was written by Tony Blair. Since then, he became the key advisor to Angela Merkel in Germany, presiding over the, really, dismantling of the German economy, with their nuclear-exit program, their insane carbon-reduction policy, and their suicidal green energy program. 2009, in the buildup to the Copenhagen Climate Summit, Schellnhuber worked closely with Prince Charles to try and build support for this summit, including making another trip to the United States to meet with then Obama as the President, to make sure the Obama Administration was in line with this whole program. So, you know, he’s got a clear, very high-level track record of trying to recruit and strong-arm leading officials to go along with this population-reduction program of the British. Now, he is the guy who has moved in on the Pope, bringing this entire program into the Vatican. As Megan referenced, just earlier today in his address to the United Nations, the Pope clearly asked for support from the world population, from the leaders represented there at the U.N. Summit, to support the upcoming Climate Summit in Paris this December, where they’re trying to get nations to agree to really a suicidal commitment to reduce carbon emissions in the name of this fraud of a so-called climate-change scare. This is a killer policy, but the point is, that’s the intention. This is being pushed by these radical de-population fanatics. They don’t care about the facts, they don’t care about the climate, they don’t care about the reality of the science between CO2 and the climate — their objective is this population-reduction program. You know, what are that facts we actually know on CO2 and climate? Well, number one: there’s been no warming of the Earth’s temperature on average, for the past nearly 20 years, now, despite the fact we’ve been putting CO2 in the atmosphere at a faster rate than ever. So there’s no evidence that the climate is highly sensitive, or highly responsive, to CO2, and there’s no evidence to show that mankind is going to have some catastrophic effect. It’s just getting ridiculous.
There’s been no increase in extreme weather, despite what you hear. There’s no evidence that CO2 can be tied to any increase in sea level rise, according to the most accurate measurements we have available. And, as an added irony to the whole thing, we know that the planet is actually getting greener, because CO2 is a plant food; it’s not a pollutant, despite the insane proclamation of the EPA. It’s a vital component to the biosphere, and the higher levels of CO2 have actually led to a greener planet overall.
But, the point is, these guys don’t care about these facts. They don’t care about the scientific arguments, because they’re starting from their program of a Malthusian population reduction policy, not any scientific argument. And Schellnhüber is a leading example of this.
Now, Mr. LaRouche has also emphasized the importance of highlighting the role of another figure, another situation, expressing this exact same fight, which is Jerry Brown, over in California, the governor of California. Where yes, he’s also pushing this insane idea for a murderous reduction in CO2 emissions, but that agenda is really no different than his water policy, or maybe better said, his no water policy. The facts are clear; the reality is clear. There’s plenty of water for California. Jerry Brown doesn’t want new water for California. He doesn’t want to develop new resources. He wants to kill off sections of the population; he wants to reduce the population of California.
There’s no shortage of water supplies for the state. They’re being denied to the population by the policies of that governor. As we’ve covered on these shows, on this site, we can get all the water we need for California, and we can actually get it in new ways. We can get it more quickly. We can get it more efficiently than ever before, if we decide to actually act human, and move to higher levels, by understanding how our galactic system operates.
You can ask the question: How do specifically the atmospheric components of our Earth’s water system operate? How does the atmospheric aspect of the Earth’s water cycle operate? Well, you can’t actually understand that unless you understand how the Solar System as a whole is actually subsumed by the higher order system of the Galaxy as a whole. If you understand that, if we understand that, and we act on that; if we act on a galactic level, on a Galactic principle, then we can manage the world’s water supplies in a completely new way. We can bring water to where it’s needed, by managing the atmospheric characteristics of the water system, in a way we haven’t been able to do before.
But people like Jerry Brown — they don’t want that. It’s not that that’s not an option; it’s not that we don’t have that available. They don’t want that policy. The British Royal Family does not want that policy, because it’s contrary to their Zeusian view of mankind. Because this shows us that mankind can go to qualitatively higher levels. We can create new resources. We’re not limited by any finite amount of resources. We’re limited by the boundaries of our knowledge at any given state, but what we can do as mankind is transcend to a higher state; go to a higher level of discovery, fundamentally transforming what the nature of the human species is in the Universe. Just like this galactic perspective is a clear demonstration of that, and that’s what these people hate.
They want their Green program. They want a program of so-called sustainability. Not progress, not creation, not really truly human action, but sustainability, sustaining some prior earlier state of mankind as a fixed animal-like species.
So, this is the fundamental fight going on right now. And this is what’s happening at the United States, with the so-called move to adopt some idea of a “sustainable” policy.
If you go to the fundamental principle of the matter, and Mr. LaRouche was very emphatic on this earlier today when we were meeting with him, sustainability is a Satanic policy. This is a scientifically defined Satanic outlook. Because this goes to a deeper issue, something quite frankly that the Pope should understand, but apparently he either doesn’t understand it, or refuses to discuss. But the issue of what is the true nature of mankind. And Mr. LaRouche said this very clearly earlier today. He said: Sustainability is death. There is no such thing as sustainability. Without progress, mankind will cease to exist. Because the issue is that mankind as a unique species on this planet, is uniquely characterized by a type of creative action, which does not exist in the domain of the animal world. Something that distinguishes our species as fundamentally unique. That this is what should be discussed at the United Nations right now. This should be the fundamental principle on which we discuss a new era of relations among nations, a truthful scientific insight and understanding of what mankind is as a creative species. Not a green program, not a sustainability program.
If you’re starting from a green program, you’re starting from a Satanic conception of mankind. Despite what the Pope said earlier today, despite what these crazy fanatics say, mankind is not a product of the natural biosphere, so to speak. We’re not a product of animal life. We do not exist in any steady balance with nature that we have to maintain. It’s not true.
Mankind, the existence of society today, is purely a product of mankind. We exist at the present state we’re at right now, because of the creative contributions of prior generations that have created the current state of existence of our species. And that is what we need to focus on. That is what we need to understand.
We have to ask these questions: how is it that mankind uniquely creates his own future? And it’s not just something that happened once, and then we’ve achieved that state and that’s it. This is the substance of what makes us human: continual and unending progress. And I think the issue is that we have to treat — if we’re going to treat individuals as truly human, we must recognize every individual’s fundamental inherent right to participate in this process.
It’s not just about biological life. It’s not just about a lifespan per se. Sure, we need better living conditions. Much of the world needs better living conditions. We need longer lifespans, we need better health care, we need better infrastructure. That’s all true. But, for what purpose? Do those lives actually get a chance to mean anything? They can live out their live, you can live and you can die, without even having the chance to make a fundamental human contribution to the progress of society, without having the chance to really be truly human, and actually participate in a creative process to move society forward.
So, that’s the principal issue. That is why a green program, a program focussed on sustainability, sustaining some magical, fanatical idea of balance with nature, some inherent balance that we should just maintain, is a Satanic conception. There’s nothing truly human in it. There’s no actual creation. And so this whole green program — it’s not just evil because it kills people. That is evil; it’s evil to kill people. But it’s evil because it denies people access to their real nature as mankind as a unique species. It denies people access the right and the ability to contribute something unique and something meaningful to the progress of society. So, this is the issue that Mr. LaRouche was emphatic that needs to be put on the table; the actual principle of what mankind is. What is the basis on which we need to move the world forward on a positive conception of true human nature? But even this Green program that we’re talking about here today, Mr. LaRouche emphasized, is only a recent expression of a longer standing fight; a longer standing issue. Today’s Green policy is not really unique; it may have new clothes, it may have a more recent expression. But it’s a much longer standing policy, longer standing fight. And I think Jason has some more to elaborate here on the deeper roots of this issue.
JASON ROSS: I do.
One of the other things that the Pope had brought up at the United Nations was, that in this speech he says that as human beings, we have to follow certain laws of physics and chemistry and biology, because we have bodies. We need to talk about what it is that makes us human. And I’m going to do that tonight in two aspects. One is from the standpoint of the scientist Vernadsky; and the other is from the standpoint of Zeus or Bertrand Russell against the Promethean outlook of man, and talk about what a real human identity must be and what we need to hold on to today.
So, is it true what the Pope said, that we have to follow the laws of nature and biology and chemistry and physics because we have physical bodies? Well, ask yourself this: Are there any unique things about us as a species? Do we apply laws of morality to animals? Do we say that a lion is being immoral when it’s catching, hunting down some animal and then only eating half of it; wasting the leftovers? Are there any rosebushes or orange trees that are going to be attending the Pope’s mass on Sunday? I doubt it. The difference between human beings and animals is an obvious thing to everybody in the sense that it’s not hard to tell if you see something in front of you; is this a human being, or is this an animal? It’s not hard to figure that out. Just as in the study of biology or physics, it’s not difficult to know whether something that you’re seeing is part of a living process or not. Some people might say, “Well, viruses are an unusual case.”
So, what does Vernadsky have to do with this? Vernadsky, the Russian-Ukrainian biogeochemist who regular viewers of our website will have heard about I think a fair amount, he looked at life as a phenomenon. He looked at human life as a phenomenon; and rather than focussing on the actions of individual organisms the way a biologist would, his focus was more on life as a whole. The impact of life, the inter-relationship between life and the non-living material around it, and the reshaping of the originally non-living material around life by the process of the biosphere over billions of years. As a result of this process, we’re going to compare life with non-life, and then look at the human. Because imagine if someone had said, “Well, life has to follow the laws of physics and chemistry.” Imagine if you had gone back to the dawning of life on Earth, and said, “Wait a minute! Life, you’re going to destroy the planet; you’re going to alter everything. You’re going to reshape the soils; you’re going to change the atmosphere. Look at all that pollution you’re making.” This happened in life; the initial life on this planet lived off of chemical energy, such as deep sea vents, things in the crust, that sort of thing — chemical energy. The breakthrough invention in life of photosynthesis, where the light of the Sun became the fuel and power source for life; that was tremendous transformation [that] totally changed life’s relationship to the rest of the planet. It also led to the production of a very dangerous chemical. Unlike carbon dioxide, which isn’t going to hurt anything, oxygen is actually is toxic; you might have said life was polluting the planet. And indeed, the kind of life had to change to be able to live in an environment that had oxygen. New kinds of metabolic pathways were developed that used oxygen as part of metabolism; like we do, as animals.
So, there’s been a dramatic change in life’s presence on this planet. This is seen in the biogenic migration of atoms; of the flow of material from living organisms to the non-living — but almost undoubtedly shaped by life — surroundings. The flow back and forth between life and non-life. The development and growth of an increasing amount of biogeochemical energy. Vernadsky says that life increases its free energy; it colonizes the non-living. At this point, the whole crust of the Earth down to a certain depth, the atmosphere; it’s all been shaped by life. Vernadsky points to other differences. Take, for example, evolution. Now, evolution has a direction to it. I’d mentioned earlier the transition from chemical energy only to having photosynthesis, to developing higher forms of life — animals, warm-blooded animals. The process of cephalization, meaning moving towards the head, where in animal life, more and more of the senses, the neural systems developed into the head. That’s a process that took place over time; making it possible for there to be human beings. Life doesn’t respond the way chemical elements do in other respects. Life treats isotopes differently than can be explained by chemical or physical processes. It treats left- and right-handed isomers differently in a way that purely chemical processes don’t.
So, there’s plenty that distinguishes life from non-life. In a similar way, there’s plenty that distinguishes human beings from life. Despite what you may have heard about lawsuits about chimpanzees or other such animals having human rights; they’re not human. And this used to be an obvious thing. Let me read a section now from Vernadsky. This is from his paper “Problems of Biogeochemistry Two“, and it’s available in a Vernadsky anthology that we put together. (Anthology Book I Here) Vernadsky says:
“From the standpoint of the biosphere, the individual living organism is usually lost from view; in first place comes the aggregate of organisms — living matter. In biogeochemistry, however — in some strictly defined cases — at times it is necessary to pay attention to the discrete organism, to its individuality. It is indispensable to do this in those cases, where the activity of Man appears as a geological factor, as we see happening now, and the individual personality sometimes becomes vividly apparent and is reflected in large-scale phenomena of a planetary character. The human personality changes, accelerates, and causes geological processes of enormous significance, through its presence in the biosphere.”
With human beings, individuals actually matter on a planetary scale; no individual animal matters on a planetary scale, no individual plant matters on a planetary scale, no fungus. With human beings, it’s different; how is that? He said:
“We are living in a brand new, bright geological epoch. Man, through his labor — and his conscious relationship to life — is transforming the envelope of the Earth — the geological region of life, the biosphere. Man is shifting it into a new geological state: Through his labor and his consciousness, the biosphere is in a process of transition to the noosphere. [From the root noeses, or thinking.] Man is creating new biogeochemical processes, which never existed before. The biogeochemical history of the chemical elements — a planetary phenomenon — is drastically changing. Enormous masses of new, free metals and their alloys are being created on Earth, for example, ones which never existed here before, such as aluminum, magnesium, and calcium.”
“Plant and animal life are being changed and disturbed in the most drastic manner. New species and races are being created. The face of the Earth is changing profoundly. The stage of the noosphere is being created. Within the Earth’s biosphere, an intense blossoming is in process, the further history of which will be grandiose, it seems….”
Human beings aren’t animals. Bio-behavior, by looking at human existence over time as a phenomenon; just looking at it a scientist, looking at it as something that occurred. We do things that animals have never done and never will. We transform biogeochemical processes; we create new states of existence in the universe on the Earth. We make new things happen that would not have happened by any means that was purely biological, physical, or chemical; we create.
Now this is a way of understanding the idea of human beings as being made in the image of God, for example. The distinction between human beings and animals used to be, this wasn’t really much of a question. Religions that look to Genesis and the notion that human beings are made in the image of God; that’s a clear distinction. Squirrels are not said to be so made. We see it in the indications that Vernadsky gives of the kinds of transformations we’ve made; so let’s talk about how that happens. And what that means about our identity, and what it means about how we have to approach the future. I want to read a response that Lyndon LaRouche gave last night on a call of activists that we have every Thursday evening. I’ll read the question, too. The question was:
“How do you deal with strengthening the spiritual ability for mankind, or the person to deal with the problem of the world? You mentioned people are becoming disheartened of the fact that the crisis is becoming unbearable for some. But how do you strengthen the quality in defending mankind?”
LaRouche in his answer, said:
“We have the means, mankind has the means to understand mankind. And what I said in an earlier remark this evening, that at a certain point, we are able to understand mankind, how? We understand that, because we are all human, and we all know that we are going to die, sooner or later. And we know that the question is, what’s the meaning of our life? And many people have a big problem, because they have never been able to resolve what has been and what will be, ‘the meaning of my life.’
“So you start with what has been the meaning of your life; then you go to the really tougher question, and you say, what is the meaning of your future of your life? And that means you have think, now, of what you are, and shape what you are going to be, in such a way that you do not feel shame about having lived. That means that you devote your life to making contributions which lead mankind to improve mankind! That is to improve people, living people. And rather than simply taking care of your own greed, and so forth, you’ve got to think about what you can do to influence people, to make the next generation, a better generation than the one you’re living in.”
He says, “That is a short way of saying it; but I think it’s an adequately effective one.”
Now, on this subject, LaRouche — when we spoke to him this afternoon — was very emphatic about drawing the contrast between that outlook that he expressed and the outlook of mankind expressed by Zeus, or by Bertrand Russell, or by John Schellnhuber — sorry, I forgot your title there, John. You do it by not being practical. Now the story of Zeus and Prometheus is one of tyranny. Zeus the tyrant said that human beings were of a lower class than he; he was a god, human beings were these mere mortals. And that the power of fire was something reserved for him alone; it wasn’t for human beings to have. If Zeus had his way, he’d exterminate the human race, as a matter of fact. Prometheus enters the story as the fire-bringer; as defying Zeus and bringing the power of fire to mankind, and in fact, creating mankind. Listen to this; you can understand the creation of the human species as a non-biological, non-animal — we’re not animals. Here’s Prometheus. He says: “Listen to the miseries that beset mankind. How they were witless before I made them have sense, and endowed them with Reason. First of all, although they had eyes to see, they saw to no avail. They had ears; but they did not understand.” Your cat, as much as you love it, probably doesn’t understand a whole lot. “But just as shapes and dreams throughout their length of days, without purpose, they wrought all things in confusion.” He says, human beings didn’t know how to build houses; didn’t know how to use wood; didn’t understand the seasons; didn’t know when to plant crops; didn’t know how to navigate using the stars; didn’t have numbers; didn’t have poetry; didn’t have writing; didn’t use animals to do their chores for them; and didn’t have sailing. And didn’t have metallurgy; he goes on. Prometheus, yes; the fire-bringer. The power of fire which no animal species uses; and creativity itself as a whole, defining the human race.
Now, against that idea of the human race, stood Zeus then and, in our time over the past century, has loomed very large — Bertrand Russell. I’m not going to say a lot about Bertrand Russell; we’ve got a lot of material, we’ve gone through this a good deal in the past. But to give a short reminder, I suppose you could call it, in 1900, Bertrand Russell took up a task that was put down by David Hilbert about, in effect, killing science. The specific idea was about turning mathematics into a branch of logic; but what the whole pursuit meant to Russell was eliminating creativity. To turn science — instead of being something creative where new things could occur, where new discoveries happen; Russell sought to destroy it, and say, “We’ve really got it all figured out; and everything in the future can be derived from the past. We can take the model of Euclid; you derive from what you’ve already got, and that’s all that we’re going to have in the future.” And that really has taken over science; modelling, curve-fitting, throwing in more parameters to explain anomalies in the way that Ptolemy or Copernicus did by adding in extra epicycles. Approaching things mathematically, rather than as a scientist in the tradition of Mendeleyev, Kepler, Cusa, Fermat, Leibniz, or a great musician.
So, I’d like to actually at this point get to a short idea about this from Percy Shelley. Now, Percy Shelley wrote a poem, Prometheus Unbound. Aeschylus’ play Prometheus Bound is only the first of a trilogy, and the other two plays have been lost; we don’t have them. But let me read an epilogue to Shelley’s poem, Prometheus Unbound. He’s writing this to Prometheus. He says that
“To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite; to forgive wrongs darker than death or night; to defy power which seems omnipotent; to love and bear; to hope ’til hope creates from its own wreck a thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent. This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be good, great, and joyous; beautiful and free. This is alone life, joy, empire, and victory.”
That the greatest power that we have lies in our minds; lies in the power to do new things; lies in the power to — as we understand it today through LaRouche’s economics — to live our lives in such a way that not only can we feel good about ourselves, but that we can have access to a necessity. In other words, it’s possible to live a life in such a way that you will have been necessary to the future.
And as Ben said, just as we must prevent people from being killed — murder is wrong; we can’t have a SPCA approach to human beings. To develop the Third World like adopting a poor puppy from the pound, or something like that. That’s not a human approach to our fellow human beings. The development that we need is one in which people are elevated to being able to play a role in that development process itself; and to be truly human. To know what means, to have an idea of what future must be; and as in that quote from LaRouche, to shape yourself, and live your life in shaping yourself to be able to bring that about. That is the highest form of freedom for an individual. And by bringing that to society as a whole, we can achieve the true highest sort of freedom; which is not only a freedom from want, oppression, tyranny; but it’s freedom to express intelligence, a freedom to know. It’s a very developed sense of freedom; the highest sense of freedom. And to make that something that people are able to participate in, is truly the highest work for us today.
BEETS: Thank you very much, Jason.
With that, I’m going to bring a close to tonight’s broadcast. I’d like to thank Ben, Jason, and Jeff for joining me tonight; and I would like to thank all of you for watching.
Please stay tuned to larouchepac.com. Good night.
