Question: Hello, Lyn, I'm in the Los Angeles field. You had, in answer to an earlier question, you said that we as a species, had been running around the planet for a long time now. How does the concept of national sovereignty develop? When does a certain group, when is a certain group able to say, “this is our sovereign land?” And then, in that context, because the process of developing colonies, colonization, how was that--I've known it in terms of colonialism, as a negative experience, but how would you fit in the colonization of the Americas, and the development of the United States?

LaRouche: First of all, there were no nations, in general. The condition of mankind on this planet, as far as we know, was essentially, some people treating other people as human cattle. Either wild cattle, to be slaughtered, or tamed cattle, to be herded, bred, and culled. The majority of the population lived as human cattle. These were not nations, they had none of the attributes of nations. There were certain cultural currents, but the cultural currents were divided by the fact of a man-eat-man culture. So, a man-eat-man culture is an evil culture, intrinsically.

So, all we know of the cultures, is that most of them were evil, in this respect. They're based, as many parts of the world still are today, on some people eat other people. Some people enslave other people. Either in formal slavery, as chattel slavery, or in informal forms of slavery, such as the condition of many Mexican-Americans, for example, Mexicans working in the United States. They're implicitly slaves. They get paid a little bit, but they do not have rights. The U.S. government does not recognize the rights of these people, even though the Mexican government has given many of them identity cards, which identify them as Mexican citizens.

So, the idea that all these fine people, with these nice cultures, and these terrible fellows came in, and imposed these bad cultures, colonial cultures, on them, is bunk. That is not human history. Everything I know of human history, is mostly ugly, in this respect.

The first time that we had a conception of a nation-state, in a functional sense, was, as an idea, in Greece. The clearest expression of that idea was, first of all, Solon of Athens, whose idea was expressed not only by what he did to overthrow the debt-holders of Athens, but in a poem he wrote, to the Athenians, in his older years, where he scolded them, for the way they had betrayed their revolution, which had given them their freedom.

The second one was, of course, Plato's conception of the republic, which had no real precedent, except this thing from Solon. And it was never realized, except as an idea.

The first time this was realized, was in the 15th Century in Europe, where, as a result of several things, the Europeans created the first two sovereign nation-states: France under Louis XI and England under Henry VII. The distinction of these, is that the idea was, that prior to that, in Europe, especially under the Babylonian Empire, the ideas of Sparta, the ideas of the Roman Empire--the idea was that a ruling group herded the rest as human cattle. There was no notion of a right of a human being. There was the notion of a right of a power, over human beings, who'll be treated as cattle.

This was the condition of mankind, throughout the planet, to the extent we know. There were no good cultures, in that sense. There were no colonial oppressors who came in and crushed good people. It didn't happen that way. All people are born good, but all societies have been, so far, pretty much bad.

So, when you talk about oppression, you have to look at it from the standpoint of the Sublime. What should we be giving people, as justice? What should we be doing? Now that we know we should do it, aren't we obliged to do it? The difference in the 15t-Century Renaissance was, that the king had no authority, except as he efficiently promoted, and served, the general welfare of existing and future generations. That's the difference.

Prior to that time, in Europe--that is, from the time that we know in, says, ancient Mesopotamia, through the 15th Century, the idea of law was imperial law. Imperial law meant, what is meant in the mouths of the Romans, when they called it Pontifex Maximus.

The way the thing worked, is you had, as in the case of the Pantheon, the Roman Pantheon--and you had various pantheons in history, which you can find. The Mesopotamian pantheons, and so forth. You have different religions and different cultural groups, which were organized as religions, official religions. So the Romans, for example, in the Pantheon, would set up, in these niches, they would set up these images. Each image corresponded to a specific religion.

Now, the religions were all subjects of a Pontifex Maximus, who we call “Emperor” in later usage. This continued. This was the characteristic of European civilization, from the Roman Empire--before that, actually, but from the Roman Empire, in particular--until the 15th Century. And this is what we find in every part of the world. India, Africa, and so forth. You find predominantly, to the extent we have any evidence, this is the way it worked. You have an imperator, who made the law, above religions. In other words, the imperator represented a world religion, like the Moonies, or like the Moral Rearmament, which placed itself above all other religions, as Prince Philip demands a “world religion,” above all other religions. They attempt to codify every religion, to be supervised by a state, or imperial authority. So, the Catholic religion, the various Protestant sects, Islam, and so forth, would all be subject to directives by the emperor, who would tell them what it was lawful to believe. And if they didn't believe it, you could be hunted down by the Roman legionnaires, or others, to kill them off. Which, as you see, is an idea that's emerging among certain circles, utopian circles, in the United States right now. That's the situation.

What happened in the 16th Century, is, the Venetians, who represented the old system--they were an imperial maritime power, based on financier oligarchical power--they dominated the Mediterranean from about 800 A.D. up until the 17th Century. They launched, with their Hapsburg puppets, they launched a religious warfare, beginning in Spain, from 1511 to 1648. It was an attempt to destroy civilization.

Despite the work of Cardinal Mazarin, and of his protégé, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in establishing the first steps of modern civilization, and getting through the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the religious wars, in 1648--despite that, the world was corrupted. By the fact that the Renaissance, which had actually established a precedent for the modern nation-state, had been ruined by this religious warfare, organized by a corrupt Papacy, and with the Hapsburg influence leading, but also many others, on a world scale: It ruined European civilization.

So, it came down to the point, that only in North America, in English-speaking North America, could you establish a republic. We established it, but we couldn't hold it, because we found ourselves isolated in the world, and subject to internal, as well as external, problems, mostly imposed from outside, from Europe. The Spanish monarchy was always the enemy of humanity. There was no case in which it wasn't, from the time of Charles I on. The Spanish culture was corrupted, therefore, you could not get a true republic. The way we got republics in the Americas, was on the basis of the American model, which resulted eventually, in the evolution of the Mexican model, in South America, in Argentina, and so forth. Other countries adopted this model, based on the American model, and largely under the direct influence of the United States. And also, the United States, in itself, was never intrinsically a colonial power. The Confederates were. The American Tories were. But the United States was never a colonial power.

The policy of the United States was, you had to keep European systems out of the Americas. You could not let Europeans establish colonies in North America. Because European systems, of continental Europe, or the British, would destroy us, and destroy the possibility of a republic on this planet. Therefore, we had this doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which took shape--was actually the idea in the mind of people like Franklin, and President George Washington, and others--but it took shape essentially in our diplomacy, through the functioning of John Quincy Adams as Secretary of State, later, and in the articulation of this idea by James Blaine, another great diplomat of the United States. The idea of Manifest Destiny is: We must unite the nation from coast to coast, to exclude the possibility of any European intervention to colonize North America, and the Americas in general. Our policy was, to defend the independence of emerging republics in South and Central America: that is, to keep all European powers out of the Americas. Because otherwise, we couldn't have republics, and we wanted a community of republics, in the Americas.

Our policy toward China, was similar. This continued to become, as Blaine indicates, our Pacific policy. Our policy was: China must develop as an independent nation. The nations of the Pacific must develop a community of nations, as we desired for the Americas. And we must fight for that. Sun Yat-sen, who was educated by U.S., by the tradition, actually, of John Quincy Adams, through the American Missionary Society, was educated, became the leader of the creation of modern China, is an expression of that.

The British used the Japanese Emperor, from 1894 on to--well, actually, Hirohito wasn't to blame, but through 1945, the British used the Japanese emperor, as a way of trying to disrupt a stable China, and to prevent the United States from having a Manifest Destiny relationship to the nations of South and East Asia.

So, that's real history. So the idea of colonialism, case by case, and so forth, makes no sense. All cultures generally stink. All were unjust to their subjects. And that injustice persists today.

The problem is not to remove injustice, because the injustice lies in the systems. It lies in the system of the existing nations and peoples. Our job is to get the people to uplift themselves, to a higher level, so they don't do that to themselves any more. And don't allow others to do it to others anymore.

This is broadly what the policy of Franklin Roosevelt was. The end of the war, he told Churchill plainly, at the end of the war, your British system, your 18th-Century methods in economics. That is, the methods of Adam Smith, and your colonial system, is doomed. We're going to shut you down as soon as the war is over. And we're going to free these nations, and we're going to help them to develop, as independent nations. That's smart policy. The policy is to help the nations of the world develop as independent, sovereign nations, so we can live in a safe world, free of what we fought against, especially in the cases of the degeneration of the cultures and systems of Europe.

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