November 9, 2007 (LPAC)--On November 3, ministers of eight countries--Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Peoples Republic of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, meeting in the Tajik capital city, Dushanbe, agreed to an $18.7 billion investment to improve Central Asia's network of roads, railroads, airports and seaports, to make the region a vital transit route for trade between Europe and Asia. The agreement was supported by Asian Development Bank (ADB) and five other multilateral institutions which were present at the meeting. The plan calls for an $18.7 billion investment over the next decade in six new transport corridors, mainly roads and rail links.
Although Central Asia lies at the center of the Eurasian continent, less than 1% of all trade between Europe and Asia currently goes through the region. Inadequate transport infrastructure and cumbersome border processes have resulted in nearly all trade going by sea.
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The following is an excerpt taken from Lyndon LaRouche's recent paper, 'The Mask of Nancy Pelosi': The Force of Tragedy, which was deemed relevant by this editor:
Foremost, once again, is the fact that the rise of European civilization within a period of cultural evolution over a span since about 20,000 years ago, has been dominated by the cultures derived from implicitly transoceanic maritime cultures. It was the establishment of coastal settlements by maritime cultures, which has dominated all credible surviving evidence of global development of cultures and economy since that time. This is, most emphatically, a time about 4,000-2,000 years ago when the post-glacial melt had begun to settle into approximately stable present sea-levels.
We must also point out the so-called "riparian" hoaxes, which trace the development of civilization downstream, in contrast to the reality that civilization proceeds upstream, as from the mouths of riparian sites, up the principal rivers adjoining those sites. The movement of cultures has been actually upstream, from transoceanic maritime cultures, into coastal settlements and upstream. The extraordinary importance of Cyrenaica in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Ptolemaic, and later Mediterranean culture, is an included type of feature of this history. Indeed, the advantage of maritime over land-based powers held during the entire sweep of European history prior to the victory of President Abraham Lincoln over London's Confederacy puppet, and the hysterical "geopolitical" reaction of the British Empire to the eruption of transcontinental railways, still to the present geopolitical date.
These cited strategic features of known and implied history of the recent 20,000 and more years, put the emphasis on what I have written in the treatment of sea-power earlier in this present report.
However, in dealing with language, its uses, and its evolution, we must place the emphasis on what may be usefully described as a land-based language's contrary sort of geopolitical directions of development, on both the oceanic and upstream progress, and the contrary, downstream-driven motion (e.g., the example of the land-driven Persian Empire versus the sea-driven, Mediterranean-centered, cultural flows).
When we are intelligent enough to abandon that mechanistic method of shaping of world-outlook, typical of land-based ancient cultures, to adopt a dynamic outlook like that of the Pythagoreans and their relevant predecessors, instead, the internally driven impulses of cultures shift from a fixed cultural outlook, to emphasis on exploration and development as the driver of cultural impulses. The crucial role of both ancient Classical Greek culture's emphasis on its character as a maritime culture, and the relationship of the maritime culture, in Egypt, centered in Cyrenaica, in effecting the fall of Tyre, and. thus, the collapse of the Persian empire, should reenforce our attention to the opposing vectors of an ancient maritime culture and an ancient land-based culture of, for example, the rather typical Asia type.
It is to be emphasized, that it was maritime culture which shaped, and vectored the principal currents of the history of Europe and the so-called "Middle East." In the medieval period, it was chiefly the rise of the imperialist financier power of Venice, which shaped the history of Europe; the same Venetian drive was key, in modern times, to establishing an imperial form of Anglo-Dutch Liberal power in the Anglo-Dutch, maritime provinces of northern Europe, and the consequent leading power of the neo-Venetian empire of the heirs of Paolo Sarpi since most periods of modern history since the February 1763 Peace of Paris.
It was the establishment of the U.S. republic as a continental economy, with the introduction of development shaped by transcontinental railway systems, which has been the chief pivot of the challenge to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal imperialism, since the U.S. victory, under President Abraham Lincoln, over London's Confederacy puppets. This U.S. development, has been, understandably, the British Empire's chief concern since the failure of Lord Palmerston's geo-political enterprises against the U.S. republic, through the time of the present threat of a "third world war" steered from former Prime Minister Tony Blair's London presently.
Only a competent economist, such as one of my skills and inclinations, could clearly understand these matters of global grand strategy.
