Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Put the One Humanity First, So that All Nations Can Survive and Prosper

Dec. 7—The following is an edited transcript of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote presentation to Panel 1 of the Dec.7-8 Schiller Institute conference, “In the Spirit of Schiller and Beethoven: All Men, Become Brethren!” The panel was titled, “The Strategic Crisis: New and Final World War, or a New Paradigm of the One Humanity.” The full video of that panel is available here.

Good morning. Dear excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, friends of the Schiller Institute: We are coming here together at this international internet conference, in order to send out an urgent call to the world, not only because we may be weeks, days, or hours away from the potentially greatest catastrophe in human history—namely its potential annihilation in a thermonuclear war—but to also make emphatically the point that there is a solution, a way out of this danger, if people of good will unite all over the world to enforce its implementation. It is my great honor to greet all the distinguished panelists representing the Global South as well as Western nations, at this 40th anniversary of the founding of the Schiller Institute!

But the next several weeks, until the 20th of January, are the most dangerous ones ever—by far more dangerous than the Cuban Missile crisis—because the nuclear arsenals of NATO and Russia, and maybe other nations, are launch-on-warning, which means a warning time, depending on the system, of between 5 and 30 minutes—with a breathtaking escalation step-by-step to the potential Armageddon. And, contrary to the Cuban Missile Crisis, no line of communication exists between the two sides.

While President Biden, until recently, refused to allow Ukraine the use of ATACMS missiles for strikes deep into the territory of Russia, for the expressed fear that this would mean a direct military confrontation between the United States and other NATO states and Russia, less than two weeks after the election victory of Donald Trump, on November 17, he gave that permission. This was then promptly used by Ukraine on November 19 for strikes against the Russian region of Kursk—which Ukraine had invaded on August 3—and Bryansk, totally ignoring the fact that Putin had updated the Russian nuclear doctrine at the end of September. In this doctrine, it states in Point 11 that “aggression against Russia and/or its allies by any non-nuclear state with the participation or support from a nuclear state will now be considered a joint attack.” Now the U.S. and NATO were de facto in a state of war with Russia. That did not prevent Admiral Thomas Buchanan of U.S. STRATCOM [Strategic Command] from declaring in Washington Nov. 20 that the U.S. would be ready for a nuclear exchange, if the global leadership role of the United States was at stake. He was speaking at an event titled, “Report Launch: Project Atom 2024,” hosted by the U.S. CSIS [Center for Strategic and International Studies].

Russia Introduces the Oreshnik

The next day, on November 21, Russia fired a new hypersonic medium-range missile, the Oreshnik, on the Yuzhmash weapon factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. President Putin, addressing a conference of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, CSTO, in Astana, said the following about this strike:

“Dozens of warheads, self-guided units, attack the target at a speed of 10 Mach [ten times the speed of sound]. This is about three kilometers per second. The temperature of the striking elements reaches 4,000 degrees. If my memory serves me right,” Putin noted, “the temperature on the surface of the Sun is 5,500-6,000 degrees. Therefore, everything that is in the epicenter of the explosion is divided into fractions, into elementary particles; everything turns essentially into dust. The missile is capable of destroying even heavily fortified structures and those located at considerable depths.”

With other words, Putin described the impact of the deployment of several Oreshnik missiles at once as being as powerful, in terms of its destructive power, as a nuclear weapon.

Immediately, various Western “experts” were rushing to downplay the power of this new weapon, as being “negligible” and nothing special. But that misses the point made by Russian military experts, who insist that if the Oreshnik is used in a concentrated massive strike, using several Oreshnik missiles simultaneously, then the result is comparable to a nuclear weapon.

But it is a non-nuclear weapon that can be deployed at almost Mach 11 and therefore cannot be intercepted by NATO forces. It is hitting its targets with kinetic energy with such high speed that it gets converted into thermal energy, which produces an expanding mass of superheated vapors with an energy density similar to TNT. It creates craters like a meteor at high speed. The hypersonic characteristics of this new weapon mean that its designers employed the physics of hydrodynamic shockwaves.

It is typical of the usual denial by certain forces in the West, that Putin is “bluffing,” that there are “no red lines,” etc., etc., to dismiss the crucial characteristics of the Oreshnik: Namely, that it cannot be classified as a weapon of mass destruction; it demonstrates exceptional precision; and when used in combination with other newly developed weapons that Russia has not yet demonstrated but hinted at, it can achieve the power approximating that of a nuclear weapon, but contrary to those, it does not produce nuclear fallout.

Reagan Adopts LaRouche’s SDI Proposal

But the Oreshnik surprise hints beyond its immediate application to another fascinating potential: When the world was threatened already once before with nuclear extinction, during the middle-range missile crisis in the beginning of the 1980s, when the Pershing II and SS-20 were likewise directed against each other with a forewarning time of only four to eight minutes, Lyndon LaRouche developed the proposal, which became known as the SDI after President Reagan adopted it as the official U.S. strategic policy, announced in a TV address on March 23, 1983. It essentially was the idea that both superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, would jointly develop new technologies, based on new physical principles, to make nuclear weapons technologically obsolete.

LaRouche’s proposal included the concept of using these new technologies as a science-driver for the civilian economies of both sides, and a joint, gigantic technology transfer to the developing sector in order to overcome underdevelopment. It was a comprehensive design to overcome the bloc formation in favor of cooperation in the mutual interest of all countries. This proposal was rejected at the time by Moscow with the argument that it would bring the West more advantages than the Soviet Union. But the idea to make nuclear weapons technologically obsolete obviously was an element in the approach.

Then Putin announced a variety of new weapon systems in his annual state address on March 1, 2018, where he presented videos and animations of nuclear-fueled cruise missiles, hypersonic cruise missiles, and a new ICBM system, the RS-28 Sarmat missile, which is called “Satan” in the West, because of its enormous destructive power. It is supposed to have 10 independently targetable re-entry rockets and up to 15 nuclear warheads.

There is the concept of arms-control treaties as an effort to prevent a nuclear holocaust. But, as we have seen in the last 23 years, that only functions if both sides honestly agree to the agreement. Practically every single disarmament treaty between the major powers has been cancelled. LaRouche’s concept, which was backed by Reagan until the very end of his Presidency, was to make nuclear weapons technologically obsolete. The development of the Oreshnik is essentially a step in that direction. Even if the present speed of almost Mach 11 is not yet sufficient to parallel the impact of a nuclear weapon, this is in all likelihood not yet the end of the research employing the principle of shockwaves in hypersonic missiles. These missiles, at a higher speed, will surpass the effect of nuclear weapons. Most probably, in combination with other technologies, those nuclear weapons could become obsolete.

The Peace of Westphalia

When the warring parties of Europe in the 17th Century realized after 150 years of religious war, and one-third of people, villages, animals, etc. had been destroyed, they realized that nobody would be alive to enjoy the victory if they kept fighting. They sat down at the negotiating table in Münster and Osnabrück, and after four years agreed on the Peace of Westphalia. In light of the imminent risk of a global nuclear war, which would end all life on the planet, is it not urgent to agree on a new global security and development architecture, which builds on the recognition of Westphalia, that any peace order has to take into account the interest of the other, of all others? And would it not be extremely urgent, that these negotiations would include the joint collaboration of military scientists from Russia, China, and the U.S., to work together on the research of new physical principles, which could make nuclear weapons obsolete?

Kurt Campbell, Deputy Secretary of State, recently told the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “Frankly, the Cold War pales in comparison to the multifaceted challenges that China represents,” insisting that this would be the most significant challenge in the history of the United States. “It’s not just a military challenge; it’s across the board. It is in the Global South. It is in technology. We need to step up our game across the board.”

This amazing admission, that it is the scientific and technological rise of China, and by implication the rise of the Global South, which is regarded as the unprecedented threat in the history of the United States, deserves further scrutiny. As a matter of fact, it points to the solution of the Gordian Knot.

When the Cold War ended because of the economic failure of the Soviet type of economy, there was, for a certain period, no strategic threat, as such eminent witnesses at that time as U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock and others have testified. It would have been absolutely possible to implement a global peace order based on such proposals as LaRouche’s Productive Triangle (Paris-Berlin-Vienna) of 1989 and the Eurasian Land-Bridge of 1991 as the economic basis. These proposals were rejected by the neocons in Washington and London on the basis of what was later termed the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and the related break of the promises to Gorbachev not to move NATO one inch to the East and not to station foreign troops on the territory of the former GDR.

The first NATO expansion in 1999 included Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, followed by five more, over 1,000 km to the East—as well as color revolutions, regime changes, interventionist wars, and unilateral sanctions, all aimed at trying to prove the Fukuyama statement, that history had ended with the Cold War, meaning that the whole world would eventually adopt the Western liberal model of democracy.

LaRouche’s Historic Forecast of 1971

With it went a deepening of the paradigm shift LaRouche had warned against in his historic forecast of 1971, when he characterized Nixon’s adoption of flexible exchange rates as a doomed and destructive system, when it was adopted. The trans-Atlantic world abandoned more and more sound principles of the real economy in favor of outsourcing to cheap labor markets, just-in-time modes of production, initial public offerings, and profit maximizing through high-risk speculation in the derivative markets. At the same time, the view that Russia had been reduced to a “regional power,” as Obama had insisted, led to the miscalculation that it was no longer necessary to keep the cutting edge on technologies related to higher energy-flux densities, in favor of a highly-ideologized preference of “Green” alternative energy sources with a very low energy-flux density.

China, on the other hand, which had already started to reverse the anti-science orientation of the Cultural Revolution with Deng Xiaoping’s policy of Reform and Opening Up, made further qualitative advances with the economic theory of President Xi Jinping. After China lifted 850 million—850 million!—of its own population out of poverty, Xi started to make the Chinese model of development available to the countries of the Global South, when he initiated the policy of the New Silk Road in Kazakhstan in 2013. What has unfolded in the 11 years since, is the greatest infrastructure development project in history, where there are now 150 countries participating in what they regard as a win-win opportunity for themselves to overcome their own poverty and underdevelopment.

Inside of China, the focus on rapid development was more and more replaced with one of high-quality development, building up self-reliance and strength in science and technology.

According to the Critical Technology Tracker of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China is now leading in 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is tracking. Among them, the crucial fields of defense, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials, and key quantum technology areas. It also shows, that for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China, and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country.

This emphasis has been accelerated since approximately mid-2023 by Xi Jinping, when he put forward the concept of “new quality productive forces,” which should be “guided by new theories of productive forces.” He demands that “revolutionary breakthroughs in technologies” should hasten the birth of new quality productive forces, which give rise to new industries, new business models, and new growth-drivers. All of this will lead to an “explosion of original and disruptive innovations in science and technology.”

Relative Potential Population Density

Xi Jinping does not give it that name, but when one looks at the result of the “explosion of disrupting technologies,” it is very obvious that he has arrived at essentially the same economic science as my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, which the video in the beginning was pointing to. His entire method was based on an understanding that the laws of the physical universe are of an anti-entropic nature, and that any qualitative advancement in the discovery of new universal physical principles would necessarily be of a disruptive nature, causing a nonlinear increase in the degrees of freedom in the effects of the new discovery. The measuring rod, if such a new discovery would be useful for the long-term survivability of mankind, was his notion that it had to lead to a higher relative potential population density.

In his paper “What Is an Economic Shock Wave?” published in 1982, he wrote:

From this point of reference, we despise the assertion that human knowledge is typified by perfecting an existing technological mode of repeated, unchanging practice. To the extent that we merely repeat, more rigorously, the same technology, mankind dies. A zero-technological growth policy of guild-like practice, is the practice of a society which lacks the moral fitness to survive. We must despise notions respecting knowledge which bear upon measurement of repeatable actions.

LaRouche’s entire scientific-economic method was based on the fact that he rejected the linear, Euclidean-based information theory and systems analysis of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, and instead applied the Riemannian geometry presented in the paper of the great Bernhard Riemann of 1859, “On the Propagation of Plane Waves of Finite Amplitude,” and other writings of Riemann’s, to the analysis of economic processes. He was emphatic that we are not living in a universe as described by such theoreticians in the tradition of Isaac Newton, but in a universe organized according to hydrodynamic principles.

It is an irony of history, if you will, that in the two existential fields of military science and economics, it is those nations who apply the principles which LaRouche emphasized, which prove to be superior, while those who cling to the axioms of the Euclidean, Aristotelian, Newtonian outlook, are failing. Would it not be about time, to investigate the epistemological reasons for that—the LaRouche science?

A Point of Decision for Humanity

We are at a point of decision for the existence of humanity. In Ukraine, it’s either immediate peace negotiations or escalation to a nuclear conflagration. In Gaza, humanity is judged in front of a world court, and the verdict is devastating. We allow a genocide to go on in front of the world’s eyes! The entirety of Southwest Asia is about to go up in flames. South Korea, Georgia, Romania—all are the scenes of the battle of world powers.

We are confronted with the moral test of humanity to survive. We either put a new paradigm on the agenda, which puts the concept of the one humanity first, and allows national interest only in cohesion with the interest of that one humanity, or we may not make it as a species.

Let us reject the barbaric conceptions of Carl Schmitt, who maintained that the essence of politics would be the division into friends and enemies, and who foolishly saw political sovereignty as having the power “to decide on the exception” in a declared state of emergency. Let us reject the idea that relations among nations are a zero-sum game, where one will be on top, and the other one loses. We are human, and not wild animals!

The way out of this existential crisis is actually very simple: We must convince the nations of the collective West to abandon their Eurocentric arrogance, and cooperate, instead, with the nations of the Global South—who are the Global Majority, with 85 % of the human population—in building a just, new world economic order based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and the UN Charter.

In order to do that, we have to abandon, finally, all oligarchical axioms in our thinking, and replace them with the philosophy of the Coincidentia Oppositorum, the Coincidence of Opposites of Nicolas of Cusa, which enables us to think of humanity as the higher One, which is of a higher power than the Many.

We must make the spirit of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony our guiding star, where he set to music the “Ode to Joy” of Friedrich Schiller. “All men will become Brethren,” because that is what it means to be human.