ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

The Extraterrestrial Imperative Is Key to Defeat the Deadly Pessimism Spread by the British Empire

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s July 13, 2019 New Paradigm interview with the founder of the Schiller Institutes, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, by Harley Schlanger. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello! I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It’s July 13, 2019.

I think we’ll begin with some developments that are follow-ups to the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan and Trump’s trip to the Korean Demilitarized Zone. There were developments in the North Korean situation in the last few days, which certainly seem to continue the “Singapore Spirit,” Helga, what’s going on with that?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: That is one of the brightest spots in the strategic situation. Very clearly as a follow-up to the summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un, the United States, in what can only be described as a step-by-step diplomatic approach, agreed to ease some of the sanctions on North Korea for the next 12-18 months. This is very important, because if you don’t give anything to North Korea, you cannot expect them to go all the way in the denuclearization. The demand to do it all at once had actually led to the sabotage of the earlier U.S.-North Korean summit in Hanoi. But now the United States has agreed to ease the sanctions. North Korea has changed its Constitution putting less emphasis on the military, and instead emphasizing that science and technology is the most important resource of the country and it will be a high priority. I think this is a very good sign. These are positive outcomes from this summitry, but unfortunately, we are not yet over the hill.

Schlanger: I assume you would include in these positive outcomes the discussions coming up with Russia and the United States on arms talks.

Zepp-LaRouche: That is very important. The talks will take place in Geneva, between Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and Andrea Thompson, and one other Undersecretary of State from the U.S. side, David Hale. They will also discuss the new START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) agreement, and as Ryabkov said, they will try to set up a structured dialogue to deal with all of these questions. That was exactly what had been missing the whole time, which is why people had said that the situation was more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. There are clearly positive steps unfolding.

But as I said, unfortunately it does not mean that the world is in safe waters; provocations are continuing, which clearly show the British hand. We had the seizure of the Iranian tanker several days ago off Gibraltar. Then both the U.S. and British defense departments claimed that Iranian speedboats were trying to guide or force a British tanker out of the international area in the Strait of Hormuz into Iranian waters, which was then intersected by a Royal Navy frigate. Those allegations were denied by Iran. It’s very hard to say which story is true, but it just shows you that the situation is very far from being out of danger.

The British Ambassador to the U.S.

Schlanger: Speaking of the British hand, we have the continued fall-out of the affair of the British Ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, who resigned this week. But one of the most important memos that he sent back to the UK Foreign Office, was the one in which he said that Trump seems to oppose a march toward war with Iran, but another provocation could lead to a U-turn. This definitely once again shows the British desire for war, which you mentioned in terms of Iran.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. The fall-out of this Sir Kim Darroch affair is not yet fully developed, but it definitely has soured the so-called special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States. And the fact that British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt is giving full backing to Darroch also bodes ill if Hunt were to become Prime Minister. However, if Boris Johnson becomes the next Prime Minister, then the special relationship would be viewed in a completely different light.

It’s not just a question of personalities. The British Empire, as we have said many times, is not Great Britain—it’s not even the British government, even if their hand was clearly in the Russiagate affair. What we mean by the “British Empire” is the entire system of the neo-liberal financial system, with its headquarters in London, and a little dependency, called Wall Street. It is this system of unipolar power running the world as an empire, modelling itself on the old British Empire, and based on the anti-American Anglo-American special relationship. So, that must be looked at more thoroughly. A new credit system is absolutely key to breaking up and burying that system of empire.

Schlanger: Hunt praised Darroch for acting in the best tradition of British foreign policy and diplomacy. That is precisely the case: The undermining of the United States is part of that British tradition.

In terms of provocations, Helga, there’s now something brewing around the U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. Why is this significant? Why is the United States engaging in this now?

Zepp-LaRouche: This is a very dangerous. And for $2.2 billion in weapons sales to Taiwan, which China regards as a violation of the “One China” policy, why would the U.S. arm Taiwan, when officially the United States says that it agrees with the One-China policy? Now, this is a provocation. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, speaking from Eastern Europe where he was on a tour, said that the United States is playing with fire in doing that. All of these anomalies reflect the fact that Trump still, despite his intentions to improve the relationships with Russia and China, does not have his administration under control.

The Achilles Heel

Schlanger: We see also that Trump is now launching a tour of the United States, where he’s talking about the economy, talking about some things that are important; the importance of manufacturing and so on. And yet the reality of the U.S. situation is what we just pointed out in the EIR on “The Bitter Truth about the U.S. ‘Economic Recovery.’” We had a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department Chief, Michael Moore, about homelessness in Los Angeles. I think that says a lot about what’s happening in the United States.

Zepp-LaRouche: He said that 800 homeless people died in 2017; in 2018, it was 900. Now that means almost three people per day. This is an unbelievable humanitarian crisis. This is what the Los Angeles Police Department Chief said. We are absolutely on the mark with the new EIR study “The Bitter Truth about the U.S. ‘Economic Recovery’,” and the absolutely urgent need to completely shift gears and go in the direction of the Four Laws of my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche.

Schlanger: We’re coming into a moment that’s quite significant historically, one that the Schiller Institute is going to be making sure that people understand its significance—that is, the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. We’re doing a lot around that, Helga. Why don’t you identify for people the significance of this opportunity, now, to raise this question of space travel and exploration?

Zepp-LaRouche: The most important aspect is that it demonstrates the undeniable proof that the Earth is not a closed system. We are living in a large universe, which is, indeed, so large that even the best imagination has a hard time imagining it. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope has proven that we now know of at least 2 trillion galaxies. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth.

This puts the lie to the claim that resources are limited, a claim the environmentalist movement has been preaching for many decades. The Chinese mission to the far side of the Moon, where they plan to mine helium-3 as a fuel for future thermonuclear reactors on Earth, proves that any of these stars and heavenly bodies can be regarded as future sources of resources.

I find it very exciting that on the 20th of July, when we have the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, there is a lot going on, which proves that the hiatus, at least in the West and for NASA, is over. You had the announcement by President Trump that he wants to put another man and the first woman on the Moon by 2024. There are big preparations underway in this direction.

Four Powers in Space

Coincidentally with this anniversary, the Chinese have reactivated their Chang’e-4 lunar lander and Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the Moon, and they have resumed their work. India has announced that in two days, on the 15th of July to start their Chandrayaan-2 mission, which is supposed to land in September near the South Pole of the Moon to investigate the ice in deep craters which are always in shadow. This is very exciting, because ice is water, and water is crucial for life on the Moon. India, which regards itself as a major space-faring nation, is actually doing that.

Ouyang Ziyuan, the chief scientist of the Chinese lunar program, announced that next year China will start its Mars mission to investigate if there can be terraforming on Mars, to find out if the conditions can be created for mankind to stay there for a long periods.

Another very good development, an area where the German science is still active and not Green, is that the largest German-Russian joint space mission was started, where they’re sending space vehicles and satellites, which will study galaxies which are billions of light-years away, with higher resolution than ever before, to gain insights into the origin and history of the universe.

All of these things are absolutely exciting, because they prove that the creativity of man can always overcome barriers and open up new horizons. This is a complete refutation of the unscientific and superstitious view of the ecologists.

Schlanger: It also challenges those who say that the space program is a waste of money, it’s really superfluous to the economic situation. But, your husband always emphasized the importance of new technologies and especially space technologies. How does this work to refute the neo-liberal view of economics?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think it is not money and not even resources that constitute wealth. But it is only the creative powers of reason, and the ability of man to again and again generate scientific and technological breakthroughs, which completely redefines what a resource is. That was the big fight which we fought against since its beginning.

Zero Growth: British Imperial Fascism

First of all, the Club of Rome thesis that appeared in 1972 about the limits of growth, was a complete fraud, because it was just a computer model where the end result was fixed—first, namely, to say that the resources are limited, and that therefore we have to conserve everything; we have to go to zero-growth. What they left out of their computer model was the fact that new scientific discoveries redefine what a resource is.

So, in a certain sense, this is just the last trick of the oligarchy, where their financial system is collapsing, and they are now trying to invite major investment in so-called “sustainable technologies.” Goldman Sachs just put out a story saying they put out two indices, where people can see where they can invest in such sustainable technologies and play a positive moral role in this present climate debate.

People have a short memory, but these catastrophic announcements—Prince Charles came out and even changed the view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the world has only 12 years, which triggered the “Fridays for Future” hysteria among teenagers. At a meeting with the Commonwealth foreign ministers, Prince Charles declared that we only have 18 months to change the conditions which challenge the existence of mankind on this planet. He expects the ministers of the Commonwealth countries to carry out the necessary policies. This is completely crazy!

People have forgotten that in the 1980s, you had hysterical alarms about the portended dying of the forests. I remember Der Spiegel’s headline from the beginning of the 1980s saying that the ecological Hiroshima is about to happen, referring to the acid rain which would destroy the forests. Now, as everybody can see in Germany, the woods are in excellent condition. Later they buried this story, by saying it was not sufficiently researched, that this imprecise analysis caused a lot of depressive moods, and that they were sorry for that. Then in the 1990s, it was the ozone hole. Nobody talks about the ozone hole anymore. And now you have the world ending in 18 months.

I think this is all completely unscientific, and it makes very clear that the ecology movement is really not based on any scientific facts. They are basing their views on algorithms, on computer models, and these computer models are rigged to the benefit of the financial oligarchy and the neo-liberal system.

So, I think it’s high time that we go back to science and technology, and the true laws of the universe, and then we will have bright future—but only then.

Schlanger: I find it quite humorous that Goldman Sachs is talking about moral standards when it comes to economics!

Space Visionary Krafft Ehricke

You and your husband became friends and collaborators with the space visionary Krafft Ehricke. He presented something that even goes far beyond the simple economic benefits. What is the importance of the idea of the extraterrestrial imperative that he put forward?

Zepp-LaRouche: It has everything to do with the identity of man and the image of man. What space travel and space research—the idea to build industrial complexes and villages on the Moon, the idea to use that industrial base for interstellar space flight of future generations—what all of this means, Krafft Ehricke very beautifully articulated in his Three Laws of Astronautics: 1) Nobody and nothing under the natural laws of this universe impose any limitations on many except man himself; 2) Not only the Earth, but the entire solar System, and as much of the universe as he can reach under the laws of nature, are man’s rightful field of activity; and 3) By expanding through the universe, man fulfills his destiny as an element of life, endowed with the power of reason and the wisdom of the moral law within himself.

With these laws goes an incredible optimism that man can, indeed, find out the laws of the universe, and that these laws of the universe are in absolute correspondence to the laws of his own creative thinking. Now, that is very, very beautiful.

Opening the Global Manufacturing and Industrialization Summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia on July 9, President Putin spoke about the need to develop thermonuclear fusion in a crash program. He also mentioned that the beauty of fusion power is that it’s one of the technologies which is very clearly imitating processes in nature. In other words, if we can have fusion power as an energy resource on the Earth, we are doing exactly what the Sun is doing in the production of light and heat. The future of technology will be more and more that we study what is the function of life, what is the function of creative reason; and that we will bring our activity on the planet more and more into cohesion with the physical laws of our universe. That will have a tremendous impact on how we handle our affairs politically on the planet.

Krafft Ehricke, by the way, was on the board of the Schiller Institute and appreciated the work of the Schiller Institute tremendously. He once told me that it’s never the technology which is good or bad; it is always the human being: Is the human being morally capable of using these technologies for the good of the human species, or not? That is why he agreed that Friedrich Schiller’s particular idea of the Aesthetical Education for the moral improvement of mankind was absolutely necessary to go along with scientific and technological progress, because science and technology alone don’t answer the question of the moral behavior of man. But it is the Aesthetical Education, it’s the influence of great art, Classical music, Classical poetry, and other Classical arts, which have the effect of ennobling the human being, and therefore, the two things absolutely have to go together.

Classical Music, Poetry, and Arts Fuel Progress

Schlanger: I think in that context, it’s very interesting to see what’s happening in Bolivia, with a legacy of colonial policy which has deprived such countries of that connection to Classical culture and science, and now, this relatively poor country in South America is moving ahead. This is an example of the kind of optimism you’re talking about.

Zepp-LaRouche: Bolivia used to be the second poorest country in Latin America, just ahead of Haiti. In the recent years, because of collaboration, especially with Russia and China, they have done already a lot for poverty alleviation. President Evo Morales has just been in Moscow meeting with President Putin. They made many agreements: for nuclear energy, for agriculture, for infrastructure, trade deals. But especially they are very optimistic that Bolivia will become a nuclear country. For this occasion, the Bolivian government put out a one-minute video, proudly announcing that they will become such a country, focussing on science and technology.

But, if you look at that, it’s not just Bolivia; it’s—as we mentioned—North Korea also wants to put primary emphasis on science and technology. Rosatom, the Russian nuclear firm, prides itself as one of the world’s most advanced nuclear facilities, with the most capable of nuclear technology. They are co-investing in Egypt and are helping many other developing countries.

I think that what we will see in the very near future, is that many countries of the New Paradigm—that is, those countries working with the Belt and Road Initiative—will all go in the direction of higher energy-flux density, especially nuclear, with emphasis on fusion power crash programs, and even higher energy-flux density, a key notion developed by my husband, Lyndon LaRouche.

I think this is all very promising. This has incredible implications. Politico today has an article posing the question, “Which is the cleanest energy?” and answering, “Amazingly, it is nuclear energy.” That’s not a surprise, but it’s important that they have started to discuss this.

Looking at the landscape and the world map, Asia is rising; but it’s not just China. It’s South Korea, now soon North Korea; Japan, India, many other Asian countries all absolutely committed to putting their future on innovation, on science and technology, on reason.

If you then look at certain quarters in the West—not everybody—the Italian government clearly is an exception. In their first meeting, Italian Finance Minister Giovanni Tria and his Chinese counterpart set up long-term financial structures to finance the Belt and Road projects, putting out $250 million worth of so-called “Panda bonds” to finance Italian investments of small and medium industries in China. So, Italy is clearly going ahead.

But if you look at some of the other Western countries—especially Germany, which is breaking my heart, because it’s the country which has produced so many thinkers and inventors and poets and composers, and now they are on this Green suicide pact. Naturally, the Green phenomenon is also in many other European countries and the Green New Deal of the Democrats in the United States is also afflicted with the same insanity.

Green Paradigm is British Genocide

The problem is, with these policies, the West is destroying itself, while Asia is rising. I think this is a very, very dangerous phenomenon which can only lead to new conflicts. This is really behind this present confrontation by NATO and by the British, against Russia and China, because they don’t want to accept that these countries have turned to the principles of science and technology and the Western elite, the neo-liberal elite is absolutely stuck to the idea of making profit for a few at the expense of hundreds of millions of people. Because when you go with the Green paradigm, what you are saying is, “we stick with the speculation in CO₂ emissions and hedge fund investing in solar and windmills.”

But that means only the speculators get rich. You are actually saying, whether you say it explicitly or not, that hundreds of millions of people will not have food, they will not have clean water, they will not have enough money for education, for housing; this is really the core of the present migrations in Latin America and in Africa and Southwest Asia.

So, I think we have to get a paradigm shift. We have to come back to the idea that the human species is the only species capable of making scientific breakthroughs, of getting a better understanding of the physical laws of the universe, and that that is what increases the productivity in the production process, what increases the productivity of the labor force, and is the source of our long-term survivability.

All these were ideas which were beautifully developed by Lyndon LaRouche. This is why I keep saying, if you want to save the West, we have to have the exoneration of my husband. When what people wrongly called the Deep State, which is in reality is the Anglo-American secret service apparatus linked to this neo-liberal establishment—when they put my husband innocently into jail, former Attorney General and my husband’s attorney on appeal, Ramsey Clark, said that it was not just a person, it was supposed to put an entire body of ideas into jail.

If the West wants to survive, then that injustice has to be remedied and the name of my husband has to be absolutely cleared, so that people have a fresh mind and study his ideas. Because that is the absolutely crucial antidote to this stupid, silly stuff coming out of the mouths of such people as Prince Charles.

Creative Beauty is the Path to Freedom

Schlanger: I encourage our viewers to look at some of the books that Mr. LaRouche wrote. For example, There Are No Limits to Growth, which absolutely refuted the Green ideology back in 1983. We will be having some events over the next week in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing. I’d urge people also to keep an eye on our website for that.

Helga, is there anything else? I think we’ve covered a lot.

Zepp-LaRouche: I think it’s a good moment to reflect on the significance of space and think about the fact that the idea of space travel has everything to do with the image of man. It is an optimism which is caused by that. The oligarchy doesn’t like people to be optimistic. Because if man is conscious about his or her creative powers, then you are free.

I was really both shocked and disgusted about some of the programs coming from the 2nd channel of German TV, or even some programs on the German Deutschlandfunk, which is sort of the official radio: They basically completely try to suppress the beauty of space travel, by saying this was all done by German Nazis. Well, I would really say that anybody who says this has no idea who Krafft Ehricke was, or all the other scientists, who were devoted to science, and not to an ideology which they were basically imprisoned by, or rather in circumstances where they couldn’t oppose. So, to smear it that way, or when this ridiculous program in the German radio says that in the beginning people thought of astronauts as heroes; but now this has all gone, and one can see that astronauts are just victims. This is so ridiculous! Whenever you hear something like that, you should be absolutely aware, that this is the handwriting of an oligarchy that does not want you to be conscious of your own creative powers.

With that, I want you to think about it, because you will see a lot of beautiful pictures in the next days. We ourselves will have events on the 20th of July; we’ll have big rallies promoting this idea. So, join the Schiller Institute and help us to get the world into a New Paradigm which is already emerging in many parts of the world.

Schlanger: OK, with that Helga, till next week. Keep spreading optimism!

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes!