Question: Okay, Lyn. So you said something--you've said it before a couple of times, which is paradoxical to me, a big surprise. So given that you've had, in the past, many revolutionaries have been artists, musicians, poets and whatnot, and they saw that as the efficient way to uplift and bring about change in society, in what they saw as the problem--so the paradox is that, you have talked before, about how, when you were younger, you had a passion yourself for being a poet. And you were, I guess, developing and writing poetry, but you said that no audience existed for you to be a poet. So I was wondering, could you elaborate on that? Were there audiences for others who had become poets and whatnot, or what was the problem you were facing?

LaRouche: Well, there was no one that was writing any poetry that was worthwhile. There was no audience for any worthwhile kinds of poetry. And in terms of what was taught, in terms of Classical poetry, those who were teaching it didn't know what what they were talking about. I had this Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity as a reference point, that I dealt with in late '46, early '47, and I didn't agree with Empson entirely, but he posed the problem in an interesting way, and a very competent way. He was one of the leading figures in England at that time in this area of the English language and its implications.

No, the policy was, in that period, you had a real lockstep, fascist march for existentialism in poetry. I did poetry but, no, this was banned--this was Classical poetry. There's no room for it. Nobody wanted it. People say it's great poetry, but it's Classical, and that doesn't go today. And you should see what was coming out, the so-called existentialist poetry, sort of Hip-Hop I, hmm? That kind of stuff. So, there was no market for it.

That didn't mean I gave up poetry. I had to stop writing so much of it, in 1953, I just stopped. In a sense, it was my last time I really seriously took that up. But my purpose was never poetry, as such. My purpose was a sense of life, which impelled me to go into many directions, which I thought were directions I should master. I had no idea of a single profession. During the period I was taking on things like Kant, which I was taking on from the 1930s when I was a teenager, trying to get this guy out of the way. And I was just doing it for myself: I had to be sure that I had the answer to what was wrong with Kant, and everything he represented. I did it.

So, I did a lot of other things. I just found myself doing things. My ordinary life was just being myself. I had no real sense of a mission, in a sense. I had work, I had things I would do, but no, I had no sense of my political leadership mission at that point. The first time I got it was I was in military service, and some of the soldiers began to come around me. Here I was, an acting non-com, training, overseas in various functions, and people began to ask me my opinion about the world, and how should I think about the world. And I found myself in leading positions. I found myself in '46 in Calcutta in a leading position, among GIs and otherwise. I made certain commitments at the time, because they were moral commitments.

At first, I tried to get Eisenhower to run for President, and he wrote me a nice letter saying why he wouldn't--at that time, back when he was thinking of running as a Democrat. I wanted to get rid of Truman, eh? And he said, nicely, no. Then things began to get really rough. And the only people who were left, were people who were leftists. Those few who would fight this crazy Trumanism, this crazy McCarthyism. So I got into a leading position in that. Eisenhower ended that career of mine. He ended my left-wing career for the time being, because we'd won the fight. Eisenhower had suppressed McCarthy, and had beaten Truman. And so, there was no fight, and the whole left was not worth dealing with. They were only useful for one thing: as cannon-fodder to try to stop Trumanism and McCarthyism. The rest of it--not worth anything. They were intellectually bankrupt. The whole left in the United States was always intellectually bankrupt. And the European left was not much better.

And then I went on to a management consulting career, which was natural to me: I was already in and out of it. But I was basically being myself, making a living at things which were agreeable to me, for me to do, which I enjoyed doing.  I always enjoyed doing work. But then,  in 1963, when I realized what was happening, I realized where we were going, where the economy was going. I saw the Kennedy assassination after the Missile Crisis of 1962. I saw this whole bunch of young people going crazy, plunging into the counterculture, becoming psychotics, among the Baby Boomer generation. I knew I had to do something. So I'd flounder around trying to find something to do to intervene politically in the situation.

In 1966, I had the opportunity to start teaching in various campus locations, and I did. Since they were all interested in Marxism, I taught a course on Marxist economics. I wasn't preaching Marx, I was preaching me! But they were all interested in Marxism, so I was explaining what is valid in Marx, and what is not valid in Marx. As a result of this, and my forecasting and so forth, I became a celebrity in '71, and then the government decided to kill me. [laughter] They said, “Well, we'll get rid of him; in '73, they said, if we get rid of him, the whole movement around him will collapse, and it'll be finished. He's the only danger. Let's kill him.” So they got the Communist Party, organized by them, to kill me--or, actually, the Communist Party, which was run by the FBI, to do it. The way things work.

And so, it just went on like that. And we've been targetted, I've been targetted with operations, always by these agencies, for the past years. Since 1985, I've been targetted by Marc Rich's operation. Our associates have been targetted by Marc Rich's operation. It's a multi-billion dollar operation; it's the biggest organized criminal operation in the world today. This is the thing that owns John McCain, the thing that owns Joe Lieberman, Al Gore, and so forth and so on.

So, I've just been on my mission. My mission is, I'm a citizen. I'm concerned about something. I respond to something, in terms of what I think I should do in response to a situation, because I'm concerned about society.

So I find roles have been handed to me. Once I got into this role, especially since '71 on, I've been there ever since. And I keep doing it, because that's what I should be doing. So I didn't set out to make a career in anything. I just reacted as an individual to my circumstances, and used what I knew at each phase to try to carry out the mission that was thrown at me, as I do now. I have no ambition to be President. I just know I have to be, because there's nobody else who's qualified for the job, under the present circumstances. It's that simple. And, it's needed, not just for the United States; it's needed for the world, because I know what the problems of the world are. It's that simple. I just react as an individual to what the world tells me I should be doing at this time. [applause]

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