National Commission To
STOP the NEW VIOLENCE

Jeffrey Steinberg
April 8, 2000

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here today. A pleasure to be participating in this nationwide discussion with Lyndon LaRouche on the subject of the New Violence and what we're going to be doing about it.

There are two points that I want to emphasize briefly, and hopefully they'll become the subject of further discussion as the evening proceeds.

Number one: The people who are the authors of this New Violence phenomenon, whether or not they are aware of all of the consequences of what they've unleashed, let us be absolutely clear in the fact that they knew what they were doing. That they set out consciously, intentionally, to destroy the culture of this country, to destroy particularly the moral fabric of our society, the family structure, through which those values were conveyed, and to instead create a new cultural paradigm, based on {Eros.} Based on the idea that the population can be destroyed, that the individual human soul can be ripped apart, through a combination of drugs, brainwashing, and continuous exposure to the kind of violence that we see in the mass entertainment industry today, and which has now been taken to a new extreme, with the advent of the violent point-and-shoot video-game industry, which was created intentionally to desensitize people in the military and in the police, to the idea of being able to kill another human being.

It's a matter of debate whether there was any merit whatsoever in using these kinds of techniques of mass psychology to train police or soldiers, with the presumption that they would also be given adequate education and a chain-of-command, rules of engagement, and things like that. But there is {no debate whatsoever}, it is a no-brainer, that to take these technologies, that were created simply as killing simulators, and to turn them into an $11 billion-a-year industry, in which the clientele are our children--there is no doubt whatsoever that this is an evil that can only be described as Satanic.

And this is very much to the heart of the issue of the New Violence. The average child, by the time he reaches five or six years of age, has been an eyewitness to tens of thousands of murders. For the adult, it may very well be that you're capable of distinguishing between a murder that occurs in a theatrical setting on a television screen or in a movie theater, and what happens in real life. But, in the formative brain of a young child, there is no clear distinction between reality and fiction. So, children are being exposed every day, {desensitized}, to this kind of violence. In fact, they are being told that participating as an observer, and then with these video games, participating as an actual killer, is a form of entertainment to be rewarded. {It's fun. It's pleasurable.}

You go to the movie theater. You see 300 or 400 murders in one of these slash-and-burn videos, and what do you do? You have a good time with your friends. You eat popcorn and hotdogs. And you're conditioned to believe that somehow or other, this is all socially acceptable, and this is the idea of how to spend your leisure time.

The second point I want to make is that there is no human being that I know of, who is more qualified to lead this fight against the New Violence than Lyndon LaRouche. I know a bit about his personal history. He may be too modest to discuss all these things on this nationwide webcast.

But, the first time that I heard Mr. LaRouche speak, on the campus of Columbia University, was in 1973, when he gave a series of lectures on a very critical paper that he had just recently published, called ``Beyond Psychoanalysis.'' In that presentation, and in that paper, he directly took on some of the people whom we will be naming as the authors of the New Violence: the Frankfurt School. Some of the people involved in what was known at the time as the Cybernetics Group. The people who have scared the pants off at least one senior figure in the computer industry, who says, the people who are running this industry now are {monsters,} who want to turn this technology into a form of mass brainwashing and social control.

On the basis of my own years of collaboration with Mr. LaRouche, knowing that his initial involvement in the political fight came as the result of seeing that there were people putting forward the hypothesis that human beings are {merely} animals, who can be trained and programmed, but that there is nothing distinctly human and unique about human beings, that man is not in the living image of God--this is the fight, ultimately, to restore the soul to humanity, and to end the tyranny of this new violence.

So, I'm very proud and honored to be here tonight, as we begin the process of launching this initiative. Not surprisingly, Mr. LaRouche, as always, comes in with a new challenge, even beyond what I expected. This idea of figuring out, what are the consequences.

We know that the people in charge of this, who launched this back 40, 50 years ago, knew that they were attempting to launch a new Dionysian cult, using the technologies of the mass media, to combine pornography and violence, and destroy that which is human in all of us. But have they unleashed something that's even gone beyond their control?

I'll leave it at that and look forward to the discussion of the evening.