Friedrich Schiller Denkmal
Friedrich Schiller




Schiller-Institut e. V.
"Zweck der Menschheit ist kein anderer als die
Ausbildung der Kräfte des Menschen, Fortschreitung."
Friedrich Schiller

     Konferenz in Flörsheim, November 2012   

Jacques Cheminade
Jacques Cheminade, former Candidate for President, France
 

Written Submission

The mission of Europe versus the British Empire

“Of course, one can jump on one’s chair like a kid, like a young goat, and repeat Europe! Europe! Europe! But this leads to nowhere and signifies nothing.” This is what Charles de Gaulle said on December 14, 1965, prompting a great scandal to the lady-do-rightly of his times. Today, 47 years after, those who dislike empty words or words pronounced to produce the opposite effect of what they should mean have the absolute human right to despise the walking shadow that Europe has become, as ugly as a sin. There is no more Europe because the European states have given up their national sovereignty to two interrelated entities. Firstly to what de Gaulle relentlessly denounced as the British or Anglo-American Empire, a conglomerate of financial interests based in the networks of the City of London, and secondly to its mediation on our continent, this “thing” that José Manuel Barroso, the head of the European Union Commission, once called a “non imperial Empire”.

The collusion between these two entities is like a feudal Faustian pact: the British Empire has the power of finances, money, intelligence and ideology, and the European Union destroys itself to the benefit of such an imperial Empire thanks to the voluntary servitude, the voluntary servitude of whom? Of us, subjects of the non imperial Empire; a continental Empire not built by mere force but by the consent of its member states to the ruling oligarchy. Member states who hide behind what they themselves have created! At this historical moment, all of us Europeans should be ashamed to be in such an unpleasant position, when the systematic cost cutting policy of the Empire loots the very basis of our society, perverts the mind of our children with a culture of death and wrecks the creative powers of human labor.

Nonetheless, habits rule, even at the brink of the pit, because what has been so profoundly hit is the best of our common cultures, it is the belief in the process of progress, the very meaning of the existence of mankind. What has been stolen from us is the social capacity to participate and lead in that process, the language of an artistically and scientifically creative imagination, the human intention to discover principles. Europe has become an unprincipled, absurd chaos of different voices without any sense of a community of purpose, of a unit.

Let me give you two examples. First, I was three weeks ago to the Paris games week, the yearly celebration of videogames, because a journalist wanted to interview me there. It was a very crude experience, because there you had all these very young kids, most of them under twenty five, waving and screaming in front of screens, playing to first person shooter games, smashed by an addictive environment of extremely loud sounds supposed to be music, spread in the dark. Such a chaos represents for me a black metaphor of what Europe has become: sounds without music and words without sentences, images appealing to sense perceptions and people reduced to bestialized, addictive victims. Second, just this week, there has been an international colloquium in Paris titled: “Selection, sorting out and triage in medicine, logics, practices and values”. The presentations were on “The conditions of possibility for the concept of triage: 18th to 21st century perspective”. With a promotion of the Harvard Medical School, the Liverpool care pathway for the aging patient and of Tony Blair’s Nice, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. Remember that Dr Leo Alexander, at the Nuremberg trials, said that when you put a price to human life you commit a crime against humanity. I just bring these two examples to you to make clear that new Nuremberg criminals are banging at our doors, and that our mission in Europe is not just to correct some mistaken concept and eventually find a refuge in the safe houses of our respective nations, but to save mankind.

What we have under the present name of Europe is the relation between subservient subjects and the established institutions that destroys them, and not between citizens and a state of law, organized by consent to principles. This is precisely what French author La Boétie identified as the voluntary servitude during the wars of religion of the 16th century. And it leads us to a situation of economic collapse, which has always created the conditions for wars, because war is the most inhuman thing that human beings can do to each other, and they do it when they have been turned into inhuman things. The characteristic of this moment, our present moment, is that the threat of the flight forward of the oligarchy has thermonuclear teeth. Nuremberg and the threat of an escalation towards a thermonuclear confrontation, this is what defines our situation here and now.

Our mission is therefore to remove things that are a threat to the continued existence to mankind and our societies, and that is not only the British Empire as such, but the principle of the British Empire that infects our way to think or, better say, that targets our capacity to think in a creative way. At the same time, we have to present a political composition not defined by a deduction from where we are, which could only bring disaster, but to stir something in the minds that give the sense that better, higher orders of humanity can be reached. For that purpose, which is a very concrete one, we have, as Europeans, to recover our national and individual sovereignties against the imperial and non imperial Empires. Because a community of purpose cannot be generated within a political cage, but has to unite, to combine freely different aspects of a same idea.

The best way to put it, I think, is that Europe has to be composed not like a mathematic or romantic combination of sounds, like a piece of Strauss, Rameau or Elgar’s Pump and circumstance, but like a composition of Bach, as a language combining different statements of the same idea. These different statements are the contribution of our nations, breaking from the shackles of the oligarchic and imperial principle to drive towards the future the minds of all, through the common accomplishment of a great design.

First we have to prevent the Empire to harm. This is all about the Glass Steagall principle in economics. If you don’t enforce it, you cannot get the key to open the door for the future. It is only the key, but without a key you cannot open the door which leads to the walled garden, where lies the undiscovered principle of our common European future. In that sense, Glass Steagall is both a political weapon and the expression of a leap of the mind. It puts an end to the universal bank, to those banks too big to fail, too big to manage, too big to check and too big to jail. Because as long as you authorise the process of monetary creation, inherent to a commercial bank, within the investment bank, the consequence is to attract never ending quantities of new money towards all kinds of spreading speculations and to create financial bubbles to the benefit of those who Roosevelt called “the monarchists of the economy”. On one side, there are the commercial or credit and deposit banks, and on the other side the market activities; if the two are not separated, money issuance finances speculation and destroys the economy. No more bail out of the investment banks! The derivatives folly should be stopped! A dozen of megabanks control about 85% of this derivatives market and 90% are operated in the dark pools of the shadow banking, without any public control, a market amounting to more than 10 times the gross national product of the planet. The obvious first mission of Europe should be to shut down such a volcano instead of feeding it.

Once we have checked and cleaned the mess, we have to build the future. This means to understand what the word “economics” really means. It is not to buy cheap and sell dear monetary products, and to add the profits made to come out with a Gross National Product. It is defined by the capacity to guarantee the life of more human beings, with more qualified employment situations and the capacity to master more and more advanced technologies. The idea of density is crucial: the energy flux density allowing to produce more and better with less physical efforts, less occupied land and less matter involved. This is what allows the long term survival of humanity at a higher and higher level of intervention from generation to generation, to fulfil our mission to increase the development of the human mind across generations.

The take off toward the future is to create a platform for such a development: physical infrastructure (water management, energy, high speed transportation…) and human infrastructure (education, public health, R & D, innovation) and exchange of men, goods and ideas through development corridors. You have heard yesterday about a revolutionary development plan for the Near and Middle East, our fight for an Eurasian Landbridge reaching into the Mediterranean and Africa, to become an East-West and North-South World Landbridge. We have once and for all to stop the suicidal policies of cost cutting, austerity and human destruction, and go back to the spirit of the policies of Roosevelt and the reconstruction of Europe after World War II.

The answer that the enemies of such policy give is “let’s be realistic, let’s be practical; there is no money for such ideal projects”. Here comes the concept of credit. Economies are not built on the basis of “savings” or money issuance per se; they are built with credit for investments whose effects create the means to pay back the credit! Credit, as people in the German CreditAnstalt für Wiederaufbau and in the French planning commissions after World War II very well knew, credit is a bet for the future. The alternative is destruction. Proof of it is that without savings or rents, with human creativity and funds of the Marshall Plan, Europe was then rebuilt with such a political approach, while today we are self-destroying ourselves with an opposite money system. The future of the European nations is the capacity to go back to such policies, with Eurasia, the Mediterranean space, the Middle and Neat East and Africa as touchstones of our identity and survival. What we need is enthusiasm, what the Greeks called the inner God. Here is the source, and to wait is a crime.

Such a credit system is incompatible with the euro system, which is by political intention a money system in the service of the oligarchy. It cannot be arranged, it cannot be mended from inside because its very purpose is to abolish the national and individual sovereignties: you cannot master the future with bodies emptied of their souls and their culture. The proof of it is that the very people that shout today Europe! Europe! Europe! are the ones that are letting collapse the Erasmus, Leonardo da Vinci and Comenius programs for European cultural exchanges and training periods! There is no money for that too; there is only money, in the euro system, to bail out the banks and destroy peoples and nations. It is not only, of course, a matter of money; it is a matter of social selection. The average grants or scholarships are of 200 euros, and the youth that can travel are therefore only those which families can add up money to afford the living of their sons and daughters! More fundamentally, the programs are not based on exchanges of the best of all classical cultures of our respective nations, but more and more on commercial, financial or social studies amounting to the proverbial Spanish inn ruled by potluck.

The mission of Europe has therefore to be both against the British Empire and its own non imperial Empire, the failed euro system. Not to turn each of us in oneself, but to bring to Europe and the world what is needed. As it was shown yesterday, the space policy is the science driver toward our future. Mars is what compels us to change on Earth. Curiosity and the ExoMars European/Russian missions are the pathways toward not only the much needed Earth Defense Initiative (the Strategic Defense of Earth proposed by the Russians) against the dangers coming from space, but footsteps toward a mastery of the solar system and beyond by men, to secure a future for humanity when it will start to collapse, in about a billion years. But there is nothing secured about our commitment to act. On the contrary, we are stalled. The ExoMars program comes from an impulse launched well before the existence of the euro system; not only it has not been generated by the euro system, but the euro system threatens to kill it!

At this point, Curiosity and ExoMars would be end products, dead ends if we don’t fulfil our political mission. Europe and the United States, under the rule of the British Empire, would stop or downgrade to inadequate levels their space policies. “It is the system, stupid!” It is indeed a system which, if you look to its shadows on the screens of the videogames, is a cult of death. While space means a culture of life, to re-establish the knowledge of science because it asks questions for which answers not yet exist! In that sense, the work in space programs is the most advanced form of what the nature of labor for the future humanity has to become: a cognitive labor to confront the unknown and deal with what never happened before. But, again, it cannot be done without an in-depth mobilization of the economic systems, which can only be achieved with a global credit system.

We have started, in 2012, the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty between France and Germany, and the year 2013 is labelled the year of Franco-German friendship. We cannot look without a deep feeling of shame to our present governments. The French wants to continue the bail out of the banks because it has not the courage to confront them. Worse, it is about to present on December 19 a fake banking reform to the Council of Ministers to pre-empt the European debate on a Glass Steagall principle. The German government wants to impose austerity to all its partners within the euro system, destroying by the same token their capacity to import German goods, on which the so-called German model depends! Such a criminal stupidity should be stopped. We have seen yesterday that the clouds of the financial storm are bringing war to the world. It is more than time to change. It is more than time to take advantage of the fact that the British are about to leave the European Union to get us free of the rule of the City of London and re-establish the principles of the post-war European founding fathers.

It is more than time to look at the world from the standpoint of Mars and beyond. The journalists during my French presidential campaign were not mistaken on that one. They focused after some time all the attacks against me as the hair brained the eccentric that wants to cut the banks in two parts and develop a space program. Both were not allowed “to be there” by their financial masters, both and the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche. They succeeded in siphoning out the vote, but they failed in controlling the development of the ideas. Those ideas are more than ever on the table of a threatened world, because what is at stake is the very idea of a European culture.

We are at a moment where Mario Draghi has announced that for May 2013 the European Central Bank is going to issue a new series of eurobills with the face of the Phoenician princess Europe, the woman abducted by Zeus. Intelligent people noted that she is not a goddess but a mortal, and that it is bad omen for the euro.

It is our time to move, in tune to what is going to happen in the United States around the fate of Barack Obama, with things to come from there that can uniquely shift the situation of us here. Let’s stay tuned. The eyes of true European culture are not parochial but look from top down, from the standpoint of Mars.

With such eyes of the mind, our challenge, the challenge for us all in this room, is to mobilize for a new paradigm of world peace much, much more than what has been mobilized for the continuous process of world wars in the course of the ominous XXth century. It is our task, because there could not be another one at the dimension of the challenge – except having no future. Let’s fulfil it, here and now, because it would be suicidal to wait.

Thank you – thank you for what you are going to do henceforth, for what you are going to mobilize to-morrow within yourselves that would have appeared impossible before this Conference. Thank you for understanding the future, and acting accordingly.