LAROUCHE INTERVIEW WITH BOB DOBBS PACIFICA-KPFK,

LOS ANGELES MODERATOR: EBEN RAY

Aired August 26, 2004 (2-3AM)

Moderator: In this first hour, a very, very special shmorgasbord, Bob Dobbs, you know him, our little genie, our little media ecologist talking about the extended sensory nature of our first nature's extended into technology, is speaking with Lyndon LaRouche, Democratic candidate for so many years. The man behind Executive Intelligence Review, some of the best intelligence that we have seen in this decade. We have so much, we owe so much to that institution for their contrary views; that is, trying to keep the Democrats actually democratic, to bring it back to an actual party of the people. That's what EIR, what Lyndon LaRouche's organization has been doing for decades now. What we're going to be doing is eavesdropping in on a fantastic talk between Bob and Mr. LaRouche. And that's what's going to be within the first hour. So, without further ado, I would like to welcome Lyndon LaRouche to the airwaves on Radio Alchemy. Mr. LaRouche, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule.

LaRouche: I'm glad to be here.

Ray: Thank you sir. And Bob, getting you in New York, sir, thank you so much for making this all possible and joining us here on Radio Alchemy.

Dobbs: Thank you, I'm looking forward to it.

Moderator: Yes, so if you would like to start your dialog at this time, where would you like to start, Bob?

Bob: Hello, Mr. LaRouche.

LaRouche: Hello.

Bob: I would like to begin with a chart in the May 1978 issue of the Campaigner, the article you wrote, Mr. LaRouche, called The Secrets of the Inner Elites. In that chart you mentioned T.S. Eliot in the long line of Aristotelean thinkers, and I'd like you to explain, if you can, to this audience, how that tradition relates to your original objection to Marvin Minsky and the MIT group in the '50's who were developing concepts about artificial intelligence.

LaRouche: Well, they, I, of course was completely opposed to artificial intelligence. I have been since it was first being dropped around in the late 1950s, or 1940s, into the 1950s. And because there is no such thing as artificial intelligence. The human mind is unique. It is capable of hypotheses, which no computer or digital system is capable of doing.

Of course, Wiener is a product of Bertrand Russell. He and John von Neumann. And they, through certain groups during the wartime and post war period, took a leading position on various things like artificial intelligence, information theory, and so forth, and rather utopian social theories. So the connection to T.S. Eliot is remote, except that T.S. Eliot was an Aristotelian. These fellows, these wild-eyed positivists today, are what we might call a version of Aristotle for dummies.

Bob: Now, Eliot does relate to the American educational system in literature in the 40's and 50's with the influence on the Fugitives, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. How would you have taught a Platonic view of literature as opposed to those people?

LaRouche: First of all, they are very actually, as far as I'm concerned, and I don't like ugliness of that sort. Ransom, for example, is a perfect example with his, to bring thunder back into religion. We have a good deal of that running loose today. And I think many of us don't like it. We find it quite dangerous, particularly with the present Bush administration.

Now, the Classical view is actually truthful, first of all. That is, for example, in terms of Classical tragedy, which is one of the markers from which you can discuss this question of truthfulness and Classical method most clearly. The effort of the Classical tragedian, which actually was continued by Plato, which is continued by Shakespeare, is continued by Friedrich Schiller, the playwright and poet and philosopher, is to take a period of history and to convey, based on the study of that period of history, is to convy the crucial issue of that period and make it come alive for a living audience.

For example, we had something in New York, a college in New York some years ago, called the Yiddish Theatre. Now, the Yiddish Theatre was the Yiddish Theatre, but it was also, as we look at the number of actors who came out of it, was one of the best traditions of acting in the United States. And their inclination, the qualification, and orientation of these actors had, for example, Clifford Odets, who became associated with people of the Yiddish Theatre, with his famous Waiting for Leftie which established his reputation back in the 1930's, is typical of this effort, as an honest thinker who's trying to use drama to convey ideas which are based on the actually of what he is putting on stage.

But to get that across, also, to the fellow in the audience who may be sitting in the balcony; can this guy in the balcony who came in from the street, thinking about all the little issues of his personal life, sitting in the balcony, can he look down on what's going on on the stage and judge, or pass judgement in his own mind on what's wrong with what's going on on the stage interms of what's happening there? And by doing so, he becomes uplifted. Instead of being the little guy on the street, he is now a citizen. He is now looking at the leaders of society or typical important people in society and he is passing judgement on them. And therefore he is saying, I as a citizen am not just a little guy. I have to also take responsibility for what my society is doing. To me, that's the Classical method.

As opposed to Ransom, who came out of the third generation of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan, formed these people. That kind of sickly, confederacy, sort of thing, mint julip sort of thing, colored the whole effort of these fellows.

Bob: Alright, now, I'm familiar with your explanation of the interpenetration of art and science. Are you aware, or were you aware in the 60's of C.P. Snow's book The Two Cultures where he set up a division, through British intelligence, of the difference? Whereas your philosophical and intellectual methodology is to see the interpenetration of art and sciences based on the same principles. Could you comment on your awareness of snow?

LaRouche: I think that Snow was ambivalent on this question. Snow, in a sense, was lamenting the division. And, of course, I go further than lamenting it. I say it's wrong. There should not be such a division. But, he was actually one of those people who was considered as one of those whose setting off the alarm bells for the division between liberal arts and physical science and mathematics. And, he was right! I mean, he was setting off the alarm bells. I was familiar with the book at the time, and did a lot of talking about it then. I just thought he didn't go far enough to propose a solution. But, he did raise the question and that was important.

Bob: Well, he was basically an Aristotelian, then he couldn't come up with a solution; he couldn't go further probably.

LaRouche: That may possibly be so, but I have a very compassionate feeling about people who define problems even if they don't have the solutions, because then they will, by defining the problem, or calling attention to it or pushing the problem to public attention, may cause somebody else to come up with a solution. So, I consider them useful, even if they don't have solutions.

Bob: Alright. Now, another area. For you, did Buckminster Fuller contribute new principles to the anti-Euclidean tradition of spherics?

LaRouche: Who, I didn't get the name. Who?

Bob: Did Buckminster Fuller contribute...

LaRouche: Not really. But, Buckminster Fuller was a very interesting fellow. Actually very capable, very fertile mind; produced a lot of things, very useful person. I don't think he was so much on that line. He was very well educated. But, I wouldn't put him in the sense of the Kaestner tradtion or, more significantly, say the Riemann tradition.

You know, I go back in the sense, as I try to teach young people today, look back at the pre-Aristotelian scientists and Classical thinkers, such as the Pythagoreans or people like the famous Archytas. I use Archytas with young people to get across to them what the distinction is between the method of mathematics as it is taught today and the superior kind of mathematics which was actually, axiomatically, the principle of the pre-Aristotelian Greeks, including Plato.

So, I wouldn't put Buckminster Fuller in that exact situation, but he was, of course, a very important person.

Bob: Even though he did develop his geometry out of spherics, which cite as the anti-Euclidean tradition.

LaRouche: Oh, absolutely. Well, there are two of them. There are two anti-Euclidean. One is to reform the Euclidean system, radically, which is characteristic of the so-called non-Euclideans. But the modern tradition in terms of anti-Euclidean, comes through various channels. It comes actually implicitly from Nicholas of Cusa, who actually founded modern experimental science. It came through Kepler, in particular, with his 1609 The New Astronomy — is an example of this. And of course, through Leibniz. And the followers of Leibniz, which included this Abraham Kaestner, who was one of the teachers of Gauss, led to the Gauss-Riemann, etc. tradition, which is unique in modern history. And Fuller does not fit that, even though he was very educated, and does know about these other things, like the Lobochevskyian sort of thing, and so forth.

Bob: Okay. At the time of the Hellenic Sophists — you know, 200-300 B.C., there were delineated three aspects of the Logos. One was called the Logos in Diathetos, or dialectics; another aspect was the logos prophorikos, or grammar; and the third logos grammatikos, rhetoric. Would Plato has ignored these divisions in understanding the logos?

LaRouche: No. Plato would not. The key thing — to get Plato on the logos, the key work, of course, is the Timaeus, which is the most thorough work addressing that particular issue, in that form. This, of course, is the conception of the logos which was addressed implicitly by the Apostle Paul, for example, and which was the Platonic tradition in Christianity, as opposed to the Aristotelian tradition, which kept cropping up and today, was largely related to the Timaeus, as the key point of reference.

Bob: Are you aware of the role of the Trivium, consisting of dialectics, grammar, and rhetoric in the educational program of Europe up to the 18th century? I see you using elements from all three in your pedagogy. Do you agree?

LaRouche: No, not exactly. I have a very simple line of development, which is, as I say, is from the pre-Aristotelean Greeks, especially emphasis, naturally, on Plato, and through the Classical tradition in both art, as well as in science, which, to me, are not divisible. That's a long story which I've written a great deal about. But my view is that the state of mind of the Classical scientific thinker, and the state of mind of the Classical artist, such as the dramatist, the poet, the Classical musician, these are the same state of mind. They are expressed in a different way, perhaps, because of choice of subject matter. One deals with the social process, as the Classical artist does, where the other deals with the relationship of man as such, to nature as such.

Bob: All right. Now, to move up to our own time, do you have any critical thoughts on the role of pharmaceutical companies in our present medical paradigm?

LaRouche: Do I! (laughs) I'm enrage. This is all nonsense. But part of the problem is this. We go back to 1973 under Nixon, and the introduction of the HMO legislation, which overturned the previous Hill-Burton legislation. And that's the problem. The pharmaceutical business has, shall we say, piggybacked on this reductionist, this, what I consider anti-human, utopian, terrible abuse.

Look at the condition of people. Look at the condition of our health care in the United States today. Take the number of beds, hospital beds, we used to have in various parts of the country under Hill-Burton. Look what we have today. Look ... we're killing people. We're committing murder by bookkeeping methods, and the bookkeeping methods have in heavily on the pharmaceutical industry. I'm for a return to a more, more of a Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt approach to this.

Of course, it was after Roosevelt's death that Hill-Burton was put in, but it was a reflection of the mood of our times, when we had coming 16-17 million people in service during World War II. We had a military-medical system, which was actually based on the idea of the general welfare. We avoided triage. We were committed to the care of our people. And some people said, after the war, why can't we do that in the civilian sector?

So, they went at it from the standpoint of the institutions, the hospital institutions, and developed this Hill-Burton bill, which passed — a very simple bill, about 7 pages, but it's a law which made, gave justice in medical care in the United States. It wasn't perfect, but it was a commitment to the objective of improving performance to end up with something much better.

Ray: Let me remind folks that you are listening to Radio Alchemy on KPFK, 90.7 FM. On the line a very high-level discussion between Bob Dobbs, in New York, and Lyndon LaRouche. I think we're reaching him in Virginia. And so, we thank you so much for tuning it. This is a very special Radio Alchemy, and it's an honor to have these two great minds speaking on the issues of the day.

So, let's get back to it. Bob, you're up.

Bob: Mr. LaRouche, there's this new study out called Death by Medicine, which supports your statements about the present medical situation in the hospitals. It says that more people die in the hospitals — it's now up to 780 thousand, compared to deaths from cancer and heart disease. Are you aware of that study?

LaRouche: I'm aware of studies in this direction. I'm not on top of everything, but I follow that issue. I'm very much associated with that issue as such.

Bob: Right. Because it seems the pharmaceutical companies are relying on, I would call a corrupted empiricism, when they use scientific studies, in quotes, to support the psychopharmacological use of Ritalin and Prozac.

LaRouche: Well, my view ... oh, of course. My view, of course, is that this is a product of a philosophical attitude concerning man. They believe, in a sense, the practice implies a belief, or acceptance of the belief, that man... many people must be essentially be human cattle, herded for the pleasure, benefit, and profit of others. When you get the corporate accounting approach in pharmaceutical practice, and other things, you get the question not of doing the job, but the issue becomes then of making the profit. Once you get that in, the philosophy becomes, the philosophy that goes with it, or may be expressed by it, comes as sort of secretion of that kind of behavior.

Bob: Okay, so why couldn't we include all the cultural products in our post-industrial, entertainment, military complex, as indicators of increased national wealth? Perhaps they do. I understand why you object to that. But how would you argue with inclusion of the wealth that comes from Hollywood, in the media, in relation to real wealth?

LaRouche: Well, [laughs] ... I've written books and so forth on this subject, so it's not a simple subject, the way you pose the question.

For example, let's take one case, of agriculture. Do you realize what idiots we are? We used to have agriculture everywhere. We would have a primary agricultural production in every part of our society, internationally as well as nationally. We would have products from those localities. Then, off season, we would get products from other parts of the world, but primarily, we maintained a responsibility for that.

Now, what we did was this, and it becomes pretty much insane. Part of our defense for food supplies, is actually maintaining the number of varieties, of strains, of any kind of vegetable. You find the tendency now is to go to one standard vegetable, or one standard fruit, produced in a few parts of the world, and the rest of the world depends upon that for that supply. We no longer —- we haul this stuff great distances, when in former times fresh fruit and vegetables, and meat, and so forth, from local production, were the prize for quality... For example, restaurants, local restaurants, .. it's no longer the case, generally — local restaurants would have local suppliers. They would carefully pick their materials.

Look at supermarkets. In supermarkets you don't even have butchers any more in many of large chain supermarkets. So you get this frozen packaging. You don't have a selection process, where the housewife, for example, could talk behind the counter, and get what she wanted. You don't have that in vegetables any more. So, we have broken down and destroyed the culture, and we're going to have problems, genetic problems, because if one of our types we're using, and relying upon too much, gets sick, we don't have the other varieties in place to maintain the security of supply.

Bob: Okay, a little sidebar here. I've had a question for years about your personal intellectual development. I understand you spent a year and a half in Germany in the mid-70s, after which your writing took a new turn, basically emphasizing the historical struggle between the followers of Plato, and the followers of Aristotle. Your earlier writing and thinking, as Lyn Marcus, summed up in your 1975 book Dialectical Economics, didn't stress these historical factors. Were you influenced — this is my question — were you influenced by someone, or by some others in Europe at the time, or did you do some new reading or thinking, and made relevant discoveries on your own?

LaRouche: Well, I should say, in my whole life, I've never stopped studying. And it's always been a high-intensity process. I haven't changed that much. What I've done, the predicates, I've increased predicates, but that's a part of a process of a dialogue, an international dialogue with all kinds of people. And there was certainly some influence of that type. But it wasn't determining, it was significant, but not determining.

For example, my wife Helga, who, born in Trier, in Germany, studied in her Gymnasium program, a Classical program. She became for a time a journalist, and then, the way she met me, she became a highly successful journalist, the first German journalist, the first European journalist to cover China in the period of the Cultural Revolution. She came back from there, and decided to get out of journalism, and go back into science. And she did, and that's how she came across my work.

But we were having a discussion one time, about a meeting she'd had in Trier, with a professor Haubst, who was a leading figure of the Cusa Society, Cusanus Gesellschaft, and I took to the stuff, I looked at it, I said, "This is what you must study," for her doctoral degree. And she went that way.

Now, obviously I was involved with following these kinds of studies. I have a great number of friends in various parts of the world who are very productive. We've had scientific foundations, like the Fusion Energy Foundation which I founded back in the middle of the 1970s, and so I've lived in a very rich intellectual environment, and I have been greatly influenced by it.

But my thrust... you know, in dealing with Marxism, it's very simple. I was not really emotionally a Marxist ever, but coming out of World War II, and seeing the rightwing turn in the United States, under Truman— it was as if, the day that Roosevelt died, and Truman became President, the direction of the United States had changed for the worse. And I saw people around me going crazy, grovelling before this fear of this new rightwing insurgency, especially by 1948. So, at that point, I found that I thought only socialists, or people associated with them, would fight against the right wing, typified by Trumanism, and then, of course, by Joe McCarthy. And once Eisenhower got rid of McCarthy, and put the lid on that kind of thing, I was no longer interested in being associated with these socialists.

But then came the killing of Kennedy, the Missile Crisis, the launching of the Indo-China war, and I went back into it on the hope that somehow the so-called left would have some spark left in it to fight this new rightwing danger, this utopian danger, typified by the military policy going into Indo-China. So, I was influenced by that, and in dealing with this layer of the population, in the 1960s, and in early 1970s, as young people, younger people who were full of vim and vitality on campuses and elsewhere, and who were pro-Marxist. I tried to give my view of Marx, as much as possible, and I did.

I gave an honest job, but I always kept my own views, independent views, there, and that ended — but I've always been the same, even though I've run into these things and adopted these various undertakings. I mean, society is like that, you know. Life, when people have lived a longer time, they realize, your life is a social process. You don't always agree with people but you cooperate with them anyway. You find common purposes. You find they should be well-served. You serve the common purpose loyally, and you have a division, and you go in a different direction. That, to me, is history.

Ray: Bob, I have a question real quick. When you were talking about going back, Mr. LaRouche, and talking about the state of our agriculture in the United States, some folks out there would blame that on the Roosevelt Administration in the 30s, that went and nationalized, or federalized, the agricultural system in the United States, and the reaction of Truman is that they saw communist influence coming in to the United States, by the centralization up into the Federal government. Would you say that some of your thoughts around agriculture today, do come from the changes that FDR made back in the 30s?

LaRouche: Not really. Remember, the percentile of the population in that time, when I was born and growing up, and so forth, the percentile of the population that was engaged in rural activities ... we've undergone a social change to an industrial society, in terms of this shift. Even go back into the 1950s, until the agricultural revolution really took off. What Wallace did — Wallace was a very bright guy, and Roosevelt relied upon him, because he and his father had a real record in American agriculture. We did go to a specialized, more specialized agriculture in order to integrate the farm and the market. The most important thing that Roosevelt did, to bring this, make this possible, was rural electrification.

The other thing that he did was protectionism. He introduced protectionism to protect our products and so forth, which we made a slop of in the post-war period. Truman was going in a different direction. Truman was essentially a rightwing opportunist, and I didn't see much good in the trends in that period. By 1977, of course, we began to totally destroy our agricultural system. I think people don't understand agriculture. Yes, Roosevelt did, in a sense, seem to streamline, but Roosevelt put the farmer back on his feet, and in the postwar period, the impact of Roosevelt's reforms, in terms of parity legislation, parity policies, were a defense of American agriculture.

The reason we did it, however, was because the word was out that we were about to have a big war with the Soviet Union, and therefore, national security, national food security, and the national food weapon, was a major consideration, espeically in the 1950s and into the 1960s. After that, we changed. We no longer cared so much about the farmer. But if you go back to the 1960s, and you'll find that a shipload of American wheat on the high seas, going to where we didn't know, we were going to make our mind up later on that, was a weapon of warfare, of irregular warfare in the strategic context.

Bob: Okay, Mr. LaRouche, you have been the only presidential candidate who has talked for years about the historical and present role of the Fondi, f-o-n-d-i. Is this the litmus test for tackling the real issues of political economy, in a presidential race for the White House?

LaRouche: It is. But look, we had... the key thing, let's take the case of fascism. Just go quickly through it. I've written about it a great deal, but you ask the question, I'll answer by trying to sum this up.

You had the Versailles Treaty. The Versailles Treaty came up with this policy of reparations, which was fake. Keynes, who was for the policy, nonetheless ridiculed it, because he knew what the truth was about.

We adapted a policy which we knew, the so-called German War Reparations Policy, as the pillar of supporting the bankrupt France, the bankrupt United Kingdom, and supporting New York City, which was the creditor of these country. They knew it wouldn't work. But a group of these financial interests, of the Fondi type, formed what was called the Synarchist International, and they ran every... the establishment of every fascist state on the continent of Europe, from 1922 through 1945. This factor, which does go back to the Venetian Fondi,— as a matter of fact, the modern liberal system is, in a sense, an echo of the Fondi system. The fact that you have the so-called central, independent central banking systems in Europe, as opposed to our tradition, is a reflection of this Venetian Fondi tradition, in a certain contemporary form.

Today, we're at the point where the system is collapsing again. The biggest financial collapse in history is occurring right now. It's coming as a mudslide, but it's coming on fast. Now, the question is, as is posed in the case of Argentina, when the financial system collapses, and the debts are unpayable because of that, who is going to take the burden? Is it going to be the speculators? Is it going to be the financial community? Or is it going to be genocide, virtually, against the people? Or is it going to be dictatorship, directed against the people, under those conditions? In that sense, yes, the issue of the Fondi is the crucial issue for understanding modern history, since, especiallyk, about 1000 A.D.

Ray: Could you talk a little bit more about the Fondi? Could you go back into the history for our listeners?

LaRouche: Well, the Fondi idea was rattling around in the Mediterranean, in the time of the cult of Delphi, where you had all these little buildings around the cult center, and each of them was a bank. And these were loan sharks. It was a loan sharking system. This system became politically powerful, and actually established Latins as what became the basis for the Roman Empire.

So, in the Roman pater familias design, law, you had reflection of this kind of system, of where family interests, family business, financial and other interests, while they're cutting each others' throats in competition, at the same time are collaborating to maintain and defend that system.

When the Roman Empire itself collapsed, including the Byzantine Empire, then Venice came up as a model of this, and Venice became a world power. Venice used the Norman chivalry throughout Europe and the Middle East, as an instrument of its power. And so we had what was called an ultramontane system, which was against the existence of the nation state — monarchy was not a nation state system. It was a system of financier interest, was controlling a military interest, running a Europe in which the nation states were not definitely nation states.

So this was called the ultramontane system, which some try to blame on Christianity, but it was much more blamed on bankers.

So, these people actually —- this is the fight we had with them. And when the New Dark Age came, in the 14th century, then we had the eruption in the 15th century of the beginning of the modern nation states in fact, even though the idea of the modern nation state goes back as far as Solon. And so, the struggle has been, since then, as the American Revolution typifies this — the struggle to establish a system of true republics, in which the nation is sovereign, but also, as the Treaty of Westphalia specifies, a community of interest, of international law, among nation states. That's what the fight is. And against such types of bankers, or these Fondi, it's still the issue. It's what we're fighting today. It's my biggest enemies, are this crowd. So I am quite familiar with them from that standpoint too.

So, in that sense the Fondi is a key issue to understand. To understand that whole reach of history, going back to the time of the cult of Delphi, the Apollo cult of Delphi, into the present time.

Bob: All right, Mr. LaRouche. In the present media environment, which is basically one of information overload for American citizens, surrounds all Americans, if that could be countered efficiently by the Socratic dialogue, and through, by the Socratic dialectic, which is your emphasis on ideas, then could you present the principle of the thought-object for our present radio audience, as an example of ideas?

LaRouche: All right, first. Now, a baby is born. It comes out of the womb. Now, it probably has overheard the quarrels among the parents while it was in the womb, and it probably heard the noises, the music, and so forth that was going on around it, because, you know, when you take a six month premie, and they're born prematurely, you find that this premie comes out of the womb with all the qualities, and potentialities, later seen in the adult human being. So that's a human being in there. And it hears what's going on.

But then it comes out, it's able to see. And its problem then is, how is it going to orient to this environment, where he's not sitting in a womb anymore, but he's now in an environment where he has to move around, and people are moving around him. The wonderful thing that happens, that people overlook, that this little baby begins to be able to see objects. Now, these are sense-perceptual objects, but it's already a kind of miracle, that this thing, coming out of the womb, which is purblind, is able to acquire, and develop rapidly, the ability to define objects, and to orient to behavior in society around these objects, which the little infant begins to be able to identify.

Now, the same thing happens in science. When you're dealing with universal physical principles, no one has ever tasted, or eaten, a universal physical principle; yet they run the universe. In physical science, and also in Classical art, we use the same power, that we use in another way — the mind does — to define objects of, sense-perceptual objects, to define other kinds of objects, to define a discovery of a universal principle, as an object. And we get the same thing in art.

For example, take a composition, say, one of the Beethoven compositions, for example, a complicated one, say, Opus 132, 131, or 133. Now, in performance, the performers, in order to perform the work, cannot play note by note. It's not interpreting the notes. They have, in order to approach that effectively, they have conceptualized the composition as an idea, an indivisible idea, but the idea is an idea of development. And the way they're able to perform this, with meaning, and communicate meaning to an audience, is by that.

So, what we often fail to understand, is this function of thought object.

You had this come up in education, it was built in the United States and Germany, but then it was also picked up, in a sense, by Riemann, who recognized in his discovery, in dealing with the problem he addressed with his famous Habilitation Dissertation, recognized the significance of the object, and recognized the implcations also of the work of Abel, in his great work, following the Habilitation Dissertation, on Abelian functions. And this is where the concept of the object in physical science, and also in art, lies today.

Bob: I see. Are there synarchists in the Vatican, or the Roman Catholic Church in general, who are vying for influence with Pope John Paul II?

LaRouche: Oh, there are synarchists in the church, they're have been. It's what's called the right wing. It's characterized in the extreme by those in the church who will say that Pope John Paul II is not legitimate. These are some of the radicals, but there are many others who converge on that.

If you look at the history, for example, below our borders in Mexico, the Cristeros were picked up by the Nazis directly, and the Cristeros became the hard core of what was called the Nazi party in Mexico, which up into the 1940s, was a physical threat against the United States. And this was the right, so-called rightwing faction in Mexico, which was the enemy of Lazaro Cardenas, for example, in that time, and the enemies of before, of other Mexican presidents, who did not believe in the people, but believed in a Hispanidad, for example; in a system based on the tradition of Philip II of Spain, that sort of thing.

Bob: If President Bush is re-elected, do you see the use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East in the next four years?

LaRouche: If Bush were re-elected, with Cheney, and Cheney were in there, then I would think even ... it would happen, absolutely. You would have nuclear weapons targetting Iran. We might even have a nuclear attack on Iran, from Israel acting as a breakaway ally, of Bush-Cheney, even before the election.

People around the world, in Europe as well as here, knowing that Bush is a loser in an honest election in the United States now, say, "Will the Cheney crowd, will they pull something off like Goering did in 1933, in order to create a virtual dictatorship? And what kind of an incident will they use? Will they use a terrorist incident inside the United States, or will they use a nuclear war overseas?" — more likely.

They have targets: Iran, Syria. Target China, in a longer term. Target North Korea. So they have a number of options for war, and the danger is that these guys would use those options even before November, and certainly if the President were re-elected, it is almost certain that they would do it after the election.

Ray: Let me remind folks. You are turned to KPFK, 90.7 FM Los Angeles. This is Radio Alchemy. I'm your host, Ebben Ray. Tonight, very, very special. Hour one, Bob Dobbs, Lyndon LaRouche, having a discussion of minds, a discussion of today, a discussion of the past, which is present today. Talking about the issues. It's really a fantastic idea to sit back and listen to these great minds talk about the future, as it's being made right now. Thank you so much for being up late. Go right ahead, Bob.

Bob: Mr. LaRouche, I heard through your associates today, I didn't hear it myself, that Senator Roberts has announced a plan to remove, dismantle, the CIA, and move into a new kind of intelligence czar. What is your reaction to that new story?

LaRouche: This is a very, very dirty thing. People who are professionals, whom we've surveyed in the intelligence community, that we know, are also concerned. I have a very particular concern. I see this as a step toward dictatorship.

Now, you look at, if you know the history of the United States, you can locate very quickly where this come from. Who was his Democratic referent? Joe Lieberman. Joe Lieberman is the current head, as well as his position in the Senate, head of the Committee for the Present Danger.

Now, the Committee for the Present Danger was originally constituted under Truman, as the committee to get us into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. And they gave that up once they discovered the Soviet Union had thermonuclear weapons, and Eisenhower and others didn't like it either. Then this was revived in the middle of the 1970s, under James Rodney Schlesinger, who was the head of the revived Committee for the Present Danger then. Right now, you have a war party, which crosses party lines, and Joe Lieberman is part of the far, far, far, far right, in this thing, and what the Roberts relationship to Lieberman, on the same committee, may not produce the bill which change the intelligence system, but it changes the agenda of the debate on the question of what changes in the intelligence system will be made.

I see this as extremely dangerous.

Bob: All right. I have another personal question. I have talked with Ralph Schoenman through the years, and he told me, I find it interesting that your old friend from the Socialist Workers party in the late 50s and early 60s, Ralph Schoenman, who is still very active today, even, I think, is on this radio station, as well as here in New York, on WBAI, he took the exact opposite route as yourself. Here you were talking together, you know, 40 years ago, but he went on to become a colleague of Bertrand Russell, and an advocate of Russell's legacy. Do you have any comments that ideological split between you and Ralph Schoenman?

LaRouche: Oh, sure, sure. The problem with this... I became involved with the SWP, as I said, because I was against what Truman was doing, and I couldn't find anybody else in 1948 who was standing up to this trend in our policy. And I thought that only the resistance against this Truman policy, war policy, meant anything, and I thought that only the left wing had the guts to stand up to it. And, as I said, I left this thing, after McCarthy was eliminated, and I had made some kind of a position in the Socialist Workers Party, as one of the leaders against, specifically, Joe McCarthy. I was advising some of the defendants and working with the defendants against McCarthy's attack.

Once McCarthy was gone, and things had changed, what became obvious to me was the sterility, the intellectual sterility, of the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party, and I didn't leave because I had a disagreement with them. I left them because there was no reason to stay. Their intellectual sterility was more than I could take, and I went on to conduct other business.

Bob: But what's interesting is is that he went on to become an associate of Bertrand Russell. It seems that if they didn't see the sterility of their own particular party, or intellectual climate, they would drift toward the enemy from your point, from your point of view.

LaRouche: Well, in a sense. But I don't think they really know what the enemy was. I mean, this is a problem which a root in Marxism itself. Marx himself didn't know who he was, really. Marx was actually a creature of the circles of Palmerston, and one of the prizes of Marx's writing, during the 1850s, was to produce a work trying to expose Palmerston as a Russian spy, when Palmerston was the guy who had controlled Marx's career from the time that Marx was recruited in Berlin. Just, he didn't know it!

And also, Marx in economics, is not competent economics, it is simply a derivative, a reinterpretation, from one point of view, of what is the classical Haileybury school of British East India company economic education.

So, there's an inherent misunderstanding, among Marxists, that they don't know who they are. And therefore, when it came to Bertrand Russell, of course, is an extreme case, the most extreme case of positivists, or radical positivists. He's beyond the beyond, and this sort of thing may attract people because it's there, or because they're manipulated into thinking it. But actually I think the fact that people get attracted to it, reflects their intellectual sterility.

Bob: Right. Now, do you think it was Marshall McLuhan's problem, having been educated in Cambridge in the 30s, and essentially being a Thomist, an Aristotelian, that his emphasis on sense-certainty then turned his media analysis into a fetish? Would you agree with that interpretation of McLuhan's work?

LaRouche: I didn't get the name.

Bob: Marshall McLuhan.

LaRouche: McLuhan is a very interesting character — he's, of course, dead. McLuhan has been abused greatly, because what he said, and what he's credited with having intended to say, to my likes, are quite different. He was commenting on a phenomenon, whereas people tried to make him the progenitor of the phenomenon. Obviously, the mass media, through the developments of World War II — World War I also, but World War II especially — we came out of World War II, we had involved ourselves in global intelligence, in mass manipulation of opinion. The Beaverbrook's crowd did it, others did it, we did it. So, the mass — and you had people like Time magazine, for example, which set the pace intellectually through the media in the United States, in that direction. So, we became, with the emergence of the power of the mass media, more than ever, in the postwar period, the mass media, as an arm of intelligence, of mass intelligence of the type we used to manipulate populations during the war, became the dominant feature of our society. McLuhan commented on it, and identified it, and gave a name to it, which I thought was useful. But whether he intended to perpetuate that kind of stuff, or whether he was opposed to it, that's the question. And I think the tendency is, that he was opposed to this.

Bob: Yes, that is true, though he was flexible. He thought that TV, as a major new medium, had certain services, but that it shouldn't be overused, and that the population should be occasionally be turned off collectively. That was his sense of media ecology.

LaRouche: I know. My view is much less simple, and I have sympathy for people who I think may be largely wrong, because their heart's in the right place, or their inclinations are in an interesting direction. But the essential thing we have today, is, how are we going to get politics, and ideas, back to the people.

What we have... people are dependent too much on mass media, and this mass media... For example, even with the so-called talk radio thing, in a recent period this thing is largely been taken over, and it's been homogenized, so it is not a free crackerbarrel society, of discussion of ideas. It's not that kind of thing. And therefore, the problem today is, the lack of any real discussion of ideas. Instead of ideas, we have mass media packages, formulas, images, and that is a problem.

Bob: Yeah, and I understand you were in Boston at the Democratic Party's Convention, and you were asking for an open convention. What happened with that demand, and what's you comment on your efforts at the convention?

LaRouche: Well, it actually did happen, but it happened in a backhanded way. We had over a 100 young guys up there, as part of the convention. They were singing. They were singing Bach, they were singing other things, they were singing Negro Spirituals. They were singing them on the subways. They were singing them on the streets. And I was there. I was sitting across in Cambridge, and in touch with everybody. I made a few presentations in the area. I presented a platform for the Democratic Party — they really didn't have one, they made up one, but it wasn't really a platform. And that circulated all over the place. And by the end of the convention, by the time that Kerry was making his acceptance speech, many of the people, not all of them, but many of the people who had been on the opposite side on my role in the party, suddenly had changed their mind. And right now, I'm still this independent cuss I was. But we are allies, we are working together, we are cooperating. And that I think is not a perfect condition, but it's a healthy one.

Bob: All right, but there's an immediate effect of that. I understand that Vice President Cheney is now going to sue you, or demand a repayment of $220,000 from the campaign in 2000, as a counter to your support of Kerry?

LaRouche: Well, that was started earlier, that was done a couple of years ago. And everybody else on the FEC thought it was a cockup, and thought it was unjust and wrong. But you had two hard-nosed guys, one tied to Lieberman, and the other tied to the Cheney side, and these two insisted on trying to ram this through. This is going to be— this is being litigated. We've had litigation with the FEC before, on that sort of thing, and each time we've won. I expect we'll win this one too.

Ray: We have around three minutes left. I just had a quick question, Mr. LaRouche. There are those that are looking at Kerry and Bush both being Skull and Bones, Kerry and Bush both having blood lines that go back to the Queen, that Kerry is not talking about the House races or the Senate, because that would undermine his domestic agenda, and he would end up just being a Clinton, looking like kind of a nicely packaged Republican. Could you talk about what we're witnessing with this? Is this just two different factions of the oligarchy, putting forward two puppets? What is the American public seeing?

LaRouche: There are certain people behind the scenes, including these — we talked about the Fondi earlier — Fondi-types, who are associated with the Democrat and Republican party, and they would like to make sure that whatever comes out of November, that the President will be effectively more or less a puppet of them. Because they all know that the present world financial-monetary system is in the process of collapse. As a matter of fact, what's happening in Germany right now is a warning: This thing is finished, it's coming down.

But they're trying to postpone the crash until after the election — that's been their policy. And their hope was that when the crash hits, what they'll have left standing, as President of the United States, will be somebody who will capitulate to their line. That it will be the bankers who are saved, and not the people.

My view is different. My view of the expectation is different. Kerry is not.. these so-called oligarchical backgrounds of Kerry are of marginal significance. He's a much more independent man than that. But he does have a weakness, which I've spoken about, a Hamlet-type of weakness. He's a good soldier, like Hamlet was. He's willing to fight and die, as a soldier. But is he capable of dealing with the problems of the Kingdom, of the leadership of the kingdom, of society?

My approach to that is to say, well, I have a lot of influence in the Democratic party, and in the world. Some people don't like it, don't like to mention it, but I have it. Therefore, I have a responsibility. My responsibility is to help build around Kerry; first of all, help him win the election, which we're working on quite seriously, by going at certain things that we can do, which will be helpful in that direction. We're consulting with the people who are doing this.

Also, it's to build a network around the incoming Democratic President, where he'll have the best advice that a President could have, and the best connections that a President could have, which would inform him, and help shape his view, and back him up, in making the kind of decisions the President of the United States has to make under these conditions.

Ray: But why aren't they talking about the House? That's how any of his domestic policies would come through, and if it's going to be because they're going after Tom Daschle in South Dakota, if there's just a one-vote margin and we don't get the House, what's it matter what his domestic issues are?

LaRouche: Well, it does. We can win, I'm convinced we can win the House. I've looked at the national electoral situation. The Democratic Party can win the House. Now, people are talking about the customary voters, the usual voters, those who voted three out of past four elections, and a lot of the gossip is based on talking about this. But look, eight years — look at the young people who are coming in, 18 to 25. Look at the people who have not voted. Look at very energetic minority groups which, with any optimism, will come back into the fray. If you put that vote in, the uncounted vote, turns out significantly, you can have a landslide victory for a Democrats.

You have all around the country, various states, which I've been going through with experts and so forth recently, situations, hot spots. We can carry this state, we can win that election. In some cases, it's more difficult, but we're going at this thing seriously. This can be won by the Democratic party as it stands now.

The problem is this, in respect to your question. The problem is, the tendency is, on the Democratic Party, is to go for the media punch. Now, Kerry has responded properly, so far, on this question about the Swift Boat issue. He's trapped the Bush people into a position where Bush doesn't even want to talk about it. But the danger is, is getting too much involved with hot-button issues, and not going with the basic issues that the public faces. Health care he mentions, but he doesn't get into it. Building jobs. He says it, but he doesn't get into it. These are the kinds of issues which people out there are concerned about, as well as sanity and security. They're afraid. They want Ashcroft away — they don't want this. They don't want the Iraq war. They don't want another war. That's the mood in the public. The majority of people don't want it, and if the majority of people are represented in the election, and vote their way, on the kind of issues that a Presidential candidate should be talking about, then I think we've got a better country than we had recently.

Ray: I want to thank both of you. The hour, of course, flew fast. ...

THE END