Leaders from around the world are standing together to stop nuclear war. Watch this special series to find out why they are in support of Pope Francis’s initiative for peace negotiations and why you must attend this very important conference, February 4 “The Age of Reason or the Annihilation of Humanity?”
The failed visit of German Chancellor Scholz to Brazil was described by Helga Zepp-LaRouche as a prime example of how he is out of touch with the “epochal change” underway in the world. President Lula not only rejected his request to provide ammunition to Ukraine, but was at odds with him on joining the “Green Club” and the failed economic policies pushed by the EU. Instead, Lula called for a “peace club” to be formed, and identified leading nations of the Global South as the key to its success.
Scholz is not alone in his delusions. The MICIMATT in the NATO sphere is pushing for not only prolonged war with Russia, but deploying “Global NATO” to take on China. Even on this point, some networks are warning that a prolonged war with Russia is not in U.S. interests. Another important voice calling for an alternative was that of the Pope on his visit to the DRC, where he excoriated those who continue to loot Africa for raw material “wealth”, ignoring the real wealth of the continent, its people! Zepp-LaRouche said these are examples of the new paradigm which is emerging, along the lines of her call for a new strategic and development architecture. She invited the listeners to join that mobilization, by registering for and participating in the Schiller Institute conference on Saturday.
The visit to Saudi Arabia by China’s President Xi Jinping is “part of a new strategic alignment”, said Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her webcast today. “The Arabs are turning east”, with more than $30 billion in deals signed. This is part of a new dynamic, which includes explosive growth of the BRICS alliance. This is not a threat to the West, she asserted — the West should “give up geopolitics…and cooperate,” instead of sticking to the failed policies of the past.
Zepp-LaRouche, who was interviewed this week by leading Russian tv personality Vladimir Solovyov, and received the Freedom of Expression award for herself and the Schiller Institute from the Mexican Journalist Club, said she has been encouraged by the response to her proposed Ten Principles for a new strategic and financial architecture. A new chorus of world citizens is coming together, which is the best hope for humanity, in the face of continuing war drive from NATO.
Mike Billington of Executive Intelligence Review interviews Chas Freeman, leading American China scholar
Join the Schiller Institute conference on Feb 4 to build a growing movement to stop war and create a new paradigm
Schiller Institute conference
Saturday, February 4, Two panels, 10 am-1 pm and 2 pm-5 pm EST
SCHLANGER: We have a conference coming up on Feb. 4th on the question of an “Age of Reason or Annihilation of Humanity.” How can people participate in that, and how do you see this evolving into a mass movement?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I think that the conference topics will be extremely hot, and given the fact that you have this escalation, with the Leopard 2 tanks, you have the efforts to increase the Global NATO, the EU-NATO agreement, the Japan-British agreement, the so-called reciprocal cooperation agreement; the AUKUS among Australia, the U.S., and Great Britain—so you have a whole, clear sign that Global NATO is preparing for the showdown with Russia and China, and more and more people, especially in the Global South are waking up to this.
On the other side, you have the clear efforts to establish a different world economic system, and that is progressing very quickly as well. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov was just in South Africa, and South Africa will host the BRICS summit this year. So a lot is really going on, and we will discuss these things in a way which most people really do not have access to, because the mass media, unless you already know what you are looking for and you search the internet and go to the newspapers and media from different countries and you look at it from different angles, which most people neither have the time nor that they really know what to look for, because they have to be acquainted with the history of many countries and very few people have that knowledge; so we provide an overview, because we have live actors, former Presidents, former ministers, diplomats, other people who represent real life, like representatives of the clergy, the industry, the trade unions. People have started to appreciate our Schiller conferences very much from the standpoint of really getting an idea of where we stand—and building an alternative. Because we want to build, more and more people who agree that we have to discuss what should be the principles of the new order, a new paradigm, which allows the human species to survive. Because that’s what the most important discussion is.
So if you want to be part of it, then join it, register and you get live, simultaneous translation if you are a non-English speaker—in French, German, Spanish minimally. And we want to build a movement of world citizens, of people who take the cause of humanity first, and that is an idea where the receptivity is definitely growing.
The decision of the German government to submit to “massive external pressure” to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine is exemplary of the tragedy of Germany responding as an occupied country. Under heavy U.S.-British-NATO pressure, the decision announced in Berlin today is a further example of the tragic consequences when there is no commitment to serious negotiations. This is compounded by continuing moves to make NATO a global military force, to back up economic policies which are destroying nations’ abilities to provide for their citizens, by degrading their physical economies in a vain effort to bailout a collapsing system.
The Schiller Institute is convening a conference on February 4 to pull together a movement of world citizens which can stand up against the rush to oblivion. Helga emphasized that our unique role is to provide an overview, which is obscured by the censorship imposed by those who want this war to continue, regardless of the consequences for Ukraine, Russia, Germany, or any other nation. She called on viewers to join our mobilization, both to build the February 4 conference, and the demonstrations set for February 19.
The all-out mobilization underway this week to consolidate the forces of Global NATO, to continue the war against Russia in Ukraine, and to target China, was the subject of this week’s conversation with Helga Zepp-LaRouche. The “Ukraine Contact Group” meeting on Friday at Ramstein Air Base in Germany will likely see an increase in pressure on Germany to send more offensive weapons to Ukraine. Even as the War Hawks behind Global NATO are projecting the war will continue into 2024, or until Putin is removed, there is a battle plan to try to prevent Chinese development aid in Latin America, she said, citing a presentation last July by the head of the U.S. Southern Command, and an article from Army War College associate Evan Ellis, calling for the U.S. to counter the desire for development in South America.
Zepp-LaRouche pointed to the series of conferences held by the Schiller Institute as the most significant alternative to the war party. To get out of the war geometry, she said, it is necessary to organize around a different conception of man, and to bring strategic and development policy into coherence with the actual nature of man. She urged viewers to watch the videos of the recent Schiller events to see the emergence of forces committed to that change, and urged them to register for the upcoming event on February 4.
Excerpt from the January 14, 2023 Schiller Institute conference
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Hello! As we commemorate the day of Martin Luther King, it is important to reflect upon the question of if his method of nonviolence is still relevant today at a moment where the world clearly faces the danger of nuclear war. Now, Nehru, when he was asked if that method would be still valid in the face of nuclear weapons, said, Absolutely! There is no worse violence than that of nuclear weapons.
The question one has to ask is, why is it that, for example, the German government seems to be completely in the grip of those war-mongers who are driving the escalation with Russia, and hopefully not soon with China? Even so, there are some who also would want to do that. What are they doing? It is so much against the German self-interest.
In the context of what has been discussed so far, I think what happened a little bit more than 30 years ago absolutely is the clue as to why the German economic and political system right now is not functioning; why we don’t have a leadership in government which would preserve the self-interest of Germany. One has to look back in the period of the late 1970s, where in less than a year from April 1977 to March 1978, there was a wave of assassinations in Europe. Many of those in Germany were by the so-called Red Army Faction, the Baader-Meinhof gang. What these people were doing by assassinating key leaders from politics, from economics, from science, was called a “Strategy of Tension” by experts. That strategy of tension, one can also say, was a strategy of injecting so much fear in the leadership of society that they would absolutely not engage in the construction of an economic system which would in any way be different than that of the City of London or Wall Street. If you look at these assassinations, which were a lot, the character and methods used—as was clear to analysts at the time already—were such that they were not possible without the cooperation of intelligence services.
Just to give you a couple of those: On April 7, 1977, Federal Attorney General Siegfried Buback was killed in Karlsruhe by this RAF—Red Army Faction. On April 30, 1977 Jürgen Ponto, the chief of Dresdner Bank was killed near his house in a way which was horrible. I lived through this period, because I was in the process of setting up this Dr. Rickenbacher[ph], who was the chief aide or collaborator of Dr. Ponto, to set up a meeting between Ponto and my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche. Naturally, this impacted our lives tremendously, because if somebody is being assassinated who you are in the vicinity of, it has a very special impact. Then, on March 16, 1978, Aldo Moro, the chairman of the Christian Democracy in Italy was first kidnapped, then assassinated. There were many others—Schleyer, and Buback, many others I don’t want to go into right now.
On November 30, 1989, this is now several decades later, Alfred Herrhausen, the head of Deutsche Bank at that time, was killed in Bad Homburg, near his house. Then that left Rohwedder, the head of the Treuhand, April 21, 1991. In light of the events of today, if you think that there is a tremendous pressure to cut the relations between Germany and Russia forever if the people responsible have their say, and to enforce a sanctions regime to sabotage this Nord Stream pipeline; if you consider the recently-erupted scandal where it became clear that [former German Chancellor] Merkel and Hollande [former President of France], were lying concerning their intention about the Minsk process; the effort to completely decouple Europe from Russia and China. One has to look back in that period of the assassinations of people like Herrhausen and Rohwedder, to fully understand why this is possible.
Colonel Fletcher Prouty, who was in the famous Mr. X in the JFK movie, gave an interview shortly after the assassination of Herrhausen to the Italian newspaper l’Unità. He said in this interview that the common denominator in all the assassinations of this time, including the previous one of Kennedy and the later one of Enrico Mattei, was that they did not submit to the existing world order which was, and is, dominated by a small power elite. Prouty said, and he told us this; we were in contact with him. He said the significance of the assassination of Herrhausen for Germany and even the world, is as big as that of Kennedy. If you consider that at that time (in November 1989) the world was at the verge of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Eastern Europe was undergoing a tremendous change, and in Germany, reunification was on the horizon, which was a pathway in the entire history of the post-war period. Prouty told us that in his view, the key to the Herrhausen assassination was a speech which he was supposed to give one week later in New York in front of the American Council on Germany. He had planned to present a vision of shaping anew the East-West relations, which would have given the developments after 1989 a dramatically different direction.
We don’t have the speech he was supposed to give in New York, but we have a hint of what direction it would have gone in, because he was at the time the only banker—and actually the only figure—who had the idea that Poland which, in the context of the Comecon had tremendous economic difficulties at that time, should be developed with German help on the basis of the method of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, the credit institution for reconstruction which was a state-owned bank which on the basis of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of Roosevelt, was instrumental in reconstructing Germany in the postwar period. And in that way, being instrumental in creating the German economic miracle.
Lyndon LaRouche, my late husband, already in 1988 had predicted that German reunification would come soon; that Berlin would be the capital. This was one year before everything happened. And at that time already, in an absolutely visionary way, he had suggested that the reunified Germany should develop Poland with the method of the physical economy and modern science and technology, and that that development should become the model for the other Comecon states. This obviously would have been a completely different approach to the economic difficulties which led then finally to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Herrhausen had a similar idea. We never consulted with Herrhausen; I don’t know if he knew about Lyn’s theories or not, but he thought in the same direction. Herrhausen also already in 1987, in a meeting with the presidium of Deutsche Bank reported how deeply impressed he was with his discussion with Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid, with whom he discussed the debt crisis in the developing countries which was become very acute. Herrhausen said that this situation did not allow to be silent about it any longer, and one had to think about partial debt relief. It is reported in various books and even a TV program that he earned a storm of rejection from his colleagues. There is a program of the ARTE TV which was broadcast November 18, 2002 about Herrhausen. In that, they report that the Catholic priest who was a close friend of Herrhausen, said that Herrhausen told him that he no longer could cover up for a system where a few people make gigantic profits and a large number of the human species does not make it. He said, this system could not prevail, and therefore he was in favor of debt relief. Now that was obviously already the cardinal sin which would cost him his life. On November 28th, a little bit more than two weeks after the Berlin Wall had come down, Helmut Kohl published his famous ten-point program, which was a proposal for the confederation of the two German states. It did not yet talk about unification, it talked about a confederation. This was probably the only baby step a German Chancellor made in postwar history in the direction of sovereignty, because he announced this program without discussing it either with his coalition partner Genscher, nor the allies.
Two days later on November 30th, Herrhausen, who was probably the best and closest advisor of Helmut Kohl, was killed. It was generally understood among leading layers in Germany at the time that this was a message saying, “Don’t dare to go in the direction of a sovereign German policy.” A few days later at an EU meeting in Strasbourg, everybody started to attack Kohl for that ten-point program. Kohl reported later that this meeting in Strasbourg was the blackest hours of his life.
What happened subsequently was that Germany was forced to give up [Germany’s currency] the D-mark, follow the diktat of the financial oligarchy, accept the euro, give up the D-mark and basically submit to the Maastricht diktat which basically was the idea to contain Germany in the supranational structure of the EU Commission. And therefore, the unique chance which German unification represented was gone. At that time, there was the chance to create a peace order, because when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no more enemy. You could have rearranged the world; you could have integrated Russia into NATO, which Russia had even suggested at some point. You could have created a new security architecture which would have been the basis for peace.
We, the LaRouche movement, first proposed the Productive Triangle, which was the idea to integrate the economic realm between Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we extended that program into the Eurasian Land-Bridge, which then became many years later the New Silk Road, and today is the Belt and Road Initiative. But that could have been in 1991 already the basis for a new peace order. But that was not what the powers that be wanted. Remember, Margaret Thatcher, the evil witch, who called Germany at that time the Fourth Reich. Now, Kohl was not a new Hitler, this was absolutely absurd. But she did not like the German unification. Mitterrand—we only know from Jacques Attali, the advisor of Mitterrand, that supposedly Mitterrand threatened Germany with war if they would go in the direction of not accepting the euro. What was the game? They wanted to stop by all means that a sovereign unified Germany would engage in a partnership with Russia. There was a study of the CIA in 1991, which said that the Russian scientists were better educated, and the Russian labor force was better educated than that of the United States. That Russia had more raw materials, and therefore the economic development of Russia had to be suppressed, or else there would develop a competitor on the world markets which could not be contained.
They implemented then the shock therapy, which reduced Russian industrial capacity down to 30% from 1991 to 1994. The Russian economist Sergei Glazyev wrote a book about this period, which he called Genocide, which we published at the time. In any case, it was to be prevented that the German scientific and technological potential of the German industry would ally with the potential of Russia.
That was the reason why Herrhausen was killed, and shortly afterwards, that left Rohwedder, who was a very famous and very decent industrialist in the tradition of Rhineland capitalism. He had become the head of the Treuhand, which was the organization which was supposed to privatize the state-owned companies of the G.D.R. (East Germany) which were under socialism publicly owned. He was supposed to privatize them, but then he realized that the social consequences of this reckless privatization which was suggested were absolutely unacceptable. He said no, we will not do it like that, and he coined the famous slogan, “First reorganization; then privatization,” to make it socially acceptable. He, as well as Herrhausen, were killed by the phantom RAF, the phantom Red Army Faction third generation, which nobody ever saw. There were even TV programs on the 1st channel of TV, which said it’s dubious that it ever existed. It may very well have been a fiction by intelligence services in order to have the capability to assassinate these people. Now, after Rohwedder was killed, Birgit Breuel, who was a banker’s daughter, took over Treuhand, and she ruthlessly went for the privatization of nationally-owned enterprises.
The affect this had on the people of East Germany, up to the present day, many of them—and I have talked to some of them—had the feeling that their entire life was stolen; their identity of the G.D.R. life, which they had grown up in for decades, was stolen. Still, there are several organizations which do not accept October 3rd, which is the national holiday celebrating the German reunification.
Herrhausen had told the presidium of his bank, on the same day that Kohl had announced the ten-point program on November 28th, that he wanted to pursue a deep restructuration of the financial system, to remedy the debt crisis of the Third World. It is reported by books, and also by his wife, that Rolf Poller [ph], chief of Deutsche Bank at the time, that the other colleagues of the presidium completely rejected his ideas. Mrs. Herrhausen reports that her husband came home completely depressed that evening, and in the morning before the assassination, Herrhausen said, “I don’t know if I will survive this.” An hour or so later, he was killed.
So, what happened basically is that what this series of murders did to the German political life is that fear has been dominant ever since. And today, you have a climate in Germany where people don’t dare to deviate from the official line. Right now, for the moment, Germany has lost all sovereignty. Germany is right now completely in the grip of NATO, and is pursuing policies which I believe are implying the danger of escalation to a nuclear war. So, the reason why we have to think back to this period, and also remembering what FDR said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, we are right now at the verge of nuclear war. But we also could be at the verge of a completely new world economic order, where many countries of the Global South are already pursuing a policy in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, of the Non-Aligned Movement, of Martin Luther King, of nonviolence, of win-win cooperation among sovereign states. I think if we want to honor the memory of such people as Mahatma Gandhi, who was killed, too; of people who have been fighting for a new world economic order eliminating the poverty in the developing countries like Herrhausen was intending to do, and like my late husband for sure was the most prominent fighter of his lifetime; then we should really learn the lesson of this, and do everything we can to establish a just, new world economic order.
A time comes when silence is betrayal. In the face of today’s march toward thermonuclear war, the truth must be told about the international assassination bureau that kills American and world leaders, including today. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on March 4, 1933, pronounced his famous admonition that “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” he had just survived an assassination attempt in Florida on February 15, 1933. This was an attempt which killed the mayor of Chicago instead. Lyndon LaRouche often pointed out that prominent figures are assassinated not so much for what they have done, as for what they are about to do. Consider that as you listen to these remarks made President John F. Kennedy at the United Nations on September 20, 1963, just over two months before he would be murdered in Dallas.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY: The task of building the peace lies with the leaders of every nation, large and small. For the great powers have no monopoly on conflict or ambition. The cold war is not the only expression of tension in this world—and the nuclear race is not the only arms race. Even little wars are dangerous in a nuclear world. The long labor of peace is an undertaking for every nation—and in this effort none of us can remain unaligned. To this goal none can be uncommitted.
The reduction of global tension must not be an excuse for the narrow pursuit of self-interest. If the Soviet Union and the United States, with all of their global interests and clashing commitments of ideology, and with nuclear weapons still aimed at each other today, can find areas of common interest and agreement, then surely other nations can do the same—nations caught in regional conflicts, in racial issues, or in the death throes of old colonialism. Chronic disputes which divert precious resources from the needs of the people or drain the energies of both sides serve the interests of no one—and the badge of responsibility in the modern world is a willingness to seek peaceful solutions.
It is never too early to try; and it’s never too late to talk; and it’s high time that many disputes on the agenda of this Assembly were taken off the debating schedule and placed on the negotiating table….
Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon. Space offers no problems of sovereignty; by resolution of this Assembly, the members of the United Nations have foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries. [end video]
SPEED: Think of how, right now in this present political environment, how controversial and dangerous a proposal of a joint Russia-China-U.S. mission to the Moon would be. And you can thereby measure how far and how low the United States and its leadership institutions have sunk. What would have happened had that joint mission to the Moon that President Kennedy actually occurred?
The fear that has gripped American life since November 22, 1963 is palpable. Our opposition to unjust depopulation and endless war is in order today, but the fear is palpable. Throughout the trans-Atlantic world, this set cause must be taken up. We must take up the arms of creative, nonviolent, direct action against this present sea of troubles, and by opposing them, thus end them. When Martin Luther King took this cause up at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, he realized that he was confronting his own frightened silence about the war up until that point.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak….
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?” “Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people?” they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live….
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. [end video]
SPEED: As King indicated, he would not make a butchery of his own conscience in the face of “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror” that would paralyze his needed efforts to stand up against unjust war such as that in Vietnam then, or that in Ukraine today. King took the road that Hamlet refused to take to save his kingdom of Denmark. King took the narrow path—the path of Gethsemane—to save the American republic. A popular misinterpretation of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is very widespread. Hamlet is seen as a tragic figure, and the tragedy seems to be—to the credulous—to revolve around him. That is incorrect. Rather, it is Denmark which is tragic; not Hamlet. And it is Hamlet’s acquiescence to the popular opinion and “going along to get along” in Denmark. To understand the difference, consider Lyndon LaRouche’s discussion of the content of the character of Martin Luther King.
LAROUCHE: Martin was truly a man of God. Truly. In a way that very few people are actually able to realize in their lifetime. It wasn’t just that he was a man of God: It’s that he rose to the fuller appreciation of what that meant. Obviously, the image for him was Christ, and the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. That was his source of strength. He lived that. He had gone to the mountaintop, at a point that he knew his life was threatened by powerful forces in the United States. And he said, “I will not shrink from this mission, even if they kill me.” Just as Christ said, and I’m sure that was in Martin’s mind, at that point. The Passion and Crucifixion of Christ is the image which is the essence of Christianity. It’s an image, for example, in Germany, or elsewhere, where the Bach St. Matthew Passion is performed. It’s a two-hour performance, approximately. In those two hours, the audience, the congregation, the singers, the musicians, re-live, in a powerful way, the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ. And this has always been important: To re-live that. To capture the essence of what Christ means, for all Christians. And Martin showed that. [end video]
SPEED: As with Hamlet, where the actual tragedy was the rot in Denmark, in the case of John F. Kennedy, it was the assassination of the American Presidential system which was the target of the multi-layered, multinational conspiracy that took his life.
Lyndon LaRouche, an eight-time Presidential candidate himself, explains the true issue behind that assassination.
Q: Welcome to the International Connection. Today we continue our conversation with Lyndon LaRouche, from his jail cell in Alexandria, Virginia.
LAROUCHE: The point is this: Was Kennedy killed because he was John F. Kennedy, or was President Kennedy killed because he was President?
Q: That’s the problem?
LAROUCHE: That’s right. And I lean to the second one.
Q: Because he was the President?
LAROUCHE: That’s right. He happened to have the misfortune of being the President at the time, which is the primary reason for it.
Q: So there were forces—I mean, Kennedy even said there was a government behind his back. There was this group behind him that was orchestrating a lot of these crises.
LAROUCHE: It was essentially, it’s not unknown who they are.
Q: Well, the Rockefellers, would they be part of them?
LAROUCHE: I think the Rockefellers—that’s why I get would off either, with my own view, is that I think that’s exaggerated. Yes, the Rockefeller interest is very specific. I know the thing. I’ve done a lot in exposing it. And David Rockefeller is certainly no friend of mine! [laughs]
But I think that misses the point, because it makes it too narrow and makes it too linear.
Q: Right, in other words, it’s the idea of the fondi, there’s a group of associates.
LAROUCHE: There’s a social formation to the effect that no one individual, and no one individual group determines the group. It’s the inner within the group that determines what the group does.
Q: And that’s why they can’t put the finger on who killed Kennedy, those kind of things, they can’t…
LAROUCHE: It wasn’t that. I think it’s—the problem is more than that: When you organize an assassination of that type, of the President of the United States, a conspiracy which operated on the scale of which that thing operated—remember, the killing of Kennedy enveloped an overlay, efforts to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. The same operation, in effect.
So, it’s a vast conspiracy. Then, when you get a vast conspiracy, what makes a conspiracy work is a lot of perceptions in the conspiracy, and a lot of exploitation of the particular motivation of people who are drawn in to playing particular roles. So that if you interrogate somebody, who, say, who pulled a trigger, and say, “Why was the President of the United States killed? Why’d you shoot him?” this fellow might have a motive. He might simply say, “Because I was paid to do so”! Or, somebody else might explain a motive. That might have been the motive for their behavior, or the induced motive. That doesn’t mean that’s why the thing happened.
So it comes to a question—the people who planned this, and I don’t think I should name it on the air, but the people who planned this were functioning at a very high level. So they knew what they were doing, unlike people on a lower level, who may not have known fully what they were doing, apart from the killing—and even some didn’t know they were involved in the killing!
Q: Say that again?
LAROUCHE: They knew that they were destabilizing the institution of the Presidency of the United States.
Q: You just said those people who didn’t know what they were—?
LAROUCHE: They didn’t know the full implications of what they were doing.
Q: —they were doing.
LAROUCHE: They knew what they were doing, but they didn’t know what somebody else intended this to lead to.
And what they were doing was destabilizing, particularly with the cover-up, the Warren Commission cover-up—the combination of the assassination with the cover-up, actually did destabilize the United States; destabilized the institutions of government of the United States, destroyed the presidency as an efficient instrument of government, the constitutional instrument. And the fellows who organized the thing at that level knew they were doing this! So therefore, I would say, they weren’t out to kill Kennedy, though somebody may have come up with motives for killing John F. Kennedy: They were out to kill President Kennedy, because he was President.
Q: The institution?
LAROUCHE: The institution. [end video]
SPEED: So, was John F. Kennedy killed by Clay Shaw, whom Jim Garrison indicted and brought to trial? Was he killed by Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, the coordinator of the assassination according to some people, from his position in the organization Permanent Industrial Expositions?
Well, as Harley Schlanger indicated at the beginning, Lyndon LaRouche and his associates during the 1970s, particularly through their publication of the book Dope, Inc., looked at and demonstrated that the same networks that were then involved in the transformation of the international drug trade into an offshore secret government slush fund, were the forces of international terrorism and assassination. Institutions such as the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Corporation (now known as HSBC), were at the epicenter of the opium trade and various forms of mercenary activity throughout history. Hong Kong’s colonial status under British rule was an imperial legacy of the two Opium Wars that had been fought by Great Britain against China in the 19th century. President Abraham Lincoln opposed that British policy of the destruction of the minds and bodies of the Chinese nation. He sent an ambassador in 1861, the first year he was in office, Anson Burlingame, to the still-subjugated China as a sign of solidarity with China against imperial Britain. In that same war, one of the closest of American allies was the nation of Russia and its Czar Alexander II; who famously sent a fleet to both New York and San Francisco harbors in order to allow the Union side in the American war to continue its interdiction of traffic coming from Great Britain and France to the South. Lincoln, of course, was assassinated; and was assassinated in a conspiracy for which four people were hanged and John Wilkes Booth of course was also apprehended and died.
When you’re looking at today’s United States and the issue of the assassination bureau, things like for example the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation; the fact that many of the panelists on today’s program are on that hit list, you’re not looking at Ukraine, and you’re not even looking merely at NATO. You’re looking at an international assassination bureau which has never been brought to light.
It is in that cause that we are here assembled today, and we are attempting to give you a picture, a perspective on an America and a world that you’ve never been given before. We think that Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and others deserve no less and would expect no less.
Excerpt from the January 14, 2023 Schiller Institute conference
RAY MCGOVERN: Thank you, Harley. I want to start with a quote from Dr. King. It has relevance to what’s happening in providing billions and billions of dollars’ worth of arms to Ukraine.
“When profit motives are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Now, the original sin of our great country, the United States of America, is racism. It was true years ago when Dr. King was assassinated, and it’s true now. It’s at play not only in the United States, but on the world scene. I was only six years old when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki when it was not necessary to do so. Most people don’t realize that President Truman was a racist, through and through. He always referred to African-Americans with the N-word. He had only one ally urging him to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All the five-star generals who had prevailed in World War II (which was just about to end) were against it; vehemently against use of the atomic bomb. I’m talking about Eisenhower, I’m talking about MacArthur, I’m talking about Admiral Halsey in the Pacific; all of them five stars. They all really upset that anything like this was even contemplated. The only person who agreed with President Truman was a fellow named Jimmy Burns. Jimmy Burns came from South Carolina, and I want to play a little clip that will show you pretty graphically another fellow from South Carolina, and what he thought about the “oriental”. Bear in mind now, that with respect to the “oriental”, just this week the U.S. Congress passed a law authorizing a special select committee on China, on the “Yellow Peril.” To understand China? Not really; it was just sort of a regular intervals to show how wicked China is, even though in my view, China would just as much appreciate and favor a win-win situation. But that’s not in the cards with our exceptional racist government.
May we have that clip, please? It’s only five minutes. Please pay attention to the very end.
VIDEO CLIP—“The Vietnam War explained in less than five minutes. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, too. Excerpts from ‘Hearts and Minds’” from BrasscheckTV.com
[Various military aircraft flying through the sky.]
MUI DUC GIANG (in Saigon) building a child-sized coffin: Many bombs; many coffins. These are for children; 800 or 900 a week. I have lost seven children myself. Many have died here, though it’s nothing like in the countryside. Many more have died there. In the countryside, there are no coffins; there is no money to buy them.
REPORTER: How did all the children die?
MUI: Poison; poison, you know. These planes keep spouting and spraying this stuff, and so many people have died. It seems to destroy their intestines. With the spraying and bombing, so many had died. Each day, right on time, the bomb craters appear. Hundreds of tons are dropped each day, and we can’t talk about it. We can’t talk about it because we are afraid of the government.
RANDY FLOYD [98 bombing missions]: It can be described much like a singer doing an aria, who’s totally into what he’s doing; totally feeling it. He knows the aria, and he’s experiencing the aria. He knows his limits, and he knows whether he’s doing it and doing it well. Flying an aircraft can be a great deal like that.
LT. GEORGE COKER: What’s a race driver feel like? Why does a guy want to drive in the Indianapolis 500 and go charging around there? I guess perhaps that the risk of dying, being killed, is part of it that makes it thrilling.
[planes taking off from an aircraft carrier]
FLOYD: I can tell when the aircraft feels just right. I can tell when it’s about to stall. I can tell when I can’t pull another fraction of a pound, or the airplane will stall, flip out, and spin on me. I would follow a little pathway on something like a TV screen in front of me that would direct me right, left, or center. I’d follow the steering, keep the steering symbol centered. I’d see a little attack light, when we stepped in to attack. I could pull the commit switch on my stick, and the computer took over. The computer figured out the ballistics, the air speed, the slant range, and dropped the bombs when we got to the appropriate point and whichever kind of attack we’d selected; whether it be flying straight and level, or tossing our bombs out. So, it was very much of a technical expertise thing. I was a good pilot. I had a lot of pride in my ability to fly.
[explosions]
YOUNG CHILD: [crying and moaning, holding a picture of her father]
GEN. WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: Well, the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful; life is cheap in the Orient. As the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.
[explosions; whole village bombed] [end video]
MCGOVERN: Got it? Life is not so important for people who look like the Vietnamese, the Chinese. And I daresay many people still have that outlook, especially if they happen to be from South Carolina, which not only Secretary of State Jimmy Burns was, but also General William Westmoreland, and of course, Senator Lindsey Graham is created in the same mold.
What do we think of all this? Well, during Vietnam, Angela Davis, a prominent opponent of the war, was arrested. She was manacled, and she was put on the front cover of Newsweek magazine—we got her! This is at the height of the Vietnam War. James Baldwin wrote a letter to Sister Angela. I’d like to read a short excerpt:
“An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis; November 19, 1970.
“Dear Sister,
“One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But … [Americans] appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses [of others]. And so, Newsweek … puts you on its cover, chained.
“You look exceedingly alone—as alone, say, as the Jewish housewife in the boxcar headed for Dachau, or as any one of our ancestors, chained together [during the ocean passage] …
“Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness … they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered … [S]o long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between … their own experience and the experience of others, [they will never] feel themselves sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves …”
Let’s fast forward to Memphis, and the night before Dr. King was assassinated. James Lawson, who was the epitome of nonviolence, told a little story to a few of us who were doing a retreat at the Alex Haley forum in Tennessee about eight years ago. He said, when he was a little boy, his mother had schooled him in nonviolence. One day he came home from school, he had a very guilty conscience, and his mother sensed that. She asked, “What’s the matter, Jimmy?” He said, “I hit somebody really hard because he deserved it.” “My mother said,” said Dr. Lawson, “|‘Now Jimmy, think about it. What good did that do?’” James Lawson became the epitome for nonviolent advocacy, and it was he who invited Dr. King down to Memphis.
Memphis was in real trouble. The night before Dr. King was killed, he made an extremely important speech, and one of the things he said was this:
“We have difficulties ahead, but it really doesn’t matter with me anymore. Like anyone, I would like a long life. But I’m not going to be concerned about that right now. I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but as a people, we will get to the Promised Land. So, I’m happy tonight. I am not worried about anything. I am not fearing any man.”
This was just hours before he was assassinated.
I also had the good fortune of knowing Vincent Harding, who actually authored the Vietnam speech for Dr. King; the one he made exactly a year before. Vincent Harding was a prophet; he was a mentor. He would start classes or retreats or speeches by singing an old enslaved people’s spiritual tune to lyrics that go to we are building up a new world. [Sings] “We are building up a new world. We are building up a new world. We are building up a new world, children of the Lord. Courage sisters; don’t get weary. Courage brothers; don’t get weary. Courage, children; don’t get weary, for the day is long.”
Well, the day is long, and people suffer along the way. JFK, Robert Kennedy, Dr. King, Brother Martin before them all.
I’m going to close now with a quote from Fannie Lou Hamer, also a major figure in what Dr. Vincent Harding called “the church-led Southern freedom struggle”; also known as the civil rights struggle. Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper from Mississippi. She became the representative of the Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Party convention in 1964. She didn’t succeed, but she did. Here’s what she said:
“One day, I know the struggle will change. There’s got to be change; not only for Mississippi, but for the people of the United States overall, and for people all over the world. Sometimes, it seems that to tell the truth today is to risk being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.”
I hold that up as an example. I might not see the Promised Land either, but if I fall, I will fall five feet eleven inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off. Let’s none of us back off. Thank you very much.
