National Commission To
STOP the NEW VIOLENCE

"We Have Created a Chemistry of Violence"

Keynote Address by
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

April 8, 2000

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Lyndon LaRouche made the following opening remarks to a town meeting on the National Commission against the New Violence in New York City April 8, broadcast live by satellite over the Internet.

Participating in a panel at Columbia University were Jeff Steinberg, the co-author of Dope, Inc., and Counterintelligence Director of EIR; Minister Charles Quinn Mohammad, the former head of the Nation of Islam in Jackson, Mississippi; Sister Esther Mohammad, who is the former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Mississippi; Dr. Kildare Clarke, the assistant medical director of King's County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York; Matthew Fogg, chief inspector deputy, U.S. Marshal, and founder of the Congress against Racism and Corruption in Law Enforcement; and also Rep. Harold James of Pennsylvania, and former head of the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus.

The discussion was moderated by Dennis Speed, the Northeast Coordinator of LaRouche's Presidential campaign.

Well, I've heard from my wife, who is on post in Germany, that during the past three days, the leading German tabloid, one of the largest circulation newsprint publications in the world, Bildzeitung, has been featuring a story about a boy of about 15 years of age, who asked his parents, in Spain, to assist him in purchasing a Samurai sword. The parents refused, suspecting that there was something awry with this request. And, shortly thereafter, the boy beheaded both hisparents.

This is exemplary of what's going on.

Now, I think that, as people know from what I've said about these matters earlier, that I know essentially what the source of the problem is, but there's much that remains to be investigated, before any final judgment on the problem can be stated. That is, I know what has caused the problem; I know how it is developed; I've studied this matter over a period of some decades, knowing the people who have set this into motion, how it was set into motion. But we don't know always what the effects are. It's like a man who--you know the man is a crazy, he drove a car into a restaurant, but you have to investigate the effects, and the side effects, of that action, even knowing that the man willfully did that.

And the same thing here. People have set into motion something which has fostered a radiating explosion of what we call the New Violence. Typical of this New Violence are two things.

One is the separation of children, the estrangement of children, from their parents. Now, many of us know the factors which were involved in causing this. We have a breakdown over the past three decades or so, of the quality of education in the United States. We have at the same time a dependency among the lower 80% of income brackets inparticular, of more incomes per household.

The result is, we've produced the phenomenon of latchkey children, more and more, at all levels in society. If parents have a child who is not a latchkey child, the children with whom that child is associated during the day, are usually latchkey children. We have a crisis in housing, as in parts of New York City, of overcrowding, at great cost. We have this around the country. These conditions are hellholes for children. The schools have become hellholes for children.

Now, you feed into this estrangement, of the child from the parent, the sense of abandonment of the child, and you start at the age of 3 to 5 years of age, and you condition this child in certain ways to certain circumstances, and you have an explosion of what used to be called alienation of the children from parents, and society.

Somebody introduces into this situation the chemistry ofviolence, such as these Samurai tradition-modelled Nintendo games, on television, and bought through game stores, which teach children how to kill! Now, what you've created is the effect of a forest fire. You've put into society, you've created a potential among children, estrangement, distance between parents and children, this kind of thing--the use of the 911 number to cause children to turn against their parents, the fostering of these values in the schools by teachers, more and more of them, the wide-scale use of drugs such as Ritalin among children, which causes an aggravation. Now you take this child, who feels abandoned, who's estranged; you put this child, at 3 to 6 and older, in front of a television set, or in some kind of a game, in which the child plays at shooting people. Perpetrating horrible violence. This has calculable effects.

As a result of this, we have the things, such as what happened in Spain. This child, with a boy decapitating his parents, Samurai-style, to see what it would {feel} like to do it, according to the story in Bildzeitung. You see the Nintendo-type violence at Littleton, which is famous around the nation. You see similar incidents. A child who had never used a gun before, because they had practiced through an Nintendo game, going out at the age of 6, and making skillful headshots the first time he used a gun, in killing people (see interview, pages 6-7).

In other words, you have--on the one hand, you've created the social potential, the circumstances for this kind of estrangement among children. Now, you come along with games, and drugs, and other things. You create a new subculture among children with these Nintendo-style games, such as Pokeamon, which, in many cases, is sold widely throughout the country, and is on television, in afternoons, by certain television networks and circuits. And we've created a chemistry of violence.

Then we have the same thing at a different level. We have, in the case of the New York Police Department, we know, as in other police departments, there's a military-style training going on. And police units, who are inadequately trained by normal standards to be policemen, are sent out as killers. They are essentially programmed killers, because they have been trained to shoot and kill, by military-style methods, through Nintendo game-style training. And that's what you get, for example, in the Diallo case, in New York City.

So, we know some of the causes, and some of the effects, but we don't know fully what the extent of the problem is. We don't know what the reverberations are of what's being done. We don't know some of the side effects yet. We've got to find out. And we've also got to motivate people to payattention to this fact. We've got to tell the President andothers, getting guns out of the society, is not going to deal with this problem. If a child burns down the house with his parents in it, you're not going to stop that by banning guns. If a child uses a kitchen knife to kill his parents,or other people, you're not going to stop that by banning guns. The gun-related violence in this country, normally, of the kind we used to have, is actually somewhat less than it was in former times--particularly at the beginning of the 1990s. That kind of violence is on the ebb, at least for the time being. But in the meantime, a new kind of violence, typified by out-of-control police units, which are operating as deployed zombies--that is, they are brainwashed zombies, sent out in the streets to kill on program, not on the basis of judgment. They are not cops, they're just plain deployedkillers. And people try to cover that up; you can't do that.

We have also the core of the New Violence, is, we're taking the present generation of children, now between the ages of 3 and 16, approximately. We're subjecting them, with the aid of drugs, to become programmed killers on impulse, turning these children against their parents. Children killing theirparents. There are precedents for this in history, precedents in the ancient cult of Dionysius. It's come back. As I say, we know the sources, we know the people who push society to create these conditions. We do not yet know what the reverberations of the conditions are.

It's like putting a highly mutatable virus into a population. The fellow who circulated that virus with malice, knows what he did. We may detect what he did. But when that virus gets into human beings, and begins to spread from person to person, it undergoes change, and it produces incalculable side effects, in interaction with other viruses and diseases. Just the same way, we have with thistuberculosis epidemic coming back.

So, on the one hand, we should know, and the entire population should know, what some of the causes of this problem are--a new form of violence, a new kind of violence. We don't yet know what the reverberations are. We've got to pay attention to the causes; we've also got to investigate the reverberations, which have taken off, and may be out of control, of those who set this kind of thing into motion in the first place.

Thank you.