HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE
World Land-Bridge:
Mankind’s Next Great Task
[PDF version of this trancript]
Below is an edited transcript of an address by Helga Zepp-LaRouche to a Dec. 10, 2016 Schiller Institute Conference in New York City. It is preceded by a transcript of the introduction of Zepp-LaRouche by moderator Dennis Speed.
Dennis Speed: One thing struck me about what Dr. Ho just said, at the end of his slide show, “The Inexhaustible Road to Self-improvement and Development.” I’d like to say something about the next speaker, the founder of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. At a very young age, she went to China, on an unauthorized visit at a time that you weren’t supposed to be able to go there. She became involved in the economics and politics of Lyndon LaRouche. She is married to Lyndon LaRouche. But the thing that characterizes her is that she believes in the idea of living with genius and paying the price of living with genius. Now, the price of living with genius is that you have to give up being stupid, and that’s a very seductive thing.
What she did, in 1983, when Lyndon LaRouche successfully convinced the Reagan Administration to adopt the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was a new strategic platform which could have ended the age of nuclear madness, Helga proposed to elements of the United States government that they have a corresponding cultural initiative, and that this cultural initiative would seek to look for the best in all nations and advance, together with the Russians and others, the cause of a community of principle.
They rejected that; the United States State Department and others rejected that because they didn’t have the vision to see what she already saw.
And so, she founded the Schiller Institute during the summer of 1984, to carry out that initiative herself. This was a civilizing influence on the United States. It was a civilizing influence throughout the world as a whole. But she used poet Friedrich Schiller, the Poet of Freedom, and introduced Americans to him, his work, and not only that, very soon after that 1984 founding of the Schiller Institute, she pioneered work with the scientist Krafft Ehricke, one of the most important physicists and visionaries of the 20th Century.
 EIRNS/Dean Andromidas
Helga and Lyndon LaRouche in Berlin in October, 1988. He was in Berlin to issue his forecast of the imminent breakup of the Soviet bloc, and to propose a reconstruction plan for all of Europe.
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She did many other things. But at the point that the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, and her husband Lyndon LaRouche was in jail, the two of them cooked something up, which at that time was known as the European Productive Triangle, which subsequently became known as the Eurasian Land-Bridge. It was a campaign and initiative that she was qualified to do, and advance, as no one else was.
We talked earlier about how in 1996, Helga spoke in Beijing at a conference on the New Silk Road, and then became known as the “Silk Road Lady” all over the world. She was here many times in New York City, in 1997 and ’98 in particular advancing that cause.
By living with genius, in the form both of the people she has known personally, and the people she has advocated who are her friends that she never met, like Schiller, and Nicholas of Cusa and others, there’s been a new cultural platform implicitly established in the world. Now, we’re in a new era, where the power of ideas, that people like Xi Jinping have not only represented, not only embodied, not only advanced, not only improved, but have made available to everyone else on the planet, which shows a kind of love for humanity, which is indispensable in real leadership.
It’s always my honor to introduce the founder and head of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. [applause]
Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I will try to be brief because much time has been lost already [with technical problems], and when Dr. Ho said that in order to understand Chinese-ness you have to be Chinese, I was actually considering, you know, maybe given the fact that I was in China the first time in 1971, 45 years ago, maybe we as a whole movement are already Chinese, or maybe it is also the other way around, that what China is proposing now, with the New Silk Road/One Belt, One Road Initiative is actually more human, and it is the problem that the trans-Atlantic world has lost the correct way.
I came back from this trip to China—which also took me to Africa and some other Asian countries—I spent several months in China during the Cultural Revolution, and I came back from this trip, having seen the underdevelopment of China and many other countries—with the idea that the world could not stay like that. And when I came back and found the theories of Lyndon LaRouche, it was very clear that that was the road to go. And then, we spent the next several decades to make very concrete development plans for Africa; we worked with López Portillo on a Latin American integration program. We worked with Indira Gandhi on a 40-year development plan for India. Already in 1975, Mr. LaRouche proposed an International Development Bank. If you compare all of these projects which we promoted in hundreds of conferences internationally over these decades, this is exactly what China is doing now.
So, is it an affinity that we are Chinese, or is it that the Chinese are really part of the Schiller Institute? Or is it the case that it is the natural development of mankind to take that road, and it’s only the relics of the oligarchical system of the trans-Atlantic sector, which has prevented this natural development from occurring?
Dennis, since, you mentioned Krafft Ehricke—he actually had this idea of an evolution of mankind which started with the idea that life developed from the oceans through photosynthesis, to land, and then higher species developed with a higher energy-flux density in their metabolisms. Eventually man appeared and man started to settle first near oceans and rivers. And then through the development of higher levels of infrastructure—roads, canals, eventually trains—the landlocked areas of the planet would all be opened up.
The whole idea of the World Land-Bridge—the New Silk Road becoming the World Land-Bridge—is the completion of that phase of natural development. And naturally, the next phase of this development is the infrastructure development of nearby space: First the Moon, then other heavenly bodies, and this will be the natural development of civilization.
So what China is doing, based on its 5,000-year tradition is really what is inherent in the human species. And as I said, it is the trans-Atlantic sector which has left the correct path.
And I just want to pose this as a real challenge, because anybody who has been in China or is now involved in the New Silk Road dynamic—this amounts to now 100 nations and large institutions which have undertaken the most unprecedented development perspective since Xi Jinping put the New Silk Road on the agenda in 2013. Now all the countries which are a part of it, are completely optimistic, looking to the future with a bright perspective. But it is the old geopolitical interests in Europe, and also in the United States, that are definitely resisting this perspective, because it goes against everything they have been trying to impose in the last decades.
Now this trans-Atlantic world order, as we all are acutely aware, is very rapidly collapsing. The Brexit was the first drumbeat of a world revolution opposing the globalization. You had the election of Mr. Trump, which was primarily a rejection of what Obama and Hillary Clinton stand for.
The Italian “no” in the referendum again represents all the people who were left behind by globalization—which has just made the rich more rich and the poor, poorer. And this process will continue until the injustice associated with this present trans-Atlantic system is overcome.
Right now there is an unbelievable situation in the United States, where the official office for health statistics just released a report indicating that from 2014-2015, the life expectancy of Americans has dropped for the first time! This has never happened in the civilized world, anywhere. As the result of a drop from 76.5 to 76.3, for the ages of men, they are now not living as long. The drop is a little bit less for women. All the major diseases in the United States have increasing death rates: 8 out of 10 major diseases now result in more deaths than before, and this is in the formerly most advanced country.
In Europe, it’s not much better because in Greece, as a result of the Troika policy on debt repayment, 45% of the people have reached the poverty level, and in Italy, 50% of the youth are unemployed. In Calabria, youth unemployment is 65%, and what the European Central Bank (ECB) is doing right now in response to the “no” vote of the Italians in the referendum, is to open the monetary flood gates in a way which is absolutely unprecedented: quantitative easing, state printing of money, which is exactly what the Reichsbank did in 1923 in Weimar Germany.
So, I don’t want to go through more of these symptoms of collapse, because with the new paradigm on the table, I think the only way mankind will get out of this crisis is by convincing the Americans and the Europeans that it is in their best interests to join with China and go back to those policies which were original American policies—the Alexander Hamilton American System of economy, which was repeated by John Quincy Adams, by Lincoln, by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and which my husband, Mr. LaRouche again formulated in 2014 in the package of the famous Four Laws: First Glass-Steagall, then go to a credit system, and then have an international credit system to finance long-term development projects; and fourthly to institute a science-driver for a crash fusion program and joint space cooperation.
These are the tasks in front of us and I think everything will really depend on our ability to quickly promote this policy. The world is not in as much of a danger of World War III as it was the day before the U.S. election, because Trump has promised a lot of things: He has promised to normalize the relationship between the United States, Russia, and China; he has promised to implement Glass-Steagall; he has announced that he wants to have an infrastructure program which will give America the most modern infrastructure—now that is quite a task given the abysmal condition of the infrastructure in the United States.
The United States will have to do a lot of development to catch up with China. which has already built 20,000 kilometers of high speed rail, and will have 50,000 km by the year 2020. But as Mme. Fu Ying said recently in New York, this idea of having an infrastructure program for the United States, can be the bridge with the One Belt, One Road of China.
However, there are many obstacles. For example, in Europe you still have a Green paradigm in many countries, especially Germany, which is not exactly the green vision of China. China wants to have a clean environment, which is absolutely correct to do, but in other countries it is a different conception: It is the idea of what they call “sustainable development” which really is a code word for “no development.” And there are many, many obstacles to overcome. However, I think the perspective is there, because of what China has done in terms of the crash program for fusion. China is the only country which is investing more funds into fusion energy. The EAST project in Hefei at the plasma research institute reached 100 seconds of plasma stable condition a couple of months ago, so China is on the right track. China has the most advanced space program. The Chang’e-5 mission next year will bring materials from the Moon back to Earth. One year later, the Chang’e-4 mission in 2018 will go to the far side of the Moon, with the perspective of eventually mining helium-3 from the Moon for a fusion economy on the Earth.
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tech.sina.com.cn
Fusion power research in China: Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST).
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And it is really this kind of future orientation—that the next phase of evolution is the colonization of space and this must be a project of international cooperation—which is really the way how we will get mankind out of this present danger.
I don’t want to make a longer speech than that. There are many things to be said, but I would like to open it for the discussion.
