The rapidly shifting situation on the ground in Afghanistan gives increasing urgency to developing an understanding of the work of Lyndon LaRouche, who laid out, with increasing insight, his vision for the Earth’s next fifty years, and beyond. As the delta Covid variant lays bare the inadequacy of health care throughout the world, we see the profound need to develop a platform of productivity capable of sustaining billions more people with standards of physical and cultural life adequate to the creative potential of the human race.
The second panel of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation’s event “So, Are You Finally Willing to Learn Economics?” took up the topic of LaRouche’s vision of “Earth’s Next Fifty Years,” with a view towards the efforts led by Helga Zepp-LaRouche to realizing those revolutionary objectives.
Moderator Megan Dobrodt, Secretary-Treasurer of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation Board of Directors, launched the panel with a video of the LaRouches’ close friend and collaborator, Norbert Brainin, the lead violinist of the legendary Amadeus Quartet.
Brainin began a 1995 master class in Dona Krupa Castle, Slovakia, by introducing the concept of Motivführung, or “motivic thorough-composition,” an approach to classical composition developed by Haydn and refined by Mozart and Beethoven, of thorough composition according to principle. Brainin explained to the class that he often talked about Motivführung with professional colleagues and students who recognized the term, but that the only person who understood it completely was Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche often said that Brainin had introduced this concept to him, but he recognized it as a universal process for developing, not only great music, but natural and human compositions of any kind. Knowing this, Brainin explained that true classical composers are “scientists.”
This was followed by a recording of LaRouche addressing the issue of human creativity at the July 3, 2011 European Schiller Institute conference. He asserted that human beings were the only known creative species, and explained that “classical artistic culture” can be transferred “to the department of physical science,” in the words of Riemann. LaRouche explained that he determined to build a movement, when he realized that no one but himself understood the disaster the financial disruptions of the 1960s were creating. He started by visiting universities and discussing his ideas. He briefly identified his understanding of his fundamental principle:
“You get a demonstration of that in the department of Classical artistic composition, in which the mind is experimenting with the attempt to discover principles, and expresses the yearning for that experimental result as the incentive of creativity for the human mind. That is creativity. It is getting outside the ordinary habits, or habituation, of life….”
He concluded with the simple statement, “It’s not magic: It’s really humanity.”
The first guest on the panel was Jacques Cheminade, a long-time LaRouche associate, President of the Solidarité et Progrès party in France, and a former Presidential candidate. He described how, as a French diplomat, he first encountered LaRouche at an event in Manhattan and, while studying LaRouche’s writing, was confronted with a New York Times supplement in which he saw a photo of French soldiers in World War I with the caption, “Once again triage—Who’s going to live? Who is going to die?” Several pages later, there was a picture of an Ethiopian mother and child with their “skin floating off,” with the caption, “Who will be fed and who will die?” This led him to decide that, despite his prospects as a young diplomat, “Well, these are my people, even if to join them I have to pay a dear price.”
He described his collaboration with LaRouche in writing a book, in French and English, titled France After de Gaulle (La France après de Gaulle), promoting the idea of getting France back on the path of republican development as characterized by General Lafayette’s engagement with the American Revolution. Maurice Allais, the only French citizen ever to win a Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote Cheminade a letter on November 27, 2009 saying that he was “fully associating myself to LaRouche’s efforts to generate a wide public debate to radically rebuild the credit system and the international monetary system,” and authorized Jacques to make this public. Former Prime Minister Michel Rocard, Cheminade said, also shared LaRouche’s economic outlook.
In 1983 LaRouche and his wife Helga led a Club of Life event in Paris. The Club was founded by Mrs. LaRouche as a counter to the radically Malthusian Club of Rome. The Paris event was attended by world-famous oncologist Georges Mathé, resistance heroine Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, and de Gaulle’s associate, World War II hero, General Jean-Gabriel Revault d’Allonnes. All of these later wrote to request freedom for LaRouche, when he was politically incarcerated in 1989. LaRouche’s universal appeal was demonstrated by support from leading members of the French Communist Party as well as the Secretary of State under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Pierre Christian Taittinger.
Following Cheminade, two representatives from Argentina, Roberto Fritzsche and Eduardo Fernandez, used discoveries of the great Russian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky to explain LaRouche’s concept of “relative potential population density” in relation to “energy flux density” and improvements in living standards. Man’s role in this complex was explained in relationship to Vernadsky’s concept of three realms of existence: the lifeless lithosphere; the living biosphere; and the realm of cognition called the noösphere. Man is the master of all three, and, as LaRouche has explained, also participates in a fourth realm, that of cognition that we can recognize in the design and growth of the Universe, but, as yet, do not know its source in the way we know how humanity can discover concepts and “laws” of the Universe. They use Vernadsky’s calculations and more advanced knowledge to demonstrate that, with new energy sources which are on the horizon, the Earth could support a human population of 3 trillion.
This was followed by greetings from Carlos Gallardo, President of the Christian Democratic Party of Peru.
Harley Schlanger, also a long-time leader of the LaRouche movement, followed with an ironically revealing behind the scenes report on the origins of Richard Nixon’s disastrous August 15, 1971 announcement. It happened that on January 23, 1983, a dozen years after the event, John Connally of Texas, who had been Secretary of the Treasury under President Nixon, was present as his, Connally’s, possessions were being sold off at a bankruptcy auction, and agreed to an interview. Schlanger asked about the Aug. 15, 1971 decision, and Connally proudly declared it to have been his decision, and a great success. When Schlanger challenged him with LaRouche’s declaration that the decision was the cause of the subsequent disasters, which were, among other things, the cause of Connally’s personal demise, he became despondent, and eventually slinked away. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bicKvoNFYM time 58:)
Daisuke Kotegawa, formerly a top official in Japan’s Ministry of Finance and Japan’s Executive Director at the IMF, sent a greeting backing LaRouche’s distinction between investments in the real economy as opposed to speculation, and called for restoring Glass-Steagall.
Fred Huenefeld, an agricultural economist who has served in multiple government positions in Louisiana, and a long-time board member of the Schiller Institute, gave an animated description of his years of agitating for LaRouche’s ideas and hounding the U.S. Congress to wake up.
Former South Carolina State Senator Theo Mitchell, a leader in the Democratic Party and a board member of the Schiller Institute, discussed his work to expose the FBI’s misjustice in the prosecution of LaRouche and in the “Fruhmenschen” campaign which targeted Black elected officials, including himself.
The concluding section, on LaRouche in the Universities, gave youth leaders of the LaRouche movement an opportunity to discuss their commitment to getting LaRouche’s work into universities and elsewhere. Gretchen Small, a leader of the Ibero-American branch of the LaRouche movement and President of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation Board of Directors, began this session with video segments of the notorious 1971 City University of New York debate between LaRouche and top Keynesian economist Abba Lerner, in which LaRouche induced Lerner to admit that Nixon’s economic policy, and his own, were in keeping with those of Hitler’s Reichsbank governor and Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht. Sidney Hook, a leading academic “philosopher” of the day and an intelligence community operative responsible for stifling unwanted discussions, told a LaRouche supporter after witnessing LaRouche’s impact on the downed champion, Lerner, that LaRouche would never be permitted another such contest.
The first youth speaker was from the Philippines, Carlos “Itos” Valdes, the son of Carlos “Butch” Valdes, the founder and leader of the Philippine LaRouche Society and many other organizations. Itos Valdes gave a sincere and moving description of how his understanding of the movement changed his life, beginning in childhood with his family’s involvement in the LaRouche movement, and continuing with his organizing others through the ideas of Plato, Leibniz, FDR and LaRouche
Carolina Dominguez, an extraordinary leader of the movement in Mexico and throughout Ibero America, spoke about the campaign to make the work of LaRouche available throughout the university system, and presented videos of young colleagues from Mexico and Colombia. She described the problem by exposing an economics professor who said the purpose of education was to help students become part of the wealthy 50%, rather than to lift the poor 50% out of poverty.
José Vega of the Bronx closed the presentations with a video he had made discussing LaRouche’s policy for the next 50 years, including his idea of a “Space Civilian Construction Corps” modeled on FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, to recruit youth to participate in a revitalized space program.
The prepared presentations were followed by a profound discussion among the participants on the significance of what had been done and what must urgently be accomplished. One comment by Jacques Cheminade briefly highlighted the secret to LaRouche’s success. He said he was delighted to see three generations of LaRouche Youth Movements in action: the early 1960s campus recruit, Paul Gallagher; people in their 40s and 50s who were recruited by LaRouche in the 1990s-2000s, now playing a leading role in the movement; and those in their early 20s who are ripening as a highly effective force.
The full conference can be viewed at the LaRouche Legacy Foundation website, at https://www.larouchelegacyfoundation.org/news/august-15
