The prestigious Journalists Club of Mexico on December 7th announced the results of its 70th annual National and International Journalism Competition, presenting its awards to journalists selected by an independent jury. The Schiller Institute and its founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche received the Freedom of Expression award, which back in 2019 had been conferred on Julian Assange. This year, Daria Dugina, the Russian journalist who was killed in a terrorist attack outside Moscow back in August, was given a posthumous award received on her behalf by the Russian ambassador to Mexico.
The ceremony began with the Mexican national anthem. Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, press spokesman of the Mexican presidency brought greetings from President López Obrador to the gathered journalists, diplomats and other guests. And the leaders of the Journalists Clubs added their voice to the international demand for peace and an end to war, and against the assassinations and threats by groups such as Ukraine’s CCD.
On December 1, 2022 the Moscow based Foundation to Battle Injustice held a press conference on the issue of election fraud in the United States. The press conference, moderated by the Foundation’s chairwoman Mira Terada, featured U.S. Senate candidate from New York Diane Sare, Schiller Institute spokesman Harley Schlanger and independent American journalist John Mark Dougan. Dougan, a former Marine, deputy sheriff and computer specialist, is currently based in Moscow where he hosts a regular podcast focused on the war in Donbas.
Mira Terada began the press conference by asserting that because of election fraud American democracy is facing its most grave crisis in modern political history. She discussed how the Covid-19 crisis opened the door for states to make radical changes to their voting procedures, particularly massive expansion of mail-in voting. This combined with dubious “malfunctions” with electronic voting machines and delays in vote counting, sometimes lasting up to a week or more, provides ample opportunity for vote manipulation. She then reported on specific examples of various voting irregularities which occurred during both the 2020 and 2022 elections. Terada finished her remarks by stating that “Fraud, distortion and manipulation of the voting process in favor of the same party clearly indicate a violation not only of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also of the Declaration on Free and Fair Elections adopted by the Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1994 and signed by the United States.” She and her colleagues believe that “regular suppression of voters is an illegal measure unacceptable in the 21st century, which contradicts the norms and traditions of a truly democratic society.”
Diane Sare spoke following Ms Terada’s opening remarks. Sare began her comments by recounting the enormous effort her campaign had to make, because she was running as an independent, just to get her name on the ballot, which required 45,000 valid petition signatures gathered in a six week period. Her primary message to New York voters was that nuclear war with Russia and China is not good for the economy. Despite the fact that hers was the only independent campaign to meet the petition requirement, gathering 66,000 valid signatures, she was excluded from the only candidates’ debate. The reason given for her exclusion was that based on polls, she had less than fifteen percent support amongst likely voters. Not one of the polls used for the debate even mentioned Sare’s name as a candidate, and some supporters reported that they were told by the pollsters that Sare was not an option.
Sare then showed the now famous screenshots of her votes mysteriously diminishing from 55,000 on election night down to 25,000 the next morning. In Rockland County, Sare’s county of residence, her vote total election night was 6,212 or five percent. The next morning the count was 277. The question she asked was why would such an obvious fraud be perpetrated in broad daylight? Was this a “Straussian lie” in the tradition of the University of Chicago’s arch neocon Leo Strauss, the purpose of which is to demoralize people and make them feel powerless and impotent because everyone knows it’s a lie but no one has the courage to refute it? Sare’s attitude is that this blatant fraud makes her more determined than ever to fight and she has already declared her intention to run for the Senate in 2024.
The number of votes for Diane Sare decreased by 24,000 overnight
Sare ended her presentation by bringing attention to the recent election in Taiwan, where people voted overwhelmingly against war with China. The financial elites don’t want a similar surprise in the United States where the majority of people, like the Taiwanese, want peaceful relations with Russia and China. This is why it is so important for them to control the media, the election outcomes and what people perceive is the view of the majority of Americans.
Harley Schlanger was the next speaker and began his presentation by stating his intention to give the “bigger picture.” The fact is there have always been allegations of vote fraud in the United States, particularly in the 2000, 2016 and 2020 elections. However, to understand how this fraud is carried out one must look at the CIA and NSC because they’ve been rigging elections all over the world for many years. The investigations into the 2020 election vote fraud failed because they were approached from a local level. The question is: how are elections manipulated so that both political parties maintain control over the government? The way this is done is by preventing any serious issues from being presented to the American people by either party; only narrow issues are allowed which are acceptable to the ruling forces.
According to Schlanger, during the recent midterm elections 75 percent of the American people believed that inflation, the economy and the war danger were the most important issues. But instead of addressing these issues, candidates focused on identity politics: race, gender, abortion and local issues. Putin was blamed for high energy prices and inflation. (If your dog got pregnant, Putin did it.) So the reason there was no big “red wave” as many pundits predicted was because the Republicans did not present any real alternative to the policies of the Biden administration. Schlanger said that because of this suppression of debate on important issues we have ignorant people with no idea what the candidates for whom they vote stand for. People are completely unaware that the United States and NATO are pushing for war with Russia. And this was the primary reason Diane Sare’s campaign was suppressed, because even one voice speaking truth can break the power of the oligarchy.
The final speaker, John Mark Dougan, spoke on the more technical aspects of vote fraud. He began by stating that the United States since 1950 has interfered in more than fifty foreign elections and that now U.S. intelligence agencies are interfering in our own elections. One of the ways this interference is perpetrated is with electronic voting machines. The software for these machines, according to Dougan, uses algorithms which are “weighted” for a particular outcome, similar to the big tech companies which use similar algorithms to determine what content people see on social media platforms. This is why the software is “closed source” and cannot be subjected to forensic analysis. Dougan suggested that Sare take this into consideration when investigating how her votes were disappeared.
Time constraints allowed for only a couple of questions during the question and answer period which were directed to Diane Sare. One of them was whether Sare was planning to take legal action to try to resolve the issue of what happened with her vote. In response, Sare expressed her doubts that the courts would address this, but that rather we have to build a movement for political change. She discussed a group she worked with during her campaign called Citizens Audit which demonstrated how elections in New York are rigged. The Sare campaign and Citizens Audit tried to file an injunction prior to the election based on this election rigging evidence but were unable to find even one lawyer willing to take on the case. Why? Because in the wake of the January 6 investigation, people are afraid they will be ostracized like Rudy Giuliani, who was disbarred from practicing law in New York for questioning the 2020 election results. Also, look at the case of Julian Assange, who could tell the truth about the source of the Hillary Clinton email leaks if U.S. and British intelligence agencies were not trying to kill him. Current policy is decided by the intelligence agencies and there has to be a movement of people in the United States where justice is done. This also relates directly to the case of Lyndon LaRouche who was unjustly convicted for political reasons based on fraudulent charges, while running for U.S. President, and spent five years in jail as a result.
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.
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.
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.
