WEBCAST DIALOGUE

‘All Men Shall Be Brothers’:
From COVID-19 to the New Paradigm

We present here an edited transcript of the three presentations to April 4, 2020 LaRouche PAC Webcast Dialogue. The full video, with extended discussion, is available here.

We Must Build a World Health System Now

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

[Print version of this transcript]

President and Founder of the Schiller Institute

It’s getting now very clear that we are in the middle of, or at the beginning of what seems to be becoming the worst crisis in human history. It is clear that already in Europe, in Italy and Spain, and in the United States, the health systems are not sufficient. There are not enough medical supplies, face masks, respiration machines, doctors, nurses, and ICU units. It is also very clear that this pandemic—this worldwide epidemic—is spreading very quickly to the developing countries. You can be absolutely sure that if it hits countries like Haiti, or the 54 African nations, or large, populated nations in Asia, the situation will be much worse. They do not have enough medical supplies; they don’t even have health systems. They don’t have enough clean water. The idea to self-isolate and wash your hands will mean nothing, because there are no such things possible for half of the population at least. This means that this thing is getting completely out of control.

So, the purpose of the call that I made, and the purpose of this meeting tonight, is to launch a campaign to put one single issue on the agenda. That is, that we have to react to this as the one humanity, and we have to drop all other agendas. We have to build a world health system; we have to gear up naturally for the defense of the people in the United States, in the European countries. But given the fact that it is a pandemic, this will be not enough.

This virus is going to mutate; it will come back, and it will come back in waves, increasingly destroying our real production. It will have a severe impact on food production. The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) has already put out statements that it expects the economic effect to be a reduction of industrial production in the OECD countries of 30%; you will have millions of unemployed. That is why we have to have a complete shift in the agenda to completely produce only for one effect—namely, to build up a health system in every single country in the world with the same energy, the same passion, the same means.

President Trump has invoked the National Defense Production Act. New York Governor Cuomo has called for an unprecedented mobilization of all health personnel—doctors, nurses, retraining, training of young people. This is a step in the right direction, but this must be accompanied with a gearing up of the industrial production, to produce all the means necessary to combat this pandemic. That means hospitals in every country; it means protective clothes, face masks, respiration machines. The whole industry must be retooled to this effect until we have defeated this pandemic.

There is no way that the liquidity pumping of the central banks will be able to be continued throughout this mobilization. There are people who say this comes unprecedented, this is a complete shock. Well, we can prove to you that this is not the case. Lyndon LaRouche warned of this coming since 1971, when he warned of the consequences of the abandoning of the Bretton Woods system by Nixon. He especially warned since 1973 and 1974, what would be the economic impact of the conditionalities policy of the IMF and the World Bank on the developing sector. And he warned that pandemics would be the result. His entire life’s work was to warn of the fact that monetarism—this second deadly virus—would result in pandemics. You cannot lower the living standard of entire continents over prolonged periods of time without encouraging lower forms of life in the biosphere to take over; namely, viruses.

Worldwide Mobilization for a New Paradigm

The idea is to start a mobilization worldwide that will completely change the paradigm. We have called for a summit of the most important countries of the world—the United States, Russia, China, and India—that they must conduct a summit to change the system, to agree to have a new world economic order that allows for the survival of every country on this planet. There are motions in this direction. Just today, President Trump was talking on the phone with French Prime Minister Macron, and they agreed to speed up a similar proposal made by Russian President Putin at the beginning of January, that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council must immediately convene an emergency meeting and agree on increased international collaboration to move in this direction.

The Schiller Institute will convene an international internet conference on April 25th and 26th. The aim of it—long before the dimension of the pandemic was clear—was that this conference of the Schiller Institute must have a program which will help to shape the discussion of the summit of these large nations. We have to have a sudden axiomatic change. There are many discussions already which are useful and must be supported, such as for the lifting of all sanctions to allow all countries to fight the pandemic. To have an immediate ceasefire; to stop all military actions. But we need something more. We need a steamroller mobilization of many people and many organizations joining, to completely change the agenda.

There is one successful model of how the coronavirus was defeated, at least temporarily; that is what China did in Wuhan and Hubei province. That is, you have to have total testing; you have to have identification of the people testing positive, you have to isolate them and put them in quarantine. That way you can interrupt the infection chain and you can defeat the virus. The problem is, it has been proven that in the trans-Atlantic world it was not possible to replicate this model, because the test kits were not available, the industries were not yet geared up. The Western governments delayed in taking advantage of the warning time they should have gained in learning from the Chinese intervention.

That now must be geared up through the kind of mobilization I was talking about. The apocalyptic dimension of what we are facing will be getting very clear in a very short period of time. All the confusion, all the fake news that the coronavirus would be only as bad as the flu, all this disinformation will vanish. There will be an openness to discuss a completely new paradigm.

The Crisis Perpetrators

There is also the need to become very clear that the ideas of the perpetrators, of the people and the forces who are responsible that we ended up in this situation in the first place, must not prevail. Today, for example, there is an article by Henry Kissinger in the Wall Street Journal, with the headline “The Coronavirus Will Forever Alter the World Order.” We should remember that Kissinger may know what the hour is in which the old-world order becomes irredeemably and forever gone. But we should not forget that it was Kissinger’s policy of the National Security Study Memorandum, NSSM 200, agreed upon in 1974, which was one big part of this murderous Malthusian depopulation policy against the developing countries.

This memorandum, which was only made public and published in the early 1990s, said that the population in certain developing countries must be reduced and controlled because there are large resources there which are all in the strategic interests of the United States to control and conserve. Another one of the perpetrators was the evil policy of the Club of Rome, which started to spread this idea that there are limits to growth and you have to go into a zero-growth economy. A lie which was immediately refuted by Lyndon LaRouche, who wrote a very important book titled, There Are No Limits to Growth. It was also the policies of John D Rockefeller III, who at the UN Population Conference in Bucharest in the same year, 1974, started to talk about overpopulation, population explosions, and other such Malthusian ideas.

These people are murderers. If you want proof, look at what Jeremy Warner wrote on March 3rd in the Daily Telegraph, where he said that there is a benefit to the coronavirus. That is that it will cull the elderly. Obviously, Warner walks in the footsteps of Prince Philip, who in a public conference on religion said that he wants to be reincarnated as a deadly virus so that he can better help to reduce the world population. Or listen to Sir David King, the chief scientific advisor of both the Blair and Brown governments, who openly said the elderly must be sacrificed for the sake of the economy. These Malthusian views must be put in front of a new Nuremberg Tribunal, because it clearly applies to them that they knew or should have known what the consequences of their policies would be on the Third World.

Even the think tank of the German Army (Bundeswehr), the German Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies, just put out the demand for a ruthless investigation as to why the world so blindly could slide into this catastrophe. Such an investigation has already been made. We did that over the last 50 years. Lyndon LaRouche, for half a century, warned exactly that this would happen. Also in the German Parliament, in 2012, in the context of the SARS pandemic, there was a scenario run about a “Modi-SARS”—modified SARS—posing a possible pandemic reaching Europe, the United States, and Asia. Strangely enough, they left out Africa. If you talk about a pandemic and you leave out Africa, that is very strange. But that was ignored as well.

What we now need is an unprecedented—and I really mean unprecedented—mobilization. I’m calling on all of you to join in, to build an alliance of people who participate in the conference of the Schiller Institute on April 25th and 26th. And I want you to reach out to many organizations and people in North America and Europe, but also in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Reach out to UN organizations, to NGOs, to world health organizations, for only one purpose: That we have to gear up to build a Health Silk Road health system in every country. We must get a steamroller effect of people demanding the immediate construction of hospitals and ICU units. But also the production of food, because there is already the danger that this pandemic will be accompanied by a world shortage of food, because of the breakdown of parts of production, the affected people, and so forth.

Only By Burying the Casino Economy

But at the same time, if we want to build a new health system worldwide, it is very clear it cannot be done with the present casino economy. So, we will need the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche. It will be necessary to have a global Glass-Steagall banking separation in order to finance a health system in every country. We need a national bank in every country, and these national banks must be connected to a New Bretton Woods credit system. The outcome of this must also be a completely different set of values. Absolutely not the liberal order and the values of the Enlightenment that Kissinger is asking for, but what we need instead is a return to humanist values, to the idea of mankind as one humanity.

We put the interest of the common human species ahead of national interests, and we must come out of this with a completely New Paradigm of love for humanity and a new system of international relations, replacing confrontation through cooperation. If we all are united in that spirit, I think we can turn this terrible crisis into a chance for all of humanity to change the paradigm to become truly human as befits a human species.