HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE
A Life or Death Choice
Between Two Systems
Zepp-LaRouche gave this video-address to a seminar of the LaRouche movement in Mexico City, on Nov. 20 titled "A Life or Death Choice Between Two Systems: The BRICS and the Scientific-Economic Revolution That Will Change the World." The video is available on the LaRouche PAC website. The video dubbed in Spanish is on the EIR Spanish webpage.
Hello. I'm very happy to send you my greetings this way, and not only to you in Mexico, but also to the people watching and listening in Argentina, in Chile, in Colombia, in Peru, in Guatemala, in Spain, and probably many other countries.
We are right now as a civilization at a crossroads, where the future fate of mankind is completely open. We still could end up in a global world war, which would lead to the extinction of civilization. That danger is still very acute, and it is there. But the reason why I'm nevertheless extremely optimistic, is that there is a chance to avoid that, and not only to avoid it, but to begin a new era of civilization, something completely different, much more in coherence with the dignity of man, and that has to do with the developments of the BRICS countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa], and many countries which have joined that combination of nations.
Right now, it is extremely dangerous, because of the provocations by President Poroshenko in Ukraine to not only cut the population of east Ukraine off from humanitarian aid, schools, pensions, funding of hospitals, in a clear effort to provoke Russia to respond, and then entangle Russia into a war, possibly with NATO; Poroshenko even said it explicitly—that a war with Russia is not to be excluded.
I think the only answer to that should be that the international community must come out and denounce what Poroshenko is doing—Poroshenko, who came to power through a coup in Kiev, which had the help of many Nazis, and his government is riddled with Nazis to the present day. And that was the result of a long-term manipulation, by the British, by the United States, by NATO, by the EU, and unfortunately also, by the German government.
So I think the only answer can be that the international community denounces what Poroshenko is doing; and absolutely should stop the sanctions against Russia, because they were all based on lies, and blatant provocations, and therefore any country, especially in Europe, which wants to survive, should stop this policy and look at the perspective which exists for everybody else, in the form of the BRICS countries.
The World Has Changed
The world, fortunately, has changed, and the power combination is no longer what it used to be, as far back as four months ago. It started, really, more than a year ago, when Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the New Silk Road: That was the idea to combine the ancient trade routes between China and Europe through Central Asia. And this alone was already a very fantastic perspective, because the ancient Silk Road connected not only countries and nations, but at the time, it meant to overcome tremendous challenges of the desert, of the seas, and it led to a big leap forward in the evolution and development of civilization at that time. And today, it would mean even more, which I will talk about as I go along.
Then, the next step was that Xi Jinping, in November of last year, added to that, the conception of the Maritime Silk Road, which again, was the idea to combine all the countries of the Pacific, and increase trade through building of ports and sea routes, and integrate all of South Asia and Southeast Asia much, much more.
Then, the next, very big step in the evolution of the new system, was the summit which took place in May between Russian President Putin and Xi Jinping in Shanghai, where they concluded about 48 major economic cooperation agreements, and the famous 30-year gas deal, which was already a major, major event, because it meant that from then on, Russia and China were bound in a strategic partnership, which is there to stay.
Then, the next really qualitative step, occurred when the BRICS countries met in July in Fortaleza in Brazil, where they concluded major deals, and especially, they decided to build a new financial institution, the New Development Bank, a bank entirely devoted to the financing of projects, and no longer to speculation; and they also created the Contingency Reserve Arrangement, the CRA. Both of these institutions start with $100 billion funding, and the CRA is supposed to defend all countries participating in it, against speculative attacks from the vulture funds, from the hedge funds, and similar institutions.
On the occasion of that BRICS conference, Xi, on the 16th of July, summarized the spirit of this effort. He said,
"History teaches us that the law of the jungle is not the pathway for the coexistence of humanity. All nations should follow the same principle of trust, learning from each other, work together in collaboration to the common advantage, and create a harmonious world, lasting peace, for the general welfare."
Now, Western countries have a very hard time to imagine that there is a group of nations whose leaders are actually, really working for the common good. However, in history, that idea has a philosophical tradition in the works of Nicholas of Cusa, the great thinker of the 15th Century, the founder of the modern nation-state, and of modern science, who had this idea that concordance in the universe, on the planet, can only be possible if all microcosms develop harmoniously to one macrocosm.
If you apply that to the nations, there can be only peace on the planet, if all nations have the maximum potential development, and take it as their interest to develop the other nations in the best possible way and vice versa. And that idea, by the way, went into the Peace of Westphalia, which ended 150 years of religious war in 1648, and that really was also the basis of international law and the UN Charter.
Many Projects
So that idea is today the guiding principle of the BRICS countries. What has erupted in that spirit is an enormous number of projects. After the BRICS conference, there was also a meeting between the heads of state of the BRICS with the UNASUR [Union of South American Nations] heads of state, and the leaders of CELAC [Community of Latin American and Caribbean States], and they all have agreed on such a number of projects, that if they are all implemented—and that has already started—it will transform all of Latin America completely in a few years.
For example: There is nuclear cooperation among many countries—China, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, India, Bolivia, and many others. There is the building of a second Panama Canal through Nicaragua with the help of the Chinese. Also China is helping to build a transcontinental railway in all of Latin America, starting with a railroad from Brazil to Peru.
And essentially, what has happened with this geometry is that enormous optimism erupted, and that countries who were trying to build projects for decades, and who were not allowed to do so because of the IMF conditionalities, now are proceeding, with the help of the BRICS, with the help of the new financial institutions which are being built. So this is a completely new phase in the history of civilization.
And that has taken another big jump forward in the last three weeks, because three weeks ago, there were the midterm elections in the United States which led to a smashing defeat of Obama. And that, in a certain sense, while it has not solved the problem of the United States—because now you have the even-more problematic Republicans, who are taking over both Houses of Congress in January—means there is something going on in the United States, as well. However, that defeat of Obama has also, in a certain sense, symbolized the downfall of the United States, and also the shrinking of Europe, which is sort of a colony of the present Washington government.
That became very clear at the recently concluded APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] meeting in Beijing. The Europeans were not there—but in the following G20 meeting in Australia, also the Europeans were really sidelined, because they have really nothing to offer. The Europeans and the United States have a system which is based entirely on monetarism, and that system has been denounced, by the way, by Pope Francis, who has said that this economic system, you have to apply the Fifth Commandment, "Thou shall not kill," to that economic system, because it does kill.
As a matter of fact, this system, which is entirely built on profit, and has only enriched a few, while impoverishing the many, has been a system where now 85 individuals on the planet have as much wealth as 3.5 billion people! Now, Pope Francis also basically said that a system which has only the aim of profit should really be changed, and that was his message to the G20 meeting.
At the APEC meeting, it was very clear that that dying monetarist system is on the way down. It was the original intention of President Obama to not even allow the Chinese Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [AIIB], or the Silk Road to be discussed at the APEC meeting! But in the seven days leading up to the summit of the APEC Leaders, the dynamic completely changed. Xi Jinping, step by step, presented the Chinese initiatives—the New Silk Road—really, what it means is that China has undergone the largest development of any country on the planet in the last 30 years; it has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, and China, in these 30 years, has gone a long way.
In the beginning, China made some mistakes by using cheap labor to produce for export for the United States and Europe, but step by step, it has overcome that. And also, the period when China was only copying from other countries—everybody who has ever made an industrial revolution, copied from other countries, including the United States; I would say they are doing it still today, with the NSA spying, which European industrialists, for example, are very upset about. So people shouldn't make too much fuss about copying. But China has successfully also left that period behind, because now it is based on an innovation-based society and industry, and in many areas, it is the leader in the world.
So that was presented by Xi Jinping, and also the New Silk Road development fund, which China is financing with $40 billion, and at the following ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] meeting, it was announced that it will spend $20 billion in getting the Maritime Silk Road off the ground.
A Tremendous Optimism
So there is a tremendous optimism, and that led to a situation where all the other countries sort of flocked to China; and the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific, the FTAAP, was the dominant free-trade model, and even Obama, when he made his speech [at the APEC CEO Summit], said the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was originally intended to exclude China, would be only the stepping-stone to the more inclusive Chinese model.
China therefore has taken leadership, and it has taken leadership not only in all these economic infrastructure initiatives, but it also has taken leadership in the space program. China made a tremendous breakthrough with its lunar mission last December, the Yutu landing on the Moon, and it has accelerated further missions since, with the idea to very soon bring materials back from the Moon to Earth, like mining helium-3, and then using that for a fusion economy on the planet Earth. That is a fantastic perspective, because once we can use helium-3 for fusion processes on the planet Earth, that means that mankind will be able to have energy security, raw materials security, and we will completely get out of the perspective of quarrelling over supposedly scarce resources.
In the recent agreements between Russia and China, Russia and India, they also all agreed to collaborate in space, where there was the sensational breakthrough India had, with its first Mars orbiter. India, in that way, became the first nation to have an object orbiting Mars on the first effort, and at about 10% of the cost an equivalent project of NASA had cost at the time.
The only positive development coming from Europe in the recent period, has been the magnificent breakthrough of the Rosetta and the Philae lander, landing on the comet "Chury" [67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko], which is a program which took ten years; and Rosetta had to travel 7.1 billion kilometers to arrive at this comet, where the aim is to find out about the origins of the universe, about the evolution of life and similar questions.
Why are these space breakthroughs so exciting? First of all, they are a complete refutation of the lies and insanity of the ecology movement and their oligarchical masters, like the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, Prince Philip, and the British Empire in general, who all have claimed that we are living in a closed system with scarce resources, and therefore "sustainable development" is the only way mankind can live. Now that obviously is a complete lie, because we are not living in a closed system; we are living in an anti-entropic, developing universe, with completely different principles.
The great German-American scientist and rocket specialist Krafft Ehricke developed this idea of space colonization as the next phase in the evolution of mankind.[1] He had the idea that, originally, in the evolution of the universe, life developed out of the oceans with the help of photosynthesis, to the continents, and then developed species with ever-higher energy-flux density in their metabolism; and then, when the human being arrived, these human beings developed very quickly by being first settled along the oceans and rivers, then eventually developing infrastructure, canals, etc.
Charlemagne was the first one to really propose the building of canals between railroad, that infrastructure was conquering railroad, that infrastructure was conquering more and more of the continents' inner development. And with the new perspective of the New Silk Road, which, by the way, we proposed, when the Soviet Union collapsed, first in the form of the Productive Triangle, and then after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, we proposed a New Silk Road to connect the European industrial and population centers with those of Asia, and we called it the New Silk Road Eurasian Land-Bridge.
Space Colonization
This is now on the agenda, and when that project is built, it will be a World Land-Bridge, which will bring prosperity to all corners of the world, and it will overcome the under-development of all landlocked areas which still exist in the different continents.
But then, that phase of evolution will be concluded, and then, the natural next phase of evolution is to build and extend the infrastructure into nearby space. Another word for that is space colonization and space development.
In a certain sense, like the ancient Silk Road, the New Silk Road will also exchange the most advanced technologies. In the time of the ancient Silk Road, it was silk production, papermaking, gunpowder, porcelain technologies; today, it will be the exchange of nuclear energy, fusion technology, space research and travel. And the whole world, the whole planet, will transform to become more and more a knowledge-based economy.
And then, everybody can see that the fantastic conception of Vladimir Vernadsky is absolutely provable: namely, that there is a fundamental difference between human beings and animals, that mankind is the only species capable of, again and again, discovering things which are completely new, which nobody even could think about before, which nobody did before. And that is a process where we are really now at a crossroads of really taking off.
Just think: The last 10,000 years of human history, since the last Ice Age—10,000 years is a very short period of time if you compare it with the age of the universe at large. But the development which took place in these 10,000 years is just absolutely enormous. For example, an object of the size of what used to be a hand axe or a biface [a Stone Age hand axe or cutting tool], today, has the size of a smart phone; and with that smart phone you can do all kinds of things. You can have international video conferences, you can do research, you can do enormous things.
Just think: From the hand axe to the smart phone, the same size of an object, but how much technology has gone into that? And now think, if we keep doing this kind of development, where will mankind be in 100 years from now? In 1,000 years? In 10,000 years? That makes it obvious that Vernadsky's conception, that the evolution of the universe from the inorganic to the biological sphere, to the noösphere, is developing in such a way that the noösphere will become more and more dominant over the biosphere, and that human creativity is going to be what will dominate and be prevalent in the entire universe.
Therefore, we have to define the present from the standpoint of the future, because we already can see now what mankind will be capable of in the coming hundreds and thousands of years, and that we are still in the embryonic phase of civilization, and that we must become adults now.
A New Renaissance
It is also clear that this new world economic order, which is emerging very, very quickly, with China, Russia, India, and the other BRICS countries at the center, absolutely must be combined with a new cultural renaissance and the aesthetical education of man. It is based on an image of man, such that each human being, each new baby that is born on this planet, has the potential to become a genius. Not a genius in the form of a person who's just doing strange things, but a genius who is a beautiful soul, a person for whom, according to Friedrich Schiller, passion and duty, freedom and necessity, are the same thing, because there will be no contradiction any more between a person doing joyfully what contributes to the future development of mankind, and what he likes to do! He will not do his duty as a task which he doesn't like, but he will find his or her identity in creativity, and that will become the identity of the entirety of mankind.
That is why we put so much emphasis on Classical culture, because when we reject the dying monetarist system, we should also reject the terrible pop culture which goes along with globalization, which tends to turn human beings into beasts, or at least into stupid morons.
What we have to do instead, is we have to revive the best traditions in culture of each nation. For example, China has a wonderful ancient history of 5,000 years, and 2,500 years of Confucianism, and that philosophy is presently guiding the policies of Xi Jinping—I have absolutely no doubt that that is the case.
India: India has an equally long tradition, and is also one of the cradles of civilization. It has a very rich philosophical history of the Vedic tradition, the Upanishads, the beautiful drama writing in the Gupta period, the wonderful Indian Renaissance which lasted from the end of the 19th, to the beginning of the 20th Century, and produced such fantastic poets as Rabindranath Tagore.
You have Russia, which has extraordinary poets like Pushkin, scientists like Mendeleyev and Vernadsky. In Spain, we have Cervantes, Goya; in Italy, Dante, Brunelleschi, Leonardo. In Germany, we have the wonderful ideas and traditions of Nicholas of Cusa, Kepler, Bach, Beethoven, Schiller.
And we have to revive all of these high phases in our cultures, and then have a dialogue of civilizations, where each of us, each nation, relates to the highest expression of the other. And that way, we can create a new Renaissance, which goes even beyond what existed so far. And then we will have a completely new paradigm of civilization, and the beginning of that is already happening.
That it is why I am absolutely certain that there is also hope for Mexico. Despite the terrible perils and degeneration which we have seen in the last over 30 years since the time of [Mexican President José] López Portillo, where drugs, kidnapping, crime have really taken over much of life in Mexico. However, because there are very positive developments in Central and South America, they can help to influence from the outside, what is occurring in Mexico right now. And therefore, we can be hopeful that through a combination of help from the outside, and strong leadership from inside Mexico, an early redirection of developments can occur.
Don't focus on the United States right now. The United States has to sort itself out, itself; and you know, there are forces who are really trying very hard to change the direction of the United States.
What you should do, is focus on South America—on Brazil, on Cuba—because when Lyn [LaRouche], 32 years ago, worked together with López Portillo on Operation Juárez, that idea, which was very much like what is happening right now, despite the fact that López Portillo started to implement it, but could not succeed, because at that time, the governments of Brazil and Argentina did not support López Portillo.
Today, you have a different dynamic, because right now, the government of Brazil—it's part of the BRICS—and Argentina, and I'm convinced that the way things are going now, Argentina will very soon join the BRICS. So therefore, you have a completely different dynamic in all of Latin America. And also look at what Cuba does: Cuba is a very small country; it has not so many inhabitants, but right now, it is providing magnificent leadership in the fight against Ebola, which puts larger and richer countries to shame, because Cuba has moved [into Africa] with medical supplies and all kinds of medical help, when nobody else did it, and this is really a leadership by Cuba which should be taken as a model.
At a Crossroads
Now, we are working hard—when I say, "we," I mean the LaRouche movement—we are working very hard to change the United States from the inside. And there are, both in the Democratic Party, and even in the Republican Party, people who recognize that there is no good reason why the United States should not cooperate with the BRICS, and given the fact that Obama has lost [in the midterm elections—ed.], and that there are big upheavals right now occurring because of the collapse of the U.S. economy, and the drought in the U.S. Southwest, changes can come very quickly. But we also work with European countries to get them to join.
At the final press conference between Xi Jinping and Obama in Beijing, Xi told Obama: I invite the United States to join the BRICS, to join the New Silk Road, to join the New Silk Road development fund, and this is also open to every other country which wants to participate.
And we are going to change Europe, get Europe to stop the confrontation with Russia, stop the sanctions, which are ruining Europe much more than they are Russia; because for Russia, it's almost a blessing in disguise, forcing more close ties among Russia, China, India, and all other countries of the BRICS and Asia; while the German industry, the French and Italian industry, are collapsing as a result of this totally immoral and wrong policy.
So we are right now at a crossroads: The evil system of the British Empire, of Wall Street, of London, exists still. But in reality, they are finished already. It is only a question of whether they will be able to pull the world down with them, in a catastrophe, or not. But there is the optimistic perspective, that with the new power center, centering on Russia, China, and India, and in a larger context, the BRICS countries and those countries which are now associating with the BRICS, the majority of mankind is already building a new world economic order.
And so there is every reason for optimism. And therefore, I want to conclude with a line from Schiller's poem, "Ode to Joy," which was the basis for the composition of the Ninth Symphony by Beethoven: "All men will become brethren." There is only one mankind.
[1] See, Marsha Freeman, "Krafft Ehricke, Space Pioneer," EIR, Aug. 26, 2011—ed.
