Strategic German Conference

A World Divided Will Not Survive

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

[Print version of this transcript]

Oct. 4—The following is an edited transcript of the Oct. 2, 2024, opening remarks by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, to the Schiller Institute conference “Another Step Closer to Nuclear Armageddon—Germany Needs a New Security Architecture.” Embedded links and subheads have been added. The video is available here.

Welcome to the extraordinary speakers, who I think are together uniquely in a position to discuss why we need a new security and development architecture if we want to avoid the danger of World War III: Ambassador Jack Matlock, because he is the most important eyewitness of the period, when it still would have been very easy to establish a new world security architecture; Dr. Ted Postol, who is probably the world’s leading expert on nuclear weapons; then Col. (ret.) Alain Corvez, who brings in a refreshing view of sovereignists from France, which we unfortunately lack completely in Germany; Wolfgang Effenberger, who is a very astute historian and author of many books; and Rainer Rupp, who has a biography which gave him the opportunity to experience first-hand how quickly you could slide into a nuclear war, which he will tell us about.

So, we have right now cascading events, and they make clear that if we continue the way things are going right now, the chance that the situation will spin out of control is extremely high. The hottest situation right now is Southwest Asia, which is spinning quickly out of control. Basically, the sequence of events of the last year, where following the attack by Hamas on Israel and the out-of-proportion reaction by Israel in Gaza since, left a situation where, according to the British medical journal The Lancet, more than 200,000 people are dead in Gaza. Gaza is almost entirely destroyed. During the attack on the headquarters of Hezbollah [in Beirut, Lebanon], according to CNN, fifteen 2,000-lb. “bunker buster” bombs were used to kill Nasrallah and an uncounted number of other people. According to Israeli Channel 12 [TV], it was 85 bunker-penetrating bombs, one ton each, which created a gigantic crater. For me, this crater is sort of the image of the style and politics: that you just bust your way in, and kill no matter what the consequences are.

Naturally, this led to Iran on the 1st of October, answering with several hundred ballistic missiles against Israel, aiming at two air force bases and the headquarters of the Mossad. Iran claims that 90% of those missiles hit their targets; Israel naturally denies that, and says the Iranian attack was completely ineffective. In any case, we are now in a situation where, if Israel launches a significant counterstrike, maybe on the oil refineries in Iran, that, if Iran retaliates against that, then Israel would escalate maybe against the nuclear facilities in Iran.

A U.S. aircraft carrier group has been sitting for one year in the region, with many warships. You have now a situation where everything is set to explode between Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis on the one side, and Israel and its U.S. backers on the other side. Basically, if it comes to an escalation where Iran would be hit in a serious way, what will the other nuclear powers do? Russia has a military agreement with Iran; it is in the fundamental interest of China not to let Iran be significantly destroyed. So, this could be the trigger of World War III!

Russia Changes Its Nuclear Doctrine

The second situation, around the Ukraine war, has reached the point where in reaction to a long series of events, Russia recently changed its nuclear doctrine, which had been up to now, that Russia would use nuclear weapons only if the existence and territorial integrity of Russia and the Russian Federation were in danger. But now, they’ve changed it into saying that if there is a significant air attack on Russia by a non-nuclear power, if that power is backed by a nuclear power, then Russia might use nuclear weapons first. So, the situation is still, afterwards, that many people in the West are still saying “Oh, Russia is bluffing. There are no red lines,” even if we are on the verge of such red lines being stepped over all the time.

On Sept. 13, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer went to the White House and tried to convince U.S. President Joe Biden to give the permission that long-range missiles could be used for strikes deep into the territory of Russia, which Biden did not agree to at that point. But many people in the strategic discussion—including obviously the Russians—believe that this is just a question of time before Biden will agree. Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, just said yesterday, “It is important to use such long-range missiles deep into the territory of Russia, because one has to hit the archer, not just the arrows.”

Russia had made very clear already, before the change in the nuclear doctrine, that if things escalate, they will not just hit the F-16s and NATO troops inside Ukraine, but they will hit the command centers, where the orders are given to deploy these weapons. I think we will hear from Ted Postol, who has written many extremely important articles about the difference between conventional and nuclear war, and why it is the logic that, once you start to use nuclear weapons, the likelihood that all of them will be used is absolutely great.

Now, if it comes to nuclear war globally, that may end—and in all likelihood will end—all life on the planet, because it will be followed by a nuclear winter. There is a debate where people deny that that is the case, and already Albert Einstein had said he doesn’t know what a Third World War will be like, but he is certain that a Fourth World War will be fought with stones and sticks. Maybe some people will survive, but in a horrible condition, and even that is not for sure.

Therefore, we have to do everything in our power to stop that. In order to come to the right answer, we have to ask “What went wrong? How did we come from the end of the Cold War to a situation where civilization is at stake?” Tomorrow is the 3rd of October, which is the 34th anniversary of the reunification of Germany. As Mr. Matlock has also said, the Cold War actually ended two years earlier.

The Lost Chance of 1989-90

We have published a German language book about the lost chance of 1989-90, and articles, where we present the history of that crucial period, the end of the Cold War, the German reunification, our proposals we had made in order to use that historical chance which, given present conditions, this [chance] obviously was not used. The U.S. Secretary of State James Baker had promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO would not move one inch to the East. Also, Germany could be reunified, Gorbachev answered, and be in NATO. This was incredibly generous, given the fact that at that point only 45 years had passed since the end of the Second World War. Given the enormous casualties which Russia [and the other Soviet Republics] suffered—probably 27 million—for which Germany had a large part of the guilt, I think the agreement of Russia to the German unification under these conditions was incredibly generous. It turns my stomach to see how in only 34 years, that has been forgotten completely.

Our intervention in the situation, at the time, just to note it briefly, was caused by the fact that already in 1984, Lyndon LaRouche—my late husband—had made the prognosis that, if the Soviet Union would stay with the economic policies they had at that time, which was basically a form of primitive accumulation against their own economy, they would collapse in five years. Therefore, it did not surprise us that in 1988, the economic problems of the Comecon increased massively, and that is why Lyndon LaRouche and I gave a press conference at the Kempinski Bristol Hotel, where he predicted the reunification of Germany to soon come, one year before it happened, and that the unified Germany should have Berlin as a capital, and then proceed to develop Poland with Western technologies, as a model for all Comecon states to modernize.

The Berlin Wall came down on the 9th of November, 1989, and we were not surprised at all. However, on the 7th of July, 1998, the German government published their “Documents Concerning German Policy,” a 1,667-page document which normally would be confidential and secret for 30 years, but German Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided to publish it for obvious reasons. There, it said that Germany had no prepared plan for what to do if the opportunity of German unification arose. The document says, “Surprisingly, the day X, [the day] of the opening of borders had arrived, and the government did not have an available adequate concept of what to do. Not any preparation, no procedures or crisis scenario for that occasion.”

Implications of the Herrhausen Assassination

We had a concept. I wrote a leaflet, which was published on Nov. 15, 1989, with the headline, “Beloved Germany, Continue,” where I picked up on the LaRouche proposal to develop Poland with Western means, modernizing it, making it a model for the transformation of the Comecon states. Naturally, that was only a leaflet, but a few days later, on Nov. 28, Chancellor Kohl published his 10-point program, in which he did not yet propose unification of Germany, but just a confederation of two states. Two days later, Alfred Herrhausen, the chairman of Deutsche Bank, was assassinated by a very dubious “third generation” of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, an event which was characterized by former Pentagon official Fletcher Prouty as being as much of a game-changer for the German situation as the assassination of John F. Kennedy was for the United States. It was a signal to Kohl and the entire German elite not to step out of any Allied consensus, which the 10-point program had been a baby step in the direction of sovereignty, which was basically not allowed.

A few days later, at the EU summit in Strasbourg, everybody came down on Kohl like a ton of bricks, and Kohl later described this as the darkest hour of his life. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher started the “Fourth Reich” campaign, and then French President François Mitterrand—according to memoirs—demanded that Germany should give up the deutschmark for the euro, as a precondition for the unification. Everybody insisted that Germany had to agree to the Maastricht Treaty, which was basically the submission to the neo-liberal austerity dogma, and the giving up of any economic sovereignty on the part of Germany.

For Russia, the IMF insisted on the “shock therapy,” which reduced the industrial potential of Russia from 1991 to 1994 to only 30%. At that time, I made many speeches which were published where I said, if the West makes the mistake to impose on the bankrupt communist economic system the equally bankrupt neo-liberal system, then you may postpone the collapse for a few years, but it will eventually come to a collapse much, much, much more severe than even the end of communism. John Paul II, the Pope at the time, warned in the same way that the West should not become triumphalist and claim that they have won the Cold War, because there were structures of sin in both East and West, and if people would not believe it, they should look at the condition of the developing countries, to see that such structures of sin did also exist in the West.

The Productive Triangle

In January 1990, we published our Productive Triangle proposal, which was the idea to integrate the area between Paris, Berlin, and Vienna: Modernize it—this was the highest concentration of industrial capacity worldwide at that time—modernize it through an injection of maglev technology, nuclear energy, and then bring this development through development corridors to Warsaw, Kyiv, Moscow, the Balkans.

Now, obviously, that was not adopted because of geopolitical opposition from the Allied powers. So, in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, we expanded this Productive Triangle into the Eurasian Land-Bridge, which was essentially the idea to connect the population and industrial centers of Europe and Asia through economic development corridors. And we meant that explicitly as the economic foundation of a peace order for the 21st Century. Gorbachev at that time was still talking about a common European house; others were talking about a common security architecture from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

The “shock therapy” put Russia into a decade of absolute genocide, as the Russian economist Sergei Glazyev wrote in a book titled Genocide: Russia and the New World Order. And the trans-Atlantic system went along to deregulate the markets even more, because there was no more enemy. So, the plunge into a neo-liberal, neo-Malthusian, zero-growth economic system proceeded, and so did regime change, color revolution and so forth.

Revival of the Non-Aligned Movement

China was the only country which picked up on the idea of the Eurasian Land-Bridge. I’m not saying that they took our proposal directly. Sometimes these things travel many different roads: We had many conferences and seminars on five continents in the world. But in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the New Silk Road and the emergence of the Belt and Road Initiative, which has completely transformed the world in the following 11 years. As a result of it, you have now a revival of the Non-Aligned Movement, which, because of cooperation with the Belt and Road Initiative of China, for the first time has seen the chance to overcome colonialism and poverty, while the Western world—the trans-Atlantic system—basically neglected the investment in physical economy in favor of profit maximization. That is why the real reason for the war danger is the fact that the Global South, which has become the Global Majority—according to Chatham House representing 88% of the world’s population—is in the process of building a new economic system which the West is foolishly regarding as an enemy that has to be contained and suppressed.

That is why if we do not leave that geopolitical idea that there will be two systems—one is Global NATO, which will suppress or has to suppress Russia, China, and the Global South; and on the other side you have the BRICS-Plus, which will have a big conference in Kazan, Russia this month, where altogether 40-50 countries have applied for membership; not all of them will join this time, but there will be waves of [countries] joining—if that dynamic is not overcome, I think World War III will be the outcome.

This is why we are demanding, or at least from the Schiller Institute, we are demanding the immediate establishment of a New International Security and Development Architecture, modeled on the Peace of Westphalia, where the war parties came to the conclusion that a continuation of the war would not leave anybody alive to enjoy the victory. And they did sit down at the negotiation table and came up with principles which are known as the principles of the Peace of Westphalia, and were the basis for the establishment of international law.

I think this is a lot of material, and not everybody may agree with my account of history, but I want to open it for discussion.