Schiller Institute Weekly Dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche

We Have the Solution: Build LaRouche’s Oasis Plan

The following is an edited transcript of the February 12, 2025, weekly Schiller Institute dialogue with Schiller Institute founder and leader Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Subheads have been added. The video is available here.

Harley Schlanger: Hello and welcome to our weekly dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and leader of the Schiller Institute. It’s Wednesday, February 12, 2025. I’m Harley Schlanger and I’ll be your host today. You can email questions or comments to Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche at questions@schillerinstitute.org or post them in the chat page. I hope you have a lot of questions, because there’s a lot going on in the world, and Helga’s voice is needed more than ever.

Now, Helga, I think without question the leading developments are related to the danger of an escalation of the crisis in Gaza: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat to break the ceasefire in Gaza, to go back to hunting down Hamas and committing genocide in the process; and then there’s President Donald Trump’s so-called “peace plan,” which involves a U.S. takeover of Gaza and the removal of 1.5-2 million Palestinians to Egypt or Jordan or some other location—this has been condemned by the vast majority of nations, including all of Israel’s Arab neighbors. The only positive part is when Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, said, if someone has a better plan, he’d like to hear it.

So, Helga, the first question for you, is why will Trump’s plan not work? And from an Ohio podcaster, he asks: “How can we get Trump to see that the Oasis Plan is a better solution?”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: First of all, I think it’s a potential tragedy, what we are seeing, because, when Trump made this ultimatum that Hamas must release all hostages by noon on Saturday, or else “all hell will break loose,” and come down on them, combined with the unshakable demand that the Palestinians be relocated, not to return—he emphatically repeated that several times—first of all, it is not going to work. Because, even as several Israelis have noted, Israel, in 15 months-plus of fighting, did not accomplish any of its war aims: Hamas was not destroyed; the Palestinians, basically, have not been relocated. But now to put this on top of the whole situation, it is a violation of every international law, of the UN Charter, of the idea that you cannot displace people, ethnic cleansing—all of that. And the message coming from President Trump in this way, I think it’s devastating if it’s not reversed, because we are in the middle of a strategic change, an epochal change that the world has not experienced for a very long time, for several centuries, one could say 500 years, when colonialism started—this period is coming to an end. The whole world is going through a realignment. And even if one could argue that a lot more could have been done to defend the Palestinians, in many years this will be seen by more than a billion Muslims all over the world— You know, it will discredit the image of the United States, if not reversed.

There are serious analysts, like, for example, Col. [ret.] Douglas Macgregor, who in a discussion put out the warning that if this goes on, that there could be a great war in the Middle East in two weeks, by March. And, obviously, if you look at all the different pieces of it, it could even entail a war involving Israel and Iran; and then the question is, where would that stop, given the alliances of Iran with Russia, militarily, and more broadly, with China.

So, we are looking at a disaster, and I can only agree with Colonel Macgregor that Trump must be surrounded by people who either are completely detached from reality, or maybe they’re just greedy and they already see big profits from the real estate which would be created in Gaza after it has been cleansed of Palestinians. It is not entirely clear where is this coming from. Is it from Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has talked about such real estate investments in the Gaza Strip before? Is it coming from the plan which emanated from Netanyahu’s office, already last May? Maybe a convergence of the two?

But it is not going to work. And one of the things that gets to me the most is that President Trump, even if you assume that he wants to end the crisis, that he wants to fulfill his promise that the Palestinians should live a life without fearing to be killed at any moment, he did not mention in one syllable who was causing all of this misery over the last 15 months; that it was what the Israel Defense Forces did—the killing of at least 62,000 Palestinians. According to the medical journal The Lancet, its estimates from more than half a year ago are that more than 200,000 people had been killed.

What Happened to Empathy?

But more fundamentally, you would expect a leader like Trump to have some kind of empathy with the people around the world he is dealing with. And you don’t have to agree with every action, what happened over the last 80 years, because it is the logic of war, unfortunately, that if war breeds war, generates war, a lot of injustices are done on both sides—and there’s not even the time to recount it. But to not take into account what has been going on with the suffering of the Palestinians, the unbelievable pictures that have been transmitted by TV into the living room of every person— You know, to be kicked out of your territory which, according to all historical records, belonged to your people for thousands of years, and now being threatened again with eviction from that territory, this is a very incredible—I can only say, it’s a tragic, it’s a dramatic situation.

And then to just talk like Trump, “Oh, they should go somewhere else”—I mean, the lack of empathy which is reflected in that will be noted by the whole world. And if not corrected—and I would hope that it still can be corrected in the short deadline before noon on Saturday—I think that the long-, or not so long, medium-range effect of that on the status of the so-called West, on the status of people who pretend “Trump is not supporting the rules-based order any more”—but the West will be blamed by the entire world, the Global South, the Global Majority.

The absence of empathy in all of that is what startles me the most, because, are we human beings, or are we not? Are we trying to improve the world and create a better life for the people in our generation, so that future generations have an even better life? Obviously, all of that has vanished from politics, and I’m afraid that we are looking at decay and descent into a barbarism that does not bode well for the future of humanity—if it’s not reversed.

Schlanger: The second part of the question was, “How can we get Trump to see that the Oasis Plan is a better solution?”

Zepp-LaRouche: That’s what we are trying to do. When Mike Waltz said this thing, that this is the best proposal which Trump is making, and if other people have better proposals, they should come forward with them, we went into an immediate mobilization to put the Oasis Plan—which we have been campaigning for, for now more than a year—to put the actualized form of the Oasis Plan on the agenda. We conducted several international conferences, we had many meetings of the International Peace Coalition on it, and we are right now talking to a lot of people, forces, individuals, institutions, to come out and endorse the Oasis Plan.

So, there is a whole mobilization going on already. President Trump would have a chance, if he would now step forward and say, “OK, there is a better proposal which came up: It is the plan to create much more water, not high-rise buildings and casinos in Gaza, but to create a real basis for peace by making new fresh water available, by building canals, by building nuclear plants for large-scale desalination of ocean water to irrigate the entire region,” and then show some of the pictures, and give people a vision—I think it could be done!

I know, from the many organizing discussions we had, that the whole world—except maybe a few which are the obvious ones—but the whole world would wholeheartedly agree that it’s better for the Israelis, it’s better for the Palestinians, it’s better for the neighboring countries, because something like this has never happened, where all the neighbors, all the Arab neighbors, basically come out and oppose what Trump is proposing—and some of them are very dependent on U.S. military aid, on financial aid. Nevertheless, they have all come out and said, “No, we cannot accept that.” If they did accept that, their governments would not be so stable in the short term, because the injustice is being perceived by everybody who is a thinking human being, especially in the Muslim world.

The best thing would be that people who are watching this now, that you join our efforts: We will have another International Peace Coalition meeting on Friday. So that you can familiarize yourself with the Oasis Plan, we have a short video out which gives you the essential introduction of what it implies. Help us to put that on the table, which basically would mean to take the entire region from India to the Mediterranean, from the Caucasus to the Gulf states, and transform the region through creation of much new fresh water, infrastructure, agriculture, industry, forestry, to transform that part of the world which essentially is desert today into a livable area for every citizen who lives on that land. And that is the mobilization. I’m calling on you to join it, because a lot of what happens in the future of humanity is being decided right now in this battle.

President to President on Ukraine

Schlanger: The International Peace Coalition has met for the last 88 straight weeks, every Friday at 11 a.m. Eastern Time, and you can find a link to it on the Schiller Institute website. Over the last weeks there have been very extensive discussions—some disagreements and some things worked out—and I think people should take advantage of this. If you want to do something, this is where you should go.

I want to switch to Ukraine for a second, because we have a question from someone in Austria, who says she used be a supporter of Ukraine. But now she’s reading that “[Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky believes that Trump will help him get a peace deal by offering Trump Ukraine’s strategic minerals. Or, offering [Russian President Vladimir] Putin territory in Kursk, occupied by Ukrainian forces, trading for territory in Eastern Ukraine claimed by Russia. Do you know who’s advising Zelensky? And why have Putin and Trump not met, because that seems to be the solution to me.” That’s what she wrote.

Zepp-LaRouche: I think that the Zelensky proposal will not work, first of all, because the respective strategic minerals are all, or most of them, are in the territory which is controlled by Russia at this point, and there is absolutely no reason why Russia should agree to such a plan, because Russia is winning on the battlefield. All the observers are emphatic that the war is lost, and that anybody who is proposing to continue it—and there are some people—are just without any consideration for the plight of the Ukrainians, proposing to continue a useless slaughter which could have ended in March 2022. And, therefore, if Zelensky is proposing something right now which does not correspond to the core interest of the Russians, at a point when Russia is clearly militarily winning, it has no chance to go anywhere.

As for a meeting between President Putin and President Trump, there were some ambiguous statements by President Trump that he may have met or talked with Putin already, but this was not confirmed by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. So, it is unclear if they did have contact by phone or whatever means. I think Trump would be well advised to immediately set up such a meeting, and bypass all the intermediate steps. If this conflict is to be settled, it will have to be between the United States and Russia, because that’s what the war was all about the whole time.

So, my short answer is, let’s hope that Trump is doing it quickly. He has Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance, they were in various meetings in Brussels, in Paris; they will now go to the Munich Security Conference, which will go from Feb. 14-16, and supposedly there is a meeting of the Ukraine Contact Group, and they are supposedly discussing all of this.

But I think the best thing, really, is if Trump picks up the phone and calls Putin, and takes the short route on that question.

Schlanger: We have two other questions on the Oasis Plan, both revolving around the question of the use of nuclear energy for desalination.

From Bill M., he says: “After studying it, the only thing that makes me uneasy is the potential for nuclear materials to fall into the hands of Hamas, assuming they still exist. How will nuclear materials be handled and managed?”

And then from another viewer, who is a retired professor of oceanography, he asks if it’s feasible to build nuclear reactors in seismic places. I assume he’s saying there’s seismic activity in the area of the Oasis Plan.

Zepp-LaRouche: I think that there are [seismic places]. However, over time, technological progress has been made. You can go to inherently safe nuclear reactors; you can use the model which has been developed by India on the thorium basis, which cannot be used for weapons. You have models like the Pebble Bed reactor, which can physically shut down in the moment there is any malfunctioning. Obviously, there are considerations, but they are technologically manageable. And if you want to solve the problem of the large-scale amounts of water, you need to have an energy source which is of a very high energy-flux density. But the technical side absolutely can be managed.

Policy Debate Inside a Bubble

Schlanger: We have some more questions here, Helga, that reflect that people have been paying a lot of attention to these discussions. From a supporter in Germany, she writes: “Thank you for your discussion with Dr. Werner Rügemer, who wrote a book about Friedrich Merz and BlackRock. [BlackRock & Co. enteignen!] I’m having trouble getting my friends to talk about this; they say it just shows that Merz, unlike [Chancellor Olaf] Scholz or [Vice Chancellor Robert] Habeck, was a successful businessman, which would make him a good Chancellor. How do I get them to see the danger that Merz represents?”

Zepp-LaRouche: It’s not just Merz. I watched the debate between Merz and Scholz, the famous duel, where the two main candidates [for Chancellor in the upcoming Feb. 23 German elections] were talking for 90 minutes. And what struck me about that debate was they were talking a lot about the economy; the migrant issue was the main topic, but everything else was completely blended out! Nothing about the Middle East situation—naturally, in Germany, you cannot discuss this in any case—but nothing about the relationship with the BRICS; nothing about the danger of nuclear war, if this medium-range missile deployment which was agreed to between former U.S. President Joe Biden and Scholz at the last NATO summit, if this goes through by 2026, which is not so far away, it makes Germany a prime target for any escalation which then for sure would happen. Nothing of this! No war danger! No situation in the Global South, the BRICS—nothing! I was really shocked.

This debate was under a complete bubble. In German, the word is Deutsche Käse Kloake. It was absolutely terrible. My advice to you is, Dr. Rügemer is publishing a new book [BlackRock Germany: Die heimliche Weltmacht, ihre Praktiken in Deutschland und Friedrich Merz], which he just presented at a press conference in Berlin. I think you can already get it online. I would suggest you buy this book, read it, because he has lots of detailed information, and show it to your friends and basically say: Look, if you want to know what is the combination of Wall Street, of the City of London, the military-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, and especially the method of profit maximation for profit’s sake, that which has brought the whole world to the edge of World War III, then that is this system of BlackRock, Vanguard, and the other asset managers; these are the people who profit from the stocks of the military-industrial complex. They have an interest to have one war after the other.

And the other thing which is important is that Merz has a certain, get rid of the big state, libertarian view on the economy—and I would say that is one of the other weak spots of the Trump administration, that he seems to be surrounded by people who want to cut down the government. I mean, it’s one thing to cut down on USAID, because it has been involved in “regime-change,” color revolution, manipulation of foreign policy in over 100 countries, which was the case under the Biden, Obama, and previous administrations. So there is a positive side. But if you then cut down all the state functions and cut it down to the bare minimum, in the von Hayek/von Mises Austrian School tradition, and then you only go for military expenditure, where do you end up? You end up in Schachtian economics. And we in Germany had that: Hjalmar Schacht was the Economics Minister for Hitler, and his model of economics was to cut down on social spending, and put everything into the military. That is a model which already brought Germany into a terrible catastrophe, from which we have not recovered to the present day!

So, there is no shortcut. Start with the book by Dr. Rügemer, but then take your friends into the history of Schachtian economics, and basically say, if you have a combination of the present— I mean, the problem is, there is no good choice. All these parties have problems, but Merz is definitely somebody who should not win the election.

Replacing Superdepravity

Schlanger: We have an email from someone who says that her favorite part of these webcasts is when you talk about culture. And she said, “I was sickened this last week by Super Bowl mania. Betting, so-called ‘entertainment,’ half-naked women, naked men, it was disgusting! We need a change in the cultural paradigm. But how do we do it through the education system? How can we reform the education system in the West?”

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, first of all, don’t watch the Super Bowl if you hate it so much! [laughter] Don’t torture yourself!

I’m serious about that, because Plato already had advised that the parents of his time should not allow their children to go to the theater performances of the great tragedians, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and similar authors, because the violence portrayed in these plays would be too much for the children to cope with—because children are still growing, and they can be ruined at an early age. If Plato would see what is going on today, he would be spinning in his grave.

But it is also an effect. Schiller in his play The Bride of Messina, and in the introduction to that play, he writes that culture has a power that, if you go to a great theater performance, that that power does something to your soul, and that power remains even after the performance is finished and you go home; it remains with you. You know that for yourself. If you have an uplifting experience, it stays with you for days, maybe longer. But the same thing is unfortunately true if you watch something ugly. I have stopped doing any such things, but in the past, for example, if you watch one of these crime stories— In Germany you no longer have movies, you have crime stories, “Krimis,” which nowadays no longer have any plot, they only have violence, pornography, perversion, violence without any sense. And if you do that to yourself, and watch that, it puts an imprint on your mind that also stays for days, if not longer. So, that’s why I say, don’t do it to yourself.

How to get to a better education system? I think it’s a big problem. The various countries of the Global South reject all of this perversion, the gender business, the right for children to transform their gender once a year, crazy stuff going on—they reject it. The Chinese reject it, the Russians reject it, the Africans reject it, many other countries—and they go back to their own best traditions. Naturally, in science, they take a universal approach and just take everything which has contributed to the progress of humanity over millennia.

And what we have to do in the West, we have to— It’s very difficult, because most of the governments, either they belong to this neoliberal, everything goes, everything is allowed school; or, they are ignorant of the great traditions, having a very limited idea of what “tradition” is supposed to mean.

What we have to do is, we have to go back to the greatest periods in all of human history, the Classical period of Greece, the Italian Renaissance, the Andalusian Renaissance, the French École Polytechnique, the German Classical period, and then take from other cultures, like the Confucian tradition, the Vedic tradition of India, and just take the best all of mankind has produced and make that available to our pupils.

Now, the big problem, obviously, is where to get the teachers from, because that unfortunately has no longer been in the curriculum for several generations. So, I think what we have to do, is really put forward the idea of a Renaissance movement, where those people in the West who understand that we have a great tradition, but that it’s about to be forgotten—because the young generation have no inkling any more—that we have to create a movement fighting for a cultural Renaissance. And that is why I created the Schiller Institute 41 years ago, with the explicit aim that we not only need a just new world economic order, but we also need a dialogue of civilizations which brings forward the best in all cultures and all nations, and then, have a dialogue among them and out of that to create a new Renaissance. And that was, I would say, one of the best ideas I have ever had, because that is now what has been happening among the BRICS countries, among the Global South countries.

But we have to bring the West in, and that requires people who rally— We have two cultural magazines: We have Leonore in English, and we have Ibykus in German. These are two cultural magazines, in which we are trying to put forward these ideas. You can subscribe to one or both of them and spread it, because we need people who are fighting for this, which is, obviously, much more difficult than getting drunk in the Super Bowl orgy.

The ‘Extraterrestrial Imperative’

Schlanger: Now, Helga, I have one more question for you that comes from somebody that’s been following the work of the Schiller Institute for many years. He writes: “I remember the Schiller Institute’s promotion of the work of German space scientist Krafft Ehricke, and his idea of the ‘extraterrestrial imperative.’ When Elon Musk speaks of why he’s so passionate about Mars colonization and beyond, he sounds a little like Ehricke. Do you know if he’s familiar with Ehricke’s work, and is it possible that the Schiller Institute could do something again, to popularize the conceptions that were there from Krafft Ehricke?”

Zepp-LaRouche: I don’t know if Elon Musk knows about Krafft Ehricke. I agree, that’s probably one of the best aspects of Musk, because he seems to have an idea of the vision for humanity, what happens to the identity of humanity once you start to travel into space, and the idea of colonizing space. So, if anyone of you who is listening would help, maybe some of you know how to get to Elon Musk. Take the work that we have published about Krafft Ehricke—we have a book out from Marsha Freeman, a beautiful book about Krafft Ehricke—get that to Musk, and maybe he can respond to it.

I think we are right now promoting Krafft Ehricke in Germany, because Germany is one of the countries, with Hermann Oberth, and others, including Ehricke himself, who were the pioneers of the whole space dream. Krafft Ehricke had his Three Laws of space travel: I don’t have them memorized by word now, but basically he says, there’s no limit to man other than man himself. That’s alone already an incredible idea. It liberates the idea of thinking, which is extremely important. [“1. Nobody and nothing under the natural laws of this universe impose any limitations on man except man himself. 2. Not only the Earth, but the entire Solar system, and as much of the universe as he can reach under the laws of nature, are man’s rightful field of activity. 3. By expanding through the Universe, man fulfills his destiny as an element of life, endowed with the power of reason and the wisdom of the moral law within himself.”—ed.]

I fully agree, because Krafft Ehricke wrote these things in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s, but it’s hard to find anybody who has a more beautiful conception of what it does to transform the human identity, once we work internationally, together, and build cities on the Moon, cities on Mars. And that is the only hope that we will eventually overcome this condition of toddlers, who are kicking each other, and instead, become adults.

Schlanger: Can you give us a preview of what to expect from this Friday’s International Peace Coalition meeting?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. We have a very timely, extraordinary number of speakers. I think the danger that by Saturday at noon, you will have an escalation into a wider war, or following shortly thereafter, should give us an incentive to really work very hard to put the Oasis Plan on the table, right now.

So, we have as speakers, former Foreign Minister of South Africa Naledi Pandor. Obviously, South Africa had a very important role in respect to being passionate about the plight of the Palestinians, so it’s a great honor that she will be there. Then, we have extremely important speakers from the better tradition in the United States, from the Eisenhower Media Network. These are people who all refer to Eisenhower, and he had the plan to use nuclear energy for desalination in his time, so that is a way that maybe the Republican Party can actually relate to this Oasis Plan, seeing that it is in the tradition of their own party, and Lincoln, so that may help to get Trump to adopt the Oasis Plan. And then we have extremely important people from Palestine, diplomats from other countries in the Southwest Asia region.

We will put out the invitation today on the Schiller Institute website, so go to the website and you will see the other names, and then organize to get the maximum number of people participating, or at least watching the IPC meeting on Friday, because it will be a major, major intervention to try to get a better agenda on the table before it’s too late.

Schlanger: That’s Friday morning, at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. And Helga, given that so many of the questions today were “how do we do this?” that would be an excellent place for them to start.

So thank you for joining us today. Any final words?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, I think we are sitting on a potential powder keg which could explode into a catastrophe, so make sure that your contemporaries are woken up to this danger, and put the Oasis Plan on the table, because the Oasis Plan is an important ingredient of the need to go to a new security and development architecture. If President Trump would call President Putin and respond to the demand which has been put forward by Russia for quite some time, the need for a new security and development architecture, that is the only way we can end the danger of war for good, in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia, recognizing that in order to get to peace, you have to take into account the interest of the other—and that means all others. So, that is what we will discuss, also, on Friday.