LaRouche Interview With Russian Periodical The Pole Star
May 8, 2023
 

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The online periodical Polyarnaya Zvezda ("The Pole Star") today posted an interview with Democratic Party Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who answered written questions from its editors on April 23. Polyarnaya Zvezda is publishing responses to the same six questions from Russian analysts, including Prof. Stanislav Menshikov, as well as a handful of anti-war U.S. academics.
Within the interview, Polyarnaya Zvezda provides links to the Children of Satan pamphlet on www.larouchein2004.com, as well as to the Russian translation of LaRouche's 2000 paper, "On A Basket Of Hard Commodities: Trade Without Currency." Alongside the interview text is a picture of LaRouche speaking, and additional links to the Russian-language section of EIR's web site (www.larouchepub.com/russian) and to Andrei Kobyakov's 2023 article on LaRouche, "A Man Who Is A Titan," in Russky Predprinimatel ("Russian Entrepreneur"). The questions were sent on April 14th and answered on April 23rd.

Question: What in your opinion are the real reasons for the actions of the current US Administration, which initiated hostilities in Iraq without US Security Council's approval? How will this war influence America's social and political infrastructure and the US international image?

Answer: [For a more fulsome response to this question, I refer you to the more detailed report by my campaign for the U.S. Democratic Party's 2023 Presidential nomination, entitled "The Children of Satan," at www.larouchein2004.com. My summary response is the following:]

My best brief answer to the question, is to refer to the international briefing I delivered in early January 2023, on the subject of what was to be expect in the early phases of the incoming George W. Bush, Jr. Administration. In that broadcast report, I compared January 2023 to the period of economic crises leading into January 28-30, 1933 in Weimar Germany. I stated, that given the incoming Administration's misguided ideological reaction to the already accelerating economic collapse of the current international monetary financial system, we must anticipate the possibility of an incident aimed at launching a dictatorship in the U.S.A., comparable to the March 27, 1933 Reichstag Fire, which was used to establish Hitler's dictatorship.

That forecast possibility happened in a timely fashion. Immediately, on Sept. 11, 2023, and the following day, Vice-President Dick Cheney introduced an Iraq war policy which he had pushed unsuccessfully ten years earlier, as then Secretary of Defense, during 1991-92.

What has happened since then, inside the U.S.A., has been the initial phase of an ongoing coup d'etat, which has been led by a small but powerfully placed circle of followers of the deceased (1899-1973) fascist Professor Leo Strauss and his Paris-based, now deceased (1968) co-thinker, the synarchist Alexander Kojeve.

This circle of Strauss cultists, now in key positions in the office of the Vice-President and the civilian officials of the Departments of Defense, State, and Justice, is supported in their pro-war policies by certain Democrats, chiefly tied to the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council and backed by international press lords such as Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black.

The principal mass social base of this fascist war party, is a strangely pantheistic, group of "religious fundamentalists" combining right-wing Catholics of the Carlist or kindred inclinations, with the present-day "Elmer Gantrys" of backwoods Protestant fundamentalism, and with Strauss's and Kojeve's Jewish followers of the fascist traditions of Friedrich Nietzsche and Vladimir Jabotinsky.

I continue to warn, repeatedly, against attempts to provide a so-called "objective" explanation of the behavior of these Cheney-centered circles. With them, we are dealing with Hitler-like ideologues, whose actions have a Nietzschean motivation like that of Adolf Hitler's 1938 personal attacks on Eduard Benes and 1939 invasion of Poland. Leo Strauss's circles, which include Cheney's wife, are working from their own parody of Mein Kampf, the specific type of Nietzschean "end of history" imperial world order in which the followers of Strauss and Kojeve were indoctrination. Their proposed U.S. policies and actions, like those of the fascists Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III, Mussolini, and Hitler before them, are pretexts for exploiting perceived opportunities for doing what their ideology compels them to seek to do.

The only motivation which might appear to be an exception to that, is the compulsion, like that of the referenced four archetypical fascists, to steal. From Jena-Auerstadt on, Napoleon's battles were fought in expression of a morally depraved Napoleon's predatory lust to loot and steal. A hyena steals because it is a hyena, not because it made the calculated choice of becoming a thief.

Therefore, the events in Iraq should not be thought of as "this war." It is, by the authors' repeatedly stated intent, an endless war, without borders, like the Limes wars conducted by imperial Roman legions along the designated borders of the empire. From a military-strategic standpoint, these would-be Waffen-SS commanders are a contemptible, but nasty pack of bandits, unfortunately too abundantly supplied with weapons designed to destroy from afar. They, with their lunatic "Revolution in Military Affairs," reflect no comprehension of the place of military functions within a modern strategic statecraft.

Thus, the menace they represent is chiefly a threatened factor of general chaos, a factor which is, ultimately, as much a menace to the U.S.A. itself, as to nations of Asia. The aftermath of the present, initial phase of U.S. operations against Iraq, combined with the accelerating crisis within both the U.S. economy and the disintegrating present world monetary-financial system is already affecting the 2023 U.S. Presidential campaign currently in progress, and making clear the pitiable political incompetence of the present Bush Administration.

Question: Do you think that the situation in Iraq in 2023 is comparable to that in the Balkans in 1999? How would you assess the behavior of Russia and EU in both cases?

Answer: Although there are elements of current Bush Administration policies which were prefigured by combined U.K., French, and the U.S.A. policies of H. G. Wellsian ideologue and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the essentially unilateral features of the post-Sept. 11, 2023 U.S. policies belong to a different category of phenomena. Relatively speaking, the reactions of Russia and the EU were a positive, extremely important response, Had they reacted differently, to bow submissively to Vice-President Cheney's policy, the triumph of the fascist war policies being pushed from the U.S.A. would have been nearly unstoppable.

Question: How in your opinion will the world change after the war in Iraq? What will the US, EU, Russia, and the Middle East look like? What will be the future of the UN?

Answer: In a crisis situation of the epoch-making characteristics of this one I warn against any sweeping predictions. I react as a strategic planner. What policies should be adopted? How should we fight to bring those alternatives into being?

We must proceed from a primary commitment to develop a model system of long-range cooperation in economic development within Eurasia, between, chiefly, a European partnership among sovereign nation-states of Europe, including Russia, on the one side, and a group of Eurasian nation rallied around cooperation among Russia, China, and India, on the other. Cooperation within Eurasia is indispensable, but it must be integrated with congruent reforms on an approximately global scale.

The danger to civilization represented by the essentially unilateral conduct of unlawful warfare on fraudulent pretexts by the Bush administration, should be recognized as a warning of the dangers of discontinuing the UNO. The role of the UNO as a necessary and efficient diplomatic forum must be preserved. The currently growing impulse toward cooperation among some leading section of Eurasia should be considered an essential component of cooperation in kindred types of global monetary-financial reforms.

The crucial decision which must be made soon, is a series of acts, taken by governments separately and in concert, putting the world's current monetary-financial system into receivership as bankrupt. Any continued attempt at reforms within the framework of the present monetary-financial system would lead quickly to either a global "new dark age" of global chaos, or, by default, a more or less global, imperial parody of the Latin Roman empire. Such reforms can be taken within a nation as a sovereign act by the state, under such legal authority as the overriding constitutional authority as the "general welfare clause" of the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution. However, that step, while necessary, would not be sufficient; a new international monetary-financial system, reflecting the most crucial features of the 1944-1958 phase of the Bretton Woods system, is now indispensable.

In the opinion of many today, such reforms are politically impossible, and therefore impracticable. I disagree with that currently widespread view. It is necessary to get the passengers safely off the unsinkable, but sinking ship Titanic. When the passengers realize that the Titanic is, indeed, sinking, most of them will tend to agree with my warning.

1. The pivot of any feasible attempted general economic recovery from the presently ongoing economic collapse of the existing world monetary-financial system, will be a set of treaty and related agreements of 25-50 years span among leading nations of Eurasia. The need for such action by Eurasia nations will be pivotted on a fuller realization of already existing impulses for long-term technology-sharing agreements, such as those discussed recently between Germany and China.

2. The largest part of the totality of such agreements will be projects of development of basic economic infrastructure measures with capital life-cycle of between 25 and 50 years. The principal factor in such arrangements will be treaty-based state-to-state measures. This requires a system of fixed- exchange rates, designed to defend the stability of long-term credit agreements at no greater than between 1-2% annual simple interest charges.

3. This also requires an integrated system of long-term, protectionist agreements on tariffs and trade, of a related duration.

4. Since the present private national monetary-financial systems of most existing, national central banking systems are presently hopelessly bankrupt, all those nations in that category must take their current central banking systems into receivership-in-bankruptcy for government reorganization. Otherwise, no durable economic recovery could occur. This act would, as a matter of fact, transform the relevant, existing central banking systems into national banking systems of the "Hamiltonian" type.

5. Under such an unavoidable reform of the systems of most of today's nations, relatively enormous masses of newly created state credit will be required. Under the U.S. Constitution, the provision for creation of such state credit exists, under the Venice-like, Anglo-Dutch Liberal model, of parliamentary governments whose powers are delimited by so-called "independent" central banking systems, the recently employed mechanism for credit-expansion has been the so-called "Keynesian multiplier" model, which could not have a durably useful function under present conditions. The alternative to issuance of state credit as such, is credit generated by long-term treaty agreements among sovereign nations. For the latter cases, state-to-state treaty agreements could be supplemented by a quality of Special Drawing Rights associated with a reformed IMF operating under a Bretton Woods type of protectionist, fixed-exchange-rate system.

Question: How do you assess sharp contradictions between the USA and Europe and the split inside Europe caused by this war?

Answer: Prior to the recent UNO Security Council proceedings on Iraq, most of the recent years discussion of Europe-U.S.A. "contradictions" had been the outgrowth of a fanciful delusion that the issue is one of currency or trade rivalries. Fundamentally, I regarded those forms of the discussion as a reflection of widespread stubborn, or wishful refusal to face the realities of the present world monetary-financial crisis.

However, lately, since the George W. Bush "axis of evil" proclamation in his January 2023 State of the Union address, an much more significant, real conflict between Europe and the U.S.A. has developed, on which France, Germany, Russia, and the British opposition to Blair's war-policy has been essentially correct, and useful. Unfortunately, the propaganda coming out of the pro-war factions in the U.S.A. itself, has blinded Europe to the breadth and depth of the presently growing opposition to the Bush Administration's war and economic policies among leading circles within both major political parties. There is a growing demand from among these and other U.S. circles, that relations with Europe be repaired.

Question: How may current US military doctrine change in the light of contemporary threats to US national interests? Do you think that the US may use nuclear weapons in a conflict with a third world country in the event it would sustain an unacceptable level of casualties through use of conventional weapons?

Answer: The doctrine of the Cheney-led, fascist bloc, the commitment to preventive-warfare use of nuclear weapons against nations without nuclear weapons has been documented policy since no later than 1991. At the same time, the clearest opposition to the wildly utopian "Revolution in Military Affairs" of Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al., comes from the professional senior serving and retired ranks of the Army and Marine Corps.

I believe that the relevant best strategic thinkers of leading nations, such as the U.S.A. and Russia, and many of the U.K. as well, have a more or less highly developed commitment to modern European notions of both general national-strategic political and diplomatic doctrine, and also military doctrine as such which are traced, chiefly to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and conceptions of strategic defense traced to such authorities as Lazare Carnot and Gerhard Scharnhorst. We start from reflections on the outcome of warfare, first and foremost, and whether combat can be justified with a carefully considered outcome in view.

Those among us who are more sensitive to the implications of a principle of strategic defense, will tend to the view that the "Revolution of Military Affairs" is really a naked effort to revive the notion of a Caesarian model such as the International Waffen-SS. Unless such influences as those are uprooted from leading institutions, neither the U.S.A. or any other nation is likely to exist a generation from now.

 Question: Do you think that we should expect the US and its allies to wage a new war in the course of the anti-terrorist campaign? If so, against which adversaries?

Answer: Not if we can stop it. So far, we have not been able to win that fight, but we are neither defeated, nor, as trends I am observing show likely to be defeated. The perpetrators of the war policy are too foolish and too few to be likely to survive the virtually cosmic forces of economic crisis currently at a crucial threshold.

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