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Concluding Addresses : Why you must join the fight

Jacques Cheminade

President of Solidarité & Progrès, Paris.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

President of the Schiller Institute


 

Well, I would like to go into the matter of culture, but unfortunately, I have to go first into the area of counter-culture. That is, in commenting on this last panel, I was very, very shocked— and, as a matter of fact, it really shows that we are in a war, a war for civilization,—because it was just revealed that the new Papal Encyclical, which is supposed to come out on the 18th of June, in a couple of days, will be on climate change. And if you look at who will be the presenters, the official presenters of that Encyclical, it will be Cardinal Peter Turkson, who is the head of Justicia et Pax, and it will be Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon, a leading representative of the Orthodox Church of Greece. And it will be our old acquaintance, whom I just accidentally mentioned yesterday in my speech, John Schellnhuber.

Now, this is really incredible, because, as Ben Deniston mentioned in his remarks earlier, evil is really situated in this ideology. Now, that means, the devil is about to take over the Catholic Church. Or has already taken over. They are trying to compete for evil with the Protestant Church in this respect.

Now that is a declaration of war, because they have said that they want to influence two major conferences: one is the International Conference on Financing for Development, which will take place in Addis Ababa, which means that they want to completely influence that conference, so that only “sustainable technology,” only “appropriate technology” is permitted.

Unacceptable Horror

You have to understand that our fight against that goes back forty years or more. Because we had a positive conception—I mean, I joined this organization, because when I went on this trip in 1971, on a cargo ship which went to Africa, and parts of Asia, to Malaysia, Thailand, China, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. But also, I could spend a couple of days in some cities of Africa. And I spent some longer time in China. I came back from that trip, with—I mean, I really was absolutely convinced that the world could not be like that.

It could not remain like that. Because if you travel on a cargo ship, you get a completely different picture, than if you go on a cruiseliner, a luxury ship,—or if you have your well-to-do life, and you jet-set around the globe, and you go from four-star hotel, five-star hotel to five-star hotel; you don’t see this. And if you belong to a certain layer in society, you blind yourself to the real condition of where mankind is.

But when you travel on a cargo ship, you see the world as it is. For instance, in Dakar, Senegal, I left the ship in the morning, at six o’clock, and there were twenty people—beautiful tall, great Senegalese women and men, who were taller than even me, and they tried to sell me some handicrafts. And I told them, look, I don’t have money. I’m a student. I cannot buy this. And I could not convince them that it was futile. And I thought, what does this do to the dignity of man, if adult people feel that they have to run after me, a poor student? I knew that I couldn’t get it across to them.

Then, I went—we went to Thailand. At the port, parents brought their 10, 11 and 12-year children as prostitutes for the sailors. The parents brought them.

I could go on and on. When you see what poverty does to people, in their desperation, you understand that poverty is the biggest human rights violation there is.

And therefore, I joined this organization, because when I met Mr. LaRouche, and he had these ideas that you have to develop the developing countries. We started to make plans for Africa—the first book on the development of Africa, we published in 1976. Actually, we had here in Paris, a presentation of that plan, which, it is very clear, still is needed. You need ports. You need bridges. You need roads, railway. You need infrastructure, because without infrastructure, you don’t even have agriculture, because you can’t transport whatever is being produced. You need food processing.

And it would be so easy to do all of this, if there were the political will.

The Four Horsemen

So anyway, now we are here so much later. But, this has been a war between our organization and likeminded people, like Indira Ghandi, with whom we worked on a forty-year development plan for India. We worked with Lopez Portillo on a development plan for Latin America, which he started to implement. And it would have succeeded if, at that time, Argentina and Brazil had cooperated.

Then in 1974, I went to the U.N. Population Conference in Bucharest, and I went there with a development plan, which was essentially the idea that you need a large-scale technology transfer from the industrialized countries to the developing sector. And it would have been very easy to overcome the underdevelopment.

But what happened, is that you had John D. Rockefeller the Third, who presented his plan, which essentially was the first time they used this terminology: sustainable development, appropriate technology. Appropriate technology means, the Africans should never get railways, they should have little shovels, and little fountains in their village. And do things that are appropriate to them.

So at that time, these ideas were new. Environmentalism was really not yet existent. And all the left groups who were at this Bucharest population conference, they said, “Oh, population explosion.” Rockefeller said, there is an explosion of population. We have to reduce population. And all the left groups said, “Oh, the population bomb is a Rockefeller baby,” because people knew that that was an oligarchical interest.

And I intervened at that conference. I said, look, the consequence of what you are proposing is a hundred times worse than Adolf Hitler.

Now, that was absolutely true, because, if you count the number of people who have died as a consequence of the denial of technology through imposing IMF conditionalities on the Third World, I once calculated that you come to hundreds of millions of people. And, in a certain sense, we now have a situation, where Schellnhuber, who is a CBE—Commander of the British Empire—is a complete fraudster. He’s psychologically a very difficult person, to use diplomatic language. But, that he is now influencing the Catholic Church for a decarbonization of the world economy—I mean, we fought this, when he presented it to the German government, because it would mean eliminating every fossil fuel. It would mean eliminating, naturally, nuclear energy altogether.

And if you only go by renewable energies—wind, solar and so forth— you end up with the population carrying capacity of the Earth of about one billion people.

And we have studied the Zero-Growth movement way back into the early seventies, and there were people who said, “Well, how do you reduce population?” Well, there are the four riders, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Death, Famine, Epidemics, and you just let these things grow, and then the population falls by itself.

Now, if they were to succeed in imposing that into the Paris climate conference, which I don’t think will happen,—but, there will be a massive attempt to do that,—it will be tantamount to really turning these institutions into genocidalist institutions. And we really have to fight against that, with all possible means. Because this is a form of Nazism, or fascism. It’s eco-fascism, or, I don’t know how you call it, but it’s really that.

It Starts With the Mind

And so, I think that we have to really mobilize in all countries around the world to block that. And I think the panel this afternoon gave us excellent ammunition. These are fraudsters. They are, the kinds of scientists— I don’t know if you remember this old record, where you had a little dog, and a grammophone—they sing the song of whoever feeds them. These are not scientists.

This goes back to how they tried to destroy the influence of Leibniz in the Berlin Academy. They would have contests in which the most corrupt scientists would be promoted. And people like Kaestner and Lessing, and so forth—they fought against these people. This is an old trick by the oligarchy. And right now, you have a situation where many of these scientists are bored. They are not scientists; they are just doing what you get a grant for. And some of the better scientists even use green terminology, in order to get better funding. And then they sneak in their little project, so that they can do some research. But they give it a green name to get the funding.

I mean, the corruption of the mind is incredible.  Why do you think that this whole thing functions? Why do you think we are on the verge of war? Because people are too stupid to think things through, and they belong to clubs where it is the peer belief to not think that way. If you are a part of a club which is proBritish, or pro-American, then you don’t even think that it could be different.

And I can only challenge you, if you have any doubts about what has been said here, that we are on the verge of World War Three,—if you have any respect for your mind, you do not just reject it. You go home and you do your homework. Because if you have not yet studied it, and come to that conclusion yourself, you are just intellectually lazy. Because I have done the work. I have looked at all the papers of all the military experts in America, in Great Britain, in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Russia, in China, and there is no question, that, if you look at the evolution of the military doctrine, if you look at the whole forward deployment, if you look at the whole first-strike doctrine, if you look at the Russian reactions, at the Chinese reactions, if you don’t come to the conclusion that we are on the verge of World War Three—I hate to say it—you are an intellectual lazy bum. Or worse.

Because, if you are serious, you have to come to that conclusion. If you come to that conclusion, you have to get off your behind. because you have to do something to help to save civilization. And I think the corruption of the mind comes mainly from that fact. We’re not promoting anybody’s cause.

Gifts for the Future

I really think we are the only organization which takes the future into account, a thousand years from now. I even would say, a couple of billions of years from now, because I want humanity to be the immortal species. I have some good contacts who are geophysicists. And they tell me, the human race will disappear one second after twelve, or after midnight. And I do not accept that.

Because for me—I don’t know if you remember, but when the Voyager left our solar system a couple of months ago, they had records on the spaceship of Furtwängler conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. So Furtwängler conducting the Ninth Symphony is now travelling outside of our solar system, which for me, is a very intriguing idea, that if there are some intelligent people somewhere—we don’t know, because the universe is really big, and we only know a very tiny part of it—it could be that somebody gets this record, and listens to Furtwängler conducting the Ninth Symphony!

But the idea, that all of that would have been for nothing, all the great struggles of mankind. The Indian people, freeing themselves from British imperialism,—Mahatma Ghandi, other struggles. The Chinese liberating themselves from the Opium War. All the many, many courageous people. The German Resistance who tried to fight Hitler, and who got chopped off. All the beautiful human activities which led to the point where we are here today, would have been for nothing?

I think that that is a completely unacceptable idea. And in the spirit in which Schiller wrote “Why We Should Study Universal History,” I think that we should have gratitude for the rich donations from previous generations, and organize our life in such a way that we give it richer to the future generations.

And, I think that this is really something that I want to put into your heart and into your mind. Don’t think narrowly. Because it is the narrowness of the mind, which has led to two world wars. And we have set out explicitly with the idea that we must overcome geopolitical thinking, because geopolitics has twice led to world war in the Twentieth Century. And because of the existence of thermonuclear weapons, if we don’t get over geopolitics right now, the danger is that we will extinguish ourwelves.

And, why did I mention yesterday in my remarks, the difference beween ratio and intellect? And I really want you to think about it, because most people think, “Ya, it’s my Menchschenverstand—my common sense: I know everything myself. I am a learned man. I have studied. I have titles of all kinds.” But they are not self-conscious—that’s what happens if they’re thinking on the level of ratio, which is, you think in terms of contradictions. You think that my interest is against that interest. That I have this interest against the other person’s. And what’s the difference if you think on the level of reason or as Cusanus calls it, the level of intellect? Then you think on the level of coincidentia oppositorum—the coincidence of opposites, which is an idea of looking through, or you look on the level where the contradictions no longer exist. And in the philosophy of the Platonic humanist tradition of Europe, it’s the idea that the One has a higher order, and a higher power, than the Many.

And you have to think in this way. Because as long as you remain on the level of contradictions, you can’t solve any problem. I mean, that was the great achievement of the Peace of Westphalia. Because they recognized, that after 150 years of religious war in Europe,— if they had continued, nobody would have been left. Because in some areas of Europe, two-thirds of humanity were already destroyed. So they came to the conclusion that a higher principle had to be found. The idea of the “interest of the other.” That a permanent peace can only be built on the interest of the other.

Beauty is Lawful

And that is a method of thinking which you can apply to every field. You will not make a new discovery in science if you can’t hypothesize, what is the necessary step in the unknown. Scientific discovery is not that somebody has a bright idea, and then you discover something. No, it is the accumulation of knowledge, of Geistesmassen [thought-objects],—more Geistesmassen accumulate and resonate, and then out of that, is the necessary next step of discovery. Like, why, for example, thermonuclear fusion is one of the absolutely necessary next steps, because it leads to a higher energyflux density, which is important for the continued existence of mankind.

In the same way, you cannot make a great composition in classical music, if you throw out all the laws of composition. Then you end up with atonal music, or with twelve-tone music, and you end up with ugliness.

You have to go through the late string quartets of Beethoven, through the beautiful symphonies, through Brahms, through Schubert, through the beautiful songs of Schubert, and all the high points of Classical music, and then define what is the next step of the composition. You have to respect the rules and enlarge the rules in a lawful way.

And in that sense, I think that mankind has reached a point where I don’t think we will get out of this mess otherwise. And we have a mess. If you don’t think that we are at a civilizational breakdown crisis, wake up!

I mean, look, for example, some countries have young people. Like Modi. Modi said, the reason why India has such a beautiful future is because they have so many young people. And if these young people get educated, they will be the biggest export possibility, because there are countries which have demographical crises, like Germany, Italy. These countries will vanish without the Indians in the future. Because people don’t procreate anymore. I don’t know, you have too many marriages of all kinds of forms which don’t procreate.  So sooner or later, they will cease to exist. But fortunately, we have the Indians to help the Germans to survive. [Laughter, applause].

So,—but Modi said, if we educate these young people, then they are the potential of the future. And that is really how we have to think. Because, in a certain sense, the civilizational crisis is not just that we are on the verge of World War Three; that we have a refugee crisis which is heartbreaking. If you look at those pictures in the Mediterranean, I think that this is the declaration of bankruptcy of the EU. Because this is the worst of the worst behavior. Instead of developing Africa, they shoot at the boats. What is that? What is the self-image of the EU?

But it’s not just that. It’s not just that two billion people go hungry every day. Two billion people! One billion are really starving, and one billion are at the edge of not having enough to eat. And it is not necessary. It’s not only that. The drugs. Look at the drugs— how many people are taking drugs. In Russia alone, every year, 40,000 people die of drugs. And Russia has said that this is the biggest national security crisis they have. Look at the young people who go to discos. Eighty-five percent of all young people going to discos take drugs! Look at the pornography. I mean, there is no limit any more. There is no longer anything that you cannot see on public television. Every time I turn on the television, which happens once in a while, I am absolutely shocked! I don’t want to go through the gory details, but, I said, this cannot be. Every time that I think it has reached the absolute bottom of perversity, of pornography, of violence,—they come up with something new.

And, if you look at the youth culture, the youth culture where eight-year, nine-year, ten-year old girls and boys know everything. About sex, about homosexuality, about sexual practices, about violence, about snuff movies. Look at the British crown. Look at what happens now with the paedophilia scandal in Great Britain. This involves the top elite in Great Britain. Sir Leon Brittan, whom I had the misfortune to meet at this 1996 conference in Beijing, because he was one of the speakers. And he said, “Oh, the Silk Road will never function. Terrorism, destabilizations in all of Central Asia.” And it was very clear the British Great Game does want this development.

Now, this guy is now,—he is dead. He’s probably roasting in Hell already. But he was involved in the highest-level paedophilia, running boys’ houses, which is huge. It involves thousands and thousands of the British elites. They’re degenerates!

If you look at the total picture of the youth culture in Europe and in the United States. In the United States, you better don’t go shopping, because if you go in a mall you have a good chance you will be shot, by somebody just driving by. If you look at the death rate in major cities in the United States. If you look at the police violence, why do you think in all of these cities— Ferguson, Baltimore—why do you have these riots? Because the police in the United States has been militarized. They get the heavy weapons from the Army to use against their own population. And if there is a collapse of the financial system, I think that the United States will explode in a civil war. Because you have these weapons everywhere. You have violence in the culture, which is really big. And you have now a counter-movement, in which the reverends unite in all of the United States, and they say, we have to get in the act, to prevent this from happening again.

A Qualitative Leap

So, I could go on for a long time. But if you are not blind to what is around you, you see that we are not just in a war danger, in a breakdown crisis, but we have a civilizational crisis,—like the caste system in India. There are people who think that the lower castes are lower people. And I have many good friends in India, and I have seen how they behave. I have a good acquaintance, and I saw how he behaved towards somebody who brought in the luggage in the hotel. This is oligarchical thinking. This person in India is not one iota better than the Queen running drugs. And the Queen does run drugs. We have been accused of having said that; we have proven the case.

If you look at the British-Saudi running of terrorism, which is what the issue of the “28 pages” is all about, and you heard Walter Jones, that there is a growing movement in the United States, and the truth will come out about all of this.

Anyway, I want to make the point, we have a civilizational crisis, which is really all-encompassing. And we have reached in the history of mankind, a point where either we make a qualitative jump into a completely new paradigm—and a new paradigm—there are examples in history where you can study it. Where you had a breakdown crisis, as in the Fourteenth Century in Italy, or in most of Europe actually. You had the Black Death. You had the flagellants. You had witch-burning.  You had a complete, complete collapse of society, and a collapse of the financial system. If you look at the pictures of Bosch and Breughel, where people— [groan]—one eye is going up, the other one is going down. Breughel and Bush— Bosch! [Laughter] Here you had another one of these strange-looking people! What these painters captured was the mental breakdown of society in a Dark Age. And then you have to look at how did we manage to get into the Golden Age of the Italian Renaissance? It happened through many steps. It happened through Dante, Dante Alighieri. It happened through Petrarch, and a whole movement of humanists, who started to collect the manuscripts of great thinkers of the past. And then you had the courageous fight of Jean D’Arc, which, together with Louis XI, transformed France. The living standard of the French population doubled in twenty years during the reign of Louis XI. Then you had especially Nicholas of Cusa, and the people he influenced. He was consciously saying, we need a completely new thinking. He attacked the Scholastics. He attacked the Peripatetics—the Aristotelians who had dominated all of the universities of Europe at that time. And he developed a new method of thinking, which was the basis of the modern nation state, which was the basis of modern science. Kepler could not have done what he did without Cusa, and he always talked about the divine Cusanus.

Vernadsky talked about the great stepping-stone of Cusansky [Cusa]. And fortunately, Vernadsky is much more known in Russia than in Europe, because this is very good capital which Russia is using, or has used.

So we need a break like that. We need to have a completely new thinking, not defined from the present conflicts among nations, among ethnic conflicts, geographical conflicts—all of that, but we have to define mankind as one, and think how do we survive as a human species in the future. And, if you start to define everything from that standpoint, every conflict can be solved.

We have said many times, we do not just need a new world economic order—which we have presented with the idea of a world land-bridge, as a good approximation of what that could look like,—but we need a cultural Renaissance. Because the degenerate cultures has to go. And I believe that Confucius and Lessing were completely right when they said, if you decide to become good, you can decide it. If you can decide to be loving, you can start to love. It’s a moral question. Can you do it?

A Classical Revival

In the same way, I think we can break with the general culture, and I think that if each country develops their own high culture, like Germany should obviously revive the German classical period, the music from Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, and even some songs of Hugo Wolf—I want to put effort into this, and I even got my husband to agree with me. And naturally, Schiller and other great poets.

In France, you have to revive the École Polytechnique. You have to become again a science-driver society, in the tradition of de Gaulle’s thinking of France having a mission. Italy has so many rich scientists and artists—Verdi, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci. India is a country which has 5,000 years of history. You have to revive the Vedic writings. The Gupta period of drama. The Indian Renaissance of the late Nineteenth to the mid-Twentieth century, where you had so many beautiful poets and thinkers—Tagore, Shri Aurobindo, Vivekananda and many others. China is on the best way with Confucius.

The United States. The United States is struggling right now to revive the better part of its history, because the United States is not a monolithic monster, or a superpower you have to be a slave to,—or just like,—because they are the most powerful. No, the United States has two fundamentally different traditions. We just had a conference in New York last weekend where the thesis, the historical research was presented that the real making of America was the overcoming of slavery. It was really the question, which of the Founding Fathers would be the dominant. Was it the ones who would fight slavery? Or was it the compromisers, who were really influenced by the British Empire? And the British Empire never agreed to have lost the greatest colony, or the most important colony from their standpoint. So they tried to subvert it.

First, through wars—the British were allied with the Confederacy. The plantation owners financed the Confederacy. Then they realized that they could not regain America through military means, and they started using other means, like the Roundtable of Lord Milner and others, Milner’s Kindergarten. And the idea was that you have to convince the American establishment to run the world as an empire, based on the British Empire. And that’s the problem with the Bushes and the Obamas, because that is their philosophy right now.

But there is another America. The America of Benjamin Franklin, of Alexander Hamilton, of John Quincy Adams. Of Lincoln, of McKinley, of Franklin D. Roosevelt, of John F. Kennedy. We are right now very, very far advanced to regain that America. It’s my deepest conviction, that without that, there will be no solution to the world’s problems. And fortunately, you have right now a growing movement of Democrats and even a couple of Republicans, as you saw in the person of Walter Jones, you have Republicans who are absolutely decent human beings. As a matter of fact, I wish we had in Germany only one Member of Parliament like Walter Jones. Because he is a man of integrity. He is completely devoted to his constituency. There is not one wrong bone in him. And you have others like that.

So, America must become a Republic again. It must have a foreign policy like that of John Quincy Adams, who said, we have to have an alliance of perfectly sovereign republics. And that is what has to be, and then there is no problem in the world, because with that, everybody will be happy.

So I could probably find in every nation, its glorious period. But, you all know this yourselves. And you have to get to the high points of each nation and each culture. And we have to revive that. Then, out of that, we will create a new Renaissance. It will be like other Renaissances, in that you will revive what was beautiful in the past, but then, that will be the nourishment to create something even more beautiful for the future.

So I think that is the task we have immediately ahead of us. And I want you all to join in that, because this could be the most noble mission in your life. And it is necessary.

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