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The following is the opening statement made by Lyndon LaRouche to a cadre school gathering in Seattle, Washington on Oct. 27th, which identifies the strategic role of the growing youth movement around his Presidential campaign in the current period. The transcript, unfortunately, begins in mid-sentence. ... is a world in which we, as things are going now, have no future. This is not an unusual problem in the history of mankind. The history of mankind is based on a number of things. When a younger generation goes into a dionysiac fit, of hatred against the older generation, that of their parents, and so forth, which they feel have failed them, these younger people often turn against society and tend to destroy it. This is what happened in large degree during the late 1960s, when the horror of the succession of things, the financial crisis of 1962, the assassination of Kennedy, the launching of the Vietnam War, and the killing of Rev. Martin Luther King--and similar kinds of things--enraged a young, largely university-centered student population of that period, and turned many of them into virtual mad dogs, which became the basis of what's called a cultural paradigm shift in the population. This had happened after the French Revolution, in which a promising opportunity for reforming France, led by Bailly, Lafayette, and others, was transformed, with the help of the storming of the Bastille, into the later triumph of the Jacobins, then followed by the first fascist regime in modern European history--that of Napoleon Bonaparte. They then had the Congress of Vienna, which presided over the cessation of the Napoleonic dictatorship, in which the world was divided between ancient slobs of the Hapsburg type on the continent as the dominant force, and the British to the north--the Anglo-Dutch [liberals?] to the north. Our nation was isolated, civilization was ruined. Lincoln's victory over the Confederacy changed the world somewhat for the better, and then those in London and elsewhere who hated what Lincoln had achieved in the United States, organized what became World War I, and then World War II. So that's the general nature of things. A good generation, a good younger generation, given the opportunity to develop, may revive a culture--even though it has been deprived--it revives a culture because it is young, it is looking toward the future, it is trying to create a future where it believes virtually none existed otherwise. And that's the history of most human progress. Sometimes this is expressed by young individuals, such as the young Gauss, one of the greatest discoverers in modern times, and others. Sometimes it is expressed by a large part of the population of that generation. But the key thing is, a renewal of society constantly occurs, when it occurs, by an intervention of young people, generally in your age group, centered on 18 to 25 years of age--the university undergraduate and graduate range--and they, if they are able to inspire, and lead, and reawaken some virtues in the older population, are able to organize the combined generations into an effective force to change society for the better. And that's where we stand today. That is our mission today. If the older generation's habits of the period of the past 30 or 37 years continue, this nation and this civilization are finished. It's doomed. There is no future. And therefore, the older generation, especially the Baby Boomer generation--your parents' generation, which now occupies most of the leading positions in government and in other influential institutions--these people must give up their bad ways. They must change. And you must inspire them, to change. This has been done before; it can be done again. Therefore you have to impart--acquire and impart--enough of that sense of leadership, within a younger generation, corresponding generally to your age group, to move the old goats off their butts, and to get into modern society. Now there are a couple of things that you must emphasize in your self-development, to be able to accomplish that historic mission for humanity in general. One, you've got to define a few principles upon which human society must be based, because you cannot go out with recipes, with popular ideas, with gimmicks. You have to have solid principles, which work in accord with the universe. Now, the most important principle to know is, What is a human being? What's the difference between a human being, and a monkey, on the one hand? And what's the difference between a human being, and some kind of computer device, made entirely of non-biological elements, which is being fabricated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or some other loony-bin of that type? What is human? Human beings are distinguished from the animals in only one general way. And I repeat this because it is the crucial fact that you have to look at to pose the right question. We know something about the ecology, so called, of this planet, for about 2 millions years, that is, about 2 million years of the geological Ice Ages. We also know that, under those conditions, it was impossible for any type of ape to achieve a population of more than several million, total, at any time during that period. Today the human species has a population going on 6 billion. That is three orders of magnitude--or more, actually about five orders of magnitude--greater than would be possible for any higher ape. And thus, there is some crucial difference, which transcends ordinary biology, between human beings and monkeys. And we know what this difference is. We know this difference especially when we look at the discovery of universal physical principles, as, for example, Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation. A unique discovery by him--the initial discovery of gravitation. But then we look back to ancient Greece, and we look also at some of the ancient calendars, which reflect earlier societies' knowledge of astrophysics, tens of thousands of years ago, from study of the principles involved in the stellar system--in ancient navigational systems, principles which were also found in oceanic cultures, transoceanic cultures, of the earlier period. We know the difference is, that mankind is capable of discovering what we know in modern times as experimentally valid, universal principles, and that our mastery of these principles gives the human species the power to change nature. By imposing these principles, which we discover, and introducing them into the ordering of nature, we increase the potential of mankind to exist, and we increase the power of the average individual, to exist. When we transmit these discoveries--cultural discoveries, which are of the character of universal physical principles--from one generation to the next, across time, we create what is truly human culture. This ability to make these kinds of discoveries, which no monkey can do, and the ability to transmit these discoveries over successive generations, as an accumulation of discoveries, in the form of culture, is a distinction of the human species, primarily a distinction of the human individual. This is not a sociological principle, but rather the sociology of human behavior comes from the nature of the human being--not the nature of the human being from the sociology. This is the nature of man. This also the law of human rights--that man must be treated as what he is. He cannot be treated as cattle. He cannot be treated as monkeys to be kept in the zoo, though we could think of some politicians for whom that might be desirable. But, nonetheless, man must be treated as man. As a person empowered with a creative power to increase mankind power in, and over, nature. And therefore, that character of the individual must be protected under all conditions. The struggle has been to find forms of society which recognize human nature and intrinsic human rights as of that form. Now we come to a time when people say, "No. We don't believe in human nature in that way. We believe in generally accepted ideas." These generally accepted ideas involve sitting with indifference, while the lower 80% of the family income brackets of the United States, have been sinking into ruin, over the past 30 years--especially the past 25 years, since about 1977. We accept that. We distance ourselves from those who are suffering. We distance ourselves from the conditions in Africa, where the Anglo-American powers, chiefly, are continuing to conduct a quarter of a century of genocide against the people of Sub-Saharan Africa. And this is being done by our government--in our name--in concert with the British government, chiefly. And there are some Israelis who do part of the same program. Look below our borders. Look at Mexico. Look at Central and South America. What have we done to them, since 1971? We treated the people below our borders, in the Americas, as virtually human cattle. They once had sovereign nation-states. We have taken away their sovereignty and given it to the IMF and other foreign powers, or to the environmentalists, the World Wildlife Fund. We've taken away their power, their rights. We have ruined them. Where they had prosperity, where they had infrastructure, where they had progress, we took it away from them, and told them they had to submit to international institutions. We tried to do the same thing in Asia. Look at Europe--continental Europe. It's ruined. The United Kingdom is self-ruined over the past 35 to 37 years--since the first Harold Wilson administration. The United States has been ruined as an economy. We went from a productive society to a parasitical consumer society. We live on the back of the rest of the world as a consumer society, as ancient Rome did in its time. We no longer have the means of producing what we need. We have destroyed much of our agriculture. We have destroyed our railway system. We have destroyed our power production system. We have neglected to maintain our water management systems, and so forth, and so on. We have destroyed our educational system. All of these things. So we have denied human rights, by denying people the right to the benefit of the progress of humanity--the levels we had achieved at an earlier period, prior to 35 years ago. This is the problem. Now you have a generation, which is the so-called Baby Boomer generation, which at one time in their lives--many of them--revolted against this immorality coming out of Washington, out of Nixon, and so forth--things like that. But now they have learned to live with it. Now they have learned to try to adapt to it, to be realistic, not to expect too much, to slide along with popular opinion, to accept the generality and try to find niches, like single issues, into which to wriggle, and somehow hide themselves from the larger reality. You, who are the children of that generation, come along and say, "Hey, Mummy and Daddy, heh! you didn't give us much, did you!" "Whuduya mean, we didn't give you much??" "You gave us a society in which we had no future." Well, that's the mission. Now, what that means is this. It means that you represent a generation from whom there has to emerge a new spark of leadership. Not necessarily the only leadership, but it is only by your provoking leadership from within generations which have become decadent (your parents' generation, largely) that you, and that generation from which you have sparked some inspiration to do good, together, we can lead this nation, and the world, out of its present mess. And therefore the thing to concentrate upon, is to understand the difference between the decadent society, which your parents largely, or your parents' generation largely defend, which is a doomed society, a doomed culture, and to discover the principles which define what is right--what is right, in particular, to get the society out of the present mess. Therefore we have to look back to things in the history of mankind, especially modern European civilization, or back to classical Greek civilization, and understand those things that best typify the way the human species made actual progress over the recent thousands of years--as distinguished from those things that were definitely not progress. And by understanding those principles and applying them to the present situation, and taking to heart our responsibility for the general well-being of humanity as a whole--not only all of the people of our own country--we can spark the possibility of a new chance for mankind. And that is what this is all about. -30- |