Jacques Cheminade
Chairman of the Solidarity and Progress party, former French Presidential Candidate, France.
Audio
Let me start with something I had not planned to say; it is about Fidelio. It is my favorite opera, and the only one with a “happy end”. It is not like the other great plays, the best of them, where you leave the room thinking about the failure, the tragic end, of the hero or the heroine, and feeling challenged to do something better than they did. Here, in Fidelio, it is not a “happy end” because it leaves you in a state of individual comfort, a socially entropic comfort, it is happy because it shows that when you mobilize your courage and your mind, you, can overcome destiny – and that it is given to all of us to do so, because we are all human beings, like Leonora.
It is not only given to us, it is demanded of us: what Leonora has done for her husband she has done for humanity, leading the people on the stage to fight for a better world. The happy end is indeed in the future we have to create, especially in moments of life and death, such as our moment of history. Hence Fidelio’s happy end does not put us to rest, like in some sort of soap opera. On the contrary, it demands we tell the truth and fight for it, even if that means putting your life at stake, as Leonora and Florestan have done. It is as if Beethoven had composed for us, here and now, so that we be truthful.
So let’s be truthful and speak in plain, heavy words.
Europe, as it is, is a dying species, a walking shadow. There is no hope for a European Union that is based on the oligarchic principle of the disadvantage to all member states and peoples, and to the benefit of the City of London and Wall Street.
There is no hope for a European Union which not only spreads oppression to other countries, but oppresses its own constituencies and economies. Therefore our immediate mission, here and now, is to free Europe from its financial sharks and cultural millstones.
Ironically, it is the nations that were subjected to European rule that should now be the key to freeing us from our oppressors. I mean the BRICS, not as a group of nations turned inward, but as Narendra Modi said, as a concert of nations acting in their mutual interest and for the benefit of all their partners; opening the way, in the midst of the tragedy of our times, to a better future based precisely on the idea that development can only be mutual and based on the scientific achievements of human creativity. That is why we have organized this panel as an orchestra of interventions coming from various parts of humanity, a work in progress designed to play music opposed to the sound of competition and fury that prevails in our presently self-destructive world.
Look at what is happening before our eyes: the combined process of a barbaric epidemic of human crimes in South-West Asia and the spread of Ebola, potentially a new Black Death, is a threat to our entire civilization. These two “social killer” diseases are not limited to one region of the world; they are spreading into the developed sector, and into Europe in particular. The jihadists from Londonistan, Parisistan or other “istans” in Europe are ready to come back to Europe trained to rape and kill. Already, in France, one of them has called on all his brothers and sisters to kill French civilians at random, as “revenge against the air bombings of the Western armies”. We have played with fire, and that fire is now coming back to us.
According to the WHO estimate, which is probable underestimated, by next December, Ebola will be infecting 5 to 10 000 human beings per week and very soon 20 000, killing most of them for lack of adequate treatment in Africa. Under the rule of the British financial neo-colonialism, based on human triage, the African continent is the poorest and most exploited part of the world, a situation which is accepted, in one form or another, by all European countries. Not to speak of the policies of isolating the ill which, even if justified, are meant to hinder trade and economic development, adding hunger to disease. But Ebola does not stop at borders; we have created the danger of a breakout of this epidemic across continents. It has already infected medical assistants in the United States and Spain, and could spread into the poor layers of our own countries, which represent a growing proportion of the population due to destructive austerity policies, and then reach most of us should nothing be done to stop it.
I wanted to mention this, which has already been raised by previous speakers or will be developed more in depth throughout the conference, to stress that we are not faced with mere incompetence or an accident in history, but with the result of wilful policies from a European oligarchy which rules in the United Kingdom, in Brussels and among the leaders of all European countries. This system of power cannot be repaired or cured, it has to be changed.
You have been, or will be, confronted here with quotes of Prince Philip of Edinburgh or others, such as the infamous one in which he hopes to be reincarnated as a virus to reduce the world population. Others can be mentioned, such as John Holdren, Obama’s senior advisor on science and technology issues, or the famous French ecologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who, like his British colleagues, wished to reduce the world population to less than one billion human beings. This is criminal, but it is not a crime of only a few individuals. It is a crime embedded in the British imperial system and in the institutions of our European Union. Why? Because they are Malthusian. Their conception of man is that of a tamed animal; on top, are those meant to rule, and underneath, the rest are doomed to submit. Such a Malthusian thinking cannot conceive that “development” means a community of purpose, the common aims of humanity shared by those committed to fight for them, and not the criminal idea that you necessarily grow at the expense of others in a world of inevitably finishing resources. Europe therefore has to change to become an association of nation states committed to global world advancement.
Let us look at how Europe was generated since the end of World War II. It was based on three main rules: financial liberalism, free trade and the debasement of nation states. This culminated in the euro, a tool of self-induced destruction. As a result, for 2014 and 2015, we have zero growth rates – in fact negative physical rates – and the demand by Eurostat, the European Institute of Statistics, to include illegal activities in the Gross National Product of all members states. That means that prostitution, drug traffic, tobacco and alcohol smuggling will be laundered into the economy in order to increase the nominal GDPs and justify taking on more debt!
The estimated collapse of the purchasing power of the average wage earners in Europe since 2007 varies between 5% in France and Germany, to 50% in Greece! Two books written in French by Coralie Delaume, “Europe, the Disunited States”, and Robert Salais, “The rape of Europe” clearly make the point, measure by measure, that the present European Union has been deliberately organized to destroy the nation states and prevent the people from taking part in the real decision-making processes. We have been infected by the contrary — the absolute contrary — of a principled policy “of the people, by the people and for the people”, as it is enshrined in the marble of the American Constitution and in article 2 of the French Constitution.
This should not be a surprise if we consider where today’s European Union comes from. It is the creation of the Committee for a United Europe and of the American Committee for United Europe, organizations through which the British and American services channelled funds and “ideas” to the European federalists. The ideas were British, and the money was the dollar: the Committee was created by Allan Dulles, the head of the Wall Street branch of the American CIA and by Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s son in law. They were the godfathers of that Europe, along with a Frenchman, Henri Frenay, the arch-enemy of Charles de Gaulle who organized the elimination of Jean Moulin, who served as the link between the Free French outside of France and the French Resistance inside the country. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, financed through the compensation funds of the Marshall Plan, created the cultural grounds to impose such a perverted Europe. Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman shared the job on behalf of their friends throughout Europe, including those active in the corridors of the Vatican. The original sin, so to speak, of the European Union lies therein, and the shape of the children corresponds to the wishes of those who cared for them.
Let me say something about the state of affairs in the European press and in economic institutions.
On the European press: Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the leading dailies in Germany, recently admitted that “I’ve been educated to lie, to betray and not to tell the truth to the public” and described how he was under the influence of the CIA. He said that most corporate media journalists in the United States and Europe are on “so-called non official cover”, working for intelligence agencies. I quote him: “I think it is especially the case with British journalists, because they have a much closer relationship. It is especially the case with Israeli journalists. Of course with French journalists.…The German and American media try to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia.…I am very fearful of a new war in Europe”.
Well, now you understand why all these people either never publish a word about us or, when they cannot ignore us, they call us “a cult” or use other slanderous characterizations which evolve over time. These are character assassins, working on behalf of the assassins, period.
As for economics, French behaviorist economist Jean Tirole just got the equivalent of the Nobel prize for economics. To make it short: he has always claimed that the “concept of a systemic crisis is meaningless” and that to regulate hedge funds or derivatives is impossible, “let’s leave that to irrational idealists”. After teaching at Princeton and MIT, he has now founded, with 60 million euros from the French state and from French banks, the Toulouse School of Economics and the Advanced Study Institute in Toulouse, which both promote among other things the concept they themselves call “mutually assured delusion” (MAD). That is, after all, a good term to characterize the present “European groupthink”.
Let us now put our choice in blunt terms. Will Europe and Spain be the bridge for bringing the positive development of Eurasia into Africa, or will they rather be the bridge over which the death march of Ebola reaches the center of Europe? Will Germany, France, Italy and other European countries regain their humanist impulse, or will they continue to spread the contrary on behalf of the British Empire? Are we determined to throw the idiocy of geopolitics and deductive thinking into the river, and to once again become explorers and discoverers? Are we ready to jump out of the false economic dilemma which opposes the Keynesian monetarism of money forgers (monetarist diarrhoea), to the orthodox cult of “tight money” and wealth grabbers (monetarist constipation)? French and German politicians may recognize themselves in this toilet room of world politics.
These are the real questions in the real world.
What was Europe in 1411? A region with a level of development relatively much lower than that of China and India. Out of the ten major cities in the world, only one was European – Paris — with at most 200,000 inhabitants, while Beijing had at least 600,000. Even in 1792-1793, Lord Macartney described the power and the number of the Chinese as a threat for the developing British Empire, suggesting that something had to be done about that, because there were really too many of them on Earth.
So what made Europe successful after 1411? In real terms, the Renaissance and its revolution in science and art, the Renaissance of Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, the Renaissance of Leonardo and Beethoven, of Rembrandt and Bach. The idea of a homo universalis, a human being developing above the animal species, not because of his power to dominate, but because of his capacity to create and to awaken his self-conscience.
Unfortunately, instead of sharing that capacity, Europe, under the rule of its oligarchy, betrayed its own sense of universality, and the Empires used the potential created by the Renaissance on their own behalf, against other regions of the world. Looting, destruction and bestiality took over, and the technological applications of scientific discoveries were not used to launch an era of mutual development, but rather to gain power and possessions. What was developed in the United States, based on the best of European tradition – i.e., the Leibnizian principles of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and not life, liberty and property – was destroyed during the late 20th century, after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
As Europeans and Americans, our mission is to recover the founding principles enshrined in the American Constitution, and for us, in Europe, to recover the principles of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. That is precisely what Tony Blair called to eliminate in his famous Chicago speech in 1999, which was to be followed by the so-called war against terrorism, which is nothing but a war to terrorize people and to pit all against all.
The Peace of Westphalia was based on three main commitments:
* The forgiveness of past offenses, including what was considered as the main offense, debt incurred to finance wars;
* the advantage of the other, to prevent wars from breaking out and making gains at the expense of the other;
* the upholding of the principle of national sovereignty based on mutual respect.
And that is what has been sold down the river by the current European Union, which is neither European nor a Union.
So where are we going to find the impulse for our recovery? Among those who have respected our principles better, although imperfectly. I mean, yes, the BRICS, or in the words of Modi: “Let’s make development a mass movement, just like Mahatma Gandhi made the freedom movement a mass movement.” Such is the paradox of the present moment of history: we have lost our principles in Europe and the United States, and the only way to recover them is to be inspired by the dynamic of the BRICS, which was created as a defense against our mistakes and our crimes, against the oligarchic financial oppression which propagates murder and destruction of the entire social fabric. But to do that, to act for the common good, we have to free ourselves once and for all from the British oligarchy and its back-up troops.
That does not mean that we Europeans have nothing to bring to the wedding basket. I do not believe, like the school of British historians, the Gibbons and the Toynbees, in the fatality of a decline, in the continuity of a great degeneration. I believe that the more the danger grows, the more what saves is at hand, provided that we mobilize ourselves for the future of humanity, beyond Europe itself. And if Europe has done anything worth remembering since the end of World War II, it is to have made peace among European nations, even though it was on the basis of a compromise with the oligarchy. Now, we have to clean up our act at home and rid ourselves of the oligarchic infection. You cannot organise a peaceful home, with cockroaches and beetles inside. It is time to clean our houses and to act, not for ourselves, but for the advantage of other people. We need to disinfect ourselves and to leap forward together with one impulse, not only to join the BRICS but to inspire the development of the future. Our immediate challenge is not only to prevent horrible things from happening, but to make good things happen, derived from new principles.
A historical example gives me hope – in fact it is not one, but two. First that of Anton Wilhelm Amo, a young African gentleman from Ghana who was adopted circa 1707 by the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbütell and treated as a member of the family. He went to the universities of Halle, Wittenberg and then Iena, studying logic, metaphysics, physiology, astronomy, history, law, theology, politics and medicine. He mastered six languages: English, French, Dutch, Latin, Greek and of course German. In 1729, he wrote a memoire on De Jure Maurorum in Europa, where he demands the right for blacks to be treated the same as other Europeans. He earned his doctorate in philosophy at Wittenberg, in 1734. His remarkable thesis, On the absence of sensation in the human mind and its presence in our organic and living body, is against Cartesian dualism and develops a Leibnizian conception of humanity based on the discovery of principles and the elaboration of ideas beyond sensual perception. He returned to his birth place when Germany became repressive, and died under custody in a Dutch fortress in Ghana. Abbot Grégoire praises him in his « Notices des nègres et des mûlatres distingués par leurs talents et leurs ouvrages », on the intellectual achievements of black authors, and he was also a reference for Kwame N’Krumah, the first president of Ghana.
The other case in the 18th century is that of Abraham Petrovich Gannibal, a black child adopted and freed by the Russian Czar Peter the Great, who had a glorious career in Russia as an engineer and officer, married into the nobility and had generations of descendants, among them his great-grandson Aleksandr Pushkin. These two cases prove that when European individuals decide to respect the advantage of the other, such things can happen, and it is a ray of light from the past into the future. Today, we are far from having extended to all Africans such recognition of their humanity, and it is a challenge for us all to achieve that, as an expression of our rebirth. When we let them die, we murder our own humanity by doing that to them.
Because Europe, as they have tried to impose it upon us, has no future; it is finished as a financial powerhouse located on a limited region of the world under British tutorship, but the nation-states composing Europe have to be revived, like voices in a chorus or instruments in an orchestra: sovereign in serving the advantage of all.
Let’s think about it as a matter of life and death. It is a matter of life and death, and we all have to understand the danger better that in the written words that I am reading for you. Death: if we keep behaving as we are, our destiny is to die. Either we could all die in a world war, or Ebola could kill us, or we could be destroyed by the coming waves of murderous austerity breaking over us all. It is here and now and the result would be the same: a planned mass extermination. Peace: let’s think of all European nations joining together to contribute. Life: that means, first, to stop once and for all the confrontation against Russia and China, and second, to launch a credit policy to build the infrastructure or better said the platform for world peace.
Think of it as a European choir, a chorus of nations, from the Atlantic to the Urals, a Eurasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok and the Sea of China. Germany bringing its steel and machine tool capabilities, together with Switzerland and Austria, France its atomic energy and aerospace capacity, and both France and Germany uniting with Russia, China and the United States in a space project, for which researchers and engineers expect us to mobilize, from Darmstadt to Toulouse.
Think of the north of Europe — Sweden, Denmark and Finland — as a bridge towards the East. Think of the south as a bridge towards Africa, over Italy, Spain and Portugal.
Think of all the nations of Europe that I did not mention as well. It is a combination with an incredible potential for peace, it is one of the keys to open the gates of the future, but we fail to use it with our culture of death and deadly inaction, our entropic non-action, our sin of omission and pessimism. European nations can only survive if they commit themselves to giving up their bad social habits, practices and opinions of the past hundred years, and to mustering the optimism needed to reject a culture of death. To be human is not to look at yourself in a mirror like a narcissistic oligarch, but to look at yourself from the standpoint of the future, improving the condition of mankind.
Europe has no future in its perverted form, but it does have the right to claim it as an assembly of wise minds in sovereign Republics. Here we are, in this room, and I am sure we are going to be enriched by the next speakers with thoughts coming from the future.
Let us then free ourselves from the deadly embrace of the City of London, Wall Street and the British Empire, and say and mean the following:
Long live a new Silk Road around the whole Earth!
Long live free Europe; long live Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Sea of China!
Long live free Germany!
Long live free France!
Vive les Etats-Unis de Franklin, Lincoln, Roosevelt et LaRouche, Vive les Etats-Unis libres! Long live free United States!
We may all breathe freely the open air, provided we put our lives at stake on behalf of Humanity’s future. It is in our hands, it is in our hands because it is our mission. And the people, if we challenge their pessimism and set an example for them, are waiting to come onstage.
