LaRouche Addresses Nation on Sept 11, 2023

Lyndon LaRouche addressed a packed room in Washington, DC on the first anniversary of the events of September 11, 2023. A transcript of the question and answer period is also available.

[Opening sentence missed on tape, to be clarified, ending with] "fear and leadership."

On the subjects on which I will speak, the subjects of war and the economy, there are an increasing number of people in leading positions, and other positions in the United States, who know at least part of the truth of what I'm to say. But they aren't saying it.

This includes people in the Congress--in the Senate, in particular--in the U.S. government itself, the Executive branch; and among the leaders. They are afraid to tell the truth.

Now, as I shall demonstrate, if we don't tell the truth, we are in real difficulty. But, what's the problem?

The problem is the problem of smallness. Not of size, but of mind, and moral stature. Our people have lost much of the capacity for thought, moral stature of mind and purpose, that they once had. There is no leader to bring it out of them, apparently. Our leaders are incompetent.

Because what's the situation of the average person? And I mean, all the way up and down, in the ranks of influence in society. The little person, in a community. For them, trends are what is happening. They have no control over it. The Democratic and Republican party are jokes. They no longer have real meetings. They're organizations which bureaucratically control an electoral process. There are no longer party meetings. There's no longer a place, in which the individual person can go, to register a question, and to initiate the process of getting an answer.

Cowardice in Leadership and Government

The people of the United States, at virtually all levels, are sitting there, waiting to see what the trends are, and waiting to overhear themselves saying what they consider it safe to say, not the truth.

And therefore, they behave as cowards. Because they have no sense of responsible leadership which is telling the truth. If people who are considered responsible leaders tell the truth, account for what is going on, and if they are--these leaders--are accountable to the people, then the people have an influence over their own destiny. If you have the kind of leader who says-- you ask him what he thinks, and he says, "I haven't read the newspapers today." He hasn't made up his mind. He's waiting for authority to tell him what to think, or what to say, and pretty soon, what he dares to say, is what he dares to think.

Cowardice! Cowardice throughout the institutions of government. Cowardice in the White House. Cowardice in leadership of the parties. Cowardice through all kinds of institutions in society.

Many people know part of the truth. People in positions of relative power and influence, who should be telling the truth, publicly, to the people, to provide leadership, but they're not. They're cowards.

And thus, I have to assume certain responsibilities of leadership of our nation, here and now, even though I have no official position in government, because there's no one in government, in the present time, who either has the knowledge, inclination, or the courage, to tell you the truth, even if they know part of it. Therefore, I must.

Two Problems: The War and the Economy

And I must say this also, before the world.

We have two problems before us, in particular, apart from what I've just mentioned--the problem of cowardice and lack of leadership. The problems are, first of all, war, and economy.

Now, there's a relationship between the war and economy, but they are not interrelated in an ordinary sense. War is like a man, with a sawed-off shotgun, and a glint in his eye, sitting in an apartment, holding a family hostage. Reality is not dictating what he's going to do. He's got an agenda in his mind, and he's determined to carry out that agenda, without any regard for the reality in the world outside. That is our government. A man with a shotgun, holding the nation, and the world, hostage, like a family being held hostage in an apartment.

We have a government that is determined, now, to go to war, for war's own sake! Not because there's an issue in Iraq. Not because there's an issue in the Middle East. But because they are determined to go to war. No matter what reason you give them. "Well, what's your motive for going to war?" Well, it doesn't make any difference, says Rumsfeld. "It makes no difference. We're going to war! And you're not going to stop us!"

"What's your basis for choosing this enemy?"

"Well, we think..."

"What's your evidence?"

"Well, we can't tell you."

Then they pull something out they call evidence, and warmed-over lies, sometimes two years old, or older.

And that's the way it's going. They're determined to go to war. They're determined to go to war despite the fact that every nation of Europe is opposed to this war!, including the United Kingdom, with one qualification, which I'll explain. Russia's against the war. Asia's against the war. Most of the people, in fact, in the United States, are also against the war, but the newsprint doesn't report much of that.

Everybody's against the war. The world is against the war. Just a pack of lunatics, in Israel and in the United States, are for it. Nobody else.

Then, why are we going to war? What's the reason?

Well, war. There's no exit strategy! When you go to war, you have to have a purpose. The purpose involves the end of the war, getting out of the war. And when the war ends, you hope that you'll be able to negotiate, and build, peace. You don't build peace through war. War may be necessary to create the conditions under which peace can become free, and express itself. But you don't fight a war to bring peace.

War has a different purpose. Peace is what your purpose should be. To bring about a successful peace. If your war does not intend, does not aim to bring about peace, you shouldn't fight it.

We had one such war, a long, perpetual war in Vietnam, Indochina. A war which almost destroyed the United States because we conducted it. It was a perpetual war, without purpose, done to orchestrate world events, but not to do any good.

You're seeing a reflection of that among U.S. military, senior military figures today, retired and still active, who are opposed to this stinking idea of a war. Many, because, as senior figures, they had served as junior officers, or field-grade officers, in Indo-China. They continued in service. They studied war more carefully, having gone the experience of Indo-China, and they say today, "What you're proposing is pointless. It's insane." No competent military figure will tell the President of the United States to go to this war.

A Bunch of Chicken Hawks

Who's telling the President to go to war? A bunch of draft-dodgers. A bunch of chicken hawks. People who never performed their military service when they had the occasion to do so. And they're all hot to go to war. And the military, who are competent, say, "Don't do it!" And the President is sitting there, and you don't know what he really is thinking. And he's indicated that he's going to go to war.

So, we're dealing with war as a form of insanity. Someone said, "I don't like the world. I'm getting off. We're going to go to war."

And that's the inertia. Now, I'll explain some of that.

Now, the second thing is, we have an economic crisis. We are now in this moment, sitting in the last weeks, or months, at most, of the presently existing world monetary, financial system. The economy of the entire world, including that of the United States, is disintegrating. Nothing can stop it. If you know the factors in this, you know that there's nothing that can stop this thing from going to a depression, worse than 1929-33, unless you change the system.

They say, "We're sticking with the system." They're saying, "The fundamentals are sound." They may be noisy, but they're not sound.

Let me deal with these two questions.

Now, what's the war perspective?

You have a leaflet that's passed out; I'll refer to the content.

On the question of war, and the question of economics. Go back to 1944. Go back to the period about June, July 1944. The United States and its allies had landed successfully in Normandy. They fought the breakthrough. At that point, the world strategic situation, given MacArthur's campaign in the Pacific, was that, the victory of the war was so inevitable, that even Field Marshal Montgomery couldn't make us lose it. That's how secure it was.

At that point--he did postpone the end of the war, at least six months, maybe nine, by his Marshaldom. This squeaky, racist pipsqueak.

But, the situation was such, that everybody here knew the war was going to be won. An assured victory.

At that point, here was coming the 1944 Democratic nominating convention. At that point, Henry Wallace was indicated to be the vice-presidential candidate, to serve another term, with Roosevelt. Some people said, "No, we're going to stop this." Why? They said, "The President is going to get himself elected to a fourth term, an unprecedented fourth term. This President--because we got into a depression--pulled the United States out of a depression, and led us through this war and other perils, and brought the United States into the position that we shall emerge from the war, as, not the greatest world power, but the only world power. We don't like this President. Now that we've won the war, we don't need him any more. And we don't want him--he's a sick man--we don't want a successor in there as President, who would continue his postwar policies. We want the end of this war to be the end of everything that Roosevelt stood for. We want to go back to the deep past, perhaps the Confederacy."

Don't Attack a Defeated Nation

So, therefore, great pressure was put on, to get Wallace discharged from the candidacy, and to put in a bum called Harry Truman.

The moment Roosevelt died, or a few moments afterward, when his body was still warm, many of the policies of Roosevelt were scrapped, particularly his international, postwar policies. We still benefitted, through the middle of the 1960s, from policies which were created under Roosevelt, and under intentions which Roosevelt had had for the postwar period; specifically, the best features of a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, devised under Roosevelt's direction, at Bretton Woods.

These things worked. We rebuilt much of the world in the postwar period, on the inertia of Franklin Roosevelt's contributions, and those of his administration. We won the war because of Franklin Roosevelt. That's another story, which I won't go into, but that's a fact.

But the intent of these guys was expressed in August of 1945. In 1945, in the Spring and Summer of 1945, not only had the United States won the war, and really had already won the war with Japan; we were waiting for the peace. Japan was a defeated nation; we were waiting for that peace. That was the policy of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Don't attack a defeated nation. Wait for the peace!

But some people in the United States, under urging of the circles of Bertrand Russell, who was one of the most evil, fascist creatures that ever slithered across this planet, pushed for the use of two nuclear weapons--to drop them on the civilian population of Japan. For no military reason! None. There was no military excuse for dropping them. In fact, MacArthur had been explicit, in presenting his report to the Presidency, that it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated; we had to wait for the peace.

In fact, we had already negotiated the peace while Roosevelt was still alive. A man who became a friend of mine, Max Corvo, had been the head of United States OSS intelligence in Italy, on the ground, working for the State Department. He had been a key planner of the Sicily invasion by the U.S. forces; and the Sicily invasion was so successful, and his intelligence was so good, that they said, "You take over the field operations in Italy for the United States Office of Special Services." He did. And he continued that operation until this bum, Allen Dulles, got him bounced out of there, and made a mess of it. But Corvo, during that period, the latter part of the period, also took charge of--the Office of Extraordinary Affairs of the Vatican, then headed by the man who was later Pope Paul VI, were negotiating with the Japanese, and Max Corvo was auditing this.

So the Vatican had negotiated conditions, with the Emperor Hirohito, of peace; the conditions were the same ultimately imposed upon Japan after the peace was signed.

But at this point, unnecessary fire-bombing of Tokyo was already going on, which was the idea of some lame-brained nuts back here. And they dropped two totally unnecessary nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Military Utopians and World Government

What does that mean? That means that for some time, a force in the world centered in Britain, which has always hated, and continues to hate the United States, was determined to eliminate the United States and other states which might try to imitate it, by setting up a system of world government--not all at once, but as a process. This was laid out by--for example, in 1928--by a book by H.G. Wells, who was the collaborator of Russell, proposing a "utopia." These utopians propose, as Wells had proposed in 1913 in a book--had proposed in the preface to a book, that nuclear weapons be used as weapons of terror, so horrible that governments would not fight wars, but would submit to world government.

This idea was raised again in 1928 by Wells' book, The Open Conspiracy, to which Russell subscribed. And the policies which led to what formed the so-called utopian faction, inside the United States, were the result of the influence of Wells and Russell on this country and other countries. Wells was the worst ogre of the 20th Century; a more dangerous ogre--he was close to Satan; Hitler was Mephistopheles, but Russell qualifies for Satan himself, the old Beelzebub.

This is what it was. Now, at that point, what they used--a certain faction in Britain and here--the idea of starting a new military arm, the air force. Their idea was that military air power would supplement naval power, maritime power, as a way by which a nation could control the world, and one nation have all power. Initially, it was the idea of an Anglo-American power. This included forces in the United Kingdom, and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so forth, as well as the United States. They could rule the world as an English-speaking imperium, or develop that, by forcing the United Nations to become world government--or forcing something else to become world government. And they were going to use air power, together with sea power, and nuclear arsenals, as the way of controlling the world, and bringing about world government.

This was the policy of Leo Szilard, for example, a Russell clone. This was the policy of many people at Princeton, who were Russell clones. The development of nuclear weapons in the United States was done on the initiative of Russell, through Szilard and Wigner and others, to get Einstein to sign that letter to Franklin Roosevelt. If Germany had not surrendered when it did, it was intended that these bombs would have been dropped on Germany, on Berlin. Berlin was to be obliterated by a nuclear attack, if it had not surrendered before the time it did. The bombs weren't ready then; that's why they didn't use them.

So what you're dealing with is not a reaction. A bombing is a reaction to an existing imperative situation. We're dealing with the attempt to stop the success of the United States under Roosevelt, in freeing the world, potentially at least, from a lot of horrors of colonialism and other things. To set up a reactionary world empire, in which populations were controlled, and minds would be controlled, and everything else, by a supranational world government, acting in directions which are indicated, in sample at least, by H.G. Wells' book, The Open Conspiracy.

Special Operations Warfare

This crowd thus used the Air Force, and the founding of the RAND Corporation as a conjunction to the development of the Air Force, as a way of introducing a policy into the United States, which became known as the utopians; the utopians being a faction in military policy, which were opposed to the West Point, etc. traditional military policy--the policies of MacArthur, and also Eisenhower.

Another creep got into the thing, Allen Dulles. And Allen Dulles, in collaboration with his brothers, introduced what was called "special warfare." A special section of our military command, the Pentagon, created a new division called special warfare. And through a section of the command--the so-called Quartermaster, or logistics section--every creep in the world was coming out of a desk drawer, professional military, retired military, any loose lunatic; and they were being used for what was called special operations. As we saw during the 1960s, in Kennedy's time, the unleashing of this.

So you had three things. The idea of air power, used in this way; the idea of nuclear weapons, used in this way; and the idea of special operations as opposed to regular military forces. This became known as the utopian faction--or, what Eisenhower referred to, in exiting from the Presidency, as the military-industrial complex. It was not something that came out of the military as such. It was this combination. The idea of using air power, using nuclear weapons, nuclear arsenals, and special warfare. Don't go in and fight a war; go in and kill the head of state. Slaughter some people. Get two other countries to slaughter each other. This kind of thing, which was often blamed on the CIA, which was too soft to do things like that; they wouldn't really do that.

Anyway, Allen Dulles, as Director of Intelligence, did set that into motion.

Now, as long as Eisenhower was President, there were certain inherent limitations on the ability of these characters to act. And Eisenhower's statement on the military-industrial complex, on his exiting from office, typified his attitude and role on this question, with whatever his weaknesses might have been. He was a competent military officer in the American military tradition, like MacArthur, under whom he had served an important part of his career. And these utopians were determined to get rid of MacArthur, and to get rid of Eisenhower.

Once Eisenhower was out of office, you had no figure in leadership in the United States, who adequately understood, and had the authority to block, these utopians' control over the military. Jack Kennedy had good intentions, but Jack Kennedy did not understand this problem at the time. Probably, it was only at about the time that he was killed, that he began to understand--after a conversation with MacArthur--what the problem was. Jack intended to return the United States to the President Roosevelt tradition. But he did not fully understand the nature of the enemy that he had to fight.

Producer vs. Consumer Society

So they killed him. They killed him. They killed [Enrico] Mattei in Italy. They got [Ernest] MacMillan out of power in London with a scandal, the Profumo scandal. They got [Konrad] Adenauer prematurely retired in Germany. And after Kennedy was killed, they got us into the Vietnam War.

At that point, we underwent a change in character. The United States, from its beginning, had been essentially committed to become a producer society, under [Benjamin] Franklin. With Lincoln's victory, and the emergence of the United States between 1861 and 1876 as the leading world national agro-industrial power. The United States of that time, to this recent time, had been a producer society. The leading example, under the American system of political economy, of a producer society, was not British capitalism, not socialism, but the American System, as defined by Franklin and his followers, including Lincoln. It's a special system, which Europe never had, and has not had to today--the American System.

What they did, beginning the Indo-China War, was run a series of transformations, which were consolidated by Nixon--or under Nixon, by Nixon's controller, Henry Kissinger. Keep thinking of Nixon as a puppet of Henry Kissinger, and you've got about the right idea--or a sub-puppet. We were transformed, beginning that period, from a producer society into a consumer society.

Otherwise, you look back in history to ancient Rome; where Rome, coming out of the second Punic War, had undergone an internal social change, in composition of forces, away from the Rome of Cicero, to a new kind of Rome which would emerge later as Caesar, as Tiberius, as Augustus, Nero, and Caligula--types we find in politics today. At that point, this social force, which had been conducting these wars, took over Italy, expanded the institution of slavery, destroyed Italy's power internally to exist, by relying upon conquered nations to produce, on Rome's terms, the loot that Rome needed for it to survive.

We have become that. Particularly in 1971-73. We shut down the fixed-exchange-rate monetary system which had served us well in the postwar period, and had served Europe and much of the rest of the world so well. We went to a floating-exchange-rate monetary system. Through the floating-exchange-rate monetary system, controlled by Britain and the United States--and increasingly, by the United States' power--we compelled other nations to reduce the value of their currencies in such ways, that we could buy from them so cheaply, with their virtual slave labor, that we said, "Our labor here in the United States can not compete with the slave labor we have turned other countries into producing."

For example, in the Americas, from 1982 on--from the Spring and Summer of 1982--the United States has systemically destroyed the nations of South and Central America. We have ruined Mexico. We have almost obliterated Argentina. We are in the process of obliterating Brazil. We have virtually obliterated Peru. Colombia is almost destroyed. Chávez is about to be destroyed, and Venezuela with him. Central America has been virtually destroyed.

These are the conditions. We have become the parasite of the world. We suck the blood of China. We suck the blood of Asia generally. We suck the blood of Central and South America. We suck the blood of Africa. We promote wars in Africa, in order to promote genocide, reduction of the rate of population in Africa. That's the kind of nation we have tended to become, under these kinds of influence, of the utopians.

War Is Won Strategically, With Logistics

Now the second thing: war. You do not fight war on the basis of kill-power. The United States did not win World War II with kill-power. We won World War II, despite a few very important and deadly battles, strategically; we won it through logistics. We won it through a policy of strategic defense, in which logistics is the key factor. We were an overwhelming economic-strategic power logistically. And I know; I trained some of these guys that we were sending around the world, for a brief period of time. And I can tell you, when I saw them lined up on the company street--I got a new bunch of scrapings from the streets and farms of the United States--I would see them lined up on the company street--I lined them up--and I'd just say to myself, "We've lost the war." But we won it. We won it through logistics. We won it through Roosevelt's program, from 1936 on, of knowing the war with Hitler was inevitable at that point, and saying, "The United States is going to be prepared, in its recovery program, to deal with this problem." And he met with leaders of industry and others, and set into motion--with his close associates--programs of development which in 1940-41, unleashed the greatest economic mobilization the world had ever seen.

In three years, we exceeded every anticipation of logistics. We had power beyond the belief of the world as a whole. When we went to war, we soon had that power, under Roosevelt's leadership. And that's how we won the war.

These principles were taught to us by the greatest military figures of the late 18th and 19th Century: by France's great engineer and military leader, Lazare Carnot, the man who turned an absolute defeat into a stunning victory between 1792 and 1794. These were the principles which Moses Mendelssohn taught to Gerhard Scharnhorst, through Count Wilhelm Schaumberg-Lippe. Schaumberg-Lippe, who was the friend of Moses Mendelssohn, asked Moses Mendelssohn to provide a program of education for officers at the military school maintained by Schaumberg-Lippe. They were great friends. Moses Mendelssohn devised the program--military strategic training program--for Schaumberg-Lippe. Scharnhorst, a trainee of that, became the brilliant protégé of Schaumberg-Lippe, and made a Prussian military reform which is parallel in its implications to that of Lazare Carnot in France.

From that time on, on the basis of Carnot's studies of the work of the great Vauban in Germany and in France, these studies--the idea of strategic defense as consistent with modern society, modern scientifically progressive society--became a new dimension and way of dealing with the problems of warfare. If you have great economic power and great logistical power, you can win wars in various ways. You can win them with necessary war-fighting, if that comes up, but you can win them because your sheer economic power attracts not merely the envy, but the admiration of others, who say, as they said to us in India, for example--many people in India said to me, at the end of the war--can the United States send us the technology to build our own independent nation-state?

Be Powerful To Make Peace

You win war more with love.... You win peace with love, and you win wars with that factor. Develop yourself. Be rational. Be generous. Be powerful. Be powerful logistically. The utopians changed that. With idiots like Brzezinski and Huntington from the 1950s on, with the new policy, the utopian policy--kill power, kill power! They say you have to increase the rate of killing by our troops. This is like the Roman Legions going into commit massacres against whole populations--whole national populations. Kill power!! You don't win peace with kill power! You win peace by overwhelming flanking operations, and strength, to convince them to surrender; but their willingness to surrender is based not merely on their awe and fear of you, but rather the good that can come from making peace with you. Therefore, be powerful. Be powerful, above all, to make peace, and to build peace. And from that power, you can draw as you need it, the sinews of any necessary war. And you see that's exactly what we're not doing right now.

Now, out of this, there's a hand and a glove. Sometimes the glove grows into the hand. A man puts a glove on his hand, picks up a pistol and shoots somebody. Who shot him, the glove or the hand? What happens when the glove grows into the hand? And that's what this leaflet is about.

A long process which goes back to the time when the World Jewish Congress was led by Nahum Goldman. You had one predominant policy in terms of Israel, but you also had another element there which was very dangerous, and which Goldman had to fight. And that was the danger of Jabotinsky, and what Jabotinsky represented. So, as Jabotinsky took over, or his heirs took over, such as Netanyahu, Sharon, Shamir. As they took over, Israel became an instrument of a certain Anglo-American interest. Remember, Jabotinsky was both a Russian Okhrana agent and also a British agent. He was also a Mussolini agent. He also declared himself a fascist, not only for Mussolini, but he appealed twice to Hitler, when Hitler was in power, to say, give up your anti-Semitism and we'll work with you, form an alliance. That's Jabotinsky. It's important to know that, to get an insight into what's going on in the mind of Sharon and Netanyahu today, as I'll explain.

So, what the United States and Britain did, is they created--in opposition to everything that Nahum Goldman represented and in opposition to what Ben Gurion represented--they created a force which was no longer the Labor Zionist faction in Israel, but a completely contrary force. And this force was an instrument of certain Anglo-American interests, which deployed it into the Middle East for strategic purposes. Israel today has become a hand-grenade, which is throwing itself to destruction against its neighbors. If it continues the war, it will be destroyed, but that will serve its purpose!

‘Vulcans' Group--Pushing Iraq War Since 1996

So, in the course of that, as we describe this in the leaflet, in July 1996, there was an attempt to get the present Middle East war going, or what is being proposed now. The proposal came from circles such as those of Brzezinski, Bernard Lewis, and Samuel Huntington. They had attempted to move things in that direction under Bush, and had failed. The Iraq war was, in a sense, stopped at a certain point by Bush number one--Bush 41. So they came back at it again, and they tried to do it through a group inside the Clinton administration called the Principals Group. The Principals Group is essentially the same thing as the Vulcans Group, which den mother Condoleezza Rice created at the instruction of George Shultz. George Shultz pulled this crowd together, brought Condoleezza Rice into it in this new form. She became the den mother of what's called The Vulcans. These are generally a bunch of draft-dodgers, ex-Trotskyists and so forth, who are now trying to get World War III under way.

So, in 1996, this group--now called the Vulcans--many of whom are in key positions inside the Bush Administration, in the Defense Department, inside the White House, inside the State Department; these Vulcans drafted a proposal for Benjamin Netanyahu, the beneficiary of the assassination of Yitzak Rabin. And this is a policy to eradicate not only Rabin, which they'd already done, but to eradicate everything that Rabin had stood for, in combination, as a leader of Israel, from the beginning. The policy was the policy which is now being pushed, which is to have Israel destroy the Middle East, all of the Middle East. Take over the Saudi oil fields, destroy it all.

Several days later, Netanyahu, having received this report from the hands of these guys, gave an address in the U.S. Senate, which many Senators are aware of, but they don't tell you that. They know it, they were there. They didn't tell you. They didn't comment upon what Bush is saying, and say, well, this is the same thing that these guys tried to push through Clinton's administration.

Then it didn't work. So they went to another tactic, with the help of one of their backers, Mellon Scaife, who funded this operation. They ran an operation against Clinton to try to get him impeached. They worked on his profile, and had a little girl go in there who was set up, knowing his profile, to try to create the scandal. And they had listening devices watching everything, so they could create the scandal. They control the White House system.

Well, Clinton got scared. He resisted it at first, then he went into a compromise, the bombing, under pressure of the Principals--Al Gore and company. Then it ended, it failed.

They came back again under Bush, and the intended war to destroy the entire Middle East, using Sharon as the fuse on the hand grenade, goes on. The intent is, as of now, that the minute the United States makes a serious move, with land forces in particular, into Iraq, Sharon will take the Palestinian population, of Palestine, and shove it into Jordan, as a part of a plan to create a Greater Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates River--the so-called Jabotinsky, Greater, or "Eretz Israel" policy. That of course means a general war, an unstoppable general war, which would spread throughout the planet in unknown ways.

Europe Does Not Want This War

Alright, that's the policy. So, what they did is, they couldn't get the policy through. They couldn't get it through under Bush--until a year ago, when the planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. That's the truth! Everybody in relevant high places in Washington, knows that everything I've said is the truth.

Now, let me indicate what the problems are. What's happening now? As I said, all of Europe wants this war not to occur. The reasons they give are varied, but the bottom line is the same. If you start this war, you unleash an insanity from which the United State and everybody else will not survive. Partly because of the economic conditions, the war is unwinnable! We don't have the logistics to win such a war. We have a collapsing economy. The world has a collapsing economy, a collapsing monetary system. We can go in to start a war, but we can't stop it!

Look at Afghanistan. A piece of folly, a piece of military folly beyond belief. But this is much more serious than Afghanistan. Well, what's Europe saying. The British have got to compromise. Blair, on one side, is saying he's for the war. He's telling lies of the kind that George Busy wants to hear, presumably. But the British establishment, including the Labour Party, does not want the war. Hard-core strategic right-wingers in Britain, together with the hard core of the Labor Party, does not want this war! So what's Blair do? Blair, under European pressure, has come up with an alternative, which is indicated by Jacques Chirac, the President of France, recently, and that is to push the issue into the United Nations--because the worst idiocy, idiocy number one, is that the United States unilaterally makes an attack on Iraq, which may be in progress now in various degrees, and drags Britain into it as cover. That's the worst possible thing, in the minds of Europeans, and these guys. They're saying, can we temporarily stop this war? They say, let's throw it in the United Nations.

Now, this creates a problem. Let us suppose they're successful. There are three things that can happen, which are messy. First, that the United Nations would reject what Bush is demanding. They wouldn't reject proposing a remedy, a compromise; but Bush might reject anything the UN would accept. Then Bush goes to war, alone. The lone bandit, the Lone Ranger, or the Lone Disarranger. That's hell. Number two: suppose that Bush accepts a UN proposal on Iraq which is acceptable. Now, the reverse hurdle is Saddam Hussein. Is Saddam Hussein going to accept it?

Now, I know a great deal about Saddam Hussein, so I'm saying that is a problematic case. I don't think he's as insane as some people might suggest. I think he does have some sense of survival. But would he accept a reasonable offer of the type that Scott Ritter is bird-dogging? Remember, Scott Ritter is an old intelligence hand. He's bird-dogging a way out, by his presence in Iraq now. Some kind of compromise under which Ritter went in, with others, as a team, and the United Nations accepted it, might be a way out, at least in the first approximation. But then, if Saddam Hussein accepts it--and Bush accepts it, and Saddam Hussein accepts it--what next? Will Sharon accept it?

Three Problems We Face From Israel

Now, if you know Sharon the way I do, and the way some people who are inside Israel politics know him, this guy would do it. He's up against the wall. If this thing does not come off, the economic crisis and other things in Israel, could result in an internal overturn of the present government, and could create new openings, new apertures, because Israel needs to be bailed out economically. It will not survive if it is not bailed out economically. It will not get a bailout if it doesn't behave itself, at least within certain limitations. Sharon knows that, Netanyahu knows that. They know it.

What do they have? They have three German-built submarines, which carry nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which are to be positioned off the Gulf area. Israel has the world's third largest nuclear weapons capability, planes which can deliver nuclear weapons against Iraq, can hit nuclear production sites in Iran, and so forth, and the disposition to do that is there. Or, as the alternative, they can strike militarily with a straight force--the Israeli military can do that more effectively than what they're doing inside the occupation process--and say, "If you interfere with us, you'll force us to use nuclear weapons, and we'll hit Saudi oilfields."

Those are the three problems which face us on this front. Now, this problem could be solved. It could be solved with the help of people inside Israel, but the United States and Europeans would have to cooperate to make that work. I could make it work. If anybody on this planet could make it work, put me in the White House and I can make it work. The problem, you see, is not just me, as a person. The problem is, other people are not like me, including people in high positions and running for office. They're not willing...

I've got examples of this historically, in the question of military command. Some of the most famous issues of military command, under conditions of warfare. There's the case of the fellow who is in command, and all of his generals and others are telling him, "You can't do this, you can't do that, you can't do this." But he says, "What if I don't do it?." "Well, let us hope something else turns up." "Okay, we're going to do it." Like McArthur at Inchon. We're going to get into a drag-out, drawn-out war in Asia? Or are we going to outflank this situation? He took a high-risk operation and flanked it at Inchon--the Inchon landing. A tough decision. Most of the important and notable military decisions in history, and similar command decisions, have the same characteristic. Abraham Lincoln, the same characteristics. Franklin Roosevelt, at certain points, made the same kinds of decisions.

The United States is a very unusual country, with a very unusual Constitution, and the Presidency of the United States is a very unusual institution, which I don't think the incumbent President understands, among his other non-understandings. When you take the oath of office as President, and assume those powers and responsibilities, very soon in the game, if you're not a dull-head, you're going to realize that you just passed over from one condition of life to another. You're not just a politician at that point. You are a person who, under our Constitution and our history, is encumbered--under our Executive system--with personal responsibility and accountability for the future of the nation. Not just next week, and not what the polls tell you two weeks from now, but what happens two generations from now. You are personally responsible!

And thus, to lead the United States, which is still the crucial nation--I don't think the world could solve its problems without a positive role from the United States. And in the absence of an effective Presidency at this moment, I'm doing the best I can to keep the world together as what I propose to be the partner of the United States in solving the problems which are plaguing us now.

My other concern is that, since this fellow is the President, and since I have to defend the Presidency, I have to keep this fellow alive; I have to keep the Presidency intact but somehow induce the changes in policies that I would make, at least enough of those to get us through the next two years, when I'll take over.

You Vote For a Person, Not an Issue

Understand something about politics. We have conditioned our politicians to believe that they should run on issues. I will never trust a man who tells me he's going to win on issues. Now, there are occasions when local issues and other issues have to be addressed and dealt with. That's true. There are times when you must do the things to win on a local issue. But you're not going to win the solution to a national problem in a precinct. You're not going to win it on little issues that people understand--not critical matters. And then you get people who run on issues, and what do they do? Well, I've got to cover my butt. I promised my constituency on this issue, I'd take this position. Can I change it? So what is your vote on an issue worth? It's worth essentially nothing, usually.

What you vote for is a person, not an issue or package of issues. You vote for a person, because you want somebody who's going to implement what they stand for, not somebody who's going to promise you that maybe I will implement it, or I agree with you on this, therefore vote for me. I like you. I shook your hand. Give me some money and vote for me. What you want is a self-starter. You don't want a guy who buys your pitch. You want a self-starter who's going that way anyway, and says I'm glad to have you aboard, I need your support on this issue. You want it done? We have to do it? Okay, fine, I agree. But I'm going to do it!

So don't tell me about smart politicians who win on issues. They may win, but what good are they? The test in history is performance, especially in times of crisis. It's personality. You have to look inside the person. You have to look at the systemic composition of their dedication, their intentions, and see, is that the person you want to entrust with that risk? If he promises this, I'll support him? Crazy, that's wrong. That's immoral. Don't support a person because they take a certain stand on a certain issue. Vote for them because of what they are. You vote for them like you'd like to vote for a judge. I know that some of us don't trust lawyers and judges much; but if you had the choice of choosing a judge, you wouldn't choose a judge based on his issue. You'd choose him on the basis of his character, because the cases he's going to deal with, the issues he's going to deal with in his courtroom, are unpredictable to some degree. You want a man you can trust, to make an honest and effective decision. You want the chief magistrate of our country, the President, to be a man who can be trusted in making the right decision.

The problem lies not with me or with these other candidates. The problem lies with you. Not you, as you people sitting here, but you in general. It's that you're suckers. You demand candidates who, if they fill the specifications you impose upon them, are worthless. This is the essence of tragedy, of Classical tragedy. No people, no nation, ever destroys itself through its leaders. It destroys itself through its lack of leaders. It destroys itself, above all, through its popular opinion. No nation can be destroyed unless it is from within, unless it is self-destroyed. The most important factor in the self-destruction of a nation, in all history from Greek tragedy on to the present, has been popular opinion. If you have a leader who responds to popular opinion in a time of crisis, then you have a bumbling fool on your hands. Because he is going to adapt himself to the popular opinion which is actually the causal factor of the destruction of the nation.

Real, Physical Economics

Take the economic question, an example of the case in point. We in the United States generally, especially if you teach in the universities, economics above all, don't know anything about economics. If you believe a professor who teaches you economics in a university, don't trust yourself in economic matters, because they don't understand that economics is physical, not monetary. Yes, we have monetary processes, financial processes. They're important. They have to be managed, but you don't let the monetary system or the financial system manage the economy. You have to make the economy manage the financial and monetary system, and use it as tools of management, not as the rulers of society.

Real economy is physical. By physical, I mean what Vernadsky specified, the great Russian scientist. There are three factors of principle in the universe: one is the abiotic processes, as we can define them experimentally. Things that are not living processes. Then we have living processes, which are governed by principles which don't exist in abiotic processes. You could never get a living being out of a computer. You could never synthesize a living being from electromechanical parts. Never. Could never happen. Life is a principle, as Pasteur and his followers demonstrated.

You also have another principle. Mankind is not an ape, although many people try to monkey with their lives. Mankind is not an ape. Mankind is a very special kind of creature, unlike any other living creature. Don't marry a monkey, it will not be a fruitful union, and you may come to regret it on other grounds.

If we were monkeys or apes, our potential population density on this planet--that is, the number of living individuals--at any time under the circumstances known to us from the past two million years of our study of ice ages and so forth, would never exceed several million individuals. A very short life-span. Most dying in infancy, but at the same time, high grades of mortality. The human species today has a population of between five and six billion people. That is developed with the cultural and related development over successive generations. No other species of life on this planet could do that.

Where does that come from? How are we enabled to do something which we would otherwise attribute to evolution in an animal, through what we call reason?. The power of discovering universal physical principles.

Now, it's not sufficient. Many people will recognize, as Vernadsky did, that the discovery of universal physical principles is the means by which mankind increases his power per capita over nature, improves things; but you cannot rely on individual discovery alone. You must communicate these discoveries, impart their reenactment in other minds, and you must effect cooperation in joint activity based on those discoveries. You must organize, through education of the type we don't have presently--our universities and schools are an abomination, a cesspool--you transmit the cultural benefits, the cultural characteristics and knowledge of many generations of humanity from many parts of the world, you incorporate them into a nation, and its educational and cultural system. We are able to do things today because we are the beneficiaries of discoveries made by human beings from many parts of the world over many, many generations. The transmission of culture is what's important. That's what makes us human.

Therefore, culture itself, in this sense, is also a universal physical principle, because it produces a physical effect such as the increase of the size of the human population, life expectancy and so forth. It changes the universe. We change the universe, and we change ourselves through these kinds of discoveries and applying them. Thus, these are also efficient physical principles, just as life itself is intrinsically an efficient physical prinicple. Take all of the physical effects, discoveries of principle, improvements in nature, changes in the environment in general, blooming the desert, all of these kinds of things are physical effects. How are you going to judge them? You judge an improvement in this generation, by what the outcome is two generations ahead.

Your Obligation to Coming Generations

For example, if we educate you today in a certain way, and we give you certain employment opportunities today, in a certain way, what is going to be the effect on what your children do in the next generation?

It's not what you get in the short run. It's what you get in the long run, because you're a member of a human species. You have an obligation to generations which came before you, from all parts of the world. They have all contributed to what we are today. You therefore have an obligation to yourself to be a meaningful person. Because you're going to die eventually. To be a meaningful person in the coming generations. In good times, people used to think of their children and grandchildren in those terms. We have to go beyond that, and consider all the grandchildren in those terms, and those beyond them.

So those are the physical standards. What are the physical conditions of life and opportunities which we're leaving?

The genius of the United States is that, at a time when Europe could not build a true republic, the best minds of Europe--including the followers and associates of Gottfried Leibniz--established in this republic around a young guy, then, called Benjamin Franklin; a movement supported from Europe, to try to do with the English-speaking colonies of North America, what could not be done in Europe under those conditions. To found a republic based on a true principle, a constitutional principle. Ours is the only nation which has a Constitution--drawn from its preamble, as the overriding principle--which is a true republic.

Therefore, we as a melting pot nation, with this heritage given to us by Europe, with this heritage and these powers and this Constitution which no other country in the world has--much as we abuse it, it's there, it's our heritage--we have the responsibility and we have the power and position, if we can find ourselves and our true interests, and I know how to do it. Not that I'm the greatest genius that ever walked the world, but I know how to do it, and it seems that nobody else does; or at least is not in the position to express that.

I know how to bring Europe and Asia together. I'm bringing this together. I'm trying to bring the Islamic world together with us. I'm trying to bring China together with us, Korea together with us, Japan together with us, Russia together with us, India, Pakistan, the Middle East.

Our destiny as the United States is not to be an empire, but is to be as John Quincy Adams proposed for the Americas, we must be, and our interests must be, a community of respectively, perfectly sovereign nation-states, united in common effort and common principle--a community of principle. No empires! No subjugation, but cooperation. I know how to do that. Thank you.

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