INTERNATIONAL YOUTH DISCUSSION

Stop the Great Reset,
Develop Every Nation!

by Helga Zepp LaRouche:

[Print version of this transcript]

This is an edited transcript of the keynote address delivered by Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche to an international dialogue of 150 youth from 17 nations, sponsored by the Schiller Institute, Saturday, February 20, 2021. Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche is the founder and President of the Schiller Institute. Subheads and embedded links have been added. The entire event can be watched here.

I want to greet you wherever you may be—all over the world, I hope. I want to discuss with you the possible organizing perspective for this coming period. As you have noticed—one could not help but notice it—two extremely opposite developments were happening in the last week:

The first, absolutely horrible and a foreboding of the potential coming disaster, in the form of the inability of Texas and some other U.S. states to respond to extremely cold weather, coming from the polar region and creating blackouts, resulting in the deaths of 36 people.

That is one direction of where the world could go if we would go ahead with what are the plans of the central banks and most governments in the United States, the European Union, the British government, namely, to implement the so-called “Great Reset,” or the “Green New Deal.” Moving the entirety of energy production and consumption to the kind of energies which showed their absolute vulnerability in this cold, will bring on a much, much worse collapse of industrial production to come.

I want to contrast that today, with another development, which is diametrically opposite, and that is the fantastic optimism generated in everybody who watched the three nations’ Mars missions, starting on February 9 with the United Arab Emirates, on February 10, with the Chinese Tianwen-1 mission, and on February 18, with the Perseverance project of NASA. These three spacecraft reaching Mars shows what human creativity is capable of.

Quite prescient concerning the blackouts that occurred in Texas and fourteen other states only a few days later, on February 12, EIR published a Special Issue for subscribers titled “The Great Leap Backward: LaRouche Exposes the Green New Deal., This is an excellent, 68-page study, now available as a Special Report for purchase by the general public. It shows exactly the plans of the financial oligarchy of Wall Street, of the City of London, to make the “Great Transformation,” not only by going out of nuclear, but going out of fossil fuels, and transforming the entire economy to “green” investments only.

Given the fact that the financial system of the trans-Atlantic sector is absolutely bankrupt and could blow out at any moment, these central banks and other major financial institutions want to create another mega-bubble, by investing $30 trillion to even $50 trillion in green technology, to transform the economy. And naturally the speculators and the big banks are intent on making a mega-profit, speculating on things which don’t exist, like CO₂ emission certificates, something which is a complete bubble, and speculating on hot air. That would do exactly what we have seen in Texas, but on a much, much larger scale.

Going into renewable energy sources only, means the end of industrial nations. My late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, demonstrated in many of his writings the correlation between the energy-flux density used in the process of production, and the number of people who can be maintained—and that is one of his most important conceptual breakthroughs. If you go to sources of power with extremely low energy-flux density, such as solar and wind, then you reduce, automatically, the number of people who can be maintained to a level before the Industrial Revolution. John Schellnhuber and others like him have already said many years ago that the desired population level of the planet is, according to these utter Malthusians, about 1 billion or maybe 2 billion, at most.

Texas, known as the oil state, and Houston, supposedly the “energy capital of the world,” completely collapsed. This state, and others served by the same electricity grid, were only seconds away from a total blackout, which was only prevented by controlled, rolling blackouts. Nevertheless, 36 people died.

The wind turbines got frozen up; they had icicles on their blades so they couldn’t turn, and so therefore were unable to produce any energy. When the solar panels got covered with snow, they, too, stopped producing energy. This proves the main argument against the use of only these energy sources: that you don’t have energy when the wind doesn’t blow, or the blades are frozen, or the Sun doesn’t shine. The main argument in favor of these technologies was shown to be pure ideology, has nothing to do with science, has nothing to do with industrial production, but has only to do with Green ideology, and that Green ideology kills people.

The question is, how could the United States, which after all is still the most powerful economy in the world, so utterly fail? What is wrong with the U.S. system? Well, it is the same thing that is wrong with the system of the European Union: Namely, that it’s based on neoliberal theory, that is, that it goes for profit maximization for the speculators and does not pay attention to the common good.

Therefore, in addition to the vulnerability of these “renewable” energy resources to environmental conditions, maintenance has been basically eliminated. The cornerstone of what is required for the economy, like infrastructure, energy production and distribution, health systems—none of these things should be privatized; but, if they’re privatized then maintenance always gets put on a back burner, but all of these systems require constant maintenance and upgrading.

The brutal character of this system really was demonstrated by the unspeakable remarks of the Mayor of the town of Colorado City, Texas, Tim Boyd, who had the nerve to say to the victims of the blackouts:

No one owes you are [sic] your family anything, nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Only the strong will survive and the weak with parish [sic].

Now, Mr. Boyd, and maybe it has something to do with his name, that nomen est omen (“the name is an omen”), that Boyd, the type of Boyd, is having such views. He basically has since had to resign, but if you look at what happened, people with variable rate plans, saw their prices go up when energy consumption peaks.

So some people who would normally pay $125-$150 a month, because of these variable rates, had bills which in one case went up to $10,000 and in another case $17,000, and they could not switch to a fixed price, because the alternative energy companies wouldn’t take them, because there was such an overload. So, these people are now sitting there on their bills, and this is what this mayor from Colorado City, Texas was talking about.

But this is only a mild foretaste of what will come if the Green New Deal is implemented in general. And this is exactly what is on the agenda in the European Union; this is what the President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is busy implementing, and this is what the new Biden administration is committed to doing. For the industrial nations, doing this will mean all energy-intensive industries will collapse, or go abroad: they just could not stay in Europe or the United States; they will go to some other country or collapse. Going with the Green New Deal will mean a complete collapse of living standards in Europe and the United States.

Already in 2011, a study by the scientific advisory commission of the German parliament studied what would happen if there were blackouts of the system. (As I said, Texas was seconds away from a general blackout.) They came to the conclusion that if highly integrated grids like those in Europe, for example, were to collapse, then within hours, everything would come to a standstill. No smart phone use, because you couldn’t recharge the battery; no fuel for your car, so you couldn’t drive your car. The supermarkets would be empty, or even looted. Gas stations wouldn’t function, transport, trains, everything would come to a standstill, within hours. Huge traffic jams, before everything stopped. Hospitals would not be supplied, medical supplies would not be available, and in general you would have chaos. People would die.

Given the extreme volatility of societies already because of the COVID pandemic, and because of the opposition to the measures taken to arrest and defeat it, and because of the general polarization in the United States as a result of the contested election, the danger of general social chaos is also on the agenda.

That would be terrible for the advanced sector. But for the developing countries it would mean mass deaths. The developing countries, already right now, are in absolute peril. The virus is already developing new strains; new variants are developing in Brazil, in South Africa, and in Great Britain, which are much more infectious. Therefore, even with the lockdown measures, still the infection rates don’t go down. And we have not even an inkling of what is happening on continents like Africa, or Latin American because there is so little testing. Even before the pandemic erupted their health systems were in abysmal conditions.

According to the World Food Program, there is the danger of up to 300 million people dying of famine this year. If then the capacities in industrial countries, from which the kinds of measures and industrial production would have to come that would be needed to create what we are fighting for, namely, a modern health system in every country, were to collapse, you would have mass deaths. And that is obviously what the Malthusians, like the British Monarchy—which has been sponsoring a lot of these ideas for decades, actually for more than a century—really intend. These Malthusian views are used to justify depopulating the world by means of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—Hunger, Disease, War, and Pestilence—and many billions will lose their lives if these views are allowed to determine policy.

I urge all of you to study this Special Report by EIR, which is an absolute must-read, in order to understand the danger of the Great Reset, and I ask your participation to help to make sure that all relevant places, in governments around the world, and the relevant parliamentarians, get access to this report. And also that it gets discussed in universities. Contact professors, make it a subject of debate among students, that we really have no less intention than to defeat this Great Reset. And in one sense, the blackout in Texas was maybe a donation from St. Peter, who is in charge of the weather, so that he gave us notice of warning of what are the consequences of these policies.

Let me contrast this with a completely different approach, namely that if you use human creativity and the ability of the human mind to again and again discover new physical principles of the universe, and you apply those, that in an extremely short period of time, you can overcome the most underdeveloped and poorest conditions in the world, and by leapfrogging to the most modern technologies, accomplish incredible breakthroughs.

In the history of mankind, if you take universal history as one large process, the torch of progress was not always belonging to one nation, but it shifted from one civilization and one culture to another. For example, over the last 2,000 years, after the collapse of the Roman Empire in Europe, which plunged Europe into a dark age, and the Middle Ages, and the dark age then of the 14th century, which was a real setback for European civilization. And in the 4th century you had in India the Gupta period, which produced some of the most beautiful, poetical creations, dramas, poetry, and also at the same time or a little bit later, you had the replacement of the Umayyad period in the Arab world with the Abbasid period, which happened in 750 CE.

Baghdad was created in 766, and this at that time became very quickly the most developed city on the planet. In a few years, more than 100,000 architects, construction workers, engineers, and craftsmen built the city under the leadership of Caliph Al Mansur, making it at that point the most modern city in the world. And with Haroun al-Rashid, there started a dialogue with Charlemagne, which led to the Carolingian renaissance.

Under Haroun al-Rashid, whose regnal name was Al-Ma’mun and who reigned from 813 to 833, Baghdad became the scientific research center of the world. He created something which was called the House of Wisdom, and they had the good sense to send emissaries to Egypt, to Spain, to Portugal, to Greece. And all knowledge, every discovery, every book which these emissaries would bring back, the caliph would pay for them with their weight in gold, in order to show his appreciation for collecting all this knowledge.

At that time, you had a real dialogue of cultures: You had an exchange of scientific discoveries, of architecture, hydraulics, navigation; you had the emergence of the Arabic number system, which really came from India, but it was carried by a person named al-Khwarizmi whose Latinized name is Al-Gorithmi, whose fame you still have in the form of algorithms today. Then a little later, you had Ibn Sina, whose Latin name is Avicenna, who developed the most advanced system of medicine. The book he wrote was the standard medical text taught in Europe up to the 17th century.

The Abbasid period was the most advanced period in history, all over the world, at that time.

Then came a period of stagnation and collapse, and the Southwest Asia region plunged into a period of going backward.

Take All the Knowledge in the World

Now, I’m going to make a little jump: My late husband, Lyndon LaRouche and I were invited in 2002 to the United Arab Emirates, to Abu Dhabi, to a two-day conference on the future of oil. When oil was discovered in the Middle East at the beginning of the 20th century, the British Navy switched from coal-powered ships to oil-powered, but oil did not then play a major role for the region itself.

The first time the United Arab Emirates had their own refinery was only in 1999. We were there about three years after their first refinery started functioning. The subject of the conference, which was organized by the Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, was “The Role of Oil and Gas in World Politics,” and Lyn was invited to give a speech on the future of oil. He made a very prescient and prophetic speech about what should happen with this oil.

He said that the Southwest Asia region was not only important for the discovery of oil, but is at the crossroad between Asia and Europe, and between Asia and the African continent, and therefore is of strategic importance. This was 2002, one year after the 9/11 attack, when the Islamic world was under great attack at that time. Lyn basically said: Do not follow the example of the United States, because if the world follows the policies of the U.S. at this time, it will plunge the whole world into a dark age, like the 14th century. He said that, hopefully, there would be wise governments that would follow the alternative. He said that petroleum would play a role as a fuel, maybe for one generation or a little bit more, but it would change its character.

Lyn then made a very beautiful pedagogical example: He said, let’s just imagine the map of this region as a whole and zoom in, as if from an orbiting space station. We would zoom in to this region, and watch the long-range historical process of what has been going on in this region in the last 20,000 years.

He said that about 19,000 years ago, the ocean levels in this region were about 400 feet below the levels they are today, and if you look at this region in a lapse-time panorama, where you reduce these 20,000 years to a few minutes, you can see the desert growing in the entire region from the Atlantic coast of Africa, all the way through the Sahara, through the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, through Iraq, Iran, all the way to China, and there is basically this continuous growth of the desert. This entire period of the last 20,000 years was an incredible struggle against aridization. And he said, today, because of breakthroughs in science and technology, we have the chance to not only control this process, but also to reverse it.

Therefore, he said, the role of the oil which the people own is shifting, and we should not think about the oil but you should think in terms of the resources you can access by the wealth you can create with oil, and the importance of water. Then, he discussed how to irrigate the deserts, how to green the deserts, but also how the shift should go away from just trade over the sea route, to the creation of land-bridges.

And already in 2002, he discussed—this is not the first time, we were discussing it earlier—how this region should soon be connected through land-bridges, through corridors connecting Asia, Europe and Africa, and how, basically, all of this, if invested in, in the right way would pay for itself, because you create something with the power of creativity, the creation of science and technology, so that you are creating not only transport lines from A to B, but, by creating these corridors 100 km wide, you put in transport lines, fast train systems, highways, waterways, energy production and distribution, and communications, and that way you create the precondition for industrialization of the whole region.

He also said—and I think this is very important—there is no way the United States will ever recover, if the United States does not cooperate with the region of the Middle East and Africa in this way, building these land-bridges.

Next, he gave a presentation to the Zayed Center, which was heard by all the top ministers and top leaders from the region; and I also had the chance a few days later to give a presentation about the dialogue of civilizations and encouraged the participants to take the Abbasid period as an inspiration and apply it for today, to just take the knowledge from everywhere in the world and apply it.

I’m not saying our visit to the UAE is the only thing that caused things to happen, but I’m absolutely sure it had a very important effect. When we were there, in 2002, you could already see the application of water in the desert. There is an island in front of Abu Dhabi in the ocean, which only a few years earlier had been complete desert, and now it has become a beautiful blooming garden, new vegetation, old vegetation, new flowers—it has become a landing spot for all the migrating birds coming from Europe in the wintertime to Africa. They have changed their migration route, because now they have all these beautiful berries and other fruits, so they have also profited from this development.

This was the beginning, in 2002.

The Woman on Mars

In 1988, Lyn made a beautiful movie, and I would like to show you a section of that movie. The movie was called The Woman on Mars. It was Lyn’s vision as a presidential candidate in the Democratic Party of what he would do were he President, and how he would transform the U.S. economy, in collaboration with other countries, to make sure that around the year 2027, people would be living on Mars. We had discussed it earlier, with the great visionary Krafft Ehricke, a German-American rocket scientist, who had written books that are still absolutely inspirational about a colony on the Moon, on Mars. Let’s now listen to Lyn’s visionary words from 1988.

[Video: The Woman on Mars, broadcast March 3, 1988.]

Lyndon LaRouche: There are two reasons we must choose a Mars project as the way to achieve the rates of economic growth needed. First, there are powerful reasons we must have a colony on Mars, to achieve certain very specific kinds of scientific breakthroughs we shall need on Earth, we must do the kind of astrophysical research we cannot do without a Mars project. The practical purpose is to build up a system of giant radio telescopes, as far away from the Sun as possible. To sustain the scientists and engineers working on these space laboratories, we need a nearby logistical base. To support those scientists and engineers, requires a population of about the size of a medium-size city on Earth. Since Mars is the nearest location which meets the requirements, we must colonize Mars.

The second reason is that the Mars project uses every frontier technology we might expect to develop during the coming 50 years of scientific research. That means, that the space program will be supplying our civilian industries with the most advanced technologies possible, at the most rapid rate, putting the United States, permanently, in first place in technology.

These technologies include plasma processes, which are not only energy sources for all mankind during the coming 50 years and more, but also the new, basic industrial technologies. Once we can bring sufficient, cheap energy to bear, not only to boil tungsten, but to heat it into a plasma state, all limits to natural resources, as we now define such limits, cease to exist.

A second, related technology is that represented in a primitive way by today’s laser machine tools. This means controlling the entire electromagnetic spectrum, as the basic tool of production, for uncounted centuries still to come.

A third technology is modern optical biophysics, perhaps the only technology which will enable us to provide cures for such diseases as cancer and AIDS. Apart from human health needs, this is the great revolution in biology for the remainder of this century and the next.

Every other breakthrough in technology we can foresee, until the time we can master what we call the antimatter/matter reaction as an energy source, will fall among these three categories of scientific research and development. By putting all these technologies into a single, mission-oriented research and development project, we are able to ensure that the United States will be first in technology for 50 years to come. With this Mars program, we can assure every one of you, that your children and grandchildren have the opportunity for a bright future. That, in my opinion, is the true mission of government.

Narrator: Lyndon LaRouche sums up his report, by describing the way in which the Mars mission project will spill new technologies, and entirely new industries, into an expanding job market.

LaRouche: As President, I shall call together the representatives of industries, including the automotive and aerospace sector. I shall say to them:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I need your cooperation to give the United States the world’s most advanced tool industry. I shall wrestle with the Congress to provide such legislation as we need, for you to do your job properly. We are going to get the last disgusting vestige of decay, pollution and poverty, out of this nation’s life, and you are going to play a key part in bringing this about.

It will work like this:

First, as I told you in my broadcast several weeks ago, we are going to pour about $2 trillion a year, of low-cost credit into infrastructure and industrial expansion.

Second, we are going to have an emergency tax-reform which stimulates investment with investment tax-credit incentives.

Third, the research and development of the project will be tightly interfaced with the growth of our modernized tool sector.

That means that the tool sector will have the next technologies available as rapidly as they are developed. It means that industry can obtain uses of these technologies as rapidly as they are developed. With ample low-cost credit for investments in new technologies, plus investment tax-credit incentives, our national economy will achieve the highest rate of technological growth in history.

This will require sweeping improvements in public school education. It requires more classics and science in the schools. It will require National Science foundation scholarships and merit-pay increases for teachers, and will require National Science Foundation assistance to local schools in providing the exhibits and other teaching materials needed to introduce students to the new space-age technologies.

This requires a shift away from present trends in business education, to produce more managers qualified in production technologies.

It means a much better way to live, than the drab misery, illiteracy, and decay, into which our nation has been drifting the past 20 years.

Then, 39 years from now, we shall hear the broadcast from Mars, announcing that the first permanent colony there is operational. Among those colonists will be some of the children and grandchildren of you watching this broadcast tonight. Many of you will be watching that first television broadcast from the new colony.

Already, the woman who will speak to you from Mars, has just recently been born somewhere in the United States.

We shall give our nation once again that great future which our children and grandchildren deserve.

‘Dr. Gomez’: I have the announcement you’ve been waiting for. As of five minutes ago, our environmental systems have been fully stabilized. Man’s first permanent colony on Mars is now fully operational. [end video]

Hope

Zepp-LaRouche: Obviously, it did not happen exactly like that. Lyn did not become President, for the reasons of the oligarchy hating this vision. But I can say that this woman has been born, or a woman like that, not in the United States, but in the United Arab Emirates. Sarah Al-Amiri was born in 1987, and is now 34 years old. She is Minister of State for Advanced Sciences and is chairwoman of the UAE Space Agency.

She and a group of young scientists started only in 2015 to go for a Mars mission project, and now I want to play a TEDx speech she gave on January 23, 2017.

H.E. Sarah Al-Amiri: That was an exhausting day. But about 1:30 p.m., when we reached the stratosphere, I saw something that reminded me exactly why we’re doing this, why are we working on defining this mission. And I saw the edge of space. I saw the horizon, the Dubai water line, and I also saw the edge of space, the darkening of the sky that starts happening in the stratosphere. And to me, it made all the hard work that went into defining this mission, the Emirates’ Mars mission, the Hope mission, well worth it.

At the end of those 100 days, we were able to come up with the science of the mission: So, what is the mission going to do? The mission is going to provide scientists with the first holistic view of the Martian atmosphere. We’re going, for the first time, to understand the climate of Mars, over an entire Martian year, the entire climate of a planet.

A lot of people ask me [about] other spacecraft that have gone to Mars:

We know what the average temperature is on Mars. We know what the lowest temperature is on Mars, and what the highest temperatures are on Mars. We also know that there are dust storms, and different features and clouds that are there. Why is your mission noble and why is your mission new?

Well, the current data that we have on Mars is using two different times of Mars days, and cover just specific areas of Mars. So, it’s as if I’m coming to tell you to come and study Earth: Take the temperatures at 2 p.m. and 2 a.m. every once in a while. Take it over Alaska and take it here, over Dubai, and please summarize what is the climate of Earth. That doesn’t really give you a proper reference point. So that is the answer that we’re giving.

But most importantly, we’re trying to provide a sort of missing piece of the puzzle of our understanding of what happens, and what is currently happening to hydrogen and oxygen atoms on Mars. Hydrogen and oxygen, why are they so important? Because they’re the building blocks of water. Water existed on Mars’ surface, flowing water existed on Mars’ surface at some point in time. There were changes that occurred to this planet, some of them climate changes. And hydrogen and oxygen today are escaping from its atmosphere. What we want to understand, is Mars’ climate, is it playing a role in the escape of hydrogen and oxygen?

Water, again, is important to us in planets, because Mars exists in the Goldilocks zone [the habitable region around a star where the temperature on its planets would allow liquid water to exist—ed.], and water, as we understand life, is one of the building blocks of life.

And it’s called “Hope” for a reason, above and beyond the science that it’s contributing.

Today, our region, the Middle East, is filled with turmoil. It is a region that is going through a few of its darkest hours. And what we are doing at the Hope Emirates Mars Mission is providing a message: The Middle East is made up of over 50 million youth. This project, Hope, is being run by a team that is under 35, a team that is made up of 34% women; the average age is 27. An entire nation is putting its hope in a team of youth, and presenting a message to the region.

This mission is also called “Hope” because we are contributing to the global understanding of a planet’s data. We’re going above and beyond the turmoil that is now defining our region and becoming positive contributors to science. Science, to me, is the most international form of collaboration. It is limitless. It is borderless. And it’s run by passions of individuals for the benefit of human understanding.

Today, I’d like you all to do something with me. I want everyone to lift up their finger and cover a region of the sky. Look up at your finger, the region of your fingertip that is blocking the sky. The Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at a region that small, and it came up with this image. [The image she showed was something like that shown in Figure 1.]

This image, the dots of light that you see—they’re not stars. They’re galaxies. There are hundreds of billions of stars in each one of those dots in that small region of sky that we look at. Each [of] hundreds of billions of galaxies contains [those] billions of stars. Each star, imagine how many Goldilocks zones exist around them. How many planets could possibly exist around those? And how many possibilities of life, could there possibly exist in this small portion of the sky?

And today, I’d like you all to imagine, what is the positive contribution that you’re doing right here—on this unremarkable planet, in this unremarkable solar system, in this unremarkable galaxy—that justifies how infinite the possibilities are in this small image, and how positive and infinite your contribution is on this infinitesimal planet? Thank you.”

Zepp-LaRouche: I think that that is clearly getting you completely excited because this is the way to overcome backwardness, overcome chauvinism, overcome conflict among nations, and I am very, very inspired by this very remarkable woman. And she and about 200 of her collaborators were successful in getting the Hope spacecraft into the orbit of Mars just a few days ago. Let’s look at the next video from February 9, 2021:

H.E. Sarah Al-Amiri: We are gathered here today for a historic moment, for a moment that I never realized, growing up in this beautiful nation around us [the United Arab Emirates], would ever become a reality.

Space was a sector that we never dared to dream, growing up on it. This is my story, and the story of the 200 other people that worked with me on this mission. But it is a story of transformation of an entire nation.

On the December 2nd, 1971 humanity landed the very first object on Mars. But on that very same day, from humble beginnings, a group of seven people gathered together, to make the nation that surrounds us today. And it is with this mindset, of growth, of accelerating the building of nation, of unity, of coexistence, that has spurred this mission to reach the point that it has today.

This has been an internationally collaborated mission. There have been 450 souls working on this mission, collaboratively, across continents, across time zones, working together to ensure that this mission arrives on time, toward the destination, ensuring that capabilities are developed in the Emirates, because for us, this mission is about the next 50 years. The next 50 years has a solid bedrock, deeply rooted in science, technology, innovation, and creativity. That is not a choice for us: This is our reality today, and this is our reality coming in the next few decades, and it is the people that will make this reality true.

Zepp-LaRouche: If the United Arab Emirates can do it, every single nation on the planet can do it, in an equally short time. And this is the promise to overcome underdevelopment, forever. The choices are very clear: Either the Great Reset going into the Dark Age, or space cooperation leading to a new era of civilization. So let’s discuss this now.