Tuesday, March 31 at 10:00 am EDT (16:00 CET). The world is in a grave crisis which is unlike anything before. The good news is that, given that it is the terrible policies of the past decades that have put us in this situation, it will be impossible to “go back to normal.” Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called on young people of the world to take leadership at this moment of great change to fight the two deadly viruses now threatening humanity—the coronavirus pandemic and the meltdown of the global financial system. The world must emerge from this crisis with an entirely New Paradigm of peaceful relations among nations, and a new economic system based on cooperation for the progress of all humanity. As is becoming more and more stark with the coronavirus pandemic, an urgent priority will be to build a modern global health system to ensure the right to life of all people on the planet.
This video conference is an opportunity for young people across the world to speak with Helga Zepp-LaRouche and join the fight for this New Paradigm. After opening remarks by Helga, representatives from each nation will give a 2-4 minute report on their organizing, and a Q&A will follow.
Helga reiterates the serious warnings from leading German infectious disease officials and looks at the Wuhan model of breaking transmission paths at the outset. Helga calls on countries to coordinate their efforts to conquer this pandemic, including stemming the economic impacts on the global economy, but that doesn’t mean a bailout for Wall Street! See her updated petition.
Helga and Harley discuss the fraud of the just-in-time economy, reminding people of Lyndon LaRouche’s warning that if we continued down the road of zero-growth, the West would no longer be able to support itself and implode. She calls for an end of geo-politics and all efforts to be focused on solving the joint virus and finance crisis.
The following resolution is being circulated internationally by the Schiller Institute.
At a time when we are witnessing growing mindless violence, the degeneration of cultural values, an almost unrivaled dumbing-down of popular taste, and the brutalization of interpersonal relations, we nonetheless still have a crucial source from which a cultural and moral regeneration can be spawned: classical art! The magnificent image of man that is associated with the poetic works of Dante, Petrarch, Lessing or Schiller, or the sublime compositions of Bach, Mozart, Verdi, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann or Brahms, is still a reference point for the way in which we define ourselves as a society.
But when we consider the role of the artist in contemporary culture, and apply the yardstick given by Schiller:
The dignity of man is in your hands,
Preserve it!
It falls with you! With you, it will rise!
A degraded picture emerges. Our education system hardly conveys any knowledge of classical culture, our so-called youth culture is dominated by a cult of ugliness, and classical culture itself is under massive attack. For decades now, post-war theater companies have invented new abysses of hideousness, productions of Shakespeare or Schiller have become unrecognizable, opera stages have also become battlefields for some time, on which the perverse fantasies of various directors are played out, and now self-styled modern composers are even molesting the compositions of Beethoven, evidently because they are unable to create anything themselves.
This must be stopped! The time has come to launch a counter-offensive!
The Year of Beethoven, in which many Beethoven compositions will be performed all over the world, offers a wonderful occasion for us to recall the best of our cultural tradition in western culture and to oppose it to the moral downward trend of the past decades. We can no longer leave a theater and music mafia, that has ruined classical art, at the helm. Therefore, we call for the creation of a Renaissance movement for the defense and revival of classical art. As Friedrich Schiller demonstrated so incontrovertibly in his Aesthetical Letters: It is only in great art that we can find the inner force to develop our own creativity and to improve ourselves as persons.
The world is currently in the midst of an epochal change in which the previous era, dominated by trans-Atlantic countries, is clearly coming to an end, and the focus of development is shifting to Asia, where there are several peoples who are rightly proud of their civilizations, some of which are more than 5,000 years old, and foster them. If the West has anything to contribute to shaping in a humanist spirit the emerging new paradigm in the world, it is our advanced culture of the Renaissance and the Classics.
Moderated by the Schiller Institute’s Dennis Speed, the speakers included Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Bill Binney (former NSA technical director), Kirk Wiebe (former NSA senior intelligence analyst), and Michael Billington (EIR). Held at the Thalia Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the dynamic between the speakers and the capacity audience of about 160, exemplified the historic moment. A typical New York audience, it consisted of Democrats, independents, Republicans, 9/11 truth seekers, Assange WikiLeaks networks, foreign press, etc. A third of the audience had never attended a LaRouche movement event before, and were brought through various networks as well as a week of daily distributions on the Upper West Side.
Transcripts below
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the Schiller Institute, delivered the following remarks by pre-recorded audio, to the February 29, 2020 Schiller Institute event, “Rescuing the Republic from the Surveillance State.”
Hello! I’m Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and I’m the founder of the Schiller Institute. I am very happy to speak to you in this extremely important moment of history. The world is heading for what easily could become the worst crisis since the end of World War II. Unless we have a change in direction, there is very clearly the danger that the whole strategic situation could get completely out of control. What makes it so difficult, is that there are many interactive elements to this crisis.
Now, let me start with a very worrisome aspect. Despite the fact that President Trump clearly has the intention to improve relations with Russia and China, there are also very different tones coming out of some other parts of the U.S. administration. Recently, U.S. Secretary of Defense Esper was participating personally in a war game which was based on a scenario of a “limited nuclear war” between the United States and Russia in Europe, which included the use of so-called “low-yield nuclear weapons.”
Now recently the United States did deploy exactly such low-yield warheads on submarine-launched ballistic missiles on the Trident submarines, and that deployment of such “low-yield nuclear weapons” is very dangerously lowering the threshold of nuclear war.
This week there was a hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee where U.S. Air Force Gen. Tod D. Wolters, who is also the commander of the U.S. European Command and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe — the so-called SACEUR — was asked by Senator Deb Fischer, “What are your views about adopting a so-called ‘no first use’ policy. Do you believe that this would strengthen deterrence?” General Walters said, “Senator, I’m a fan of flexible first-use policy.” Now, this is Dr. Strangelove in the position of the Supreme Commander of the U.S. forces in Europe. And this is occurring as the Defender 2020 NATO military exercise, which is the largest maneuver since the end of the Cold War, is moving tens of thousands of U.S. troops and others — like the Bundeswehr — to the Russian border for several months of maneuvers.
In light of all of this, the spread of the coronavirus, which, according to top health officials, is only a step away from a pandemic, naturally shows that we are on the verge of an uncontrollable situation. In Europe already, most international events and conferences have been cancelled, and the Lombardy region of Italy is now under quarantine; it has been named the Wuhan of Europe. People are being told by the media, by the TV, by the papers, to get food reserves for several weeks. Already now, the spread of the coronavirus has had a significant impact on the real economy.
In China, which has, according to the head of the WHO, set a new standard in the fight against such epidemics, because they put up the defense of life as the first priority and did outstanding measures to contain the spread of the virus. Nevertheless, their GDP in the first quarter will probably go down to 0% as distinct from the expected 6% [growth].
Now, China probably has the best chance to recover, but for the so-called West, it looks much more grim, because the international supply chains have been interrupted, and will be interrupted much more. This is now that the effects of so-called globalization are striking back. Globalization has led to an outsourcing of production into cheap labor markets such as the food production, which is now no longer under the sovereign control of countries, but under the control of international cartels. We no longer have food security in most countries.
The coronavirus, if it becomes a pandemic, or even if it spreads to more countries, is, in all likelihood, becoming the trigger for the financial meltdown. This is not the cause, but the trigger, because this financial system is already at the absolute limit. Since September of last year, the Federal Reserve has been pumping unbelievable amounts of money into the system in the form of the so-called repo loans. The other central banks — the ECB [European Central Bank], the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and others — have pushed money into the system through quantitative easing, negative interest rates, and this is just absolutely now reaching an end point, an absolute boundary condition.
There is a way out.
On January 3rd, after the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani, and there was for about two days the danger of a very dangerous strategic confrontation, I issued à proposal for an immediate summit between the Presidents of the United States, Russia, and China, to introduce a new level of cooperation to overcome the danger of geopolitical confrontation. Now, in the meantime, President Putin has made a similar proposal that the governments of the five permanent UN Security Council countries should have such a summit. China and France have already accepted. And today, TASS reports, quoting a high-level U.S. official, that the United States would be very interested to have such a meeting on the level of the UN Security Council governments for a new arms control agreement.
Now, I think what we have to do is, we have to push the agenda of such a summit to occur immediately. Because I think any delay, given the dangers of the military situation and the dangers of the pandemic, the dangers of the financial system, any postponement is really not very meaningful. This summit must adopt what Lyndon LaRouche has proposed with his Four Laws: a global Glass-Steagall banking separation; the introduction of a national bank in every country; fixed exchange rates among these different nations, and clearly defined infrastructure and development plans which then can become, as a totality, a New Bretton Woods system; and then have an international crash program for reaching a new level in the productivity of the world economy by focusing on a crash program on fusion power, on optical biophysics and other life sciences, and international space cooperation.
Now, this is a moment of extraordinary danger, and we could lose human civilization. But if enough forces around the world join in our mobilization to bring this New Paradigm about, it could also be the beginning of a completely new epoch. There has been one man who proposed and prognosed all of these developments as early as August 1971. That is my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, who, when Nixon basically abandoned the fixed exchange rate system, and decoupled the dollar from the gold standard, Lyndon LaRouche said, if this tendency is continued, it will lead either to the danger of a new fascism and depression, or a just, new world economic order will be implemented.
Now, he also worked out the solutions for what can be done, which we have published and will continue to publish much, much more.
Therefore, I think that the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, who was innocently put in jail by the same apparatus which was involved in Russiagate and the impeachment effort against President Trump, his exoneration will be key for the implementation of this program I just mentioned. To get mankind out of the present danger and into a new era, I think is absolutely linked to the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche.
Therefore, I am appealing to all of you to join the fight for the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche, and the implementation of his ideas. This is the very best thing you can do to secure the future.
DENNIS SPEED: Who is on this stage? And what has happened to the people on this stage? What happened to Lyndon LaRouche? What happened to you?
People like to talk about something they call the “deep state.” We don’t mind that, but we know that it is neither a state, nor is it deep. [laughter] We know, those of us that have been involved, from those early days of the ’70s in some cases, and later in other cases. That you’re talking about an imperial force, and it’s an imperial force that terrifies a lot of people, but it mainly terrifies them, because they refuse to submit themselves to rigorous thought in the service of bold action. That’s all the problem is.
The problem does not involve secret police and funny microchips, and weird drugs, and subliminal messages, and all those other things. It involves the inability to look into oneself, and admit that the actions taken by people like Martin Luther King, or the actions taken by people like Malcolm X, or the actions taken by JFK, are only characteristic of the actions that all of us must take, in the context of what we have been confronted with, ever since the 1960s, particularly coming out of the United States. It doesn’t originate in the United States, but it will only be resolved if people in the United States decide to act.
We’re starting today with someone who’s well known to most, and he and his associate who is with him, Kirk Wiebe, have been fighting for 20 years, to tell a story — they told the story; they told the story 20 years ago — but they’ve been fighting for 20 years to get other people to stand up. It’s important to say that there is a faction of the American military and military intelligence, which is patriotic. It’s a faction that intended to defend the United States, and it’s a faction that also intended to make certain kinds of engineering and technical, and even scientific breakthroughs, on behalf of utilizing technology for positive purposes.
William Binney, a former intelligence official at the National Security Agency for over a 30-year period, attempted to do that, and was prevented at a critical moment, prior to September 11th of 2001, from doing his job. The United States paid for that. And you can’t walk away from that crime.
But talking about that from the standpoint of whether the planes were real, or how the buildings came down, or all these other things, doesn’t cut it. You have to confront something else: You have to confront what’s happening to you, right now, apart from your partisan beliefs, your political affiliations, you have to confront the fact that something is happening to all of us, and it’s your responsibility to listen to the people that can tell you what that is, in such a fashion that you can then take the responsibility that many of us, all, want to take!
Bill has spoken to several audiences, including to one here, three years ago, at Symphony Space, and we’re happy to have him here with us today. So, without further need to say anything, I’d like you to join me in welcoming William Binney, NSA whistleblower. [Applause]
WILLIAM BINNEY: Thank you. As Dennis said, the government we had opted for bulk acquisition for two basic reasons, I think. One was set up by Dick Cheney, and he wanted to know everything about all his potential adversaries, politically or otherwise. So, that meant he had to have information about everybody. So, the bulk acquisition satisfied his need in that respect. But in the other respect, in the bureaucracies of the government, bureaucrats tend to like to get bigger and bigger budgets and bigger and bigger organizations, so that meant more and more money, and more and more influence. In order to do that, if you opt for this bulk acquisition on everybody so that you can satisfy Cheney’s needs, it also requires the Congress to give you much more money so you can build your bureaucracy. And those are, I think, the basic motivations to do this.
But they had known also from the very beginning that there was another solution that would actually do productive things, because when you took the bulk acquisition, that meant you couldn’t see the threats coming; there was just too much data. That’s why they haven’t been able to prevent any of the terrorist attacks that have occurred anywhere in the world. Because everybody has adopted this policy, and they can’t see the threats coming. This is documented internally in NSA records produced by Edward Snowden and also by MI5 and MI6 records, and some in GCHQ. They are saying, their analysts are telling them that there is too much data; you’ve buried us, you’ve overloaded us. We can’t see the threat coming.
Just for that reason alone, they shouldn’t be doing it, but the real point is, the solution existed all along, and we were developing that in the Thin Thread program. That basically had three tenets: one was a deductive approach; one an abductive approach; and one was an inductive approach. For the deductive approach, we simply looked at social organizations that stayed within one degree of the known bad guys, and used that data to pull out information, and only that information, from the data flow that we were looking at. We were looking at a number of terabytes a minute or so at the time, and we wanted to up that to about 20 terabytes a minute. That was our approach. That was the deductive side. So, that was the human behavior property that showed probable cause. If you’re contacting a terrorist, then you need to be looked at; that’s easy to justify in a warrant.
In the inductive approach, we used simply you’re looking at sites that are advocating pedophilia or sites that advocate terrorism or violence against the West, or bomb-making, or things like that. You could try to watch people who visit those sites so you can see their frequency of visit, and say that they are probably getting radicalized, or in the process of radicalization. Or, you have people who have cell phones in the mountains of Afghanistan, or satellite phones in the mountains of Afghanistan, or the jungles of Peru. And you say, they’re dope traffickers, or they’re terror potentials. And you look at those kinds of things. That’s kind of the inductive approach.
So far, those two approaches would have caught every terrorist attack in the world before, during, and after 9/11; every one. But did we do that? No, because that’s a focused, disciplined, professional attack on the data and against bad behavior by people indicating potential threats. The abduct approach is a little bit more abstract; it says you look a geographical distributions. If you have a network at one degree that is distributed in countries that are involved in terrorist advocation or something like that, you need to look at them to see if they’re terrorists or in any way affiliated with a terrorist attack or organization. Once you look at them, if they’re not, then you take them out, and you simply say they’re out. The rest data you simply let go right by.
Now what that does is, it gives everybody in the world privacy. And it respects the Constitutional and privacy rights of everybody in this country and every country in the world. Plus, it creates an extremely rich environment for analysts to succeed at preventing threats and potential adversarial attacks. That’s the whole point of why we did the Thin Thread program to begin with, because even back then our analysts were buried with data.
So the end result today is, we have a situation where — the key point here is NSA databasing of information. Because our country is the only country in the world that afford all the data storage that can store all the information they’re collecting. They’re collecting multiple petabytes a day. My estimate of the Utah storage facility alone was based on Cisco routers being put into it, and what they were estimating was 966 exabytes of data going into that data center a year by 2015. So, I figure they had to have at least five years of storage capacity, which meant five zettabytes, which is much less than a yottabyte, but still, it’s quite a bit. After that, we get a bunch of bytes, and a lot of bytes, and all that kind of stuff. So, it hadn’t been named above a yottabyte.
But the point is, NSA is the key element here, because it’s a storage facility for not just NSA, but all of the agencies of the United States government, all the Five Eyes, and the nine other countries that are participating with them in this worldwide collection of data and bulk acquisition of data on everybody on the planet. And all we would have to do is take our rules — deductive, inductive, and abductive — take those rules and run it and process the entire database that’s stored, and pull out only that which is relevant and purge the rest of it. At that point, there would be no data available for anybody in the US government or the British government or anywhere to use against their people. So it couldn’t be abused. So, that would fix the problem. That would mean that the FBI, the DEA, the DOJ, or anybody in the intelligence community, or in the Five Eyes, or any of the others, could not go into that database and find information on any one citizen, unless that citizen had probable cause, warrant-based evidence that they should be there. That’s the way to fix this whole problem and do it rather quickly. Because once you take that data out, no one has the ability to abuse it.
SPEED: Let me say that we’re going to have an extensive Q&A session, so anybody who has particular questions, you’ll be able to ask those questions. What Bill has just done is provide the solution; and that’s what we asked him to do.
We’re going to next hear from Kirk Wiebe. I don’t think a lot of people know much about Kirk, so I’ll just say the following: He and Bill, and another gentleman by the name of Ed Loomis, developed what is called the Thin Thread system, which was referred to just a minute ago by Bill. I’m going to let Kirk tell you a little bit; he has a very specific view about the relationship between intelligence and the Constitution. Kirk?
KIRK WIEBE: Hello. Thank you, Dennis, and thank you to the LaRouche organization for making this possible, and for inviting us to address these fine people before us.
A lot of people don’t realize it, but the National Security Agency — and I’m going to pick on them, because I worked there for a long time with Bill — has operated unconstitutionally for about 70% of the time it has existed on the planet. What do I mean by that? Well, the people in charge — namely, the Executive, namely the Legislative branches of government — have formed a cabal, a cartel, if you will, that has decided to mass surveil the world, stuff the information in a big database somewhere, and claim that they’re not violating your rights under the Constitution. Because they say, “Yeah, we collected it,” although they won’t overtly admit it, “But we haven’t looked at it. And if we haven’t looked at it, it hasn’t meant anything to an official in the government.”
Now, if we go back to the late 1700s, just before the outbreak of our famous Revolutionary War, King George of England, it’s documented, wanted to put a Redcoat — a British soldier — in the home of every colonial settler in the United States. And why do you think he wanted to do that? You know the answer. He wanted to know what they were thinking and doing. Let me suggest to you that, with all the electronic devices — if I asked any one of you, “How many electronic devices connected to the internet does your family have?” I know it’s more than one; probably four. What do you think, more? I agree. The point is this: Each of those is sources of information about you and those who you love the most. Every detail, every thought that’s communicated via those devices can be collected and put in a database. And when someone decides you’re important for some reason — it could be anything; somebody wants to blackmail you, somebody wants to scam you. The only difference between a good person and a bad person in government is what? What is it? Yeah, really, it’s opportunity. Do you have what we would call moral clarity? But beyond that, do you have a sense of what’s right and wrong in this nation? The founding document of which is the United States Constitution, and do you care?
Well, I would submit to you, we have in the news, events going on — namely, the attack using the weaponized sources of the intelligence community to subvert a duly elected President. If that’s not a warning, what do you think they could do to one of you? Or three of you? Or Bill and me? Or anyone else?
So, the threat is real. It has been abused, and it lies at the feet of people who are greedy for power. It didn’t start out that way; it started out nobly. But now, we’ve reached a point where people have decided they know better, they know best how to manage all of our lives. And it’s not just the NSA anymore. Google knows what you’re doing; Facebook knows what you’re doing; Instagram knows what you’re doing. It’s proliferating everywhere, and now we have the internet of things, where even your refrigerator can talk to the internet. It’s ridiculous; your whole lives are stuck in a database.
The point of it is, Bill has suggested that there’s a way to put the genie back in the box. But it’s going to be you, who makes it happen. Don’t expect some Senator, don’t expect some Congressman to do it. With the exception of CIA chief Pompeo inviting Bill to talk about the DNC data hack, no member of government has ever approached him or me, and said, “Would you come talk to a few Congressmen about what’s happened? Your ideas for fixing it.” No! Why? They like it the way it is. Your data is available to anyone in 16 agencies within the intelligence and law enforcement communities. That’s the threat, and only we can change it. Thank you.
SPEED: Thank you, Kirk. We’re going to hear now from Mike Billington, and Mike is going to tell you a bit about himself. He is, as is listed here in your program, Executive Intelligence Review Asia Editor. He’s author of a book called Reflections of an American Political Prisoner. Mike was offered — I say it and he has to say it — after two trials; one trial for which he served 2-3 years, he was offered a plea bargain, which would have meant that he would have simply time served. No time would have been additional. All he had to do was claim to be guilty of something of which he was not. A lot of his friends would have had a big problem. And Mike decided, “You know what? I don’t think I’m going to do that.” Despite the fact that his own attorney asked to be replaced, despite the fact that Mike said he would replace him, the judge in the case refused to do that; and Mike was given a 77-year sentence. He served eight years of it. Is that the price you have to pay for integrity in this country?
Now if it is, I will submit to all of you, as you listen to him, you think about whether or not that’s the kind of country you want to live in. Mike Billington.
MICHAEL BILLINGTON: Thanks, Dennis. If any of you have a sense that calling for the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche is a pipe dream, or that Trump would never do this, I want you to put that out of your minds. And I’ll try to prove that.
This is a rare moment in history for many reasons. But one, which I will address, is that this is, in fact, the time that the exoneration of LaRouche is both possible, absolutely necessary, and will transform not just the nation, but the world, forever. And I want to try to convey that in as clear a way as I possibly can. Let’s start by looking at the fact that just last week, Donald Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 11 people. Some of them were people who, like myself and my co-defendants, were innocent and were illegally and unjustly charged and tried and sent to prison. Others did commit crimes, but they were subjected to outrageous sentences, not just to silence them, but to terrorize other people. The fact that Trump did this, and that he also addressed quite publicly and at some length the issue of Roger Stone, and the fact that, as he said, “He will probably be exonerated one way or another,” means that this very much on Donald Trump’s mind. And I’ll mention that Roger Stone, who is someone who has quite publicly addressed Lyndon LaRouche as one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, has interviewed him, has spoken at our conferences, is very well known to the criminal network in the criminal justice system who have run the entire operation against Trump, against Roger Stone, and others. And I’ll come back to that.
One of the people released by Donald Trump was Rod Blagojevich. [shuffles papers] Somehow, I don’t have what I wanted to read to you. I will convey, in brief, some of what he said the day he came out, where he and his wife and his two daughters met outside the house. He addressed the fact, first of all, that there was no way to thank President Trump for freeing a man from a charge which he had not committed; there was no way to thank him. He said that Trump is a very firm leader, a very tough leader, but also has a huge heart. And that releasing Blagojevich was an act of kindness, which people had to recognize.
He then went on to say, to the people of Illinois who had elected him twice as Governor, he said, “I did not let you down. I would have let you down had I given into this; had I admitted guilt to something I didn’t do. If I had gone along to save myself this 14-year sentence” — of which he served 8 years. He then quoted from a Supreme Court Justice, Justice Breyer, who said that the idea that people in politics and the political world could be charged criminally for what they’re supposed to do as politicians is one of the greatest threats to America today. This is a Supreme Court Justice. And that in particular, he said, “Prosecutors armed with this potential is a grave danger to our system of government.” And Blagojevich said he learned that the hard way, as many of us did.
But I think it’s extremely important that you have people at that level directly addressing the broken criminal justice system that existed, he specifically said, since 1994 when this Crime Act was passed, which was a disaster. He described it as a racist and illegal act.
Lyndon LaRouche, long before that, was convicted and served 5 years of a 15-year sentence, from 1990-1995. He could have been exonerated by President Clinton; Clinton was considering it. Literally tens of thousands of leading citizens of this nation and from around the world wrote to Clinton, calling on him to pardon and exonerate Lyndon LaRouche; but he didn’t. He did make sure that LaRouche was released after the first parole potential, after five years. So, he served 5 years of that 15-year sentence. When he was released, he organized here in Virginia, a forum before a panel of very distinguished jurists and political leaders and others, testimony on the LaRouche case and on other cases of the misuse of the criminal justice system — in particular, the Fruehmenschen case, which was the official FBI doctrine that any black elected official was, by the fact that of being black, more prone to corruption and therefore legitimate to be investigated. In that hearing, I want to read some of what Lyn said himself in that testimony. He said — and this is long before the 1990s and 9/11 — this is back in the 1980s:
“We have, in my view, a system of injustice whose center is within the Department of Justice, especially the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The problem lies not with one administration or another, though one administration or another may act more positively or more negatively. You have permanent civil service employees … who are coordinators of a nest of institutions in the Criminal Division, which show up repeatedly as leading or key associates of every legal atrocity which I’ve seen.
“In my case, when the time came that somebody wanted me out of the way, they were able to rely upon that permanent injustice in the permanent bureaucracy of government, to do the job. … Always there’s that agency inside the Justice Department, which works for a contract, like a hitman, when somebody with the right credentials and passwords walks in, and says, ‘we want to get this group of people,’ or”we want to get this person.’ And until we remove, from our system of government, the rotten, permanent bureaucracy which acts like contract assassins, using the authority of the justice system to perpetrate assassination, this country is not free, nor anyone in it.” [applause]
Odin Anderson, Lyn’s lawyer, then presented a series of documents which we had obtained through Freedom of Information from the FBI, and I’ll just briefly mention, it included the idea of putting out false leaflets under the LaRouche organization’s name, going back into the 1960s and 1970s. It included Henry Kissinger’s letter to the head of the FBI saying, can’t you get this guy? He’s being very obnoxious. A letter from the Director of the FBI to some of his subordinates, saying let’s investigate him. We don’t know where his money comes from; let’s investigate him as being funded by a foreign hostile force, which then calls into being Executive Order 12333, which basically says somebody financed by a foreign hostile force, you can throw the Constitution out and do whatever you want. And others of this sort. So, this was well documented.
Then, Ramsey Clark spoke. Ramsey Clark, I’m sure most of you know, was the Attorney General of the United States under President Johnson. He became our lawyer for the appeal, when we were first convicted in the Federal case. Here’s what he said, first of all, in a letter that he wrote to Janet Reno, then the Attorney General — the same position he had held. He says:
“This case [the LaRouche case], I believe, involves a broader range of deliberate and systemic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time, in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other Federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge. A tragic miscarriage of justice.”
In the testimony of the same hearings that Mr. LaRouche spoke in, he said:
“What was a complex and pervasive utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations [NGOs — those ‘no-good organizations’] focussed on destroying an enemy, this case must be number one. The purpose can only be seen as destroying more than a political movement; more than a political figure. It is those too, but it is a fertile engine of ideas and a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems regardless of the impact on the status quo or on vested interests. It was the deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost.”
So, this is what the LaRouche case was, and was recognized increasingly by many people. That’s why they had to destroy him and try to poison his name in the media, to prevent these ideas from being placed at the accessibility of the American and world populations.
Clearly, it’s exactly this same network that went after Donald Trump. I don’t think I have to explain that; it’s pretty obvious.
In terms of my own case, I think to get at that, I want to say something else about Roger Stone. You probably all watched the raid; the great raid on Roger Stone’s house. A 66-year-old man with no criminal record, attacked at 5 a.m. or something like that; with, of course, CNN standing out there. Everybody watched this horrible criminal, being put in handcuffs and dragged off.
Well, I’m very familiar with that scene. On October 6, 1986, the day of what we call the Great Panty Raid in Leesburg, armed forces from many different law enforcement agencies raided our offices, surrounded Lyndon LaRouche’s house. And when my wife got up that morning and was taking the garbage down to the end of our lane, she saw a whole slew of armed men in police cars — and CNN — ready to come in; for some reason, not coming in immediately. So, we called our neighbors, John and Renée Sigerson, who happened to live near us at that time, and said, “Why don’t you come over while we wait ’til they come in and arrest me?” So, we were sitting there watching The Marriage of Figaro on a video, when these men finally decided to come running up the road with their guns drawn and surrounded the house. They pulled me out and put me in chains and took me off, and so forth. Why? And CNN. My wife came out and said, “Get the hell off my yard, you have no right to be here.”
This is something that was going on then, and is going on now. In my case, there was something of this deep state — so-called — directly involved. A fellow named Oliver North — some of you probably remember — who was, at that time, running through the Iran-Contra operation, a scam where we were arming terrorists in Nicaragua. And the planes unloading the guns that were being shipped down to them, just as we were shipping weapons to al-Qaeda in Libya and so forth, were coming back loaded up with cocaine. We exposed that; that this was drug-running operation, and that Oliver North — the good friend of Henry Kissinger and others — was running this scam. Then we found out that Ollie North was also running around raising huge amounts of money — stealing really, huge amounts of money from people. Telling them that this was to fight communism; it was to save America, and so forth. When in fact, it was financing arms-running and drug-running. One of the people they scammed was somebody who was a major contributor to us, and with whom I was in regular contact. Oliver North told her that you had bad people, who are trying to undermine your doing good things; therefore, you should let me tap your phone, which was done. They monitored our calls. This was not just to get me, but it was to be fully on top of what exactly we were doing as an organization at that time.
So, I think that’s the reason I was hit particularly hard with the indictments. I was indicted both in the Federal case and in the Virginia state case. The “Railroad” as we called it, went forth; we were all convicted. I won’t go through the ugly details, but it’s worth reading. And I got three years in the Federal case. And then, as Dennis explained, I was told in the state case, where I was charged with crimes that could have been 90 years, that I simply had to lie, and — pffft! — I could go home.
So, that didn’t happen. And as a result, I got a 77-year sentence. Many of the people I met in prison, when I said I had a 77-year sentence, said, “how many bodies do ya got?” [laughter] So, I did not [lie to get out of prison], and I want to read something that Dennis actually read at a previous event and which really struck me, from Martin Luther King. He said, “You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…. You’re afraid because you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized and will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you, or bomb your house, so you refuse to take that stand.
“Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you will be just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.”
And I can assure you, that my life is proof of that fact: Because I did have to spend a total of 10 years in prison. But I can honestly say, these were the best years of my life — [applause] my only problem with my fellow inmates was my trying to convince them that this was the only chance they had in life, where they didn’t have to work, they didn’t have to support a family, they should learn, they should read, they should not waste away, feeling sorry for themselves. But I was given, really, the assignment of China — I mean, 77 years, you’ve got a 5,000 years of history to study, you need 77 years to take that on. [laughter]
But it became a real passion. It was something we needed to do. My co-defendant, Will Wertz, was at the time, translating Nicholas of Cusa, who was the relatively unknown great mind of the European Renaissance era; and I was then reading Confucius and Mencius and another relatively unknown but magnificent figure called Zhu Xi during the Song dynasty in the 12th century, and saw the comparison between what I was reading of Cusa, and what I was reading of these Chinese philosophers, and was able to pull together a sense of the way in which the great Christian Renaissance of Europe, and the Confucian Renaissance, where Zhu Xi, like Cusa, was restoring the Platonic tradition and the Confucian tradition which had been lost, over the dark ages in both Europe and China. So this it was a profound chance for me to really make great discoveries, which enriched my life, and through my work, hopefully, enriched the world, and made those who put me in prison very sorry that they’d given me the opportunity, to do that.
And, then, lastly, I’ll say, there was one particularly profound experience: At one point another of my co-defendants, Paul Gallagher and I were in the same prison, and we formed a Classical chorus. So we had a chorus of people — of criminals, some fairly serious criminals, child molesters, murderers — but people who, with one exception had never participated in any kind of Classical music, were totally unfamiliar with Classical music, and had never tried to sing. But we had been trained in some bel canto methods, and we began to train them. We sang Bach, and we sang Schubert, and we sang Negro spirituals. And in particular, we sang Beethoven. Now, this is the Year of Beethoven, our theme is to “Think Like Beethoven.” Many of you may have seen Helga Zepp-LaRouche, two weeks ago, gave a forum here in New York, from Germany, on Fidelio, the great opera by Beethoven: In which the woman, Leonora, dresses as a boy, “Fidelio” to work for the warden of a prison where she believes her husband is being held illegally, and secretly, by a tyrant. And through this story, she eventually frees her husband, and this is a very powerful story, and you can imagine why Helga loves this story, with Lyn having been in prison at this time.
And I had a similar experience: My late wife, at that time, traveled the world meeting with presidents and world courts, and so forth, addressing this injustice to Lyndon LaRouche.
And one scene in this great opera is called the “Prisoners’ Chorus,” where Leonora/Fidelio succeeds in getting the warden to let the prisoners out for just a moment, to get some fresh air. And they come out, and sing this male chorus, called, “O welche Lust,” “Oh, what joy,” to breathe fresh air again. And they think about freedom, freedom, freedom — Freiheit, Freiheit. But then, they remember that they’re being watched, and they sort of skulk back into their cells.
We sang this at the prison, and that, in particular — the whole thing — but that in particular, that Beethoven principle, had a profound effect on everyone of those people. And I’ve told this story before, and I tend to choke up when I say it: But every one of them, at some point afterward, came up to me, to try to express that they had never known of this kind of beauty in the world — and, let alone, that they could participate in the creation of that kind of beauty. So, when Lyndon LaRouche launched the Manhattan Project here in New York, with the intention of creating a vast chorus that would sing both the Classical repertoire and the Negro spirituals, because there were not just popular music, or gospels, these were songs that were about the fight for freedom, and had a Classical nature, in that sense — I understood exactly what he meant: That this was the way in which we can build the necessary movement for a true Renaissance.
So the Schiller Institute’s motto has always been, the Schiller motto, that the path to truth is through beauty. And that this is an example of why building this chorus — there was a Musikabend last night, and I understand that those people who went and participated in the music, who are being recruited to our political ideas, but it’s through participating in this kind of great culture, which we’ve lost, in America, with the ugliness that now passes for “culture,” that this is the way we create the potential to reverse the decay in the collapse of the civilization that we’re living in, and actually creating the New Paradigm that Helga addressed.
So, I think this is why, if we make this possible that LaRouche is exonerated by a President Donald Trump, who wants to achieve what he says, in terms of bringing the world together around these powerful ideas of development, of science, of cooperation, and great culture, that all of these ideas of this brilliant man, these beautiful ideas, will be made available to everyone, which has been denied them for these last 40 or 50 years, which is the great crime of the persecution of Lyndon LaRouche, that these ideas were prevented from being known and uplifting the population.
So this is where we stand, and I think this is why we have this kind of a fight, to expose and destroy, whether you call it deep state or British intelligence, destroy those who have purposely set out to destroy both the culture as well as the economy and the participation of our citizens in this kind of commitment, to what, in fact, can and must be, a New Paradigm. Thank you. [applause]
Urgent appeal to President Trump, President Xi, President Putin, Prime Minister Modi and leaders of other countries for the emergency implementation of the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche
Updated March 8, 2020
By Helga Zepp-LaRouche, President of the Schiller Institute
Most health experts are now calling the coronavirus officially a pandemic, and only a few are avoiding this term in order not to rattle the markets and the investments in the “Pandemic Bonds”. It is also apparent that this pandemic will be the deathblow for the otherwise already bankrupt financial system, of which the largest stock market collapse since 2008, the unprecedented plunge in the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes, and the announcement of Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren to go for “helicopter money” are alarming and undeniable signals.
Instead of learning from China, which according to the WHO has set a new standard for dealing with such a crisis, most governments (Italy and Japan are exceptions) did not use the three months warning time they gained due to the efficient intervention by China to go into a crisis mode. It is shocking, but not surprising, how completely incapable the liberal establishment has shown itself to be of reflecting on the fact that it is their policies which are the cause of an unprecedented threat to the entire human civilization, and of drawing the conclusions to change their ways.
Already in 1974, Lyndon LaRouche set up an Ecological-Biological Holocaust Task Force, to investigate the effect of the policies of the IMF and the World Bank to slash food and energy consumption, as well as health expenditures in the developing countries—showing that this would lead to biological catastrophes, the emergence of old and new diseases and pandemics. In the following decades, LaRouche and his movement published many more warnings, as well as offering concrete development programs for all continents, the implementation of which would have prevented the present crisis from spinning out of control.
Sure, the so-called industrialized countries may somehow cope with the crisis, but at what price? Due to the privatization—i.e., profit-orientation—of the health sector, there are now far too few beds for ICU treatment. The Belgian critical care doctor and head of the national trade union of doctors, Dr. Philippe Devos, has just warned that this shortage will lead to the triage of old people for the sake of young ones, when the number of cases surpasses the number of available ICU facilities, which he expects will happen. Are we getting back to the slippery slope of ending “unworthy lives,” as condemned at the Nuremberg trials?
And what about the poor countries, which have not even the capacities for tests, let alone treatment? What about countries like Haiti, Nigeria, and Bangladesh? What about Iran, where the sanctions denying medical supplies are clearly already causing the loss of many lives, unnecessarily?
What about the locust infestations in African and Asian countries, a danger which has been known for many months, and where the ridiculously small required financial help of $76 million has not been given, so that now the danger is that the locust swarms develop into a full-fledged plague, threatening millions of people’s lives in a short period of time?
What about the barbaric scenes at the Turkish-Greek border, where police from both sides are using tear gas against refugees, where one side may “instrumentalize” these people who have absolutely nothing, but the other side is no less barbaric trying to keep the “outer borders of the EU” protected? Does the EU establishment really think they can build a new Limes Line around Europe, while Southwest Asia and Africa implode with a coronavirus pandemic, a locust plague, starvation, and desperation?
This establishment turned a blind eye to the interventionist wars by the Bush and Obama administrations, which were, after all, the main cause for the refugee crisis. They have had no interest in building infrastructure in Africa over the last decades, mainly because of their neo-Malthusian ideology. Have they, in reality, accepted the idea to let this pandemic and this locust plague run their “natural course”? Is this not fitting with the Green ideology, which preaches that having fewer people is good for the environment?
There is a solution for this existential crisis, but when the so-called “elites” are morally unfit to introduce the necessary reforms, we need a broad mobilization of the population, who must become “state citizens” (Staatsbürger). There has to be a broad, popular demand that the leading countries of the world—starting with the U.S., China, Russia, and India, supported by others—must implement urgently needed steps in the reorganization of the present financial system. The best way to accomplish that is to conduct an immediate emergency summit of President Trump, President Xi, President Putin, and Prime Minister Modi to initiate the following steps:
There must be an immediate implementation of a global system of bank separation, modeled exactly on Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall law of June 16, 1933. Under this system, the commercial banks must be put under state protection, and must be completely separated by a firewall from the speculative investment banks, which can no longer be allowed access to either the assets of the commercial banks, or the privilege of bail-outs through taxpayer money. The toxic paper of these banks, including outstanding derivatives contracts, have to be written off. Legitimate claims, which have to do with the real economy or the pensions and other assets of working people, are to be marked as valid in the new system. Some categories of demand for payments have to be frozen for the time being, to be evaluated in terms of their validity by state institutions.
There must be the creation of a national bank in every country, in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States or the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau in Germany after World War II, so that state credit for productive investments can supply the physical economy with the necessary funds. The issuance of these credits must be guided by the principles of high energy-flux density and an optimal increase of the productivity of the productive capacities and the powers of labor, through an emphasis on scientific and technological progress.
Among the participating countries, a system of fixed parities must be established, and cooperation treaties must be established among sovereign states for the purpose of well-defined infrastructure and development projects. These treaties together represent factually a New Bretton Woods system as it was intended by Roosevelt, with the explicit intention to provide credit for the industrial development of the developing sector.
The urgent increase in the productivity of the world economy to accommodate a world population of presently almost 8 billion people must be facilitated through an international crash program for the realization of thermonuclear fusion power and other advanced technologies, such as optical biophysics and life sciences, in order to find solutions for challenges such as the coronavirus; as well as international cooperation in space technology and travel, which can establish the necessary next higher economic platform for the world economy, as this has been developed by the economist Lyndon LaRouche.
The Belt and Road Initiative initiated by President Xi Jinping, which already has been joined by 157 countries, offers a concrete perspective to bring the urgently required industrial development to Southwest Asia and Africa. China has offered to cooperate with all countries on this planet in a win-win cooperation to extend the New Silk Road to Southwest Asia and Africa, and in this way provide a concrete development perspective, which is the only human way to solve the refugee crisis. The United States and all European nations must cooperate with this plan.
We, the signers, are making this urgent appeal to the governments mentioned, to act in this moment of an extraordinary challenge to the safety and existence of all of mankind, to correct the mistakes of the present system which led to this present crisis, and return to the principles of the common good, of sovereignty of the nation-state, and food and energy security, while we adopt a vision for the common aims of mankind and a community of the shared future of humanity.
The name of the German weekly magazine “Der Spiegel” actually means in English, “The Mirror.” And indeed what you see this week on the cover page of the print version of Der Spiegel—a person with a gas mask, goggles, earphones and a hoody—is the mirror image of the ugly face of the racism of its editors. The caption “Corona-virus Made in China” should actually be “The ugly face of the racist monster Spiegel.”
This piece of yellow trash journalism was so bad that the Chinese embassy in Germany issued a formal complaint on their website. The notorious Jylllands-Posten of Denmark had an equally disgusting so-called cartoon putting the corona virus on the Chinese flag. Various American so-called mainstream media use the abominable racist term “The Yellow Peril.” What all of these portrayals demonstrate is the ugly reality of an obviously deep-seated racism under a very thin varnish of “western values.”
The reality of the matter is, that the Director General of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,has praised China repeatedly for the excellent handling of the epidemic, noting that China has set a new standard of dealing with such problems. That the Chinese government had published a full genome-mapping of the new variants within days of the outbreak made it easier for scientists in other countries to start working on possible vaccines, but also that China has made significant breakthroughs in the biological sciences over the past 15-20 years. Other health officials stated that the response of the Wuhan regional government and the dissemination of information was “state of the art“ and that an extremely impressive quantity of new information contained in their daily updates had been published since December 31st/January 1st.
To call any virus a “Chinese” virus is as silly as to say that it is someone’s fault if he catches the flu or gets sick in general. It can happen anywhere in the world and it can happen to every person on the planet. The lesson from this recent case of the reaction to the outbreak of the coronavirus is that it shows who in the international community is capable of responding to dangers that threaten all of humanity, and who is a troglodyte, and who is not.
If Europe and the US want to be credible in talking about “human rights” and “western values” then they should join hands with China and cooperate on the fight to defeat the coronavirus. The coronavirus and the fact that every year 100,000s of people get killed by the influenza shows how urgent it is to make new breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding of living processes to overcome what are today, life threatening diseases. Europe and the US should also cooperate with the most future oriented vision on the international agenda, namely the extension of the BRI into south west Asia and Africa and the international cooperation in the Space Silk Road.
For sure we should reflect on the actuality of the judgment of Gottfried Leibniz who said:
“In any case it seems that the situation of our present conditions in light of the growing moral decadence is such that it almost seems necessary that Chinese missionaries are sent to us, who could teach us the application and practices of natural theology….I therefore believe, that if a wise man would be elected not to judge about the beauty of goddesses, but about the excellence of peoples, he would give the golden apple to the Chinese.”
I think Leibniz was a lot wiser than Der Spiegel, Jyllands-Posten and New York Times.
With their case for impeachment falling apart, the British-American coup plotters deploying against President Trump and the American electorate predictably turned to the New York Times to preview John Bolton’s “memoirs”, to try to pump some life into their efforts for a regime change in the U.S. In her weekly webcast, Helga Zepp LaRouche said this is a sign of desperation, as their case has been effectively refuted by Trump’s legal team, and a significant segment of the population is enraged at the unconstitutional assault on the institution of the Presidency, and the increasing difficulty they are having to cover the cost of basic necessities.
The biggest danger the imperial forces behind the coup face has been Trump’s commitment to establish better relations with Russia and China. Not surprisingly, Bolton, one of those virulently opposed to this shift in U.S. strategic policy, is now being embraced by the same Democrats who in the past denounced him as a dishonest war-hawk. This latest eruption on behalf of the war party occurs as the President has put forward his Middle East peace plan, which LaRouche described as a potential first step toward an expanded negotiation process—one which must include the Palestinians, as well as the Russians.
With social chaos world-wide, and the war danger still real, she called on viewers to become active in the battle to defeat the geopoliticians with a great power summit, which can assure security and economic cooperation. A major aspect of this activity must be to revive the role of classical culture as a means of uplifting people.
TRANSCRIPT
HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute with our founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is January 29th, 2020. And as most of you are well aware, we are in the midst of this crazy impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. There have been some significant developments in the last hours, the last couple of days, including the resurfacing of John Bolton, courtesy of the lying New York Times. Helga, what do you make of this situation, where it’s headed now?
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think the emergence of Bolton, while naturally its designed to put the nail in the coffin for the impeachment of Trump, is also a sign of desperation. Because they could not prove the case, there is no criminal act which they could attribute to President Trump. But Bolton who obviously was guided to write this book — it’s supposed to come out and spill the beans about what Trump supposedly did in the phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine. Now, this is obviously an act of desperation on the side of the Democrats, because, if you remember, they used to attack Bolton as a liar, as a completely untrustworthy fellow, but now they are relying on him as the key witness.
Where this will go it’s too early to say. It’s Wednesday. Friday is the vote. If the Senate will allow more witnesses, in which case it would open up not only the potential to have Bolton testify, but the Trump team could bring into the Senate hearing all the other crucial people — Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, the so-called “whistleblower,” and many others. Adam Schiff, for example, they could bring out the entire British involvement in the coup attempt against Trump from the very beginning, the Christopher Steele dossier, the FISA Court, all of these things which were mentioned in the Horowitz report. So it could become a big mud fight. And if the Democrats succeed in getting Bolton as a witness, then maybe you have to have the whole truth out. That was the view of President Trump in the beginning. He said, let’s have a big discussion. Later he changed it and said it may be bad for the country to drag this out indefinitely. But if it comes down to that, then maybe the whole truth has to come out.
McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said he doesn’t have the vote to block the witnesses. This is today, we have to see how this goes until Friday. But I think it is very clear that this is not functioning with the American people. We have picked up an increasing mood of the American population, that they really are enraged. And if you need one proof, yesterday, Trump appeared at a rally in south New Jersey, and there were 175,000 people registered to go to this rally. Naturally not so many could, but that shows you there is a tremendous ferment, and south New Jersey, that is where the so-called “deplorables” live, this is a poor working-class area and obviously this is where Trump is resonating very big in the population.
So, I think we are probably in the end stage of this coup attempt, despite the fact that the Democrats have stated their intention to keep dragging this on. Maxine Waters, for example, said they will continue this impeachment throughout the election campaign; but I think the Democrats are playing a very risky game, because the population is really sick and tired of this whole story.
I think it is becoming very clear this is a coup. There is another very interesting blog piece by Pat Lang, who says that in his former capacity as a person working for the CIA or the military in the dark field of covert operations, he recognizes that there was a continuous political campaign against Trump from day one, and if one operation doesn’t function, they pull up another one: This was Russiagate, then Ukrainegate, now the impeachment, and the Bolton thing being the latest such operation. So it is really a battle where the role of what some people mistakenly call the “deep state” — it really should be better called the Anglo-American British Empire intelligence apparatus — the role of these forces is becoming very, very open. And I think that that may change the character of politics not only in the United States, but internationally, for good.
SCHLANGER: You mentioned that the case was not proven by the Democratic managers. In fact, I think Trump’s attorneys did a very good job of countering it. One of the most significant was the testimony of Alan Dershowitz, who made the point this was not just against Trump; it’s against the Constitution, it’s against the American Presidential system. I think that was quite significant, don’t you?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, Dershowitz is not a Trump supporter, he is a Democrat, and he had been very critical of Trump in the past. But he argued very strongly on the question that what is at stake here is the American Constitution: That this is a blatant attempt by the Democrats to turn the U.S., as a republic based on the Constitution, into a British Parliamentary system, that this goes completely against the will of the framers of the Constitution. He takes apart these arguments by the Democrats very efficiently. For example, this ominous notion, which they all of a sudden treated as if this would be the final proof of Trump’s crime, that in the discussion with Ukraine that he pursued a quid pro quo. Now Dershowitz says, so what about it? Even if everything Bolton is saying would be true, this does not constitute a crime, because a quid pro quo is what every head of state uses in any negotiation with any other state, so it is nothing special; it is what normal negotiations among states are. And I think these kinds of arguments which demystify the ghosts which are being created artificially, like this ominous quid pro quo, that he takes it down and takes it apart as a constitutional lawyer, I think is very, very useful. Because there is a lot of confetti spread around and thrown around to have a voice arguing for constitutional matters is extremely useful.
SCHLANGER: I think one of the things that came out from Dershowitz and others is this argument that a policy disagreement is not the basis for impeachment. And Helga, from the beginning we have been emphasizing that you have to look beyond the so-called facts of the case, because the facts of the case don’t exist. But what does exist is this coup, and we see this again in terms of the re-emergence of Bolton who has been opposed to what President Trump was trying to do in working with Russia.
How do you explain this to the American people? I think this is something that has not been fully explained fully enough by the President’s team, but I think we’ve done the job. How would you explain it?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, Trump — who obviously is not a simple person, he has many sides to him; he does use a language which antagonizes a lot of people — and therefore it is actually very important to note the fact that, despite the fact of all these things which one can argue “is this the style I like, is it not the style I like” — the point is the biggest mortal danger to the existence of the British Empire is the demonstrated willingness by Trump to seek a better relationship with Russia and China. And that has to be understood, because that is the most important. He has made clear that, given the opportunity, he is absolutely easy with Putin; this was demonstrated especially in the Helsinki summit, despite all influences around him to the contrary. He does want to have a positive relationship with China. He still calls Xi Jinping his “good friend.” He praises the great culture of China. And from the standpoint of the British Empire this is the end of them, because once they lose the ability to manipulate the great powers in a geopolitical manner, one against the other, then they will absolutely vanish. And given the potential which we have helped to create in terms of having a summit of these major powers, they are really in a panic.
So, I think it is important for the people who support Trump, especially in the United States, people should really think through, the world is in a terrible condition. We are sitting on a powder keg of a potential blowout; there are many problems we can address as we continue to talk. And there is no way how to solve these problems, unless you have a new level of politics which overcomes geopolitics, and that requires that at least the three Presidents of the United States, Russia and China work together and work out solutions for the world’s problems. If that does not occur there are incredible dangers.
So, the people who are anti-Russian but pro-Trump, or people who are pro-Trump and anti-China, they should really rethink their prejudices. Because a lot of what people think they know or what their dear opinion is, is the result of psychological warfare coming from the mainstream media and other operations. And the fact that Trump wants to have a positive relation with Russia for the sake of world peace, positive relations with China, is the most important factor of the strategic situation and it really explains almost every other aspect of the strategic situation.
SCHLANGER: We see this very clearly in the reaction of Adam Schiff, with trying to use Bolton as the key witness. Schiff, in his presentation as a Democratic manager, constantly stressed, we’re at war with Russia. And he lied about this, he made the whole case again, the Mueller case on Russia;, and it showed that this is a pro-war faction in the Democratic Party that’s opposing Trump.
In this context you mentioned the British Empire, the geopolitics: We’ve now seen at least the beginnings of the so-called “deal of the century,” of a peace plan for the Middle East. From what you’ve seen so far, what’s your analysis of this?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I mean we knew this was in the makings, it shows the handwritings of Jared Kushner. It is a first step and I think if you look at the international reactions, which I will mention in a second, it shows it has at least the potential to start a negotiation process. If you look at the proposal itself, naturally it was proposed between Trump and Netanyahu, who faces criminal trial back at home, so he was probably very happy to have that occasion. And it gives Israel practically everything they would possibly ask for: It reaffirms Jerusalem as the unified capital of Israel; it says the settlements are okay in the West Bank; the Golan Heights, the Syrian territory, belongs to Israel, so it has all of these things. It gives security guarantees to Israel fully.
The interesting thing is, that it does talk for the first time about the U.S. promoting a Palestinian state. Now the Palestinian Authority was not involved in the discussion, so they even rejected this plan before it was published, because they said all the decisions made before, point in the direction that it does not represent any Palestinian interest. President Abbas called for an emergency summit of the Arab League, which will take place on the Feb. 1. Naturally, the proposed Palestinian state, from a territorial standpoint, is extremely meager. It basically cuts out a lot of the interesting parts. To make it viable, will be very difficult. The proposed money over a certain period of time of $50 billion is not a hell of a lot.
So I think the reactions to it — I would like to mention a couple of them — first of all, Netanyahu will immediately leave Washington and go to Moscow to discuss with Putin. Various Russian spokesmen, Lavrov, Peskov, Kosachev, the head of the International Relations Committee of the Federation Council, they all said they would study it, we will look at it intensively; and negotiations have to be based on the involvement of the so-called “quartet” — the quartet meaning the United Nations, the EU, Russia, and the U.S. In any case it’s an international approach and even the EU foreign representative, Josep Borell, said it has to be based on respect for all the UN resolutions concerning Israel-Palestine, and the representative of the UN General Secretary said, it has to be in respect of all UN resolutions, including the one that Israel has to go back to its pre-1967 borders. So that naturally is not what’s here proposed, but that is the reaction from international forces.
I think it’s useful to start a negotiation process provided that the Palestinians agree to that, which they have not so far. But I want to say very clearly, that it is good to give security guarantees for Israel. That is absolutely crucial. But I think there is not going to be a peace in the region, in Southwest Asia, if you don’t give security interests to all relevant parties, and that includes emphatically Iran. If people go back in history and look at which peace treaties functioned and which didn’t, you have the Peace of Westphalia which explicitly formulated the principle that for the sake of peace, you have to take into account the interest of every other, and that’s why the Peace of Westphalia was such a groundbreaking work and led to the whole development of international law; as compared, in total contrast to the Versailles Treaty, which going against all historical evidence, presumed Germany was the only guilty party for World War I, all the reparations had to be paid by Germany, and that laid the ground for the developments which then led to the Great Depression of 1929 and naturally the emergence of the Nazis, and it led to World War II. If you don’t have a peace which takes into account the interest of every party, it cannot function.
And most importantly, you have to look at the region as a whole. You have to look at Afghanistan—a mess; Iraq—pretty bad; Syria—totally destroyed from the senseless war; Yemen. You can even go into North Africa: Libya. Look at the result of what President Trump clearly wants to end, namely, these endless wars. Therefore, if you want to reconstruct this area and have a durable peace, what you need is an economic development for the entire Southwest Asian region, and that can only happen if all the great powers work together. I think the immediate perspective is given, because the Chinese have offered to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Syria, to extend the New Silk Road. Also the Arabs have many interests of cooperation along the Silk Road with China. That is the only way how you can have the hope to calm down this region. And rather than trying to continue geopolitical games, I think all the great powers—Russia, China, India, the United States, European countries—they should all join hands and reconstruct this area, and then you can have the hope for peace.
So, I think the extension of the New Silk Road from China via Iran, Iraq; into Turkey, Syria; into Egypt, all the way to Africa, developing Africa in the same way. Then, through Turkey, extend the New Silk Road to Europe, to the Balkans; to connect via the Central Asian corridors — If you have a total peace plan like that, I think it can be really the basis for peace.
And I would hope now, this is now a first step. It needs to have more steps. But I think it’s a negotiation basis, and people should take a positive attitude, and then, hopefully, it can lead to the result of a real peace in the region.
SCHLANGER: As we’re discussing these things, there’s been something that has just emerged as a strategic concern in the last days, really last weeks: the spread of the coronavirus out of China. President Trump, in a comment a couple days ago, praised the Chinese for the way they’re handing it. The anti-China lobby is going crazy against China. What’s your assessment of where we stand in dealing with this virus?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, one of the leading Chinese scientists, who is charge of managing this crisis, said that he thinks the peak of the epidemic may be in ten days from now. That would be a very good news. China has done a very big job, by putting about 60 million people into quarantine. In major cities, people are being told to stay home. They have a letter out for the elderly, that they should especially not leave their apartment, because they are more at risk than other people. I think it is an incredible job. There was just a meeting between President Xi Jinping and the leadership of the WHO, the World Health Organization. They praised China, by saying they did an absolute fantastic job, by also giving a standard of how to deal with such a crisis. From an objective standpoint, there is no question that China is handling this extremely well, building three hospitals of more than 1,000 beds in a week — I don’t know what other country could do that at this point.
As you mentioned, there are also some really degenerated minds, who have absolutely no respect for human life. One is the unspeakable Danish newspaper Jyllands-Post with its cartoon, which showed the Chinese flag with the stars in the flag being replaced by the coronavirus. China protested very strongly, and basically said that this is a complete contempt for human decency, and should not be regarded as a cartoon. I think our colleagues from the Schiller Institute in Denmark also put out a similar statement, absolutely condemning the degenerate mindset coming from such “cartoons.”
Other than that, if this Chinese scientist is correct, then hopefully this could be resolved very soon. Naturally, doomsday-sayers, who say the economic impact could be a trigger for the world financial collapse. I don’t think that is more than a cover story, for the fact that this financial system is bankrupt as it is.
SCHLANGER: These very same central bankers and financiers, who have bankrupted the financial system, are circulating this new report from the Bank for International Settlements, talking about the “Green Swan.” They are now saying that the scapegoat for the crash will be man-made climate change. Obviously, this is another aspect of the cover-up, isn’t it?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yeah. The “Black Swan” is a synonym for the big financial crash, for the “everything bubble” to collapse, which we are very close to. So, to blame the climate crisis for such an event is ridiculous. The effort to impose green financing, and in that way destroy the basis for industrial economy is a danger to the financial system, if it needed another one, other than the one caused by the insane bailouts and quantitative easing policies.
So, I think this is an absolute lie. I think we are entering a period, where not only a crash is hanging on the horizon, but the effects of this financial policy are causing the entire society, in many countries, to disintegrate. I only want to mention two situations: One, I think now eight weeks of strikes in France; this is not reported at all, but I know about it from our French colleagues. These demonstrations and strikes are becoming more violent all the time. That is the result of the government policy, because the French police have the policy of throwing out sort of a net, isolate different groupings, and basically drive them into violent reactions.
This doesn’t only come from antifa and Black Bloc, but it comes from the Yellow Vests. For example, you have lawyers who are so absolutely furious about the attack on them, that they have thrown down their robes by the hundreds. Tax accountants who throwing their tax codes on the floor. This is really getting out of proportion. And the government of Macron is making absolutely no concession, but keeps absolutely with the line of BlackRock, which is really what this pension reform is driven by.
You have a similar situation now in Germany, where the German farmers, who are now basically fighting for their existence, they have now changed their tactic. They do flash-mobs at political meetings: All of a sudden, you have 250 tractors showing up; they block the warehouse deliveries from the large food chains. They say they are now being destroyed, between a rock and a hard place, because the food chains lower the prices for their products way below the parity price — you can forget, not even the producer’s price. And then you have the European Union legislations which make it impossible for these farmers to continue to farm.
So, we are looking at a real social explosion, not only in places like Chile and Lebanon and Algeria, but also, increasingly, in the European countries. I can only see this continuing, because if people like [European Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen implement their green legislation, thereby raising the prices for everything—electricity, transport, food—then this social ferment will just explode, because many people are already at the end of their means.
I think this is going to require our intervention, globally, to impose what we have proposed many times, the full package of LaRouche: the Four Laws, Glass-Steagall, national bank, New Bretton Woods, crash program for fusion and space cooperation to increase the productivity of society, and cooperate with the New Silk Road. That is the solution, but we need more people to help us in this mobilization. So, go to the links provided at the end of this webcast. Subscribe to our Alerts and other publications. Sign our petitions and mobilize together with us. I think that’s the only answer you can give.
SCHLANGER: There’s another aspect to this situation, which you’ve addressed many, many times: which is, the social explosion, the social ferment, and social disintegration are occurring at the same time as there’s a cultural collapse, which is engineered by the same British Empire, destroying the image of man. You’ve just written an article on this; you are quite prolific on this. What do people need to know about how we reverse this cultural collapse?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I launched a campaign which I called an “Open Letter to the Lovers of Classical music.” I deliberately do not address this letter only to people in Germany, but I really want to address it to everybody who thinks that Classical music is important for the mental health and creativity of people.
We will put the link of this Open Letter below, so please download it, read it, circulate it, comment on it, because I want to generate a debate. There was this unbelievable assault, where some so-called modern composer dared to change the finale of Fidelio in a performance in Darmstadt. What came out was absolutely horrible ugliness. So, please read my letter and circulate it.
But it points to something which I think is really of a general nature. If you look at what is happening in the United States, you have the drug epidemic, you have the school shootings; you have a lot of violence as a potential breaking out very quickly. In Germany, you now have churches being robbed. People are stealing the sacral instruments for the church service, pictures from the walls. You have attacks on first responders, on the police — I mean, this getting very, very ugly. I think what all of these symptoms—which I could tell you a long, long, long list of, but you probably all know it—all of these are symptoms of a decaying, collapsing society, like the end of the Roman Empire, or some other cultural collapses.
This very dangerous and this is why I take this attack on Classical music as extremely important to be countered. Because if you look at Europe, Europe is in terrible condition right now; political unity doesn’t exist. We just found that the German government already in 2018, at a conference in Berlin on Africa, deliberately countered the proposal which was adopted in 2018 in Abuja, Nigeria, by the governments of the Lake Chad region demanding implementation of the Transaqua project, which we have discussed many times on this show; and Germany gave only Greenie arguments, basically perpetuating the colonial world-outlook toward Africa, condoning the disgusting policy of the EU against the refugees from Africa and Southwest Asia, which is really a murderous policy. The Pope called these camps for refugees “concentration camps,” which I think is absolutely on the mark.
So, if you look at all of these things, the only positive thing which Europe still has — other than its potential to be an industrial powerhouse, if we change our ways; but that is not in the cards right now, if you look at the EU—so the only thing which we is our great Classical tradition: The Italian Renaissance, which indirectly President Trump referred to in his speech in Davos, by pointing to the Cupola of the Florence Duomo, by mentioning the beautiful Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, by referring to the European cathedrals. That ennobled view of man, including the German Classical period, the German, Italian, and other Classical music in general, these are the most precious heritages of Europe which we could contribute to the shaping of a New Paradigm in the world.
And if you have, right now, as a continuation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) operation, the ongoing destruction of Classical music, with disgusting Regietheater; you can’t go into a German theater any more, since quite a while, without people copulating on the stage, being naked, doing absolutely obscene things. András Schiff, the great pianist, wrote an article recently, where he said that in New York people are talking about this kind of theater as “Eurotrash.” What this unspeakable so-called composer did in this re-write of the finale of Fidelio is nothing but Eurotrash; and that is a mild expression for what was presented there.
We have to defend Classical Culture. We have to go back to the idea that we need beauty in art. I fully agree with Friedrich Schiller, who in a letter exchange with his friend Christian Körner, said that art which is not beautiful, is no art, it’s trash (those are my words, not those of Schiller).
So, I would really ask all of you who have any sense that we cannot allow the continuation of this destruction of great culture to go on, that you should join with us, and that we really create a Renaissance movement as a counter to that. This is completely in the spirit of my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche. His spirit is alive, especially as all of his prognoses in respect to the financial system, the strategic situation, become more obvious; there is a growing recognition of the increasing intellectual role of the work of my late husband. I want to encourage to always include the demand for his exoneration, because people have to have unmediated access to his works, because it is that, what great minds have written, what great composers have composed, which gives us the inner strength to get out of this crisis of humanity. So, help us in really making this Renaissance movement.
SCHLANGER: We also have the benefit that this year is the 250th anniversary celebrating the birth of Beethoven. Your husband gave us the marching orders: “Think Like Beethoven!” which is the way out of this
So, Helga, thank you for joining us today, and we’ll see you again next week.
The very same day that the impeachment trial against President Donald Trump was started in the U.S. Senate, EIR and the Schiller Institute gave a 2.5-hour background briefing in Berlin, featuring Harley Schlanger and former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney, the latter by video.
The participants from various nations and institutional backgrounds heard an extensive briefing by Schlanger about the strategic implications and history of the impeachment battle in the U.S. and the all-encompassing need to establish cooperation among the U.S., Russia, and China in the present strategic escalation, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche called for on January 7.
Schlanger described the British Empire’s role in bringing about regime change wars, the Blair doctrine of maintaining the failing “rules-based world order” of geopolitics and the bankrupt financial system of globalization. He contrasted those failures to the newly emerging paradigm of economic and political cooperation. It became clear to the participants that all of this was set up to end Trump’s explicit intention to stop the regime change wars and re-establish good relations with Russia — the nightmare for the Empire. Therefore, the impeachment question is of strategic importance for the whole world.
In the extended discussion period, questions included: Why is the British Empire still so important in all of this? If Trump is so peace-loving, why does he surround himself with war-hawks? Why did Gen. Michael Flynn not realize that he was under surveillance? What would happen if the Senate votes to convict Trump? How can the confrontation between Iran and the U.S. be stopped, and what role is this going to play in the U.S. elections? What was the role of then French President Sarkozy in eliminating Qaddafi?
The overall response by the participants demonstrated a growing demand to understand the full strategic picture, its historical dynamics, and above all the solution.
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute
The first thing one can say about the performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Darmstadt Theater, in a production of Paul-Georg Dittrich with a musical adaptation of the finale by Annette Schlünz, is: It’s god-awful! It couldn’t be worse. God-awful from a musical, artistic, philosophical and human standpoint. Of the long series of stupid, crude, repetitive Regietheater [fn1] performances, that have been staged for over half a century(!)—limited at first to theater, but then also inflicted on the opera—this performance was the absolute low point.
In the summer of 1966, when Hans Neuenfels—then a 25-year-old dramatist at the Trier Theater—had a leaflet distributed to promote the “First Happening in Rheinland-Palatinate,” in which he even asked, “Why don’t you rape little girls?” he was expressing the convictions of the 1968 movement, as we have known it since at least Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Since then—for 53 years now!—various nudes, rock bands, schizophrenics, or actors in Nazi costumes have been copulating on stage, and have succeeded in distorting beyond recognition the plays and compositions of Classical poets and composers. This is definitely not originality.
A scene from the Darmstadt performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio.
The Fidelio staging in Darmstadt presents a multimedia mixture of aesthetic vulgarity, Brechtian alienation effects, and the intrusion during the first part’s musical scenes of a screen filling the entire stage, on which photos and film clips are projected. They are supposed to illustrate the historical background of eight productions from 1805 until today. The overall impression is chaotic, and you begin to feel sorry for the singers who have to sing against this storm of clips, and for the heroine Leonore, who has to run around the stage the whole time like a headless chicken.
But the real monstrosity comes in the second part, when the Finale, the opera’s magnificent hymn to freedom, is literally chopped up in martial manner by the insertion of compositions in the New Music style of Annette Schlünz. In the program notes, Schlünz describes her insertions:
Annette Schlünz
Little by little, a “chorus of hails” emerged, which becomes silent in part, or in which only individual voices or words remain. Sometimes I radicalize Beethoven’s instrumentation to reinforce his ideas or I repeat individual bars and then suddenly stop. I very much wanted to weave in external sounds and to color the music in some places. The trumpet fanfare, which is heard from the balcony of the State Theater before the performance begins, is something I take up and expand. It’s the signal that summons to a departure: Some instruments and musicians that drop out of the sound of the orchestra become, so to speak, rebellious, and bring in something new. The F major ensemble piece—a fantastic piece with a sacredness and coherence that I would never dare to approach—I leave untouched like a gem. The subsequent interlude with my music, in which different sounds, including the voices of eight vocalists, are sent throughout the room, completely breaks up Beethoven’s world of sound.
From the standpoint of the maltreated spectator, the noise that Schlünz inserted, during which the singers and instrumentalists trumpeted their deafening rubbish from the middle of the audience and from all sides, has nothing to do with music: It clearly crosses the line to bodily harm.
Just how emotionally damaged Schlünz is, becomes clear in the next sentences:
When listening, I often imagined that I was sitting at the controls of a mixer console and turned up the speed. And then I would just assume that Beethoven, when he composed, almost intended to go too far and fast. It’s really exulting! It reminds me of children who go crazy with excitement because they don’t know how to keep their emotions under control.
If there is anything crazy here, it is the pitiful state shown by Schlünz, in her emotional impotence to understand the sublime nature of the victory of the love between Leonore and Florestan. Moreover, she obviously cannot stand such greatness; her idea of wanting to speed up the music by adjusting a mixer console, represents the same uncontrollable freak-out that led the murderers of Ibykus [fn2] to betray themselves after the choir of the Erinyes had called forth the higher power of poetry in the theater of Corinth. Small, base minds cannot stand great ideas nor sublime feelings.
The magnificent Finale of Fidelio, in which Beethoven celebrates the defeat of tyranny through the courage of conjugal love is an expression of the noblest humanity, where love, courage and the desire for freedom are expressed in music. In Leonore’s preceding aria, she sings: “I shall not waver, I am strengthened by my duty of marital love.” Beethoven chose as subject for the opera the idealization, in Schiller’s sense, of a historical event, namely the liberation of the hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, the French Republican, by his wife Adrienne. This reflects Beethoven’s own republican sentiments, which included at that time of feudal structures and Napoleonic campaigns, both personal courage and the desire for freedom.
Portrayal of Leonora in the Darmstadt performance of Fidelio.
Such deeply human feelings, however, are no longer accessible to the disturbed emotionality of the representatives of the Frankfurt School and the liberal Zeitgeist. Stage director Paul-Georg Dittrich states most tellingly in his interview in the program notes, that the Finale seems to him “like a celebration where you don’t even know what is actually being celebrated.” While Dittrich and Schlünz may not know it, that in no way gives them the right to destroy ordinary people’s access to it by deconstructing Beethoven’s composition.
But precisely that was the intention from the very beginning of the diverse currents that formed the tradition in which Dittrich, Schlünz and the entire production in Darmstadt stand, in an amalgam of Theodor Adorno, the Eisler-Brecht School, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).
In a noteworthy touch of truthful reporting, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported on November 12, 2017, in an article titled, “The CIA and Culture: How to Steal the Big Words,” about the exhibition organized on the 50th anniversary of a scandal that erupted in 1967, when it was reported that the entire gigantic operation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA-funded operation as part of the Cold War effort. The FAZ added an admission about the whole thing that was tantamount to sensational for that daily:
The worrying point is that the secret service did not simply promote sinister reaction [i.e. the right wing], but it helped achieve the breakthrough of that same left-wing liberalism that still forms the mainstream standard of Western intellectuals.
The Fidelio production in Darmstadt is, so to speak, the terminal moraine of this process. It began with the change in U.S. post-war politics. After Roosevelt’s untimely death, under whose leadership the United States was allied with the Soviet Union in the fight against fascism in the Second World War, the intellectually much smaller Harry Truman quickly came under Churchill’s influence. The latter, in his notorious Fulton, Missouri speech on March 5, 1946, ushered in the Cold War. Thus the forerunners of those elements in the U.S. security apparatus, which Eisenhower later warned were the military-industrial complex and which are often called the “deep state” for short today, gained the upper hand. The Cold War thus proclaimed—demanded—that the deep emotions linking Americans and Russians together through the war experience, culminating in the meeting of the armies on the Elbe River in Torgau, be replaced by an anti-Russian sentiment. A new image of the enemy had to be built up and the population’s entire axiomatics of thought had to be changed accordingly. For the United States, this meant changing the basic beliefs that had contributed to the support for Roosevelt’s policies. For Europe, and especially Germany, the roots of European humanist culture, which constituted its cultural identity despite twelve years of a reign of terror, had to be destroyed and replaced by a construct—the deconstruction of Classical culture.
The Evil of the Congress for Cultural Freedom
The instrument that was created for this purpose was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a gigantic psychological warfare operation launched by secret service circles around Allen Dulles under the direction of Frank Wisner, then head of the Office for Political Coordination of the State Department. The CCF was later moved to the covert operations department. The operation officially lasted from 1950 to 1967, when the New York Times published on April 27 the news that the CCF was a CIA operation. That revelation became the biggest cultural scandal of the 20th century. The CCF operated in 35 countries and published 20 magazines, and the CIA controlled virtually every art exhibition and cultural event. At that time, there was virtually no writer, musician, painter, critic, or journalist in Europe who was not in some way connected to this project—some knowingly, some with no inkling.
The first Congress for Cultural Freedom convention, Berlin, 1950.
The orientation of these cultural projects was essentially the same as that of the Frankfurt School, which was exiled to the United States during the National Socialist period and whose individual representatives were in the pay of the American secret services, such as Herbert Marcuse. In any case, the views of the Frankfurt School fit perfectly into the CCF’s program. Theodor Adorno, for example, defended the absurd and ignorant view that Friedrich Schiller’s idealism led directly to National Socialism, because he took a radical point of view. Therefore, Adorno claimed, beauty must be eradicated from art. In his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” written in 1949, his misanthropic view culminated in the much-quoted phrase: “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
Here again, there was nothing new about the Fidelio performance in Darmstadt. In the program notes, George Steiner expresses the exactly the same opinion:
Is it possible that classical humanism itself contains a radical failure in its tendency towards abstraction and aesthetic judgment? Can it be that mass murder and that indifference to the atrocities that abetted Nazism are not enemies or negations of civilization, but rather their hideous but natural accomplice?
What is expressed here in very clear terms is the psychological warfare carried out by the CIA-steered CCF, which was intended to eradicate the roots of the humanist identity of the German population, in favor of an Anglo-American cultural value scale.
To restate the point concisely: There can be no greater contrast than that between the sublime image of man presented in humanism and Classical art, and the barbaric image of man of the National Socialists. The Classical image of man sees man as being good in principle, as the only creature endowed with reason, who is able, through aesthetic education, to develop the potential within himself to a harmonious whole, to a beautiful character, as Wilhelm von Humboldt expressed it. Classical works of art in poetry, the visual arts, and music celebrate this beautiful humanity, and inspire in turn the creative powers of the readers, viewers, and listeners.
In contrast, the National Socialists’ image of man, with its blood-and-soil ideology, is based on a racist, chauvinistic, and Social Darwinist conception of the superiority of the “Aryan” race. To claim that because both the classics and National Socialism occurred in Germany, there is an inner connection between these diametrically opposed ideas, is just as absurd as to assert that the United States Constitution directly gave rise to the interventionist wars of the Bush and Obama Administrations, or that Joan of Arc’s convictions were the basis for French colonial policy. That claim actually came from the CIA’s devil’s kitchen, which included such recipes as “necessary lies” and “staunch denial” since at least the time of the CCF. In the recent period, the world has again been treated to an ample taste of them in the ongoing coup against President Trump by British intelligence in cooperation with the “deep state.”
The question of how it was possible to go from the ideal of the German classics to the abyss of Nazi rule, is one of the most important questions there is. To answer it, one has to consider the entire history of ideas from the Romantics’ attack on the classics, and the dissolution of the classic form it began to spawn, to the beginning of cultural pessimism, which set in with the Conservative Revolution in response to the ideas of 1789 and the political restoration under the Congress of Vienna, down to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the youth movement prior to World War I, and finally to World War I and its consequences.
Inducing Cultural Pessimism
Inducing cultural pessimism was also the goal of various music projects of the CCF. In 1952, it held a month-long music festival in Paris titled: “Masterpieces of the 20th Century,” during which over 100 symphonies, concerts, operas, and ballets of more than seventy 20th-century composers were performed. The Boston Symphony, which was to play a leading role in other CCF projects, opened the festival with a more-than-strange performance of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring). Other pieces were performed from the atonalists Arnold Schoenberg (one of Adorno’s teachers) and Alban Berg, as well as Paul Hindemith, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name but a few. Further conferences for the propagation of atonal and twelve-tone music followed in Prato and Rome, which were exclusively devoted to avant-garde music. At all of these well-funded events, it was taken for granted that everyone would pretend to enjoy ugly music.
Theodor Adorno
The Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, which were also supported by the American military government and the CCF, performed Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Béla Bartók. Lecturers such as Adorno, Olivier Messiaen, and John Cage gave lectures on their music theory. In an official assessment of these courses, Ralph Burns, head of the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) Cultural Affairs Branch’s “Review of Activities,” wrote:
It was generally conceded that much of this music was worthless and had better been left unplayed. The over-emphasis on twelve-tone music was regretted. One critic described the concerts as the “triumph of Dilettantism.”
The issue here is not about stopping anyone from composing or listening to atonal or twelve-tone music, or other forms of avant-garde music. To each his own taste. The point is, that the idea of the equality of all tones of the tempered chromatic scale massively reduces the much higher degrees of freedom flowing from the polyphonic harmonic and countrapuntal composition, as it was developed from Bach to Hadyn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. It eliminates the ambiguity of the notes and the relationships between the keys, and the possibility of enharmonic confusion: Motivführung is a form of composition that, out of a single musical idea, develops further themes, movements, and ultimately the entire composition. This technique of composition, as elaborated and rigorously demonstrated in various master classes by Norbert Brainin, the first violinist of the Amadeus Quartet, was developed into greater complexity and perfection from Haydn’s “Russian” quartets Op. 33, to Mozart’s “Haydn” quartets, and then to Beethoven’s late quartets.
Given the heights that Classical composition had achieved with Beethoven, so-called modern music, if it throws these principles out the window—and there are undoubtedly good modern compositions—represents a decline comparable to reducing an anti-entropically developing universe of two trillion galaxies known so far, to a flat earth.
Classical Music Ennobles
Virtually all truly creative people, from Confucius to Albert Einstein, recognized and used the effects of good or Classical music to foster their own creative abilities and the aesthetic ennoblement of the population. Confucius rightly observed that the state of a country can be seen in the quality of its music. Immersion in the works of great Classical composers opens the deepest access to the creative faculties of the human soul and spirit. Where else, other than in Classical music, can one strengthen and deepen the passion needed to look beyond one’s own concerns and to address the great objects of humanity? Or where can one educate the sensibility needed to fulfill Schiller’s demand, as stated in his speech on universal history:
A noble longing must glow within us to add from our own resources our contribution to the rich legacy of truth, morality and freedom, which we have received from former ages, and must deliver richly increased to the ages to come; and to fasten to this imperishable chain, which winds through all the generations of men, our own fleeting existence.
It is precisely this emotionality of love, as expressed in the Finale of Fidelio, love for one’s spouse, love for humanity, and the idea of freedom in necessity, the idea of fulfilling one’s duty with passion, and thereby becoming free, that Schiller defines as the qualities of his ideal of the beautiful soul and of genius. It is the quintessence of the entire aesthetic method of the classics and of Friedrich Schiller in particular: “It is through beauty that one achieves freedom.”
This notion of freedom is what all the proponents of Regietheater, disharmonious music, and postmodern deconstruction attack, because it goes against their liberal concept of “freedoms,” rather than freedom.
Therefore, they dip unrestrainedly into the mothballed box of Brechtian alienation effects: interruptions, film clips, banners, cameras pointed to the audience, etc., so as to “shock” the viewers out of their habits of hearing and thinking. What came out of that in Darmstadt was a mixture of “Clockwork Orange” (recall the violence-ridden atrocity from Stanley Kubrick, accompanied by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), and the intellectual depth of pop star Helene Fischer. When Helene Fischer, in a red latex outfit and with orgiastic movements, belts out her song “Tell Me, Do You Feel That?” to an enthralled audience, it’s about as subtle as when the question, “Does it move you?” lights up the stage in large neon letters during the entire Finale of Fidelio. Obviously, the director Dittrich thinks the intellectually challenged audience needs to be awakened with a two-by-four. On top of that came the previously mentioned bombardment of deafening noise from the instrumentalists and chorus members scattered throughout the opera house.
The audience expressed its thanks for the din with a tormented mini-applause. If the goal of the staging was to summon the audience to political action in the present or to open contemporary music to a “broader audience” (Dittrich), one has to say in both cases: Mission failed. The well-known (to German speakers) “Hurz” skit by Hape Kerkeling describes quite aptly the reaction of most viewers, who have apparently grown accustomed for much too long to the outrageous demands of Regietheater and to the CCF’s cultural war, which is still ongoing.
Finally, a quote is in order from Alma Deutscher, who really can compose: “If the world is so ugly, why should we make it even uglier with ugly music?”
Before the example of Annette Schlünz is followed and other compositions of classical music are “raped,” in the spirit of Hans Neuenfels, this review should serve to launch a debate in the year of Beethoven on how to defend the classics against such assaults.
Celebrate This Year of Beethoven!
This Year of Beethoven, which will feature performances of many of the master’s compositions not only in Germany, but around the world, offers a wonderful opportunity for us to recall our better cultural tradition in Germany, to resist the moral decline of the past decades, and to find within ourselves, by consciously listening to Beethoven’s music, the inner strength to have our own creativity come alive.
The world is now in the midst of an epochal change, in which the era dominated by the Atlantic countries is clearly coming to an end, and the focus of development is shifting to Asia, where there are many nations and peoples who are very proud of their civilizations, and nourish their classical culture. Some of these civilizations are more than 5,000 years old. If Europe has anything to contribute to shaping in a humanistic spirit the new paradigm emerging in the world, then it is our lofty culture of the Renaissance and the Classics.
Many scientists, artists, and people appreciative of Germany all over the world have been wondering for some time now what is wrong with the Germans, that they have distanced themselves so much from being a people of poets and thinkers. If we let the Year of Beethoven be so ruined, then Germany will likely be written off for good as a cultured nation.
More discussion of this subject is needed and welcome.
hz.zepp@schiller-institut.de
[fn1] Regietheater, or “Directors Theater,” is a mode of performance of Classical drama and opera, whereby the director arbitrarily imposes modern (and usually degenerate) costumes and staging upon the production, thereby ripping the work out of its true historical context and ironies, and degrading the audience, the performers, and the composer himself.
[fn2]See Friedrich Schiller’s poem, “Die Kraniche des Ibykus” (“The Cranes of Ibycus”). Full text available here.
The Schiller Institute is organizing a Day of Action, Wednesday, January 15, to intensify support for the Institute’s January 7 “Call for Presidents Trump, Putin, and Xi To Convene an Emergency Summit to Address the Danger of War.” Activists on five continents will mobilize citizens, government officials, diplomats and institutions, in support of the call, which was authored by Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
January 15, which is the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is the day of rallies and activity at appropriate locations, and on social media, websites, and all means of outreach. The Schiller Institute encourages all to commemorate the ideas and life’s work of Dr. King, by organizing for peace through economic development, as in the Call for the Emergency Summit.
The central international event will be at the United Nations in New York City, from 12 noon to 3 pm, Wednesday, January 15. Follow us on Facebook for on-the-ground reports from organizers throughout the world. To participate in New York, please contact: Lynne Speed, in New York, at (201) 562-9890.
