Lyndon LaRouche Return Interview On WOL Radio
 With Host Bernie McCain
April 22, 2023

LaRouche:  Good being with you.

McCain:  Thank you for coming back on board with us.

LaRouche:  It's always good to be with you.

McCain: We had a time when we were talking about what was taking place in the Mideast between the Palestinian homeland and the Israelis, moving into that area.  I'll begin there, and then start to move into a couple of other pieces, if I may.

LaRouche:  Sure.

McCain:  Let us get your observations of, one, what has taken place into the Israeli incursions into those areas, and two, your reaction to the reports that of what took place in Ramallah, and whether you believe, or have information that atrocities are taking place.

LaRouche: Well, first of all, the operation, itself, is an atrocity. You don't have to get the body count to know it is an atrocity. The very method of the operation, the very way the policy is run.  What this is, and this has been, this is heavily in the Israeli press, particularly on Ha'aretz, which is one of the best sources of press coverage from in among Israelis today. And, what we've determined is that the Israeli military leadership associated now with the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, but also Netanyahu, has the same policy, are committed to a policy of removal of the bulk of the Palestinian population from the present Palestinian authority area. That means, essentially, genocide.  Now, what in going to do that the Israeli military knew they faced a problem which was analogous to the problem which the Nazis had in 1943 when they moved to clean out the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto.  The operations that have been run, which we have seen on television, in part, which we've seen reports, we don't even have to get to the nitty gritty, we've seen it. These kinds of operations, and the way the thing has been run, it's been run on two bases.  First of all, Arafat is head of the Palestinian Authority, has as his major operation, Hamas.  Now many people in Hamas are a different political persuasion than that of Yasser Arafat, they are more militant, generally. But also one has to know that Hamas was created by Ariel Sharon. Ariel Sharon as Housing Minister set up special arrangements by which he actually set into process a way Hamas was created.  His purpose was to ruin the representation of Yasser Arafat and thus cause a conflict among Palestinians which he could play to the advantage of his policy which was to get the Palestinians out of Israel.  So you had some people in Hamas who have not been touched at all by the Israeli operations, whereas, most of the organization of the incidents, the resistance people using themselves as human bombs, and other things.  Most of this has come from a Hamas circle, but nothing has been done about it.

McCain:  Let me ask you a question.  Why then would, because, in effect, what I hear you saying, is that what he has done is to maintain Yasser Arafat because that seems to be the bogey man that everyone can see and identify with, is that the sum reason for keeping him in power?

LaRouche:  No.  He's only kept in power because from pressure from the United States and from Europe.

McCain:  Okay.  I shouldn't say in power, I should say in place because I'm not quite sure what level....

LaRouche:  How much power he has at that location.  Well, he has a spiritual power, actually, Yasser Arafat today has probably more power than he's had in the world for years.  He's recognized as a folk hero throughout most of the world.  Now Sharon's intention is to kill him.  And, they've said it very clearly. That Arafat is to be removed.

McCain:  Yes.

LaRouche:  Now, to remove him means that they have to remove him by force.  That means killing him.  Sharon has always wanted to kill Arafat.  So, what we're dealing with, we're dealing with murder.

McCain:  Here's the question.  If Yasser Arafat is dead, okay? That's the devil that you know, what about the devil that you don't know that is going to eventually come into that chair?

LaRouche:  Well, what's going to come in eventually is that, what Sharon is doing-- here's the deal danger.  The military in Israel knows, and this was made clear by Yitzhak Rabin before he was Prime Minister, and was Prime Minister. The Israelis know, the top Israeli military leaders know they can not successfully conduct this kind of war, ostensibly.  Because this is the kind--it's  a special kind of warfare--it's nose to nose, neighbor to neighbor, and there is no way you can win that kind of war by the kind of methods that are being used.  The objective of the Israelis, the ones who are doing this, and the objections largely from Israelis opposed to this, is that this is insane. They are destroying the country.  So, his policy is to start a war with Syria, and to get the United States to join him to start a war with Iraq.  So, Sharon's tactic is to extend the area of war to the Mideast generally, and, thus, to get the pressure off him for conducting a war inside the Palestinian area itself. Therefore, under conditions of warfare, general war, he would simply round up the Palestinians and move them out into neighboring areas, and say that this is a wartime measure.

McCain:  Well, here is a question.  Do you believe, and it has to do with European world more than it has to do more than with the African world.  Do you believe that the European world wants to see Israel with that kind of power no matter what America thinks it wants to do, would Europe sit back and allow that to take place, because those Arab states are still client states to Europe, and have historically been?

LaRouche:  Well, most European opinion, the leading opinion, is, has been for a long time, for decades, that the Middle East should be an area for economic co-operation and peace.  There should be two states, a Palestinian state and an Israeli state, in peace.  That under those conditions, the Europeans, in particular, would make a significant contribution to the economic to this area, for both Israel and Palestine, as a way of fostering peace.  That's simple.  So, we have no particular malicious attitude toward any party in the Middle East on the part of the Europeans.  You have individuals, of course, who are problematic, but, in general, no problem. The problem is, and also the United States, even old George Bush, the guy in the attic pounding on the floor, even he, and James Baker III, they shut off the water to Israel, at one point, in order to get, look, don't go too far ...

McCain:  Do me a favor, Mr. LaRouche, stay on board with us. I got to make a commercial coming right back to you.

LaRouche:  Fine.

McCain:  Outstanding.  Lyndon LaRouche is on board with us. And I want to make sure you stay right here....

(commercial break)

McCain:  Walking us down an aisle here, and having us take a look at both Israel and what is taking place in the Middle East, my question that you were still expounding on was, would Europe stand back and allow America to just give its way in sway, throughout that arena?  If I remember correctly, you had said, "No, they weren't going to let them just do anything and everything they wanted to, but they were going to let them play the game of keeping those in check that they believe need to be placed in check."

LaRouche:  Well, more or, the actual Europeans, they are very upset about this and they are opposed to everything that Bush is doing. But, they also take the view that they can not buck the United States in this area.  And, therefore, you get all kinds of resistance, and expressions of very strong resistance to what is happening in the Middle East, especially from Sharon, from Europe.  But they say, the issue is not the Israeli issue, curiously enough.  That's not the way it breaks down in Europe. The way it breaks down is the question is war against Iraq.  Now the Europeans know that if this problem in Israel expands into a general war against Iraq, it's not going to be Desert Storm again, it's going to be something that won't quit.  And, you're talking putting, even military leaders, are talking about putting a half million U.S. troops into that region for that kind of contingency--a force we don't have--we don't have a trained force we can stick in there now.  But, they are still pushing on it, as some people in the U.S. say it's not going to happen, but then you keep hearing the commitment from the wooley-wooley guys that's going to happen, like Wolfowitz, and Perle, and people like that....

McCain:  Well, the name of the game is, if they want that to happen, then, they have to fess up sooner or later, and say, "Look gang, we have got to start to draft again, because there are a lot of folks who are riding around all over America with flags flying from their cars and trucks, but they're not heading down to the enlistment centers."

LaRouche:  Oh, no.  No, this is a panic phenomenon.  America people are in a terrible state because of the economic situation, because of the lack of leadership, because of the dumb-bunnies getting elected into the White House, and the Congress completely out of control, no response to any real issues of life.  The typical America is concerned by the social-economic problems of life, which hit the lower 80% of the family income brackets especially.  You have people who are in housing, where there are shacks of $500,000 mortgage, or up to a million, and they are about to lose them, if they lose the job.  The typical American is in a state of anxiety about everything.  And therefore, they're panicked into things, but this issue in the Middle East, this Middle East war, that's being pushed from some quarters in the United States, this is the thing that has the Europeans excited.  Also, we're, today,...

McCain:  Let me bring you back.  Why do we have people in this country, knowing that you do not have the manpower, and the only way that you're going to do it, that you're going to get it, is to come up with a draft,-- why would they be pushing for something like that, when they know that it would push Europe,-- Europe does not want it, and in all likelihood, you're going to have other states in that region, who are going to join either overtly or tacitly, with Iraq, in the resistance to what would take place?

LaRouche:  Well, to understand this, you have to go back to the mentality which we can find in our country.  It's typified for many of us by racism.  Which makes no sense.  Right?  It just makes no sense, but its there.  And people kill, or do similar things, because of it.

McCain:  What we're looking at, is the attitude that, "I have the right to be wrong, and to involve you in my wrongness."

LaRouche:  Exactly.  You've got even worse.  You have to look back to June-July, 1944.  Where the success of the Allied invasion of Normandy, demonstrated that Germany's case was impossible.  And therefore, you had the German generals, who had put up with Hitler all along, since 1933, suddenly said, "No. We stop now.  We must have a separate peace."  Well, the British double-crossed them, because the British didn't want a peace with Germany.  And so, they turned the generals over to the Gestapo, who hanged most of them, right?  But, nonetheless, the point was, at that point, what was obvious to everyone who understood the situation in Germany, that Germany had inevitably lost World War II.  Hitler, in the bunker, and others, kept the war going. Now, you have in the United States today, people who think like Hitler in the bunker.  People like, for example, let's take Richard Perle.

McCain:  Do me a favor.  Hold your point; we'll come back to Mr. Perle in must a moment....  [break]

LaRouche:  ...similar situation, you have people who, for ideological reasons, like Richard Perle, or Wolfowitz, or that crowd, whether or not they could actually,-- they don't think about what they're doing.  They think about what they intend to do.  And they're like a drunk, or a madman, or a guy who's holding a family hostage with a double-barrelled shotgun, or something, in a house someplace.  They've got their own agenda, and they're determined to carry out that agenda, and not let anybody interfere with that.  And that's the kind of problem we have; we've come to a world which is,-- essentially, there's more and more insanity at the top.  I've been around for a few decades, you know, and I've seen a lot of insanity.  And I'm telling you that what I see now, from my knowledge of the world at large, there is more insanity loose in high places in the world, than I've seen since the Second World War.

McCain:  Whoa!  When we take a look at, let us say, the demonstrations that were taking place over the weekend, into today, in Washington, D.C., peace groups from all over the world, some coming to focus on what is taking place in the Palestinian homelands with the Israelis, some taking a look at what is going in in Colombia, some taking a look at what is going on with Native Americans in the front page of the Washington Post,-- I think it is misdetermined in how it is set up.  "Lost Trust, Billions Go Unaccounted," in reality, what we're talking about is collective U.S. thievery of funds for the Native Americans. When you see these demonstrations taking place, they are different than the demonstrations we have seen over the last three years, aimed at the IMF and the World Bank, though the IMF and World Bank had been in town.  Are we looking at possibly a new era in demonstration, and are we looking at a far more serious era in response to the things that are going on in the world, or is this just something that is taking place because of the times?

LaRouche: Well, as you know, I have some kind of professional quality experience of knowing how these things are done.  And you have to look at two things in all these kinds of demonstrations. One, you have to look at who's organizing it and how.  Because, these are not spontaneous demonstrations. Somebody's organized them, that's why they occur.  Now, the second thing you look at, is, what about the response of the people who are being organized to appear in these demonstrations? And you make a careful look at that.  What you see, in general, as a conclusion,-- because this is, as you indicated, it's a real assortment of many different kinds of things, with no one clear issue, but a general disquiet in the population, on a broad scale, about the fact that things aren't working at the top.  So, you have a general loss of confidence.

For example, you had an election in France just now, a phase one of a two-phase election, for President of France.  And the lowest turnout in French history, for the voters.  The top-runner was getting 19 percent,-- Chirac, the President.  The number-two guy's Le Pen, getting about 17 percent.  And then down after that, about 13-15 percent, somewhere in between there, for the guy who's Prime Minister of France, Jospin.

McCain:  Are you going along with what the commentators have been saying in France, that one of the reasons for that low turnout was going to be, it was so predictable in how it was going to be. Are we looking at that kind of predictability in this situation?

LaRouche:  No, not that.  That's what they say, but that's wrong. Because we have people on the inside there.  What really is happening. is the French people are disgusted with the entirety of the political leadership they're getting.  What you have is, you have this Le Pen thing is very significant.  Because I've known of Le Pen for some time back.  He's a very queer animal. He's a former Legionnaire type, you know,-- this kind of thing. And he goes right, left, and so forth.  He's swung the other way this time.  He didn't go with his right-wing stuff.  He went with something else.  He went to the nerve.  And now he was actually put in, in a sense,-- he was set up by Chirac, the President. And President Chirac set up Le Pen to come out with this second-place victory, because this is the way Chirac could keep Jospin from being the contention in the second round.

McCain:  And Jospin is the one who is...

LaRouche:  Well, you know, he's the Socialist candidate. And therefore in the second round, normally, when it...

McCain:  He'd much rather have a right-wing, almost neo-fascist, on the other side of him, than...

LaRouche:  And he'd win the election.

McCain:  There you go.

LaRouche:  By default.  And so, what happened is, the issues in France, the issues of the Middle East, the issues of the economy, the issues of the euro, all these kinds of issues in France,-- none of the issues which occupy the intelligent French citizen, were actually raised by any of the candidates who were on the ballot yesterday.  Including Chirac, Jospin and so forth. And so the French people turned out in the lowest vote ever,-- and also you have the spoiled ballot phenomenon.  Massive spoiled ballot phenomenon.  And this kind of thing indicates that the government has lost the people.

The same thing is happening in Germany.  In an election in Germany, one state in Germany.  The SPD, the ruling government, lost the election, by a big margin, and they lost it on the issue of the economic crisis, which the government, the SPD government of Germany, is pretending virtually does not exist.  And the same thing in the United States.  You have a President, who has made this crazy thing, "Sharon is a man of peace."  Even the liberal press sort of vomited over that one.  Eh?

McCain:  Next thing you know, they'll be saying Chirac is a man of financial honor.

LaRouche:  Something like that.  So, we have the same thing in the United States.  We have the government, and the parties, are divorced from the people.  When that happens, you get this spark, spontaneity factor, in organizing, where organizers who would normally get 12 people out to a demonstration, suddenly find themselves with hundreds.  And it's not because they're good organizers; it's because the people are fed up, and they will generally will go into almost any store, to find out what's on the counter.

McCain:  Do you believe that you are going to see more activism in this country?  You're going to see a level of activism that's coming from those who are out there, who are late teens into maybe 30 years of age, but are you going to watch a change in the demographics, one, and, two, are you going to see more people settling in to liberal conservative thinking, because of this dialogue about terrorism?

LaRouche:  I think you're seeing something which Newt Gingrich hoped for, when he made his speech as the new candidate Speaker of the House, back after the 1994 election.  What you're seeing is the danger of chaos of the form which characterized the period of the French Revolution from the storming of the Bastille, into the inauguration of Napoleon as Emperor.  This is the danger. That when leadership fails, when the leading forces of the country can not command leadership, a majority, because after Bailly and Lafayette were pushed, beaten by an operation against them, then France decayed.  So we're seeing a situation in Europe, and in the United States, where the lack of recognized leaders, representing an address, an identification of the actual problems, and proposed alternatives to the problems, the vacuum created by the absence of competent leadership, creates a danger of something like the French Revolution.

You look at the Congress now.  Especially, you have this McCain, Lieberman, Gore phenomenon.  Bizarre!  Which means that,-- Lieberman is crazy.  He's totally for almost anything Sharon wants.  McCain needs an electrician as his attending psychiatrist, heh?  And you've got Gore, who is, you know, the beaten dog, who's out there whimpering.  What's happened, this has frozen, since Jeffords retired from the Republican Party, and this McCain meeting with people like Lieberman and so forth,-- this thing has jammed up U.S. politics.  So, even the organizing effort which you saw in the early part of the year 2023, collapsed at that point. And since that time, the crisis has become worse, and there is no leadership.

For example, you have Bill Clinton.  Former President of the United States.  Al Gore couldn't have gotten a ticket to the Coliseum, without the backing of Bill Clinton.  Now, where's Bill Clinton today?  He's out there trying to raise money for his financial problems of the past.

McCain:  But he's also raising money for the party, at a level that Al Gore, who is supposedly the banner-carrier, he couldn't raise, he can't...

LaRouche:  I know.

McCain:  It amazes me that anyone wants to talk about Al Gore as a political anything anymore.

LaRouche:  All right.  But Clinton is frozen out of the Democratic Party.

McCain:  Yup.

LaRouche:  He raises money for the Democratic Party, but he's frozen out.  So, in this kind of condition, you have, you know, you've got a couple of people in the Democratic Party who could do something.  But they're not doing it.

McCain:  When we come back from the break, help us to understand in your opinion, who those somebodies might be, because it looks as though, today, George W. Bush is going to run almost unopposed for re-election, and if the Democrats reach in, and pull Al Gore back in one more time, they will, for sure, solidify in the minds of many, their will isn't real deep [inaud].

LaRouche:  [Laughs.]  [Break.]

McCain:  Mr. LaRouche, give us,-- you know, I had made a crack about the Democratic Party.  You have run for the Presidency three times in your life.

LaRouche:  Six.

McCain:  Six times.  Excuse me.  Six times in your life. The first time I did an interview with you, I think it was 1979.

LaRouche:  Yeah.

McCain:  Your observation,-- the only other person I interviewed, I've interviewed in my life, who has come close to it,  the record that you set, was Mr. Stennis.

LaRouche:  [Laughs.]

McCain:  And he left me with a souvenir.  You know, I have one of his hats.  Ummm.  I need for you to take a look at the Republicans and the Democrats, and here's George W., really plowing the field, getting ready for his second run.

LaRouche:  I think not.  I think that George is in real trouble. I don't even know that the United States is going to make it to the next Presidential election.  We're in that kind of situation. Despite the efforts to talk about a proposed recovery, and so forth, there's no such prospect in sight.  People, you know, people are frightened of the idea of a Great Depression, really a severe one, and this is potentially more severe than what happened in the 1930s.  So that what they do, is they get into wishful thinking,-- "It's not going to happen.  No, somebody's going to fix it,-- it's not going to happen."  But as of now, it is going to happen.  With the meeting we had, the Trilateral Commission meeting, which I wasn't at, of course, this past week, is an example of that.  The Trilateral Commission is falling apart. And it's falling apart on this and other issues,-- on the economic issues.  So that we're looking at a series of crises, beyond the imagination, all over the world.  The fight between Japan and the United States, at the recent affair, is typical of this.

So, we're in a period where we're going to have to make a decision, before the election, on where the country goes.  My concern is to,-- is go back to a time, back about 1812, when a follower of Benjamin Franklin, whom Franklin had made his publisher, Mathew Carey, wrote a book called The Olive Branch, in which he noted that, since the Adams government, which had been a failure, the John Adams government, and the Jefferson and Madison governments, which were terrible failures, that both the Democratic Party of that form, the Democratic-Republican Party, which is not the Democratic Party, but a different party, and the Federalist Party, were scrapped.  They were useless.  So he said, at that point, we have to pull the country together, around ideas.

Now, I'm functioning as a Democrat, but my expectation is, that we're going to have a split of the two parties in their present form, in the fairly near future.  It may come as a result before this Fall election, or it may come afterwards.

McCain:  But we're had something that is similar to that in the past, when we used to speak of Dixiecrats,-- when we take a look at economic conservatives on either side, they have joined in a philosophical, ideological alliance.  And it's also a political alliance.  So, we see this taking place....

LaRouche:  All right.  See, the problem is,-- Ted Kennedy said this in 1995, at the Press Club meeting.  "This country does not need two Republican parties."  What we have, essentially, is we have two Republican parties.

McCain:  Right.

LaRouche:  The Democratic Party under the DLC, is really another Republican Party.  That's what Gore represents.  He's sort of the joke of the second Republican Party.  But you have, again, you have a split coming up, inside the Republican Party. And the split is brought to the surface very closely right now. I think we're headed for a reversal of what was the Nixon phenomenon, when Nixon went down to Mississippi in 1966, and made a deal with the Klan, to become the next President of the United States.  I think we're at the point that a reversal of that kind of process, in which all the bad guys go into one corner, the good guys tend to go into the other.  And I think that what I'm doing as a Democrat, is to represent those who think that we don't need two Republican Parties.  But my hands are reached out to those who may have been Republican supporters, and say, "Let's get together...  [tape break]

You see, the constituencies are cut off totally from the top politicians.  And I think the constituencies out there, which are being ignored, have to get their gumption up, so to speak, and demand that they be actively represented.  See, the constituent goes and says, "I go to the supermarket.  It's called politics. I pick on the shelves, what I think is the least worst product for me, at the prices I can afford."  They don't support these guys; how can they support them?-- they don't represent anything.

McCain:  Let's come back, because you raise something interesting,-- let's get your thoughts on it.  When we start talking about representing in those arenas of need or expectation, Blacks, Hispanics, Asian groups, even those Hispanic groups broken down into whether or not they're Salvadorian or Guatemalan, or whatever,-- are looking for certain things that they need in concession, or in political understanding and reality, because of the conditions that affect them particularly,-- we find more and more, that the politicians on either side, are playing those groups off one against the other,--Hispanics against Blacks, Blacks against somebody else, so that they can find a group that they can put off to the side and make more promises to somebody else.  What is going to be different if there's a change in these parties?

LaRouche: Well, for example, you know, I've been working very closely, particularly on the state level, of the Black legislative group, on the state level, especially.  And I know our problems. Our problems are: I've got some people in there, who I'm working with, who are among the best politicians we have in the United States.  I mean they can really think.  There's no one up there in the Congress generally, with maybe one or two rare exceptions, who can match them as thinking persons.  But then they're stuck with a constituency.  They're stuck in an election campaign, without money, heh?  With a constituency.  The constituency wants short-term, immediate goodies, which they can't deliver.  They don't have the power to deliver them.  But the constituency is upset about that.

Now, we're also working with a lot of Hispanic groups, because of my involvement in South and Central America, and other things.  I have a lot of interests there.  And, we're working actively there.  My view is that there are certain certain policies of principle, which are of concern to organized labor, not necessarily the labor 'crats, but the people in the shop, and all the other people, who are largely in the lower 80 percent of the family-income brackets, who have some sense of interest, who would tend to come together on the basis of a, shall we say, a multi-colored interest, common interest group.  And that can br brought together.  [Break.]

McCain:  ...the people of this country are going to have a hard time.  Did I encapsulate that well?

LaRouche: Well, that's the threat.  And that's what you've got to change.

McCain:  How do you change it?

LaRouche:  Well, for example, we did this work earlier, last year, on the question of the D.C. General Hospital.  That was a highly unifying issue, or became that.  We had, in the Congress, we had people about ready to go on and fight for that hospital. But we lost it, when Daschle and others were having a meeting with McCain.  They were about to get control of the Senate.  And they gave up.  They abandoned it.  There's not a single popular issue, which the Democratic of Republican leadership has been willing to take up, seriously, since that time.

McCain:  So they've been able to create and to mold, and to make larger or smaller, the terrorist situation, and everybody plugs in.  Cause everybody's going to get paid from it.

LaRouche:  That's exactly it.  And therefore... But this thing is going to blow up.  It's about to blow up.  My concern is, I don't know exactly what hour or what day this thing is going to blow out.  But it's going to blow out, and it's going to blow out soon.

McCain:  Lyndon LaRouche, I want to thank you for coming on board with us....  [Advertises 800 number.]  Lyndon LaRouche, I look forward to speaking with you before the year is out, sir.

LaRouche:  Thank you.

McCain:  Take care.

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