We Can Shape a New Era of Mankind!

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

[Print version of this article]

Helga Zepp-LaRouche is the founder and Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute. We present here her edited keynote address on the Nov. 16, 2019 to the Schiller Institute Conference, “The Future of Humanity as a Creative Species in the Universe,” in Bad Soden, Germany. Subheads have been added.

Coups and Attempted Coups

I cannot open my remarks without addressing the unprecedented events taking place in the United States right now. With the so-called impeachment proceedings, what is happening in that country is actually an attempted coup against the elected President, and regime-change by the same forces who are conducting the effort of regime-change in Hong Kong and in Bolivia.

It is very clear, they want to get Trump out of office by any and all means. The intention becomes very clear if you look at the testimony of such people as the diplomat William B. Taylor, Jr., George Kent, Fiona Hills, and others who made unbelievable assertions under oath which have absolutely nothing to do with reality. Taylor, for example, lied, saying President Trump, in collusion with Ukraine President Zelensky, delayed the delivery of heavy military equipment to Ukraine; and in that way costing many Ukrainian lives to be lost by not deterring the Russian aggression.

This is a completely upside-down situation. If you think in terms of what happened with the coup in the Maidan in 2014, which I think Natalia Vitrenko will speak about, or can answer any questions you may have, it is all the more impertinent what George Kent said. He said the forces in Ukraine opposing Russia are to be compared to the Minutemen of the American Revolution, and are heroes like the Marquis de Lafayette and Baron von Steuben in the American Revolution. This is so absolutely outrageous; it is 100% the opposite of the proud tradition of Lafayette and von Steuben.

If you turn the truth so upside-down, and you turn it into the absolute contrary, it can only be called Satanic. Because the people who committed the coup in Ukraine, and who are the enemies of Russia, are people in the tradition of the Nazi, Stepan Bandera. We all remember the infamous words of Victoria Nuland, who said that the State Department spent $5 billion in order to finance this opposition in Ukraine.

At the same time, less important but significant for the new spirit in the neo-con and neo-liberal circles in the United States, the 2019 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission just came out, denying China’s statehood by referring to Xi Jinping as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and no longer as President of the People’s Republic of China. This is worse than McCarthyism, and the only good thing is, this coup is not yet decided because the coup plotters are under criminal investigation by Attorney General William Barr; and they may all end up being prosecuted and eventually end up in jail.

Now, what is going on in the United States is, as I said, a policy of coup d’état and regime-change as we have seen it in many countries around the world—what is now happening in Hong Kong and Bolivia. If you compare that to what the mass media in Europe are saying, it could not be more incredible in terms of, really, a kind of, I would almost say “Goebbels-like” propaganda. It is very clear that this is showdown time. What is behind all of that is the effort of the old oligarchical paradigm against the emergence of a completely new paradigm in the history of mankind.

This Conference Is Dedicated to
Lyndon LaRouche

This conference is devoted to the memory of my late husband, the great statesman, economist, visionary, and human being, Lyndon LaRouche. But not as something belonging to the past, but as a solemn commitment to keep his ideas alive and make them spread, because they represent the indispensable solution he has proposed for the existential problems we as a human civilization are facing today. The solutions he has proposed are absolutely realizable, but they require a completely different mindset than most governments of Europe and populations have today. In order to transform that mindset from one that can only lead to catastrophe to one by which the solution can be realized, the understanding of the scientific method of Lyndon LaRouche is absolutely indispensable.

It is that method which is the reason why he was the most successful forecaster. Of all the many examples where he was right, and all of his critics were wrong, let me choose maybe one of the most far-sighted examples. In August 1971, when President Nixon destroyed the Bretton Woods system by replacing the fixed exchange system with one of floating exchange rates, LaRouche said prophetically, “If this trend in monetary policy is continued, down the road it will lead to the danger of a new Depression and fascism, or a just New World Economic Order.” We are exactly at that point today.

That trend he warned of was continued.

Controlled Disintegration of Nations

At each turn, LaRouche warned of the consequences, and also proposed each time a remedy which did shape the course of history, even if the trans-Atlantic sector rejected his solutions. This trend was continued in the 1970s policy of the Council on Foreign Relations for so-called “controlled disintegration” of the world economy, which resulted in the destruction of full industrial production and related supply chains in the United States, and the kind of Chilean model which we see exploding today in many countries around the world.

The outsourcing of domestic production into cheap foreign labor markets; the high interest-rate policy of then Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker; the change from the physical economy to a shareholder value society; Thatcherism and Reaganomics; the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act; the deregulation of the financial markets; the policies of quantitative easing after the crash of 2007-2008; and now, the negative interest rates; and lastly, helicopter money, and what the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney is proposing—regime-change, eliminate the power of sovereign governments, and going to a global dictatorship of the central banks: which would impose legislation to channel all financing into Green investments combined with bail-outs, bail-ins, and brutal austerity leading to massive population reduction.

We see this last phase since mid-September. Please give me the slide of the Triple Curve Figure 1. This is a pedagogical graph which Lyn developed in 1995, which shows you the point where the financial aggregates are completely out of control.

According to the latest figures of the Bank for International Settlements, the notional value of over-the-counter derivatives rose by 20% from 2018 to June of this year, to $640 trillion. They are generally at least twice that official figure, as compared to an increase of global trade of 3%, and of GDP of 2.9%.

According to the Federal Reserve data quoted by the blog Econimica, the Federal Reserve’s assets increased by $300 billion to $4.04 trillion since Sept. 17. But since the excess reserves of mega banks on deposit at the Fed are lower than August, that means the newly printed money went straight into speculation of all kinds: into stocks, bonds, debt securitizations, interest rate derivatives, and so forth. So therefore, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s claim that quantitative easing would only build up excess bank reserves, assuring it would never cause hyperinflation, was clearly a lie. Global financial aggregates broke $1.8 quadrillion, on the way toward an estimated $2 quadrillion by the end of the year.

Figure 2, You can actually see that we are at a point,— in 2008 this peaked, then you had the crash, and now we are actually at the same level, but going beyond. So, all the instruments of the “toolbox” German Chancellor Angela Merkel talked about in 2008 have been used up. Why did Frau Merkel alter her position to the idea of a European Banking Union and an EU deposit insurance fund during her recent trip to Rome? I think that the Fed, Draghi, Lagarde, Carney, Scholz, Merkel, all know that the system is bankrupt beyond belief. But they are Betonköpfe, troglodytes—as JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon just demonstrated in an imitation of Erich Honecker, who declared on Aug. 14, 1989, when he was talking about socialism staying around for another thousand years, “The U.S. economy is the most prosperous economy the world has seen, and it’s going to be very prosperous for the next 100 years.”

We should remember that it took only two months before Honecker was toppled after his famous statement three months before the Berlin Wall fell that socialism would be around for another 1,000 years.

This system is absolutely not sustainable. We are on the verge of a general breakdown crisis of the world monetary system, exactly as Lyndon LaRouche has warned. We are at the point he forecast in 1971: depression and fascism, or a just new world economic order.

Mass Anti-Austerity Demos,
But Who Will Lead?

You see right now rebellion worldwide in the form of mass demonstrations against these policies in Chile, Haiti, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, and among the German farmers. Then you had the election victory of President Alberto Fernández and Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina against these neo-liberal policies on the one side, and a replay against President Evo Morales in Bolivia of the State Department-supported Maidan coup—against President Evo Morales—because Morales dared to follow the Chinese example of lifting the population out of poverty with the help of scientific progress, and even attempting to leapfrog to the most advanced technologies.

The social effects of this neo-liberal economic policy are destroying the social fabric of countries around the globe. Because several countries in the G20 are, in fact, defending the British Empire, the City of London, Wall Street, and the central banks; the solution—I’m afraid—will not come from the G20, which, as the representative organization, would normally have been expected to take on the reorganization of the system when the systemic crisis erupted in 2008.

But they did not; they have made it worse since then with their policies. This is why Lyndon LaRouche, already in 1997, insisted that only the combination of the United States, Russia, China, and India as the core representative nations would be strong enough to impose a new credit system, a New Bretton Woods system. The strategic cooperation between Russia and China actually has been strengthened to an unprecedented level as a result of the failed effort to impose a unipolar world—and we will hear more on that from Professor Ostrovskii—as the new form of the British Empire after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

India moved closer, and there are several organizations which developed really as a backlash to this empire, such as the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Belt and Road Initiative, and others. So, the potential of such cooperation exists, but I’m not certain if they have the contingency plan to act to put the right solution on the table—the New Bretton Woods system—before the system blows up. They are taking all kinds of measures—moving out of the dollar; organizing trade in bilateral currencies; buying gold; setting up cyber-currencies. But that is not adequate to the problem, because—and this is not a debatable point—if the United States is not part of the solution, it will collapse. And I do not think that such a collapse would be anything like the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It is more likely than not, that out of a disorderly collapse of the global financial system, there would be war.

LaRouche’s Four Laws, and President Trump

What is needed instead is the implementation of Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws. A global Glass-Steagall system—banking separation where almost all of the outstanding derivatives and unpayable debt are written off. The commercial banks would be put under government protection, and then in each nation, a national bank is created in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton and the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau in Germany in the postwar reconstruction period. Third, a new international credit system; a New Bretton Woods. And fourth, international cooperation in a crash program to develop thermonuclear fusion power, space research and travel, leading to the colonization of the cosmos.

I know that leading individuals in Russia and China are very skeptical about the possibility of getting the United States into the kind of cooperation I am speaking about. I know the present obstacles, but that potential is absolutely there.

This is the entire reason why British intelligence, especially the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) were “alarmed” already in the fall of 2015 about the Trump Campaign’s pro-Russian stance and contacts. They conspired with Obama’s U.S. intelligence apparatus because they recognized in Trump the potential of participating in a new system of sovereign nation-states. Ingrained deeply in the mindset of the British Empire, which has taken over the American neo-liberal establishment, according to the guidelines of H.G. Wells’ Open Conspiracy, they smelled the threat Trump could present to their system. For sure, these circles—the Anglo-American military-industrial complex—whom Trump recently attacked by name, had nightmares when they heard Trump speak at the General Assembly of the United Nations this year. Trump said:

Looking around and all over this large and magnificent planet, the truth is plain to see. If you want freedom, take pride in your country. If you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty. And if you want peace, love your nation. Wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country first. The future does not belong to the globalists. The future belongs to the patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors, and honor the differences that make each country special and unique.

That outlook is actually in principle in perfect cohesion with the spirit of the New Silk Road, which is based on the idea of perfect respect for the sovereignty of each nation and acceptance of the other social system. Trump’s stated outlook is in harmony, not in contradiction, to the vision of President Xi Jinping: a shared community for the future of mankind.

Empirists React with Horror, Push War

That kind of thinking, however, is a vision of horror for the forces of the British Empire, because it overcomes geopolitics and it establishes the ground for the pursuit for the common goals of mankind.

I remember the reaction of Germany’s Defense Minister, Ursula von der Leyen, the morning after Trump’s election victory in 2016. She said she was in deep shock that this man had won. As of December 1, she will be the President of the EU Commission. In a recent speech in front of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Berlin, she projected her British-inspired demeanor of imperialism by falling back into a confrontational Cold War tone by pushing deterrence: “Europe has to learn the language of power. She has to build up her military muscle.” Against whom? Against what she calls “autocratic regimes,” whose “unrestrained shopping tours must be stopped,” in an obvious reference to China.

Von der Leyen also has promised to put through a Green New Deal in the first 100 days of her office, pushing for taxation on CO₂ emissions so high that people change their behavior. In other words, at a point when Merkel is turning over the last remnants of sovereignty of Germany’s own economy to the EU to the total detriment of the German population, von der Leyen intends to impose a Green economic policy which will destroy any industrial economy in Europe, for reasons elaborated by Lyndon LaRouche and which we can take up in the discussion.

In light of the impending financial/economic catastrophe, it is as lunatic as unfeasible when German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced that she wants to send the Bundeswehr [the German Armed Forces] into the Pacific as a counterforce to China, as she recently declared at the Bundeswehr Academy in Munich, fitting in perfectly with the Cold War outlook expressed in the June 1, 2019 Indo-Pacific Strategy Report of the U.S. Department of Defense. The Bundeswehr is collapsing, so if the German economy collapses, the Bundeswehr will have trouble carrying out such policies; it’s just complete madness.

So why all of this? Is this policy, which can only lead to war with Russia and China—is that in the interest of Germany? This is nothing but the old geopolitical agenda of the Great Game against Russia of Lord Palmerston of the British Empire, and his successor, Halford Mackinder, the official author of “geopolitics,” the imperial idea that those who control the Heartland of Eurasia control the world at the expense of the Atlantic Rim countries. Which was, among other things, the reaction of the British Empire to the Trans-Siberian Railway at the end of the 19th Century.

This junk, as well as the evil book of Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State, belongs to the required curriculum of the U.S. Armed Forces officer training, and entertainment literature for the empire faction on both sides of the Atlantic. This is the outdated mindset of a system about to disintegrate. It is the backward-oriented geopolitical thinking that relations among nations is a zero-sum game. When proponents of that system insist on a “rules-based order” instead of the international law of the UN Charter, they really mean the justice of the Thrasymachus of Plato’s Republic: That the rules which define the advantage of the stronger must prevail, and that therefore the dominant role of that power must be maintained.

The New Silk Road Changes History

Since President Xi Jinping put the New Silk Road on the agenda in 2013 in Kazakhstan, a program which is in complete cohesion with the developments Lyndon LaRouche had worked on since the beginning of the 1970s, a very different model of international relations has been established. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has developed into the largest infrastructure program in history. About 157 nations and 30 large international institutions are participating in this project, which intends to replicate the poverty alleviation program successfully implemented in China and in other developing countries.

Despite the recently escalating anti-China campaign by the same politicians, intelligence agencies, and think tanks that are supporting the coup against President Trump, and some putting on the brakes on the EU, according to the Chinese news portal Sina.com, the China Railway Corporation had 6,300 trains making the journey from China to Europe in 2018, an increase of 72% compared to the previous year. Of these, 2,690 trains made the return trip to China, up 111% on the year. Since 2011, China has sent more than 11,000 freight trains to Europe as part of the BRI. A total of 65 freight rail routes have been opened between Chinese cities, and 44 cities in 15 European countries, in select routes, compared to practically none 10 years ago [Figure 3].

The most frequented route is Chongqing-Duisburg, with 39 trains arriving in Duisport every week now. Among the cities in Europe served by freight trains from China are Hamburg, Nuremberg, Lyon, Madrid, Vienna, Prague, Trieste, Budapest, Tilburg, but especially Duisburg, which has served as a central hub for rail freight in Europe with many destinations reached from there.

In addition to rail freight coming to Europe from China directly on land, freight is also being handled on rail routes going into the European landmass from the European seaports of which presently Piraeus, Rotterdam, and Hamburg are the most important in terms of seaborne containers arriving from China [Figure 4].

So rather than opposing the BRI, European nations and the United States should take up Xi Jinping’s offer of win-win cooperation, not only on a bilateral basis, but especially joint operations for larger projects, such as the economic reconstruction of Southwest Asia, the industrialization of Africa and Latin America, and not the least, the modernization of infrastructure in the United States and Europe.

Monetarist Financial System About to Blow

To address the immediacy of the danger of a blow-out of the financial system, what must be done is exactly what LaRouche has demanded for decades: A new system must be adopted by the U.S. and European nations, which repudiates all the post-1971 changes in the global financial monetary and trade policies which I mentioned in the beginning. And they must suddenly adopt a new credit system, a New Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates.

Like the old Bretton Woods system, which Churchill and Truman had distorted away from Franklin Roosevelt’s intention to end colonialism, it emphatically must include long-term credit with low interest rates for the industrialization of the developing sector. The fact that China, Russia, India, and many other countries are cooperating already with the BRI, creates the setting where such a change is absolutely feasible. If President Trump, who has rejected the British doctrine of geopolitics, can beat back the coup in process against him, and if Attorney General William Barr continues with his criminal investigation of the coup-plotters, the fact that there is a U.S. President who embraces the principle of sovereignty and patriotism, will represent the kind of path for Europe to align with the perspective of a Eurasian economic integration from Vladivostok to Lisbon, mentioned by President Putin again recently.

LaRouche’s Discoveries

For this to happen, it requires the kind of shift in the mindset of a significant part of the population in the United States and Europe, which goes to the essence of the life work of Lyndon LaRouche. It requires a rejection of the underlying axioms of thinking of the oligarchical model, and replacing them with the notion that man is set apart from all other species by a quality of mind which can be most easily called cognition. It is that quality which no animal has, which enables man again and again to make qualitative discoveries of previously unknown physical principles which increase man’s power over the universe per capita and per square kilometer.

The great Russian scientist, Pobisk Kuznetsov, recognized the significance of LaRouche’s discovery of the concept of potential relative population-density and the related concept of an increase of the energy-flux density in the production process as a measuring rod for the durable sustainability of the society. He predicted that since many discoveries have been given the name of their discoverer, like Watt and Ampère, the LaRouche concept would be called the “La” in future science. To master this scientific method is key to the understanding of the success of his economic forecasting.

In a clarity unmatched by any other thinker of Western science, Lyndon LaRouche identified the crucial battle of ideas between the mind-deadening follies of the purely mathematical and linearized physical doctrines of the Euclidean tradition of Galileo, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho, Newton, Euler, and Cauchy, up to the 20th Century of Russell, Wiener, and von Neumann; contrasting that with the Platonic tradition of the anti-Euclidean science from Cusa, Kepler, Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz, and others.

LaRouche pointed to the significance of the mistaken and allegedly self-evident principle of shortest distance of refraction of light, as compared to the physical experimental principle of shortest time, and Leibniz’s extension of this to his experimental principle of universal least action, as the proof that any true new discovery of previously unknown physical principles can only come out of the second tradition.

The reason why LaRouche’s works are so crucial to science today is because they identify a method to identify the pathway to the absolutely necessary, next higher level discovery by putting a scientist in a Riemannian mindset, which allows for a non-deductive solution to paradoxes in established belief.

It is absolutely unique to Lyndon LaRouche that he has demonstrated the crossover between relativistic physics and the creativity of the human mind as such, and the connection of that domain to Classical forms of art and statecraft. Lyn provided ample proof that it is only through Classical forms of poetry, drama, and music that those faculties of the mind capable of generating valid hypotheses of new insights into the lawfulness of the universe, are developed. Why in music, poetry, and drama, the same battles against reductionist and deductionist conceptions have to be fought, and why therefore the quality of metaphor, irony, and Wilhelm Furtwängler’s idea of “playing between the notes,” are so crucial to elevate the mind into that higher Riemannian mindset.

With that goes the education of the emotions out of the realm of the sensual and profane, up to the level of agapic passions.

While the oligarchical model of society and image of man reduces the individual to a creature of hedonistic desires, easily manipulated and accepting the role of the underling by the powers of Thrasymachus’ rules-based order, it is the cognitive experience associated with Classical forms of composition which sets the individual free by evoking the beauty of the mind and unleashing the kind of agapic love for mankind which is necessary to choose the New Paradigm of the one humanity, leaving behind the narrow-minded evil pursuit of alleged geopolitical interests of a privileged class at the expense of the lower classes.

The LaRouche Legacy Foundation

It is for the unparalleled richness and importance of Lyn’s life’s work for the solutions of the existential challenges of today and the vision of a truly human future for humanity that I want to announce we just created the LaRouche Legacy Foundation, whose aim is to publish his collected works, and to create a Renaissance of the studying of his ideas worldwide.

I want to invite all of you to take an active part in this endeavor. Lyndon LaRouche was the most agapic person I have ever met. He was a man of providence, because he lived his life in tune with history and the laws of the universe. He lives in the simultaneity of eternity.

A Very Precious Moment in History

We are at a very precious moment in history, and it is full of incredible challenges. But the New Paradigm, the vision of a completely new epoch of mankind, is already within reach. Let us be a decisive factor to bring it about. Let us fight this war for a beautiful future for humanity with a passionate love for mankind, as Lyn had. He is not with us today in person, but his spirit is with us. And in this incredible moment, because an empire is collapsing, lashing out, destroying the world rather than allowing the New Paradigm to emerge.

But we believe in the innate goodness of man, and therefore let’s look to mankind 100 years from now; let’s look at mankind with the mind of Lyndon LaRouche.

We will have fusion power, energy security, raw materials security. We will have villages on the Moon; we will have cities on Mars. And we will have established the shared community of mankind. Despite all of the unknowns of our very large universe—about two trillion galaxies have been discovered so far—with that approach, mankind will be the immortal species.