LAROUCHE TO ARGENTINE JOURNALIST:
Fight the IMF for Americas To Survive
The following is the full text of Lyndon LaRouche's telephone
interview on Oct. 12, 2004 with Romina Manguel of Veintitres
magazine, of Argentina. Clips from an earlier interview (see
EIR, Oct. 22, 2004) she had done with LaRouche were used in a
movie documentary, "Debt," directed by the well-known Argentine
television personality and journalist Jorge Lanata. "Debt" was
released on Oct. 7, 2004, generating great interest in LaRouche
in Argentina.
Q: Your statements in the documentary had a big impact,
and many people have asked: "Who is this personality?" Can you
tell us who you are?
LaRouche: I have been a Presidential candidate for the
United States, and I'm now a political figure of the United
States. I'm a prominent international economist, quite
successful in long-term forecasting, pretty much over the last
40 years. And I'm something of a political figure
internationally.
Q: Why are you interested in the international credit
institutions? Since when? And why do those institutions have a
particular interest in the Third World nations that suffer from
them?
LaRouche: Essentially you are dealing with the same
phenomenon that gave us Hitler and others between 1922 and 1945.
It's a group of international financier circles, largely family
circles on the Venetian fondo model. And these circles
control most of the banking interests of Europe, and related
interests, and also have spread, of course, into the Americas.
These people actually are imperialist in their mentality.
Go back to the period between, say, 1000 A.D. and the 15th
Century Renaissance, you will find that these Venetian families
set up what is called an ultramontane system of banking, such as
the Lombard banking system, which collapsed first in the Dark
Ages of the 14th Century, but came back and had been responsible
for the religious wars of 1511-1648 in Europe, and were the
basis for the establishment of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system,
to which the United States was opposed.
So even though the United States is corrupted by this, the
United States at its foundation was the creation of a republic
to establish independence of these kinds of systems, plus the
old Hapsburg system. And in the Americas, in countries like
Argentina, especially after the period of the Lincoln victory in
the Civil War in the United States, these countries became more
and more republics modeled consciously upon the American System
of political economy.
This is true in Mexico, in what became the process of the PRI
[the Revolutionary Institutional Party]. It's true in Argentina.
It came later, a tendency in this direction, in Brazil. It was
also in Peru—a tendency in this direction. So, in the Americas,
especially as consolidated under President Franklin Roosevelt,
there was a sense of a system of republics based upon the model
of the United States, and based on the idea of John Quincy
Adams' drafting of the Monroe Doctrine. That is, a system of
independent republics, cooperating with each other, in a mutual
pact, like the Rio Pact that Franklin Roosevelt negotiated.
So what you have here, with respect to a country like Argentina,
you have what is considered historically a treasonous faction in
the United States, these kinds of financier interests, who are
out to destroy the system of the Americas—which is not the
British capitalist system; it's the American System. And you
find in the constitution, and in the traditions of
Argentina—although there are other traditions there too—you find
that tradition. You find that in Mexico, in Franklin Roosevelt's
relationship to the government of Mexico, the Cárdenas
government. And you find it in Peru. You find the aspiration in
the Americas for this kind of a system of republics.
And so the issue here is: You now have the international banking
interests, the liberal bankers, which include New York bankers,
who are part of this Venetian tradition. And these are the guys
that gave us fascism between the Versailles Treaty and the end
of World War II. These guys were never rooted out; they still
exist inside the United States in a very powerful faction. They
are a more powerful faction in Europe than they are in the
United States. And we've come to a financial crisis, which is,
their system is in crisis. And now they are back to the same
business of trying to eliminate the sovereign nation-state, to
loot the world, and all kinds of nasty things.
Q: Why did this subject interest you? How did you become
interested in it and have this position, and involve yourself in
a subject which, for many U.S. politicians, is an alien one, or
which is only on the agenda before elections?
LaRouche: Oh, I came back from World War II, from service
overseas, and I had gone overseas as a man in the footsteps of
Franklin Roosevelt. That is, he was my President, and he had
saved the United States. He was leading in saving the world from
what was spreading across Europe: fascism. When I came back to
the United States, in 1946, from overseas service, I saw a real
right-wing turn in the United States, back towards precisely
what we fought against in fascism.
As I came to know later in my study of this question, that on
the day that Franklin Roosevelt died, under his successor, Harry
Truman, the people who had created Hitler and people like that
in Europe, the people behind Hitler, the bankers behind Hitler,
the financier oligarchy behind Hitler, were back in power. They
had actually owned the Nazi system. Some Nazis had been hung, or
were being hung or whatnot, but they were back in power, with
their money. They're still back in power.
What the problem is, is that the United States has been betrayed
from within, by the influence of this kind of force. Eisenhower
was a patriot, Truman was not. Jack Kennedy had question marks,
but he did some good things. Johnson was essentially a patriot,
but a frightened one after Kennedy's assassination. Nixon was
evil, pure evil. He belonged to them. Carter was controlled by
these people, although he didn't know it—the Trilateral
Commission was a part of this. Reagan was a mixed bag. Reagan,
on the one side, was like me—actually, ten years older than I
am—like me, he was in the Roosevelt tradition, but he was
brought over to this crazy liberal system. And then you had
Bush. The first Bush was a part of the system. Clinton was a
different case, and this Bush is a tool of the worst of this
system.
So, I've simply been reacting as a patriot of my country to what
I know to be my tradition, and against the resurgence of what we
fought in World War II, which is now back again, and is trying
to take over the world.
Q: Do you think that the average U.S. politician is aware
of the costs to these countries of paying the debt? Do they know
what the social cost is, of having to pay the debt, or are they
not aware of it?
LaRouche: Most of the politicians in the United States
and in Europe today are little men. They are not really
qualified as leaders, patriotic leaders, of countries. They're
not all bad people, but they're little men, and they tend to be
opportunist in going along with what they believe they can
succeed in doing for their benefit, to their own advantage, or
for the advantage of their own circles. They have very little
imagination, that is, political imagination. They are not great
statesmen, like Solon of Athens. They're not great statesmen
like Franklin Roosevelt or de Gaulle, for example, as an example
of someone in Europe of the same type.
We don't have great men. Not great men in the sense of tyrants,
but great men who have a vision, who are like Jeanne d'Arc in
the case of France, who gave her life for a principle, and had a
vision of the importance of this principle, as all great
European and other leaders have had: the vision, a patriotic
vision of what they must do for their nation, and also for the
benefit of civilization in general. We do not have such leaders
in the United States today. In that sense, I'm unique, at least
at this time.
Q: The International Monetary Fund continuously
terrorizes countries, talking about what the consequences would
be of not paying the debt. Do you believe, in the realm of
fiction, that it is possible for a country to not pay the debt
to the Fund, and survive?
LaRouche: It's not possible to pay the debt to the
IMF, and survive as nation-states. That's the situation today.
The IMF has—since 1971 in particular, when Nixon took over and
destroyed the fixed-exchange system, and that was at the Azores
conference in 1972—set up this floating exchange-rate system.
The IMF has become a tool of a predatory force of international
financier circles. Now, we've got to the point that if we try to
collect the debts, as they are now, civilization will vanish
from the planet for some time to come. That is, it's not
possible to collect the debts, and for civilization to survive.
That's what you see in Argentina. It's not possible for
Argentina to pay this debt and for Argentina to survive
physically as a nation and people. This is true also for the
entirety of South and Central America. Very soon, sooner or
later, but in the near future, every country in South and
Central America will be destroyed, if the IMF has its way. And
there will be genocide caused by this kind of thing. The kind of
genocide that will remind historians of what happened in Europe
during the 14th century.
So therefore, the choice is, either you meet the obligations
imposed by the IMF and thus give up civilization, accept global
genocide; or you say, no: The highest law of society is the
maintenance of the welfare of the people, and the posterity and
the sovereignty of nations, which is the principle of our
Constitution here in the United States.
So, if we defend our Constitution, we say, the international
financier circles, with their predatory power, have committed a
crime against humanity. We are not going to honor the criminals.
We will do justice, but we will do justice by starting by
defending the sovereignty, the general welfare, and the
posterity of our people.
Q: In the film documentary, you compared the dynamics of
those institutions with the Gestapo, and that had an enormous
impact. Can you amplify your reasoning on this a bit?
LaRouche: My point is, if you want to conquer a
people—for example, you had the German people in a fit of fright
and foolishness, endorse the adoption of a dictator, Adolf
Hitler. Now, to prevent the German people from coming back,
voluntarily, out from under the kind of dictatorship and schemes
that Adolf Hitler represented, you create an instrument of
terror, a police-state instrument of the type that John
Ashcroft, the present Attorney General of the United States,
would like to impose—is attempting to impose on the people. What
you have, therefore, is the same thing. To impose the kind of
dictatorial rule, by a predatory force, the international
financial cartel, upon people, it is necessary to destroy the
democratic rights of people, and to crush all of those
people—either by exemplary actions of cruelty, or simply by
eliminating persons who will stand up and fight.
Q: In light of this panorama, do you think that the
Argentine leaders, the Argentine Presidents, who do not rebel
against the policies of the Fund, are accomplices?
LaRouche: Not necessarily. They are in effect
accomplices, but they're like the appointed leaders who are
under the control of an overreaching power of compradores.
They're the outside compradores typified by the Bank of
Santander, which is a predatory instrument of Europe in South
and Central America. And now, in a sense, with the IMF backing,
and with backing from European governments and from the U.S.
government, they have imposed a cruel dictatorship upon
Argentina.
The question is, how do we fight? If a nation is not capable in
and of itself to resist, then those of us, among all nations who
understand justice, must intervene and must act, and establish
our solidarity with the people of republics, to jointly work to
defend them.
For example, what I'm doing in the United States: I know that
there's no force on this planet today which could stop the worst
depression the world has known, at least modern civilization,
unless we save the Presidency of the United States. We have a
candidate, John Kerry, who is not the best choice in the world,
but is the only choice available to us, to defeat what George
Bush and Cheney represent. My belief is that there's no one on
the planet who has the combination of power and knowledge to
defeat this monster, except the United States. Therefore, my
view is that the United States must provide a leadership, like
Franklin Roosevelt did during the 1930s and the war, a
leadership which can reach out to other countries, which do not
have the strength to defend themselves independently, and we
must have solidarity with these countries and work together with
them, to enable them to secure their rights.
Q: How responsible are the men in those institutions
regarding what happens? I'm speaking of [former IMF Managing
Director Michel] Camdessus, at one point, of [IMF First Deputy
Managing Director] Anne Krueger. Or are they victims of the
system in which they are immersed? How much responsibility can
be ascribed to each one?
LaRouche: They're just as responsible as the Nazis, as
the Nazi concentration camp administrator. They may not intend
to kill people themselves, but they're employed in a position
where that's the duty that's mandated on them, and they will do
it. Some will resist, some will not do it. But they will do it.
They are, in a sense, they're like pimps. They make their living
that way. They make their career that way, and they may say they
regret what they do, but they say: "I have to do it. I'm just
doing my job." Like a mafia boss.
Q: Over the course of your most active political career.
what do you think most irritated the credit institutions of the
U.S. political Establishment?
LaRouche: I think two things are most notable. Number
one, my exposure, my successful forecast, of what happened in
1971-72. The system was coming down, and the system did come
down. The monetary system collapsed under Nixon, as I had
forecast was probable.
Secondly, in the latter part of the 1970s, running for President
and especially during the first term of President Reagan's term
of office, I launched the initiation of what became known as the
Strategic Defense Initiative. At that time, there were leading
political figures in Argentina, who were associated with me in
defending that proposal, in the beginning of the 1980s; they
didn't get much of a reward from the United States for that,
though.
But these two things were considered a great threat to the
policies of the oligarchy.
For example, it was not only the U.S. oligarchy. One has to
remember that in 1986, when a section of the U.S. government
deployed over 400 people in an operation against me and my
associates, and had a force deployed to assassinate me,
officially, where they had a force ready to come in where I was,
and shoot everybody on sight, in the place where I was living,
to get me. The Soviet government of Gorbachov was one of those
who screamed loudest for my elimination, at the same time that
the faction behind George Bush, Sr. was also pushing for my
elimination. It was George Bush, Sr., of course, and his crowd,
which put me into prison.
So I think it was these two things, my persistent action on this
as typified by my intervention in 1976 on behalf of the just new
world economic order, as in the Non-Aligned nations project in
Ceylon, in Sri Lanka, at that time. That was number one. That
was almost a death sentence for me. Number two, the SDI. That
became almost a death sentence for me. These two things I have
never been forgiven for by the oligarchy.
Q: Finally, what is your answer to your critics who, in
an effort to discredit you, brand you a fanatic, delirious, a
man of impossible ideas?
LaRouche: I don't pay much attention to these characters.
Most of them are not honest, that is, they're not sincere. It's
simply, they're repeating what somebody tells them to say. Most
of this comes through the corrupt press, which is controlled by
what are in fact the fascists of today—though some of the
leading press has come over, in a sense, on my side, against the
worst abuses. For example, the New York Times sometimes
acts on issues in a way which I find favorable, and other people
like that. In general, I give no credit to any of this stuff,
because I know what it is, I know where it comes from. And
frankly, I despise people who do that. They're beneath my
dignity.
Q: I thank you greatly for this interview, which is going
to be featured prominently in the magazine. The people of the
LaRouche Youth also participated in this report.
LaRouche: It's fun, isn't it? Life is fun. It's a
dangerous fight, but it's fun. |
