Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Time to Dump the Learning-Resistant Establishment: Start the Adult Age of Man!

Helga Zepp-LaRouche is the Founder and President of the Schiller Institute. This is an edited transcript of her keynote address to Panel 2, “Energy, World Health and the End of War: The Power of Energy Flux Density,” of the Schiller Institute’s July 24, 2021 conference, “There Is No Climate Emergency—Apply the Science and Economics of Development to Stop Blackouts and Death. Subheads have been added.

Hello, I greet you, wherever you may be. And I’m really responding to what was said in the first panel. And as a world citizen, which I pride myself to be, I’m also a patriot, and in that capacity, it really gets to me that Germany is becoming the laughingstock of the entire world. Formerly, Germany was a very proud nation, of poets, of thinkers, of inventors, admired by the whole world for these qualities. But since a while, it seems that Germany can’t get anything done any more.

Chancellor Angela Merkel will soon be out of office. She was in that office for 16 years, and this is the time when she has to be concerned about how she will look in the history books. And I’m quite certain that Merkel will be the synonym for the image of a failing Germany.

You may remember that after the tsunami in Fukushima, she decided, together with some very bad advisors, to have Germany exit from nuclear energy. And I remember, I had meetings in Washington at that time, and people in the Congress and elsewhere were very upset, and they said, “What is going on in Germany? You must have an ace up your sleeve—have you gotten a breakthrough in fusion?” Because nobody could imagine that a high-technology, highly industrialized country like Germany would exit nuclear energy without having an alternative in place. But that’s exactly what was the case.

The decision has been made by the European Union, and naturally, Germany as well, to exit coal, and fossil fuels in general. And you would think there is an alternative in place. Absolutely not. You would need a territory of the size of Portugal, to put up all the windmills and solar panels, and that is about the territory of Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Pfalz, Hessen, and Thuringia, which is a good portion of Germany! And obviously, this is not realistic, and now they want to put these solar panels and wind parks into Africa, even South Africa—completely unworkable!

Flooding in Germany
Was a Man-Made Failure

Look at what happened with the airport for Berlin, the BER. This lasted, to get finished, about several decades; I think it was more than a decade. Ridiculous! The Chinese put up such airports in two years or three years. The maglev train was invented and tested first in Germany. Do you see any maglev trains, even a test track, in Germany? No. But in China, they now have the first line, going 600 kph, and building more tracks nationwide for fast train systems, of which you can only dream in Europe or the United States.

When the recent flooding occurred in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Pfalz, which we have heard about already, this was emphatically not the result of climate change, but man-made failure: The inability to act in time, despite the fact that the knowledge about the coming heavy rain and danger of flooding was there for one week earlier. Instead of responding to that failure, Merkel, after the flood had devastated the whole region said, “Oh, now we have to go faster in the fight against climate change.” When she was together with the mayor of the town of Schuld, Helmut Lussi, the mayor contradicted her, not by saying so, but by simply reporting the chronology of floods in Schuld, 1790, 1910, and then now the recent one.

This is very close to my home region. I was born in Trier, and I know the Moselle very well. If you travel along the Moselle, you find everywhere, marks on buildings which show how high the water was in what year, and you can actually see that there were many floods over the centuries. In the 14th century, such a flood may have been a natural catastrophe, but not in 2021, because nine days before, the satellite pictures were there, and they showed, increasingly as the days went on, three days before the flood occurred, before the rain started to pour, they had precise knowledge of which cities and towns would be hit. They named all the towns which are now devastated!

So, why did more than 170 people have to die, and many more are still missing? I mean, this is Germany, this is not Bangladesh! The warning was not communicated, there were no sirens, the radio did not report it, nor TV, there were no apps—and within hours the smartphones were dead because there was no electricity.

The Green Ideology Reflects a
Horrible Image of Man

The reason for this horrendous failure, is the absolutely horrible image of man which goes along with the Green ideology. This has so much clouded the thinking in Germany, that they don’t get anything straight anymore! And that image of man is actually the same for the Greens and the financial oligarchy. They all refer, in an almost pseudo-religious deification of nature, and this goes actually back to a mythology of a cyclical notion of the world which goes along with a circular economy. And that is the pre-Christian, heathen idea of Gaia. In that ideology, man is regarded as a parasite, as a pollutant, and it is unsaid, but quite acknowledged and agreed upon that the fewer people there are, the better.

This Green ideology unfortunately is no longer only the ideology of the Greens, but in Germany all parties have become green! I mean, we fought this for almost 50 years, since the Club of Rome put out their fraudulent report, The Limits to Growth. We fought against that, and made a zillion conferences, published hundreds of articles, and many books, but the financial powers that be, the City of London, Wall Street, and the like, have poured all their money into the propagation of this Green ideology.

As a result, in Germany right now, all parties are Green, all the big DAX firms have bought into the Green Deal of Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the EU Commission. A few days ago, Merkel was asked after the flood catastrophe by a Japanese journalist if Germany’s exit from nuclear energy would be permanent. And she answered, “The die is cast. Any future governments will not change that.”

How arrogant is that? What kind of notion and understanding of democracy is that? How can she say something about future governments, which happen to be, or supposedly are the result of the German voters voting? So, she is really the symbol for a failed Germany. I hesitated many times to attack her, because she sometimes made a little thing a little bit better than the worst hawks of the neocons, and in some respects she is not quite that bad. But if I hear something like that, on perpetuating the lie that the flood was the result of climate change, that she will stick to the nuclear energy exit, this is really too much. Merkel says, “Après nous le déluge” She is giving that phrase a new meaning.

Will the Western Nations All Vanish?

If this outlook prevails, the prognosis is that Germany will vanish as an industrial nation, or even as a nation altogether, like many civilizations which have disappeared, because right now, it is on course to be a failed nation. And I have said many times, and I repeat it here: that if Germany continues on its present course, you will find in a few years or decades, the relics of Germany in museums in Africa, in China, in India. And for Merkel, who claims to be a natural scientist, to make such remarks after the flood, means this woman is completely either learning-resistant, or she takes the side of the financial oligarchy. Which, remains to be judged.

What is so worrisome, is that this is the characteristic of almost the entire Western establishment. They have had policy failure after policy failure. And in spite of that, and despite the fact that everybody can see it, they have demonstrated a complete inability to reflect on the causes, namely, that infrastructure should not be left to private interests, or to anything like the German “black zero” policy. Infrastructure belongs to the realm of the common good, and therefore, must be the responsibility of the state. This flooding should be understood as a resounding warning signal that we have to go back to the policy of the common good and the people first.

A Biological Holocaust

Let us look at another example, which seems to be unrelated, but it is not: The failure of the establishment in respect to the corona pandemic. In 1973, my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, initiated a Biological Holocaust Task Force, which had the job of investigating the impact of the IMF conditionalities policy on the developing sector. It was already clear that that conditionality which prescribed that third world countries had to pay their debt before they were allowed to invest in infrastructure, health systems, education, let alone, industrialization would lower the living standards and therefore, people’s immune systems, by not allowing the populations to develop. LaRouche forecast that if you were to do this over a longer period of time, it would lead to the emergence of old and new diseases and pandemics.

For almost 50 years, virtually nothing was done from the side of the IMF, the World Bank, Europe, the United States, or other industrialized countries to help the developing countries to overcome that underdevelopment. So therefore, the population of the so-called third world, was basically abandoned or worse until China came in with the New Silk Road and started to build railways and industrial parks and similar things which started to overcome poverty in China and in those other developing countries.

What was done in the West, instead of listening to the warnings of LaRouche, governments went ahead with the privatization of the healthcare sector. That led to the outsourcing of the production of medical and pharmaceutical supplies into cheap labor markets; it led to a reduction in hospital beds and hospitals, and a general lowering of the supplies of healthcare to the populations, creating a two-class society, the rich on the one side, and the poorer parts of society on the other side.

When COVID-19 hit, there was an incredibly slow response! There were for months no masks, no protective gear, no respiratory machines, and an enormous amount of time was lost despite the spectacular speed of the later development of vaccines, which is a laudable result, but mainly due to the ingenuity of medical scientists. In the United States, more than 600,000 lives have been lost. In the world, so far, officially more than 4 million, but if one considers that in India alone, it is estimated that the factor of mortality is 5 to 10 times greater than officially counted; in Africa, as well, simply because people are not counted if they die in bed at home. One can actually calculate how many more millions have really died.

The immediate response of the Schiller Institute was to call for the construction of a world health system, meaning to build modern health systems in every single country on the planet. It is clear that when you have a pandemic there will be mutations, and in the worst case, these will make existing vaccines ineffective. If every country would have had a health care system like China had in Wuhan, where they were able to have a rapid response, with immediate testing, isolation, quarantine, building new hospitals with 1,000 beds in one week—the pandemic was contained after two months—then it would not have become a pandemic, because it wouldn’t have spread worldwide in the same way.

Instead, vaccines were bought, and in some cases hoarded by the rich countries, which is leading to complete devastation in developing countries. There are now massive mutations. Delta, a very aggressive variant, is very contagious. There’s already the lambda variant, and as a result of the lockdown of the so-called informal economy, we now face a famine of biblical dimensions, as David Beasley of the World Food Program called it, with 270 million people in danger of starvation this year.

Three days ago, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in the United States warned about outbreaks of a “superbug” fungus called Candida auris found in nursing homes in Washington, D.C. and in two hospitals in Dallas. There, the patients were resistant to all categories of treatment. It’s the first time there had been such a clustering of resistance, and patients are becoming infected from each other. This is a fungus which was known for years, but it is the first time that it has spread from person to person. It is not a virus; it’s not a bacterium, but fungi have cells.

Virologists are certain that new pandemics are coming and that we are approaching very quickly the condition Lyndon LaRouche had warned about: that if you suppress the immune systems of entire continents over a long period of time, there will be an interaction of biological processes leading to a biological holocaust. And the pandemic is not over, and with these new developments now branching into other categories, I think we are looking at a very, very serious health condition of the whole world, which is not receiving the kind of attention required yet in any form worth talking about.

Afghanistan: For the Moment,
the Theater of World History

Let us look at a certain area of utter failure of policy: That is the 20 years of the Afghanistan war, or one could say, all the interventionist wars: Iraq, Libya, Syria, where the only thing left is almost scorched earth, millions of civilians dead, populations now living in unimaginable misery. In Afghanistan, $2.2 trillion were spent, 3,300 American soldiers died; 59 German soldiers; far over 100,000 Afghanis were killed. This war was ill defined from the very beginning, and the latest, when the “Afghanistan Papers” were published in 2018, it should have been acknowledged and troops should have been pulled out immediately.

If the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan leads only to a realignment and redeployment, or a concentration, instead on the containment of China and Russia by focusing on the Indo-Pacific, then people and institutions have learned nothing from this 20 years of futile war. If the confrontation with Russia and China is continued, it can potentially lead to thermonuclear extinction.

The situation in Afghanistan represents a crossroad. For probably only a short period of time, there is the potential of a change in paradigm. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and the Afghan ambassador to China Javid Ahmad Qaem, have all stated that there is a potential for a cooperation between Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, the United States and European nations, and the integration of Afghanistan into the entire Eurasian Land-Bridge, the Belt and Road Initiative, the New Silk Road, to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to Afghanistan, into Central Asia, replacing opium production with modern agriculture and industry.

Now, this cooperation between Russia, China, and the U.S., in the small, could build the bridge for future cooperation in the large, avoiding strategic confrontation and replacing it with win-win cooperation. This could be the start of building a world health system by building a modern health system in Afghanistan, which has presently no health system worth speaking about. To build modern hospitals in Afghanistan, training programs for medical personnel, provide and build electricity and clean water, build up infrastructure in Afghanistan and the entire region once called “the land of the thousand cities.” And make it no longer the battleground for the Great Game, the control of the Eurasian continent, but a turning point in human history, of cooperation and mutual benefit of all people.

I think we should start the era of the adult age of mankind and focus on the common aims of our human species. Don’t you think it’s time to overcome poverty for 4 billion people? It cannot be that people live in such miserable conditions like you see in Yemen, in Syria, in many countries in Africa, and Latin America forever. China has demonstrated it can be done.

Finding cures for deadly diseases would be another one of such common aims of mankind. The rapid development of vaccines for COVID-19, again, has demonstrated it can be done, once you mobilize the political will.

International cooperation in space science, to erect villages on the Moon, cities on Mars, to join forces for the defense of planet Earth from asteroids—these are the common aims of mankind we should be concentrating on.

It is not clear if all of these questions can be addressed, but I think it requires people of good will to hold accountable these “establishments” which are obviously learning-resistant and have not shown any desire or willingness to reflect on these policy failures. And I would hope that this conference and this discussion will be one big step in this direction.