'I Stand at the Bedside of a Doomed Empire'

Here is the edited keynote address of Lyndon LaRouche, to the annual Presidents' Day conference of the International Caucus of Labor Committees and Schiller Institute, Feb. 14, 2023 that was used for the third LaRouche in 2004 broadcast.

Introduction by Lyndon LaRouche:
What you are about to see is the core of a presentation I delivered in Reston, Virginia, on Feb. 14. For some of you, this may seem a bit sophisticated, but since your lives depend upon it, you may find it worth the strain.

Lyndon LaRouche speaking at ICLC/Schiller Institutute Conference:
This is, as I have promised, a truly momentous occasion. It's a historic occasion, more than historic. Because, we're looking at not only the collapse of an empire, which came into being about 250 years ago, between 1755 and 1763, when the British victory over the French, in particular, established the British East India Company as an empire, casting itself in the image of the Roman Empire, an empire which was constituted by a group of banking interests, essentially of Venetian origin, which ran the British East India Company, and ran the Company as, itself, an empire. At that point, in 1763, the British Empire, as it then existed, was led by a man who had not quite reached his 30th birthday, known as the Marquess of Lansdowne, later, and also more notorious as Lord Shelburne. This man set forth two operations, part of the same thing, in place, which have governed the direction of world history--as world history--from that time to the present day. The first intent of Shelburne was to destroy the English-speaking colonies of North America. And he assigned a number of people, including Adam Smith, as agents, to conduct that policy.

This was a policy which led to the American Revolution, and led to the establishment of the greatest threat, which the British Empire has faced, to the present day: the American Revolution, and the establishment in 1789, of the Federal Constitution of the United States. The greatest single threat to the empire, on this planet, over the entire past quarter-century has been that process, which created the United States. At the same time, Shelburne and Co., through agents including Adam Smith, most notably Jeremy Bentham, and others, organized in France, around some of the followers of Voltaire, organized a cult, a freemasonic cult called the Martinists. This Martinist cult, which included assets of Shelburne, such as Jacques Necker of Lausanne, Switzerland, Philippe Égalite´, and others, set into motion on July 14, 1789, the Bastille event, which was intended to bring the danger of the spread of the influence of the United States to an end worldwide. Because, at that moment, you had had the attempt by Bailly and by Lafayette, to introduce a reform in France, which would have established a constitutional monarchy, which would have steered that monarchy along economic-development lines, akin to those policies adopted by the United States, with its Constitution.

So again, this is the way history has gone. The two English-speaking foci of the current of world history, the United States, which represented the best currents in Europe--typified by the Classical humanists and the influence of Leibniz; typified by the tradition of the Treaty of Westphalia; typified by the legacy of the 15th-Century Renaissance: These were the great English-speaking forces in the world, which were assembled for a collision, which is now coming to a point of historic decision, in the weeks and months immediately ahead of us.

One way or the other, this is the end of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal model of parliamentary government, and its influence in the United States--either for better, or for very much worse. Now, it should be recalled, that the Martinists, who were used by Shelburne, and run largely, directly out of London by Bentham, as the head of the secret committee of the British Foreign Office, which had been created by Shelburne: They ran the French Revolution. They ran the affair of the Bastille. They ran the Jacobin Terror. Danton and Marat were British agents, trained in London, deployed from London, and delivering speeches in France, written in London, under the direction of Bentham. The Jacobin Terror was run from London. Napoleon was a creation of the Martinist freemasonic lodge, the Napoleonic Empire. And then, when the time came, that Napoleon and his empire had essentially destroyed much of Europe, then the British said, "Okay, get rid of Napoleon." It was done by Germans, actually.

And they set up the Vienna Congress--which was a "sexual" Congress of Vienna, where countesses and others diverted the count-heads of state for the British, and Castlereagh and Castlereagh's stooge in Austria, ran what became the Vienna Congress.

And in good time, as the British had planned well, that Metternich disappeared, over the period from 1830-1832 to 1848. It was an operation run by Bentham's successor, Lord Palmerston, who ran Giuseppe Mazzini, the head of Young Europe, an organization which included Karl Marx. The entire operation of the Revolution of 1848, was run by British intelligence, for the purposes of finishing off the power of the Habsburgs, and making them a subordinate agent, within a British-controlled empire. We were almost crushed, repeatedly. The intention of Britain was to destroy us. This was the perpetual policy, of the British toward the United States, and the policy of the key traitors within the United States: Such as Gallatin, such as Aaron Burr, such as the leadership of many of the political parties. The controllers of agents, such as Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, who were agents of the enemy, determined to destroy us.

In the process, the American patriotic tradition had a resurgence, around the tradition of Lafayette, around the personality of John Quincy Adams, and with a very significant recruit by John Quincy Adams to his cause, the Whig, Abraham Lincoln, who was Quincy Adams' voice in the Congress, in denouncing the Polk Presidency for the war against Mexico, of that period. And that President Lincoln, later, led the United States to return to itself, as a nation. And we emerged from that Civil War, as the greatest single nation-state power on this planet, in terms of economics. The British had more power, as an empire, but, we were the most powerful state, the greatest economy, the most progressive economy, in the world, by 1876. This was the work of Lincoln's revolution: We had become ourselves. But, meanwhile, the Anglo-Dutch Liberals were already at work, subverting us, with Andrew Johnson, who was a disaster, and others.

So, time came, at the end of the so-called First World War, which had been concocted by the British, especially by a man who had been dead--Edward VII, the man who created the Federal Reserve System in the United States through his agents here, including Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The British had decided at the end of World War I, to close in, and create a new kind of world empire. The empire was the empire of fascism: It was the empire of the Synarchist International, which we knew as fascism from 1922 through 1945. The forces behind this fascism, were bankers, including Lazard Frères, in France; and others. These bankers conspired to install fascism on the continent of Europe.

Some of these fascists went further, around Hitler. They conceived of creating a world empire, along the following lines, which came to a crisis point in 1940, when the remains of the British Expeditionary Force were sitting on the sands at Dunkirk, waiting for Hitler's tanks to pounce, and finish them off. Hitler held back his tanks, at that time--very momentous. Because, Hitler thought that the British Establishment was going to join the Nazis in a program of world conquest, whose included target was the destruction of the United States. Here was the plan. Now, this is Churchill, as Defense Minister of Britain, sitting in opposition to these fascists, not because he wasn't a fascist; but because he didn't think it was in British interests to play this game. Or, British imperial interests.

The fascist plan, including people in London of very high rank, some of whom were never prosecuted for what they did, conceived of taking the British Navy, the German Navy, the French Navy, the Italian Navy, and the Japanese Navy, as one force, which, once the Soviet Union had been quickly destroyed by this alliance, would then turn on the United States and destroy the power of the United States. The reason that didn't happen, is that the British Navy did not join the Nazis at that point, that Hitler was sitting there poised, ready to receive them with open arms, as part of his alliance--which is why he didn't crush the British Expeditionary Force, when he could, at Dunkirk. Churchill said, "No, we will not let someone from the continent of Europe, even if we like his nastiness, such as Hitler, to take over control of the British Empah! And therefore, we will even degrade ourselves, to go to our so-called `American cousins'--even to one we hate the most, Franklin Roosevelt--and seek his cooperation in defeating the Nazis." So, a German official, Canaris, who was not exactly a Hitler man, prevailed upon Francisco Franco--another nasty fascist, in the tradition of the Inquisition--not to occupy Gibraltar: Because, had the alliance gone through, and had Gibraltar been occupied by the Nazis, i.e., Franco, then the Mediterranean would have been a closed lake, controlled by this alliance. Under those conditions, the existence of civilization would have been in jeopardy. Canaris prevailed upon, and frightened Franco, into refusing Hitler's demand that he seize Gibraltar.

So, this combination of decisions: Churchill says, the British fleet will go to Canada, if England is invaded, and will ally with the United States. This decision did not prevent the war, but it ended the possibility of Hitler's world conquest. Therefore, in 1944, once the Allied forces, led by the United States, had made the breakthrough in Normandy, and the Wehrmacht position on the continent of Europe was in terminal jeopardy--and was saved only because the British intelligence services informed the Nazis of the plot for peace, and they hanged the generals, in July 1944.

At that point, there was turn in U.S. policy: That those bankers, who had been for Hitler, like Harriman, Morgan, Mellon, du Pont--the same types of bankers who had conspired to assassinate the President of the United States in 1933-34, in the thing that was testified before the Congress on the Generals' Plot--these guys went back to their old ways. Their policies were, at that point: Take a right turn; go to a utopian policy; use weapons of mass destruction, including the nuclear weapon which the United States was developing in experimental mode, at the time; and air power, to conduct a new kind of warfare. And to use a war against the Soviet Union, or with the Soviet Union, as the pretext for this policy. In other words, going back to the same Nazi policy that Hitler and Co., and his allies in France, in Italy and so forth, had had up to June 1940: Go for a war against the Soviet Union, as the way of putting this policy into place.

We had, in the United States, we had a reign of terror in the United States which reached a peak, in about 1947. Later, it became known as McCarthyism. McCarthy was a joke--Joe McCarthy. Truman was the problem. But, not all of our people in this country were fools. There was the plan already, which I, sort of, was party to, in a, sense in 1947: To have Eisenhower run for the Democratic nomination, and get Truman out of there. The only way to save the United States. Eisenhower turned it down, but did run for President later.

Then, Truman got us into a Korean War, through his own stupidity, his own recklessness, his own fascist qualities. Some people may not like that, but that's what he was, don't kid yourself. He's a bankers' man.

And the Korean War became a mess. And, about the same time, it was discovered that the Soviet Union had developed priority in a thermonuclear, deployable weapon.

Preventive nuclear warfare, using air power, went off the agenda. Truman was told not to run again. Eisenhower was put in place. The Korea mess was put into--not deep freeze--but was put into some kind of management. And we stumbled through two Presidencies fairly well.

But then, when Eisenhower left office, warning against the danger, not in a clear way, but in a frank way--some honest details--warning against what he called "the military-industrial complex," the military-industrial complex was nothing other than the Bertrand Russell policy, the Winston Churchill policy, the policy of what we call the "Utopians" in the United States, of using nuclear weapons and air power, as a way of terrorizing the world into submitting to world government: a new form of empire; an echo of the Roman Empire; a continuation, in a new form, of the British Empire.

That's what he was warning against, when he said"military-industrial complex." It was not a "military-industrial complex," it was actually a commitment, by the same crowd whose policies are expressed by Cheney, today, for world government, through nuclear terror. We have lived under different, various phases of nuclear terror, since the close of the war. It was for this reason, that Truman dropped two totally unnecessary nuclear weapons on Japan, on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The last two weapons of the type we had--they were experimental prototypes. It took some time, before we got online, producing nuclear weapons in a line sense. So, we went first. Truman's policy was the policy of preventive nuclear warfare! The policy designed by Bertrand Russell, the man who's considered a pacifist. I guess killing everybody makes you a pacifist: Nobody shoots back.

That was the policy--until the Soviet development of a deployable, thermonuclear instrument was known. At that point, Bertrand Russell opened negotiations with Stalin's successor, Khrushchev. This was done in London. And, what happened was, that Khrushchev and Russell agreed on negotiating a system, a so-called permanent system of world rule, based on what we later called "Mutual and Assured Destruction."

Now, once Eisenhower was out of office, having made his warning speech, the right wing surged forward, in the form of Allen Dulles's caper, the Bay of Pigs. It surged forward, in the realization of the plan which Khrushchev and Russell, among others, had concocted, in the form of the 1962 Missile Crisis. And after the Kennedy assassination, which cleared the way for launching the Indo-China War, we underwent a great change, which leads to the immediate subject we have to consider now, in these weeks: We have to decide, as a nation, as nations, whether civilization will survive on this planet. That decision will be made, in the course of the coming weeks! And I shall indicate what the problem is. But first, get the situation.

What happened was, that we, in the United States, underwent a transformation in our national character, which has threatened us with doom, today. The danger comes, not from someone outside our skins. It comes from our own people. It comes from those who are large 60 years of age, or slightly younger: the so-called Baby-Boomer generation, which occupies the key positions in government, business, and other institutions of the United States, today. This is the source of the danger. Not someone from the outside, but a generation from the inside, which did what? They underwent a cultural paradigm-shift, as it's called, typified by the rock-drug-sex counterculture, during the middle of the 1960s. This was the result of the cumulative effect on their parents' generation--that is, my generation--and on themselves.

We have, in the United States, gone from being, in Kennedy's time, the world's leading producer society--the greatest producer of agricultural and industrial goods, the world leader in technology: We went from being that, to becoming a relic, a caricature of Rome under the Caesars. Especially after 1971-72. In 1971-72, what did we do? We shut down the monetary system, the fixed-exchange-rate monetary system that Roosevelt had established. The system which had given us the possibility of recovery in the post-war period. We shut it down. We went to what is called a floating-exchange-rate system. And, what did we do, with this floating-exchange-rate system? We went to poor countries of the world, more and more; we said, "We will determine the value of your currency, under a floating-rate system."

So, what we have done, as a nation, we have gone to the poorest countries of the world--or those we made poor, by decree; we told them, "You will now produce cheap goods, for us! And they're going to be cheap, buddy--even if you die doing it!" Then, we said: Okay. We're getting our goods, not from our production. We're getting it from cheap labor, in foreign countries. Therefore, we can shut down our factories. We can go into globalization. We can let NAFTA go into effect. We now suck the blood of the world. We bring slave labor into the United States, and we call it "illegal immigrants." But, we bring it in, because we want the cheap labor. We force Mexico to supply cheap labor, even at the cost of the lives, of people who are paid so little that they can not survive, or raise a family on that income, not physically. We do the same thing throughout South America.

We conduct genocide in Africa.

So, we now come to a world, which, in terms of Europe and the Americas, can not survive on its present levels of productivity. Our level of infrastructure collapse, in the United States today, in power generation and distribution, in mass transit, and so forth, is poorer, by a large margin, than the time when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President. We are on the verge of destruction.

We have, in our aspirations, and the founding of our republic, we've established the principle of the sovereign nation-state, as the most suitable form of government for a people. We have also understood, that all people have an interest, whether they recognize it yet, or not, in having such a form of state for themselves. We should understand, by now, that the principles of that sovereign state, are so common to us all, that despite the fact that we are separate and sovereign, we have a common interest, in a system of relations among sovereign states, which recognizes that principle reflected in our Declaration of Independence and Preamble of our Federal Constitution.

The time has come, when we need to have a new vision of leadership of this planet. A sense, we must now, for the sake of humanity, we must now create a global alliance, of respectively sovereign nation-states, committed to recovery, and committed to the principle of the immortality of the human individual. That the meaning of the individual lies, not merely in what happens between birth and death--which is a very short period of time on which to base a policy--but morality is based on a sense of what we, with our lives, with our talent, give to future generations; and to realizing the intentions of the generations before us: The kind of intention, which enables us, if lived, to die with a smile on our face, that we have performed our mission, and it is good. And we are pleased.

We are looking at the brink of a precipitation into a New Dark Age, beyond anything that recorded history has given us before.

We have the option, the alternative, of moving upward again. And learning this lesson of the mistakes we've made, by taking steps to ensure these mistakes are not made again, then we can recover from the present situation.

That's the message of today. And we have to make the choice, in the immediate days and weeks ahead. If we don't change, we are finished. We better start changing, now.

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