PANEL 1
The Urgent Need to Replace Geopolitics with a
New Paradigm in International Relations

 

Helga Zepp-LaRouche
The Crimes and Downfall of British Liberalism and
the New Paradigm of the Future of Humanity

Dennis Speed: We, all over the world, stand simultaneously on the precipice both of disaster and of the greatest potential in human history. We are one human race, tied together in this whether we like it or not. Now more than ever, Lyndon LaRouche’s wise words and his passion for solving great problems is needed. There is an idea, a principle in drama, which Friedrich Schiller used, called the punctum saliens. It is an idea with which today’s keynote speaker is very familiar. The whole of civilization is now at a crossroads, and only from the higher realm of art, which is the same region from which statecraft comes, can the promise of a durable future proceed. That has been the life’s preoccupation of our keynote speaker, and it is always an honor for me to introduce the founder and chairman of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I am pleased to greet all of you watching this internet conference from all over the world. We are all aware that the human species right now is confronted with an unprecedented crisis, which not only threatens the cost of many millions of people, through illness and hunger; to sweep away many of the institutions which people have taken for granted until now; and to plunge large parts of the world into a new dark age, including culturally; but it can also lead to a thermonuclear war that would potentially wipe out all of humanity.

This crisis is more far-reaching than that of the 14th century, when the Black Plague wiped out one-third of the population from India to Iceland. It is more serious than the Great Depression of the 1930s, because it can potentially destroy more economic substance. And if war does break out, it will be definitely more consequential than the world wars of the 20th century, because it would probably involve the deployment of thermonuclear weapons.

Due to globalization and the internationalization of many systems—including the internet, nuclear weapons—we are all sitting in the same boat. And unlike previous epochs—when one part of the planet was prospering and another was collapsing—this time there will be no partial solutions. More than ever before in our history, we as a community, as one mankind, are challenged to agree on new principles that can guarantee the long-term fitness of mankind to survive. That is the point of this conference: How can we identify the causes of this crisis, eliminate them, and open a new chapter in universal history that leads our existence out of geopolitical confrontation, into a level of reason that befits the identity of mankind as a creative species?

Some people may wonder why, in the middle of a pandemic and financial crisis, I am also bringing up the question and the danger of nuclear war? Because of the outrageous and malicious accusations against China made by the British secret services, MI6 and MI5, and their propaganda outfits—the Henry Jackson Society of London, the Atlantic Council and various “cluster agents” on both sides of the Atlantic—blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic because it supposedly either delayed the information about it, or even used biological warfare against the West. This comes down to an outward building of an enemy image for war. The insolence with which the Henry Jackson Society, the hard core of the liberal neocons and British war party on both sides of the Atlantic, is demanding billions of dollars in compensation from China, can only be seen as a provocation designed to prepare the ground for a strategic showdown.

That is the hysterical but ultimately desperate reaction of an Empire that realizes that it’s all over, and that the world will never again return to the already unravelling strategic orientations of a unipolar world, the so-called “Washington Consensus” and the “rules-based order,” that it was able to maintain at least as a facade until the outbreak of COVID-19. The calculations of the war party were wrong; it over-hastily declared the “end of history” following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was also linked to the illusion that China had only to be given membership in the WTO in order to automatically develop into a British-style liberal democracy; and that all other countries would also be transformed into western democracies via a regime-change policy either through color revolutions or interventionist wars.

China’s Achievement

China’s unique world-historical cultural achievement—that of not only lifting 850 million of its own people out of poverty, but also for the first time, giving developing countries, with the New Silk Road, the prospective of overcoming the colonial policy that is still implemented to this day by the IMF, as well as poverty that caused—was met with disbelieving horror by the various mouthpieces of the British Empire. After the western media had ignored the largest infrastructure program in history for about four years, attacks on so-called “autocratic regimes” of China, and Russia, and others, were suddenly escalated by the same media that have profiled themselves since 2015 in the “witch hunt” against President Trump, in collusion with the coup attempt of the British secret services.

But once the figures were released in March and April that showed that China had not only been able to crush the pandemic more effectively, but also to overcome the economic consequences of the crisis much more easily than the Western countries, which the privatization of the health sector had left totally unprepared for the pandemic, the tone towards China became shrill. The “rules-based order” of Western democracies, the only “democratic legitimacy,” has been shaky for a long time, and it now threatens to collapse, while Beijing—it was claimed—is pursuing a “strategy of unrestricted warfare.” The fact of the matter is that the liberal system of the British Empire has failed with a bang. But that does not mean that the forces allied to the Empire cannot still inflict enormous damage in their death agony, for example by instigating a world war.

It is high time to rectify the names, as Confucius would say. If the idea is to draw up a list of guilty parties and compensation due for the current crisis, then it has to be the list of the effects of British liberalism, whose protagonist Winston Churchill carries the main responsibility for the lack of the most important aspect of the postwar Bretton Woods system that Franklin D. Roosevelt had intended—namely a credit mechanism for overcoming colonialism and industrializing the developing sector. Because of this lack, the British Empire’s control over the so-called Third World was perpetuated in the postwar period. This situation was then exacerbated after President Nixon terminated the Bretton Woods system in August 1971, which led to successive deregulations of the financial markets, the infamous out-sourcing to cheap-labor countries, and IMF conditionalities. The one and only purpose of this whole policy was to maintain colonial looting and prevent any serious development in those countries.

What of the Poorer Countries?

How could anyone in the so-called “advanced countries”—and we now see with the coronavirus pandemic just how advanced they are—assume for even one minute that the brutal poverty in Africa, Latin America, and some Asian countries is self-evident or self-inflicted? If the West had done for the last 70 years what China has been doing in Africa since the 1960s, but especially in the last 10 years now, namely building railways, dams, power plants, and industrial parks, then all of Africa would be enjoying the level of development you see in South Korea or Singapore or better, today! Africa, as a result of these policies, has virtually no health system, no infrastructure; half of the population does not have access to clean water, sanitation, or electricity, because the British Empire deliberately suppressed them, working through the IMF and the World Bank, through the World Wildlife Fund, which considers the protection of an insect species in cases of doubt as more important than the lives of millions of people! If you take into account the overall effect of this policy, you will come up with a figure of millions of people whose lives have been shortened by hunger and untreated diseases! Contrary to the myth that the British Empire ceased to exist once and for all with the independence of the colonies and the hand-over ceremony of Hong Kong on June 30, 1997, it still exists in the form of neoliberal monetarist control of the world financial system; a control that has always been the quintessence of empires.

Another example of pure propaganda from the Empire is to say that Third World countries simply do not want to develop. The reality is that even the concept of the UN Development Decades was de facto eliminated with the end of Bretton Woods, and its replacement by the idea of population reduction, the Club of Rome’s crude ideas about the supposed limits to growth, and the misanthropic notions of John D. Rockefeller III, as he presented them at the UN Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974, or Henry Kissinger’s scandalous NSSM 200 from the same year, which were just vapid molds of the assertions of the evil Parson Malthus, the scribbler of the British East India Company, who in turn plagiarized the ideas of the Venetian “economist” Giammaria Ortes.

This Was All Foreseen by Lyndon LaRouche

Lyndon LaRouche reacted to this paradigm change when he began—in a series of studies in 1973 on the effects of the IMF policy—to warn that the growing under-nourishment, weakening of the immune system, lack of hygiene, etc. would lead to the emergence of global pandemics. After the thousands of speeches and writings by LaRouche, which have circulated in the intervening five decades over all five continents, no one can say that the current pandemic was not foreseeable! Especially since LaRouche’s entire life’s work was dedicated, among other things, to working out development programs that would have exactly prevented it!

The fundamental reason why the liberal paradigm and the underlying the current trans-Atlantic “rules-based order” have failed, and why the Establishment has proven to be so completely unable to reflect on the reasons for this failure, is linked to the axiomatic basis and the generally accepted assumptions of this paradigm’s image of man, as well as its concept of state and science.

After the initial emergence, during the Italian Renaissance, of ideas and forms of a State that consciously fostered the creative capacities of a growing proportion of the population and the role of scientific progress as a source of social wealth, the feudal oligarchy of the then-leading empire, Venice, launched a deliberate counter-offensive, in which Paolo Sarpi, as the leading thinker of that Venetian oligarchy, put forward his teachings, out of which the Enlightenment and liberalism ultimately developed. The idea was to control the scientific debate, but to deny the ability to know and to discover real universal principles, to suppress the Promethean potential—by force if need be—to reduce people to the level of sensual experience, and to turn the backwardness of “human nature” into a dogma.

The Oligarchical Mindset of Liberalism

From this tradition came the mechanistic scientific tradition of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, the game and information theory of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, and more recently the algorithms that underlie the derivatives trading of today’s casino economy. The empirical and materialistic dogma and decadent image of man peddled by Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, John Locke and John Stuart Mill remain to this day the basis of British liberalism and the virus that has contributed more to the current state of the world than anything else.

The oligarchical mindset of the British Empire, which denies all men, but especially all colored men, the divine spark of creativity is expressed in full clarity in numerous writings and statements, if people only care to look for them, from Prince Phillip’s notorious wish to be reincarnated as a deadly virus, in order to help reduce the overpopulation of the human race, to the despicable outlook expressed by Adam Smith in his 1759 Theory of the Moral Sentiments:

The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension, they are of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country.... Nature has directed us to the greater part of these by original and immediate instincts. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any considerations of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them.

Racist Ideology

Since these attributes all apply equally to animals, then it is obviously also okay to cull the herd periodically, just as the Spartans killed the Helots, when they thought they would become too numerous. This misanthropic image of man is amplified through pure racism, as Bertrand Russell expressed it so unashamedly in The Prospects of Industrial Civilization:

The white population of the world will soon cease to increase. The Asiatic races will be longer, and the negroes still longer, before their birth rate falls sufficiently to make their numbers stable without the help of war and pestilence.... Until that happens, the benefits aimed at by socialism can only be partially realized, and the less prolific races will have to defend themselves against the more prolific by methods which are disgusting even if they are necessary.

It is precisely this racist ideology which was the justification for colonialism, the slave trade, the opium wars, and, to be honest, it is ultimately also the reason for the monumental indifference shown by large parts of the population in the West when they hear the news about the locust plague in Africa and in some Asian countries, which could have been eliminated two months ago for a cost of only $75 million.

And nothing has changed in the fundamental support for eugenics among representatives of the Empire. That was emphasized once again in a column in the Daily Telegraph March 3 by Jeremy Warner:

Not to put too fine a point on it, from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.

It is these barbaric premises of the liberal dogma, although it is hardly fashionable to admit their existence in the so-called developed countries, that led Lyndon LaRouche many years ago to stipulate that the combination of the four economically and militarily most important countries in the world—the U.S.A., China, Russia, and India—was required to carry out the urgently needed reorganization of the world order. This reorganization, however, must begin with the explicit and definitive rejection of the image of man of this liberal dogma and its political implications. The British Empire in all its forms, but above all in its control over the financial system, must be ended.

Leadership: A Four-Power Emergency Summit

These four nations—the United States, China, Russia, and India—urgently need to convene an emergency conference and adopt a new Bretton Woods system that realizes FDR’s full intention, by creating a credit system that guarantees once and for all the industrialization of the developing sector. It should begin with the implementation of a world health system that builds up a health system in every single nation on this planet. First of all with a crash program to fight the coronavirus pandemic, but then reaching very quickly the same standards that were set out in the Hill-Burton Act in the U.S.A., or as it was the health standard in Germany and France before the privatization in the 1970s. As Roosevelt put it in his speech on the State of the Union in 1941, in the famous declaration of the “Four Freedoms,” where he stated: “The third [freedom] is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt made it her personal mission to ensure that these Four Freedoms were incorporated into the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In Lyndon LaRouche’s 1984 “Draft Memorandum of Agreement Between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.” that defined the principles and the basis of the Strategic Defense Initiative which he proposed, and which was declared the official policy of the United States by President Reagan on March 23, 1983, and which was repeatedly offered to the Soviet Union to cooperate on a comprehensive nuclear disarmament program. LaRouche defined the conviction that represents an absolutely crucial aspect of his life’s work and the mission of this organization. The first article of LaRouche’s paper, the principles of which also apply to the cooperation among the four nations and all others who choose to join this new partnership, states:

The political foundation for durable peace must be a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all. The most crucial feature of present implementation of such a policy of durable peace is a profound change in the monetary, economic, and political relations between the dominant powers and those relatively subordinated nations often classed as “developing nations.” Unless the inequities lingering in the aftermath of modem colonialism are progressively remedied, there can be no durable peace on this planet. Insofar as the United States and Soviet Union acknowledge the progress of the productive powers of labor throughout the planet to be in the vital strategic interests of each and both, the two powers are bound to that degree and in that way by a common interest. This is the kernel of the political and economic policies of practice indispensable to the fostering of durable peace between those two powers.

In view of the escalating anti-China campaign, launched by British intelligence, which has people in President Trump’s entourage attempting to outdo each other almost hourly in their accusations against China, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Peter Navarro [Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy], [Senator] Lindsey Graham, and [Fox TV host] Tucker Carlson, while various demonstrations of a show of force by the U.S. and NATO forces appear to be limited only by the number of COVID-19 infections among the uniformed military, the existential question is posed of how the world can get out of this dangerous escalation. Are we doomed to relive how the overtaking of the ruling power by the second most powerful leads to war, as has already happened twelve times in history?

The Programmatic Solution

The combination of the coronavirus pandemic, the world hunger crisis, the impending financial hyperinflationary blow-out, and the depression of the global real economy is so overwhelming that it should be clear to every thinking human being that mankind can only get out of this crisis if the economic potential of the United States and China—supported by the other industrialized countries—is jointly deployed and increased in order to create the capacities needed to ensure medical care, infrastructure, and industrial and food production. It is in the existential interest of every individual and every nation on this planet to work towards this goal. We have to create a worldwide chorus among all other nations and many millions of people to demand just that!

The conflict between the United States and China only exists if those forces in both parties in the U.S. prevail, that are in the tradition of H.G. Wells’ Open Conspiracy, with the idea that the U.S. accepts the model of the British Empire as the basis of an Anglo-American controlled unipolar order, they can run the world. This vision of H.G. Wells was carried on by William Yandell Elliott, the mentor of Kissinger, and by Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, up to the neocons of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). If, on the other hand, the United States harks back to its true tradition of the Declaration of Independence against the British Empire and of the American System of economics of Alexander Hamilton, then there will be a great affinity with China’s economic model which contains many of the principles of Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, and Henry C. Carey. In the same way, the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, was very much influenced by the American System.

At the urgent emergency summit of the U.S., China, Russia, and India, and at the then immediately necessary founding conference of the New Bretton Woods System, the heads of state can take up on the spirit of the original Bretton Woods conference, at which the head of the Chinese delegation, H.H. Kung, submitted Sun Yat-sen’s proposal for an “International Development Organization.” Kung, one of Sun Yat-sen’s brothers-in-law, said in his speech in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire:

China is looking forward to a period of great economic development and expansion after the war. This includes a program of large-scale industrialization, besides the development and modernization of agriculture. It is my firm conviction that an economically strong China is an indispensable condition to the maintenance of peace and the improvement to the well-being of the world. After the first World War, Dr. Sun Yat-sen proposed a plan for what he termed “the international development of China.” He emphasized the principle of cooperation with friendly nations and utilization of foreign capital for the development of China’s resources. Dr. Sun’s teaching constituted the basis of China’s national policy. America and others of the United Nations, I hope, will take an active part in aiding the postwar development of China.

FDR’s Intention and LaRouche’s Proposals

As I said, Roosevelt supported the internationalization of this development policy during the negotiations, and he considered the increase of a high standard of living worldwide as the key to global stability. And he saw the way to do so in the internationalization of the New Deal policy.

The four main nations of the world—the United States, China, Russia, and India—must now establish a New Bretton Woods system and together with all nations that wish to join, a new paradigm in international cooperation among nations that is guided by the common aims of mankind. The fourth of Lyndon LaRouche’s four laws defines the qualitatively higher economic platform, the higher level of reason, of the Coincidentia Oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa, on which the contradictions of geopolitical confrontation will be overcome.

International cooperation among scientists who rely exclusively on verifiable universal physical principles must replace the primacy of politics based on ideology and interests. Research into the life sciences, a better understanding of what causes the characteristics of life and its origin in the universe, is the prerequisite for the fight against the coronavirus and all other potential viral, bacterial, and other disease processes. As part of the world health system, we need to build up collaborative medical research centers internationally, where the young scientists of all developing countries will also be trained. The profound experience of the coronavirus pandemic is that the provision of healthcare must be a common good, and not serve to maximize profits for private interests. The results of this research must therefore be immediately provided to all universities, hospitals, and medical personnel in all nations.

Another area in which international cooperation toward the common goals of mankind is indispensable, is the achievement of energy and raw material security, which will be possible with the mastery of thermonuclear nuclear fusion and the associated fusion torch process. The international ITER project at the Cadarache facility in the south of France, a tokamak nuclear fusion reactor and international research project already involving the cooperation of 34 countries, is a good start, but the funding of ITER and other models of nuclear fusion must be massively increased. One of LaRouche’s central discoveries is the interconnection between the energy-flux density used in the production process and relative potential population-density. The mastery of nuclear fusion is imperative, not only for the living population, but especially for manned space flight.

Space research itself is the one area that would be unthinkable without international cooperation and which, more than any other branch of science, demonstrates in a positive way what the pandemic demonstrates negatively: That we are actually the one species that is determined by its future, and whose long-term survivability will depend on our learning to better understand and master the laws of the universe—including the at least 2 trillion galaxies that the Hubble Space Telescope has been able to verify. Defense against asteroids, meteors, and comets is only one among many important elements of this. For developing countries, unlimited participation in research projects is the best way—through scientific and technological leapfrogging—to create the preconditions for economies that are able to provide all citizens with a good and safe life.

End the British Empire and
Build a Human Future!

Nicholas of Cusa wrote, back in the 15th century, that all discoveries in science should immediately be made available to representatives of all countries, so as not to unnecessarily hold back the development of any one of them. He also found that concordance in the macrocosm is only possible when all microcosms develop in the best possible way. The New Paradigm that we need to shape for cooperation among nations, must start from the common interest of all mankind, towards the realization of which all nations and cultures, in counterpoint as it were, as in a fugue, are intertwined and rise dynamically to higher stages of anti-entropic development.

Are we, as human civilization, able at this late stage of events, to avert the tsunami of pandemics, famine, financial crisis, depression, and the danger of a new world war? Then the world needs this summit of the four nations now! If such a summit were to announce all these changes—a New Bretton Woods system, the four great powers joining hands in building up a global development program in the form of a “New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge,” a world health system, an international crash program in fusion and related research, a massive upgrade in international space cooperation, and last but not least, a dialogue of the Classical traditions of all nations with the aim of sparking a new Renaissance of Classical cultures in a similar, but even more beautiful way, than the great Italian Renaissance overcame the horrors of the dark age of the 14th century—then a new era of humanity can be born!

Is there a reasonable hope that we can overcome the current profound crisis of mankind? I would say, Absolutely! We are the only creative species known so far in the universe, which has the ability to discover new principles of our universe again and again, which implies that there is an affinity between our creative mental processes to these physical laws.

A thought that elucidates this optimistic perspective concerns one aspect of space research, the seemingly accelerated process of aging in conditions of weightlessness, and the change of this process in hyper-gravity. A better understanding of this “space gerontology” is obviously crucial for the future of manned space travel to Mars and in interstellar space, and it is expected that it will significantly increase the ability of humans to have a longer healthy life.

If you consider that Schubert only lived to be 31 years old, Mozart 35, Dante 36, Schiller 45, Shakespeare 52, and Beethoven only 56, then you have an idea of how much the geniuses of the future, with a life expectancy of 120 or 150 years, will be able to contribute to mankind’s development!

Therefore, join us in putting an end to the British Empire! And let’s create a truly human future for all of mankind! Thank you.