HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE:
The Choice Is Ours To Make—
WWIII or Cultural Renaissance
[PDF version of this presentation]
Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed a private seminar in Washington, D.C., April 9, 2014. She was introduced by Jeffrey Steinberg, who noted that she had just returned from Germany, where her party, the BüSo (Civil Rights Solidarity Movement), is campaigning for the May 22-25 European parliamentary elections; in February, she had traveled to China where she had a series of high-level meetings. Here is her address.
I welcome you to this discussion which is taking place at a very hot strategic moment. And I think, having been in China in February, in Germany, until just a couple of days ago, and now being in the United States, I can assure you that the world looks quite different from each of these angles, and that there is a growing rift, actually, between what is happening in Germany, and what is the viewpoint of matters in the United States. As a matter of fact, I think that it is much more dramatic than most people who are listening to the main mass media would assume.
The reason is, that the policy which erupted around the crisis of Ukraine last November, and which has subsequently led to a putsch, a coup, in Kiev, which installed a non-legitimate, interim government, which in turn, then triggered the events leading to the independence of Crimea, and its joining the Russian Federation—that these developments are looked at quite differently in the United States, than they are looked at in most of Europe, but emphatically in Germany.
And there is, on the side of some forces in the Anglo-American world, much more willingness to go for a confrontation with Russia, to go for a confrontation with China, than there is in Europe, where people who had two world wars on their territory in the last century are extremely concerned, that if this policy by NATO and the United States, and by the British government, is pursued, that this could lead to a third, and this time, thermonuclear world war, which would lead to the destruction of all humanity.
An Undefined Situation
There is right now an undefined situation. This present strategic situation could evolve either to a complete catastrophe of mankind, or, if we can change the parameters in time, it could also lead to a complete, new peace order for the 21st Century, and therefore, go in the direction of something which would have been the logical development after the Soviet Union's collapse between 1989 and '91. Because, at that point, the "enemy," so-called, Communism, had vanished, and it would have been quite easy to use what was called in Germany, "a star-hour of civilization, a star-hour of history." That could have been used, and we could have established a completely different world order of a lasting peace.
Unfortunately, at that point you had a government in the United States which was very much contrary to the tradition of the American Revolution, or the tradition of Benjamin Franklin, or Alexander Hamilton, or John Quincy Adams: If John Quincy Adams would have been the President in 1991, it would have absolutely, with certainty, led to an alliance of sovereign republics around the world, for the development of the common good. Unfortunately, you had, with Bush Sr., a President who was strongly leaning in an Anglophile direction, and they decided at that point, to go on the basis of the neo-conservative "New American Century" doctrine, to go in the direction of building a world empire.
And subsequently, with the interruption of the eight years of the Clinton Administration, the Bush Sr. Administration, the two Bush Jr. Administrations, and now, the Obama Administration, the U.S. has been on a policy course of rollback of Russian interests, and also trying to contain China.
A Nazi Coup in Ukraine
Now, this was combined with, for example, in the case of Ukraine and other East European countries, the financing of thousands of NGOs; in the case of Ukraine, some 2,200 NGOs were financed by such organizations, like the National Endowment for Democracy, the IRI (the International Republican Institute); unfortunately, also European think-tanks, such as the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which built up a network of activists which were selected on the profile of their being anti-Russian. This led to the Orange Revolution in 2004, which brought in Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister, a government which lasted only very briefly; and it led to other such changes, such as in Georgia, the Rose Revolution; and subsequently, regime-change in many other countries which were regarded as not submitting to the idea of a "new world order."
This was in place, and when the [President Viktor] Yanukovych government, in November, at the last second, refused to join the EU Association Agreement, this triggered this present situation. Now, what Mr. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, at that point, said, is that what was activated were networks which had been prepared and which were in place for the Presidential election of 2015.
And what then erupted, was that the peaceful demonstrators, a handful of students, a handful of citizens who legitimately opposed the corruption of the Yanukovych government, were immediately taken over, not only by these organized networks of the NGOs, but also some new phenomena emerged: the hard-core Nazi networks, like Svoboda, like Right Sector, and other groupings which all referred to the tradition of Stepan Bandera, the Nazi collaborator, who had helped the invasion of the Nazis in the 1940s, and networks which, despite the fact that they had committed Nazi crimes, like killing over 100,000 Jews, Gypsies, Communists, were never prosecuted.
Now, these networks were never put in front of a Nuremberg Tribunal or other prosecution, for a very simple reason: The Western intelligence services—the CIA under the leadership of Allen Dulles, MI6, and also later, the [West German] BND, took over these networks for a "stay behind" operation when the Cold War started, to be used in the case of a confrontation with the Soviet Union. A lot of the people who became active in the Maidan were people associated with the "captive nation" conception—these were networks in the East, which, despite the fact that they had a very dubious character, never really were questioned.
So, they started to recruit new people in the 1970s and '80s, and these are the people who then carried out the really violent activities in the Maidan. They snatched this revolution, so to speak, or this protest, and increased the violence over December and January. On Feb. 20, snipers, according to all witnesses, went onto the roofs around the Maidan and killed people from both the police and the demonstrators. And then on the 21st of February, the three foreign ministers from Germany, Poland, and indirectly, also from France, witnessed an agreement for a peaceful transition, including an election for 2015. This was rejected by the Maidan, and that was what then triggered the coup, which brought in Mr. "Yats" [Arseniy Yatsenyuk], as he's called, which was announced by [State Department official] Victoria Nuland, in the famous phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev, a couple of weeks earlier.[1]
And there was a big freakout at the time that Victoria Nuland had used rather vulgar language to express her view that the EU was superfluous and actually a burden, and should be gotten rid of in terms of its influence. But the real scandal naturally is not that she is a vulgar person; the real scandal is that she was caught red-handed, meddling in the internal affairs of a foreign country. And the fact that Mr. Yats, as she calls him, is now the interim prime minister, proves that his is an illegitimate government which has no legal authority at all.
The question then was, the openly Nazi character of these networks associated with the government of Yats, which Svoboda is a part of; and the security forces which were organized by such people as [Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Andriy] Parubiy, who is a member of this Nazi grouping. And you now have a Nazi coup in Ukraine. Among other things, the rule that the Russian language should be forbidden, helped to trigger the events in Crimea, and there is now a big dispute: Is this a violation of international law, and was this an illegitimate coup, establishing a Nazi government in Ukraine?
Encirclement of Russia, China
This has all escalated now, by NATO calling for more troop presence in Poland, in the Baltic States, and it is very clear that we are on a course which could lead to World War III in the short term.
The reason I'm saying this, is, as we have published in the past, you cannot look at the effort to enlarge NATO eastward, up to the borders of Russia, including the expansion of the EU up to the borders of Russia, as an isolated fact. Just a couple of days ago, Mr. [Jack] Matlock, the former ambassador of the United States [to the USSR], in this crucial period, reconfirmed, that there was a promise by [George H.W.] Bush in 1990-91, that there would be no enlargement of NATO. This promise was given also to [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin; it was given to [former German Chancellor Helmut] Kohl, to [former German Vice Chancellor Hans-Detrich] Genscher, and obviously, this promise was completely broken, and NATO was expanding into all kinds of East European countries, step-by-step encircling Russia.
Now, if you go around to think-tanks in Washington, they will all say this is not true. But it is a fact: If you look at the map (Figure 1), the fact is that NATO has expanded. And when it came to Ukraine, and the danger that Ukraine would be incorporated into NATO, whereby the existence of the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, and the access to the Black Sea, and therefore to the Mediterranean, for Russia was endangered, this had become a point where even Western think-tanks admitted that, if Ukraine had gone into the NATO orbit, Russia, de facto, would have become indefensible. And that is why Russia acted the way it did. Because the idea that Russia would just give up and capitulate was obviously a complete miscalculation.
We have made, emphatically, the point that the war danger comes from a couple of facts. One is, the fact that the NATO strategy has completely changed. If you remember in the beginning of the 1980s, we had the middle-range missile crisis between the SS-20 and the Pershing 2, whereby you had NATO and the Warsaw Pact in a state of "launch on warning" all the time, and there could have been an accidental thermonuclear war, because the warning time of these two missile systems being headed toward each other in Central Europe was just too short! That if one side would have seen a missile on its radar, it would have had no choice but to launch the entire arsenal. And at that point, we had the Mutual Assured Destruction [MAD] doctrine, which was the idea that you can never use thermonuclear weapons, because if you use them, then everybody will be extinct as a result.
Now, at that time, [former Chancellor] Helmut Schmidt and many others warned that we were on the verge of World War III. You had hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the streets in Germany, and there was a clear awareness that we were on the verge of potential extinction.
In the meantime, a lot of things have happened, and you had an evolution of military doctrines. For example, there have been many articles published about the real significance of the U.S. missile-defense system in Eastern Europe, that it's really a first-strike doctrine. Naturally, this is not officially admitted, because, officially, this missile system is supposed to be against Iranian missiles, but then, if you look at the map, why put it in Poland and Romania, now?
And there were articles, such as, for example, by authors [Daryl G.] Press and [Keir A.] Lieber,[2] that admitted quite clearly that, due to the development of modern technologies, it would be possible to take out the nuclear arsenal of any opponent without the danger of radioactive fallout, and that therefore, you, de facto, had a first-strike doctrine.
Now, Russia, about two years ago, had a big conference in Moscow, where the General Staff presented video animations which showed very clearly that the Russian interpretation of the U.S. missile-defense system in Poland and in Romania, and in the Aegis destroyer component, is meant as a first-strike doctrine, and that Russia does not accept that, but that they have counter-systems, like the deployment of the Iskander missiles in Königsberg (Kaliningrad), and that they are quite capable of launching a second strike. Chief of the General Staff General Makarov even said that it could come to a first strike launched by Russia, at Central Europe, if the U.S. missile-defense system were to be built beyond a certain stage, after which, Russia would become indefensible.
Another doctrine, called "Prompt Global Strike," goes in the same direction; it essentially has the idea to put conventional weapons in ICBMs and other missile systems, which would have also the ability to knock out the second-strike capability of Russia and other forces, essentially by using cyberwarfare, by eliminating the command and control, very quickly, as it was already demonstrated on a small scale in the two wars against Iraq.
The same logic rules the U.S. "Asia pivot" policy, the Air-Sea Battle doctrine against China, which, again, has the idea that, due to the development of modern technologies, it would be possible to take out the nuclear arsenal of, in that case, China. Against which China, last October, presented, in all the leading Chinese publications, documentation that, given the fact that China has 70 strategic submarines in the Pacific, any such idea is completely ludicrous, and China would be able to react to a first strike, with a second strike, knocking out the entire West Coast of the United States, and then having a second line of attack, via the North Pole, knocking out the East Coast.
This is what we are dealing with: that you have practically a worldwide deployment, whereby, as part of this NATO expansion—the encirclement of Russia and China—the United States has developed more than 1,000 bases around the world, and, in a certain sense, it is a trigger, whereby the world could be blown up. Just imagine how many nuclear weapons are in place, ready to go, launch-on-warning, the Ohio-class submarines in the Indian Ocean and Pacific: We are sitting on a potential Armageddon, which could extinguish civilization.
Bail-In
What is now happening in Europe?
On the one side, the war danger not only comes from these weapons systems and military doctrines, and from the military posture, but the real war danger comes from the fact that the entire trans-Atlantic sector, that is, the EU and the United States, is in a process of total collapse of the financial system.
Many people say, "Oh, it's not so visible yet," but the fact that the EU finance ministers and heads of state, a couple of weeks ago, signed the law for a so-called "bail-in": that is, the idea that the entire policy which followed the banking crisis in 2008—the bail-outs using taxpayer money to finance the debt of the speculators, and thereby turning private gambling debt into state debt, thereby increasing the debt burden of the states—and combining that with quantitative easing, i.e., pumping liquidity practically without limit—theoretically, that that policy has now been exhausted, and that you need to deal with the danger of one or more too-big-to-fail banks, which could collapse at any moment, by the so-called "bail-in."
The bail-in has been a tool which was developed essentially by the large banking associations, the ISDA—International Swaps and Derivatives Association—which authored a law for the EU, and I think also for Dodd-Frank, which was applied for the first time, a little bit more than a year ago in Cyprus, the so-called "Cyprus template," by making a "hair-cut," demanding that all the banks, all the people who have accounts in the banks, the people who have bonds or other assets in the bank, should be drawn into financing the banks, in case of their bankruptcy. This was done in Cyprus, and it led to a collapse of the real economy in the year following, a third collapse of the real economy.
If this bail-in were to be implemented in all of Europe, and in the United States, it would lead to something which my husband, Mr. LaRouche—who is known to be the economist who has been right in all of his forecasts about the economy since 1971—said that if the bail-in were implemented, it would be like being in the elevator of a skyscraper on the 70th floor, and the cable would be cut. And then you would fall without any restriction; you would rush to the bottom of the building. And that would be the fate of the real economy: Because if you would apply the Cyprus template to all of Europe and the United States, it would lead to a complete destruction of the real economy, a social explosion, and, I'm absolutely certain, it would also then lead to World War III, because I do not think that the system of free-market economy would collapse as peacefully as was the case with the Soviet Union 24 years ago.
So, the real war danger comes from the fact that there are people in what we call the "British Empire"—and by British Empire, we do not mean the British Isles, or the British people, but we mean that which is generally called "globalization," and which is historically dominated by the empire which originated in Great Britain, and for which Wall Street was essentially a junior partner, historically, from the beginning, trying to subvert the American Revolution. And when this British Empire recognized that it was impossible to undo the American Revolution by military means—which they had tried to do with the War of 1812 and the Civil War, in which the British Empire was allied with the Confederacy—they shifted, and said, we have to convince the American establishment to run the world as an empire, to apply the model of the British Empire as the model for the Anglo-American "special relationship."
What is happening right now, is, while the European Union is a failed experiment—look at the condition of Southern Europe: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, are completely desperate. I can assure you, that the people in Greece are really—it's a complete tragedy that is happening; and if you have 65% youth unemployment in countries like Greece and Spain, after thousands and thousands of young and educated people have already left, because they have absolutely no future in their countries, it means the European experiment of the euro, is a completely failed experiment.
And as you know, the United States situation, if you look at Detroit, or if you look at what's happening in Texas and California, in terms of the worst drought in 500 years, the situation is not much better.
Geopolitics
So at this moment, you have an impulse which already occurred at the end of the 19th Century in Great Britain: namely geopolitics. At the end of the 19th Century, when, due to the influence of Lincoln's economic advisor, Henry C. Carey, in changing the policy of Bismarck, Bismarck turned Germany, in a very few years, from a feudal country into a highly successful industrial power. Then, as a consequence of that industrial revolution in Germany, the Trans-Siberian Railroad was built in the 1890s; there was plan to have a railway from Berlin to Baghdad. And with the perspective of Eurasian development threatening the sea-dominance of the British Empire, but also of the United States, at that point, you had the emergence of geopolitics in Great Britain.
Geopolitics: Halford Mackinder, [Alfred Lord] Milner, later [Karl] Haushofer, developed the theory that whoever controls the "Eurasian heartland" brings the Atlantic rim countries to a disadvantage. And then they moved, step-by-step, to create something which can be only called "the chessboard," leading to World War I. And that geopolitical impulse is now clearly operating.
It is operating from the standpoint that the trans-Atlantic world is collapsing, while, despite all the problems which China, India, South Korea, Japan, and other countries have, the Pacific world is relatively moving in a much better direction. I'm not saying that these countries don't have problems, but if you compare the absolute determination in China to go for the economic transformation of undeveloped parts of its own country, into highly developed parts, China has made a gigantic economic development leap in the last 30, 40 years.
For example, China has still, despite the problems it has, growth rates of around 7-8%; it has a very successful high-technology program, especially in terms of energy production; it has the most advanced fusion program; it had a very successful landing on the Moon with the Jade Rabbit [rover], with the idea that China will explore and mine helium-3 for future fusion production on Earth. This Moon landing by China probably could not be replicated without gigantic efforts by anybody! Not by the European Union, ESA, nor by NASA, and therefore, the commitment of China to become the leading space nation by the year 2030 is a very credible proposition.
Also, look at countries like South Korea which has a pro-nuclear policy; look at Russia, which, for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has a positive demographic curve. Putin announced a couple of months ago, that for the first time since the end of the Soviet Union, the birth rate is higher than the death rate. That means that the genocide policy which was destroying Russia during the Yeltsin period, has been successfully conquered.
So it is very clear that this geopolitical impulse, to not allow the successful development of the Pacific world, at a point when the Atlantic world is going under, is an unspoken, but nevertheless very real factor in the situation.
Some Sanity in Germany
The good thing is that there is a huge debate in Europe, whereby, for the first time—I would say, in 69 years, since 1945—an impulse for sovereignty is emerging in Germany. When the U.S. and NATO and the British demanded sanctions against Russia, because of what happened in Crimea, practically all the representatives of industry came out and said this is absolutely to be rejected, because obviously sanctions would hurt German interests as much as Russia's. Therefore, they all came out—all kinds of industry associations, but also many CEOs of leading firms, such as Siemens and others; but also representatives of the entire political spectrum from the Linkspartei [Left Party] to the CSU [Christian Social Union], came out.
And there was a big discussion that the whole crisis was originated by the mistake of the West! Because the mistake was made at the time when the Soviet Union collapsed: Why not include Russia in all alliances? Why not include Russia in a missile-defense system? In a Customs Union? Why not pick up on Putin's proposal to have a joint economic space, from Vladivostok to Lisbon? Why not respond to the Russian proposal to have joint missile defense, maybe positioning it in southern Russia or in Azerbaijan, if the worry was Iranian missiles? And so, there is now the sense that this present crisis was not caused by Russia, but that it was caused by this capitulating to the idea to isolate Russia, and encircle it, instead of including it.
Then, there were also many discussions in the recent period, that it was a mistake of the EU to put the ultimatum to Ukraine, at the point of the signing of the EU Association Agreement, of including a military clause in that agreement, whereby the military of Ukraine would have been put under the control of NATO, immediately. And naturally, if you look at Ukraine, in the west, it's mostly Catholic and Western-oriented; in the east, it's mostly Orthodox and Russian-oriented. And therefore, to put an ultimatum to Ukraine that it should decide either/or, is now recognized as a big mistake.
Then, you had a poll in Germany, published last weekend, which said, first of all, that 80% of the German people do not trust Russia, but 59% do not trust the United States; 49% believe that there should be an equal distance between Russia and the West, and only 41% believe that Germany should be firmly in the West.
So this caused a huge freakout: For example, there was a scribbler with the name Jan Techau, the European director of the Carnegie Endowment, who wrote a completely unnerved piece, saying, this is an outrage; Germany is having second thoughts about becoming neutral; this is completely unacceptable, because if it were a small country somewhere on the fringes of Europe, it wouldn't matter, but Germany is big, it's strong, it's sitting geographically in the center of Europe, and this is completely untenable, and not to be allowed.
Now, I do not think that Mrs. [Chancellor Angela] Merkel is going in the direction of neutrality. Mr. [Wolfgang] Schäuble, the unfortunate Finance Minister of Germany, came out with this ridiculous comparison of Hitler and Putin; our new Defense Minister, Ursula von der Leyen, is talking a lot, and very fast, but she doesn't mix this talking with a lot of thought, so she is now calling for a high presence of NATO in Poland, and so forth. So that is obviously still there.
But there is a huge discrepancy between what this government is saying, and the tendency in the population. We know that, because we are politically organizing every day in the streets, as part of the election campaign; and especially in eastern Germany, we have now many, many people who are coming on their own to our info-table, and saying, "We do not agree with the mainstream gleichgeschaltet media—like during the times of Goebbels, when all the papers would write the same thing—and the people oppose the campaign against Putin, and say, this is completely unjust; it's demonization, which has only one purpose, to prepare for a future war. And people in Germany do not want war again. We had two world wars on our territory, and there is a tremendous desire not to make that mistake one more time.
The Eurasian Land-Bridge
So therefore, the situation is very, very interesting, because our policy—and I think we discussed this here in previous luncheons—our response to the collapse of the Soviet Union, was to propose the so-called Eurasian Land-Bridge. When the Iron Curtain had disappeared in 1991, we said, we have to connect the population- and industry-centers of Europe with those of Asia, through so-called "development corridors." And we immediately published, in January 1990, the first report proposing that the old infrastructure connections between Europe and Asia, the Trans-Siberian Railway, the old Silk Road, and then, other branches spreading out from these main lines, should connect all of Eurasia through a network of infrastructure corridors, 100 km wide, to include not only high-speed trains, maglev, waterways, canalization, computerized main stations, but also energy production and distribution, and communications; and in that way, create the conditions for investment in the landlocked areas of Asia.
So it was the idea to continue the natural process of evolution of mankind, conquering the landlocked areas of this planet, through development. And for a very long time, we were like criers in the desert; people said, "Oh, this is a utopian idea, who should finance this? This will never happen." But we held, in the last 24 years, about 100 conferences, seminars, in major European and American cities. I was invited as a guest speaker in 1996, at a big conference in Beijing, on the development of the Eurasian Land-Bridge. And a lot of things happened to prevent that from developing as quickly as possible: You had the Asia crisis of 1997; you had the Russian GKO crisis in '98; a lot of things happened to slow down this process.
But now, it is on the table! Chinese President Xi Jinping, in September, announced at a big conference in Kazakhstan, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting, that the new policy of China, is the building of the New Silk Road into Central Asia.
We were extremely happy, as you can imagine. We said, "Oh, this is our policy, what we proposed, or we have been campaigning for and working on, for the last quarter of a century." And subsequently, President Xi visited four European countries, especially in France and Germany; in France, he made a beautiful intervention, and concluded economic deals for EU25 billion.
Then he proceeded to go to Germany, where a strategic partnership was established between Germany and China. And he made a speech which absolutely caught the spirit and the soul of the German people, because he said: What unites Germany and China is that we are the two poles of the world economy. We are both countries which have successfully made an economic miracle, referring to the change of China after the Deng Xiaoping reforms, and the German economic miracle, rebuilding Germany in the postwar period from a rubble field, into the famous German economic miracle. So these two poles must work together: building the New Silk Road, and especially, the great spirit of the German Classical culture must play a big role. And he referred to Lessing, Heine, Schiller, to the music from Bach to Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms; and he said that he, all the time, is overwhelmed by the power of these Classical ideas and their beauty.
So therefore, if you look at it now, what is the position of Germany? If Germany capitulates to the war drive of NATO, and to the escalation against Russia, Germany would be the playground for World War III. And there is right now a recognition: Why is the United States modernizing the nuclear weapons stations in Germany, when it was the explicit policy of President Obama to promise that he would reduce the role of nuclear weapons? Why modernize tactical nuclear weapons, the B61-12? We looked into this matter: It fits into the already-mentioned first-strike doctrines by having nuclear weapons more deployable, by making them more accurate, by making them less easy to detect, and other modern aspects.
So there is right now, a clear understanding that Germany should not go in this direction, but that there is an alternative, namely the strategic partnership between Germany and China could become the model for the Eurasian economic space, from Lisbon to Vladivostok. And why not really understand: What do we have to gain if we continue on the course of encirclement, which can only lead to total destruction? Why not recognize that NATO, de facto, has lost its raison d'être? Why not go back to the point when the mistake was made, namely in 1991? In '91, we had a clear, historic point of decision, to end the Cold War, to end confrontation, to end the thinking in terms of military blocs, and to go for cooperation of sovereign republics among nations in the world, and thereby establish a peace order for the 21st Century.
Now that this mistake was made—the eastward expansion of NATO, and this regime-change policy against Saddam Hussein, against Qaddafi, attempted against Assad—now happened in Ukraine. If you look at what the consequences of these policies were, you have a long, long track of destruction. These policies have not helped the interests of the United States. There are former diplomats who made speeches here in Washington, making the argument that even from a narrow American interest, these policies of regime-change have done the opposite! They hurt American interests! Look at the situation in Iraq: Iraq is today a hell, a total hellhole, bombed back to the Stone Age, religious war between Shi'ites and Sunnis, misery of the people.
Look at what happened in Libya: Libya, which may not have been the perfect democracy under Qaddafi, is now a hellhole of tribal warfare, total destruction, spread of terrorism. The same in Syria. The beautiful country of Syria is now a hellhole! All the historic buildings—obviously, the human beings are more valuable—but destruction after destruction.
Look at Afghanistan: Thirteen years of war of NATO in Afghanistan—a complete waste! And if you then think about the fact that the premise of the Afghanistan War, evoking Article 5 of NATO,[3] may all have been very dubious, because if the Sept. 11 question was not the way it was presented, maybe the whole Afghanistan War was based on a lie, and must be questioned. In any case, it has been a complete failure, and the only result was that, in the 13 years of NATO war in Afghanistan, opium production has increase 40 times, leading to 1 million dead people! This was the figure presented by Viktor Ivanov, the Russian anti-drug chief, just a couple of weeks ago.
Shut Down Wall Street
I'm just ending here, because I want to make the point: We have now two roads to go. One is a continuation of something which is an utterly failed policy, the NATO expansion to the borders of Russia, encirclement of China, changing all regimes which are not submitting to this idea of a global empire, which has led to a hell. It has led to the emergence of new fascism; there is right now the emergence of true Nazi movements, in Ukraine, in Greece, in Romania, in Hungary, in Holland, in France, in Germany—and the EU has been condoning this.
So I think this policy is really something which should be questioned, and the alternative should be taken, which is quite feasible: We have to close down Wall Street. I don't know if people appreciate this, but on the plane right here, from Germany, I watched this movie "Wolf of Wall Street." This movie has been criticized that it's too excessive because it shows the various habits of these brokers. But I think the basic artistic message of that movie gets across very well: namely, that Wall Street, and by that token, the City of London, are completely useless, parasitical entities, looting the population, looting the poor for the advantage of the 1%, or less, of the very rich, and thereby destroying the real economy, destroying any kind of human civilization. And therefore, Mr. LaRouche has made emphatically the point that we must close down Wall Street. Because the war danger comes from this high-risk speculation and the effort to keep that system going.
We have proposed to close down Wall Street, through Glass-Steagall, the reintroduction of the separation of the banks, as it was done by Franklin D. Roosevelt. And then replace the present monetary system, through a credit system, in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton, by creating national banks in all countries, and then issuing credit lines for large-scale, long-term economic development.
In the meantime, that is, in the last 24 years, we have enlarged the idea of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, to become a World Land-Bridge, involving all of the globe, from the Southern tip of Chile, bringing development corridors up Latin America to Central America, building NAWAPA, the North American water-management project for the United States, which is right now super-urgent, because Texas and California, have the worst drought in 500 years.
What is threatening there is not just a drought, but the complete, irreversible destruction of Texas and California, through desertification, which could only be reversed by having large-scale water-management projects like NAWAPA; then combining that with the building of a rail tunnel under the Bering Strait, developing the Arctic coast of Siberia, developing the whole Eurasian Land-Bridge, which is not just development corridors, but it has many, many sub-projects, like the development of the Mekong River Delta, the Tyumen region, the Kra Canal, the re-diversion of water systems, like the Siberian Rivers Ob and Irtush, to irrigate the Aral Sea, and use that for irrigation for all of Central Asia.
To include water management into the Silk Road project, and then spread that throughout the whole region from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf, take that whole region as one, extend the Eurasian Land-Bridge, and therefore, create an incentive to stop terrorism and drug production, and extend that then, through the Strait of Gibraltar, through a bridge or tunnel from Sicily to Tunisia, and through an extension of the Eurasian Land-Bridge to Egypt, and develop all of Africa.
This is always in reach. We can do it! And in a certain sense we have reached an absolute point of decision of civilization: We end Empire, and the idea of the domination of small, privileged elites over a mass of poor and backward people; and we go in a completely different direction and create a world livable for all human beings on this planet.
Toward a New Renaissance
I think that if you think about the great traditions of European civilization, of which America is a part—for example, take Leibniz: Leibniz, who was the author of a very important idea of the Declaration of Independence, namely, that the inalienable right of all people is the right of life, of liberty, and happiness. And this notion of "happiness," that this is an inalienable right of all people is an idea which has been forgotten! If you think about this word, how unnecessary misery exists in Africa! Among the thousands of people who are fleeing by boat every week, trying to get to Europe, knowing that 50% of them are going to drown! Taking that risk despite the fact, that they have only half a chance to survive, they take the risk to flee from hunger, war, disease. Or take the hellhole of the whole larger Middle East region, look at the hellhole many parts of the world have become, especially for the young people in Europe and in the United States.
The youth culture is the best mirror of how this culture of globalization has completely failed; that we must go back to the noble ideas of the German Classical period, of the American Revolution, and of Leibniz's idea that the pursuit of happiness is a human right for all human beings. And how easy it would be to eliminate world hunger: I can assure you, if Mr. LaRouche were President of the United States, world hunger would vanish in half a year. Because technically, it would be very easy to stop it. And in five years, in ten years, we would have overcome most of poverty in the world, and we could start treating our planet as a garden, as a beautiful garden, with lush vegetation, with new cities, a place habitable for human beings.
And I know that all we need right now is a vision of what the world should look like 50 years from now, and how we can transform this poor, tortured globe, from a wretched condition, into something which will be a new Renaissance, based on the ideas of the greatest artists and scientists of all cultures, of all times. And if we go in this direction, I think we have only seen the very beginning of what mankind can become.
So, these are the alternatives, and I think we need all human beings of decent spirit and good soul to work together to accomplish that second result.
[1] See Helga Zepp-LaRouche, "Will Plot Against Ukraine Lead to Coup, Civil Waror World War III?," EIR, Feb. 14, 2014.
[2] "The New Era of Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence, and Conflict," Strategic Studies Quarterly, Spring 2013.
[3] Article 5 provides for collective defense of all NATO allies; that if a NATO ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this as an armed attack against all members, and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the ally attacked.
