Engelsk udskrift: Matthew Ogden kommenterer Helga Zepp-LaRouches besøg og tale i Indien om behovet for en Marshallplan/Silkevej i Sydvestasien; Jeffrey Steinberg giver os Lyndon LaRouches meget skarpe kommentar om EU’s korrupte aftale med Tyrkiets Erdogan om mod betaling at tage syriske flygtninge tilbage, og Jason Ross fra LPAC Videnskabsteam taler om Gottfried Leibniz og nødvendigheden af kreativ nytænkning, som Kina i dag legemliggør.
WE NEED THE NEW SILK ROAD NOW FOR ALL OF MANKIND! –
International Webcast for March 11, 2016
MATTHEW OGDEN: Good afternoon. It’s March 11, 2016. My name
is Matthew Ogden, and you’re joining us for our weekly Friday
night broadcast from LaRouche PAC.com. I am joined in the studio
today by Jason Ross from the LaRouche PAC Science Team and Mr.
Jeff Steinberg from {Executive Intelligence Review}, and the
three of us had the opportunity to have an extensive discussion
with both Mr. LaRouche and also Helga Zepp-LaRouche earlier
today.
Now, as you know, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has just recently
returned from an extraordinary trip that she took to India. This
is the first time that either one of the LaRouches has been to
India since I think at least 2003; so this was a very important
trip, and during that visit to India, Helga was a featured
speaker on one of the keynote panels at a discussion in New Delhi
called the Raisina Dialogue Forum. This was a major conference
which included international representation, former prime
ministers, former heads of state, finance ministers, elected
parliamentarians, and so forth.
Now during that speech, Helga LaRouche focused her remarks
on the necessity for a new win-win, Marshall Plan development
project for the Middle East and North Africa. She remarked that,
in the wake of Xi Jinping’s visit to Iran, to Saudi Arabia, and
to Egypt where he brought the development vision of the Chinese
New Silk Road, that now was the time to adopt what she’s been
calling for, for years: which is, a New Marshall Plan to develop
that region of the world and to create a new era of peace and
prosperity for a region of the world that has suffered so much
under perpetual war, and a total breakdown of society.
Now this is very relevant, because obviously, as a
representative of the Schiller Institute from Germany, Helga
LaRouche was speaking directly from the standpoint of the
perspective of a European, who is witnessing the unprecedented
refugee crisis of millions and millions of refugees fleeing the
Middle East and North Africa, and flooding into Europe.
Our institutional question for this week actually focusses
directly on that topic, and what I’m going to do is read the
institutional question, and then give Jeff Steinberg and
opportunity to go through, both specifically and more in general,
what both Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche’s remarks were concerning this
question, and some broader questions as well.
So the question is as follows:
“Mr. LaRouche, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has blamed
European nations for
unilaterally shutting the Balkan route for migrants. She said
that this has put Greece in a very difficult situation, and such
decisions should be taken by the whole of the EU. Austria,
Slovenia, Croatia, and non-EU member states — Serbia and
Macedonia — have all acted to stem the migrant flow. The
European Union and Turkey — from which migrants reach Greece —
have set out a plan to ease the crisis from their perspective.
Under the proposals that have been hammered out at a summit that
occurred in Brussels on Monday, but still to be finalized, all
migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey, would be sent back. For
each Syrian returned, a Syrian in Turkey would be resettled in
the EU. European Council President Donald Tusk has said that the
plan would spell the end of ‘irregular migration to Europe.’ What
is your view on the EU’s new migrant policy?”
So, Jeff.
JEFFREY STEINBERG: To put it very mildly, Mr. LaRouche was
extremely blunt. You’ve got to start from the standpoint that
this is a rotten deal; it’s not going to work. And furthermore,
that nobody has any business making any kind of backroom deal
with President Erdogan of Turkey. Here’s somebody who has been a
principal sponsor of the jihadist terrorism, including the
Islamic State and the Nusra Front; who has robbed his country
blind; he’s one of the most notorious thieves on the planet. He’s
killed his own people. He shut down the entire opposition
newspaper, and, quite frankly, he’s carried out a 6 billion euro
extortion operation against the European Union.
So the problem, in fact the disease that we’re dealing with,
is the tendency that’s rampant in the entire trans-Atlantic
world, to make these kinds of rotten deals with people who have
no business being allowed to remain in power. You have an entire
trans-Atlantic system that was really, in effect, characterized
this week by two developments. Number One: this rotten deal with
Erdogan, which should never be allowed to happen. And number two,
by the announcement by the European Central Bank head, Mario
Draghi, that the ECB was going to replicate the insane policies
that were carried out in the United States under the Quantitative
Easing, bail-out, and Dodd-Frank bill, all of which are
universally known to have been complete and total failures. So,
Draghi announced zero interest rates, and announced that the QE
policy of the ECB would be extended up to $80 billion euro a
month, and furthermore, that the ECB would begin purchasing
absolutely worthless private sector bonds to keep what one
columnist called the “zombie banks” in business.
Now, there’s been an absolute revolt in Germany, in
particular, against this Draghi policy, because the net effect is
that, with zero interest rates, people are going to be pulling
their money out of the actual savings banks and regional
commercial banks, through which all of the lending into the real
economy takes place. And as the result of that, you’re going to
see rampant bankruptcies on top of the already advanced complete
breakdown of the European real economy. All of the European
too-big-to-fail banks are already hopelessly bankrupt.
So you’ve got these two examples of absolute policy
insanity, of attempting to operate and make compromises and
“reforms,” within a system that is already dead. As Mr. LaRouche
said, you don’t make deals with dead people; there’s nothing in
it for you. There’s no future in it. Yet that’s exactly what
we’re seeing as the dominant phenomenon throughout the
trans-Atlantic region.
Now the fact of the matter is that there are viable
solutions. In the case of the United States, you could just
simply say, the Wall Street debt is unpayable, and we’re going to
just simply cancel it, and we’re going to go back to the
traditional American, Hamiltonian credit system, and we’re going
to just simply let Wall Street sink, period. It’s already
bankrupt. The people involved in it are absolutely correct —
they should have been frog-marched off to jail a long time ago.
So, by and large, when you talk to people in the political
system at a relatively high level, you’re dealing with a system
that is absolutely paralyzed with fear, and overwhelmed by
corruption. Because you press the issue, and you’ll get
widespread admission that the system is doomed, we’re headed for
another blow-out far worse than 2008; it could happen any moment
now. It could happen Monday morning when you wake up. And
furthermore, you could cancel this rotten debt, wipe out those
cancerous aspects of the whole system, and you could go ahead to
rebuild, but based on a completely different set of premises.
Same thing with the arrangement with Turkey. There’s no
grounds whatsoever for paying 6 billion euros in extortion,
knowing that a character like Erdogan is going to come back again
and again and demand more, and will continue to threaten to
unleash massive waves of migration, while at the same time Turkey
is trying to sabotage the efforts of Lavrov and Kerry to bring an
end to this five-year monstrosity of a war that’s been going on
inside Syria.
So, if you operate within a dead system, you are doomed to
go down with it. Now there are things that are working in the
world today. Putin is functioning. Putin is carrying out very
effective flanking operations in Syria. China is functioning, and
is in fact functioning at a much higher level from the standpoint
of real economic growth. And China is willing to invest in real
physical economic growth all across Eurasia, down into Africa,
into Latin America. And furthermore, China is leading a global
science driver policy. The plans to actually land an orbiter on
the dark side of the Moon have been discussed frequently in
recent weeks on this broadcast. China is now the leading R&D
nation on the planet, and they embody the principle of human
creativity. They’re not trying to draw deductive, pragmatic,
practical conclusions from policies that have failed. You can
never derive success by trying to scrutinize and analyze
systematic failure. You need human creativity, and you see that
in China.
Increasingly, there are nations that are grouping around
these opportunities that are posed for real development, centered
around China. Russia has taken certain measures to assure that
Russia survives, and that Russia has the military and material
resources to be able to conduct the kind of flanking operations
that may very well save Syria and the Middle East, and major
parts of Africa, from the genocidal destruction that will occur
if the existing trans-Atlantic forces, led by the British Empire
and stooges that they’ve got at their disposal like President
Obama, with his Dodd-Frank madness; like Mario Draghi; like the
corrupt Erdogan.
So, anytime that there’s an offer to make a rotten deal with
a rotten SOB like Erdogan, the obvious answer should be, run in
the other direction. Don’t do it. And so, in response to the
question that’s been posed, this is a rotten deal that is doomed
to failure, but it’s typical of a much larger problem, which is
the tendency to be stuck thinking inside the deductive box when
the only avenue for survival for mankind is to think creatively,
and align with those people who’ve demonstrated that they’ve got
a viable commitment to the future.
You find that in China. You find that in many of the actions
taken by Putin in Russia, and it’s pretty scarce everywhere else.
And it’s certainly virtually nonexistent in the entire
trans-Atlantic region.
OGDEN: Thank you very much, Jeff. I also neglected to
mention in my remarks in the beginning that, coinciding with
Helga’s trip to India and these very important developments with
Xi Jinping’s visit to the Middle East. The Arabic version of the
EIR Special Report, “The New Silk Road Becomes the New
Land-Bridge,” which was available in English and also has been
translated into Chinese; has now been translated into Arabic. And
I think Helga LaRouche’s foreword or preface to that will put it
very appropriately; that “either this is an extraordinary
coincidence or an act of divine intervention” that this would be
available at a time like this, when this is precisely what you
need. This sort of vision for a new Marshall Plan, the World
Land-Bridge, to bring development to this part of the world which
is in such dire need of it.
Now, as Jeff summarized quite succinctly, what Mr.
LaRouche’s focus in our discussion was, is that we are on the
edge of a total implosion of the trans-Atlantic system. That you
have a community of nations which is, in its present form, dead,
because of its own behavior; it has brought this upon itself. On
the other hand, you have nations such as China and others, who
are engaged in a process of real physical economic progress. And
this was a willful choice that was made by China to invest in
exactly the types of things that would create a future potential
of growth, scientific development and otherwise. So, Mr.
LaRouche’s question was, why would you associate yourself with a
dead system, when the alternative is immediately at hand?
So, Mr. LaRouche had a much more developed idea, however, of
what it is that brings success to a nation and to the human race
in general. And he was very specific to say that real creativity
is never a replication of the past; real creativity depends on
new ideas that are new in a very real sense. That creativity is
always {ad novo}, he said; and it’s not achieved through the
reform of a bad system. But it is only achieved through the
introduction of an entirely new principle which is truly new. He
said, Einstein is a good example of this; the personality of
Brunelleschi is an ideal example of this. But the goal is never
to deduce what the solution to a crisis must be from some sort of
precedent; but rather, to ask the question, “What is it that we
actually wish to accomplish for the future of mankind?” And, with
that question in mind, therefore, what must be done? What must be
done to achieve that future? And we tend to fail to ask that
question, and we get too consumed by the details of the present;
when we should be thinking from a total global standpoint about
what we wish to achieve in the future.
Now, I think at a time like now, where it’s very clear that
the nations of Europe and the United States are imploding,
socially, economically, politically; what brought us to this
point? But also, more significantly, what must be done to save
civilization now? And we discussed, I think very appropriately,
that when a nation loses its {raison d’etre}, when a nation loses
its mission, it tends to implode and fall in upon itself. And we
can learn a lot from the mission that China has, and the
optimistic vision of the future which is shared by all of its
citizens. So, with that said, I would like to invite Jason to
come to the podium. As you know, Jason Ross has been conducting a
many-part series of presentations, classes on the LaRouche PAC
website on the unique genius of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; this
is a series which will continue. But I would like to invite him
to the podium now.
JASON ROSS: Well, this year, 2016, is the 300th anniversary
of Leibniz’s death in 1716. Leibniz lived from 1646 to 1716. And
a number of the disputes that he was in, the discoveries that he
made, are very freshly relevant for us today. Both historically
from the standpoint of understanding where we came from, and
because there are disputes that continue to the present. Disputes
over the nature of the purpose of the nation, disputes over the
nature of the Universe, disputes over the nature of mankind.
To discuss one of those, I’d like to frame it by contrasting
the views of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton. Many people are
probably familiar, certainly if you’ve been watching this
website, with the concept of the dispute over the calculus. That
Leibniz plagiarized the calculus from Newton, as Newton and his
friends said; no. Did Newton steal the calculus from Leibniz, who
invented it first? Let’s leave that aside; that’s really not at
issue for what I want to talk about today. Let’s consider the
dispute that was represented between the British outlook of
Newton and the outlook of Leibniz in terms of the purpose for
humanity, as seen in their views of creation and of the Universe
as a whole. In the very last years of Leibniz’s life, he was
engaged in a dispute via letters with a follower of Isaac Newton,
Samuel Clarke. And in this discussion, one of the primary topics
that came up was the basis of considering God to be great. On
this, the two differed in a very fundamental way. Newton, via
Clarke, said that God’s greatness came from his power; Leibniz,
while not disputing that, said that God’s wisdom is also one of
His perfections, and that in leaving this out, you have a total
misunderstanding about God.
Now, I’m not going to make a theological point about this
today. I want to look at this in terms of the existence of the
nation-state. While Newton said that because God can do anything,
that shows how wonderful He is; and while this same outlook — a
religious outlook — was applied to man and society by John Locke
and Thomas Hobbes, who said that a powerful ruler of society
really exists for himself, and that people form a society through
a compact to not infringe upon each other, not with the idea to
have a mission together, but simply to get along as a way of
putting under control the impulses of people to steal from each
other and this sort of thing. So, on the one side, you have the
notion that the state exists, the ruler exists and is justified
in existing to maintain power; that that is the basis of
legitimacy of a ruler — holding power. It’s a somewhat circular
reason.
On the other side, you have Leibniz, who — in keeping with
his view of God being worth reverencing, respecting, loving
because of His wisdom; and having chosen in making the Universe,
to make it the best of all possible universes that could be
created. Leibniz applies that idea as well to society; saying
that the justification, the legitimacy for a ruler for a nation,
lies in how it is creating a happy society. And how it is imbuing
its people with wisdom, and developing science and economy to
create a more productive and a happier future. Happiness is an
important thing.
So, if you consider that today, and you look at — Matt had
brought up where is the {raison d’etre}; what is the
justification for the United States, for example, right now? What
is our {raison d’etre} right now under Obama? We don’t have one.
Obama’s destruction of the space program, which as a policy
better encapsulates an attack on the future than anything you can
imagine, has left us without a future in the stars; contrasted
with other nations, being led by China, with a serious,
comprehensive, really breath-taking mission of advancements that
they have been making towards reaching out into the heavens, and
the potential of developing new scientific breakthroughs in that
way.
So, as Jeff and Matt said, LaRouche, in the discussion that
we had with him today, was stressing that, in creating the
future, it is made {de novo}; it isn’t something we deduce from
the past, although we can certainly learn from the past. The
essential characteristic is making something where nothing of
that sort existed before. He had singled out Brunelleschi and
Einstein in this regard. Einstein, who made breakthroughs
scientifically that did not follow from, or result from, the
thoughts of his day; but rather, contradicted and overthrew them.
This is an example of the kind of thinking that’s necessary. In
the United States in our most recent history, the time under the
Apollo program, as launched in its strength by Kennedy to go to
the Moon and back; this was in recent times, probably the most
singly powerful example of a potential to reach that. That
program didn’t result in Einstein’s per se; it didn’t have that
kind of effect. Amazing technological developments were made. The
potentials that the space program has as a whole to make new
scientific breakthroughs, however, is absolutely tremendous.
So, consider China. China, which has brought hundreds of
millions of people out of poverty in just the past few decades.
China, which currently lends out more internationally in
investments in nations than the whole World Bank does. China,
which has played a major role along with Russia in setting up the
BRICS; the Shanghai Cooperation Organization for Peace and
Stability; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to address
the $5 trillion or more needs for infrastructure within that
region of the world; offering loans that are without the
conditionalities that are the hallmark of the World Bank. This
ability to put into very specific practice a concept of “win-win”
cooperation, as it was put by President Xi; these specific ways
of cooperating with neighbors, with other nations for development
projects. As for example, the railroad operating in Ethiopia at
present, allowing the transport of food to the interior of the
nation in a timely fashion; preventing the intensity of
starvation that would otherwise be likely given the agricultural
disasters they’ve faced recently.
Take a look at space and science. China’s East Tokamak, a
super-conducting tokamak, recently had a 50 million-degree plasma
held for 100 seconds; a breakthrough for them on their way
towards developing fusion. Their space program — that was the
first soft landing on the Moon in decades — the Chang’e 3 with
the Yutu rover. Planning to come out next year, Chang’e 5, a
sample return mission to the Moon; again, the first time in
decades, and they’ll be only the third nation to have done this.
And then in a few years, a space first — not only for them, but
for the world — the Chang’e 4 mission, to land on the far side
of the Moon. The first time ever; this is something new that
mankind has never done before. It opens up new windows
scientifically in terms of the potential the far side of the Moon
offers for different types of telescopes — such as radio
telescopes. They’ll be able to show us things that no other —
it’s the most convenient place to be able to do these things. It
simply is impossible from here on Earth, or in orbit; you need a
body to place these things on.
So, I think when we think about what’s the purpose of a
nation, it can’t be a short-term survival; it certainly can’t be
dominance per se, or maintaining a place in the world. For
example, the United States; there’s an unfortunate form of
thought that the United States should be first in everything.
Well, how did the United States become such a powerful nation?
The policies that made that possible, the outlook that made that
possible, the sense coming from the American Revolution that
there’s a mission for the nation that is beyond having
sovereignty itself, per se; but lies in a mission for development
and for the pursuit of happiness — as it’s put — that’s the
concept that has to guide us today. Now, if we were to adopt this
in the United States, which we must, as we force the adoption of
this policy in our own nation, we have the potential for the US
to play a very important role among other nations internationally
in reaching these objectives. And there’s really no reason for
conflict among nations; it’s simply not necessary at this point.
There might be some specific examples, but on the whole, by
throwing out the British-led creation of conflicts, and putting
the US on a path towards cooperation, participation, and
leadership on these sorts of ventures, we can regain in terms of
history, the right to exist, or reason for existing; a mission
for the nation.
So, if we’re going to turn around our domestic conditions,
as we see frighteningly in the dramatic rise in deaths by drug
overdoses or suicides in other forms that are increasing
dramatically; if we’re going do this, we have to have a mission.
We have to have a vision for the kind of future that we’re going
to make that doesn’t exist a present. The opportunities for this
exist; there are plenty of the particular policies that are
needed. These things are known. What is necessary is a demand and
a change in direction in the United States without Obama, to
adopt this orientation as our own. And if we do that, we can look
to the future with the knowledge that there is a reason for the
existence of the nation; and there’s a purpose to be fulfilled,
and that we’re taking up that purpose in our future which lies
beyond the Earth and out in the stars.
OGDEN: Thank you very much, Jason. And I think we can use
that as a promotional to encourage you to tune in to all of his
classes, which are available and will continue to be available on
larouchepac.com. And I’d like to thank Jeff for joining us here
as well, today. So, that’s what we have to present to you here
today; short and sweet. And we thank you for tuning in; and we
encourage you to please stay tuned to larouchepac.com. Good
night.