Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Universal History Must Not End in a Tragedy

This is the edited transcript of the Keynote presentation of Helga Zepp-LaRouche to Panel 1, “How To Inspire Humanity To Survive the Greatest Crisis in World History,” of the Schiller Institute’s Sept. 10-11, 2022 Conference, “Inspiring Humanity To Survive the Greatest Crisis in World History.” Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche is the Founder and leader of the Schiller Institute, and convenor of the conference.

Hello, good day wherever you may be around the globe, I welcome you. I want to speak about the subject, that universal history must not end in a tragedy.

Who wants to deny the fact that we are faced with the most dangerous moment in history, ever? Let me say this forcefully from the beginning: This multi-faceted, unprecedented crisis is entirely the result of wrong policies, and therefore it can be corrected; that is, if the political will to do so exists. To mobilize that political will is what this conference, which commemorates the 100th birthday of my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, is all about.

We face the acute danger of the strategic situation spinning out of control, leading to a thermonuclear World War III. A situation which is more dangerous than at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis; and, if it comes to that, would lead to the annihilation of mankind, a nuclear Winter, and there would not even be an historian left to study the reasons why it occurred.

Despite the fact that there is no question that that danger is very real, there are still some politicians saying that no scenario can be excluded. The tabloid Bild Zeitung today is bragging that the present Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv is helped massively by NATO, armored vehicles from the U.S. and Turkey, tanks from Poland, intelligence from NATO, the U.S. altogether giving $10 billion in weapons to Ukraine. Well, are all these countries and NATO not already war parties? So the question is, when is the red line crossed, and when will we have a full-fledged war between Russia and NATO?

Then, in addition, the financial system of the trans-Atlantic world is hopelessly bankrupt. It’s about to go through either a hyperinflationary blow-out like Weimar Germany in 1923, only this time it would be not one country but the entire so-called West. Or, we could experience very shortly ahead, a chain-reaction crash, triggered by the belated increase of the interest rates through the central banks. The European Central Bank just increased [its deposit facility rate from zero to] 0.75%, the highest in its history. Jerome Powell from the Fed evokes the “pain” of the Paul Volcker high-interest rate policy, which at the end of the 1970s, beginning of the 1980s, was over 20%. If you imposed that now in the already completely bankrupt situation of many over-indebted firms, already capital flight out of the emerging markets, this could trigger a prolonged plunge into a dark age of every country dependent on the trans-Atlantic financial system.

If we would have such a collapse, it would naturally increase the war danger instantly. We already have a world famine. Already now there are 1.7 billion people in danger of starvation. According to the United Nations, each day 25,000 people die of hunger, completely unnecessarily! Obviously, if there would be a crash, it would lead to the death of hundreds of millions, if not billions of people.

The pandemic is not defeated. New ones are looming for the same reason COVID-19 erupted, because you have, in a completely under-developed world, in large parts of entire continents, you have the suppression of the immune system of entire populations.

In Europe, and in Germany in particular, we are right now, with the policies of the present government, going to crash against the wall this winter. There will be mass bankruptcies, mass unemployment, emergencies, blackouts. Banks like JPMorgan Chase are already preparing to leave Germany to London or other capitals in case of a blackout, which they expect.

Charade of ‘Democracies’ vs. ‘Autocracies’

Officially, we have a strategic situation, where the rules-based order of the “democracies” of the West are against the nefarious “autocracies” and
“dictatorships” of Russia and China. In reality, the situation is mirror-inverted. The countries of Asia, led by the rise of China, the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and much of the Global South, are building a new economic system with the aim to overcome poverty and have real economic development. There is a renaissance of the Bandung spirit, the revival of the Non-Aligned Movement. What these countries are absolutely determined to do this time is to end colonialism for sure: the colonialism which officially does not exist, but which came along in new clothes. They want to implement this time for sure the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.

Let’s take a look. What is actually the state of affairs in the so-called West? There is no democracy anymore. The possibility that the West could move towards a system of “fascism with a democratic face” was already discussed in the mid-1970s by the Trilateral Commission and think tanks, who openly discussed that in the case of an economic collapse it could become necessary to impose such draconian austerity, that one has to do away with the basic constitutional rights. Samuel Huntington, of The Clash of Civilizations fame—which was a blueprint for the North-South conflict to replace the East-West conflict—and the author of the horrible book The Soldier and the State, which is an entire argument of mercenary armies to defend the Empire, wrote for the Trilateral Commission in 1975 The Crisis of Democracy—which was the idea that zero-growth would make it necessary to limit democracy; that if governments are too democratic, then only a cataclysmic crisis would be sufficient to impose on the people the sacrifices which may be necessary.

Well, that is the policy of [Nazi jurist] Carl Schmitt, that the sovereign is he who decides on the state of emergency. This brings us back to the point when [economist] Abba Lerner was telling LaRouche in their famous debate at [Queens College], that if people had accepted Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler would not have been necessary. Forty-seven years later, democracy—which a while ago, one would assume includes the right of free speech; the democratic multitude of viewpoints could be exchanged—that idea is completely gone. There is no more knowable truth, which one can find out, at least in approximation, for example through Socratic dialogue; instead, one can only accept the one narrative. And much of so-called politics going on these days is the absolute attempt to have dictatorial control over that narrative.

Part of that narrative is that the Ukraine war was the result of “an unprovoked Russian aggression.” Even mentioning that history didn’t start on Feb.23—even if you say that there was a history before that—makes you a Putin agent, a follower or proponent of Russian propaganda. And if you propose to try to end the war as soon as possible—which is what the opinion is, also, of leading military experts such as retired German General Kujat, former General Inspector of the Bundeswehr and head of the Military Committee of NATO (a very high position), [who] says in a recent article that the war cannot be won by either side; that the sanctions may cause irreversible damage to the German economy; that our freedom was neither defended at the Hindu Kush, nor is it defended in Ukraine right now; that this escalation risks the escalation to a nuclear war.

All of these are obviously very good reasons to negotiate a peace settlement. If you say all of that, you are being put on a death list on Ukrainian websites which are financed by the U.S. State Department: Now, obviously, that is real democracy. And European governments participate regularly in meetings of the Ukrainian institutions, which run these websites, such as the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation.

You have right now in most of the Western European and American countries—Britain for sure—a Gleichschaltung, a lockstep in the mainstream media, which would make Goebbels turn pale with envy. You have an atmosphere of McCarthyism; you have a digitalized Gestapo. And during the last months, dozens of people told me privately that they are afraid to speak their mind, even in private circles, because otherwise they fear to be ostracized.

And I want to say this for the record: We don’t need Russian analysis to come to our conclusions. We have an international private news service, Executive Intelligence Review, which was created by Lyndon LaRouche in 1974. The National Security Council’s Senior Director of International Economic Affairs, Norman Bailey, in 1984, in the position as a White House advisor of the Reagan administration, told us that he considered EIR the best private intelligence service in the world. And more importantly, we are not gathering intelligence by reading newspaper clips, but by educating [the public with] our own policies, and then we evaluate the reactions and come to the conclusions and analyze what that means.

‘To Give History a Better Direction’

We know the prehistory of the 23rd of February, because we are part of it. Even before the Berlin Wall came down, LaRouche had forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union, absolutely correctly in 1984, when he said that if the Soviet Union would continue their then-existing policies of rejecting cooperation with Reagan on the SDI, of sticking to the Ogarkov Plan, then they would collapse in five years. That is exactly what happened. We put out the answer to that—the Productive Triangle Paris-Berlin-Vienna. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, we proposed to connect Europe and Asia through economic development corridors, and we called that the Eurasian Land-Bridge. It was our idea of a peace order for the 21st Century. Please show the picture of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, which then became the World Land-Bridge, which is still our present policy.

It would have been in the self-interest of all countries to realize that proposal. We know that it was rejected for geopolitical reasons by Thatcher, Bush Sr., and Mitterrand, because at that point it was the policy of these countries to have the former superpower Soviet Union turn into a Russia which would just be degraded into being a raw material-exporting, Third World country. This was the idea in 1991 to eliminate a potential competitor on the world market, because it was considered that Russia would have more educated scientists and more raw materials, so, if you would allow economic development, it would become stronger than the United States at that time.

But despite the fact that this policy was rejected at that time, we kept organizing for the Eurasian Land-Bridge on five continents. We held hundreds of conferences and seminars, and from that standpoint experienced and observed firsthand how the historic chance of 1989 was lost. We published a book about that. And how the promises not to expand NATO to the East were broken. We observed firsthand, by organizing for the Productive Triangle and the Eurasian Land-Bridge, how in the Yeltsin years, the shock therapy reduced Russia’s industrial potential between 1991 and 1994 to only 30%. The intention to ruin Russia was already there, and Yeltsin was the willing instrument of such policies.

Now, after Putin came to power, the policies of color revolutions were implemented: the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004; the Rose Revolution in Georgia; the White Revolution attempted in Russia; Yellow Revolution attempted in Hong Kong against China. In 1999, [then UK Prime Minister Tony] Blair instigated the policy of the “right to protect,” which was the idea to replace the Peace of Westphalia order and the UN Charter with a “rules-based order,” to create the basis for interventionist wars in Southwest Asia and Libya.

No, we are not repeating Russian propaganda. We are attempting to give history a better direction, and we saw who supported this proposal and who opposed it. Most importantly, we are not the Flat Earth people. We have a different method of thinking, which relates to the real physical universe of ideas, not opinions based on sense perception. That’s why we cannot be “nudged”—in the term of Cass Sunstein—into believing what is the allowed narrative.

I said in the beginning, we have the worst crisis in history as the result of wrong policies, and therefore, they can be corrected. LaRouche forecast in 1971—and this is probably the most important forecast ever made in history—that when Nixon introduced the floating exchange rates and cut the dollar from the gold standard, if the countries would continue with these monetarist policies, it would lead to a new depression, fascism, and a new world war. Or, we would have to have a completely new economic system. This was 51 years ago, and LaRouche made in the meantime nine major forecasts, and many, many more at each branching point.

When the Trilateral Commission introduced the “controlled disintegration of the world economy,” and the authors of that then all became members of the Jimmy Carter Administration, this was the evil idea to never allow the emergence of mercantilist economies in the developing sector. Never allow “another Japan” in the Southern Hemisphere, meaning that Japan, after being undeveloped for many centuries, then in the Meiji Restoration suddenly made an industrial revolution in a few years, which obviously could be replicated by every developing country. That was supposed to be outlawed. That was followed by the Volcker high interest rate policy, a brutal austerity policy, Reaganomics, Thatcherism, mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing to cheap labor markets, just-in-time production, shareholder value society, going public of middle-level industries, market deregulation, derivative speculation, quantitative easing, negative interest rates, etc.

At each step, LaRouche not only made a brilliant analysis, but presented policy initiatives. He proposed the IDB in 1975, which was the idea to replace the IMF with a development bank which would allow the massive development of the developing sector. He proposed, together with and for Mexican President José López Portillo, Operation Juárez in 1982. He proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was implemented by President Reagan on March 23, 1983. We developed in all of this time, programs for Africa, Latin America, Eurasia, the Middle East, the U.S. LaRouche was always working on the idea, that to avoid plunging into a prolonged Dark Age, one had to get the institutions to reject and overturn the wrong assumptions of monetarism.

The Importance of Renaissance

What is involved here is a fundamental difference in the methodology of thinking. If one looks at the long arc of universal history, mankind has made enormous progress. From the hunter and gatherer society where the population did not surpass 10 million on the planet, alone during the last 10,000 years there was an enormous population growth to about 8 billion people today. We see in that history a recurring phenomenon: Actual leaps forward occurred through renaissance periods. For example, I can name Classical Greece, the Abbasid Dynasty, the Song Dynasty in China, the Italian Renaissance, the German Classical period; all of these are high phases of history, and they were always catalyzed by a relatively small number of individuals who contributed original discoveries as the result of adequate hypothesis in science and art, leading to new levels of understanding concerning valid principles of the physical universe.

So far, each time these upturns were subsequently interrupted by the enemies of progress, who were able to induce society from the leading layers down to the credulous majority of the population to adopt views which ignored the realm of ideas just discovered, and replaced them with ideologies suiting the interest of those enemies—i.e., the ruling oligarchy.

The secret of why LaRouche has been the most successful forecaster of economic and social tendencies, and all his critics have been utter failures, lies in the fact that he acquired throughout his life an unparalleled knowledge of those ideas which over the course of millennia led to the qualitative advancement of human history; and, those ideas that would fold the universe down, from what Gauss would call later the complex domain, to a reductionist Euclidean conception of things and events. Plato describes that difference in the Paradox of the Cave: Where the real world of ideas exists outside the cave, while those people who rely on their biological sense-perceptual apparatus, only perceive reality as shadows, as if upon the walls of a dimly fire-lit cave.

A crucial example of that difference is highlighted by the paradoxes in geometry that do not allow reductionist solutions, such as the construction of the five Platonic solids and the doubling of the line, the square, and the cube. It is these paradoxes which laid the foundation of thinking for a whole class of thinkers, who were thinking and subsequently making discoveries in the realm of the complex domain and the Platonic tradition—such as Brunelleschi, Nicolaus of Cusa, Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Gilbert, Fermat, Huyghens, Leibniz, Bernoulli, Kästner, Gauss, Lazare Carnot, Dirichlet, and Riemann. And naturally, Einstein and Vernadsky. All progress in human history has come from that tradition, as LaRouche has demonstrated in numerous treatises.

On the contrary, the ideologues of the reductionist tradition have done absolutely nothing to contribute, but a lot to obscure, the insight into real knowledge, such as the Aristotelian tradition of Descartes, Newton—remember his famous “hypotheses non fingo,” you don’t need hypothesis, or you don’t assume hypothesis—Boyle, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Cauchy, Clausius, Grassmann, Helmholtz, Maxwell, Lindeman, Felix Klein, Bertrand Russell, and the students of those.

The same is essentially true for ideas in art, where you have the fundamental, axiomatic difference in the Classical art aimed at the elevation of the creative power of the audience; and those forms of art which dwell on the banalizing, or even worse, brutalizing the senses—the preferred method of the oligarchy for the control of the population. In this respect, there is no difference between the Roman Empire making the audiences of the amphitheater complicit in the killing of the gladiator—where the audience has to put thumbs up or down, to decide if the gladiator dies or lives—and the cult of violence portrayed in the entertainment industry of today. LaRouche had a profound knowledge about the different axiomatic outlook of these opposite traditions, and provided ample proof that the physical universe does not follow the pathway of Euclidean geometry, such as the difference between the shortest distance and the actual principle of the Leibnizian least action.

In the same way, the physical economy cannot be described adequately by mathematical and statistical methods. LaRouche developed his whole economic scientific method, explicitly with a polemic against information theory and the systems analysis of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann. Or, algorithms don’t fit the real economy either, but only by the methods of a Riemannian space-time of general relativity.

It is only that thinking in terms of the complex domain, which can conceptualize the impact of a never-ending series of discoveries of qualitative new principles of the physical universe, which each defines an entirely new economic platform, where the newly-discovered principle redefines the relative productivity of each aspect of the entire economy. Out of that methodological approach, LaRouche arrived at the unique concept of relative potential population density and the related concept of energy-flux density in the production process, both of which must continuously increase per square kilometer and per capita, because of the relatively finite character of resources at each level of development. At each level, the cost of development of the resources tends to increase and thus lower the productivity of labor. With the stagnation of the technological level, the effort and cost to maintain the same number of people increases, and the relative potential population density decreases.

Against Limits to Growth

But the conclusion of that fact, as LaRouche concludes, is exactly the opposite of what the evil Club of Rome concluded in its oligarchical propaganda pamphlet, Limits to Growth; namely, from now on, one needs zero growth and even negative growth.

And LaRouche wrote against that in his book There Are No Limits to Growth, with which Lyn wrote one of his most important books; he demonstrated that continuous scientific and technological progress are necessary, and that higher degrees of anti-entropy are arrived at by the continuous application of human creativity. This is corresponding to the laws of the real physical universe, and this is therefore the precondition for the durable survival of humanity.

The relative population potential in primitive society was approximately 0.06 to 0.1 persons per square kilometer, and the total potential of the world did not exceed 10 million people. Today, with 8 billion people, there are more than two orders of magnitude more. And with the commercial use of fusion technology within reach, and the existing technologies to produce essentially limitless amounts of new fresh and clean water, the population potential can double, and beyond, in a very short period of time and create a living standard for each human being comparable to the average family living in Switzerland today.

From solar and wind energy, with a very low energy flux density, to fossil fuels, to nuclear energy, this measurement increased from 0.2 kilowatts per square mile to 70,000 kilowatts per square mile, and has the potential to increase to 10¹⁵ kw/sq mile with the second generation of fusion power.

In light of this reality, the exit from nuclear energy in Germany, and the EU policies of the Green Deal, not only means the end of Germany as an industrial state—and that is the intention of the Greens—it also means the reduction of the relative potential population density of the world, because the productive capacity of the fourth largest economy of the world, Germany, will be subtracted, and this will absolutely lead to an increase in famine, epidemics, and social unrest. And that is the intention of the Malthusian oligarchy as well.

LaRouche knew all the essential representatives of the two opposing outlooks, and he made it absolutely transparent for anybody who wanted to know, why the elimination of creativity and the potential for genius, was so absolutely essential for the oligarchical class, for whom the evil Malthus was only a paid scribbler. So, it was clear that the common denominator between the outlook of the British East India Company, the controlled disintegration of the world economy of the Trilateral Commission, the Great Transformation of Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and the Great Reset of the World Economic Forum, is the same reductionist, empiricist, Malthusian ideology.

When China recognized its error that the assumption of limited resources of the planet was wrong, they changed the one-child policy, because they recognized that each additional child would contribute the potential of new creative discoveries, and they emphasized from there on the continuous need for innovation in the economy. Thus, the Chinese economy made a miracle, which did not suffer economic cycles, because the continued increase in productivity eliminated the reasons for that.

A Self-Inflicted Crisis

So, the rise of China is the result of a correct economic policy which echoes the theory of LaRouche, and the United States and Europe are collapsing because they prefer Malthus over LaRouche. The crisis in the West is entirely self-inflicted, and not the result of evil policies of Russia or China.

The BRICS countries, the SCO which have their big summit on the 15th and 16th of September—just in a few days from now in the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan; many organizations of the Global South working on a new world economic order, reviving the tradition of the Non-Aligned Movement— all of these are aiming to end colonialism, overcome poverty and underdevelopment. And the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, and the Global Security Initiative which are proposed by China—these are all concepts to overcome the geopolitical confrontation and create a platform for a shared future of mankind.

The United States and Europe, rather than trying to contain these developments, should rethink the reasons why we are in the mess we are, and we should join with these countries in a new paradigm of international relations based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and the UN Charter.

We are not only going into a hot autumn and winter, but what in all likelihood will be the collapse of the entire system. This is why the Schiller Institute has put the need for a new paradigm, a new security and development architecture, on the table.

So, with Friedrich Schiller, we can say, “Man is greater than his destiny”—provided, however, if we follow the advice of López Portillo and “Listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche.” Thank you.