ZEPP-LAROUCHE ADDRESS

The New Silk Road, End of Colonialism: A New Shared Future for Humanity

Schiller Institute founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche keynoted an invitation-only event for diplomats and others in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 17. The event was also addressed by Virginia State Senator Richard Black, who spoke about the strategic situation in Syria, and former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy advisor to the Senate Republican leadership, James Jatras, who spoke on British interference in the United States from the Southern Confederacy to what the British call Russiagate.

Technical difficulties prevented recording the first few minutes of Zepp-LaRouche’s remarks, in which she introduced the concepts of the new paradigm versus those of the old paradigm. The following is an edited transcript of her presentation.

Russiagate: Biggest Scandal in U.S. History

Now emerging and coming out into the open, is what will probably turn out to be the biggest scandal in the history of the United States—that is the so-called Russiagate and the so-called collusion of the Trump election campaign with Putin to win the election in 2016. This is all being exposed as collusion between the intelligence services of the Obama Administration with British intelligence—as a matter of fact, of MI6 and GCHQ with the FBI, the CIA, John Brennan, and the Department of Justice during the Obama Administration.

This is now all coming out into the open. There was, two days ago, a very fascinating interview with former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova on WMAL radio in Washington, in which he described how MI6 was conducting electronic surveillance on U.S. citizens at the request of the FBI, and CIA Director Brennan. Brennan actually visited London and he met with MI6 and GCHQ before the whole Russiagate story began, and where this all started still needs to be clarified. Did it come from John Brennan or did it not come from British intelligence? This question is now opening up. According to diGenova, who is the former U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., this is a tremendous liability on the part of these U.S. intelligence officials—for possible criminal prosecution.

It is also very clear that President Trump is completely aware of the coup against him, and that he is planning to defeat it. As a matter of fact, he just was in a very remarkable interview for “60 Minutes” with Lesley Stahl, where afterwards Lesley Stahl commented that he is now fully in control, that he is now running his Presidency in a completely sovereign way. And when she, in the interview, asked him if he would pledge that he would not get rid of the Mueller investigation, he said, “I don’t have to pledge anything to you. I’m the President, and you are not.”

So, it is very clear that Trump has defeated the Mueller investigation, which is now practically over. We are now three weeks from the Nov. 6 election, and a lot can happen in between. For example, you could have sudden turns, you could have a new financial crash much bigger than the one of 2008. We could also have the complete declassification and publication of all the documents related to this British coup against an American President. If that comes out, then it will not only be the biggest scandal—that the so-called “closest ally” of the United States, Great Britain, was involved in a coup attempt against an elected President—but this will reveal the motives, why this attempted coup occurred.

And that goes immediately to Trump’s promise in the election campaign that he would remedy the relationship with Russia. As you could see in the very successful summit he conducted in Helsinki with President Putin, despite the incredible stories thrown against him with the Russiagate story, he is, indeed, on this course. Not only will the British role come out, but also the different British operations, the false flag operations against the Syrian government, which Virginia State Senator Richard Black talked about, and naturally also, the phony Skripal affair. All of the British operations were designed to draw the United States into an increasing confrontation against Russia.

From recent encounters we’ve had in the United States with people at the Trump rallies, and also with simple citizens in the streets, it is very clear that Americans increasingly understand that this is a coup against the President.

The polarization in the United States, right now, as you all are aware, is unprecedented. And what is really clear is that the Democrats are in an all-out effort in the midterm election to win the House of Representatives, and possibly pick up some Senate seats. They have on their agenda,— if they win, they will probably be able to lure some neo-con Republicans into their camp and go for an immediate impeachment of President Trump.

If that were to happen, we would be immediately back on a path to war against Russia and against China. Look at the very bellicose statements, for example, by General Curtis Scaparrotti, NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, who recently said that the West is already at war with Russia, that it’s not yet a shooting war, but they are at war. The Democrats have been the real war party, in the recent period, even beyond what Obama and Hillary Clinton were doing in their time. With the Democrats back in power, we would be back on a confrontation with Russia right away.

It is also very doubtful, if there were to be any power play in this election, that the Trump supporters would take it. So, we are in for a really, very decisive battle, in which world peace depends on Trump getting the necessary backing. Trump people in the United States immediately freak when you say that, but it is the case.

Now, what is the understanding of this internal situation in the rest of the world? Well, it is very clear from the statement of different Russians, like Foreign Minister Lavrov, for example, that the Russians have a quite differentiated view. They do know what President Trump is up against—they always make a clear distinction between what Trump says and what the Senate says, as does China.

The Chinese right now are really quite disappointed with the Trump Administration’s tariff policy, and even feel outright anger because, after the initial very positive relations between Trump and Xi Jinping, their relations are really not on the level they should be right now as a result of this. Nevertheless, they make a big distinction between such outrageous attacks on China, coming from Pence and also Bolton, and on the other side, Pompeo and General Mattis, who frequently just said that it is not the intention of the United States to contain China.

In Europe, it is absolutely amazing. I just checked this afternoon to be sure, and my colleagues confirmed for me that practically in no European country has there been honest coverage of this coup attempt. Articles, when they do appear, are rare, and if they mention anything at all about Christopher Steele, they never mention the British role as such! Such references are so opaque that nobody can understand them who has not got a complete knowledge of the whole story; and the other references are spins, attacks on Trump, and generally take the side of the Democrats. It is quite amazing that in Europe, concerning an issue where world peace is at stake, people are really in the dark.

Thucydides Trap or
New Silk Road?

The big question other than this internal fight in the United States, is the conflict between the United States and China. It is the old question of the “Thucydides trap”: How will the up-to-now dominant power, namely the United States, react to a secondary power rising and eventually bypassing it? What are people such as Steve Bannon and Kissinger, who seem to have formed an alliance, and many think tanks, so absolutely freaked out about? Bannon is absolutely obsessed. He says that China represents a mortal danger to the existence of the United States, that there is a tremendous stealing of technologies—which by the way, is a lie, because China, in the meantime, has long surpassed the state of its development where it was dependent on stealing technology, and has become a leading power in many areas of science and technology itself.

Now, ever since Xi Jinping announced the New Silk Road in Kazakhstan in 2013, about 100 countries have joined this effort. There have been investments in all of these countries, totaling 12 times the size of the Marshall Plan, all based on a win-win cooperation—an enormous number of infrastructure corridors, industrial parks, power plants; various agricultural projects have been built. And in the recent time, you have the building of a completely new system of international relations, based on respect for sovereignty, respect for noninterference in the affairs of the other country, and respect for the perspective of different social systems, and this has created a completely different dynamic in the world.

This has, for example, recently led to the complete integration of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization with the Belt and Road Initiative. There is a new formation of South-South relations which became very apparent at the recent annual BRICS meeting in Johannesburg, where you had the formation of Global South, which was practically all the organizations from the developing sector, the G77, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Mercosur, the African Union, many regional organizations. And then the very big Africa-China summit, of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), in Beijing at the beginning of September, at which about 48 presidents and 5 other heads of state or government participated from Africa, announcing a new era in the friendship and relations between China and the countries of the African continent.

At the BRICS summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin promised that Russia would light up Africa by providing electricity, not from oil and gas, but through helping African nations to build nuclear power plants. At the same meeting, Xi Jinping said that Africa, of all the places in the world, has the biggest development potential in the world.

Now the New Silk Road Spirit, which has really captured this dynamic, is transforming geopolitical conflicts in many parts of the world. For example, the very successful developments concerning North and South Korea, who are now fully on the way to possibly announcing a peace treaty before the end of the year, and going in the direction of unification. This is definitely one of the great successes of President Trump, who at the Singapore summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, promised to help to make North Korea a prosperous country if the denuclearization continues. And China has promised to integrate the Koreas into the Belt and Road Initiative. Russia has also promised to contribute to the economic prosperity in North Korea. This is a model in which you can see how this new spirit is helping to transform previous crisis situations into real miracles.

A similar thing is happening in the Horn of Africa where—as a result of the construction of the fast railway between Djibouti and Addis Ababa—Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia are now developing new diplomatic relations and cooperation, which was unthinkable a very short time before.

The biggest breakthrough in such developments occurred two days ago with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Italian government and the Lake Chad Basin Commission on the realization of the Transaqua project. The LaRouche organization has been fighting for Transaqua for over 30 years.

That China, Italy and six African nations have agreed to build it, is a game-changer for the entire African continent. Transaqua will refill Lake Chad, which is now down to about 10% of its previous volume, by bringing 3-4% of the water from the tributaries of the Congo River in a region about 500 meters higher, through a system of canals, into Lake Chad, creating an inland waterway for participating countries. It will provide hydropower, it will provide huge amounts of water for irrigation, it will fill up Lake Chad, and it will still provide for large areas in the Sahel zone to be irrigated. And that way you can really improve the life about 40 million people who live there.

This is a tremendous breakthrough, and I think this is really the kind of project which can happen around the world everywhere.

In the context of the New Silk Road, there have also been an enormous number of strategic realignments of countries that previously, for historical reasons and past wars, were completely at odds. For example, now there is a new cooperation between Japan and China, where both say that there is the possibility of joint projects in Africa. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, just two days ago, said that Japan and China can cooperate in third countries and the pivot could be Thailand. Another great project, for which we have been fighting for more than 30 years, is the Kra Canal, about which there has recently been a conference putting that project back on the agenda. The Kra Canal would be a game-changer for the entire transport route in Southeast Asia.

Even as Latin American countries are extremely keen to work with China, U.S. Vice President Pence had threatened them and attacked them, saying they shouldn’t cooperate with China. But, since the United States is not offering what China is offering, the tendency is clearly in this direction.

In Europe, the reaction has been mixed. The European Union and Berlin are insisting on a “European way.” I’ll come to what that means in a second. Tomorrow is the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), in Brussels, where the Europeans will propose their own connectivity as a counter to the New Silk Road, but China so far sees no problem in such an arrangement, saying the two schemes can be integrated. Let’s see what happens at this summit.

But even Europe is completely captured by the advantages of cooperating with the New Silk Road. The 16+1, the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) plus China, are bringing in lots of infrastructure projects, and this has instilled optimism, for example in the Visegrad countries—that is Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary—whose transport ministers just met and announced that they want to connect their capitals through high-speed rail systems. So soon the Visegrad countries will be more prosperous and have more advantages than the West European countries which have basically not engaged in such infrastructure projects.

A wonderful example of cooperation with the New Silk Road is Austria, where Chancellor Sebastian Kurz will conduct a big Europe-Africa Forum, before the end of the year. Austria has the presidency of the European Union for this present half-year; many institutions in Austria and Vienna are completely enthusiastic. For example, the head of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce is pushing for the complete integration of Austria into the New Silk Road. And he said the New Silk Road is very easily explained: It is our economic future. The Mayor of the city of Linz called the connection of Austria to China the “Trade Route of Creativity.”

Also the new Italian government, which is being attacked by the mainstream media practically every day, is practically going for a full strategic alliance with China. Various cabinet ministers, Michele Geraci, and Giovanni Tria just returned from China after concluding huge deals, inviting China to rebuild Italy’s infrastructure. Paolo Savona, made a wonderful speech in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, comparing Italy’s new economic plan to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and also advocating cooperation between China and Italy in Africa. And before the Transaqua Memorandum of Understanding, there was an earlier memorandum of understanding between China and Italy to engage in this great project. So this can be a model of any Western country.

This plan is also, naturally, coming under attack by the European Council on Foreign Relations, which is a George Soros-financed institution. I think the Swiss financial daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung summed it all up recently, writing about Europe’s “paralyzing fear of Africa,” pointing to the crucial difference that Europeans only see Africa as a source of refugees, as a big migration crisis, while China is seeing the economic opportunity, and that therefore Europe is completely missing the signs of the times; that even countries including India, Turkey, the Gulf States, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, and China, all are saying, “Let’s go to Africa; this is where the economic next big development will take place.” These people are talking about Africa being a “new China with African characteristics.”

A New Paradigm for the Old

Now, the new paradigm is very clearly a new system of relations among nations, which allows the developing countries to leapfrog, overcome their underdevelopment, and get access to advanced technology. The old paradigm is completely hysterical about that, because if you look at what they have been trying to build, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, namely, a unipolar world based on the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain, they’re trying to save what Zbigniew Brzezinski called the “Great Game,” the efforts to contain Russia and China.

PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, was put on the agenda by the neo-cons after the collapse of the Soviet Union—going for “humanitarian” interventions; causing wars in the Middle East under the pretext “right to protect”; going for regime change, in which Syria is just one example—Iraq, Libya, other situations. All this has created a situation in which the developing countries have increasingly realized that they have to do something.

After the Asian crisis—already a result of the economic policies associated with this old paradigm—when George Soros speculated against the currencies of Southeast Asian countries in one week, driving their value in respect to the U.S. dollar down 50, 60, 80%, they realized they had to do something to defend themselves. The first such step was the Chiang Mai Initiative, an effort to protect against speculative attacks; and then came the Contingent Reserve Arrangement as a part of the BRICS policy, another effort in the same direction. But then, especially, the financial institutions associated with the New Silk Road—the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Silk Road Fund, the Maritime Silk Road Fund, and many others—all created specifically to provide financing of infrastructure.

Now the old paradigm was not just something with respect to the so-called “advanced sector,” but it was a paradigm shift at the end of the 1960s, ending the relative industrial optimism of the Kennedy period, the de Gaulle and Adenauer period, by trying to go to a post-industrial utopia. At that time the Club of Rome appeared with its fraudulent Limits to Growth theory, which was the idea that you had strict limits to raw materials, that you had to basically go for austerity, and this was a complete fraud. It was admitted by Meadows and Forrester, the authors, later on, namely, that they had left out completely the role of science and technology in defining what a “raw material” is.

Along the same line, the famous or infamous, Kissinger-authored National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM-200), came out in 1974, which guided U.S. foreign policy, saying that all raw materials belong to the United States and therefore excessive world population growth should be curbed because too many people will need too many raw materials. At that time, there was the promotion of a concern for the so-called “population explosion” as the biggest threat to world stability, and they developed the ideas of “sustainable development” and “appropriate technology,” which really meant no technology, because “appropriate technology” means everybody gets a shovel and can dig their own fields, but no tractors, no advanced machinery. NSSM-200 was only declassified sometime in the 1990s.

At the same time, you had the World Wildlife Fund under the leadership of Prince Philip, on behalf of this same British Empire, blocking any kind of development project in the developing sector.

The policies of the World Bank have to be critically reviewed in this context, because many of the loans given for development projects were organized in such a way that they had to be repaid even before the project had yielded any real productive result; the World Bank never financed infrastructure as the needed framework for these projects. That approach went along well with the infamous IMF conditionalities, conditionalities which prevented investment in infrastructure or even social systems in the developing sector, by demanding that debt repayment had priority over any domestic investments. This is the reason why there has been such a tremendous deficit in infrastructure.

This is also what the EU means when they say that the development of Africa needs to be “sustainable,” “appropriate.” They still have not woken up to the fact that what Africa and all the developing countries need, is real investment in infrastructure, in industry, in science and technology, in the most advanced technologies.

IPCC Turns Up the Heat of Dangerous Nonsense

Now recently, when it became clear that the New Silk Road was developing an unbelievable dynamic, there came renewed, unprecedented attacks, this time from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demanding the total decarbonization of the world economy by the year 2050.This is an old-hat project of John Schellnhuber, the former president of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who in 2011 published a report called the World in Transition—Social Contract for a Great Transformation, demanding exactly the total decarbonization of the whole world’s economy.

Many countries are completely dependent on coal, and that will not change for a long time, until we have developed new levels of energy, like fusion power.

Now we have demonstrated, and Schellnhuber has also admitted, or even demanded, that if you go to a complete decarbonization of the world economy, the carrying capacity of the Earth is about 1 billion people. In his “60 Minutes” interview, Trump basically dismissed the IPCC report, and said he was not going to spend billions of dollars and destroy millions of jobs for an unproven change in the climate; that there is absolutely no scientific proof that the climate change that is taking place is caused by man’s activity.

Indeed, climate change has been going on for millions of years in cyclical fashion—ice ages, warming trends—which are mostly caused by the position of our Solar System in the galaxy, and all the causes have not been researched sufficiently to demand such incredible demands such as the decarbonization of the economy, which would lead to a dramatic collapse—as a matter of fact, it would be genocidal in its effects.

Energy Flux-Density and Progress

One of the unique contributions of my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, was to develop the absolute connection between the potential relative population density on the planet and the energy flux-density in the production process. Each qualitative breakthrough is associated with a breakthrough in the energy flux-density, thus defining a new economic platform. If you look at the upward development from using combustion of wood as an energy resource, to combustion of coal, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear fission, and—on the horizon—fusion, then you can see that with these increases in energy flux-density you have an absolute rise in the potential of the Earth to maintain more people, living longer lives and in better conditions.

Now energy flux-density can be measured by the rate of energy use per person and per unit area of the economy as a whole. The energy used with a 2,000 calorie diet per person in civilization as it existed before man was able to tame fire for production uses, was about 100 watts, where every activity depended on the muscle of human beings. When the leap occurred to a wood-based economy, it comes to 3,000 watts per person, a 30-fold increase. With coal as a combustible fuel, it is 5,000 watts; with petroleum, the per capita rate of energy consumed shot up to 10,000 watts, which is already over 100 times that of a society without fire.

If nuclear fission were to become the dominant energy source, we would arrive at 20,000 watts per person, which would provide a much higher living standard and greater longevity for everyone, comparable to the best living standards in the United States and Western Europe today.

But this improvement of living standards is exactly what the neo-liberal oligarchy of the old paradigm wants to deny the developing countries. Just remember the disgusting speech given by President Barack Obama in his trip to South Africa, in which he said, if everybody in Africa wants to have a car, air conditioning, and a big house, the planet will boil over. Now, this open racism should never be forgotten. “Sustainable development” means “no development,” and it is really very useful that President Trump rejected the IPCC report.

I have not yet seen if there was any reaction coming from China, which previously only criticized the impossibility to implement the required measures, but to my knowledge China has not questioned in general the unscientific basis for this report. I have not yet seen the Russian reaction, either. But I remember very well that at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, it was the Sudanese head of the G-77, Lumumba Di-Aping, who refused to accept the findings of that climate conference, saying, “We are not going to sign a suicide pact.”

Now, if the New Silk Road becomes the World Land-Bridge, which is exactly what is in the process of happening, then in the next one to two generations, the world will require a completely new economic platform, in the terms it has been defined by LaRouche. It will require at least a tenfold increase in energy production and consumption, and obviously an immediate crash program for fusion power.

The IPCC report, in a scandalous way, says that they intend to invest $122 trillion by the year 2050, to implement the decarbonization of the world economy, and since these people are anti-nuclear as well, you go only to renewables—wind, solar, and so forth. If you were to invest the same sum, or even less, in fusion power, the breakthroughs could be accomplished in the near future.

Xi Jinping has set a different goal for 2050. He said, in the next development phases of the cooperation of all these countries participating in the New Silk Road, you will have by 2050 a completely new, beautiful, and wonderful world for the entire human population. This is an absolutely reachable goal. If you just consider that the wealth of only one man, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, whose private wealth is $150 billion, would be enough to pay for clean water for the entire world’s population for 15 years, you can see how quickly the approach taken by the New Silk Road countries can actually lead to this result.

Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws

What you need is the entire Four Laws program by Lyndon LaRouche: You need Glass-Steagall banking separation in the tradition of Roosevelt’s 1933 Banking Act. You need that on a global scale, which means you have to end the casino economy.

You have to go, secondly, to the American System of economy, a national banking system in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton. And you have to create a New Bretton Woods system, an international credit system, by which countries cooperate with national banking systems that provide credit for production, for real investment in the real economy, the most recent examples being the Reconstruction Finance Corp. of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, the Credit Institution for Reconstruction, used by Germany in the postwar period to bring about the German economic miracle. Were the banks in the West reorganized according to this model, they could then cooperate with the AIIB, the New Silk Road Fund, and others, for fulfilling the World Land-Bridge.

And especially, you would need the Fourth Law of LaRouche, which is a crash program for fusion power and international cooperation in space to achieve a massive increase in the productivity of the world economy. Now, space research and travel are especially important because they uplift the eyes and minds of the people to our larger universe, and they make clear that the idea of our planet being a closed system is completely ludicrous. Consistent with space exploration and the fact that our planet conforms to the laws of the universe, which are anti-entropic, a new economic platform will be established, and many further ones are already visible.

My husband Lyndon LaRouche said many years ago, that the only way this will get done is if the four most important powers—the United States, Russia, China, and India—work together to implement a New Bretton Woods system, because only they have the power to undo the present system of financial control of Wall Street and the City of London.

Obviously, now, most people will ask: “Is that possible? Can the world be persuaded to join the new paradigm?” Well, provided the midterm elections turn out well for President Trump, it is my biggest hope and firm expectation that we will be much freer in the second half of his first term, and that he will pursue positive relations with Russia, and that if he meets with President Xi Jinping, that they will find a way to overcome the present tariffs crisis in a better way than implementing additional and higher tariffs, which are really driving both sides into lose-lose positions.

Great Power Cooperation in Earth’s
Next 50 Years

If Japan and China can cooperate in third countries for their mutual benefit, I think the United States and China can do so. For example, the United States could accept Chinese investments in building up the infrastructure of the United States, connecting all the major cities where infrastructure is currently in such terrible condition. If you drive from Washington to New York, you’ll find that the highways are full of potholes. The railroads are in terrible condition. The United States has no fast train system at all, while China is connecting all its major cities with fast train systems by 2035.That could be done in the United States.

And the United States could make joint ventures in third countries in collaboration with China, rather than threatening Latin America not to cooperate with China. The United States and China should develop together the Latin American continent. They could invest in Asia; together they could develop Africa—a huge continent, which needs international cooperation. The trade deficit can be overcome by making trade bigger.

There is a new concept of great power relations, developed by China, and proposed to the United States. In light of the current tensions between China and the United States, the Global Times, a government-related newspaper, recently asked the question: “What should the relations be between China and the United States in 30, 40, 50 years from now, or even towards the end of the century?”

In 2005, my husband Lyndon LaRouche wrote a beautiful book called Earth’s Next Fifty Years, in which he developed the absolutely optimistic perspective that the future of Eurasia, and by implication the rest of the world, should be dominated by the ideas of Vladimir Vernadsky, namely that the noösphere will play an increasingly dominant role over the biosphere. That is, that the impact of human creativity, of inventions in scientific and technological breakthroughs, will increasingly dominate the behavior of human beings, and will constitute a physical force in the universe.

Now, I think that is absolutely what our true identity should be: The human species is the only known creative species in the universe, at least the only one known so far, and this is a moment when I think we have to grow up as human beings and become truly human. We cannot sit on the sidelines of history in such a moment.

I would like to remind you of what Schiller said in “What Is Universal History and Why Does One Study It?” He said—and I am saying it now in my own words—We should look at the long chain of generations before us, who gave us a tremendous heritage. Should it not be our proud and passionate desire to connect our ephemeral life to that long chain of human generations, and contribute with our own life, so that soon, a generation will be living a better life as a result of what we have done?

So, in this period, in the words of Schiller, there is one thing to be done worth speaking of, so let’s do it. Thank you.