Hard Words; Who Can Hear Them?

by Tony Papert

Yesterday, probable FBI interference had almost succeeded in preventing Lyndon LaRouche’s participation, via internet, in a major Northern California conference organized by his associates. LaRouche would have been unable to participate but for a timely intervention by the leadership there.

View the San Francisco Schiller Institute seminar proceedings here

Then, when LaRouche was finally able to speak, his starting point was the current acute threat to human existence.

“Well, the key thing I’m concerned about is the threats to the existence of the human species, in the total area right now. Because right now, at this time, the existence of the entire human species continues to be on the edge of jeopardy, and therefore we have to attune ourselves to understanding what the problems are that are involved in this, and what are the remedies for which we can get an escape for humanity in general.

“Humanity in general, right now, is under serious threat of jeopardy on a global scale.  This does not mean that it has to happen that way.  It means that if we do the right things, we can escape those threats, or at least have a reasonable ability to deal with those threats.  That’s where we stand, generally, right now.  And if you want to do something about it, let’s talk about it.”

But from that moment forward, the whole tenor of LaRouche’s remarks,— let’s face it,— grated badly on the nerves of many listening.  He kept coming back to the question of personal identity, but more especially of his own personal identity.  To a question about how the individual mind overcomes obstacles to winning a battle for mankind, he answered:

“I can tell you, I’m pretty good living qualities. I’m an active person, in society, and I’m a senior, and an experienced one, one of the most experienced of all people in that category. So I should think no one would have any difficulty in understanding who I am, what I am, where I came from and what I do.        

“Somebody else may be clinging to an idea of a different identity of some other person, who I don’t know, but it seems to be that.”

LaRouche turned almost every question around in this way. This may be irritating to you, but the first question for you to ask is: is it true?  Do things “just happen,” or are they “made to happen” by men and women who, as LaRouche said, are “qualified to make history?”  When MacArthur was forced out of the Philippines on 12 March 1942, was he right to say, “I shall return,” or should he have changed it to “we shall return?” Would mankind have made it to the Moon in 1969—or ever—but for the solitary figure of the first and greatest German space pioneer, Hermann Oberth (1894-1989).  Oberth spent most of his life in poverty. After fighting for his ideas of space travel for decades, he had met hardly anyone who both agreed and understood their importance. But it is precisely to that “hardly anyone,” like Wernher von Braun, that we owe the revolution which has been the space program.        

To a question on how we can determine whether our imagination is fantastic or truthful, LaRouche answered:        

“Why don’t we just say, let’s identify a truthful example, a truthful personality, a truthful identity.  I am. And anyone who would deny that, would be mistaken, misguided.        

“I am known, I am identified, I am a figure of the history of most of the 20th Century, and most people from the 20th Century should know who I am, and they should know what I do. They may not know every detail of what I do, but that’s it:  I am a prominent and most prominent figure on this planet, among the most prominent ones.”

Indeed, the later 20th Century would have been unrecognizable but for LaRouche’s victory over the British system of economy in a Queens College, New York debate in 1971, which then led by circuitous routes to his victory for the Strategic Defense Initiative in the Reagan Administration by 1983.  This in turn prepared the way for his initiative, with his wife Helga, which has now become the Eurasian Land-Bridge and the New Silk Road, which is the keystone development of the 21st Century to date.        

Why is it so irritating to hear the obvious: that LaRouche is a key figure of the 20th and 21st Centuries?  Because we were taught in school about the virtues of Democracy?  Is that the real reason, or is it rather that we close our ears because we find it more comforting to us personally, to deny that any man or woman can actually be responsible for the human condition and the fate of humanity?