Subject: LaRouche Tells Why Moscow Declared Him a `Casus Belli' LaRouche tells why Moscow declared him a `casus belli' {The following is an edited transcript of a presentation by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., delivered by audiotape to a private seminar in Wiesbaden, Germany on Feb. 24, 1993.} The subject is the reflections of my personal role, and the bearing of the circumstances and causes of my imprisonment, upon the current strategic situation among the superpowers and other states. The key to the present situation in Moscow and the strategic situation generally is bound up intimately with the circumstances under which the U.S. government adopted a commitment to my imprisonment, at the urging of the Soviet government of Gorbachov in 1986. Let me just state the facts, because it's at least necessary that you have these facts clearly, and thus we can then situate, in respect to those facts, the relevant point which I have to make today. If one goes back to an array of the Moscow press, which was circulated widely, including internationally, between the months of July and October 1986, one will come across a collection of prominent articles clamoring for my incarceration by the Reagan-Bush administration. If one looks at the sum total of these articles, one finds that they demand my incarceration, or a visible commitment to my incarceration, by the U.S. government, as a condition of good relations for such events as the October summit between Gorbachov and Reagan. And it is notable that the 400-man-plus raid on the Leesburg headquarters of several organizations associated with me, and the intent by some participating in that raid to kill me during Oct. 6-7, was a manifest demonstration, a self-commitment by the U.S. government, to my impending imprisonment. This was not the beginning of the process. The commitment obviously goes back even earlier in 1986. The Warsaw Pact intelligence services were involved, in complicity with the U.S. Anti-Defamation League and others. There's a fellow called Iona Andronov who has something to say about this, in connection with trying to implicate me in the authorship of the assassination of Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme. That was part of the process. One would go back also in this process, properly, to the spring of 1983, and various events and developments that occurred over the period between the spring of 1983 and 1986. There is a pattern of Soviet collaboration with the Democratic Party and others at the highest level inside the United States, as well as other countries, all to the purpose of, first, forcing the Reagan administration to distance itself from me, and then, demanding my imprisonment as a condition of good summit relations with the Gorbachov faction in 1986. The history behind that is as follows. - LaRouche's back-channel discussions - A member of the Soviet intelligence services stationed then at the United Nations, in the fall of 1981, approached a representative of the {Executive Intelligence Review} at the United Nations premises, and made a series of questions and suggestions which was clearly a signal of a desire to obtain, through us, a new back channel to the recently installed Reagan administration. I was in Europe at the time, and I caused a report to be written, at my instruction, under my cover, including the facts of the encounter, to relevant circles within the U.S. government. In December 1981, the U.S. government responded to this, asking me to open the back channel, or to seek to open this new back channel to Moscow, for strategic and related questions. I said I would do so, conditionally. The condition included the proposal that I present what later became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was my work, and present that as an option under consideration by the Reagan administration, though not yet adopted, and explore Moscow's willingness to consider my proposal, if Mr. Reagan were to offer it. That resulted in a discussion, chiefly with a Soviet official at the Soviet embassy in Washington, [Yevgeni] Shershnev, between February 1982 and March 1983. The discussion was amplified by a number of public documents which were circulated by me personally, and by my associates, and also was emphasized during mid-February 1992 at a two-day conference in Washington, D.C., at which representatives of the relevant U.S. and non-U.S. agencies, governments, and other agencies, were present. About 400 people were present during the conference's two days, in which I outlined some of the considerations involved in my proposal for what became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. - Momentum toward a first-strike policy - I indicated throughout this period that it was obvious, to all parties who were clear-headed, that the increase of precision, combined with forward-basing, of strategic nuclear weapons, land-based and submarine-based, had created a situation in which the head of government of either superpower, on seeing a flight of missiles aimed at his own country's territory, had implicitly about two minutes in which to push the button or not. This was a highly dangerous situation which was leading the world toward a first-strike policy, whether everybody liked the idea or implications of a first strike or not. My argument was that this condition had been created by the Pugwash negotiations and the acceptance of the Pugwash negotiations by governments, beginning certainly no later than 1958, with the Quebec Pugwash Conference of that year. The idea of prohibiting effective ballistic-missile defense, or restricting it greatly to below truly strategic implications, had ultimately led, inevitably, to the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine of McNamara, Kissinger, et al. (the Pugwash doctrine), and also led, by the middle of the 1970s, into a phase in which the combination of Soviet submarine launch off the U.S. coast and the electromagnetic pulse effects of detonation of such warheads, and similar conditions of land-based and other basing in the Soviet Union, had brought us into the vicinity of a first-strike threat. I added the observation that so-called kinetic energy systems, of the type of high-speed rockets, which were the option obvious to most nations at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, were not really a solution to ballistic-missile defense. A significant ration of attacking missiles would not be eliminated by such a strategic defense, in addition to the fact that the high-speed rocket would cost more to develop and deploy than the attacking missile. Therefore, from an economic logistical standpoint, the idea of using a so-called kinetic energy system as an antiballistic defense of strategic significance, is obviously an absurdity. However, buried within the protocols of the 1972 Antiballistic-Missile Treaty, was the provision for ``new physical principles,'' as was developed in a Soviet document from earlier in the 1960s on the question of other means of strategic defense, which were then classified as ``new physical principles.'' I proposed, from my knowledge, that the new physical principles were feasible: that with a crash program we could begin to deploy such ballistic-missile defense systems, and thus avoid, from the military domain, the military danger of a first strike lock-in. I should note that a document from East Germany, dating to 1989, indicated that Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov's plans were generally in the qualified first-strike posture area into as late as 1989, as at least an active training and development option. I proposed, therefore, that both superpowers had to accept the idea of a crash program for the development of effective strategic missile defense based on new physical principles, principally, as an agreed option to replace the Mutually Assured Destruction pattern of treaties. - The impending economic breakdown crisis - What I proposed further, which is the most significant, was that the world economy was collapsing. The U.S. economy was collapsing as well as the British, and dragging down their European partners. The Soviet economy was collapsing, especially since the onset of the 1970s, when certain changes in the East bloc and so forth were occurring. The Soviet economy as a whole had a dependence upon the eastern European economies, especially in terms of the military and high-tech, upon the weakened East German economy and the Bohemian, the Czechoslovak economy. These economies were coming to the limit of exhaustion, and the Soviet economy itself was coming to the limit of exhaustion, because of errors in policy or implementation of policy, particularly within the economic domain. It was my estimate by 1982, that there were about five years or so--essentially the half-life of one average capital investment cycle--before a breakdown would occur in the ability of the economies of eastern Europe and therefore also of the Soviet economy, to continue to function at what were the current apparent rates of production, and that this would lead to some kind of historical consequences if this were not remedied. Therefore, I pointed out that the use of ballistic-missile defense, based on new physical principles, should be seen not only as a way of getting out of the first-strike risk, which was growing rapidly with the new offensive weapons deployment, but that we should use these principles, through the machine tool sector, to generate the obvious technological revolution in the civilian economies, not only of the two superpowers, but of other nations around the world--to generate, in short, a global economic boom based on increases of productivity accomplished through increases in investment in technology. - Moscow replies: `Nyet!' - The response was made to me from Moscow, via Shershnev in Washington, in February 1983. First, the feasibility of strategic ballistic-missile defense based on new physical principles was accepted. Second, the economic effect of new physical principles on the civilian economies was accepted. Third, the proposed policy, if enunciated by Reagan, would be {rejected,} because the western nations, under conditions of a crash program using such technologies, would rapidly outpace the Soviet Union and its allies. It was further added that the top levels of the Democratic Party had assured the Soviet government that my proposals to this effect would be prevented from coming off the desk, or even reaching the desk, of President Ronald Reagan, and therefore the Soviet government had nothing to worry about in this connection. Not long thereafter, a number of gentlemen met to prepare a section of a speech for President Reagan, consistent exactly with what I had presented to the Soviet government, through representative Shershnev and others, and that was presented on March 23, 1983, as the concluding portion of Reagan's televised address to the United States. This produced, naturally, the relevant shock effects, first in Moscow, because Moscow believed that the Democratic Party leadership had successfully prevented this from occurring, and yet it {had} occurred, which indicated that I seemed to have much more influence and much more power than Moscow had thought earlier. This was seen as a threat to the entire strategic plan of Andropov and of Nikolai Ogarkov. Mr. Shershnev broke off the discussions in early April, stating that he had been ordered to do so at the highest level. - Rising chorus of Soviet attacks - Promptly thereafter, there began to come attacks, first implicitly and then by name, from Fyodor Burlatsky through {Literaturnaya Gazeta.} We are also aware of attacks of the same nature, very strong, very violent, very typically Soviet, coming from many channels in many parts of the world. By no later than May 1983, the Andropov regime had taken a very strongly adversarial position against me, to the point that in the fall of 1983 I was designated personally, by name, by Mr. Burlatsky, as a potential {casus belli} in relations between the two superpowers. Then, of course, following that, a demand directed specifically to the Reagan administration, publicly, that the Reagan administration demonstratively distance itself from me, as well as breaking off relations with me, for the sake of good relations between the two superpowers. There was a certain quietness in these matters during the period of General Secretary Chernenko, but shortly after Gorbachov's installation, the matter heated up, to the point we saw in February-March 1986, and then with the press {e@aaclat} against me in the referenced set of articles over the period July through October of 1986. The implication here is, from the response both from Andropov and Gorbachov--especially Gorbachov--and from circles in the United States, that I was an individual, agreed leader or {primus inter pares} of a movement, who, as a personality, had been designated as a probable {casus belli} or potential {casus belli} in the relations between the two superpowers. And that had been emphasized in 1986: that my elimination as a personality was necessary for good thermonuclear relations between the two superpowers, or at least the heads of the two superpower states. This buildup included some other things of interest and relevance here. First of all, as Iona Andronov could qualify, the Anti-Defamation League was an asset of the Soviet intelligence services in operations against me (in a sense, a mutual asset--I guess they were assets of each other), including, visibly, in the case of the attacks on me orchestrated by Warsaw Pact intelligence services in connection with the allegations about the assassination of Olof Palme. But going back to the spring of 1983, Mr. Burlatsky himself sent a KGB delegation, partly dressed in Russian Orthodox attire, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to the University of Minnesota campus there, and to the Hubert Humphrey Institute. They were hosted by [Donald] Fraser, then the mayor of Minneapolis and the key machine man on locale for presidential candidate Walter Mondale. Walter Mondale did not visibly participate in the floor session there, but was on the premises, and later adopted what Burlatsky et al. proposed as the form of rejection of my proposals to the Reagan administration as reflected by the Reagan speech of March 23, 1983. This became, then, the official policy of the leadership of the Democratic Party, through Charles Manatt, the chairman of the Democratic Party, in August 1983. Through the ``Bush-league'' part of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, the issue of the SDI was kept out of the 1984 primary and general election campaigns, except for my televised and other addresses as a candidate during that period, until the second so-called debate between Reagan and Mondale in 1984. And after that, generally, after 1984, though Reagan remained committed to some version or approximation of the SDI, the creature was essentially dead as an active option thereafter, even though some development was going on. But the Soviet government, which had already been assured by the Democrats and others that there was no chance of my proposal being adopted by the Reagan administration in the first place, was convinced that there was a large-scale secret program for the SDI's development and progress, and that I was the evil genius behind this. To judge from the Soviet press accounts, they refused to believe any disclaimers from the U.S. State Department and others to the effect that I was {not} on the inside, somehow, of the U.S. intelligence or military or whatever circles. That is the sum and the substance of the matter. That is how I came to jail. There were many other factors involved, many other issues, but they all cohere with this one, and this was the reason why I went to prison. Certain things ought to be learned about the present circumstances from this particular bit of history. First of all, we are dealing with a situation where, according to the Soviet press and others, my imprisonment represented a situation in which one person, as the representative of a movement, but one person otherwise, had become virtually classified as a potential {casus belli} in the relationship between two thermonuclear superpowers. That in itself says something about the nature of the history of the 1980s, and also history today. This tells us, implicitly, that we must search for an explanation and a complete re-thinking of recent politics, of recent relations among states, to reflect this fact. In what kind of a universe could this occur? What is the nature of the universe? What is {so significant} in my personal functioning as the {primus inter pares} of a small movement, that could give me such global importance as this? What was really going on, globally, behind the scenes (or should I say, underneath the events on the surface) to cause this kind of phenomenon to present itself? - A second chance for war-avoidance - In the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990, there was an action initiated by me and my friends, especially in Europe, to launch a proposed response to the collapse of Mr. Churchill's Iron Curtain, a response which we called the ``Productive Triangle.'' The idea was to use the historically determined concentration of productive power in the Paris-Vienna-Berlin spherical triangle area as the generator of new technologies to be linked to other parts of Eurasia and other parts of the globe, by means of the development of what they call ``galactic spiral arms,'' logistical arms, which would integrate other parts of Eurasia with this ``generator,'' this economic-technological locomotive, to develop satellite centers of development in other places along routes which would be defined, to a very large degree, by new developments in improved rail, especially toward high-speed rail and magnetic levitation rail. This was a continuation, of course, of the same thinking which had underlain the specific features which I had successfully induced the President of the United States to adopt, as in his television address of March 23, 1983, in connection with the SDI proposal. This was also a continuation of a policy which I had presented and highlighted in an address given in Berlin on Oct. 12, 1988 (Columbus Day, in point of fact), indicating the early collapse of eastern Europe and the crisis in the Soviet Union based on economic issues, the reunification of Germany, the emergence of Berlin as the future capital again of unified Germany, and the crucial role of the economic development of Poland in determining the course of history in eastern Europe and in the economy of the Soviet Union over that period. We see that all that, has been the history of the period. Instead of economic development, instead of the triangle approach, we have had the Jeffrey Sachs/International Monetary Fund conditionalities approach, the attempt to loot and destroy eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, in a strategic move to set up a ``new world order.'' This is bringing us into the greatest calamity of this planet in all known history, unless we reverse it. - The key to developments today - It is my view, that despite a certain concern on my part about putting myself personally forward in this way, that history in a sense has put me forward in this way, and it is necessary to deal with the matters we are considering, about the future of the nations and the future of strategic developments on this planet, from this highly personalized standpoint. Because when we exclude these factors, we have misrepresented the reality, and therefore, any proposal or analysis we make fails to comprehend the reality with which we're presently dealing. This is not simply past history; this is the key to understanding present developments. Had the Soviet government, in 1983, after Mr. Reagan's announcement, accepted discussion on the basis of the speech--not necessarily accepted the proposal raw, but accepted discussion on the basis of the speech--this would have changed, profoundly and radically, the internal politics of the United States, would have assured that the kind of axiomatic thinking which I represented would have become prominent in shaping the policy of the United States, and we would have a world {free} of the specific kinds of disaster which are seeing today. If, also, the Triangle program had been accepted in 1990, instead of this insane, lunatic attack on Iraq, which was diversionary in the short term, then the Anglo-Americans would not have launched the Serbs in this Balkan war aimed against Germany and aimed to destroy Eurasia geopolitically--in which you get all the local fools involved in ``taking sides'' in a Balkan war, destroying Eurasia, while the ``rim powers,'' as they call themselves, laugh their rear-ends off at the spectacle of everyone from Moscow to Paris making fools of themselves. This would not have occurred. Only if we focus on the mistakes of the past which have created the present, will we remove the continuing causes of the disasters which pile up upon us now. This disaster, of course, goes back many years, to many things. It can be traced back to the period immediately following the Civil War in the United States, at a point at which Russia and the United States were allies, or at least the Lincoln administration and those forces in Russia around Alexander II were allies. Trace the history of the two countries and their relations from that time to the present, to see how the two world wars developed out of a geopolitical thrust by the advocates of a geopolitical rim policy, as it later came to be called; how the worst horrors of war in Eurasia of this century were unleashed as a result of geopolitics; how the present concerns resulted in the desire to set up a new world order under Anglo-American freemasonic domination; how this is itself a reflection of geopolitics and is the potential cause for any war or similar horror which might beset this planet in the years immediately ahead, perhaps before the end of the century. It is also relevant to consider the introduction of the Georg Lukacs-influenced policies, their applications from 1963 on, as a ``cultural paradigm shift,'' or a ``New Age shift'' which has led into much of this horror we face today. In that context, perhaps the most crucial thing that has occurred in the deliberations and decisions of the various governments, is the matters in which I was involved from 1982, and continue to be implicitly involved up to the present. If that is clearly seen, then the discussion on the table of policy-shaping means something. If those considerations, the list that I have just given, are brushed to one side, then we can expect nothing from governments but folly, and nothing for nations but ruin. From Executive Intelligence Review V20, #13.