A time of crisis has come for this nation, and it forces upon each of us, as it did upon our republican forefathers around the poets John Dunmore Lang and Charles Harpur, the “intense and impassioned” question, “What is my identity as an Australian? Am I an American republican-style thinker, or a British subject non-thinker?”
This is not a matter of nationality in the strictest sense, but of identity. What is an “American”, really? Is an American a “gung-ho, trigger happy brute” striving for world empire? A baby-boomer might answer so (particularly given that America since World War II has often acted as a pawn for Wall St. and City of London financiers). But not someone who has ever truly contemplated the ideas for which the American revolution was fought, as enshrined in the Preamble of the American constitution. That Preamble defines the duty of the American citizen, and the mission of his country:
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare , and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Was that merely idealism by Benjamin Franklin and his co-thinkers, simply nice ideas which were never acted upon, or only briefly? Or are these not the ideals which have always seen America through its great crises, from the Revolutionary War of Independence; to the victory of the Union under President Lincoln over the British-organised, slave-holding Confederacy; to the leadership of President Roosevelt in the triumph over the Depression and leading the world to victory over fascism?
Those ideals have been revived again today by America’s greatest living patriot, the economist and stateman Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche has defined a true republic as one in which each among all newborn infants will have the potential to be developed into poets, scientists, discoverers and statesmen, or to otherwise reach their very highest potential. It is this principle that is embedded within the history of the United States, even now when the elected congress chooses out of their own generational (baby boomer) impotence not to respond to the leadership which the American people demand of them.
What principle, if any, is stated in our own Australian Constitution? Philosophically, what is the intended mission of the Australian? Is the role of the Australian simply to strip the natural wealth from our soils and to export it for British gain? Are we allowed no more than the role of “dirt-diggers” extracting the enormous wealth of our mineral deposits for multinational corporations? Under this system, we, the people of Australia, remain mere colonists, with no say as to our own future. The generation which fought or lived through World War II has largely passed from the scene, while the following generations gave up the fight for national sovereignty, as exemplified in the shift from the “old ALP” which still existed in the Whitlam era, to the pathetic British stooges Hawke and Keating and on through to the present.
The generations that experienced the two great world wars of the past century remember the senseless slaughter of Australians in the interest of the Empire, and so had a developed sense of the necessity of our breaking from British colonial rule. They knew what the British use of Australians as “cannon fodder” meant, where 60,000 of our finest young men out of a population of only five million died in the senseless trench warfare in Europe, or charging machine guns at Gallipoli for Winston Churchill. Now, we are a nation like ancient Athens, in that we have “no old men among us”, as the Egyptian priest admonished Socrates. The ranks of our great patriots have been decimated by illness and death, and thus the knowledge of what Australia should be has almost disappeared from living memory. Therefore the Youth generation must now intervene on the stage of history. If human civilisation is to continue, then we must reverse the assumptions that underpin the disgusting environmentalist ideology which the British have foisted upon us, by which we allow ourselves to be destroyed. What are the axioms of that “left wing” zero-growth, post-industrial ideology of environmentalism? Are they not identical with those of “right wing” free trade and neo-liberalism, respecting man’s nature, whereby man is merely a beast? Do these “popular sentiments” not deny what makes man different from the beasts, which is his or her creative capacities in the image of God? It is the denial of that “divine spark” in man which leads to the belief that all men and women are not equal, or are merely beasts, which in turn leads to policies of genocide, as we see today being carried out against our Aboriginal citizens and farmers alike, with the rest of us next in line. Does not each and every human being at inception represent equal potential? Does not each one of us have something to contribute to posterity? How do we create a culture where mankind as a creative being is held in the highest respect?
It is the intention of the LaRouche Youth Movement to create such a culture within Australia. Our fight is a continuation of Franklin Roosevelt’s intention before his premature death in April 1945: to free the world of British imperialism. That intention defies the embedded ideogical crippling of the “subject” mentality, as expressed in the deep cultural pessimism of the Australian who continues to vote for one or the other of the two “major” parties which have increasingly destroyed this country, who thereby chooses not to break from his mental shackles, and who therefore chooses to remain a slave rather than become a free man.
It is this torch of the promethean fire-bringer which we hold high, as did former Indonesian President Sukarno at the 1955 Bandung Conference of the Nonaligned Movement. In his opening speech there, he evoked the image of the American War of Independence, which he called “the first successful anti-colonialist war in history”, declaring that “the battle which began 180 years ago is not yet completely won”.
The LaRouche Youth Movement internationally is fighting a war of ideas respecting the nature of man, a fight exemplified by Aeschylus’ great drama of Prometheus, who the tyrant Zeus tortured for giving fire (technology) to mankind, so that Zeus and the gods of Olympus could keep the shackles on the minds of mortal men. This was the battle which Solon of Athens fought, to whom the Americans looked in their revolution, a struggle continued in the Golden Renaissance in Italy in the 15th Century when the modern nation state was founded through the work of Nicholas of Cusa and the Council of Florence, which then burst forth in the American Revolution of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the other American Founding Fathers, who established the first true republic in world history.
At present we Australians are a nation so rich with potential, yet a people kept so small by the suppression of the unique republican identity within our national history as typified by J. D. Lang, King O’Malley and John Curtin. Their struggles have bequeathed to us extraordinary inspirations, such as our original 1912 “Commonwealth” National Bank. This once represented the foundation for American System Hamiltonian economic development, a public credit bank which our governments could use to fund infrastructural development for nation building, the greatest example of which was the 1949-1974 construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, known as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”. The anglophile Menzies government already started to turn away from that tradition of nation building, a process which disappeared when Keating privatised and destroyed the Commonwealth “Savings” bank in 1996.
Today, the United States must return to its own nation-building tradition. In so doing, it would find great partners in the nations of Russia, China and India, who, unlike their European counterparts, are responding to this crisis by calling for long-term investment in co-operative development between their neighbours, including investment in great infrastructure projects such as Russia’s proposal for the Bering Strait tunnel which has the potential to become a global trade route through the Americas, across Eurasia and eventually down to Africa.
With LaRouche leading the United States, that Four Power bloc would weave the threads for an intricate tapestry of global development of sovereign nation states. These four nations cannot develop alone in this world of many cultures, but will anchor and also depend upon the survival and development of the nations of Asia and Africa. Within this Four Power alliance, Australia has a mission. Australia can play a crucial role in developing the regions to the north of our great land that are suffering from a 70-80% poverty rate, if we mobilise our vast land and resources to mass produce the food and raw materials which Asian nations urgently require, along with clean water. For this we must revitalise our own collapsed agro-industrial base. Our responsibility to our northern neighbours is implicit in our existence; this is the role we have to play in the fight for the future existence of mankind, as LaRouche outlined to the CEC National Conference in Melbourne in 1993:
“We must give Australia a purpose for existence, a cultural purpose for existence, in terms of the entirety of the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean Basin. Australia must make itself indispensable to the peoples of this region; and it can best do that by resolving to abandon the demontage, the destruction of its industrial and agricultural potential, the destruction of its scientific potential ... and become an outpost of the very best which the Americas and European tradition have had to offer, to the benefit of all the peoples of this region, so that all of the peoples of this region will know that the continent of Australia and the nation of Australia, is a beacon of benefit to them all, which they will treasure, as they would treasure any benefit of that sort. ”