DENNIS SMALL: Thank you, Stephan. In listening to a number of the presentations over the course of this morning and this afternoon, one can’t help but muse over a certain irony. Dr. Postol was just explaining that if driven to the wall, Iran has a capability. But the irony of this is that supposedly to prevent Iran from launching a nuclear war or using nuclear weapons, the United States and Israel—and with the British prominent in the background—have created the very circumstances in which that could well happen. Isn’t that interesting? Almost as if they intended it.
Or take the case of the Strait of Hormuz, where again, a tremendous dislocation has occurred—and I’ll talk a little bit more about that—with President Trump howling bloody murder, that this is a result of what Iran has done. But it is not Iran that has shut the Strait of Hormuz, as they themselves have said. It has been shut partially to those who are waging war against Iran. And that again, is something that has occurred and been initiated by the United States and Israel with the British prominently in the wings. So again, it’s almost as if this had been their intention.
Now, we’ve all been witness to, and most of us quite horrified to hear the blood-curdling savage remarks of President Donald Trump about not just bombing Iran back into the Stone Ages, that would be bad enough, but then adding the phrase “where they belong.” The thing that is resulting from this, besides the war itself, is we have an ongoing implosion of the physical economy, where the Strait of Hormuz plays an important role in this, where we see a dramatic shutdown of a large part of the world’s supply of oil, a collapse of a significant portion of natural gas and fertilizer capabilities, where food production is already beginning to be drastically affected, with the prospects for this going through a ratchet-style collapse. Do not look for a linear, gradual collapse step-by-step.
I would argue that what we will be seeing if this policy is not changed is the equivalent in the domain of economics of a nuclear chain reaction. And we are on the verge of that. It’s worse than simply bad, however, because the intention behind this, and I think it is an intention, is very similar to what happened with Nord Stream. One asks, perhaps, could they be so crazy as to do something like this, to deliberately bring down the world economy? Well, just look at what happened around Nord Stream over the last few years, and I think you have your answer.
But what makes this worse is the fact that this physical economic collapse underway already is intersecting a blowout of the global financial system and of a speculative bubble, which now totals over $2.4 quadrillion. And it is the relationship of these two things—a physical economic collapse and an out of control speculative financial bubble—that has brought the world to the edge of a new dark age. And a new dark age whose effect and consequences is arguably greater in its damage than the damage done by war, other than nuclear war, of course. But other than that, that is the nature of what we’re facing.
My argument, my thesis to you today, and what I will say, is that to understand this process, if we understand exactly how this collapse function works, why it is nonlinear, why we are toying with utter destruction, actually provides us with a key, the very secret to solving the crisis. And that has to do with the fact that the nature of economic growth and of political solutions requires the deployment, the recognition, and the generalization of an absolutely unique human characteristic, a moral intention of action, which is the supreme power that shapes the physical universe around us. It is the non-use of that capability or its misuse which has brought us to the edge of this kind of nonlinear collapse, and it is that capability which provides the solution.
Now, let me get into some specifics. Let me begin by showing you a map. This is a map which indicates what many authorities, experts in the field, say are the 150 border conflicts in existence on the planet today. I have not counted the dots. It may be 250, or it may just be 100, I don’t know. But we’re talking about 150 border conflicts, and almost every single one of these has been created by and left behind by the British Empire intentionally for the purpose of having a world where they can control chokepoints, as they refer to them. This goes all the way back to the geopolitics of Alfred Mackinder, of Alfred Mahan, and so on, control chokepoints for the purpose of doing what the word indicates, choke the rest of the world. And use border conflicts to provoke a state of war of each against all, which would have made Thomas Hobbes proud.
Now, let me just do something very simple, which is to draw a little ellipse around the area of maximum concentration of these border conflicts. It’s true there are many also in the African region, and we don’t need to get into detailed comparisons. But this area, which is the area of our immediate concern involving Southern Asia, Southwest Asia, the crossroads of the BRICS, the Belt and Road Initiative, the expansion of that into Africa, the development of the Global South. That is exactly the area that is being targeted with the dangerous situation that we have today.
Now, the Strait of Hormuz, as has been mentioned here before, which is in the area to Iran’s south, through this area, as is well known, 20% of world oil trade occurs, 30% of fertilizer. This has already, in only one month of—a little over a month of war—begun a process of a shattering of the physical economic capability worldwide that is dramatic in its implications. I’ll give you one example. We could spend all afternoon discussing the specifics, but one example. Acute hunger, according to recent statements by the World Food Program, is expected to rise from 319 million people today by 45 million people to 364 million. Acute hunger is a condition of acute, extreme shortage of food, which, if it continues, will create the conditions for starvation and genocide as a result of that. That is already a 14% increased forecast based on merely a month of war. Africa is one of the areas hardest hit because, among other things, it turns out that Eastern Africa and other African countries are among the largest importers of the fertilizer coming out of the Strait of Hormuz region. Now, for example, Sudan has 26 million people living in acute hunger. Sudan also imports 54% of its fertilizer from there. They import a lot in general. I’m sure they don’t have the capability of doing that, but you can imagine the impact of this. The lack of fertilizer simply means that the capability of producing food will be reduced.
There was a similar comment raised and posed by the chief economist for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the FAO, Mr. [Maximo] Torero, and what he said is, well, look, this is what has happened after a month, and we can manage, the world can manage, we can adjust, if it stops now. But if this continues for three months, it will have unleashed a process which is unstoppable; or unstoppable without producing tremendous dramatic damage. Now, I think that what Mr. Torero is pointing to is at the center of the issue of both the problem and the solution. Because the way a physical economy works, as Lyndon LaRouche has pointed out and proven in great detail, is that it’s a living process. And unless you are in the process of expansion and growth by increasing scientific and technological discoveries, which allows you to overcome temporary limitations of existing raw materials, because you will exhaust certain raw materials for existing technological modes, but our capability of having creative scientific and cultural discoveries allows us to invent new technologies, new ways of growing in a nonlinear fashion. This creates the ability, LaRouche demonstrated, to increase what he called the potential relative population density of mankind. That is to say, the power of a society, of an economy, to sustain and grow an ever-growing population at a higher level of living, greater longevity, in the same territorial area. In other words, the population density increases. That’s dependent on nonlinear growth and technological advance. This is not something that you can simply reverse and expect things to be OK. You cannot simply kill a living process and then say, oh no, let’s reverse it and make it alive again. The example of Easter applies to other matters. It is not a justification of destroying an economy and thinking you can revive it.
