The Role of the Individual in History Today

Aug. 23-The Berlin Wall was not demolished as the result of the success of an election campaign. Nor was it a referendum which brought hundreds of thousands into the streets to ultimately smash through concrete and rebar-to see their family and friends they had been partitioned from for decades. The Berlin Wall came down for the reasons that Lyndon LaRouche had identified in his speech at the Kempinski Hotel in Berlin a little over a year before the wall fell-the intellectual, cultural and economic mortar of that society could no longer sustain and nourish its population. The state of society within the trans-Atlantic community is far worse today than that of Germany in 1989. The structural integrity of our own wall degenerated long ago, and either it will come down by financial collapse and world war, or we will embrace what is on the other side: the growing New Paradigm spreading throughout Eurasia. At the core of this new paradigm is the "New Silk Road" concept, put forward by Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche 25 years ago, as well as the extraordinary space program that is coming into increasing focus around China's declared mission to land on the far side of the moon by 2018. However, there is no way this new paradigm can be realized without a new financial architecture to facilitate its growth. From his call for the creation of an "International Development Bank" in 1975, to his more recent proposal for the convening of a "New Bretton Woods Conference," Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly proven that the creation of a new global "financial architecture" is a prerequisite for the development of a new world-wide physical economy to replace the dead and rotting British Empire. Now, the Chinese Government, recognizing the likelihood of an imminent collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system, has announced that the issue of a new financial architecture will be a core agenda item at the upcoming G-20 Summit in Hangzhou, China, September 4-5. In recent discussions that Lyndon and Helga LaRouche have conducted with associates, Mrs. LaRouche has made it clear that, at the present moment, there is no sign from either the European Union or the United States that they are willing to agree to the Chinese agenda of a new financial architecture. Hence, the question-now before the citizens of Europe and the United States-is whether they will show the same foresight and courage as the Germans of 1989 and seize upon this great moment to provide leadership.