News / Brèves LHLDiscussion Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente LPAC Policy Committee with Lyndon LaRouche 17 March 2015 This week, LPAC Policy Committee discuss with Mr. LaRouche his recent paper "On the Subject of Germany’s Role" Steinmeier, Schmidt, O’Malley and We ’Now represent an effort to prevent a Thermonuclear war from occuring’. Matthew OGDEN: good afternoon. It’s March 16th, 2015, my name is Matthew Ogden, and I would like to welcome all of you to our discussion with the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee.... I’m joined over video by Bill Roberts, who’s joining us from Detroit, Michigan; Dave Christie, who’s joining us from Seattle, Washington; Lyndon LaRouche, who’s joining us live over video today; Rachel Brinkley who’s joining us from Boston, Massachusetts. We will not be joined by either Kesha Rogers or Michael Steger today, they’re both out of town. But I am joined in the studio by Diane Sare as you can see, and two special guests from the LaRouche PAC Basement Team: Megan Beets and Ben Deniston. Now, I think I’ve going to give Lyn a chance to begin our discussion here today. I’ll just remark for people that the latest article that Mr. LaRouche wrote and published yesterday, called, "On the Subject of Germany’s Role", is available, and I encourage everybody to read that as soon as you can, if you haven’t, yet already. So, Lyn, I’ll let you begin our discussion here. LYNDON LAROUCHE: Yes, what the problem is, to understand how we’re going to deal with the fact that we have two leading German figures, who have connected themselves to an American figure, in the sense that he’s working from the United States on trying to create an option for getting through this present international financial system, without getting into a thermonuclear war. And also in dealing with some of the issues that have to be dealt with. I wrote this thing on the subject of Germany’s role in this and I addressed it specifically one of the members, which is the Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and so I published this thing this morning, actually last evening; but this morning, and we will find out that this is actually the first thing I’ve done in this way in a very long time. Usually I’ve been doing this orally or in a few notes here and there, but this was a composition which I thought was necessary as a composition. And I made the presentation to Steinmeier who was active in this thing, and my point was to make a contribution to bring together forces across the trans-Atlantic region, to bring them together, leading people, and to get them to start to move this thing, to prevent going through an Obama operation. The danger here is Obama is a threat, right now, is a threat, is the leading, number one threat to the survival or extinction of the human species. Because he’s been pushing by every kind of swindle way you can imagine , he and his cronies, to try and get a thermonuclear war going! What is happened is O’Malley has intervened in this case; [helmut] Schmidt has intervened on this case, and also in general all of us on this case. So therefore, we are actually working to define an approach, a collective approach implicitly, which can get us out of this threatened war, threatened world war which could be the extermination of the species. And we’re up against, with these German leaders who are active on this thing, what we’re getting from O’Malley on this thing from the United States, we now represent implicitly an effort to prevent a thermonuclear war from occurring. Because this could happen. If you get the German government, other agencies and O’Malley, an American figure of some merit and weight, we’ve got the possibility, of preventing a thermonuclear war. OGDEN: Obviously, what you’re referring to Lyn, as people who viewed the Friday webcast are also familiar with, are these three statesmen, German foreign Minister Steinmeier, who made a very significant speech at the Center for Strategic and international Studies (CSIS) on Thursday; former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt who wrote an article that was published in Bild-Zeitung on the same day, last Thursday; and then former [maryland] Governor O’Malley, who’s been indicating his intention to run as a Democratic candidate for President and focussing his entire preliminary or ante-campaign, around the need to restore Glass-Steagall, to immediately deal with the collapsing trans-Atlantic financial system. But Lyn, in your paper that you wrote, what you mentioned on the subject of Germany’s role, in pulling together this trans-Atlantic grouping of statesmen around your leadership, you make the example of counter-posing the disintegration of the trans-Atlantic physical economic system, the physical economic productivity per capita of the trans-Atlantic system which has been cannibalized by the usury of financial speculation, versus the dramatically increasing rates of productivity, both in terms of economic but also creativity productivity of the citizens of Eurasia, especially with the leadership of China. And you’ve remarked, what China is doing with the leadership into exploring the Moon, exploring the helium-3 potential of mining the surface of the Moon, but bringing the Solar System into the domain of mankind’s control, this is the image of what a proper organization of the entire human habitation of the planet Earth should represent, according to the Johannes Kepler principle. LAROUCHE: Yeah, well, this was the full, short piece of about two and a half pages, printed, which I produced for circulation which covers this. And I didn’t want to go into details because I thought the discussion would probably be more fruitful, than my just listing all the details. Diane SARE: Well, I think this Steinmeier visit, I mean, he is the current foreign minister, so he wouldn’t be making the trip if there were not an institutional decision in Germany for him to see this. And he saw this with Hollande and Merkel and their initiative to create this Normandy Four in Ukraine. And I think it’s really crucial, because Obama had been obsessed, that his trans-Atlantic alliance, based on his dictatorial rule under the British Empire and Wall Street had to be maintained. And what’s occurred is that this now has broken. So it’s extremely significant. And then you have the British, the U.K., joining the AIIB [Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank], which then makes it extremely, — what is going to be their argument now to prevent other European nations from joining with Asia, ultimately joining the Silk Road, etc.? And I think it is a great moment of opportunity, and the danger is, Obama’s controllers, the only weapon at their avail is their idea of a so-called thermonuclear war. Because everything that they are trying to do is not succeeding. They’ve lost the trans-Atlantic alliance, the BRICS New Development Bank has been ratified, the British have now decided they have to join the AIIB, so Obama is very weak. And I think the spirit at the end of the memo about Joan of Arc and about doing the impossible, I mean, this is the concept that could capture the American spirit, because we have to get the American population on the right side of this. Dave CHRISTIE: Well, this is also in the context, the moves by Steinmeier and Helmut Schmidt is in the context also of the revelations by Putin, in this documentary that was put together on Crimea, in which he made it extremely clear that this was the Obama administration, that ran this coup, that the forces that ran the coup were then planning the assassination of [ousted Ukrainian President] Yanukovych. And then was admitted by Obama anyway, so this is not necessarily a new revelation; Obama admitted on the CBS interview where he said, or maybe it was CNN, where he said that he had brokered the transition government, which is simply a way to say that, more or less. But the other striking point on this, which goes to Lyn’s warnings that really go back to the death of Qaddafi, when Lyn first put forward the warning that we were in a march towards a thermonuclear confrontation, but Putin made the revelation in this documentary that indeed, they had plans that, if needed, they would arm the nuclear arsenal of Russia, concerning the Crimea situation, which actually goes to about a year ago, when I made the request, when I made the request of Obama, at the Democratic National Committee, to tell us about his plans for nuclear war with Russia. And I guess the revelations by Putin made it clear that that was what the issue was at that time. But indeed, this also goes to what Lyn had put out the warning it’s not a war of extinction. They want this limited strike, Obama and the forces of the British Empire want the limited strike to wipe out Eurasia, but the response that has come from the Russian government which has made it clear that they’re not going to play a tit-for-that game concerning the Global Strike, or the use of tactical nuclear weapons: They will respond in full. And so, I think that this revelation by Putin follows that up on the clarity, or the danger of the situation. Rachel BRINKLEY: You also made the point about China, which is important to keep in perspective, that while the trans-Atlantic system is collapsing, China has come in and is making amazing breakthroughs in the physical economy, including the possibility of major discoveries of principles of the Solar System, and that that brings together the combination of the social development of mankind, the fact that we need to enter a new system of collaboration among nations, and new principled scientific discoveries, which does bring into play the question of Kepler. And I do think it’s important that we get out of this mode practical discussions in the current system, that we have to think creatively, we have to think in terms of the quality of someone like Joan of Arc, who imagined the impossible and creates it. And so, it is essential that we think about this question of Kepler himself, coming back into play now, through what the Chinese have done, and what that represents also as a social principle, the related social principles which that would drive nations to take up. OGDEN: Yeah, absolutely. That caught my attention at the conclusion of your memo, here, Lyn. What you’re saying about what it takes to make the impossible possible. How do you bridge the gap between something which seems to be seemingly impossible and to actualize that as a possibility, and to create the future. And I think that is the act of discovery. That is the act of creativity. How do you get from the present to the future? How do you give birth to a future which was inconceivable in terms of the parameters of what’s seemingly "acceptable" in the present? LAROUCHE: Well, the parameters are interesting, because what I referred to, in this, — I mean this thing is now in print, so I don’t need to go through the whole thing again in detail — but the point is that we realize, or have to realize, that what China has done, — I don’t know exactly how to put it because there was a Chinese figure who was assigned to do the study of the space program. He did it, it was approved. The thing is going now; it’s going on the Moon programs, but it’s going way beyond the Moon programs and implicitly is going all the way to Kepler’s den, shall we say. And so that is what the destiny of mankind is, that the human being is not an animal, the human being is not like an animal, the human being is not something that dies. An animal dies. Animals do develop however. They do develop. Human beings develop. But the point is that what was required is to understand that mankind is not an animal that dies. Yes, human being dies, but they don’t die as animals die, it’s not a termination. Human beings, unlike animals, contribute to making a future for mankind. No animal makes a future for its own species and develops itself to a higher quality of species on that basis. And so the important thing here is, what are we going to do with mankind? Here is mankind, being challenged by the threat of a thermonuclear war. The war could happen, and human beings might become extinct. So therefore, what is the carryover from an extinct species which is a threat given to us, as opposed to the development of the human species to a higher level where such threats and so forth could be conquered, and mankind can achieve things that no previous human being could do. I used in this case, the case of Jeanne d’Arc. The Jeanne d’Arc case is an example of exactly how the history of mankind produces a kind of mankind which is never simply a copy of the predecessor or the predecessor species; that mankind develops to a higher level. And the necessary thing now, is mankind has to think in terms of Kepler, in the sense we have to think about the fact that Kepler is the key point for us to [inaudible 17:07] to solar development in the Solar System. And from that standpoint, we have the idea of a future of mankind which is of a form beyond anything mankind before has experienced, or mankind will experience in the future. Mankind is a creature of the future, is the driver of the future, is the creator of the future. And when mankind recognizes that that is mankind’s assigned responsibility and capability, then mankind will begin to behave as mankind should. CHRISTIE: You know, Lyn, I was struck by the way that you developed the intervention by Steinmeier and Schmidt, upgrading it and bringing up Kepler and the concept of statecraft. And I was just reflecting on the fact that Johannes Kepler basically died in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, which was ravaging Europe and the playground of the empires of the time. And the fact that he was committed to develop this creative outpouring even in the middle of this great horror that was gripping Europe. And towards the end of the Thirty Years’ War, you also had the birth of Leibniz, who was obviously directly influenced by Kepler and made it extremely clear in his writings as such. And I was just thinking on this question of harmonics, because what is harmony? Well, it’s to bring elements together, or to see relationships between certain elements, and I was just reflecting on the fact that one of the things that Leibniz was involved in, as part of this creative outpouring was that he was involved in the creation of the scientific academies in Russia. But also was investigating what China represented and had writings on the role of Confucius and how that was very much in coherence with the traditions of Europe, of Christ and that outlook; and had the idea that really, Russia could be the bridge between Asia and Europe. And I think that’s at least in my mind, a conception of how harmonics relates to statecraft, and that fight by Leibniz which was really to bring the world into coherence, really has been the foundation of the fight concerning geopolitics. You know, Helga Zepp-LaRouche had put forward the call in this petition to bring the United States and Europe to the BRICS, but that was also the call to end geopolitics. And of course, the geopolitics of Mackinder and the British Empire towards the end of the 1800s, which was entirely to prevent Russia from becoming the bridge between Europe and Asia , and also the potential that that would go across the Bering Strait and be in cooperation with the United States. But I just think that it’s notable that even in this kind of profound crisis of war that had gripped Europe, you had Kepler striving to fight for this creative identity which then sparked the larger outpouring of trying to bring the world into more harmony, by Leibniz and others. LAROUCHE: Yes. Benjamin DENISTON: And that’s a good case study for exactly what, Lyn, I think you were just saying, about the ability of the individual to create a new future which didn’t exist without its actions, is the basis for judging the value or the contribution of one’s life. I think that point came across very strongly in your memo, and the way you were saying just now, that that it’s not how much success you think you can get in the context of society today, because what makes us human is the ability to transform society to a completely new level, to a higher level which doesn’t exist in the present. So, are you living your life in a way, where your action is focussed on creating a potentially real new stage for mankind, that that’s your only real scientific basis to judge the value — and I think this goes also to the problem with the degeneration in society, where we’ve gone through generations of de-generation, where people are further removed from having the internal capability to see their lives in that role, and they’re increasingly judging their value, their importance, who they think they are, by what kind of response they get from society around them. So what you’re doing, bringing in this higher perspective that mankind has to go to a new stage now. So, are your actions coherent with, no popular opinion today, but what’s necessary to create that new higher stage for mankind? And that’s all that really matters, that’s what’s really valuable. Whether or not you see that manifest in some big popular way or not, that’s not the point. The point is, are you fighting in a way that’s coherent with where mankind has to go? Is that where you’re focussing your activity? It’s crucial today to shift the discussion to that level, explicitly. LAROUCHE: What we see in the process of the last century, the 20th century, we see a shift of mankind from certain parts of the planet, really had an idea of creating a future, of creating a new kind of future, new qualities, new technologies, new scientific discoveries. And the utilization and development of these processes used to be, in society, for example from the Jeanne d’Arc on, process, that mankind should always better than the previous generations. And therefore you can never assign a fixed capability to a human being. The human being should always have a higher capability developed than anybody beyond, or groups beyond. And that is what’s been lost. What I emphasized in this case, for example, the report, we’re using stagnant conceptions of production. The concept production no longer means production. It means something completely different: It means, using up people, taking things out, being practical. And the worst thing that you could do to a human being is tell them to be practical. Because practical means "become an animal." Don’t become a human being, be a practical animal. Learn an animal’s tricks! How many people work on the basis of being trained, to perform animals’ tricks, or tricks exactly like those of animals? How many people do that? The majority of the people of the United States are compelled, if they have any employment at all, to act like animals, not like human beings, not like creativity! And the issue which I’ve raised in this case, was, especially our people across [the Atlantic], Steinmeier for example, that this issue is the issue! The issue is that mankind is not going to apply something that they’ve been taught, they’re not going to be a dog performing a dog on a stage. Mankind is going to be something which, in each case, is better than anybody that ever lived before. Or has made a contribution to society which is greater than has ever been accomplished before. That is the proper definition of mankind. And what we’ve done is we’ve degraded society, that since the beginning of the 20th century, there’s been a persistent degeneration of the morals and minds of the human beings of the trans-Atlantic region, in particular. And that’s what the problem is. We’ve now come to the point that the animal, — Obama typifies the animal principle, the non-human animal principle, in his policies, his behavior. He becomes a point of convergence, for this kind of degeneration. And therefore, what my approach to this is to say, OK, we’ve got a couple of Germans, one whom I know, and the other of whom I know; and we have also O’Malley. They’ve come to agreement to start to do something, something that has to be done to pull together forces which will act to change the course of history, from the routine and degenerate, into the promising. And I used the case of China, because China’s work on the Moon project, its Moon experiments, the implications of those experiments which are going to mean the higher levels of the solar system, these things are the things which should capture the mind and desires of people. And that’s the difference. We have to understand how badly we’ve been treated! How badly we’ve been educated, especially since the beginning of the 20th century. The rate of degeneration, especially in the trans-Atlantic region, the moral and intellectual degeneration of each school program, is more degenerate than the next! I’ve been through this thing. You know I’m a century man, I’ve been through this thing. And I can tell you that the schooling process is a process of degeneration, step by step down, of every class, every level of education class, and similar things in the United States and Europe. SARE: You know, what I was thinking, when you were talking about what people contribute is what [egyptian] President el-Sisi said — I think it was him — in a speech, where he said "The people are Egypt are going to give infinitely, we are capable of giving infinite gifts to mankind." Or, now that you have a government in Greece that’s standing up against this usurious policy, and you meet people, Greek Americans, who say, "We have given civilization a great deal, and why should we feel like slaves now? We were feeling like second-class citizens. Now we’re liberated." But the interesting thing is when they feel "liberated," their response is to think of what they are giving to mankind, as opposed to what they’re getting. It’s a completely different, actually human outlook. Megan BEETS: Yeah, in the way, in a discussion a few days ago, the way that you put it, Lyn, was that the American people have been trained to strive to triumph in an animal existence. And I found that to be really hard-hitting. And then what you put in this paper, and then what you just expressed, Diane, is absolutely the antidote and the real place where we have to fight to direct people’s attention. Because what’s addressed in here, which I found incredibly gripping is what you called an interlocked relationship between man’s discoveries in the Solar System and the development of society, and in how man’s explorations of the Solar System in his discoveries mentally, as Kepler did, are then reflected into reshaping society in a way that man didn’t plan, or which could never have been elaborated from the current state of society. And it made me think of two things, actually. One was the Joan of Arc/Cusa relationship and the way that the inspiration from what Joan of Arc achieved with her life and her sacrifice, and her utter passion to free mankind from the state of bestiality as expressed in France at that time, was then the spark of inspiration for Cusa, who created a kind of society which didn’t exist at the time. Cusa is the foundation of the coming-into-being of the nation-state, first in France and then later in our republic. So that to me is also — it’s a projection of a new idea in society of man, that comes from the future, in shaping how man moves into that future. But then the other thing it made me think of, is the issue of culture, and this also tells you why society has become so degenerate, is the issue of things like music. And , this process of shaping society by a new discovery is exactly the process that a musician, a composer or a performer, goes through in creating a performance of Classical music, where the notes aren’t given ahead of time, in a sense. The notes and the intonation of the notes, and the tuning and everything of the performance is chosen as the performer passionately struggles to fulfill a need, to bring something into being and to establish a new form of existence in the form of this musical composition, this conception. And I think that’s the level on which we have to fight with people today, to realize that that’s human. Like you were referencing, none of people’s experience, what they think they experience today is reality. DENISTON: Mm-hmm. BRINKLEY: We see this turn of the century change, we’ve discussed the point that what happened around World War I, started in 1890, with the ouster of Bismarck and that that was the beginning of this paradigmatic change. You had also the assassination of the President of France at the time, [Marie François] Sadi Carnot, who was the nephew of the scientist [Nicolas Léonard] Sadi Carnot, who set up a certain physical understanding of legitimate thermodynamics, which was later destroyed and gave us a lot of these mechanical principles we use today which have destroyed real science. But it gives you a sense — one example of this joining of this question of the destruction of the nation and the destruction of science and morality being one and the same, going hand in hand with what we’ve discussed also with the connections of Kepler to Benjamin Franklin and Hamilton, etc. And there was also a connection of Mozart: His librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, also was in the United States, in Philadelphia and New York, and was also connected to some of the circles around the Society of the Cincinnatus and some of the republican circles in the United States at that time. So I think we can go back and trace some of these things, but it is an interconnected fight. This demoralization of the culture, the economics, the system of government and the policy towards war, has all been and the same. And this question of culture is a must to freeing people from this as well. We have to free them from this slavery, that’s been imposed on them throughout the century. LAROUCHE: You could say, generally the history of the last century, the 20th century, which has been the last century so far, that that has been a degeneration. There’s been a systematic degeneration of everything, in the trans-Atlantic region — everything. Education, every bit of education, skills, qualities of employment, progress, all these things have degenerated, have been degenerated, over the course of the 20th century, up into continuation right now. Every day today, the people of the United States are becoming more and more degenerate. Every day, now, the people of Europe are becoming more and more degenerate, day by day, almost the beating of the heart, day by day! And the problem here is not to solve a problem, to build an object. The problem here is to create a reversal of these tendencies, to build a future which had never been known before, a reality which had never been experienced before — an achievement, something original, because that’s the characteristic that defines the difference between being a human being an animal! An animal is a practical creature. Human beings are not animals. Bill ROBERTS: Just to say something on the O’Malley comments that we covered. I think, you know, Lyn on what you’re raising on this question of how the culture created a situation where people actually control their behavior, I thought what he said, not just in the sense of coming out and saying "Glass-Steagall is what’s required," but the way in which he said that we pretend like the economy is just something that swept in on a Gulf Stream, and he called Democrats who adapt to this kind of Wall Street-friendly thinking, he called "victim-crats"; that human beings are just victims of these types of circumstances. And you know, you think about China’s space program as a completely different — I mean, they’re going out to the Moon. They’re already making discoveries on the Moon, that the Moon has been much more active geologically, recently, and it’s helping to just overturn these corrupt assumptions that are imposed, because people are just thinking about getting along within a fixed system in which you adopt certain habits, certain beliefs, to make yourself friendly to these type of forces. LAROUCHE: Yeah. OGDEN: Well, what O’Malley also said is that the problem of the Democratic Party has been their willingness to prostitute themselves to Wall Street, trying to get the money of Wall Street, and so they’ve become the party of "Dodd-Frank Lite." I think that’s absolutely the point. And it’s the willingness of somebody to say, Wall Street’s my enemy and I relish their hated, like Franklin Roosevelt did. That’s what’s required to create a reversal in this trend of degeneration that you’re talking about, Lyn. And do you see the action of these three statesmen, Schmidt, Steinmeier and O’Malley, do you see this as indicative of the potential to reverse that trend of degeneration in the trans-Atlantic system, Lyn? LAROUCHE: It’s an option. I think it’s an option presented before us. I [inaudible 38:25] to that, their actions and that of O’Malley is exactly that. These are people who realize that we had to turn the corner, we had to go back, reverse process. And to re-create humanity again, rebuild humanity again, build it up! Now, we have several things that are pushing us in that direction: One is China. China is one of the most important developments. Now, the China development is actually the secret of the BRICS formula. That’s how it happened. Inspiration of China, in that period. Helga has a special experience in that, because she was almost postgraduate sort of to say, when she made her first trip into China, when she spent some time there. But the point was, I could see from Helga’s experience and the way she has lived, she’s always gone with this China business! She went into China, on this boat, and it was a funny kind of arrangement. But she was captured by the experience of China, when she was a very young woman, and she followed that ever since. And every step she’s made, generally, has been somehow related to more and more things about China, and to different parts of the world, in the same way as we look at China. So we start to look at the whole planet, as being one population, one human population. We find ourselves going in that direction. We find ourselves in terms of developing, each of us — I mean, each nation, each group of people, each talent — to get everybody to rise to an achievement level which they had never experienced before. That the idea of having children is to produce as an adult, or a semi-adult, to produce children who are superior to anything you had achieved in life before. That’s the process. And that’s what I think the inspiration is here. You have, Germany — I know these people; I know Schmidt, for example, which is a funny story. But these people have acted, these three people, from Germany and United States, have acted to initiate something. And I felt, when I saw this thing happen, and I experienced, I said, something has broken loose, and that’s what’s happened: Something good has broken loose. And O’Malley, and Schmidt and Steinmeier have done something jointly, which really should not be stopped! It is a revival, a renaissance of humanity. And what they’re doing, and what I share in, is that. What I’m doing, for example, is — you know, even in our own organization, we have a lot of people who are so-called "practical" people, and I hate to see people degenerate into practical people. I hate to see the degeneration of many members of my organization, morally degenerating into becoming "practical people," not creative, but "practical." Now, what we’ve done in terms of our efforts recently, in actually New York City, what we’ve done recently, is we’ve turned the corner. We’ve gone into New York, Manhattan, and adjoining areas, and we say, "we’re going to revive this place, we’re going to revive the spirit that made this place." We’ve going to look at the people in Manhattan, for example, and we find some of them are willing to progress, re-progress, to achieve things, in which most parts of the United States don’t. Most parts of the United States, or the population in most parts of the United States, are degenerating, day by day! The quality of the human being being created, being born and raised, is degenerating! Which has been going on as a trend over the course of the 20th century, into the present time. And therefore, that’s what the issue has to be. The issue is that mankind must always go to a higher level than mankind has ever achieved before. And mankind must do it, not as an individual, mankind must do it as a species. But the ability of the species to do that depends upon the development of the individual. Because it’s the individual that makes the individual investments, individual discoveries. But you need people who are oriented toward that kind of progress, and without that, society degenerates — it literally not just degenerates, it rots: The economy and the people and the culture of the United States have been in at least [inaudible 44:08] has been rotting, rotted out! And I’ve experienced the whole process of the real, accelerating turnabout, into degeneration of the policies and the conditions of life of the American people. I’ve seen this in other nations. And then I’ve seen the contrary development, which we call the "BRICS phenomenon." The BRICS represents an effort an attempt, a foresight, as well into a better future for mankind. Whereas in Europe, Europe is degenerating. And you find that Schmidt, for example, and Steinmeier, and O’Malley have reacted! Reacted, let’s reverse the degeneration! OGDEN: You know one of the other things that O’Malley mentioned that got less attention, obviously, primarily was his remarks on Glass-Steagall, but he mentioned in this interview with Salon magazine that the policy of regime change has been what has brought us to the point of the danger of global war, I mean, not in those terms. But he denounced the doctrine of regime change, the policy of overthrowing governments from Iraq, to Libya, to potentially Syria and beyond, as making the world a more dangerous place, which is tantamount to denouncing the entire policy of the last 16 years, the Bush/Obama foreign policy, which has been one and the same thing. And I think what you’re mentioning, Lyn, about this degeneration of the trans-Atlantic culture has accelerated in a very condensed form, over these past two Presidential administrations, over these past 16 years. And I know you were making a big point of highlighting the setup, the frameup of Bill Clinton, towards the end of his term in the 1990s, and the turning point that this marked in the trend towards collapse of the United States. LAROUCHE: That’s the pestilence! [laughs] SARE: The thing that’s I think clear is that this degeneration can change, I mean this quality of — because what is it when people say, "No, we’re going to go the other way," it’s a certain quality of defiance. It’s not simply resistance, which implies stopping things where it is, but a defiant quality where — I was thinking of just the encounters with the population, and it’s true, people are very demoralized, very depressed. The U.S. has a spike recently in suicides among middle-aged Americans. But then, you look at what’s happened with the BRICS process, look at Greece, they had a 27% increase in suicides. But now that you have a defiant leadership, the population is not in that kind of mindset. And I think that’s power of letting Americans know that there is such leadership. That’s why, Lyn, the American people have loved you, all these years, because they see him as someone who stands against this crap, the tide of the popular destruction or degeneration. And I just think it’s very important that everyone remember that this is not a state that has to continue in this direction, or that we have to be in. The point is to reverse it, for which the potential is now very clear. DENISTON: Yeah, it’s a clinical approach. Like why is it such a shitty situation today? What has actually happened to bring us here? That’s what’s so important about defining these last two presidencies in particular, the succession of generations. People come in and say, "is this what humanity is? Is this what society is, this rotten state?" No! That’s not what it is inherently. This is the process that got us there. And the point is not to say, well, then that’s unchangeable. The point is to say, that’s what we know we have to break from. We have to know how we got to where we are, so we have a sense that this is what must be rejected and overcome. And I think, what Lyn said is important about his memo being a contribution to that whole process, because it is a unique addition to the entire discussion. There’s a certain recognition that we need a break from the system, this is not working, we need to go in this other direction. And intervening to add in this higher conception, well, we need to move somewhere else, so what is mankind’s mission in the Solar System, in the universe more generally? Let’s intervene and put that on the table: that’s what we need to start focussing on. You’re not trying to derive that from the current situation. We need to introduce that, and say, "this what needs to come in." This is what we need to bring to the table right now, this is what we need to get people, not just talking about it, but really thinking about it, trying to figure out. SARE: Well, think of starting the work on laser beam defense, when Jimmy Carter was President. And I mean, it worked to change history completely. But it certainly was not something that was part of that culture. LAROUCHE: Take me back, to memories! [laughs] When you get memories like that, you get me to see how old I am! But it’s a good thing, because we have a chance to reverse the direction of history, from going backwards to going forwards. And I think that what we’ve seen with Steinmeier, Schmidt, and O’Malley, that this is exactly what it is. This is what has been for me, has been a turning point, or a potential turning point: When you look at what China represents now. China is the actual leading nation on the planet in terms of its rate of development. Other parts of the planet are emulating what China is doing, responding to it. Then we have the fight between the reactionaries and those who are trying to progress. And we just have to make sure that we unify our forces to make sure that the right people win out. That’s the important thing to consider. And to win means to progress, to defy the practical people! Practical people are stupid people, and they’re also a degeneration of society, practical people. The idea of being practical is a commitment to moral and otherwise degeneration. And that’s what has to be stopped. And that’s what I think the three gentlemen involved we’ve been discussing, have actually been able to engender in the minds of some other people around the world. OGDEN: As you said, it creates the option, and it’s now the prerogative of us to lead the decision to take that option. LAROUCHE: Mm-hmm! Absolutely. Absolutely! That’s the idea: to enjoy taking the option. To enjoy taking the option! OGDEN: Mm-hmm. LAROUCHE: That’s what I do. I get very upset if I don’t. OGDEN: Great. Well, we were very happy to get this new paper that you’ve written, Lyn. And I think it’s created a good basis for our discussion here today, and I really encourage everybody who’s viewing to read and study what Mr. LaRouche put in this latest statement. Again, it’s available on the website. So, unless there’s anything to add, I think I’m going to bring a conclusion to our discussion here today. Thanks a lot everybody for joining us, and please stay tuned to larouchepac.com.