LaRouche: Dvs., at der fra begyndelsen af det 20. århundrede og frem til i dag har været en fortsat degeneration mht. de økonomiske tendenser over længere tid i USA og Europa. Vi må derfor lukke alt dette ned, ikke alene Wall Street i USA, men i Canada, Storbritannien og mange dele af Europa: Luk det ned! Og gå tilbage til Franklin Roosevelts intention med sin reform, ved at lukke Wall Street ned og opbygge et nyt, økonomisk system.
Engelsk udskrift.
TRANSCRIPT
MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening, it’s December 11, 2015. My name is Matthew Ogden and you’re watching our weekly Friday night broadcast here from larouchepac.com. Tonight I’m joined in the studio by Jeffrey Steinberg from Executive Intelligence Review and by Jason Ross from the LaRouche PAC scientific team, and the three of us did have a chance to have a sit-down conversation with both Mr. and Mrs. Helga LaRouche earlier today.
Now, that discussion was largely a development on a very important policy statement that Mr. LaRouche made last night, and for those of you who had the opportunity to participate in the Fireside Chat discussion last night, you had a chance to hear Mr. LaRouche’s remarks live. But what I would like to do during this initial stage of the broadcast here tonight, is to go through in fairly substantial detail what Mr. LaRouche’s remarks were last night, as sort of a statement of policy right up front here, to begin tonight’s broadcast: In order to put these remarks on the record, and to underscore what Mr. LaRouche’s marching orders are for the present moment.
Now Mr. LaRouche said that we are clearly seeing a current tendency of a handful of decent senior people in both the Republican Party and in the Democratic Party, who are beginning to distinguish themselves as potential sources of qualified leadership, and these are persons who could, under the correct leadership, be brought together into a sort of unified organization to create a functional government in this nation. On the Republican side, you see the huge backlash against the outrageous and frankly fascist statements that were made earlier this week by Donald Trump, and as Mr. LaRouche said last night, disliking Trump is curiously a virtue among Republicans. And he emphasized that Trump is very dangerous, and absolutely must be dumped.
And then on the Democratic side, you have those who are now increasingly allying themselves openly against what both Obama and Hillary represent. So Mr. LaRouche said that if we can take these elements from both of the political parties, and, granted, these are persons who might not agree with each other on everything, but if we can find common ground when it comes to at least the core fundamental principles which are required to save this nation, and if we can unite those elements around these core fundamental principles, then we can create a team which will be qualified to confront the urgent crisis that is now facing the United States.
And let me just read a little bit of what Mr. LaRouche said in his own words, to underscore this:
“That is urgent. That is not a choice, that is an urgent command. Because we’re on the edge, of possibly going into a horrible situation. It’s building up fast and we’ve got to take charge. The people of the United States have to take charge on the basis, of the right people from the Democratic side and the right people, from the Republican side. That is what we must stick to, right now.”
Now this doesn’t mean,” Mr. LaRouche said, that you’re going to have a perfect organization. “It does mean that we can bring together these two major elements of our nation. But, that is still not good enough. On top of this, we’ve got to shut down Wall Street. We’ve got to shut it down right away. You can’t leave it. You’ve got to get rid of it. Get rid of Wall Street, period. Because everything you do to try to defend any part of Wall Street, means that you’re killing Americans. And I’m sure you don’t want to do that.
“Now, among Republicans and Democrats who are sane, and human, unlike the other type, the different type, this will work.”
Then, Mr. LaRouche continued: “What we have to do, is make a fundamental change, from everything that most people in this nation have learned. That is, beginning with the 20th Century policy, and up to the present time, there has been a continuous degeneration, in terms of long-term trends of the United States and European economy. Therefore, we must shut down everything that is like, not only the Wall Street system in the United States, but in Canada, in Britain, and in many parts of Europe: Shut it down! And go back to what Franklin Roosevelt had intended, for his reform, by closing down Wall Street and building up a new system of economy.
“But no more of any of this thing. No deals! No deals for Donald Trump. No deals for Hillary Clinton. No deals for any people of those categories.”
We’re going to get two teams together, Mr. LaRouche said. The Democrats and Republicans and some other people who are fit to serve, and we’re going to get what Franklin Roosevelt aimed to do, when he did it in the 1930s. That’s our policy. There’s a certain element of shambles in this whole thing when we do it, I mean, decent Republicans and decent Democrats don’t always agree; they don’t even have the same agenda. But we have to take that part of the policy, build the organization around that, get some degree of unity among those two elements I’ve indicated, and do the best we can to build up from there.
Now later in the discussion on the Fireside chat last night, Mr. LaRouche responded to a question and he emphasized that what he laid out in the initial phase of that discussion, is something that absolutely can be done. He said, because there are people in our nation who are senior, and very important people in terms of their political and economic functions in the United States — and Mr. LaRouche mentioned that he’s in both direct and indirect dialogue with persons of that caliber. And Mr. LaRouche said that what he’s observed over the recent period, is that there’s been a phenomenon of a sort of division among this group of people, because they haven’t been able to figure out the formula for unity, unity among those people who are prepared to make a reasonable agreement in order to save the United States as a viable organization, but he said that what his obligation is, is to concentrate on what that element, what that recipe for unity is.
And this is how he said it has to be done:
“Once we decide, that a significant number, among the Republican members of the organization, and the Democratic Party part, minus Wall Street and minus what Hillary’s trying to do, and under those conditions, you will find that we have a possibility of a very sudden turnabout, where doubtful people are no longer going to be doubtful. Because if we can bring together that kind of unity, around those kinds of considerations, we are able to pull the United States population together around this issue.
“A lot of people will still disagree, but we have a hard core, of both Republicans and Democrats and the thinking that goes with that, and that is the best thing we can possibly do at this time. It’s from that point of view, if we start that, then a lot of other development can be obtained.”
So, at the conclusion of last night’s discussion, what Mr. LaRouche said was the following:
“The time has come, to take Democrats and Republicans who fit the sanity test, and get them into motion. Because if we can get an agreement within a significant part of the totality of our own Presidency, and spill that same spirit, into other countries which we deal with, I think we can make a good headway quickly, and it’s one which is very much needed….
“Therefore, instead of worrying about blaming people who are making mistakes — without question, making terrible mistakes — you’ve got to take the people, who as a group, will build a force which will spread its influence throughout other parts of the United States.
“Because if you just sit and say, ‘We’ve got a terrible situation out there, it ain’t going to work. It’s not working.’ You’re just asking for the worst kind of effect. You have to get in there, form organization, focus on your issues, and get people together on those issues. Without that, everything you will say will become a waste of time! And we don’t want that.
“We want our citizens, to recognize that what I’m talking about, as some Republicans, a significant number of Republicans, and that’s a late reform; and some other members of the House, are thinking a little more seriously now.
“What you’ve got to do is focus on encouraging, those forces, to become unified forces, with a unified conception of what has to be done! Without that we’re dead. So just complaining and denouncing people will not work. It just makes things worse. You’ve got to get people on the issues that mean something to them! Real issues!
“I need to get Republicans, who are decent, but who are not necessarily very accurate right now; we’ve got to bring them into the fold. We’ve got to do the same thing in other parts of the nation. We’ve got to bring the people together. We’re not going to get them all there at once, in one big swoop. But we can organize very rapidly; there are intelligent people, members of the Congress many of them; members of the House of Representatives; other kinds of people like that; and we have a force.
“Our job now is to bring those willing people, who are willing to do that, and bring them together and enlarge the growth of their movement.”
So, that was Mr. LaRouche’s very clear statement of policy last night, and I wanted to go through it in detail, because it’s very important that it go on record, and that it be underscored in terms of what Mr. LaRouche’s outlook is at the current time.
Now, earlier today, as I mentioned, when we had a chance to meet with both Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, the discussion developed from there, based off of what Mr. LaRouche had to say last night. And the discussion developed in the context of the following question which I’m about to read, and which I’m going to ask Jeff to elaborate a little bit of what Mr. LaRouche’s answer was. This our institutional question for the week, and it reads as follows:
“Mr. LaRouche, the European Union’s Executive on Thursday stepped up pressure on the Bloc’s governments to enforce migration rules, launching a legal case against Hungary’s stringent asylum law, and advancing steps against Italy, Greece, and others for failing to implement EU legislation. In your view, how should the European Union manage the refugee crisis, emanating from multiple conflicts in countries such as Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan?”
So, I’ll ask Jeff to come to the podium at this point.
JEFFREY STEINBERG: Thanks, Matt. The response by Mr. LaRouche was very immediate, very rapid, and very clear. He said, the problem emanates from the European Union itself, and the only viable solution for Europe is to break up the European Union itself. It’s become a factor chaos in all of Europe, and the basic policies of the European Union are creating the conditions for effectively the sealing-off of the borders of the entire European territory from desperate people, fleeing the wars in places like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, which have been creations of the policies coming from the United States and from Europe over the course of the last 15 years — really, the problems go back even earlier. In effect, the Afghan operation began in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was still President of the United States, and Zbigniew Brzezinski was the National Security Adviser, taking his cue from a high-level British intelligence figure named Dr. Bernard Lewis.
That was the beginning of the promotion of the terrorist apparatus, that at the time was known as the Afghan mujahideen. They were called freedom fighters. A number of years later, they were known as al-Qaeda, and more recently, they’ve morphed into other even more virulent forms, such as the Islamic State.
So, the policies that have come out of the trans-Atlantic region, including policies emanating from the European Union, have been catastrophic, and they’ve brought the entire trans-Atlantic system to a point of absolute breakdown.
Now, at the same time that we’ve seen this policy of building a wall around the European region, and of creating the conditions for widespread deaths of desperate refugees trying to get into Europe, to escape the ravages of the war in Libya, for example, which came about because Britain, France, and the United States, Cameron, Sarkozy, and Obama — with a very strong endorsement from Hillary Clinton, unfortunately — overthrew and assassinated Libyan leader Qaddafi, and opened the floodgates for a jihadist stronghold on the Mediterranean shores of the Maghreb region of Africa.
Weapons flowed out of that area, into Syria, fueling the rise of the Islamic State. So Europe, particularly Britain and France, with the full complicity of the Obama Administration in the United States, created that refugee crisis in Northern Africa. Similarly, the United States and Britain created the catastrophes in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and it’s been the regime change policy of Washington and London to overthrow the Assad government in Syria, that’s led to the rise of the Islamic State, and created yet another major refugee flow into Europe.
So the European Union’s policy of shutting out those desperate people, is basically a condemnation of those people to mass death.
Now, internally within Europe itself, over the past week, we’ve seen four major banks in Italy go bankrupt, and under the policies adopted by the European Union and the European Central Bank, those banks have looted their depositors’ funding in a massive bail-in operation, which has meant the impoverishment of scores of citizens, hundreds, thousands of citizens of Italy, who thought their money was protected under the guideline rules of the European Union, only to find that the Cyprus model of bail-in has looted their accounts. There’s now an ongoing criminal investigation in Italy, because one of the depositors who had his entire life savings looted, committed suicide, and there’s an appropriate investigation now underway, as to the fact that the policies of the European Union, the European Commission, and the ECB, acted upon by the leading management of those banks, was a direct cause for a death.
So, you’re talking about a capital offense having been carried out.
This is the legacy of the European Union. And what Mr. LaRouche said, is that the theft of funds in Italy, along with the sealing-off of the European borders, is a worse form of fascism than we’ve seen since the end of World War II. And the same exact trend is in existence in the United States, under the top-down direction of Wall Street. He said, when you take people’s lives away, this is an act of mass murder, and this is an act of a policy of outright fascism. Wall Street, London fascism.
We’ve seen similar things going on in Greece. And therefore, the starting point for any kind of solution, for Europe in particular, is that you’ve got to destroy the European Union. Whatever benefit some people may have argued in the past, may have been associated with the EU, are now vastly overshadowed by the damage and negative factors. Bail-in as a policy is unforgivable. We already have bail-in in Europe. We already have bail-in in the United States — it’s yet to be acted upon, but it’s there, imbedded in Dodd-Frank, in Article 2 of the Dodd-Frank Act. Anyone involved in these policies deserves to be immediately pushed into jail, immediately. These are mass kill policies. These same mass kill policies are playing out in Paris at the COP-21 forum, and an outright mass genocidalist, Hans Joachim Schellnhüber, one of the leading advisors to the Pope on this issue of global warming, is calling for the Pope to step in and make a “religious intervention” to salvage the COP-21 conference, because leading nations in the developing sector are saying, “This is flat out a policy of genocide; we will not go along with it.” Malaysia, India, in particular, have taken the lead on this issue.
Now, the policies that we’re discussing, in the case of the European Union, are being carried out with the same ferocity here in the United States. And what we’re seeing, in terms of the reaction against the [Dec. 2 mass killing] incident that took place in San Bernardino, California, the overall blanket condemnation of Islam, the stoking up of this hatred ,on the part of Donald Trump, among others, is a further indication of the degeneration of the entire political situation.
Now, as Matt said earlier, quoting Mr. LaRouche from his Fireside Chat on Thursday night, there are clearly people of good will in both political parties, who’ve got to, basically, forge a non-partisan political alliance. We’ve got to clean out the garbage, and we’ve got to create the condition where the Presidential election in 2016 represents a return to core principles upon which this nation was founded. Many people are familiar with the first President of the United States, George Washington’s Farewell Address, from the standpoint of his warnings against foreign entanglements. But, in that same Farewell Address, George Washington warned against the tyranny of political parties, the tyranny of factionalism and sectionalism, and those warnings ring more true today, than perhaps at any point in recent memory.
Now, you’ve got some serious members of Congress, both the House and the Senate, and it’s not surprising that the areas where there is already common collaboration, are areas that are the most relevant to the issues that Mr. LaRouche put on the table, namely, wiping out Wall Street, and wiping out the power of the British Empire system, which still dominates the trans-Atlantic region. You’ve got a large and growing numbers of members of both the House and the Senate, who are supporting the idea of the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, which would be an efficient means of bankrupting Wall Street, in one fell swoop.
Many of those same members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, are also demanding the release of the 28 pages from the original 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, the September 11, 2011 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Remember, that those 28 pages catalog the role of the Saudi royal family, the role of Saudi intelligence, the role of the Saudi Ambassador at that time to the United States, Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, in financing the hijackers who carried out the greatest terrorist atrocity on U.S. soil in recorded history.
So, there are movements that strike at the heart of the problems that are facing this nation and are facing the world — that combination of people, many of them in Congress, others in the military and intelligence domain, former leading military figures, like [ret. Lieut.-]Gen. Michael Flynn, who we’ve talked about repeatedly in recent weeks on this broadcast. Michael Flynn was in Moscow this week, speaking at the 10th Anniversary Conference of RT, along with a number of other prominent American critics of the Anglo-American policy.
And Gen. Flynn correctly emphasized that to destroy ISIS, to defeat the Islamic State decisively, there must be cooperation between the United States and Russia. Others, leading retired military and intelligence figures, have come out publicly and said there must be a joint, unified, military command, conducted by the United States and Russia. Russia is an invited power that’s been asked in to Syria to help the Syrian government to fight the Islamic State. The United States has been, similarly, invited into Iraq, to do the same thing, until our invitation runs out. If there were a joint effort, the United States launching a pincer attack from the Iraq side, Russia launching a pincer attack with Syrian military forces from the Syrian side, you could crush the Islamic State. You could decisively defeat it.
So, there are people who are thinking strategically. We’ve got to take all of those elements, and create the kind of team that can coalesce around a viable American Presidency. And that both can and must happen, in the immediate period ahead. Trump, Hillary Clinton — these are not viable figures. They’ve demonstrated that repeatedly in the recent period. President Obama is not a viable figure. I had meetings, just in the past week, where a number of leading figures were expressing grave concern that the United States will not survive, if Obama remains in office for the next 13 months. There are people now who are openly discussing the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment. We talked about this last week.
Many people were shocked to see President Obama’s psychological meltdown on three recent occasions: first, you had the joint press conference with French President [François] Holland, following the Paris attacks of November 13th, where Holland was clearly in a frame of mind of marshalling for war, and President Obama was disassociated, disconnected, and thoroughly emotionally blocked, on the greatest challenge facing the trans-Atlantic region, in memory. Then in Paris, at the CO-P21 conference, where the [series of coordinated terrorist attacks] that took place on Nov. 13th in Paris, were trumping the issues that were nominally on the table, around “global warming.” Obama’s [Nov. 16th] press conference in Paris was shocking, in terms of the level of disassociation from reality. And so people became openly alarmed. And then, again, last Sunday evening, when the President dragged a podium and a teleprompter into the Oval Office, to deliver what was supposed to be a rallying cry for a war against the Islamic State, after the attacks in San Bernardino. And, once again, it was a disconnected, disassociated, policy statement that had nothing in it of any content.
People are talking about the need for the 25th Amendment. It’s been out in the media. Behind the scenes in Congress, it’s being discussed intensively, to the point that President Obama dispatched [Senior Advisor to the President] Valerie Jarret to Capitol Hill this week, to basically tell Democrats that the Republicans are getting ready for impeachment, and that the Democrats better be prepared to rally behind Obama. This is absolute nonsense, but indicates a further level of paranoia, emanating from the inner circle at the White House.
So, this Presidency has to be ended, using Constitutional means. And, frankly, at this point, the 25th Amendment is far more viable as a means to do it. Either members of Cabinet, or leaders of the Congress, can take action to convene a review, and immediately suspend the Obama Presidency, and move on from there. This is both necessary and vital for avoiding the kind of war danger which continues to emanate from this White House; even as military figures like General Flynn, like former Defense Secretary Bill Perry, echo warnings that we are closer to a thermonuclear war of annihilation than we were even at the height of the Cold War.
So these are real issues. You can’t tolerate the continuation of this existing system; whether it’s in the European Union case or it’s in the case of the Obama Presidency. We need the kind of change that is only going to come about from this sort of rallying of a nonpartisan grouping of leading figures who don’t think of themselves any longer as Democrats or Republicans; but as responsible leaders of a republic facing its gravest crisis in recent history. If we can do that, if we can marshal those forces, with the proper mobilization of you, the citizens of this country, we can get through this crisis and turn things around. But anything short of that, leaves us dangerously on the edge of destruction.
OGDEN: Thank you Jeff. What I read from Mr. LaRouche earlier was sort of a thesis along which lines we were going to follow through on the course of the remainder of this broadcast. And I want to call your attention to one short part of those remarks that I did read, but I want to underscore as sort of an introduction to the next segment of what you’re about to see. One thing that Mr. LaRouche said last night is the following: “What we have to do is make a fundamental change from everything that most people in this nation have learned. That is, beginning with the 20th Century policy and up to the present time, there has been a continuous degeneration in terms of long-term trends of economy and culture.”
Now, last week, at the concluding of the webcast, as an introduction to Benjamin Deniston’s segment, I referenced another very important statement that Mr. LaRouche delivered at the conclusion of his previous Fireside Chat; the one of last Thursday, on the topic of how history actually works in terms of mankind’s obligation to willfully generate his own future. In order to set up what Jason Ross is going to present to us in the remainder of this broadcast tonight, I would actually like to read that statement in full; what Mr. LaRouche had to say on this subject last week. What Mr. LaRouche said was the following:
“There is no such thing as an evolutionary process of development of human culture. There are effects which occur at certain times, but then suddenly, the whole culture collapses; vanishes. Then, somebody else arrives and stimulates something new, and gives mankind another chance at progress. And our job is to understand this question of progress; and progress is not an evolutionary process. It’s always a revolutionary process; it is never evolutionary. And everybody who is sitting around waiting for a revolutionary process is just kidding themselves. A revolution of that type has to be an act of genius, which comes as if from nowhere; but that’s the way mankind succeeds. And I’m looking for people who will do that kind of work, and become the geniuses who cause the future to be reborn again.”
So, let me ask Jason to speak on that subject.
JASON ROSS: All right; thanks. One key figure who LaRouche has pointed to for understanding this notion of breaks, of jumps, of revolutions in human self-conception and in the history of our species, is Filippo Brunelleschi. Who, along with Cusa and Kepler, was one of the three real founders of modern science. I’m going to read another quote from LaRouche; this is from the show this Monday. LaRouche had said, “Most of human history is breaks; breaks in human history, and evil periods and broken periods came into existence in the history. And so then, what Brunelleschi did was, he brought in a concept of science which is unique in terms of what is known today. Most people who were educated in this have no comprehension whatsoever of what Brunelleschi did. It’s all available there for people if they were to study it enough; and it was brilliant, it was absolutely unique. And so, I would say, the problem is that in our location itself, and in other locations, the lack of understanding of the work of Brunelleschi is the reason for the source of stupidity shown by even many of our own members on this. And therefore, it’s extremely important that we realize that we are facing a great challenge threatening us. And the Obama administration is an example of the great danger to the existence of the human species. And this kind of thing, which is expressed by the work of Brunelleschi, is actually the solution; the key to the solution to understand actually how things were intended to work.” What I’d like to do tonight is help give some background to the point that Mr. LaRouche is making by going through some of what Brunelleschi did in his life, and then come to some conclusions from that about intent and about shaping history today.
So, Brunelleschi himself — he lived from 1377 to 1446 — what he’s most known for is the construction of this magnificent dome [Fig. 1]. What you see here is the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiori in Florence. You can just see from this picture, this is far larger; it dominates the entire city. It’s an incredible accomplishment. And you might be able to make out, standing on top of the red dome at the base of the white lantern as it’s called which tops it, there are people there, standing at a railing which may not even be visible as more than a pixel to you. It gives some sense of how tall this structure is. At the top of that gold ball on the top, which Da Vinci helped create, it rises higher than the US Capitol. This is an enormous building; and it was built over the period of the 1300s and 1400s.
So, to give a little bit of background about the other things that Brunelleschi did as a very frankly, universal genius, I want to step through some other things in his life. These aren’t in chronological order, but I want to give a sense of what he did, to then come back to the dome. Among his accomplishments was the purported first construction of a spring-based watch, so you could actually have a clock that was based on springs, as opposed to weights, as they were made at the time. I’m not really entirely certain that that was done. He did work on perspective; he had created a sort of a “trick” painting that incorporated a mirror; so that if you stood in the right place, you would have an effect where the mirror would become part of the painting. To show his work in sculpting — if we see the next image — he was officially apprenticed as a goldsmith, which is the same occupation that Donatello, his friend the great sculptor, took up. Verrocchio, who was Da Vinci’s mentor, Da Vinci himself; these were goldsmiths. Here you see one of his first projects, which was on the right [Fig. 2] a panel he submitted for a competition to design a set of doors for the Baptistry in Florence there. He didn’t win; this was one of his first tries at getting a commission, but this is from him early in life. You get a sense of what kind of skill he had.
The next image [Fig. 3], we see a painting in Santa Maria Novella in Florence by a colleague of Brunelleschi’s; this is by Masaccio, and it’s painting of the Trinity. You may not notice, but there’s a dove there as the Holy Spirit in between the Father in the back and Christ in the front. This is the first painting that really used perspective, so that on the flat wall of the church, you had a space that was created there; where the boundary, the type of the medium was broken. And something flat turned into something solid. Leon Battista Alberti, later the writer of a very famous book on painting, credited Brunelleschi with the invention of perspective. And this is the work of one of his colleagues.
We see in the next image [Fig. 4], on the left we see an image of a crucifix, Christ on the cross that was made by Donatello. Brunelleschi saw it, and he said that he didn’t really think Donatello had done a good enough job; he thought that Christ looked a little too “meaty” — that wasn’t the word he used. But Donatello said all right; well, you take a shot at it, knowing that this wasn’t exactly Brunelleschi’s foremost skill as a sculptor. But Brunelleschi created the image you see on the right [Fig. 5], and in Donatello’s eyes, it was superior.
The next image, we see a building that he had designed [Fig. 6]; this is a very nice looking building. It’s got what’s called a loggia on the front; a sort of porch, the sort of thing you would see on the front of the house of a wealthy Roman from the height of the Roman Empire, or in Venice. This is a building for orphans, this is the Ospedale degli Innocenti; and da Vinci brought that humanist approach to the beauty of the individual in constructing this building for orphans, where a decision could have been made to do this on the cheap. Let’s throw up something that looks like it might have come out of East Germany in more recent times; but no, this is what he created.
The next image [Fig. 7], we see the interior of a church, Santo Spirito, which was designed by Brunelleschi; and although it’s difficult to get a sense of space when you see still images, these are buildings which give you a sense of goodness and beauty walking through them. They’re beautiful buildings. One more beautiful building we see here in the next image [Fig. 8], is the exterior — unfortunately this is the outside of the Pazzi Chapel that LaRouche has made frequent reference to. Inside the chapel, which was designed by Brunelleschi, there is a really astonishing quality of sound; reverberation, echo, but not simply echo. As LaRouche has put it, if you sing to it, it sings back to you. And I’d like to read some words from the Italian soprano Antonella Banaudi, who spoke about this chapel in a conference of the Schiller Institute in Berlin in 2012. Banaudi said, “I recently went to the Pazzi Chapel in Florence; the Florence of Brunelleschi and Ficino. In its naked proportion and simplicity, in the balance of light and colors, it gave a beautiful resonance to the sound of my voice. A demonstration that it is the proportion, the idea translated into construction, that resonates inside of us. The emotion I felt in hearing a response from the stone that almost supported me in singing; as if the stone were alive and expressing itself through cosmic vibration, made me feel part of a whole that unites stone and man in a harmony that is the reason for the existence for everything. It is the same harmony that we seek and experience when singing together, playing together, participating in a sort of rite or celebration that is beyond religion and is profoundly moral and human.” Pretty good endorsement for a singing space.
So now, let’s come back to the dome; I’d like to talk about its background and creation. The first stone was laid for its construction back in 1296, and construction was continuing through the 1300s; at a time when Florence saw a great period of growth. In 1367, there was a referendum on how to build the cathedral. I know I’ve got local things that come up on the ballot, like school bonds, or things like that. Imagine having this to vote on. There was a referendum for two designs for the cathedral, which at that time was certainly nowhere near complete. And the referendum was to vote between the structure you see here, which is obviously the one that won the referendum. The alternative approach was one that had a different idea of building. You see on the cathedral here, the windows are very small; this is not a bright cathedral on the inside. It’s very spacious, it’s enormous; but there’s not a lot of natural light coming in through those huge stained glass windows that you might associate with the beginning of the cathedral movement in Europe. Those cathedrals with the huge windows, given that they had a lot of glass and not a lot of stone to hold the building up, had those arches on the outside — the flying buttresses to hold it in. But the vote on this referendum, which Brunelleschi’s father voted in, and he voted for this design which eventually won; was to forego the windows for a more beautiful design of the building as a whole. And it laid out some requirements for the dome.
At the time, no one knew how to build the dome, but its general height was proposed; the height of that ring above the height of the rest of the cathedral to the dome was set. So, this occurred in 1367. To give a couple of numbers, the cathedral is 140 feet tall; the timbre, that extra ring before the dome starts, is another 30 feet tall; and then the dome itself goes to 300 feet with another 70 or so for the lantern and the ball and cross on top of it.
Brunelleschi was born ten years after this referendum in 1377. He lived a few blocks from the cathedral; he would have — you couldn’t have missed this obviously, if you lived in Florence anywhere. But living only a few blocks from it, he saw this every day; he saw the construction taking place. This is the kind of thing that would cause a young person to have an incredible sense of wonder. So, as he became a more accomplished sculptor, artist, architect, goldsmith, he entered later in his life, in 1418, another competition. And this was the competition to become the contractor, so to speak, to build the dome.
Now, there’s a lot of difficulty in terms of how you would build the dome; and it raised a very important question of construction. So in the next image [Fig. 9], you see a typical sort of Roman dome; you can barely even see that there’s anything going on there. This is the Pantheon; and you can see there’s a bit of a pimple or something sticking out of the top of it. That dome is about as wide as the one in Florence, but you can barely see it; it’s in the shape of a sphere. It’s 23 feet thick at the base, where the dome starts to come out of the rest of the building; that’s how thick they had to make it to hold itself up, and the way it was built — Let’s see the next image [Fig. 10] for a similar example of construction. If you thing about the images — maybe you’ve seen Roman aqueducts with the semi-circular arches along the way — the way that they’re built, this is the Pont du Gare in today’s France. The way that these arches were built was that you built a scaffolding underneath while you built the circular arch; and once the whole arch was done, and you put the keystone on top, then it would support itself. The two parts that are trying to lean inward on the two sides could lean against each other and hold themselves up. So, here you can see this type of construction being applied to an arch today in the next image [Fig. 11]. This is in Morocco. You can see there’s scaffolding.
Now, the dome is very large. It would have been impossible to build scaffolding under the dome. It began at the height of 170 feet; there are no trees that tall. This is beyond the height of trees. So, if you’re trying to put up a bunch of posts to go underneath this thing to hold up the dome as you’re building it, you’re not going to get enough wood. It would have taken 1000 trees anyway, even if you could have big enough ones; it was basically impossible. So, what Brunelleschi had done in this competition is, he said it’s not an issue. I’ll build this dome without scaffolding. I’ll build this dome without centering, he said.
So, people asked him, “How are you going to do this?” He actually responded with a joke. I don’t know if it’s a true story about him, but a story about an egg, where he said, here’s the challenge; how do you make an egg stand up on its base. And Brunelleschi took the cooked egg and just cracked it down, flattening the bottom, and said, “There you go; see? The egg stands up just fine.” And they said, “Well, if we knew that, we could have put the egg up.” And he said, “Exactly. I know how to build this dome, and you don’t. So, you’re not going to understand it, but I can do it. I’m your man.”
In the construction, he developed a number of new techniques. So, I’m going to talk about the overall shape of the dome; and Lyndon LaRouche has emphasized the importance of the catenary principle in this. The catenary is just a word that means chain; it just means chain-ish. So, the catenary, the shape of a hanging chain, it’s a shape that’s not coming from geometry, it’s not in Euclid; you can’t make it with a compass and a straight edge, the kinds of things you do in geometry class. It’s a physical shape that’s made by a physical thing — a chain; it’s something real and physical. It has a different kind of curvature in every spot of it; and LaRouche sees in Brunelleschi’s use of this principle in the construction of the dome, that Brunelleschi rejected the idea of linearity in the small. That in the infinitesimal, there’s always an activeness to it; it’s not flat, it’s not linear.
In building this dome, let’s take a look at some of the technologies Brunelleschi developed. In addition to being a sculptor and a goldsmith, he was also a very good contractor. The next image [Fig. 12], you see a crane that he had developed. If you’re lifting a bunch of material up to the top of this dome, you don’t want to be carrying it up all those steps. If you imagine you’re carrying every brick up these steps, that would be a very grueling and tiring way to build this. So what he did was, he repurposed, he developed a new way to use a winch system to lift material. Before him, they used cables to lift things up, but they would use people, because people could turn around more easily than animals. So before Brunelleschi, they used basically a giant hamster wheel with people in it, a treadmill. And people would run in it, and that would twist the cranks and lift the bucket up; and when it came time to bring it down, they’d run the other way. The difficulty of using animals — this is a picture of a horse by da Vinci [Fig. 13], but oxen were used is, you can’t make them go backwards; they don’t like to turn around. So, here you see a transmission. Brunelleschi built this with two sets of pegs on the vertical axis to connect to the horizontal one, where you’d change the height of it, and you could make it go forward or in reverse without making the animals change direction. So, what a guy.
In the next image [Fig. 14], you see an interior schematic of the dome itself, where here we see another chain. Four stone chains, a wooden chain which you can see inside the cathedral today, and a metal chain which is believed to exist. Sort of like the hoops around a barrel to hold it in, Brunelleschi built in these chains to help hold in the dome. This let him build it very thin, and actually surprising light. Unlike the dome of the Pantheon, which was 23 feet thick at its base, the inner dome that Brunelleschi built was only 7 feet thick; and the outer dome — the one that you see on the outside of the building — is only 2 feet thick at its base, which is pretty astonishing.
So another aspect we see in the next image [Fig. 15] is the brickwork which Brunelleschi used. Rather than flat layers of brick, where the bricks would basically fall off or cave in, Brunelleschi didn’t know how sheer lines; and with this space that you see here, this is the space between the inner and outer dome that you walk through to get up to the top. This was a new technique that required 4 million bricks; these were custom shaped bricks; all different sizes. He made these bricks very well; he’d season them for two years before he’d bake them. This was a major, major undertaking.
So, the dome is under construction; it takes over a decade and a half. The Pope himself comes to announce that it’s complete. The Council of Florence, which I think people who are familiar with Mr. LaRouche’s work will have heard of; this important council to pull for unanimity and to resolve religious differences, was held here in Florence with this cathedral. Which I’m sure had an amazing impact on the participants. If you’re trying to think through what’s the relationship of God and man; and you’re in this incredible, astonishing, unbelievable construction, I think that’ll have an effect on what you believe man’s identity to be, for sure.
So, shortly after that, Brunelleschi died. The white lantern on the top made of marble — and this terrified people living in the area, because that’s tons and tons and tons of marble. They were amazed that the dome was up at all; when it came time to bring even more weight up on top, to add the marble on those ribs, to add the marble for the lantern, people thought it was going to crack, it was going to break. Obviously, it didn’t; it’s still here. In 1461 it was completed, and as I mentioned, da Vinci was part of the crew that helped build that golden ball that you see at the very top there. So, this takes us from Brunelleschi into da Vinci.
That other image you saw of the light on the ground, in 1475, Toscanelli put a plate inside the lantern to have a nice spotlight come down from the Sun. Since this was the tallest structure around — the top of the lantern is 370 feet up — this is a very good solar observatory. So, you’re able to get a very good sense of how the Sun is moving to correct the length of the year, you have a sense of the timing of the seasons. And this is the kind of thinking that went into Toscanelli’s collaboration with Columbus, and providing him with maps, and the whole voyage to the New World.
So, that’s some about Brunelleschi; let’s talk about the implications for today, briefly. In his approach, Brunelleschi — if you think about in the way that LaRouche like to talk about science vs. mathematics today, for example, if you compare the physical structure built by Brunelleschi to the geometry of the Pantheon, which was just a hemisphere, circle shape, those other arches in the Roman aqueduct. They served their purpose, but they’re very much a shape that’s conceived and then you figure out how to bring it into being. Brunelleschi started with the physical space he was working with, and went from geometry into physics; in a way like what real physics is, as compared to Euclid. In the same way that Kepler, taking the insights from Brunelleschi’s work, taking the insights from Cusa’s work, approached astronomy; from the standpoint not of shapes but of the physical causes that brought about the motions of the planets. Of gravitation, of the need for harmony; this was Kepler’s approach. It was the approach of Leibniz, who, unlike the math and geometry based ideas of motion in physics that came from Descartes; Leibniz said, “No, forget it. We can’t understand the physical world by how it appears to us,” by geometry and by shape. There’s something more there; there’s something physical that’s distinct from the perceptual or from extension and shape and geometry. Leibniz discovered what we would today understand as the force of motion; what he called vies viva, what today people would call kinetic energy.
You think about what Riemann did, where he in his Habilitation dissertation of 1854 said what Gauss knew but didn’t really way, when he said, “Look; we have been using ideas of mathematics and geometry to shape our thinking, but we don’t even know if it’s based on something that’s true.” Are the idea of geometry that we base everything else on, are they true? Is space flat? How would we answer that question? And what did Riemann say? He said, in that tradition of Brunelleschi, get out of geometry; look to physics. In the small, things are happening; it’s something physical, but it’s not a shape you can just imagine.
So, with these kinds of jumps that we saw, with Brunelleschi’s character as a person, he had certain achievements. But what he did was, he made new things happen; that was his personality. He did new things; they don’t happen on their own, he made the leaps. So, think about the kinds of leaps we need to make today. Some of the leaps, like leaping over the crap; throwing out Obama, dumping Trump. And then there are the leaps upward, besides leaping over the pits; the leaps upward, things like developing fusion power. We don’t know how the nucleus works; there’s so much unknown about it. What’s occurring with low-energy nuclear reactions; will that be a viable source of power? Maybe. Will it be an insight into what’s actually going on in the nucleus? Yes. What will it mean to have a fusion power basis for our economy? How will that change our relationship to materials, to resources, to water, when we can produce all we want and not worry about shortages of materials anymore?
What do we have to learn about the galaxy, where the limits of Newtonian gravity are making themselves very apparent with the inventions of dark matter and dark energy to try to keep the old law in place while accounting for new things that don’t fit them? What are we actually going to learn? What are we going to learn about water? About the ability to control water cycles here on Earth? What’s role of the galaxy, of the Sun, in changing how the atmosphere responds to the formation of clouds, to climate over time, to water? How does our Sun’s relationship to the galaxy we are in impact life here on Earth over evolutionary time, over climatic time, over long periods and shorter periods in terms of weather effects?
These are all incredible jumps that need to be made; that will not come from the past, but will come from what we’ll look back on and say, “Oh, that was that necessary step.” And that’s the real basis in economy; the intention to have a leap, the intention to make a jump. The desire to go to a future that hasn’t existed before. This is what Alexander Hamilton’s outlook was in setting up our initial credit system, and his goal for an industrial, scientific, and technologically advancing United States; as opposed to the agrarian dream of Thomas Jefferson.
Here’s one of Hamilton’s mottoes. He said, “As a general marches at the head of his troops, so ought wise politicians — if I dare use the expression — they should march at the head of affairs, insomuch that they ought not to await the event to know what measures to take, but the measures which they have taken ought to produce the event.” We can produce a recovery; we can have direction in our economy. We can have missions the way that Kennedy with the space program; the way Lincoln did with building the transcontinental railroad and other programs even during the Civil War. With the initiatives that Franklin Roosevelt took to create a real recovery and separate the economy from the Wall Street-connected finance that Hoover was tied to.
So, nothing happens on its own. As LaRouche has been saying, you don’t get evolutionary development over time in that sense in human history; it’s revolutionary. Things don’t just happen; you make them happen. You go out and you do them. You throw Obama out, you create a credit system; they don’t just happen on their own.
And I’d like to end what I was going to say with another quote from Mr. LaRouche, from our discussion with the Policy Committee on Monday. LaRouche said, “With the personality of human beings, you can’t say that you located it in the person as such; the living person who dies. That is not the way to define the problem; you have to find the connection which creates the leap into progress, as opposed to a continuity. You don’t know what the process is until you live it, and find out what the mystery is. It’s sort of, when you go to Kepler, you get a leap; when you go to the galactic system, you get a leap. You get all kinds of leaps in the Solar System and through the whole thing itself; and it’s the understanding that this is the mind of man which is creating mankind, and not the other way around.”
OGDEN: Well, thank you very much, Jason. And I think that gives us a very good idea of exactly what Mr. LaRouche was saying; that history is not something that you allow to act on you and just react against. But, history is something which must be understood in terms of the future being something that we must generate. So, I think what Mr. LaRouche has prompted to think about, that that generation of the future can only come through an act of genius, which comes apparently out of nowhere, as Brunelleschi’s did. And as Mr. LaRouche said, “I’m looking for people who will do that kind of work, and become the geniuses who cause the future to be reborn again.”
So, with that said, I would to bring a conclusion to tonight’s webcast. Thank you very much to Jason and to Jeff for joining us here tonight; and thank you to all of you. And please stay tuned to larouchepac.com. Good night.
