Schiller Institute on YouTube Schiller Institute on Facebook RSS

Home >

A Vision for Europe in Eurasia

by Jacques Cheminade

Conference Program

E1-cheminade_jacques_0117.jpg
EIRNS/Christopher Lewis
Jacques Cheminade.

Jacques Cheminade, founder of Solidarité & Progrès, is a longtime associate of Lyndon LaRouche, and a former French Presidential candidate. He gave the keynote address for Panel 3 of the Schiller Institute conference, on April 14.

Dear friends, distinguished guests:

Let’s consider what I’m going to say now, as an attempt to reflect upon the process of what happened yesterday [the first day of the con­ference—ed.], and is go­ing to unfold today.

First, everything can change overnight. Ours are times when everything can change overnight. Either we commit ourselves to that change for the better, locate our identity in the future, and fight to become its cause, or we are finished as a human culture. There is no third way, because the present world system is a living dead. The consequence of its submission to the British imperial monetarist law is trumpeted, as Lyn said yesterday, at the highest level of the British system: a reduction of human population from the present 7 billion people to slightly more than 1 billion, or even less.

It means a policy of mass killings, either by an organized extinction or by a thermonuclear war. The conditions to produce the foodstuffs required by even our present population, not to speak of the more than 9 billion human beings allegedly expected for 2050—these conditions are not met. The conditions for energy production are not met. The conditions for scientific discoveries and technological improvements are not met.

The conclusion is tragically obvious. Nobody who is informed could say they did not know where the present policies lead. It is like at the Nuremberg Tribunal: “knew or should have known,” and there is no excuse. However, the European heads of states are behaving like servants of the time bomb: They react with sophisms, compromises with the murderous conditions created in Greece, in Cyprus, in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and, soon to be, France and Germany. Their policies spread murder because their minds are occupied by a culture of death.

Look at the spread of tuberculosis and malaria in Greece; look at the Greek kids, as it was said yesterday, scrambling into garbage cans; and this past Winter, adults cutting trees in private gardens, in public parks, along the streets, to get wood to avoid freezing. Look at the masses of Spanish people thrown out of their homes, people dying because there is no medicine in Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, and Spain. And look, also, at the increase of the rates of suicides, not only there, but in Italy and in France. There are presently French workers setting fire to themselves, not only unemployed, but also those broken down by unbearable working conditions. It is not only in some remote country, it is coming to us, us as a whole, here and now. Even to Germany, which remains a safe haven only in the desperate illusions of the humble and offended from the South.

The Future Is in Eurasian Cooperation

If we would take such conditions as a reference point, the future of Europe in Eurasian cooperation would be nothing but the transmission of a venereal disease. This is the immediate reason why a paradigm change is not only necessary but mandatory. The future of Europe is in Eurasian cooperation, provided we change our way of thinking and acting. To think about it as some economic decision within the present system would be not only dishonest, but idiotic.

The truth is, first, that there could be no European recovery, without the development of the Mediterranean and Africa, and there could not be that development without the development of Eurasia as a whole. And there could not be, in turn, the development of Eurasia without the development of a World Land-Bridge. It is not a question of interlinked logics, it’s a question of political necessity.

Our enemy is operating on a world scale; we also have to operate on a world scale, from the top down. There could not be today a solution for a partial cause, without rising to the cause of all the causes. In other words, for a European future in Eurasian cooperation, we have to make the change at the top, which means at the level of the United States. At present, both the United States and Europe are occupied countries, on a trans-Atlantic scale, and the fight to free ourselves from the shackles of that occupation should be, and has to be, trans-Atlantic. There is absolutely no way that Europe or any European country can “fara da se,” do it by itself. It cannot be.

This doesn’t mean that the European countries should wait to be freed by an uprising in the United States. It means that we have to think of ourselves, human individuals, as a link between Eurasia and the United States, to help that uprising in the United States to happen as soon as possible. This is the starting point for the future of Europe in Eurasia, which necessarily lies in the United States.

The second truth is that we have to identify the true nature of the enemy: the British Empire. It is not “British” as a matter of nationality; it is British as a matter of empire, the empire of the “animal kingdom,” as Lyndon LaRouche puts it. It treats human beings like beasts, and promotes for that cause, the worst drug in human beings, the drug of money and gambling. It imprisons them within the empire of money and the compulsion to gamble, to be fascinated in a morbid game, to come out on top at the expense of all others—the exact opposite of the “advantage of the other,” which was the basis for the creation of the nation-state at the Peace of Westphalia. This empire is organized both to destroy the individual sovereignty of human beings, and the sovereignty of nation-states.

We are now at its end phase. After the murders of the Kennedy brothers and of Martin Luther King, it spread, to unprecedented amounts in world history, both fictitious capital and fictitious pseudo-goods. By pseudo-goods, I mean goods produced for an early collapse, to compel people to buy again to replace them, thanks to credit made available by the banks, without any real technological development for the economy in the process.

Now we have reached a point at which the pyramids of debts and credit can only be maintained by hyperinflation—the bail-out—and the looting of people’s assets—the bail-in, seizing the deposits in the banks.

This is no longer capitalism, because the respect for private property is thrown to the wolves. It’s no longer capitalism, not even financial capitalism, because the system continues to buy people with cheap credit and cheap goods. It has become a financial fascism based on the looting of all, except those protected by an electrified financial and law-enforcement ring-fence. And that’s what the British oligarchy is promoting now, right under our noses.

The Crucial Role of the United States

It is on the basis of fighting against this enemy, which is nothing more than the modern version of the old Roman Empire, that the common future of Europe and Eurasia is located. The crucial role of the United States lies not only—as people sometimes mistakenly believe in Europe—in its physical power, but on the power of its Constitution—what LaRouche stressed yesterday—its Hamiltonian Constitution, explicitly based against the British Empire, the oligarchic system of predators.

It is based on the fact that the existence of the human species lies outside the bounds of life defined by the animal kingdom. Therefore, the American Constitution is based on the future conditions to be created for the common good of all, and not on an extrapolation or deduction of given present conditions. It is a “bet on the future,” not a bet on futures’ prices in some financial market. This requires the existence of a national banking entity which will secure public credit to build that future, reimbursed by the pay-back of the development created by the related investments. This is, in simple terms, the principle of a Hamiltonian economic principle, as a law of the American Constitution, issuance of credit for the capacity of human beings to create in the physical universe, and not to bet on markets.

The starting point, again, is what LaRouche defines as the foremost distinction of human life from all other forms of life, the human species’ power to effect willful increase in the quality of its energy-flux densities, which, in the case of the human species, is the systematically functional distinction of the qualitative leaps upwards, into willfully chosen higher orders of magnitude of energy-flux density.

This is the very important issue of “progress,” which is not an indefinite extension of what already exists. It is not basically quantitative, but it is to create the conditions for those qualitative leaps toward the future. Not pseudo-goods at a relatively fixed stage of technology, and traded with funny money, but a set of new products based on the application of new scientific principles. And that is precisely what the oligarchy of the Empire wants to prevent at any cost, because it raises the question of the necessity of human freedom to create. Without human freedom, there is no creation. The oligarchy wants to manage a fixed universe, in space and time, and when the conditions of the fixity of its power, the conditions of its control, are not met, it destroys, more and more like the Roman Empire of yesterday, and the British Empire of today. Money, then, which under normal conditions is an idiot, becomes a criminal.

That’s why, to be something useful for the future of Eurasia, our European countries and people have to understand the issue of change in the United States. This means the combined effect of the Glass-Steagall principle and a public-credit system—the explicit and implicit basis for the American Constitution that was applied in the United States under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and also in Europe for the reconstruction after World War II. Since the death of Roosevelt and the murder of John Kennedy, this principle of the Constitution has been betrayed in the United States and replaced by the British monetarist system.

In Europe, worse, our heads of state have become the lackeys of that British system and the enemies of their own states. To recover the Constitution in the United States, where this reference of principle does exist, is therefore, the issue for Europe and Eurasia.

First, Glass-Steagall

It means, first, Glass-Steagall, originating in America, in the United States, and then spread to the whole world as a global Glass-Steagall. It is not a mere separation of commercial banks and investment banks. It is an anti-monetarist principle—it is a principle—to stop the hyperinflationary looting: The banks that have bet on the markets will be left on their own, without bail-outs or bail-ins, and therefore, become officially bankrupt. They are already the living dead; Glass-Steagall will be their death certificate, and for all of us, the liberation from their murderous pollution—that’s the true pollution.

All the European heads of state may expect it, or some would expect it, but they have not the courage to face the British Empire, as exemplified by the fake banking reform in France. They are historically so much plunged into the system of the British Empire, that even those that are not outright accomplices are like rabbits caught by the lights of an oncoming truck: They are paralyzed by their fear. Therefore, our initial fight for the future of Europe in Eurasia is to push for the Glass-Steagall principle where we can win, in the United States, and then to adopt it in Europe as a rebirth of the post-World War II reconstruction, to be the basis of a common European/Eurasian recovery, from the Atlantic to the Sea of China.

This means to make known, and to spread the fight of the friends of Lyndon LaRouche, both in Europe and in Eurasia; that’s our task, to make the organizing known here. And that’s why they are here, why Diane Sare is here, among us today. Because we need them! We need them as an inspiring motion, an essential leverage, to give us the courage to free ourselves from what we have allowed ourselves to become.

Next, a Hamiltonian Credit System

The positive complement to Glass-Steagall is a public credit system: Once the grounds are cleaned up, or the Augean Stables are cleaned up, we need an engine to build our future. This is, again, the notion of Hamiltonian public credit, based on a national banking principle—not allowing the oligarchy to seize the state privilege to issue currency. The reimbursement of the credit is provided by the accomplishments that that credit has generated.

FIGURE 1
The Eurasian Land-Bridge
E1-eurasian_landbridge_rgb%5b1%5d.jpg
Schiller Institute

Our publications have shown what could be done with it, even at the present level of technologies: the Eurasian Land-Bridge (Figure 1), an economic miracle for the Mediterranean region and Africa, a world New Deal as stated in our Kiedrich resolution of Sept. 16, 2007.

My purpose here is not to enter into the different aspects of those projects, but to show what we are missing by not launching them. At this point, what we are truly missing is the future of humanity. Indeed, the euro system prevents that creation of a credit system. It was created to prevent the creation of that system, and instead, to promote austerity for the people; meaning now, the policy of mass murder, and safe havens for the ring-fenced principalities and powers. That’s the main reason why the euro system has to be dumped—not as a single monetary issue, but as a monstrous system created to destroy the physical economy, an intrinsically evil system, not a honest failure, as Mr. [Bernd] Lucke may believe wrongly and stupidly.1

Our projects, in a word, mean instead, to open the gates of the global concentration camps that are now being established by the oligarchy of the British Empire and its allies. Look at Greece, Portugal, Spain; then look at our projects: It is the difference between life and death, not the difference between two available programs.

At this point in our present Europe, I meet a lot of people who say “Yes, yes, you are right, you are right, but it is not possible to go there.” “It is utopian. It is too beautiful to be true. It is too beautiful to be done.” This suicidal European pessimism is our worst enemy, and the best, induced weapon of the British oligarchy, at a moment of decision between self-destruction and a better future: the perfectibilitas humanitatis [perfectibility of humanity]. What is here now at stake, is the understanding and the capacity of the human mind to master and improve the future, and to rationally believe that an improvement is possible, and not only possible, but necessary.

Cusa: The Coincidence of Opposites

At this point, to give a sense of what Europe can bring to Eurasia as a gift to our common destiny, I am convinced that it is more than legitimate to bring in the example of somebody who fought in a similar moment of change like ours, between the Middle Ages and modern times: the man of the Renaissance after the Great Plague of the 14th Century and during the Hundred Years War of the 14th and 15th centuries, Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa. He is one of the greatest thinkers of human history, but do not imagine him settled in some monastery “thinking.” He was engaged in the public life of his times, and we don’t say it enough, many times at the risk of his life, and had to reform the religious organization in a region of Europe going from Switzerland to Hamburg, and from Louvain in Belgium to Magdeburg, a sizable portion of Eurasia. He was twice imprisoned in the fortress of Andratz and had to abandon everything he owned.

e1-nikolaus_cusa.jpg
In the face of those who said “It can’t be done,” Cusa (left), after discussions with his friend Paolo Toscanelli (whose map, seen here, was used by Columbus), conceived the solution as an escape from the grip of the European oligarchy, in an outreach toward the Americas.
E1-toscanelli-sepia.jpg
E1-Toscanelli_map.jpg

It is in 1438, when he was accompanying the theologians from Constantinople to the Council of Florence, that he conceived the concept at the center of all his theology and philosophy, the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites. This concept is crucial for world history, and in particular, for our decisive moment here and now, as it was in Florence in 1439. Because it defines how, from above, from the top down, ideas or forces that seem and are in contradiction at a certain level, can coincide at a higher level, after a “leap” beyond any established conjunctions or disjunctions. These leaps correspond exactly to the qualitative leaps upwards that a public credit system has the mandate to promote, and, also, the basis for a dialogue of religions that Cusa later elaborated in his De Pace Fidei, as the common foretaste, the common pregustatio, of truth in its quest for unity, in Europe, Eurasia, today.

What is so revolutionary about it, is that the concept of coincidentia oppositorum, which locates truth in the motion to know, and to improve beyond the apparent circumstances, is in absolute opposition to the principle of non-contradiction of the then-prevalent Aristotelian cult! The principle of non-contradiction operates in a world of fixed formal logics, of controlled rituals, preventing the mind from reaching the level of intellectual imagination to discover new principles in the “splendor of truth.”

There you have it: The world of the oligarchy is the Aristotelian world of a finished, fixed nature, opposed to the discovery of new physical principles, and opposed to change. “It can’t be done. It is too beautiful to be true. It is not possible—it’s even impossible.” This is precisely the world of the European and trans-Atlantic oligarchy today, once again, and Cusa gives us the keys to get out of it.

In his time, after discussions with his friend Paolo Toscanelli, he conceived the solution as an escape from the grip of the European oligarchy in an outreach toward a new found land. This mission, conveyed to Columbus first, and to the Mayflower later, gave birth to the American principle of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the America of the Mathers, of Hamilton, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, based on the rising of humanity through the transformation of man and nature for the common good, the General Welfare principle, and the service of future generations.

This is, beyond the population and the territory, America as a principle, a human creativity system: This is what it is. It doesn’t exist today in the present organization of the American Presidency, but it does exist as a principle there, and our task is to make it happen, and to organize its rebirth.

Our task today, is that this process of becoming, associated with the discovery and creation of the United States, continues with the development of Eurasia and beyond, with a space policy, beginning with a planetary defense. It is the condition for the human mind to maintain its integrity. “Daydreaming! Daydreaming!” we hear in Europe, some would say. And some would scream, from their position in the low, frozen valley of Aristotelianism, “It’s impossible! It’s impossible!” Their blindness mistakes daydreaming for an experiment in thinking, for a Gedankenexperiment. They have no sense of what it is.

Daydreaming? Well, the answer is that the same Cusa who elaborated these philosophical and theological conceptions, is the one who, in the fourth dialogue of his Idiota, De Staticis Experimentis [The Layman on Experiments Done with Weight-Scales], elaborated the principles of all modern mechanics and medicine, through his conception of knowing through weighing, the weight being the reflection of a higher reality: weighing of human weight, respiration, breath, and urine, according to age, to measure the overall physical condition through such reflections; and also, by the same token, conceiving in the same way, in the same trust, music, astronomical, and meteorological instruments, hygrometers, barometers, and also soundings.

The point, here, is that it was a philosopher who established a principle of a perfect balance capable of correcting the imperfection of the human senses; it is that philosopher, who laid out the basis of mechanical science, and not an Aristotelian obsessed by mechanical relations between objects!

Energy and Power

I want now to put it in another way, related to yesterday’s discussion on energy: It is to understand energy and power, as two opposed species. The Aristotelian, oligarchical concept is that of energy. It is linear. It takes into account the units produced, and then it takes their quantity and establishes it as addition of the units, independent of their creative process. It is meat for academic asses, a mathematical dead-end.

The anti-Aristotelian, Cusan, or Leibnizian conception is that of power. It measures the progression of flux density according to the process of production, corresponding to the level of the productive powers of labor, per capita and per square kilometer. It is not meat, it is matter for creative minds. It means the future, reached through progress—“progress, progress,” as LaRouche said yesterday. It means fusion power, and it means fusion as a way to Mars.

I must add that it is Helga Zepp-LaRouche, as an expert in the creative commitment of Cusa, who conceived the Eurasian Land-Bridge principle, and not an assembly of learned asses muzzled to the trough of their formal expertise, and satisfied with the fodder provided by the Academies. It was Helga.

Cusa himself makes a very interesting point in expressing his optimism about the human mind, in his Hunt for Wisdom, his second to last work: “Since I have now read in Diogenes Laertius’s book, On the Life of the Philosophers, about the various hunts for wisdom of the philosophers, I was impelled to devote my mind to this so-pleasing speculation, that which nothing more delightful can occur to a man.” And he concludes: “Therefore, I believe, I have unfolded the rough and not completely purified concept of my hunts, De venatione sapientiae, as far as it was possible to me, and now submit everything to him, who is better able to contemplate these lofty things.”

“Him?” Who is he? We! That is we! There we are—there we are, challenged to hunt for wisdom, challenged to progress, to improve, and make the impossible possible, which is the most joyful thing that can be accomplished, because it is the most human. Glass-Steagall, a public credit policy, the Eurasian and World Land-Bridges, an Earth defense policy—this should be the European philosophy, unfolding in the process of an active, compassionate hunting. It should be our common European/Eurasian philosophy to get humanity out of the pit.

As I said before, now everything can change overnight. And it depends upon us, that it is for the good, and not for what the British have prepared before us, a terrestrial Hell.

Thank you.

1. Bernd Lucke heads a new, fake “anti-euro” party, Alternative for Germany. When Lucke was recently in Paris, he said that the euro is made for the strong countries, and the weak countries of the South should return to national currencies.