March 20—At an international conference of the Schiller Institute held in Bad Schwalbach, Germany, March 21-23, 2003, which assembled nearly 600 people from 45 nations, including 120 young people, Lyndon LaRouche opened his keynote address:
“There is a combination of farce and tragedy in progress in Washington, D.C. It’s a kind of Shakespearean farce, in which the President is playing the role of King Lear, and the Vice President that of Lady Macbeth. But this is a very serious matter. Sometimes fools will do what others will not do, and sometimes, he who wishes to have a great crime committed, finds a fool to do it, because he won’t shrink from it, because he doesn’t know any better. Like this poor President, who sincerely does not know what he’s doing. Has no idea what the reality is, in which he’s operating.
“What we have to understand is that, in this tragedy, as in all Classical tragedies, in all true tragedies in history, the root of disaster is not leaders of the people. It is not leading institutions. It is the people themselves, who bring disaster upon themselves, by selecting leaders, or by supporting leaders, who are the agents of that disaster. That’s what the Greek tragedy teaches. That’s what Shakespeare teaches. That’s what Schiller teaches. That’s truth.
“Therefore, when we come to a time of crisis, the people must, first of all, examine themselves, and when studying the misleaders, they must look inside themselves, and find the error by which they become complicit in the evil work done by those leaders.”
Later in his speech, LaRouche referred back to his January 2001 forecast for the incoming Bush administration and looked into the future targeting of China as part of the intent in launching the Iraq War:
“What I forecast, in my broadcast, on the 27th of January of 2001, was that, we are in a situation today, where, by the year 2000, the United States was already in a hyperinflationary mode—that is, the rate of money being printed, or issued in other ways, to roll over bankrupt financial assets, was such that we were in a hyperinflationary spiral. That meant that the postwar system, especially the system of the post-1971 floating-exchange-rate system, was now at an end phase: It was doomed. Nothing could have saved this financial system, then or now. The IMF in its present form, can not survive. If it does survive, then the human race won’t survive.
“So I said, then, in January, that’s where we were. Therefore, we would expect, given what the Bush Administration is, what forces were involved, that we have to expect, not only a depression, an accelerating depression, which has accelerated, in fact, since then—it was already in process earlier. But that we had to look for the occurrence of a Reichstag-fire-like event, a terrorist event, which will be used as a pretext, to bring in emergency government into power in the United States, which would then launch war, or a warlike posture, in order to attempt to control the political situation, by worldwide warfare, rather than facing the economic crisis.
“Now, there are some people who think that the war against Iraq, is a war against Iraq: It is not a war against Iraq. It is a war against the pretext of Iraq, to start a world war. The purpose behind this, is a world war, not an Iraq war. If you don’t stop, there is no ”after" Iraq war. The Iraq war will never end. The destruction of Iraq, may occur within the next days or weeks, but the Iraq war will never end. Because you will be going into another war, under an administration, which is totally committed to a worldwide fascist imperialism. I’ll make clear what that is.
“Therefore, we must stop it. This war is not inevitable. Its continuation is not inevitable. We must stop it. Those who say, let’s accept an inevitable war, and try to clean up afterward, are fools. There is no afterwards. There’s only a continuing war. You could expect the bombing of North Korea to occur, almost automatically, in the context of this, if it’s not stopped. And it won’t stop there. Iran is on the target list already. And this war could spill into Iran, already. The war would explode throughout the Middle East, if it’s continued. It can not be stopped, unless the war as a whole is stopped.
“China is one of the nations targeted by this war, which gives you some sense of what the dimensions are, what we’re up against.
“We must stop this war.”
