This transcript appears in the Februuary 5, 2016 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

DIALOGUE FROM THE EIR FORUM, NATIONAL PRESS CLUB

‘I’m Absolutely Optimistic that
Mankind Has the Possibility
To Dramatically Change’

[PDF version of this transcript]

Jan. 26—This is a transcript of the dialogue between the speakers at the Jan. 26, 2016 EIR forum at the National Press Club, Helga Zepp-LaRouche and Tom Wysmuller, and members of the audience.

Tom Wysmuller: [in response to the presentation by Helga Zepp-LaRouche] Helga, if I can add, if we stop wasting billions on climate research, you can buy a lot of bricks for that New Silk Road.

Michael Billington: I can assure you, the Chinese are not wasting much of their money.

So I want to open the floor to questions in just a moment. First, I want to say that when you do leave, we have copies of this report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge for which Helga was the inspiration. She has a long introduction; it’s a 370 page, detailed analysis of what we could do with the world as a whole, and the universe, if we could overcome the political insanity now governing our society.

Before the COP21 conference, we also published a report called “ ‘Global Warming’ Scare Is Population Reduction, Not Science.” Half of it is an analysis of how this population control movement—this Malthusian idea of depopulation—was fostered on behalf of the oligarchy, such as the royal families in London and Holland.

The second half is, as Tom was talking about, real science, real climate science. We hope to have some of the material Tom’s done included in our publications later.

Let’s open the floor for questions to both of our speakers.

Visas for al-Qaeda

Question: I’m Mike Springmann. I’m not sure whether I have a question or a couple of statements. I would dispute the analysis of the Middle East, based on my book, Visas for al-Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World. It basically talked about how the United States has created an organized terrorist group, that once was the mujahideen, then was rebranded as al-Qaeda, and is now rebranded as ISIL. And the problems with the Middle East stem from the United States and its repressive allies in the area, recruiting arming, financing, and training these people.

And they were carefully connected, I think, to be driven into Europe, through Turkey, another one of America’s repressive allies, and Frau Merkel said, “Y’all come,” and they did! There’d been a steady trickle in the past from North Africa, thanks to America’s Libya policies. But now it’s North Africa, the Middle East, and all over the world. And they’re in Germany, they’re welcomed with opened arms; from what I can see, the hope of driving down wages, or at least preventing them from rising. They will be used to split the natives apart from one another; they will be used to create hate between the Christian Europeans and the Muslims and the Arabs, which has been done.

We’ve seen how Germany and France and Britain have been driven into the American war in the Middle East. The French started bombing Syria—they sent an aircraft carrier, the nuclear-powered Charles de Gaulle; Germany sent two frigates to the Mediterranean, the Augsburg and Karlsruhe, one of which was an escort to the Charles de Gaulle carrier which is bombing Syria and Iraq. And I think it’s a complete disaster and I think it’s basically American policy.

This is being aided and abetted by the German chancellor, who really ought to know better. From what I’ve seen, it’s a disaster, and it’s getting worse. You had carefully coordinated robberies, rapes, and thefts of cellphones and gropings, all throughout Germany on New Year’s Eve, and Manuel Ochsenreiter, who is the publisher of Zuerst! an online magazine among other things, showed a video of Berlin with the caption, “This is not Berlin in April of 1945, this is Berlin on New Year’s Eve 2015.” And it’s all of the aliens firing strictly controlled handguns into the air, and shooting rockets and roman candles, horizontally into the crowd. And the German government did nothing!

In Cologne, the lord mayor refused to take any action and said everyone should keep an arm’s length from strangers, to avoid being raped, and when a thousand protesters came out the next week, about her policies, a water cannon was turned on them.

So, anyway, I’m talking too much. Read my book Visas for al-Qaeda, it pretty much sets forth the basis for current policy.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think you’re mixing obviously truthful facts with a view of the matter which doesn’t give any hope. And I’m talking about how to get out of this situation.

I could give you a several-hour presentation on how the United States policy, starting with Brzezinski in 1975, in Tokyo, proposed to play the “Islamic card,” how that was used to build up the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union; how that evolved into what you are correctly saying, including what happened in Libya, in Benghazi; and you know, General Michael Flynn has said the same thing. He said that he briefed the White House that they were planning a caliphate, and that he thought the White House had an intention to allow that to happen—all of that is true!

I didn’t want to go at length into the known history of how this disaster happened, and I agree with you, it is a horrible disaster!

How Do We Get Out of This?

However, the question is, how do we get out of this? Consider how we got into this crisis. Many people warned about this danger, including the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock. In addition, you had such people as Horst Teltschik and many others who were eyewitnesses, who said that Russia had been promised that NATO would not expand to the borders of Russia. And then, unfortunately, you had the policy of the Project for the New American Century, the PNAC doctrine. basically, from the beginning, you had a policy of regime change, of color revolutions, of Victoria Nuland. They have said publicly that they have spent $5 billion in Ukraine alone, to build all these NGOs and so forth for regime change, first with the Orange Revolution in 2004, and then the whole Maidan coup.

The color revolution in Ukraine: troops of the Azov Batallion. “Were seeing that something similar is starting right now in Moldova! When does this stop?!”

And you know, given the fact that I have a positive conception of what the world should look like, I follow events more critically in making evaluations, because I see what they are detrimental to. And therefore, when the EU made the association offer to Ukraine in November 2013, it was very clear that this was a provocation which would eventually mean that NATO would have access to the Black Sea, and even American think tanks like Stratfor had long articles saying that that was unacceptable from a Russian standpoint, because of the location of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and the relatively indefensible danger of NATO being only 300 km away from Moscow.

So it was very clear that the decision by Yanukovych not to sign that EU agreement was an admittedly late recognition that this agreement wouldn’t work. In addition, it would have opened up Russia to cheap products from the European Union (EU). So, who is responsible for the Ukraine crisis, therefore?

Maastricht Led to the Maidan

I fully agree with what the late German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt said: The Ukraine crisis started with the Maastricht agreement.

Maastricht was the turning point at which the EU was transformed from a European alliance into an imperial, expansionist movement, trying to expand eastward. And they would like to expand as far as they possibly could, according to the words of Robert Cooper, who was the adviser of Lady Ashton [then the EU foreign policy representative].

Then, of course, you had the Maidan, which was immediately subverted by the Bandera groupings, who were old Nazis who were kept by by MI6, the CIA, and by the German Intelligence BND/Gehlen organization during the Cold War. So these were known entities, and nobody can tell me that the Western governments didn’t know what they were dealing with during the Nazi coup in Ukraine!

So if you look at the question, how did we come to this point?, you have the NATO expansion to the Russian border; you now have provocations everywhere. So you have to understand that Russia is not the evil one. And I’m fully aware that in Washington there is a prevailing view that Russia is the culprit, that Putin is a monster; I can assure you that, if it were not for Russia, we probably would have had World War III already! And the fact that Russia has now moved in a brilliant way in Syria, basically taking back large areas from ISIS by supporting the legitimate government of Assad. There is such a spin put on the chronology of these events and who committed the atrocity and what was the reaction! And that is the logic of war: Once you are in a war, all sides commit crimes. There has not been one war where that didn’t happen.

What I’m saying is that Germany and France and Italy were drawn into this Cold War provocation of sanctions against Russia. This is very much to the detriment of German interests, because German industry is losing more than Russia! Russia can go to China and elsewhere, but Germany is losing export markets forever! So that was very dangerous. And I’m extremely happy, that there was a change after the intervention of Putin in Syria. There was also a change because the refugee crisis forced Germany to say, “wait a second, we cannot solve this problem without Russia.” So therefore you have now, amazingly, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who is not my favorite man—I said it again—is welcoming the Russian deployment in Syria, as is the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and various other people.

Quarantine Wahhabism

This is a good thing, because if you get an agreement among the people who are participating in the Vienna congress, to militarily reconquer Syria and Iraq, you can get rid of ISIS; ISIS is not that many people. But then, you have to do something to change the environment, because the evolution from the mujahideen to al-Qaeda to al-Nusra to ISIS shows that as long as you have Wahhabism, and the Salafist idea of eradicating culture, you will have new groups. If ISIS is eradicated, there will be a new group!

World Conflict News ISIS fighters in Yarmouk, near Damascus, Syria. “As long as you have Wahhabism, and the Salafist idea to eradicate culture, you will have new groups. If ISIS is eradicated, there will be a new group!”

And I’m talking about a thorough,— an immediate and thorough solution to dry out terrorism for sure. I have said this many times: If you have the power of the United States, Russia, China, and India, that alone is enough to put these other countries in containment. Because what would Saudi Arabia be without the United States? Nothing.

You can change the rules. If the big powers can be gotten at one table and work together, we can solve it. And it’s the only human thing to do. Realize that we are about to lose our humanity: Look at this drug epidemic in the United States, and look at people like German Deputy Finance Minister Jens Spahn, who said, “Oh, we shouldn’t be afraid of ugly pictures, when we deport women and children back to the countries they come from.” I don’t think we will morally survive that. We are about to lose our humanity.

A New Paradigm

Instead I’m proposing that these programs are a way to change to a new paradigm, and I’m absolutely optimistic that mankind has the possibility to dramatically change. If you look at the change from the Middle Ages, which was dominated by scholasticism, by peripatetics, by witchcraft, by all kinds of horror-shows, but then you had the Renaissance, you have Nicholas of Cusa, you had Brunelleschi, you had great minds which created the new paradigm which created modern times and which had a completely different set of axioms.

What I’m saying is that we need a change of axioms as fundamental as the change from the Middle Ages to modern times, if we want to survive.

Question: Hello, my name is V—B—. I didn’t catch the book author’s name, but I thought he brought up some very important points. Because as you were speaking—and this is all very interesting and very relevant—you just said something about, for example, the images of refugees being sent back, the children and the mothers, that we’re losing our humanity, but we stand to lose a great deal more if we don’t stem the tide of this ludicrous refugee crisis, which was precipitated on fictitious premises. Because you have mentioned in the last couple of minutes that there are people who are suggesting that the refugee crisis could get to the point where there are some billions of people coming from Iraq, and Afghanistan, and northern Africa, and Syria into Europe.

And at the same time, you also mentioned that the whole paradigm, the whole philosophical international viewpoint of nuclear war has changed since the ’60s. It used to be that we understood it was a potential mutual destruction, whereas now we’re thinking it’s a winnable situation. Well, if you have on the one hand, a billion refugees coming in, and completely changing the population of Europe, who’s going to be behind the nuclear buttons in just another 10 or 20 years?

No More Color Revolutions!

So we can worry about losing our humanity, but I think we stand to lose a great deal more if we don’t stem the tide of these refugees. And I therefore think that as important as it is to look forward, you can’t look forward without also looking back. We have to step backwards and look at what really precipitated the refugee crisis. The gentleman brought up the rise, going from the Taliban, to al-Qaeda, to ISIS, and the United States’ role in this, and it’s very important to take a look at that, because if we don’t examine how it started then—these color revolutions, for example, that are leadership deposals in so many countries, which are creating the power vacuums into which these so-called rebels groups begin to run like cockroaches that, as soon as the light is off, and they’re in there and they’re reproducing! But if we’re going to continue to destroy the power structures in countries like Syria, whose leader we’re trying so hard to remove, and completely ignoring what happened after we did this in Iraq and in Libya for God’s sake!

You know, we created a situation where these people are developing strength; you know, we pay for the people, for example, that we think are going to serve our purposes in a given country, and someone comes along, they sell some illegal oil, they have more money and they just run over to the other side.

So we have to look back, we have to stop these ridiculous color revolutions, and leadership deposals, and let the leadership in a given nation stay there! It’s none of the United States’ call to decide who should be running Syria. I think we should step back and let Assad keep his country intact. We’ve already seen what, God knows what happened, in Libya.

So it’s very important to examine, what are we doing wrong? I mean, you mentioned also the Ukraine and Victoria Nuland, admitting that we spent some $5 billion and upwards of regime change money over in the Ukraine! We’re seeing that something similar is starting to happen right now in Moldova! When does this stop?!

I don’t see how we can maintain a concern for humanity and culture, if we’re decimating country after country after country. So we definitely have to start a conversation about what we did wrong, so that we can get the United States, the American people, to see that we have to stop doing this, and stop having Ted Cruz and people send around their surveys for Presidential support, saying “Don’t you think we should be—do you agree with me that the United States should lead the charge against ISIS?” In other words, what he’s trying to say is, don’t you think we should send our troops and get them on the ground in Syria.

We need a conversation about this. Because we are one of the main problems, and only a change in our conversation is going to wake up the American people so that we can just let the rest of the world live, and culture continue.

Danger of Nuclear War

Zepp-LaRouche: I couldn’t agree with you more, and I’m very happy that you seem to be a full, red-blooded American, . . . compared to the bluebloods. [laughter]

No, I agree with you. And there was a letter just put out, an open letter to the American people by Richard Falk and a couple of other people, pointing to the war danger, saying that it is an absolute scandal that none of the Presidential candidates has even touched the issue. And that’s why I put the danger of nuclear war at the beginning of my remarks, because, not to say that these other crises are not equally existential, but if this happens, it would be the end.

creative commons/wikiHow “There are people who think you can win a nuclear war,” such as Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, and the Pentagons Office of Net Assessment. Here, some of their propaganda on a wikiHow page titled, “How to Survive a Nuclear Attack.” The page has been visited more than a million times.

There must be a public discussion, is it the right thing to entertain the idea that nuclear war is winnable? And I have read enough articles by all the experts, commenting on this, that I think there is no question that there are people who think you can win a nuclear war, including a limited nuclear war in Europe. Why would you modernize nuclear weapons in Europe? The B61-12 bomb, which is supposed to be so small and so smooth, and a bunker buster—and you know, there is no debate about that! And I can only encourage you, we must discuss that. Is it legitimate to plan for nuclear war? Isn’t that a Nuremberg Crime? Isn’t it an absolute insanity to maintain nuclear weapons when that implies the possible extinction of civilization?

I fully agree: Let’s have this debate and have it a lot. We have had previous events where we discussed this—every Friday we have a webcast where these issues are being raised. But the reason why I wanted the idea of a future orientation, is because I think we are now at a moment where the situation can be changed only if people, including the Americans, see a positive idea of the future. Consider, why do so many Americans commit suicide? Now, that should shock people! It should shock the hell out of people that Americans are killing themselves more quickly than medicine makes progress in curing diseases! If that is not a symptom of a dying society, I don’t know what is.

And how do you get hope? We have to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did with the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC program: The same young people who are now despairing in drug addiction must be brought into—we have to build America. We have here now, a first study about how you can rebuild the United States. And that’s what FDR would do. FDR would close down Wall Street; he would put in a Pecora Commission and put all these bankers in jail, because the banks are laundering the money of the Mexico drug cartel. HSBC laundered in one year, I think $100 billion in drug money from Mexico alone, and then they got a $1.9 billion fine. They had already calculated that into the operating costs! It’s a tiny amount of money.

All the Afghanistan heroin, you know, the various anti-drug czars, like Antonio Maria Costa from the United Nations, or Viktor Ivanov, said the entire financial system would have already collapsed but for the influx of the drug money.

So Wall Street has to be scrutinized and we have to see—you know, the LIBOR manipulation, the drug money laundering—you have a criminal banking system, but nobody went to jail!

So, anyway, we could have many, many of such things, but I welcome what you’re saying.

Question: G— R—: First of all, I want to note that Concepción, who for 30 years sat over in front of the White House on the sidewalk protesting the idea of nuclear war, passed away yesterday. So that protest, that continuous 24/7/365 protest for the last 30 years, is gone now.

Anyway, I very much appreciated your proposing that we’re facing an existential threat to our humanity. That’s very profound and very far-reaching, and I hope you can get that concept circulated. The whole idea of our very existence is a big part of the Zionist-imperialism stuff. Their fear, their sense that they are existentially threatened when they’re existentially threatening so many others.

But I wanted to address the question of taking the profit out of war. We seem to be—certainly this city—is run by the war profiteers. It seems our government is run by the war profiteers, and so I’m wondering what you might have to say with regard to that?

Bullet Trains, Not Bullets

Zepp-LaRouche: I don’t know if it was [former] Defense Secretary William Perry, or one of the other experts, who said that the announcement by President Obama of the plan to spend $1 trillion in the modernization of the nuclear triad in the next 30 years should be stopped cold, now, because he said, once you start, it becomes a dynamic of its own, because then you will have constituencies, with factories, who lobby their congressmen to go for it and so, I think that that is really very true. And I would really urge all of the participants of this meeting to help to mobilize against that.

White House China’s President Xi at a joint press conference with President Obama at the White House, Sept. 25, 2015. President Xi’s Three No’s for China: “No interference in the internal affairs of other nations. No attempt to increase the so-called ‘sphere of influence.’ No striving for hegemony or dominance.” President Obama’s three no’s for the world: No end to war. No industrial development. No interference with British imperial hegemony.

Because the military-industrial complex, you know, it is a really a very important force. And Ramsey Clark has spoken on this issue, very, very meaningfully. And I think the only remedy to it is, we have to awaken the moral conscience of enough Americans to say there could be a solution! You can convert any factory, from producing tanks into producing some usable, useful thing, such as maglev trains, tracks, cabins, locomotives, tubes for these new maglev systems by which you can go in the future, in one hour from New York to London. I want to see these kinds of things. And the same with the auto industry: It would be very easy to transform it into other production.

Question: [follow-up] Yes, Walter Hickel, who was Secretary of Interior and Governor of Alaska, said “wars are just big projects.” So rather than put your money into this big project, put it into this big project.

We Join the New Silk Road

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, and I again can only ask you, please, get ahold of this pamphlet and circulate it as widely as possible, “The United States Joins the New Silk Road: A Hamiltonian Vision for an Economic Renaissance.” Because the reason why I think there is hope that it can be done, is because of what China is doing—I know that if you only read the Washington Post and the New York Times you will not know what I’m talking about—but China has developed a new model of state, which is based on completely different principles. It’s based on Confucianism to a very large extent.

If you read the book by President Xi Jinping titled The Governance of China, which is a publication of about 70 of his speeches, and other speeches he gave on his travels which are not in this book, there is no question, that what China is doing is producing a new model of society, no longer “Made in China,” but “Created in China.” They’re right now investing in the rejuvenation of their nation on a daily basis; they’re putting maximum emphasis on the excellence of the education of their students. They want to leapfrog technologies, to always be the vanguard in all areas. That’s why they have the best Moon program of any nation right now.

And in a certain sense, they’re not competitive. They’re offering that model for a “win-win” cooperation to transform the planet. When President Obama went to Africa, he made a really silly speech: He attacked China, I think without mentioning it by name, but it was pretty clear. And the response of the Chinese media was to say that that was an infantile response; because why not join hands and together uplift this continent which is right now really in trouble?

There are so many common aims of mankind, so many things, like defending the planet against asteroids, finding out what is really happening with the sunspots. Maybe you want to talk about this a little bit more. Because you know, people should be scared of the real things. They should not be scared of irrational things, they should be scared of what happens to our small, blue planet, if we don’t find out better how the universe works. And I would like to. . . .

Wysmuller: That’s why I ended my talk with the solar slide. The other thing, yes, put research where it counts. You have a real, potential threat you want to find out about.

The other thing is, take a step back, and decide for instance what NASA should be doing. Right? NASA right now is a shell of its former self. I think it’s been hijacked by the climatologists, but that’s a different story.

Manned Mission to Mars

But what NASA could do, is resurge the technological drive that we had when we went to the Moon, and here I’m not talking about going back to the Moon, as much as I’m suggesting that we should seriously look at a Mars mission, sending a human being to the inner moon of Mars, which is Phobos, and there are some real good reasons to pick that particular moon, because it rotates around Mars three times per earth day, so that means we need less braking to land on it than we would if we would land on a planet. And when we want to come back, we would need less fuel to take off, because we’re already getting a boost from the moon on its way around the other side of the planet, heading back to Earth.

creative commons/© Guillermo Abramson We should seriously consider a manned mission to Mars, landing a human being on its inner moon, Phobos; there are good reasons to choose Phobos. Here, a collage that presents Phobos in orbit around Mars.

That’s the adventure part, OK? What are the real benefits? You look at what we did in the Apollo program, and the benefits that we accrued as a result of that—I think somebody at the Department of Commerce estimated that one out of every five jobs in this country alone, is dependent upon and utilizes a technology that we developed in the process of getting to the Moon.

People used to say, “We went to the Moon and we put $20 billion up there.” We didn’t! We spent that money on Earth. It stayed on Earth! It developed our technology; it developed medical sensing systems, imaging systems, communications systems, all these things that you now define today, as what humans should be using and accomplishing.

The Soviet Union electrified the world in 1957 by putting a satellite, Sputnik 1, in Earth orbit. “Sputnik challenged our high schools and universities to focus on science, engineering, mathematics. And our lunar landing was the culmination of that.” Here, a Soviet scientist prepares Sputnik 1.

You know, I can go into my pocket and pull out an iPhone: You think that would have existed without the space program? And the need for miniaturization and the movement away from vacuum tubes to transistors, to integrated circuits. All of that was a byproduct of one of mankind’s greatest achievements. And the achievement wasn’t getting on the Moon and coming back. It was developing the technology that got us there.

Question: I’m a little concerned, I think we need to talk a little more about what we can do realistically, and I believe there was a guy named Eisenhower who referred to the military-industrial-congressional complex. I could be wrong on that.

And I think right now, our biggest problem is the congressional portion. And I’ve decided to run for Congress at my advanced age and I would like to have as much support and get this material that we’ve been putting out here—I’d like to get that before the committees in Congress, and get some action to do these things. And I have to start here in this country; we can talk about grandiose things left and right, but that’s not going to do us any good unless it gets through our Congress.

And I’d like to be, if possible, a point man to do that, but first I have to get elected. And I’m more than willing to do it, if I’m elected, and I hope I can have some support from people like this organization and others.

Audience: Where are you running from?

Question: [follow-up] West Virginia’s 2nd District. I am nothin’ but a po’ West Virginia hillbilly boy. Although some of my West Point classmates thought that being two reports away from Jack Welch at GE was worth four stars; but I said, “No guys, it’s only three.” (Got to have a little humor at some point.)

Vicious ‘Carbon’ Fraud

Wysmuller: Well, let me remind you that The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS) group has made its skillset available to any politician, any party, running for any office, who wants to get a good handle on what climate is really about. And I am more than happy to send you slides and things like that, that you can use in your campaign; I think, I hope you’ve learned a little bit of what climate is really about today; there’s a lot more.

Question: [follow-up] I certainly have. I was walking through the halls of Congress, and a guy by the name of Steve Scalise announced that his biggest problem was reducing carbon emissions. And I’m not sure that that’s true any more, after listening to this!

Wysmuller: Hang on. There’s a difference. The carbon emissions include carcinogens, particulates, toxins, and other things that may have a carbon link to them. I was talking about CO₂, carbon dioxide. That’s what you’re exhaling right now; it’s what makes plants grow. It has been conflated with carbon pollution, and that’s the fraudulent part of it. They are basically mixing some real poisons that we ought to be concerned about, with things that make us healthy.

And it’s the lack of science understanding that I think is a big problem in this country. It’s what we overcame when Sputnik challenged the technical skills of our country. It challenged the high schools, and the universities to focus on science, engineering, mathematics. And our lunar landing was the culmination of that.

I think a Martian moon-landing at first, would be a beautiful way to reignite that kind of research, that kind of energy, make jobs that are meaningful for people, because there’s a goal at the end. And the goal, like I say, is not just getting to Mars, but the development of the technology that would get you there.

So if you want that climate help, I will be more than pleased to talk to you. And I can find 30 other guys who’ll do the same thing; and women, too, by the way. We have some very highly capable women engineers and scientists in the TRCS group.

Make sure you get my card before you leave.

Question: [follow-up] That’s what I was about to say. I need one of your cards and you need some of mine.

The other thing, the nuclear war. We need to do a number of things, and I am surprised that the word about China that you’re giving, is completely different from what the press is giving. I say that surprisingly. You realize that this country has educated 50,000 Chinese engineers in the best schools here. And I believe that they are probably not sitting in China playing Tiddlywinks. So we do have a real challenge ahead of us, and we do need to clearly reinvent the science/math curriculum, principally for our schools that we have lost in the interim.

People were mentioning Franklin D. Roosevelt. There are a number of policies that he implemented that would move us out of this incoming depression, and put people back to work. In my state that I’m going to hopefully represent, 41% of its workforce is no longer counted as “unemployed,” because there is no—they’re not on unemployment any more, and there are no jobs for them to look for. So that is not a good situation. And it’s under-reported by the government and that’s one of the major issues I’m going after.

And as far as nuclear things go, I have a little experience: I once was in charge of guarding a nuclear storage site in Europe. So this is real! And we need to minimize that. And I’m surprised that we’re close to that again.

NASA Shut Down in 1972

Question: I must say that this latest discussion brought to my mind a very important point, and a thing that’s been troubling me for decades, now. My first job when I went to work after graduating from City College in New York, was to work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which became NASA in 1958. And I was working on the development of nuclear rocket propulsion, a joint office of NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission; I headed that office.

And we developed the nuclear rocket so that in 1969, I said, “Well! We’re ready to start planning for missions to Mars!” Now, I go to various meetings in NASA and AEC and all of them, and I keep saying, “are we ever going to think about humans to Mars?” because that’s the position I had taken at that time; we’re ready to start planning for that.

Wysmuller: I salute you for that.

Question: [follow-up] And in 1972, they killed the nuclear rocket development program! I don’t understand that at all. They’re not really working on it. They’re using nuclear propulsion in various small ways, the isotopes and various things like that. But they’ve killed the whole reactor development which we had proven out in Jackass Flats in Nevada. It was already there!

U.S. Atomic Energy Commission The government destroyed NASA in 1972, cutting its budget in half. In the process, it killed the nuclear propulsion rocket program. The Space Nuclear Propulsion Office had already certified the NERVA rocket engine for a human mission to Mars. Here, a mockup of a NERVA engine.

Wysmuller: Keep in mind, in 1972 they took the whole program out. They decided not to fly Apollo 18 which was ready to go; they had astronauts selected and everything. They sliced the NASA budget in half. We had 34,000 people in ’71; we ended up with 14,000 three years later. And I was one of the victims, by the way, or casualties—whatever you want to call it, because that’s when I left the agency. I didn’t have sufficient seniority. It was the old NACA guys who were keeping me from staying at NASA. [laughter] That’s okay, that’s okay.

I ended up at Pratt & Whitney and had an interesting career after that.

But you’re absolutely right: ’72 was the key year. You hit the nail on the head.

Zepp-LaRouche: People have to realize that China has just concluded a sale of a commercial high-temperature reactor without having one operating; they had a research reactor which I happen to have seen when they did the excavation in ’96 at the outskirts of Beijing, and now it’s functioning, and they’re selling it as an export item.

INET/Tsinghua University, Beijing China has just concluded a sale of its high-temperature pebble bed reactor to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi monarchy plans to have 16 nuclear power reactors within 20 years. China’s demonstrator of the technology, at Roncheng City, Shandong Province, will be connected to China’s grid in 2017. Here, a drawing of a plant with six such reactor modules.

So China is going ahead, and if America doesn’t want to fall back into the Stone Age, I think we have to turn this situation around.

So we will hopefully get all of you onboard to create a Renaissance movement, because that’s what we need. I think we need a Renaissance movement in the United States. It’s almost like the famous elephant and the blind men; people are in their fields of specialty, and they see how this was dismantled, how that was destroyed.

It’s the British Empire

But you have to look at the whole elephant, and the elephant is the British Empire. The reason they commit this swindle on the climate change, as we wrote that in our report, is genocide! Because if you decarbonize the world economy, which is what this guy Hans Joachim Schellnhuber is advertising, the population carrying capacity of the Earth will only be a billion people or less.

If you take all carbon fossil fuels—and they are also anti-nuclear, naturally—if you only go to alternative energies, you kill people! What is the refugee crisis, what is the failed wars, other than killing people? What are the drug epidemic? Why are people so stupid? It is really true! If you look at the entertainment industry, it is not to entertain people, it’s designed to make people stupid!

Wysmuller: Yes, look at some of the video games they’re selling kids, and you’ll see them shooting, shooting, shooting, killing, killing, killing, killing. That’s not the way a functioning society can function, can work.

Audience: That isn’t something real!

Zepp-LaRouche: So that’s why I’m really appealing to all of you: Join our choruses. You may think you are too old for this, or too young. We are creating a Renaissance movement in Manhattan; we are doing the same thing now in Berlin, in Paris, in other places where we can build Classical choruses.

Reaching the People With Classical Music

Billington: Our organization in New York and what we call the Manhattan Project—which is largely focussed on creating a cultural revolution and doing it through great Classical music—conducted a free concert in two leading churches—one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan in late December—for which we have a DVD sitting out on the table there. I think they’re $10 or something

I encourage you to watch this. It’s not just a “good performance” of the Messiah. It’s at Classical, Verdi tuning, not the high pitch that they’ve driven up since the time of Goebbels. This concert represented a reaching out into the population, pulling that population in through music to find in themselves that power of creativity which is driven out of them, day after day after day, by the ugliness of this culture.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis With our choruses, we are creating a Renaissance movement in Manhattan, and also now in Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere, so that people can find in themselves “that power of creativity which is driven out of them, day after day after day, by the ugliness of this culture.”

And in doing so, believe me, we see it’s working: This is creating a movement which is not just for New York, it’s not just for America. It’s global, it has the impact, not just amongst the people there, but all of those who are able to be part of it through watching it, through being part of our movement, to recognize what a real future would be if we create it, through the creativity in our minds, and not simply follow along in a pragmatic way of what seems possible.

So on your way out, add that to the list of things I encouraged you to pick up.

Question: [Lawrence Freeman] I have a question for each of the speakers. Helga talked about the propaganda against China and China’s economy. One of the parts of that propaganda now is that quote “China’s collapse” is now effecting a collapse in the economies throughout Africa. And so there have been dozens of articles in the last several weeks, including one in the New York Times today, blaming the “collapse of the rising economies of Africa” on China. So I thought that maybe you could analyze and provide an answer to that particular narrative.

Blind to the Climate Hoax

Mr. Wysmuller, on climate change, I talk to a lot of people in the UN, in Washington, and in Africa, who are reasonably intelligent people. But on climate change, they become completely irrational and they have accepted every aspect of the propaganda. And otherwise, they can at least be encouraged to think on other issues, but on this, they’ve become so completely brainwashed and dogmatic,—you must have run into this. And I wonder if you might want to say something about how to deal with it?

Wysmuller: I run into it all the time. This arose from a conscious effort to seek revenue from companies that produce energy. How do you get the public to buy into that? What you do is you propagandize the average person, including school children. And if you notice, the syllabus that your children are learning from or learning from has been orchestrated and controlled, to all include this “climate education”! If you can get the public to come to you and say, “we need a tax to prevent this,” it could be sea-level rise, it could be a lot of other things, the request to ask for a tax is wonderfully accepted by politicians as “Yes, we will give it to you!”

And all these countries have signed on, because they are all revenue hungry—every one of them. They’re looking for additional revenue that the public does not mind giving them. So if they’re willing to accept a gasoline tax that’s a nickel higher or a dime higher, hey, that’s all fine! I think that is one of the fringe benefits of lots of countries getting behind it.

The rest is, I think, more insidious. It is actually changing a culture in people that is not science-oriented. They’re talking about putting windmills that produce one one-hundredth of the energy that you need at a utility scale, to power the world. Our President goes to Africa and makes a speech in Soweto, June 29, 2013; now, I’m paraphrasing it. I can’t quite get it right, but to a group of African students he said something like “You guys don’t need cars and air conditioners until we figure out a different way how to power them. Then maybe you’ll get them.” The hubris involved in that statement is astounding! The fact is, those African kids do deserve to get cars and air conditioners; and for us to withhold them is ludicrous!

Electrify Africa

You know, there are people in Africa who are running around, or sending their kids out into the local forest, gathering up firewood to boil the water, so their kids won’t get river blindness. And that’s how they’re living! To deny them power when we could electrify Africa, at a fraction of what we are spending and wasting on climate research—that’s the paradigm that has to change!

Green University “There are people in Africa sending their kids into the local forest, gathering up firewood to boil the water, so their kids won’t get river blindness. And that’s how they’re living! To deny them power, when we could electrify Africa at a fraction of what we are wasting on climate research—that’s the paradigm that has to change!

And it’s not just Africa, it’s South America, Indonesia—lots of places. Why? Because we can get kids and school them! And they can find cures for cancer and other things that we will never know if they have never been given the chance to develop their intelligence.

We need the intellect of humanity, available to solve the problems of humanity. And by keeping two-thirds of world on a subsistence economy, you will never achieve that goal!

Zepp-LaRouche: Briefly on this propaganda against China, it is really absurd, because the United States manipulates statistics in such a way that is unbelievable. All categories of production go down, but then they have a “confidence index” which goes way up, and then they put this out as the forecast. You know, there are fortunately some European economists who have seen through this fraud, and there are many newsletters now, saying: Forget it, if you look at all the investments in Africa and in Asia that China is involved in, in the second half of 2016 you will see that these things will transform every place where this is happening, because it’s based on sound economics. It’s based on high technology, on increase of productivity of the labor force, on education. So don’t believe it, and I think it’s just total propaganda.

I mean, the New York Times, the Washington Post,—the Washington Post is lying! They just had three articles on why Glass-Steagall could not have prevented the crash of 2008. Just by repeating and reprinting the same document, which they did on two Sundays, doesn’t make it any more true. This is spin! This is spin-doctor medicine, trying to nudge the people into believing different axioms.

Go to the website of LaRouche PAC and look at the presentation by Jeff Steinberg on the British Empire drug policies going back to Aldous Huxley and various other people, and then compare what is happening to the United States today.

This is a long-term plan to lower the cognitive potential of the population, which is what empires do. The Roman Empire invented the circus, the gladiators, they included the population in bestial decisions about whether a gladiator should die or live, and in that way you make people bad, you turn them into evil people, because then you can control them more easily.

Media Menticide

As for the entire media, I don’t know. Maybe they are 20% journalists. All the rest is “public relations,” (PR). They have a certain belief structure they want to convey, and they run campaigns like a PR firm using every piece of information to spin it in a certain sense, until they have nudged, like Cass Sunstein describes it in his horrible book [Nudge]: You have a group of people sitting on one side of the room, and then, by the end of the meeting, they’re all sitting on the other side of the room, because you have nudged their beliefs to group-think, they now believe they should sit on the other side of the room. This is manipulation.

And the biggest task we have to accomplish is to get people thinking for themselves again, so that they should have an allergy against group-think. Group-think makes people stupid. You know, you have clubs and people believe only the belief structure of their club, and if you don’t go along with the leading axioms of that club you get kicked out, so therefore you adjust your belief structure to what this group of people is thinking. And that’s what the neighbors are saying, or your colleagues, or your peers. And the number of self-thinking people, of truth seeking people, of people who are trying to develop their own minds in such a way that they may not know everything, but they know how to find out how to think—and I don’t mean Google.

People should start reading books, again, do research. If you want to investigate any subject, you have to read books, lots of them!

Wysmuller: Let me add a little bit to that: I’ll give you one example, and that’s a club that I’m fairly familiar with, that’s the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club used to be composed of people who really were true environmentalists: They did not want the environment hurt by poisons, carcinogens, or water pollution or things like that! They have been methodically, I use the word hijacked, to now be anti-energy, anti-development, anti-carbon dioxide obviously, but this is a total change from what the group really originally was. Protecting forests and keeping them pollution free, are very laudable aims. But again, they’ve been hijacked into a totally different direction. I don’t recognize the Sierra Club any more when I read their publications. I’m trying to persuade them to go back to what they ought to be doing.

But you see that in different organizations all over the country—this process of hijacking. If you’re involved in a group, make sure it doesn’t happen in yours, that you keep your mind intact, and your purposes clear.

‘Accidental Launch’ Now Intended

Question: [Jeff Steinberg] Yes, I have a comment and then a question for both speakers.

Helga, right at the start of your presentation, you mentioned Perry and the danger of an accidental launch of nuclear missiles. I have just finished reading his memoir. What he describes as “accidental” or “unintentional” has now become completely intentional. [My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, by William J. Perry; see Steinberg’s review in EIR, Jan. 29, 2016.

What he basically says, is that we must abandon this doctrine of launch on warning, because given the provocations against Russia, given all of the crises, the danger is that if there is even a perception of a launch by one side, then the amount of time in which a decision has to be made about whether to launch a war of total Armageddon is now reduced to a matter of seconds. And what I’m afraid of, is quite frankly, that these are not even human decisions any more, but that these are computer programmed decisions where, in effect, the outcome is completely predetermined.

I was happy to get a fuller explanation which Perry goes through in this recent book. It’s really not accidental in the sense of somebody slipping and their elbow knocks on the nuclear button, or something like that. There is now, an opportunity to avoid the danger. And there have been calls by Perry, by Matlock, by General [James E.] Cartwright, to bring an immediate end to launch on warning, and to the extent that’s not being done, that’s now willful. So I think the danger is even greater, that there’s an opportunity to at least de-escalate the danger, and the decision not to do it, is a conscious decision on the part of the White House, the President.

My question stems from that little quick back-and-forth between the gentleman from NACA and you, because I hadn’t realized there had been this total decimation of NASA in 1972. And Helga talks about a paradigm shift being urgently needed today; what’s clear from the scope of this discussion, is that there was a paradigm shift that was consciously enforced in that early period. NASA was taken down, the Club of Rome issued the Limits to Growth book, there was the Bucharest UN conference on population reduction—in other words, there was a conscious, top-down onslaught, to change the policy thinking and the policy paradigm. And one of the things I was struck by, is that, had Robert Kennedy not been assassinated, it’s almost a certainty he would have been elected President. I highly doubt that he would have shut down the Apollo program and halved NASA, considering it was the hallmark of his brother’s Presidency.

Armageddon Closer than in 1962

So I’d like comments on this paradigm shift issue, because I think we’re living through, now, the dying moments of a bad paradigm that, one way or the other, is coming to an end. And it’s both a great opportunity, but the danger is greater than ever, and I think that’s the larger context in which all of these establishment figures tied to the nuclear program have all come out and said, the danger of nuclear Armageddon is greater now than it was at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Wysmuller: Let me address the NASA shift, the extent of which is stunning, if you think about it. These days, when we had a shuttle program, that’s been terminated, too. And people like to blame Bush and the current administration, but I can blame both Bush and Obama. Obama in his first two years controlled both sides of Congress; they easily could have gotten NASA back on a funding track, but the answer was no, they were going to continue that taking down of the agency.

Now, what do we do? We pay the Russians $100 million each, per astronaut that we send to the International Space Station. Now, this is $100 million of your tax dollars, and they’re going to supply and fund jobs in Russia. A typical shuttle launch, for about $200 million—and a little more if you count salaries and stuff—takes seven or eight people up there, plus cargo. It’s an astounding shift!

I’ve heard people defend this, saying, well, this is the only way we could have gotten the Russian space program to survive, because they needed that money. That may have been true, but you know, cooperation is the way to go here and we shouldn’t be sending those American jobs that used to be here, in shuttle support and others, they’re gone! These people aren’t working in NASA any more. They left like I did; they work other places, if they have jobs, or they’re still counted in the unemployed.

But what happened to NASA is real. I don’t know,—this administration is not going to be able to solve it. Will a subsequent administration change things around? I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of confidence in it, because there’s lots of other things going on in the economy, and I think Helga’s probably better off to address those. But NASA is a shell of its former self.

British Oligarchs for Hunger, Backwardness

Zepp-LaRouche: I think this paradigm shift,—if you think back, Roosevelt wanted to end colonialism at the end of World War II. De Gaulle wanted to have the French people involved in a mission to develop the so-called “Third World”; Kennedy, obviously. So you had a certain direction which I would put under the category of “good government,” where the aim was to improve the livelihood, the living standard of the people, to have a moral improvement: You know, the old idea that you are working so that future generations have a better life than you. That was always the yardstick of morality.

And then, in this period, you had—in the ’60s—you had the UN Development Decades, the idea that eventually you would overcome underdevelopment of the Third World; you had Paul VI with his Encyclical Populorum Progressio, which was the idea that you would overcome poverty, that you would eliminate poverty! Because poverty is the biggest human rights violation there is. Because if people die of hunger—Jean Ziegler has written very important things about that—that people who die of hunger, it’s the most horrible death you can have. Because all your bodily functions gradually stop, and it’s agonizing.

So, there was a clear commitment to overcome underdevelopment in the Third World. And I remember very well, somewhere in the ’60s, there was a conscious decision by the international British-dominated oligarchy, to eradicate that commitment. And we saw it: It was the Club of Rome, which put out the lies about the limits to growth. And Meadows and Forrester later admitted that they had programmed the assumptions of their computer program such that it would prove that there are limits to growth. And they admitted that they left out the most important aspect, namely that what is a resource is defined by the technology you have.

So it was a fraud. That’s how the green movement was created. And I remember, they transformed the ’68 movement, and made it a green movement. They used social engineering. And it was the genius of my sweet husband, that he recognized in the ’60s that the rock-drug counterculture would destroy the cognitive potential of society. And he was the only one who said that, at that time. Everybody else said, “Oh these hippies, they’re so sweet, flower power, isn’t that nice?” But he said, “no, it is that culture which will completely destroy the cognitive potential of society.”

EIRNS “LaRouche recognized in the 1960s that the rock-drug counterculture would destroy the cognitive potential of society. And he was the only one who said that at that time. Everybody else said, ‘Oh, these hippies, theyre so, sweet, flower power, isn’t that nice?’ ”

And that’s how this movement was founded, as a conscious counter, based on Classical music, based on science, on natural science, and beautiful conceptions in literature, which celebrate creativity.

This other culture makes people stupid! Rock music makes people stupid. Drugs—sex, I don’t know . . . [laughter]

Wysmuller: Well, sex makes people.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, it has a useful function, but mixed with these other things it is—definitely . . .

So, I think that the paradigm was induced very consciously. We have published an enormous amount of materials about that, including the invention of the “population bomb.” People used to think that population is an asset: That the more people you have, the more creativity, the more people can develop expertise. If you want to have a modern, industrial society you need to have a lot of people, because you need a lot of different branches of knowledge being pursued in depth, and if you have only Luxembourg, you will never become a. . . [laughter]; you look at [former prime minister of Luxembourg Jean-Claude] Juncker, you see what comes out of it!

People Are Wealth

But I think the idea of people being a parasite, that idea was induced! That the fewer people, the better, because they are all polluting the planet, this is a bestial conception! And a whole green movement—we watched how it came into being: It was the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth. Die Zeit had a series of articles discussing the so-called “scarcity of resources.” And I was at the Bucharest UN population conference in ’74, and at that time, people were not yet green! All the left groups were left, they were Marxists, they were something, but they were not green. The Communists used to be for technology—can you imagine that? It’s no longer the case!

No, I think that the real paradigm shift was the combination of the green—and Lyn has always said what is green is already decaying, and people should remember that.

Wysmuller: But that’s the hijacking I talked about, you know? You take an organization that is basically interested in making sure a forest doesn’t die, and you hijack it by turning them green, which means anti-energy, anti-development, anti-lots of other things. And that’s happened to a number of—that’s happened to politicians, they’ve been hijacked. I think the world has to—we need to be sensitive to that.

So, do your best to keep your mind functioning, and make sure you do that for your children too.

Billington: So, on behalf of everybody, I want to thank Tom Wysmuller and Helga Zepp-LaRouche for an amazingly inspiring afternoon.