September 12, 2007 (1:40pm) ECT
Kiedrich Conference Keynote Precis
The Eurasian Landbridge:
Precis To LaRouche's Keynote Address: September 15, 2007
We shall be assembled here on Saturday, Sept. 15, 2007, amid the onrush of what already onrushing events are demonstrating to be, this most momentous period of change in globally extended modern civilization since the great 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The outcome of this presently accelerating world-wide crisis, is not yet decided; but, the alternatives can be, and must be made politically clear.
In any case, it is certain that the kind of global monetary-economic system which has evolved in the aftermath of the crisis-events of 1968, will not survive the presently onrushing calamities. It should also be made clear, as the proceedings of this two-day conference will help to show us, that there are great, hopeful options for change, some of which will be addressed during the course of this two-day conference. For my part in these proceedings, my attention is focussed upon what appear to me as being the most crucial of the changes in physical-economic policies on which the successful rise out of the presently most ominous crisis will depend.
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Remarks on Background for My Address:
As we meet today, the world is experiencing the early phases of the collapse of the greatest financial speculative bubble in all modern history. The form of this crisis has certain marked, systemic similarities to the hyper-inflationary panic which struck the Weimar, Germany republic during the course of 1923. The principal difference between the two situations, then and now, is that the presently skyrocketing monetary-financial crisis is global; there are no powerful outsiders, as with the introduction of the Dawes Plan, to rescue the present crisis-ridden world as a whole from the explosion which has first appeared as the collapse centered in the trans-Atlantic financial-monetary bubble which is in the process of imploding during the current months.
However, there are some degrees of relevant similarities between the present world monetary-financial crisis, and the circumstances leading into the Germany crisis of 1923.
In the case of Germany's 1923 crisis, the distinguishing, underlying cause of the crisis had been the fraudulent assertion, during the Versailles proceedings, by President Woodrow Wilson's U.S. Secretary of State Lansing, that Germany had sole responsibility for World War I. On this account a vast, unpayable debt was imposed upon Germany at Versailles. The actual guilt for all of the relevant cases of warfare, from the beginning of the process of war-fighting, with Japan's first war on China, had been with Britain's Prince of Wales Edward Albert, and, later, King Edward VII, whose government actually orchestrated, out of explicitly stated geopolitical motives, the plan for placing Germany under attack, on its western and eastern frontiers.
In the present case, notable prolonged warfare, that of the U.S.A. in the 1964-1972 combat in Indo-China, and the rash of wars, over the recent sixteen years, in the Balkans and Southwest Asia, when combined with the effects of the destructive monetary and financial reforms within the U.S.A., in particular, have served as the underlying basis for the spreading state of general bankruptcy in North America and in Central and Western Europe. The conditions now associated, on the one side, with the waves of collapse of so-called "hedge funds" and related, John-Law-style forms of reckless speculation; and, on the other side, the effects of bleeding long-wars of the 1964-2007 interval to date, are the principal markers of the process leading directly into the present general breakdown-crisis of the existing world monetary-financial system.
The political-strategic implications of this present state of affairs are deadly, in the most profound way. The only peaceful remedy for the present world situation, today, would be by actions which, in effect, place the present world monetary-financial system into a process of reorganization of bankruptcy; and a return to a design consistent with what U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt had intended for the Bretton Woods System, had he lived. No possible solution for this crisis exists within the structures of the present world financial-monetary system. Only a political reform of the world system, as it must be promoted by the initiative of a relevant leading group of powerful nation-states, could turn the tide of horror now gripping the fate of this planet as a whole.
