DIALOGUE WITH HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE

War or Peace Depends on Individuals Acting for the Common Good

This is the edited transcript of the October 20 broadcast of the weekly Schiller Institute interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Subheads and embedded links have been added. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: It’s less than two weeks to the U.S. election. The situation is really quite wild. There is a public debate tonight between the two candidates. There is also the recent breakout of the story around Hunter Biden’s laptop. Why don’t we start there, because this gets to the censorship of the story, why they’re censoring it, and why this is so important, involving Ukraine and Joe Biden. What are your thoughts about that?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think what we are looking at is Gleichschaltung [synchronization as in Nazi Germany] of the U.S. mainstream media, meaning that they’re all marching in lockstep in complete censorship of this scandal. And I think that should really wake up the world. Because people are looking at the U.S. election from the standpoint of what the media report, but if you read the European media, for example, you have little references to this scandal, but absolutely not the importance of it.

On October 20, the LaRouche PAC hosted a webcast featuring two National Security Agency whistleblowers, Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney, and LaRouche PAC’s Barbara Boyd and Dennis Speed, in which they warned that civil war in the United States has already begun. That was Kirk Wiebe saying that. He said the fact that the effort was so blatant to suppress an article in the New York Post—covering this obvious corrupt behavior of Biden when he was Vice President, in relation to his effort to suppress the Burisma investigation by Ukraine—that that forebodes the intent of the establishment to go for complete vote fraud, and that everything really depends on getting the story out before the election. I think this is really important for the international audience to understand.

What is at stake here? You had an impeachment against President Trump, with the false accusation that he would have withheld money from Ukraine if they would not cover up his involvement. Now, the reality is, exactly the opposite happened! What they accused Trump of having done in the impeachment, is what Biden actually did! When he was Vice President, his son Hunter Biden was on the board of this oil firm Burisma, and this was clearly a money laundering job, because Hunter Biden had no qualification for his job; as a matter of fact, he was known to have been using drugs and all kinds of other things.

Joe Biden put pressure on the Ukrainian government at the time to kick out the prosecutor general [Viktor Shokin] to stop the investigation of Burisma for corruption. He threatened to withhold $1 billion payment for buying arms from the United States, if this would not happen. They capitulated and Shokin was kicked out.

This is unbelievable. The New York Post had run that story. There is absolutely every reason to think this is an authentic story. The Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said there is absolutely no evidence that it was a Russian story, as immediately claimed by the usual suspects like John Brennan and James Clapper. So, you have a story which then is suppressed by Twitter and Facebook in a blatant effort to censor the covering of a major crime of the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party.

If the U.S. voters knew about this, maybe they would have second thoughts about giving their vote to Biden. This is literally a blatant effort to censor the truth from coming out. It should be obvious that what is at stake here is not just a question of who wins the election, but the question is, will the United States remain a republic, or is it going to be an empire basically run on the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain as the de facto unipolar British Empire? The implication of that is gigantic, and I think everything depends on getting that story out.

We held a press availability which has had a lot of viewers already, so you should spread it as far as you can.

What is really at stake here is the question of war and peace. There is no question about that with the agenda of Biden bringing back the entire war party machine—and you just look at the cast of characters and what they have said about Russia and China—so I think everything depends really on getting this story out before the election.

Will NATO and the ‘Quad’ Contain China?

Schlanger: Helga, one aspect of this is this push to move NATO into the Indo-Pacific region, as it’s called, with the establishment of a “Quad” [the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue Countries, Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.]. Why would NATO have a policy for the containment of China?

Zepp-LaRouche: It is the question of which paradigm is going to come out of this situation on top. With the financial crisis; the escalation of the pandemic practically everywhere except China; an incredible famine in Africa; and a collapsing physical economy, it is very clear that these people have only one aim in mind, to contain Russia, to contain China. As we have seen in the recent, extremely risky, maneuvers at the Russian border,—fighter jets almost colliding with Russian jets, and the same going on, on the Chinese border—it really is encirclement, and the tone is getting rougher. So, the effort to expand NATO into the Pacific, into the Indo-Pacific, and get India into a confrontation course against China in particular, is really the geopolitical game which contains the seeds of World War III.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will go to New Delhi on October 26-27, and there are also maneuvers, to which India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has invited the Quad countries. So this is definitely something one should keep in mind, especially with the provocations around Taiwan, where China is again and again insisting that according to the One China policy, it will not allow Taiwan to be made independent, or be used as a tool to confront China. This is really very, very dangerous.

Conference on European-Chinese Relations

Schlanger: You participated in a conference yesterday on European-Chinese relations. It sounded like a very interesting discussion of Confucianism. Can you give us an overview of what was discussed and how the conference went?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think this was really an important event: “China and the West Face to Face: Rivalry or Cooperation.” It was cosponsored by the Schiller Institute and a Spanish think tank, Cátedra China. The Minister Counsellor of the Chinese Embassy in Madrid, Yao Fei, spoke; then the President of Cátedra China Marcelo Muñoz; then Michele Geraci from Italy; Jacques Cheminade from France; myself; and one other person from Cátedra China, Dr. Ángel Álvarez. Thirty countries participated.

This is an important issue in Germany, and in France, Spain, Italy, because Pompeo is putting maximum pressure on all of these countries, that they must break with China, and that is clearly not feasible because it would completely ruin the economies of European nations that have massive trade with China. But more fundamentally, it’s about how to relate to a rising country? Can you live with such a country? What is the intention of China?

Marcelo Muñoz, who is the President of Cátedra China, gave a speech that I really would like everybody to read. He said: What people don’t understand in the West is that China and the West are two completely different civilizations. China knows quite some bit about Europe and about the West, but the West knows almost nothing about China. And then he quoted Leibniz saying that China is even another planet. He gave a very dense presentation about how China is the only continuous nation and civilization over 5,000 years, with a Confucian-based system for 2,300 years; and that it had been the world leader in technology until the 15th century. Many inventions were made by China. And for China to come back and resume a role on the stage of history is just something quite natural, because it had that role for thousands of years.

I really think this was very, very interesting. And I focussed my presentation on the differences, but also the similarities concerning universal principles as they are expressed by Friedrich Schiller and Confucius.

I want to emphasize one aspect that came up in the discussion: namely, the main difference, which was pointed out by many speakers, is that the Chinese tradition puts a priority on community, on the collective, rather than the rights of the individual. And that is deeply embedded in Chinese history. In the discussion, the question came up, “Is Confucianism actually furthering creativity, or is it restricting it?” I’m absolutely of the opinion that it is furthering creativity. The Chinese central authorities a few days ago issued new guidelines, which I find very interesting for the West to think about, that the arts—poetry, drama, opera, painting, dance—all will have the same importance in the curriculum as the so-called MINT subjects (Mathematics, Information Technology, Natural Sciences and Technology); the MINT subjects being the natural sciences, where China is already in a leading position in the PISA rating (OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment). China wants education in the aesthetic areas to be as important as in these natural sciences by 2022.

That is the approach taken by Confucius, who developed his whole philosophy in answer to a period of increasing chaos in China, and that was also why Leibniz, in the 17th century, was so excited about Confucius, because he was looking at the 150 years of religious wars in Europe, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, and recognized that the aesthetic education is the only way to get people back to the pathway of reason and emotional development.

This is the kind of dialogue that is urgently needed, and not the kind of “enemy image” and demonization of China and Russia, of Putin, and of Trump, that we have seen in the recent period. We need to find out about the other culture and really understand it in depth, and then new horizons will open up.

China Moves Ahead in Science

Schlanger: The other aspect of this, though, Helga, is that China is moving ahead in a number of areas in science as well. What do you have on what the Chinese are doing in energy and space?

Zepp-LaRouche: Certain developments are in one sense joyful, but as a German, I’m naturally also a little bit upset about it, because some technologies that were developed in Germany, like the maglev, the Chinese are now building test runs for it, and it will go 600 km/h; they already have the so-called slow maglev, which was developed by the German firm Bögl; they will use that for urban traffic, which goes up to 150 km/h, for inner urban transport. While Germany is collapsing, closing down its steel plants, China is moving in the right way and developing.

They already have the most modern transport system in the world, more than 30,000 km of fast, conventional trains, connecting all the major cities. So that clearly is a sign that they know what is good for the common good, because they have a large population of 1.4 billion people, who want to travel to their families over the holiday periods. If you want to move such large masses of people, you need a good transport system, and that’s exactly what they built.

Another technology China is building that was developed in Germany, in Jülich—by Professor Rudolf Schulten, an old acquaintance of my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche and me—is the high-temperature reactor. It’s still a test reactor, but it’s supposed to become a commercial reactor soon. That is clearly one more step forward in nuclear technology, and China will be the first country in the world to have it.

In our event yesterday, Minister Counsellor Dr. Yao Fei emphasized that China still has some underdeveloped areas, in the west and in the interior, and therefore they are still in a sense a developing country, but they also have already very clearly reached number-one status in several fields. That should not be felt as a threat, because they are not threatening anybody. The Minister Counsellor yesterday reiterated that the Belt and Road Initiative is open to everyone: Every country in the world can join and work together on a win-win basis. So that is an offer there to be taken.

The Navalny and Skripal Affairs

Schlanger: One of the craziest things that’s coming out now, is the use of the Navalny affair to go after the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. This not only targets Russia, but also Germany, and all of Europe, with new sanctions being imposed. What can you tell us about that?

Zepp-LaRouche: The Alexei Navalny business is so clearly an orchestrated affair: If you look at the people who are sponsoring Navalny, they are all oligarchs, some linked to the Integrity Initiative in Great Britain, a British intelligence psywar institute, which has so-called “clusters of influence” in every country around the world, involved in anti-Russia and anti-China propaganda. They are sponsoring Navalny. The whole affair is extremely dubious, because the findings of the doctors in the hospital in Omsk, reveal no sign of Novichok; the Charité Hospital in Berlin at first said there was no Novichok, and only when samples were brought to a military lab of the Bundeswehr, were traces of Novichok claimed to have been found. However, everybody knows, if it would have been Novichok, Navalny would have been dead within 10 minutes.

The whole thing is completely questionable. It really looks like a classical British intelligence operation, of the same type as the Sergei and Yulia Skripal affair [in March 2018]. Unfortunately, the EU immediately moved in, and said that it will implement sanctions. Now, naturally, targetting Nord Stream 2 targets the independence and sovereignty of Europe. This is quite serious. Hopefully, we will see some resistance to it. This goes to the very self-interest of European nations.

Mobilization to Save Africa from Mass Famine

Schlanger: I want to come to something that you started bringing up very early this year, which is the situation of famine in Africa, facing 30-70 million people. David Beasley, the Executive Director of the UN’s World Food Programme, has been fighting to get aid. Interestingly, President Donald Trump has increased aid to the World Food Programme, but it’s still not enough.

I wonder if you can just summarize the developments around the situation and also the importance of looking to major infrastructure projects as the solution to the problem in the future?

Zepp-LaRouche: Already this year 7 million people have died, which was not necessary, because Beasley had warned of it a year ago! He demanded that he needed EU5.8 billion and he only got EU1.4 billion. In a subsequent speech, Beasley said of the world’s more than 2,000 billionaires, if they would each give a certain amount, they wouldn’t miss a meal, and that is so obvious.

If this is not remedied with a short-term airlift this year, as the Leader of LaRouche South Africa, Phillip Tsokolibane, has urgently appealed to Trump for, but also appealed in general to the world, then 30 million more people are in acute danger of dying—and that is not necessary! It’s one thing if you have a natural catastrophe where you can’t do anything about it; but to increase the food shipments to Africa, to double food production would be very, very easy.

We are campaigning around that, that you need to have a short-term mobilization. The interests of the farmers who are threatened by the cartels to go bankrupt—for them to have more food production based on a parity price; to double food production also in light of a growing world population, is an absolute need. The developing countries urgently need the food; it would be in the interest of the Europeans to help, because if this is not solved, Europe will have the largest migration wave ever. By 2050 the African population alone is likely to grow to 2.5 billion people. We need to double food production in light of this development.

Then there is the Transaqua project, which we have talked about on this program several times, but let me just restate it. This is the idea to refill Lake Chad, which has dried out to be only 10% of its original volume. The Sahel zone is, as a consequence, an area of instability, hunger, and social strife, leaving ground for terrorism and so forth. Lake Chad could be refilled by taking 3-4% of the water volume of the tributaries of the Congo River, bringing this water which now is going into the Atlantic. It doesn’t hurt anybody to take this 3% and bring it through a system of canals and waterways into Lake Chad.

This project would immediately give the opportunity for inland shipping, for large-scale irrigation of agricultural areas, for [hydropower] for industrial parks. You would put an infrastructure development program into the heart of Africa, which would positively affect 12 countries, especially in the Lake Chad region, which is one of the key areas of migration and horror. So that should be put on the agenda immediately.

We will escalate our mobilization. We will put out the call of Tsokolibane for this program, “A Matter of Life and Death—Call for International Mobilization of Food Resources to Fight Starvation in Africa.”

Schlanger: Helga, when we meet again next week, it will be just days before the U.S. election. I think it would be very useful for all of our viewers to go to the LaRouche PAC site and look at the video from October 20 of Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe, “ ‘We Are Now In a Civil War’ (with Regard to the Hunter Biden Censorship).”

Is there anything else you want to add?

Zepp-LaRouche: This is a moment in which people are really tested: Can they look, in shaping the future—can they mobilize themselves to be part of the solution? The best way of doing it, is to become part of the Schiller Institute and help us in our efforts.

Schlanger: OK, Helga, thank you. And I’ll see you next week!

Zepp-LaRouche: Till next week.