ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Be Optimistic! Trump-Putin Phone Call Advances the New Paradigm

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s New Paradigm Webcast of May 5, 2019. A video of this webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger with the Schiller Institute. Welcome to this week’s webcast with our founder and President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. This week there have been, as we have every week, a number of very significant developments. We see a growing momentum toward the possibility of a Four Power agreement—an hour-and-a-half discussion between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. And I think, Helga, that’s the place for us to start—the significance of this coming after the release of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the fact that the President is now talking again with Vladimir Putin. What’s your reading on this?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I think this is really good news, because, as you said, on the initiative of President Donald Trump, the two Presidents talked for 90 minutes on the phone, and they covered a far, wide range of strategic issues, which I think anybody who is interested in world peace should be very happy about; contrary to such strange people as Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is upset about it. Think about it: The heads of the two largest nuclear powers in the world are talking again about strategic issues. That should make everybody happy, because it’s very important for the strategic stability and the possible solution of all relevant conflicts.

They talked for the first time since the cancellation of the Nov. 30, 2018 summit, when they were supposed to meet in Buenos Aires; because of the whole hysteria of Russiagate, this was then downgraded to then just an informal, short discussion.

So they had now a long talk, discussing economic issues, trade relations, investments; but also strategic, security-related issues. They reportedly discussed North Korea, Venezuela, Ukraine, and also the fact that the charge of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 campaign is now over. Trump, afterwards wrote several tweets in which he said, to have good relations with Russia and China is a good thing and not a bad thing; great potential for future relations.

And I think this is really, very, very important, because, you can say, about two years of Trump’s Presidency, or a little bit more already, was lost because of this absolutely incredible Mueller investigation. It is now becoming more and more clear that this was collusion with British intelligence on the part of the heads of intelligence of the Obama Administration, and naturally, this was with the knowledge of Obama and Hillary Clinton. It is now very difficult to say that it was not.

So I think this is a real breakthrough.

On Venezuela, Trump and Putin agreed that it’s entirely up to the Venezuelan people to settle their internal affairs; I think this is very good. It was also reported that President Trump has expressed increasing doubt about the intelligence he was given about the situation in Venezuela. They discussed Ukraine in the context of the new President there, Volodymyr Zelensky, that this means that now, absolutely, the Minsk agreement must be gotten to some success. Also, extremely important, they discussed nuclear disarmament, even the possibility of including China in a tri-party strategic agreement on nuclear disarmament.

I think this is really a very, very important development, and good news for the whole world, because it’s a real blowback against those people who had tried to go for confrontation with Russia, up to the point of turning a new Cold War into a hot war. So, I think these are really good developments.

Schlanger: It brings back into focus what happened at Helsinki. Speaking of lost time, when President Trump and President Putin met in Helsinki, on July 16, 2018, one of the things they discussed was disarmament, the nuclear arms agreements. Trump, brought this up again after this call the other day, asking “Why are we spending trillions of dollars on arms and wars when we have other needs?”

The other thing I think is significant, is Trump, once again, literally joking with Putin about the fraud about what he called the “hoax” of Russiagate. Remember, after that Helsinki discussion, what the media focussed on was Trump saying he trusts Putin more than he does the U.S. intelligence community.

Back and Forth Over China

In that context, Helga, we have this continuing back and forth over China. Is this a clash of civilizations, or is it something that’s worthwhile? How do you think the Trump-Putin discussion will affect U.S. coverage, or U.S. and Western thinking, about the Belt and Road Initiative?

Zepp-LaRouche: On the one side, next week or in the coming week is supposed to be the next round of U.S.-China trade negotiations. [Vice Premier] Liu He is supposed to come to Washington, and if it comes to an agreement, then there is also the chance that President Xi Jinping may actually come to the White House to sign the agreement, because this is what Trump had indicated earlier. So hopefully, this is on a good track.

But one has to also see that there is this hardcore Bush-league, neo-con establishment, sitting in the United States, and they’re not giving up at all. As a matter of fact, they’re trying to really portray China as the long-term enemy, the adversary, and there is a new expression of this really racist view—I mean, it’s really racism!

The State Department Policy Planning staff is a very important institution in the State Department and historically. It’s there as a permanent bureaucracy; it’s almost more important than whoever is the Secretary of State, who is Mike Pompeo at this point, who has also proven to be not so loyal to Trump as he initially pretended. Pompeo was, together with National Security Adviser John Bolton, in a lot of the confrontation policies against North Korea, Venezuela, Iran.

The State Department Policy Planning Director is a woman—actually an Afro-American woman, which makes it all the more incredible—whose name is Kiron Skinner. She put out the story that the United States is involved in a real, long-term clash of civilizations with China because, supposedly, according to her worldview, China is the first great power the United States has ever confronted which is “not Caucasian.”

Can you imagine that? She’s not precisely “Caucasian” herself, but she says, China is a completely different civilization, completely different ideology, and even the Soviet Union, despite the fact that they were Marxist and communist, they were still somehow belonging to the family of Western nations, because after all Karl Marx was counted in Western philosophy, and so forth. I mean, this is really unbelievable. And she said, the Soviet Union could be confronted on the basis of human rights violations and so forth, but this will not be possible with China.

Naturally, she is quite right, because China has an impeccable human rights record, because they lifted 800 million people out of poverty, and if there’s any violation of human rights, then it is poverty, because if you are poor, then you can only either afford housing, or food, or health services, but not all of these combined. So, therefore, poverty is a human rights violation!

Geopolitical Racism or World Harmony?

Now, China has, in the 40 years of reform and opening-up, changed from a really, very, very poor developing country, into what you can say is really becoming now more and more the engine of the world economy. It has created a strong, well-to-do middle class, of now 300 million, which is supposed to double in 5 to 10 years to become 600 million people—which for U.S. and European exporting nations is a tremendous market, among other things; that’s not the only value, but it is one. So to say that China cannot be challenged on human rights, is in one sense, very true, because they do a lot for solving of any poverty or whatever problems.

Naturally, that’s not what she means; she means that the Chinese tradition is a completely different one, but that shows that she’s as ignorant as Samuel Huntington, who obviously is one of her mentors. In his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, from 1996, twenty or more years ago, Samuel Huntington claimed that there will be an increasing clash between Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism.

If you read this book—I tortured myself to do that at the time—you realize that this guy had absolutely no knowledge about any of the philosophies he discussed. And so does this Kiron Skinner prove herself to be completely ignorant, because you can absolutely make the case that China is really grounded very deeply in the Confucian tradition, and I have proven, and I will prove this more in the future, that the Confucian tradition, and the humanist tradition in the West are extremely closely related, and they have a great affinity. The aesthetic education of Confucius and of Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt, are absolutely based on the same principle of the need for the ennoblement of the individual as the precondition for the harmonious development of the state.

And just to contrast this really terrible stuff which she pronounces there, Xi Jinping on his side, has called for a dialogue of civilizations on the possibility of their development in harmony in diversity, and as people may remember, I have always emphasized that this is one of the core ideas of Nicholas of Cusa, who also talks about unity in diversity all the time, that there is a common interest to the entire civilization of the human species.

So you can really see the two worldviews, that of confrontation, the geopolitical racist conception on the one side, and the idea of having a harmonious development, which is creating the basis for world peace. So people should draw their own conclusions of who has the interest of civilization in mind and who does not.

Schlanger: I would encourage our viewers to go to the Schiller Institute website archives, where you will find many writings of Helga Zepp-LaRouche on the aesthetical education of man and the common agreement between the Confucian tradition and that of Western humanism.

Attraction of the BRI for Europe

This fight is obviously expanding. We have developments from Italy and elsewhere, following the Second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which took place over April 25-27 in Beijing. There was a lot of harmony and dialogue at that event, but we also see now, even in Germany, as you pointed out from a Handelsblatt researcher, a very significant article essentially saying that Germany must be involved in the Silk Road. How is this developing in Germany? There’s also an oppositional side, along the lines of what this Skinner wrote.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, but I think the growing attractiveness of a new paradigm of cooperation in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative is becoming more expressed and more dynamic. For example The Bavarian state government commissioned the Munich Institute for Economic Research, the Ifo Institute, to make a study on the Silk Road interest for Germany, and for Bavaria in particular. Ifo came to the conclusion that the economic advantages for Germany to cooperate with the New Silk Road are really very big, but that Bavaria and Germany—Bavaria, in particular—must urgently upgrade and modernize its own infrastructure, because the non-investment in infrastructure in Germany over a long time carries the danger of it being completely sidelined.

I think this is a very useful study, and it coincides also with the fact that Bavaria will have a second big New Silk Road conference in Nuremberg this year, and it is one of the German states which is extensively cooperating already, and many delegations are going back and forth. So I think that that is on a good track.

This Handelsblatt article you mentioned, by the director of the Handelsblatt Research Center, Dr. Jörg Lichter, basically says, yeah, sure, Germany should stick with the EU connectivity plan, but it should also cooperate with China. And then he points to the many, many connections which have been established between a half-dozen or more Chinese cities with the equivalent number of German cities—Hamburg with both the Maritime Silk Road connection, but also the overland route, the Eurasian connection; and then, Duisburg, being the largest inland port in Europe, but also many other routes; Wilhelmshaven is the only deep water port of Germany. So, it’s really growing, and there is especially from the Mittelstand, the middle-level industry, an increasing interest for cooperation. So I think this is all on a very good track.

You mentioned the Skinner type of crazy side. One woman, Nadine Godehardt, from the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik—German Institute for International and Security Affairs—just repeats this old line about a “geopolitical threat,” and so forth.

But while it is still aiming to poison the well and scare people off, I’m actually quite optimistic that reason will prevail in all of these points.

Schlanger: I think a good example of that is what happened in Malaysia, where the BRI was being attacked. After Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the Prime Minister, attended the Belt and Road Forum, he said the Chinese were more than willing to make some compromises and changes in agreement, and he pointed out that this is the future for Asia. So, this idea that the Chinese are “imposing” their will with an imperial, aggressive policy, has been disproven by one of the very cases that were being cited by its enemies.

Infrastructure on the Agenda

On the infrastructure question: A very significant development in the United States, which cuts through some of the insanity in the Democratic Party concerning the Mueller report, was an April 30 meeting between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and President Trump on infrastructure. This could be promising, couldn’t it?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. I think that the Democratic Party is split more and more between the really radical, crazy wing, which wants to have impeachment, even as there is no basis for it and there never was. Even Bernie Sanders said an impeachment drive is just going to drive voters away. Pelosi and Schumer, together with a number of other leading Democrats, met with Trump on infrastructure.

Now, Trump said there is an urgent need to have a $1-2 trillion infrastructure program over the next 10 years, and it will not be easy but very difficult, to secure the financing. Now, I think that this needs to be supported, but I think it needs to be upgraded. The American Society of Civil Engineers has said the actual infrastructure demand in the United States is more than $4.5 trillion, and a Chinese corporation involved in infrastructure investments has said it’s $8 trillion. According to our own estimates, it comes to more like $20 trillion, because it’s not just a question of repairing existing infrastructure, but what would be desirable for the United States is a complete overhaul and modernization of the infrastructure.

Because of the return to better relations between Trump and Putin, the chances of accomplishing this are actually growing. We need a Four Power agreement, a New Bretton Woods system to overcome the danger of a new financial crash, which is looming. And then have a really modern infrastructure plan for the entire North American continent, by connecting, for example, all U.S. cities with high-speed trains, with maglev trains, to completely innovate the inter-urban traffic through so-called “slow maglev” trains.

The financing of that could come, not from conventional means, but through a combination of what my husband, Lyndon LaRouche had outlined already many years ago, the Four Laws legislation: First Glass-Steagall banking separation; then a national bank in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton; then an international credit institution, a New Bretton Woods system for international financing of long-term projects; and increasing the productivity of the economy through a crash program for fusion, for international space cooperation—to take all this as one package.

Now, even if you do that, it speaks a lot for Chinese investment in this U.S. infrastructure modernization. Given that the Chinese hold $1.3 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds in their foreign exchange reserves, it would be quite easy and helpful if they would invest this money, through an infrastructure bank in the United States, and cooperate in the building of such infrastructure.

That, in turn, could mean then that the Chinese offer to the United States to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, in Latin America, in Asia, in the urgent building up of Africa, would really create a situation in which all countries of this world would be engaged in the creation of a completely new paradigm of cooperation, and the crazy geopolitical fantasies of such people as Kiron Skinner would be put ad acta of history for good.

So I think we want to have the debate, especially among the population. We need to have a discussion of how to get the kind of funding necessary to reconstruct the United States economy. The flooding catastrophe in the Midwest, where President Trump promised he would help the governors of the affected states, is just the context in which such a debate can and must occur.

Brits Behind Russiagate and LaRouche Prosecution

Schlanger: You mentioned a split in the Democratic Party. It’s very interesting that the people who are continuing to push for impeachment, are the same ones who oppose Trump’s outreach to Russia and China, which is the whole basis, the whole point of Russiagate from the beginning. But they’re also supporters of this radical, anti-growth policy, the so-called Green New Deal. An agreement with China on trade and then extending it into infrastructure would be the best way to counter that.

Now, on the craziness that’s coming out around people like Rep. Jerry Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who continue to beat the drums on “collusion,” “obstruction” and so on, there are some new developments: A Fox News interview on May 3 with George Papadopoulos, in which he went aggressively against the British role, while Rep. Devin Nunes, Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, says he wants to find out what the CIA, FBI and others knew about one of the key people in the Papadopoulos case, an FBI/CIA/MI6 informant, Joseph Mifsud.

This investigation into the British side brings us back to the importance of the exoneration campaign for your husband that we at the Schiller Institute, with our friends and allies, are waging. I’d like you to discuss the critical intersection of what we’re doing with the exoneration fight, and getting to the truth, to the bottom of what was behind Russiagate.

Zepp-LaRouche: As we have stressed several times, the apparatus which went for the prosecution of my husband and his colleagues in the 1980s, is exactly the same kind of war party that is behind the Russiagate campaign against President Trump. This must all come out! It is coming out. You mentioned that Papadopoulos was on Fox TV on the Hannity program, where he discussed the role of British intelligence and other Western intelligence services in this whole affair. And he made a joke which is very close to what we had said last week—namely, that if President Trump goes on this state visit to Great Britain, he should bring up with Theresa May and the Queen what was the role of the British? I mean, maybe he shouldn’t go at all, but if he goes, he should have great fun.

Anyway, I think the British side is really the most important one to focus on, because it is also at the bottom of what led to the prosecution of my husband. In a big book we wrote about this, which people can easily access, called Railroad! U.S.A. v. Lyndon LaRouche, et al., among the many documents published there or since is a letter from British intelligence, I think dating back to 1982, demanding that something should be done about Lyndon LaRouche.

My husband wrote an article on Feb. 15, 2000, published in the March 10, 2000 issue of EIR, which I think anybody who wants to get to the bottom of this should read. It is titled, “U.S.A. vs. Lyndon LaRouche: ‘He’s a Bad Guy, But We Can’t Say Why’.” He describes extensively the FBI/CIA intelligence operations against him.

Why They Went After LaRouche

As the real reasons, he mentions five. One was his collaboration with President Reagan on the Strategic Defense Initiative, because this would have upset the entire geopolitical situation of the postwar period, because he proposed a way to overcome nuclear weapons through new weapons based on new physical principles which would have made nuclear weapons obsolete, which President Reagan did make official American policy on March 23, 1983. This caused a huge freakout on the side of the Bush leaguers in the United States, but also Soviet government elements associated with Nikolai Ogarkov absolutely hit the roof.

My husband also repeatedly made very important steps to get a new financial system, the most effective being his collaboration in 1982 with President José López Portillo of Mexico.

Then he was also working with heads of governments of the developing sector to get long-term development projects to overcome their underdevelopment, whereas the policy of the British Empire and the establishment was precisely to prevent that from happening, through such institutions as the Trilateral Commission; the Council on Foreign Relations’ “1980s Project,” with its “controlled disintegration” of the world economy; and earlier the Club of Rome introducing the fraud of zero growth and so-called limits to resources.

These are really the fundaments of why you had an underdevelopment of the developing sector, and of the proposals my husband, myself, and our organization have worked on for almost 50 years. It is a question of the future of the United States.

Exonerate LaRouche, Be Optimistic!

So the exoneration of my husband, who was condemned and prosecuted because of his ideas, is extremely important. People must study these ideas if the United States is to come out of this present crisis.

I would really urge you: Read his writings, help us in the exoneration campaign, sign and circulate the petition, build up the pressure that he be exonerated and take his rightful place in history in the United States and the world.

Schlanger: Helga, when you mention the Railroad! book, which was the story of the persecution of your husband, it reminds me that the only railroad that really works in the United States right now is that run by the shadow government operation against their opponents. If we can root out these British networks embedded in U.S. institutions, we can begin to establish new railroads based on new physical principles, and that would be the object of what Mr. LaRouche had been fighting for his whole life.

I think, if people want to do something on the exoneration—and you should!—go to the Schiller Institute website. There’s a petition there: Read it, read the supporting documents with it, and circulate it. Be active. That’s the only way we’re going to win this fight.

Helga, is there anything else you want to bring up today?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think people should be optimistic. I think the biggest enemy of the human species, sometimes, is the pessimism of too many individuals and the doubt that you can actually move history in a better direction. But I think the role of the individual in history, especially in conjunctures like the one we have now, is really big. If you have a plan, and an idea, and if the time for that idea has come, and you have the courage to move on it, you can actually change the course of history completely.

My husband has done that, and we have now the noble task to complete his vision and his work. So I’m asking you to join us in this endeavor.

Schlanger: OK! And we’ll see you next week, then.

Zepp-LaRouche: Till next week.