HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE
To Stop War, Join the BRICS
Mass Movement for Development
Helga Zepp-LaRouche is the founder of the International Schiller Institutes. She gave this speech by video conference to an Institute meeting in Houston, Tex., on Feb. 28.
Good afternoon. We do need in the United States, and also in Europe, a mass movement for development, and a mass movement to join the very optimistic new world economic order that is developing among the BRICS countries—that’s Russia, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, but these countries have been joined by most of the Latin American countries, many of the Asian, and even some of the African countries, in a completely new economic system.
But before I can come to this optimistic perspective, I have to tell you that the idea of joining the BRICS countries, and the other countries which are actually very speedily constructing a new world economic order, is not an optional thing, but it is the question of the very survival of the United States, and also the world at large. Because right now we are closer to the potential of an outbreak of World War III than most people have any inkling of, and that is actually one of the most dangerous points: that people are sort of sleepwalking, that the dark clouds which could be very quickly turning into thermonuclear clouds, or one big thermonuclear cloud—they’re not awake to it. And that is what we have to discuss first.
So, what I want to tell you probably will be scary, or new, for many of you, but that is the reality.
A Buildup Toward War
You probably have heard that yesterday, one of the critics of President Putin, Boris Nemtsov, former deputy prime minister during the Presidency of Boris Yeltsin, was assassinated, with seven shots, in Moscow. And naturally, without any evidence, immediately the international media ganged up, and said, “Naturally, it had to be Putin, to silence one of his critics.”
Now, first of all, I don’t think Putin is that stupid, that he would do such an obvious thing. Secondly, the activities of Mr. Nemtsov have not in the slightest reduced the 85% popularity of Putin. As a matter of fact, there are reports that there is only 2% of the population in Russia against Putin; 85% are openly for him, and the remaining 13% or so criticize him that he is not harsh enough against the West—they criticize not from the standpoint of the Western criteria, but the other way around.
Now, why would such an event occur? It could very well be a false flag operation, something which is pinned on Putin, in order to mobilize the non-existent resistance, because tomorrow was supposed to be a big demonstration in Moscow, whereas everybody knew it would fizzle out—it would be very small. But obviously, such an assassination could be aimed to fuel the protests, and to bring a so-called Maidan demonstration into Moscow.
Why is that a sign of the closeness of a potential World War III?
You have to see it as a pattern of similar events which occurred in the last period. You had, for example, the extremely influential British establishment figure Malcolm Rifkind, and the former minister Jack Straw, also British, who were watergated practically overnight (Rifkind was ousted from a very influential position in the British Parliament), because they had opposed the confrontation against Russia. They were set up with a sting operation, there was a trial by media, and out they went.
You have similar destabilizations against President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina, which fortunately seems to be failing; against President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, and many similar operations. And all of that is like a streamlining, eliminating the opposition against a confrontation against Russia.
Now, why do I say that we have a situation which could very quickly turn into a hot war?
First of all, James Clapper, the head of the U.S. National Intelligence, came out two days ago and demanded that the United States start arming the Ukrainian military, while everybody knows that Russia has said that they will not allow that—that the idea of the U.S. arming the Ukrainian military is a red line, after which, if it is crossed, they will have some kind of a response. They didn’t say what.
Also, Ukrainian President Poroshenko was in Abu Dhabi, where he bought weapons from a big weapons fair. Abu Dhabi is not known to be a big producer of weapons, but they are a sales agency for American weapons.
Now, William Polk, who was one of the three advisors of President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, just came out and said, what is happening in Ukraine is like a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. The only difference is, when this crisis occurred in 1962, between Kennedy and Khrushchov, and when Russian nuclear bombs were put on the island of Cuba, at that time everybody knew that if thermonuclear weapons would be used, it would lead to the annihilation of mankind.
And today, nobody is even thinking about it.
People may remember, that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy said, if nuclear weapons are ever used, those people who die in the first hours will be happy, as compared to those who die a few weeks later in a nuclear Winter, dying of starvation, because all plant and animals life will be eliminated.
So, there is a clear change, because nowadays, you have people—and this is the doctrine of the United States right now—who have the illusion that you can win a first strike against the nuclear capabilities of Russia and China.
In the recent period, a lot of people have spoken about it. They’re not yet mainstream, but there are some voices. The first, obviously, was Lyndon LaRouche, who, after the military attack against Libya in 2011, and the absolutely brutal murder of Qaddafi, said this only makes sense if this is a drive to World War III. And Mr. LaRouche is famous, that not only had he the right economic analysis many, many times, but also that he has a unique capability to give a new historical development a name, to give it a sort of a notion—and later people say, “Ah ha, that is what it was.”
So, when he identified the murder of Qaddafi as a trend quickly going toward regime change—before that, there was Iraq, Afghanistan, then the attempt in Syria, the attempt in Ukraine, which happened a little bit later—that was very clearly a recognition that we had entered a phase of confrontation with the danger of leading to World War III.
Right now, if you look at the entire nuclear arsenal of the world, there are in existence 16,400 nuclear warheads. Ninety-four percent of those warheads are either in the possession of the United States or of Russia, and both of these arsenals are in a condition of highest alert, because of the crisis in Ukraine. Also, the United States recently announced that it will modernize its entire nuclear arsenal, although President Obama in 2008, during the election campaign, one of his big promises was that he would reduce the nuclear weapons around the world. Now they will modernize these nuclear warheads, and delivery systems via ship, submarines, missiles, planes—at a cost of $1 trillion in the next period.
This is a point of utmost danger, and the situation in Ukraine is getting out of control; and there was the effort by the Presidents of France, Germany, Ukraine, and Russia to try to conclude the so-called Minsk II agreement, which is sort of halfway being implemented. But completely independent of that, the United States keeps moving with the push to arm the Ukrainian military with weapons, to push more NATO posts into the Baltic States, to move more troops along the Russian border, and all of this is really going with breathtaking speed.
Who Is To Blame?
How could we come to this point? Is it Putin who is the warmonger? Well, I must tell you, absolutely not. Because you have to go back to the point of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which I want to review very quickly, because people tend to forget—and after all, this is only a quarter-century ago.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, relatively peacefully—because it could have also led to more aggression and military occurrences—you had at that point the chance for a peace order for the 21st Century. After all, communism had disappeared—at least the Soviet version of it. You could have integrated Russia into new alliances, and the Schiller Institute and the LaRouche movement presented such a plan, in the form of a proposal to build a Eurasian Land-Bridge, to connect Europe and Asia through infrastructure corridors, and we called that the New Silk Road.
Now, unfortunately that idea, which was totally acceptable to many forces in the world, was rejected by the United States—the Bush Administration (Bush Sr.) and his neo-cons, in alliance with Margaret Thatcher. And these people instead said, okay, now we have no second superpower; we are the only superpower left. And therefore, we declare the Project for a New American Century doctrine. And what that really means is, we can try to establish a world empire based on the special relationship between Great Britain and the United States, and then we will run the world together, and kick out every government around the globe which resists that.
That effort was usually called globalization: the idea that you could have, from now on, an unrestricted free-market economy; that you would deregulate all remaining regulations in the banking sector, and change the whole financial system in such a way that high-risk speculation would make the rich more rich, while impoverishing the majority of the population of the globe. But who cares? There was no longer anybody who could resist that.
Naturally, there was the idea to get rid of the governments that would be obstacles, through regime change. The first such effort was made against Saddam Hussein, in the first Gulf War. This was then stopped when Clinton came in for eight years, but it continued with Bush, Jr., for two administrations, and then the six and a half years of Obama.
The idea was to have regime change, to have color revolutions, to finance NGOs to recruit people who would make propaganda for these goals. And Victoria Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, admitted, that in the case of Ukraine, the State Department spent $5 billion to recruit 2,200 NGOs in Ukraine, and basically make propaganda against the alliance with Russia. And this led in 2004 to the so-called Orange Revolution, which brought in Yulia Tymoshenko, who subsequently had to leave office because of utter incompetence.
A similar thing was done in Georgia, with Saakashvili, the Rose Revolution; and it was later attempted in the Arab Spring. It was attempted in the so-called White Revolution against Russia [around Putin’s reelection as President, 2012—ed.], where this Boris Nemtsov played a leading role. It was attempted in Thailand; it is being attempted in Mexico; it is now being attempted in Brazil, in Argentina. And it is generally a method where you have asymmetric warfare, color revolution, which in the meantime, has been recognized by the Chinese and the Russian governments as being a real form of war, even if it is not fought with real weapons. Because it’s aimed at regime change by using large amounts of money.
At the same time, you had the expansion of the NATO borders, all the time farther toward the East, to the borders of Russia. It had been explicitly promised to Gorbachov at the time [of the reunification of Germany], and later to Yeltsin—also to German Chancellor Kohl and to Foreign Minister Genscher, that this would never happen.
Now, the official narrative is that such a promise was never given. But fortunately, the ambassador to Moscow at the time, Jack Matlock, a couple of weeks ago, gave a press briefing in the National Press Club in Washington, where he reiterated that, even if it was not in a written treaty, it was promised to the Russians that NATO would not take advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union.[1]
That promise was utterly broken, and every pretext was taken to include more East European countries in the NATO alliance, and that way, move the borders closer and closer to Russia, and encircle not only Russia, but try to do the same in China, in the Pacific, as well.
Escalation in Ukraine
The recent crisis was triggered one and a half years ago at Vilnius, at the EU summit, where the EU tried to incorporate Ukraine into an EU Association Agreement, which would have meant that European products would have immediately flooded, unrestrictedly, the Russian domestic market, and therefore it would have represented a form of economic warfare of the type which we now have in the sanctions, trying to destabilize Putin in such a way that he could be kicked out and replaced by some more pro-Western government. [Then-Ukraine President] Yanukovych didn’t go for that at the last moment, including because he recognized, as was also mentioned for example by the American thinktank Stratfor, that in that moment when Ukraine would have joined the EU Association Agreement, NATO would have had [enhanced] access through the Crimea to the Black Sea, and that would have made Russia indefensible.[2]
After Yanukovych rejected that agreement, in the next hours, you had demonstrators on the Maidan, which at first may have been innocent, normal citizens, but they were immediately taken over by these NGOs, but even worse, by Nazis. And there is no question that the Right Sector, the Svoboda organization, and several others are not only neo-Nazis, but they are full-fledged Nazis, in the tradition of Stepan Bandera, who was the leader in Ukraine in the 1940s who helped the Nazi occupation at that time.
The Bandera networks, the Ukrainian Nazis were never prosecuted, they were never put in front of a Nuremberg Tribunal, and the reason was, that immediately after the end of the war, the CIA, MI6, the [German] BND, started to take over these networks for the coming Cold War against the Soviet Union, and they were kept in a kind of controlled network, also in the West. They were part of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations organization, which was run out of London, and, in part, out of Munich; they were organized by Yaroslav Stetsko, and later his wife Slava Stetsko; these were people sitting in Munich and they started to recruit new people into this Bandera network, which later became Svoboda/Right Sector.
These were the people who basically then made the demonstration on the Maidan violent, and they were the ones who did the coup on Feb. 21, 2014, which then brought in the government of “Yats” [Arseniy Yatsenyuk], who was the darling of Victoria Nuland, and of Poroshenko. These Nazis are sitting in the government; they’re in the army; they’re partly controlled, partly not controlled. The Azov Battalion, are people who are complete Nazis!
And the big scandal is that, as the present Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany [Andriy] Melnyk just said on a German talk show, it’s much better for Ukraine to work with these Nazis, because without them, the Russians would have advanced much more. So they openly admit, 70 years after the end of World War II, that they have no problem to work with such Nazis.
A First-Strike Military Doctrine
Why is the West turning a blind eye to such operations? Because obviously, they have ulterior motives. At the same time that all this eastward expansion of NATO went on, the color revolutions, the regime-change policy, there was also a change of the military doctrine of NATO. Remember that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the only reason this could be stopped at the last moment was because there was an acceptance that the NATO military doctrine would be Mutually Assured Destruction, which was the idea that nobody in their right mind would ever use nuclear weapons, because nobody would survive it; it would lead to the extinction of mankind. And, you had, despite the Cuban Missile Crisis, direct communication between Khrushchov and Kennedy.
That no longer exists, on both accounts. Instead of Mutually Assured Destruction, you have right now a first strike doctrine—this is admitted; there is enough literature out there for you to verify what I’m saying. You have Prompt Global Strike; that’s the idea of a first strike, that it would be possible, through the modernization of cyberwar, to knock out the air defense of an opponent, that you could take out the second-strike capability of Russia and China. You also have a global missile defense system which has the same purpose; you have the Air-Sea Battle doctrine against China, which explicitly has the same idea. And a little while ago, the president of the Academy for Geopolitical Problems in Moscow, Dr. Konstantin Sivkov, said that also the modernization of the tactical nuclear weapons in Europe must be read as a possible preparation for a nuclear attack against Russia.
Why would you modernize tactical nuclear weapons sitting in Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Turkey? It does not make sense if you’re trying to maintain peace. But what is happening with this modernization, is that they’re transforming the fighter-bomber F16, the Tornado VBC, the F35 fighter, in such a way that they can carry nuclear bombs of the B61-12 class, which then will turn these five countries I just named into nuclear countries, which they had not been so far. There are several people who say that this is already a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Now, what is being created with that, is a completely new nuclear capacity with much more precise targeting. It’s kind of a use-for-all nuclear bomb and it has the idea—and this is what Mr. LaRouche has been discussing since the beginning of this week—that you can limit nuclear war, with these new weapons, in which cyberwar is playing a very big role, and with the ability of the NSA to not only surveil the whole world population, but to also take over even the computer hardware of your opponents and destroy all the systems which are run by this hardware, and even occupy private laptops, and do these operations from there under the cover of this so-called human shield.
This is all incredible, but that is the idea. And the idea is that this way, you can limit a nuclear war to Europe, to Russia, and to China, and spare the United States from a counterattack.
Now, this is absolute insanity! This is criminal, and I think somebody who is preparing a first strike falls under the Nuremberg criteria, which said that whoever is preparing a war of aggression is committing war crimes, and to prepare or even play with the idea of a first strike, in my view, at least needs to be investigated, if they are not such war criminals.
This is completely ludicrous, and if you look at recent articles that have been published by the American nuclear expert Theodore Postol, who wrote in both The Nation and in the Boston Globe recently, articles saying that the people who think this way, that you can win a first strike, make a fundamental error in confusing the fundamental difference between a conventional war and a nuclear war: that in the conventional war you will try to disarm your opponent, to destroy as much as possible of his military capability, and then the war is won, and then you stop and it’s over.
In a nuclear war, however, it is impossible to eliminate all nuclear weapons. Right now, the intention of the first strike is well-known, and the Russians have consequently moved a lot of their strategic weapons onto trains; they have ICBMs running throughout the large territory of Russia; they have put them on strategic submarines, as the Chinese have also done; there are silos, there are many, many ways of making sure that such weapons are not hit, and that in any case, the remaining nuclear capability will be enough to cause global nuclear war. But even if you would have only part of these nuclear weapons being used, the nuclear Winter which would follow would shortly eliminate all life on the planet, and therefore lead to the extermination of civilization.
Nobody knows, is this a bluff? Is this a thermonuclear chicken game? Are these people Dr. Strangeloves, loving the bomb? It is very difficult to say. But if you look at the situation in Ukraine, and the many warnings from people like Gorbachov, who used to be a critic of Putin’s, who has now come out recently, defending Putin and warning that the Third World War is about to happen—there is no question that we are on the verge of this, and we absolutely, absolutely, first of all must have a discussion about that throughout the whole world, because the fact that we are that close to the extinction of civilization, and there is no public debate. That has to be changed, and I’m appealing to you that you should help, to first of all read all the articles about that—we have published a list of such articles on our website; but also help us to mobilize to change that.
Globalization and War
Now, how do you change that? You do not change it by creating a peace movement, because a peace movement as such may have good intentions, but they’re not effective. How do you stop this machine? You have to understand where it comes from: It comes from the fact that we identified in the beginning as “globalization,” the idea to take over the world, eliminate all resisting governments, and establish a banking dictatorship geared entirely to profit-maximization of those people who are the multimillionaires and the hangers-on to power, so to speak, those who profit from speculation.
Well, that system, that system of unrestricted globalization is about blow in a bigger crash than happened in 2008, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and AIG. As a matter of fact, the too-big-to-fail banks, today, are 40-80% larger than in 2008; Bank of American today has 85% more derivatives than in 2008, and all the Wall Street and European banks are completely bankrupt and have a derivatives exposure of $2 quadrillion, and are so indebted that this debt can never be paid.
Why do you think there is such hysteria against Greece right now? In Greece you recently had a democratic election, where the Syriza party and the Independent Greeks won a majority, they formed a government, and they won on an election platform that they would reject the brutal austerity policy of the Troika—the European Central Bank, the EU Commission, and the IMF—a policy which has ruined Greece in the last years, reduced the real economy of Greece by one-third; has increased the death rate, has thrown the population into desperation; has increased youth unemployment up to 65%. So the population rejected that and the new government attempted to say, OK, we have a democratic mandate and we want to cancel the Memorandum of the previous government. And then they were met by the EU, by Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, by Wolfgang Schäuble, the Finance Minister of Germany, with absolute anger and a hard line, totally, totally rejecting any effort by the Greek government to have a debt conference, to reduce the debt, a measure which was done in 1953 for Germany in a conference in London, where they cancelled 60% of the debt of Germany, and that was the precondition for Germany to be able to have the “economic miracle,” for which Germany became famous.
So why are they such hardliners? Why do they want to continue the suffering of the Greek people? Well, because they know that the moment you cancel part of this debt, you trigger the collapse of the entire derivatives bubble of the European banks, which are connected through a swap agreement with the Federal Reserve to the U.S. banks, and it would bring instantly a collapse of the whole system.
The war danger comes from that dynamic, because the more Wall Street and the City of London realize that they’re about to blow—and they’re looking at Asia, China, India, Brazil, other countries, and they see that they are prospering, that they are rising—they say, “We have geopolitical interests, and rather than allowing that part of the world to progress while we are collapsing, we will go for this thermonuclear confrontation, even if it risks the extinction of the civilization.”
Now, they probably think that this will not happen, that they can destroy everybody and remain in control afterwards, but that is an illusion: That’s the illusion of the god of Olympus, Zeus, who chained Prometheus to a rock, because Prometheus had dared to bring fire and therefore technology, to humankind. If Zeus is successful to do that, Zeus will die too, and the whole human population.
That is why, when we say we need a mass movement for development in the United States and in Europe, it is not an option, but an absolute necessity.
The BRICS New Paradigm
Now, let me go back a step: We have now a parallel economic system. This was begun one and a half years ago, a little bit more than that, by Chinese President Xi Jinping, when he, in a conference in Kazakhstan in September 2013, announced that China will revive the ancient Silk Road of 2,000 years ago, in the form of a New Silk Road, connecting China, Central Asia, all the way to Europe, and he called that the New Silk Road, “One Road, One Belt” economic policy. And he said, like the ancient Silk Road during the Han dynasty 2,000 years ago—where you had an exchange of goods, of technologies, of silk-making, of porcelain-making, of book printing, and many other very useful things which improved the living standards of all the people at that time—we are now extending our Chinese economic miracle through the New Silk Road to all the countries who want to participate.
I don’t know how many of you have been in China recently. I had the advantage of having been in China 44 years ago, during the Cultural Revolution, on a cargo ship. And I could travel around quite a bit. And I can tell you, China was a horror-show; people were afraid, the Red Guards would terrorize people; they had no development, they were hungry, there were periods of mass starvation. And I went back in 1996 with our proposal for a Eurasian Land-Bridge, as I mentioned, as a peace order proposal, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was invited by the Chinese government in ’96 as a speaker to a big conference on the Eurasian Land-Bridge.
And when I came back to China after 25 years, I can tell you, this was absolutely unbelievable! China has progressed, you had a gigantic economic miracle in the east, on the coastal areas in the south. And I went there subsequently several times; and more recently, after President Xi Jinping announced the New Silk Road last year, I went back two times to China, and there was even more development: 800 million people, or more have been lifted from poverty into a very, very good living standard. People are optimistic, they are proud, they are proud to be Chinese, and they say, we could transform China in 30 years in a way which took the industrialized countries in Europe and the United States 200 years, we did that in 30 years, and now we are extending that model as a Silk Road to all countries who want to participate.
There was a development in Fortaleza in Brazil, last July, where the BRICS countries, and also the heads of state of the Latin American countries agreed that they would build an enormous number of projects—a second Panama Canal in Nicaragua, a continental railway from Brazil to Peru, and many, many, many other projects, cooperation for nuclear energy, for space travel, for water projects, for a war against the deserts in many parts of the world. It’s a completely different idea, of bringing recovery and economic development to all of the participating countries.
They have also created a new financial system. China created an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which has now been joined by more than 21 countries; the BRICS created a New Development Bank, which has just been ratified by the parliament in Russia, in India, and in China, so it can start working; and many other financial institutions which are entirely devoted not to speculation, but only to development and investment.
When the APEC [Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation] conference took place last November in Beijing, there was a press conference where President Xi Jinping told President Obama, why do you, the United States, and other major nations not join with us in this effort of the New Silk Road, the BRICS development projects, and let’s work together in “win-win” cooperation? In other words, what China is offering right now is not geopolitics against geopolitics, where one country or one bloc of countries has to make war against the other bloc, simply because their supposed geopolitical interests are threatened. But China says, no, we have to have “win-win” cooperation; we should cooperate for the common aims of mankind, for the benefit of each participating country.
Obviously, this is opposite of what the Project for a New American Century people say, people like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney—they said that the United States will be the unilateral, only superpower, and will never allow any other country or bloc of countries to bypass that role of the United States.
That is the reason we are on the verge of World War III right now, as long as the United States says “we are the unilateral master of the universe and all these other countries have to be our followers.” And that is what Obama said in the State of the Union address, that Russia is just a regional power—which is sort of absurd: If a country has thousands of ICBMs with nuclear warheads, they’re not a “regional power”; and when he said that China must not be allowed to determine trade relations in Asia, but the United States has the only right to do so, well, that is strongly debated by all of these countries, who say, we do not want to have a unipolar world, we want to have a multipolar world, and if the United States joins with us, we have no problem with that, but we do not want to be the slaves and the underlings of one superpower. We want to be sovereign, in sovereign relations with the United States.
A Challenge to the United States
That’s where we are. The big question is, can we find, in time, before we are all dead, enough forces in the United States who say, “Well, that is a reasonable proposal by Xi Jinping”? There are so many problems which fall under the category of “common aims of mankind,” like eliminating poverty; making sure there is fresh drinking water for the 2 billion people who don’t have such water; reversing the deserts—this is not a problem just of the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula, and China, this is a problem of the United States! We have an expanding desert in Texas, in California, and we don’t have right now the means to stop that!
Maybe it would be a good idea if the United States joins this new development idea, the New Silk Road. The New Silk Road is a metaphor for a just, new world economic order, and if the United States would join it, maybe we would stop having money printing for bankrupt banks in Wall Street and instead go back to a credit system like Alexander Hamilton created in the First National Bank of the United States after the War of Independence, and we would issue credit for development. Then we could build new cities, not in China, but in the United States.
Don’t you think that the United States could very well have some beautiful, new cities that would be a little bit more beautiful than Houston? We could build new cities in the West, in this area east of the Rocky Mountains, which is very thinly populated, where we would build maglev system throughout the United States, replacing the not-so-well-functioning railways, and replacing much of the short-route air traffic through a functioning system of maglev trains which could make it much safer, much quicker, and which would connect the East and the West coasts, the North and the South. That way we would have the infrastructure to build new, beautiful cities, let’s say, east of the Rocky Mountains and in other thinly populated states in the United States.
Don’t you think that that would cause some more excitement among young people? Don’t you think that that would encourage them more, to not take drugs, to start to learn, to study, to study for the future? If we would join with Russia, with China, with India, and even Bolivia, in the space program—because Bolivia has now joined the space effort—we would say, we have the questions and challenges of the future! We have to defend the planet against asteroids; we have to find out, how is the Solar System organized? We don’t know! I mean, we know very little: Just recently, we discovered that there are many planets that have the same conditions as the planet Earth—maybe we should find out how to get there in time. These are all very exciting questions which we have to answer, if we want to exist as a human species on this planet and beyond.
I think the idea that history has come to an end, that we have to revert to a third world war to maintain the banking structure which is bankrupt—that is completely crazy. And what we need instead, is a mass movement of development, like the new prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, called for in India. He said, we need to have a mass movement of young people and older people who fight for development. He is now engaged in “Operation Clean Water” for India, “Clean Streets,” just have India become a clean nation, which is super-important hygienic question. But also to fight for development and to have young people study and not just do some make-work jobs, but to have the highest scientific education. And then, take the fact that India, for example, has, I think 60% of its population is under 30 years of age, and if these people are all well-educated, Modi said, that can become the biggest export, because these young, educated people are needed very much in countries that have demographic problems, like Italy, Germany, and many other so-called advanced countries, where the population is dying out.
So, we have to change the thinking, we have to get the United States back to being a republic. I think the American model, as it was conceived of by the Founding Fathers, by Benjamin Franklin, by George Washington, by Alexander Hamilton, by John Quincy Adams a little bit later, by Lincoln, by Roosevelt, by Kennedy, this America was a beacon of hope for the whole world. People wanted to go there, to have a new world, to have all the chances for their own lives, for the pursuit of happiness as it is written in the Declaration of Independence.
But America has turned away from that beautiful path, and now has turned into a country which is really not liked, and that is a British understatement of the year! As a matter of fact, the anti-Americanism around the world, as a result of the drone warfare, the torture, the regime change against all these countries—anti-Americanism right now is at a high point: I think if most people in the United States knew how big it is, they would have a sleepless night or two.
This can be remedied very quickly, if we can get a majority, or at least a significant portion of people in the United States—mayors, city councils, state representatives, even Congressmen and Senators, other institutional people, trade unionists, and businessmen to say, “We want to join with the BRICS countries to have a new paradigm for mankind, a paradigm in which we stop being warriors against other countries, but where we focus on the common aims of mankind, where we focus on the true identity, that the human being is the only species that can be creative, and again and again change the mode of living and in that way improve the living standard of all human beings.”
Why don’t we join hands with the BRICS countries and create a mass movement for development and turn America, as part of it, again into the beautiful country it was meant to be? I call upon you to passionately, passionately join this fight, because what is at stake is the danger of World War III, but also to have a future. And let’s make sure that we don’t only have a future, but that we have the kind of beautiful future worthy of the beauty of mankind.
[1] See Matlock’s speech in EIR, Feb. 20, 2015.
[2] Ukraine’s Association Agreement has been called a “Trojan Horse for NATO,” because it commits Kiev to a Common Security and Defense Policy with the EU, most of whose members are also members of NATO. With Crimea under Ukrainian jurisdiction, the agreement implied a challenge to Russia’s continued basing of its Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, as well as the potential for significant eastward extension of the forward basing of NATO weapons systems, including the EuroBMD program identified by Russia as a threat to its strategic nuclear deterrent—ed.
