Transscript
We convened this conference not out of pessimism,
but with the intention of intervening in world history to change the paradigm
underlying world policies today. And we are optimistic that this is possible.
But still I must begin with some quite terrible
things, because for anyone who is observing developments around Iran and Syria,
and the strategic situation as a whole, there is no doubt that we are living
through the greatest crisis in modern history. And if this direction is not
changed immediately, the crisis will end horribly. Unless urgent steps are
taken to define the whole situation in a new way, I think we may be actually
only days or weeks away from a huge catastrophe.
Ostensibly it was the situation in Syria and
the escalation around Iran that ignited the crisis, but actually this crisis is
inextricably linked to the escalating disintegration of the financial system in
the trans-Atlantic region.
Unfortunately, I have to declare the highest
level of alert, because the indications right now are that the intention is--I
won't say it will definitely happen, but the intention is--to launch a military
strike against Iran, perhaps in early March or April. And if this happens, it
would be the trigger for a global thermonuclear war, with the United States,
the U.K., NATO, Israel, Australia, and maybe a few other countries on one side,
and Syria, Iran, Russia, China, and other countries on the other. Given the
incredible destructive potential that would be unleashed by a global thermonuclear
war, one can assume that there is a risk that this would be the end of human civilization.
I can assure you, and I say this with the benefit
of background knowledge, that all the world's leading governments and all
military leaders are absolutely clear about this, and the evidence is available
to anyone who takes the trouble to follow strategic developments.
Comparing this with what is
being disseminated by the mass media and the so-called "mainstream"
politicians, one can only say that there is more confetti being strewn around
here than at the Carnival parade in Mainz.
Iran's Nuclear Program
The most recent report, for
example, that Iran had denied experts from the International Atomic Energy
Agency access to Iran's nuclear sites, led immediately to a hue and cry: "Aha, this
proves that Iran still has a nuclear weapons program!" And of course the
spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, [Ramin] Mehmanparast, immediately
explained that the assignment of this team of inspectors was not to examine the
nuclear facilities themselves, but to negotiate the framework for future cooperation
with the IAEA--i.e., there was simply no obstruction of this assignment. And
then it was reported that this team had requested access to the Parchin
military base. Of course, no country would give a team of inspectors access to
secret facilities unless that had been explicitly mandated, especially not in
the case of Iran, given that almost every day since last October, there have
been statements from Israel, Great Britain, and the United States, that a
military strike is likely by April.
Meanwhile, according to the media, the deputy
head of Iran's Armed Forces, Mohammed Hejazi, declared that Iran was ready to
launch a preemptive strike if its national interests were threatened. The
Iranian ambassador to Russia, Seyed Mahmoud-Reza Sajjadi, immediately issued a
correction, saying that Iran had no intention of preventive military action.
If you consider this disinformation to be psychological
warfare, then you have to ask: What role is the current leadership of the IAEA playing?
And this agency's latest report, which stated
that Iran would have nuclear weapons within a year, was extremely dubious. It
was immediately contradicted by Hans Blix, former head of the IAEA. It is also
contradicted by the November 2011 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, which is
the evaluation of the umbrella organization of all the American intelligence
agencies; the NIE confirmed its finding of 2007, that Iran has not been pursuing
a nuclear weapons program since 2003. Hans Blix also said that all the
information that the IAEA obtained came from French, British, and American
intelligence sources, and was not specifically investigated by the agency itself.
Now a new IAEA report has been published, which
in effect repeats that Iran was not willing to cooperate; a definitive report
is expected early in March.
All of this is coming to a head this week, with
the March 4-6 annual meeting in Washington of AIPAC (the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, an organization usually dominated by the hawks). And U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that a military strike
against Iran by Israel is likely during between April and June--June being a "red
line," because by then, Iran will allegedly have managed to bunker its nuclear
research installations deep underground, so that bombs could no longer reach
them.[FN1]
The new IAEA report
is supposed to come out during the first week of March, and would hit the AIPAC
conference like a thunderbolt. That would be about a day after the Russian election,
which Vladimir Putin is expected to win.
So, we are looking at an immediate escalation
in March-April, or perhaps even earlier. The truth is that we may be only days or
weeks away from a global thermonuclear war. And that would be tantamount to the
obliteration of civilization.
Background to the Crisis
Let's look at how things could get to that point.
Look at the alliance of the forces of the British Empire--understood to mean
the whole combination of financial institutions of globalization, i.e., central
banks, investment banks, hedge funds, holding companies, special purpose
entities, insurance companies. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
when there was a chance to actually create a new world order of peace for the
21st Century, the so-called neocons in the United States around the Bush, Sr.
government, along with the British government, decided to create a globalized
empire on the basis of the Anglo-American special relationship. That was the idea, from 1990-91 on, to carry out "regime change" in
all countries whose governments resisted the Empire's policies. That was
the reason for the first Gulf War. This process was interrupted
by the eight years of the Clinton Administration, but the trend toward global empire
continued in the background even then, as represented by Richard Perle, or the
policy of the so-called "Clean Break,"<sup>2</sup> which was the
neo-cons' response to Bill Clinton's Oslo policy.
This policy was
continued by Bush, Jr., leading to the second Iraq War, the Afghanistan War,
and of course to the war of aggression against Libya and the murder of Qaddafi.
And now, continuing this policy, regime change and military operations against
Syria and Iran are on the agenda.
How close we are to World War III was shown by
nothing so clearly as the revelation of a de facto alliance among the United States,
Great Britain, al-Qaeda, and the Iranian terrorist organization MEK (Mujahedeen-e-Chalq);
the latter two are operating in both Iran and Syria, where the new head of al-Qaeda,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, is the string-puller behind the suicide attacks in Damascus
and Aleppo, for the sabotage of pipelines and other infrastructure, for the murder
of Syrian government officials and military personnel--all the while operating from
Iraq.
What does this mean, if the present governments
of the United States and Great Britain apparently have no qualms about working with
the September 2001 assassins?
The background to Sept. 11 was revealed long
ago: the role of the al-Yamamah Anglo-Saudi apparatus, with Saudi Prince Bandar
bin Sultan playing a very crucial role in financing al-Qaeda; the role of the
British BAE group, which essentially built up this apparatus about 24 years
ago, and which is now supplying the Syrian opposition with money and weapons.
The MEK, under the protection of U.S. military
forces at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, has been carrying out acts of sabotage against
Iran since 2003. They were responsible for sabotage of Iranian military
facilities, and probably also for the assassination of four Iranian nuclear
scientists, to which Iran has actually responded relatively mildly. But looking
at this escalation, one must state very clearly that the war has actually
already begun.
The news media scarcely took note of it, but
anyone who wants to investigate can find out that since last Autumn, an
absolutely massive military buildup has been under way in the Indian Ocean, the
Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean. There are currently three U.S.
aircraft carriers there, each with the capacity to carry several hundred
fighter planes and cruise missiles; there are also destroyers, frigates,
nuclear submarines, plus British and Canadian warships. Overall, there is a
nuclear destructive power there which is several orders of magnitude larger
than would be required to wipe out the entire human race, and which bears no
relation whatsoever to support for the Syrian opposition, for example, or to
operations against Iran.
It is the logic of the regime of thermonuclear
weapons, that once they are used at all, the entire arsenal is used. The Third World
War will not happen with first one nuclear weapon being launched, then a counterstrike,
and then another; in a nuclear war, the entire arsenal of one side will actually
be deployed, because counterstrikes would be anticipated.
In view of this situation, and of course the
fact that the European missile defense systems are viewed by Russia as part of
the tactic or strategy of encirclement, Prime Minister Putin has just now
announced that Russia's military potential will be increased by EU583 billion.
He explained that in a world filled with such turmoil, certain forces are tempted
to solve their own problems at the expense of third parties--for example, by demanding
that resources of global importance be removed from the exclusive sovereignty
of individual nations, and this of course refers primarily to Russia's
resources, in Siberia and the Far East; that Russia will not go along with such
a thing, not even theoretically; that conflicts and new regional and local wars
are breaking out repeatedly along the very borders of Russia, intentionally
manufactured chaos, undermining the basic principles of international law.
Putin warned that Russia will find an answer
to all this with an effective and asymmetrical response to the global missile defense
system, and that it is Russia's position that this missile defense system is a significant
expansion of the strategic missile system by other means, because it destroys relative
parity.
President Medvedev acted on this by activating
the radar facilities in Kaliningrad, as a first measure. Foreign Minister
Lavrov was even more explicit. He said very unambiguously that the power center
of economic potential has shifted to Asia, and that there are obviously people
or forces who want to distract attention from this by means of provocative
adventures in the Near and Middle East.
The danger of the situation is underscored not
only by these statements by Putin and Medvedev; in Russia now there is a television
debate on the most popular TV channel between Presidential candidates Vladimir
Zhirinovsky and Mikhail Prokhorov, who spoke openly about it: There will be a
war this Summer. We are already in the same position as in 1937-38, i.e., with
only half a year to go. Who will be next? Syria. Why did we let the Americans
and NATO come up to our southern borders? And then scenarios were developed on
how an escalation could occur. The details are not important, and could be seen
differently; but what is important, is that in prime time on Russian television,
there was a debate about World War III being right around the corner.
What This Means for Europe
We in Germany clearly have a problem, because
we are hostage to this threat of global nuclear conflict. Defense Minister
[Thomas] de Maizière was recently asked, at the Munich Security Conference, how
Germany would act in the event of a war against Iran. De Maizière refused to
make any statement or to speculate about it. The only problem is that Chancellor
Merkel adheres to the dogma that Israel's security is a raison d'être for
Germany, and that Germany is prepared to defend Israel in case of emergency.
One thing must be absolutely clear: If such an emergency should occur, we are
talking about World War III, in which Germany would be on the side of the United
States, Great Britain, and NATO, and would be involved in a thermonuclear
exchange with Russia, China, and some other states. In plain language: Nobody
in Germany would be expected to survive such a war.
And so, we urgently need an alternative to this
insanity. But now, if you consider the financial policy background of these developments
against the backdrop of the escalating euro crisis, yet another dimension comes
into view. Every five minutes, Mrs. Merkel repeats that "If
the euro fails, Europe fails." But precisely the opposite is true! Namely,
if we do not rid ourselves of the euro as quickly as possible, Europe will not survive.
If we do not regain our sovereignty, we won't even be able to decide
whether--or not--we want to become cannon-fodder for a third world war.
Let us recall that the price we had to pay for
reunification was our abandonment of the deutschemark and the formation of the
European monetary union. Mitterrand, Thatcher, and Bush Sr. declared at the
time, that they would not allow Germany to reunite, unless Germany hobbled
itself by becoming integrated into the EU, and became constrained inside the
corset of the European Union. And as Jacques Attali, the éminence grise of
French politics and a close advisor of Francois Mitterrand, recently said in an
interview, the European monetary union was deliberately created with a birth
defect, so that later on, political unification could be forced into being,
which was not possible at the outset. In other words, looking at the European
Union today, we see that it has become a supranational dictatorship aimed at
eliminating the nation-state, and that the escalating series of EU treaties,
from Maastricht to Lisbon, has invested the EU with ever more extensive
imperial structures.
Let us recall that one of
the top advisors to the EU's so-called "Foreign Minister" Catherine Ashton, is
Robert Cooper, who was quite open about the fact that he's aiming at a new
liberal imperialism. And in his 2003 book, The Breaking of Nations: Order and
Chaos in the Twenty-First Century, he proclaimed that the EU is an imperial "post-modern
system," which is a necessary counterweight to the pre-modern states which tend
toward chaos, on the one hand, and on the other, the great nation-states such
as the United States. Cooper writes that "The most far-reaching form of imperial
expansion is that of the European Union.... The post-modern European answer to threats
is to extend the system of co-operative empire ever wider."
Neither the EU nor
its governments are going to admit that, of course, but already back when
Vedrine was France's Foreign Minister, a fracas broke out when Zbigniew Brzezinski
wrote an article in the journal The National Interest, where he stated that
Europe is more or less merely a militarized colony, and that in any case, the
image of man has changed so much that whereas up to now, Homo sapiens has
been at the center, now we're in a post-human era, and that the age of the
Peace of Westphalia is over, and that therefore the expansion of NATO and of
the EU all the way to Russia's borders must be aggressively pursued. The
remarks contained in this article touched off a huge scandal, and Vedrine
recalled all French ambassadors from around the world to Paris for a meeting.
But apparently, Brzezinski himself has gotten panicky in the meantime, since he
recently issued an urgent warning against a military strike on Iran, because it
would have unforeseeable consequences.
But Brzezinski was entirely
right when he pointed out that the EU treaties marked the beginning of a "post-human
era"--as we can see today in what's happening to the Greeks, the Italians, the
Spaniards, and the Portuguese. The propaganda line of the EU advocates,
and of the advocates of European integration, has always been that a single Europe
promotes peace; but today we see the reality, when people in Greece are burning
the German flag, and hideous caricatures of Mrs. Merkel are in circulation. As
a direct result of this policy, not since World War II have the peoples of
Europe been so at loggerheads with each other, than they are now. The unified European
state exists only inside the heads of the EU bureaucracy's oligarchical elite. For the European population, on the other hand, there is no common
culture, and no such things as a "medial public." What do Germans know about
how people in Brittany are thinking, or in Sicily? What do the northern
Swedes know about Slovakia? So, the whole idea of a unified state is a fiction.
The euro is a failed experiment. And now, if there's an attempt to leverage the European Financial
Stability Facility by a factor of ten to one, into a money-printing machine, or
to establish the European Monetary System as a de facto permanent bail-out
mechanism, then this would be the end of our sovereignty and control over our
own budget, the so-called "sovereign right of parliament." We would lose all sovereignty
to an EU dictatorship which would no longer be in any way accountable to our citizens.
It is a relapse, not into a post-Westphalian order, but rather into a pre-Westphalian
order--that is, the period before the Thirty Years War, or perhaps the preceding
150 years of religious warfare--only this time, in the age of thermonuclear
weapons.
The next-to-last President of Germany, Horst Köhler,
resigned rather than putting his signature on the first bailout package for Greece.
And what about Christian Wulff's resignation? I think the key to that is in the
speech he delivered in Lindau, along with other remarks he made previously in
Lower Saxony. Let me quote from his Lindau address:
"At the German Banking
Congress I warned the financial sector that we've neither dealt with the causes
of the crisis nor can we say today that we've recognized the risks and done
everything to eliminate them. In fact, we're faced with a development
which resembles a game of dominoes. First individual banks rescued other banks
and then states rescued their banks, and now the international community is
rescuing individual states. But the question that should be asked is: who will ultimately
rescue the rescuers? When will the accumulated deficits be distributed among
whom, and who will shoulder them? ...
"Instead of setting a clear
regulatory framework, governments are increasingly allowing themselves to be
driven by global financial markets....
"First of all, politicians
have to regain their ability to act. They have at long last to stop
reacting frantically to every fall on the stock markets. They mustn't feel
dependent on or allow themselves to be led around the ring by the nose by
banks, rating agencies or the erratic media. Politicians have to formulate policies
for the common good and they have to show courage and strength in the face of conflict
with individual interest groups. They have to put structures into order and, if
necessary, adapt the regulatory framework so that scarce resources can be used
in the best possible way and business and society can thrive. Politicians have
to take a long-term view and, if necessary, make unpopular decisions. In a
liberal democracy, decisions always have to be made in parliament. For that's
where legitimacy lies. In a democracy the power comes from the people, who
elect and vote for their representatives."
I think these remarks make it quite clear that
the position which Wulff took in Lindau is in total opposition to the current
policy of the EU and of the German government. And are we to believe, that
there exists no connection between this and the unparalleled media assault
against him over receipt of favors, which perhaps aren't very pretty, but which
are totally normal in the political milieu, and something that almost all politicians
engage in. And now we are to get a new President who
characterizes the Monday demonstrations against Hartz IV as foolish, who describes
the Occupy Movement as "unspeakably inane", and who believes that the
free-market economy, which has just proven to be more bankrupt than the G.D.R.
ever was, is our "guarantor of freedom."
What we urgently
need, is the same measure of transparency about this Mr. Gauck, as the media
and politicians have created concerning Christian Wulff--only this time
before he has been sworn in.
If we look at this situation, then I think we
need a completely different kind of politics in Germany. If we simply go along
further on this path, in the direction of the NATO military alliance, then
we're hostages to the impending new world war. If we continue in the direction
of the EU, Germany's fate will be absolutely sealed. But there are, of course, alternatives.
For example, in 2001, Russian President Putin delivered an address before the German
Parliament in which he proposed to intensify absolutely extensive cooperation between
the two countries. The current Deputy Prime Minister Rogozin recently
reiterated the offer that the common problems of humanity will have to be
solved jointly by a Strategic Defense of the Earth initiative--the SDE proposal,
which is absolutely in the tradition of the SDI policy. Former Foreign Minister
Igor Ivanov has likewise called upon the world's nations to jointly develop the
unbelievably rich resources of the Arctic. Anyone who is not completely blind
has to recognize that the EU in its current form is not in Germany's interests,
but that rather it has become an empire, an oligarchical system directed by a tiny
money and power elite, by an EU bureaucracy which is essentially serving the financial
beneficiaries of the bailout packages, while the masses of the populace are deliberately
kept in backwardness.
How does this oligarchy operate? Through manipulation
of sense-perception, and a dumbing-down of the emotions associated with those
senses. It's based on the model of the Roman Empire: bread and circuses--in
modernized forms, of course. If you look today at how full-grown men, week
after week, show more interest in their favorite soccer team's game scores,
than they do in humanity's future over the next few weeks; when you see how our
youth have been poisoned by the counterculture, and that for the entire
population, from disco to the Musikantenstadl TV program, from Black Gothic to
Lady Gaga, the main leisure time occupations are shopping and perfecting one's vacation
plans, seeking ever more pleasure in the here and now, playing video games,
spending all one's spare time on social networks, attending wine festivals; and
when you also see how today's media in Germany are more controlled than they
ever were in the days of Goebbels, then you get a basic picture of what the
problem is.
Humanity is on the cusp of being annihilated
in a third world war, and 99.9% of all people don't have a clue that this
danger even exists! People are running here and there, they are all oh-so-busy
using up their brief lives, yet they've scarcely lived, consciously.
And that, of course, is the intention of the
oligarchy, which has deliberately created an image of man that is based on the deliberately
false theses of the Club of Rome, namely that the world is a closed system governed
by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a world in which man is merely a parasite
who is ruining the environment, using up scarce resources which emit too much
CO2, a world in which human population growth is the greatest threat to the
beetles and the toads.
You've been in the forest at one time or other,
and have seen an anthill, and you've seen that this anthill is perfectly
organized according to the anthill's internal logic. The hierarchy
functions, tasks are accomplished systemically and perfectly, infrastructure is
built, each has his own task to perform, and no single ant ever gets the idea
that there is a world "out there," governed by entirely different laws.
And so it goes with
people who rely solely on sense-perception--on a higher level, of course, with
much more complex processes--but for these people, the world is fundamentally the
same box. If, however, we look at the universe as it really is, we realize that
the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not hold true, and that we're not inside
a closed system. Our planet Earth is located in a galaxy which is developing,
amid countless other galaxies which are likewise developing. The most recent
measurements of the red-shift of electromagnetic emissions, whereby the light from
a galaxy appears to be more shifted toward the red, the more distant it is from
us, gives us insight into how, on the macrocosmic scale, the universe is
expanding into an ever-higher form of organization. Only when we bring the Earth's
political and economic order into agreement with the cosmic order, will be be able
to overcome humanity's existential crisis, and the potential extinction of the
human species. This necessity corresponds to a profound philosophic known
principle in the Christian-humanist tradition of European intellectual history.
But this idea also exists in other cultures--for example, in the Vedic tradition
in Indian philosophy, or, in another guise, also in Confucianism.
The laws of the universe are anti-entropic.
The kernel of this idea was first recognized in the 15th century by Nicholas of
Cusa, who discovered the so-called biogenetic law of evolution. It was he who,
for the first time, distinguished between three completely distinct domains:
the domain of the inorganic, of the biological, and of human reason. And for
Nicholas of Cusa, there was also the fourth domain of divine reason. And he basically
defined evolution in such a way, that no mode in any of these domains can fully
accentuate its potential, unless it also participates at one point with the
next-higher species. Which is to say that Man is only wholly Man when he
participates in divine reason. And Nicholas defined evolution such that, unlike
with Darwin, for whom evolution was from the bottom up, the lower are, as it were,
pulled upward by the higher, so that development occurs from the top down.
Kepler grasped this idea, but first and foremost,
it was Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian scientist, who added to the domains of the
inorganic and the biological, the domain of reason, which he called the Noösphere,
which reaches ever higher levels of complexity, and whose action on the
universe is continuously increasing. That is, with advancing evolution, the
impact of human reason becomes increasingly efficient. The German-born
scientist Krafft Ehricke, a space pioneer who developed crucial rockets for the
Apollo program, determined, from this standpoint, that space travel and colonization
must be the next step in human evolution.
Life, which, with the help of photosynthesis,
developed out of the ocean, and has arrived at ever-higher levels of energy-flux
density, reached a new level with the appearance of mankind, which must find
its next level with the colonization of space. When you consider that in the
history of our universe, mankind is an extremely recent phenomenon, then
measured against the age of the universe, the Earth has existed for only a single
day. The development of complex life-forms has existed for three hours, mankind
has existed for three minutes, and what has come down to us as recorded
history, has existed for a mere tenth of a second.
Now, there are pessimists among scientists,
among geophysicists and others, who are convinced that mankind will disappear
again a second after midnight. But this will only occur if we fail to act more
intelligently then the dinosaurs did. Over the last 500 million years, there
have constantly been cycles of 60 to 65 million years, at the end of which, in each
case, there have been extinctions in which up to 96% of all species have been
obliterated. But every time, following the extinction, a more highly developed
form of existence has come into being, whose metabolism and basic means of
subsistence were associated with higher energy-flux densities. For example, after
the extinction of the dinosaurs, the last great extinction, came the mammals,
which had already existed in a rudimentary way before, but which now became the
dominant species.
That is, we can find proof in the history of
the universe that the development of the biosphere on Earth operates absolutely
anti-entropically, never in the opposite direction, but always at higher
energy-flux densities. And the species which, for whatever reason, wanted to
remain at the same level, have always died out, as did the dinosaurs; and if
mankind were to stick with green ideology, the same fate will befall us.
At the same time, we have to deal with the dangers
resulting from our planet's position in the universe, and which we had better acknowledge.
The Earth has almost been struck by asteroids nearly 5,000 times in the past, and
so far we do not have the technical capabilities to deflect them, although it
would be very serious if they were to hit the Earth. We have
had a clear increase in the number of earthquakes over the last period,
including the March 11, 2011 earthquake of 9.0 on the Richter scale, with the
known results at Fukushima; we have had extreme weather phenomena--droughts, floods--and
volcanic eruptions, none of which have anything to do with so-called "anthropogenic
climate change." Instead, over the last year, we been had to register unusual activity
throughout the Solar System. For example, in December 2010 there was a
massive storm on Saturn, which lasted until July 2011, and thus outside of the
usual 30-year cycle which has to do with Saturn's orbital period. This storm
came seven years ahead of schedule, and was the largest storm since
observations began to be made.
We also have solar activity which has not been
observed for 400 years, and which points toward a long-lasting solar minimum, which
would perhaps be like the period of the great Irish Frost around 1740, which
ushered in the longest cold period in modern European history. There were two
huge X-class solar flares at the beginning of 2011. In the Sun's Northern Hemisphere
there were several X-class flares, while at the same time, in the Southern Hemisphere,
the situation at the end of the year was remarkably peaceful--and then suddenly
it became very active, and there were several coronal mass-ejections, which had
large-scale effects on processes on Earth. The so-called solar maximum was not
expected to be reached until 2013, but there are various indications that it
already occurred at the end of 2011, with potentially enormous dangers for the Earth.
If coronal mass ejections strike the Earth's
magnetic field, this can result in geomagnetic storms which could, in serious cases,
shut down the electricity supply of entire continents, and would practically produce
a dark age overnight. In the second half of 2011 there were more such coronal
mass ejections, which the Earth only barely escaped. The Sun's activity has a
huge influence on our weather; by contrast, man's CO2 emissions are totally
negligible, something like the impact of mayflies on an elephant.
A year ago, the climate mafia still had relative
hegemony. Although scientists such as Hendrik Svensmark and those at the CERN research
facility had long since reported their research on the influence of cosmic rays
on cloud formation, and had established the effect of cosmic radiation on our
atmosphere, namely that the formation of clouds has to do with ionization, it
was still common doctrine that man was responsible for climate change. But this
cosmic radiation has an enormous effect on the cooling or warming of the Earth,
and on the amount of precipitation.
But meanwhile, even the gutter press is now
reporting that the Sun's activity influences our weather, and I would say that this
is, at a minimum, the result of our own activities worldwide.
Considering all these relationships, it must
be really clear to anyone, that if mankind remains within the paradigm of the
oligarchical system and green ideology, and thereby of the monetarism and
positivism with which it is consistent, then our fate will be the same as that
of the dinosaurs and of millions of other species which were not creative, and
did not adapt themselves to the anti-entropic laws of the universe.
In contrast to all other forms of life--at least
of those forms we know of so far--mankind is a unique species, which, by virtue
of our creative capacity, can understand the laws of the universe ever more
profoundly and with greater precision, and can discover and apply new universal
principles; and therefore we are also the only species that can deal with these
challenges, and therefore we are potentially the only immortal species.
The reason for this lies in the principle which
Nicolas of Cusa already understood in the 15th Century, namely that the laws of
the microcosm, human reason, and those of the macrocosm, the self-developing
universe, are absolutely identical.
Plato described this as mankind's capability
to form appropriate hypotheses. Nicolas took this same point further, namely that
the intangible idea which a man can generate in his creative reason, is capable
of generating a change and further development of the physical universe. In
other words, an intangible idea has a physical effect in the physical universe,
and this is the proof that there is this coherence of the microcosm and the
macrocosm.
If we want to overcome the crisis on Earth--the
potential extinction of the human species in a thermonuclear World War
III--then we must, in this hour of danger, not only turn our gaze toward the
stars, but to the galaxies, and look at the unbelievable expanse of a self-developing
universe.
Krafft Ehricke coined the concept of the extraterrestrial
imperative, namely that mankind will only grow up once it accepts the fact that
the next level of evolution lies in manned space flight and colonization of
space. But Krafft Ehricke was also aware of the fact that this absolute
affirmation of scientific and technological progress must go hand-in-hand with
the humanist education of man, because it is never technology in itself which
is good or bad, but rather it is the human individual who decides whether a
technology will be employed toward a good or a bad end. Mankind can only survive
if the majority of people grow up, if the knowledge of universal principles in science
and art, which are verifiable--they are universal, because they can at any
point be proven, and thus they signify rationality--if these principles become
the basis upon which the greatest proportion of mankind thinks.
In just the part of the universe known up to
now, there are hundreds of millions of galaxies. Just imagine: It's almost the
limit of human imagination which is being challenged here. And
this evening, we'll hear the choral section of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in
the musical part of this conference--the symphony for which Beethoven took
Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy" as the foundation, and in whose chorus comes the
wonderful line, "Over the starry tabernacle, a loving father must dwell" ("Überm
Sternezelt muß ein lieber Vater wohnen"). And as I gaze upward at that tent of
stars, composed as it is of hundreds of billions of galaxies, I say, with awe,
and with optimism: "Over the starry tabernacle, there must dwell a loving
father!"
Footnotes
1. See David Ignatius, "Is
Israel Preparing To Attack Iran?" Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2010. The
evaluation about Iranian bunkers is attributed by Ignatius to "the Israelis."--ed.
2. "A Clean Break: A New
Strategy for Securing the Realm," issued in 1996 by the Institute for Advanced
Strategic and Political Studies in Jerusalem. Directed to then-Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it called for a shift toward pre-emptive military
action, and for regime change in Iraq, Syria, and Iran.--ed.